Blood, Matthew Crane thought feverishly, should not do these things.
The wound itself was minor, more an abrasion than a cut, quite superficial, really, except that it didn’t rush to heal itself, and the underflesh revealed by the wound was peculiarly structured, not like honest human meat, more like the hemorrhaging honeycomb of a wasp’s nest.
He buzzed Lily on the interoffice line and asked her to have some cotton and a bandage sent up from the infirmary. “And please don’t make a crisis of it — I’ve only scratched myself.”
A moment’s silence. “Yes, sir,” she said.
Crane replaced the phone. A drop of blood dribbled onto his pants. The smell was stronger now. Like something the janitor might use to clean a toilet.
He took several calming breaths and examined his hands. His fingers looked like an infant’s fingers, pink and unformed. The last of the nails had come off during the night. He had searched for them, childishly, petulantly, but hadn’t been able to find them among the pink-stained bedclothes.
He still had his toenails, however. They were trapped in his shoes. He could feel them, loose and tangled in the webbing of his Argyll socks.
Lily arrived a few moments later with cotton pads and a bottle of disinfectant. He had neglected to cover his arm, and she gaped at the wound. She would be hysterical, Crane thought, if she got a closer look. He thanked her and told her to get out.
He poured iodine over the cut and mopped up the excess with a copy of the Congressional Proceedings. Then he tied loose cotton around his arm with a shoelace and rolled his tattered and blood-brown sleeve down over the mess.
He would need a new jacket, but what was he supposed to do? Send Lily out to a men’s shop?
Something had gone wrong, and it was more than the loss of his nails, more than the wound, more than the unnerving silence of his indwelling god. Crane felt the wrongness in his bones, literally. He ached all over. He imagined he could feel an upheaval in the mantle of the Earth, a clashing of the gears that operated the material world.
Battle is at hand, he thought, the moment of ascendancy, the dawning of a new age; the gods would erupt from their hidden valley in Europe, would build their palaces with the bones of the truculent masses, and Crane would live forever, would rule forever his barony of the conquered Earth…
His god had told him so.
What had gone wrong?
Maybe nothing. But he was falling apart.
He held up his nailless fingers, ten pudgy pink sausages.
He saw from the litter on the desk that his hair had begun to fall out, too.
Matthew Crane didn’t leave his office during the morning, and he canceled the day’s appointments. For all Lily knew he might had died of exsanguination, except that he rang periodically with demands for more bandages, a mop and bucket, a bag of surgical cotton. (“Quickly,” on this last request. “And for Christ’s sake be discreet.”)
Hard to be discreet, Lily thought, when you’re begging bottles of Pine-Sol from the building’s janitor.
Crane accepted these offerings through a door barely ajar; Lily was forbidden to come in.
But even through this chary aperture she could smell the bitter tang of ammonia, bleach, and something more pungent, sharp as nail polish remover. Barb and Carol wrinkled their noses, stared at their typewriters, said nothing.
They left promptly at four-thirty. The interoffice line buzzed just as Lily was tidying her own desk. She was alone in the spacious outer office, echoes muted by carpeting, the tiled ceiling, the banks of recessed lighting. Outside the office’s single window, daylight was already waning. Her ficus, she observed, had begun to wilt.
Don’t pick up the phone, Lily thought. Just take your purse and leave.
But the person she had so painstakingly created, this dutiful secretarial drone, the unloved middle-aged woman married to her work — that person wouldn’t ignore the summons.
She thought briefly of what Guilford had told her about her grandfather during their brief time in Fayetteville. Her grandfather had been a Boston printer so firmly attached to his sense of duty that he had been killed while attempting to reach his print shop — which hadn’t seen a paying customer for a month — in the midst of that city’s food riots.
Hey, grandfather, Lily thought. Is this what it felt like, fighting the crowd?
The receiver was already in her hand. “Yes?”
“Please come in,” Matthew Crane said.
His voice was hoarse and inarticulate. Lily looked with deep foreboding at the closed inner door.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Elias Vale approached the sacred city, leaving bloody tracks in the loam beneath the sage-pine trees.
He wasn’t accustomed to this raw Darwinian wilderness. His god guided his steps, had steered him from the train yard at Perseverance past primitive mine heads, down dirt and gravel roads, at last into the unfenced forest. His god warned him away from the white-bone coral of the insect middens, found him fresh water to drink, sheltered him from the chill of the clear autumn nights. And it was his god, Vale supposed, who infused in him this sense of purpose, of wholeness, of clarity.
His god, to date, had not explained the rapid loss of his hair and nails, nor the way his immortal skin lacerated and sloughed away after any minor injury. His arms were a patchwork of weeping sores; his shoulders throbbed with pain; his face — which he had last seen reflected in a pool of icy water — seemed to be coming apart along its fractured seams. His clothes were stiff with dried fluids. He stank, a piercing chemical reek.
Vale climbed a wooden ridge, leaving his pink worm-trail in the dry soil, his excitement flaring to a crescendo. Close now, his god whispered, and as he crested the hill he saw the city of redemption, the sacred city glittering darkly in its hidden valley, vast and imperial and ancient, long uninhabited but alive now with god-ridden men. The city’s heart, the Well of Creation, still beat beneath a fractured dome. Even at this distance Vale could smell the city, a mineral fragrance of steam and sunlight on cold granite, and he wanted to weep with gratitude, humility, exaltation. I am home, he thought, home after too many years in too many lightless slums and dark alleys, home at last.
He ran gladly down the wooded slope, breathless but agile, until he reached the barbed-wire perimeter where men like himself, half gods seeping pink-stained plasma, greeted him wordlessly.
Wordlessly because there was no need to speak, and because some of these men might not have been able to speak even if they had wanted to, considering the way their skin drooled from the faces like rotten papier-mâché. But they were his brothers and Vale was immensely pleased to see them.
They gave him an automatic rifle and a box of ammunition, showed him how to sling these things over his blistered shoulder and how to arm and fire the rifle, and when the sun began to set they took him to a ruin where a dormitory had been installed. There was a thin mattress for Vale to sleep on, deep in the stony darkness, wrapped in the organic stench of dying flesh and acetone and ammonia and the subtler odor of the city itself. Somewhere, water dripped from stone to stone. The music of erosion.
Sleep was elusive, and, when he did sleep, he dreamed. The dreams were nightmares of powerlessness, of being trapped and slowly suffocated in his own body, smothered and submerged in the effluvia of his flesh. In his dreams Vale longed for a different home, not the sacred city but some abandoned home that had slipped from his grasp long ago.