Until Cappadocia. Then he knew. It was time. The beast was going to destroy him anyway. Perhaps he would find
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Chiun before it did. Perhaps, once he accomplished his task, he would be free.
As long as he did not allow the madness to take root, he reminded himself. Keep the beast caged, and you'll find your way. He took pains to keep away from civilization. No people. People were too strong a temptation for the beast. It needed to kill, and once it started, it couldn't stop.
He foraged for his food. He ate no meat, drank nothing but water. He walked and ran each day toward the east until he fell with exhaustion. The days were long, his periods of rest short. He made good time.
Keep the beast caged. . . .
He heard a sound. In the leaves on the forest floor behind him were footsteps, small and unself-conscious. A girl's voice sang a pretty Russian folk tune.
He ran.
"Ho," the girl called, laughing.
He closed his eyes in despair. It was already too late.
She was young, no more than twenty, with dark, curly hair and smiling eyes. She wore a red shawl over her dress and carried in her hands a basket filled with mushrooms. "Are you lost?" she asked in Russian.
The language was familiar to him, as nearly all were. Part of his training had been to learn every major language spoken on earth. It had been the easiest part of his schooling, and the most pleasurable.
"I'm-I'm just walking," he said.
It had been so long since he'd held a woman. Mixed with the fragrance of the forest, he could smell her, warm and sweet and female.
"Do you live in the village?" she asked, smiling. It was an invitation.
He tried to talk, to utter some pleasantry and then depart, but his eyes couldn't leave hers.
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"I said-"
He stepped forward and took her in his arms.
She intoxicated him. Her lips were ripe and hot. The skin on her neck was as smooth as alabaster. Beneath it, blue veins throbbed with her heartbeat.
She pulled away from him in a tease. He was a handsome man, lean and tall, with eyes of an extraordinary electric blue color, and women liked him. Women who didn't know what he was.
"Please go," he whispered.
She laughed. "Are you frightened? No one will see us." Setting down her basket, she unknotted the shawl around her shoulders and let it slip to the ground. Beneath her dress he could see the outline of her erect nipples in the bright moonlight. She held out her hands to him, sturdy working hands that knew how to please a man. A prostitute, he thought.
"How much?"
"No more than a few kopeks. For my family. You will not regret it." She smoothed her hands over him, lingering expertly over the growing hardness between his legs. "You will please me, too."
She undressed him and put her mouth on him. He closed his eyes and allowed the colors to wash over him. Bright, familiar colors . . . The beast was unlocking its cage and stretching its muscles.
He groaned. "Stop . . . you must stop."
"But I've just begun," she teased. Her tongue flicked over him as softly as a moth's wings.
The beast was laughing at him. It would never be caged again.
With a yank, he pulled her up by her hair and tore her dress from top to bottom. She shrieked.
"Look what you've done! You are too rough. My dress ..."
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He slapped her, knocking her to the ground. She lay there, stunned, her ripped clothing spread out behind her. Her breasts were large, and quivered with her short, frightened breathing. Her legs were covered by an absurd pair of long cotton bloomers.
As he watched her, she backed away slowly, on her elbows. "Please," she said, holding up one hand as she tried to get to her feet.
He fell on her, pinning her arms over her head, tearing off the pants she wore while she lashed her legs. The struggle enflamed him. When she cried out, he slapped her, again and again, until her face was swollen and bruised. At last she stopped, her wide, terrified eyes spilling over with silent tears.
He entered her in a frenzy, thrusting wildly. She screamed with the pain.
"The police will come for you. My brothers will come-"
He slammed his fist into her mouth. Two teeth broke with a crack and lodged in the back of her throat. She choked, gagging and spitting blood on his face.
He stopped, shaking. The blood. He could taste it. Deadly nectar for the beast.
The girl's eyes rolled back in her head. She stopped struggling, and her clenched fists opened. A sound, deep and rasping, came from her throat. Her blood-smeared mouth froze into an open O.
The Dutchman exploded.
With his teeth, he gouged the blue vein, no longer throbbing, in her neck, and pressed his lips to it, sucking the red juice while he spilled his own fluid into her.
In the distance, a tree cracked and splintered apart in a shower of sparks. The small animals of the forest shrieked and darted for cover.
When he was done, it was nearly dawn. The round moon was high in the graying sky. On the forest floor lay
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the dead girl's body, caked with dried blood, her face unrecognizable. Beside her were the silly cotton bloomers, now dark with blood.
He staggered away. There was no remembrance, no regret. The ravaged body in the woods meant nothing to him. The beast had won. In the Dutchman's mind was only a feeling of deep, everlasting weariness, and one thought. A word: Sinanju.
Chapter Nine
As the president of the United States was flying to Europe for a special meeting with the German president, Harold Smith was attending his first lecture sponsored by the Earth Goodness Society.
Its president was a British physician named Mildred Pensoitte, who was speaking to a school assembly at Revvers College in Massachusetts, where just days before, the American ambassador to the United Nations had not been allowed to speak because her views did not coincide with those of the Revvers english and sociology departments.
As one female student explained to the middle-aged man in the three-piece gray suit:
"We keep bad things from being said here. We have freedom of speech. Some things just shouldn't be said."
"No doubt," said Smith.
"We do have freedom of speech. I disagree all the time. Some of us think America is the most evil nation in history. But then there's the opposite view. Others think it's the second most evil. They think Nazi Germany was the most evil. What do you think?"
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"I think many good people died, young lady, so you would have the freedom and comfort to be so absurdly stupid," said Smith who did not usually bother with retorts like that.
The first thing Smith noticed about Revvers College was the vast green lawns and magnificent trees. The second thing he noticed was the vast number of expensive cars. The third thing he noticed were the obscene scrawlings in day-glo paint, calling for an end to manicured lawns and expensive cars.
Dr. Mildred Pensoitte was a handsome woman in her mid-thirties. She spoke in clear tones, making grammatical statements.
There was the earth, she told her enraptured audience. And the earth was good. Everything about it was good. The air was good, or had been once. The grass was pure, or had been once. And the rain was good. Or had been, once.
"And then something happened. Then people who did not care whether anything of the earth, other than their bank accounts, survived, began poisoning it all. We broke our basic contract with nature. And what is that contract, that simple obvious contract? That we are a part of it. A part of nature.
"What right do we have to assume that, just because we can make lawns, we have a right to kill the grass's natural growth? What right do we have to poison the air for all living things? What right do we have to carve the coal from the earth's tender skin and then burn it into poisoned fumes? What right does man-centered man have to murder anything he wishes to help his bank account?"' .