Paul sat reflectively for a moment, re-read the last line (mentally filling in the omissions), and then simply went back to work.
3
had been.
“Let me go!” Ian snarled, and turned on Geoffrey, his right hand curling into a fist. His eyes bulged madly from his livid face, and he seemed totally unaware of who was holding him back from his darling. Geoffrey realized with cold certainty that what they had seen when Hezekiah pulled the protective screen of bushes aside had come very close to driving Ian mad. He still tottered on the brink, and the slightest push would send him over. If that happened he would take Misery with him.
“Ian - “
“Let me go, I say!” Ian pulled backward with furious strength, and Hezekiah moaned fearfully. “No boss, make dem bees crazy, dem sting Mis'wee - “ Ian seemed not to hear. Eyes wild and blank, he lashed out at Geoffrey, striking his old friend high on the cheekbone. Black stars rocketed through Geoffrey's head.
In spite of them, he saw Hezekiah beginning to swing the potentially deadly gosha - a sand-filled bag the Bourkas favored for close work - in time to hiss: “No! Let me handle this!” Reluctantly, Hezekiah allowed the gosha to subside to the end of its leather string like a slowing pendulum.
Then Geoffrey's head was rocked back by a fresh blow. This one mashed his lips back against his teeth, and he felt the warm salt-sweet taste of blood begin to seep into his mouth. There was a rough purring sound as Ian's dress shirt, now sun-faded and already torn in a dozen places, began to come apart in Geoffrey's grasp. In another moment he would be free. Geoffrey realized with dazed wonder that it was the same shirt Ian had worn to the Baron and Baroness's dinner party three nights ago… of course it was. There had been no opportunity to change since then, not for Ian, not for any of them. Only three nights ago… but the shirt looked as if Ian had been wearing it for at least three years, and Geoffrey felt as if at least three hundred had passed since the party. Only three nights ago, he thought again with stupid wonder, and then Ian was raining blows into his face.
“Let me go, damn you!” Ian drove his bloody fist into Geoffrey's face again and again - his friend for whom, in his right” mind, he would have died.
“Do you want to demonstrate your love for her by killing her?” Geoffrey asked quietly. “If you want to do that, then by all means, old boy, knock me senseless.” Ian's fist hesitated. Something at least approximating sense came back into his terrified, maddened gaze.
“I must go to her,” he murmured like a man in a dream. “I'm sorry I hit you, Geoffrey - truly sorry, my dear old man, and I'm sure you know it - but I must… You see her… “ He looked again, as if to confirm the dreadfulness of the sight, and again made as if to rush to where Misery had been tied to a post in a jungle clearing, her arms over her head. Glimmering on her wrists and fastening her to the lowest branch of the eucalyptus, which was the only tree in the clearing, was something the Bourkas had apparently taken a fancy to before sending Baron Heidzig into the mouth of the idol and to his undoubtedly terrible death: the Baron's blued steel handcuffs.
This time it was Hezekiah who grabbed Ian, but the bushes rustled again and Geoffrey looked into the clearing, his breath momentarily catching in his throat, as a bit of fabric may catch on a thorn - he felt like a man who must walk up a rocky hill with a load of decayed and dangerously volatile explosives in his arms. One sting, he thought. Just one and it's all over for her “No, boss mussun”,” Hezekiah was saying with a kind of terrified patience. “It like d'utha boss be sayin”… if you go out dere, de bees wake up from dey dream. And if de bees wake, it doan matter for her if she be dine of one sting or one-de-one t'ousan” sting. If de bees wake up from dey dream we all die, but she die firs” and de mos” horrible.” Little by little Ian relaxed between the two men, one of them black, the other white. His head turned toward the clearing with dreadful reluctance, as if he did not wish to look and yet could not forbear to.
“Then what are we to do? What are we ft do for my poor darling?” I don't know came to Geoffrey's lips, and in his own state of terrible distress, he was barely able to bite them back. Not for the first time it occurred to him that Ian's possession of the woman Geoffrey loved just as dearly (if secretly) allowed Ian to indulge in an odd sort of selfishness and an almost womanly hysteria that Geoffrey himself must forgo; after all, to the rest of the world he was only Misery's friend.
Yes, just her friend, he thought with half-hysterical irony, and then his own eyes were drawn back to the clearing. To his friend.
Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, yet Geoffrey thought that even the most prudish church-thrice-a-week village biddy could not have faulted her for indecency. The hypothetical old prude might have run screaming from the sight of Misery, but her screams would have been caused by terror and revulsion rather then outraged propriety. Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, but she was far from naked.
She was dressed in bees. From the tips of her toes to the crown of her chestnut hair, she was dressed in bees. She seemed almost to be wearing some strange nun's habit - strange because it moved and undulated across the swells of her breasts and hips even though there was not even a ghost of a breeze. Likewise, her face seemed encased in a wimple of almost Mohammedan modesty - only her blue eye peered our of the mask of bees which crawled sluggishy over her face, hiding mouth and nose and chin and brows. More bees, giant Africa browns, the most poisonous and bad-tempered bees in all the world, crawled back and forth over the steel bracelet's before joining the living gloves on Misery's hands.
As Geoffrey watched, more and more bees flew into the clearing from all points of the compass - yet it was clear to him, even in his current distraction, that most of them were coming from the west, where the great dark stone face of the goddess loomed.
The drums pulsed their steady rhythm, in it's way as much a soporific as the sleepy drone of the bees. But Geoffrey knew how deceptive that sleepiness was, had seen what happened to the Baroness, and only thanked God that Ian had been spared that… and the sound of that sleepy hum suddenly rising to a furious buzz-saw squeal… a sound which had at first muffled and then drowned the woman's agonized dying screams. She had been a vain and foolish creature, dangerous as well - she had almost gotten them killed when she had freed Stringfellow's bushmaster - but silly or not, foolish or not, dangerous or not, no man or women deserved to die like that.
In his mind Geoffrey echoed Ian's question: What are we going to do? What are we to do for our poor darling?
Hezekiah said: “Nothing can do now, boss - but she is in no danger. As long as de drums dey beat, de bees will sleep. And Mis'wess, she is goan sleep, too.
Now the bees covered her in a thick and moving blanket; her eyes, open but unseeing, seemed to be receding into a living cave of crawling, stumbling, droning bees.
“And if the drums stop?” Geoffrey asked in a low almost strengthless voice, and just then, the drums did.
For a mom h hr of h m
4
Paul looked unbelievingly at the last line, then picked the Royal up - he had gone on lifting it like some weird barbell when she was out of the room, God knew why - and shook it again. The keys clittered, and then another chunk of metal fell out on the board which served as his desk.
Outside he could hear the roaring sound of Annie's bright-blue riding lawnmower - she was around front, giving the grass a good trim so those cockadoodie Roydmans wouldn't have anything to talk about in town.