Down the street, something black-looking slipped around the corner. A scream drifted back. Ralloux in hot pursuit of his torture and justification.
“Let him go,” said Carmody, “as long as he takes the flame with him.” But, he thought, it was the flame that was dragging the monk after it.
Now that Mary was dead, it was time to determine for himself something about which he’d wondered very much.
It took him a little while. He had to get out of the car’s toolbox a hammer and a dull chisel-like instrument that was probably used to pry the hub cap and the tire from the wheel. With these he managed to split her skull open. Putting the tools down, he picked up the flashlight and on his knees bent over close to the open cranium, holding his coat over him to give some cover for the beam. He pressed the light’s button, shining it straight into the hole, his face close as possible to the brain. It was not, he knew, that he would be able to distinguish between a man’s brain, his, and a woman’s brain, Mary’s. But he was curious to see if she did have a brain or if, perhaps, there was just a large knot of nerves, a nexus for the telepathic orders that he gave it. If her life and her behavior were somehow dependent upon the workings of his own unconscious, then...
The light sprang into being.
There was no brain that he could see. Just what it was he had no time then to determine, only time to see a coiled shape, glittering red eyes, a gaping white-fanged mouth, and then a blur as it struck.
He fell back, the light falling from his hand and rolling away, its beam shining out into the night. He didn’t care or even think about it, for his face had begun puffing up at once. It was like a balloon, swelling as if air were being pumped into it at a very fast rate. And at the same time, an intense pain spread from it, ran down his neck and into his veins. Fire invaded his body, spreading through him as if his blood were turning into molten silver.
There was no running away from this flame, as there had been from Ralloux’s.
He screamed again and again, leaped to his feet, and, half out of his mind, drove his heel in hysterical fury and pain against the snake whose fangs had bitten into his cheek and whose tail merged into the cluster of nerves at the base of Mary’s spine, growing from it. It had been living coiled up in her skull, surely waiting for the time when John Carmody would open its bony nest. And it had released its deadly poison into the flesh of the man who had created it.
Not until the horrible thing had been crushed beneath his heel, smashed into a blob from which two long curved broken fangs still stuck out, did Carmody cease. Then he fell to the ground beside Mary, the tissue of his body seeming like dry wood that had burst into flame, and the terror of dissolving forever wrenching a choked cry from a throat that had seemed too full of a roaring fear to utter ever again...
There was one thought, the only shape in the chaos, the only cool thing in the fire. He had killed himself.
Somewhere in the moon-tinged purple mist a bell was ringing.
Far off, the referee was chanting slowly, “... five, six, seven...”
Somebody in the crowd—Mary? -- was screaming, “Get up, Johnny, get up! You’ve got to win, Johnny boy, get up, knock that big brute down! Don’t let him count you out, Joh-oh-oh-oh-neeee!”
“Eight!”
John Carmody groaned, sat up and tried, in vain, to get on his feet.
“Nine!”
The bell was still ringing. Why should he get up when he was saved by the bell?
But then why hadn’t the ref quit counting?
What kind of a fight was this where the round wasn’t over even if the bell did ring?
Or was it announcing the opening of a new round, not the closing of an old?
“Gotta get up. Fight. Whale hell outa that big bastard,” he muttered.
“Nine” still hung in the air, as if it had yelled in the mist and was glowing there, faintly, violently phosphorescent.
Who was he fighting? he asked, and he rose, shakily, his eyes opening for the first time, his body crouching, his left fist sticking out, probing, his chin behind his left shoulder, his right hand held cocked, the right that had once won him the welterweight championship.
But there was no one there to fight. No referee. No crowd. No Mary screaming encouragement. Only himself. Somewhere, though, there was a bell ringing.
“Telephone,” he muttered, and looked around. The sound came from the massive granite public phone booth half a block away. Automatically, he began walking towards it, noticing at the same time what a headache he had and how stiff his muscles were and how his guts writhed uneasily within him, like sleepy snakes being awakened by the heat of the morning sun.
He lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said, at the same time wondering why he was answering, knowing that it couldn’t possibly be for him.
“John?” said Mary’s voice.
The receiver fell, swung, then it and the phone box erupted into many fragments as Carmody emptied a clip at them. Pieces of the red plastic struck him in the face, and blood, real blood, his, trickled down his cheeks and dripped off his chin and made warm channels down the sides of his neck.
Stiffly, almost falling, he ran away, reloading his gun but saying over and over, “You stupid fool, you might have blinded yourself, killed yourself, stupid fool, stupid fool. To lose your head like that.”
Suddenly, he stopped, put the gun back into his pocket, took out a handkerchief, and wiped the blood off his face. The wounds, though many, were only surface-deep. And his face was no longer swollen.
Not until then did he perceive the full significance of the voice.
“Holy Mother of God!” he moaned.
Even in his distress, one part of him stood off, cool observer, and commented that he’d not sworn since childhood, but now he was on Dante’s Joy he seemed to be doing it at every turn. He had long ago given up using any blasphemous terms because, in the first place, almost everybody did, and he didn’t want to be like everybody, and, in the second place, if you blasphemed, you showed you believed in what you were blaspheming against, and he certainly didn’t believe.
The cool observer said, “Come on, John, get a grip on yourself. You’re letting this shake you. We don’t let anything shake us, do we?”
He tried to laugh, but succeeded only in bringing out a croak, and it sounded so horrible that he quit.
“But I killed her,” he whispered to himself.
“Twice,” he said.
He straightened up, put his hand in his pocket, gripped the gun’s butt tightly. “OK, OK, so she can come back to life, so I’m responsible for it, too. So what? She can be killed, again and again, and when the seven nights are up, then she’s done forever, and I’ll be rid of her forever. So, if I have to litter this city from one end to the other with her corpses, I’ll do it. Of course, there’ll be a tremendous stink afterwards”—he managed a feeble laugh—“but I won’t have to clean up the mess, let the garbage departments do that.”
He went back to the car but decided first to look at the old body of Mary.
There were huge pools of black blood on the pavement and bloody footprints leading off into the night, but the dead woman was gone.
“Well, why not?” he whispered to himself. “If your mind can produce flesh and blood and bone from the thin air, why can’t it even more easily repair blasted flesh and blood and bone and re-spark the dead body? After all, that’s the Principle of Least Resistance, the economy of Nature, Occam’s razor, the Law of Minimum Effort. No miracles in this, John, old partner. And everything’s taking place outside you, John. The inner you is secure, unchanged.”