But it was better in here. Maybe he could get control of it in here, by himself. And at least if he freaked out he wouldn’t-
“Hi there.”
He jumped, startled, and looked into the corner. A man was sitting there in a high-backed chair by one of Walter’s bookcases. There was an open book on the man’s lap, as a matter of fact. Or was it a man? There was a single light on in the room, a lamp on a small round table to the speaker’s left. Its light cast long shadows on his face, shadows so long that his eyes were dark caverns, his cheeks etched in sardonic, malefic lines. For a moment he thought he had stumbled on Satan sitting in Wally Hammer’s den. Then the figure stood and he saw it was a man, only a man. A tall fellow, maybe sixty, with blue eyes and a nose that had been repeatedly punched in losing bouts with the bottle. But he wasn’t holding a drink, nor was there one on the table.
“Another wanderer, I see,” the man said, and offered his hand. “Phil Drake.”
“Barton Dawes,” he said, still dazed from his fright. They shook. Drake’s hand was twisted and scarred by some old wound-a burn, perhaps. But he didn’t mind shaking it. Drake. The name was familiar but he couldn’t remember where he had heard it before.
“Are you quite all right?” Drake asked. “You look a little-”
“I’m high,” he said. “I took some mescaline and oh boy am I high.” He glanced at the bookcases and saw them going in and out and didn’t like it. It was too much like the beating of a giant heart. He didn’t want to see things like that anymore.
“I see,” Drake said. “Sit down. Tell me about it.”
He looked at Drake, slightly amazed, and then felt a tremendous surge of relief. He sat down. “You know about mescaline?” he asked.
“Oh, a little. A little. I run a coffeehouse downtown. Kids wander in off the streets, tripping on something… is it a good trip?” he asked politely.
“Good and bad,” he said. “It’s… heavy. That’s a good word, the way they use it.”
“Yes. It is.”
“I was getting a little scared.” He glanced out the window and saw a long, celestial highway stretching across the black dome of the sky. He looked away casually, but couldn’t help licking his lips. “Tell me… how long does this usually go on?”
“When did you drop?”
“Drop?” The word dropped out of his mouth in letters, fell to the carpet, and dissolved there.
“When did you take the stuff?”
“Oh… about eight-thirty.”
“And it’s…” He consulted his watch. “It’s a quarter of ten now-”
“Quarter of ten? Is that all?”
Drake smiled. “The sense of time turns to rubber, doesn’t it? I expect you’ll be pretty well down by one-thirty.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes, I should think so. You’re probably peaking now. Is it very visual mesc?”
“Yes. A little too visual.”
“More things to be seen than the eye of man was meant to behold,” Drake said, and offered a peculiar, twisted smile.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s just it.” His sense of relief at being with this man was intense. He felt saved. “What do you do besides talk to middle-aged men who have fallen down the rabbit hole?”
Drake smiled. “That’s rather good. Usually people on mesc or acid turn inarticulate, sometimes incoherent. I spend most of my evenings at the Dial Help Center. On weekday afternoons I work at the coffee house I mentioned, a place called Drop Down Mamma. Most of the clientele are street freaks and stewbums. Mornings I just walk the streets and talk to my parishioners, if they’re up. And in between, I run errands at the county jail.”
“You’re a minister?”
“They call me a street priest. Very romantic. Malcolm Boyd, look out. At one time I was a real priest.”
“Not any more?”
“I have left the mother church,” Drake said. He said it softly, but there was a kind of dreadful finality in his words. He could almost hear the clang of iron doors slammed shut forever.
“Why did you do that?”
Drake shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What about you? How did you get the mesc?”
“I got it from a girl on her way to Las Vegas. A nice girl, I think. She called me on Christmas Day.”
“For help?”
“I think so.”
“Did you help her?”
“I don’t know.” He smiled craftily. “Father, tell me about my immortal soul.”
Drake twitched. “I’m not your father.”
“Never mind, then.”
“What do you want to know about your ‘soul’?”
He looked down at his fingers. He could make bolts of light shoot from their tips whenever he wanted to. It gave him a drunken feeling of power. “I want to know what will happen to it if I commit suicide.”
Drake stirred uneasily. “You don’t want to think about killing yourself while you’re tripping. The dope talks, not you.”
“I talk,” he said. “Answer me.”
“I can’t. I don’t know what will happen to your ‘soul’ if you commit suicide. I do, however, know what will happen to your body. It will rot.”
Startled by this idea, he looked down at his hands again. Obligingly, they seemed to crack and molder in front of his gaze, making him think of that Poe story, “The Strange Case of M. Valdemar.” Quite a night. Poe and Lovecraft. A. Gordon Pym, anyone? How about Abdul Allhazred, the Mad Arab? He looked up, a little disconcerted, but not really daunted.
“What’s your body doing?” Drake asked.
“Huh?” He frowned, trying to parse sense from the question.
“There are two trips,” Drake said. “A head trip and a body trip. Do you feel nauseated? Achey? Sick in any way?”
He consulted his body. “No,” he said. “I just feel… busy.” He laughed a little at the word, and Drake smiled. It was a good word to describe how he felt. His body seemed very active, even still. Rather (fight, but not ethereal. In fact, he had never felt so fleshy, so conscious of the way his mental processes and physical body were webbed together. There was no parting them. You couldn’t peel one away from the other. You were stuck with it, baby. Integration. Entropy. The idea burst over him like a quick tropical sunrise. He sat chewing it over in light of his current situation, trying to make out the pattern, if there was one. But-
“But there’s the soul,” he said aloud.
“What about the soul?” Drake asked pleasantly.
“If you kill the brain, you kill the body,” he said slowly. “And vice versa. But what happens to your soul? There’s the wild card, Fa… Mr. Drake.”
Drake said: “In that sleep of death, what dreams may come? Hamlet, Mr. Dawes.”
“Do you think the soul lives on? Is there survival?”
Drake’s eyes grayed. “Yes,” he said. “I think there is survival… in some form.”
“And do you think suicide is a mortal sin that condemns the soul to hell?”
Drake didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said: “Suicide is wrong. I believe that with all my heart.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Drake stood up. “I have no intention of answering it. I don’t deal in metaphysics anymore. I’m a civilian. Do you want to go back to the party?”
He thought of the noise and confusion, and shook his head.
“Home?”
“I’ll drive you.”