"Here's a letter for you, by the way. If you like, I'll open it and read it to you. If that's easier."
A letter!
"No!" He reached out a fungus-chipped hand. "Please. Leave."
The lovely florid script was Clara's. His pulse rose. Suddenly, in spite of the terminal prognosis, he felt blazing with light.
The light of love, he realized.
And Clara had at last written back to him, to verify her own love.
I can die now, he thought, even before opening the pink perfumed envelope. He did not fear death now. He wouldn't die alone and forgotten.
She's written. She still loves me.
His scaled fingers fumbled. His ridged face drew up in the brightest smile.
Out dropped a stack of Polaroids.
He looked at the letter. It contained one line.
Here's how much I love you.
His eyes felt held open by fish hooks. His heart slugged in his chest as his blood reverted to sludge.
His scale-encrusted fingers flipped through the deck of photos one by one. Each picture, once its image registered, felt like a shovel of grave dirt dropped into his face.
It was a bright, wickedly hot Saturday afternoon when Clara learned of Howard's death. She'd been walking back to her dorm from the quadrangle where she sunned herself every day in a white Bill Blass string bikini. A good tan was top priority. She was surprised how few women strove to be appreciated; Clara's most personal goal was to turn every male head she passed, and it was a goal she'd long since achieved. It particularly tickled her to know that the two campus day-shift cops went out of their way to scope her on the quad with binoculars every day. She'd always give them a show, to tease them up. Yeah, it's nice to be appreciated. Her body, and the extent she went to keep it looking good, she regarded as an aspect of her womanhood which deserved to be celebrated. And, well… It's also a great way to reel in cock, she thought, and a woman like Clara — she needed to reel in a lot of that.
But—
She'd stopped at the Student Union for a campus paper. And there it was in boldface.
ASSISTANT BOTANY PROFESSOR DIES IN RAIN FOREST
Poor Howard. The genus of shelf-fungus that was going to make him famous had also killed him. A "blood-born spore infection," the article reported. "Antibiotic resistant."
A heavy grief settled over Clara like a weighted net.
It lasted for all of two minutes.
Because suddenly there were Barney and David, coming through the lobby, smiling. David in his tight jeans, Barney in his more fashionable khaki baggies. Muscles straining their tank tops, and something else straining at their groins.
"Sandwich anyone?" asked Barney.
And Clara was hungry.
It was weeks later that she received his final letter, delayed by overseas mail.
She read it over, thankful that he'd obviously died before getting those awful Polaroids she'd sent. They'd been weighing on her conscience lately.
Dearest Clara, the letter said. I still love you.
Howard
It was shorter than usual, thank god.
"Rest in peace," she muttered, and tossed the letter into the garbage.
I'm a monster, he'd thought, giggling as he plodded toward the nurses' station. Walking didn't come easy. Not when your body sprouted hundreds of fungal shelf bodies. But he plodded on, inspired to the very end by love.
At 4 a.m. the floor was vacant, the skeleton crew of nurses all busy with their bed checks.
Howard crunched across the floor.
Writing had been harder even than walking, yet his scarlet, scaleencrusted hand had eventually penned his final love letter to Clara Holmes. Before he'd sealed the envelope he'd coughed up several million white spores onto the letter, invisible against the paper. By now the tendrillike mycelium of Vermilius Moleyus had wormed into his brain. He could think only in snatches. Air…dispersible…
…blood-born…
…via inhalation…
He shuffled down the hall to the desk, then shuffled back to his bed, where he died moments later, his ridge-studded face set in the faintest of smiles. Love had prevailed. No one had seen him place his letter in the OUT box on the counter of the nurses' station.
"Just our luck, huh," Straker was still complaining. "I look forward to a gander at that dish every day. I mean, she might as well be wearing dental floss."
Bilks frowned. No gander today. Where the hell is she?
Just as the car backed out of the undergrad library lot, their radio started squawking. "Campus Unit 208, 82 with guard at Morril Hall, Room 304. Investigate possible Signal 22."
Bilks frowned. He frowned a lot. "10-4," he answered.
"What the fuck's a Signal 22?"
"Unknown trouble," Bilks recited off the code sheet.
"Some call. Shit." Straker pulled onto Campus Drive. "What was that loke again?"
"Morril Hall, 304." He checked the student directory. And stared. "Anybody we know?"
"Morril Hall, room 304. Clara M. Holmes."
"What's this 22 shit?" Bilks asked.
The security guard, a criminal justice major part-timing, seemed fidgety. "Complaints about a smell."
"You don't say. Stinks worse than a Georgia hoghouse."
"No answer when I knocked. And her car's in the lot."
Bilks nodded. A moment later the floor RA appeared, a chubby blonde in flip flops and an avocado sundress. "What is that?" she asked, her nose crinkling.
"We won't know what till you open up," said Bilks.
The girl unlocked the door with her master. Took one glance into the room and fainted.
The stench hit them like a runaway truck. The security guard turned away and threw up in the hallway. Bilks and Straker gagged as they entered the cramped room.
Time to go back to the city, thought Bilks.
At first he wasn't even sure the thing on the bed was human. But it had to be. Despite the mass of queer, flat, glistening red ridges, like slimy chips of stone, that covered the body so completely you couldn't see an inch of flesh between them. It had to be because the thing had a head — topped by short butter-blonde hair, neatly coiffed.
That, and a white string bikini.
Masks
"The bedroom's down this hall," he said. "You'll find a box at the foot of the bed. I'd like you to wear what's inside. Only what's inside." He smiled and poured them each a second glass of cognac, handed one to her. The crystal sang against her fingernail. She drank and touched the delicate silver chain around his neck, felt its warmth between her thumb and forefinger — his warmth — and let it fall.
She turned to do as he said. On the wall in front of her was a mounted stone image of the triadic Shiva Maheshvara. The face on the left was female, on the right, male. In the center, the mask of Eternity. An ancient masterpiece. Where in God's name had he plundered this? she thought.
Below, on a pedestal, stood a terracotta figurine from Tlatilco over seven hundred years old — the dual-faced "pretty lady" that the Toltecs buried with their dead. And on the opposite wall, a relief carving in black granite. Kali. His apartment was filled with treasures. Scythian goldwork. Bassari and pre-Christian Polynesian sculpture. The restored fragments of twelfth-century Norman mosaics — two of them — occupying an entire wall in the living room. A "Harrowing of Hell" from a fifteenth-century psalter. The dealer/collector in her was reeling.