The children sat in the darkness, saucer-eyed and unblinking.
“I’m so good. I’m gonna stretch you all out of shape.”
“So you keep saying.”
It was raining outside, but the kitchen was an island of warmth and light. Chu leaned against a wall, drink in one hand, careful to laugh no more than anyone else. The room smelled of fried pork brains and old linoleum. Under the table Anubis noisily thumped his tail. Le Marie’s wife bustled about clearing away the dishes.
The landlord himself brought out two more pitchers of blood mixed half and half with fermented mare’s milk. “Have another glass! I can’t give it away!” The skinny old man set a glass before Mintouchian. With a small, tipsy smile and a nod, the puppeteer interrupted his performance to accept it. He drank deep, leaving a thin transient line of foam on the bottom edge of his mustache. Other roomers held forth their glasses as he returned his thumb and fist to combat.
“Don’t you want any?”
“No, no, I’m stuffed.”
“Try some! Do you have any idea how much this costs down North?”
Smiling, the bureaucrat held up his hands and shook his head. When the old man shrugged and turned away, he slipped backwards out onto the porch. As the door was closing, Mintou-chian’s fist spat out a limp and subdued thumb.
It giggled. “Next!”
Raindrops fell like small hammers, so hard they stung when they struck flesh. The bureaucrat stood on the lightless porch, staring through the screens. The world was all one color, neither gray nor brown but something that partook of both and neither. A sudden gust of wind parted the rain like curtains, and gave him a glimpse of the barges anchored on the river, then hid them away again. A house and a half down the street, all of Cobbs Creek faded to nonexistence.
Cobbs Creek was all hogs and lumber. The last of the pigs had already been butchered and hung in the smokehouses, but logs still floated down the creek to the mills, in a final fevered slashing of timber before the tides turned the trees to kelp. The bureaucrat watched the rain splash mud knee-high on the clapboard walls. It forced up the stale smell of earth from ground and road, tempered by the rising odors from the tomato bush by the herb garden and the red brick walkway around to the back.
He felt sad and lost, and he could not stop thinking of Undine. When he closed his eyes, he could taste her tongue, feel the touch of her breasts. The nail tracks lingering on his back stung at the memory of her. He felt utterly ridiculous and more than a little angry at himself. He was not a schoolboy to be haunted so by the vision of her eyes, her cheeks, the warm amusement in her smile.
He sighed, took Gregorian’s notebook from his briefcase, flipped idly through its pages. A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or the scientific sense. Impatiently he skipped ahead.
What is good? Whatever increases the feeling of power, the will to power, and above all else, power itself. Rereading the words, he could see the young Gregorian in his mind, the doubtless gaunt magician-apprentice, filled with that sourceless teenage hunger for importance and recognition. Men are my slaves.
He put the book back, irritated by the naive posturing tone of its aphorisms. He knew this type of young man all too well; there had been a time when he was one of them. Then something tugged at his mind, and he took the notebook out again. There was an early exercise captioned The Worm Ouroboros. He read through the instructions carefully: The magician places his wand in the chalice of the goddess. The handmaid herself. … Yes, under the newly transparent allegory was the same technique Undine had taught him the other day.
The people in the kitchen laughed again.
The bureaucrat found himself wishing the day were over, that the roads were safe to travel again, and he could be off and away. This town had been nothing but disappointing. The ar-cheologists who had worked here were gone, the dig covered over and ground-stabilized, all trace of Gregorian lost in the outmi-gration of citizens to the Piedmont.
He squinted into the rain. There was a faint smudge of light in the gloom to the east, indistinct, almost nonexistent, and for a second he thought the storm was ending. Then it moved slightly. Not a natural light, then.
Who would be out on a day like this? he wondered.
The light brightened slowly, intensifying, drawing in on itself, picking up a touch of blue coloration. Now he could see it for what it was: the glowing videoscreen face of a surrogate trudging through the rain. Slowly the body took shape beneath that spark of blue — a scarecrow caricature of human form, with a rain slicker tied about the body and a wide-brimmed hat lashed to the headpiece to help keep water out of the mechanism.
Raincoat flapping in the wind, the surrogate approached.
It came straight for the hotel. The bureaucrat saw now that it carried something under one arm, a long, skinny box, exactly the right length to hold a dozen roses or perhaps a short rifle.
The bureaucrat stepped to the edge of the doorway, down onto the top step. Rain spattered his shoes, but an overhanging eave sheltered the rest of him. The surrogate came to the foot of the stoop, and looked up at him, grinning.
It was the false Chu.
“Who are you?” the bureaucrat said coldly.
“My name is Veilleur. If it matters.” Veilleur smiled with sweet indifference. “I have a message for you from Gregorian. And a gift.”
He frowned down at that arrogant adolescent smirk. This must surely be what Gregorian had been like in his youth. “Tell Gregorian I wish to speak with him in person, on a matter of interest to us both.”
Veilleur pursed his lips with mock regret. “I’m afraid that the master is terribly busy these days. There are so many who desire his help. But if you care to share your matter of concern with me, I’d be happy to do whatever I can.”
“It’s of a confidential nature.”
“Alas. Well, my business is brief. Master Gregorian understands that you have come into possession of a certain item which has some sentimental value to him.”
“His notebook.”
“Just so. A valuable learning tool, I might point out, that you lack the training to take advantage of.”
“Still, it is not exactly devoid of interest.”
“Even so, my master must beg its return. He trusts you will prove cooperative, particularly considering that the book is not, properly speaking, yours.”
“Tell Gregorian he can pick up his book from me any time he wishes. In person.”
“I am in the master’s confidence. What can be said to him can be said to me, what can be given him can be given me. In a sense one might say that where I am he is indeed present.”
“I won’t play this game,” the bureaucrat said. “If he wants his book, he knows where I am.”
“Well, what can’t be arranged one way must be arranged another,” Veilleur said philosophically. “I was also instructed to give you this.” The surrogate laid its box at the bureaucrat’s feet. “The master directed me to tell you that a man bold enough to fuck a witch deserves something to remember her by.”
Briefly his electronic grin burned on the telescreen, bright as madness. Then the surrogate turned away.
“I’ve spoken to Gregorian’s father!” the bureaucrat shouted. “Tell him that too!”
The surrogate strode away without a backward glance. The wind lifted and swirled its raincoat, and then it was gone.
Suddenly fearful, the bureaucrat crouched down and lifted the box. It held something heavy. He stepped back onto the porch, unwrapping the wet oilskin, then removed the lid.
Stars, snakes, and comets burned wildly in the box’s dim interior. Putrefaction had just begun, and the iridobacteria were feasting.