The dry wood burned furiously, hurling itself up into the dark abyss of the night. And in it he saw Soaring Woodhelven in flames. He could smell in memory the smouldering dead of the tree village. He could feel himself killing Cavewights, incinerating them with an impossible power which seemed to rage out of the white gold of his wedding band.
Impossible!
He fled the fire, dashed back into his house and turned on the lights as if mere electric bulbs were his only shield against insanity and darkness.
Pacing there miserably around the safety of his living room, he remembered what had happened to him.
He had walked-leper outcast unclean! — into town from Haven Farm where he lived, to pay his phone bill, to pay it in person as an assertion of his common humanity against the hostility and revulsion and black charity of his fellow citizens. In the process, he had fallen down in front of a police car
And had found himself in another world. A place which could not possibly exist, and to which he could not possibly have travelled if it did exist: a place where lepers recovered their health.
That place had called itself “the Land.” And it had treated him like a hero because of his resemblance to Berek Halfhand, the legendary Lord-Fatherer- and because of his white gold ring. But he was not a hero. He had lost the last two fingers of his right hand, not in combat, but in surgery; they had been amputated because of the gangrene which had come with the onset of his disease. And the ring had been given to him by a woman who had divorced him because he was a leper. Nothing could have been less true than the Land's belief in him. And because he was in a false position, he had behaved with a subtle infidelity which now made him squirm.
Certainly none of those people had deserved his irrectitude. Not the Lords, the guardians of the health and beauty of the Land; not Saltheart Foamfollower, the Giant who had befriended him; not Atiaran Trell-mate, who had guided him safely toward Revelstone, the mountain city where the Lords lived; and not, oh, not her daughter Lena, whom he had raped.
Lena! he cried involuntarily, beating his numb fingers against his sides as he paced. How could I do that to you?
But he knew how it had happened. The health which the Land gave him had taken him by surprise. After months of impotence and repressed fury, he had not been prepared for the sudden rush of his vitality. And that vitality had other consequences, as well. It had seduced him into a conditional cooperation with the Land, though he knew that what was happening to him was impossible, a dream. Because of that health, he had taken to the Lords at Revelstone a message of doom given to him by the Land's great enemy, Lord Foul the Despiser. And he had gone with the Lords on their Quest for the Staff of Law, Berek's rune staff which had been lost by High Lord Kevin, last of the Old Lords, in his battle against the Despiser. This weapon the new Lords considered to be their only hope against their enemy; and he had unwillingly, faithlessly, helped them to regain it.
Then almost without transition he had found himself in a bed in the town's hospital. Only four hours had passed since his accident with the police car. His leprosy was unchanged. Because he appeared essentially uninjured, the doctor sent him back to his house on Haven Farm.
And now he had been roused from somnolence, and was pacing his lighted house as if it were an eyot of sanity in a night of darkness and chaos. Delusion! He had been deluded. The very idea of the Land sickened him. Health was impossible to lepers; that was the law on which his life depended. Nerves do not regenerate, and without a sense of touch there is no defence against injury and infection and dismemberment and death-no defence except the exigent law which he had learned in the leprosarium. The doctors there had taught him that his illness was the definitive fact of his existence, and that if he did not devote himself wholly, heart and mind and soul, to his own protection, he would ineluctably become crippled and putrescent before his ugly end.
That law had a logic which now seemed more infallible than ever. He had been seduced, however conditionally, by a delusion; and the results were deadly.
For two weeks now he had completely lost his grasp on survival, had not taken his medication, had not performed one VSE or any other drill, had not even shaved.
A dizzy nausea twisted in him. As he checked himself over, he was trembling uncontrollably.
But somehow he appeared to have escaped harm. His flesh showed no scrapes, burns, contusions, none of the fatal purple spots of resurgent leprosy.
Panting as if he had just survived an immersion in horror, he set about trying to regain his hold on his life.
Quickly, urgently, he took a large dose of his medication-DDS, diamino-dephenyl-sulfone. Then he went into the white fluorescence of his bathroom, stropped his old straight razor, and set the long sharp blade to his throat.
Shaving this way, with the blade clutched in the two fingers and thumb of his right hand, was a personal ritual which he had taught himself in order to discipline and mortify his unwieldy imagination. It steadied him almost in spite of himself. The danger of that keen metal so insecurely held helped him to concentrate, helped to rid him of false dreams and hopes, the alluring and suicidal progeny of his mind. The consequences of a slip were acid-etched in his brain. He could not ignore the law of his leprosy when he was so close to hurting himself, giving himself an injury which might reawaken the dormant rot of his nerves, cause infection and blindness, gnaw the flesh off his face until he was too loathsome to be beheld.
When he had shaved off two weeks of beard, he studied himself for a moment in the mirror. He saw a grey, gaunt man with leprosy riding the background of his eyes like a plague ship in a cold sea. And the sight gave him an explanation for his delusion. It was the doing of his subconscious mind-the blind despair work or cowardice of a brain that had been bereft of everything which had formerly given it meaning. The revulsion of his fellow human beings taught him to be revolted at himself, and this self-despite had taken him over while he had been helpless after his accident with the police car. He knew its name: it was a death wish. It worked in him subconsciously because his conscious mind was so grimly devoted to survival, to avoiding the outcome of his illness.
But he was not helpless now. He was awake and afraid.
When morning finally came, he called his lawyer, Megan Roman-a woman who handled his contracts and financial business-and told her what had happened to Joan's stables.
He could hear her discomfort clearly through the connection. “What do you want me to do, Mr. Covenant?”
“Get the police to investigate. Find out who did it. Make sure it doesn't happen again.”
She was silent for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she said, “The police won't do it. You're in Sheriff Lytton's territory, and he won't do a thing for you. He's one of the people who thinks you should be run out of the county. He's been sheriff here a long time, and he gets pretty protective about `his' county. He thinks you're a threat. Just between you and me, I don't think he has any more humanity than he absolutely needs to get re-elected every two years.”
She was talking rapidly as if to keep him from saying anything, offering to do anything. “But I think I; can make him do something for you. If I threaten him-tell him you're going to come into town to press charges-I can make him make sure nothing like this happens again. He knows this county. You can bet he already knows who burned your stables.”
Joan's stables, Covenant answered silently. I don't like horses.
“He can keep those people from doing anything else. And he'll do it-if I scare him right.”
Covenant accepted this. He seemed to have no choice.