What was it with Cary Rossington? What had happened to him? Part of Billy Halleck most definitely did not want to know. Houston had apparently made no connection between what was happening to Billy and what was happening to Rossington -why should he have? Houston didn't know about the Gypsies. Also, Houston was bombing his brain with big white torpedoes on a regular basis.
Leda came back and sat down again.
'If he calls and says he's coming back,' she told Billy calmly, 'I'm going to our place on Captiva. It will be beastly hot this time of year, but if I have enough gin, I find I barely notice the temperature. I don't think I could stand to be alone with him anymore. I still love him – yes, in my way, I do – but I don't think I could stand it. Thinking of him in the next bed … thinking he might … might touch me . . .' She shivered. Some of her drink spilled. She drank the rest all at once and then made a thick blowing sound, like a thirsty horse that has just drunk its fill.
'Leda, what's wrong with him? What's happened?'
'Happened? Happened? Why, Billy dear, I thought I'd told you, or that you knew somehow.'
Billy shook his head. He was starting to believe he didn't know anything.
'He's growing scales. Cary is growing scales.'
Billy gaped at her.
Leda offered a dry, amused, horrified smile, and shook her head a little.
'No – that's not quite right. His skin is turning into scales. He has become a case of reverse evolution, a sideshow freak. He's turning into a fish or a reptile.'
She laughed suddenly, a harsh, cawing shriek that made Halleck's blood run cold: She's tottering on the brink of madness, he thought – the revelation made him colder still. I think she'll probably go to Captiva no matter what happens. She'll have to get out of Fairview if she wants to save her sanity. Yes.
Leda clapped both hands over her mouth and then excused herself as if she had burped – or perhaps vomited – instead of laughed. Billy, incapable of speaking just then, only nodded and got up to make himself a fresh drink after all.
She seemed to find it easier to talk now that he wasn't looking at her, now that he was at the bar with his back turned, and Billy purposely lingered there.
Chapter Eleven. The Scales of Justice
Cary had been furious – utterly furious – at being touched by the old Gypsy. He had gone to see the Raintree chief of police, Allen Chalker, the following day. Chalker was a poker-buddy, and he had been sympathetic.
The Gypsies had come to Raintree directly from Fairview, he told Cary. Chalker said he kept expecting them to leave on their own. They had already been in Raintree for five days, and usually three days was about right – just time enough for all the town's interested teenagers to have their fortunes told and for a few desperately impotent men and a like number of desperately menopausal women to creep out to the encampment under cover of darkness and buy potions and nostrums and strange, oily creams. After three days the town's interest in the strangers always waned. Chalker had finally decided they were waiting for the flea market on Sunday. It was an annual event in Raintree, and drew crowds from all four of the surrounding towns. Rather than make an issue of their continuing presence – Gypsies, he told Cary, could be as ugly as ground wasps if you poked them too hard – he decided to let them work the departing flea-market crowds. But if they weren't gone come Monday morning, he would move them along.
But there had been no need. Come Monday morning, the farm field where the Gypsies had camped was empty except for wheel ruts, empty beer and soda cans (the Gypsies apparently had no interest in Connecticut's new bottle-and-can-deposit law), the blackened remains of several small cookfires, and three or four blankets so lousy that the deputy Chalker sent out to investigate would only
poke at them with a stick – a long stick. Sometime between sundown and sunup, the Gypsies had left the field, left Raintree, left Patchin County … had, Chalker told his old poker buddy Cary Rossington, left the planet as far as he either knew or cared. And good riddance.
On Sunday afternoon the old Gypsy man had touched Cary's face; on Sunday night they had left; on Monday morning Cary had gone to Chalker to lodge a complaint (just what the legal basis of the complaint might have been, Leda Rossington didn't know); on Tuesday morning the trouble had begun. After his shower, Cary had come downstairs to the breakfast nook wearing only his bathrobe and had said: 'Look at this.'
'This' turned out to be a patch of roughened skin just a little above his solar plexus. The skin was a shade lighter than the surrounding flesh, which was an attractive coffeewith-cream shade (golf, tennis, swimming, and a UV sunlamp in the winter kept his tan unvarying). The rough patch looked yellowish to her, the way the calluses on the heels of her feet sometimes got in very dry weather. She had touched it (her voice faltered momentarily here) and then drawn her finger away quickly. The texture was rough, almost pebbly, and surprisingly hard. Armored – that was the word that had risen unbidden in her mind.
'You don't think that damned Gypsy gave me something, do you?' Cary asked worriedly. 'Ringworm or impetigo or some damned thing like that?'
'He touched your face, not your chest, dear,' Leda had replied. 'Now, get dressed quick as you can. We've got brioche. Wear the dark gray suit with the red tie and dress up Tuesday for me, will you? What a love you are.'
Two nights later he had called her into the bathroom, his voice so like a scream that she had come on the run (All our worst revelations come in the bathroom, Billy thought.) Cary was standing with his shirt off, his razor humming forgotten in one hand, his wide eyes staring into the mirror.
The patch of hard, yellowish skin had spread – it had become a blotch, a vaguely treelike shape that spread upward to the area between his nipples and downward, widening, toward his belly button. This changed flesh was raised above the normal flesh of his belly and stomach by almost an eighth of an inch, and she saw there were deep cracks running through it; several of them looked deep enough to slip the edge of a dime into. For the first time she thought he was beginning to look … well, scaly. And felt her gorge rise.
'What is it?' he nearly screamed at her. 'Leda, what is it?'
'I don't know,' she said, forcing her voice to remain calm, 'but you've got to see Michael Houston. That much is clear. Tomorrow, Cary.'
'No, not tomorrow,' he said, still staring at himself in the mirror, staring at the raised arrowhead-shaped hump of harsh yellow flesh. 'It may be better tomorrow. Day after tomorrow if it isn't better. But not tomorrow.'
'Cary -'
'Hand me that Nivea cream, Leda.'
She did, and stood there a moment longer – but the sight of him smearing the white goo over that hard yellow flesh, listening to the pads of his fingers rasp over it – that was more than she could stand, and she fled back to her room. That was the first time, she told Halleck, that she had been consciously glad for the twin beds, consciously glad he wouldn't be able to turn over in his sleep and … touch her. She had lain wakeful for hours, she said, hearing the soft rasp-rasp of his fingers moving back and forth across that alien flesh.
He told her the following night that it was better; the night after that he claimed it was better still. She supposed she should have seen the lie in his eyes … and that he was lying to himself more than he was to her. Even in his extremity, Cary had remained the same selfish son of a bitch she supposed he had always been. But it hadn't all been Cary's doing, she added sharply, still not turning back from the bar where she was now fiddling aimlessly with the glasses. She had developed her own brand of highly specialized selfishness over the years. She had wanted, needed the illusion almost as much as he had.