The Crystal World (11 page)

"Running out of time?" he repeated. "I haven't thought about it yet. What's your explanation?"

"Isn't it obvious, Doctor? Doesn't your own 'specialty,' the dark side of the sun we see around us here, provide a clue? Surely leprosy, like cancer, is above all a disease of time, a result of over-extending oneself through that particular medium?"

Dr. Sanders nodded as Ventress spoke, watching the man's skull-like face come alive as he discussed this element that he appeared, on the surface at least, to despise. "It's a theory," he agreed when Ventress had finished. "Not-"

"Not scientific enough?" Ventress threw his head back. In a louder voice, he declaimed: "Look at the viruses, Doctor, with their crystalline structure, neither animate nor inanimate, and their immunity to time!" He swept a hand along the sill and scooped up a cluster of the vitreous grains, then scattered them across the floor like smashed marbles. "You and I will be like them soon, Sanders, and the rest of the world. Neither living nor dead!"

At the end of this tirade Ventress turned away and resumed his scrutiny of the forest. A muscle flickered in his left cheek, like distant lightning marking the end of a storm.

"Why are you looking for Thorensen?" Dr. Sanders asked. "Are you after his diamond mine?"

"Don't be a fool!" Ventress swore over his shoulder. "That's the last thing-gem-stones are no rarity in this forest, Doctor." With a comtemptuous gesture he scraped a mass of crystals from the material of his suit. "If you want I'll pluck you a necklace of Hope diamonds."

"What are you doing here?" Dr. Sanders asked evenly. "In this house?"

"Thorensen lives here."

"What?" Incredulously, Sanders looked again at the ornate furniture and gilded mirrors, thinking of the burly man in the blue suit at the wheel of the dented Chrysler. "I saw him for only a few moments, but it doesn't seem in character."

"Precisely. I've never seen such bad taste." Ventress nodded to himself. "And believe me, as an architect I've seen plenty. The whole house is a pathetic joke." He pointed to one of the marquetry divans with a spiral bolster that had transformed itself into a brilliant parody of a rococo cartouche, the helix twisting like the overgrown horns of a goat. "Louis Nineteen, perhaps?"

Carried away by his jibes at the absent Thorensen, Ventress had turned his back on the window. Looking past him, Dr. Sanders saw the crocodile trapped in the stream lift on its weak legs, as if snapping at a passer-by. Interrupting Ventress, Sanders pointed down at it, but another voice anticipated him.

"Ventress!"

The shout, an angry challenge, came from the crystal shrubbery along the left-hand margins of the lawn. A second later a shot roared out into the cold air. As Ventress swung round, pushing Sanders away with one hand, the bullet crashed into the ceiling over their heads, bringing down a huge lattice-like section that splintered around their feet into a mass of flattened needles. Ventress flinched back, and then blindly fired off a shot at the shrubbery. The report echoed around the petrified trees, shaking loose their vivid colors.

"Keep down!" Ventress scuttled along the floor to the next window, then worked the barrel of the shotgun through the frosted panes. After his initial moment of stunned panic he had recovered his wits, and even seemed to seize on this chance of a confrontation. He peered down at the garden, then stood up when the cracking of a distant tree appeared to mark the retreat of their hidden assailant.

Ventress walked across to Sanders, who was standing with his back to the wall beside the window.

"All right. He's gone."

Sanders hesitated before moving. He glanced around the trees at the edges of the lawn, trying not to expose more than a glimpse of himself. At the far end of the lawn, framed between two oaks, a white gazebo had been transformed by the frost into a huge crystal crown. Its glass casements winked like inlaid jewels, as if something were moving behind them. Ventress, however, stood openly in front of the window, surveying the scene below.

"Was that Thorensen?" Sanders asked.

"Of course." This brief passage-at-arms seemed to have relaxed Ventress. The shotgun cradled loosely in his elbow, he strolled around the room, now and then pausing to examine the puncture left by the bullet in the ceiling. For some reason he obviously assumed that Sanders had taken his side in this private duel, perhaps because Sanders had already saved him from the attack in the native harbor at Port Matarre. Sanders's actions, however, had been little more than reflex, as Ventress no doubt was aware. Patently Ventress was not a man who ever felt under much obligation to other people, whatever they might have done for him, and Sanders guessed that in fact Ventress had sensed some spark of kinship during their voyage by steamer from Libreville and that he would plunge his entire sympathy or hostility upon such a chance encounter.

The movement inside the gazebo had ended. Sanders stepped forward from his hiding place behind the window.

"The attack on you in Port Matarre-were those Thorensen's men?"

Ventress shrugged. "You might well be right, Doctor. Don't worry, I'll look after you."

"You'll have your work cut out-those thugs meant business. From what the army captain at the base told me the diamond companies don't intend to let anything get in their way."

Ventress shook his head, exasperated by Sanders's obtuseness. "Doctor! You persist in finding the most trivial reasons-obviously you have no idea of your real motives! For the last time, I am not interested in Thorensen's damned diamonds-and nor is Thorensen! The matter between us-" He broke off, staring vaguely through the window, his face for the first time showing any sign of fatigue. In a distracted voice, more to himself, he went on: "Believe me, I respect Thorensen- however crude, he understands that we have the same aim, it's a question of method-" Ventress swung on his heel. "We'd better leave now," he announced. "There's no point in staying. Where are you going?"

" Mont Royal, if that's possible."

"It won't be." Ventress pointed through the window. "The storm center is directly between here and the town. Your only hope is to reach the river and follow it back to the army base. Whom are you looking for?"

"A former colleague of mine and his wife. Do you know the Bourbon Hotel? It's some distance from the town. Their mission hospital is near the hotel."

"Bourbon?" Ventress screwed up his face. "Sounds like the wrong century-you're out of time again, Sanders." He made for the door. "It's an old ruin, God only knows where. You'll have to stay with me until we reach the edge of the forest, then work your way back to the army base."

Testing each step, they went down the crystallizing staircase. Halfway down, Ventress, who was in the lead, stopped and beckoned Sanders forward.

"My pistol." He patted his shoulder holster. "I'll follow you. See if you notice anything from the door."

As he retraced his steps. Sanders walked across the empty hail. He paused among the jeweled pillars, uneager, whatever Ventress's instructions, to expose himself in the wide doorway with its colonnaded portico. From the center of the hail the garden and trees beyond were silent, and he turned and waited among the pillars by the alcove on his left, dozens of reflections of himself glowing in the glass-sheathed walls and furniture.

Involuntarily Sanders raised his hands to catch the rainbows of light that ran around the edges of his suit and face. A legion of El Dorados, all bearing his own features, receded in the mirrors, more images of himself as the man of light than he could have hoped for. He studied a reflection of himself in profile, noticing how the bands of color softened the drawn lines of his mouth and eyes, blurring the residue of time there that had hardened the tissues like the scales of leprosy itself. For a moment he seemed twenty years younger, the ruddy overlay of colors on his cheeks more skilful than the palette of any Rubens or Titian.

Turning his attention to the reflection facing his own, Sanders noticed with surprise that among these prismatic images of himself refracted from the sun he had found one darker twin. The profile and features were obscured, but the skin was almost ebony in color, reflecting the mottled blues and violets of the opposite end of the spectrum. Somehow menacing in this company of light, the somber figure stood motionlessly with its head turned away from him, as if aware of its negative aspect. In its lowered hand a lance of silver light flared like a star in a chalice.

Abruptly Sanders leapt behind the pillar on his left, as the Negro hiding in the alcove lunged forward across him. The knife flashed in the air past Sanders's face, its white light diving among the reflections that swerved like drunken suns around the two men, the colors bleeding off their arms and legs. Sanders kicked at the Negro's hand, half-recognizing one of the thugs he had seen on the catwalk at Port Matarre. Crouching down, his bony pointed face almost between his knees, the Negro feinted with the knife. Sanders moved back toward the staircase, and then saw the giant mulatto in the bush-shirt watching from behind a bookcase in the drawing room, a Colt automatic in his scarred hand. The frost outside had given his dark face a luminous sheen.

Before Sanders could shout up to Ventress, a shot roared out through the air over his head. Ducking down, he saw the Negro with the knife knocked to the floor, his heels kicking in pain. The punctured lattice on the wall behind him slid and shattered across a divan, and the Negro picked himself up and raced like a wounded animal through the entrance. A second shot followed him from the staircase, and Ventress moved down from his vantage point behind the banister. His tight face hidden behind the stock of the shotgun, he beckoned Sanders away from the entrance to the drawing room. The mulatto hiding by the bookcase ran across the room, firing once as he stopped below the chandelier, the impact of the explosion showering the light from the cutglass pendants like rain over his cropped head. He shouted at a tall white-skinned man in a leather jerkin who stood by the far wall, with his back to the staircase opening a safe over the ornamental fireplace.

Covering him, the mulatto fired through the door. The man by the safe dragged a small strongbox from the upper shelf as Ventress upended the mahogany hall stand across the archway. The strongbox fell to the floor, and dozens of rubies and sapphires scattered between the tall man's feet. Ignoring Ventress, who was trying to get in a shot at the mulatto, he bent down and scooped some of the stones into his big hands. Then he and the mulatto turned and ran for the French windows, crushing aside the light frames with their shoulders.

Leaping over his barricade, Ventress entered the drawing room, darting in and out of the overstuffed settees and armchairs. As his quarry disappeared through the trees Ventress reached the windows, then reloaded his gun with the shells in his pocket and fired a parting shot over the lawn.

He moved the barrel in Sanders's direction as the latter stepped over the hall stand into the room.

"Right, Doctor, all clear?" Ventress was breathing rapidly, his small shoulders moving about in an excess of nervous energy. "What's the matter? He didn't touch you, did he?"

Sanders went over to him. He pushed aside the gunbarrel, which Ventress still held toward him. He stared down at the bearded man's bony face and over-excited eyes.

"Ventress! You knew they were here all along-you were bloody well using me as a decoy!"

He broke off. Ventress was paying no attention to him, and was peering left and right through the French windows. Sanders turned away, a sense of limp calm coming over his fatigue. He noticed the jewels sparkling on the floor. "I thought you said Thorensen wasn't interested in gem-stones."

Ventress turned to look at Sanders, and then down at the floor below the safe. Half-dropping his shotgun, he bent over and began to touch the stones where they lay, as if puzzled to find them there. He absently pocketed a few of them, then gathered the rest together and stuffed them into his trousers.

He went back to the windows. "You're right, Sanders, of course," he said in a flat voice. "But I was thinking of your safety, believe me." Then he snapped: "Let's get out of here."

As they made their way across the lawn, Ventress lagged behind a second time. Sanders stopped, looking back at the house which loomed behind them among the trees like a giant wedding cake. Ventress was staring at the handful of gem-stones in his hand. The bright sapphires slipped between his fingers and lay on the sequined grass behind him, illuminating his footprints as he entered the dark vaults of the forest.

For an hour they moved along the fossilized stream. Ventress remained in the lead, the shotgun held warily in front of him, his movements neat and deliberate, while Sanders limped behind. Now and then they passed a power-cruiser embedded in the crust, or a vitrified crocodile reared upwards and grimaced at them soundlessly, its mouth choked with jewels as it shifted in a fault of colored glass.

Always Ventress was on the lookout for Thorensen. Which of them was searching for the other, Sanders could not discover, nor the subject of their blood feud. Although Thorensen had twice attacked him, Ventress almost seemed to be encouraging Thorensen, deliberately exposing himself as if trying to trap the mineowner.

"Can't we get back to Mont Royal?" Dr. Sanders shouted, his voice echoing among the vaults. "We're going deeper into the forest."

"The town is cut off, my dear Sanders. Don't worry, I'll take you there in due course." Ventress leapt nimbly over a fissure in the surface of the stream. Below the mass of dissolving crystals, a thin stream of fluid rilled down a buried channel.

Led by this white-suited figure with his preoccupied gaze, they moved on through the forest, sometimes in complete circles, as if Ventress were familiarizing himself with the topography of his jeweled twilight world. Whenever Dr. Sanders sat down to rest on one of the vitrified trunks and brushed away the crystals forming on the soles of his shoes, despite their constant movement, Ventress would wait impatiently, watching Sanders with ruminative eyes as if deciding whether to abandon him to the forest. The air was always icy, the dark shadows closing and unfolding around them.