The Crystal World (17 page)

"And Suzanne-your dark lady-what does she mean for you, Edward?"

"I'm not sure-obviously she stands in some way for the _leproserie_ and whatever _that_ means-the dark side of the equinox. Believe me, I recognize now that my motives for working at the _leproserie_ weren't altogether humanitarian, but merely accepting that doesn't help me. Of course there's a dark side of the psyche, and I suppose all one can do is find the other face and try to reconcile the two-it's happening out there in the forest."

"How long are you staying?" Louise asked. "In Mont Royal?"

"Another few days. I can't leave straightaway. From my point of view coming here has been a complete failure, but I've hardly seen either of them and they may need my help."

"Edward-" Louise walked over to the window. Pulling on the blind, she raised the blades so that they let in the afternoon light. Silhouetted against the sun, her white suit and pale skin became suddenly dark. As she played with the string, opening and closing the blind, her slim figure was lit and then eclipsed like an image in a solar shutter. "Edward, there's an army launch going back to Port Matarre tomorrow. In the afternoon. I've decided to go."

"But, Louise-"

"I must go." She faced him, her chin raised. "There's no hope of finding Anderson-he must be dead by now-and I owe it to the bureau to get my story out."

"Story? My dear, you're thinking in terms of trivialities." Sanders went over to the whisky decanter on the bare sideboard. "Louise, I'd hoped you could stay on with me-" He broke off, aware that Louise was putting him to the test and not wanting to upset her. Whatever his references to Suzanne, he knew that he would have to stay with her and Max for the time being. If anything, Suzanne's leprosy had increased his need to remain with her. Despite her aloofness the previous night, Sanders knew that he was the only person to understand the real nature of her affliction and its meaning for them both.

To Louise, as she picked up her handbag, he said: "I'll ask Max to call the base and send a car for you."

During the rest of the afternoon Sanders remained in the chalet, watching the corona of light that lay over the distant forest. Behind him, beyond the perimeter fence, the lepers had moved forward again through the trees. As the afternoon light faded, the brilliance of the sun was still held within the crystal forest, and the old men and women came to the edge of the trees and waited there like nervous wraiths.

After dusk Suzanne appeared again. Whether she had really been asleep or, like Sanders, sitting in her room behind drawn blinds, he had no means of knowing, but at dinner she seemed even more withdrawn than at their previous meeting, eating with a kind of compulsive nervousness as if forcing down food that lacked all flavor. She had finished each of the courses when Sanders and Max were still talking over their wine. The black velvet curtain behind her-obviously placed against this single window for Sanders's benefit-made her dark robe almost invisible in the dim light, and from the far end of the table, where she had placed Sanders, even the white powdered mask of her face seemed a veiled blur.

"Did Max take you on a tour of our hospital?" she asked. "I hope you were impressed?"

"Very," Sanders said. "It has no patients." He added: "I'm surprised you need to spend any time at all in the dispensary."

"Quite a number of the natives come along during the night," Max explained. "During the daytime they're hanging around near the forest. One of the drivers told me that they're starting to take their sick and dying into the affected area. A kind of instant mummification, I suppose."

"But far more splendid," Suzanne said. "Like a fly in the amber of its own tears or a fossil millions of years old, making a diamond of its body for us. I hope the army let them through."

"They can't stop them," Max rejoined. "If these people want to commit suicide it's their affair. The army is too busy anyway evacuating themselves." He turned to Sanders. "It's almost comical, Edward. As soon as they put the camp down somewhere they have to uproot the whole thing and back off another quarter of a mile."

"How fast is the area spreading?"

"About a hundred feet a day, or more. According to the army radio network things are getting to the panic stage in the focal area in Florida. Half the state has been evacuated, already the zone there extends from the Everglades swamps all the way to Miami."

Suzanne raised her glass at this. "Can you imagine that, Edward? An entire city! All those hundreds of white hotels transformed into stained glass-it must be like Venice in the days of Titian and Veronese, or Rome with dozens of St. Peters."

Max laughed. "Suzanne, you make it sound like the new Jerusalem. Before you could turn around I'm afraid you'd find yourself an angel in a rose window."

After dinner, Sanders waited for Clair to leave and give him a few moments alone with Suzanne, but Max took a chess set from the blackwood cabinet and set up the pieces. As he and Sanders played the opening moves Suzanne excused herself and slipped out.

Sanders waited an hour for her to come back. At ten o'clock he resigned his game and said good night to Max, leaving him mulling over the possibilities of the end game.

Unable to sleep, Sanders wandered around his chalet, drinking what was left of the whisky in the decanter. In one of the empty rooms he found a stack of French illustrated magazines and leafed through the pages, scanning the by-lines of the articles for Louise's name.

On an impulse he left the chalet and went out into the darkness. He walked toward the perimeter fence. Twenty yards from the wire he could see the lepers sitting under the trees in the moonlight. They had come forward on to the open ground, exposing themselves to the moonlight like bathers under a midnight sun. One or two were shuffling about through the lines of people halfasleep on the ground or squatting on their bundles.

Hiding himself in the shadows behind the chalet, Sanders turned and followed their gaze. The vast outspill of light rose from the forest, its extent broken only by the dim white form of the Bourbon Hotel.

Sanders walked back into the compound. Crossing the courtyard, he made his way to the perimeter fence as it turned in the direction of the ruined hotel, which was now hidden by the intervening trees. A path led toward it through the trees, passing the abandoned mine-works. Sanders stepped over the fence, then walked through the dark air toward the hotel.

Ten minutes later, as he stood at the top of the wide steps that led down among the tumbled columns, he saw Suzanne Clair walking in the moonlight below him. In a few places the affected zone had crossed the highway, and small patches of the scrub along the roadside had begun to vitrify. Their drab leaves gave off a faint luminescence. Suzanne walked' among them, her long robe sweeping across the brittle ground. Sanders could see that her shoes and the train of her robe were beginning to crystallize, the minute prisms glancing in the moonlight.

Sanders made his way down the steps, his feet cutting at the shards of marble between the columns. Turning, Suzanne saw him approach. For a moment she flinched toward the road, then recognized him and hurried up the weed-grown drive.

"Edward-!"

Sanders reached out to take her hands, afraid that she might stumble, but Suzanne slipped past and pressed herself to his chest. Sanders embraced her, feeling her dark hair against his cheek. Her waist and shoulders were like ice, the silk robe chilling his hands.

"Suzanne, I thought you might be here." He tried to move her away, so that he could see her face, but she still held on to him with the strong grip of a dancer moving with her partner through an intricate step. Her eyes were turned away so that she seemed to speak from the ruins beyond his left shoulder.

"Edward, I come here every night." She pointed to the upper stories of the white hotel. "I was there yesterday, I watched you come out of the forest! Do you know, Edward, your clothes were glowing!"

Sanders nodded, then walked with her up the drive to the steps. As if straightening her hair, Suzanne held one hand to her forehead between them, the other clasping his own hand to her cold waist.

"Does Max know you're here?" Sanders asked. "He may send one of the houseboys to keep an eye on you."

"My dear Edward!" Suzanne laughed for the first time. "Max has no idea, he's asleep, poor man-he realizes he's living on the edges of a nightmare-" She stopped, checking herself in case Sanders might guess that this referred to her own condition. "The forest, that is. He's never understood what it means. You do, Edward, I could see that straightaway."

"Perhaps-" They climbed the steps past the drums of the toppled columns and entered the great hail. High above, the cupola over the staircase had fallen through and Sanders could see a cluster of stars, but the light from the forest below cast the hall into almost complete darkness. Immediately he felt Suzanne relax. Taking his hand, she guided him past the shattered chandelier at the foot of the staircase.

They walked up to the second floor, and then turned into a corridor on their left. Through the broken panels Sanders saw the worm-eaten hulks of tall wardrobes and collapsed bedposts, like the derelict monuments in some mausoleum to the hotel's forgotten past.

"Here we are." Suzanne stepped through a locked door whose central panels had fallen in. In the room beyond, the empire furniture was in place, a desk stood in the corner by the window, and a mirrorless dressing table framed the forest below. Dust and wormwood lay on the floor, small footprints winding through them.

Suzanne sat down on one side of the bed, opening her robe with the placid gestures of a wife returning home with her husband. "What do you think of it, Edward, -my pied a terre, or is it nearer the clouds than that?"

Sanders glanced around the dusty room, looking for some personal trace of Suzanne. Apart from the footprints on the floor there was nothing of her there, as if she dwelled like a ghost among the empty chambers of the white hotel.

"I like the room," he said. "It has a magnificent view of the forest."

"I only come here in the evening, and then the dust looks like moonlight."

Sanders sat down on the bed beside her. He glanced up at the ceiling, half-afraid that at any moment the hotel might crumble and collapse into a dust-filled pit, carrying Suzanne and himself down into its maw. He waited for the darkness to clear, aware of the contrast between Suzanne and this room in the derelict hotel with its moonlit empire furniture and the functional but sunfilled chalet where he and Louise had made love that morning. Louise's body had lain beside him like a piece of the sun, a golden odalisque trapped for Pharaoh in his tomb. As now, in turn, he held Suzanne's cold body in his arms, his hands avoiding her face, which lay beside him in the darkness, its pale lantern like a closing moon, he remembered Ventress's "We're running out of time, Sanders-" As time withdrew, his relationship with Suzanne, drained of everything but the image of leprosy and whatever this stood for in his mind, had begun to dissolve into the dust that surrounded them wherever they moved outside the forest.

"Suzanne-" He sat up beside her, trying to massage some warmth into his hands. Her breasts had been like goblets of ice. "Tomorrow I'm going back to Port Matarre. It's time for me to leave."

"What?" Suzanne drew the robe across herself, sealing the white outline of her body into the darkness. "But, Edward, I thought you'd-"

Sanders took her hand. "My dear, apart from everything I owe Max there are my patients at Isabelle. I can't just leave them."

"They were my patients as well. The forest is spreading everywhere, there's no more you or I can do for them."

"Perhaps not-I may only be thinking of myself again-and you, Suzanne-"

While he spoke she had left the bed and now stood in front of him, the dark robe brushing the dust from the floor. "Stay with us for a week, Edward. Derain won't mind, he knew you were coming here. In a week-"

"In a week we may all have to go. Believe me, Suzanne, I've been trapped in the forest."

She walked toward him, her face raised in a shaft of moonlight as if about to kiss him on the mouth. Then he realized that this was far from being a romantic gesture. At last Suzanne was showing him her face.

"Edward, just now, do you know to whom you- made love to?"

Sanders touched her shoulder with one hand, trying to reassure her. "Suzanne, I do know. Last night-"

"What?" She turned away from him, hiding her face again. "What do you mean?"

Sanders followed her across the room. "I'm sorry, Suzanne. It may sound hollow comfort, but I carry those lesions as much as you do."

Before he could reach her she had slipped through the door. He picked up his jacket and saw her moving swiftly down the long corridor to the staircase. When he reached the entrance hail she was more than fifty yards ahead of him, running through the tumbled columns, her dark gown like an immense veil as she moved along the crystalline pathways away from the white hotel.

At midnight, as he lay half-asleep in his room at the rear of the chalet, Dr. Sanders heard the sounds of a distant commotion from the compound of the hospital. Almost too tired to sleep, and yet sufficiently exhausted not to listen more closely, he ignored the raised voices and the flickering beam of the Land-Rover's searchlight carried over the roof and reflected off the tall trees outside.

Later, the noise began again. The engine of an antiquated truck was being hand-started in the compound. As it coughed and sneezed and the voices chattered around it, he heard more footsteps running in and out of the chalets. All the servants seemed to be up, wandering in and out of the rooms across the courtyard and slamming the cupboard doors.

When he saw someone with a torch inspecting the vegetation outside his window Sanders climbed from his bed and dressed.