The Crystal World (20 page)

Turning his head to watch Dr. Sanders, Father Batthus sat at the organ, his thin fingers drawing from the pipes their unbroken music, which soared away through the stained panels of the windows to the distant dismembered sun.

For the next three days Sanders remained with Balthus, as the last crystal spurs dissolved from the tissues of his arm. All day he knelt beside the organ, working the footbellows with his jeweled arm. As the crystals dissolved, the wound he had torn in his arm ran with blood again, washing the pale prisms of his exposed tissues.

At dusk, when the sun sank in a thousand fragments into the western night, Father Balthus would leave the organ and stand out on the porch, looking up at the spectral trees. His slim scholar's face and calm eyes, their composure belied by the nervous movements of his hands, like the false calm of someone recovering from an attack of fever, would gaze at Sanders as they ate their small supper on a footstool beside the altar, sheltered from the embalming air by the jewels in the cross.

This emblem had been the joint gift of the mining companies, and the immense span of the crosspiece, at least five or six feet, carried its freight of precious stones like the boughs of the crystallized trees in the forest. The rows of emeralds and rubies, between which the smaller diamonds of Mont Royal traced starlike patterns, ran from one end of the crosspiece to the other. The jewels emitted a hard, continuous light so intense that the stones seemed fused together into a cruciform specter.

At first Sanders thought that Balthus regarded his survival as an example of the Almighty's intervention, and made some token expression of gratitude. At this Balthus smiled ambiguously. Why he had returned to the church Sanders could only guess. By now it was surrounded on all sides by the crystal trellises, as if overtopped by the mouth of an immense glacier.

From the door of the chancel Sanders could see the outbuildings of the native school and dormitory that Max Clair had described, presumably the home of the tribe of lepers abandoned by their priest. Sanders mentioned his meeting with the lepers, but Balthus seemed uninterested in his former parishioners or their present fate. Even Sanders's presence barely impinged upon his isolation. Preoccupied with himself, he sat for hours at the organ or wandered among the empty pews.

One morning, however, Balthus found a blind python searching at the door of the porch. Its eyes had been transformed into enormous jewels that rose from its forehead like crowns. Balthus knelt down and picked up the snake, then entwined its long body around his arms. He carried it down the aisle to the altar, and lifted it up to the cross. He watched it with a wry smile when, its sight returned, it slid away among the pews.

On the third day Sanders woke to the early morning light and found Balthus, alone, celebrating the Eucharist. Lying on the pew pulled up to the altar rail, Sanders watched him without moving, but the priest stopped and walked away, stripping off his vestments.

Over breakfast he confided: "You probably wonder what I was doing, but it seemed a convenient moment to test the validity of the sacrament."

He gestured at the prismatic colors pouring through the stained-glass windows. The original scriptural scenes had been transformed into paintings of bewildering abstract beauty, in which the dismembered fragments of the faces of Joseph and Jesus, Mary and the disciples floated on the liquid ultramarine of the refracted sky.

"It may sound heretical to say so, but the body of Christ is with us everywhere here-" he touched the thin shell of crystals on Sanders's arm "in each prism and rainbow, in the ten thousand faces of the sun." He raised his thin hands, jeweled by the light. "So you see, I fear that the Church, like its symbol"-here he pointed to the cross-"may have outlived its function."

Sanders searched for an answer. "I'm sorry. Perhaps if you left here-"

"No!" Balthus insisted, annoyed by Sanders's obtuseness. "Can't you understand? Once I was a true apostate-I knew God existed but could not believe in him." He laughed bitterly at himself. "Now events have overtaken me. For a priest there is no greater crisis, to deny God when he can be seen to exist in every leaf and flower."

With a gesture he led Sanders down the nave to the open porch. He pointed up to the dome-shaped lattice of crystal beams that reached from the rim of the forest like the buttresses of an immense cupola of diamond and glass. Embedded at various points were the almost motionless forms of birds with outstretched wings, golden orioles and scarlet macaws, shedding brilliant pools of light. The bands of color moved through the forest, the reflections of the melting plumage enveloping them in endless concentric patterns. The overlapping arcs hung in the air like the votive windows of a city of cathedrals. Everywhere around them Sanders could see countless smaller birds, butterflies and insects, joining their cruciform haloes to the coronation of the forest.

Father Balthus took Sanders's arm. "In this forest we see the final celebration of the Eucharist of Christ's body. Here everything is transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time."

Toward the end, as they stood side by side with their backs to the altar, his conviction seemed to fail him. As the deep frost penetrated the church, the aisle transformed itself into an occluding tunnel of glass pillars. With an expression almost of panic Balthus watched the keys of the organ manual sealing themselves together as they merged into one another, and Sanders knew that he was searching for some means of escape.

Then at last he rallied. He seized the cross from the altar and wrenched it from its stand. With a sudden anger born of absolute conviction he pressed the cross into Sanders's arms. He dragged Sanders to the porch and propelled him to one of the narrowing vaults, through which they could see the distant surface of the river.

"Go! Get away from here! Find the river!"

When Sanders hesitated, trying to control the heavy scepter with his bandaged arm, Balthus shouted fiercely: "Tell them I ordered you to take it!"

Sanders last saw him standing arms outstretched to the approaching walls, in the posture of the illuminated birds, his eyes filled with relief at the first circles of light conjured from his upraised palms.

The crystallization of the forest was now almost complete. Only the jewels in the cross allowed Sanders to make his way through the vaults between the trees. Holding the shaft in his hands, he moved the crosspiece along the trellises that hung everywhere like webs of ice, looking for the weaker panels that would dissolve in the light. As they slid to the ground at his feet he stepped through the openings, pulling the cross with him.

When he reached the river he searched for the bridge he had found when he entered the forest for the second time, but the prismatic surface extended away in a wide bend, its light obliterating the few landmarks he might otherwise have recognized. Above the banks the foliage glowed like painted snow, the only movement coming from the slow traverse of the sun. Here and there a soft blur below the bank revealed itself as the illuminated specter of a lighter or river launch, but nothing else seemed to retain any trace of its previous identity.

Sanders followed the bank, avoiding the faults in the surface and the waist-high needles that grew together on the upper slopes. He came to the mouth of a small stream and began to walk along it, too tired to climb over the cataracts in its path. Although his three days with Father Balthus had rested him sufficiently to realize that some way still remained out of the forest, the absolute silence of the vegetation along the banks and the deep prismatic glow almost convinced him that the entire earth had been transformed and that any progress through this crystal world had become pointless.

At this time, however, he discovered that he was no longer alone in the forest. Whenever the overhead canopy of trees gave way to the open sky, along the bed of the stream or in the small clearings, he passed the halfcrystallized bodies of men and women fused against the trunks of the trees, looking up at the refracted sun. Most of them were elderly couples seated together with their bodies fusing into one another as they merged with the trees and the jeweled undergrowth. The only young man he passed was a soldier in field uniform, sitting on a fallen trunk by the edge of the stream. His helmet had blossomed into an immense carapace of crystals, a solar umbrella that enclosed his face and shoulders.

Below the soldier the surface of the stream was traversed by a deep fault. At its bottom a narrow channel of water still flowed, washing the submerged legs of three soldiers who had set out to ford the stream at this point and were now embalmed in its crystal walls. Now and then their legs stirred in a slow liquid way, as if the men, roped together around their waists, were forever marching through this glacier of crystals, their faces lost in the blur of light around them.

There was a distant movement through the forest, and the sound of voices. Sanders hurried on, clasping the heavy cross to his chest. Fifty yards away, in a clearing between two groves of trees, a troupe of people dressed like harlequins were moving through the forest, dancing and shouting to one another. Sanders caught up with them and stopped at the edge of the clearing, trying to count the scores of dark-skinned men and women of all ages, some of them with small children, who were taking part in this graceful saraband. They were wandering in a loose procession, small groups breaking away to dance around single trees or bushes. There were well over a hundred of them, passing through the forest with no evident route in mind. Their arms and faces were transformed by the crystal growth, and already their drab loincloths and robes were beginning to frost and jeweL

As Sanders stood by his cross a small party came over to him in a series of leaps and jumps, then gamboled around him like newly admitted entrants to paradise serenading an attendant archangel. An old man with a deformed light-filled face passed Sanders, gesturing at his fingerless hands as the jeweled light poured from his stunted joints. Sanders remembered the lepers seated beneath the trees near the mission hospital. During the previous days the whole tribe had entered the forest. They danced away from him on their crippled legs, holding their children by the hands, grotesque rainbows dazzling their faces.

As the lepers moved off, Sanders followed behind them, dragging the cross in both hands. Through the trees he saw the train of the procession, but they seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared, as if eager to familiarize themselves with every tree and grove in their new-found paradise. However, for no reason the entire troupe then turned and came round again, as if delighted to take a last look at Sanders and his cross. As they went by Sanders caught a glimpse of a tall dark-robed woman at their head, calling to the others in a clear voice. Her pale arms and face already shone with the crystal light of the forest. She turned to look back, and Sanders shouted over the bobbing heads: "Suzanne! Suzanne, here-!"

But the woman and the remainder of the troupe had scattered again among the trees. Hobbling along, Sanders found the last remnants of their meager baggage lying on the ground-rag shoes and broken baskets, begging bowls with their few grains of rice already half fused to the vitrified ground.

Once Sanders came across the half-crystallized body of a small child who had fallen behind and been unable to keep up with the others. Lying down to rest, it had become fused to the ground. Sanders listened to the voices fading away among the trees, the child's parents somewhere among them. Then he lowered the cross over the child and waited as the crystals deliquesced from its arms and legs. Freed again, the child's deformed hands clasped the air. With a Start it clambered to its feet and ran off through the trees, the dissolving light pouring from its head and shoulders.

Sanders was still following the procession, lost far away in the distance, when he reached the summer house where Thorensen and Serena Ventress had first taken refuge. It was now dusk, and the jewels of the cross shone faintly in the failing light. Already the cross had lost much of its power, and most of the smaller diamonds and rubies had faded to blunted nodes of carbon and corundum. Only the large emeralds still burned strongly against the white hulk of Thorensen's cruiser trapped in its fault in front of the summer house.

Sanders walked along the bank, past the crystal remains of the mulatto in his crocodile skin. The two had become merged, the man himself, half-white and halfblack, fusing with the dark jeweled beast. Their own outlines were still visible as they effloresced through each other's tissues. The face of the mulatto shone through the superimposed jaws and eyes of the great crocodile.

The door of the summer house was open. Sanders climbed the steps and walked into the chamber. He looked down at the bed, in whose frosted depths, like swimmers asleep on the bottom of an enchanted pool, Serena and the mine-owner lay together. Thorensen's eyes were closed, and the delicate petals of a blood red rose blossomed from the hole in his breast like an exquisite marine plant. Beside him Serena slept quietly, the unseen motion of her heart sheathing her body in a faint amber glow, the palest residue of life. Although Thorensen had died trying to save her, she lived on in her own half-death.

Something glittered in the dusk behind Sanders. He turned to see a brilliant chimera, a man with incandescent arms and chest, race past among the trees, a cascade of particles diffusing in the air behind him. He flinched back behind the cross, but the man had vanished, whirling himself away among the crystal vaults. As his luminous wake faded Sanders heard his voice echoing across the frosted air, the plaintive words jeweled and ornamented like everything else in that transmogrified world. "_Serena-! Serena-!_"

Two months later, as he completed his letter to Dr. Paul Derain, director of the leper hospital at Fort Isabelle, in the quiet of his hotel bedroom at Port Matarre, Sanders wrote: