Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (10 page)

 
          
Immediately
he and Sally could both see through the cage. And of course, all the reflection
worlds had disappeared. Weinberger was still wrestling — with thin air. His fingers
still clutched — nothing. Jim could see what the man was doing, because he
already knew what he was doing, but to Sally it must have seemed an insane
mime.

 
          
Now
Weinberger was tearing Death free so that he could hold it in one clenched hand
— to throw it far away from him? No, now that he had succeeded he would never
give up his hold on Death. He held that one imprisoning hand aloft in a salute.
Baring his teeth, he grinned through his agony.

 
          
“Cut
the current!” he ordered harshly.

 
          
Jim
squeezed the bulb. The crackling hiss, which might have been the sound of
Death’s wingbeat or its wordless voice, faded away.

 
          
“Unlock
the cage!”

 
          
Jim
pulled the glass wall open, as ordered, then hesitated. Was he, in effect,
letting Death — impossible, inconceivable, living Death — out into the world?
Yet with the current no longer flowing, a mesh of frail wires hardly seemed
any obstacle . . .

 
          
Weinberger
saw his hesitation.

 
          
“You
fool, I’ve got tight hold of it!” he shouted at Jim’s face from the other side
of the wires. He could easily burst through the wires by main force, but even
in this extremity he had no desire to damage any part of his invention.

 
          
“It
isn’t
here.
Not in this ‘here*! It’s
still in the reflection — that’s where I’ve got hold of it!”

 
          
Had
he? Had he really? Or was the pain so deeply etched into his punctured nerves
and scoured fingers that he only thought he had? Was Weinberger only imagining
that the struggle still went on in the way that an amputee feels phantom limb
sensations?

 
          
Jim
could not believe it. Weinberger continued to clutch the air — impeccably,
and agonisedly. All the reflections had gone away to wherever reflections went
when they were off duty. Yet, wherever that place might be, his reflected hands
must
still be mimicking, there, the
shape and stance of his actual flesh and blood hands . . .

 
          
Jim
tore the key from his neck, snapping the chain in his haste. He jabbed it at
the lock twice before he succeeded in inserting it and turning it. At last he
tugged the door open.

 
          
Weinberger
crawled out and staggered erect before Jim and Sally, his clenched hand held at
arm’s length, triumph and torment written on his face.

 
          
As
soon as
Jim sank into the bean-bag
seat, Resnick planted both hands firmly on the corner of his desk and began to
pivot from side to side.

 
          
“This
House is
not
a theatre of the absurd
. .

 
          
Resnick
was upset, and if he sat down he might not be able to speak coherently.

 
          
Sally
Costello had talked to Claudio Menotti, who had duly complained to the Master
about her distress. Jim’s cry — ‘He’s caught Death and he’s fighting it’ — had
planted a dagger of disquiet in Sally’s heart, which had been driven deep by
Weinberger’s frenzied emergence from the cage clutching an imaginary
something
at arm’s length.

 
          
Resnick’s
scene-screen showed no sunset seascape this morning, but a smouldering volcano
billowing smoke, on the verge of exploding.

 
          
‘If
he needs
that
to browbeat me,’
thought Jim, ‘then he can’t quite manage it by himself.’

 
          
But
Alice Huron was there too, sitting straight and tall, as well as Mary-Ann
Sczepanski who seemed nervously intoxicated by the black, fire-flecked clouds.
For the moment the etiquette of privacy and confidentiality had disappeared
somewhere behind those plumes of smoke.

 
          
“What
exactly
did
you mean when you said
that, eh? And now that it’s the morning after, how do you assess what
happened?”

 
          
Jim
considered.

 
          
Up
in his room, Weinberger had not slept a wink all night. How could you get to
sleep when your hand was being tortured? Jim doubted whether Weinberger could
let go now, if he wanted to. His
hand, and Death, were
too intermixed: hooks trapped in bones, bones trapping wings.
If, indeed, he was holding anything . . .

 
          
But
Weinberger
knew
that he was holding
something. His hand remained bent like an arthritis victim’s, quite unable to
flex. Yet to all outward appearances it was a perfectly unblemished hand. He
did not sleep. He could not rest. He gritted his teeth, and held Death at arm’s
length.

 
          
“I
believed I saw Death,” said Jim defiantly. “It was like a bat. It was like a
huge moth, though there was nothing flimsy about it! It had big crystal eyes.
It was red — with a kind of redness, anyway. Maybe it was infrared.”

 
          
“So
now you can see in the infrared?” asked Alice Huron sarcastically. “Maybe that
explains why those cameras saw nothing!”

 
          
This
was true. When the videotapes were played back they had merely showed
Weinberger jerking upright when he was injected, then scrabbling at the empty
air for a minute or so — all on his own. Admittedly the record was confused by
all the multiple images of Weinberger in the mirrors, but certainly no other
creature was visible.

 
          
“It
didn’t register,” agreed Jim. “Yes, it’s exactly as though the tapes couldn’t
record light of the wavelength I saw. It’s as though it came from a different
spectrum entirely! But I swear that my eyes saw it.”

 
          
“You
hallucinated
,” said
Resnick
, still arcing about. “You hypnotised yourself by
staring through that periscope into all those mirrors. Your attention drifted.
You were almost in a state of sensory deprivation — and you know where those
can lead! What was his name, eh? Mike Mullen, hmm?
Your
friend.
According to your dossier —”

 
          
“Thank
you for acquainting everybody with my dossier!”

 
          
“Necessary information, Jim!
In case you don’t realize it,
we’re in trouble.
First the murder, now this.
If this
fantasy
gets
out.
. .! But it won’t, will it, Jim?”

 
          
“If
you put Weinberger on public exhibition, it may.”

 
          
“And
we must do that — though I do take grave exception to the word ‘exhibition’. Do
you think you have us in a cleft stick, then?” Resnick danced from side to side
as though to dislodge himself. “Let me remind you that in certain extreme
circumstances a guide can be
required
to retire prematurely. If you follow me . . .”

 
          
“Oh,
I do.” Jim looked from Resnick’s face to those of his accomplices of the stormy
night at the chalet. His minions . . . Mary-Ann smiled automatically at the
mention of retirement.

 
          
“All
right, so Weinberger didn’t
Find
peace in his
‘machine’,” said Jim angrily. “But damn it, he’s begun to purge his hostile
feelings about death. That’s what happened — don’t you see? They’re something
he can seize hold of now. That’s a darn good start.”

 
          
“And
what about your own hostile feelings about death?” asked
Alice
.
“Since you’re so
positive that you saw the thing too!”

 
          
“Hostile —?
What bloody nonsense! Just give me time with the
man! Anyway, it isn’t
your
job to
decide.”

 
          
Though
who
really did pull
whose
strings around this House?

 
          
“Maybe
I developed a sort of quasi-telepathic linkage with Nathan,” he admitted.
“As a true guide should.”

 
          
“With
you in a state of sensory deprivation, that’s understandable,” said
Resnick
, in a more mellow tone. “You hallucinated, freely
and grandiosely, when Weinberger sat up and began his phantom battle. You
filled in the empty space in his hands. You gave it unreal life. So did
Weinberger. He was torn out of deep trance by those stimulants. The blood was
pounding through his heart valves, and probably through his eyeballs too. He
saw that blood
personalised
.”

 
          
‘I
couldn’t have hypnotised myself,’ thought Jim. ‘I knew the risk. I looked away
from time to time.’

 
          
“I
do wonder,” said
Alice
, “why Jim should have filled in the empty space with
that
in particular. That bat or fighting
cock or whatever it was.”

 
          
Or
whatever: bat, rooster, moth — none of these, really.
Or all
of them.
An alien composite, a creature not of Earth.

 
          
“Quasi-telepathy?”
repeated Jim vaguely.

 
          
“It
occurs to me,” said Mary-Ann, “that we’re all just
assuming
that you both saw the same thing.” She sounded eager to
help. “Okay, so it was a very powerful experience for you both, and you both
saw something. But was it necessarily the
same
something? Was it the same experience? Have you asked Weinberger exactly what
he saw?”

 
          
And
Jim realized that he had not.

 
          
Because
the event had been so very vivid, and because Nathan’s clutchings had
synchronised so perfectly with what he himself saw, he had indeed leapt to the
conclusion that the thing that Weinberger saw himself fighting with, and the
thing that Jim saw him fighting with, were one and the same.

 
          
Jim
cursed himself silently, without letting any of the chagrin he felt show on his
face.

 
          
He
decided to lie. They
must
have seen
the same thing. Otherwise, Jim’s own private image of death — a secret even to
himself, apparently!
— was crazy and irresponsible.
It
was utterly childish.

 
          
Mary-Ann
was not really being helpful, he decided. But she was eager enough: eager for
him to fall into the trap of admitting his oversight, and so lay himself open
to the charge of harbouring feelings which he was certain he did not possess,
emotions which were the opposite of what any true guide should feel, if he
admitted the truth, he might as well resign here and now — if indeed the House
allowed him simply to resign without at the same time demanding his premature
retirement.
As they could so demand.
As they could.

 
          
“Of
course I asked him,” said Jim, hoping that no one else had asked Weinberger in
the meantime. “We both saw the same thing.”

 
          
“A
case of powerful identification, then,” said Resnick, reeling in the line just
at the instant when the fish had been about to bite. “I agree that that’s a
fine thing in a guide — though in this case it does seem a
little
excessive. Okay, we’re tolerant people here in Egremont. We
always could afford to be, with Norman Harper at the heart of our society.
Could
afford to be, Jim.
Past tense.
Could.”

 
          
“Weinberger
experienced catharsis,” said Jim, feeling more sure of his ground. “The hostile
feelings have burst out of him, like an actual physical creature. As soon as he
can
let go
of it, he’ll be free of
those feelings.
Permanently.”

 
          
“He
only has to be free of them for the next few weeks,” said Resnick. “I suggest
that you go and hold his hand, till he opens it.” The Master glanced at Alice
Huron, who had leant forward as though about to say something. “We’re in too
deep to consider changing guides again. The bob-sled’s half-way down the run.”
This sounded like a quotation from one of Norman Harper’s poems.

 
          
Resnick
bent to fiddle with a touch-pad behind his desk. The smoking volcano which had
been looming over their discussion disappeared. In its place was a serene
snow-clad mountain. All the inner fires and fumes and gobbets of lava were
frozen by white
Winter
— the Winter of the world.

 
          
Jim
left the office, aware that his own life was in a real sense beginning to
depend upon Weinberger’s good death.

 
          
Up
in room 302 Nathan Weinberger lay slumped in bed, kept awake by pain. His
clenched hand rested on a bolster to keep it from contact with the sheets.

 
          
How
long could he succeed in holding Death at arm’s length? When Death escaped from
him at last, would it wing elsewhere — or would it come straight to this
room? Would it home in, and perch on the real hand whose mirror image at
present held it at bay, captive in the realm of reflections? Jim wondered
whether the pain allowed Weinberger much leeway for such speculations.

 
          
“My
bones are coming apart,” groaned Weinberger. “It feels as though they are!
Maybe they aren’t at all. This hand’s still solid. Oh my too too solid flesh!
But I can’t
see
those other bones. I
can only feel them. Oh hell, what I feel.”

 
          
“Let
go of it. Open your hand.”

 
          
“I
can’t, Jim. I can’t.”

 
          
Jim
leaned over Weinberger.

 
          
“We
both did see the same thing, didn’t we?” he whispered. “It was red, an
unearthly red. It looked like a huge moth, or a bat — both at once. You
did see that? That
is
what you’re
holding on to now?”

 
          
“Damn
right it is!” Incongruously — confidingly — Weinberger winked. Or maybe the
man’s eye had developed a twitch. “Never fear, Jim — I shan’t let you down.”

 
          
“You’ll
let go,” Jim promised. “You will.”

 
          
“Ah,
but will
you
let go?” Weinberger asked
him roughly.