Wilde West (44 page)

She smiled. “Bohb.” Once again she placed her fingertip against his chin. “I enjoy you very much. I liked you from the first time I saw you. I sensed your kindness, and your concern. You are, I think, a good man. Truly. But we are very different, you and I. I have my plans and you have yours. I must continue with my journey. And you must continue with your own. You have unfinished business, I believe. You are still deeply in love with your wife, and this is something with which you must contend. You must either return to her somehow, or you must at last move on.”

Grigsby took a sip of his brandy. “But accordin' to you, if me and her got back together, we'd just mess each other up all over again.”

“It is possible, I think, for two people to work together, to help each other with this.”

Grigsby smiled sadly. “I don't think Clara would go for it.”

“Then perhaps it is time for you to continue with your life.”

Grigsby sighed again. “I purely do hate it when a woman starts makin' sense.”

Mathilde smiled. “But for now, we have some time together, you and I. We have, not love, perhaps, not exactly. But affection.” She smiled. “And lust, too, of course.”

Grigsby grinned. “Sounds to me like you got one hell of an idea there.” He stubbed out his cigarette, set his glass on the night table, and turned to reach for her.

L
YING IN BED, HE
sang it softly to himself:

Doe, Doe, Doe.

Doe Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti
Doe.

Doe Re Mi …

Doe Re
Mine.
Elizabeth McCourt Doe is
mine.

You are
mine
, harlot. You are
mine
, slut.

Somewhere, perhaps right at this moment, she was writhing and squirming beneath some slobbering male, Tabor or Wilde or some other; somewhere she cooed and grunted, gasped and groaned:
and she did not know.
She did not know that she had been chosen. Did not know that her destiny had been immovably fixed. Did not know that the passing hours were carrying her toward them, toward him and the Lords of Light, as surely, as inexorably, as the currents of a river swept refuse and carrion to the waiting sea.

But of course getting her would require every particle of his cunning. She was different from the rest. Although at heart she was as corrupt and foul as the others, as lost as they, finally as doomed, on the surface she was successful, prosperous, one of society's darlings. She had a sponsor: Tabor. She had friends, she had money. She had a lair into which she could retreat, like a scorpion, like a snake.

And Grigsby was still hanging about. Bumbling and inept he might be, a drunkard and a clown; still he was persistent. He was watching. He was waiting.

How infuriating it was to be forced to take that slovenly dullard into account.

Sometimes the pressures and the tensions of the work seemed nearly overwhelming. Sometimes the difficulties, the dangers, seemed nearly too much to bear, crowding around him, looming black and weighty overhead. Sometimes, even, he doubted.

She
will
be mine?

She will be yours
, came the deep, raspy, magisterial voice.
She will be ours.

What comfort those voices provided him! The absolute certainty throbbing in their tones—how it inspired him!

He

had learned that if he stopped fighting it, if he embraced it as a friend, the pain from the ropes would become a part of himself. Instead of lingering at the chafed strips of skin where the hemp bit into his flesh, it would slowly expand, slowly drift through tissue and bone, slowly fill his entire being with a dull red glow, as hot and potent as a smoldering ember of coal. To contain the glow, to prevent it from seeping off, his skin would harden, stiffen, become shiny and brittle, like the shell of a beetle.

The darkness no longer frightened him. Often, in the beginning, he had heard things moving through it. He had heard the feathery whisper of scales as something slithered along the wood of the floor, he had heard the rustle of fur beneath his bed, the click of sharp tiny claws.

But over time he had learned to use it. Now he was not only in it, but of it. While his body lay armored and protected atop the mattress, his. soul merged with the darkness, and together he and the darkness billowed out beyond the confines of the narrow room, out beyond the confines of the house, out into the night sky, out to the very ends of the universe.

He had begun, almost, to dislike the light. Where the darkness was powerful and boundless, the light was frail and petty. Limited. And with the light came the Preacher. And, sometimes, the Harlot, the Red Bitch. And, always, each time, a new and different pain.

As now:

He heard a door slam, down below. They had returned. His soul swept back into his body and hid itself beneath the sleek smooth shell of his skin.

He heard the footsteps on the stairs, and the unmodulated murmur, the jerky rise and fall, of drunken voices. Both of them were coming.

The door swung open and light swung across the room. In the yellow rectangle at the doorway stood the dark towering form of the Preacher. Swaying slightly, he advanced toward the bed. The floorboards creaked beneath him. In the background, her arms crossed as she leaned against the jamb, her disheveled red hair burning like a flame, stood the Harlot. At the bottom of her round white face, her painted red mouth hung open in a leer.

The Preacher leaned over, put out his hands to feel the mattress. His black bulk blotted out the ceiling.

“Wet again,” said the Preacher, and his breath was thick with liquor. “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. You must learn, boy.”

His hand moved between the boy's legs, and then pain like a bolt of lightning rattled up the center of the world. “You must learn, boy.”

From far off, the boy heard the wild jangling laughter of the Harlot. He

stood at the very center of a flat featureless field of pale parched grass that extended in every direction out to the horizon. Overhead the sky was booming with light, the sun so fierce it had scorched away the blue. In the distance wheeled a small flock of crows, black hieroglyphs sliding down the white of sky. The boy watched until they seemed about to slip between the thin line that separated sky and field.

And just there, just at the point where they vanished, the fissure began. It slashed upward from the horizon into the bare bleached sky, as straight and true as though sliced by a razor, and it stopped directly overhead, where the sun had burned only a moment before. The lips of the gash trembled for a moment, then buckled earthward, splitting apart, and from between them gushed a glistening tumble of entrails. Gigantic coils and loops of pink shiny intestine, monstrous red gleaming chunks of liver and spleen and kidney, gray lumps and strands of brain, spilled in a vast torrent to the field and splattered against it, slopping over one another, heaping themselves in slick steaming piles. The boy

sometimes felt the need for comfort now. All too often now those strange periods of blackness would overtake him and sweep him away into that mysterious, timeless limbo. Minutes or hours might pass before he returned to himself. Fortunately he had learned to sense their approach. He could feel himself becoming attentuated, becoming somehow less real, less substantial, thinning into a pale gray mist within his clothes; and before he allowed himself to slip altogether into transparency he would retreat to the safety of his room. But sometimes, still, when he returned, he would discover himself pacing down a sidewalk he had never seen before, or eating a meal he had not ordered, or engaged in a conversation he had not initiated. On one or two occasions, only his supreme skill at dissembling had saved him.

It was, yes, the result of fatigue. The enormous energy he expended on his mission. The difficulties and the dangers he daily faced and daily defeated.

And yet, paradoxically, it was the mission which provided him with energy, which brought him into contact with the pulse that beat at the very center of creation. Without the mission, he might wisp away entirely, his body disintegrating, dissipating, its isolate atoms floating off into the ether forever. Without it, he might disappear.

He

danced, he reeled, he spun like a dervish as he chanted in a language he did not recognize but one he knew was sanctified by the Lords of Light. Sometimes he laughed and sometimes, when he considered how he had been blessed, how he had been graced, he sobbed in gratitude. He