The twittering and scurrying had been growing louder.
I had hardly noticed them. Now they stopped abruptly. In the sudden silence, I could feel the circle grow ringed with unseen, voracious eyes.
I couldn't delay much longer. Fay, seeing my dilemma, took Carol's hand in hers and held it out to me, palm upward. She passed me the knife.
Carol didn't resist. I looked at her blue-veined, defenseless wrist hesitantly. After an instant, Fay indicated the spot where I was to cut—a good idea, since my concern for Carol was clouding my judgment. Not the least of my fears was that Carol would wince badly when she felt the touch of the knife, and I would cut wrongly or too deep.
"Do it," Fay breathed. "The longer you wait, the harder it will be to do." Almost blindly I drew the knife across the spot she had picked.
Carol's body heaved. She did not cry out. Blood followed the line of the knife. Fay stooped for the saucer and held it under her wrist. Blood began to run into the little dish.
Was there a bluish glow from the blood? If there was, it lasted only an instant. The blood dripped; and Carol, who had been sagging heavily against my arm, straightened. She was standing on her own feet.
Fay was watching her closely. When she judged the cut had bled enough, she clapped a gauze pad over it. She held the pad in place with strips of adhesive. As she put the last strip on, Carol said, in quite a normal voice, "Where am I? What's been happening?"
Fay drew a deep breath. "It worked," she said.
"What worked?" Carol asked.
"Sssh!" I warned her. "Not so loud."
"Why did you cut my wrist?" she asked, but in an obedient whisper. "Dick—it is Dick, isn't it?—I remember something about a hotel room—Hood—and then it's all black. But I think there was a lot of suffering."
I explained. Carol listened, pressing her fingertips lightly against the gauze pad. "I remember a little now," she said. "And I'm over it! The addiction, I mean." She smiled, an extraordinary, luminous smile.
"Yes," said Fay. She was leaning on Merlin's sword. "You'll never crave atter-corn again."
"I can hardly believe it," I put in. I was shaky with nervous reaction. "And yet, from my own experience, I knew it would work."
We were still congratulating each other, and I was on the point of asking whether it was safe to leave the circle yet, when I heard a light cough behind me. I turned, thinking it must be Mrs. Schumucker and wondering what we were going to say to her that would excuse our nudity convincingly. But it was Hood.
Chapter Fifteen
It was certainly Hood. He was wearing the same green jacket he had been wearing when I had left him for dead in Fresno and, though his shoulders were sagging and the muscles of his face were lax, it was unquestionably he. And yet, there was a difference in him, something subtle and pervasive; he seemed a little blurred, like an image seen through badly focused binoculars. I stared at him, puzzled. He was holding a little drum in his right hand, a thing about the size of a honeydew melon. The skin of the drumhead was black.
Carol had turned death-white. I was afraid she might faint. I put out my hand to steady her. She gave me an odd look and pulled away from me, I suppose she was remembering that it was because of my failure to make sure of Hood's death in Fresno that he was standing here in Berkeley now.
"This isn't Hood," she said after a second. There was a hint of relief in her unsteady voice.
"Isn't it?" I asked stupidly.
"No. This is somebody from Underearth. I don't know who it is. But it isn't Hood. Hood's been pushed out."
The person in Hood's body had been listening to us, rubbing his forefinger back and forth over the skin of the drum so it gave out a low buzzing noise. "Who are you?" I asked.
He rubbed the drum a little harder, and the buzzing turned into a growling roar. "You know who I am," he said. "We've met before this."
His voice had a fruity, mushy quality, as if a plum pudding were talking. It was not at all like Hood's usual calm, clipped manner of speech. It sounded like—but his voice had been high, and squeaky—but—"You're the Gray Dwarf," I said.
He gave me a faint smile. The drum made a complaining noise. "How did you get here?" I asked. "What do you want?"
"I got here in a rented car," he said in his fruity voice. "It was a long drive. This body's not much good, actually. Hood was a sloppy liver, always gulping down some drug. He was going downhill even before we planted our little secret in the small of his back. He didn't take good care of himself."
I was beginning to be really alarmed. Hood, as an unkillable opponent, had been a little dim; he was half-mad when I had encountered him in Fresno, and I felt I could probably have worsted him. But the Dwarf, who was riding in Hood's body as he had once ridden on the back of an elf, was an unknown quantity. He might well have added to his arsenal of menace since I had met him before. I wasn't sure what the limits of his power were.
I glanced toward Fay. She was leaning on Merlin's sword, a faint frown between her brows, but she looked calm enough. The sight reassured me. "What do you want?" I asked.
"Oh." He rubbed the heel of his hand over the drum. "That girl"—he tipped his head toward Carol to indicate her—"belongs to us. She's thin, of course. But we never let anything we took for food get back to the light. She must go below and wait for the feast."
"No," I said. Sweat was running down my naked back. "I didn't save her twice to let you have her. She shan't go."
He raised his shoulders in a little shrug. "We'll get her all the same. And then, I'd like your body. You're in better shape than Hood was. And you're of elf stock. You should be rather easy to evict."
Somehow, this threat did not much worry me. The Dwarf might have been able to take over the dead or dying Hood, but I didn't see how it could happen to me. It was more in curiosity than in fear that I asked, "What do you want my body for? You have a body of your own."
"True, true," he said in his mushy, mouthy voice. He moved the drum so it was resting in the crook of his left arm. "But it's a less attractive body than yours is, and daylight bothers its eyes.
"I don't intend to stay in Underearth always. Hood tried to use us. He failed. But we learned a lot from him. We"—he coughed daintily—"we have plans."
Had Hood really found out how to hold Underearth, so shifting and restless, together for a purpose? It had seemed to me as uncohering as a rope of sand. But if that had been Hood's aim, it explained a good deal.
Once more I looked at Fay. She was frowning harder, but she still didn't seem especially alarmed.
"Have all the plans you want," I told the Dwarf. "There may be others with you; I have the impression that there are. But you can't get over the threefold barrier Fay made. And we have Merlin's sword to protect us. It defeated you before. It will be daylight in a little while."
He didn't bother answering. He moved the drum a little higher on his body, so that it was resting against his chest, and began to tap on it with the fingers of the arm that was supporting it, the fingers of his left hand. It was the first time he had really played the drum.
It was a dry, high pattering, a rhythm that a metrician would have called a series of anapests and resolved anapests. At the same time, he beckoned imperiously to Carol with his free right hand.
She was very pale. Her eyes were opened wide, so that I saw the whites all around. But she moved forward jerkily, out of the protection of the barrier Fay had made, as if the pattering of the drum were something she could not possibly disobey.
I reached out to stop her. I still wasn't greatly alarmed; I knew I was strong enough to hold her back. But as I touched her, the Dwarf, without missing a beat, began to drum another, different rhythm against the skin of the drumhead, using his right hand. It was stronger and deeper-toned than the first drumming, and it cut into it without disturbing it. The two patterns intermeshed.
The drumbeats paralyzed my hand. I couldn't close my fingers around Carol's arm, I couldn't hold her back. Ashen and terrified,
she moved over the protective line of the circle, and I couldn't stop her. I couldn't move at all. The pad on her wrist was stained red with blood.
Of all the miseries Underearth brought me, this was the worst: to have to look on helplessly while Carol was compelled back into the power of her enemies. Had I saved her twice for this, that she should be reclaimed by them in the end? It would have been kinder to let them kill her in the first place; and I wished that, at least, I had not taken her withdrawal symptoms away from her. It would have been better for her to have her consciousness clouded by physical suffering than to go down to her death fully awake and aware.
Bitterness filled me. Even now I have nightmares about that helpless, paralyzed submission to the sound of the Dwarf's drumming, and I wake up from them dizzy and sick.
I could move my eyeballs a little. I rolled my eyes toward Fay. She was standing a little hunched over, the muscles of her upper arms and legs standing out like drawings in an anatomy book. Her face glistened with sweat. She couldn't move any more than I could. The Dwarf's drum had paralyzed her, too.
I suppose that I had still unconsciously hoped she'd be able to help us—she, or the sword. Now I realized that the drum was what the Dwarf had promised to find when I had parted from him in Underearth: the answer to Merlin's sword.
Carol got to where they were waiting for her. Some shapes—the light was poor, and it was hard to make out whether they were black or white elves—took her by the shoulders. The drumming went on.
The sound not only paralyzed, it stung and bit. It seemed to have an abrasive quality, to burn my skin. A hot wind blew through my permeable flesh and dried up the marrow within my bones. It had the curious quality of making me feel like an imitation of myself.
I don't mean a mere detachment or a depersonalization. I mean that the Richard Aldridge, who stood paralyzed in a basement in Berkeley, sweating helplessly while his girl was led away and the Dwarf played hatefully on a little drum—that Richard Aldridge was only one of a hundred, a thousand possible Richard Aldridges, all equally insubstantial and all equally false. We were all bad imitations of an imperfect original.
The tempo of the drumming increased. If the Dwarf had wished, he could have sent Fay and me capering around within the circle like figures pulled by a string, or made us bow backward until our spines cracked. He preferred to keep us paralyzed.
I not only imitated myself, I didn't know who Richard Aldridge was. I felt deflected, drawn aside from myself. Ego—even a speaking acquaintance with that man Aldridge—was a goal the drum taps deflected me from. The noise fettered my thoughts.
Faster and faster. The Dwarf was smiling a little. And now I had a purely physical sensation. My chest was contracting. My breathing grew more and more shallow. It was like the peine forte et dure of medieval criminology, where the accused panted under an ever-increasing weight of stone piled on his chest.
I knew what it meant. The Dwarf had said he wanted my body. He had said that, since I was of elf stock, I should be rather easy to evict. The compression of my chest meant that the eviction had begun.
Chapter Sixteen
There was a patch of paint, green, like the scum on a pond, on the wall of the basement toward which Carol was being led away. I stared at it blindly, while the muscles of my chest contracted and the air in my lungs rushed out. My chest hurt like the devil, not only because my lungs were being sharply compressed, but also because my chest muscles were locked in an acute tonic spasm, like the muscle contractions of tetanus. Sweat was pouring down my face and running off my body, and I couldn't even writhe or cry out.
The tempo of the drumming changed slightly, and I managed to draw a little air into my lungs. I suppose the Dwarf didn't want to do too much damage to my body before he evicted me. His general plan seemed to be to render me partly unconscious from asphyxiation, and then possess himself of my only weakly tenanted body. But I didn't know just what form the eviction would take.
Abruptly I was a rabbit—a large, healthy buck rabbit, with white and brindle fur, a wiggly nose, and a chin that itched and itched. The illusion was extraordinarily vivid, like those I had had in Otherworld; when I reverted to my human identity a moment later, I realized that giving me the illusion of an animal body lay at the heart of the Dwarf's plan for dispossessing me. He was going to turn me into an animal, evict me into an animal's body, and that the body was illusory made no difference. I would be much easier to evict from my human tenement if I thought I were an animal.
The drumbeat had gone back to its earlier cadence, and the compression of my chest began again. There was a reddish mist before my eyes. I wondered, between noiseless shrieks of anguish, whether I would live on as a sort of ghost in my own body after the Dwarf had dispossessed me, sometimes almost rising to the dignity of an independent nod of the head or a movement of the hand. Or would I be ousted once and for all, dead while my body yet breathed and moved? Would fragments of my personality survive after the odious little Dwarf had taken over my body?
Something was trying to communicate with me.
Somebody or something. It was in the background of my mind, like a name of which one says, "It's on the tip of my tongue." It was persistent; it wanted to attract my attention. I couldn't focus on it or understand what it wanted to tell me; I was in too much pain. When my next period of being a rabbit came, I slid into it with relief. My chest hurt much less when I was a rabbit, and I didn't have to try to discover what the unknown communicator wanted to say.
I didn't stay a rabbit very long this time, and when I went back to being poor old short-winded Dick with the aching chest, the communicator was waiting for me. It was, it gave me to understand, opposed to the Dwarf. It wanted my help.
Help from me? Ridiculous. I was too weak, too small, too short of breath to be able to help anybody. My chin itched too much. I didn't want to help. I felt resentful. It was asking more of me than ought to be asked. I wanted to be allowed to be a rabbit in peace.
The communicator persisted. I might say, "Go away," over and over in my head—it kept on trying to attract my attention, like a man swinging a signal light in front of a washed-out bridge. Help. Help. The darkness swallowed the flashes. There was always another flash. What did the communicator want? How could I help?
The drum kept on pattering, a light, intricate, changing rhythm, during all this. I suppose the time was not nearly so long as I thought; certainly Carol had only moved a few steps toward her fate. But now I "heard" the communicator, newly strong, telling me imperatively, "Become what you are!"
It was a cryptic utterance, especially as I was at the moment in process of becoming a rabbit. The communicator must mean that I should try, at all costs, to hang on to my human identity. If I could stay human, no matter how much it hurt, the Dwarf would have to revise his plans. And that might give whatever the force was that opposed him a chance for success.
All right. I'd try. Though I was already half-covered with brindle fur, I groped desperately after an awareness of my human self, trying to become conscious of Dick Aldridge, naked and immobilized in a basement in Berkeley, and of his naked, suffering, human body. For a moment, I had it. Then it hurt too much, and I fell back, glad to be a rabbit again. If the communicator made any attempts after that to attract my attention, I didn't notice them.
Carol was led away into the dark. I was slipping back and forth limply between being a buck rabbit and a two-thirds suffocated man when I heard a sudden high noise, not very loud.
The noise itself didn't seem to be important, but it was followed by a rush and flurry of movement in the room. For a moment, the light, rhythmic patter of the drum taps stopped.
The walls of the room seemed to shake like a curtain made of painted cloth. Reality—the reality of our world—was being twitched aside. In that moment I felt—I knew—that everything in our universe—galaxies, viruses, time, matter, energy, space, everything—was nothing but a flimsy cover for the horrors and splendors of a vaster cosmos than ours.
And these horrors and splendors were funneling down indescribably on the spot in which I stood.
What had happened was that Carol, being led away into the darkness forever, had made a sudden screaming break from her captors. The sight of the patch of green paint, with its reminiscence of the scum-coated pond at the service station in Paicines, may have triggered her rebellion. Or there might have been other causes. However that may be, her outburst had startled the Dwarf. The steady, hateful patter of the drum taps had been interrupted. And what was opposed to the Dwarf had a chance to assert itself.
There came a great gust of wind. Three of the four candles Fay had set around the circumference of the circle were blown out. The basement seemed to be filling with an element denser than air, more rarefied than water. Staggering, buffeted by the backlash of incomprehensible energies, I found myself in command of my body again, able to move.
Much good it did me. I was so weak and spent that I could only gasp for air, my head almost between my knees, while I tried not to fall forward on the floor. I felt like a broken jumping jack. The shock of the moment when the hyperworld had impinged on our world had been particularly severe for me, since I had been partially out of my body when it happened. Occultists will know what I mean.
I was still panting and trying to straighten up when I heard two light taps from the drum. The merest fraction of a second later "Become what you are" rang once more in my brain.
Become—? What was I? A lost man, losing, a loser, sure to lose in this final struggle with Otherworld. For the drum taps, ragged and uncertain at first, were strengthening as the Dwarf regained control of himself. But once again there came the inner voice: "Become—what you are."
I was—I was—my identity went a long way back. I had thousands of years to draw from, tens upon thousands of years. Men dance on deathless feet. But more than anything else, I was—I felt like a dull pupil finally getting the point of a difficult lesson—I was the man who had carried a naked blade through Hell.
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