delicacy, reading the function of the equipment as a blind man would read Braille with swift, sure, gliding fingertips. He imagined the detective finding the injection port in the main drip line, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. Saw him produce a hypodermic needle as a magician would pluck a silk scarf from the ether. Nothing in the syringe except deadly air. The needle sliding into the port
Junior wanted to scream for help, but he dared not.
He didn't even dare to pretend to wake up now, with a mutter and a yawn because the detective would know that he was faking, that he had been awake all along. And if he'd been feigning unconsciousness, eaves dropping on the conversation between Dr. Parkhurst and Vanadium, and later failing and respond to Vanadium's pointed accusations, his deception would inevitably be read as an admission of guilt in the murder of his wife. Then this idiot gumshoe would be indefatigable, relentless.
As long as Junior continued to fake sleep, the cop couldn't be absolutely sure that any deception was taking place.
He might suspect, but he couldn't know. He would but would be left with at least a shred of doubt about Junior's guilt.
After an interminable silence, the detective said, 'Do you know what believe about life, Enoch?'
One stupid damn thing or another.
I believe the universe is sort of like an unimaginably vast musical with an infinite number of strings.'
Right, the universe is a great big enormous ukulele.
The previously flat, monotonous voice had in it now a subtle but undeniable new roundness of tone: 'And every human being, every living thing, is a string on that instrument.'
And God has four hundred billion billion fingers, and He plays a really hot version of 'Hawaiian Holiday.
'The decisions each of us makes and the acts that he commits are like vibrations passing through a guitar string.'
In your case a violin, and the tune is the theme from Psycho.
The quiet passion in Vanadium's voice was genuine, expressed with reason but not fervor, not in the least sentimental or unctuous-which made it more disturbing. 'Vibrations in one string set up soft, sympathetic vibrations in all the other strings, through the entire body of the instrument.'
Boing.
'Sometimes these sympathetic vibrations are very apparent, but alot of the time, they're so subtle that you can hear them only if you're unusually perceptive.'
Good grief, shoot me now and spare me the misery of listening to this.
'When you cut Naomi's string, you put an end to the effects that I her music would have on the lives of others and on the shape of the future. YOU struck a discord that can be heard, however faintly, all the way to the farthest end of the universe.' if you're trying to push me into another puke-athon, this is likely to work.
'That discord sets up lots of other vibrations, some of which will return to you in ways you might expect-and some in ways you could never see coming. Of the things you couldn't have seen coming, I'm the worst.'
In spite of the bravado of the responses in Junior's unspoken half of the conversation, he was increasingly unnerved by Vanadium. The cop was a lunatic, all right, but he was something more than a mere nut case.
'I was once doubting Thomas,' said the detective, but not from beside the bed any longer. His voice seemed to come from across the room, perhaps near the door, though he had made not a sound as he'd moved.
In spite of his dumpy appearance-and especially in the dark, where appearances didn't count-Vanadium had the aura of a mystic. Although Junior didn't believe in mystics or in the various unearthly powers they claimed to possess, he knew that mystics who believed in themselves were exceptionally dangerous people.
The detective was driven by this string theory of his, and maybe he also saw visions or even heard voices, like Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc with out beauty or grace, Joan of Arc with a service revolver and the authority to use it. The cop was no threat to the English army, as Joan had been, but as far as Junior was concerned, the creep most definitely deserved to be burned at the stake.
'Now, I'm doubtless,' Vanadium said, his voice returning to the uninflected drone that Junior had come to loathe but that he now preferred to the unsettling voice of quiet passion. 'No matter what the situation, no matter how knotty the question, I always know what to do.
And I certainly know what to do about you.'
Weirder and weirder.
'I've put my hand in the wound.'
'What wound? Junior wanted to ask, but he recognized bait when he heard it, and he did not bite.
After a silence, Vanadium opened the door to the corridor.
Junior hoped that he hadn't been betrayed by eyeshine in the fraction of a second before he closed his eyes to slits.
A mere silhouette against the fluorescent glare, Vanadium stepped it the hall. The bright light seemed to enfold him. The detective shimmered and vanished the way that a mirage of a man, on a fiercely hot desert highway, will appear to walk out of this dimension into another, slipping between the tremulous curtains of heat as though they hang between realities.
The door swung shut.
Chapter 14
A severe thirst indicated to Agnes that she wasn't dead. There would be no thirst in paradise.
Of course, she might be making an erroneous assumption about her sentence at Judgment. Thirst would likely afflict the legions of Hell, a fierce, never-ending thirst, made worse by meals consisting of salt and sulfur and ashes, nary a blueberry pie, so perhaps she was indeed dead and forever cast down among murderers and thieves and cannibals and people who drove thirty-five miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-per hour school zone.
She was suffering from chills, too, and she'd never heard that Hades had a heating problem, so perhaps she hadn't been condemned to damnation, after all. That would be nice.
Sometimes she saw people hovering over her, but they were just shapes, their faces without detail, as her vision was blurred. They might have been angels or demons, but she was pretty sure they were ordinary people, because one of them cursed, which an angel would never do, and they were trying to make her more comfortable, whereas any self respecting demon would be thrusting lit matches up her nose or jabbing needles in her tongue or tormenting her in some hideous fashion that it had learned in whatever trade school demons attended before certification.
They also used words that didn't fit the tongues of angels or demons: hypodermoclysis? intravenous oxytocin? maintain perfect asepsis, and I mean perfect, at all times? a few oral preparations of ergot as soon as it's safe to give her anything by mouth More than not, she floated in darkness or in dreams.
For a while, she was in The Searchers She and Joey were riding with a deeply troubled John Wayne while the delightful David Niven floated along overhead in a basket suspended from a huge, colorful hot-air balloon.
Waking from a starry night in the Old West into electric light, gazing up into a blur of faces sans cowboy hats, Agnes felt someone moving a piece of ice in slow circles over her bare abdomen. Shivering as the cold water trickled down her sides, she tried to ask them why they were applying ice when she was already chilled to the bone, but she couldn't find her voice.
Suddenly she realized-Good Lord! — that someone else had a had inside her, up the very center of her, massaging her uterus in the same lazy pattern as that made by the piece of melting ice on her belly.
'She'll need another transfusion.'
This voice she recognized. Dr. Joshua Nunn. Her physician.
She'd heard him earlier but hadn't identified him then.
Something was very wrong with her, and she tried to speak, but again her voice failed her.
Embarrassed, cold, abruptly frightened, she returned to the Old West, where night on the low desert was warm. The campfire flickereded welcomingly. John Wayne put an arm around her and said, 'There are no dead husbands or dead babies here,' and though he intended only to reassure her, she was overcome by misery until Shirley MacLaine took her aside for some heart-to-heart girl talk. Agnes woke again and was no longer chilled, but
