He was feeling dizzy, and glad of the support of the lamppost, but he knew he had to get into that tavern and find out whether or not that young man was the real Byron or not. He pushed himself out onto the sidewalk and took a couple of steps and he suddenly realized that the fear building up within him was too primal and powerful to be caused by something as abstract as the question of what time stream he was in. Something was happening to him, something his conscious mind couldn’t sense, but which was churning up his sub-conscious like a bomb detonated at the bottom of a well.
The crowd and the building in front of him suddenly lost all their depth and most of their color and clear focus, so that he seemed to be looking at an impressionist painting of the scene done only in shades of yellow and brown. And someone’s snapped the volume knob down, he thought.
Just before light and sound flickered away altogether and, unsupported now, he fell into unconsciousness like a man falling through the trap door of a gallows, he had an instant in which to wonder if this was how it felt to die.
* * *
Sometimes hopping, but more often crawling on one foot and two hands like a half-stomped cockroach because his left leg had a new, grating joint in it, Doyle scuttled retching and gasping across the rain-slick asphalt, not even seeing the oncoming cars bow their front ends down close to the pavement as their brakes took hold and the tires began barking and squealing.
He could see the crumpled figure lying, in the random attitude of carelessly tossed things, on the gravel shoulder, and even though he was torturing himself toward her to see if she was all right, he knew she would not be—for he’d already lived through this event once in real life and several times in dreams; though his mind was incandescent with anxiety and fear and hope, he simultaneously knew what he’d find.
But this time it happened differently. Instead of the remembered porridge of blood and bone and bright- colored helmet fragments exploded across the pavement and freeway pillar, the figure’s head was still whole and attached to the shoulders. And it wasn’t Becky’s face—it was the beggar boy Jacky’s.
He sat back in surprise, and then saw, somehow without surprise, that he wasn’t on a freeway shoulder at all—he was in a narrow room with filthy curtains flapping stiffly in an unglassed window. The window kept changing its shape; sometimes it was round, swelling and contracting like some architectural sphincter from the size of a peep-hole in a door to the size of the rose window at Chartres Cathedral, and at other times it elected to warp itself through all the shapes that could be called rectangular. The floor too was capricious, at one moment swelling so that he had to crouch to avoid bumping the ceiling, at the next sagging like a dis-spirited trampoline, leaving him in a pit, looking up to watch the belly-dancing window. It was an entertaining room, all right.
His mouth was numb, and though the dentist, who wore two surgical face masks so that his glowing eyes were all Doyle could see, ordered him not to touch it, Doyle did surreptitiously drag a furry-gloved hand across his lips, and was terrified to see bright blood matting the golden fur., Some dentist, he thought, and though he forced himself out of that vision and back into the little room, he was still wearing the fur gloves and blood was still dripping energetically from his mouth. When he hunched over, huddling himself against another stomach cramp, the blood spattered the plate and knife and fork that someone had left on the floor.
It made him mad that whoever it was hadn’t picked up their dishes, but then he remembered that these were the remains of his own dinner. Had it caused the numbness and bleeding? Had there been broken glass in it? He picked up the fork and stirred the bits of food still on the plate, fearfully watchful for any hard gleamings. After a while he decided there wasn’t any glass in it.
But what was it, anyway? It smelled vaguely like curry, but seemed to be some kind of cold stew made of leaves and something that looked like kiwi fruit, but smaller and harder and more furry. His mind stuck on the rhyme of curry and furry—like a coin banging around in the intake hood of a vacuum cleaner, the evident relation of the two words held his attention and prevented consideration of anything else—but he finally got past it and experienced a moment of cold lucidity when he recognized the unusual fruit. He’d seen them before, in the Foster Gardens of Nuuanu in Hawaii, on a tall tree whose scientific name he still remembered: Strychnos Nux Vomica, the richest source of raw strychnine.
He’d been eating strychnine.
The water smelled terrible, implying a dead tide clogged with days-old fish corpses and putrid seaweed, but the sidewalk was alive with cheery people in colorful bathing suits, and Doyle was glad to see there wasn’t a line at the Yo-Ho Snack Stand. He lurched up to the narrow window and banged his quarter on the wooden counter to get the man’s attention. The man turned around, and Doyle was surprised to see that it was J. Cochran Darrow in the apron and white paper hat. He finally did go broke, Doyle realized sadly, and now he has to run a damned frozen banana stand. “I’ll have a—” Doyle began.
“All we’re serving today is activated charcoal shakes,” Darrow interrupted. He cocked his head. “I told you that, Doyle.”
“Oh yeah. I’ll have one of those, then.”
“You’ve got to make it yourself. I’ve got a boat to catch—it’s due to sink in ten minutes.” Darrow reached out through the window, grabbed Doyle by the collar and with a powerful heave pulled him in through the window until his shoulders jammed against the sides.
There was no light inside, and a cloud of ashes swirled up and set Doyle choking. He unwedged himself and fell back on the floor and saw that he’d wedged himself head first into the room’s little fireplace.
In a moment he had found a bowl and a little round-headed statuette of some dog-headed Egyptian god or other, and was using them as a mortar and pestle to pulverize the black chunks of crunchy incinerated wood. While doing this he noticed that his hands and forearms appeared to have grown a pelt of glossy yellow fur, and this he ascribed, a little nervously, to the hallucinations.
Another explanation of the phenomenon patiently awaited consideration on a back burner of his mind.
Through it all the blood kept dripping from his mouth, often falling into the mound of grainy black powder, but it was tapering off, and he had more important things to worry about.
He began by swallowing all the charcoal pieces that were relatively pill-sized. Then, using water from a basin in the corner, he made little balls of the black powder and managed to force down several dozen of these.
Mixed with a little water the stuff was adequately malleable, and after a while he stopped eating the black lumps and began pushing them together to make a little man-shaped figure. His skill surprised him, and he resolved to get some modelling clay at the first opportunity and begin life anew as a sculptor—for he’d only rolled the limb columns between his fingers for a few moments before pinching them onto the trunk lump, but now he noticed that the swell of thigh and bicep and the angularity of knee and elbow were faultlessly done, and the few quick thumbnail scratches he’d made on the front of the head had somehow produced a face like Michelangelo’s Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He’d have to save this little statue—sometime it would be reverently exhibited at the Louvre or someplace: Doyle’s First Work.
But how could he have thought the face looked like Adam? It was the face of an old, a hideously old man. And the limbs were twisted, shrunken travesties, like the dried worms you find on the sidewalks on a sunny day after rain. Horrified, he was about to crush it when it opened its eyes and gave him a big smile. “Ah, Doyle!” it croaked in a loud, harsh whisper. “You and I have a lot to discuss!”
