of crystal. A gilt-lettered sign perched above it, with THE GLASS MAN emblazoned on it in silver.
Johann covered his face with his hands and tried to drift inconspicuously into the crowd—forgetting that his hands were also made of glass and offered no protection whatsoever. He slowly made his way toward an open doorway. He bumped into a vendor, a man selling buttons made of clear plastic that said 'Glass Man' on them, and as he instinctively turned away in apology the man cried in recognition. 'He's here! He's here!' the man shouted, holding his card of buttons aloft. A panic ensued.
Johann dove for the doorway, turning quickly through the revolving doors of the building closest to him, losing some of his outer clothing to grasping hands. He dashed for the banks of elevators at the end of the corridor, and as he reached them the horde behind him, impatient with entering through the spinning doors and frightfully weighted with pressure from behind, threw itself through the glass windows of the building. The people in front screamed, those behind stepping over them past the jagged shards of window and after Johann. Johann ran into an open elevator, then nearly fainted when he realized that the doors would not close in time to save him.
He quickly removed his clothes, dropping them in a pile at the back of the elevator, and stepped out just as the first of the mob rushed in. He was not noticed, and as a cry of dismay went up behind him he moved slowly and invisibly along the row of elevators to the last open one on the end. A woman with an ecstatic, converted look on her face brushed past him close enough to touch; Johann held his breath as she wandered on. He backed into the elevator and the doors closed in front of him.
He heard another shout of dismay and it occurred to him that the doors might be forced back open, but the car began to rise. Pushing the button for the top floor, he noted that it was fifty flights up: this, then, was one of the highest buildings in the city. He knew he would probably have to climb above that floor since the mob would use both stairs and elevators to follow him up as quickly as it could.
As the doors hissed open on the top floor, Johann stepped from the elevator and noticed that the lights on the rest of the elevator bank indicated that all the cars were nearing his floor. He searched for the emergency stairwell and pulled the door open as the first of the elevators was discharging its passengers. There was a bolt on the door and he locked it behind him.
The click of the bolt sliding into place obviously drew someone's attention, and as Johann made his way up the dimly lit stairs the door was set upon. Johann prayed that it would hold. He ran up the steps three at a time and nearly stumbled; 'Is this how I am to end?' he thought, 'a pile of glass splinters on a back stairway?'—but he regained his balance and continued upwards. There was a shorter stairway at the end of the climb, ending in a blank concrete wall with a steel ladder bolted to it; and seeing no alternative, with the poundings on the door below still audible, Johann heaved himself up and through the trap door in the ceiling.
He found himself on the roof of the building. The tarred surface crackled under his glass footsteps, and a chill breeze whistled through and around the fissures in his body as he walked to the edge and looked down.
The throng below, as one, raised its myriad heads to him and began to shout wildly. Babies and placards were held aloft, and a huge banner, a full three blocks in length, was unfurled, reading simply, 'THE GLASS MAN BELONGS TO ALL.' The crowd was immense, swelling into the streets, on top of cars, covering every inch of ground down every street as far as the eye could see. A chant went up as Johann looked down on them; it started as a whisper among the multitude and quickly grew in intensity to a frightful roar: 'Glass Man, Glass Man, Glass Man, Glass Man!' Johann looked down at all this and trembled, thinking he must surely break apart under the intensity of that intonation. He began to sway back and forth on the edge of the building.
People, he saw, were now actually scaling, like obscene mountain climbers, the side of the building to get to him. And now, there came a noise from behind, and he twisted his head to see that Ise, his Ilse, was rushing toward him over the rooftop, followed by a group of chanting people. Johann began to cry out to her, but the sound gagged in his throat when he saw the wild look in her eyes and she said, 'Johann, go to them!'
Johann gave a silent scream, and twisted away from her. More for support than in greeting, he threw out his arms and the chant instantly ceased. There were a huge, echoing hush.
Johann stood suspended between sky and roof, his arms thrust out before him, and in that picture-frame of a moment he cried out, above all of them.
'I am not made of glass!'
At that instant, his arms out before him, he saw that, indeed, he was not made of glass. His arms were covered with smooth flesh, his hands
of the same, their nails and cuticles plainly, lucidly, visible. A gasp of joy escaped his throat as he looked down at his body to discover that it was a plain and naked flesh of which he was composed.
'I am not made of glass!' he screamed again.
There was a moment of utter silence, and then the hush broke below, and a thousand voices, a million, spoke as one, beginning once more to chant in rhythmic cadence, 'Glass Man, Glass Man, Glass Man, GLASS MAN!' Johann's own cries were drowned in the midst of the roar. The climbers, Johann saw, were once again advancing toward him like spiders up the side of the building, and, behind him, Ilse and the others were coming toward him, arms outstretched; Ilse was once more pleading, 'Johann, my glass man, go to them!'
The trembling hands that Johann brought to his face, he saw with sudden and absolute horror, were once more made of clear glass. He turned to Ise and pleaded, 'What is happening?'
'Johann, don't you see?' she said, her hands, and the hands of those around her reaching out to his crystal body, 'You are the Glass Man!'
'NO! I AM NOT—'
His scream was lost, a molecule of water in a sea of intonation: 'GLASS MAN! GLASS MAN!' Their hands were on him then, and he was lifted high overhead, and passed over the edge of the roof and down the side of the building.
In the midst of the madness around him Johann had a moment of lucid, beautiful vision: his fingers, dangling before his eyes in the bright lights of the city square, gave off the sharp rainbow colors of a prism.
And then his hand was yanked away, and he saw below, waiting hungrily to meet him, the silent salute of a million hammers held aloft.
Violets
The air was wet with perfume. I saw Lonnigan ahead of me, as if through a fog, though there was no mist in the greenhouse, only the thick, damp smell of flowers. 'Lonnigan!' I said hoarsely, the words falling leaden to the ground as they left my mouth. I had difficulty in breathing—as though my lungs were coated with pleuritic fluid. 'Lonnigan—don't go on ahead without me!'
But Lonnigan, I knew, was already possessed; he merely waved a hand at my words without turning around, and plunged ahead into the deeper recesses of the glass room.
Flowers, violets, nearly to the glass-paned ceiling. They were thick as the air around me, their stalks slicked bright green with moisture, their petals curling stiffly from deep purple buds. Through the fog my mind had become I thought they turned to watch me as I moved—and they regarded me with nothing short of malevolence.
Ahead of me, Lonnigan was disappearing into the thicker recesses of the greenhouse, where a veritable canopy of green thickened against the far wall like a miniature forest, blotting out the sun
'Lonnigan—!'
Then I heard him scream.
It was not a natural sound. It was more like the sound a distressed animal, faced with an unknown assailant, might utter. There was a thick grunt of surprise, and then a strangling cry that rose quickly and then, just as quickly, died.
I could not see Lonnigan ahead of me.
And then I did a cowardly thing—the most cowardly of my life.
I turned, even as the last dull sound of Lonnigan's distress ahead of me sounded, and, even as the end of that gargling cry sounded, I made my way in a panic out of the greenhouse.
Coughing for air, pushing aside thick sapped vines that appeared to block my exit, striving not to lose consciousness, I pushed my way out of that wicked room and toward clear air and sunlight.
