The Throat

3

He exhaled with what seemed his whole being, making a sound like one of Glenroy Breakstone's breathy final notes. 'I didn't want any veils between me and whatever reality was. I thought you could sort of burst out into the open.' He let out that long, regretful sound again. 'You understand me? I thought you could cross the border.'

'Did you ever think you got close?'

He jumped up from the chair and turned off the lamp nearest him. 'Sometimes I thought I did, yeah.' He picked up his glass and turned off the lamp on the far side of the couch. 'It's too bright in here, do you mind?'

'No.'

John walked around the table and switched off the lamp at my end of the couch. Now the one light left burning was in a tall brass standard lamp near the entrance to the foyer, and the flared, bell-like shape of the lamp threw its illumination into a yellow circle on the ceiling. Dim silver light floated in from the windows across the room.

'There was this time I was doing hard traveling, going way in-country. I was with another man, Jed Champion, superb soldier. We'd been traveling on foot, mostly at night. We had a jeep, but it was way back there, way off the trail, covered up so it'd still be there when we got back.'

He was moving to a complicated pattern that sent him from the window to the mantel to his chair, then past the wall of paintings to the open floor near the brass lamp, and finally returning to the window, carving the shape of an arrow into the darkness with his body.

'After two or three days, we stopped talking entirely. We knew what we were doing, and we didn't have to talk about it. If we had a decision to make, we just acted together. It was like ESP—I knew exactly what was going on in his mind, and he knew what was going on in mine.'

'We were working through relatively empty country, but there had been some VC activity here and there. We weren't supposed to make any contact. If we saw them we were supposed to just let them go their sweet way. On our sixth night, I realized that I was seeing better than I had the night before—in fact, all of my senses were amazingly acute. I heard everything.'

'I could practically feel the roots of the trees growing underground. A VC patrol came within thirty feet of us, and we sat on our packs and watched them go by—we'd heard them coming for about half an hour, and you remember how quiet they could be? But I could smell their sweat, I could smell the oil on their rifles. And they couldn't even see us.'

'The next night, I could have caught birds with my bare hands. I was beginning to hear something new, and at first I thought it was some noise made by my own body—it was that intimate. Then, right before dawn, I realized that I was hearing the voices of the trees, the rocks, the ground.'

'The night after that, my body did things completely by itself. I was just up there behind my eyes, floating. I couldn't have put a foot wrong if I tried.'

Ransom stopped talking and turned around. He had come back to the window, and when he faced into the room, a sheet of darkness lay over his features and the entire front of his body. The cold silver light lay across the top of his head and the tops of his shoulders. 'Do you know what I'm talking about? Does this make any sense to you?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Good. Maybe the next part won't sound totally crazy to you.'

For an uncomfortably long time, he stared at me without saying anything. At last he turned away and went toward the fireplace. Cold light from the window touched his back. 'Maybe I wouldn't even want to be that alive anymore. You're right up next to death when you're that alive.'

He reached the fireplace, and in the darkness of that part of the room, I saw him raise an arm and caress the edge of the marble. 'No, I'm not saying it right. Being alive like that includes death.'

He turned from the mantel and walked back into the silver wash of light. He looked as dispassionate as a bank examiner. 'Not long before this, I lost a lot of people. Tribesmen. We had two 'A' teams in our encampment, one under me, the other under an officer named Bullock. Bullock and his team went out one night, and none of them ever came back. We waited an extra twelve hours, and then I took my team out to look for them.'

He had stepped into the darkness between the windows. 'It took three days to find them. They were in the woods not far from a little ville, about a hundred feet off the trail, in only moderately thick growth. Bullock and his five men were tied to trees. They'd been cut open—slashed across the gut and left to bleed to death. One more thing.'

He moved past the far window without turning to look at me, and the light turned his shirt and skin to silver again. 'Their tongues had been cut out.' John began moving toward the brass lamp, and now did turn, half in and half out of the soft yellow light. 'After we cut down the bodies and made litters to carry them back, I wrapped their tongues in a cloth and took them with me. I dried them out and treated them, and wore them everywhere after that.'

'Who killed Bullock and his team?' I asked.

I saw the flicker of a smile in the darkness. 'VC cut out tongues, sometimes, to humiliate your corpse. So did the Yards, sometimes—to keep you silent in the other world.'

Ransom walked around the lamp and began heading back to the windows and the wall of paintings.

'So it's about the eighth night out. And then something says Ransom.'

'I thought it must have been my partner, but I tuned to his frequency, you know, I focused on him and he wasn't making any more sound than a beetle. He sure as hell wasn't talking.'

'Then I hear it again. Ransom.'

'I came around the side of a tree about twenty feet wide, and standing off a little way under a big elephant fern like a roof, standing up and looking right at me, is Bullock. Right next to him is his number one guy, his team leader. Their clothes are covered with blood. They just stand there, waiting. They know I can see them, and they're not surprised. Neither am I.'

Ransom had made it past the windows again, and now he was stationed before the fireplace, in the darkest part of the room. I could barely make out his big figure moving back and forth in front of the fireplace.

'I was in the place where death and life flow into each other. Those little tongues felt like leaves on my skin. They let me pass through them. They knew what I was doing, they knew where I was going.'

I waited for more of the story, but he faced the fireplace in silence. 'You're talking about going to bring Bachelor back.'

I could hear him smiling. 'That's right. He knew I was coming, and he got out way ahead of me.' He was softly beating a hand on the fireplace, like a mockery of self-punishment. 'That way I was? He was like that all the time. He lived in the realm of the gods.'

I was still waiting for the end of the story.

'Have you ever experienced anything like that? Are you qualified to judge it?'

'Something like that,' I said. 'But I don't know if I'm qualified to judge it.'

John pushed himself off the fireplace like a man doing a standing push-up. He switched on the lamp on the end table, and the room expanded into life and color. 'I felt extraordinary— like a king. Like a god.'

He turned around and gazed at me.

'What's the end of the story?' I asked.

'That is the end.'

'What happened when you got there?'

He was frowning at me, and when he spoke, it was to change the subject. 'I think I'd like to take a look inside the Green Woman Taproom tomorrow. Want to come with me?'

'You want to break in?'

'Hey, my old man owned a hotel,' John said. 'I have a lot of skeleton keys.'

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