THE ABYSS IN FLAMES
Wind rattled the Big House all that night, a hot salt wind stirred out of the Atlantic by three days of unnatural sunlight. I was aware of it even as I slept: it was what I rose to in moments of near-wakefulness and it was the soundtrack for a dozen uneasy dreams. It was still knocking at the window after sunrise, when I dressed myself and went looking for Carol Lawton.
The house had been without electrical power for days. The upstairs hallway was dimly illuminated by the rainy glow from a window at the end of the corridor. The oaken stairway descended to the foyer, where two streaming bay windows admitted daylight the color of pale roses. I found Carol in the parlor, adjusting an antique mantel clock.
I said, 'How is she?'
Carol glanced at me. 'Unchanged,' she said, returning her attention to the clock as she wound it with a brass key. 'I was with her a moment ago. I'm not neglecting her, Tyler.'
'I didn't think you were. How about Jason?'
'I helped him dress. He's better during daylight. I don't know why. The nights are hard on him. Last night was… hard.'
'I'll look in on them both.' I didn't bother asking whether she had heard any news, whether FEMA or the White House had issued any fresh directives. There would have been no point; Carol's universe stopped at the borders of the property. 'You should get some sleep.'
'I'm sixty-eight years old. I don't sleep as much as I used to. But you're right, I'm tired—I do need to lie down. As soon as I finish this. This clock loses time if you don't tend to it. Your mother used to adjust it every day, did you know that? And after your mother died Marie wound it whenever she cleaned. But Marie stopped coming about six months ago. For six months the clock was stuck at a quarter after four. As in the old joke, right twice a day.'
'We should talk about Jason.' Last night I had been too exhausted to do more than learn the basics: Jason had arrived unannounced a week before the end of the Spin and had fallen ill the night the stars reappeared. His symptoms were an intermittent, partial paralysis and occluded vision, plus fever. Carol had tried calling for medical help but circumstances had made that impossible, so she was caring for him herself, though she hadn't been able to diagnose the problem or provide more than simple palliative care.
She was afraid he was dying. Her concern didn't extend to the rest of the world, however. Jason had told her not to worry about that. Things will be back to normal soon, he said.
And she had believed him. The red sun held no terrors for Carol. The nights were bad, though, she said. The nights took Jason like a bad dream.
* * * * *
I looked in on Diane first
Carol had put her in an upstairs bedroom—her room from the old days, done over as a generic guest bedroom. I found her physically stable and breathing without assistance, but there was nothing reassuring in that. It was part of the etiology of the disease. The tide advanced and the tide ebbed, but each cycle carried away more of her resilience and more of her strength.
I kissed her dry, hot forehead and told her to rest. She gave no sign of having heard me.
Then I went to see Jason. There was a question I needed to ask.
According to Carol, Jase had come back to the Big House because of some conflict at Perihelion. She couldn't remember his explanation, but it had something to do with Jason's father ('E.D. is behaving badly again,' she said) and something to do with 'that little black wrinkly man, the one who died. The Martian.'
The Martian. Who had supplied the longevity drug that had made Jason a Fourth. The drug that should have protected him from whatever was killing him now.
* * * * *
He was awake when I knocked and entered his room, the same room he had occupied thirty years ago, when we were children in the compassed world of children and the stars were in their rightful places. Here was the rectangle of subtly brighter color where a poster of the solar system had once shaded the wall. Here was the carpet, long since steam-cleaned and chemically bleached, where we had once spilled Cokes and scattered crumbs on rainy days like this.
And here was Jason.
'That sounds like Tyler,' he said.
He lay in bed, dressed—he insisted on dressing each morning, Carol had said—in clean khaki pants and a blue cotton shirt. His back was propped against the pillows and he seemed perfectly alert. I said, 'Not much light in here, Jase.'
'Open the blinds if you like.'
I did, but it only admitted more of the sullen amber daylight. 'You mind if I examine you?'
'Of course I don't mind.'
He wasn't looking at me. He was looking, if the angle of his head meant anything, at a blank patch of wall.
'Carol says you've been having trouble with your vision.'
'Carol is experiencing what people in your profession call denial. In fact I'm blind. I haven't been able to see anything at all since yesterday morning.'
I sat on the bed next to him. When he turned his head toward me the motion was smooth but agonizingly slow. I took a penlight from my shirt pocket and flashed it into his right eye in order to watch the pupil contract.
It didn't.
It did something worse.
It glittered. The pupil of his eye glittered as if it had been injected with tiny diamonds.
Jason must have felt me jerk back.
'That bad?' he asked.
I couldn't speak.
He said, more somberly, 'I can't use a mirror. Please, Ty. I need you to tell me what you see.'
'This… I don't know what this is, Jason. This isn't something I can diagnose.'
'Just describe it, please.'
I tried to muster a clinical detachment. 'It appears as if crystals of some kind have grown into your eye. The sclera looks normal and the iris doesn't seem to be affected, but the pupil is completely obscured by flakes of something like mica. I've never heard of anything like this. I would have said it was impossible. I can't treat it.'
I backed away from the bed, found a chair and sat in it. For a while there was no sound but the ticking of the bedside clock, another of Carol's pristine antiques.
Then Jason draw a breath and forced what he seemed to imagine was a reassuring smile. 'Thank you. You're right. It isn't a condition you can treat. But I'm still going to need your help during—well, during the next couple of days. Carol tries, but she's way out of her depth.'
'So am I.'
More rain beat at the window. 'The help I need isn't entirely medical.'
'If you have an explanation for this—'
'A partial one, at best.'
'Then please share it with me, Jase, because I'm getting a little scared here.'
He cocked his head, listening to some sound I hadn't heard or couldn't hear, until I began to wonder whether he had forgotten me. Then he said, 'The short version is that my nervous system has been overtaken by something beyond my control. The condition of my eyes is just an external manifestation of it.'
'A disease?'
'No, but that's the effect it's having.'
'Is this condition contagious?'
'On the contrary. I believe it's unique. A disease only I can develop—on this planet, at least.'
'Then it has something to do with the longevity treatment.'
