‘I want you to help me, Ben,’ said Elegy quietly, her eyes fixed on the huri as if it were a cobra preparing to strike.
‘What do you want me to do?’
She beckoned with her knife hand.
Thinking it might be best to engage the huri on two fronts, I eased myself into the fan of silk on the right side of the pit and wove my way inward until I was crouching opposite Elegy. The huri turned to face me, turned back to keep Elegy in view, and set the entire hammock quivering in its lacework harness. The shrill piping noises the huri was now making were all too audible, brief but ear-splitting bursts of sound.
‘Suppose the little bastard calls in reinforcements?’ I asked Elegy in an even voice.
‘That’s something we’re just going to have to chance . . . I’m going to cut my father free of this, Ben – I’m going to midwife his resurrection.’
Elegy thrust the knife viciously forward, nearly skewering the huri. It skittered up Egan Chaney’s chest to his head, and Elegy lunged at it again, pulling back just in time to keep from falling. The huri flapped once and wove a miraculous zigzag to the top of the rear wall, where it sat facing inward, piping its fainter and fainter protests but recording our every move with pulses in the steep ultrasonic.
I stood, leaned forward, and steadied Egan Chaney’s chrysalis. Elegy canted her knife blade and began digging at the cerements around her father’s hips and bound hands. The silk – the extruded huri cable – comprising these wrappings was exceptionally tough; Elegy had to struggle to make a clean cut without plunging the knife into the body itself. At last, though, she made a neat incision and began peeling away the fiber around her father’s right hand – not, oddly, in unending strings, but in scablike clumps that she lifted away easily and then dropped into the pit.
Beneath these silken scales was a thin bluish membrane, like a birth caul. Almost at once Elegy began scraping at the exposed membrane on the back of her father’s hand. When a piece about two centimeters square bunched up in front of her knife blade, both she and I realized the membrane had either replaced her father’s human skin or interpenetrated it to such a depth that the two were virtually indistinguishable. Black blood oozed from the scraped area, in which veins were now visible.
‘It’s impossible,’ Elegy said between her teeth, lifting her knife away. ‘They’ve fixed it so we can’t unwrap him, they’ve fixed it so—’
Her voice broke, and with grimacing fury she flipped the knife into the pit. I worked my way around the foot of the tilted chrysalis to join her on the other side.
As I did, the huri dropped from the wall and balanced itself on Chaney’s head. Soon it was peeling back scales of silk with its claws and transferring these to its ugly, scissoring mouth.
Elegy, seeing, started to shoo the creature away, but I restrained her, and in a few minutes the huri had uncovered her father’s face. All that yet clung to his features was the bluish undercaul. We could see the man’s nose, his stony beard, the sockets of his eyes. The huri tore a hole in the membrane where Chaney’s mouth was supposed to be and put its beak to the hole. It flapped to keep from falling.
‘Ben, goddamn you, let me go!’ Elegy tried to wrench free, but I held her even more tightly. Our struggle swayed the cables around us. When she finally did escape me, the huri had returned to the top of the wall and her father was gargling a dark, syrupy liquid.
Obligated by the fear that Chaney would strangle, I brushed past her, got caught in the huri web, tore at it, then ducked beneath the clinging strands and pulled the hammock far enough over that the fluid in Chaney’s mouth was able to spill into the pit. Digging with my forefinger at the viscous substance in his mouth, I held the hammock in this position until my shoulders ached and Chaney seemed to be completely drained.
This took several minutes, but Elegy joined me before I was finished and eased a little of the burden. Soon Chaney was breathing audibly, sucking the pale blue undercaul into his nostrils and then billowing it out again. With a fingernail I made a pair of gimlet holes in this membrane – Chaney’s breathing grew regular, so systematic and sane that I half believed he had only been dozing in a peculiar sort of sleeping bag. I let go of the hammock and painfully straightened up.
Stunned by the sound of Chaney’s breathing, we waited a long time. The Bachelor deserted us altogether, leaving his huri as sentinel atop the wall. We didn’t miss him because we had other things on our mind.
‘Go ahead,’ I urged Elegy. ‘Talk to him.’
She crouched beside the chrysalis again and reached out to touch it with her right hand. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘it’s Elegy. It’s your daughter – I’ve come all this way to find you.’
There was a brief hitch in Chaney’s breathing, then the same, even, miraculous rhythm as before. After glancing bemusedly at me, Elegy tried again, repeating her name several times and assuring the transfigured man that she was actually beside him. Nothing. If Chaney was alive, he seemed alive beyond reach.
‘Do you think he can hear?’ Elegy asked me. ‘Maybe the caul’s a hindrance, maybe that syrup’s gumming up his inner ears.’
‘He’s already heard you, Elegy.’
‘But he’s not responding. He might as well be dead.’ She dropped her arm, pivoted toward me on the balls of her feet. Then her eyes flared and she exclaimed, ‘Like hell!
‘I’m the problem, Ben. I’m too far removed from
