The Book of Strange New Things(149)

He stopped the vehicle and switched off its engine. He would walk into the settlement, lost and befuddled, and he would try to find someone he knew. He would call ‘Jesus Lover . . . ’ – no, that would be ridiculous. He would call . . . ‘??????’. Yes, he would call ‘??????’, he would call ‘??????’, he would call all the ????? names he could remember. And eventually someone – a Jesus Lover or more likely not a Jesus Lover – would be intrigued by his bellowing and come to him.

He opened the car’s door and stumbled out into the humid night. There were no lights in the settlement, no signs of life. Unsteady on his feet, he lurched sideways, almost bashing his shoulder against the wall of the nearest building. He steadied himself against the polished bricks with his palm. As always, they felt warm and sort of alive. Not alive like an animal, but alive like a tree, as if each brick was a bulge of hardened sap.

He’d walked only a few metres when his hand plunged suddenly into empty space. A doorway. No string-of-beads curtain hanging in front of it, which was odd. Just a big rectangular hole in the building, with nothing visible inside but darkness. He ventured in, knowing that at the opposite end of the chamber there would be another door which would open out onto a network of laneways. He moved gingerly through the claustrophobic black space, shuffling one small step at a time in case he blundered face-first into an internal wall, or was apprehended by gloved hands, or tripped on some other obstacle. But he reached the far side without encountering anything; the room seemed to be completely empty. He found the back door – again, just a hole without a curtain – and emerged into the lane.

Even in daylight, all the ????? lanes looked much the same; he’d never negotiated them without a guide. In the dark, they felt more like tunnels than pathways, and he advanced painfully slowly, hands outstretched, like a man newly blinded. The ????? might not have eyes, but they had something else that allowed them to move confidently through this maze.

He cleared his throat, willing himself to call out names in an alien language he imagined he’d learned quite well, but which he now realised he had only the feeblest grip on. Instead, he remembered the 23rd Psalm, his own paraphrase of it, carefully devised to remove consonants. He’d sweated blood over it and now, for some reason, it came to him.

‘The Lord be he who care for me,’ he recited as he shuffled through the darkness. ‘I will need no more.’ This voice was the same one he used for preaching: not strident, but quite loud and with each word articulated clearly. The moisture in the atmosphere swallowed the sounds before they had a chance to carry very far. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my soul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all this, for he be God. Yea, though I walk through the long dark corridor of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your care wand make me feel no harm can come. You feed me even while unfriendly men look on in envy. You rub healing oil on my head. My cup runneth over. Good unfolding and comfort will keep me company, every day of my life. I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’

‘Hey, that’s good!’ cried an unfamiliar voice. ‘That’s good!’

Peter whirled around in the dark, almost losing his balance. In spite of the fact that the words were friendly, he was adrenalised with instinctive, fight-or-flight fear. The presence of another male (for the voice was definitely male), a male of his own species, somewhere very nearby but invisible, felt as life-threatening as a gun-barrel to the temple or a knife in the side.

‘I take my hat off to you! If I had a goddamn hat!’ the stranger added. ‘You’re a pro, what can I say, sheer class! The Lord is my shepherd without a f*cking shepherd in sight. Only a couple of “t”s and “s”s in the whole damn thing!’ Curses aside, the sincerity of the admiration was clear. ‘You wrote that for the ?????, right? Like, Open up for Jesus, this won’t hurt. A banquet with all the bones taken out, a meal in a milkshake, thesaurus semolina. Bravo!’

Peter hesitated. A living shape had materialised from the gloom behind him. As far as he could make out, it was human, hairy and naked. ‘Tartaglione?’

‘Got it in one! Put it there, palomino! Come va?’ A bony hand grasped Peter’s. A very bony hand. The fingers, though strong, were skeletal, pressing spoke-like phalanges into Peter’s softer flesh.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Peter.

‘Oh, you know,’ was the drawled reply. ‘Just hanging out, shootin’ the breeze. Watching the grass not grow. Happy campering. What are you doing here?’

‘I . . . I’m the minister,’ said Peter, divesting his hand from the stranger’s. ‘The pastor for the ????? . . . We built a church . . . It was right here . . . ’

Tartaglione laughed, then coughed emphysemically. ‘Beg to disagree, amigo. Nobody here but us cockroaches. No gas, food, floozies or floorshows. Nada.’

The word was released like a bat into the humid night, and disappeared. All of a sudden, a lightbulb went on in Peter’s brain. He wasn’t in C-2 at all: he was in the settlement that the ????? had abandoned. There was nothing here but air and brick walls. And a naked madman who’d slipped through the net of human civilisation.

‘I got lost,’ Peter explained, feebly. ‘I’m sick. I think I’ve been poisoned. I . . . I think I may be dying.’