The Sea Peoples(62)

Oh, bloody marvelous, she thought with a shudder, and continued briskly aloud:

“So if we’re not to grab him and commence with the pointed—and sharp and heavy—questions, what the bloody hell do we do?” she said.

“Follow and observe and think, I would say,” Deor said.

? ? ?

John caught something out of the corner of his eye. . . .

No, he thought. Castaigne did, and someone else did. . . .

Castaigne had seen four people on the street, moving in a group: two women and two men, one of the latter very large and very dark. Hildred’s attention was focused on that one for an instant, frowning in distaste at something he disliked in the man.

I thought they’d all gone to Suanee? ran through his thoughts.

Then he dismissed it and returned to his own thoughts—which were, as usual, mostly about himself and his endless circle of grievances.

I’m trapped with a madman and it’s so boring, John thought. Then his mind went clear for an instant: That was Pip! How can Pip be here? And Deor and Thora and Toa!

He struggled like a madman himself for a moment . . . and then realized the futility of it. He felt as if he was thrashing about, but nothing changed. Yet there was something there, teasing at the edges of his mind. Something like golden threads, two of them, one a bit stronger than the other, spinning out towards Thora and Pip.

That hint of another personality, the Boisean agreed. John felt more . . .

Present. As if I can feel the boundaries between me and the rest of the world. Without everything blurring into everything else for a moment. It’s like bobbing about in the water and coming to the surface now and then.

He could also feel how little a man saw of the world around him, and how much was filled in by memory, as if it were a series of pictures ruffled through and held up from little clues. What Hildred Castaigne saw was so familiar to him that it hardly registered at all, just flashes—and all of them were exotic beyond words to John. They passed the place called the Lethal Chamber again, and Castaigne paused.

The door had just closed behind someone who sought it out. John felt pity; suicide was mortal sin, and he prayed for the soul that had abandoned itself. Perhaps the man had been mad, not responsible for what he did. . . .

They were close enough as they crossed the park for the sound of machinery whirring and chunking could be heard—heavy machinery, like a metalworking mill in Corvallis he’d visited once, when his father and mother were cutting the ribbon to celebrate its opening. Gears and flywheels whining, but here they were muffled behind heavy concrete and stone, and with it somehow a wet sound that gradually diminished to rrrrrrr like a mill grinding bone for fertilizer.

Castaigne didn’t consciously notice the sound, but something flowed through him, a dark strength that felt like health but that the ones who shared his mind could instantly feel wasn’t. It put an extra spring into the step, though. It felt like power, too, and that was more truthful. Like taking some drug that increased your strength now but undermined it in the long run.

As always when he felt power, Castaigne thought of revenge. This time it was the square face of the doctor, the one who’d tended him after his injury. Flashes of that treatment came back to the surface of his mind; it was impossible to tell bloody fancy from dark reality, though he thought the parts about sobbing all alone in a dark locked box were true, and then screaming and trying to flail against the straight confines of it.

This doctor may have earned some of his hate. On the other hand, he seems to have been genuinely trying to help.

Castaigne turned onto a broad north–south thoroughfare that he thought of as Madison Avenue. It was flanked by brick mansions, with here and there a taller structure under construction or recently built, mostly of marble and columns in what was apparently the current prevailing style in this city.

Hildred’s mind was skipping about as he approached his goal; this experience was showing John how much of the internal monologue you assumed, the mind talking to itself, was an illusion. Or possibly Castaigne was just less coherent than most. Now he was remembering a fall from a horse, the sudden shock of coming loose. That was familiar, but Hildred landed badly, his head striking the stone curb of a pathway in some sort of park. More images after that, of blurred thought and pain in the head and neck and pain, the wretched debilitating misery that came with concussion. John recognized it, and so did the fellow . . .

Passenger, John decided. We’re fellow-passengers.

Time blurred; then Hildred was sitting across from Dr. Archer in a rather heavy, fussy-looking book-lined office that smelled of print and leather covers, and faintly of disinfectant. A faint muffled howling sounded, like a man screaming endlessly and hoarsely, just on the verge of hearing. It was in the present, if that meant anything; at least it was not one of Hildred Castaigne’s memories, and Archer was trying to smile.

“Still determined to settle my hash for me, are you, Mr. Castaigne?” he said, laughing . . . though from where he stood, John could tell that there was no jest involved.

“Oh, implacably,” Castaigne said calmly. “Though it’s really a minor matter, in a sense, yet still I do look forward to seeing your debt paid in full.”

He brought out a checkbook, indistinguishable from those used in the more advanced parts of Montival, and made out a sum.

“I believe this completes my . . . tuition, Dr. Archer?”