Deus Irae (9 page)

The figure withdrew, and he found the strength to unsnap his ammo belts and tear off his clothing, for he no longer felt like a glass of ice water, and he pushed these items over the edge of the bed.

He lay there panting, and his head throbbed with each beat of his heart.

The rats! The rats … They were all around him, moving closer…. He reached for the napalm. But,
Deliver us, deliver us from Your Wrath
, said the rats, and he chuckled and ate their offerings. “For a time,” he told them, and then the sky burst and there were slow-swimming, shapeless forms all about him, mainly red, though some were colorless, and he existed indifferently as they flowed by him, and then—or before or after, he could not be certain, and he knew that it did not matter—he heard and felt, rather than saw, a light within his head, pulsing, and it was a pleasant thing and he let it soak deep into him for a time, for a time that could have been hours or seconds (it did not matter), and while he felt, suddenly, that his lips had been moving, he had heard no words, there where he was, until a voice said, “What’s a D-III, Daddy?”

“Sleep, damn you! Sleep!” his mouth finally communicated to his ear, and there came the sound of fleeing footsteps. Rats … Deliver us … D-III … Light … Light. Light!

He was glowing like a neon tube, pulsing like one, too. Brighter and brighter. Red, orange, yellow. White! White and blinding! He reeled in the pure white light. Reveled in it for a moment. A moment only.

It descended slowly, and he saw it coming. He saw it hovering. He cowered, cringed, abased himself before it, but it began its eternally slow descent nevertheless. “God!” came the strangled
cry from his entire being, but it drew nearer, nearer, was upon him.

A crown of iron came down, settled upon his brow, drew tighter, fit him. It tightened and felt like a circlet of dry ice about his head. Arms? Did he have arms? If so, he used them to try to drag it away, but to no avail. It clung there and throbbed, and he was back in his bunker in the digs, feeling it.

“Alice!” he cried out. “Alice! Please … !”

“What, Daddy? What?” as she came to him again.

“A mirror! I need a mirror! Get the little one on top of the john and bring it to me! Hurry!”

“Mirror?”

“Looking-glass! Spiegel! Reflector! The thing you see yourself in!”

“Okay.” And she ran off.

“And a knife! I’ll need a knife, I think!” he called out, not knowing whether he had been heard.

After an aching time, she returned. “I have the mirror,” she said.

He snatched it from her and held it up. He turned his head and looked into it with his left eye.

It was there. A black line had appeared in the center of the lump.

“Listen, Alice,” he said, and stopped then to draw a deep breath. “Listen … In the kitchen … You know the drawer where we keep the knives and forks and spoons?”

“I think … Maybe …”

“Go get it. Pull the whole drawer out—very carefully. Don’t drop it. Then bring the whole thing here to me. Okay?”

“Kitten. Things drawer. Kitten. Things drawer. Things drawer …”

“Yes. Hurry, but be careful not to drop it.”

She ran off, and a moment later he heard the crash and the rattling. Then he heard her whimpers.

He threw his feet over the edge of the bed and collapsed upon the floor. Slowly, he began to crawl.

He reached the kitchen and left moist handprints upon the tile. Alice cowered in the corner, repeating, “Don’t hit, Daddy. Sorry, Daddy. Don’t hit, Daddy …”

“It’s all right,” he said. “You can have another piece of chocolate.” And he picked up two sharp knives of different sizes, turned, and began the long crawl back.

Ten minutes perhaps, and his hands were steady enough to raise the mirror in the left and the small knife in the right. He bit his lip. The first cut will have to be a quick one, he decided, and he positioned the knife beneath the black line.

He slashed and screamed, almost simultaneously.

She ran to his side, sobbing, but he was sobbing too, and unable to answer.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” she cried.

“Give me my shirt!” he cried.

She pulled it from the pile of his clothing and dropped it on him.

He touched it gingerly to his brow, wiped the tears from his eyes on its sleeve. He bit his lip again, and from the wet trickle realized that it, too, needed wiping. Then, “Listen, Alice,” he said. “You’ve been a good girl, and I’m not mad at you.”

“Not mad?” she asked.

“Not mad,” he said. “You’ve been good. Very good. But you’ve got to go away tonight and sleep in another room. This is because I’m going to be hurting and making noises, and there is going to be lots of blood—and I don’t want you to see all this, and I don’t think you’d like it either.”

“Not mad?”

“No. But please go to the old room. Just for tonight.”

“I don’t like it there.”

“Just for tonight.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “Kiss me?”

“Sure.”

And she leaned forward, and he managed to turn his head so that she did not hurt him. Then she withdrew, without—thank god!—undue noise.

She was, he estimated, around twenty-four years old, and, despite her wide shoulders and her fat-girded waist, was possessed of a face not unlike one of Rubens’s cherubs.

After she had gone, he rested awhile, then raised the mirror once again. The blood was still coming, so he blotted it—several
times—as he studied the wound. Good! he decided. The first cut had gone deep. Now, if he’d the guts …

He took up the knife and positioned it above the black line. Something inside him—down at that animal level where most fears are born—cried out, but he managed to ignore it for the single instant necessary to make the second cut.

Then both mirror and knife fell upon the bed and he grasped the shirt to his face. He blacked out then. No lights. No crown. Nothing.

How long it took him to come around, he did not know. But he pulled the shirt from his face, winced, licked his lips.

Finally, he raised the mirror and regarded himself.

Yes, he had succeeded in parenthesizing the thing. The first step had been completed. Now he would have to do some digging.

And he did. Each time the blade struck against the protruding piece of metal, his head felt like the inside of a cathedral bell, and it was minutes before he could proceed again. He kept mopping the blood and tears and sweat from his face.

Then it was there.

He had finally exposed a sufficient edge so that his fingernails might gain purchase. Biting his tongue now, as he had bitten his lower lip clean through, he took hold very gently, tightened his grip carefully, and pulled with all his strength.

When he awakened and was able to raise the mirror once again, it stood out a quarter of an inch from his head.

He moistened the shirt with his saliva in order to clean his face.

Again, the slow approach and the spasmodic tug. Again, the blackness.

After the fifth time, he lay there with a two-inch thorn of metal fallen from his right hand upon the bed, and his face was a sweating, bleeding, crying mask with a hole in the left side of it, and he slept a sleep without dreams—in fact, beneath that ruddy surface there seemed a certain layer of peace, though it could have been a trick of the lights through the mess.

She tiptoed in with the exaggerated care of a child, and raised both hands to her mouth and bit the knuckles because she knew
that she was not supposed to bother him and she felt that if she cried she would.

But, it was like Halloween—like a mask, that he was wearing. She saw the shirt fallen to the floor. He was so wet …

“Daddy …” she whispered, and laid it across his face, pressing lightly, lightly, with fingertips like spiders’ legs, until it absorbed all, all, all of that which covered him like mud or swarming insects.

Later, she pulled it away, because she had been cut, many times, and she knew that such things dry and stick and hurt to pull away.

He looked cleaner then, though still somewhat altered, and she clutched it to her and took it back with her, back to the old room, because it was his, because he had given her toys and chocolate and because she wanted something of his which he would not want anymore—not when it was that dirty.

Later, much later, when she looked at it, fully unrolled, spread out upon her bed, she was delighted to see that it bore a perfect likeness of his face, traced in the juices of his own body, lying there flat, dark now, conforming in every detail to his countenance.…

Save for the eyes—which, strangely, seemed horizontal—just slots—as though they viewed straight across the surface of the world, as if the world were flat and his gaze traveled on without end, forever.

She did not like the way it showed his eyes, so she folded it up and took it back and hid it away at the bottom of her toy box, forgetting it forever after.

This time, for some reason, she remembered not to drop the lid, but closed it carefully.

Here! The scrabbling man on hands and knees in the drainage ditch. Dark eyes seeking an opening. An X of canvas belts upon his back. Above him the lightnings, upon him the rain. And about the next bending of his way, he watches/they watch/it watches, for he/they/it—it—knows that he is coming with a pain in his head. And it glances into the place where the storm meets the earth and the mud is born, wipes splashes from its coat, sniffs the air, sees the man’s head and shoulders pass the turning point, withdraws.

The man finds the opened sewer and crawls within.

  After twenty feet he flicked on his hand torch and shone it upon the ceiling. He stood then on the walkway beside the slop and leaned his back against the wall. Mopping his brow on his khaki sleeve, he shook droplets from his hair and dried his hands on his trousers.

For a moment, he grimaced. Then, dipping into a shoulder-pack, he withdrew a tube of tablets, gulped one. The thunders echoed about him in that place and he cursed, clutching his temples. But it came again and again, and he fell to his knees, sobbing.

The level of the slop in the center ditch began to rise. Observing it in the light of his torch, he rose to his feet and staggered further inward until he came to something resembling a platform. The smell of refuse was more powerful here, but there was space to sit down with his back to the wall, so he did. He switched off the torch.

After a time, the pill began to take effect and he sighed.

See how feeble it is that has come among me
.

He unsnapped his holster and thumbed down the safety catch on his revolver.

It has heard me and knows fear
.

Then, between the rumbles of thunder there was only silence. He sat there for perhaps an hour, then drifted into a light sleep.

That which awakened him might have been sound. If so, it had been too soft to have registered consciously.

It is awake. How is it that it can hear me? Tell me. How is it that it can hear me?

“I can hear you,” he said, “and I’m armed,” his mind automatically falling to the weapon at his side and his finger finding its trigger.

(
Image of a pistol and feeling of derision as eight men fall before it clicks upon an empty chamber
.)

With his left hand he turned on the torch once more. As he swept it about, several opallike sparkles occurred in a corner.

Food! he thought. Ill need something before I make it back to the bunker! They’ll do.

You will not eat me
.

“Who are you?” he asked.

You think of me as rats. You think of a thing known as
The Air Force Survival Handbook,
where it explains that if you cut off one of my heads—which is where the poison is—you must then slit open the ventral side and continue the cuts to extend the length of each leg. Subsequent to this, the skin can be peeled off, the belly opened and emptied, the backbone split and both halves roasted on sharpened sticks over a small fire
.

“That is essentially correct,” he said, then. “You say that you are ‘rats’? I do not understand. The plural—that’s what I don’t understand.”

I am all of us
.

He continued to stare at the eyes located about twenty-five feet from him.

I know now how you hear me. There is pain, pain in you. This, somehow, lets you hear
.

“There are pieces of metal in my head,” he said, “from when my office exploded. I do not understand this thing either, but I can see how it may be involved.”

Yes. In fact, I see that one of the pieces nearer the surface will soon work its way free. Then you must break your skin with your claws and withdraw it
.

“I don’t have claws—oh, my fingernails. Then that must be what’s causing these headaches. Another piece is moving around. Fortunately, I can use my knife. That time I had to claw one out was pretty bad.”

What is a knife?

(
Steel, sharp, gleaming, with a handle
.)

Where does one get a knife?

“One has one, finds one, buys one, steals one, or makes one.”

I do not have one, but I have found yours. I do not know how to buy or steal or make one. So I will take yours
.

And more opallike sparkles occurred, and more, and more, and slowly they drifted forward, and he knew that his gun was worthless.

There came a terrible pain within his head and white flashes destroying his seeing. When it cleared, there were thousands of rats all about him and he moved without thinking.

He pulled the bulb from his ammo belt, withdrew the pin, and hurled the bulb into their midst.

For three pulsebeats nothing happened, except that they continued their advance.

Then there came a blinding solar-corona blaze, which did not diminish but persisted for many minutes. White phosphorus. He followed it with napalm. He chuckled as they burned and screamed and clawed at one another. At least, something within him was chuckling, some part of him. The rats fell back and there came another pain within his head. There was an especially violent throbbing in the vicinity of his left temple.