Night & Demons (47 page)

Come to me . . . . Come to Marie . . . .

* * *

The activities of the firebase went on as usual, ignoring Schaydin just as he did them. Second Platoon and some vehicles from Headquarters Company bellowed off on a Medcap to a village ten kilometers down Route 13. There the medics would dispense antibiotics and bandages to the mildly ill. The troops would also goggle at ravaged figures whom not even Johns Hopkins could have aided: a child whose legs had been amputated three years past by a directional mine; a thirty-year-old man with elephantiasis of the scrotum, walking bowlegged because of the bulk of his cantaloupe-sized testicles. . . .

Chinook helicopters brought in fuel and ammunition resupply in cargo nets swinging beneath their bellies. Schaydin did not notice their howling approach; the syncopated chop of their twin rotors as they hovered; the bustle of men and vehicles heading toward the steel-plank pad to pick up the goods. The lieutenant sat impassively in his tent even when the howitzer battery fired, though the hogs were lofting some of their shells to maximum range. The muzzle blasts raised doughnuts of dust that enveloped the whole base. Schaydin’s mind’s eye was on a dancing girl, not men in baggy green fatigues; the roar he heard was that of a crowd far away, watching the dancer . . . and even the dust in Schaydin’s nostrils did not smell like the pulverized laterite of Tay Ninh Province.

“Time for the officers’ meeting, sir,” Sloane murmured.

Schaydin continued to sit like a thin, nervous Buddha in a lawn chair.

“Sir,” the driver repeated loudly, “they just buzzed from the TOC. It’s already 1500 hours.”

“Oh, right,” muttered the lieutenant dizzily. He shook his head and stood, then ran his fingertips abstractedly over the blackened minican. “Right.”

The Tactical Operations Center was merely a trio of command vehicles around a large tent in the middle of the firebase. Schaydin had forgotten to carry his lawn chair with him. He pulled up a box which had held mortar shells and sat facing the acetate-covered map with its crayoned unit symbols. The afternoon rain started, plunging sheets of water that made the canvas jounce like a drumhead. It sounded like an angry crowd.

The Civil Affairs Officer and the lieutenant from the military intelligence detachment shared a presentation on the results of the Medcap. They proved that zero could be divided in half to fill twenty minutes. Then the Operations Officer described F Troop’s morning sweep. It had turned up two old bunkers and some cartridge cases, but no signs of recent occupation. The sector was quiet.

The balding S-3 switched to discussing the operation planned in two days. When he directed a question to Schaydin, the lieutenant continued to rock silently on his box, his eyes open but fixed on nothing in the tent.

“Schaydin!” the squadron commander snarled. “Stop sitting there with your finger up your butt and pay attention!”

“Yes, sir!” Schaydin’s face flushed hot and his whole body tingled, as if he had just been roused from a dead faint. “Would you please repeat the question, sir?”

The meeting lasted another ten minutes, until the rain stopped. Schaydin absorbed every pointless detail with febrile acuteness. His flesh still tingled.

After Col. Brookings dismissed his officers into the clearing skies, Schaydin wandered toward the far side of the defensive berm instead of going directly to his tent. He followed the path behind one of the self-propelled howitzers, avoiding the pile of white cloth bags stuffed with propellant powder. The charges were packed in segments. For short range shelling, some of the segments were torn off and thrown away as these had been. Soon the powder would be carried outside the perimeter and burned.

Burned. A roaring, sparking column of orange flame, and in it—

Schaydin cursed. He was sweating again.

Three ringing explosions sounded near at hand. The noise had been a facet of the background before the rain as well, Schaydin remembered. He walked toward the source of the sounds, one of First Platoon’s tanks. It had been backed carefully away from the berm, shedding its right tread onto the ground, straight as a tow line between the vehicle and the earthen wall. Four men hunched behind a trailer some yards from the tank. One of them, naked to the waist, held a detonator in his hand. The trooper saw Schaydin approaching and called, “Stand back, sir. We’re blowing out torsion bars.”

The lieutenant stopped, watching. The trooper nodded and slapped closed the scissors handle of the detonator. Smoke and another clanging explosion sprang from among the tank’s road wheels. The enlisted men straightened. “That’s got it,” one of them murmured. Schaydin walked to them, trying to remember the name of the tall man with the detonator, the tank commander of this vehicle.

“What’s going on, Emmett?” Schaydin asked.

None of the enlisted men saluted. “Emery, sir,” the TC corrected. “Our tank had six torsion bars broke, so she steered and rode like a truck with square wheels. Back in the World they’ve got machines to drift out torsion bars, but here we’re just using a couple ounces of C4 to crack each one loose.” The tall noncom pointed at the block of explosive dropped on the ground beside him. Its green sandwich backing had been peeled away from both sides, and half the doughy white
plastique
had been pinched off. Several copper blasting caps lay on the ground beside the C4.

Emery ignored the lieutenant’s sudden pallor. He stopped paying attention to Schaydin entirely since it was obvious that the officer was not about to help with the job. “Come on, snakes,” Emery said, “we got a lot to do before sundown.”

The crewmen scrambled to their fifty-ton mount, hulking and rusted and more temperamentally fragile than any but the men responsible for such monsters will ever know. Schaydin’s staring eyes followed them as he himself bent at the knees and touched the block of C4. Its smooth outer wrapper was cool to his fingers. Without looking at the explosive, Schaydin slid it into a side pocket of his fatigue trousers. He walked swiftly back to his tent.

Tropic sunset is as swift as it is brilliant. It crams all the reds and ochres and magentas of the temperate zones into a few minutes which the night then swallows. But the darkness, though it would be sudden, was hours away; and Schaydin’s pulsing memory would not let him wait hours.

Sloane was radio watch this afternoon. The driver sat on the tailgate of the command vehicle with his feet on the frame of his cot. He was talking to the staff sergeant who would take over as CQ at 2000 hours. They fell silent when Schaydin appeared.

“Go ahead, Skip, get yourself some supper,” the lieutenant said stiffly. “I’ll take the radio for a while.”

“S’okay, sir, Walsh here spelled me,” Sloane said. He pointed at the paper plate with remnants of beef and creamed potatoes, sitting on his footlocker. “Go ahead and eat yourself.”

“I said I’d take the radio!” Schaydin snapped. He was trembling, though he did not realize it. Sloane glanced very quickly at his commander, then to the startled sergeant. The driver lowered his feet from the cot and squeezed back so that Schaydin could enter the track. The two enlisted men were whispering together at the open end of the tent when their lieutenant drew the poncho shut, closing off the rest of the world.

It was dim in the solid-walled vehicle, dimmer yet when Schaydin unplugged the desk lamp. Radio dials gleamed and reflected from the formica counter, chinks of light seeped in past the curtain. But it would serve, would serve . . . .

The texture of the C4 steadied Schaydin’s fingers as he molded it. The high sides of the ashtray made it difficult to ignite the pellet. The hot steel of the lighter seared his fingers and he cursed in teary frustration; but just before Schaydin would have had to pull away winked the spark and the orange flare—and in it, the girl dancing.

Her head was flung back, the black, rippling, smoky hair flying out behind her. Schaydin heard the words again, “A Marie! Ici! Viens ici!”

The radio was babbling, too, on the command frequency; but whatever it demanded was lost in the roar of the crowd. Passion, as fiercely hot as the explosive that gave it form, flashed from the girl’s eyes. “Come to me!”

The flame sputtered out. Schaydin was blind to all but its afterimage.

The compartment was hot and reeking. Sweat beaded at Schaydin’s hairline and on his short, black moustache. He stripped the backing away from the rest of the explosive and began to knead the whole chunk, half a pound, into a single ball.

“Battle Six to Battle One-Six,” the radio repeated angrily in Col. Brookings’s voice. “Goddammit, Schaydin, report!”

The ashtray had shattered in the heat. Schaydin swept the fragments nervously to the floor, then set the lump of explosive on the blood-marked formica. A shard of clear glass winked unnoticed in the heel of his hand. He snapped his lighter to flame and it mounted, and she mounted—

—and she called. Her hands could not reach out for him but her soul did and her Hell-bright eyes. “Viens ici! Viens!”

The dancer’s smooth flesh writhed with no cloak but the flame. Higher, the radio dials melting, the lizard-tongue forks of the blaze beading the aluminum roof—Schaydin stood, his ankles close together like hers. He did not reach for her, not because of the heat but because the motion would be—wrong. Instead he put his hands behind his back and crossed his wrists. Outside the curtain, voices snarled but the dragon-hiss of the C4 would have drowned even a sane man’s senses. She twisted, her eyes beckoning, her mouth opening to speak. Schaydin arched, bending his body just so and—

“Come!”

—and he went.

The poncho tore from Col. Brookings’s fingers and a girl plunged out of the fiery radio compartment. She was swarthy but not Vietnamese, naked except for smoldering scraps of a woolen shift. Neither Brookings nor the enlisted men could understand the French she was babbling; but her joy, despite severe burns on her feet and legs, was unmistakable.

No one else was in the vehicle.

On October 14, 1429, the assembled villagers of Briancon, Province of Dauphiné, Kingdom of France, roared in wonderment. The witch Marie dé la Barthe, being burned alive at the stake, suddenly took the form of a demon with baggy green skin. The change did not aid the witch, however, for the bonds still held. Despite its writhing and unintelligible cries, the demon-shape burned as well in the fire as a girl would have.

CODEX

I
wrote “Codex” in December, 1967 (I finished it on December 14), a few months after I had begun law school at Duke University. Coursework doesn’t frighten me, but change does. Moving to the South and entering law school were big changes, and the question of what I was going to do after I graduated was a huge cloud over the future.

I didn’t worry about Viet Nam. This was before Robert S. McNamara, in one of his last gifts to the American people, cancelled the graduate student draft deferment and emptied grad schools to feed his meat-grinder in Southeast Asia.

Libraries have always been refuges for me. Duke had a number of very good libraries, and I browsed their contents contentedly. Because of mentions in secondary sources, I looked for and found the
Periplus Maris Erythraei.
This wasn’t a history book, it’s a book that was history.

The
Periplus
told me about the sailing and trading conditions up and down the shores of the Indian Ocean in the first century AD: what products could be found in each port and what the locals wanted in exchange for their produce. The writer—presumably a trading captain himself—didn’t care who ruled a village (except as a consumer of luxuries) or what gods the locals worshipped. All that mattered to him was what they had to sell and how much you had to pay them.

This view of the ancient world as ordinary people doing ordinary things was completely different from the one I’d held until that time. It was also a view of ordinary people in contact with aliens, both literally (the Latin word
alienus
means a foreigner) and figuratively: to an Alexandrine Greek, a native of Zanzibar or Sri Lanka might as well be from Venus.

Recently I had learned that writing could help me to deal with fear. I had sold a story, “Denkirch,” in my last year as an undergraduate at Iowa, so I tried again to lose myself in fiction. “Denkirch” was a Lovecraftian pastiche; this time I wrote a contemporary SF story about the arrival of aliens (the interplanetary kind) in a college town.

I set “Codex” in Iowa City, where I’d lived for four years, rather than in Durham to which I’d just moved. My story gives a capsule of college life in approved student housing just before the culture changed completely under the impact of birth control pills.

The book collection I describe did exist, though the characters themselves are fictional. Many years later I learned that the householder (who worked at the U of I library) had been stealing books by the carload before they were catalogued. (Truth may not have aliens in it, but it can be extremely strange.)

I finished the rough draft of “Codex,” but I never submitted it. I don’t remember precisely why, but there weren’t many short-fiction markets at the time and the story had problems even I could see. It wasn’t published until 2003, when the Nameless Presences of the Side-Car Preservation Society asked me if I had something they could bring out as a chapbook.

There are certainly things wrong with “Codex,” but it has more merit than simply giving a glimpse of a now-vanished past. I had a lot to learn about how to pace and structure a story; but when I did, the obvious ability to research proved to be of great value to me as a writer.

I guess the other reason I’m including “Codex” here is that it’s an example of the direction I might have gone if I hadn’t been drafted into the Viet Nam War. I would like to be the person I thought then that I was going to become: a guy who was afraid of the future instead of one who is bleakly despairing about the past.

* * *

B
ob McElroy had the finest personal collection of books that Carter knew of; it made it all the more unfortunate that the man was an ass about books.