The Man Who Melted (16 page)

ELEVEN

The morning light was dim and gritty and filled Mantle's room like dust. He felt the need to urinate, but he lay where he was, staring out the arched arcade window, listening to the morning sounds of birds, distant chatter, and laughter; the long buzzings of the heat bugs, promising a hot day; and the crunching of leaves and twigs as a handyrobot weeded and planted somewhere in the great gardens. He felt as if he had been very ill and had just broken the fever. He was exhausted, his mouth was dry, and he could smell his own sour odor. But he felt at ease, secure in this morning world. He had had his schizophrenic episode, scammed through the black and silver spaces, made the transition into the dark world and back into the light. He had come full circle, or so he thought. He had not discovered himself, nor had he found any hidden telepathic talents. He could not summon the dead nor guide them through Gaol. He had simply been sick. Now he lay on the bed, alone, his head propped against a sweat-stained pillow. His arms and legs were outstretched, as if he had been on a raft in a stormy sea, and although it was calm now, he was still afraid of losing his hold and being tipped into the deep.

He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, and then, instead of taking a dry shower, walked down the hall to stand under the old multinozzled
shower until he became faint from the heat. He returned to his room and found a stylish pair of brown slacks and a matching open-collar shirt in the dresser. He dressed and found the soft boots that had been placed just under the bed. On impulse, he looked around for the filthy clothes he had had on last night, but they were not to be found. Jesus, Mantle thought, remembering, my clothes and wallet are somewhere in Dramont. If
Gendarmerie
find the wallet, I'm done. I'll have to find it—perhaps it hasn't been picked up.

There was a knock at the door.

“Yes?” Mantle asked, distracted.

“It's Roberta. May I come in?”

“Yes, of course.” He would ask her about the wallet.

She came inside and stood by the door, somewhat awkwardly. She was dressed in a pale blue skirt made of a silky, clinging material and a white, sleeveless blouse in the American style. Her frizzy blonde hair was pulled back and tied; it looked gauzy in the sunlight. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like I've been stepped on.” Mantle stood up. “Well, are you coming in? I've got to talk to you.” Then he realized something was wrong: Roberta was upset. And Mantle suddenly remembered a voice calling him in a dream. “What's the matter?” he asked.

“It's Joan. She's here.”

“Well, I'm very pleased that—”

“She's in a coma,” Roberta said, softly kicking the door shut.

Mantle was touched by a vague, uneasy memory of smashing into Joan in the dark spaces. It was last night's fever dream remembered.

Mantle stared at her.

“What happened?”

“Joan was attending your friend Pfeiffer, who was organ gambling—”

“Jesus Christ, I didn't know they were going organ gambling. Well, I guess she was bound and determined to hook-into someone.”

“—and she had an accident.”

“What?”

“She was hooked-into Pfeiffer and his opponent, and she lost it. It was a pretty bad show; Pfeiffer's opponent died in the hook-in.”

“Jesus. If she's in a coma, why isn't she in a fucking hospital, getting proper care?”

“We had her taken out of the hospital and brought here.”

“Why?”

“Because she's better off here. If it comes to reaching inside and pulling her back, she's safer with us.”

“So we'll have to hook-in?”

“If we'd let the hospital psychs at her, she'd end up brain-burned—Is that what you want? She can just as easily rest here—we have adequate medical facilities. She might come out of it by herself. We thought you might be able to help.”

“Where's Carl?”

“Carl?”

“Pfeiffer, the man Joan was with.”

“He contacted us. I left a message on the Net for Joan, and he had sense enough to trace—”

“Where is he now?”

“It seems that he made the arrangements and left.”

“I'm sure he wanted her out of the hospital. He's always looking out for his own ass.”

“What?”

“What happened to you last night? Why didn't you stay?” Mantle was suddenly afraid, as if the dark spaces were claiming him again. He couldn't bear the thought of being alone. He felt as if he was being
watched
.

“You told me to leave, remember?”

But Mantle didn't remember.

He went into Joan's room alone. It was in the old wing of the house which had probably served as servants' quarters in bygone days. Joan was lying on a bed near the far, plaster-cracked wall; and a robot, lifeless as stone, stood in its recess and stared at her. The life-signs monitor murmured as if talking to itself. Joan was breathing deeply and evenly, as if in a deep, dreamless sleep. Her face was smooth, calm, except for a nervous tic beating its rhythm inside her cheek.

“Joan,” he whispered as he leaned toward her. He watched her and listened, but she was all silence and distance, lost. “Joan, can you hear me?” he asked, louder. “It's Ray. Come on, please try.” No response. Sunlight cut into the room as if it were a solid block of yellow. Dust motes did their Brownian dance. It was a lovely young afternoon; there wasn't a shadow in the room.

But once again Mantle felt that he was being watched.

Then a voice whispered to him, just as it had in his dream this morning. It was Joan's voice, but Joan was sleeping, not speaking. He felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise. Automatically, he looked for the robot in the recess. It was still, dead until needed.

“Joan,” he said anxiously, “wake up.” He could feel himself being pulled into the dark spaces, see the sunlit room turn to silver. Terrified, he turned away from her, as if to run. But the voice called him again, wrapping him in a waking dream. He could not run, he was drugged with it.

The voice seemed to have direction now. It was near the door, a discontinuity, calling. Whispering.

He went to the door. The voice seemed to be ahead, calling him into the doorway. It led him on, turned into the
Aria ariari isa
that he had heard at the hook-in ceremony. Whispers became tongues of fire, every word a punishment. Joan had finally found him, just when he thought he was free, when he thought his episode was over.

He walked through the light-flooded, expansive rooms and hallways of the great house, following her voice as if in a trance. It was as if the sunlight were only an illusion, a superimposition upon the raw, ever-present reality of darkness.

The voice led him down, through the house, winding, wending from floor to floor, into the cellars, which were rough-hewn, ancient, and damp. They smelled faintly sulphurous. He walked through wide and narrow passageways and down stone steps. His heels clicked on the stone, something scurried ahead, and Joan's voice murmured like a cold stream rushing through the corridors and rooms.

If a house could be said to have a soul, this is where it would reside. If the house had a memory, it would be here too: in the dark, mazed corridors; the crypts, caverns, and recesses. Mantle felt as if he were being led into a cold
womb. To dig, to climb into the earth, to be at one with the dark places and protected from the hot-blooded beasts above: those were his elemental urges.

Corridors gave way to natural rock formations, stalactites and stalagmites, but human artifice was always present in the subtle, indirect lighting.

The voice led him into a cavernous room, a grotto which contained a still, transparent lake. Mantle stood at the edge of this subterranean pool and began to wake up. Shocked, he looked into the grassy lake and saw what seemed to be descending galleries of blue-green amphitheaters below its surface. It was very deep, and the preternaturally clear water glowed with a dim, nostalgic light.

Here was the secret of the house.

“Jesus,” Mantle mumbled, feeling as if he were standing on the edge of a ledge, looking at the world below. He felt he would fall, and stepped backward. Water dripped in the distance, in another room, worlds away.

And something moved in the water. At first it was a shimmering; then, a vague shape in the deeps. It was a drowned woman, rising. The surface rippled, dividing everything below. The woman floated upright toward the surface.

It was Joan.

Mantle screamed.

She rose out of the lake before him as if she were a statue standing upon an invisible platform. She was hard, dead, unforgiving. Her face and body were stone white and mottled blue; her wet, short-cropped hair a helmet.

She rose slowly, as if in slow motion, and her dreaming eyes stared into his.

Then she stepped across the water toward him.

She came to him like a lover and dragged him screaming into the icy, transparent lake.

TWELVE

Normally, Carl Pfeiffer could have easily slept through the morning noise of neighbors gossiping from window to window and house to house; the sounds of cleaning machines making their second pass down the street below, children playing and laughing and speaking a delightfully idiomatic French
punctuated with jarring Americanisms, and the vendors calling their wares. After all, he had been up most of the night. But he got out of bed, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and crossed the room to the front window, which he opened fully, as if to let in the concentrated life of the streets.

The bedroom smelled of Pfeiffer, of anxiety and cold sweat.

I did everything I could for Joan, under the circumstances, he told himself; but the old guilt gnawed away at him. I had to let her go, he thought, remembering the deadly tunnel created by Gayet's death. He had tried to hold on to her, to her thoughts, but something had happened. Joan's mind had snapped, for she hallucinated Raymond Mantle. Pfeiffer saw and felt that: he was hooked-into her. But the hallucination had the effect of a shock of electricity. As if by reflex, Pfeiffer buried himself in white thought and cut himself off from Joan. After all, he
had
to protect himself. And with the connection broken, poor Joan must have been sucked into the dark spaces.

Still, something niggled away at him, as if there were more to the incident than he could remember.

Surely, Joan had only projected Raymond….

Pfeiffer leaned out the window and took a deep breath, as if to clear his insides of the past. He watched some of the boys in the street below playing nail-the-cross, a game he had known as a child, although his parents, being very religious, had forbidden him to play it. Women shouted at each other across the street. Fish and produce mingled with the particular dusty odor of old Cannes in the morning. It was an odor with which every child was familiar, the unique smell exuded from two stones being rubbed together. Perhaps it was caused by the friction of feet and wheels on the cobbled streets. The smells—and the sensation of the sun warming him—seemed to evaporate the anxiety left over from the restive night.

He turned away from the window to wash and dress.

Feeling refreshed, he passed Mantle's bedroom, which was locked, keyed-in breakfast in the kitchen, and then padded through the sitting room into the living room. The high windows caught the morning light; this was a perfect place to work, or so it seemed to Pfeiffer. He set his tray of food on a sideboard, which he pulled over to the couch; he sat down to eat. The omelet was lousy; the fine herbs were dried. But what did he expect? Raymond could
afford much better, but evidently didn't care. Raymond would never change. He would always slide from this to that. Yet he always managed to keep working, even if he wasn't doing good work. But this recent stuff was quite good, Pfeiffer thought as he chewed noisily. He was alone and could suck the juices out of his food, something he could not do when he was in public—nor, for that matter, when he dined with Caroline, his wife.

After placing his tray in the disposal, he took another cup of coffee and returned to the couch. The living room was cozy, and he felt secure in the niche of protected space formed by wall, couch, and sideboard. Then he placed a call to Joel Bose, a little stump of a man who seemed to be everywhere and in touch with everyone (and yet was
not
a public personality). Pfeiffer and Joel had been logrolling and pork-barreling for years. This would even things up, for Pfeiffer had done more than his share for Joel over the last five years—had, in fact, kept Joel anonymous in a few dangerous situations, and helped elect five of Joel's toadies—good men, really, but it didn't hurt to have patronage in the right places. That was not only good business, but good ethical sense, because he could not be of use to his public if he didn't constantly mend political fences. It was a sadomasochistic game: every newsbreak, every good story, made and destroyed friendships. Keeping in the middle was also expensive. Pfeiffer always made some sort of remuneration to anyone he had to victimize.

Except Raymond, he thought. Jesus, did he owe Raymond….

Joel's image appeared in the living room at a comfortable distance from Pfeiffer. It was a bit fuzzy, the image, but then Joel always used a scrambler.

“…it's all taken care of,” Joel said, “but, Christ, was it a fucking massacre, and you know goddamn well that those fucking
gendarmes
were getting their rocks off, and the fuckers hadn't even taken anyone into custody, said the terrorists weren't local, couldn't be found, the old bullshit—”

“Yes, yes, I heard the news from Max. What I'm interested in is—”

“It's done,” Joel said. He had a hard, handsome face. He made a sucking noise with his lips and cheek, one of his characteristic expressions of satisfaction. What could not be seen on the hollie, however, was that Joel was very overweight; yet, the fat had not yet padded out his face. “Your friend left his clothes lying about; we collected them. Everything's tidy; we recovered his wallet, too.”

“Wonderful,” Pfeiffer said, relieved.

“Yes, it certainly was. The wallet, dear Carl, was already in the hands of the police, just in case you thought it was easy work.”

“Well, I guess that evens us up….”

“More than that, I would say.”

“Then I'm in your debt again,” Pfeiffer said, smiling.

“You certainly are. I'll let you know what the damage comes to. A fuck of a lot of money had to change hands.”

“Well, my…client can afford it,” Pfeiffer said, nodding, indicating that he was about to break the connection.

“Carl?”

“Yes, Joel.”

“I heard about what happened at the casino. Did everything work out?”

“Yes, fine,” Pfeiffer said. He hadn't expected the news to spread that fast through the grapevine.

“And your lady friend?”

“All taken care of, thanks.”

“Carl, one last thing.”

“Yes…?”

“You are aware of the
Trouble
; it is conceivable that you could be implicated if—”

“Max gave me the word,” Pfeiffer said. “But I appreciate the thought.”

“If there's anything I can do…”

“What are
you
going to do?”

Joel smiled one of his engaging backroom smiles and broke the connection. Pfeiffer stared at the space where Joel's image had been. Things would work themselves out, he told himself. He sat very still; he was satisfied with himself and took the time to enjoy it. He would take time for everything now, he thought. He was going to start living. But first he had to set his past in balance; then he could get back into the world. It would be a new world, and he would be a new man.

But his old fears rushed back to him like a crazed mob that had found its witch. He knew he was going to suffer. He would pay. The room suddenly darkened as a cloud passed across the sun, and then it was bright again. He was living and breathing Mantle's world now; it was deep and layered, as
comfortable as an Oriental carpet. Pfeiffer floated upon his thoughts. He became the rational part of himself, the observer, and his fear became only a small, tangible thing. And he could handle “things.”

He was worried about Joan and Raymond, especially Raymond. He would call Boulouris again and inquire; but first he called Max back, and then confirmed his passage on the
Titanic
, which was docked in a special berth in Southampton harbor, awaiting its final voyage.