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Kerans began to walk forwards across the foyer, remembering the deep twilight
bower of the auditorium and its strange zodiac. Then he felt the dark fluid
tilling out across the mud between his feet, like the leaking blood-stream of
a whale.
Quickly he took Beatrice's arm, and retraced their steps down the street. "I'm
afraid the magic has gone," he remarked flatly. He forced a laugh. "I suppose
Strangman would say that the suicide should never return to the scene of his
crime."
Attempting to take a shorter route, they blundered into a winding cul de sac,
managed to step back in time as a small caiman lunged at them from a shallow
pool. Darting between the rusting shells of cars, they regained the open
street, the alligator racing behind them. It paused by a lamp post on the edge
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of the sidewalk, tail whipping slowly, jaws flexing, and Kerans pulled
Beatrice after him. They broke into a run and had covered ten yards when
Bodkin slipped and fell heavily into a bank of silt.
"Alan! Hurry!" Kerans started to go back for him, the caiman's head pivoting
towards them.
Marooned behind in the lagoon, it seemed bewildered and ready to attack
anything.
Suddenly there was a roar of gunfire, the flames stabbing across the roadway.
Flares held above their heads, a group of men appeared around a corner. In
front of them was the white-faced figure of Strangman, followed by the Admiral
and Big Caesar, shotguns at their shoulders.
Strangman's eyes glittered in the flare light. He made a small bow towards
Beatrice, then saluted Kerans. Its spine shattered, the alligator thrashed
impotently in the gutter, revealing its yellow underbelly, and Big Caesar drew
his machete and began to hack at its head.
Strangman watched it with evil pleasure. "Loathsome brute," he commented, then
pulled from his pocket a huge rhinestone necklace, still encrusted with algae,
and held it out to Beatrice.
"For you, my dear." Deftly, he strung the strands around her neck, regarding
the effect with pleasure. The entwined weeds among the sparkling stones
against the white skin of her breast made her look like some naiad of the
deep. "And all the other jewels of this dead sea."
With a flourish he was off again, the flares vanishing in the darkness with
the shouts of his men, leaving them alone in the silence with the white jewels
and the decapitated alligator.
During the next days events proceeded to even greater madness. Increasingly
disorientated, Kerans would wander alone through the dark streets at night--by
day it became unbearably hot in the labyrinth of alleyways--unable to tear
himself away from his mem ories of the old lagoon, yet at the same time locked
fast to the empty streets and gutted buildings.
After his first surprise at seeing the drained lagoon he began to sink rapidly
into a state of dulled inertia, from which he tried helplessly to rouse
himself. Dimly he realised that the lagoon had represented a complex of
neuronic needs that were impossible to satisfy by any other means. This
blunting lethargy deepened, unbroken by the violence around him, and more and
more he felt like a man marooned in a time sea, hemmed in by a mass of
dissonant realities millions of years apart.
The great sun beating in his mind almost drowned out the sounds of the looting
and revelry, the roars of explosives and shotguns. Like a blind man he
stumbled in and out of the old arcades and entrances, his white dinner Suit
stained and grimy, jeered at by the sailors as they charged by him, playfully
buffeting his shoulders. At midnight he would wander through the roistering
singers in the square and sit beside Strangman at his parties, hiding back
under the shadow of the paddle-ship, watching the dancing and listening to the
beat of the drums and guitars, overlayed in his mind by the insistent pounding
of the black sun.
He abandoned any attempt to return to the hotel--the creek was blocked by the
two pumping scows and the intervening lagoon seethed with alligators--and
during the day either slept in
Beatrice's apartment on the sofa or sat numbly in a quiet alcove on the gaming
deck 0f the depot ship. Most of the crew would be asleep among the crates or
arguing over their spoils, waiting with surly impatience for the dusk, and
they left him alone. By an inversion of logic it was safer to stay close to
Strangman than to try to continue his previous separate regimen. Bodkin
attempted this, withdrawing in a growing state of shock to the testing
station--now reached by a precipitous climb up a dilapidated fire escape--but [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]