Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg's feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.
"You're free, Lloyd. Come on out."
Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might burn him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.
Something was placed in his hand. The key.
"It's yours now, Lloyd."
"Mine?"
Flagg grabbed Lloyd's fingers and closed them around it … and Lloyd felt it move in his hand, felt it change. He uttered a hoarse cry and his fingers sprang open. The key was gone and in its place was the black stone with the red flaw. He held it up, wondering, and turned it this way and that. Now the red flaw looked like a key, now like a skull, now like a bloody, half-closed eye again.
"Mine," Lloyd answered himself. This time he closed his hand with no help, holding the stone savagely tight.
"Shall we get some dinner?" Flagg asked. "We've got a lot of driving to do tonight."
"Dinner," Lloyd said. "All right."
"There's such a lot to do," Flagg said happily. "And we're going to move very fast." They walked toward the stairs together, past the dead men in their cells. When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.
Chapter 40
Nick Andros lay sleeping but not quiet on the bunk in Sheriff Baker's office. He was naked except for his shorts and his body was lightly oiled with sweat. His last thought before sleep had taken him the night before was that he would be dead by morning; the dark man that had consistently haunted his feverish dreams would somehow break through that last thin barrier of sleep and take him away.
It was strange. The eye which Ray Booth had gouged into darkness had hurt for two days. Then, on the third, the feeling that giant calipers had been screwed into his head had faded down to a dull ache. There was nothing but a gray blur when he looked through that eye now, a gray blur in which shapes sometimes moved, or seemed to move. But it wasn't the eye injury which was killing him; it was the bullet-graze down his leg.
He had gone without disinfecting it. The pain in his eye had been so great that he had barely been aware of it. The graze ran shallowly along his right thigh and ended at the knee; the next day he had examined the bullet hole in his pants where the slug had exited with some wonder. And on that next day, June 30, the wound had been red along the edges and all the muscles of that leg seemed to ache.
He had limped down to Dr. Soames's office and had gotten a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He had poured the whole bottle of peroxide over the bullet wound, which was about ten inches long. It had been a case of locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. By that evening his entire right leg was throbbing like a rotten tooth, and under the skin he could see the telltale red lines of blood poisoning radiating out from the wound, which had only begun to scab over.
On July first he had gone down to Soames's office again and had rummaged through his drug closet, looking for penicillin. He found some, and after a moment's hesitation, he swallowed both of the pills in one of the sample packets. He was well aware that he would die if his body reacted strongly against the penicillin, but he thought the alternative might be an even nastier death. The infection was racing, racing. The penicillin did not kill him, but there was no noticeable improvement, either.
By yesterday noon he had been running a high fever, and he suspected he had been delirious a great deal of the time. He had plenty of food but didn't want to eat it; all he seemed to want to do was drink cup after cup of the distilled water in the cooler which stood in Baker's office. That water had been almost gone when he fell asleep (or passed out) last night, and Nick had no idea how he might get more. In his feverish state, he didn't care much. He would die soon, and there would be nothing to worry about anymore. He was not crazy about the idea of dying, but the thought of having no more pain or worry was a great relief. His leg throbbed and itched and burned.
His sleep those days and nights after the killing of Ray Booth had not seemed like sleep at all. His dreams were a flood. It seemed that everyone he had ever known was coming back for a curtain call. Rudy Sparkman, pointing at the white sheet of paper: You are this blank page. His mother, tapping lines and circles she had helped him make on another white page, marring its purity: It says Nick Andros, honey. That's you. Jane Baker, her face turned aside on the pillow, saying, Johnny, my poor Johnny. In his dreams Dr. Soames asked John Baker again and again to take off his shirt, and again and again Ray Booth said, Hold im … I'm gonna mess im up … sucker hit me … hold im … Unlike all the other dreams he had had in his life, Nick did not have to lip-read these. He could actually hear what people were saying. The dreams were incredibly vivid. They would fade as the pain in his leg brought him close to waking. Then a new scene would appear as he sank down into sleep again. There were people he had never seen in two of the dreams, and these were the dreams he remembered the most clearly when he woke up.
He was on a high place. The land was spread out below him like a relief map. It was desert land, and the stars above had the mad clarity of altitude. There was a man beside him … no, not a man but the shape of a man. As if the figure had been cut from the fabric of reality and what really stood beside him was a negative man, a black hole in the shape of a man. And the voice of this shape whispered: Everything you see will be yours if you fall down on your knees and worship me. Nick shook his head, wanting to step away from that awful drop, afraid the shape would stretch out its black arms and push him over the edge.
Why don't you speak? Why do you just shake your head?
In the dream Nick made the gesture he had made so many times in the waking world: a laying of his finger over his lips, then the flat of his hand against his throat … and then he heard himself say in a perfectly clear, rather beautiful voice: "I can't talk. I am mute."
But you can. If you want to, you can.
Nick reached out to touch the shape then, his fear momentarily swept away in a flood of amazement and burning joy. But as his hand neared that figure's shoulder it turned ice cold, so cold it seemed that he had burned it. He jerked it away with ice crystals forming on the knuckles. And it came to him. He could hear. The dark shape's voice; the far-off cry of a hunting night-bird; the endless whine of the wind. He was struck mute all over again by the wonder of it. There was a new dimension to the world he had never missed because he had never experienced it, and now it had fallen into place. He was hearing sounds. He seemed to know what each was without being told. They were pretty. Pretty sounds. He ran his fingers back and forth across his shirt and marveled at the swift whisper of his nails on the cotton.
Then the dark man was turning toward him, and Nick was terribly afraid. This creature, whatever it was, performed no free miracles.
– if you fall down on your knees and worship me.
And Nick put his hands over his face because he wanted all the things the black manshape had shown him from this high desert place: cities, women, treasure, power. But most of all he wanted to hear the entrancing sound his fingernails made on his shirt, the tick of a clock in an empty house after midnight, and the secret sound of rain.
But the word he said was No and then that freezing cold was on him again and he had been pushed, he was falling end over end, screaming soundlessly as he tumbled through these cloudy depths, tumbled into the smell of-
– corn?
Yes, corn. This was the other dream, they blended together like this, with hardly a seam to show the difference. He was in the corn, the green corn, and the smell was summer earth and cow manure and growing things. He got to his feet and began to walk up the row he had found himself in, stopping momentarily as he realized he could hear the soft whicker of the wind flowing between the July corn's green, swordlike blades … and something else.
Music?
Yes-some sort of music. And in the dream he thought, "So that's what they mean." It was coming from straight ahead and he walked toward it, wanting to see if this particular succession of pretty sounds came from what was called "piano" or "horn" or "cello" or what.
The hot smell of summer in his nostrils, the overarching blue sky above, that lovely sound. In this dream, Nick had never been happier. And as he neared the source, a voice joined the music, an old voice like dark leather, slurring the words a little as if the song was a stew, often reheated, that never lost its old savor. Mesmerized, Nick walked toward it.
I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear
The son … of God … disclo-o-ses
And he walks with me and he talks with me
Tells me I am his own