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  There was a pay phone in the lobby. Henley called Ralf's apartment, and the phone rang a long time before it was answered by a basso-rumble voice he didn't recognize. Henley hung up immediately.

  His hands were trembling so violently that it took him five minutes to dial correctly an alternate number Ralf had given him. A woman answered and said she hadn't seen Ralf in days and had no idea where he was. Henley told her his name and where he was staying and then hung up.

  He went back to his room and closed, bolted, and chained the door before he noticed the green luminance glowing in the darkness. It pulsed brighter as he turned, and he saw that the cutting stone was emitting a haze of light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and to recognize that it wasn't light at all but a gas or a vapourous plasma that was deliquescing as it sublimed from the rock.

  Henley stood for a long time, mesmerized. It was a tricky gas. Against the dark windowpanes, it was feathered and iridescent. Along the ceiling, it was billowing in small dark streams. But Henley was watching the stone. There the vapour was folding over on itself slowly, like a flower blossoming. It entranced him, and he kept his gaze fixed on it until something of another texture altogether appeared in its depths. There against the surface of the jade-coloured rock, a shiny wet substance was oozing. Slowly a knob of clear jelly striated with smoky colours bulbed out. It extended a pseudopod and slimed along the edge of the sill.

  The light switch was to his left, and Henley snapped it on. Nothing happened. The tungsten coils glowed red in the light bulbs, but the room stayed semidark, crepuscular in the thin vapour light of the stone.

  A cold finger touched Henley between his shoulder blades, and he shuddered and spun about to leave. As his hands fumbled with the dead bolt, a horrible thing happened. The idiot's voice, scrawny and demonic as in his nightmare, called out from behind: Fear arrives like a runner.

  Shut your ears big, Henley, and look shadows go by long after the bodies have passed. Your eyes blow backward.

  Henley whimpered and turned from the door. The ichor squeezing from the stone had stretched into a membrane and was quivering in the air like a sea plant. It was still pulling from the rock, and in the halflight Henley thought he could see a net of fine blue capillaries webbed over it. He was overwhelmed by a frantic urge to flee, but the voice, booming in his head, held him fast: Dark carries you, broods like wells in the deep ground. You can't run, nowhere to run, for you and I are the same.

  A soft moan forced itself out of Henley's lungs, and he pivoted to run. The dead bolt clanked open, and the chain lock jangled free before there was a loud popping noise behind him followed by a frying sizzle.

  Henley glanced over his shoulder as he fidgeted with the door latch. The viscous protoplast had snapped free, and it was swimming through the air towards him, a small shimmering mass the size of his fist.

  Curly-edged feathers of flesh trailed below it, as from a jellyfish, and the whole bulk, dimpled with blood spots, arrowed for his head.

  Henley swung the door open and bolted into the corridor just as the tendrilous thing caught up with him from behind. Icy snug fingers wrapped around the back of his head and over his ears.

  Something hard and needle-sharp was pressing against the nape of his neck, forcing the base of his skull. He scrambled for the stairway, stumbled, and fell. The corridor went suddenly white, as if blasted by lightning. There was a hot piercing pain between his eyes, and Henley understood, with a spasm of terror, that the thing had punctured his skull!

  He lurched to his feet, jerked forward a pace, and plunged over the stairwell with a stammering cry.

  He bounced off the top steps and went careening over the banister into space. There was an awful moment when it felt as if his head were rupturing at the seams, and then the blur of steps braked.

  Henley could see the yellowed flower wallpaper spin off gracefully to one side as the stairs swung up from below. He was floating. The hug of gravity was strong around his waist, and he sensed something within him pushing out, buckling space around him so that his descent was very slow.

  Only the piercing ivory pain that pitched him through the back of his neck to a point between his eyes, kept him from marvelling.

  Abruptly, the pain cracked, shot down his spine, and cramped his bowels. There was a terrifying explosion, and the stoop of the stairs that he was settling towards banged apart and splintered across the vacant lobby like a broken vase. Henley slapped to the ground amid a patter of dislodged plaster and lay there stunned, trying not to faint.

  His stomach muscles knotted again, and he was hoisted to his feet by a powerful surge of strength.

  There was some movement down at the opposite end of the lobby, but he couldn't make sense out of it in the whistling deafness. Mechanically, his body turned, swung over the blasted stoop, and lumbered up the stairs. In his room, Henley collapsed.

  On the floor, some sense of self-control returned. His head was throbbing, and there were trickles of dark, almost black blood dripping over his cheeks from the back of his head. With one finger, he felt the nape of his neck. There was a deep hole in it, too painful to probe. He swayed to his feet and leaned against the wall. People were scurrying up and down the hall.

  Gradually, one thought cleared itself from the terror trilling through him. It was his cache. Despite the horror, he had to think about his stash. Quietly and quickly as possible, he shuffled over to the night table and sealed the cotton ditty bag with the heroin in it. He debated for a moment about flushing it down the toilet and getting himself to a hospital, but that idea was too closed. He felt trapped and terrified. There was the smell of something broken in the air, and he knew that he had to get away and think all of this through.

  There was a fire escape outside his window, and he clambered down it to the street. Two cop cars had pulled up in front of the Elton, so he skipped down the alley and jumped a fence to Twenty-seventh Street. He was glistening with sweat and shaking ferociously. Whatever it was that had leaked out of the rock and attacked him, it had burrowed into his skull. He could feel part of it quavering at the mouth of the puncture wound it had made. It sickened him with despair, and he wanted to get help immediately, heroin or no, but he couldn't stop walking. His body marched on mechanically, sleepwalking. His eyes were glazed like small brown fruits, and those that saw him approaching gave way, widely.

  The moon sang down around him, grim and cool, and he walked on and on, sticking to the darker cross streets. Finally, hours later, he stopped. He was on a tiny side street, virtually an alley, whose name he hadn't seen. A shopfront door with iron bratticing opened and an old, old man, skin grey and hackled as bark, urged him in. The old man leaned forward like a dead tree and studied him with eyes as bright as pins. Visions had made his face unearthly, scorched-looking, between the silver wires of hair. He wore a mantle sewn with seashells and porcupinequill scrollwork, and he stood still, hooded like a cobra, silent, beckoning Henley with a sway of his head to enter.

  Henley stepped a pace into the shop, faltered a moment as he surveyed the place. One wall was covered with the wing-feather fan of an eagle. A stuffed monkey hung by its genitals from the ceiling, which was crusted with black mussel shells. The odour of the room was sticky. In a polished clawfoot burner with talons spread, an orange lump of olibanum squatted, and as Henley slowly pivoted to view the coils of a white python on one of the rafters, the hognose head watching him with dusty eyes, the old man lit the incense coals. The yellow vapours wafted over the rickety shelf, seethed over husks of seahorses, the moult of a tarantula, red-speckled seabird eggs, and amber and green bottles stoppered with the thumbs of apes.

  The room was glimmering with the trills of canaries. The lizards that would eventually devour them drowsed below in cages crafted from twigs. A yellow and papery light, filtered through tall lanterns stained with images of serpents and squids, gave everything an umber cast. In that light the old man, who had closed the door and was now motioning Henley to sit, looked ag
eless.

  Henley sat in the corner and watched anxiously as the old man approached, his trouser legs hissing.

  He held a thin bone whistle to his lips and blew a brittle note. 'I been waitin' a long time for you.'

  With a wombsoft tread, he stepped closer. 'Cthulhu fhtagn!' he spit, and Henley felt a surge of strength. The old man was wrapped in a cloak of shadow. 'You knaw nuthin' 'bout what has you.

  Well, I got to say, dat is best.' He leaned far forward out of the shadows, and Henley saw that he had only one eye. The other had been replaced by a shard of mirror, and seeing his reflection in it, he grew faint. Henley's eyes were so widely dilated, there were no whites showing, and around the corners of his mouth a scaly blackness was crusted. 'You knaw nuthin'

  'bout de way dat has you. And dat be good. Dat be best good.' He pulled the bone whistle to his parched mouth and sucked a sea chant, a modal hymn, through it that seemed to come from all around, like a sound heard underwater.

  Listening to it, Henley felt both as if his life were a small animal dying in a bottle and as if he would live for ever in the open spaces of lone birds.

  Ralf's head was going bad. There had been too many lousy breaks, and he was getting to feel threatened.

  When he learned that Henley had signed out of St Vincent's, he went to a gunshop and got several extra clips for the Walther automatic. It was too heavy to stay in the city, so he drove out to his sister's place in Stony Brook. By the time he got there, Henley's message had come through, and Ralf wheeled back into New York. At the Elton the cops had left, but there were several people in the lobby, grouped together, mumbling, Nobody had any idea what had happened.

  Henley's door was unlocked, and Ralf entered without knocking. Except for a squelchy odour in the air and several drops of dark blood on the floor, the place was vacant as a sucked egg. The lights were on, and the window was open. When he went over to check the fire escape, he spotted a small dull rock with curious etchings on it. Ralf at first thought it was a paperweight, but when he examined it more closely, he recognized that it was like nothing he had ever seen before. He pocketed it, searched the bathroom scrupulously, and left.

  He rarely got drunk, but when he did he became so tight that only violence could unspool him. He went down to the Red Witch and got skunked enough to call his old field captain. The last time he had seen Vince Pantucci was in Can Tho when they were spreading a little lead around some of the villages, hoping to enrage the Cong. Shortly afterward, Ralf was caught smuggling M16’s out of the country.

  Pantucci was the ring's honcho, but Ralf did two years in the clam without fingering him. Since then, Pantucci had completed his tour and walked. Ralf knew he was in the city. He had been hearing tales about him for over a year. The man was mean. He was the only person that Ralf knew who could really move weight - other than Gusto. And he wasn't talking to Gusto.

  Getting in touch with Pantucci was difficult. He was big time now, and he stayed low. Eventually Ralf had to drop a few lines about gun running to make contact. An hour later, Pantucci stalked into the Red Witch. He was big, wide as an oven, with arms like dock ropes and tight brass-red curls that boiled up around his neck from under his silk shirt. His dark cave-sitter eyes spotted Ralf instantly, and he muscled into the booth where he was sitting, said, 'What's the take, clothead?'

  'I need a favour.'

  Pantucci rolled his eyes. He had the face of an Etruscan - ethereal cheekbones, high fat forehead, and skin the colour of baked earth pulled tight over his skull. 'What's it gonna be, monk?

  Cash?''Look, captain...'

  'The captain is looking, Ralf, and he don't like what he sees. You're strung out, ain't you?'

  'Nah, cap. I'm clean, but I got caught sidewise in a sour deal.' 'Dope?' 'Yeah.'

  'What? Ganja?'

  'Another class. Schmeck.'

  'How much?'

  'More than two kilos.'

  Pantucci made a face like he smelled something disgusting. He slapped Ralf on the cheek and twisted his ear till it hurt. 'You jooch.' He pulled Ralf by his ear halfway across the table until their noses were practically touching. 'You move dub with strangers until you get boxed. Then you cry for me. Right?

  Why didn't you come to me in the first place?'

  Ralf pulled himself away and slumped in the corner, looking vaguely disgruntled. 'Didn't know you moved it.'

  'You bullshit so much your molars are brown. Thought you'd get more play elsewhere, eh? Or was it that two years in the can made me look ugly? Who's the muscle?''Gusto.'

  Pantucci coughed up a thick salty wafer of phlegm, let it lay hot on his tongue for a moment, then hawked it into the sawdust. 'What a weasel you are. What'd you expect from woolheads? You think you're a brother?' He stared for a moment into the thin cold eyes opposite him, engaging the emptiness he saw there. They were the most remote eyes he had ever known.

  They reminded him of Ia Drang Valley and long swamp roads. He shook his head and looked away.

  'Give me the plot.'

  'Eastoh's brother Henley copped in Seattle and crossed to the city while ! lined up Gusto. Along the way something happened. He went into a coma. None of the meds could pin it. By the time I found him in St V's, Gusto was working on me. Now I know Henley's got the stuff, but he lit out. I guess he still thinks I was responsible for his brother getting blown away at Ngoc Linh. We patrolled together. I don't know. I was thinking you might find him.'

  'So you can cop and deliver to Gusto? I don't work for nates, mongoose.'

  'Yeah, well I do.' The wings of Ralf's nostrils whitened. His hands were under the table. 'My ass is on the line. You going off on me, captain?'

  'How do you even know Henley has it?'

  'I don't. But I got to ride something.'

  Pantucci looked down at his hands, which were barked with callus. He liked Ralf. He looked intense, but he knew he could trust him. 'Give me the man's profile.'

  'You think you can find him?'

  'It's on the rails.'

  Pantucci had a villa in the mountains where he set up Ralf. There was an indoor swimming pool there and a live-in maid and cook. There was also a metalworking shop for retooling stolen goods.

  Ralf spent a few hours in the shop trying to bore a hole in the strange rock he had found in Henley's room. It was no good.

  The rock was harder than any known substance. An automatic drill press with a diamond bit didn't even scratch it. Ralf was amazed but too preoccupied with evening the score with Henley to think much about it. He liked the rock. He liked its heft and its silky texture. It was the size of his palm with a few natural holes on its edge. Eventually he was able to thread some wire through one of the holes, and he wore the rock around his neck like a talisman.

  A few days later, Pantucci found Ralf catnapping on the veranda beneath a vine-tangled trellis.

  Trembling smells of cedar bark and pine riffled in the air. Sunlight buzzed off dusty rocks. 'I found him,' Pantucci whispered.

  Ralf leapt out of the sunchair. 'Where?'

  'He left an hour ago for Haiti.' He waved a packet of paper slips. 'Here's your ticket and passport.

  There will be money at the airport - and a gun permit. Go in peace, jooch. And remember. We're even.'

  Ralf arrived in Port-au-Prince wearing dark glasses, a USMC muscle shirt, and black flight pants tucked into steel-tipped boots. He carried an attache with a few changes of underwear, twenty-five hundred dollars in traveller's checks, five hundred dollars cash, and his Walther automatic. On the flight, he'd taken his butterfly out of the attache and slipped it into one of the many pockets on his trouser leg.

  As he was deplaning, Ralf scanned the crowd, but there were so many black faces, it was impossible to eye any of Gusto's goofers. It wasn't until he was shouldering through the mob in the pavilion that he was sure they were laying for him. He felt hard metal pressing against his spine.

  'Awright, pogue, you're comin' with me.'

  He recognized the voice. It wa
s the hit man he had tumbled in the parking lot. He was nudging Ralf out of the crowd with the barrel of his gun. Ralf groaned loudly and dropped to the ground. As he fell, he palmed the butterfly, sprung it open under his chest, and swivelled his attache to block the gun. The goofer turned and bent down to free his gun for a shot. As he did so, Ralf rolled and stood up quick, forcing the barbed end of the blade between the man's ribs. With a neat twist, he severed the aorta and yanked his knife free by pushing the man away.

  The crowd was dispersing fast, and Ralf lost himself in the knots of scurrying people. A few minutes later, he was in a cab heading into town. He booked into a cheap hotel in the East End and began asking around for Henley. No one in the city had seen him, and on his second day he went out to the dirt-farmer markets near the shantytowns. He had bought a white jellaba, and, despite the heat, he wore it so that he could carry his Walther inconspicuously. It was only a matter of time before Gusto's men would hunt him down.

  In the native-dominated marketplaces, the talisman drew a lot of attention. No one would touch it, but everyone wanted to see it. Three boys with the fetal air of bay pirates - brash gold teeth, oil-soaked T-shirts, reversed crucifixes - tried to tug it off his neck. They questioned Ralf about it first, mumbled something in a language he didn't recognize, and then, just when he realized that he had missed some sort of cue, one of them snatched at the rock. The wire cord it was on bit into Ralf's neck and held. His eyes tightened to a squint, and he elbowed the boy in the mouth. The other two drew long cruel knives from their thigh sheaths.

  Ralf spun on his heels and spartied in and out between the stalls heading towards the alleys of the shantytown. The boys ran after him, whooping and throwing fruit and rocks. In the alley, Ralf stopped short and curled around, both hands holding his Walther automatic way out in front. The boys fell over each other trying to pull up. They backpedalled slowly, and at the mouth of the alley one of them made a gesture Ralf didn't understand and cried, 'Cthulhu fhtagn? The sound of his voice had a shrill, frightening quality that unsettled Ralf more than the sight of their knives had. He decided to call it a day.