Tra-Con-Per-Ski!

with the resumption of their travels.

  At one of the more savage corners of their journey, Peter was thrown against the side of the cart and felt a soft ‘pop’, a yielding of pent-up pressure, then a sickly wetness. One of the blisters had burst. He distastefully pulled aside his dampened shirt and turned his arm to look at the damage. He frowned. The blister was deeper than it had appeared. The easing of the liquid reservoir had left a pit in his arm. What was stranger was that, seen by comparison with the rest of his arm, it should have extended down into the area occupied by his tendons, yet he felt no pain or discomfort in the functioning of his arm.

  There was worse to come that evening.

  They arrived back in Delhi late evening. The last of the natural light was fading behind the ambient petrol generated smog, yet the streets were still full of people, mainly on the pavements and also walking haphazardly across the busy roads.

  They resolved to contact the doctor the next day, at a more sociable hour, although Dr. Russell was unsure about his chances of sleep, given his worries.

  They booked into a mid-price hotel, sparse of luxury by western standards, but bearable. The walls bore the tell-tale streaks of blood where someone had been killing mosquito. Peter didn’t really care right at that moment; although he had known a man once who was constantly sick with malaria, insects were the least of his worries now.

  He managed sleep for two or three hours before the dream confronted him. This time the light was closer and there was a form barely distinguishable within its radiance, a random collection of black lines, gathered together in a form part-ethereal, like a ‘daddy long legs’ with the transparent wings of a fly.

  He had heard of people near death experiencing a brilliant light and riding a tunnel to heaven, and pondered dreamily on whether this was such a portent.

  Somehow, afterward he slept on, until something woke him around four or five in the morning. At first, he wondered if it was merely the beginning of a vivid dream, to his dulled senses it certainly felt like one. He was unsure what had awoken him, but he had a dim recollection of a buzzing and wondered if it had been a mosquito loose in the room, hidden behind the curtains or in some corner until nightfall. Had it already drank his blood, he wondered?

  He sat up in frustration - the insects had always annoyed him. The sheets clung to him, like sweat, but unnaturally sticky. He feared another blister had burst, but did not dare look. Thus as he peeled the sheet free with his right hand, he averted his eyes, preferring instead to concentrate his mind on the task of finding the mosquito.

  He raised his left hand to aid in finishing the task, but there was a strange stickiness about it and one of the fingers felt a little numb, as though he had been lying on it in the night.

  Disturbed, he reached out to turn on the room’s yellow light, enhancing the feeling of sickness that permeated the room.

  He lifted his left hand closer to the light, scrutinising it. There was definitely something wrong, though he couldn’t see it at first glance. Then he noticed it: his finger wobbled slightly on its joint as he wriggled it. He turned his hand round; though there was a numbness, not shared by the rest of his hand, there was no dislocation.

  Peter squeezed the finger in question, his left middle finger, pressing it between thumb and forefinger, from the nail down to the root. As he got to the base of the finger, a clear excretion oozed out, dribbling down his hand then dripping off his wrist.

  Abruptly, the finger fell forward, dropping off his hand, hanging suspended by a thin, mucus-like tendril; he screamed.

  The next five minutes he could only later remember as a blurry haze. He ran around the room in a panic, stumbling round in between bits of furniture, knocking over the odd chair or pot, crying out to God, whilst trying to hold the finger back in place.

  His last sight, before the merciful blackness of the feint that claimed him, was Kate’s door beginning to open.

  He slept for what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact more like nineteen hours. The doctor, he found out shortly after his arousal, had kept him sedated for the benefit of his nerves.

  Most of the time he spent in blackness, or in the innocent confusion of dreams of friends long forgotten. The vision of light did not spare him in that blackness, however:

  On waking he recalled dreaming of that golden light once more, vaguely imagining this might be the moment of his death. As it approached closer, he saw within the brilliance a figure, humanoid with wings. Perhaps this was an angel, he theorised with his semiconscious dreaming mind.

  The figure drew closer, until it distinguished itself into three or four similar figures, like the clarity of an object moving into view from the distance.

  He dreamt on after this, of more mundane things. Once he imagined himself waking screaming from a dream of losing his fingers, then his limbs, until he was just a disembodied, powerless head - but that too was a vision of his disturbed sleep.

  When he awoke, he saw first a brightly coloured blur, which resolved itself into Doctor Edward Patterson. The doctor leaned forward, concern showing on his face.

  “How are you feeling Russell old man?” he said, trying to put on a brave face.

  Peter struggled to sit up, but found himself restrained by Kate’s hand on his shoulder.

  He was dressed in a pair of white pyjamas, through which he could see many dark patches. His skin was pitted and blistered like the skin of a leprosy victim. His chest was thin, much thinner than it should have been. It was cratered with deep grooves where flesh, bone and viscera were absent, yet still his body functioned.

  He began to breathe in shallow gasps, fighting to stay on the edge of a panic attack.

  Kate noticed his distress and squeezed his shoulder, rubbing his back along the shoulder blades. He was grateful for that small comfort.

  His eyes dropped down to where his left hand lay, concealed under the sheets.

  “I’m afraid we couldn’t save the finger,” the doctor said, following his gaze.

  “What’s the matter with me?” he croaked, his voice cracking up in desperation.

  Doctor Patterson took a deep breath and frowned. “Well, I’m afraid that’s still a bit of a mystery,” he admitted. “We’ve tried all the tests I could think of, tried lancing those boils when they first appear. We’ve even tried taking that damn piece of pottery apart.” He lifted the disassembled remains of the papier mache shape Peter had bought in the village.

  “Doctor Patterson says there’s some sort of poison in it,” Kate added from behind him.

  “Yes, but I’m damned if I can tell what it is.” The doctor shook his head. “Something new to science I’ll wager.”

  Peter’s eyes suddenly felt dry; he blinked and a stream of multi-coloured lines appeared around the doctor. He raised his right hand to his face, to rub his eyes clear of the illusion, but to no avail. Doctor Patterson continued, oblivious to this new development: “Of course, we tried to find an antidote, but nothing would work against the dashed stuff.”

  “So what do I do? Am I going to die?” The optical effect extended slightly as he spoke. Now he could see a dim luminescence behind the objects in the room: the bed, the window frame, the chair, the door, the lamp … as though they were lit from behind by a flashlight.

  Again Edward Patterson shook his head. “I’m afraid we don’t know even that old chap. Nothing so far has interfered with your breathing or heart, but there’s simply no way of knowing.”

  His eyes began to grow heavy. Suddenly he realised he was still tired, or at least that the sedative was still in effect in his bloodstream. He slept once more.

  This time the angels were clearer still. They were only a few feet in front of him. He could see their alien faces, which somehow he knew were expressing their equivalent to pity. Their three fingered hands stretched out to him...

  Whether the dream went on further, he could not later remember. It was obscured by his memory of waking in the small hours of the night. The room was lit with a blu
e-lavender light and he could see as though by day. The things around him retained a hint of their earlier glow.

  Feeling much rested and assuming it was just past dawn, he reached out to the bedside lamp and switched it on. The light was somehow less pure, more mundane than that by which he had been seeing since he woke, but it did illuminate one thing further - his right hand was missing, its only remnant a ghost glow, like those he had seen around the objects of the room.

  His first reaction was shock, then disbelief. The impossibility was this: he could still feel its presence, and if it was not still there how had he used it to switch on the light?

  There was something on the floor by his bed, which now dawned on his awareness, a giant, melted pink spider, covered in black and red blotches - his disowned hand.

  For a moment he stared in disbelief, then he shouted incoherently at the top of his voice, words ejected from his throat which even he did not comprehend, until a multi-coloured blur that seemed to hold something of the doctor’s essence came running, bringing another shot of that sweet blackness.

  He dreamed the angels were before him that night, come to take him into their midst.

  “You have evolved too soon brother,” they said with their minds, in their own group language, higher and more beautiful than the sweetest music.

  He awoke early, scrabbled for a pen and the nearest