The Mantooth

  He had brought the wine, for which she was grateful, and she drank of itprobably more than she should. But it gave her confidence, and helpeddull the edge of her rebelling senses. Perhaps half an hour had passedfrom the time of her first ready mouthful; and he smiled each time theglass touched her lips. If an eerie contraction of taut face musclescan be called a smile.

  'Have you ever done hallucinogenic drugs?' He tried to askcarelessly, but could not quite pull it off.

  'What on earth made you ask that?'

  'Oh, nothing really. Just curious.' She wished he would stoplooking at her that way.

  'Yes I have. Once, with Kalus. We..... It was peyote.'

  'How much did you do?'

  'Two buttons each. One right away..... Why are you laughing?'

  'Two peyote buttons, and you think you've seen it all. Ha! Thatwouldn't be enough to open your pretty little eyelids.' Shewondered why she suddenly felt restless and irritable.

  'What makes you think it's only how much, and not how pure? Ormaybe we just didn't need to have our whole consciousness blown awayto get something meaningful from it.' She felt angry, defiant, andhorribly uncomfortable. 'I could do LSD if I wanted to.'

  'Could you now? We're going to find out.' She felt the touchof an icy hand inside her.

  'What do you mean?'

  'The wine is laced with it.'

  And the current closed over her head.

  *

  Kalus sat in the fore of the leering monolith, which lay just inside therim of the oblong vale. The dwarfish Obelisk, like a pointed tombstone,lay swart and square in its center. Kalus remembered the first time hehad come here, driven on by Sylviana's almost distracted haste tofind others of her kind. AND TO ESCAPE, he thought bitterly, HERDEPENDENCE ON ME. It was here, beneath the monolith, that he had triedto cleanse and bandage the wound on her leg. The memory and sight ofit, of blood on her beloved flesh, filled all his thoughts. Through thestrong taste of pride and anger, a fresh and cutting sense of worryreturned to him. The protective instinct was too strong inside him, andwhat they had shared, too deep.

  He thought of following after her, but did not know which way she hadgone, and doubted Alaska's ability (as well as his own) to find andisolate her most recent trail among the layered and crisscrossing pathsof the colonists. He could only wait, and watch the sun wheel theshadows around him. When the longer shadow of the Monolith joined thatof the deeply carved Obelisk, locking together into a long sword ofdarkness upon the earth, it would be time. And she must come to him.

  But that remained at least two hours away. He looked down at thedeerskin pouch, which had slipped from his shoulder and rested, halfopen, on the ground. Remembering one of its contents, he emptied it outonto a gray, porous stone before him.

  There, beside the wrapped hunting knife (which she now refused tocarry), the whet-stone, and the flints for making fire, he saw them.Dryer, less green, but still potent in their otherworldly magic: thefive remaining peyote buttons. He lifted one and turned it in his hand,wondering. It had helped him to understand once before..... Perhaps itwould show him something now, which he could see no other way.

  Guided by an impulse he did not completely understand, and half againsthis better judgment, he put the first in his mouth, and chewed it. Thenslaked his throat with water. Again. And a short time later, again.

  *

  There are no words to describe LSD. For the person who has taken itbefore it is still like landing from another planet: nothing isfamiliar, and nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is powerful,evocative, unknown. For the person who has not, it is like a bewilderedand even unconscious dream. If the experience is good, it is life atits deepest and most intense. If it is bad, there is no greater horroron the Earth. And in either case, the mind is never quite the same.Doors are opened which cannot later be shut, and some residue, bothchemical and spiritual, remains forever.

  The acid that William had made was not particularly strong or pure, andthis alone saved her sanity. But it was strong enough, and tinged withstrychnine and speed. She could not hide, from anything.

  Sylviana tried to master her panic. And so far, by the narrowest ofmargins she had succeeded. ALL RIGHT, she told herself. All right. Ithad happened. There was nothing to done now but see it through. Exceptthat she kept forgetting what the words meant, forgetting the words shesaid, forgetting words. She was alone in a gruesome place with a manshe did not know or trust. She could not force herself to remain therea moment longer.

  'We have to go,' she said, rising. The motion, scarcely felt,elevated her head, the line of her sight. But she could not shake thefeeling of being deep under the water, lungs bursting for air. Shewanted to swim with all her strength, upward toward the surface. Butsome horrible weight, or cold serpentine grip held her down, wrappedabout her legs and ankles. That grip was her obsession. Thelife-saving air was Kalus, and she knew it.

  But no, her stupor-rationale insisted. It's not so. I can breathe.I can walk. She strode to the top of the hill, feeling a moment'srelease, only to find that William had followed her soundlessly, like ashadow. And that she no longer knew where she was, or how to find herway back.

  BACK. To what?

  And then the real fear, the telling blows, began to find her. Becauseit seemed, it was, an overriding certainty that there was no returning.This was reality, doubly real. She had fallen into a bottomless pit.NO WAY OUT!

  'Let's go for a walk,' said William gently, now so sure of hisprey that he was almost disappointed. But he would see it through, andknew that to do so he must build her up again, just enough. Then tearher down. Again, until the moment was ripe. And then God help her.

  But Sylviana was there ahead of him. She clung to this mockery of careand affection, five simple words, with all the desperate power of herdesire not to believe. 'Yes, my dear, sweet William. Let's gofor a walk.' And he smiled, a moment of sympathy that he knew wouldonly make the fire of his hatred burn the whiter. She might make thegoing pleasing, after all.

  'Yes,' he said wryly. 'A walking tour of the neighborhood.I'll show you how the other half. . .dies.'

  So they set out, Sylviana forgetting that this unraveled the last of herplans, and that Kalus would no longer be close at hand.

  For better or worse.

  *

  Kalus remained, still as the stone on which he sat. He had moved sometime before to the more level ground before the Obelisk, though thegrotesque figures carved upon it kept him from coming too close. Thepeyote had begun to work on him, but its effect was entirely differentthan what he had hoped. Instead of giving him peace and a quietunderstanding, it filled him with a dread that was almost physical. Allhis thoughts, worded and otherwise, seemed to crash in upon themselveslike the breaking of a wave, crushing and smothering every positiveimpulse, every hopeful thought within him. He was back in the hopelessworld of his past, from which she had helped him to escape.

  But there was no escape. No matter how he turned it around, no matterwhat contingencies he tried to make and force himself to swallow, thebitter truth remained. Without his woman he had nothing: no love, nopurpose, no home. No way to go on, and no reason to try. The ancientsense of fatalism and betrayal returned to him, with still greaterintensity, because for a time he had been free. And the brief intervalof spoken words and close female companionship evaporated, could nolonger protect him from the silent, brutal worlds he had known. Againhe saw before him the long chain of savagery and violence, of endlesspain and pointless perseverance. All leading to this. To be broken andalone, as only the last of a species is alone.

  He too felt the razor, though dully. And his one regret in thosedarkened moments was that he had been so skilled in eluding it.

  *

  'Forty-second street,' said William, continuing in the manner of atour through Hell. They stood at the base of a long, flat stretch, likea sunken airport runway before them, the grassy dikes to either sidesti
ll suggestive of the tombs, the mass graves they barely covered.

  'You see before you a busy street---strip joints, adult book stores,pornographic theaters. But you don't seem to notice the backgroundmuch. No. It's the ragged flowers springing from the sidewalk thatcatch and hold your eye: prostitutes, the whipping girls of the city.

  'On a good day all they're required to do is give their bodies topawing, drooling idiots, who in their half-assed passion call them?mother', ?cheap whore', or the name of some long-lostlover. Oh, but of course they don't really FEEL anything.They're not real people, like you and I.' At this he curled hislip, barely able to contain his rage. 'On bad days..... They'reharassed and preyed upon by police, jaded social workers and psychotickillers, or just beaten and abused by the ?fatherly' pimps.

  'And what is their crime, that makes them the object of universalscorn and reprisal? They're VICTIMS, vulnerable, bringing out thepredatory instinct in all of us. And more than that, they commit themost unforgivable sin of all: they make us look at ourselves, and seesomething about our pretty little world that we don't like. Becausethey do, in fact, what the rest of us do in spirit: sell themselves,body and soul, for MONEY. Only they lack the skills and social graces,like the ones you learned in college, to be subtle and self-justifyingabout it. They are OBVIOUS, and much too real, an easy target fornearly everyone. And the human animal never misses easy prey.'

  Sylviana heard the words---stark and depressing enough---but what gavethem their power were the images her own memory provided. She saw itall: the rooster-like pimps grabbing gaudily dressed women by the hair,and without remorse throwing them into the back seats of still gaudiercars, for later punishment, which no doubt included beating and rape.And if her head happened to strike the roof, starting a rivulet ofblood.....

  And she remembered the murder she had so nearly witnessed: saw the chalkoutline that the homicide detectives had drawn on the sidewalk as theparamedics arrived to wheel her into a waiting ambulance, her death aforegone conclusion, the eyes still terrified though the life even nowfled from them. A face once young and fair: a sixteen-year-old runawayfrom nameless suburbs, driven from her home perhaps by an abusiveparent, drawn to the city like a moth to flame. And brought to the sameend. While the jagged man the police had cuffed and were dragging away,screamed in bursts of occasional coherence, 'All women arewhores!'

  And she remembered too, even as he said, the thoughts that she hadalways used to dismiss such women, and the hopeless tragedy of theirlives. HOW CAN THEY DO IT? THEY MUST JUST TURN OFF THEIR MINDS, ANDNOT FEEL ANYTING..... IT'S AWFUL, BUT SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THANTO WALK THE STREETS ALONE. As if this was something she had done of herown volition, and against the warnings of loved ones and friends. Andshe thought of her own plan, which was worse. Not to sleep with a manfor money, which could at least claim the honest shred of need. But forrevenge.

  And coming back to herself for a moment, she realized with a suddenshock that this same plan, along with the subconscious safety valve shehad built into it, were now completely out of hand. She had no ideawhere they were (in relation to anything else), only where theyweren't: within hearing range of Kalus, on whom she had relied toprotect her at need. As the dagger of fear sank an inch lower into herbreast.

  'You're right William,' she said hurriedly. 'And it'shorrible. But please, please take me somewhere else.' Sheer movementseemed the only defense from the razor---

  'My GOD.' There seemed to be a literal razor forming out of theair before her, a glint of sunlight on cold steel. She cowered, andcrossed her arms defensively in front of her.

  'Oh, no, not yet,' said the Stranger, as if he understood it all.He seized her by one foreshortened arm, and led her toward the nextexhibit. After an interminable length of time he stopped again, andpointed.

  'Seventh Avenue.'

  *

  Kalus remained, still as stone, but no longer in confusion and despair.He stood rooted to the spot in horror.

  The two shadows had met and become one, a broadsword of Death upon thewounded earth. The sun was now directly south of the monolith. Yet itwas not the Shadow, but a patch of wicked, unexpected Light that showedhim in a searing instant the real danger into which his woman hadfallen, and the true Evil that walked upon the earth. A square-cut holehigh in the center of the monolith, hidden earlier by its vague,uncontoured grayness, now let through a shaft of light, which came torest in impossible coincidence upon a single carving of the dwarfishObelisk: the face of a horned Devil, its lolling tongue six inches long,was held in the internal pentagon of a ghoulish star, pointing downward.Carved perhaps by some mutant from the days when half-men, like lepers,still clung to the fire-pillaged rock, it looked down upon the slab ofaltar at its feet, just large enough for a child, just deep enough tocontain its flowing blood. As remorseless and aroused, the Beast smiledin the helpless light of day.

  'Sylviana!' he cried aloud, knowing now that only he could saveher. No answer. He stood up and called again, one last act ofdesperation.

  Nothing. He went down on one knee, and patted the ground with his openhand. He needed no more prodding. The time had come to act.

  'Alaska,' he whispered intently. 'Sylviana. SYLVIANA.'This time the cub seemed to understand, and apparently had some insightas to where they might be found, for she set out at once. Or at leastsome idea where they might begin to look.

  If it was not already too late.

  *

  'Stop it! Stop it!' she cried, covering her face with her hands.She had gone with him, and listened as he spoke of junkies, toxic waste,victims and violence and hospitals. From place to place, in growinghorror, thinking with one last gasp of real courage that perhaps shedeserved this, and needed to know.

  But when he brought her at last to the ruins of an enormous researchfacility, and began to describe, in detail, the torturous experimentsperformed here on bound, terrified animals in the name of progress andthe greater good, she felt the tip of the blade licking at her heart.

  Because she knew it was true. Her father had been assigned here as anintern. He had stormed out in a rage at the asphyxiation, force-feedingof toxic substances, vivisection, 'Sweet Jesus,' and ?stresstests', performed on dogs and cats, rhesus monkeys and otherprimates, some more intelligent than the lackeys who tormented them.Refusing to participate had put his career in jeopardy, something he waswilling to do, to stand up against what he knew was wrong andindefensible. And he had spoken out against the Horror, for those whocould not speak.

  But many of his colleagues had not been willing. All the beloveddoctors and scientists, characterized as forthright, altruistic men andwomen, working for the good of humanity, if not actively involved, atleast turning the other way as innocent, uncomprehending creatures weresubjected to physical and psychological tortures that were the rival ofthe Holocaust. The Leeds Institute of Animal Research, called by itscritics, LIAR.

  She kept thinking of Alaska.

  But William felt no sympathy for her. The fact that such men hadmurdered themselves in the process, that humanity had been no kinder toits human victims, that it was ?over now', could not cover thebrutal shame of it. All of it. Could not bring back the dead. Theinnocent and the dead, who had been helpless before the grimmachinations of vicious human fear and ignorance.

  He let her remain there, hobbled against a mound of slag. Then he drewout his stiletto, and shot the blade into place. And held it six inchesfrom her face. She had ceased weeping and sat helpless, sobbing, readyfor the fall. As he said in a gentle, sing-song voice.

  'Time to wake u-up.'

  She opened her hands and her eyes, as if seeing for the first time.

  She opened her eyes. The razor stood before her. Not as some dark andfrightening intangible, but a stark physical reality, held in the irongrip of her fellow man. Because malicious evil is still only a weapon,and requires willing human hands to wield it.

  For a single instant she sat there numb, neither believing no
rcomprehending. But then he seized her violently by the front of theblouse, lifting her to him. And with a quick insertion of the blade anda hard jerk backwards, he cut away her bra, ripping the garment wideopen as he threw her back onto the ground.

  A startled, 'William, don't do this,' tried to form in herthroat, but was drowned out as he screamed in a wrath no longer his own,but that of all creatures brutalized and turned vicious by the bloodyhells from which man has barely begun to raise himself.

  'And do you know who's going to PAY for it! YOU ARE!'

  One word alone would form from her terror, a last, instinctive cryagainst the Razor, and the trickle of blood at her breast. She screamed,louder than he.

  'KALUS!'

  *

  >From a distance of three hundred yards he heard her. Instantly his senses were trained upon the spot and he was running, leaving the startled cub far behind. The broken, undulating ridges kept her from his sight, and tried to impede him. But he did not need to hear the sound twice to locate it, or force his hammering body to respond.

  And by the time he reached the final crest, his anger had turned to arage that bordered on madness that ANYONE, EVER, would DARE to attackhis woman. All his pain and frustration now found release in thoughts,soon to be acts, of violence. The sight of them struggling, of Williamagain throwing her down and glowering over her, knife in hand, undid thelast thin strands of mercy and restraint. He all but flew down thehill, and from atop the same mound of slag, leapt out like a pantherwith a savage cry.

  An instant later their bodies crashed together, as Sylviana crawled backagainst the shelter of broken stone, drawing her torn blouse shutagainst the maelstrom.