The Mantooth Part 50

'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 her plans, 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 some time before to the more level ground before the Obelisk, though the grotesque figures carved upon it kept him from coming too close. The peyote had begun to work on him, but its effect was entirely different than what he had hoped. Instead of giving him peace and a quiet understanding, it filled him with a dread that was almost physical. All his thoughts, worded and otherwise, seemed to crash in upon themselves like the breaking of a wave, crushing and smothering every positive impulse, every hopeful thought within him. He was back in the hopeless world of his past, from which she had helped him to escape.

But there was no escape. No matter how he turned it around, no matter what contingencies he tried to make and force himself to swallow, the bitter truth remained. Without his woman he had nothing: no love, no purpose, no home. No way to go on, and no reason to try. The ancient sense of fatalism and betrayal returned to him, with still greater intensity, because for a time he had been free. And the brief interval of spoken words and close female companionship evaporated, could no longer protect him from the silent, brutal worlds he had known. Again he saw before him the long chain of savagery and violence, of endless pain and pointless perseverance. All leading to this. To be broken and alone, as only the last of a species is alone.

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

'Forty-second street,' said William, continuing in the manner of a tour through h.e.l.l. They stood at the base of a long, flat stretch, like a sunken airport runway before them, the gra.s.sy dikes to either side still suggestive of the tombs, the ma.s.s graves they barely covered.

'You see before you a busy street---strip joints, adult book stores, p.o.r.nographic theaters. But you don't seem to notice the background much. No. It's the ragged flowers springing from the sidewalk that catch and hold your eye: prost.i.tutes, the whipping girls of the city.

'On a good day all they're required to do is give their bodies to pawing, drooling idiots, who in their half-a.s.sed pa.s.sion call them ?mother', ?cheap wh.o.r.e', or the name of some long-lost lover. Oh, but of course they don't really FEEL anything.

They're not real people, like you and I.' At this he curled his lip, barely able to contain his rage. 'On bad days..... They're hara.s.sed and preyed upon by police, jaded social workers and psychotic killers, or just beaten and abused by the ?fatherly' pimps.

'And what is their crime, that makes them the object of universal scorn and reprisal? They're VICTIMS, vulnerable, bringing out the predatory instinct in all of us. And more than that, they commit the most unforgivable sin of all: they make us look at ourselves, and see something about our pretty little world that we don't like. Because they 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-justifying about it. They are OBVIOUS, and much too real, an easy target for nearly everyone. And the human animal never misses easy prey.'

Sylviana heard the words---stark and depressing enough---but what gave them their power were the images her own memory provided. She saw it all: the rooster-like pimps grabbing gaudily dressed women by the hair, and without remorse throwing them into the back seats of still gaudier cars, for later punishment, which no doubt included beating and rape.

And if her head happened to strike the roof, starting a rivulet of blood.....

And she remembered the murder she had so nearly witnessed: saw the chalk outline that the homicide detectives had drawn on the sidewalk as the paramedics arrived to wheel her into a waiting ambulance, her death a foregone conclusion, the eyes still terrified though the life even now fled from them. A face once young and fair: a sixteen-year-old runaway from nameless suburbs, driven from her home perhaps by an abusive parent, drawn to the city like a moth to flame. And brought to the same end. While the jagged man the police had cuffed and were dragging away, screamed in bursts of occasional coherence, 'All women are wh.o.r.es!'

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

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

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

'My G.o.d.' There seemed to be a literal razor forming out of the air before her, a glint of sunlight on cold steel. She cowered, and crossed 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 next exhibit. After an interminable length of time he stopped again, and pointed.

'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 the wounded earth. The sun was now directly south of the monolith. Yet it was not the Shadow, but a patch of wicked, unexpected Light that showed him in a searing instant the real danger into which his woman had fallen, and the true Evil that walked upon the earth. A square-cut hole high in the center of the monolith, hidden earlier by its vague, uncontoured grayness, now let through a shaft of light, which came to rest in impossible coincidence upon a single carving of the dwarfish Obelisk: 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 of altar at its feet, just large enough for a child, just deep enough to contain its flowing blood. As remorseless and aroused, the Beast smiled in the helpless light of day.

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

Nothing. He went down on one knee, and patted the ground with his open hand. 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 insight as to where they might be found, for she set out at once. Or at least some 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 growing horror, thinking with one last gasp of real courage that perhaps she deserved this, and needed to know.

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

Because she knew it was true. Her father had been a.s.signed here as an intern. He had stormed out in a rage at the asphyxiation, force-feeding of toxic substances, vivisection, 'Sweet Jesus,' and ?stress tests', performed on dogs and cats, rhesus monkeys and other primates, some more intelligent than the lackeys who tormented them.

Refusing to partic.i.p.ate had put his career in jeopardy, something he was willing to do, to stand up against what he knew was wrong and indefensible. And he had spoken out against the Horror, for those who could not speak.

But many of his colleagues had not been willing. All the beloved doctors and scientists, characterized as forthright, altruistic men and women, working for the good of humanity, if not actively involved, at least turning the other way as innocent, uncomprehending creatures were subjected to physical and psychological tortures that were the rival of the Holocaust. The Leeds Inst.i.tute of Animal Research, called by its critics, LIAR.

She kept thinking of Alaska.

But William felt no sympathy for her. The fact that such men had murdered themselves in the process, that humanity had been no kinder to its human victims, that it was ?over now', could not cover the brutal shame of it. All of it. Could not bring back the dead. The innocent and the dead, who had been helpless before the grim machinations of vicious human fear and ignorance.

He let her remain there, hobbled against a mound of slag. Then he drew out his stiletto, and shot the blade into place. And held it six inches from her face. She had ceased weeping and sat helpless, sobbing, ready for 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 and frightening intangible, but a stark physical reality, held in the iron grip 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 nor comprehending. But then he seized her violently by the front of the blouse, lifting her to him. And with a quick insertion of the blade and a hard jerk backwards, he cut away her bra, ripping the garment wide open as he threw her back onto the ground.

A startled, 'William, don't do this,' tried to form in her throat, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.ls 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 cry against the Razor, and the trickle of blood at her breast. She screamed, louder than he.