A Rose-Red City

Seven

I can’t help you unless you want me to help you, Ariadne. You must know that all this isn’t really happening? I can help you if you want me to, but you must ask me. It must be your decision. Tell me that you want me to help you

The voice was that of Dr. Waters, the only one who had ever been able to give her any real help in St. Luke’s Sanitarium. She had heard his voice start very quietly and then get louder. Jerry had said he was hearing hounds, but she had known that it was the voice of Dr. Waters. It grew louder and more insistent, ever more sympathetic and caring, begging her to let it help her. The effect was hypnotic. She had recalled what Jerry had said and tried to remember that it was a trick, that she must not ask for help, because that would be an invitation, but it was so very hard to believe that Jerry was not the hallucination, hard not to believe that Dr. Waters was standing outside the door of her room, standing in the corridor and talking to her— because it sounded just like Dr. Waters.

Then suddenly he had rattled the door handle and shouted that she must answer now.

She had been going to tell him to come in when she saw Carlo leap for the window and knew that they had both been tricked. Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion: Jerry jumping for Carlo, Carlo doing some sort of Kung Fu or Judo and Jerry flying off sideways, Carlo grabbing up the butcher knife from the bowl of dirty dishes and heading for the door, Killer bounding up from the sofa to block him, the two of them swaying in an embrace with Carlo’s hand bringing up the knife, and then Jerry striking him down with that white stick that he had kept close by all evening— and managing to shut out the horrors and get the door closed once more She was already kneeling by Killer when Jerry turned around and looked down and the laughter began.

Blood… torrents of it… together they rolled Killer over on his side and stared at the handle protruding from his abdomen.

“Pull it out!” Jerry snapped, because it was on her side, and somehow she found the willpower to grip that bloody handle and pull. It came out quite easily. Jerry eased Killer over on his back and laid the white stick on him.

She jumped up and ran for the bedroom and yanked a sheet from the bed; something was giggling helplessly outside the window. She raced back into the kitchen and around the sofa again with the sheet and knelt down beside Killer; she started folding the tangle of bedsheet into a pad.

Killer’s eyes had opened, but his face was already almost as pale as the sheet. He was looking at Jerry, twitching and trying to speak.

“Oo… that one hurts, friend,” he said. “Just relax,” Jerry said. “The wand will hold it.”

He shook his head as she offered the bedsheet. There was someone laughing outside the door; Lacey was screaming in the background, Maisie was holding her and gabbling prayers. Killer grimaced and then grabbed the wand with both hands; Jerry’s face was the bleakest she had ever seen, but he seemed to be waiting for the wand to work a miracle— or else for Killer to die.

She glanced around— Maisie was taking Lacey away into the other bedroom, with Alan, and Lacey’s hysterics were becoming quieter. Carlo was sitting up, rubbing the back of his head and obviously still only half-conscious. Graham was as white as any of them, standing by the table and staring down at the casualty— he was convinced now. No one could disbelieve, with that demonic laughter outside; it sounded like a dozen of them screaming with mirth. She could visualize comicstrip devils with horns, hooves, and tails, all bellowing with laughter, slapping one another on the back, and staggering around in helpless mirth: she wanted to clap her hands over her ears and scream at them to stop.

“Jerry?”

“Don’t speak, Killer. Just wait.”

Killer’s lips moved and then he said, “Jerry? You there?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Jerry said. “Tell Clio she did well.”

“You tell her yourself,” Jerry snapped. “We’ll get you back to Mera all right. I have a promise to fulfill, remember?”

Killer’s eyes were closed, but he smiled and said sleepily, “Then it was not always Eros?”

“Of course not!” Jerry said loudly.

Killer’s smile died away, and he seemed to become unconscious, his hands tight around the wand. If he was still bleeding, it did not show; but there was too much blood to be sure. Jerry bent down and put an ear on Killer’s chest for a moment, then straightened up.

“He’s alive,” he said. He, too, was smothered in blood.

They all climbed to their feet at the same time— Jerry, Carlo, Ariadne— and their shadows swayed around the walls.

Carlo looked confused and dazed. Jerry stepped over to him and grabbed him by the front of his shirt.

“You bastard!” he said, and struck him hard across the face with his gun. Carlo staggered and would have fallen had the other man not been holding him. “Bloody bastard!” He struck him again.

“Cut that out, Howard!” Gillis barked, and Jerry pointed the gun at him. “You keep out of this!” he said. He was about to swing the gun again when the bolt on the door rattled and moved slightly. Jerry rushed over to it, letting Carlo collapse on the floor.

He pushed the bolt back hard with the butt of the pistol and it stayed. Jerry wiped his forehead and turned to look at his victim. “If it wouldn’t bring in the demons, I would kill him. If Killer dies, then I shall kill him for certain— if I can get to him before they do. Violence brings them… Take him in that other room and tie him up. Gag him. Move!” Graham always knew when to back off, and this was one of those times. He bent down, took hold of Carlo, and dragged him away. Jerry took a spoon from a drawer and knelt down to hold it over Killer’s lips. The laughter outside was louder, as though more demons were joining in.

Ariadne sat down on the sofa and started to shake uncontrollably. The laughter! She should go to Lacey, but Maisie was probably doing as good a job as she could, and she was all splattered with Killer’s blood. Jerry tossed the spoon away, listened to Killer’s chest again, and then stepped over him and sat down beside her on the sofa.

Graham came back, took the lamp from the piano, and returned to the bedroom. She heard linen being ripped.

“He may be all right,” Jerry said. “The wands have power to heal, and it has stopped the bleeding.” She tried to speak through chattering teeth. “He needs a hospital.”

“He needs Mera!” Jerry ran a hand through his pale hair, leaving it streaked with blood. “I’ve heard of this, though— the wand put him into some kind of coma; his heart beat is very, very slow, but it seems to be steady. Aku was saved this way once. I think it can hold him till morning.” The blood had not stuck to the wand, and the wand was glowing white.

Then he looked at her and suddenly put an arm around her. “Thanks, Ariadne. You were the only one who kept her head. God! I shouldn’t have battered the kid like that…” It was very comforting to be held. No one had held her like that in a very long time; there was no sex in that embrace, merely human contact and mutual comfort.

“You can’t turn off the sound effects, can you?” she asked, her voice a little steadier. “It sounds like a sitcom out there.”

“Whatever that is,” he muttered. “No. This is the chirping and gibbering stage, I suppose. They know they won’t fool anyone now, so they’ll try to drive us crazy.” She shivered and cuddled closer to him. His grip tightened.

“He’s tied up,” Graham said, behind them. “I can’t gag him— his mouth is bleeding too much. He’d choke.” Jerry stood up and gestured with the gun. “Right. Back in there, Gillis. You’re next.”

“I’ll behave, damn it!” Graham said. “I believe you now, Howard.”

“Move!”

She sat and shivered with her hands over her ears for a while. It was impossible to drown out that laughter— bellows and shrieks and giggling and chuckling, all around the cottage.

Drive us crazy… it wouldn’t take long. If Lacey was still shrieking or Maisie still praying, she couldn’t hear them.

Then the shadows danced and Jerry returned with the lamp. He put it on the piano again and came back to her side. They sat together and looked down at the motionless figure of Killer, lying on the floor like a corpse laid out for burial, clutching the wand.

“I’ve really loused up,” Jerry muttered. She could barely hear him over the gibbering. It was more a gibbering now, less like human laughter, more like a cage of apes. “I’m sorry, Ariadne. You deserved to get to Mera, and frankly our chances aren’t too good any more.”

“I can stand the noise if you can,” she said. “We’re none of us going to be inviting that lot inside.” Strangely, she was feeling better than she had done earlier— backs-to-the-wall syndrome?

“True,” he said… but there had been a hesitation there. “Give me the bad news, then,” she said.

“No— you’re right. We can wait it out.”

“Tell me, Jerry, please. I’d like to know the worst.”

He turned and smiled at her, and almost she thought there was admiration there. Who had given her admiration since… since Noah’s flood?

“Okay!” he said. “It’s just about hopeless, though. You saw that door? I had to force it shut and I thought I couldn’t.” She nodded. “So?”

“It’s the third wave,” he said grimly, watching her face carefully. “First the flesh and blood. Then the disembodied. But now… it’s as though it takes them time to gather their forces, and now we must be nearing the darkest hour. Dammit, this night can’t go on for ever!

Why are they so strong? What’s bringing them?”

“What’s the third wave?” she demanded as calmly as she could.

“The in-betweens. Griffins or sphinxes or basilisks— the monsters that aren’t one thing or the other.”

“Vampires and werewolves?” she said. “Stakes through the heart and silver bullets, like the old stories?”

He nodded. “That’s it. We do have silver bullets, truly. A silver bullet through the heart will kill most of the in-betweens, but I have an uneasy feeling that we’re going to get something big, really big. Maybe an antitank gun with a silver shell would do it.” He studied her and then blurted out, “You’re a brave woman, Ariadne!”

“When you’ve spent as much time in hell as I have,” she said, “it begins to lose its terrors.” He put his arm around her again, this soft-spoken, lanky man with his fair hair and bare chest, now dark with his friend’s blood. “I had hoped to rescue you from that hell of yours,” he said. “But I doubt that I’m going to make it. I should have liked to have shown you Mera, Ariadne. It’s a wonderful place. You deserve it.” Deserve it? She thought of the strange beds she had wakened in a few times— sometimes with smelly old men asleep in them beside her, sometimes with nobody there except hallucinations. She thought of gutters, of being mugged, of the drunk tank, of begging total strangers for small change. Deserve it?

She shivered. “No I don’t! Those things that Graham said about me were true, Jerry. If ever there was a fallen woman, it was me. I don’t deserve Mera, and perhaps that’s why your demons have done so well. It wasn’t fair of your Oracle to send you and Killer after one like me.” He turned his head away from her and looked down at Killer, his face shadowed. Something with claws rattled across the roof, and they ignored it.

“I told you that I wasn’t worthy of Mera, either,” he said. “I’ve never talked about it and I shan’t now… but I often think that many people in Mera…” His voice died away, and she said, “Why is he called Killer?”

Jerry chuckled. “Oh, I named him that; a pun on Achilles, is all. He loved it and insisted on it after that. He’s very childlike, is Killer, in many ways. He comes from a childlike culture. The early Greeks were a bunch of squabbling brats. Even the great philosophers who came after were sort of childlike, weren’t they? Asking questions like kids? The showing off and the fighting, the love of nudity and the homosexuality— they’re juvenile traits. Even their gods were a gang of quarrelsome, horny perverts.”

“I’d never thought of that,” she said. The racket outside was getting quieter, or else she was finding it easier to ignore.

He nodded to himself. “I don’t suppose they were all as bad as Killer; he’s an extreme case. People don’t change in Mera, Ariadne. They may get younger-looking as the wrinkles disappear, as hair and teeth grow back, but their natures don’t change after they get there. I arrived as a thirty-year-old and I’m a thirty-year-old now. I don’t have Killer’s adolescent wildness, but I’m not a seventy-year-old, either. You can learn things, but you don’t change. Killer is a boy with four hundred years’ experience. I was thinking last night what a superb guerilla fighter he would make with those qualifications.” He was mourning his friend. She thought that Killer would mourn a friend sincerely also, but not in quite the same way. His friendship would be much more easily granted than Jerry Howard’s, so Jerry’s would be a deeper, more precious, and more vulnerable thing.

“You talked of Father Someone, who was an old man?”

“That’s true,” he said. “And there was a Chinese mandarin rescued just after I was— Shi-liu. About the same age as me, from the Tang Dynasty. He’s aged steadily and looks his seventy-or-so years now; I expect he’ll stay that way from now on.” He smiled at her surprise. “His culture respected age, so that was how he wanted to be. Father Julius is much the same. He sees himself as an elderly shepherd guarding his flock, so his appearance didn’t change. My good friend Gervasse looks like Benjamin Franklin. Not all societies worship youth. And there are limits, even in Mera. A woman or a man rescued in old age never gets truly youthful— but they’re all strong and healthy.” Things were howling up and down outside, gurgling howls dying away in chuckles. Something was tapping persistently on the door.

She must keep the conversation going, it kept her panic down.

“Tell me about Killer,” she said. “Why was his birthdate so important to you?” He shook his head and frowned, and for a moment she thought he would not tell tales about his friend. Then he gave a slight shrug. “It’s guesswork. He’s a Thespian.”

“You mean an actor?”

Jerry smiled. “No. Drama was invented by a a man named Thespis, which is why actors are called Thespians. It also means a citizen of Thespiae, which was a city northwest of Athens. Do you know any Greek history?”

“Not much,” she confessed.

“Thermopylae?” he asked. “You must have heard of that? 480 BC. After Marathon, it’s the second date in European history; not counting fictional dates like the founding of Rome.”

“Persia?” she said doubtfully.

“Right. The Emperor Xerxes invaded Greece and he was held up at the pass of Thermopylae by the Spartans. They died to a man defending the pass against impossible odds, and even then, the Persians only won because of treachery by other Greeks.” He fell silent for a while, and she suddenly realized that in Mera history would be very real. Probably you could find eyewitnesses to most of it, to the Black Death or the Crusaders; meet people who had fought in the great battles. Killer? Born in 500 BC, and Thermopylae was in 480, when he would have been about twenty.

“There was one Spartan who missed the battle,” Jerry said. “He was sent away— under orders— so he missed it and did not die with his friends.”

“Killer?” He shook his head impatiently. “No, he was a Thespian, not a Spartan. That one Spartan was so overwhelmed by shame that he killed himself. Can you imagine that, Ariadne? It wasn’t his fault that he survived, and any of us would be happy and relieved, and our friends and relatives would congratulate us, but to the Spartan it was a disgrace he couldn’t bear.” Maisie suddenly appeared, silently, a shadowy figure looming in the uncertain lamplight. She stood there, looking down at Killer and fingering her beads.

“The children are both asleep,” she said. “Or else unconscious…”

“Thank you, Maisie,” Ariadne said. “Thank you very much. I have all this blood on me— I thought I would frighten them if I came.” Maisie nodded, still looking at Killer. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Jerry said, looking up. “The wand will save him.”

She nodded again doubtfully. “That was what you used to lift my purse, is it? It was invisible?”

“You can only see it if you believe in Mera, because it is a part of Mera,” Jerry said. “You can see it now?” Obviously she could, but she didn’t say so. She crossed herself. “Graham and the other man?”

“They’re tied up in the other room,” Jerry said. “You come and sit with us.” She muttered something about the children and wandered back to their room; she was clearly in shock.

The gibbering they must keep talking. “You were telling me about Thermopylae.”

“Yes,” Jerry said. “The Spartans had a very good press, as we would say nowadays. Mention Thermopylae, and everyone thinks of Sparta. But a thousand Greeks died there, defending Greece from the Persian horde— three hundred Spartans and seven hundred Thespians.” So there it was. The man lying at her feet might have fought at Thermopylae, the second date in European history. And incredibly, she could believe.

“Only a thousand men, out of all Greece,” Jerry growled. “Some had gone over to the enemy, but do you know where the others were that day? At the Olympic games! No, I’m serious. You see why I think of them as children?

“Thespiae had the shrine of Eros,” he continued, “but it did not have as good publicity as Sparta did. If we come out of this alive, Ariadne, you must never mention this conversation to Killer!”

“No. Of course not.” He was trusting her. She had forgotten what trust felt like.

“So I’m guessing,” Jerry said. “I think there was one Thespian who survived, one of the seven hundred. I just can’t imagine Killer running away— although I suppose that’s possible, and it might explain his insane courage now, constantly proving himself— but I speculated that his scar was a wound from Thermopylae, that he awoke among the carnage and wandered away. The Thespians as a whole were not as bloody-minded as the Spartans, but Killer certainly was— he wouldn’t be able to stand the shame, either. I thought the scar was his mark of Cain… But now he says that he’s had it since childhood, so I was wrong on the scar.”

“The date fits,” she said.

He nodded and suddenly forced a laugh, breaking the spell. “Probably he just missed the battle because he was worshipping Eros with someone else’s wife. He’ll never tell us, that’s certain.” He was telling her that Killer had a dark secret and he had said that he had one himself. Was he hinting that her shame was her passport to Mera?

As though he had read the thought he said, “There are many people in Mera who will not discuss their past, Ariadne. Only the Oracle knows.”

“That wand,” she said. “It’s glowing!” He did not reply, and she looked at him and saw fear in his face.

“Why?” she asked. “Why is it so bright?”

“What is a wand?” he replied. “I don’t know. Killer believes they have spirits in them. I tend to think they are machines, that the Oracle charges them up somehow with power, with faerie, like batteries. When they’re working really hard, they shine like that.”

“Keeping him alive?”

“Certainly.” He glanced uneasily around the shadowy room. “But it’s also keeping this cottage in existence, because this place isn’t truly real. The faerie is holding the daemon out… and the demons’ power is growing. Can’t you feel it? The air stinks of sulfur.” She wished he hadn’t said that. He was more frightened than she was, because he knew more. This time she put her arm around him.

“Can the wands overload?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he muttered reluctantly. “Or run out? If they do, then that might explain the rescues that fail— the ones where nobody returns. It must be taking a lot of faerie to keep Killer alive.” The light flickered. He pulled out of her hug and jumped up. He grabbed the lamp on the table, muttered a curse, and went to inspect the one on the piano.

“We’re almost out of oil!” he shouted. Then he strode over to the oil can, picked it up, and shook it. There was no sound. “It was half full!” They stared at each other in mutual dismay as the lamp on the piano guttered out.