Lord Foul's Bane

Two: “You Cannot Hope”

IN his confusion, he scanned the street rapidly, but the boy had escaped completely. Then, as he turned back toward the old beggar, his eyes caught the door, gilt-lettered: Bell Telephone Company. The sight gave him a sudden twist of fear that made him forget all distractions. Suppose-This was his destination; he had come here in person to claim his human right to pay his own bills. But suppose—

He shook himself. He was a leper; he could not afford suppositions. Unconsciously, he shoved the sheet of paper into his pocket. With grim deliberateness, he gave himself a VSE. Then he gripped himself, and started toward the door.

A man hurrying out through the doorway almost bumped into him, then recognized him and backed away, his face suddenly grey with apprehension. The jolt broke Covenant's momentum, and he almost shouted aloud, Leper outcast unclean! He stopped again, allowed himself a moment's pause. The man had been Joan's lawyer at the divorce-a short, fleshy individual full of the kind of bonhomie in which lawyers and ministers specialize. Covenant needed that pause to recover from the dismay of the lawyer's glance. He felt involuntarily ashamed to be the cause of such dismay. For a moment, he could not recollect the conviction which had brought him into town.

But almost at once he began to fume silently. Shame and rage were inextricably bound together in him. I'm not going to let them do this to me, he rasped. By hell! They have no right. Yet he could not so easily eradicate the lawyer's expression from his thoughts. That revulsion was an accomplished fact, like leprosy-immune to any question of right or justice. And above all else a leper must not forget the lethal reality of facts.

As Covenant paused, he thought, I should write a poem.

These are the pale deaths

which men miscall their lives:

for all the scents of green things growing,

each breath is but an exhalation of the grave.

Bodies jerk like puppet corpses,

and hell walks laughing-

Laughing-now there's a real insight. Hellfire.

Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?

He felt that he was asking an important question. He had laughed when his novel had been accepted-laughed at the shadows of deep and silent thoughts that had shifted like sea currents in Roger's face laughed over the finished product of his book laughed at its presence on the best-seller lists. Thousands of things large and small had filled him with glee. When Joan had asked him what he found so funny, he was only able to reply that every breath charged him with ideas for his next book. His lungs bristled with imagination and energy. He chuckled whenever he had more joy than he could contain.

But Roger had been six months old when the novel had become famous, and six months later Covenant still had somehow not begun writing again. He had too many ideas. He could not seem to choose among them.

Joan had not approved of this unproductive luxuriance. She had packed up Roger, and had left her husband in their newly purchased house, with his office newly settled in a tiny, two-room but overlooking a stream in the woods that filled the back of Haven Farm-left him with strict orders to start writing while she took Roger to meet his relatives.

That had been the pivot, the moment in which the rock had begun rolling toward his feet of clay-begun with rumbled warnings the stroke which had cut him off as severely as a surgeon attacking gangrene. He had heard the warnings, and had ignored them. He had not known what they meant.

No, rather than looking for the cause of that low thunder, he had waved goodbye to Joan with regret and quiet respect. He had seen that she was right, that he would not start to work again unless he were alone for a time; and he had admired her ability to act even while his heart ached under the awkward burden of their separation. So when he had waved her plane away over his horizons, he returned to Haven Farm, locked himself in his office, turned on the power to his electric typewriter, and wrote the dedication of his next novel:

“For Joan, who has been my keeper of the possible.”

His fingers slipped uncertainly on the keys, and he needed three tries to produce a perfect copy. But he was not sea-wise enough to see the coming storm.

The slow ache in his wrists and ankles he also ignored; he only stamped his feet against the ice that seemed to be growing in them. And when he found the numb purple spot on his right hand near the base of his little finger, he put it out of his mind. Within twenty-four hours of Joan's departure, he was deep into the plotting of his book. Images cascaded through his imagination. His fingers fumbled, tangled themselves around the simplest words, but his imagination was sure. He had no thought to spare for the suppuration of the small wound which grew in the centre of that purple stain.

Joan brought Roger home after three weeks of family visits. She did not notice anything wrong until that evening, when Roger was asleep, and she sat in her husband's arms. The storm windows were up, and the house was closed against the chill winter wind which prowled the Farm. In the still air of their living room, she caught the faint, sweet, sick smell of Covenant's infection.

Months later, when he stared at the antiseptic walls of his room in the leprosarium, he cursed himself for not putting iodine on his hand. It was not the loss of two fingers that galled him. The surgery which amputated part of his hand was only a small symbol of the stroke which cut him out of his life, excised him from his own world as if he were some kind of malignant infestation. And when his right hand ached with the memory of its lost members, that pain was no more than it should be. No, he berated his carelessness because it had cheated him of one last embrace with Joan.

But with her in his arms on that last winter night, he had been ignorant of such possibilities. Talking softly about his new book, he held her close, satisfied for that moment with the press of her firm flesh against his, with the clean smell of her hair and the glow of her warmth. Her sudden reaction had startled him. Before he was sure what disturbed her, she was standing, pulling him up off the sofa after her. She held his right hand up between them, exposed his infection, and her voice crackled with anger and concern.

“Oh, Tom! Why don't you take care of yourself?”

After that, she did not hesitate. She asked one of the neighbours to sit with Roger, then drove her husband through the light February snow to the emergency room of the hospital. She did not leave him until he had been admitted to a room and scheduled for surgery.

The preliminary diagnosis was gangrene.

Joan spent most of the next day with him at the hospital, during the time when he was not being given tests. And the next morning, at six o'clock, Thomas Covenant was taken from his room for surgery on his right hand. He regained consciousness three hours later back in his hospital bed, with two fingers gone. The grogginess of the drugs clouded him for a time, and he did not miss Joan until noon.

But she did not come to see him at all that day. And when she arrived in his room the following morning, she was changed. Her skin was pale, as if her heart were hoarding blood, and the bones of her forehead seemed to press against the flesh. She had the look of a trapped animal. She ignored his outstretched hand. Her voice was low, constrained; she had to exert force to make even that much of herself reach toward him. Standing as far away as she could in the room, staring emptily out the window at the slushy streets, she told him the news.

The doctors had discovered that he had leprosy.

His mind blank with surprise, he said, “You're kidding.”

Then she spun and faced him, crying, “Don't play stupid with me now! The doctor said he would tell you, but I told him no, I would do it. I was thinking of you. But I can't-I can't stand it. You've got leprosy! Don't you know what that means? Your hands and feet are going to rot away, and your legs and arms will twist, and your face will turn ugly like a fungus. Your eyes will get ulcers and go bad after a while, and I can't stand it-it won't make any difference to you because you won't be able to feel anything, damn you! And-oh, Tom, Tom! It's catching.”

“Catching?” He could not seem to grasp what she meant.

“Yes!” she hissed. “Most people get it because” for a moment she choked on the fear which impelled her outburst “because they were exposed when they were kids. Children are more susceptible than adults. Roger-I can't risk-I've got to protect Roger from that!”

As she ran, escaped from the room, he answered, “Yes, of course.” Because he had nothing else to say. He still did not understand. His mind was empty. He did not begin to perceive until weeks later how much of him had been blown out by the wind of Joan's passion. Then he was simply appalled.

Forty-eight hours after his surgery, Covenant's surgeon pronounced him ready to travel, and sent him to the leprosarium in Louisiana. On their drive to the leprosarium, the doctor who met his plane talked flatly about various superficial aspects of leprosy. Mycobacterium leprae was first identified by Armauer Hansen in 1874, but study of the bacillus has been consistently foiled by the failure of the researchers to meet two of Koch's four steps of analysis: no one had been able to grow the microorganism artificially, and no one had discovered how it is transmitted. However, certain modern research by Dr. O. A. Skinsnes of Hawaii seemed promising. Covenant listened only vaguely. He could hear abstract vibrations of horror in the word leprosy, but they did not carry conviction. They affected him like a threat in a foreign language. Behind the intonation of menace, the words themselves communicated nothing. He watched the doctor's earnest face as if he were staring at Joan's incomprehensible passion, and made no response.

But when Covenant was settled in his room at the leprosarium-a square cell with a white blank bed and antiseptic walls-the doctor took another tack. Abruptly, he said, “Mr. Covenant, you don't seem to understand what's at stake here. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

Covenant followed him out into the corridor. As they walked, the doctor said, "You have what we call a primary case of Hansen's disease-a native case, one that doesn't seem to have a-a genealogy. Eighty percent of the cases we get in this country involve people-immigrants and so on-who were exposed to the disease as children in foreign countries-tropical climates: At least we know where they contracted it, if not why or how.

“Of course, primary or secondary, they can take the same general path. But as a rule people with secondary cases grew up in places where Hansen's disease is less arcane than here. They recognize what they've got when they get it. That means they have a better chance of seeking help in time.

“I want you to meet another of our patients. He's the only other primary case we have here at present. He used to be a sort of hermit-lived alone away from everyone in the West Virginia mountains. He didn't know what was happening to him until the army tried to get in touch with him-tell him his son was killed in the war. When the officer saw this man, he called in the Public Health Service. They sent the man to us.”

The doctor stopped in front of a door like the one to Covenant's cell. He knocked, but did not wait for an answer. He pushed open the door, caught Covenant by the elbow, and steered him into the room.

As he stepped across the threshold, Covenant's nostrils were assaulted by a pungent reek, a smell like that of rotten flesh lying in a latrine. It defied mere carbolic acid and ointments to mask it. It came from a shrunken figure sitting grotesquely on the white bed.

“Good afternoon,” the doctor said. “This is Thomas Covenant. He has a primary case of Hansen's disease, and doesn't seem to understand the danger he's in.”

Slowly, the patient raised his arms as if to embrace Covenant.

His hands were swollen stumps, fingerless lumps of pink, sick meat marked by cracks and ulcerations from which a yellow exudation oozed through the medication. They hung on thin, hooped arms like awkward sticks. And even though his legs were covered by his hospital pyjamas, they looked like gnarled wood. Half of one foot was gone, gnawed away, and in the place of the other was nothing but an unhealable wound.

Then the patient moved his lips to speak, and Covenant looked up at his face. His dull, cataractal eyes sat in his face as if they were the centre of an eruption. The skin of his cheeks was as white-pink as an albino's; it bulged and poured away from his eyes in waves, runnulets, as if it had been heated to the melting point; and these waves were edged with thick tubercular nodules.

“Kill yourself,” he rasped terribly. “Better than this.”

Covenant broke away from the doctor. He rushed out into the hall and the contents of his stomach spattered over the clean walls and floor like a stain of outrage.

In that way, he decided to survive.

Thomas Covenant lived in the leprosarium for more than six months. He spent his time roaming the corridors like an amazed phantasm, practicing his VSE and other survival drills, glaring his way through hours of conferences with the doctors, listening to lectures on leprosy and therapy and rehabilitation. He soon learned that the doctors believed patient psychology to be the key to treating leprosy. They wanted to counsel him. But he refused to talk about himself. Deep within him, a hard core of intransigent fury was growing. He had learned that by some bitter trick of his nerves the two fingers he had lost felt more alive to the rest of his body than did his remaining digits. His right thumb was always reaching for those excised fingers, and finding their scar with an awkward, surprised motion. The help of the doctors seemed to resemble this same trick. Their few sterile images of hope struck him as the gropings of an unfingered imagination. And so the conferences, like the lectures, ended as long speeches by experts on the problems that he, Thomas Covenant, faced.

For weeks the speeches were pounded into him until he began to dream them at night. Admonitions took over the ravaged playground of his mind. Instead of stories and passions, he dreamed perorations.

“Leprosy,” he heard night after night, “is perhaps the most inexplicable of all human afflictions. It is a mystery, just as the strange, thin difference between living and inert matter is a mystery. Oh, we know some things about it: it is not fatal; it is not contagious in any conventional way; it operates by destroying the nerves, typically in the extremities and in the cornea of the eye; it produces deformity, largely because it negates the body's ability to protect itself by feeling and reacting against pain; it may result in complete disability, extreme deformation of the face and limbs, and blindness; and it is irreversible, since the nerves that die cannot be restored. We also know that, in almost all cases, proper treatment using DDS — diamino-diphenyl-sulfone-and some of the new synthetic antibiotics can arrest the spread of the disease, and that, once the neural deterioration has been halted, the proper medication and therapy can keep the affliction under control for the rest of the patient's life. What we do not know is why or how any specific person contracts the illness. As far as we can prove, it comes out of nowhere for no reason. And once you get it, you cannot hope for a cure.”

The words he dreamed were not exaggerated-they could have come verbatim from any one of a score of lectures or conferences-but their tolling sounded like the tread of something so unbearable that it should never have been uttered. The impersonal voice of the doctor went on: "What we have learned from our years of study is that Hansen's disease creates two unique problems for the patient-interrelated difficulties that do not occur with any other illness, and that make the mental aspect of being a leprosy victim more crucial than the physical.

“The first involves your relationships with your fellow human beings. Unlike leukemia today, or tuberculosis in the last century, leprosy is not, and has never been, a “poetic” disease, a disease which can be romanticized. Just the reverse. Even in societies that hate their sick less than we Americans do, the leper has always been despised and feared-outcast even by his most-loved ones because of a rare bacillus no one can predict or control. Leprosy is not fatal, and the average patient can look forward to as much as thirty or fifty years of life as a leper. That fact, combined with the progressive disability which the disease inflicts, makes leprosy patients, of all sick people, the ones most desperately in need of human support. But virtually all societies condemn their lepers to isolation and despair-denounced as criminals and degenerates, as traitors and villains-cast out of the human race because science has failed to unlock the mystery of this affection. In country after country, culture after culture around the world, the leper has been considered the personification of everything people, privately and communally, fear and abhor.

“People react this way for several reasons. First, the disease produces an ugliness and a bad smell that are undeniably unpleasant. And second, generations of medical research notwithstanding, people fail to believe that something so obvious and-ugly and so mysterious is not contagious. The fact that we cannot answer questions about the bacillus reinforces their fear-we cannot be sure that touch or air or food or water or even compassion do not spread the disease. In the absence of any natural, provable explanation of the illness, people account for it in other ways, all bad-as proof of crime or filth or perversion, evidence of God's judgment, as the horrible sign of some psychological or spiritual or moral corruption or guilt. And they insist it's catching, despite evidence that it is minimally contagious, even to children. So many of you are going to have to live without one single human support to bear the burden with you.

“That is one reason why we place such an emphasis on counselling here; we want to help you learn to cope with loneliness. Many of the patients who leave this institution do not five out their full years. Under the shock of their severance, they lose their motivation; they let their self-treatments slide, and become either actively or passively suicidal; few of them come back here in time. The patients who survive find someone somewhere who is willing to help them want to live. Or they find somewhere inside themselves the strength to endure.

“Whichever way you go, however, one fact will remain constant: from now until you die, leprosy is the biggest single fact of your existence. It will control how you live in every particular. From the moment you awaken until the moment you sleep, you will have to give your undivided attention to all the hard corners and sharp edges of life. You can't take vacations from it. You can't try to rest yourself by daydreaming, lapsing. Anything that bruises, bumps, burns, breaks, scrapes, snags, pokes, or weakens you can maim, cripple, or even kill you. And thinking about all the kinds of life you can't have can drive you to despair and suicide. I've seen it happen.”

Covenant's pulse was racing, and his sweat made the sheets cling to his limbs. The voice of his nightmare had not changed-it made no effort to terrify him, took no pleasure in his fear-but now the words were as black as hate, and behind them stretched a great raw wound of emptiness.

“That brings us to the other problem. It sounds simple, but you will find it can be devastating. Most people depend heavily on their sense of touch. In fact, their whole structure of responses to reality is organized around their touch. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they touch something they know it's real. And it is not an accident that we describe the deepest parts of ourselves-our emotions-in terms of the sense of touch. Sad tales touch our feelings. Bad situations irritate us or hurt us. This is an inevitable result of the fact that we are biological organisms.

“You must fight and change this orientation. You're intelligent creatures-each of you has a brain. Use it. Use it to recognize your danger. Use it to train yourself to stay alive.”

Then he woke up alone in his bed drenched with sweat, eyes staring, lips taut with whimpers that tried to plead their way between his clenched teeth. Dream after dream, week after week, the pattern played itself out. Day after day, he had to lash himself with anger to make himself leave the ineffectual sanctuary of his cell.

But his fundamental decision held. He met patients who had been to the leprosarium several times before-haunted recidivists who could not satisfy the essential demand of their torment, the requirement that they cling to life without desiring any of the recompense which gave life value. Their cyclic degeneration taught him to see that his nightmare contained the raw materials for survival. Night after night, it battered him against the brutal and irremediable law of leprosy; blow by blow, it showed him that an entire devotion to that law was his only defence against suppuration and gnawing rot and blindness. In his fifth and sixth months at the leprosarium, he practiced his VSE and other drills with manic diligence. He stared at the blank antiseptic walls of his cell as if to hypnotize himself with them. In the back of his mind, he counted the hours between doses of his medication. And whenever he slipped, missed a beat of his defensive rhythm, he excoriated himself with curses.

In seven months, the doctors were convinced that his diligence was not a passing phase. They were reasonably sure that the progress of his illness had been arrested. They sent him home.

As he returned to his house on Haven Farm in late summer, he thought that he was prepared for everything. He had braced himself for the absence of any communication from Joan, the dismayed revulsions of his former friends and associates-though these assaults still afflicted him with a vertiginous nausea of rage and self-disgust. The sight of Joan's and Roger's belongings in the house, and the desertion of the stables where Joan had formerly kept her horses, stung his sore heart like a corrosive-but he had already set his heels against the pull of such pains.

Yet he was not prepared, not for everything. The next shock surpassed his readiness. After he had double-and triple-checked to be sure he had received no mail from Joan, after he had spoken on the phone with the lawyer who handled his business-he had heard the woman's discomfort throbbing across the metallic connection-he went to his but in the woods and sat down to read what he had written on his new book.

Its blind poverty left him aghast. To call it ridiculously naive would have been a compliment. He could hardly believe that he was responsible for such supercilious trash.

That night, he reread his first novel, the best-seller. Then, moving with extreme caution, he built a fire in his hearth and burned both the novel and the new manuscript. Fire! he thought. Purgation. If I do not write another word, I will at least rid my life of these lies. Imagination! How could I have been so complacent? And as he watched the pages crumble into grey ash, he threw in with them all thought of further writing. For the first time, he understood part of what the doctors had been saying; he needed to crush out his imagination. He could not afford to have an imagination, a faculty which could envision Joan, joy, health. If he tormented himself with unattainable desires, he would cripple his grasp on the law which enabled him to survive. His imagination could kill him, lead or seduce or trick him into suicide: seeing all the things he could not have would make him despair.

When the fire went out, he ground the ashes underfoot as if to make their consummation irrevocable.

The next morning, he set about organizing his life.

First, he found his old straight razor. Its long, stainless-steel blade gleamed like a leer in the fluorescent light of his bathroom; but he stropped it deliberately, lathered his face, braced his timorous bones against the sink, and set the edge to his throat. It felt like a cold line of fire across his jugular, a keen threat of blood and gangrene and reactivated leprosy. If his half-unfingered hand slipped or twitched, the consequences might be extreme. But he took the risk consciously to discipline himself, enforce his recognition of the raw terms of his survival, mortify his recalcitrance. He instituted shaving with that blade as a personal ritual, a daily confrontation with his condition.

For the same reason, he began carrying around a sharp penknife. Whenever he felt his discipline faltering, felt threatened by memories or hopes or love, he took out the knife and tested its edge on his wrist.

Then, after he had shaved, he worked on his house. He neatened it, rearranged the furniture to minimize the danger of protruding corners, hard edges, hidden obstacles; he eliminated everything which could trip, bruise, or deflect him, so that even in the dark his rooms would be navigable, safe; he made his house as much like his cell in the leprosarium as possible. Anything that was hazardous, he threw into the guest room; and when he was done he locked the guest room and threw away the key.

After that he went to his hut and locked it also. Then he pulled its fuses, so that there would be no risk of fire in the old wiring.

Finally he washed the sweat off his hands. He washed them grimly, obsessively; he could not help himself-the physical impression of uncleanness was too strong.

Leper outcast unclean.

He spent the autumn stumbling around the rims of madness. Dark violence throbbed in him like a picar thrust between his ribs, goading him aimlessly. He felt an insatiable need for sleep, but could not heed it because his dreams had changed to nightmares of gnawing; despite his numbness, he seemed to feel himself being eaten away. And wakefulness confronted him with a vicious and irreparable paradox. Without the support or encouragement of other people, he did not believe he could endure the burden of his struggle against horror and death; yet that horror and death explained, made comprehensible, almost vindicated the rejection which denied him support or encouragement. His struggle arose from the same passions which produced his outcasting. He hated what would happen to him if he failed to fight. He hated himself for having to fight such a winless and interminable war. But he could not hate the people who made his moral solitude so absolute. They only shared his own fear.

In the dizzy round of his dilemma, the only response which steadied him was vitriol. He clung to his bitter anger as to an anchor of sanity; he needed fury in order to survive, to keep his grip like a stranglehold on life. Some days he went from sun to sun without any rest from rage.

But in time even that passion began to falter. His outcasting was part of his law; it was an irreducible fact, as totally real and compulsory as gravity and pestilence and numbness. If he failed to crush himself to fit the mould of his facts, he would fail to survive.

When he looked out over the Farm, the trees which edged his property along the highway seemed so far away that nothing could bridge the gap.

The contradiction had no answer. It made his fingers twitch helplessly, so that he almost cut himself shaving. Without passion he could not fight-yet all his passions rebounded against him. As the autumn passed, he cast fewer and fewer curses at the impossibilities imprisoning him. He prowled through the woods behind Haven Farm-a tall, lean man a with haggard eyes, a mechanical stride, and two fingers gone from his right hand. Every cluttered trail, sharp rock, steep slope reminded him that he was keeping himself alive with caution, that he had only to let his surveillance slip to go quietly unmourned and painless out of his troubles.

It gave him nothing but an addition of sorrow to touch the bark of a tree and feel nothing. He saw clearly the end that waited for him; his heart would become as affectless as his body, and then he would be lost for good and all.

Nevertheless, he was filled with a sudden sense of focus, of crystallization, as if he had identified an enemy, when he learned that someone had paid his electric bill for him. The unexpected gift made him abruptly aware of what was happening. The townspeople were not only shunning him, they were actively cutting off every excuse he might have to go among them.

When he first understood his danger, his immediate reaction was to throw open a window and shout into the winter, “Go ahead! By hell, I don't need you!” But the issue was not simple enough to be blown away by bravado. As winter scattered into an early March spring, he became convinced that he needed to take some kind of action. He was a person, human like any other; he was kept alive by a personal heart. He did not mean to stand by and approve this amputation.

So when his next phone bill came, he gathered his courage, shaved painstakingly, dressed himself in clothes with tough fabrics, laced his feet snugly into sturdy boots, and began the two-mile walk into town to pay his bill in person.

That walk brought him to the door of the Bell Telephone Company with trepidation hanging around his head like a dank cloud. He stood in front of the gilt-lettered door for a time, thinking,

These are the pale deaths…

and wondering about laughter. Then he collected himself, pulled open the door like the gust of a gale, and stalked up to the girl at the counter as if she had challenged him to single combat.

He put his hands palms down on the counter to steady them. Ferocity sprang across his teeth for an instant. He said, “My name is Thomas Covenant.”

The girl was trimly dressed, and she held her arms crossed under her breasts, supporting them so that they showed to their best advantage. He forced himself to look up at her face. She was staring blankly past him. While he searched her for some tremor of revulsion, she glanced at him and asked, “Yes?”

“I want to pay my bill,” he said, thinking, She doesn't know, she hasn't heard.

“Certainly, sir,” she answered. “What is your number?”

He told her, and she moved languidly into another room to check her files.

The suspense of her absence made his fear pound in his throat. He needed some way to distract himself, occupy his attention. Abruptly, he reached into his pocket and brought out the sheet of paper the boy had given him. You're supposed to read it. He smoothed it out on the counter and looked at it.

The old printing said:

A real man-real in all the ways that we recognize as real-finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have colour and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world-the real world-will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive.

The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no “real” danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation, and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world.

Question: is the man's behaviour courageous or cowardly?

This is the fundamental question of ethics.

Ethics! Covenant snorted to himself. Who the hell makes these things up?

The next moment, the girl returned with a question in her face. “Thomas Covenant? Of Haven Farm? Sir, a deposit has been made on your account which covers everything for several months. Did you send us a large check recently?”

Covenant staggered inwardly as if he had been struck, then caught himself on the counter, listing to the side like a reefed galleon. Unconsciously he crushed the paper in his fist. He felt light-headed, heard words echoing in his ears: Virtually all societies condemn, denounce, cast out-you cannot hope.

He focused his attention on his cold feet and aching ankles while he fought to keep the violence at bay. With elaborate caution, he placed the crumpled sheet on the counter in front of the girl. Striving to sound conversational; he said, “It isn't catching, you know. You won't get it from me-there's nothing to worry about. It isn't catching. Except for children.”

The girl blinked at him as if she were amazed by the vagueness of her thoughts.

His shoulders hunched, strangling fury in his throat. He turned away with as much dignity as he could manage, and strode out 'into the sunlight, letting the door slam behind him. Hellfire! he swore to himself. Hellfire and bloody damnation.

Giddy with rage, he looked up and down the street. He could see the whole ominous length of the town from where he stood. In the direction of Haven Farm, the small businesses stood close together like teeth poised on either side of the road. The sharp sunlight made him feel vulnerable and alone. He checked his hands quickly for scratches or abrasions, then hurried down the gauntlet, as he moved, his numb feet felt unsure on the sidewalk, as if the cement were slick with despair. He believed that he displayed courage by not breaking into a run.

In a few moments the courthouse loomed ahead of him. On the sidewalk before it stood the old beggar. He had not moved. He was still staring at the sun, still muttering meaninglessly. His sign said, Beware, uselessly, like a warning that came too late.

As Covenant approached, he was struck by how dispossessed the old man looked. Beggars and fanatics, holy men, prophets of the apocalypse did not belong on that street in that sunlight; the frowning, belittling eyes of the stone columns held no tolerance for such preterite exaltation. And the scant coins he had collected were not enough for even one meal. The sight gave Covenant an odd pang of compassion. Almost in spite of himself, he stopped in front of the old man.

The beggar made no gesture, did not shift his contemplation of the sun; but his voice altered, and one clear word broke out of the formless hum:

“Give.”

The order seemed to be directed at Covenant personally. As if on command, his gaze dropped to the bowl again. But the demand, the effort of coercion, brought back his anger. I don't owe you anything, he snapped silently.

Before he could pull away, the old man spoke again.

“I have warned you.”

Unexpectedly, the statement struck Covenant like an insight, an intuitive summary of all his experiences in the past year. Through his anger, his decision came immediately. With a twisted expression on his face, he fumbled for his wedding ring.

He had never before removed his white gold wedding band; despite his divorce, and Joan's unanswering silence, he had kept the ring on his finger. It was an icon of himself. It reminded him of where he had been and where he was-of promises made and broken, companionship lost, helplessness-and of his vestigial humanity. Now he tore it off his left hand and dropped it in the bowl. “That's worth more than a few coins,” he said, and stamped away.

“Wait.”

The word carried such authority that Covenant stopped again. He stood still, husbanding his rage, until he felt the man's hand on his arm. Then he turned and looked into pale blue eyes as blank as if they were still studying the secret fire of the sun. The old man was tall with power.

A sudden insecurity, a sense of proximity to matters he did not understand, disturbed Covenant. But he pushed it away. “Don't touch me. I'm a leper.”

The vacant stare seemed to miss him completely, as if he did not exist or the eyes were blind; but the old man's voice was clear and sure.

“You are in perdition, my son.”

Moistening his lips with his tongue, Covenant responded, “No, old man. This is normal-human beings are like this. Futile.” As if he were quoting a law of leprosy, he said to himself, Futility is the defining characteristic of life. “That's what life is like. I just have less bric-a-brac cluttering up the facts than most people.”

“So young-and already so bitter.”

Covenant had not heard sympathy for a long time, and the sound of it affected him acutely. His anger retreated, leaving his throat tight and awkward. “Come on, old man,” he said. “We didn't make the world. All we have to do is live in it. We're all in the same boat-one way or another.”

“Did we not?”

But without waiting for an answer the beggar went back to humming his weird tune. He held Covenant there until he had reached a break in his song. Then a new quality came into his voice, an aggressive tone that took advantage of Covenant's unexpected vulnerability.

“Why not destroy yourself?”

A sense of pressure expanded in Covenant's chest, cramping his heart. The pale blue eyes were exerting some kind of peril over him. Anxiety tugged at him. He wanted to jerk away from the old face, go through his VSE, make sure that he was safe. But he could not; the blank gaze held him. Finally, he said, “That's too easy.”

His reply met no opposition, but still his trepidation grew. Under the duress of the old man's will, he stood on the precipice of his future and looked down at jagged, eager dangers-rough damnations multiplied below him. He recognized the various possible deaths of lepers. But the panorama steadied him. It was like a touchstone of familiarity in a fantastic situation; it put him back on known ground. He found that he could turn away from his fear to say, “Look, is there anything I can do for you? Food? A place to stay? You can have what I've got.”

As if Covenant had said some crucial password, the old man's eyes lost their perilous cast.

“You have done too much. Gifts like this I return, to the giver.”

He extended his bowl toward Covenant.

“Take back the ring. Be true. You need not fail.”

Now the tone of command was gone. In its place, Covenant heard gentle supplication. He hesitated, wondering what this old man had to do with him. But he had to make some kind of response. He took the ring and replaced it on his left hand. Then he said, “Everybody fails. But I am going to survive as long as I can.”

The old man sagged, as if he had just shifted a load of prophecy or commandment onto Covenant's shoulders. His voice sounded frail now.

“That is as it may be.”

Without another word, he turned and moved away. He leaned on his staff like an exhausted prophet, worn out with uttering visions. His staff rang curiously on the sidewalk, as if the wood were harder than cement.

Covenant gazed after the wind-swayed ochre robe and the fluttering hair until the old man turned a corner and vanished. Then he shook himself, started into his VSE. But his eyes stopped on his wedding ring. The band seemed to hang loosely on his finger, as if it were too big for him. Perdition, he thought. A deposit has been made. I've got to do something before they barricade the streets against me.

For a while, he stood where he was and tried to think of a course of action. Absently, he looked up the courthouse columns to the stone heads. They had careless eyes and on their lips a spasm of disgust carved into perpetual imminence, compelling and forever incomplete. They gave him an idea. Casting a silent curse at them, he started down the walk again. He had decided to see his lawyer, to demand that the woman who handled his contracts and financial business find some legal recourse against the kind of black charity which was cutting him off from the town. Get those payments revoked, he thought. It's not possible that they can pay my debts-without my consent.

The lawyer's office was in a building at the corner of a cross street on the opposite side of the road. A minute's brisk walking brought Covenant to the corner and the town's only traffic light. He felt a need to hurry, to act on his decision before his distrust of lawyers and all public machinery convinced him that his determination was folly. He had to resist a temptation to cross against the light.

The signal changed slowly, but at last it was green his way. He stepped out onto the crosswalk.

Before he had taken three steps, he heard a siren. Red lights flaring, a police car sprang out of an alley into the main street. It skidded and swerved with the speed of its turn, then aimed itself straight at Covenant's heart.

He stopped as if caught in the grip of an unseen fist. He wanted to move, but he could only stand suspended, trapped, looking down the muzzle of the hurtling car. For an instant, he heard the frantic scream of brakes. Then he crumbled.

As he dropped, he had a vague sense that he was falling too soon, that he had not been hit yet. But he could not help himself; he was too afraid, afraid of being crushed. After all his self-protections, to die like this! Then he became aware of a huge blackness which stood behind the sunlight and the gleaming store-windows and the shriek of tires. The light and the asphalt against his head seemed to be nothing more than paintings on a black background; and now the background asserted itself, reached in and bore him down. Blackness radiated through the sunlight like a cold beam of night.

He thought that he was having a nightmare. Absurdly, he heard the old beggar saying, Be true. You need not fail.

The darkness poured through, swamping the day, and the only thing that Covenant was sure he could see was a single red gleam from the police car-a red bolt hot and clear and deadly, transfixing his forehead like a spear.