And still, with every step taken, his fears multiplied. He gripped the filthy banister, and forced himself onward and upward. I don't want to go, the child in him complained. Don't make me go, please. Easy enough to turn around, easy enough to delay the whole thing. Look! Your feet will do it, just say the word. Go back! She'll wake eventually; just be patient. Go back!
And if she doesn't wake? the voice of reason replied. And that made him go on.
As he took another step, something moved on the landing ahead of him. A flea-jump noise, no more; so soft he could barely hear it. A rat, perhaps? Probably. All manner of scavengers would come here, wouldn't they, in the expectation of a feast. He'd preempted that horror too, and was hardened to the thought.
He reached the landing. No rats scurried away from his footfall, at least he saw none. But there was something here. At the head of the stairs a small brown maggot rolled around on the carpet, twisting upon itself in its enthusiasm to get somewhere. Down the stairs probably: into the dark. He didn't look at it too closely. Whatever it was, it was harmless. Let it find a niche to grow fat in, and become a fly in time, if that was its ambition.
He crossed the penultimate landing and started up the final flight of stairs. A few steps up, the smell abruptly worsened. The stench of fetid meat assaulted him, and now, despite the Scotch and all the mental preparation, his innards turned over and over; like the maggot on the carpet, twisting and turning.
He stopped two or three steps up the flight, pulled out his whisky, and took two solid throatfuls, swallowing it so quickly it made his eyes water. Then he continued his ascent. Something soft slid beneath his heel. He looked down. Another maggot, the larger brother of the one below, had been arrested in its descent by his foot: it was squashed to a fatty pulp. He glanced at it for only a second before hurrying on, aware that the sole of his shoe was slimy; either that or he was pressing other such grubs underfoot as he went.
The gulps of liquor had made his head sing; he took the last two dozen steps almost at a run, eager to have the worst over with. By the time he'd reached the top of the stairs, he was breathless. He had an absurd image of himself, a drunkard's fancy, as a messenger coming with news-lost battles, murdered children-to the palace of some fabulous king. Except that the king too was murdered, his battles lost.
He started toward the penthouse; the smell had become so dense it was almost edible. As he had once before, he caught sight of himself in the mirror; he looked down, ashamed, from the frightened face and-God!-the carpet crawled. Not two or three but a dozen or more fat, ragged maggots were laboring, blindly it seemed, to find their way across the carpet, which was stained by their travels. They were like no insect he'd ever seen before, lacking any decipherable anatomy, and all different sizes: some finger-thin, others the size of a baby's fist, their shapeless forms purple, but streaked with yellow. They left trails of slime and blood like wounded slugs. He stepped around them. They'd got fat on meat he'd once debated with. He didn't want to examine them too closely.
But as he pushed open the door of the suite, and stepped, cautiously, into the corridor, an appalling possibility crept into his head and sat there, whispering obscenities. The creatures were everywhere in the suite. The more ambitious of them were scaling the pastel walls, gluing the slivers of their bodies to the wallpaper with seeped fluids, edging up like caterpillars, a peristalsis moving through their length. Their direction was arbitrary; some, to judge by their trails, were circling on themselves.
In the dim light of the corridor his worst suspicions merely simmered; but they began to boil when he edged past Whitehead's sprawled body and stepped into the slaughterhouse room, where the light from the highway made a sodium day. Here the creatures were in yet greater abundance. The whole room swarmed with them, from flea-sized fragments to slabs the size of a man's heart, throwing out tattered filaments like tentacles to haul themselves about. Worms, fleas, maggots-a whole new entymology congregated at the place of execution.
Except that these weren't insects, or the larvae of insects: he could see that plainly now. They were pieces of the European's flesh. He was still alive. In pieces, in a thousand senseless pieces, but alive.
Breer had been unrelentingly thorough in his destruction, eradicating the European as best his machete and failing hands would allow. But it had not been enough. There was too much stolen life buzzing in Mamoulian's cells; it roared on, in contravention of any sane law, unquenchable.
For all his vehemence the Razor-Eater had not finished the European's life, merely subdivided it, leaving it to describe these futile circles. And somewhere in this lunatic's menagerie was a beast with a will, a fragment that still possessed sufficient sense to think itself-albeit stutteringly-into Carys' mind. Perhaps not one piece, perhaps many-a sum of these wandering parts. Marty wasn't interested in its biology. How this obscenity survived was a matter for a madhouse debating society.
He backed out of the room and stood, shivering in the hall. Wind gusted against the window; the glass complained. He listened to the gusts while he worked out what to do next. Down the corridor a piece of filth fell from the wall. He watched it struggle to turn itself over, and then begin the slow ascent again. Just beyond the spot where it labored lay Whitehead. Marty went back to the body.
Charmaine's killers had enjoyed themselves mightily before they left: Whitehead's trousers and underwear had been pulled down, and his groin scrawled on with a knife. His eyes were open; his false teeth had been removed. He stared at Marty, jaw sagging like a delinquent child. Flies crawled on him; there were patches of decay on his face. But he was dead: which in this world was something. The boys had, as a final insult, defecated on his chest. Flies gathered there too.
In his time Marty had hated this man; loved him too, if only for a day; called him Papa, called him bastard; made love to his daughter and thought himself King of Creation. He'd seen the man in power: a lord. Seen him afraid too: scrabbling for escape like a rat in a fire. He'd seen the old man's odd species of integrity in practice, and found it workable. As fruitful, perhaps, as the affections of more loving men.
He reached across to seal off the stare, but in their zeal the evangelists had cut off Whitehead's lids, and Marty's fingers instead touched the slick of his eyeball. Not tears that wetted it, but rot. He grimaced; withdrew his hand, sickened.
Just to shut off the look on Papa's face he thrust his fingers under the corpse to heave it onto its belly. The body fluids had settled, and his underside was damp and sticky. Gritting his teeth he rolled the man's bulk onto its side, and let gravity pull it over. Now at least the old man didn't have to watch what followed.
Marty stood up. His hands stank. He baptized them liberally with the rest of the Scotch, to cancel the smell. The libation served another purpose: it removed the temptation of the drink. It would be too easy to become muzzy and lose focus on the problem. The enemy was here. It had to be dealt with; put away forever.
He began where he was, in the hall, digging his heels into the pieces of flesh that crawled around Whitehead's body, squashing their stolen life out as best he could. They made no sound, of course, which made the task simpler. They were just worms, he told himself, dumb slivers of mindless life. And it became yet easier as he went up and down the corridor grinding the meat into smears of yellow fat and brown muscle. The beasts succumbed without argument. He began to sweat, working out his revulsion on this human refuse, eyes darting everywhere to make sure he caught each wretched scrap. He felt a smile twitch at the corners of his mouth-now a low laugh, quite without humor, escaped. It was an easy decimation. He was a boy again, killing ants with his thumbs. One! Two! Three! Only these things were slower than the most laden ant, and he could stamp them down at a leisurely pace. All the power and wisdom of the European had come to this muck, and he-Marty Strauss-had been elected to play the God-game, and wipe it away. He had gained, at the last, a terrible authority.