A Feast Unknown (32 page)

Calibans proportions were also such that he did not look so massively constructed if he stood alone. But next to me, he seemed to be muscled with pythons. And I’m sure that we looked to Trish like a male African lion straining against an American mountain lion.

For what seemed minutes, we strained against each other. Both of us were bleeding from a dozen wounds and profusely from several. We had become weakened by the loss of blood and the energy expended. Our breathing was labored.

We strove. And then, slowly, oh, so slowly, but steadily, his arms were pushed back. His eyes widened slightly, and he breathed more harshly. The muscles of neck, shoulders, chest, and arms ridged. Blue veins pushed up the sweating bronze skin on his temples.

He bent forward and caught my nose in his teeth and bit. I jerked it out of his teeth, but it cost me a pain that seemed to run through my nose and split my brain. It shot down through the pit of my belly and down my legs, as if it were a streak of lightning. Part of it was torn off, and blood spurted.

Somehow, he jerked one hand loose and grabbed my testicles. It was done quickly, as savagely and powerfully as the swipe of a tiger’s paw. Another sear of pain struck, like a spear head, between my legs. I screamed then, and I reacted half-unconsciously. We both were standing there with each other’s ripped-off testicles in our hands.

Blood spurted from the torn skin and veins and arteries between his legs. I felt a warmth shooting down my leg but did not look down because that would have been fatal. There was not much time left before I became weak with shock and pain, and loss of blood.

I cast his testicles in his face and leaped. He dropped mine and tried to grab both my hands again, but this time I caught one of his hands and with the other made my own swipe. The penis, amazingly, was still huge and hard, though it was deflating. It
twisted like a spigot in my grip; he screamed; I yanked with all my strength; the flesh tore like a piece of silk; the member, spurting blood at one end and jism at the other, was in my hand and before his face.

I dropped it; he stepped forward as if to pick it up. Then I was on his back and had a full-Nelson on him. He fell forward and crashed upon his face. The wind went out of him.

Despite this, he still had enough vitality to resist my pressure. His neck muscles became as hard as wood. I could feel my own strength flapping away, like a sick bat into the night.

Yet, my penis was still hard and throbbing. It was up against his buttocks, which also felt as hard as oak.

I applied pressure with my hands against the back of his neck in a surge, knowing that if he could withstand that, he might yet win. Blackness was closing in on the edges of my consciousness.

His skin began to gray, even as the bones of his neck creaked like a ship’s mast against the force of the wind.

I heard, faintly, a cry of protest from Trish. Caliban grunted once as if he were trying to force something out from him. His neck bent, and then the bones snapped.

I spurted over him with only a vague awareness of it. The black rushed in as the fluid rushed out, and shortly thereafter I cared as little as Caliban about the world.

42

The awakening was partial and blurred. I felt some pain, though it was everywhere, but so little that I realized—later—that I was drugged. The lights overhead were high and hexagonal. Dimly, I knew I was in bed in the atom-bomb shelter.

“Clio,” I said but could not hear myself say it.

A head, framed in a bronze halo, blacked out the lights. It was smiling and weeping at the same time.

“Trish,” I said. “Where’s Clio?”

Another head, haloed in gold, appeared beside the bronze.

It leaned down and kissed me.

“Go back to sleep, dear.”

I obeyed.

When I awoke again, I was still drugged. The pain had increased, however. It was wired throughout my body but centered from beneath my penis.

I turned my head. I
was
in the shelter. It was eighty feet wide, sixty long, and thirty high. Portable screens divided it into
rooms, with the exception of a cement-block cube which housed the fuel cells and the converters. The air system was based on that used in manned space craft. There were supplies enough to last us six months. I had been against building it because we were so seldom in England. Clio had insisted that we construct it, and now I was glad that she was so stubborn.

I had many questions, but I asked first, in a weak voice, if she was all right. She told me to keep quiet and eat. She spoon fed me, and then I felt strong enough to put some questions to her. She began a lengthy account, during which, despite my intense curiosity, I fell asleep again.

On awakening the third time, I found Clio gone and Trish taking care of me. She said my wife had left the shelter to talk to the contractors about rebuilding Catstarn Hall.

I said, “I’m sorry, Trish. I tried to talk some sense into him. You heard me.”

“I heard,” she said. She shuddered. “I hope I never have to go through anything like that again if I live to ten thousand.”

“Have you been contacted by the Nine yet?” I said.

She started and then said, slowly, “Yes. In the first place, we would have had worldwide publicity about this if the Nine hadn’t pulled the strings of some highly placed puppets in the government. They clamped down on all reporters and police investigations, claimed security demanded it, and that was that. Oh, yes, the servants were told to be quiet, and threatened with severe penalties if they talked.”

“The bodies?”

“We took care of … you … set up the intravenous and the blood. I didn’t know Clio had had some medical training. Without her I’d have been lost. Then I drove like hell to Keswick and got Doctor Hengist, who is one of us. He’d already phoned to Whitehall before I got there. I’d phoned him I was coming. There were soldiers up here on the heels of the people from Cloamby and Greystoke.”

“All those bodies,” I said.

“The three of us worked like mules. We dragged every one of the bodies, except for those in the hall, of course, every one of the bodies outside and in here into a room in the castle and shut it up. That included dear old Jocko and Porky, too, but we’ll give them a decent burial later, out on the hill by that big boulder. They’d like that.”

There were tears in her eyes. For a moment, I did not realize that she was talking about the two old men.

“We washed off the blood as well as we could and covered up what wouldn’t come off. Some high muckamuck is supposed to fly up here and make a complete report for the government, but he hasn’t shown up yet. We’ll tell him that a gang of criminals tried to kidnap us so they could force the location of the gold, which is nonexistent, of course, from us. We’ll hint that the whole thing was a Communist plot. The only bodies for him to look at will be those in the crashed copter and in the ashes of the hall.”

“What about the cars and the men on the road?” I said. “And the landing at Penrith, and so on?”

“We don’t know anything about that.”

She hesitated and then said, “We found out—we weren’t officially notified—that one of the Nine is coming, too. One of Doc’s friends dropped in—he’s important enough to get
through the military cordon—and he told us we’re going to get a surprise visit.”

“What about it? Why so alarmed?”

Clio entered then. I said, “What’s so frightening about this visit from the Nine?”

“Who’s scared?” she said.

“I’ve lived
with
you long enough to know you,” I said. “Besides, I can smell the fear from both of you.”

“Oh, Jack!” Clio said. “We were going to wait until you were stronger before we told you! But there’s really not time now to put it off!”

Trish said, “Doc is alive!”

43

It was a shock, but I felt glad. Perhaps, now that he was alive, he would have felt the same sense of the madness drained off which I had experienced. The third time I awoke, even with the pain, I felt an exultation. This resulted, not from the inflooding of sensation but from the departure of a sensation. I
knew
that the physical linkage between my sexual behavior and killing was gone. It was as if I were a bottle uncorked and turned upside down and emptied of a black stinking decayed fluid.

The shock of being castrated by Caliban may have done it. And perhaps—I hoped it was so—the shock of what I had done to him had had a similar effect on him.

I would not be absolutely certain that I was back to normal until my testicles had regenerated. That should not take much longer than the month required after the ritual excision of one testis. And it should take much less time than the six months required to regrow my right leg below the knee. I had lost this when the RAF bomber of which I was pilot crashed
after a mission over Hamburg.

Trish said that Doc was sleeping on a bed behind a screen at the other end of the room. He would live. That is, until the Nine found out he was not dead.

“Doctor Hengist could not believe that Doc was still breathing. He said that he would have to die soon. It was just as well, because the Nine would not let him live. Neither Clio nor I knew that the Nine had decreed you two must fight to the death.”

Trish began to cry. She said, “It’s wrong—evil—to have to murder each other. And it’s hideously evil that the Nine can now say that Doc will have to be put out of his misery. Or that you two should have to fight again after you get back on your feet.”

“I was weak once,” I said. “I accepted the gift of immortality because the price seemed worth it. Not now. I intend to fight the Nine. But we have to be cunning until we are able to run.”

“That’s what Doc said,” Trish cried, “when he was able to talk for a short time. Listen! Don’t worry too much about losing the elixir. Doc has been working for thirty years on it. He couldn’t get any samples of the elixir, of course, because the Nine controls it so rigorously. But he figured out that our tissues must be saturated with the elixir. Two years ago he cut off his own fingers and managed to isolate the elements of the elixir. He still hasn’t been able to synthesize them correctly, but he says that it’s only a matter of a short time until he will be able to do so.”

“Is Caliban in good enough shape so that he could dispense with Hengist’s services?” I said. “Could you and Trish take care of him, with remote-control advice from me? When I can get out of bed and take a look at him, I’ll take over the active doctoring.”