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"Nol Brute! Chewer of corpses!" he cried. "The dead are sacred! My dead are sacred!"
He had a scalpel in his hand then, and he slashed expertly at the tendons, the bunches of muscle on the straining shoulders, the soft belly, the ropes of the arteries.
Weeping, he dismembered the monster, limb by limb, and it bled and it bled, fouling the vehicle and the remains within it with its infernal animal juices, drippingand ru
Render fell across the pulverized hood, and it was soft and warm and dry. He wept upon it. "Don't cry," she said.
He was hanging onto her shoulder then, holding her tightly, there beside the black lake beneath the moon that was Wedgewood. A single candle flickered upon their table, She held the glass to his lips. "Please drink it." "Yes, give it to mel"
He gulped the wine that was all softness and lightness. It burned within him. He felt his strength returning. "I am ..."
"—Render, the Shaper," splashed the lake. "No!"
He turned and ran again, looking for the wreck. He had to go back, to return ... "You can't."
"I can!" he cried. "I can, if I try. ..." Yellow flames coiled through the thick air. Yellow serpents. They coiled, glowing, about bis ankles. Then through the murk, two-headed and towering, approached his Adversary.
Small stones rattled past him. An overpowering odor corkscrewed up his nose and into his head. "Shaperi" came the bellow from one head. "You have returned for the reckoning!" called the other. Render stared, remembering.
"No reckoning, Thaumiel," he said. "I beat you and I chained you for—Rothman, yes, it was Rothman—the cabalist." He traced a pentagram in the air. "Return to Qliphoth. I banish you." "This place be Qliphoth."
"... By Khamael, the angel of blood by the hosts of Seraphim, in the Name of Elohim Gebor, I bid you vanish!"
"Not this time," laughed both heads. It advanced.
Render backed slowly away, his feet bound by the yellow serpents. He could feel the chasm opening behind him. The world was a jigsaw puzzle coming apart. He could see the pieces separating. "Vanish!"The giant roared out its double-laugh.
Render stumbled.
"This way, lovel"
She stood within a small cave to his right.
He shook his head and backed toward the chasm.
Thaumiel reached out toward him.
Render toppled back over the edge.
"Charles!" she screamed, and the world shook itself apart with her wailing.
"Then Vemichtung," he answered as he fell. "I join you in darkness."
Everything came to an end.
"I want to see Doctor Charles Render.**
"I'm sorry, that is impossible."
"But I skip-jetted all the way here. just to thank him. I'm a new man! He changed my life!"
"I'm sorry. Mister Erikson. When you called this moming, I told you it was impossible."
"Sir, I'm Representative Erikson—and Render once did me a great service."
*Then you can do him one now. Go home."
"You can't talk to me that way!"
"I just did. Please leave. Maybe next year sometime ..."
"But a few words can do wonders...."
"Save them!"
"I-I'm sorry... "
Lovely as it was. pinked over with the morning—the slopping, steaming bowl of the sea—he knew that it had to end. Therefore ...
He descended the high tower stairway and he entered the courtyard. He crossed to the bower of roses and he looked down upon the pallet set in its midst.
"Good morrow, m'lord," he said.
"To you the same," said the knight, his blood mingling with the earth, the flowers, the grasses, flowed from his wound, sparkling over his armor, dripping from his fingertips.
"Naught hath healed?"
The knight shook his head.
"I empty. I wait.""Your waiting is near ended."
"What mean you?" He sat upright.
"The ship. It approacheth harbor."
The knight stood. He leaned his back against a mossy tree trunk. He stared at the huge, bearded servitor who continued to speak, words harsh with barbaric accents:
"It cometh like a dark swan before the wind— returning."
"Dark, say you? Dark?"
"The sails be black, Lord Tristram.*'
"You lie!"
"Do you wish to see? To see for yourself—Look then!"
He gestured, The earth quaked, the wall toppled. The dust swirled and settled. From where they stood they could see the ship moving into the harbor on the wings of the night.
"No! You lied!—See! They are white!"
The dawn danced upon the waters. The shadows fled from the ship's sails.
"No, you fool! Black! They must be!"
"White! White!—Isolde! You have kept faith. You have returned!"
He began ru
"Come back—Your wound! You are ill—Stop ..."
The sails were white beneath a sun that was a red button which the servitor reached quickly to touch.
Night fell.
COMES NOW THE POWER
I wrote this story on one of the blackest days in my memory, a day of extreme wretchedness accompanied by an unusual burst of writing activity—which I encouraged, to keep from thinking about what was bothering me. I sat down and did three short stories, one after the other without leaving the typewriter. They were "Divine Madness," this one and "But Not the Herald." I later put the other two into my collection The Doors of His Face. The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (Donhteday's title—not mine; I had suggested Hearts & Flov/ers) and I would have included this one there, too, save that I could not locate a copy at the time I assembled the manuscript. I ca
It was into the second year now, and it was maddening.
Everything which had worked before failed this time, Each day he tried to break it, and it resisted his every effort.
He snarled at his students, drove recklessly, blooded his knuckles against many walls. Nights, he lay awake cursing.
But there was no one to whom he could turn for help. His problem would have been non-existent to a psychiatrist. who doubtless would have attempted to treat him for something else.
So he went 'away that summer, spent a month at a resort: nothing. He experimented with several hallucinogenic drugs; again, nothing. He tried free-associating into a tape recorder, but all he got when he played it back was a headache.
To whom does the holder of a blocked power turn, within a society of normal people?
... To another of his own kind, if he can locate one.
Milt Rand had known four other persons like himself: his cousin Gary, now deceased; Walker Jackson, a Negropreacher who had retired to somewhere down South; Tatya Stefanovich, a dancer, currently somewhere behind the Iron Curtain; and Curtis Legge, who, unfortunately, was suffering a schizoid reaction, paranoid type, in a state institution for the criminally insane. Others he had brushed against in the night, but had never met and could not locate now.
There had been blockages before, but Milt had always worked his way through them inside of a month. This time was different and special, though. Upsets, discomforts, disturbances, can dam up a talent, block a power. As event which seals it off completely for over a year, however, is more than a mere disturbance, discomfort or upset.
The divorce had beaten hell out of him.
It is bad enough to know that somewhere someone is hating you; but to have known the very form of that hatred and to have proven ineffectual against it, to have known it as the hater held it for you, to have lived with it growing around you, this is more than distasteful circumstance. Whether you are offender or offended, when you are hated and you live within the circle of that hate, it takes a thing from you: it tears a piece of spirit from your soul, or, if you prefer, a way of thinking from your mind; it cuts and does not cauterize.