Night of Light

There was no ru

He screamed again and again, leaped to his feet, and, half out of his mind, drove his heel in hysterical fury and pain against the snake whose fangs had bitten into his cheek and whose tail merged into the cluster of nerves at the base of Mary’s spine, growing from it. It had been living coiled up in her skull, surely waiting for the time when John Carmody would open its bony nest. And it had released its deadly poison into the flesh of the man who had created it.

Not until the horrible thing had been crushed beneath his heel, smashed into a blob from which two long curved broken fangs still stuck out, did Carmody cease. Then he fell to the ground beside Mary, the tissue of his body seeming like dry wood that had burst into flame, and the terror of dissolving forever wrenching a choked cry from a throat that had seemed too full of a roaring fear to utter ever again...

There was one thought, the only shape in the chaos, the only cool thing in the fire. He had killed himself.

Somewhere in the moon-tinged purple mist a bell was ringing.

Far off, the referee was chanting slowly, “... five, six, seven...”

Somebody in the crowd—Mary? -- was screaming, “Get up, Joh

“Eight!”

John Carmody groaned, sat up and tried, in vain, to get on his feet.

“Nine!”

The bell was still ringing. Why should he get up when he was saved by the bell?

But then why hadn’t the ref quit counting?

What kind of a fight was this where the round wasn’t over even if the bell did ring?

Or was it a

“Gotta get up. Fight. Whale hell outa that big bastard,” he muttered.

“Nine” still hung in the air, as if it had yelled in the mist and was glowing there, faintly, violently phosphorescent.

Who was he fighting? he asked, and he rose, shakily, his eyes opening for the first time, his body crouching, his left fist sticking out, probing, his chin behind his left shoulder, his right hand held cocked, the right that had once won him the welterweight championship.

But there was no one there to fight. No referee. No crowd. No Mary screaming encouragement. Only himself. Somewhere, though, there was a bell ringing.

“Telephone,” he muttered, and looked around. The sound came from the massive granite public phone booth half a block away. Automatically, he began walking towards it, noticing at the same time what a headache he had and how stiff his muscles were and how his guts writhed uneasily within him, like sleepy snakes being awakened by the heat of the morning sun.

He lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said, at the same time wondering why he was answering, knowing that it couldn’t possibly be for him.

“John?” said Mary’s voice.

The receiver fell, swung, then it and the phone box erupted into many fragments as Carmody emptied a clip at them. Pieces of the red plastic struck him in the face, and blood, real blood, his, trickled down his cheeks and dripped off his chin and made warm cha

Stiffly, almost falling, he ran away, reloading his gun but saying over and over, “You stupid fool, you might have blinded yourself, killed yourself, stupid fool, stupid fool. To lose your head like that.”

Suddenly, he stopped, put the gun back into his pocket, took out a handkerchief, and wiped the blood off his face. The wounds, though many, were only surface-deep. And his face was no longer swollen.

Not until then did he perceive the full significance of the voice.

“Holy Mother of God!” he moaned.

Even in his distress, one part of him stood off, cool observer, and commented that he’d not sworn since childhood, but now he was on Dante’s Joy he seemed to be doing it at every turn. He had long ago given up using any blasphemous terms because, in the first place, almost everybody did, and he didn’t want to be like everybody, and, in the second place, if you blasphemed, you showed you believed in what you were blaspheming against, and he certainly didn’t believe.

The cool observer said, “Come on, John, get a grip on yourself. You’re letting this shake you. We don’t let anything shake us, do we?”

He tried to laugh, but succeeded only in bringing out a croak, and it sounded so horrible that he quit.

“But I killed her,” he whispered to himself.

“Twice,” he said.

He straightened up, put his hand in his pocket, gripped the gun’s butt tightly. “OK, OK, so she can come back to life, so I’m responsible for it, too. So what? She can be killed, again and again, and when the seven nights are up, then she’s done forever, and I’ll be rid of her forever. So, if I have to litter this city from one end to the other with her corpses, I’ll do it. Of course, there’ll be a tremendous stink afterwards”—he managed a feeble laugh—“but I won’t have to clean up the mess, let the garbage departments do that.”

He went back to the car but decided first to look at the old body of Mary.

There were huge pools of black blood on the pavement and bloody footprints leading off into the night, but the dead woman was gone.

“Well, why not?” he whispered to himself. “If your mind can produce flesh and blood and bone from the thin air, why can’t it even more easily repair blasted flesh and blood and bone and re-spark the dead body? After all, that’s the Principle of Least Resistance, the economy of Nature, Occam’s razor, the Law of Minimum Effort. No miracles in this, John, old partner. And everything’s taking place outside you, John. The i

He got into the car and drove on. Because the night seemed a little brighter, he drove a little faster. His mind, too, seemed to be coming out of the slowness induced in it by the recent shocks, and he was thinking with his former quick fluidity.

“I say, ‘Arise from the dead,’ and they arise,” he said, “like Jairus’ daughter. Talitha cumi. Am I not a god? If I could do this on some other planet, I would be a god. But here,” he added, chucking with some of his old vigor, “here I am just a bum, one of the boys, prowling the night with the other monsters.”

The avenue ahead of him drove straight as a kaser beam for two kilometers. Normally, he would have been able to see the Temple of Boonta at the end of the avenue. But now, despite the enormous globe of the moon, halfway up the sky, he could discern the structure only as a darker purple bulk looming in the lesser purple. The mass gave only a hint that it was formed of stone and not of shade, that it was itself the substance and not the shadow. And the hint was ominous.

Above it, the moon shone golden-purple in the center and silver-purple around the edges. So huge was it, it seemed to be falling, and this apparent down-hurtling was strengthened by the slight shifting of hue in the purple haze. When Carmody looked directly at the moon, it billowed. When he looked to one side, the moon shrank.

He decided to quit staring through the windshield at the uncertain globe. Now was no time to get lost in the monster, to feel utterly small and helpless beneath its overbearing bulk. It was dangerous to concentrate on anything in this darkness of threats. Everything seemed ready to swallow him up. He was a little mouse in the midst of giant purple cats, and he did not like the feeling.

He shook his head as if trying to waken himself, which was, he thought, exactly correct. Those few seconds of looking at the moon had almost put him to sleep. Or, at least, the brief time had sucked much awareness from him. The moon was a purple sponge that absorbed much—far too much. He was now only a half a kilometer from the Temple of Boonta, and he did not remember traveling the last kilometer and a half.