stream of its will and, in moments, it would set him in motion.
Was this that merciful shock they said the zebra felt as the lion ate it alive? This suspension? A sense that tearing jaws were already at work on him, but still far away somehow?
The air swelled more strongly against the back of his neck, displaced by a nearing mass. Cold blue fingers sprouted before his eyes, interlocked across his brow, their grip like winter stone. An effortless, inhuman strength bent him back in his chair.
What he saw above him was the eerie loveliness of Susan Kravnik’s untouched face, above her shattered chest and limbs. Her hands took a grip on his cranium and wrenched his head, sending a complex, surrendering crack through his frame.
His body sagged, a long floppy thing, a Something Else he was anchored to. Harst’s eyes scanned for the last time this odd little office he’d ruled from for so many years. One dead hand gripped the back of his collar and dragged him out of the chair. His legs and arms hit the floor.
Out of the light she dragged him, then down the length of the morgue. Facing forward, with a click and a hitch like clockwork in her tread (he recognized that brutally fractured femur on the right) she hauled him one-armed behind her. He looked around him, watched the trusty old tables passing, gleaming him goodbye.
Then down through the utility plant, its big gloom starred with small red and white trouble lights, lit gauges. Harst, his torso hissing across the polished floor, saw around him other old friends, these elemental servitors of his temple who had furnished him with the heat, and the deep cold, and the light, and the voltage for his handy little bone-saws… .
Goodbye, then.
Down the black iron stairs and into real darkness. His heels dragged drumbeats down the crusty risers, as he sank into the echoes, into the big, dank breathing of this stony lung. This was the buried breath of life itself, of life’s relentless conspiracy against the universe.
They crossed concrete, its bucklings like a sine wave his limbs traced, a reading of the restless gravels, the fractured sediments, the snaking waters just beneath this earth… . Yet there was a node of light down here. He glimpsed it when a jolting cocked his head back far enough to see, slantingly, there along the farther wall, a low faint exhalation, a most delicate glow of the dimmest memory of green… .
When she had laid him by the aperture, he saw this nimbus, smelled its cold fetor, close at hand. It whispered to his nostrils of recycled generations, deep-layered ancestries of lives as remote and numberless as stars. The corpse, most awkwardly upon its shattered props and hinges, was kneeling at his side.
She gripped his clothing at the throat and tore it half asunder with one pull. Turning him, tilting him, gripping him, she tore his jacket and shirts to rags, and clean away. The thickest seams shrieked and yielded. As she worked, the unreal loveliness of her face made her seem to daydream, her gaze slanting up and away, inwardly following the landscape of death’s discoveries, still so new to her… .
The livid fingers snapped his belt, stripped off his trousers and briefs, the cloth surrendering like dead leaves. Tore the stout leather cuffs of his leg-brace free, the aluminum struts ringing on the concrete… .
Harst lay, his clothes in a torn, placental scatter around him. He was nude as a newborn, but a re delivery, to be popped back into the oven of birth. Lay while she worked herself upright again on her broken frame, the surviving one of her small breasts rocking with the labor on her half-crushed thorax.
Collecting the litter of his torn envelope, she wadded and flung it down the fissure, seeming, in these movements, nightmarishly maternal, gathering his garments before tucking him in… .
No utterance? No promise? No… warning?
There was a moment of her face close to his and he saw then, hovering far back within its remoteness, a
Was this that merciful shock they said the zebra felt as the lion ate it alive? This suspension? A sense that tearing jaws were already at work on him, but still far away somehow?
The air swelled more strongly against the back of his neck, displaced by a nearing mass. Cold blue fingers sprouted before his eyes, interlocked across his brow, their grip like winter stone. An effortless, inhuman strength bent him back in his chair.
What he saw above him was the eerie loveliness of Susan Kravnik’s untouched face, above her shattered chest and limbs. Her hands took a grip on his cranium and wrenched his head, sending a complex, surrendering crack through his frame.
His body sagged, a long floppy thing, a Something Else he was anchored to. Harst’s eyes scanned for the last time this odd little office he’d ruled from for so many years. One dead hand gripped the back of his collar and dragged him out of the chair. His legs and arms hit the floor.
Out of the light she dragged him, then down the length of the morgue. Facing forward, with a click and a hitch like clockwork in her tread (he recognized that brutally fractured femur on the right) she hauled him one-armed behind her. He looked around him, watched the trusty old tables passing, gleaming him goodbye.
Then down through the utility plant, its big gloom starred with small red and white trouble lights, lit gauges. Harst, his torso hissing across the polished floor, saw around him other old friends, these elemental servitors of his temple who had furnished him with the heat, and the deep cold, and the light, and the voltage for his handy little bone-saws… .
Goodbye, then.
Down the black iron stairs and into real darkness. His heels dragged drumbeats down the crusty risers, as he sank into the echoes, into the big, dank breathing of this stony lung. This was the buried breath of life itself, of life’s relentless conspiracy against the universe.
They crossed concrete, its bucklings like a sine wave his limbs traced, a reading of the restless gravels, the fractured sediments, the snaking waters just beneath this earth… . Yet there was a node of light down here. He glimpsed it when a jolting cocked his head back far enough to see, slantingly, there along the farther wall, a low faint exhalation, a most delicate glow of the dimmest memory of green… .
When she had laid him by the aperture, he saw this nimbus, smelled its cold fetor, close at hand. It whispered to his nostrils of recycled generations, deep-layered ancestries of lives as remote and numberless as stars. The corpse, most awkwardly upon its shattered props and hinges, was kneeling at his side.
She gripped his clothing at the throat and tore it half asunder with one pull. Turning him, tilting him, gripping him, she tore his jacket and shirts to rags, and clean away. The thickest seams shrieked and yielded. As she worked, the unreal loveliness of her face made her seem to daydream, her gaze slanting up and away, inwardly following the landscape of death’s discoveries, still so new to her… .
The livid fingers snapped his belt, stripped off his trousers and briefs, the cloth surrendering like dead leaves. Tore the stout leather cuffs of his leg-brace free, the aluminum struts ringing on the concrete… .
Harst lay, his clothes in a torn, placental scatter around him. He was nude as a newborn, but a re delivery, to be popped back into the oven of birth. Lay while she worked herself upright again on her broken frame, the surviving one of her small breasts rocking with the labor on her half-crushed thorax.
Collecting the litter of his torn envelope, she wadded and flung it down the fissure, seeming, in these movements, nightmarishly maternal, gathering his garments before tucking him in… .
No utterance? No promise? No… warning?
There was a moment of her face close to his and he saw then, hovering far back within its remoteness, a
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