“interaction target,” or something like that, and “socio-economic construct.” He used them constantly, as naturally as he breathed, a little like a lunatic using words with all normal sense drained out of them. Except, when he thought about it, when Wittaker used those words of his, Clumly would turn off his mind for a moment, annoyed. The prisoner’s word had a different effect: it had given a queer sort of jolt to his heart. Yes! Clumly had thought. There it was. Whatever it meant, spiritualistic trash for old ladies or the roaring secret of life and death, for a minute there Clumly had believed he wanted to know. Better watch that man, he thought. He came wide awake. What the devil had he meant by that? Psst! Interested in—
But all was still. All was well. The room silent and comfortable, haunted by no turbulence but the breath of his nostrils and the nostrils of his wife. The house silent. The street. Nevertheless, he had a terrible sense of things in motion, secret powers at work in the ancient plaster walls, devouring and building, and forces growing and restive in the trees, the very earth itself succinct with spirit. He had an image, culled from some old book, perhaps, or a sermon he’d heard—an image of his house taken over by owls and ravens and cormorants and bitterns, and strange shapes dancing in his cellar. And in his livingroom, thorns and brambles. He listened to his heartbeat going choof, kuh-choof, and he could not get to sleep. “Dear Lord,” he said, and fell silent.
Unbeknownst to Clumly or anyone else, three boys in the alley by the post office were letting the air out of people’s tires with an ice pick. Elsewhere—beside the Tonawanda—a woman was digging a grave for her illegitimate child three hours old. Jim Hume was chasing his cows back through the fence some hunter had cut. There was no moon.
II
When the Exorcist
Shall Go
to the House
of
the Patient …
His diademe of dyamans droppede adoun;
His weyes were a-wayward wroliche wrout;
Tynt was his tresor, tente, tour, & toun.
—Anon., Early 14th Century
1
He came to be known as the Sunlight Man. The public was never to learn what his name really was. As for his age, he was somewhere between his late thirties and middle forties, it seemed. His forehead was high and domelike, scarred, wrinkled, drawn, right up into the hairline, and above the arc of his balding, his hair exploded like chaotic sunbeams around an Eastern tomb. At times he had (one mask among many, for stiff as the fire-blasted face was, he could wrench it into an infinite number of shapes) an elfish, impenetrable grin which suggested madness, and indeed, from all evidence, the man was certainly insane. But to speak of him as mad was like sinking to empty rhetoric. In the depths where his turbulent broodings moved, the solemn judgments of psychiatry, sociology, and the like, however sound, were frail sticks beating a subterranean sea. His skin, where not scarred, was like a baby’s, though dirty, as were his clothes, and his straw-yellow beard, tangled and untrimmed, covered most of his face like a bush. He reeked as if he’d been feeding on the dead when he first came, and all the while he stayed he stank like a sewer. For all his elaborate show of indifference, for all his clowning, his play-acting, his sometimes arrogant, sometimes mysteriously gentle defiance and mocking of both prisoners and guards, he sweated prodigiously, throughout his stay, from what must have been nervousness. He talked a great deal, in a way that at times made you think of a childlike rabbi or sweet, mysteriously innocent old Russian priest and at other times reminded you of an elderly archeologist in his comfortable classroom, musing and harkening back. He would roll his eyes slowly, pressing the tips of his fingers together, or he would fix his listener with a gentle, transmogrifying eye and open his arms like a man in a heavy robe. He pretended to enjoy the official
But all was still. All was well. The room silent and comfortable, haunted by no turbulence but the breath of his nostrils and the nostrils of his wife. The house silent. The street. Nevertheless, he had a terrible sense of things in motion, secret powers at work in the ancient plaster walls, devouring and building, and forces growing and restive in the trees, the very earth itself succinct with spirit. He had an image, culled from some old book, perhaps, or a sermon he’d heard—an image of his house taken over by owls and ravens and cormorants and bitterns, and strange shapes dancing in his cellar. And in his livingroom, thorns and brambles. He listened to his heartbeat going choof, kuh-choof, and he could not get to sleep. “Dear Lord,” he said, and fell silent.
Unbeknownst to Clumly or anyone else, three boys in the alley by the post office were letting the air out of people’s tires with an ice pick. Elsewhere—beside the Tonawanda—a woman was digging a grave for her illegitimate child three hours old. Jim Hume was chasing his cows back through the fence some hunter had cut. There was no moon.
II
When the Exorcist
Shall Go
to the House
of
the Patient …
His diademe of dyamans droppede adoun;
His weyes were a-wayward wroliche wrout;
Tynt was his tresor, tente, tour, & toun.
—Anon., Early 14th Century
1
He came to be known as the Sunlight Man. The public was never to learn what his name really was. As for his age, he was somewhere between his late thirties and middle forties, it seemed. His forehead was high and domelike, scarred, wrinkled, drawn, right up into the hairline, and above the arc of his balding, his hair exploded like chaotic sunbeams around an Eastern tomb. At times he had (one mask among many, for stiff as the fire-blasted face was, he could wrench it into an infinite number of shapes) an elfish, impenetrable grin which suggested madness, and indeed, from all evidence, the man was certainly insane. But to speak of him as mad was like sinking to empty rhetoric. In the depths where his turbulent broodings moved, the solemn judgments of psychiatry, sociology, and the like, however sound, were frail sticks beating a subterranean sea. His skin, where not scarred, was like a baby’s, though dirty, as were his clothes, and his straw-yellow beard, tangled and untrimmed, covered most of his face like a bush. He reeked as if he’d been feeding on the dead when he first came, and all the while he stayed he stank like a sewer. For all his elaborate show of indifference, for all his clowning, his play-acting, his sometimes arrogant, sometimes mysteriously gentle defiance and mocking of both prisoners and guards, he sweated prodigiously, throughout his stay, from what must have been nervousness. He talked a great deal, in a way that at times made you think of a childlike rabbi or sweet, mysteriously innocent old Russian priest and at other times reminded you of an elderly archeologist in his comfortable classroom, musing and harkening back. He would roll his eyes slowly, pressing the tips of his fingers together, or he would fix his listener with a gentle, transmogrifying eye and open his arms like a man in a heavy robe. He pretended to enjoy the official
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