Watson, Ian - Novel 08 by The Gardens of Delight (v1.1) Page A

they left in the same fast scrimmage of shoulders and elbows
and straining thighs.
                 Jeremy
restrained the two from following. (He was restraining himself too, trying to
remember that he was The Witness.) “The old body will dissolve into the prima materia of flesh—a protoplasmic
jelly. When the shell opens again, it will host a new being.”
                 “A new Denise?”
                 “No.
She will have to hatch in Hell. Death leads to Hell. Hell leads to new life.”
Jeremy sounded convinced enough, but he was sweating. “Did she have much of a
devil in her?” he asked cautiously.
                 “Perhaps
a tiny little imp of the perverse,” said Muthoni sourly, remembering Denise’s
fantasies about psychotronic radiation—a biomysticism which she’d kept locked
away in a secret cupboard in herself. (But were those fantasies any longer?)
“She was gentle. Does she have to be tortured to make her devilish?”
                 “Everybody
has a devil in them—the old dragon of our dreams. Every time we go to sleep, it
marches, breathing fire. It’ll present its calling card in Hell.” He swallowed.
                 The
dragon of our dreams . . . The trouble was that
                 Jeremy
was right, thought Sean. The old archaic instincts, lusts and fears and rages
of the preconscious beast merely co-operated under duress with the new brain,
like a bridled dragon. Or should it be a bridalled one? What a mad marriage we are! His own rage and
anger rose up in him.
                 “We’ll
hunt that bloody unicorn! We’ll call it to account!”
                 “Don’t,”
said Jeremy weakly.
                 “If
the superbeing wants us to be instinctive, then we’ll damn well act
instinctively!”
                 Amid
the laburnums, magnolias, flame trees, they soon realized the extent of the
wood. However, snapped twigs and trampled flower sprays betrayed—to Muthoni’s
eyes—the path which the unicorn had taken. It had even halted to stick its
spear into the trunks and the turf. To cleanse itself?
                 “I
don’t think I really want to see it again, Sean.”
                 “We
must! We have to. Knossos said so! It’s our danger.”
                 Presently
the wood opened up into a maze of glades. Now rhododendrons and azaleas heaped
ruby, orange and salmon flowers around them, offering numerous avenues. One
turfway was torn and impaled, though, as if the unicorn was determined to mark
the trail. They walked now, certain that they would catch it. As he walked,
Sean sharpened the end of a stick he had picked up with a blade of stone,
whittling as they went along.
                 And
as he whittled, he felt himself being whittled too— to a point, pointing him in
one direction only, with no way back. Rage and obsession fogged his eyes,
blinding him to the beauty of the bloom-laden bushes. He smelled blood and
sweat instead of flowers—as though his nose had become something primitive, or
animal at least: the keen nose of a hound following one slight scent among a
million other stronger scents which didn’t drown that one scent out because it
ignored all the others that were swirling around it.
                 He
was a moth, drawn from a mile away by a single molecule of a particular
pheromone ... of death, which became its whole cosmos, its special beacon. He
was a shark, maddened by a single trace of blood in the whole salt-rich velvet
sea. He smelled fear: impaled on the
horn of the unicorn skewered into a sod of turf here, scratched across the
face of a bush there, and it became his own fear, pointing him.
                 He
tried to think. Was this how it once was—for the sub-man and the beast in the
back of my brain? Fear keened at him
from a vivid orange azalea, but he only saw the bush as