The Wounded Land

One: Daughter

WHEN Linden Avery heard the knock at her door, she groaned aloud. She was in a black mood, and did not want visitors. She wanted a cold shower and privacy-a chance to accustom herself to the deliberate austerity of her surroundings.

She had spent most of the afternoon of an unnaturally muggy day in the middle of spring moving herself into this apartment which the Hospital had rented for her, lugging her sparse wardrobe, her inadequate furniture, and a back-breaking series of cardboard boxes containing textbooks from her middle-aged sedan up the outside stairs to the second floor of the old wooden house. The house squatted among its weeds like a crippled toad, spavined by antiquity; and when she had unlocked her apartment for the first time, she had been greeted by three rooms and a bath with grubby yellow walls, floorboards covered only by chipped beige paint, an atmosphere of desuetude bordering on indignity-and by a piece of paper which must have been slipped under the door. Thick red lines like lipstick or fresh blood marked the paper-a large crude triangle with two words inside it:

JESUS SAVES

She had glared at the paper for a moment, then had crumpled it in her pocket. She had no use for offers of salvation. She wanted nothing she did not earn.

But the note, combined with the turgid air, the long exertion of heaving her belongings up the stairs, and the apartment itself, left her feeling capable of murder. The rooms reminded her of her parents' house. That was why she hated the apartment. But it was condign, and she chose to accept it. She both loathed and approved the aptness of her state. Its personal stringency was appropriate.

She was a doctor newly out of residency, and she had purposely sought a job which would bring her to a small half-rural, half-stagnant town like this one-a town like the one near which she had been born and her parents had died. Though she was only thirty, she felt old, unlovely, and severe. This was just; she had lived an unlovely and severe life. Her father had died when she was eight; her mother, when she was fifteen. After three empty years in a foster home, she had put herself through college, then medical school, internship, and residency, specializing in Family Practice. She had been lonely ever since she could remember, and her isolation had largely become ingrained. Her two or three love affairs had been like hygienic exercises or experiments in physiology; they had left her untouched. So now when she looked at herself, she saw severity, and the consequences of violence.

Hard work and clenched emotions had not hurt the gratuitous womanliness of her body, or dulled the essential lustre of her shoulder-length wheaten hair, or harmed the structural beauty of her face. Her driven and self-contained life had not changed the way her eyes misted and ran almost without provocation. But lines had already marked her face, leaving her with a perpetual frown of concentration above the bridge of her straight, delicate nose, and gullies like the implications of pain on either side of her mouth-a mouth which had originally been formed for something more generous than the life which had befallen her. And her voice had become flat, so that it sounded more like a diagnostic tool, a way of eliciting pertinent data, than a vehicle for communication.

But the way she had lived her life had given her something more than loneliness and a liability to black moods. It had taught her to believe in her own strength. She was a physician; she had held life and death in her hands, and had learned how to grasp them effectively. She trusted her ability to carry burdens. When she heard the knock at her door, she groaned aloud. But then she straightened her sweat-marked clothes as if she were tugging her emotions into order, and went to open the door.

She recognized the short, wry man who stood on the landing. He was Julius Berenford, Chief of Staff of the County Hospital.

He was the man who had hired her to run his Outpatient Clinic and Emergency Room. In a more metropolitan hospital, the hiring of a Family Practitioner for such a position would have been unusual. But the County Hospital served a region composed largely of farmers and hill people. This town, the county seat, had been calcifying steadily for twenty years. Dr. Berenford needed a generalist.

The top of his head was level with her eyes, and he was twice her age. The round bulge of his stomach belied the thinness of his limbs. He gave an impression of dyspeptic affection, as if he found human behaviour both incomprehensible and endearing. When he smiled below his white moustache, the pouches under his eyes tightened ironically.

“Dr. Avery,” he said, wheezing faintly after the exertion of the stairs.

“Dr. Berenford.” She wanted to protest the intrusion; so she stepped aside and said tightly, “Come in.”

He entered the apartment, glancing around as he wandered toward a chair. “You've already moved in,” he observed. “Good. I hope you had help getting everything up here.”

She took a chair near his, seated herself squarely, as if she were on duty. “No.” Who could she have asked for help?

Dr. Berenford started to expostulate. She stopped him with a gesture of dismissal. “No problem. I'm used to it.”

“Well, you shouldn't be.” His gaze on her was complex. “You just finished your residency at a highly respected hospital, and your work was excellent. The least you should be able to expect in life is help carrying your furniture upstairs.”

His tone was only half humorous; but she understood the seriousness behind it because the question had come up more than once during their interviews. He had asked repeatedly why someone with her credentials wanted a job in a poor county hospital. He had not accepted the glib answers she had prepared for him; eventually, she had been forced to offer him at least an approximation of the facts. “Both my parents died near a town like this,” she had said. “They were hardly middle-aged. If they'd been under the care of a good Family Practitioner, they would be alive today.”

This was both true and false, and it lay at the root of the ambivalence which made her feel old. If her mother's melanoma had been properly diagnosed in time, it could have been treated surgically with a ninety per cent chance of success. And if her father's depression had been observed by anybody with any knowledge or insight, his suicide might have been prevented. But the reverse was true as well; nothing could have saved her parents. They had died because they were simply too ineffectual to go on living. Whenever she thought about such things, she seemed to feel her bones growing more brittle by the hour.

She had come to this town because she wanted to try to help people like her parents. And because she wanted to prove that she could be effective under such circumstances-that she was not like her parents. And because she wanted to die.

When she did not speak, Dr. Berenford said, “However, that's neither here nor there.” The humorlessness of her silence appeared to discomfit him. “I'm glad you're here. Is there anything I can do? Help you get settled?”

Linden was about to refuse his offer, out of habit if not conviction, when she remembered the piece of paper in her pocket. On an impulse, she dug it out, handed it to him. “This came under the door. Maybe you ought to tell me what I'm getting into.”

He peered at the triangle and the writing, muttered, “Jesus saves,” under his breath, then sighed. “Occupational hazard. I've been going to church faithfully in this town for forty years. But since I'm a trained professional who earns a decent living, some of our good people-” He grimaced wryly, “-are always trying to convert me. Ignorance is the only form of innocence they understand.” He shrugged, returned the note to her. “This area has been depressed for a long time. After a while, depressed people do strange things. They try to turn depression into a virtue — they need something to make themselves feel less helpless. What they usually do around here is become evangelical. I'm afraid you're just going to have to put up with people who worry about your soul. Nobody gets much privacy in a small town.”

Linden nodded; but she hardly heard her visitor. She was trapped in a sudden memory of her mother, weeping with poignant self-pity. She had blamed Linden for her father's death-

With a scowl, she drove back the recollection. Her revulsion was so strong that she might have consented to having the memories physically cut out of her brain. But Dr. Berenford was watching her as if her abhorrence showed on her face. To avoid exposing herself, she pulled discipline over her features like a surgical mask. “What can I do for you, doctor?”

“Well, for one thing,” he said, forcing himself to sound genial in spite of her tone, “you can call me Julius. I'm going to call you Linden, so you might as well.”

She acquiesced with a shrug. “Julius.”

“Linden.” He smiled; but his smile did not soften his discomfort. After a moment, he said hurriedly, as if he were trying to outrun the difficulty of his purpose, “Actually, I came over for two reasons. Of course, I wanted to welcome you to town. But I could have done that later. The truth is, I want to put you to work.”

Work? she thought. The word sparked an involuntary protest. I just got here. I'm tired and angry, and I don't know how I'm going to stand this apartment. Carefully, she said, “It's Friday. I'm not supposed to start until Monday.”

“This doesn't have anything to do with the Hospital. It should, but it doesn't.” His gaze brushed her face like a touch of need. “It's a personal favour. I'm in over my head. I've spent so many years getting involved in the lives of my patients that I can't seem to make objective decisions anymore. Or maybe I'm just out of date-don't have enough medical knowledge. Seems to me that what I need is a second opinion.”

“About what?” she asked, striving to sound noncommittal. But she was groaning inwardly. She already knew that she would attempt to provide whatever he asked of her. He was appealing to a part of her that had never learned how to refuse.

He frowned sourly. “Unfortunately, I can't tell you. It's in confidence.”

“Oh, come on.” She was in no mood for guessing games. “I took the same oath you did.”

“I know.” He raised his hands as if to ward off her vexation. “I know. But it isn't exactly that kind of confidence.”

She stared at him, momentarily nonplussed. Wasn't he talking about a medical problem? “This sounds like it's going to be quite a favour.”

“Could be. That's up to you.” Before she could muster the words to ask him what he was talking about, Dr. Berenford said abruptly, “Have you ever heard of Thomas Covenant? He writes novels.”

She felt him watching her while she groped mentally. But she had no way of following his line of thought. She had not read a novel since she had finished her literature requirement in college. She had had so little time. Striving for detachment, she shook her head.

“He lives around here,” the doctor said. “Has a house outside town on an old property called Haven Farm. You turn right on Main.” He gestured vaguely toward the intersection. “Go through the middle of town, and about two miles later you'll come to it. On the right. He's a leper.”

At the word leper, her mind bifurcated. This was the result of her training-dedication which had made her a physician without resolving her attitude toward herself. She murmured inwardly, Hansen's disease, and began reviewing information.

Mycobacterium lepra. Leprosy. It progressed by killing nerve tissue, typically in the extremities and in the cornea of the eye. In most cases, the disease could be arrested by means of a comprehensive treatment program pivoting around DDS: diamino-diphenyl-sulfone. If not arrested, the degeneration could produce muscular atrophy and deformation, changes in skin pigmentation, blindness. It also left the victim subject to a host of secondary afflictions, the most common of which was infection that destroyed other tissues, leaving the victim with the appearance-and consequences-of having been eaten alive. Incidence was extremely rare; leprosy was not contagious in any usual sense. Perhaps the only statistically significant way to contract it was to suffer prolonged exposure as a child in the tropics under crowded and unsanitary living conditions.

But while one part of her brain unwound its skein of knowledge, another was tangled in questions and emotions. A leper? Here? Why tell me? She was torn between visceral distaste and empathy. The disease itself attracted and repelled her because it was incurable-as immedicable as death. She had to take a deep breath before she could ask, “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Well- ” He was studying her as if he thought there were indeed something she could do about it. “Nothing. That isn't why I brought it up.” Abruptly, he got to his feet, began measuring out his unease on the chipped floorboards. Though he was not heavy, they squeaked vaguely under him. “He was diagnosed early enough-only lost two fingers. One of our better lab technicians caught it, right here at County Hospital. He's been stable for more than nine years now. The only reason I told you is to find out if you're-squeamish. About lepers.” He spoke with a twisted expression. “I used to be. But I've had time to get over it.”

He did not give her a chance to reply. He went on as if he were confessing. “I've reached the point now where I don't think of him as leprosy personified. But I never forget he's a leper.” He was talking about something for which he had not been able to forgive himself. “Part of that's his fault,” he said defensively. “He never forgets, either. He doesn't think of himself as Thomas Covenant the writer-the man-the human being. He thinks of himself as Thomas Covenant the leper.”

When she continued to stare at him flatly, he dropped his gaze. “But that's not the point. The point is, would it bother you to go see him?”

“No,” she said severely; but her severity was for herself rather than for him. I'm a doctor. Sick people are my business. “But I still don't understand why you want me to go out there.”

The pouches under his eyes shook as if he were pleading with her. “I can't tell you.”

“You can't tell me.” The quietness of her tone belied the blackness of her mood. “What good do you think I can possibly do if I don't even know why I'm talking to him?”

“You could get him to tell you.” Dr. Berenford's voice sounded like the misery of an ineffectual old man. “That's what I want. I want him to accept you-tell you what's going on himself. So I won't have to break any promises.”

“Let me get this straight,” She made no more effort to conceal her anger. “You want me to go out there, and ask him outright to tell me his secrets. A total stranger arrives at his door, and wants to know what's bothering him-for no other reason than because Dr. Berenford would like a second opinion. I'll be lucky if he doesn't have me arrested for trespassing.”

For a moment, the doctor faced her sarcasm and indignation. Then he sighed. “I know. He's like that-he'd never tell you. He's been locked into himself so long-”The next instant, his voice became sharp with pain. “But I think he's wrong.”

“Then tell me what it is,” insisted Linden.

His mouth opened and shut; his hands made supplicating gestures. But then he recovered himself. "No. That's backward. First

I need to know which one of us is wrong. I owe him that. Mrs. Roman is no help. This is a medical decision. But I can't make it. I've tried, and I can't."

The simplicity with which he admitted his inadequacy snared her. She was tired, dirty, and bitter, and her mind searched for an escape. But his need for assistance struck too close to the driving compulsions of her Me. Her hands were knotted together like certainty. After a moment, she looked up at him. His features had sagged as if the muscles were exhausted by the weight of his mortality. In her flat professional voice, she said, “Give me some excuse I can use to go out there.”

She could hardly bear the sight of his relief. “That I can do,” he said with a show of briskness. Reaching into a jacket pocket, he pulled out a paperback and handed it to her. The lettering across the drab cover said:

Or I Will Sell My Soul for Guilt

a novel by

THOMAS COVENANT

“Ask for his autograph.” The older man had regained his sense of irony. “Try to get him talking. If you can get inside his defences, something will happen.”

Silently, she cursed herself. She knew nothing about novels, had never learned how to talk to strangers about anything except their symptoms. Anticipations of embarrassment filled her like shame. But she had been mortifying herself for so long that she had no respect left for the parts of her which could still feel shame. “After I see him,” she said dully, “I'll want to talk to you. I don't have a phone yet. Where do you live?”

Her acceptance restored his earlier manner; he became wry and solicitous again. He gave her directions to his house, repeated his offer of help, thanked her for her willingness to involve herself in Thomas Covenant's affairs. When he left, she felt dimly astonished that he did not appear to resent the need which had forced him to display his futility in front of her.

And yet the sound of his feet descending the stairs gave her a sense of abandonment, as if she had been left to carry alone a burden that she would never be able to understand.

Foreboding nagged at her, but she ignored it. She had no acceptable alternatives. She sat where she was for a moment, glaring around the blind yellow walls, then went to take a shower.

After she had washed away as much of the blackness as she could reach with soap and water, she donned a dull grey dress that had the effect of minimizing her femininity, then spent a few minutes checking the contents of her medical bag. They always seemed insufficient-there were so many things she might conceivably need which she could not carry with her-and now they appeared to be a particularly improvident arsenal against the unknown. But she knew from experience that she would have felt naked without her bag. With a sigh of fatigue, she locked the apartment and went down the stairs to her car.

Driving slowly to give herself time to learn landmarks, she followed Dr. Berenford's directions and soon found herself moving through the centre of town.

The late afternoon sun and the thickness of the air made the buildings look as if they were sweating. The businesses seemed to lean away from the hot sidewalks, as if they had forgotten the enthusiasm, even the accessibility, that they needed to survive; and the courthouse, with its dull white marble and its roof supported by stone giant heads atop ersatz Greek columns, looked altogether unequal to its responsibilities.

The sidewalks were relatively busy-people were going home from work-but one small group in front of the courthouse caught Linden's eye. A faded woman with three small children stood on the steps. She wore a shapeless shift which appeared to have been made from burlap; and the children were dressed in gunny sacks. Her face was grey and blank, as if she were inured by poverty and weariness to the emaciation of her children. All four of them held short wooden sticks bearing crude signs,”

The signs were marked with red triangles. Inside each triangle was written one word: REPENT.

The woman and her children ignored the passersby. They stood dumbly on the steps as if they were engaged in a penance which stupefied them. Linden's heart ached uselessly at the sight of their moral and physical penury. There was nothing she could do for such people.

Three minutes later, she was outside the municipal limits.

There the road began to run through tilled valleys, between wooded hills. Beyond the town, the unseasonable heat and humidity were kinder to what they touched; they made the air lambent, so that it lay like immanence across the new crops, up the tangled weed-and-grass hillsides, among the budding trees; and her mood lifted at the way the landscape glowed in the approach of evening. She had spent so much of her life in cities. She continued to drive slowly; she wanted to savour the faint hope that she had found something she would be able to enjoy.

After a couple of miles, she came to a wide field on her right, thickly overgrown with milkweed and wild mustard. Across the field, a quarter of a mile away against a wall of trees, stood a white frame house. Two or three other houses bordered the field, closer to the highway; but the white one drew her attention as if it were the only habitable structure in the area.

A dirt road ran into the field. Branches went to the other houses, but the main track led straight to the white one.

Beside the entrance stood a wooden sign. Despite faded paint and several old splintered holes like bullet scars, the lettering was still legible: Haven Farm.

Gripping her courage, Linden turned onto the dirt road.

Without warning, the periphery of her gaze caught a flick of ochre. A robed figure stood beside the sign.

What-?

He stood there as if he had just appeared out of the air. An instant ago, she had seen nothing except the sign.

Taken by surprise, she instinctively twitched the wheel, trying to evade a hazard she had already passed. At once, she righted the sedan, stepped on the brakes. Her eyes jumped to the rearview mirror.

She saw an old man in an ochre robe. He was tall and lean, barefoot, dirty. His long grey beard and thin hair flared about his head like frenzy.

He took one step into the road toward her, then clutched at his chest convulsively, and collapsed.

She barked a warning, though there was no one to hear it. Moving with a celerity that felt like slow-motion, she cut the ignition, grabbed for her bag, pushed open the door. Apprehension roiled in her, fear of death, of failure; but her training controlled it. In a moment, she was at the old man's side.

He looked strangely out of place in the road, out of time in the world she knew. The robe was his only garment; it looked as if he had been living in it for years. His features were sharp, made fierce by destitution or fanaticism. The declining sunlight collared his withered skin like dead gold.

He was not breathing.

Her discipline made her move. She knelt beside him, felt for his pulse. But within her she wailed. He bore a sickening resemblance to her father. If her father had lived to become old and mad, he might have been this stricken, preterite figure.

He had no pulse.

He revolted her. Her father had committed suicide. People who killed themselves deserved to die. The old man's appearance brought back memories of her own screaming which echoed in her ears as if it could never be silenced.

But he was dying. Already, his muscles had slackened, relaxing the pain of his seizure. And she was a doctor.

With the sureness of hard training, self-abnegation which mastered revulsion, her hands snapped open her bag. She took out her penlight, checked his pupils.

They were equal and reactive.

It was still possible to save him.

Quickly, she adjusted his head, tilted it back to clear his throat. Then she folded her hands together over his sternum, leaned her weight on her arms, and began to apply CPR.

The rhythm of cardiopulmonary resuscitation was so deeply ingrained in her that she followed it automatically: fifteen firm heels of her hands to his sternum; then two deep exhalations into his mouth, blocking his nose as she did so. But his mouth was foul, cankerous, and vile, as if his teeth were rotten, or his palate gangrenous. She almost faltered. Instantly, her revulsion became an acute physical nausea, as if she were tasting the exudation of a boil. But she was a doctor; this was her work.

Fifteen. Two.

Fifteen. Two.

She did not permit herself to miss a beat.

But fear surged through her nausea. Exhaustion. Failure. CPR was so demanding that no one person could sustain it alone for more than a few minutes. If he did not come back to life soon-Breathe, damn you, she muttered along the beats. Fifteen. Two. Damn you. Breathe. There was still no pulse.

Her own breathing became ragged; giddiness welled up in her like a tide of darkness. The air seemed to resist her lungs. Heat and the approach of sunset dimmed the old man. He had lost all muscle-tone, all appearance of life.

Breathe!

Abruptly, she stopped her rhythm, snatched at her bag. Her arms trembled; she clenched them still as she broke open a disposable syringe, a vial of adrenaline, a cardiac needle. Fighting for steadiness, she filled the syringe, cleared out the air. In spite of her urgency, she took a moment to swab clean a patch of the man's thin chest with alcohol. Then she slid the needle delicately past his ribs, injected adrenaline into his heart.

Setting aside the syringe, she risked pounding her fist once against his sternum. But the blow had no effect.

Cursing, she resumed her CPR.

She needed help. But she could not do anything about that. If she stopped to take him into town, or to go in search of a phone, he would die. Yet if she exhausted herself alone he would still die.

Breathe!

He did not breathe. His heart did not beat. His mouth was as fetid as the maw of a corpse. The whole ordeal was hopeless.

She did not relent.

All the blackness of her life was in her. She had spent too many years teaching herself to be effective against death; she could not surrender now. She had been too young, weak, and ignorant to save her father, could not have saved her mother; now that she knew what to do and could do it, she would never quit, never falsify her life by quitting.

Dark motes began to dance across her vision; the air swarmed with moisture and inadequacy. Her arms felt leaden; her lungs cried out every time she forced breath down the old man's throat. He lay inert. Tears of rage and need ran hotly down her face. Yet she did not relent.

She was still half conscious when a tremor ran through him, and he took a hoarse gulp of air.

At once, her will snapped. Blood rushed to her head. She did not feel herself fall away to the side.

When she regained enough self-command to raise her head, her sight was a smear of pain and her face was slick with sweat. The old man was standing over her. His eyes were on her; the intense blue of his gaze held her like a hand of compassion. He looked impossibly tall and healthy; his very posture seemed to deny that he had ever been close to death. Gently, he reached down to her, drew her to her feet. As he put his arms around her, she slumped against him, unable to resist his embrace.

“Ah, my daughter, do not fear.”

His voice was husky with regret and tenderness.

“You will not fail, however he may assail you. There is also love in the world.”

Then he released her, stepped back. His eyes became commandments.

“Be true.”

She watched him dumbly as he turned, walked away from her into the field. Milkweed and wild mustard whipped against his robe for a moment. She could hardly see him through the blurring of her vision. A musky breeze stirred his hair, made it a nimbus around his head as the sun began to set. Then he faded into the humidity, and was gone.

She wanted to call out after him, but the memory of his eyes stopped her.

Be true.

Deep in her chest, her heart began to tremble.

Two: Something Broken

AFTER a moment, the trembling spread to her limbs. The surface of her skin felt fiery, as if the rays of the sun were concentrated on her. The muscles of her abdomen knotted.

The old man had vanished. He had put his arms around her as if he had the right, and then he had vanished.

She feared that her guts were going to rebel.

But then her gaze lurched toward the dirt where the old man had lain. There she saw the used hypodermic, the sterile wrappings, the empty vial. The dust bore the faint imprint of a body.

A shudder ran through her, and she began to relax.

So he had been real He had only appeared to vanish. Her eyes had tricked her.

She scanned the area for him. He should not be walking around; he needed care, observation, until his condition stabilized. But she saw no sign of him. Fighting an odd reluctance, she waded out into the wild mustard after him. But when she reached the place where her eyes had lost him, she found nothing.

Baffled, she returned to the roadway. She did not like to give him up; but she appeared to have no choice in the matter. Muttering under her breath, she went to retrieve her bag.

The debris of her treatment she stuffed into one of the plastic specimen sacks she carried. Then she returned to her car. As she slid into the front seat, she gripped the steering wheel with both hands to steady herself on its hard actuality.

She did not remember why she had come to Haven Farm until the book on the seat beside her caught her attention.

Oh, damn!

She felt intensely unready to confront Thomas Covenant.

For a moment, she considered simply abandoning the favour she had promised Dr. Berenford. She started the engine, began to turn the wheel. But the exigency of the old man's eyes held her. That blue would not approve the breaking of promises. And she had saved him. She had set a precedent for herself which was more important than any question of difficulty or mortification. When she put the sedan into motion, she sent it straight down the dirt road toward the white frame house, with the dust and the sunset at her back.

The light cast a tinge of red over the house, as if it were in the process of being transformed into something else. As she parked her car, she had to fight another surge of reluctance. She did not want to have anything to do with Thomas Covenant-not because he was a leper, but because he was something unknown and fierce, something so extravagant that even Dr. Berenford was afraid of him.

But she had already made her commitment. Picking up the book, she left her car and went to the front door of the house, hoping to be able to finish this task before the light failed.

She spent a moment straightening her hair. Then she knocked.

The house was silent.

Her shoulders throbbed with the consequences of strain. Fatigue and embarrassment made her arms feel too heavy to lift. She had to grit her teeth to make herself knock again.

Abruptly, she heard the sound of feet. They came stamping through the house toward her. She could hear anger in them.

The front door was snatched open, and a man confronted her, a lean figure in old jeans and a T-shirt, a few inches taller than herself. About forty years old. He had an intense face. His mouth was as strict as a stone tablet; his cheeks were lined with difficulties; his eyes were like embers, capable of fire. His hair above his forehead was raddled with grey, as if he had been aged more by his thoughts than by time.

He was exhausted. Almost automatically, she noted the redness of his orbs and eyelids, the pallor of his skin, the febrile rawness of his movements. He was either ill or under extreme stress.

She opened her mouth to speak, got no further. He registered her presence for a second, then snapped, “Goddamn it, if I wanted visitors I'd post a sign!” and clapped the door shut in her face.

She blinked after him momentarily while darkness gathered at her back, and her uncertainty turned to anger. Then she hit the door so hard that the wood rattled in its frame.

He came back almost at once. His voice hurled acid at her. “Maybe you don't speak English. I-”

She met his glare with a mordant smile. “Aren't you supposed to ring a bell, or something?”

That stopped him. His eyes narrowed as he reconsidered her. When he spoke again, his words came more slowly, as if he were trying to measure the danger she represented.

“If you know that, you don't need any warning.”

She nodded. “My name is Linden Avery. I'm a doctor.”

“And you're not afraid of lepers.”

His sarcasm was as heavy as a bludgeon; but she matched it. “If I were afraid of sick people, I wouldn't be a doctor,”

His glower expressed his disbelief. But he said curtly, “I don't need a doctor,” and started to swing the door shut again.

“So actually,” she rasped, “you're the one who's afraid.”

His face darkened. Enunciating each word as if it were a dagger, he said, “What do you want, doctor?”

To her dismay, his controlled vehemence made her falter. For the second time in the course of the sunset, she was held by eyes that were too potent for her. His gaze shamed her. The book-her excuse for being there-was in her hand; but her hand was behind her back. She could not tell the lie Dr. Berenford had suggested to her. And she had no other answer. She could see vividly that Covenant needed help. Yet if he did not ask for it, what recourse did she have?

But then a leap of intuition crossed her mind. Speaking before she could question herself, she said, “That old man told me to 'Be true.'”

His reaction startled her. Surprise and fear flared in his eyes. His shoulders winced; his jaw dropped. Then abruptly he had closed the door behind him. He stood before her with his face thrust hotly forward. “What old man?”

She met his fire squarely. “He was out at the end of your driveway-an old man in an ochre robe. As soon as I saw him, he went into cardiac arrest.” For an instant, a cold hand of doubt touched her heart. He had recovered too easily. Had he staged the whole situation? Impossible! His heart had stopped. “I had to work like hell to save him. Then he just walked away.”

Covenant's belligerence collapsed. His gaze clung to her as if he were drowning. His hands gaped in front of him. For the first time, she observed that the last two fingers of his right hand were missing. He wore a wedding band of white gold on what had once been the middle finger of that hand. His voice was a scraping of pain in his throat. “He's gone?”

“Yes.”

“An old man in an ochre robe?”

“Yes.”

“You saved him?” His features were fading into night as the sun dropped below the horizon.

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“I already told you.” Her uncertainty made her impatient. “He said, 'Be true.'”

“He said that to you?”

“Yes!”

Covenant's eyes left her face. “Hellfire.” He sagged as if he carried a weight of cruelty on his back. “Have mercy on me. I can't bear it.” Turning, he slumped back to the door, opened it. But there he stopped.

“Why you?”

Then he had re-entered his house, the door was closed, and. Linden, stood alone in the evening as if she had been bereft.

She did not move until the need to do something, take some kind of action to restore the familiarity of her world, impelled her to her car. Sitting behind the wheel as if she were stunned, she tried to think.

Why you?

What kind of question was that? She was a doctor, and the old man had needed help. It was that simple. What was Covenant talking about?

But Be true was not all the old man had said. He had also said, You will not fail, however he may assail you.

He? Was that a reference to Covenant? Was the old man trying to warn her of something? Or did it imply some other kind of connection between him and the writer? What did they have to do with each other? Or with her?

Nobody could fake cardiac arrest!

She took a harsh grip on her scrambled thoughts. The whole; situation made no sense. All she could say for certain was that Covenant had recognized her description of the old man. And Covenant's mental stability was clearly open to question.

Clenching the wheel, she started her car, backed up in order to turn around. She was convinced now that Covenant's problem was serious; but that conviction only made her more angry at Dr. Berenford's refusal to tell her what the problem was. The dirt road was obscure in the twilight; she slapped on her headlights as she put the sedan in gear to complete her turn.

A scream like a mouthful of broken glass snatched her to a halt. It pierced the mutter of her sedan. Slivers of sound cut at her hearing. A woman screaming in agony or madness.

It had come from Covenant's house.

In an instant, Linden stood beside the car, waiting for the cry to-be repeated.

She heard nothing. Lights shone from some of the windows; but no shadows moved. No sounds of violence betrayed the night. She I stood poised to race to the house. Her ears searched the air-. But the dark held its breath. The scream did not come again.

For a long moment, indecision held her. Confront Covenant-demand answers? Or leave? She had met his hostility. What right did she have-? Every right, if he were torturing some woman. But how could she be sure? Dr. Berenford had called it a medical problem.

Dr. Berenford-

Spitting curses, she jumped back into her car, stamped down on the accelerator, and sped away in a rattle of dust and gravel.

Two minutes later, she was back in town. But then she had to slow down so that she could watch for street signs.

When she arrived at the Chief of Staff’s house, all she could see was an outline against the night sky. Its front frowned as if this, too, were a place where secrets were kept. But she did not hesitate. Striding up the steps, she pounded on the front door.

That door led to a screened veranda like a neutral zone between the dwelling itself and the outside world. As she knocked, the porch lights came on. Dr. Berenford opened the inner door, closed it behind him, then crossed the veranda to admit her.

He smiled a welcome; but his eyes evaded hers as if he had reason to be frightened; and she could see his pulse beating in the pouches below their sockets.

“Dr. Berenford,” she said grimly.

“Please.” He made a gesture of appeal. “Julius.”

“Dr. Berenford.” She was not sure that she wanted this man's friendship. “Who is she?”

His gaze flinched. “She?”

“The woman who screamed.”

He seemed unable to lift his eyes to her face. In a tired voice, he murmured, “He didn't tell you anything.”

“No.”

Dr. Berenford considered for a moment, then motioned her toward two rocking chairs at one end of the veranda. “Please sit down. It's cooler out here.” His attention seemed to wander. “This heat wave can't last forever.”

“Doctor!” she lashed at him. “He's torturing that woman.”

“No, he isn't.” Suddenly, the older man was angry. “You get that out of your head right now. He's doing everything he can for her. Whatever's torturing her, it isn't him.”

Linden held his glare, measuring his candour until she felt sure that he was Thomas Covenant's friend, whether or not he was hers. Then she said flatly, “Tell me.”

By degrees, his expression recovered its habitual irony. “Won't you sit down?”

Brusquely, she moved down the porch, seated herself to one of the rockers. At once, he turned off the lights, and darkness came pouring through the screens. “I think better in the dark.” Before her eyes adjusted, she heard the chair beside her squeak as he sat down.

For a time, the only sounds were the soft protest of his chair and the stridulation of the crickets. Then he said abruptly, “Some things I'm not going to tell you. Some I can't-some I won't. But I got you into this. I owe you a few answers.”

After that, he spoke like the voice of the night; and she listened in a state of suspension-half concentrating, as she would have concentrated on a patient describing symptoms, half musing on the image of the gaunt vivid man who had said with such astonishment and pain, Why you?

"Eleven years ago, Thomas Covenant was a writer with one bestseller, a lovely wife named Joan, and an infant son, Roger. He hates that novel-calls it inane-but his wife and son he still loves. Or thinks he does. Personally, I doubt it. He's an intensely loyal man. What he calls love, I call being loyal to his own pain.

“Eleven years ago, an infection on his right hand turned out to be leprosy, and those two fingers were amputated. He was sent down to the leprosarium in Louisiana, and Joan divorced him. To protect Roger from being raised to close proximity to a leper. The way Covenant tells it, her decision was perfectly reasonable. A mother's natural concern for a child. I think he's rationalizing. I think she was just afraid. I think the idea of what Hansen's disease could do to him-not to mention to her and Roger-just terrified her. She ran away.”

His tone conveyed a shrug, “But I'm just guessing. The fact is, she divorced him, and he didn't contest it. After a few months, his illness was arrested, and he came back to Haven Farm. Alone. That was not a good time for him. All his neighbours moved away. Some people in this fair town tried to force him to leave. He was to the Hospital a couple times, and the second time he was half dead-” Dr. Berenford seemed to wince at the memory. "His disease was active again. We sent him back to the leprosarium.

“When he came home again, everything was different. He seemed to have recovered his sanity. For ten years now he's been stable. A little grim, maybe-not exactly what you might call diffident-but accessible, reasonable, compassionate. Every year he foots the bill for several of our indigent patients.”

The older man sighed. “You know, it's strange. The same people who try to convert me seem to think he needs saving, too. He's a leper who doesn't go to church, and he's got money. Some of our evangelicals consider that an insult to the Almighty.”

The professional part of Linden absorbed the facts Dr. Berenford gave, and discounted his subjective reactions. But her musing raised Covenant's visage before her in the darkness. Gradually, that needy face became more real to her. She saw the lines of loneliness and gall on his mien. She responded to the strictness of his countenance as if she had recognized a comrade. After all, she was familiar with bitterness, loss, isolation.

But the doctor's speech also filled her with questions. She wanted to know where Covenant had learned his stability. What had changed him? Where had he found an answer potent enough to preserve him against the poverty of his life? And what had happened recently to take it away from him?

“Since then,” the Chief of Staff continued, "he's published seven novels, and that's where you can really see the difference. Oh, he's mentioned something about three or four other manuscripts, but I don't know anything about them. The point is, if you didn't know better, you wouldn't be able to believe his bestseller and the other seven were written by the same man. He's right about the first one. It's fluff-self-indulgent melodrama. But the others-

“If you had a chance to read Or I Will Sell My Soul for Guilt, you'd find him arguing that innocence is a wonderful thing except for the fact that it's impotent. Guilt is power. All effective people are guilty because the use of power is guilt, and only guilty people can be effective. Effective for good, mind you. Only the damned can be saved.”

Linden was squirming. She understood at least one kind of relationship between guilt and effectiveness. She had committed murder, and had become a doctor because she had committed murder. She knew that people like herself were driven to power by the need to assoil their guilt. But she had found nothing-no anodyne or restitution-to verify the claim that the damned could be saved. Perhaps Covenant had fooled Dr. Berenford: perhaps he was crazy, a madman wearing a clever mask of stability. Or perhaps he knew something she did not.

Something she needed.

That thought gave her a pang of fear. She was suddenly conscious of the night, the rungs of the rocker pressing against her back, the crickets. She ached to retreat from the necessity of confronting Covenant again. Possibilities of harm crowded the darkness. But she needed to understand her peril. When Dr. Berenford stopped, she bore the silence as long as she could, then, faintly, repeated her initial question.

“Who is she?”

The doctor sighed. His chair left a few splinters of agitation in the air. But he became completely still before he said, “His ex-wife. Joan.”

Linden flinched. That piece of information gave a world of explanation to Covenant's haggard, febrile appearance. But it was not enough. “Why did she come back? What's wrong with her?”

The older man began rocking again. “Now we're back to where we were this afternoon. I can't tell you. I can't tell you why she came back because he told me in confidence. “If he's right- ”His voice trailed away, then resumed. ”I can't tell you what's wrong with her because I don't know."

She stared at his unseen face. “That's why you got me into this.”

“Yes.” His reply sounded like a recognition of mortality.

“There are other doctors around. Or you could call in a specialist.” Her throat closed suddenly; she had to swallow heavily in order to say, “Why me?”

“Well, I suppose-” Now his tone conveyed a wry smile. “I could say it's because you're well trained. But the fact is, I thought of you because you seem to fit. You and Covenant could talk to each other-if you gave yourselves a chance.”

“I see.” In the silence, she was groaning, Is it that obvious? After everything I've done to hide it, make up for it, does it still show? To defend herself, she got to her feet. Old bitterness made her sound querulous. “I hope you like playing God.”

He paused for a long moment before he replied quietly, “If that's what I'm doing-no, I don't. But I don't look at it that way. I'm just in over my head. So I asked you for help.”

Help, Linden snarled inwardly. Jesus Christ! But she did not speak her indignation aloud. Dr. Berenford had touched her again, placed his finger on the nerves which compelled her. Because she did not want to utter her weakness, or her anger, or her lack of choice, she moved past him to the outer door of the veranda. “Goodnight,” she said in a flat tone.

“Goodnight, Linden.” He did not ask her what she was going to do. Perhaps he understood her. Or perhaps he had no courage.

She got into her car and headed back toward Haven Farm.

She drove slowly, trying to regain a sense of perspective. True, she had no choice now; but that was not because she was helpless. Rather, it was because she had already made the choice-made it long ago, when she had decided to be a doctor. She had elected deliberately to be who she was now. If some of the implications of that choice gave her pain-well, there was pain everywhere. She deserved whatever pain she had to bear.

She had not realized until she reached the dirt road that she had forgotten to ask Dr. Berenford about the old man.

She could see lights from Covenant's house. The building lay flickering against a line of dark trees like a gleam about to be swallowed by the woods and the night. The moon only confirmed this impression; its nearly-full light made the field a lake of silver, eldritch and fathomless, but could not touch the black trees, or the house which lay in their shadow. Linden shivered at the damp air, and drove with her hands tight on the wheel and her senses taut, as if she were approaching a crisis.

Twenty yards from the house, she stopped, parked her car so that it stood in the open moonlight.

Be true.

She did not know how.

The approach of her headlights must have warned him. An outside lamp came on as she neared the front door. He stepped out to meet her. His stance was erect and forbidding, silhouetted by the yellow light at his back. She could not read his face.

“Dr. Avery.” His voice rasped like a saw. “Go away.”

“No.” The uncertainty of her respiration made her speak abruptly, one piece at a time. “Not until I see her.”

“Her?” he demanded.

“Your ex-wife.”

For a moment, he was silent. Then he grated, “What else did that bastard tell you?”

She ignored his anger. “You need help.”

His shoulders hunched as if he were strangling retorts. “He's mistaken. I don't need help. I don't need you. Go away.”

“No.” She did not falter. “He's right. You're exhausted. Taking care of her alone is wearing you out. I can help.”

“You can't,” he whispered, denying her fiercely. “She doesn't need a doctor. She needs to be left alone.”

“I'll believe that when I see it.”

He tensed as if she had moved, tried to get past him. “You're trespassing. If you don't go away, I'll call the Sheriff.”

The falseness of her position infuriated her. “Goddamn it!” she snapped. “What are you afraid of?”

“You.” His voice was gravid, cold.

“Me? You don't even know me.”

“And you don't know me. You don't know what's going on here. You couldn't possibly understand it. And you didn't choose it.” He brandished words at her like blades. “Berenford got you into this. That old man-” He swallowed, then barked, “You saved him, and he chose you, and you don't have any idea what that means. You haven't got the faintest idea what he chose you for. By hell, I'm not going to stand for it! Go away.”

“What does it have to do with you?” She groped to understand him. “What makes you think it has anything to do with you?”

“Because I do know.”

“Know what?” She could not tolerate the condescension of his refusal. “What's so special about you? Leprosy? Do you think being a leper gives you some kind of private claim on loneliness or pain? Don't be arrogant. There are other people in the world who suffer, and it doesn't take being a leper to understand them. What's so goddamn special about you?”

Her anger stopped him. She could not see his face; but his posture seemed to twist, reconsidering her. After a moment, he said carefully, “Nothing about me. But I'm on the inside of this thing, and you aren't. I know it. You don't. It can't be explained. You don't understand what you're doing.”

“Then tell me. Make me understand. So I can make the right choice.”

“Dr. Avery.” His voice was sudden and harsh. “Maybe suffering isn't private. Maybe sickness and harm are in the public domain. But this is private.”

His intensity silenced her. She wrestled with him in her thoughts, and could find no way to take hold of him. He knew more than she did-had endured more, purchased more, learned more. Yet she could not let go. She needed some kind of explanation. The night air was thick and humid, blurring the meaning of the stars. Because she had no other argument, she challenged him with her incomprehension itself. “'Be true,'” she articulated, “isn't the only thing he said.”

Covenant recoiled. She held herself still until the suspense drove him to ask in a muffled tone, “What else?”

“He said, 'Do not fear. You will not fail, however he may assail you.'” There she halted, unwilling to say the rest. Covenant's shoulders began to shake. Grimly, she pursued her advantage. “Who was he talking about? You?”

He did not respond. His hands were pressed to his face, stifling his emotion.

“Or was it somebody else? Did somebody hurt Joan?”

A shard of pain slipped past his teeth before he could lock them against himself.

“Or is something going to happen to me? What does that old man have to do with me? Why do you say he chose me?”

“He's using you.” Covenant's hands occluded his voice. But he had mastered himself. When he dropped his arms, his tone was dull and faint, like the falling of ashes. “He's like Berenford. Thinks I need help. Thinks I can't handle it this time.” He should have sounded bitter; but he had momentarily lost even that resource. “The only difference is, he knows-what I know.”

“Then tell me,” Linden urged again. “Let me try.”

By force of will, Covenant straightened so that he stood upright against the light. “No. Maybe I can't stop you, but I as sure as hell don't have to let you. I'm not going to contribute to this. If you're dead set on getting involved, you're going to have to find some way to do it behind my back.” He stopped as if he were finished. But then he raged at her, “And tell that bastard Berenford he ought to try trusting me for a change!”

Retorts jumped into her throat. She wanted to yell back, Why should he? You don't trust anybody else! But as she gathered force into her lungs, a scream stung the air.

A woman screaming, raw and heinous. Impossible that anybody could feel such virulent terror and stay sane. It shrilled like the heart-shriek of the night.

Before it ended, Linden was on her way past Covenant toward the front door.

He caught her arm: she broke the grip of his half-hand, flung him off. “I'm a doctor.” Leaving him no time for permission or denial, she jerked open the door, strode into the house.

The door admitted her to the living room. It looked bare, in spite of its carpeting and bookcases; there were no pictures, no ornaments; and the only furniture was a long overstaffed sofa with a coffee table in front of it. They occupied the centre of the floor, as if to make the space around them navigable.

She gave the room a glance, then marched down a short passage to the kitchen. There, too, a table and two straight-backed wooden chairs occupied the centre of the space. She went past them, turned to enter another hall. Covenant hurried after her as she by-passed two open doors-the bathroom, his bedroom-to reach the one at the end of the hall.

It was closed.

At once, she took hold of the knob.

He snatched at her wrist. “Listen.” His voice must have held emotion-urgency, anguish, something-but she did not hear it. “This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken.”

She gripped the knob with her free hand. He let her go.

She opened the door, went into the room.

All the lights were on.

Joan sat on an iron-frame bed in the middle of the room. Her ankles and wrists were tied with cloth bonds which allowed her to sit up or lie down but did not permit her to bring her hands together. The long cotton nightgown covering her thin limbs had been twisted around her by her distress.

A white gold wedding ring hung from a silver chain around her neck.

She did not look at Covenant. Her gaze sprang at Linden, and a mad fury clenched her face. She had rabid eyes, the eyes of a demented lioness. Whimpers moaned in her throat. Her pallid skin stretched tightly over her bones.

Intuitive revulsion appalled Linden. She could not think. She was not accustomed to such savagery. It violated all her conceptions of illness or harm, paralyzed her responses. This was not ordinary human ineffectuality or pain raised to the level of despair; this was pure ferocity, concentrated and murderous. She had to force herself forward. But when she drew near the woman and stretched out a tentative hand, Joan bit at her like a baited cat. Involuntarily, Linden recoiled.

“Dear God!” she panted. “What's wrong with her?”

Joan raised her head, let out a scream like the anguish of the damned.

Covenant could not speak. Grief contorted his features. He went to Joan's side. Fumbling over the knot, he untied her left wrist, released her arm. Instantly, she clawed at him, straining her whole body to reach him. He evaded her, caught her forearm.

Linden watched with a silent wail as he let Joan's nails rake the back of his right hand. Blood welled from the cuts.

Joan smeared her fingers in his blood. Then her hand jumped to her mouth, and she sucked it eagerly, greedily.

The taste of blood seemed to restore her self-awareness. Almost immediately, the madness faded from her face. Her eyes softened, turned to tears; her mouth trembled. “Oh, Tom,” she quavered weakly. “I'm so sorry. I can't-He's in my mind, and I can't get him out. He hates you. He makes-makes me- ” She was sobbing brokenly. Her lucidity was acutely cruel to her.

He sat on the bed beside her, put his arms around her. “I know.” His voice ached in the room. “I understand.”

“Tom,” she wept. “Tom. Help me.”

“I will.” His tone promised that he would face any ordeal, make any sacrifice, commit any violence. “As soon as he's ready. I'll get you free.”

Slowly, her frail limbs relaxed. Her sobs grew quieter. She was exhausted. When he stretched her out on the bed, she closed her eyes, went to sleep with her fingers in her mouth like a child.

He took a tissue from a box on a table near the bed, pressed it to the back of his hand. Then, tenderly, he pulled Joan's fingers from her mouth and retied her wrist. Only then did he look at Linden.

“It doesn't hurt,” he said. “The backs of my hands have been numb for years.” The torment was gone from his face; it held nothing now except the long weariness of a pain he could not heal.

Watching his blood soak into the tissue, she knew she should do something to treat that injury. But an essential part of her had failed, proved itself inadequate to Joan; she could not bear to touch him. She had no answer to what she had seen. For a moment, her eyes were helpless with tears. Only the old habit of severity kept her from weeping. Only her need kept her from fleeing into the night. It drove her to say grimly, “Now you're going to' tell me what's wrong with her.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose I am.”

Three: Plight

HE guided her back to the living room in silence. His hand on her arm was reluctant, as if he dreaded that mere human contact. When she sat on the sofa, he gestured toward his injury, and left her alone. She was glad to be alone. She was stunned by her failure; she needed time to regain possession of herself.

What had happened to her? She understood nothing about evil, did not even believe in it as an idea; but she had seen it in Joan's feral hunger. She was trained to perceive the world in terms of dysfunction and disease, medication and treatment, success or death. Words like good or evil meant nothing to her. But Joan-! Where did such malignant ferocity come from? And how-?

When Covenant returned, with his right hand wrapped in a white bandage, she stared at him, demanding explanations.

He stood before her, did not meet her gaze. The slouch of his posture gave him a look of abandonment; the skin at the corners of his eyes crumpled like dismay pinching his flesh. But his mouth had learned the habit of defiance; it was twisted with refusals. After a moment, he muttered, “So you see why I didn't want you to know about her,” and began to pace.

“Nobody knows”- The words came as if he were dredging them out of the privacy of his heart, — “except Berenford and Roman. The law doesn't exactly smile on people who keep other people prisoner-even in her condition. I don't have any legal rights at all as far as she's concerned. What I'm supposed to do is turn her over to the authorities. But I've been living without the benefit of law so long now I don't give a damn.”

“But what's wrong with her?” Linden could not keep her voice from twitching; she was too tightly clenched to sound steady.

He sighed. “She needs to hurt me. She's starving for it-that's what makes her so violent. It's the best way she can think of to punish herself.”

With a wrench, Linden's analytical instinct began to function again. Paranoiac, she winced to herself. He's paranoiac. But aloud she insisted, “But why? What's happened to her?”

He stopped, looked at her as if he were trying to gauge her capacity for the truth, then went back to his pacing.

“Of course,” he murmured, “that isn't how Berenford sees it. He thinks it's a psychiatric problem. The only reason he hasn't tried to get her away from me is because he understands why I want to take care of her. Or part of it. His wife is a paraplegic, and he would never consider dumping the problem off on anyone else. I haven't told him about her taste for blood.”

He was evading her question. She struggled for patience. “Isn't it a psychiatric problem? Hasn't Dr. Berenford been able to rule out physical causes? What else could it be?”

Covenant hesitated, then said distantly, “He doesn't know what's going on.”

“You keep saying that. It's too convenient.”

“No,” he retorted, “it's not convenient. It's the truth. You don't have the background to understand it.”

“How can you be so goddamn sure?” The clench of her self-command made her voice raw. “I've spent half my life coping with other people's pain.” She wanted to add, Can't you get it through your head that I'm a doctor? But her throat locked on those words. She had failed-

For an instant, his gaze winced as if he were distressed by the idea that she did in fact have the necessary background. But then he shook his head sharply. When he resumed, she could not tell what kind of answer he had decided to give her.

“I wouldn't know about it myself,” he said, "if her parents hadn't called me. About a month ago. They don't have much use for me, but they were frantic. They told me everything they knew.

"I suppose it's an old story. The only thing that makes it new is the way it hurts. Joan divorced me when we found out I had leprosy. Eleven years ago. Took Roger and went back to her family. She thought she was justified-ah, hell, for years I thought she was justified. Kids are more susceptible to leprosy than adults. So she divorced me. For Roger's sake.

“But it didn't work. Deep inside her, she believed she'd betrayed me. It's hard to forgive yourself for deserting someone you love-someone who needs you. It erodes your self-respect. Like leprosy. It gnaws away at you. Before long, you're a moral cripple. She stood it for a while. Then she started hunting for cures.”

His voice, and the information he was giving her, steadied Linden. As he paced, she became conscious of the way he carried himself, the care and specificity of all his movements. He navigated past the coffee table as if it were a danger to him. And repeatedly he scanned himself with his eyes, checking in turn each hand, each arm, his legs, his chest, as if he expected to find that he had injured himself without knowing it.

She had read about such things. His self-inspection was called VSE-visual surveillance of extremities. Like the care with which he moved, it was part of the discipline he needed to keep his illness arrested. Because of the damage leprosy had done to his nerves, the largest single threat to his health was the possibility that he might bump, burn, scrape, cut, or bruise himself without realizing it. Then infection would set in because the wound was not tended. So he moved with all the caution he could muster. The furniture in his house was arranged to minimize the risk of protruding corners, obstacles, accidents. And he scanned himself regularly, looking for signs of danger.

Watching him in this objective, professional way helped restore her sense of who she was. Slowly, she became better able to listen to his indirect explanation without impatience.

He had not paused; he was saying, "First she tried psychology. She wanted to believe it was all in her mind-and minds can be fixed, like broken arms. She started going through psychological fads the way some people trade in cars, a new one every year. As if her problem really was mental instead of spiritual.

"None of it made sense to her parents, but they tried to be tolerant, just did what they could to give Roger a stable home.

"So they thought she was finally going to be all right when she suddenly gave that up and went churchy. They believed all along that religion was the answer. Well, it's good enough for most people, but it didn't give her what she needed. It was too easy. Her disease was progressing all the time. A year ago, she became a fanatic. Took Roger and went to join a commune. One of those places where people learn the ecstasy of humiliation, and the leader preaches love and mass suicide.

“She must have been so desperate-For most of her life, the only thing she really wanted to believe was that she was perfectly all right. But after all those years of failure, she didn't have any defences left. What did she have to lose?”

Linden was not wholly convinced. She had no more use for God than for conceptions of good and evil. But Covenant's passion held her. His eyes were wet with violence and grief; his mouth was as sharp as a blade. He believed what he was saying.

Her expression must have betrayed some of her doubt; his voice took on an echo of Joan's ferocity. “You don't have to believe in God to grasp what she was going through. She was suffering from an affliction for which there's no mortal cure. She couldn't even arrest the way it rotted her. Maybe she didn't know what it was she was trying to cure. She was looking for magic, some power that could reach into her and heal-When you've tried all the salves in the world and they don't work, you start thinking about fire. Burn out the pain. She wanted to punish herself, find some kind of abnegation to match her personal rot.”

His voice broke; but he controlled it instantly. “I know all about it. But she didn't have any defences. She opened the door for him, and he saw she was the perfect tool, and he's been using her — using her, when she's too damaged to even understand what he's using her for.”

Using her? Linden did not comprehend. He?

Slowly, Covenant suppressed his anger. "Of course, her parents didn't know anything about that. How could they? All they knew was that about six weeks ago she woke them up in the middle of the night and started babbling. She was a prophet, she'd had a vision, the Lord had given her a mission. Woe and retribution to the wicked, death to the sick and the unbelieving. The only sense they could make out of it was that she wanted them to take care of Roger. Then she was gone. They haven't seen her since.

“After a couple weeks, they called me. I hadn't seen her-that was the first I'd heard about it. But about two weeks ago she showed up here. Sneaked into my room during the night and tried to tear my face off. If she hadn't been so weak, she would have succeeded. She must have come all the way on foot.”

He seemed too exhausted himself to go on pacing. His red-rimmed eyes made him look ill, and his hands trembled. How long had he been without decent sleep or peace? Two weeks? When he sat down on the opposite end of the sofa, Linden turned so that she could continue to study nun. In the back of her mind, she began trying to conceive some way to give him a sedative.

“Since then,” he sighed, “Berenford and I have been taking care of her. I got him into this because he's the only doctor I know. He thinks I'm wrong about her, but he's helping me. Or he was. Until he got you into this.” He was too tired to sound bitter. “I'm trying to reach her any way I can, and he's giving her drugs that are supposed to clear her mind. Or at least calm her so I can feed her. I leave the lights on in there all the time. Something happens to her when she's alone in the dark. She goes berserk-I'm afraid she'll break an arm or something.”

He fell silent. Apparently, he had reached the end of his story-or of his strength. Linden felt that his explanation was incomplete, but she held her questions in abeyance. He needed aid, a relief from strain. Carefully she said, “Maybe she really should be in a hospital. I'm sure Dr. Berenford's doing what he can. But there are all kinds of diagnostic procedures he can't use here. If she were in a hospital-”

“If she were in a hospital”- he swung toward her so roughly that she recoiled, — “they'd keep her in a straitjacket, and force-feed her three times a day, and turn her brain into jelly with electroshock, and fill her up with drugs until she couldn't recognize her own name if God Himself were calling for her, and it wouldn't do any good! Goddamn it, she was my wife!” He brandished his right fist. “I'm still wearing the bloody ring!”

“Is that what you think doctors do?” She was suddenly livid; her failure made her defensive. “Brutalize sick people?”

He strove to contain his ire. “Doctors try to cure problems whether they understand them or not. It doesn't always work. This isn't something a doctor can cure.”

“Is that a fact?” She did not want to taunt him; but her own compulsions drove her. “Tell me what good you're doing her.”

He flinched. Rage and pain struggled in him; but he fought them down. Then he said simply, “She came to me.”

“She didn't know what she was doing.”

“But I do,” His grimness defied her. “I understand it well enough. I'm the only one who can help her.”

Frustration boiled up in her. “Understand what?”

He jerked to his feet. He was a figure of passion, held erect and potent in spite of weakness by the intensity of his heart. His eyes were chisels; when he spoke, each word fell distinctly, like a chip of granite.

“She is possessed.”

Linden blinked at him. “Possessed?” He had staggered her. He did not seem to be talking a language she could comprehend. This was the twentieth century; medical science had not taken possession seriously for at least a hundred years. She was on her feet. “Are you out of your mind?”

She expected him to retreat. But he still had resources she had not plumbed. He held her glare, and his visage-charged and purified by some kind of sustaining conviction-made her acutely aware of her own moral poverty. When he looked away, he did not do so because he was abashed or beaten; he looked away in order to spare her the implications of his knowledge.

“You see?” he murmured. “It's a question of experience. You're just not equipped to understand.”

“By God!” she fumed defensively, “that's the most arrogant thing I've ever heard. You stand there spouting the most egregious nonsense, and when I question you, you just naturally assume there must be something wrong with me. Where do you get the gall to-?”

“Dr. Avery.” His voice was low, dangerous. “I didn't say there was anything wrong with you.”

She did not listen to him. “You're suffering from classic paranoia, Mr. Covenant.” She bit each word mordantly. “You think that everybody who doubts you isn't quite right in the head. You're a textbook case.”

Seething irrationally, she turned on her heel, stamped toward the door-fleeing from him, and fighting furiously to believe that she was not fleeing. But he came after her, caught hold of her shoulders. She whirled on him as if he had assaulted her.

He had not. His hands dropped to his sides, and twitched as if they ached to make gestures of supplication. His face was open and vulnerable; she saw intuitively that at that moment she could have asked him anything, and he would have done his best to answer. “Please,” he breathed. “You're in an impossible situation, and I haven't made it any easier. But please. At least consider the chance that I know what I'm doing.”

A retort coiled in her mouth, then frayed and fell apart. She was furious, not because she had any right to be, but because his attitude showed her how far she had fallen into the wrong. She swallowed to stifle a groan, almost reached out toward him to apologize. But he deserved something better than an apology. Carefully, she said, “I'll consider it.” She could not meet his eyes. “I won't do anything until I talk to you again.”

Then she left the house, frankly escaping from the exigency of his incomprehensible convictions. Her hands fumbled like traitors as she opened the door of her car, slid behind the wheel.

With failure in her mouth like the taste of sickness, she drove back to her apartment.

She needed to be comforted; but there was no comfort in those grubby walls, in the chipped and peeling floorboards which moaned like victims under her feet. She had accepted that apartment precisely because it offered her no comfort; but the woman who had made that decision was a woman who had never watched herself buckle under the demands of her profession. Now, for the first time since that moment of murder fifteen years ago, when her hands had accepted the burden of blood, she yearned for solace. She lived in a world where there was no solace.

Because she could think of no other recourse, she went to bed.

Tension and muggy sheets kept her awake for a long time; and when she finally slept, her dreams were sweat and fear in the hot night. The old man, Covenant, Joan-all babbled of He, trying to warn her. He who possessed Joan for purposes too cruel to be answered. He who intended to harm them all. But at last she sank into a deeper slumber, and the evil went back into hiding.

She was awakened by a knocking at her door.

Her head felt swollen with nightmares, and the knocking had a tentative sound, as if the knocker believed the apartment to be dangerous. But it was imperative. She was a doctor.

When she unclosed her eyes, the light of mid-morning pierced her brain.

Groaning, she climbed out of bed, shrugged her arms into a bathrobe, then went to open the door.

A short timid woman with hands that fluttered and eyes that shied stood on the landing. Timorously, she asked, “Dr. Avery? Dr. Linden Avery?”

With an effort, Linden cleared her throat. “Yes.”

“Dr. Berenford called.” The woman seemed to have no idea what she was saying. “I'm his secretary. You don't have a phone. I don't work on Saturdays, but he called me at home. He wants you to meet him. He's supposed to be on rounds.”

“Meet him?” A pang of apprehension went through her. “Where?”

“He said you'd know where.” Insistently, the woman went on, “I'm his secretary. I don't work on Saturdays, but I'm always glad to help him. He's a fine man-a fine doctor. His wife had polio. He really should be on rounds.”

Linden shut her eyes. If she could have summoned any strength, she would have cried out, Why are you doing this to me? But she felt drained by bad dreams and doubt. Muttering, “Thank you,” she closed the door.

For a moment, she did not move; she leaned against the door as if to hold it shut, wanting to scream. But Dr. Berenford would not have gone to such trouble to send for her if the situation were not urgent. She had to go.

As she dressed in the clothes she had worn the previous day and ran a comb through her hair, she realized that she made a choice. Sometime during the night, she had given her allegiance to Covenant. She did not understand what was wrong with Joan, or what he thought he could do about it; but she was attracted to him. The same intransigence which had so infuriated her had also touched her deeply; she was vulnerable to the strange appeal of his anger, his extremity, his paradoxically savage and compassionate determination to stand loyal to his ex-wife.

She drank a quick glass of orange juice to clear her head, then went down to her car.

The day was already unnaturally hot; the sunlight hurt her eyes. She felt oddly giddy and detached, as if she were experiencing a hallucination, as she entered the dirt roadway and approached Covenant's house. At first, she was not sure of her vision when she descried the dark stain on the wall.

She parked beside Dr. Berenford's car, jumped out to look.

Near the doorway, a tall, crude triangle violated the white wall. It was reddish-black, the colour of dried blood. The vehemence of its intent convinced her that it was blood.

She began to run.

Springing into the living room, she saw that it, too, had been desecrated. All the furnishings were intact; but everything was splotched and soaked with blood. Buckets of blood had been thrown into the room. A sickly-sweet smell clogged the air.

On the floor near the coffee table lay a shotgun.

Her stomach writhed. She slapped her hands to her mouth to keep herself from crying out. All this blood could not have come from one ordinary human body. Some atrocity.

Then she saw Dr. Berenford. He sat in the kitchen at the table, with a cup between his hands. He was looking at her.

She strode toward him, started to demand, “What the hell-?”

He stopped her with a warning gesture. “Keep it down,” he said softly. “He's sleeping.”

For a moment, she gaped at the Chief of Staff. But she was accustomed to emergencies; her self-command quickly reasserted itself. Moving as if to prove to him that she could be calm, she found a cup, poured herself some coffee from the pot on the stove, sat down in the other chair at the old enamel-topped table. In a flat tone, she asked, “What happened?”

He sipped his own coffee. All the humour was gone out of him, and his hands shook. “I guess he was right all along.” He did not meet her stare. “She's gone.”

“Gone?” For an instant, her control slipped. Gone? She could hardly breathe past the thudding of her heart. “Is anybody looking for her?”

“The police,” he replied. “Mrs. Roman-did I tell you about her? She's his lawyer. She went back to town after I got here-a couple hours ago. To light a fire under the Sheriff. Right now, every able-bodied cop in the county is probably out looking. The, only reason you don't see cars is because our Sheriff-bless his warm little heart-won't let his men park this close to a leper.”

“All right.” Linden mustered her training, gripped it in both hands. “Tell me what happened.”

He made a gesture of helplessness. “I don't really know. I only know what he told Mrs. Roman-what he told me. It doesn't make any sense.” He sighed. "Well, this is what he says. Sometime after midnight, he heard people at his door. He'd spent most of the evening trying to bathe her, but after that he fell asleep. He didn't j wake up until these people began acting like they wanted to tear the door down.

“He didn't have to ask them what they wanted. I guess he's been expecting something like this ever since Joan showed up. He went and got his shotgun-did you know he had a shotgun? Had Mrs. Roman buy it for him last week. For self-defence — as if being a leper wasn't more defence than he ever had any use for.” Seeing Linden's impatience, he went back to his story. "Anyway, he got his gun, and turned on all the lights. Then he opened the door.

“They came in-maybe half a dozen of them. He says they wore sackcloth and ashes.” Dr. Berenford grimaced. "If he recognized any of them, he won't admit it. He waved the shotgun at them and told them they couldn't have her.

“But they acted as if they wanted to be shot. And when it came right down to it, he couldn't. Not even to save his ex-wife.” He shook his head. "He tried to fight them off by main strength, but one against six, he didn't have much chance.

“Sometime early this morning, he came to long enough to call Mrs. Roman. He was incoherent-kept telling her to start a search, only he couldn't explain why-but at least he had sense enough to know he needed help. Then he passed out again. When she got here, she found him unconscious on the floor. There was blood everywhere. Whoever they were, they must have bled an entire cow.” He gulped coffee as if it were an antidote for the reek in the air. “Well, she got him on his feet, and he took her to check on Joan. She was gone. Restraints had been cut.”

“They didn't kill her?” interjected Linden.

He glanced at her. “He says no. How he knows-your guess is as good as mine.” After a moment, he resumed, “Anyway, Mrs. Roman called me. When I got here, she left to see what she could do about finding Joan. I've examined him, and he seems to be all right. Suffering from exhaustion as much as anything else.”

Linden shrugged aside her doubts about Covenant's condition. “I'll watch him.”

He nodded. “That was why I called for you.”

She drank some of her coffee to steady herself, then inquired carefully, “Do you know who they were?”

“I asked him that,” Dr. Berenford replied with a frown. “He said, 'How the hell should I know?'”

“Well, then, what do they want with her?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “You know, the worst part about the whole thing is-I think he knows.”

Frustration made her querulous. “So why won't he tell us?”

“Hard to say,” said the doctor slowly. “I think he thinks if we knew what was going on we'd try to stop him.”

Linden did not respond. She was no longer prepared to try to prevent Thomas Covenant from doing anything. But she was equally determined to learn the truth about Joan, about him-and, yes, about the old man in the ochre robe. For her own sake. And for Covenant's. In spite of his fierce independence, she could not shake the conviction that he was desperately in need of help.

“Which is another reason for you to stay,” the older man muttered as he rose to his feet. “I've got to go. But somebody has to prevent him from doing anything crazy. Some days-” His voice trailed away, then came back in sudden vexation. “My God, some days I think that man needs a keeper, not a doctor.” For the first time since her arrival, he faced her squarely. “Will you keep him?”

She could see he wanted reassurance that she shared his sense of responsibility for Covenant and Joan. She could not make such a promise. But she could offer him something similar. “Well, at any rate,” she said severely, “I won't let go of him.”

He nodded vaguely. He was no longer looking at her. As he moved toward the door, he murmured, “Be patient with him. It's been so long since he met somebody who isn't afraid of him, he doesn't know what to do about it. When he wakes up, make him eat something.” Then he left the house, went out to his car.

Linden watched until he disappeared in dust toward the highway. Then she turned back to the living room.

What to do about it? Like Covenant, she did not know. But she meant to find out. The smell of blood made her feel unclean; but she suppressed the sensation long enough to fix a breakfast for herself. Then she tackled the living room.

With a scrub brush and a bucket of soapy water, she attacked the stains as if they were an affront to her. Deep within her, where her guilt and coercion had their roots, she felt that blood was life-a thing of value, too precious to be squandered and denied, as her parents had squandered and denied it. Grimly, she scrubbed at the madness or malice which had violated this room, trying to eradicate it.

Whenever she needed a break, she went quietly to look at Covenant. His bruises gave his face a misshapen look. His sleep seemed agitated, but he showed no sign of drifting into coma. Occasionally, the movements of his eyes betrayed that he was dreaming. He slept with his mouth open like a silent cry; and once his cheeks were wet with tears. Her heart went out to him as he lay stretched there, disconsolate and vulnerable. He had so little respect for his own mortality.

Shortly after noon, while she was still at work, he came out of his bedroom. He moved groggily, his gait blurred with sleep. He peered at her across the room as if he were summoning anger; but his voice held nothing except resignation. “You can't help her now. You might as well go home.”

She stood up to face him. “I want to help you.”

“I can handle it.”

Linden swallowed bile, tried not to sound acerbic. “Somehow, you don't look that tough. You couldn't stop them from taking her. How are you going to make them give her back?”

His eyes widened; her guess had struck home. But he did not waver. He seemed almost inhumanly calm-or doomed. “They don't want her. She's just a way for them to get at me.”

“You?” Was he paranoiac after all? “Are you trying to tell me that this whole thing happened to her because of you? Why?”

“I haven't found that out yet.”

“No. I mean, why do you think this has anything to do with you? If they wanted you, why didn't they just take you? You couldn't have stopped them.”

“Because it has to be voluntary.” His voice had the fiat timbre of over-stressed cable in a high wind. He should have snapped long ago. But he did not sound like a man who snapped. “He can't just force me. I have to choose to do it. Joan — ” A surge of darkness occluded his eyes. “She's just his way of exerting pressure. He has to take the chance that I might refuse.”

He. Linden's breathing came heavily. "You keep saying he, Who is he?

His frown made his face seem even more malformed. “Leave it alone.” He was trying to warn her. “You don't believe in possession. How can I make you believe in possessors?”

She took his warning, but not in the way he intended. Hints of purpose-half guesswork, half determination-unexpectedly lit her thoughts. A way to learn the truth. He had said, You're going to have to find some way to do it behind my back. Well, by God, if that was what she had to do, she would do it.

“All right,” she said, glaring at him to conceal her intentions. “I can't make you make sense. Just tell me one thing. Who was that old man? You knew him.”

Covenant returned her stare as if he did not mean to answer. But then he relented stiffly. “A harbinger. Or a warning. When he shows up, you've only got two choices. Give up everything you ever understood, and take your chances. Or run for your life. The problem is”- his tone took on a peculiar resonance, as if he were trying to say more than he could put into words, — “he doesn't usually waste his time talking to the kind of people who run away. And you can't possibly know what you're getting into.”

She winced inwardly, fearing that he had guessed her intent. But she held herself firm. “Why don't you tell me?”

“I can't.” His intensity was gone, transformed back into resignation. “It's like signing a blank check. That kind of trust, fool-hardiness, wealth, whatever, doesn't mean anything if you know how much the check is going to be for. You either sign or you don't. How much do you think you can afford?”

“Well, in any case”- she shrugged — “I don't plan to sign any blank checks. I've done about all I can stand to clean up this place. I'm going home.” She could not meet his scrutiny. “Dr. Berenford wants you to eat. Are you going to do it, or do I have to send him back out here?”

He did not answer her question. “Goodbye, Dr. Avery.”

“Oh, dear God,” she protested in a sudden rush of dismay at his loneliness. “I'm probably going to spend the rest of the day worrying about you. At least call me Linden.”

“Linden.” His voice denied all emotion. “I can handle it.”

“I know,” she murmured, half to herself. She went out into the thick afternoon. I'm the one who needs help.

On her way back to her apartment, she noticed that the woman and children who advised repentance were nowhere to be seen.

Several hours later, as sunset dwindled into twilight, streaking the streets with muggy orange and pink, she was driving again. She had showered and rested; she had dressed herself in a checked flannel shirt, tough jeans, and a pair of sturdy hiking shoes. She drove slowly, giving the evening time to darken. Half a mile before she reached Haven Farm, she turned off her headlights.

Leaving the highway, she took the first side road to one of the abandoned houses on the Farm. There she parked her car and locked it to protect her medical bag and purse.

On foot, she approached Covenant's house. As much as possible, she hid herself among the trees along that side of the Farm. She was gambling that she was not too late, that the people who had taken Joan would not have done anything during the afternoon. From the trees, she hastened stealthily to the wall of the house. There, she found a window which gave her a view of the living room without exposing her to the door.

The lights were on. With all her caution, she looked in on Thomas Covenant.

He slouched in the centre of the sofa with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets, as if he were waiting for something. His bruises had darkened, giving him the visage of a man who had already been beaten. The muscles along his jaw bunched, relaxed, bunched again. He strove to possess himself in patience; but after a moment the tension impelled him to his feet. He began to walk in circles around the sofa and coffee table. His movements were rigid, denying the mortality of his heart.

So that she would not have to watch him, Linden lowered herself to the ground and sat against the wall. Hidden by the darkness, she waited with him.

She did not like what she was doing. It was a violation of his privacy, completely unprofessional. But her ignorance and his stubbornness were intolerable. She had an absolute need to understand what had made her quail when she had faced Joan.

She did not have to wait long. Scant minutes after she had settled herself, abrupt feet approached the house.

The lurching of her heart almost daunted her. But she resisted it. Carefully, she raised her head to the window just as a fist hammered at the door.

Covenant flinched at the sound. Dread knurled his face.

The sight of his reaction stung Linden. He was such a potent individual, seemed to have so many strengths which she lacked. How had he been brought to this?

But an instant later he crushed his fear as if he were stamping on the neck of a viper. Defying his own weakness, he strode toward the door.

It opened before he reached it. A lone man stepped uninvited out of the dark. Linden could see him clearly. He wore burlap wound around him like cerements. Ash had been rubbed unevenly into his hair, smeared thickly over his cheeks. It emphasized the deadness of his eyes, so that he looked like a ghoul in masque.

“Covenant?” Like his mien, his voice was ashen, dead.

Covenant faced the man. He seemed suddenly taller, as if he were elevated by his own hard grasp on life. “Yes.”

“Thomas Covenant?”

The writer nodded impatiently. “What do you want?”

“The hour of judgment is at hand.” The man stared into the room as if he were blind. “The Master calls for your soul. Will you come?”

Covenant's mouth twisted into a snarl. “Your master knows what I can do to him.”

The man did not react. He went on as if his speech had already been arrayed for burial. “The woman will be sacrificed at the rising of the full moon. Expiation must be made for sin. She will pay if you do not. This is the commandment of the Master of life and death. Will you come?”

Sacrificed? Linden gaped. Expiation? A flush of indignation burned her skin. What the hell-?

Covenant's shoulders knotted. His eyes flamed with extreme promises, threats. “I'll come.”

No flicker of consciousness animated the man's grey features. He turned like a marionette and retreated into the night.

For a moment, Covenant stood still. His arms hugged his chest as if to stifle an outcry; his head stretched back in anguish. The bruises marked his face like a bereavement.

But then he moved. With a violence that startled Linden, appalled her, he struck himself across the cheek with his half-hand. Abruptly, he threw himself into the darkness after his summoner.

Linden almost lost her chance to follow. She felt stunned by dismay. The Master-? Sacrificed? Dreads and doubts crawled her skin like vermin. The man in burlap had looked so insentient-soulless more than any animal. Drugs? Or-?

However he may assail-

Was Covenant right? About the old man, about possession? About the purpose-? She's just a way for them to get at me.

Sacrificed?

Oh, dear God! The man in burlap appeared insane enough, lost enough, to be dangerous. And Covenant-? Covenant was capable of anything.

Her guess at what he was doing galvanized her. Fear for him broke through her personal apprehension, sent her hurrying around the corner of the house in pursuit.

His summoner had led him away from the highway, away from the house into the woods. Linden could hear them in the brush; without light, they were unable to move quietly. As her eyes adjusted, she glimpsed them ahead of her, flickering like shadows in and out of the variegated dark. She followed them.

They travelled blindly through the woods, over hills and along valleys. They used no path; Linden had the impression that they were cutting as straight as a plumb line toward their destination. And as they moved, the night seemed to mount around her, growing steadily more hostile as her trepidation increased. The trees and brush became malevolent, as if she were passing into another wood altogether, a place of hazard and cruel intent.

Then a hill lay across their way. Covenant and his summoner ascended, disappeared over the crest in a strange flare of orange light. It picked them out of the dark, then quenched them like an instant of translation. Warned by that brief gleam, Linden climbed slowly. The keening of her nerves seemed loud in the blackness. The last few yards she crossed on her hands and knees, keeping herself within the cover of the underbrush.

As her head crested the hill, she was struck by a blaze of light. Fire invisible a foot away burst in her face as if she had just penetrated the boundary of dreams. For an instant, she was blinded by the light, paralyzed by the silence. The night swallowed all sound, leaving the air empty of life.

Blinking furiously, she peered past the hillcrest.

Beyond her lay a deep barren hollow. Its slopes were devoid of grass, brush, trees, as if the soil had been scoured by acid.

A bonfire burned at the bottom of the hollow. Its flames sprang upward like lust, writhed like madness; but it made no noise. Seeing it, Linden felt that she had been stricken deaf. Impossible that such a fire could blaze in silence.

Near the fire stretched a rough plane of native rock, perhaps ten feet across. A large triangle had been painted on it in red-colour as crimson as fresh blood.

Joan lay on her back within the triangle. She did not move, appeared to be unconscious; only the slow lifting of her chest against her nightgown showed that she was alive.

People clustered around her, twenty or thirty of them. Men, women, children-all dressed in habiliments of burlap; all masked with grey as if they had been wallowing in ashes. They were as gaunt as icons of hunger. They gazed out of eyes as dead as if the minds behind their orbs had been extirpated-eyes which had been dispossessed of every vestige of will or spirit. Even the children stood like puppets and made no sound.

Their faces were turned toward a place on Linden's left.

Toward Thomas Covenant.

He stood halfway down the hillside, confronting the fire across the barrenness of the hollow. His shoulders hunched; his hands were fists at his sides, and his head was thrust combatively forward. His chest heaved as if he were full of denunciations.

Nobody moved, spoke, blinked. The air was intense with silence like concentrated coercion.

Abruptly, Covenant grated through his teeth, “I'm here.” The clench of his throat made each word sound like a self-inflicted wound. “Let her go.”

A movement snatched Linden's attention back to the bottom of the hollow. A man brawnier than the rest changed positions, took a stance on the rock at the point of the triangle, above Joan's head. He raised his arms, revealing a long, curved dagger gripped in his right fist. In a shrill voice like a man on the verge of ecstasy, he shouted, “It is time! We are the will of the Master of life and death! This is the hour of retribution and cleansing and blood! Let us open the way for the Master's presence!”

The night sucked his voice out of the air, left in its place a stillness as sharp as a cut. For a moment, nothing happened.

Covenant took a step downward, then jerked to a halt.

A woman near the fire shambled forward. Linden nearly gasped aloud as she recognized the woman who had stood on the steps of the courthouse, warning people to repent. With her three children behind her, she approached the blaze.

She bowed to it like a dead woman.

Blankly, she put her right hand into the flames.

A shriek of pain rent the night. She recoiled from the fire, fell in agony to the bare ground.

A red quivering ran through the flames like a spasm of desire. The fire seemed to mount as if it fed on the woman's pain.

Linden's muscles bunched, ached to hurl her to her feet. She wanted to shout her horror, stop this atrocity. But her limbs were locked. Images of desperation or evil froze her where she crouched. All these people were like Joan.

Then the woman regained her feet and stood as dumbly as if the nerves to her burned hand had been severed. Her gaze returned to Covenant like a compulsion, exerting its demand against him.

The oldest of her children took her place at the bonfire.

No! Linden cried, striving uselessly to break the silence.

The young boy bowed, thrust his emaciated arm into the blaze.

His wail broke Linden's will, left her panting in helpless abomination. She could not move, could not look away. Loathings for which she had no name mastered her.

The boy's younger sister did what he had done, as if his agony meant nothing to her. And the third waif followed in turn, surrendering her flesh to harm like lifeless tissue animated solely for immolation.

Then Linden would have moved. The rigid abhorrence of Covenant's stance showed that he would have moved. But the fire stopped them, held them. At every taste of flesh, lust flared through it; flames raged higher.

A figure began to take shape in the heart of the blaze.

More people moved to sacrifice their hands. As they did so, the figure solidified. It was indistinct in the flames; but the glaring red outlined a man in a flowing robe. He stood blood-limned with his arms folded across his powerful chest-created by pain out of fire and self-abandonment.

The worshipper with the knife sank to his knees, cried out in exaltation, “Master!”

The figure's eyes were like fangs, carious and yellow; and they raged venomously out of the flames. Their malignance cowed Linden like a personal assault on her sanity, her conception of life. They were rabid and deliberate, like voluntary disease, fetid corruption. Nothing in all her life had readied her to witness such palpable hate.

Across the stillness, she heard Covenant gasp in fury, “Foul! Even children?” But his wrath could not penetrate the dread which paralyzed her. For her, the fiery silence was punctuated only by the screaming of the burned.

Then the moon began to rise opposite her. A rim as white as bone crested the hill, looked down into the hollow like a leer.

The man with the knife came to his feet. Again he raised his arms, brandished his dagger. His personal transport was approaching its climax. In a shout like a moan, he cried, “Now is the hour of apocalypse! The Master has come! Doom is at hand for those who seek to thwart His will. Now we will witness vengeance against sin and life, we who have watched and waited and suffered in His name. Here we fulfil the vision that was given to us. We have touched the fire, and we have been redeemed!” His voice rose until he was shrieking like the burned. “Now we will bring all wickedness to blood and eternal torment!”

He's mad. Linden clung to that thought, fought to think of these people as fanatics, driven wild by destitution and fear. They're all crazy. This is impossible. But she could not move.

And Covenant did not move. She yearned for him to do something, break the trance somehow, rescue Joan, save Linden herself from her extremity. But he remained motionless, watching the fire as if he were trapped between savagery and helplessness.

The figure in the blaze stirred. His eyes focused the flames like twin scars of malice, searing everything with his contempt. His right arm made a gesture as final as a sentence of execution.

At once, the brawny man dropped to his knees. Bending over Joan, he bared her throat. She lay limp under him, frail and lost. The skin of her neck seemed to gleam in the firelight like a plea for help.

Trembling as if he were rapturous or terrified, the man set his blade against Joan's white throat.

Now the people in the hollow stared emptily at his hands. They appeared to have lost all interest in Covenant. Their silence was appalling. The man's hands shook.

“Stop!”

Covenant's shout scourged the air.

“You've done enough! Let her go!”

The baleful eyes in the fire swung at him, nailed him with denigration. The worshipper at Joan's throat stared whitely upward. “Release her?” he croaked. “Why?”

“Because you don't have to do this!” Anger and supplication thickened Covenant's tone. “I don't know how you were driven to this. I don't know what went wrong with your life. But you don't have to do it.”

The man did not blink; the eyes in the fire clenched him. Deliberately, he knotted his free hand in Joan's hair.

“All right!” Covenant barked immediately. “All right. I accept. I'll trade you. Me for her.”

“No.” Linden strove to shout aloud, but her cry was barely a whisper. “No”

The worshippers were as silent as gravestones.

Slowly, the man with the knife rose to his feet. He alone seemed to have the capacity to feel triumph; he was grinning ferally as he said, “It is as the Master promised.”

He stepped back. At the same time, a quiver ran through Joan. She raised her head, gaped around her. Her face was free of possession. Moving awkwardly, she climbed to her feet. Bewildered and afraid, she searched for an escape, for anything she could understand.

She saw Covenant.

“Tom!” Springing from the rock, she fled toward him and threw herself into his arms.

He hugged her, strained his arms around her as if he could not bear to lose her. But then, roughly, he pushed her away. “Go home,” he ordered. “It's over. You'll be safe now.” He faced her in the right direction, urged her into motion.

She stopped and looked at him, imploring him to go with her.

“Don't worry about me.” A difficult tenderness softened his tone. “You're safe now-that's the important thing. I'll be all right.” Somehow, he managed to smile. His eyes betrayed his pain. The light from the fire cast shadows of self-defiance across his bruised mien. And yet his smile expressed so much valour and rue that the sight of it tore Linden's heart.

Kneeling with her head bowed and hot tears on her cheeks, she sensed rather than saw Joan leave the hollow. She could not bear to watch as Covenant moved down the hillside. I'm the only one who can help her. He was committing a kind of suicide.

Suicide. Linden's father had killed himself. Her mother had begged for death. Her revulsion toward such things was a compelling obsession.

But Thomas Covenant had chosen to die. And he had smiled.

For Joan's sake.

Linden had never seen one person do so much for another.

She could not endure it. She already had too much blood on her hands. Dashing the tears from her eyes, she looked up.

Covenant moved among the people as if he were beyond hope. The man with the knife guided him into the triangle of blood. The carious eyes in the fire blazed avidly.

It was too much. With a passionate wrench, Linden broke the hold of her dismay, jumped upright.

“Over here!” she yelled. “Police! Hurry! They're over here!” She flailed her arms as if she were signalling to people behind her.

The eyes of the fire whipped at her, hit her with withering force. In that instant, she felt completely vulnerable, felt all her secrets exposed and devoured. But she ignored the eyes. She sped downward, daring the worshippers to believe she was alone.

Covenant whirled in the triangle. Every line of his stance howled, No!

People cried out. Her charge seemed to shatter the trance of the fire. The worshippers were thrown into confusion. They fled in all directions, scattered as if she had unpent a vast pressure of repugnance. For an instant, she was wild with hope.

But the man with the knife did not flee. The rage of the bonfire exalted him. He slapped his arms around Covenant, threw him to the stone, kicked him so that he lay flat.

The knife-! Covenant was too stunned to move.

Linden hurled herself at the man, grappled for his arms. He was slick with ashes, and strong. She lost her grip.

Covenant struggled to roll over. Swiftly, the man stooped to him, pinned him with one hand, raised the knife in the other.

Linden attacked again, blocked the knife. Her fingernails gouged the man's face.

Yowling, he dealt her a blow which stretched her on the rock.

Everything reeled. Darkness spun at her from all sides.

She saw the knife flash.

Then the eyes of the fire blazed at her, and she was lost in a yellow triumph that roared like the furnace of the sun.