Blood Is Not Enough Page 12

  Which reminded him: It was time for her to get her headache back. As a former veterinary student he was quite familiar with Pavlovian conditioning—had, in fact, been writing his thesis on the ways it had been used to train the attack dogs used by the government in quelling the then-recent Polish workers’ insurrection when he’d been forced to flee Romania—and his spiritual experience in later years had proven to him how useful a correct application of its basic principles could be to a shaman like himself. Thus, whenever Liz did something he approved of he rewarded her for it, whenever she did something he disapproved of he punished her, but always in ways that would seem to her to be in some way the direct result of her behavior, and not of any interference or judgment on his part. And that, finally, was the rationale for the use of the pills he gave her whenever he went away: Not only did they keep her properly subdued in his absence and insure that she’d have taken off her excess weight by the time he returned and restored her to normal, but they made her so miserable that when he did return she equated his presence—the secondary stimulus—with the primary stimulus of her renewed health and vitality in the same way she’d learned to equate his absence with her misery.

  It was all very rational and scientific, a fact on which he prided himself. Too many of his colleagues were little better than witch-doctors.

  “You’re my whole happiness,” Liz had told him once. “My only reason for staying alive.” And that, to be sure, was how he wanted things.

  It had taken her five phone calls but she’d finally found someone: Marie-Claude had agreed to accompany her, and they were going to meet at the tea room they liked on the Île St. Louis where the ice cream was so good. And the sun was coming out again. He flew there to wait for them.

  From his perch in the tree across the street from the tea salon he could see them easily enough as they entered together, though when they sat down away from the window he had to cock his head just right to watch them through the walls. They both ordered ice cream—Bertillon chocolate, coffee, and chestnut for Liz, the same for Marie-Claude but with coconut in place of the coffee—and while they were waiting for the waitress to bring it convinced each other that it would be all right to have some sherbets with their coffee afterward.

  Eminescu waited until Liz’s first few swallows of chocolate were reaching her stomach to cock his head at the angle that let him see what was going on inside her.

  Her stomach acids and digestive enzymes had already dissolved the pills and liberated the encysted bladder worms, and these in turn were reacting to the acids and enzymes by evaginating—turning themselves inside out, as though they’d been one-finger gloves with the fingers pushed in, but with the fingers now popping out again. Once the young tapeworms (as he’d learned to call them at UCLA, and it was a better name for them than the French vers solitaires, because these worms at least were far from solitary) had their scolexes, head-sections, free they could use the suckers and hooks on them to attach themselves to the walls of Liz’s intestines, there to begin growing by pushing out new anterior segments—though he’d be back to deal with them before any of the worms was more than five or so meters long, and thus before any of the worms had reached its full sexual maturity.

  Three specimens each of three kinds of tapeworm—Taenia solium, Taenia saginata, and Diphyllobothrium latum, the pork, beef, and fish tapeworms, respectively—he allowed to hook and sucker themselves to Liz’s intestinal walls, though not without first ensuring that the individuals he favored would all be fairly slow-growing, as well as unlikely to excrete excessive amounts of those toxic waste products peculiar to their respective species. The myriad other worms whose encysted forms the pills had contained he killed, reaching out from his perch in the tree to pluck them from her intestinal walls with his beak, pinch off and kill their voracious little souls. It was all very well controlled, all very scientific, with nothing left to chance.

  He watched her the rest of the afternoon, at that and three other tea salons, to make sure the nine worms he’d selected for her would do her no more damage than he’d planned for them to do, and that none of the other worms the pills had contained had escaped his attention and survived.

  When at last he returned to the apartment on the rue de Condé he was weak with hunger. He took a quick shower and ate a choucroute at a nearby brasserie before going back to his office to make sure nothing unexpected had come up in his absence.

  And every day until the time came for him to leave, he checked Liz two or three times, to make sure the worms now growing so rapidly inside her would do no lasting harm. He valued Liz a great deal, enjoyed her youth and spontaneity fully as much as he valued the son she was going to bear him, and he had no desire to be unnecessarily cruel to her.

  On the morning he’d chosen to leave he went to his second apartment and checked on her one last time as she showered—thinner already and beautiful for all the fatigue on her face and in her posture—then returned to the windowless room and resumed his human form. He was hungry, but for the next month he was Eminescu Eliade again, and there was no way he could use Julien de Saint-Hilaire’s money to pay for as much as a merguez-and-fries sandwich from one of the window-front Tunisian restaurants on the rue St. André des Arts without destroying much of his costume’s power.

  The rat he was to follow was waiting for him as arranged at the bottom of the stairs, behind the trash cans. He put it in one of his plastic bags, where it promptly made a nest for itself out of the rags that weren’t really rags. Then he went out to beg the money for the three things he’d need to get started: the bottles of wine he’d have to share with his fellow shamans as long as he remained aboveground, the first-class métro ticket he’d need to enter the labyrinths coexistent with the Parisian métro system, and the terrine de foie de volailles au poivre vert from Coesnon’s which the rat demanded he feed it each time it guided him through the city’s subway labyrinths.

  There were a lot of clochards he didn’t recognize behind the Marché and on the streets nearby, even a blond-haired threesome—two bearded young men and a girl with her hair in braids—who looked more like hitchhiking German or Scandinavian students temporarily short of money than like real clochards, for all that they seemed to know most of the others and be on good terms with them. What it added up to was an unwelcome reminder that he’d been spending too much time either abroad or as Julien de Saint-Hilaire, and not nearly enough staying in touch with his city and its spirit world—and that was an error that could well prove fatal to him unless he took steps to correct it. He’d have to stay in Paris that October after all, and miss the Australian congress that had had him so excited ever since he’d begun to learn the kinds of things one could do with quartz crystals.

  It took him five days to get the money he needed: He was out of practice at begging and every few hours, of course, he had to put most of what he’d earned toward the wine he shared with the others. And Coesnon’s had tripled their prices during the last year alone. But by the fifth evening he had what he needed, so he walked down the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie to the rue Dauphine, where he bought the four-hundred-and-fifty-franc terrine despite the staff’s and other customers’ horrified disapproval when he squeezed himself and his bulging sacks into the narrow charcuterie, knocking a platter of blood sausage with apples to the floor in the process, then spent another four hours listening to the mutterings and arguments of the future shamans awaiting birth in the hundreds of tiers of invisible pigeons’ nests that completely covered the green bronze statue of Henri IV astride his horse, there on its pedestal atop the little fenced-off step pyramid on the Pont Neuf. But there was nothing useful to be heard—Tabarin and his pompous master Mondor arguing as usual in the nest they shared, Napoleon pleading to be rescued from the tiny statuette of himself that the overly zealous Bonapartist who’d been commissioned to cast Henri’s statue had hidden in the king’s right arm, thus inadvertently imprisoning his hero’s spirit there until such time as someone should destroy the statuette o
r rescue him—and so after listening a while he proceeded on diagonally across the Île de la Cité to Chatelet where he entered the métro system.

  He bought himself a first-class ticket and pretended to drop it as he went to insert it in the machine so he could release the rat. It scurried away from him through the thick crowds and he had to run after it as soon as the machine disgorged his enigmatically stamped ticket, plastic bags, rags and leather overcoat flapping as he ran. Four or five times he lost sight of the rat—once because some fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds thought it would be fun to trip him and see how long they could keep him from getting back to his feet before somebody stopped them—but each time he found the rat again and at last it led him in through one of the urinals to the first of the labyrinth’s inner turnings. There he fed it the first half of the terrine and the stamped metro ticket.

  The corridors were less crowded when he emerged from the urinal, the light dimmer and pinker, and with each subsequent turning away from the public corridors into the secret ways which led through the land of the dead there were more and more of the German shepherds whose powerful bodies housed the souls of those few dead who’d been granted leave of the Undercity for a day and a night in return for guarding Paris itself, fewer and fewer people, and those few only the dying and mentally ill, the North African blacks who worked as maintenance men and cleaners in the metro system, and shamans like himself—plus once a politician whose name he couldn’t recall but to whom he’d made the proper ritual obeisances anyway.

  When he regained his feet and wiped the filth from his forehead he found the corridor around him had changed yet again. The murky and polluted bottom waters of the Seine flowed sluggishly past and around him without touching him, and his guide now wore the baggy bright-red shorts with the two big gold buttons on the front that told him he’d finally escaped the outer world entirely and entered the land of the dead.

  He fed the rat the rest of the terrine and began retracing the route he knew should take him back to the place where he’d hidden the soul of the first of those patients whom he intended to have make a miraculous recovery upon his return, a retired general suffering from the delusion that he was a young and bearded bouquiniste making his living selling subversive literature and antique pornographic postcards from a bookstall by the Seine.

  But Hell had changed, changed radically and inexplicably in the year he’d spent away from it, and it took him almost seven weeks before he was able to escape it again by a route that led up and out through the sewer system. Because someone, somehow, had found his patients’ souls where he’d buried them in the river mud and filth, had dug them up and left in their place small, vicious but somehow indistinct, creatures that had attacked him and tried to devour his soul. He’d been strong enough to fight them off, though they’d vanished before the mud cloud they’d stirred up had settled and he’d had a chance to get a closer look at them. But though he’d found his patients’ souls and recovered them from their new hiding places without overmuch trouble, none of his usual contacts among the dead had been willing or able to tell him who his enemy was, or what the things that had attacked him had been.

  He’d planned to stay Eminescu Eliade for a while after his return to the surface so he could try to locate his enemy where he knew the man had to be hiding, among the clochards who had not yet achieved professional recognition in a second identity (because while professional ethics allowed stealing other psychiatrists’ patients’ souls, even encouraged it as tending to keep everyone alert and doing their best, leaving creatures such as the things that had attacked him to devour a fellow psychiatrist’s soul was specifically forbidden by the Ordre des médecins)—but when he took the form of a pigeon and returned to the apartment he shared with Liz to see how she was doing and make sure the tapeworms in her intestines hadn’t done her any real harm in the extra weeks, ready to perhaps even kill one or two of them if they were getting a little too long, he saw that something further had gone wrong, horribly wrong.

  Liz was in the kitchen in her striped robe, spooning chestnut puree from a one-kilo can frantically into her mouth as though she were starving, and his first impression was that he’d never before seen her looking so disgustingly fat and sloppy. But then he realized that though her belly was distended and she looked as though she’d neither slept nor washed in a few days she was if anything skinnier than she’d been when he’d seen her last. Much skinnier. And that the swollen puffiness that so disfigured her face came from the fact that she was crying, and that her legs—her legs that had always been so long and smooth and beautiful, so tawny despite her naturally ash-blond hair that she’d always refused to wear any sort of tinted or patterned stockings, even when her refusal had cost her work—her legs were streaked with long, twitching fat blue veins. Varicose veins, as though she were a fat and flaccid woman in her sixties.

  He cocked his pigeon’s head to the right and looked in through her abdominal walls to see what was happening within her intestines, in through the skin and muscles of her legs to understand what was going on there.

  Only to find that the tapeworms had reached sexual maturity despite all the careful checking he’d done on them before his departure, and that not only had their intertwined ten-meter bodies almost completely choked her swollen and distended intestines, but that their hermaphroditic anterior segments had already begun producing eggs. And those eggs—instead of having been excreted as they should have been, to hatch only when and if stimulated by the distinctive digestive juices of the pigs, cows, or fish whose particular constellation of acids and enzymes alone could provide their species of worm with its necessary stimuli—those eggs were hatching almost immediately, while they were still within Liz’s digestive tract, and the minute spherical embryos were anchoring themselves to the intestinal walls with the six long hooks they each sported, then boring through the walls to enter her bloodstream, through which they then let themselves be carried down into her legs. There, in the smaller vessels in her calves and thighs, they were anchoring themselves and beginning to grow, not encysting as normal tapeworm embryos would have done, but instead developing into myriads of long, filament-thin worms that were slowly climbing their way from their anchor points up through her circulatory system toward her heart as they lengthened.

  His enemy, whoever his enemy was, had planned the whole farce with his patients’ stolen but easily recoverable souls and the things that had been lying in wait for him in their place just to keep him occupied while he played around with the worms in Liz, modified them for his own purposes. He must have had her under observation long enough to have known about the fear of all other doctors but himself that Eminescu had long ago conditioned into her, known that he’d have a free hand with her until Eminescu got back. And if Eminescu’d stayed trapped in the secret ways even a few days longer she might well have lost her feet, perhaps even her legs, to gangrene and so been ruined as the potential mother of his son. A week or two beyond that and she could have been dead.

  She was constantly moving her legs, twitching them as she gorged herself on the purée, kneading her calves and thighs. Keeping the circulation going as best she could despite the filament worms waving like strands of hungry kelp in her veins, the worms that had so far only impeded, and not yet blocked, the flow of blood through her legs.

  It was all very scientific and precise, masterfully devised. Whoever’d done it could have easily killed her, done so with far less effort and imagination than he’d expended on producing her present condition. The whole thing was a challenge, could only be a challenge, traditional in intent for all that the way it had been done was new to him. And what the challenge said was, I want your practice and your position and everything else you have, and I can take it away from you, I’ve already proved that anything you can do I can do better, and I’m going to go ahead and do it unless you can stop me before I kill you. The challenge was undoubtedly on file with the Ordre des médecins, though there’d be no way for Eminescu to get a look
at the records and learn who his challenger was: The relevant laws were older than France or Rome, and were zealously enforced.

  But what he could do was take care of Liz and keep her from being damaged any further while he tried to learn more about his opponent. He reached out with his beak, twisted the souls of the filament worms in Liz’s legs dead. They were much tougher than he’d anticipated, surprisingly hard to kill, but when at last they were all dead he pulled them carefully free of the blood vessels in which they’d anchored themselves, pulled them out through Liz’s muscles and skin without doing her any further damage, then patched the damaged veins and arteries with tissues he yanked from the legs of a group of Catholic schoolgirls who happened to be passing in the street. They were young: They’d recover soon enough. The stagnant and polluted blood, slimy with the worms’ waste products, began to flow freely through her system again.

  He watched Liz closely for a while to make sure the waste products weren’t concentrated or toxic enough to be dangerous to her in the time it would take her liver or other organs to filter them from her blood. When he was sure that any harm they might do her would be trivial enough to be ignored he reached out to take and squeeze the souls of the tapeworms knotted together and clogging her intestines, snatched himself back just in time to save himself when he recognized them: the creatures that had attacked him in the land of the dead. But fearsome though they were on the spiritual plane—and now that he had a chance to examine them better he saw that their souls were not those of tapeworms but of some sort of lampreys, those long eel-like parasitic vertebrates whose round sucking mouths contain circular rows of rasping teeth with which they bore their way in through the scales of the fish they’ve attached themselves to, so as to suck out the fish’s insides and eventually kill it in the process—physically they were still only tapeworms despite their modified reproductive systems. And that meant that he could destroy them by physical—medical—means. Quinacrine hydrochloride and aspidium oleoresin should be more than sufficient, if there hadn’t been something better developed recently that he wasn’t aware of yet. But to make use of any kind of medicine he’d have to resume his identity as Julien de Saint-Hilaire, if only long enough to return home, soothe Liz and prescribe for her, then make sure she was following the treatment he suggested and that it was working for her.