“Please pay Wallace,” Erskine said. “My nephew takes such delight in counting money.”
Bridget and I got to our feet and together handed eight rolls of hundred-dollar bills to Wallace Beebs.
Remaining in his armchair, Erskine combed one hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, which was when for a moment it ceased being a hand and became an utterly alien appendage of six tentacles, each tipped with a wickedly sharp talon.
|?28?|
When we got up from our armchairs in the library, explosives didn’t detonate under us. Neither did a score of poison-tipped four-inch-long spikes, driven by highly compressed air, pierce us from buttocks to brainpan. Neither did trapdoors open in the floor to dump the chairs and us into a pit seething with hungry crocodiles.
I didn’t know if Bridget had seen what I’d seen—Erskine’s hand briefly revealed as an arrangement of tentacles rather than fingers, the retractable talons deployed as if he would have liked to gut us with them. I was prepared to give her a pointed look, one that she might instantly interpret to mean: Erskine is a Nihilim, a Screamer, a wormhead monster, I’m not kidding, I really mean this. To my great frustration, my bride-to-be didn’t look at me as we four moved out of the library, not when I cleared my throat meaningfully, not when I cleared it again at greater length, and not even when I pretended to stumble on the threshold between the library and the downstairs hall.
Earlier in the day, when we arrived in Peptoe, Bridget had worried that her ability to see through the Screamers’ masquerades wasn’t reliable. She’d said, I have the disturbing feeling some of them are better shielded, better disguised, and I’m unaware of them.
Now, as we set off for the only other building in the Republic of Beebs, she walked beside Erskine, out onto the porch and down the steps, engaged in some quiet conversation that I, in the company of the garrulous Wallace, could not quite hear. More than once, she put a hand on the Nihilim’s shoulder, as if she had developed a degree of affection for him.
Saddle shoes clopping on the steps, my companion handed me a small pressurized can with a spray top. “This will help with your throat. It’s the desert air that does it. This stuff has zinc plus emollient substances that really soothe inflammation.” I assured him that I was fine, but he would not accept the little can when I tried to return it to him. “You think it’s cleared up, the throat thing, but then it comes back. It’s the desert air. I have to buy that stuff by the case.”
The night was calm at ground level, but high-altitude wind had entirely stripped the mask of clouds off the face of the sky. The night was moonlit and moon shadowed.
As Wallace and I followed Erskine and Bridget toward the large single-story storage building, he said, “I buy books I can’t read for a few reasons. For one thing, each copy I add to my collection is a copy that no one else can read. The fewer people reading books, the better off the world will be.”
“I see your point,” I said.
“For another thing, I like the homey look of a library, but I never want to risk polluting my mind with the thoughts of writers who disagree with me. You never know until you get into a book just what wrong thinking it might contain.”
“Every book,” I said, “is potentially a rattlesnake in your hands.”
“That’s an excellent analogy!” he exclaimed, and he clapped me on the back.
Erskine was a Nihilim whose real name was probably something like Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth, but my best guess was that Wallace was nothing more than what he appeared to be: an ignorant, misanthropic, wardrobe-challenged psychopath whom the Nihilim could use to further the destruction of civilization; a useful idiot. Somehow he’d fallen under the insidious influence of the monster, had allowed himself to be convinced that he was related to it. He now filled the role of Czar Nicholas II to his so-called uncle’s Rasputin, although in a venue less elegant than the palace in Saint Petersburg.
“Then,” Beebs said, “I also have the books so that when the Day of Blood and Change arrives, I can celebrate by burning them.”
“Won’t that be a day?” I said. “The war of all against all.”
“I can hardly wait,” Beebs agreed.
“Well,” I said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait awhile yet. There are still too many people who don’t understand why Utopia can grow only out of an ocean of blood.”
“Too true,” he said sadly. “So many people just don’t get it. You’re a truth teller, Bill Torgenwald. You’re a wise young man.”