The Bridge by D Keith Mano

Author:D Keith Mano [Mano, D Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780451061447
Amazon: 0385028709
Goodreads: 1547120
Publisher: Signet
Published: 1973-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Priest dreamed that he was killing Mary. She gave imperturbable birth under him. He rode. His hands flopped on their wrists, stifling pillows. Mary inhaled suffocation as though it were perfumes. Her head unnecked, rolling free of her torso, yo-yoed up/back. It gave splinters. He hurt. Priest knew she was in labor; he hurried the business. Mary’s lips reasoned, but he heard no sound. Reluctantly, then, Priest turned her nose off, and it was an old iron faucet: he screwed tight, flakes of bloody rust broke away, her cheeks filled with breath. He shouted, “You’re a coward! You’re a coward!” The face was two-dimensional, a sheet of mask. He pulled from the right ear, tore it off, tore it off, calendar pages, and the face changed, a smile, a grimace, despair, shame, lust, laughter. But her fecund body was not killed. Enormously, with squeaking release, it was extruded to the waist. A girl. Her face was cauled by strips of rubber.

Priest awoke. Two-by-fours of late-morning sunlight slanted down from a small upper window, half open. He lay in a kind of cellar. Priest smelled humus: its deep rot suggested food. The walls were damp, chalked with lichen clots of efflorescence. He pushed to his knees. He ached; he was shivering. Opposite, brace for the planks of sunlight, a brass handle nosed from the wall. He saw other brass handles, each centering a square of marble; carved inscriptions were above. Priest tried to stand. His tongue used up all oral room: he could swallow without gagging only when he held it down with his forefinger. There was a stubble of festering stings on his neck and forehead, second growth under his beard. He tried to tweeze them out, but fingerpads had swollen against their nails. He was running a temperature. Priest searched across the floor for hood and mask, for his sandal. Then he remembered.

Priest had crushed her chest. He had trampled the child’s ribs over her heart. Now, as he remembered. Priest began to squat. His arms dangled over the cement floor; he drummed fists against his shins, rhythms of sullen, autistic reproach from childhood. The guardsmen had intercepted her, administered a capsule before following him into the hangar. Delirious, Priest’s mind had inverted actor and victim. He had paused from exhaustion, kicked again, as though packing her into the soil: pauses that made his act seem premeditated and heinous. Then Priest had limped away from Route 17, into retentive, brittle underbrush. He recalled stumbling once, being suspended above the ground in a basket of low brachiate growth, swung there by the whole forest’s natural motion. He did not remember climbing into this room; the one window was certainly too high. Yet there were footprints of a biped in the dust: one exact rubber sole, one shapeless, whisking blur. It was a long room, a rectangle. At the far end, lower steps of a spiral staircase turned upward in wedges. Priest crossed to the wall of handles. He was in a crypt.

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