“Smart boy. I quit. You’re too good. I need a cigarette. Damn, I’m all out. Mind if I run up to the car and get some?”
“I’ll go,” you say.
“Never mind.” She is off across the sand. You watch her run, lazily, sleepily, in patterns of rising hot atmosphere. You think it rather strange she is taking her purse and bottled liquid with her. Women. But all the same you cannot help but notice she is beautiful, running. She climbs up the wooden steps, turns and waves and smiles. You smile back, move your hand in a brief, lazy salute. “Hot?” she cries.
“I’m drenched,” you cry back, lazily.
You feel the sweat crawling on your body. The heat is in you now and you sink down into it, as into a bath. You feel the sweat pouring down your back in torrents, faint and far away, like ants crawling on you. Sweat it out, you think. Sweat it all out. Streaks of sweat well down your ribs and along your stomach, tickling. You laugh. God, what a sweat. You never sweated like this before in your life. The smell of that oil Anne put on you is sweet in the warm air. Drowsy, drowsy.
You start. You head yanks upward.
On top of the cliff, the car is started, put in gear, and now, as you watch, Anne waving to you, the car flashes in the sun, turns, and drives away down the highway.
Just like that.
“Why you little witch!” you cry irritably. You start to get up.
You can’t. The sun has made you weak. Your head swims. Damn it. You’ve been sweating.
Sweating.
You smell something new on the hot air. Something as familiar and timeless as the salt smell of the sea. A hot, sweet, sickish odor. An odor that is all the terror in the world to you and those of your kind. You cry out and stagger up.
You are wearing a cloak, a garment of scarlet. It clings to your thighs, and as you watch, it encases your loins and spreads and grows upon your legs and ankles. It is red. The reddest red in the color chart. The purest, loveliest, most terrible red you have ever seen, spreading and growing and pulsing along your body.
You clutch at your back. You mouth meaningless words. Your hands close upon three long open wounds cut into your flesh below the shoulder blades!
Sweat! You thought you were sweating. And it was blood! You lay there thinking it was sweat coming out of you, laughing about it, enjoying it!
You can feel nothing. Your fingers scrabble clumsily, weakly. Your back feels nothing. It is insensible.
“Here, let me put some oil on your back,” says Anne, far away in the shimmering nightmare of your memory. “You’re going to burn.”
A wave crashes on the shore. In memory you see the long yellow twine of liquid pouring down on your back, suspended from Anne’s lovely fingers. You feel her massaging you.
Narcotic in solution. Novocain or cocaine or something in a yellow
solution that, after it clung to your back a while, deadened every nerve. Anne knows all about narcotics, doesn’t she?
Sweet, sweet, lovely Anne.
“Are you ticklish?” asks Anne, in your mind again.
You retch. And echoing in your blood-red swimming mind, you give an answer: No. Tickle away. Tickle away. Tickle away... Tickle away, Anne J. Anthony, lovely lady. Tickle away.
With a nice sharp barnacle shell.
You were diving for abalones offshore and you scraped your back on a rock, in rough streaks, with a crop of razor-sharp barnacles. Yes, that’s it. Diving. Accident. What a pretty setup.
Sweet, lovely Anne.
Or did you have your fingernails honed on a whetstone, my darling?
The sun bangs in your brain. The sand is beginning to melt under you. You try to find the buttons to unbutton, to rip away this red garment. Senselessly, blindly, gropingly, you search for buttons. There are none. The garment stays. How silly, you think, foolishly. How silly to be found in your long, red woolen underwear. How silly.
There must be zippers somewhere. Those three long cuts can be zipped up tight and then that sliding red stuff will stop sliding out of you. You, the immortal man.
The cuts aren’t too deep. If you can get to a doctor. If you can take your tablets.