Nineteen

The fire was shortly luminous and most of the barflies stepped

or staggered out to watch.

They looked primitive. Their faces

seemed to float between the flames and the ice-chip brilliance of the sky.

Alina watched them and felt the discomfort of fleeting despair for the sad times of this world. The loss. Things had stretched apart. There was no glue at the center anymore.

Somewhere something was tottering, and when it fell, all would end. She had never seen the ocean, and never would.

"If I had guts," she murmured. "If I had guts, guts, guts . . ." Scott raised his head at the sound of her voice and smiled emptily at her from hell.

She had no guts. Only a bar and a scar. And a word. It struggled behind her closed lips.

Suppose she were to call him over now and pull him close despite his stink?

Suppose she said the word into the waxy bugger lug he called an ear? His eyes would change.

They would turn into his eyes—those of the man in the robe. And then Scott would tell what he had seen in the Land of Death, what lay beyond the earth and the worms. I will never say that word to him.

But the man who had brought Scott back to life and left her a note—left her a word like a cocked pistol she would someday put to her temple—had known better.

Nineteen would open the secret. Nineteen was the secret.

She caught herself writing it in a puddle on the bar—19—and skidded it to nothingness when she saw Scott watching her.

The fire burned down quickly and her customers came back in. She began to dose herself with the Taaka Vodka, and by midnight she was darkly drunk.

She halted her narrative, and when he made no immediate comment, she thought at first that the story had put him to sleep. She began to drowse herself when he asked: "That's all?"

"Yes. That's all. It's very late."

"Um." He was rolling another cigarette.

"Don't go getting your tobacco ashes in my bed, " she told him, more sharply than she had intended. "No."

Silence again. The tip of his cigarette winked off and on.

"You'll be leaving in the morning," she said dully.

"I should. I think he's left a trap for me here. Just like he left one for you."

"Do you think that number would—"

"If you like your sanity, you don't ever want to say that word to Scott," the slayer said. "Put it out of your head. If you can, teach yourself that the number after eighteen is twenty.

That half of thirty-eight is seventeen. The man who signed himself Dune o' Brien is a lot of things, but a liar is not one of them."

"But—" When the desire comes and it's strong, come up here and hide under your coverlets and say it over and over again—scream it, if you

have to—until the urge passes."

"A time will come when it won't pass."

The slayer made no reply, for he knew this was true. The trap had a ghastly model.

If someone told you you'd go to hell

if you thought about seeing your mother naked (once when the slayer was very young he had been told this very thing), you'd eventually do it.

And why? Because you did not want to

imagine your mother naked. Because you did not want to go to hell.

Because, if given a knife and a hand in which to hold it, the mind would eventually consume itself. Not because it wanted to; but because it did not want to.

Sooner or later Alina would call Scott over and say the word.

"Don't go," she said.

"We'll see."

He turned on his side away from her, but she was comforted. He would stay, at least for a little while. She drowsed. On the edge of sleep, she thought again about the way Scott had addressed him, in that strange talk.

It was the only time he had seen her strange new lover express feeling. Even his lovemaking had been a quiet thing, and only at the last had his

breathing roughened and then stopped for a second or two.

He was like something out of a story or a myth, an incredible, dangerous creature. Could he grant wishes? She thought the answer was yes, and that she would have hers. He would stay awhile.

That was wished enough for a luckless scarred bitch such as her.

Tomorrow was time enough to think of another or a third. She slept.

In the morning she cooked him grits, which he ate without comment. He shoveled them in without thinking about her, hardly seeing her.

He knew he should go. Every minute he sat here the ebony man was further away—probably out of the hardpan and arroyos and into the desert by now.

His path had been directly southeast, and the slayer knew why.

"Do you have a map?" he asked, looking up.

"Of the town?" she laughed. "There isn't enough of it to need a map."

"No. Of what's southeast of here."

Her smile faded. "The desert. Just the desert. I thought you would stay for a little."

"What's on the other side of the desert?"

"How would I know? Nobody crosses it. Nobody's tried since I was here." She rubbed her hands on her apron, got potholders, and dumped the tub of water she had been heating into the sink,

where it splashed and steamed.

"The clouds all go that way. It's

like something sucks them—"

He got up.

"Where are you going?" She heard the shrill fear in her voice and hated it.

"To the stable. If anyone knows, the hostler will." He put his hands on her shoulders. The hands were hard, but they were also warm.

"And to arrange for my mule. If I'm going to be here, he should be taken care of. For when I leave."

But not yet. She cheered up at him. "But you watch that Almiron. If he doesn't know a thing, he'll make it up."