He sounded eminently civilised. Eminently sane. I wondered again if I’d been drugged, or if he was pulling some boochie mind-trick, since I felt lulled by the simplicity of the equation. I had an image of picking Zoë and Lorcan up from a school in Manhattan. Books. Homework. No more care (except the benign aesthetic one) for the next full moon. No more blood on our hands. Were they young enough to forget? Could I tell them it had all been a dream?

“Why didn’t you just use Devaz?” I said. For all Olek’s suavity the vision of his other guest’s despair was fresh. “You’ve got your werewolf right there. I’m sure he would’ve obliged. He’s probably broke. He’d probably have done it for fifty bucks.”

Olek nodded. “He would have,” he said. “When I found him he’d have done it for a pack of cigarettes or a decent pair of shoes. But back then I was still missing several vital pieces to the puzzle. And I’m afraid my curiosity about the cure got the better of me. I can’t tell you how much the timing depressed me. But I must repeat, when I tried the cure on Devaz it was in a spirit of complete scepticism. I simply wasn’t expecting it to work. Well, that was a lesson!”

The refrigerator hummed. As far as Olek was concerned, he’d said all he needed to say. The opening line of “Childe Roland” came back to me. My first thought was, he lied in every word.

“Let’s go up,” my host said. “I don’t expect you to answer until you’ve seen proof of the cure, obviously. Besides, I don’t want Mikhail and Natasha to start worrying I’ve done something unpleasant to you.”

On the last landing before the living quarters, he stopped and turned: “Before we rejoin your friends,” he said, “let me reassure you, since you’ve been too polite to ask, that your feeding needs have been provided for. All you’ll need to do is walk fifty metres into the trees beyond the garden. Acceptable?”

Only because it was the simplest thing to do, I nodded.

“Very good,” Olek said. “Now, let’s rejoin the company.”

69

ABSURDITY HAS A momentum you can surrender to. As does exhaustion. Olek left Konstantinov, Natasha and me at our leisure to “catch up” (throughout which Walker was the invisible fourth person in the room, loudly not mentioned by any of us; he must have short-versioned it to Konstantinov over the phone—and really, what was the long version?) but by two in the morning jet-lag and tantrumming wulf had me at my limit. I gobbled four codeine and took a large Macallan with me upstairs to my quarters. These were a cedar-scented sitting room of dark wooden panelling, Indian silk paintings, a lute, a statue of Krishna, and a bedroom of soothing pale walls with one huge framed mandala over the bed, carpeted with at least twenty more of the fabulous fringed rugs. An en suite with a free-standing tub and a walk-in shower, mosaic tiled in a dozen shades of blue, frangipani incense sticks burning in a tiny brass pot. I was escorted there—with impeccable deference—by what looked like a freshly scrubbed and hair-oiled Grishma, who handed over matching white towels and robe that had plainly never been used before. Sensuous pleasures present themselves regardless of circumstances, and I was tired and unhinged enough to let them in. An hour soaking in the tub to allow the pills and booze to take off what edge they could, then I undressed and got into a large double bed that recieved me like a lover who’d been waiting for my body for a thousand years.

Which was when I noticed the copy of Browning’s Men and Women, open at “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” on the ebony nightstand.

Everything in me that could send its message sent: sleep.

But of course I picked it up anyway.

My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance to watch the workings of his lie

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored

Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

The speaker is the knight (or “Childe”) Roland, last survivor of a gallant band whose lifelong quest has been to find the Dark Tower. Following the satanic old cripple’s directions (which he both believes and despises), Roland sets off into a weird landscape of deformity and horrors.

Yet acquiescingly

I did turn as he pointed: neither pride

Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,

So much as gladness that some end might be.

It’s a long (thirty-four stanzas) journey through a lonely phantasmagoria. Among other horrors, Roland comes across a wretched horse:

One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,

Stood stupefied, however he came there:

Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,

With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,

And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;

I never saw a brute I hated so;

He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

Mutilated horses, stunted trees, turf that looks “kneaded-up with blood,” a stream the knight’s forced to ford, convinced he’s treading drowned corpses underfoot. Halfway across he sticks his spear in to test the stream bed:

It may have been a water-rat I speared,

But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek—

I stopped reading.

I’d heard a baby cry.

Not a cry as in crying—but the start-up or preamble to crying proper, the perilously narrow window which, if you can get in—with the feed, the diaper, the lullaby, the kiss—might just stop the real crying from starting.

I sat up.

Silence.

Not quite silence; the bathroom’s cooling pipes and the ambient rasp of the garden’s cicadas.

But no human sound. No baby.

I was more than willing (more than enough whacked, Macallaned and painkillered) to write it off as … As whatever. Aural hallucination. As nodding off. As ludicrous, Northanger Abbey paranoia. But in spite of myself I got out of bed and went through the panelled sitting room to the door. Opened it a crack.

Only the low murmur of Kostantinov and Natasha talking downstairs. I listened past it. Sent strained hearing out through the house’s packed atoms.

Nothing. No baby.

You dismiss things.

I closed the door and went back to bed. Back to the poem.

It gets worse for Roland, mile after hellish mile all alone. He tries to comfort himself by remembering his virtuous friends—the other knights who shared his quest—but the visions his memory calls up are grotesque and wretched: all his companions died in shame and disgrace.