Despite Cody’s assurance that he had not seen a trace of the white sedan for over an hour, Oelefse insisted on circling the several blocks surrounding the hospital, spiraling into a covered parking lot instead of heading there directly. No one tailed them from the lot to the lobby, or followed them into the elevator. All the while, both men kept careful watch on everyone from nurses to janitors to visitors. All appeared clean and uninfected, as did the colorful boulders that adorned the fountain on the third level.
Since it served the most seriously ill patients, the floor where Kelli lay was quieter than most. There, everything and everyone seemed to move more slowly than elsewhere in the complex. Nurses spoke more often in whispers, and doctors smiled less. There was no need for such courtesies anyway; not when the patients for whom they might have been intended could neither see nor hear those who were attending them.
Kelli’s room was at the far end of the hall. As he did every time he paid a visit, Cody pictured her walking, perhaps tottering a little, in her white hospital gown as she came through the door. Saw her glancing up to see him approaching, her face breaking out in the irresistible, sunny, slightly sardonic smile of affection he knew so well. And as also happened every time, no recuperating Kelli emerged to greet him. Nor did he find her standing alone inside, gazing longingly out the window at the sun-kissed cityscape beyond, waiting to whirl around happily at his arrival.
The body in the bed was pallid and immobile, unchanged from the last time he had seen her. In his absence he knew that nurses turned and cleaned her, that doctors prodded here and poked there. But she always looked the same to him; flat on her back, eyes closed. She did not look up as he entered, nor react in any way to his touch.
Something else did, however. It always did.
This time it took the form of a small white worm limned in pale bluish stripes. It emerged from her upper arm to stab several times in his direction before retreating back into the living form that provided it with sustenance and shelter. He did not make a grab for it. Had he done so, he knew that his fingers would have passed completely through it. Likewise, the inhabitants of his wife’s body, her abiding tormentors, could not move from her to him in the absence of a natural vector such as a rock or tree. And not just any rock or tree. Many, he had learned from Oelefse, were unsuitable homes for the creatures. Otherwise, every inch of the Earth and every growing thing would have boasted its own coiling, twisting, loathsome inhabitant. Drawing back, he mentioned as much to his mature companion.
“Your American Indians and other animist peoples were right all along, my young friend.” Never stopping, never pausing for rest, Oelefse was investigating the room foot by foot, section by section. “They worshiped many things: the forest, the animals within, the rivers and lakes, the mountains and valleys. For them, each had its own spirit, to be avoided or propitiated. They were more right than ever they knew.” Using the tip of his umbrella, he flipped open a cabinet and leaned forward to peer carefully inside.
“The animals have their spirits, but they are natural to them. They are not Interlopers. And Those Who Abide cannot be assuaged with prayers. The practice of human sacrifice throughout the ancient world had a very real basis in sound medical practice. It was the ultimate means of ridding individuals of the Interlopers who had taken residence within them and emotionally and spiritually sucked them dry. Of course, as a consequence of this method of cleansing the host also perished, but it was the only way the majority of our ancestors had of coping with the spread of Those Who Abide. When your Iroquois or Ute or Sioux prayed to the spirit of a particular rock or river, more than likely a tribal shaman had already identified it as the home of a waiting Interloper.”
Fascinating as the older man’s discourse was, Cody listened with only half an ear. His attention was on his motionless wife. “So the Chachapoyans weren’t the only ancient peoples with access to such knowledge.”
“Nein, my friend. The proper combination of drugs to take to enable one to perceive was once widely known. It is less so today, due not to the myopia of physicians and scientists but to a concerted effort on the part of Those Who Abide to constrict the spread of such knowledge.” Concluding his inspection of the room, he carefully set his umbrella aside. “Now, let me have a look at her.”
Reluctantly, Cody made room so that the older man could stand next to the bed, close by Kelli’s upper body. Oelefse contemplated the recumbent form: the gentle, barely perceptible rise and fall of her chest, the occasional fluttering of closed eyelids, the soapy drip of nutrients through plasticine tubes. Reaching out, he gently stroked one exposed arm, his fingers journeying as delicately as a surgeon’s from cheek to neck to shoulder, down the promenade of bare flesh until they reached the hand that was lying palm downward on the blanket. Collecting the limp fingers in his own, he squeezed gently while murmuring under his breath.
“What’s that?” Leaning forward, Cody tried to make out the words. “What are you saying? I don’t underst—”
Crunching and gnashing unearthly fangs, a mouth mounted on a weaving stalk burst from the tip of his wife’s waxen index finger. It snapped at the oldster’s cradling fist, the razor-thin teeth slashing harmlessly through his flesh. Oelefse’s hand shuddered slightly, but he maintained both his grip and his incantation. Frustrated, the emergent jaws withdrew swiftly back into the finger from which they had erupted. Giving a little shake of his head, Oelefse released Kelli’s hand and laid the slack fingers gently down on the bed. Turning back to an anxious, expectant Cody, the older man sighed heavily.
“I have not the inclination to play the diplomat. Her condition is grave.”
“I can see that,” the archaeologist snapped testily. “Tell me something I don’t know. Can you do anything for her?”
“I will try. First I must get some things from my car.” Leaving Kelli’s bedside, he strode past the anxious archaeologist. “I will be right back.”
Cody resumed his stance beside the beautiful, motionless woman in the bed. “Don’t touch the rocks around the fountain on the way out. They’re contaminated.”
Oelefse smiled knowingly on his way out the door. “I know. I saw that on the way in.”
What was he thinking, pointing out the obvious? Cody chided himself as the door closed quietly behind the oldster. Oelefse was the nearest thing he had encountered to a professional Interloper hunter. It was just that Cody was still not used to the idea that there were others at least as adept as himself at ferreting out the hiding places of the intruders. It helped considerably to know that he was not alone in the world, was not the only one with the ability to espy secret horrors lurking in innocent-looking pools of water and unworked stone. There existed a mysterious brotherhood in which he had automatically been granted membership by virtue of his ability to perceive. Where Kelli’s still abject condition was concerned, he could dare to hope. He no longer felt completely alone.
As he always did during such visits he talked softly to her, not expecting a response. Nor did he receive one. There was no way of knowing if she heard what he murmured lovingly. The doctors said that it was possible, but they were the same doctors who were baffled by her condition. Without clearance to stick his head into other rooms, Cody could only wonder how many of the hospital’s other patients might be suffering from similar Interloper infestations.
They fed off human misery and suffering, Oelefse had assured him. A hospital, therefore, would seem a logical place to find them in great numbers. How much of it did they cause? How many afflictions did they directly induce? These were sobering thoughts to which he could only direct a small portion of himself. His focus, his primary concern, remained Kelli.
True to his word, Oelefse was not gone long before returning with a large briefcase in hand. Except for its size, it looked like an ordinary businessman’s attaché; just the sort a European of Oelefse’s class and station in life might carry. Setting it down on an empty chair, Cody’s new friend popped it open with a remote radio control. Seeing the archaeologist’s expression, the older man explained.
“Those Who Abide cannot of course open metal latches or tumblers, but their human minions can. Of necessity, we of the Society are very security-minded.” Flipping up the top, he began removing an assortment of materials, laying them out neatly on the empty, four-wheeled food-service tray nearby.
“Lock the door,” Oelefse instructed him. “And the windows. Draw the blinds.” He gestured. “Jam the back of that chair against the door latch.”
As Cody complied, the diminutive, smartly dressed Oelefse proceeded to remove his clothes, stripping down until he stood naked in the hospital room save for his briefs. Though reflective of his age, his pallid physique was more developed than his well-cut suit might have suggested. As the archaeologist looked on, he began to paint himself.
Cody was a more than competent professional. He prided himself on being well-read in his field, and not just within his specialty of western South American studies. But he had never seen anything resembling the patterns that the dignified German was now daubing upon his nude form. Slashes and spirals, curls and chevrons, groups of dots and mysterious anthropoidal shapes began to color his blanched, exposed skin. He went about this artistic self-embellishment in silence and as efficiently as if he were preparing to go to the opera.
Finished with the paints, he began to slick back his white hair with a handful of glistening, oily material scooped from a stubby, wide-mouthed jar. A powerful stench filled the room, magnified by the lack of outside ventilation.
“What the hell is that?”
“Bear grease.” Concluding the procedure, Oelefse moved to the sink to wash his hands—and only his hands. “Infused with distinctive chemicals. The byproducts of certain animals have powers undreamed of by most men. The Orientals know this, and suffer a good deal of criticism for it.”
Cognizant of the worldwide trade in animal parts, Cody frowned unhappily. “Rhino horn? Tiger genitals?”
“Nothing like that. Some among the Oriental herbalists are knowledgeable, but most can do no better than random guessing. The Society has made a study of such things.”
The archaeologist’s nose twitched. “I can see where that stuff might repel Interlopers—and everyone else.”
“Not at all.” Reaching once more into his open briefcase, Oelefse removed a sequence of necklaces and placed them one at a time around his neck. “It is not the odor, but a combination of other chemicals that are released into the air. Smells have power just as do tastes and sounds and visuals.” Holding up a small, exquisitely incised gourd that sat on one end of a stick decorated with feathers, beads, and seashells, he shook it in Cody’s direction. Small hard objects unseen within the gourd produced a satisfying rattle.
Setting it momentarily aside, Oelefse removed several lengths of gleaming, beautifully machined stainless steel and began screwing them together to form a long pole, at the end of which he attached a colorful explosion of feathers, bone, and shell. Thus equipped with rattle and staff, paint and grease, he looked preposterous indeed as he stood nearly naked in the middle of the hospital room: a modern parody of some Neolithic witch doctor.
His expression, however, was deadly earnest. “Now, we begin. Watch the door, my young friend. Do what you must to see that I am not interrupted.”
“What are you going to do?” The archaeologist within Cody was more enthralled than amused by the older man’s appearance. Though he recognized none of the patterns painted on the slim, elderly body, nor any of the contrivances Oelefse carried, they hinted at a collective lineage that was hoary and respected.
“Medicine,” Oelefse declared, “is an evolving science that all too often looks down upon its roots. Many of those roots are false, but others are fixed in real knowledge. Some day I will show you the medical library that the Society has maintained for thousands of years.” He smiled through paint and grease. “Its contents are not on-line.”
Approaching the foot of the bed, he began to chant, shaking the rattle while passing it back and forth over Kelli’s feet and legs. From time to time he would raise the instrument toward the ceiling or point it toward different corners of the room. He alternated this with slow horizontal passes of the steel staff over her entire blanketed body.
Thinking himself prepared for anything, Cody was startled when Kelli moaned and writhed beneath the bedsheets. He wanted to ask Oelefse if she was in pain, but seeing the look of concentration on the German’s face, observing the tension in his muscles as he sang and moved with studied precision, he dared not interrupt.
The room grew dark, darker than the shuttered windows ought to have allowed. A warm breeze, almost hot, caressed Cody’s cheeks. Something on the rising wind sang in his ears that was more than the passage of air. An occasional rumble, as of distant thunder trapped in the mattress, punctuated the breeze. Where wind and rumble arose from in the sealed room he could only imagine.
There came a rapping at the door. “Hello? Mr. Westcott, is that you? Are you in there? What’s going on?”
“Everything’s fine, nurse!” He had to raise his voice slightly to ensure that his words would be understood above the wind that was now whipping his long hair about his face. “I thought I’d try some music. My wife loves heavy metal.”
“You have to turn it down, Mr. Westcott. Excessive noise will not be tolerated.”
“I’ll watch it!” he replied in response to the admonition. The rapping ceased. Pleased with himself, he turned back to the bed—whereupon his eyes all but jumped out of his head.
A small but intense vortex had formed directly above his wife’s body; a wide-lipped, slowly rotating squat tornado of a spiral within which flashes of red light raced like electrified rats skittering for distant burrows. His position unchanged at the foot of the bed, a chanting Karl Heinrich Oelefsenten von Eichstatt conducted this energetic specter with rattle and staff and carefully composed incantation. Cody was certain there was a perfectly good scientific explanation for what he was seeing: it just escaped him at the moment.
The rapping at the door was now replaced by a more insistent pounding. “Open up in there! Mr. Westcott, you must open this door.” The voice was demanding, insistent. Glancing in Oelefse’s direction for a sign, Cody found himself ignored. When the pounding intensified, the archaeologist responded by pressing his shoulder against the door and leaning his weight into it, more than a little astonished at the position he suddenly found himself occupying.
The wind in the room had risen to a howl, all of it sucked inward toward the flashing, shrieking vortex. As Oelefse’s surprisingly strong voice rose to a feverish pitch, a small greenish length of spectral plasm emerged from his wife’s abdomen. Fighting to cling to its host, the shape was drawn involuntarily upward, to vanish into the spoutlike underside of the vortex. It was followed by a cluster of tentacles attached to a knobbed egg. Eyes dipped and bobbed wildly as a flattened, crablike blob went next. A staring, gaping Cody did not know if he was witnessing multiple Interlopers being drawn from his wife’s twisting, moaning form, or pieces of a single, much larger one. Wherever the truth lay, it was clear that her infection was as serious as he had believed all along.
The door shuddered as something heavy slammed against the other side. Tightening his jaws, Cody struggled to find a better purchase on the slick hospital floor as he pushed back against whatever was trying to get in. Whoever was out in the hall had stopped yelling at him and shouting orders in favor of turning to brute strength. With a desperation born of revived hope, the archaeologist held his ground, his efforts abetted by the metal chair he had jammed against the handle. Again the door boomed as something heavy thudded against it.
How much longer, he wondered? The tireless Oelefse showed no sign of ceasing his chorusing or his choreography. When would whoever was on the other side call in Security, or outside police? And when they finally arrived, as it now seemed inevitable that they must, what would Cody tell them? If they got a good look at the painted-up, greased-down elderly German, they might not bother with questions.
Not that Cody cared if he was arrested and incarcerated along with Oelefse. He would suffer any indignity, endure any punishment, if only Kelli’s health could be restored to her. And maybe this time she would take his “crazy theories” a little more seriously. Especially after she had the opportunity to converse with her hapless doctors.
She was far from cured yet, however. As Cody held the door against all intruders, Oelefse stood straight and strong in the darkened room, which was now alive with brief bursts of supernal brilliance and streaks of emancipated crimson lightning. Kelli continued to twist and whine softly within the bed as one grotesque guise after another was pulled from her body to vanish into the slender but irresistible maw of the wailing vortex.
A cluster of saw-edged tentacles suddenly thrust through the door, weaving and flailing. One pierced the archaeologist’s forearm, emerging on the other side. There was no blood and no pain; only a slight coolness in the vicinity of his wrist. After writhing futilely for a few moments, the tentacles withdrew. The hospital door was metal and composite. While the Interlopers on the other side could penetrate it as if it were water, in the absence of a vector composed of natural material they could neither infect nor affect the human leaning against the other side.
Cody was wondering how they were going to celebrate, when something monstrous and irredeemably evil suddenly burst through his wife’s chest to strike at the vortex. It had a wide, warty, leprous face with burning white eyes and tiny bright yellow pupils that bulged so far forward they seemed on the verge of tumbling out of their inadequate sockets and onto the floor. A great, clawed, four-fingered hand reached up from a muscular shoulder still buried within Kelli to slash violently at the vortex, cleaving it as though it were made of paper. Bits of the compact maelstrom went flying in all directions. One just missed Cody’s face and he felt the heat of its passing as it flew past him and through the solid hospital door. The apparent catastrophe had one beneficial side effect, one unforeseen consolation: Something on the other side of the door screamed, and the heavy pounding that threatened to numb the desperate archaeologist’s shoulder momentarily ceased.
Abruptly confused, the wind tore at his exposed skin and clothes. The massive yet ethereal hand reached for the chanting Oelefse. Bringing his metal staff down in a swooping arc, the German struck it between its grasping fingers. Red sparks that were not the fire of Earth flew, momentarily blinding Cody. A distant, discordant howl rose from that horrific, swollen face and it promptly withdrew, pulling the single hand down with it, back into Kelli’s writhing form. Tears started from Cody’s eyes at the thought that something like that might be living within, and feeding upon, the woman he adored.
With the destruction of the vortex the wind began to fade, individual zephyrs slipping away to hide beneath doors and windowsills and in ventilator shafts. Normal, subdued sunlight that had been forced from the room returned, brightening it considerably. An exhausted Oelefse stood supporting himself with one hand on the bed’s footboard. His expression was drained and sweat poured in rivulets down his face and naked body, streaking the patterns he had so carefully painted there. For the first time, Cody noted that the elderly man was as muscled as a retired circus performer, the lumps and bulges within his flesh clad in skin the texture and hue of dirty white suede.
Interestingly, the pounding on the door was not resumed. The calm before the accusatory storm, the archaeologist decided. Moving quickly to the side of the bed, he stared down at Kelli. She appeared to be resting comfortably once more, though droplets of sweat now beaded her face. Finding a washcloth, he tenderly brushed away the perspiration. Her eyes remained closed, her expression as nonresponsive as before. Troubled, he turned to Oelefse.
“Is she better? She looks the same. And she’s still not reacting.”
“Give me a moment, my friend. I understand your distress, but nothing will change if I take a few minutes for myself, and we will present a much more reassuring appearance to the administrative functionaries if I alter mine.” Snapping the briefcase shut, he took it with him into the bathroom. Moments later Cody heard the shower running.
Apprehensive as he was, there was nothing he could do to draw an explanation from the older man. He would have to wait. And he had to admit that Oelefse was right. Hospital security would be far less inclined to have them arrested if the German did not appear before them clad in bear grease, war paint, and little else.
Glancing idly toward the foot of the bed, he saw that Oelefse had laid rattle and staff down on the bed sheets. Three-quarters of the way up the staff, the tough stainless steel was partially melted beneath a black streak slightly less than a foot long. Cody went cold inside. The thing that had caused that was living within, and feeding off, the woman he loved. Based on what he knew, Interlopers could not normally affect non-natural objects such as steel. But the events of the preceding half hour had been anything but normal. Certain minor laws of nature had been suspended, existence altered, and perception adjusted. Reality had been tampered with.
Leaving Kelli’s bedside, he removed the chair propped against the door and opened the window blinds, flooding the room once more with unfiltered sunshine. By the time Oelefse emerged from the bathroom, once again impeccably attired, there was little to indicate that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. The German was just setting his handsome hat back on his head when two husky security guards burst into the room, closely trailed by a doctor and nurse. As they cast suspicious glances in all directions, Cody looked up curiously.
“Everything all right?”
When the security men gazed hard at the archaeologist, he met their accusatory stares with an expression of bemused innocence. The doctor turned on the bewildered nurse.
“Well? What’s this all about, then?”
“I—it sounded like there was a war going on in here. I swear, Doctor! The outside walls were shaking. If you put your palm against them you could feel the vibrations!”
The duty physician turned sternly to face Cody, who was seated on the edge of the bed alongside his gently breathing wife. “My nurses are not subject to hallucinations, Mr. Westcott.”
“I told her.” Cody shrugged, affecting the air of one who when confronted by a meaningless challenge could not and would not argue with those too daft to accept the obvious. “My wife likes heavy metal. I’m sorry if I had it going a little too loud.”
“A little loud!” The flustered nurse’s outrage was palpable. “It was more than music that was going on in here!”
Oelefse spoke up, gesturing at the room. “Really, Herr Doktor, do you see anything amiss?”
The duty physician scanned the room. “No. No, everything looks all right.” His eyebrows drew together and he gestured with a nod. “What are those?”
As one, Cody and Oelefse’s eyes went to the two long objects resting crosswise on the foot of the bed. Rising from his seat, the old man picked them up, prepared to allow the doctor closer scrutiny should he be so inclined.
“Gifts for my young friend here. He is an archaeologist, and as such interested in all manner of primitive objects.”
The doctor stared a moment longer. Then he finally relaxed. “They’re very handsome. Indian? The metal one is, of course, a reproduction.” Behind him, the nurse glowered silently.
“Of course. Ja, they are Indian. You are perceptive beyond your field, Herr Doktor.”
Feeling good about himself and better about the situation, the physician smiled broadly. “Sorry to have bothered you, then. Please do try to keep the volume down in here, though. Our walls are reasonably well soundproofed, but they’re not impenetrable, and not all our patients are heavy metal fans. Especially some of the elderly ones. American or British band?”
Oelefse gestured deferentially. “German, of course. Rammstein. I thought they might be especially efficacious in this case.”
The doctor shook his head in amusement. “Heavy metal music. Now that’s a therapy I haven’t tried.” Favoring the bewildered nurse with a withering look of reproach, he turned and led the way out of the room. Relieved of any need to wrestle with recalcitrant visitors, the security men followed without comment.
Cody let out a deep, inward sigh of relief. So preoccupied with the nurse’s report and then distracted by Oelefse’s colorful gear had the doctor been, he’d failed to notice the absence of a CD player, tape deck, or any other visible source of the sounds that the archaeologist had claimed as the “music” that had shaken the room. The older man began to break down the staff into its component parts to repack in the briefcase. He paused to inspect the scorched, marginally melted section of shaft, running a finger over it speculatively.
“Donnerwetter. Very powerful infestation, this. Very, very strong,” he muttered under his breath.
“What now? What happened?” Cody glanced helplessly down at his beloved. “Did any of that do any good? She doesn’t seem any better.”
“Oh, but she is.” Carefully, Oelefse placed the rattle in his attaché. The archaeologist noted absently that the interior was equipped with customized holding straps, pockets, and slots designed to accommodate a wide variety of paraphernalia not usually found in such cases. The decorated and incised gourd-rattle fit neatly between an ultrathin laptop computer and a satellite telephone.
“Is that a fact?” Cody cradled his wife’s limp hand. “Better how?”
“She was suffering from a multiple infestation. Perhaps you saw, when I drew them out.”
“I didn’t know what was going on.” Was Kelli’s pulse stronger? As he spoke, he let his fingers slide affectionately along her wrist. “Are you telling me you performed some sort of exorcism?”
“That word conjures up all manner of irrelevant theological connotations. Rather say that I interfered on a metaphysical level with a number of the Interlopers abiding in your wife’s body. Through a combination of sounds produced by a variety of means I rendered them exceedingly uncomfortable.”
Cody listened intently. “Okay, so you got them out. I don’t pretend to understand how, but you can fill me in on the details some other time. Where did they go?” He indicated the smooth, painted hospital walls. “There are no natural materials in here for them to make contact with, unless the wood in the walls would suffice. In which case,” he finished with a start, “they’re still here.”
“They are not still here. There is very little wood in these walls. Like those of most large commercial structures, they are framed with steel. Having no accessible locus of human contact outside your wife’s body, and being unable in the absence of a suitable natural vector to find a way to enter ours, they were inescapably drawn back to their own world.”
The archaeologist’s gaze narrowed. “Their world?”
“One that exists in tandem with our own. Not parallel, as some theoreticians would have it, but thoroughly integrated. Even as we speak, parts of it are passing through this city, this room, our bodies. Think of a sheet of aluminum foil, crumpled into an irregular ball and then pierced with many long needles. The needles represent the world of the Interlopers. Portions of the needles penetrate and make contact with the aluminum sphere while others either stick out the sides or pass through air pockets within. Where folds of aluminum make contact with shafts of steel, congruency exists. All Interlopers can perceive our world, but only a few among us, those whose sight has been altered, can perceive them. As for their world, well, it is a place best not seen, not even by those who are prepared to do so.”
Cody hesitated uncertainly. “By drawing these Interlopers out of Kelli’s body and sending them back to their world, you’ve cured her?”
“Unfortunately, no. I have cured some, and seen it done by other members of the Society, but I am afraid that in this instance my best was not good enough. In your wife were abiding no less than seven different kinds—we do not say ‘species’—of Interlopers. As they were drawn from her I recognized Thalep, Ozixt, Horok, Jaquinq, Balemete, and Sagravht.”
“That’s six,” Cody pointed out unnecessarily. “You said you recognized seven.”
Rising from his chair, Oelefse walked forward until he was standing at the foot of the bed. Reaching out and down, he put a hand on Kelli Westcott’s blanketed ankle and squeezed gently. The softest of moans escaped her barely parted lips.
“Uninivulk. Very bad one, very potent. Hard as I tried, I could not break its grip on your wife’s vitals. It is too strong, too tightly interwoven with her system. It is always hungry, always feeding. Frankly, I was surprised to see it co-existing with so many lesser of its virulent brethren. Usually a Uninivulk will not tolerate company.” Eyes brimming with sad wisdom rose to meet those of the anxious archaeologist. “They must hate you very much.”
“It’s reciprocated.” Staring down at his wife, Cody tried to recall in detail the awful phantasm that had risen from her resting form to take a vicious, if ineffective swipe at the older man. It was living inside her, feasting on her discomfort, wallowing in her physical and mental suffering. He could do nothing about it. Without Oelefse’s intervention he could not even see it. And neither could the well-meaning physicians who came to check on her condition twice a day.
“That is how I helped her.” Oelefse released the covered ankle and took a step back. “Though the worst of the Interlopers remains within, six have been expunged.” His expression twisted in wry amusement. “The next nurse or physician who checks the equipment that is monitoring her condition will be very surprised, and encouraged. The improvement is real, but any encouragement is false. For the moment, she is better: physically stronger, her body freed to do battle with the only one that still abides. Sometimes humans can fight off such infestations on their own, through sheer effort of will. That is how seemingly incurable victims of inexplicable illnesses suddenly manage to make full recoveries.” The slight smile evaporated.
“That will not happen in your wife’s case. Not when her system is forced to deal with an abiding Uninivulk. I have never known of anyone infected by so virulent an Interloper to survive. She will be better for a little while. Then its presence, and feeding, will begin to take a toll on her temporarily reinvigorated system. She will again begin to fail, to start on the inevitable, slow descent into paralysis, and death.”
Cody could barely control his response. “Then you didn’t help her very much after all, did you? All that happened here was that you postponed the inevitable.”
“It is only inevitable if we do nothing, and if the Uninivulk is allowed to continue feeding unchallenged. I said that I had never known anyone infected by that variety of Interloper to have survived. I did not say that survival was impossible. There are things that can be tried.” His eyes bored into the younger man’s. “It will be dangerous. You must trust me implicitly and do everything exactly as I say.”
“Tell me what I have to do.” Cody responded without hesitation. “Just don’t expect me to trust your driving.”
“Good! You can still joke. Remember always how much the Interlopers hate that.” Turning, he walked back to his chair and closed the briefcase. Multiple locks snapped shut. “First, you must hire someone to watch over your wife around the clock.”
The archaeologist frowned. “Isn’t that the responsibility of the hospital staff?”
“I can see that you have never had to spend much time in hospitals. Staff carry out their assignments, and little more. Nurses will bring your wife new bags of nutrients, will check her vital signs manually to back up the work of the machines, and will keep her clean. Doctors will make brief checks on her condition as part of their scheduled rounds. The rest of the time, she will lie here like this. Alone.” He indicated the door.
“Reflect a moment on the adverse possibilities. Late at night, a lackey of Those Who Abide enters. He is not noticed, not challenged. He carries a canvas sack containing several large stones, or pieces of wood brought from the forest. He lays these on your wife’s helpless body. Each stone and piece of wood contains—”
“All right, all right: I get the picture. I’ll see that she gets twenty-four-hour care.”
“We will see that she does. We must make certain that whatever agency you use, whoever you hire, is Interloper-free. It is not a difficult thing to do, but it must be done. Then, and only then, you and I must make a little trip.”
“Where to? Drugstores? Someplace that can only be found in a bigger city? It’s not far to L.A.”
“If we are to help your wife survive to see another birthday, I am afraid we must roam farther than that. You have done much work in Peru. May I therefore assume that your passport is in order?”