24.5.13 1.1版本更新：斜体似乎无法正确显示，仍使用粗体代替斜体，同时在评论区放出完整link

24.2.29 1.0版本更新：更新了若干错误，移除了译名表，将原文中斜体部分重新使用了斜体，同时翻译部分已经完成，校对后放出

24.1.29 0.9版本发布

本人注：本小说与CoC模组《燃烧的星辰》(The Burning Star)关联极其密切，如果你准备作为玩家参与这个模组，请不要阅读以下内容

文章来源：《Twice Dead Things》故事九，P208-266，英文版由本人手打完成，如有错漏，请在评论区指出，不胜感激

文章作者：A. A. Attanasio

出版社：Elder Signs Press

你还可以在于 Ramsey Campbell 编纂的 《New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos》一书找到此文章。

本书可以在亚马逊等网站购买，不在此提供链接

写在前面：《燃烧的星辰》是基于《星池》这篇小说创作的，而事实上如果你是一个准备备团的kp，你会发现你在中文社区根本找不到一点关于这篇小说的信息，这也是我做这个搬运的目的。目前本人的翻译计划暂时搁置，如果有大佬想要接过翻译，我将不胜感激并为你提供力所能及的帮助。翻译已完成

注1：文中有一些看上去是拼写错误的地方是原文如此，推测是为了表现出口音特色

（防剧透分界线）

The Star Pools

There is a calling under the breath, a cry that goes on long as a vein. It is the last senseless moment of the organism, the instant of death that cries back through the narrows of air from the ferrous edge.

——Schiavoni and Malamocco, Voorish Rituals

Pain that even the cold stream water couldn't numb, a brittle, ruby pain, Henley Easton shuddered, then sat down in the stream, up to his waist in water, trousers ballooning. Slowly, he lifted the sharp rock he had stepped on, squeezed it hard, pressed it to his forehead, his lips. In the water, a cloud of blood swelled. A flap of skin on his foot winked open and closed. Seeing it and the blood holding back in the icy water, he thought he was going to be sick. But there were children looking on; so, he clutched at the blade of stone until he came back.

    He limped to shore and spotted the familiar silver lines of his car parked at the edge of an escarpment above the sand. He still grasped the rock. There was no blood on its cutting edge, and he felt ashamed. With a lopsided heave, he sent it flying over the heads of the fishing children and watched it arc alone above the reeds, falling into the shadows of the far bank.

    He wrapped his foot in a rag from the trunk of his car and sat for a while on the hood, looking out across the swale to a clump of cedar pines where an hour before he had frantically dug up mulchy earth and buried his cache.

    Beyond the green colony of trees, the tortured land rose in great broken-backed steps toward a haze of iron-spined mountains. Nobody would be coming out here to look for anything but steelheads.

    Reassured, already mindless of the itching throb in his foot, Henley Easton got into his car and swung out onto the highway. By dusk, he arrived in New York City. He had a leisurely dinner at Shakespeare's and decided to limp across Washington Square Park to find a doctor he knew. At the corner of MacDougal and Fourth, a rush of dizziness overtook him. It happened so quickly, there was no time to cast about for support. He floundered on the curb, tried hard to make it back to the sidewalk. Eyes glaring dark, he slumped to his knees, A moment later, he sprawled in the gutter, awareness sinking into the shadows of his body.

He endures an endless dream, wandering through dank, night-lighted corridors that stink of rime and something burnt. He moves alone in darkness, feeling his way along greasy walls and abrupt corners that goat-step down into smoky grottoes. The air, murmurous with the sound of purling water, also carries distant voices and the far off seethe of ocean rollers steaming to shore.

    He wanders a long time, unable to wake. Eventually he stumbles out the mouth of the labyrinth and howls into the sear of the sun until the landscape he has entered awes him to silence. A white horse nearby, standing still as rock, its eyes an evil pink. Ashy sea grapes and palmetto hanging limp from long trellises above shocks of colorless grass. To the left, the sea, silver as mercury around a small boat with a black stick of a man standing in it, waiting. Three white huts squat on the right, each with a vacant window. Everything perfectly still and white. Even the sky white — except for the sun. It is black. Seeing it, Henley feels his muscles melt, and he drops to his knees. It is fibrous black, an immense spore, too painful to stare at. He rubs his eyes and blinks. He blinks. Nothing changes. The silver sea steams beneath the virus star.

    A thin breeze picks up, and Henley watches several ashy leaves litter away. The white horse remains motionless, and its pink eyes are staring. Closer now, the boatman's features become visible. Bristly and thick, dully gaping. Puffed lips move, and Henley hears nothing. The face looks moronic, the forehead bulging, filling up the sockets so that the eyes stare up from under the skull. An idiot's face. Lips continue to move in a whisper. And then the breeze shifts and is full of patterns as it presses by. Silky curves of air carry a voice, scrawny and wicked: Shut your ears big, let the darkness come unrolling from your eyes and your fingers blow longer all in the stillness. Shut your ears big, Henley.

    Henley straightens as if struck. The voice is horrible. He tries to heave himself to his feet, and the effort collapses him. He squelches into the mud. The heat of the black sun thuds against the back of his neck. He squeezes his eyes tight and tries to will himself awake, but the dream is unbreakable.

    So there he lies, feeling as if he's wrinkling smaller in the alien light, drying to a dusty char that whispers away in the breeze, scattering through an incommensurable darkness.

    Black.

    A palpable darkness. Thick oozing masses of black. Immense galleries of space, choirs of distance, and at their center, a mountain of black convulsion gulfing all sound, all light.

    With a terrible shriek, Henley wrenched awake. His eyelids tugged open, their mineral stare facing a wall. Gradually sounds sifted through, and he heard footsteps, sensed a faint medicinal stain on the air. He was in a hospital, and that realization calmed him. Yet there was no chance to wonder what had happened, because it was still happening. The very air around him seemed to pulse with the massed blackness of his nightmare —

    No — not a nightmare.

    Reality had gangplanked him into perpetual horror. Sitting perfectly still in his hospital bed, Henley felt utterly transformed. The room loomed empty. However, that was only an appearance confuting reality. The darkness of the room hovered cellular and shifting, its relative silence humming, a mockery of the void from which he had just risen. That supreme deadness endured, disguised, lurking as emptiness at the center of all things, voracious black holes invisible behind reflecting surfaces: walls, a night table, the windows...

    At first light, a doctor came in with his medical chart. Henley could see through him, sensed the doctor's surprise at finding him awake, saw his body resolve into a cloud of atoms, a confusion of energies temporarily united, and, at their center, blackness.

    The doctor unwrapped Henley's foot, and for the first time since waking, Henley stared at his own body. He could see through it as well. At his foot, there was something different. It leaked darkness. Threads of blackness rayed from it, shafting up his leg to his knee. Seeing it, he remembered the sharp rock, remembered hiding the cache beneath the trees, remembered ...

    Henley Easton snapped awake.

    "Christ! Where am I?"

    The doctor looked up with a benign, puzzled expression. "Relax, Mr. Easton. You're in good hands."

Mike Rapf prowled the carpet of a consultation room in St Vincent's Hospital, He moved with ponderous exhaustion, having slept only in snatches the last week. Fever sores crusted a corner of his mouth, and he walked with a slight limp. Nervous as a rat, he shuffled from corner to corner, hands deep in his pockets. Of average height with flat snake eyes and a pachuco haircut, he resembled someone dangerous while actually suggesting no threat at all, which more than once had proved lethal for his adversaries. Beneath his madras shirt, he carried a butterfly switchblade and, strapped to his leg under his trousers, a modified bayonet. His face, once lucid as porcelain, shone sundark and scribbled with many fine blond wrinkles.

    When he heard the scream, he stopped in his tracks, and his dark eyes narrowed. He identified Henley. Though he had known the boy only briefly, he was certain that he recognized something about that cry — a whimpering quality that he associated with this craven mule. It wasn't a scream of pain. It was fear.

    A doctor came in — young, thin-boned, with long intelligent hands. "He's coming around."

    "What's wrong with him?"

    The doctor shrugged. "No idea. It's the zaniest catatonia I've ever seen. He sent off theta waves the whole time he was out — the EKG of an alert person. Yet, he didn't respond to any stimulation."

    "But he's going to pull through, isn't he?"

    "I think so. His vital organs, nervous and lymph systems are full unaffected."

    Rapf released an audible sigh, ran a hand over his face. "When can I see him?"

    "Now, if you like. He's remarkably alert for all he's been through."

    When Rapf entered, Henley Easton essayed a smile, sitting up straighter in the bed of his private room. Rapf went over to him directly, without returning the smile, and leaned close to his face. "Where is it, coconut?"

    Henley kept smiling. He made a small feathering gesture with one hand and stared remorselessly into the flat dark eyes. He was good-looking, with flame-bright hair, clean jawline and gray eyes that looked a little crazed from the medication. "Since when did they start letting baboons in here?"

    "Don't loose-lip, Easton."

    "How'd you find me?"

    "When you didn't show last week…"

    "Last week? How long have I been here?"

    "Don't you know? Nine days, man. The only good thing that happened to you is I ten-twentied before Gusto or his crew. They'd have left nothing for the hospital but an autopsy."

    Henley closed his eyes. A weight heavy as heat lay on the back of his neck. And there were memories, ugly nightmare memories, of darkness, a maze, a black sun, horrible whispering…

    "I laid out a lot of coin to get you this private box." Rapf reached into his pocket and pulled out a jangle of dog tags. "Your brother's plates. I figured they'd do more good here than they would where he's trashed. I used them to convince the hospital that you and I are kin. It was the only way to take charge."

    "What about Gusto?"

    Rapf shook his head, contentious. "He wants your ears, clown. He figures you ripped him. What else is the stooge to think after more than a week? The best thing for you is tell me where the skeejag is so I can tighten him up."

    Henley rubbed the back of his neck. A retinal afterimage of the black sun seemed to hover before him. Everything looked dark, outlined by a soft mystical shine. "No way. You'd just run it."

    "What?" Rapf's face closed with indignation. "I'm your cover."

    Henley looked cool and arrogant. "You were my bro's cover, too. At Ngoc Linh."

    Rapf's emotional valence swung from indignation to fury and then to remorse with unnatural swiftness. "Yeah. Well, pal, you'll be on your way to a family reunion if you don't gratify Gusto. He wants those two kilos."

    "And he can have them. I'm in this for the payoff. You know that. I'm not going to run it."

    "Fine. Then tell me where I can get it."

    "No way. We go together or not at all."

    "Sure, and just how long before you're mobile? I could be fish chow by then."

    "We go tomorrow."

    "The doc doesn't even know what's wrong with you."

    Henley nodded, and his eyes glazed over, face distracted. The afterimage of the black sun had expanded so that it covered everything like a gray film. Rapf's face reflected in a dark mirror wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights. The room suddenly seemed foreshortened, and Henley stared through mistings of shadow. A blue light whose source might be somewhere behind the bed suffused his vision, and movements other than what he knew were there attracted his attention. Another scene superimposed the room: a pedestrian landscape — a parking lot. Henley recognized Rapf's car and watched dumb-faced as a black man in duck trousers unholstered a pistol and knelt down in the back seat of an adjacent white Chevy. Just as swiftly, the image splintered.

    Rapf laid a callused hand on Henley's shoulder. "You need rest, kid."

    Henley blinked, rubbed his temples. With cold objectivity, every rift and flaw in the opposite wall, every pore on Rapf's face stood out sharp as glass. For a moment, he had felt as if he was leaning outside himself, teetering on the brink of a nightmare cliff that mawed beyond the particled world. Now he was himself again, and it was difficult to imagine that what he had seen was real. But he couldn't take the chance —

    "Hold on, Mike. There's someone with a gun waiting for you in a white Chevy wheelside of your car."

    "Huh?"

    "Call it fever jitters. But stay sharp."

    "Yeah. Sure."

     When Rapf left, Henley leaned back and closed his eyes. A cold brilliance ran along the surface of his skin, and he seemed to sense that eerie whispering he had heard in his nightmare, sensed it the way the deaf hear sounds through the small bones of the head. Somewhere deep within himself the nightmare continued, an evil pushing out into the world. He had a feeling that if he let himself he could fall toward it, that it was pulling him.

    Staring at the wall directly opposite, he tried to root himself in its cracks. It was beginning to shimmer. He was certain that it was starting all over again. Then, just as he reached for the call button, the wall solidified. He felt suddenly warm, and the sunlight slanting through the blinds reassured him.

    He pressed the button anyway. When the nurse arrived, he was sitting at the edge of the bed, wearing, he hoped, his most alert and gracious smile. "Would you mind getting my clothes, please? I'm signing out."

Rapf left the hospital through the service garage and emerged on Twelfth Street at Seventh Avenue. He had parked his car in the Waverly Building's lot, and he approached it the long way. When he got to the corner of the lot, he froze. A white Chevy had parked beside his car.

    Without hesitation, he circled the lot and approached the Chevy from behind. When he was within four cars of it, he lay down and bellycrawled until he was alongside its left rear door. From where he lay, he could see the latch was up. He surveyed the surrounding cars best he could. No one was in sight. In one swift movement, he unsprung his butterfly glade and jerked open the door.

    The man inside lay belly down, peering through a drillhole in the opposite door. Rapf burst in, and the man swung around with a Walther automatic in his right hand.

    Rapf slapped the gun aside, then pulled the killer into a sitting position and jacked his jaw. With a fierce tug, he dragged him out of the car, waved the butterfly under his nose. "All right, knucklehead, no more surprises. Who sent you?"

    "Who you think?" The man rubbed his jaw and scowled. "Gusto wants his scag."

    "Yeah, well, you tell Gusto it's his. My touch was laid up or he'd have it by now."

    "He wants it last week."

    "Sure, sure. You think I'd still be in the country if I was running it? Come on!" He pulled the gunner to his feet, pushed him back a pace, and retrieved the Walther. "Tell him he can have it tomorrow." He backed his way to his car. "Same drop. " Rapf threw the gun under the seat, slid behind the wheel and drove off.

    For nine days, since Henley turned up at St Vincent's in a coma, he'd kept on the move, not daring to return to his flat. He knew Gusto would kill him. The man had a notorious temper. But handling the hit man gave him some confidence, and he decided to go home. He circled the block slowly twice and scouted the lobby cautiously. Even so, the instant he put his key in the latch, he realized he had blundered.

    The door of the opposite apartment burst open, and two men pounced on him, shoved him into his rooms. One of them handcuffed him immediately. The other bolted the door and led him by the nose to the bathroom. They were big, wild, mongrel blacks with natty denims, their hair twisted into spikes. One had a beard and was missing half his left ear. The other wore dark wraparound glasses and a pink hat with a tight brim cocked low. He carried a shopping bag. In the bathroom, they knelt him down before the toilet bowl.

    "Hey! Lay off!" Rapf pleaded. "I'm good with Gusto."

    The bearded one laughed. "My name's Duke Parmelee. And that's Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz. We are here to take your face apart."

    Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz took four cans of drain cleaner and a bottle of bleach from the shopping bag and emptied them into the bowl. The Duke continued, "Gusto wants you to know, he's hurt you ignored him."

    Hi-Hat grabbed Rapf behind the neck and shoved his face toward the fuming water. The acid vapors seared his sinuses and scalded his eyes.

    "Yawww!" Rapf bawled. "Don't! Please! I got the stuff!"

    Hi-Hat eased up, and Rapf pulled back with a gasp, face slick with tears.

    "Where is it?" the Duke asked.

    "It's hidden. Tomorrow, I'll lift it tomorrow."

    Hi-Hat steered Rapf's face toward the blue burning water. Rapf screamed, and the fumes gagged him. He went into a glide.

    The Duke pulled him back and slashed him across the face with a sharp-ringed hand. "Cry for me. Cry and I won't make you drink that soup."

    Rapf cried, his whole body shaking with sobs.

    "Just you remember," Duke Parmelee said. "You're a juke and everybody knows you're a juke. If you don't have that H tomorrow, you will suffer and die."

    They uncuffed him and were gone before he could get to his feet. All thing considered, they had been practically cordial.

Henley Easton took a cab from St Vincent's to Pennsylvania Station, then rode the L.I.R.R. to Garden City where he rented a car. After eating at McDonald's, he had fifty dollars left. The nightmare hadn't recurred, and he was beginning to feel confident. The plan was to get his cache and head west. He didn't want to burn Rapf, yet he felt he had no choice. The coma had changed everything. No doubt Gusto and his black mafia felt ripped after a nine-day delay. Better, Henley figured, to find another market and leave Rapf behind to answer questions.

    Henley spent the night in a motor inn where he inspected his foot for the first time since leaving the hospital. There was no swelling, but the lips of the wound looked scaly and black. Examining it made him feel drowsy. He put his sock on, lay back and slid into a dark sleep.

    The next morning, he went down to the stream early, uncovered his cache and secured it inside the car's spare tire. But when he got behind the wheel to go something stopped him. He stared through the windshield at the larkspur, the myrtle and the great bellowing fireweed that flourished on the slopes. He felt suddenly woozy, as if swaying with deep sea rapture over whispery distances — becoming no one, everything, endless space.

     Come alive! He snapped at himself and jerked upright behind the wheel. It was no good. He determined that he had to get out of the car, and when he did it was like moving in a dream. He felt light as a cloud beginning to vanish. A shadow spread its anonymous dark over everything, and the air turned soft as rock seen underwater. Limbs, remote and rubbery, moved as though by their own will, descending the slope through a swatch of burned reeds. When he stopped moving, he looked down, and there jutted the stone that had cut him, huddled among crusts of dirt like a stunned animal.

    It came away from the ground easily, and the dry dirt crumbled, revealing a palm-sized green rock. When he had first seen it wet, he thought that color was moss. The green color and oily shine were the rock's own strange attributes. Dizziness and nausea returned.

    Henley moved to heave the thing away, but something about the patterning on the rock stopped him. Looking closely, he discerned markings engraved in sharp cuneiform-like designs. He ran his fingers over them, studied again the fine cutting edge and turned to take it back with him.

    On the return walk to the car, his body no longer felt light. He was hungry, and he decided to find a restaurant. At the highway, he turned toward the city impulsively. He wanted to wheel around and go west, but it was impossible to do more than speculate about that. He felt stoned and uneasy, and he stopped several times to question his motives. Yet, each time he stopped, an overriding urgency, razor-apt, urged him back into his car. When he arrived in Manhattan, his clothes had soaked through with a cold sweat.

    He returned the rented car and took a room at the Elton on East Twenty-sixth. There, he unbagged the heroin and repeatedly touched it with his fingertips. It had become the primary purpose in his life, even though he was doing everything with it wrong.

    He took a pinch, divided it into two thin slivers and used his thumbnail to snort them. A few moments later, he drifted slowly and powerfully across the room through the cool red light of day's end. He mastered a small spasm of nausea and floated to the corner of his cot where he sat down, all of the day's problems already on the point of an energetic solution.

    An hour later, the room darkened. Stern shadows, deep as oil, gloomed on all sides. Everything seemed immense, and the apprehensions of the nightmare began to feel real. The cutting stone, propped on the windowsill, pulsed a dull incandescent green. It's the drug, he reassured himself, though he wasn't confident. Fear hazed around him like a thunder charge. At any moment, the horror could begin again. Something dark and cold as an ocean current tugged at him, pulling him away. He touched the bedspread to reassure himself. It was death-cold! In terror, he hopped off the bed before he saw that he had touched the metal bedpost.

    He breathed deeply to calm himself. It came to him that the nightmare was still there, somewhere deeper, much deeper than awareness. It continued. It had never stopped. Like thunder beginning too late to remember the light, his mind shivered in the afterfall of an intractable doom. Clearly, he saw that it was only a matter of time before the darkness welling within surged outward. He sat shivering in the twilight and resolved to contact Rapf. He had to unload the heroin. If he went into a coma and anyone found him with it, it would be better if he never woke up.

    From a pay phone in the lobby, Henley called Rapf's apartment, and the phone rang a long time before a basso-rumble voice he didn't recognize answered. Henley hung up immediately. His hands trembled so violently it took him five minutes to dial correctly an alternate number Rapf had given him. A woman answered and said she hadn't seen Rapf in days and had no idea where he was. Henley told her his name and where he was staying and hung up.

    He went back to his room and bolted and chained the door before he noticed the green luminance in the darkness. It pulsed brighter as he turned, and he noted that the cutting stone emitted a haze of light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and recognize it wasn't light at all but a gas or vaporous plasma deliquescing from the rock.

    Henley stood for a long time, mesmerized. This was a tricky gas. Against the dark windowpanes, it appeared feathery and iridescent. Along the ceiling, it billowed in small dark streams. Henley pulled his attention to the stone. There, the vapor folded over itself slowly, like a flower blossoming. It entranced him, and he kept his gaze fixed on it until something of another texture altogether appeared in its depths. There against the surface of the jade-colored rock, a shiny wet substance oozed. Slowly, a knob of clear jelly striated with smoky colors bulbed out. It extended pseudopods and slimed along the edge of the sill.

    Henley snapped on the light switch. Nothing happened. Tungsten coils glowed maroon, and the room remained semi-dark, crepuscular in the thin vapor light of the stone.

    A cold finger touched Henley between his shoulder blades, and he shuddered and spun around to leave. As his hands fumbled with the dead bolt, a horrible thing happened. The idiot's voice, scrawny and demonic as in his nightmare, called out from behind: Fear arrives like a runner. Shut your ears big, Henley, and look — shadows go by long after bodies have passed. Your eyes blow backward.

    Henley whimpered and turned from the door. The ichor squeezing from the stone had stretched into a membrane quivering in the air like a sea plant. It was still pulling from the rock, and in the half-light Henley thought he could see a net of fine blue capillaries webbed within it. Though overwhelmed by a frantic urge to flee, he stood motionless, the voice booming in his head holding him fast: Dark carries you, broods like wells in the deep ground. You can't run, nowhere to run, for you and I are the same.

    A soft moan forced out of Henley's lungs, and he pivoted. The dead bolt clacked open, and the chain lock jangled free before a loud noise popped behind him followed by a frying sizzle. Henley glanced over his shoulder as he fidgeted with the door latch. The viscous protoplasm had snapped free, and it swam through the air toward him, a small shivering mass the size of a fist. Curly-edged feathers of flesh trailed below it, as from a jellyfish, and the whole bulk, dimpled with blood spots, arrowed for his head.

    Henley swung the door open and bolted into the corridor just as the tendrilous thing caught up with him from behind. Icy snug fingers wrapped around the back of his head and over his ears. Something hard and needle-sharp pressed against the nape of his neck, forcing the base of his skull. He scrambled for the stairway, stumbled and fell. The corridor went suddenly white, as if blasted by lightning. A hot pain pierced him between the eyes, and Henley understood, with a spasm of terror, that the thing had punctured his skull!

    Lurching to his feet he jerked forward a pace and plunged over the stairwell with a stammering cry. He bounced off the top steps and careened over the banister into space. For an awful moment his head bulged, rupturing at the seams, and then the blur of steps braked. Henley could see the yellow wallpaper spin off gracefully to one side as the stairs swung up from below. He floated. Gravity hugged him strongly around his waist, and he sensed something within pushing out, buckling space around him so that he descended very slowly. Only the piercing ivory pain pithing him through the back of the neck to a point between his eyes kept him from marveling.

    Abruptly, the pain cracked and shot down his spine. With a terrifying explosion, the stoop of stairs that he was settling toward banged apart and splintered across the vacant lobby like a broken vase. Henley slapped to the ground amid a patter of dislodged plaster and lay there stunned, trying not to faint.

    Stomach muscles knotted again, and a powerful surge of strength hoisted him to his feet. Some movement down at the opposite end of the lobby caught his eye, but he couldn't make sense out of it in the whistling deafness. Mechanically, his body turned, swung over the blasted stoop and lumbered up the stairs. In his room, Henley collapsed.

    Some sense of self-control returned. His head throbbed, and trickles of dark, almost black blood dripped over his cheeks from the back of his head. With one finger, he explored the nape of his neck and a deep hole there, too painful to probe. He swayed to his feet and leaned against the wall. People scurried up and down the hall.

    Gradually, one thought cleared itself from the terror. His cache. Quietly and quickly as possible, he shuffled over to the night table and sealed the cotton ditty bag with the heroin in it. He debated for a moment about flushing it down the toilet and getting himself to a hospital. That idea closed down immediately. He felt trapped and terrified. The smell of something broken in the air troubled him, and he knew that he had to get away and think all of this through.

    He clambered down the fire escape outside his window. Two cop cars had pulled up in front of the Elton. So, he skipped through the alley and jumped a fence to Twenty-Seventh Street. Glistening with sweat and shaking ferociously, he slid along the storefronts. Whatever had leaked out of the rock and attacked him, it had burrowed into his skull. He could feel part of it quavering at the mouth of the puncture wound. Sickened with despair, he wanted to get help immediately, heroin or no. But he couldn't stop walking. His body marched on mechanically, sleepwalking with him awake. Eyes glazed like small brown fruits, he stared past pedestrians who saw him approaching and gave way, widely.

    The moon sang down around him, grim and cool, and he walked on, sticking to the darker cross streets. Hours later, he stopped on a tiny side lane, virtually an alley, whose name he hadn't seen. A shop front with iron bratticing opened, and an old, old man, skin gray and hackled as bark, urged him in. The old man leaned forward like a dead tree and studied him with eyes bright as pins. Visions had made his face unearthly, battered-looking. He wore a mantle sewn with seashells and porcupine-quill scrollwork, and he remained still, hooded like a cobra, silent, beckoning Henley with a sway of his head to enter.

    Henley stepped a pace into the shop, faltered a moment as he surveyed the place. A wing-feather fan from an eagle covered one wall. A stuffed monkey hung by its genitals from a ceiling crusted with black mussel shells. The odor of the room smelled sticky. In a polished claw foot burner with talons spread, an orange lump of olibanum squatted, and as Henley turned to view the coils of a white python nailed to one of the rafters, its hognose head watching him with dusty eyes, the old man lit incense coals. Yellow vapors wafted across a rickety shelf, seethed over husks of seahorses, the molt of a tarantula, red-speckled seabird eggs, and amber and green bottles stopped with thumbs of apes.

    Trills of canaries glimmered in the room. Lizards that would eventually devour the bright birds drowsed below in cages crafted from twigs. A yellow and papery light, filtered through tall lanterns stained with images of serpents and squids, gave everything an umber cast. In that light, the old man, who had closed the door and was now motioning Henley to sit, looked ageless.

    Henley sat in the corner and watched anxiously as the old man approached, trouser legs hissing. He held a thin bone whistle to his lips and blew a brittle note. "I been waitin' a long time for you." With womb-soft tread, he stepped closer. "Cthulhu fhtagn!" he spit, and Henley felt a surge of strength. The old man stood wrapped in a cloak of shadow. "You knaw nuthin' 'bout what has you. Well, I got to say, dat is best." He leaned far forward out of the darkness, and Henley saw he had only one eye. A shard of mirror had replaced the other, and confronting his reflection in it, he grew faint. Henley's eyes had so widely dilated no whites showed, and around the corners of his mouth a scaly blackness crusted. "You knaw nuthin' 'bout de way dat has you. And dat be good. Dat be best good." The old one pulled the bone whistle to his parched mouth and sucked a sea chant, a modal hymn, which seemed to come from all around. Listening to it, Henley knew both that his life had shrunk to a small animal dying in a bottle and that he would live forever in the open spaces of lone birds.

Rapf's head was going bad. There had been too many lousy breaks. When he learned that Henley had signed out of St Vincent's, he went to a gunshop and got several extra clips for the Walther automatic. Staying in the city scared him, and he drove out to his sister's place in Stony Brook. By the time he got there, Henley's message had come through, and Rapf wheeled back into Manhattan. At the Elton, the cops had left no wiser than when they arrived, and there were several people in the lobby, grouped together, mumbling. Nobody had any idea what had happened.

    Henley's door stood unlocked, and Rapf entered without knocking. Except for a squelchy odor in the air and several drops of dark blood on the floor, the place was vacant as a sucked egg. Lights blazed, and wind flowed through an open window. When he went over to check the fire escape, he spotted a small dull rock with curious etchings on it. Rapf at first thought it was a paperweight. When he examined it more closely, he recognized it was like nothing he had ever seen before. He pocketed it, searched the bathroom scrupulously and left.

    Rapf rarely got drunk, and when he did he became so tight only violence could unspool him. He went down to the Red Witch and got skunked enough to call his old field captain. The last time he had seen Vince Pantucci was Can Tho when they were spreading a little lead around some of the villages, hoping to enrage Charlie. Shortly afterward, Rapf got caught smuggling M-16s out of the country. Pantucci was the ring's honcho, and Rapf did two years without fingering him. Since then, Pantucci had completed his tour and walked. Rapf knew he was in the city. He had been hearing tales about him for over a year. The man was mean. He was the only person that Rapf knew who could really move weight — other than Gusto. And he wasn't talking to Gusto.

    Getting in touch with Pantucci proved difficult. He was big time now and stayed low. Eventually, Rapf had to drop a few lines about gun running to make contact. An hour later, Pantucci stalked into the Red Witch. A big man, wide as an oven, he had arms like dock ropes and tight brass-red curls that boiled up around his neck from under his silk shirt. Dark cave- squatter eyes spotted Rapf instantly, and he muscled through the happy hour crowd and into the booth. "Why are we here?"

    "I need a favor."

    Pantucci had the face of an Etruscan — ethereal cheekbones, flat forehead, and skin the color of baked earth. "What's it gonna be then?”

    "Look, captain ..."

    "The captain is looking, Rapf, and he doesn't like what he sees. You're strung out, aren't you?"

    "Nah. I'm clean. But I got caught sideways in a sour deal."

    "Dope?"

    "Yeah."

    "Ganja?"

    "Another class."

    "Schmeck. How much?"

    "More than two kilos."

    Pantucci made a disgusted face. He slapped Rapf on the cheek and twisted his ear till it hurt. "You kid your captain." He pulled Rapf by his ear halfway across the table until their noses practically touched. "You move dub with strangers until you get boxed. Then you cry for me?"

    Rapf pulled himself away and slumped in the corner, looking vaguely disgruntled. "I didn't know you moved that stuff."

    "You mean you thought you'd get more play elsewhere. Who's the muscle?"

    "Gusto."

    Pantucci coughed up thick phlegm and hawked it into the sawdust. "What a weasel you are, Mike. What'd you expect? You think you're a brother?" He stared for a moment into the thin cold eyes opposite him, engaging the emptiness he saw there. They were the most remote eyes he had ever known. They reminded him of Ia Drang Valley and long swamp roads. He shook his head and looked away. "Give me the plot."

    "Easton's brother Henley copped in Seattle and crossed to the city while I lined up Gusto. Along the way something happened. He went into a coma. By the time I found him at St Vs, Gusto was working on me. Now I know Henley's got the stuff, but he lit out. I guess he still thinks I was responsible for his brother getting clipped at Ngoc Linh. We patrolled together. I don't know. I was thinking you might find him."

    "So you can deliver to Gusto? I don't work for the brothers, mongoose."

    "Yeah, well I do." The wings of Rapf's nostrils whitened. His hands were under the table. "My ass is on the line. You owe me, captain."

    "How do you even know Henley has it?"

    "Why else would he run?”

    Pantucci looked down at his thick hands. "Give me the man's profile."

In the mountains, Pantucci had a villa with an indoor swimming poll and a live-in maid and cook. He set up Rapf there. Taking advantage of a metalworking shop for retooling stolen goods, Rapf spent a few hours trying to bore a hole in the strange rock he had found in Henley's room. It was no good. The rock was harder than any drill bit could scratch. He liked the rock. He liked its heft and silky texture. It was the size of his palm with a few natural holes on its edge. After a while, he was able to thread some wire through one of the holes, and he wore the rock around his neck.

    Pantucci found Rapf catnapping on the veranda a few days later. Trembling smells of cedar bark and pine riffled on the breeze. Sunlight buzzed off dusty rocks. "I located him."

    Rapf sat up. "Where?"

    "He left an hour ago for Haiti." He waved a packet of paper slips. "Here's your ticket and passport. There will be money at the airport and a gun permit. Go in peace, mongoose. And remember. We' re square."

Rapf arrived in Port-au-Prince wearing dark glasses, a USMC muscle shirt, and black flight pants tucked into steel-tipped boots. He carried an attaché with a few changes of underwear, twenty-five hundred dollars in traveler's checks, five hundred dollars cash and his Walther automatic. On the flight, he'd taken his butterfly out of the attaché and slipped it into one of the many pockets on his trouser leg.

    Deplaning, Rapf scanned the crowd, searching for any of Gusto's men. It wasn't until he shouldered through the throng in the pavilion that he knew for sure they were laying for him. Hard metal pressed against his spine.

    "Awright, fool, you're comin' with me."

    He recognized the voice. It was the hit man he had tumbled in the parking lot. He nudged Rapf out of the crowd with the barrel of his gun. Rapf groaned loudly and dropped to the ground. As he fell, he palmed the butterfly, sprung it open under his chest and swiveled his attaché to block the gun. The killer turned and bent down to free his gun for a shot. As he did so, Rapf rolled and stood up quickly, forcing the barbed end of the blade between the man's ribs. With a twist, he severed the aorta and yanked his knife free by pushing the man away.

    The crowd dispersed fast, and Rapf lost himself in knots of scurrying people. A few minutes later, he was in a cab heading into town. He booked himself into a cheap hotel in the East End and began asking around for Henley. No one in the city had seen him, and on his second day he went out to the dirt-farmer markets near the shantytowns. He had bought a white jellaba and, despite the heat, wore it so that he could carry his Walther inconspicuously. It was only a matter of time before Gusto's men hunted him down.

    In the native-dominated marketplaces, the rock he wore like a talisman around his neck drew a lot of attention. No one would touch it, though everyone wanted to see it. Three boys with the feral air of bay pirates — brash gold teeth, oil-soaked T-shirts, reversed crucifixes — tried to tug it off his neck. They questioned Rapf about it first, mumbled something in a language he didn't recognize, and then, just when he realized he had missed some sort of cue, one of them snatched at the rock. The wire cord bit into Rapf's neck and held. His eyes tightened to a squint, and he elbowed the boy in the mouth. The other two drew long cruel knives from their thigh sheaths.

    Rapf spun on his heels and spartled in and out between the stalls heading toward the alleys of the shantytown. The boys ran after him, whooping and throwing fruit and rocks. In the alley, Rapf stopped short and curled around, both hands holding his Walther automatic way out front. The boys fell over each other trying to pull up. They backed away slowly, and at the mouth of the alley one of them made a gesture Rapf didn't understand and cried, "" The sound of his voice had a shrill, frightening quality that unsettled Rapf more than the sight of their knives. He decided to call it a day.

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