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By Root 1385 0

him. Smoke curled up in the still air, looping and coiling. He leaned back in his chair, forcing it to rock slightly, the old canework creaking. He rolled the pool balls together as he went on. “You see, I knew—or at least guessed at—the nature of your affliction. But I never stopped to think just how awful it would be to endure. Every creak, click, tap, and squeak intruding itself into your brain. The chirping of the birds, the brightness of the sun, the smell of smoke… To be tormented by every little thing carried into your brain by the five senses, to live at the edge of being overwhelmed every minute of every hour of every day. To know that nothing can be done, nothing at all. Even your, ah, unique relationship with June Brodie can provide nothing but temporary diversion.”

“Her husband lost his apparatus in Desert Storm,” Slade said. “Blown off by an IED. I’ve stepped in to fill the breach, so to speak.”

“How nice for you,” said Pendergast.

“Go stuff your conventional morality. I don’t need it. Anyway, you heard June.” The mad sheen to his eyes seemed to fade somewhat, and he looked almost serious. “We’re working on a cure.”

“You saw what happened to the Doanes. You’re a biologist. You know as well as I do there’s no hope for a cure. Brain cells cannot be replaced or regrown. The damage is permanent. You know this.”

Slade seemed to go off again, his lips moving faster and faster, the hiss of air from his lungs like a punctured tire, repeating the same word, “No! No, no, no, no, no!”

Pendergast watched him, rocking, the snooker balls moving more quickly in his hand, their clacking filling the air. The clock ticked, the smoke curled.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” Pendergast said, “how everything here was arranged to remove any extraneous sensory trigger. Carpeted floor, insulated walls, neutral colors, plain furnishings, the air cool, dry, and scentless, probably HEPA-filtered.”

Slade whimpered, his lips fairly blurring with maniacal, and virtually silent, speech. He lifted the flail, smacked himself.

“And yet even with all that, even with the counterirritant of that flail and the medicines and the constant dosings of morphine, it isn’t enough. You are still in constant agony. You feel your feet upon the floor, you feel your back against the chair, you see everything in this room. You hear my voice. You are assaulted by a thousand other things I can’t begin to enumerate—because my mind unconsciously filters them out. You, on the other hand, cannot tune it out. Any of it. Listen to the snooker balls! Examine the curling smoke! Hear the relentless passage of time.”

Slade began to shake in his chair. “Nononononononoooo!” spilled off his lips, a single never-ending word. A loop of drool descended from one corner of his mouth, and he shook it away with a savage jerk of his head.

“I wonder—what must it be like to eat?” Pendergast went on. “I imagine it’s horrible, the strong taste of the food, the sticky texture, the smell and shape of it in your mouth, the slide of it down your gullet… Isn’t that why you’re so thin? No doubt you haven’t enjoyed a meal or a drink—really enjoyed—for a decade. Taste is just another unwanted sense you can’t rid yourself of. I’ll wager that IV drip isn’t only for the morphine—it’s for intravenous feeding as well, isn’t it?”

Nonononononononono… Slade reached spastically for the flail, dropped it back on the desk. The gun trembled in his hand.

“The taste of food—mellow ripe Camembert, beluga caviar, smoked sturgeon, even the humblest eggs and toast and jam—would be unbearable. Perhaps baby food of the most banal sort, without sugar or spice or texture of any kind, served precisely at body temperature, would only just be bearable. On special occasions, naturally.” Pendergast shook his head sympathetically. “And you can’t sleep—can you? Not with all those raging sensations crowding in on you. I can imagine it: lying on the bed, hearing the least of noises: the woodworms gnawing between the lathe and plaster, the beat of your heart in your eardrums, the ticking of the house, the scurry of