Filaria - Brent Hayward [77]
Tran so got to his feet, brushing himself off. Crawling gods scuttled anxiously, as if he might bolt. His eye watered profusely. The same eye, he realized, the parasite had been in.
“I’d like to clarify something.” He looked at the girl. “I wasn’t spying.”
Shrugging, and tugging at the hose she carried, so that the little trolley squeaked closer to her leg, she said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”
“My name is Tran so,” insisted Tran so.
“Sir,” the crawling god called up to him, “you’ll have to come with us.”
He could have kicked them all aside, like crabs, and run away, but what would be the point? He wanted to stay in this room. He wanted to talk to the girl, to learn her name, to touch her hands and feel her neck, hot against his lips. He might never see her again if he fled.
But the damned gods would not let him stay.
“Where will you take me?” he asked them.
“Anywhere but here. We’ll take you to our supervisor’s office. He’ll give you what for. And he’ll contact your boss.”
Tran so nodded. Most of what the little gods said made no sense, but the lake god had called itself a supervisor. If the supervisor of these lesser gods was a step further up their ladder of divinity, perhaps he had regained the trail he needed to be on. Mysterious ways, indeed. Would he get an audience with the god of all gods? Would he meet the network?
The girl, he saw, wore a nametag. Hello. My name is Sandra. Such a wonderful name. “Listen, Sandra, I can’t help but think we were meant to meet.”
The crawling gods actually laughed at his line. The girl, however, paid him no attention whatsoever. So he let his hand, which he’d held out, drop. He did not know what else to do. Should he actually touch her, hold her arm?
“Sir, please come with us.”
At a loss, he let himself be escorted from the room.
Underfoot, the gods crossed his path hither and thither. He glanced back surreptitiously; Sandra was not looking at him, as he’d hoped. His ego withered.
They escorted him down a long hall.
Love had been so difficult, over the past months, to retain for Minnie sue. Ravaged by disease, she no longer really existed, outside of memories. Was he expected to remain at his wife’s side the whole while she wasted away? When Minnie sue woke from her comatose sleeps, she called him atrocious names, hurt him in every conceivable way, screaming the Red Plague’s obscenities at him. How many times had he knelt by Minnie sue’s futon while she raved and cursed and spat at him?
They passed dozens of rooms. In most, busy women cleaned, dressed in black skirts with white aprons. None, of course, were as charming or as pretty as Sandra. But there sure were a lot of rooms. A lot of women.
And minor gods, too, dashing from doorway to doorway, giving out instructions as they went, barking out annoying orders, watching over the staff as Tran so was led past.
These hallways, like the sleeping chambers, were carpeted. A rich, decorative layer that altered tones of deep reds and burgundies covered the walls. Lights, mounted in the walls, set in sconces between each pair of doors, illuminated hemispheres of warm amber over the ruddy carpeting and over him as he followed the minor gods. It became apparent that the entire place was a series of similar halls and rooms. Difficult to find his way back to where Sandra worked. Nonetheless, he tried to memorize the layout.
But the vistas were confusing and the proximity of all these women distracting.
Secondary hallways led off, either side. These also were doorlined. Some doors open, some doors shut. More rooms, more women, more gods. He heard the various droning sounds of mingled voices and the laughter of people trying to deal with tedium, and an ambient humming overall. He thought about Sandra, her voice, her smile. He wondered what it would be like to fuck her, and he wondered what had happened to make him so obsessed. Had it been the spray? His heart pounded. He felt strong, alive; he had not felt like this in years.
“Who sleeps in all these rooms?” he demanded.