The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [105]
Jack folded his arms across his chest.
Now I've got him on the ropes.
Doyle held up a foot and inspected the laces on his boot.
Jack exhaled heavily.
Time to apply the coup de gr&ce.
Doyle began to hum. Aimlessly, tunelessly. A bit of this, a snatch of that; nothing at all. Spikes driven under one's fingernails could scarcely have been more effective. Three minutes of this before ...
"I mean, really," said Jack.
"What's that?"
"Must you?"
"Must I what?"
"Are you deliberately trying to aggravate me?"
"Why, that's not my intent at all, Jack—"
"Good God, man."
"—whatever do you mean?"
"Barging in here. Brandy and a cigar. That appalling noise. This isn't the reading room of the Garrick Club."
"Oh, am I disturbing you? Terribly sorry, old man."
Another patient smile. Not the slightest twitch of intention to vacate. Jack looks away. Another minute elapses. Then. Begins moving his head slightly from side to side—silent humming—while he conducts the imagined music with small waves of his cigar.
" What?" said Jack, exasperated.
"What?"
"What do you want?"
"Not a thing; perfectly content, old chap; thanks, ever so—''
"Monstrous; rude; invasion of privacy. Not like you at all."
Then, as if a subject he'd been meaning to bring up had come rushing back into his mind, Doyle fixed Sparks with a benign physician's eye and paused dramatically before asking, "How have you been, Jack?"
"What sort of a deeply moronic question is that?"
"I can't honestly say I don't have my concerns about you____"
"Now you are really making me angry—"
"Perhaps if I express it this way, Jack: There are certain ... behaviors you exhibit that, as a doctor, one can't help but take notice of."
"What?"
"Certain symptomatic tendencies—"
"Stop mincing around and come out with it: What do you mean to say?"
Doyle regarded him with a thoughtful series of nods. "It occurs to me that in the years between our periods of acquaintanceship, you may have become mentally deranged."
Even in the shadowy haze, Doyle could see blood rush to his face like mercury up a raging thermometer; it seemed to require a supreme act of will for Jack to contain the violence that fireballed inside him. For a tense moment, Doyle feared his strategy had backfired and he might have to physically defend himself; he knew how to box but Jack knew how to kill. But instead of attack came the rigid pointing of a scarred and crooked index finger and a voice strangled with fury.
"You ... don't know ... a bloody thing ... about anything." Corners of Jack's mouth flecked with white. Snorting like an agitated bull.
"I don't know the facts, of course," said Doyle, somehow keeping his pitch at the same infuriating even keel. "All I have are my observations. What else have you given me to go on?"
"Would you like to hear that there were times when I begged whatever passes for intelligence in the Creator of this world to let me die? That I got down on my bloody knees and prayed like some simple-minded vicar to a God I don't even believe in? Is that what you want, Doyle? Because that would be true. And I am pleased to report that there is no God of the kind they try to sell us, because nothing bearing a resemblance to such a being would have left one of its creatures alive in such a state."
Right, thought Doyle, now we've primed the pump.
"So instead He ... left you alive to suffer, is that it?"
"What a stupid, common presumption: Didn't you hear a word I just told you? Regarding our fate no decision is made; no one presides, no being, no thing even bears witness. Can you begin to understand me?"
Doyle stared at him mutely: Let him talk.
"No great or lesser intelligence takes any notice of our existence whatsoever because we are alone, Doyle, every one of us, left adrift in cold and empty space. That's the dirty joke on the washroom wall: It's all a mistake; cruel, random, and senseless as a railway accident...."
"Human life?"
"I mean creation."
Jack leaned forward; the piercing lightness of his eyes like diamonds in the dark of the carriage. His voice fell to a whispery