Lord Foul's Bane Read Free Page B

hours after his surgery, Covenant's surgeon pronounced him ready to travel, and sent him to the leprosarium in Louisiana. On their drive to the leprosarium, the doctor who met his plane talked flatly about various superficial aspects of leprosy. Mycobacterium leprae was first identified by Armauer Hansen in 1874, but study of the bacillus has been consistently foiled by the failure of the researchers to meet two of Koch's four steps of analysis: no one had been able to grow the microorganism artificially, and no one had discovered how it is transmitted. However, certain modern research by Dr. O. A. Skinsnes of Hawaii seemed promising. Covenant listened only vaguely. He could hear abstract vibrations of horror in the word leprosy , but they did not carry conviction. They affected him like a threat in a foreign language. Behind the intonation of menace, the words themselves communicated nothing. He watched the doctor's earnest face as if he were staring at Joan's incomprehensible passion, and made no response.
But when Covenant was settled in his room at the leprosarium- a square cell with a white blank bed and antiseptic walls- the doctor took another tack. Abruptly, he said, “Mr. Covenant, you don't seem to understand what's at stake here. Come with me. I want to show you something.”
Covenant followed him out into the corridor. As they walked, the doctor said, "You have what we call a primary case of Hansen's disease- a native case, one that doesn't seem to have a- a genealogy. Eighty percent of the cases we get in this country involve people- immigrants and so on- who were exposed to the disease as children in foreign countries- tropical climates: At least we know where they contracted it, if not why or how.
“Of course, primary or secondary, they can take the same general path. But as a rule people with secondary cases grew up in places where Hansen's disease is less arcane than here. They recognize what they've got when they get it. That means they have a better chance of seeking help in time.
“I want you to meet another of our patients. He's the only other primary case we have here at present. He used to be a sort of hermit- lived alone away from everyone in the West Virginia mountains. He didn't know what was happening to him until the army tried to get in touch with him- tell him his son was killed in the war. When the officer saw this man, he called in the Public Health Service. They sent the man to us.”
The doctor stopped in front of a door like the one to Covenant's cell. He knocked, but did not wait for an answer. He pushed open the door, caught Covenant by the elbow, and steered him into the room.
As he stepped across the threshold, Covenant's nostrils were assaulted by a pungent reek, a smell like that of rotten flesh lying in a latrine. It defied mere carbolic acid and ointments to mask it. It came from a shrunken figure sitting grotesquely on the white bed.
“Good afternoon,” the doctor said. “This is Thomas Covenant. He has a primary case of Hansen's disease, and doesn't seem to understand the danger he's in.”
Slowly, the patient raised his arms as if to embrace Covenant.
His hands were swollen stumps, fingerless lumps of pink, sick meat marked by cracks and ulcerations from which a yellow exudation oozed through the medication. They hung on thin, hooped arms like awkward sticks. And even though his legs were covered by his hospital pyjamas, they looked like gnarled wood. Half of one foot was gone, gnawed away, and in the place of the other was nothing but an unhealable wound.
Then the patient moved his lips to speak, and Covenant looked up at his face. His dull, cataractal eyes sat in his face as if they were the centre of an eruption. The skin of his cheeks was as white-pink as an albino's; it bulged and poured away from his eyes in waves, runnulets, as if it had been heated to the melting point; and these waves were edged with thick tubercular nodules.
“Kill yourself,” he rasped terribly.