Thomas Covenant 03: Power That Preserves Read Free

could he tell her that he needed to be forgiven for allowing another woman to die in his dreams?
    Yet he needed someone—needed someone to whom he could cry out, Help me!
    He had gone so far down the road to a leper’s end that he could not pull himself back alone.
    But he could not call the doctors at the leprosarium. They would return him to Louisiana. They would treat him and train him and counsel him. They would put him back into life as if his illness were all that mattered, as if wisdom were only skin-deep—as if grief and remorse and horror were nothing but illusions, tricks done with mirrors, irrelevant to chrome and porcelain and clean, white, stiff hospital sheets and fluorescent lights.
    They would abandon him to the unreality of his passion.
    He found that he was gasping hoarsely, panting as if the air in the room were too rancid for his lungs.
    He needed—needed—
    Dialing convulsively, he called Information and got the number of the nightclub where he had gone drinking Saturday night.
    When he reached that number, the woman who answered the phone told him in a bored voice that Susie Thurston had left the nightclub. Before he could think to ask, the woman told him where the singer’s next engagement was.
    He called Information again, then put a long-distance call through to the place where Susie Thurston was now scheduled to perform. The switchboard of this club connected him without question to her dressing room.
    As soon as he heard her low, waifish voice, he panted thickly, “Why did you do it? Did he put you up to it? How did he do it? I want to know—”
    She interrupted him roughly. “Who are you? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Who do you think you are? I didn’t do nothing to you.”
    “Saturday night. You did it to me Saturday night.”
    “Buster, I don’t know you from Adam. I didn’t do nothing to you. Just drop dead, will you? Get off my phone.”
    “You did it Saturday night. He put you up to it. You called me ‘Berek.’ ” Berek Halfhand—the long-dead hero in his dream. The people in his dream, the people of the Land, had believed him to be Berek Halfhand reborn—believed that because leprosy had claimed the last two fingers of his right hand. “That crazy old beggar told you to call me Berek, and you did it.”
    She was silent for a long moment before she said, “Oh, it’s you. You’re that guy—the people at the club said you were a leper.”
    “You called me Berek,” Covenant croaked as if he were strangling on the sepulchral air of the house.
    “A leper,” she breathed. “Oh, hell! I might’ve kissed you. Buster, you sure had me fooled. You look a hell of a lot like a friend of mine.”
    “Berek,” Covenant groaned.
    “What—‘Bere k ’? You heard me wrong. I said, ‘Berrett.’ Berrett Williams is a friend of mine. He and I go ’way back. I learned a lot from him. But he was three-quarters crocked all the time. Anyway, he was sort of a clown. Coming to hear me without saying a thing about it is the sort of thing he’d do. And you looked—”
    “He put you up to it. That old beggar made you do it. He’s trying to do something to me.”
    “Buster, you got leprosy of the brain. I don’t know no beggars. I got enough useless old men of my own. Say, maybe you are Berrett Williams. This sounds like one of his jokes. Berrett, damn you, if you’re setting me up for something—”
    Nausea clenched in Covenant again. He hung up the phone and hunched over his stomach. But he was too empty to vomit; he had not eaten for forty-eight hours. He gouged the sweat out of his eyes with his numb fingertips, and dialed Information again.
    The half-dried soap on his fingers made his eyes sting and blur as he got the number he wanted and put through another long-distance call.
    When the crisp military voice said, “Department of Defense,” he blinked at the moisture which filled his eyes like shame, and responded, “Let me talk to Hile Troy.”