The priest shrugged and continued toward the lighted doorway.
“Father, wait…”
“Yes?”
“I—I am a little tired.
The room… I mean, will you show me where to get transportation tomorrow?”
“Certainly.”
Before midnight, the party had returned to the hospital.
Paul lay on a comfortable mattress for the first time in weeks, sleepless, and staring at the moonlight on the sill.
Somewhere downstairs, Willie was lying unconscious in an operating room, while the surgeon tried to repair the torn tendon.
Paul had ridden back with them in the ambulance, sitting a few feet from the stretcher, avoiding her sometimes wandering arms, and listening to her delirious moaning.
Now he felt his skin crawling with belated hypochondria.
What a fool he had been—touching the rope, the boat, the wheelbarrow, riding in the ambulance.
There were a thousand ways he could have picked up a few stray microorganisms lingering from a dermie’s touch.
And now, he lay here in this nest of disease….
But strange—it was the most peaceful, the sanest place he’d seen in months.
The religious orders simply accepted the plague—with masochistic complacency perhaps—but calmly.
A cross, or a penance, or something.
But no, they seemed to accept it almost gladly.
Nothing peculiar about that.
All dermies went wild-eyed with happiness about the “lovely desire” they possessed.
The priests weren’t wild-eyed.
Neither was normal man equipped with socially-shaped sexual desire.
Sublimation?
“Peace,” he muttered, and went to sleep.
A knocking at the door awoke him at dawn.
He grunted at it disgustedly and sat up in bed.
The door, which he had forgotten to lock, swung open.
A chubby nun with a breakfast tray started into the room.
She saw his face, then stopped. She closed her eyes, wrinkled her nose, and framed a silent prayer with her lips.
Then she backed slowly out.
“I’m sorry, sir!” she quavered through the door. “I—I knew there was a patient in here, but I didn’t know… you weren’t a hyper. Forgive me.”
He heard her scurrying away down the hall.
Somehow, he began to feel safe.
But wasn’t that exactly what they wanted him to feel!
He realized suddenly that he was trapped.
He had left the shotgun in the emergency room.
What was he—guest or captive?
Months of fleeing from the gray terror had left him suspicious. Soon he would find out.
He arose and began dressing.
Before he finished, Mendelhaus came.
He did not enter, but stood in the hallway beyond the door.
He smiled a faint greeting, and said,
“So you’re Paul?” He felt heat rising in his face.
“She’s awake, then?” he asked gruffly.
The priest nodded.
“Want to see her?”
“No, I’ve got to be going.”
“It would do her good.” He coughed angrily.
Why did the black-cassocked dermie have to put it that way? “Well it wouldn’t do me any good!” he snarled. “I’ve been around too many gray-leather hides already!”
Mendelhaus shrugged, but his eyes bore a hint of contempt.