 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
what it was: it seemed important to know what it was. And for an instant, before his eyes closed
against the glare, he thought he knew what it had been. Someone watching him, staring down past
the surgical lamp that hung above the naked, anesthetized body of Lawrence Talbot, asleep on an
operating table.
It had been the old woman, Nadja.
He stood unmoving for a long time, thinking of her.
Then he went to his knees and felt the tissue plane that formed the floor of the navel shaft.
He thought he could see something moving beneath the surface, like water flowing under a
film of ice. He went down onto his stomach and cupped his hands around his eyes, putting his face
against the dead flesh. It was like looking through a pane of isinglass. A trembling membrane
through which he could see the collapsed lumen of the atretic umbilical vein. There was no opening.
He pressed his palms against the rubbery surface and it gave, but only slightly. Before he could find
the treasure, he had to follow the route of Demeter’s map--now firmly and forever consigned to
memory--and before he could set foot upon that route, he had to gain access to his own body.
But he had nothing with which to force that entrance.
Excluded, standing at the portal to his own body, Lawrence Talbot felt anger rising within
him. His life had been anguish and guilt and horror, had been the wasted result of events over which
he had had no control. Pentagrams and full moons and blood and never putting on even an ounce of
fat because of a diet high in protein, blood steroids healthier than any normal adult male’s,
triglycerol and cholesterol levels balanced and humming. And death forever a stranger. Anger
flooded through him. He heard an inarticulate little moan of pain, and fell forward, began tearing at
the atrophied cord with teeth that had been used for just such activity many times before. Through a
blood haze he knew he was savaging his own body, and it seemed exactly the appropriate act of self-
flagellation.
An outsider; he had been an outsider all his adult life, and fury would permit him to be shut
out no longer. With demonic purpose he ripped away at the clumps of flesh until the membrane
gave, at last, and a gap was tom through opening him to himself....
And he was blinded by the explosion of light, by the rush of wind, by the passage of
something that had been just beneath the surface writhing to be set free, and in the instant before he
plummeted into unconsciousness, he knew Castafieda’s Don Juan had told the truth: a thick bundle
of white cobwebby filaments, tinged with gold, fibers of light, shot free from the collapsed vein,
rose up through the shaft and trembled toward the antiseptic sky.
A metaphysical, otherwise invisible beanstalk that trailed away above him, rising up and up
and up as his eyes closed and he sank away into oblivion.
He was on his stomach, crawling through the collapsed lumen, the center, of the path the
veins had taken back from the amniotic sac to the fetus. Propelling himself forward the way an
infantry scout would through dangerous terrain, using elbows and knees, frog-crawling, he opened
the flattened tunnel with his head just enough to get through. It was quite light, the interior of the
world called Lawrence Talbot suffused with a golden luminescence.
The map had routed him out of this pressed tunnel through the inferior vena cava to the right
atrium and thence through the right ventricle, the pulmonary arteries, through the valves, to the
lungs, the pulmonary veins, crossover to the left side of the heart (left atrium, left ventricle), the
aorta--bypassing the three coronary arteries above the aortic valves--and down over the arch of the
aorta--bypassing the carotid and other arteries--to the celiac trunk, where the arteries split in a
confusing array: the gastroduodenal to the stomach, the hepatic to the liver, the splenic to the spleen.
And there, dorsal to the body of the diaphragm, he would drop down past the greater pancreatic duct
to the pancreas itself. And there, among the islets of langerhans, he would find, at the coordinates
Information Associates had given him, he would find that which had been stolen from him one full-
