As I lay back on one of the glass-embroidered chesterfields in a bedroom upstairs, the bearded man in the white suit explained something of this to me in his sharp intermittent voice. He still stood by the open window, peering down at the lawn and the crystal stream where the alligator and the jewelled boat lay embalmed. As the broken panes annealed themselves he drove the butt of his shot-gun through them. His thin beard gave him a fevered and haunted aspect, emphasized by the white frost forming on the shoulders and lapels of his suit. For some reason he spoke to me as if to an old friend.
‘It was obvious years ago, B-. Look at the viruses with their crystalline structure, neither animate nor inanimate, and their immunity to time.’ He swept a hand along the sill and picked up a cluster of the vitreous grains, then scattered them across the floor like smashed marbles. ‘You and I will be like them soon, and the rest of the world. Neither living nor dead!’
He broke off to raise his shot-gun, his dark eyes searching between the trees. ‘We must move on,’ he announced, leaving the window. ‘When did you last see Captain Shelley?’
‘The police captain?’ I sat up weakly, my feet slipping on the floor. Several plate glass windows appeared to have been fractured and then fused together above the carpet. The ornate Persian patterns swam below the surface like the floor of some perfumed pool in the Arabian Nights. ‘Just after we ran to search for the helicopter. Why are you afraid of him?’
‘He’s a venomous man,’ he replied briefly. ‘As cunning as a pig.’
We made our way down the crystal stairway. Everything in the house was covered by the same glac sheath, embellished by exquisite curlicues and helixes. In the wide lounges the ornate Louis XV furniture had been transformed into huge pieces of opalescent candy, whose countless reflections glowed like giant chimeras in the cut-glass walls. As we disappeared through the trees towards the stream my companion shouted exultantly, as much to the forest as to myself: ‘We’re running out of time, B-, running out of time!’
Always he was on the look-out for the police captain. Which of them was searching for the other I could not discover, nor the subject of their blood-feud. I had volunteered my name to him, but he brushed aside the introduction. I guessed that he had sensed some spark of kinship as we sat together in the landing craft, and that he was a man who would plunge his entire sympathy or hostility upon such a chance encounter. He told me nothing of himself. Shot-gun cradled under his arm, he moved rapidly along the fossilized stream, his movements neat and deliberate, while I limped behind. Now and then we passed a jewelled power cruiser embedded in the crust, or a petrified alligator would rear upwards and grimace at us noiselessly, its crystalline skin glowing with a thousand prisms as it shifted in a fault of coloured glass.
Everywhere there was the same fantastic corona of light, transfiguring and identifying all objects. The forest was an endless labyrinth of glass caves, sealed off from the remainder of the world, (which, as far as I knew, by now might be similarly affected), lit by subterranean lamps burning below the surface of the rocks.
‘Can’t we get back to Maynard?’ I shouted after him, my voice echoing among the vaults. ‘We’re going deeper into the forest.’
‘The town is cut off, my dear B-. Don’t worry, I’ll take you there in due course.’ He leapt nimbly over a fissure in the surface of the river. Below the mass of dissolving crystals a thin stream of fluid rilled down a buried channel.
For several hours, led by this strange white-suited figure with his morose preoccupied gaze, we moved through the forest, sometimes in complete circles as if my companion were familiarizing himself with the topography of that jewelled twilight world. When I sat down to rest on one of the vitrified trunks and brushed away the crystals now forming on the soles of my shoes, despite our constant movement — the air was always icy, the dark shadows perpetually closing and unfolding around us — he would wait impatiently, watching me with ruminative eyes as if deciding whether to abandon me to the forest.
At last we reached the fringes of a small clearing, bounded on three sides by the fractured dancing floor of a river bend, where a high-gabled summer house pushed its roof towards the sky through a break in the overhead canopy. From the single spire a slender web of opaque strands extended to the surrounding trees like a diaphanous veil, investing the glass garden and the crystalline summer house with a pale marble sheen, almost sepulchral in its intensity. As if reinforcing this impression, the windows on to the veranda running around the house were now encrusted with elaborate scroll-like designs, like the ornamented stone casements of a tomb.
