4
“Look at him, will you.” Hank felt his gut clench as he leaned close to the Orsa and stared at Darryl. “I don’t believe it.”
When his daddy had visited him during his growing years, he’d filled his head with tales of Other Gods wanting to come in from the outside, and how he was part of a special bloodline, and how his daddy could see things with his ruined left eye that people with two good eyes had no clue about.
Hank had listened and he’d believed all that weird shit because his daddy so obviously believed it. But all those years they’d been words, just words. He’d never seen anything to back them up.
Until now.
Darryl was barely visible.
“It’s like he isn’t there.”
“But he is,” Drexler said beside him. “He is very much there.”
Yesterday it had been just his skin. Today it was his whole body, through and through.
From a distance he looked like a shirt, jeans, a pair of shoes, and a clump of hair suspended in a block of Lucite—something some asshole in a museum would call “art.” But when you got closer you could start to make out details.
Yesterday just his skin had gone transparent. Now Hank could see right through him. He wasn’t invisible. Still a faint outline of the scalp—easier because the hair was the same as ever—around an even fainter outline of the skull beneath, and a vague tracing of the irregular contours on the surface of the brain within.
“I think we might be nearing the end of the process.” “
“ ‘Might be’? You’re supposed to know.”
“Well, none of this is on a strict timetable. It matters how sick he was. Maybe he had more illnesses than we knew, or even he knew. The Orsa is going to cure everything wrong with him.”
Seemed to Hank like Drexler was trying to sound more certain of this than he really was.
“Yeah, well, he keeps sliding, though. He’s past the halfway point now. Will it spit him out when he’s cured?”
“Yes.”
Hank wheeled on him. “You don’t have a fucking clue, do you?”
“Of course I have. It’s all been written down over the centuries, the millennia.”
“But you said it’s never been done before.”
Drexler gave him a stony look. “He will be cured when he emerges from the Orsa.”
“Yeah? But what else will he be? The invisible man? I think he might rather be dead.”
“Then that will be his choice, won’t it.”
Again that urge to strangle Drexler. The guy must have sensed it because Hank noticed his knuckles whiten as he tightened his grip on the cane.
He forced himself to turn away.
“When do you think this will be over?”
“At the rate he’s moving, tomorrow or the next day.”
He stared at Darryl. You poor bastard. You went in a human being. What’ll you be when you come out?
A Fhinntmanchca?
What the hell was a Fhinntmanchca?