Stephen Donaldson - Covenant 1 - Lord Foul' s Bane

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LORD FOUL'S BANE
By: Stephen R. Donaldson
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Unbeliever BOOK ONE
C 1977
**SCANNED BY LUPINIV FEB01**
ONE: Golden Boy
SHE came out of the store just in time to see her young son playing on the sidewalk directly in
the path of the gray, gaunt man who strode down the center of the walk like a mechanical derelict.
For an instant, her heart quailed. Then she jumped forward, gripped her son by the arm, snatched
him out of harm's way.
The man went by without turning his head. As his back moved away from her, she hissed at it, "Go
away! Get out of here! You ought to be ashamed!"
Thomas Covenant's stride went on, as unfaltering as clockwork that had been wound to the hilt for
just this purpose. But to himself he responded, Ashamed? Ashamed? His face contorted in a wild
grimace. Beware! Outcast unclean!
But he saw that the people he passed, the people who knew him, whose names and houses and
handclasps were known to him-he saw that they stepped aside, gave him plenty of room. Some of them
looked as if they were holding their breath. His inner shouting collapsed. These people did not
need the ancient ritual of warning. He concentrated on restraining the spasmodic snarl which
lurched across his face, and let the tight machinery of his will carry him forward step by step.
As he walked, he flicked his eyes up and down himself, verifying that there were no unexpected
tears or snags in his clothing, checking his hands for scratches, making sure that nothing had
happened to the scar which stretched from the heel of his right palm across where his last two
fingers had been. He could hear the doctors saying, "VSE, Mr. Covenant. Visual Surveillance of
Extremities. Your health depends upon it. Those dead nerves will never grow back-you'll never know
when you've hurt yourself unless you get in the habit of checking. Do it all the time-think about
it all the time. The next time you might not be so lucky."
VSE. Those initials comprised his entire life.
Doctors! he thought mordantly. But without them, he might not have survived even this long. He had
been so ignorant of his danger. Self-neglect might have killed him.
Watching the startled, frightened or oblivious faces -there were many oblivious faces, though the
town was small-that passed around him, he wished he could be sure that his face bore a proper
expression of disdain. But the nerves in his cheeks seemed only vaguely alive, though the doctors
had assured him that this was an illusion at the present stage of his illness, and he could never
trust the front which he placed between himself and the world. Now, as women who had at one time
chosen to discuss his novel in their literary clubs recoiled from him as if he were some kind of
minor horror or ghoul, he felt a sudden treacherous pang of loss. He strangled it harshly, before
it could shake his balance.
He was nearing his destination, the goal of the affirmation or proclamation that he had so grimly
undertaken. He could see the sign two blocks ahead of him: Bell Telephone Company. He was walking
the two miles into town from Haven Farm in order to pay his phone bill. Of course, he could have
mailed in the money, but he had learned to see that act as a surrender, an abdication to the
mounting bereavement which was being practiced against him.
While he had been in treatment, his wife, Joan, had divorced him-taken their infant son and moved
out of the state. The only thing in which he, Thomas Covenant, had a stake that she had dared
handle had been the car; she had taken it as well. Most of her clothing she had left behind. Then
his nearest neighbors, half a mile away on either side, had complained shrilly about his presence
among them; and when he had refused to sell his property, one of them moved from the county. Next,
within three weeks of his return home, the grocery store-he was walking past it now, its windows
full of frenetic advertisements had begun delivering his supplies, whether or not he ordered them-
and, he suspected, whether or not he was willing to pay.
Now he strode past the courthouse, its old gray columns looking proud of their burden of justice
and law-the building in which, by proxy, of course, he had been reft of his family. Even its front
steps were polished to guard against the stain of human need which prowled up and down them,
seeking restitution. The divorce had been granted because no compassionate law could force a woman
to raise her child in the company of a man like him. Were there tears? he asked Joan's memory.
Were you brave? Relieved? Covenant resisted an urge to run out of danger. The gaping giant heads
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which topped the courthouse columns looked oddly nauseated, as if they were about to vomit on him.
In a town of no more than five thousand, the business section was not large. Covenant crossed in
front of the department store, and through the glass front he could see several high-school girls
pricing cheap jewelry. They leaned on the counters in provocative poses, and Covenant's throat
tightened involuntarily. He found himself resenting the hips and breasts of the girls-curves for
other men's caresses, not his. He was impotent. In the decay of his nerves, his sexual capacity
was just another amputated member. Even the release of lust was denied to him; he could conjure up
desires until insanity threatened, but he could do nothing about them. Without warning, a memory
of his wife flared in his mind, almost blanking out the sunshine and the sidewalk and the people
in front of him. He saw her in one of the opaque nightgowns he had bought for her, her breasts
tracing circles of invitation under the thin fabric. His heart cried, Joan!
How could you do it? Is one sick body more important than everything?
Bracing his shoulders like a strangler, he suppressed the memory. Such thoughts were a weakness he
could not afford; he had to stamp them out. Better to be bitter, he thought. Bitterness survives.
It seemed to be the only savor he was still able to taste.
To his dismay, he discovered that he had stopped moving. He was standing in the middle of the
sidewalk with his fists clenched and his shoulders trembling. Roughly, he forced himself into
motion again. As he did so, he collided with someone.
Outcast unclean!
He caught a glimpse of ocher; the person he had bumped seemed to be wearing a dirty, reddish-brown
robe. But he did not stop to apologize. He stalked on down the walk so that he would not have to
face that particular individual's fear and loathing. After a moment, his stride recovered its
empty, mechanical tick.
Now he was passing the offices of the Electric Company-his last reason for coming to pay his phone
bill in person. Two months ago, he had mailed in a check to the Electric Company-the amount was
small; he had little use for power-and it had been returned to him. In fact, his envelope had not
even been opened. An attached note had explained that his bill had been anonymously paid for at
least a year.
After a private struggle, he had realized that if he did not resist this trend, he would soon have
no reason at all to go among his fellow human beings. So today he was walking the two miles into
town to pay his phone bill in person-to show his peers that he did not intend to be shriven of his
humanity. In rage at his outcasting, he sought to defy it, to assert the rights of his common
mortal blood.
In person, he thought. What if he were too late? If the bill had already been paid? What did he
come in person for then?
The thought caught his heart in a clench of trepidation. He clicked rapidly through his VSE, then
returned his gaze to the hanging sign of the Bell Telephone Company, half a block away. As he
moved forward, conscious of a pressure to surge against his anxiety, he noticed a tune running in
his mind along the beat of his stride. Then he recollected the words:
Golden boy with feet of clay,
Let me help you on your way.
A proper push will take you far
But what a clumsy lad you are!
The doggerel chuckled satirically through his thoughts, and its crude rhythm thumped against him
like an insult, accompanied by slow stripper's music. He wondered if there were an overweight
goddess somewhere in the mystical heavens of the universe, grinding out his burlesque fate: A
proper push leer will take you far-but what a clumsy lad you are! mock pained dismay. Oh, right,
golden boy.
But he could not sneer his way out of that thought, because at one time he had been a kind of
golden boy. He had been happily married. He had had a son. He had written a novel in ecstasy and
ignorance, and had watched it spend a year on the best-seller lists. And because of it, he now had
all the money he needed.
I would be better off, he thought, if I'd known I was writing that kind of book.
But he had not known. He had not even believed that he would find a publisher, back in the days
when he had been writing that book-the days right after he' had married Joan. Together, they did
not think about money or success. It was the pure act of creation which ignited his imagination;
and the warm spell of her pride and eagerness kept him burning like a bolt of lightning, not for
seconds or fractions of seconds, but for five months in one long wild discharge of energy that
seemed to create the landscapes of the earth out of nothingness by the sheer force of its
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brilliance-hills and crags, trees bent by the passionate wind, night-ridden people, all rendered
into being by that white bolt striking into the heavens from the lightning rod of his writing.
When he was done,
he felt as drained and satisfied as all of life's love uttered in one act.
That had not been an easy time. There was an anguish in the perception of heights and abysses that
gave each word he wrote the shape of dried, black blood. And he was not a man who liked heights;
unconstricted emotion did not come easily to him. But it had been glorious. The focusing to that
pitch of intensity had struck him as the cleanest thing that had ever happened to him. The stately
frigate of his soul had sailed well over a deep and dangerous ocean. When he mailed his manuscript
away, he did so with a kind of calm confidence.
During those months of writing and then of waiting, they lived on her income. She, Joan Macht
Covenant, was a quiet woman who expressed more of herself with her eyes and the tone of her skin
than she did with words. Her flesh had a hue of gold which made her look as warm and precious as a
sylph or succuba of joy. But she was not large or strong, and Thomas Covenant felt constantly
amazed at the fact that she earned a living for them by breaking horses.
The term breaking, however, did not do justice to her skill with animals. There were no tests of
strength in her work, no bucking stallions with mad eyes and foaming nostrils. It seemed to
Covenant that she did not break horses; she seduced them. Her touch spread calm over their
twitching muscles. Her murmuring voice relaxed the tension in the angle of their ears. When she
mounted them bareback, the grip of her legs made the violence of their brute fear fade. And
whenever a horse burst from her control, she simply slid from its back and left it alone until the
spasm of its wildness had worn away. Then she began with the animal again. In the end, she took it
on a furious gallop around Haven Farm, to show the horse that it could exert itself to the limit
without surpassing her mastery.
Watching her, Covenant had felt daunted by her ability. Even after she taught him to ride, he
could not overcome his fear of horses.
Her work was not lucrative, but it kept her and her husband from going hungry until the day a
letter of acceptance arrived from the publisher. On that day, Joan decided that the time had come
to have a child.
Because of the usual delays of publication, they had to live for nearly a year on an advance on
Covenant's royalties. Joan kept her job in one way or another for as long as she could without
threatening the safety of the child conceived in her. Then, when her body told her that the time
had come, she quit working. At that point, her life turned inward, concentrated on the task of
growing her baby with a single-mindedness that often left her outward eyes blank and tinged with
expectation.
After he was born, Joan announced that the boy was to be named Roger, after her father and her
father's father.
Roger! Covenant groaned as he neared the door of the phone company's offices. He had never even
liked that name. But his son's infant face, so meticulously and beautifully formed, human and
complete, had made his heart ache with love and pride-yes, pride, a father's participation in
mystery. And now his son was gone-gone with Joan he did not know where. Why was he so unable to
weep?
The next instant, a hand plucked at his sleeve. "Hey, mister," a thin voice said fearfully,
urgently. "Hey, mister." He turned with a yell in his throat -Don't touch me! Outcast unclean!-
but the face of the boy who clutched his arm stopped him, kept him from pulling free. The boy was
young, not more than eight or nine years old-surely he was too young to be so afraid? His face was
mottled pale-and-livid with dread and coercion, as if he were somehow being forced to do something
which terrified him.
"Hey, mister," he said, thinly supplicating. "Here. Take it." He thrust an old sheet of paper into
Covenant's numb fingers. "He told me to give it to you. You're supposed to read it. Please,
mister?"
Covenant's fingers closed involuntarily around the paper. He? he thought dumbly, staring at the
boy. He?
"Him." The boy pointed a shaking finger back up the sidewalk.
Covenant looked, and saw an old man in a dirty ocher robe standing half a block away. He was
mumbling, almost singing a dim nonsense tune; and his mouth hung open, though his lips and jaw did
not move to shape his mutterings. His long, tattered hair and beard fluttered around his head in
the light breeze. His face was lifted to the sky; he seemed to be staring directly at the sun. In
his left hand he held a wooden beggar-bowl. His right hand clutched a long wooden staff, to the
top of which was affixed a sign bearing one word: "Beware."
Beware?
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For an odd moment, the sign itself seemed to exert a peril over Covenant. Dangers crowded through
it to get at him, terrible dangers swam in the air toward him, screaming like vultures. And among
them, looking toward him through the screams, there were eyes-two eyes like fangs, carious and
deadly. They regarded him with a fixed, cold and hungry malice, focused on him as if he and he
alone were the carrion they craved. Malevolence dripped from them like venom. For that moment, he
quavered in the grasp of an inexplicable fear.
Beware!
But it was only a sign, only a blind placard attached to a wooden staff. Covenant shuddered, and
the sir in front of him cleared.
"You're supposed to read it," the boy said again.
"Don't touch me," Covenant murmured to the grip on his arm. "I'm a leper."
But when he looked around, the boy was gone.
TWO: "You Cannot Hope"
IN his confusion, he scanned the street rapidly, but the boy had escaped completely. Then, as he
turned back toward the old beggar, his eyes caught the door, gilt-lettered: Bell Telephone
Company. The sight gave him a sudden twist of fear that made him forget all distractions. Suppose-
This was his destination; he had come here in person to claim his human right to pay his own
bills. But suppose-
He shook himself. He was a leper; he could not afford suppositions. Unconsciously, he shoved the
sheet of paper into his pocket. With grim deliberateness, he gave himself a VSE. Then he gripped
himself, and started toward the door.
A man hurrying out through the doorway almost bumped into him, then recognized him and backed
away, his face suddenly gray with apprehension. The jolt broke Covenant's momentum, and he almost
shouted aloud, Leper outcast unclean! He stopped again, allowed himself a moment's pause. The man
had been Joan's lawyer at the divorce-a short, fleshy individual full of the kind of bonhomie in
which lawyers and ministers specialize., Covenant needed that pause to recover from the dismay of
the lawyer's glance. He felt involuntarily ashamed to be the cause of such dismay. For a moment,
he could not recollect the conviction which had brought him into town.
But almost at once he began to fume silently. Shame and rage were inextricably bound together in
him. I'm not going to let them do this to me, he rasped. By hell! They have no right. Yet he could
not so
easily eradicate the lawyer's expression from his thoughts. That revulsion was an accomplished
fact, like leprosy-immune to any question of right or justice. And above all else a leper must not
forget the lethal reality of facts.
As Covenant paused, he thought, I should write a poem.
These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives: for all the scents of green things
growing, each breath is but an exhalation of the grave. Bodies jerk like puppet corpses, and hell
walks laughing-
Laughing-now there's a real insight. Hellfire.
Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?
He felt that he was asking an important question. He had laughed when his novel had been accepted -
laughed at the shadows of deep and silent thoughts that had shifted like sea currents in Roger's
face laughed over the finished product of his book laughed at its presence on the best-seller
lists. Thousands of things large and small had filled him with glee. When Joan had asked him what
he found so funny, he was only able to reply that every breath charged him with ideas for his next
book. His lungs bristled with imagination and energy. He chuckled whenever he had more joy than he
could contain.
But Roger had been six months old when the novel had become famous, and six months later Covenant
still had somehow not begun writing again. He had too many ideas. He could not seem to choose
among them.
Joan had not approved of this unproductive luxuriance. She had packed up Roger, and had left her
husband in their newly purchased house, with his office newly settled in a tiny, two-room but
overlooking a stream in the woods that filled the back of Haven Farm-left him with strict orders
to start writing while she took Roger to meet his relatives.
That had been the pivot, the moment in which the rock had begun rolling toward his feet of clay-
begun with rumbled warnings the stroke which had cut him off as severely as a surgeon attacking
gangrene. He had heard the warnings, and had ignored them. He had not known what they meant.
No, rather than looking for the cause of that low thunder, he had waved good-bye to Joan with
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regret and quiet respect. He had seen that she was right, that he would not start to work again
unless he were alone for a time; and he had admired her ability to act even while his heart ached
under the awkward burden of their separation. So when he had waved her plane away over his
horizons, he returned to Haven Farm, locked himself in his office, turned on the power to his
electric typewriter, and wrote the dedication of his next novel:
"For Joan, who has been my keeper of the possible."
His fingers slipped uncertainly on the keys, and he needed three tries to produce a perfect copy.
But he was not sea-wise enough to see the coming storm.
The slow ache in his wrists and ankles he also ignored; he only stamped his feet against the ice
that seemed to be growing in them. And when he found the numb purple spot on his right hand near
the base of his little finger, he put it out of his mind. Within twenty-four hours of Joan's
departure, he was deep into the plotting of his book. Images cascaded through his imagination. His
fingers fumbled, tangled themselves around the simplest words, but his imagination was sure. He
had no thought to spare for the suppuration of the small wound which grew in the center of that
purple stain.
Joan brought Roger home after three weeks of family visits. She did not notice anything wrong
until that evening, when Roger was asleep, and she sat in her husband's arms. The storm windows
were up, and the house was closed against the chill winter wind which prowled the Farm. In the
still air of their living room, she caught the faint, sweet, sick smell of Covenant's infection.
Months later, when he stared at the antiseptic walls of his room in the leprosarium, he cursed
himself for not putting iodine on his hand. It was not the loss of two fingers that galled him.
The surgery which amputated part of his hand was only a small symbol of the stroke which cut him
out of his life, excised him from his own world as if he were some kind of malignant infestation.
And when his right hand ached with the memory of its lost members, that pain was no more than it
should be. No, he berated his carelessness because it had cheated him of one last embrace with
Joan.
But with her in his arms on that last winter night, he had been ignorant of such possibilities.
Talking softly about his new book, he held her close, satisfied for that moment with the press of
her firm flesh against his, with the clean smell of her hair and the glow of her warmth. Her
sudden reaction had startled him. Before he was sure what disturbed her, she was standing, pulling
him up off the sofa after her. She held his right hand up between them, exposed his infection, and
her voice crackled with anger and concern.
"Oh, Tom! Why don't you take care of yourself?"
After that, she did not hesitate. She asked one of the neighbors to sit with Roger, then drove her
husband through the light February snow to the emergency room of the hospital. She did not leave
him until he had been admitted to a room and scheduled for surgery.
The preliminary diagnosis was gangrene.
Joan spent most of the next day with him at the hospital, during the time when he was not being
given tests. And the next morning, at six o'clock, Thomas Covenant was taken from his room for
surgery on his right hand. He regained consciousness three hours later back in his hospital bed,
with two fingers gone. The grogginess of the drugs clouded him for a time, and he did not miss
Joan until noon.
But she did not come to see him at all that day. And when she arrived in his room the following
morning, she was changed. Her skin was pale, as if her heart were hoarding blood, and the bones of
her forehead seemed to press against the flesh. She had the look of a trapped animal. She ignored
his outstretched hand. Her voice was low, constrained; she had to exert force to make even that
much of herself reach toward him. Standing as far away as she could in the room, staring emptily
out the window at the slushy streets, she told him the news.
The doctors had discovered that he had leprosy.
His mind blank with surprise, he said, "You're kidding."
Then she spun and faced him, crying, "Don't play stupid with me now! The doctor said he would tell
you, but I told him no, I would do it. I was thinking of you. But I can't-I can't stand it. You've
got leprosy! Don't you know what that means? Your hands and feet are going to rot away, and your
legs and arms will twist, and your face will turn ugly like a fungus. Your eyes will get ulcers
and go bad after a while, and I can't stand it-it won't make any difference to you because you
won't be able to feel anything, damn you! And-oh, Tom, Tom! It's catching."
"Catching?" He could not seem to grasp what she meant.
"Yes!" she hissed. "Most people get it because" for a moment she choked on the fear which impelled
her outburst "because they were exposed when they were kids. Children are more susceptible than
adults. Roger- I can't risk- I've got to protect Roger from that!"
As she ran, escaped from the room, he answered, "Yes, of course." Because he had nothing else to
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say. He still did not understand. His mind was empty. He did not begin to perceive until weeks
later how much of him had been blown out by the wind of Joan's passion. Then he was simply
appalled.
Forty-eight hours after his surgery, Covenant's surgeon pronounced him ready to travel, and sent
him to the leprosarium in Louisiana. On their drive to the leprosarium, the doctor who met his
plane talked flatly about various superficial aspects of leprosy. Mycobacterium leprae was first
identified by Armauer Hansen in 1874, but study of the bacillus has been consistently foiled by
the failure of the researchers to meet
two of Koch's four steps of analysis: no one had been able to grow the microorganism artificially,
and no one had discovered how it is transmitted. However, certain modern research by Dr. O. A.
Skinsnes of Hawaii seemed promising. Covenant listened only vaguely. He could hear abstract
vibrations of horror in the word leprosy, but they did not carry conviction. They affected him
like a threat in a foreign language. Behind the intonation of menace, the words themselves
communicated nothing. He watched the doctor's earnest face as if he were staring at Joan's
incomprehensible passion, and made no response.
But when Covenant was settled in his room at the leprosarium-a square cell with a white blank bed
and antiseptic walls---the doctor took another tack. Abruptly, he said, "Mr. Covenant, you don't
seem to understand what's at stake here. Come with me. I want to show you something."
Covenant followed him out into the corridor. As they walked, the doctor said, "You have what we
call a primary case of Hansen's disease-a native case, one that doesn't seem to have a-a
genealogy. Eighty percent of the cases we get in this country involve people-immigrants and so on-
who were exposed to the disease as children in foreign countriestropical climates: At least we
know where they contracted it, if not why or how.
"Of course, primary or secondary, they can take the same general path. But as a rule people with
secondary cases grew up in places where Hansen's disease is less arcane than here. They recognize
what they've got when they get it. That means they have a better chance of seeking help in time.
"I want you to meet another of our patients. He's the only other primary case we have here at
present. He used to be a sort of hermit-lived alone away from everyone in the West Virginia
mountains. He didn't know what was happening to him until the army tried to get in touch with him-
tell him his son was killed in the war. When the officer saw this man, he called in the Public
Health Service. They sent the man to us."
The doctor stopped in front of a door like the one to Covenant's cell. He knocked, but did not
wait for an answer. He pushed open the door, caught Covenant by the elbow, and steered him into
the room.
As he stepped across the threshold, Covenant's nostrils were assaulted by a pungent reek, a smell
like that of rotten flesh lying in a latrine. It defied mere carbolic acid and ointments to mask
it. It came from a shrunken figure sitting grotesquely on the white bed.
"Good afternoon," the doctor said. "This is Thomas Covenant. He has a primary case of Hansen's
disease, and doesn't seem to understand the danger he's in."
Slowly, the patient raised his arms as if to embrace Covenant.
His hands were swollen stumps, fingerless lumps of pink, sick meat marked by cracks and
ulcerations from which a yellow exudation oozed through the medication. They hung on thin, hooped
arms like awkward sticks. And even though his legs were covered by his hospital pajamas, they
looked like gnarled wood. Half of one foot was gone, gnawed away, and in the place of the other
was nothing but an unhealable wound.
Then the patient moved his lips to speak, and Covenant looked up at his face. His dull, cataractal
eyes sat in his face as if they were the center of an eruption. The skin of his cheeks was as
white-pink as an albino's; it bulged and poured away from his eyes in waves, runnulets, as if it
had been heated to the melting point; and these waves were edged with thick tubercular nodules.
"Kill yourself," he rasped terribly. "Better than this."
Covenant broke away from the doctor. He rushed out into the hall and the contents of his stomach
spattered over the clean walls and floor like a stain of outrage.
In that way, he decided to survive.
Thomas Covenant lived in the leprosarium for more than six months. He spent his time roaming the
corridors like an amazed phantasm, practicing his VSE and other survival drills, glaring his way
through hours of conferences with the doctors, listening to lectures on leprosy and therapy and
rehabilitation. He soon learned that the doctors believed patient psychology to be the key to
treating leprosy. They wanted to counsel him. But he refused to talk about himself. Deep within
him, a hard core of intransigent fury was growing. He had learned that by some bitter trick of his
nerves the two fingers he had lost felt more alive to the rest of his body than did his remaining
digits. His right thumb was always reaching for those excised fingers, and finding their scar with
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an awkward, surprised motion. The help of the doctors seemed to resemble this same trick. Their
few sterile images of hope struck him as the gropings of an unfingered imagination. And so the
conferences, like the lectures, ended as long speeches by experts on the problems that he, Thomas
Covenant, faced.
For weeks the speeches were pounded into him until he began to dream them at night. Admonitions
took over the ravaged playground of his mind. Instead of stories and passions, he dreamed
perorations.
"Leprosy," he heard night after night, "is perhaps the most inexplicable of all human afflictions.
It is a mystery, just as the strange, thin difference between living and inert matter is a
mystery. Oh, we know some things about it: it is not fatal; it is not contagious in any
conventional way; it operates by destroying the nerves, typically in the extremities and in the
cornea of the eye; it produces deformity, largely because it negates the body's ability to protect
itself by feeling and reacting against pain; it may result in complete disability, extreme
deformation of the face and limbs, and blindness; and it is irreversible, since the nerves that
die cannot be restored. We also know that, in almost all cases, proper treatment using DDS -
diamino-diphenyl-sulfone-and some of the new synthetic antibiotics can arrest the spread of the
disease, and that, once the neural deterioration has been halted, the proper medication and
therapy can keep the affliction under control for the rest of the patient's life. What we do not
know is why or how any specific person contracts the illness. As far as we can prove, it comes out
of nowhere for no reason. And once you get it, you cannot hope for a cure."
The words he dreamed were not exaggerated-they could have come verbatim from any one of a score of
lectures or conferences-but their tolling sounded like the tread of something so unbearable that
it should never have been uttered. The impersonal voice of the doctor went on: "What we have
learned from our years of study is that Hansen's disease creates two unique problems for the
patient-interrelated difficulties that do not occur with any other illness, and that make the
mental aspect of being a leprosy victim more crucial than the physical.
"The first involves your relationships with your fellow human beings. Unlike leukemia today, or
tuberculosis in the last century, leprosy is not, and has never been, a `poetic' disease, a
disease which can be romanticized. Just the reverse. Even in societies that hate their sick less
than we Americans do, the leper has always been despised and feared-outcast even by his most-loved
ones because of a rare bacillus no one can predict or control. Leprosy is not fatal, and the
average patient can look forward to as much as thirty or fifty years of life as a leper. That
fact, combined with the progressive disability which the disease inflicts, makes leprosy patients,
of all sick people, the ones most desperately in need of human support. But virtually all
societies condemn their lepers to isolation and despair-denounced as criminals and degenerates, as
traitors and villains-cast out of the human race because science has failed to unlock the mystery
of this affection. In country after country, culture after culture around the world, the leper has
been considered the personification of everything people, privately and communally, fear and
abhor.
"People react this way for several reasons. First, the disease produces an ugliness and a bad
smell that are undeniably unpleasant. And second, generations of medical research notwithstanding,
people fail to believe that something so obvious and -ugly and so mysterious is not contagious.
The fact that we cannot answer questions about the bacillus reinforces their fear-we cannot be
sure that touch or air or food or water or even compassion do not spread the disease. In the
absence of any natural, provable explanation of the illness, people account for it in other ways,
all bad-as proof of crime or filth or perversion, evidence of God's judgment, as the horrible sign
of some psychological or spiritual or moral corruption or guilt. And they insist it's catching,
despite evidence that it is minimally contagious, even to children. So many of you are going to
have to live without one single human support to bear the burden with you.
"That is one reason why we place such an emphasis on counseling here; we want to help you learn to
cope with loneliness. Many of the patients who leave this institution do not five out their full
years. Under the shock of their severance, they lose their motivation; they let their self-
treatments slide, and become either actively or passively suicidal; few of them come back here in
time. The patients who survive find someone somewhere who is willing to help them want to live. Or
they find somewhere inside themselves the strength to endure.
"Whichever way you go, however, one fact will remain constant: from now until you die, leprosy is
the biggest single fact of your existence. It will control how you live in every particular. From
the moment you awaken until the moment you sleep, you will have to give your undivided attention
to all the hard corners and sharp edges of life. You can't take vacations from it. You can't try
to rest yourself by daydreaming, lapsing. Anything that bruises, bumps, burns, breaks, scrapes,
snags, pokes, or weakens you can maim, cripple, or even kill you. And thinking about all the kinds
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of life you can't have can drive you to despair and suicide. I've seen it happen."
Covenant's pulse was racing, and his sweat made the sheets cling to his limbs. The voice of his
nightmare had not changed-it made no effort to terrify him, took no pleasure in his fear-but now
the words were as black as hate, and behind them stretched a great raw wound of emptiness.
"That brings us to the other problem. It sounds simple, but you will find it can be devastating.
Most people depend heavily on their sense .of touch. In fact, their whole structure of responses
to reality is organized around their touch. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they
touch something they know it's real. And it is not an accident that we describe the deepest parts
of ourselves-our emotionsin terms of the sense of touch. Sad tales touch our feelings. Bad
situations irritate us or hurt us. This is an inevitable result of the fact that we are biological
organisms.
"You must fight and change this orientation. You're intelligent creatures-each of you has a brain.
Use it. Use it to recognize your danger. Use it to train yourself to stay alive."
Then he woke up alone in his bed drenched with sweat, eyes staring, lips taut with .whimpers that
tried to plead their way between his clenched teeth. Dream after dream, week after week, the
pattern played itself out. Day after day, he had to lash himself with anger to make himself leave
the ineffectual sanctuary of his cell.
But his fundamental decision held. He met patients who had been to the leprosarium several times
before-haunted recidivists who could not satisfy the essential demand of their torment, the
requirement that they cling to life without desiring any of the recompense which gave life value.
Their cyclic degeneration taught him to see that his nightmare contained the raw materials for
survival. Night after night, it battered him against the brutal and irremediable law of leprosy;
blow by blow, it showed him that an entire devotion to that law was his only defense against
suppuration and gnawing rot and blindness. In his fifth and sixth months at the leprosarium, he
practiced his VSE and other drills with manic diligence. He stared at the blank antiseptic walls
of his cell as if to hypnotize himself with them. In the back of his mind, he counted the hours
between doses of his medication. And whenever he slipped, missed a beat of his defensive rhythm,
he excoriated himself with curses.
In seven months, the doctors were convinced that his diligence was not a passing phase. They were
reasonably sure that the progress of his illness had been arrested. They sent him home.
As he returned to his house on Haven Farm in late summer, he thought that he was prepared for
everything. He had braced himself for the absence of any communication from Joan, the dismayed
revulsions of his former friends and associates-though these assaults still afflicted him with a
vertiginous nausea of rage and self-disgust. The sight of Joan's and Roger's belongings in the
house, and the desertion of the stables where Joan had formerly kept her horses, stung his sore
heart like a corrosive-but he had already set his heels against the pull of such pains.
Yet he was not prepared, not for everything. The next shock surpassed his readiness. After he had
double- and triple-checked to be sure he had received no mail from Joan, after he had spoken on
the phone with the lawyer who handled his business -he had heard the woman's discomfort throbbing
across the metallic connection- he went to his but in the woods and sat down to read what he had
written on his new book.
Its blind poverty left him aghast. To call it ridiculously naive would have been a compliment. He
could hardly believe that he was responsible for such supercilious trash.
That night, he reread his first novel, the best-seller. Then, moving with extreme caution, he
built a fire in his hearth and burned both the novel and the new manuscript. Fire! he thought.
Purgation. If I do not write another word, I will at least rid my life of these lies. Imagination!
How could I have been so complacent? And as he watched the pages crumble into gray ash, he threw
in with them all thought of further writing. For the first time, he understood part of what the
doctors had been saying; he needed to crush out his imagination. He could not afford to have an
imagination, a faculty which could envision Joan, joy, health. If he tormented himself with
unattainable desires, he would cripple his grasp on the law which enabled him to survive. His
imagination could kill him, lead or seduce or trick him into suicide: seeing all the things he
could not have would make him despair.
When the fire went out, he ground the ashes underfoot as if to make their consummation
irrevocable.
The next morning, he set about organizing his life.
First, he found his old straight razor. Its long, stainless-steel blade gleamed like a leer in the
fluorescent light of his bathroom; but he stropped it deliberately, lathered his face, braced his
timorous bones against the sink, and set the edge to his throat. It felt like a cold line of fire
across his jugular, a keen threat of blood and gangrene and reactivated leprosy. If his half-
unfingered hand slipped or twitched, the consequences might be extreme. But he took the risk
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consciously to discipline himself, enforce his recognition of the raw terms of his survival,
mortify his recalcitrance. He instituted shaving with that blade as a personal ritual, a daily
confrontation with his condition.
For the same reason, he began carrying around a sharp penknife. Whenever he felt his discipline
faltering, felt threatened by memories or hopes or love, he took out the knife and tested its edge
on his wrist.
Then, after he had shaved, he worked on his house. He neatened it, rearranged the furniture to
minimize the danger of protruding corners, hard edges, hidden obstacles; he eliminated everything
which could trip, bruise, or deflect him, so that even in the dark his rooms would be navigable,
safe; he made his house as much like his cell in the leprosarium as possible. Anything that was
hazardous, he threw into the guest room; and when he was done he locked the guest room and threw
away the key.
After that he went to his but and locked it also. Then he pulled its fuses, so that there would be
no risk of fire in the old wiring.
Finally he washed the sweat off his hands. He washed them grimly, obsessively; he could not help
himself -the physical impression of uncleanness was too strong.
Leper outcast unclean.
He spent the autumn stumbling around the rims of madness. Dark violence throbbed in him like a
picar thrust between his ribs, goading him aimlessly. He felt an insatiable need for sleep, but
could not heed it because his dreams had changed to nightmares of gnawing; despite his numbness,
he seemed to feel himself being eaten away. And wakefulness confronted him with a vicious and
irreparable paradox. Without the support or encouragement of other people, he did not believe he
could endure the burden of his struggle against horror and death; yet that horror and death
explained, made comprehensible, almost vindicated the rejection which denied him support or
encouragement. His struggle arose from the same passions which produced his outcasting. He hated
what would happen to him if he failed to fight. He hated himself for having to fight such a
winless and interminable war. But he could not hate the people who made his moral solitude so
absolute. They, only shared his own fear.
In the dizzy round of his dilemma, the only response which steadied him was vitriol. He clung to
his bitter anger as to an anchor of sanity; he needed fury in order to survive, to keep his grip
like a stranglehold on life. Some days he went from sun to sun without any rest from rage.
But in time even that passion began to falter. His outcasting was part of his law; it was an
irreducible fact, as totally real and compulsory as gravity and pestilence and numbness. If he
failed to crush himself to fit the mold of his facts, he would fail to survive.
When he looked out over the Farm, the trees which edged his property along the highway seemed so
far away that nothing could bridge the gap.
The contradiction had no answer. It made his fingers twitch helplessly, so that he almost cut
himself shaving. Without passion he could not fight-yet all his passions rebounded against him. As
the autumn passed, he cast fewer and fewer curses at the impossibilities imprisoning him. He
prowled through the woods behind Haven Farm-a tall, lean man a with haggard eyes, a mechanical
stride, and two fingers gone from his right hand. Every cluttered trail, sharp rock, steep slope
reminded him that he was keeping himself alive with caution, that he had only to let his
surveillance slip to go quietly unmourned and painless out of his troubles.
It gave him nothing but an addition of sorrow to
touch the bark of a tree and feel nothing. He saw clearly the end that waited for him; his heart
would become as affectless as his body, and then he would be lost for good and all.
Nevertheless, he was filled with a sudden sense of focus, of crystallization, as if he had
identified an enemy, when he learned that someone had paid his electric bill for him. The
unexpected gift made him abruptly aware of what was happening. The townspeople were not only
shunning him, they were actively cutting off every excuse he might have to go among them.
When he first understood his danger, his immediate reaction was to throw open a window and shout
into the winter, "Go ahead! By hell, I don't need you!" But the issue was not simple enough to be
blown away by bravado. As winter scattered into an early March spring, he became convinced that he
needed to take some kind of action. He was a person,
human like any other; he was kept alive by a personal heart. He did not mean to stand by and
approve this amputation.
So when his next phone bill came, he gathered his courage, shaved painstakingly, dressed himself
in clothes with tough fabrics, laced his feet snugly into sturdy boots, and began the two-mile
walk into town
to pay his bill in person.
That walk brought him to the door of the Bell Telephone Company with trepidation hanging around
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his head like a dank cloud. He stood in front of the gilt-lettered door for a time, thinking,
These are the pale deaths . . . and wondering about laughter. Then he collected himself, pulled
open the door like the gust of a gale, and stalked up to the girl at the counter as if she had
challenged him to single combat.
He put his hands palms down on the counter to steady them. Ferocity sprang across his teeth for an
instant. He said, "My name is Thomas Covenant."
The girl was trimly dressed, and she held her arms crossed under her breasts, supporting them so
that they showed to their best advantage. He forced himself to look up at her face. She was
staring blankly past him. While he searched her for some tremor of revulsion, she glanced at him
and asked, "Yes?"
"I want to pay my bill," he said, thinking, She doesn't know, she hasn't heard.
"Certainly, sir," she answered. "What is your number?"
He told her, and she moved languidly into another room to check her files.
The suspense of her absence made his fear pound in his throat. He needed some way to distract
himself, occupy his attention. Abruptly, he reached into his pocket and brought out the sheet of
paper the boy had given him. You're supposed to read it. He smoothed it out on the counter and
looked at it.
The old printing said:
A real man-real in all the ways that we recognize as real-finds himself suddenly abstracted from
the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma,
smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is
informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his
world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is
defeated, he will die, and his world -the real world- will be destroyed because it lacks the inner
strength to survive.
The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or
hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no
"real" danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation,
and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world.
Question: is the man's behavior courageous or cowardly? This is the fundamental question of
ethics.
Ethics! Covenant snorted to himself. Who the hell makes these things up?
The next moment, the girl returned with a question in her face. "Thomas Covenant? Of Haven Farm?
Sir, a deposit has been made on your account which covers everything for several months. Did you
send us a large check recently?"
Covenant staggered inwardly as if he had been struck, then caught himself on the counter, listing
to the side like a reefed galleon. Unconsciously he crushed the paper in his fist. He felt light-
headed, heard words echoing in his ears: Virtually all societies condemn, denounce, cast out-you
cannot hope.
He focused his attention on his cold feet and aching ankles while he fought to keep the violence
at bay. With elaborate caution, he placed the crumpled sheet on the counter in front of the girl.
Striving to sound conversational; he said, "It isn't catching, you know. You won't get it from
methere's nothing to worry about. It isn't catching. Except for children."
The girl blinked at him as if she were amazed by the vagueness of her thoughts.
His shoulders hunched, strangling fury in his throat. He turned away with as much dignity as he
could manage, and strode out 'into the sunlight, letting the door slam behind him. Hellfire! he
swore to himself. Hellfire and bloody damnation.
Giddy with rage, he looked up and down the street. He could see the whole ominous length of the
town from where he stood. In the direction of Haven Farm, the small businesses stood close
together like teeth poised on either side of the road. The sharp sunlight made him feel vulnerable
and alone. He checked his hands quickly for scratches or abrasions, then hurried down the
gauntlet, as he moved, his numb feet felt unsure on the sidewalk, as if the cement were slick with
despair. He believed that he displayed courage by not breaking into a run.
In a few moments the courthouse loomed ahead of him. On the sidewalk before it stood the old
beggar. He had not moved. He was still staring at the sun, still muttering meaninglessly. His sign
said, Beware, uselessly, like a warning that came too late.
As Covenant approached, he was struck by how dispossessed the old man looked. Beggars and
fanatics, holy men, prophets of the apocalypse did not belong on that street in that sunlight; the
frowning, belittling eyes of the stone columns held no tolerance for such preterite exaltation.
And the scant coins he had collected were not enough for even one meal. The sight gave Covenant an
odd pang of compassion. Almost in spite of himself, he stopped in front of the old man.
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