The ebony, leathery, bat’s wings rising from the shoulder blades—quivering—completed the frightening picture.

Wisps of smoky, filmy garments were draped over the woman-thing’s shoulders, around her waist. She stood unmoving.

Then she spoke to them. It was not mental.

It actually sounded; but not from the body before them. They knew it was—her?—but it did not come from her at all. The fearful mouth remained almost shut, propped slightly open on the sharp tiers of teeth.

The voice issued from the walls, from the tips of the stalagmites, from the high, arching roof of the volcano; it boomed from the rocky floor—it even floated down the length of the infinitely-stretching Corridor.

The voice spoke in thunder, yet softly.

Well, Gentlemen?

Krane stared for a second at the woman-thing; then he looked about wildly, trying to find the source of the voice. His head swung back and forth as though it was manipulated by strings from above. “Well, what?” he shouted to no one.

Have you realized the truth yet?

“What truth? What are you talking about? Who is that? Is it you?” chimed in Marmorth, bathed in sudden fear. He pointed an accusing finger at the woman-thing.

The Corridor shimmered oddly. It lived just behind the stone walls of the volcano.

I’m a voice, Gentlemen. A voice and an illusion. Just an illusion, that’s all, Gentlemen. Just an illusion from both of your minds. Made of equal portions of your minds. For you are one as strong as the other.

There was a pause. Then:

But tell me, have you realized what you should have known before you were foolish enough to enter the Corridor?

Krane looked at Marmorth with suspicion. For the first time it occurred to him that perhaps this was a trick on the other’s part. Marmorth, recognizing the glance, shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “No! Tell us, then! What should we have known?”

The only real answer as to who is right; which Theorem is the correct one!

“Tell me, tell me!” they shouted, almost together.

There was silence for a moment. The woman-thing ran a scarlet-tipped hand across the hideous lizard snout, as though searching for a way to phrase what was coming. Then the single word sounded in the heart of the volcano.

Neither.

Krane and Marmorth stared past the woman-thing, stared at each other in confusion. “N-neither?” shouted Marmorth incredulously. “ Are you mad! Of course one of us is right! Me!” He was shaking fists at the gruesome being before him. Illusion, perhaps; but an illusion that was goading him.

“Prove it! Prove it!” screamed Krane, stepping forward, flat-footedly, as though seeking to strike the woman-thing. Then the voice gave them the solution and the proof that neither could contest, for both knew it to be true on a level that defied mere conviction.

You are both egomaniacs. You could not possibly be convinced of the other’s viewpoint. Not in a hundred million years. The message dies between you. You are both too tightly ensnared in yourselves!

The woman-thing suddenly began to shimmer. She became indistinct, and there were many shadow-forms of her, surrounding her body like halos. Abruptly, she disappeared from between them. Leaving them alone in the quickening darkness of the volcano’s throat.

Alone. Staring at each other with dawning comprehension, dawning belief.

They both realized it at the same moment. They both had the conviction of their cause, yet they both knew the womanthing had been right.

“Krane,” said Marmorth, starting toward the black-bearded man, “she’s right, you know. Perhaps we can get together and figure…”

The other had started toward the older man as he had spoken. “Yes, perhaps there’s something in what you say. Perhaps there’s a…”

At the instant they both realized it—the instant they considered the other’s viewpoint—the illusion barriers shattered, of course, and the red-hot lava poured in on them, engulfing both men in a blistering inferno.

“Give me some light!”

Cry: tormented, half-moan half-chant, cast out against a whispering darkness: a man wound in white, arms upflung to roistering shadows, sooty sockets where eyes had been, pleading, demanding, anger and hopelessness, anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a step, two, faltering, weak, the man returned to the child, trying to find some exit from the washing sea of darkness in which he trembled.

“Give me some light!”

Around him a Greek chorus of sussurating voices. Plucking at his garments he staggered toward an intimation of sound, a resting place, a goal. The man in pain, the figure of all pain, all desperation, and nowhere in that circle of painful light was there release from his torment. Sandaled feet stepping, each one above an abyss, no hope and no safety; what can it mean to be so eternally blind?

Again, “Give me some light!”

The last tortured ripping of the words from a throat raw with the hopelessness of salvation. Then the man sank to the shadows that moved in on him. The face half-hidden in chiaroscuro, sharp black, blanched white, down and down into the grayness about his feet, the circle of blazing-white light pinpointing him, a creature impaled on a shard of brilliance, till closing, closing, closing it swallowed him, all gone to black, darkness within and without, black even deeper, nothing, finis, end; silence.

Richard Becker, Oedipus, had played his first role. Twenty-four years later, he would play it again, as his last. But before that final performance’s curtain could be rung, twenty-four years of greatness would have to strut across stages of life and theater and emotion.

Time, passing.

When they had decided to cast the paranoid beggar in Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker had gone to the Salvation Army retail store and bought a set of rags that even the sanctimonious charity workers staffing the shop tried to throw out as unsaleable and foul. He bought a pair of cracked and soleless shoes that were a size too large.

He bought a hat that had seen so many autumns of rain its brim had bowed and withered under the onslaught. He bought a no-color vest from a suit long since destroyed and a pair of pants whose seat sagged raggedly and a shirt with three buttons gone and a jacket that seemed to typify every derelict who had ever cadged an hour’s sleep in an alley.

He bought these things over the protests of the kindly, white-haired women who were doing their bit for charity, and he asked if he might step into the toilet for a few moments to try them on; and when he emerged, his good tweed jacket and dark slacks over his arm, he was another man entirely. As though magically, coarse stubble had sprouted on his sagging jowls. (It may well have been there when he came into the shop, but who would have noticed? He was too nice-looking a young man to go around unshaved.) The hair had grown limp and off-gray under the squashed hat. The face was lined and planed with the depravities and deprivations of a lifetime lived in gutters and saloons. The hands were caked with filth, the eyes lusterless and devoid of personality, the body grotesquely slumped by the burden of mere existence. This old man, this skid from the Bowery, how had he gotten into the toilet, and where was the nice young man who had gone in wearing that jacket and those slacks? Had this creature somehow overpowered him (what foul weapon had this feeble old man used to subdue a vital, strong youth like that) ? The white-haired Good Women of Charity were frozen with distress as they imagined the strong-faced, attractive youth, lying in the bathroom, his skull crushed by a length of pipe.