Pete, his forehead wrinkling, said slowly, “I saw once what’s called der Todesstachel. At least that’s what your buddy Father Handy and that inc Tibor would call it; they like those German theological terms.”

“What’s ein Todesstachel?” she asked. She had never heard the word before, but she knew that Tod meant death.

Pete said somberly, “The sting of death. But listen. ‘Sting,’ as when a bug or a nettle stings you… that’s the modern usage. It now means being touched by a poison-filled stinger, as with a bee. But it didn’t always mean that. In the old days, as for example when the King James scholars wrote the phrase ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ they meant it in the old sense. Which is—” He hesitated. “Like being stung by a remark. Do you get it? Stung, for instance, into rage, hurt by a remark. It meant to be pierced by a dartlike point. In dueling, for instance, they stung each other; we would say ‘pricked,’ now. So Paul didn’t mean that death stung the way a scorpion stings, with a tail and a sac of poison, an irritant; he meant a piercing.” Paul had meant what he himself, Pete Sands, had once, under the influence of drugs, experienced.

He had been fighting; the drugs had set off a polymorphic, circus-movement destructiveness and he had strode about smashing things, and, since it was Lurine’s small apartment, he had smashed her possessions and then, incredibly, had, when she tried to stop him, kicked and hit her. And when he did so, he felt the sting—the sting in its older sense: the deep piercing of his body by a sharp-pointed metal gaff, a barbed spear such as fishermen use to secure heavy fish, once netted.