His watch. 2:16.
She said, “The Supreme Court didn’t legalize abortion until early ‘seventy-three, when I was in the last month of my term, so it wasn’t available to me until it was too late.”
In fact, had abortion been legal, she still might not have gone to a clinic, for she feared and distrusted all doctors. She first tried to rid herself of the unwanted child with the help of a mystic Indian homeopathic practitioner who operated out of an apartment in Haight-Ashbury, the center of the counterculture in San Francisco at that time. He had first given her a series of herb potions known to affect the walls of the uterus and sometimes cause miscarriages. When those medications did not work, he tried a series of potent herbal douches, administered with increasing pressure, to flush the child away.
When those treatments failed as well, she turned in desperation to a quack offering a briefly popular radium douche, supposedly not radioactive enough to harm the woman but deadly to the fetus. That more radical approach was equally unsuccessful.
It seemed to her as if the unwanted child was consciously aware of her efforts to be free of it and was clinging to life with inhuman tenacity, a hateful thing already stronger than any ordinary unborn mortal, invulnerable even in the womb.
2:18.
Harry was impatient. She had told them nothing, thus far, that would help them deal with Ticktock. “Where can we find your son?”
Jennifer probably felt she would never have another audience like this one, and she was not going to tailor her story to their schedule, regardless of the cost. Clearly, in the telling there was some form of expiation for her.
Harry could barely stand the sound of the woman’s voice, and could no longer tolerate the sight of her face. He left Connie by the bed and went to the window to stare out at the fog, which looked cool and clean.
“Life became, like, really a bad trip for me,” Jennifer said.
Harry found it disorienting to hear this pinched and haggard ancient use such dated slang.
She said her fear of the unborn was worse than anything she had experienced on drugs. Her certainty that she harbored a monster only increased daily. She needed sleep but dreaded it because her sleep was troubled by dreams of shocking violence, human suffering in infinite variety, and something unseen but terrible moving always in shadows.
“One day they found me in the street, screaming, clawing at my stomach, raving about a beast inside of me. They put me in a psychiatric ward.”
From there she had been brought to Orange County, under the care of her mother, whom she’d deserted six years earlier. Physical examinations had revealed a scarred uterus, strange adhesions and polyps, and wildly abnormal blood chemistry.
Although no abnormalities were detectable in the unborn child, Jennifer remained convinced that it was a monster, and became more hysterical by the day, the hour. No secular or religious counseling could calm her fears.
Hospitalized for a monitored delivery that was necessitated by the things she had done to be rid of the child, Jennifer had slipped beyond hysteria, into madness. She experienced drug flashbacks rife with visions of organic monstrosities, and developed the irrational conviction that if she merely looked upon the child she was bringing into the world, she would be at once damned to Hell. Her labor was unusually difficult and protracted, and due to her mental condition, she was restrained through most of it. But when her restraints were briefly loosened for her comfort, even as the stubborn child was coming forth, she gouged out her eyes with her own thumbs.
At the window, staring into the faces that formed and dissolved in the fog, Harry shuddered.
“And he was born,” Jennifer Drackman said. “He was born.”
Even eyeless, she knew the dark nature of the creature to which she had given birth. But he was a beautiful baby, and then a lovely boy (so they told her), and then a handsome young man. Year after year no one would take seriously the paranoid ravings of a woman who had put out her own eyes.
Harry checked his watch. 2:21.
At most they had forty minutes of safe time remaining. Perhaps substantially less.
“There were so many surgeries, complications from the pregnancy, my eyes, infections. My health went steadily downhill, a couple of strokes, and I never returned home with my mother. Which was good. Because
“How do you know he killed your mother?” Connie asked.
“He told me so. And he told me how. He describes his power to me, how it grows and grows. He’s even shown me things…. And I believe he can do everything he says. Do you?”
“Yes,” Connie said.
“Where does he live?” Harry asked, still facing the fog.
“In my mother’s house.”
“What’s the address?”
“My mind’s not clear on a lot of things… but I remember that.”
She gave them the address.
Harry thought he knew approximately where the place was. Not far from Pacific View.
He checked his watch yet again. 2:23.
Eager to get out of that room, and not merely because they urgently needed to deal with Bryan Drackman, Harry turned away from the window. “Let’s go.”
Sammy Shamroe stepped out of the shadow-hung corner. Janet rose from the nurse’s chair, holding her sleeping child, and the dog got to his feet.
But Connie had a question. It was the kind of personal question Harry ordinarily would have asked and that until tonight would have made Connie scowl with impatience because they had already learned the essentials.
“Why does Bryan keep coming here to see you?” Connie inquired.
“To torture me in one way or another,” the woman said.
“That’s all — when he has a world full of people to torture?”
Letting her hand slide off the bed rail, which she had been grasping all this time, Jennifer Drackman said, “Love.”
“He comes because he loves you?”
“No, no. Not him. He’s incapable of love, doesn’t understand the word, only thinks he does. But he wants love from me.” A dry, humorless laugh escaped the skeletal figure in the bed. “Can you believe he comes to
Harry was surprised that he could feel a grudging pity for the psychotic child who had entered the world, unwanted, from this disturbed woman.
That room, though warm and comfortable enough, was the last place in creation to which anyone should go in search of love.
6
Fog poured off the Pacific and embraced the night coast, dense and deep and cool. It flowed through the sleeping town, like the ghost of an ancient ocean with a high-tide line far above that of the modern sea.
Harry drove south along the coast highway, faster than seemed wise in that limited visibility. He had decided that the risk of a rear-end collision was outweighed by the danger of getting to the Drackman house too late to catch Ticktock before he had recovered his energy.
The palms of his hands were damp on the steering wheel, as if the fog had condensed on his skin. But there was no fog inside the van. 2:27.
Almost an hour had passed since Ticktock had gone away to rest. On the one hand, they had accomplished a lot in that brief time. On the other hand, it seemed that time was not a river, like the song said, but a crashing
