“Horticulture,” he said approvingly, “is a therapeutic pastime for an agoraphobic. Ornamental plants allow you to remain in touch with the natural world beyond these walls. But when I’m talking to you, I expect your attention to remain on me.”
She looked at him again. She was no longer weeping. The last of her tears were drying on her face.
An oddness about her, subtle and indefinable, nagged at the doctor. The levelness of her stare. The way her lips were pressed together, mouth pinched at the corners. Here was a tension unrelated to her humiliation and shame.
“Spider mites,” he said.
He thought he saw worry crawling through her eyes.
“They’re hell on a ming tree, spider mites.”
Unmistakably, what spun across her face was a web of worry, but surely not about the health of her houseplants.
Sensing trouble, Ahriman made an effort to clear the postcoital haze from his mind and concentrate on Susan. “What are you worried about?”
“What am I worried about?” she asked.
He rephrased the question as a command: “Tell me what you’re worried about.”
When she hesitated, he repeated the command, and she said, “The video.”
Valet’s hackles smoothed. He stopped growling. He became his familiar, tail-wagging, affectionate self, insisted upon a cuddle, and then returned to his bed, where he dozed off as though he had never been bothered.
Bound hand and foot at her insistence, even more profoundly subdued by three sleeping pills, Martie was unnervingly still and silent. A few times, Dusty raised his head from the pillow and leaned close to her, worried until he heard her faint respiration.
Although he expected to lie awake all night, and therefore left his nightstand lamp aglow, eventually he slept.
A dream stirred his sleep, blending dread and absurdity into a strange narrative that was disturbing yet nonsensical.
He is lying in bed, atop the covers, fully dressed except for his shoes. Valet is not present. Across the room, Martie sits in the lotus position on the dog’s big sheepskin pillow, utterly still, eyes closed, fingers laced in her lap, as though lost in meditation.
He and Martie are alone in the room, and yet he is talking to someone else. He can feel his lips and tongue moving, and although he can hear his own voice reverberating — deep, hollow, fuzzy — in the bones of his skull, he cannot quite make out a single word of what he is saying. The pauses in his speech indicate that he is engaged in a conversation, not a monologue, but he can hear no other voice, not a murmur, not a whisper.
Beyond the window, the night is slashed by lightning, but no thunder protests the wound, and no rain drizzles on the roof. The only sound arises when a large bird flies past the window, so close that one of its wings brushes the glass, and it squawks. Although the creature appears and vanishes in an instant, Dusty somehow knows that it is a heron, and the cry it makes seems to travel in a circle through the night, fading and then growing louder, again faint but then near once more.
He becomes aware of an intravenous needle in his left arm. A plastic tube loops from the needle to a clear plastic bag, which is plump with glucose and dangling from a pharmacy-style floor lamp that serves as a makeshift IV rack.
Again the storm flashes and the huge heron passes the window in the pulsing glare, its shriek traveling into the darkness behind the lightning.
The right sleeve of Dusty’s shirt is rolled higher than the left, because his blood pressure is being taken; the pressure cuff of a sphygmomanometer wraps his upper arm. Black rubber tubing extends from the cuff to the inflation bulb, which floats in midair like an object in zero gravity. Strangely, as if in the grip of an unseen hand, the bulb is being rhythmically compressed and released, while the pressure cuff tightens on his arm. If a third person is in the room, this nameless visitor must have mastered the magic of invisibility.
When lightning flares again, it is borne and comes to ground in the bedroom, not in the night beyond the window. Many-legged, nimble, slowed from the speed of light to the speed of a cat, the bolt hisses out of the ceiling as it usually sizzles from a cloud, springs to a metal picture frame, from there to the television, and finally to the floor lamp that serves as an IV rack, spitting sparks as it gnashes its bright teeth against the brass.
Immediately behind the leaping lightning swoops the big heron, having entered the bedroom through a closed window or a solid wall, its swordlike bill cracking wide as it shrieks. It’s huge, at least three feet, head to foot: prehistoric-looking, with its pterodactyl glare. Shadows of wings wash the walls, fluttering feathery forms in the flickering light.
Leading its shadow, the bird darts toward Dusty, and he knows it will stand upon his chest and pluck out his eyes. His arms feel as if they are strapped to the bed, although the right is restrained only by the pressure cuff and the left is weighed down by nothing but the bracing board that prevents him from bending his elbow while the needle is in the vein. Nevertheless, he lies immobile, defenseless, as the bird shrieks toward him.
When lightning arcs from television to floor lamp, the clear-plastic glucose bag glows like the gauzy sac in a pressurized gas lantern, and a hot rain of brassy sparks — which ought to set the bedclothes afire but does not — showers upon Dusty. The shadow of the descending heron shatters into as many black fragments as there are sparks, and when the clouds of bright and dark mites swarm dazzlingly together, Dusty closes his eyes in terror and confusion.
He is assured, perhaps by the invisible visitor, that he need not be afraid, but when he opens his eyes, he sees a fearsome thing hanging over him. The bird has been impossibly condensed, crushed-twisted- squeezed, until it now fits inside the bulging glucose bag. In spite of this compression, the heron remains recognizable — though it resembles a bird painted by some half-baked Picasso wanna-be with a taste for the macabre. Worse, it is somehow still alive and shrieking, although its shrill cries are muted by the clear walls of its plastic prison. It tries to squirm inside the bag, tries to break free with sharp beak and talons, cannot, and rolls one bleak black eye, glaring down at Dusty with demonic intensity.
He feels trapped, too, lying here helpless under the pendant bird: he with the weakness of one crucified, it with the dark energy of an ornament fashioned for a satanist’s mock Christmas tree. Then the heron dissolves into a bloody brown slush, and the clear fluid in the intravenous line begins to cloud as the substance of the bird seeps out of the bag and downward, downward. Watching this filthy murk contaminate the tube inch by inch, Dusty screams, but he makes no sound. Paralyzed, drawing great draughts of air but as silently as one struggling to breathe in a vacuum, he tries to lift his right hand and tear out the IV, tries to cast himself off the bed, cannot, and he rolls his eyes, straining to see the last inch of the tube as the toxin reaches the needle.
A terrible flash of inner heat, as though lightning arcs through his veins and arteries, is followed by a shriek when the bird enters his blood. He feels it surging up his median basilic vein, through biceps and into torso, and almost at once an intolerable fluttering arises within his heart, the busy twitching-pecking-fluffing of something making a nest.
Still in the lotus position on Valet’s sheepskin pillow, Martie opens her eyes. They are not blue, as before, but as black as her hair. No whites at all: Each socket is filled with a single, smooth, wet, convex blackness. Avian eyes are generally round, and these are almond-shaped like those of a human being, but they are the eyes of the heron nonetheless.
“Welcome,” she says.
Dusty snapped awake, so clearheaded the instant he opened his eyes that he didn’t cry out or sit up in bed to
