sympathetic cold revulsion, even though he could not imagine what ghastly visions plagued her.
He drove faster yet, weaving with greater aggression from lane to lane, taking bigger risks, to the accompaniment of more blaring horns and, now, the frequent squeal of brakes. He almost hoped that a policeman would pull him over. Considering Martie’s condition, any cop was likely to forgo issuing a traffic citation and, instead, provide an emergency escort, with siren.
Dusty spoke to her, urged her to calm down, to hang on, to remember that he was here for her, that he trusted her, and that everything was going to be all right. He didn’t know if she could hear him. Nothing he said appeared to comfort her.
He wanted desperately to reach out to her and gentle her with his touch, but he suspected that during this seizure, any contact would have the opposite effect of what he intended. His hand upon her shoulder might send her into even greater paroxysms of terror and revulsion.
Dr. Closterman’s offices were in a medical high-rise adjacent to the hospital. Both buildings rose in the next block, the tallest structures in sight.
Regardless of the padding, she was certain to hurt herself if she kept knocking her head against the dashboard, but she would not relent. She didn’t cry out in pain, only grunted with each impact, cursed, and quarreled with herself—“Stop it, stop it, stop it”—and seemed like nothing less than a woman possessed. More precisely, she was both the possessed and the exorcist, striving mightily to cast out her own demons.
At the medical complex, the surrounding parking lots were shaded by aisles of big carrotwood trees. He searched for and found a space close to the office high-rise, under a canopy of branches.
Even after he braked to a halt and put the car in park, Dusty felt as though he were still moving. A morning breeze shivered leaf shadows across the windshield, while interleaved blades of sunshine fluttered against the curve of glass and seemed to tumble away to each side as if they were bright scraps of foliage spinning into his wake on a slipstream.
As Dusty switched off the engine, Martie stopped butting the dash. Her hands, until now trapped between her clamped thighs, broke free. She clasped her head as though trying to suppress the waves of pain from a migraine headache, pressing so hard on her skull that the skin over her knuckles tightened until it was as smooth and white as the bone beneath.
She was no longer grunting or cursing, no longer quarreling with herself. Worse, bending forward once more, she began to scream. Shrill shrieks punctuated by hard swallows of air, like a swimmer in trouble. Terror in her cries. But also outrage, disgust, shock. Screams that shuddered with revulsion, as those of a swimmer who had felt something strange sliding past beneath the water, something cold and slick and terrible.
“Martie, what? Talk to me. Martie, let me help.”
Maybe her cries and the booming of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears didn’t allow her to hear him, or maybe there was simply nothing he could do, therefore no reason to answer him. She was struggling against riptides of powerful emotion that seemed to be dragging her out into deep waters, toward a drowning abyss that might be madness.
Against his better judgment, Dusty touched her. She reacted as he had been afraid she would, shrinking from him, swatting his hand off her shoulder, jamming herself up against the passenger’s door, still irrationally convinced that she was capable of blinding him or worse.
A young woman, crossing the parking lot with two small children, heard Martie’s screams, came closer to the Saturn, frowning-peering, and locked eyes with Dusty, her gaze darkening as if she saw in him the evil of every tower sniper, schoolboy assassin, serial strangler, mad bomber, and head-collector who had made the news in her lifetime. She pulled her kids close to her and moved them more quickly toward the hospital, probably seeking a security guard.
Martie’s frenzy passed more abruptly than it had arisen, not by slow degrees but nearly all at once. A final scream, resounding glass to glass to glass in this small space, gave way to quaking gasps, until soon the gasps were only deep shuddery breaths, and threaded through them was a disheartening wounded-animal mewl, as thin as a silken filament, fading in and out, sewing one ragged breath to the next.
Although Dusty had seen not one frame of the spook show that had stuttered through the sprockets of Martie’s mind, the ordeal of observation, in itself, had left him weak. His mouth was dry. His heart raced. He raised his hands to watch them tremble, and then blotted his damp palms on his jeans.
The keys still dangled from the ignition. He plucked them out, muffled their jingle in his clenched hand, and stuffed them into one of his pockets before Martie could raise her bowed head and catch sight of them.
He was not concerned that she would grab the keys and stab at his face in a furious determination to blind him, as she claimed to have seen herself doing in a vision. He was no more afraid of her now than he had been before this latest episode.
In the immediate aftermath of her seizure, however, perhaps a glimpse of the keys would be enough to send her tumbling down the stairs of panic yet again.
Silent now except for her hard breathing, she sat up straighter and lowered her hands from her head.
“I can’t take much more like that,” she whispered.
“It’s over.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t.”
“For now, anyway.”
Dappled with sunshine and leaf shadows, Martie’s face appeared to flicker, gold and black, as if it were no more substantial than a face in a dream, likely to glimmer less with gold and darkle more with black, until at last it lost all composition and sparkled into extinction like the last few bright crackles of a Roman candle in a bottomless night sky.
Though intellectually he rejected the possibility that he was losing her, in his heart he knew that she was slipping away from him, captive of a force that he could not understand and against which he could offer no defense.
No. Dr. Ahriman could help her. Could, would, must.
Perhaps Dr. Closterman, with MRIs and EEGs and PET scans and all the abbreviations and acronyms of high- tech medicine, would identify her condition, isolate the cause, and provide the cure.
But if not Closterman, then surely Ahriman.
From out of a wilderness of wind-stirred leaf shadows, as blue as the two jewels in the sockets of a jungle- wrapped stone goddess, Martie’s eyes met his. No illusions in her gaze. No superstitious surety that all would be well in this best of all possible worlds. Just a stark appreciation of her dilemma.
Somehow she overcame the dread of her lethal potential. She extended her left hand to him.
He held it gratefully.
“Poor Dusty,” she said. “A druggie brother and a crazy wife.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“I’m working at it.”
“Whatever happens to you,” he said, “won’t happen just to you. It happens to both of us. We’re in this together.”
“I know.”
“Two musketeers.”
“Butch and Sundance.”
“Mickey and Minnie.”
He didn’t smile. Neither did she. But with characteristic fortitude, Martie said, “Let’s go see if Doc Closterman learned any damn thing at all in medical school.”
44
