“You’re just sort of a cold fish by nature, then?”
“I was hardly feeling cold.” He went to her, reached down and took her hands. He drew her up to him. She came, but leaned against him as a child might, expressing affection without yearning.
What had been broken here, and so suddenly? And by him, or by her? He put his arm around her waist. Tentatively, he moved toward the bedroom. She came without the protest he expected, but when she sat on the edge of the bed, he saw in her face for just a moment a haggard expression. She was exhausted, but she was here.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You were suddenly just so distant. What do you think about when you do that?”
“Do I do it often?”
“People around here say you have no emotions. That you’re—well, that you’re heartless, David.” She took his hand in hers, and for a moment they sat side by side, two awkward kids.
He went to her top button.
“I’m scared, Katie.”
“Not of me.”
He unbuttoned it.
“Of taking on a job I can’t handle. And from a murdered man in a place where murders happen.”
She opened her blouse, then reached around and unsnapped her bra. Her breasts tumbled out in a pale perfection of curves. Then she put a hand on his belt and glanced up at him. He found the shyness flickering in her eyes profoundly erotic.
She drew down his zipper. Laughing a little in her throat, she said, “You’re going to tear these pants,” and she drew him out into the coolness of the air and the warmth of her hands.
Her nakedness was exquisite. Certainly, she was among the most beautiful women he had ever touched. She was as pure and smooth as cream, and when they lay back together, he sensed that he was forgiven, as if whatever had almost driven them apart had with kindness and grace been put aside. The only flaw she possessed was a brown shadow along the back of her neck, and as he slid his hand along its smooth coolness, then kissed it, it tasted faintly of ash, perhaps a faded suntan. And yet, it was odd, not really a color at all. He’d never seen anything quite like it, as a matter of fact, a color that wasn’t a color, that seemed more like a shadow being cast from within. Maybe it was something bizarre to do with exposure to the sun.
“Have you been outside?”
“When?”
“Recently? Say, the past three days?”
She sat up. “Why do you ask?”
“Just don’t go. There’s a lot of radiation in the atmosphere.”
She kissed his nose. “I’ve wanted to do that.”
“Kiss my nose?”
She hugged him, and they fell together and he tried to love her with skill and care, to be for her what he believed women wanted, drawing from his not very wide experience, which was of mostly equally unsure nurses. Many a hospital was full of exhausted, brilliant kids exploring not only the challenges of medicine, but also those of the heart.
When he reached up and turned off the bedside lamp, the room filled with greenish-purple flickering so intense that he had to close his eyes against it. This had been a long, hard day, and one that seemed to have become night very quickly. But the hour was eight by the clock.
She reached up and turned the lamp back on, pushing away the demented flashes. “Let’s not let it spoil it,” she whispered.
The lamp was another treasure, graceful girls sleeping, satyrs with erections leaping. Perhaps the only piece of pornographic glass ever produced by Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Coming together seemed so completely right and so completely innocent, and as his body filled with the pleasure that she had for him, the burdens that he bore slipped away like soldiers into a morning mist.
He knew that he would be too quick with her, and tried to slow his pace, but the energy of it burst through, and as his body was swept by the familiar tingling waves, he looked down into her face, into the happiness there, and could only think that, glowing in the soft light of the bedside lamp, it was the most beautiful of faces.
Then his body swept all thought away and his loins shuddered and his blood hummed, and the glorious, dying explosion came, and she smiled and was excited, too, at least that’s how she appeared, and he came to rest on her and in her.
They shared a silence that was marred only by the twisting of the wind as it worried the eaves of the old building.
“Have you noticed the scene on that lampshade?” she asked, her voice full of warmth… and, he thought, a certain triumph. He had thought himself the seducer, but this Katie was a clever woman.
“This is the room where he took his mistresses. He had dozens of them, you know.”
She came up onto her elbow, then kissed him on the cheek, a tentative sort of a peck. “David, you have got to be about the cutest guy who ever came here.”
“I thought you really did not like me.”
She kissed him again, this time on the edge of his mouth.
“Please just melt a little, okay, David?”
Then she kissed him full on the lips, pressing him down into the thick and giving pillows. He opened his mouth, letting the kiss penetrate, enjoying her sudden aggression.
They swam together across the gulf of the night. He let himself be intoxicated by her, and, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, he made love to her again. Toward dawn, he slept deeply.
It was then that the dreams came, his mind flowing so seamlessly into its own reality that he had essentially no idea that he was, in fact, dreaming.
The first one involved the opening of the bedroom door. Although, later, he understood that he must have been asleep, he seemed to hear a click, and to sit up and look toward the door. However, nobody came in. Instead, a shadow appeared a few feet in front of it, a human shadow. Or no, it wasn’t a shadow, it was more solid than that. He watched it move forward, and thought that it was something that was coated in a darkness deeper than any normal darkness, and felt emanating from it what he could only describe as a wave of hate. His first impulse was to push away from it, and then next thing he knew, Katie was shaking him.
He looked up into her face, dark with night shadows, alive with light from the flickering sky.
“You were having a nightmare,” she said. “You were really going strong.”
“I saw somebody in here.”
“What? Paranoid about a place like this? What
They laughed together, but he felt little conviction. That had not been a nightmare, it had been a whole level more intense than that. It had been a classic pavor nocturnus, a parasomnia disorder. Classically, also, he had felt as if he was still awake, when actually he had been deep in slow wave sleep.
“God, what if I’m hypoglycemic? That’s all I need.”
“You want a test? I can look for one in supply.”
“Nah, it’s not that. It’s just stress.”
“You’re the doctor.” She slid close to him, and they kissed, and he felt that she could not only inspire him sexually, she could be warm and comfortable in the night, and he began to drift off again.
He did not drift off, though. Instead, when he heard her breath change to a sleep rhythm, he found himself growing uneasy. He was lying with his back to the room, and he began to get the impression that this was a mistake, because the figure—or was the word “phantom”?—was still there.
Finally, he turned over and looked out into the room. The door was securely locked and chained, and there was no other way to get in here. Or was there? In an old place like this, especially a room where mistresses had been entertained, there might be hidden access.
Then, without seeing anything specific, he knew that the presence was approaching the bed. Despite the fact that his scientific mind could not for an instant believe such a thing—knew it to be impossible—it appeared that a vividly alive but invisible presence was now standing right beside the bed.
