cloud of darkness, obscuring the clock, rising to the ceiling, turning in on itself like a funnel. She screamed, struggling backwards against the wall. A shock ran through the rafters, through the plaster. She could hear it like the roar of an earthquake.
“No, God, no!” In sheer panic, she screamed. She turned and ran through the parlor door into the hallway. She reached out for the knob of the front door. “God help me. Michael, Aaron!”
Somebody had to hear her screams. They were deafening in her own ears. They were ripping her apart.
But the rumbling grew louder. She felt his invisible hands on her shoulders. She was thrown forward, hard against the door, her hand slipping off the knob as she fell to her knees, pain shooting up her thighs. The darkness was rising all around her, the heat was rising.
“No, not my child, I’ll destroy you, with my last breath, I’ll destroy you.” She turned in one last desperate fury, facing the darkness, spitting at it in hate, willing it to die, as the arms wound around her and dragged her down on the floor.
The back of her head scraped the wood of the door, and then banged against the floorboards, as her legs were wrenched forward. She was staring upwards, struggling to rise, her arms flailing, the darkness bubbling over her.
“Damn you, damn you in hell, Lasher, die. Die like that old woman! Die!” she screamed.
“Yes, Rowan, your child, and Michael’s child!”
The voice surrounded her like the darkness and the heat. Her head was forced back again, slammed down again, and her arms pinned, wide and helpless.
“You my mother and Michael my father! It is the witching hour, Rowan. The clock is striking. I will be flesh. I will be born.”
The darkness furled again, it coiled in upon itself and it shot downward. It shot into her, raping her, splitting her apart. Like a giant fist it shot upwards inside her womb, and her body convulsed as the pain caught her in a great lashing circle that she could see, shining bright, against her closed eyes.
The heat was unbearable. The pain came again, shock after shock of it, and she could feel the blood gushing out of her, and the water from her womb, gushing onto the floor.
“You’ve killed it, you damnable evil thing, you’ve killed my baby, damn you! God help me! God, take it back to hell!” Her hands knocked against the wall, struggled against the slimy wet floor. And the heat sickened her, caught her lungs now as she gasped for breath.
The house was burning. It had to be burning. She was burning. The heat was throbbing inside of her, and she thought she saw the flames rising, but it was only a great lurid blast of red light. And somehow she had managed to climb up on her hands and knees, again, and she knew her body was empty, her child was gone, and she was struggling now only to escape, reaching out once more, desperately and in her fierce relentless pain, for the knob of the door.
“Michael, Michael help me! Oh God, I tried to trick it, I tried to kill it. Michael, it’s in the child.” Another shock of pain caught her, and a fresh gush of blood poured out of her.
Sobbing, she sank down, dizzy, unable to command her arms or legs, the heat blasting her, and a great raw crying filled her ears. It was a baby’s crying. It was that same awful sound she’d heard over and over in her dream. A baby’s mewling cry. She struggled to cover her ears, unable to bear it, wailing for it to stop, the heat suffocating her.
“Let me die,” she whispered. “Let the fire burn me. Take me to hell. Let me die.”
She tightened the grip on her ears, but she couldn’t shut out the little telepathic voice that rose and fell with the baby’s sobs. Her hand slipped in the blood and her face fell down in it, sticky and wet under her, and she rolled over on her back, seeing again the shimmer of the heat, the baby’s screams louder and louder as though it was starving or in agony.
She knew what she would see even before she looked. Through her tears and through the waves of heat, she saw the manikin, the monster.
On its back it lay, its man-sized head turning from side to side with its cries, its thin arms elongating even as she watched it, tiny fingers splayed and groping and growing, tiny feet kicking, as a baby’s feet kick, working the air, the calves stretching, the blood and mucus sliding off it, sliding down its chubby cheeks, and off its slick dark hair. All those tiny organs like buds inside. All those millions of cells dividing, merging with his cells, like a nuclear explosion going on inside this flesh and blood thing, this mutant thing, this child that had come out of her.
She struggled towards it, her body still throbbing with sharp bursts of pain, her hand out for that tiny slippery leg, that little foot pumping the air, and then as her hand closed on that soft, slick baby flesh, the darkness came down on her, and against her closed eyelids she saw the anatomy, saw the path of the cells, saw the evolving organs, and the age-old miracle of the cells coming together, forming corpuscles and subcutaneous tissue, and bone tissue, and the fibers of the lungs and the liver and the stomach, and fused with his cells, his power, the DNA merging, and the tiny chains of chromosomes whipping and swimming as the nuclei merged, and all guided by her, all the knowledge inside her like the knowledge of the symphony inside the composer, note after note and bar after bar, and crescendo following upon crescendo.
Its flesh throbbed under her fingers, living, breathing through its pores. Its cries grew hoarser, deeper, echoing as she dropped down out of consciousness and rose up again, her other hand groping in the dark and finding his forehead, finding the thick mass of manly curls, finding his eyes fluttering under her palm, finding his mouth now half closed with the sobs coming out of it, finding his chest, and the heart beneath it and the long muscular arms flopping against the boards, yes, this thing so big now that she could lay her head on its pumping chest, and the cock between his legs, yes, and the thighs, yes, and struggling upwards, she lay on top of him, both hands on him, feeling the rise and fall of his breath beneath her, the lungs enlarging, filling, the heart pumping, and dark silky hair sprouting around his cock, and then it was a web again, a web shining in the darkness, full of chemistry and mystery and certainty, and she sank down into the blackness, into the quiet.
A voice was talking to her, intimate and soft.
“Stop the blood.”
She couldn’t answer.
“You’re bleeding. Stop the blood.”
“I don’t want to live,” she said. Surely the house was burning. Come, old woman, with your lamp. Light the drapes.
Lemle said, “I never said it wasn’t possible, you know. The thing is that once an advance has been envisioned, it is inevitable. Millions of cells. The embryo is the key to immortality.”
“You can still kill him,” said Petyr. He was standing over her, looking down at her.
“They’re figments of your imagination, of your conscience.”
“Am I dying?”
“No.” He laughed. Such a soft silky laugh. “Can you hear me? I am laughing, Rowan. I can laugh now.”
Take me to hell now. Let me die.
“No, my darling, my precious beautiful darling, stop the bleeding.”
The sunlight waked her. She lay on the living room floor, on the soft Chinese rug, and her first thought was the house had not burned. The awful heat had not consumed it. Somehow it had been saved.
For a moment she didn’t understand what she was seeing.
A man was sitting beside her, looking down at her, and he had the smooth unblemished skin of a baby-over the structure of a man’s face, but it resembled her face. She had never seen a human being who looked this much like her. But there were definite differences. His eyes were large and blue and fringed with black lashes, and his hair was black like Michael’s hair. It was Michael’s hair. Michael’s hair and Michael’s eyes. But he was slender like her. His smooth hairless chest was narrow as her chest had been in childhood, with two shining pink nipples, and his arms were narrow, though finely muscled, and the delicate fingers of his hand, with which he stroked his lip thoughtfully as he looked at her, were narrow and like her fingers.
But he was bigger man she was, as big as a man. And the dried mucus and blood was all over him, like a
