dark ruby red map covering him.
She felt a moan coming up out of her throat, pushing against her lips. Her whole body moved with it, and suddenly she screamed. Rising off the boards, she screamed. Louder, longer, more wildly than she had ever screamed last night in all her fear. She was this scream, leaving herself, leaving everything she’d seen and remembered in total horror.
His hand came down over her mouth, pushing her flat against the rug. She couldn’t move. The scream was turning around inside, like vomit that could choke her. A deep convulsion of pain moved through her. She lay limp, silent.
He leaned over her. “Don’t do it,” he whispered. The old voice. Of course, his voice, with his unmistakable inflection.
His smooth face looked perfectly innocent, a picture of astonishment with its flawless and radiant cheeks, and its smooth narrow nose, and the great blue eyes blinking at her. Snapping open and closed like the eyes of the manikin on the table in her dreams. He smiled. “I need you,” he said. “I love you. And I’m your child.”
After a while, he took his hand away.
She sat up. Her nightgown was soaked with blood and dry and stiff with it. The smell of blood was everywhere. Like the smell of the Emergency Room.
She scooted back on the rug and sat forward, her knee crooked, peering at him.
Nipples, perfect, yes, cock perfect, yes, though the real test would come when it was hard. Hair perfect, yes, but what about inside? What about every precise little interlocking part?
She drew closer, staring at his shoulders, watching the rise and fall of his chest with his breath, then looking into his eyes, not seeing him look back, not caring if he did, just studying the texture of the flesh and the lips.
She laid her hand on his chest and listened. A strong, steady rhythm coming from him.
He didn’t move to stop her as she laid her hands on both sides of his skull. Soft, like a baby’s skull, able to heal after blows that would kill a man of twenty-five. God, but how long was it going to be that way?
She put her finger against his lower lip, opening his mouth and staring at his tongue. Then she sat back, her hands lying limp on her folded legs.
“Are you hurting?” he asked her. His voice was very tender. He narrowed his eyes, and for just a second there was a little bit of mature expression in the face, and then it returned to baby wonder. “You lost so much blood.”
For a long moment she stared at him in silence.
He waited, merely watching her.
“No, I’m not hurt,” she murmured. Again she stared at him for the longest time. “I need things,” she said finally. “I need a microscope. I need to take blood samples. I need to see what the tissues really are now! God, I need all these things! I need a fully equipped laboratory. And we’ve got to leave here.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “That should be the very next thing that we do. Leave here.”
“Can you stand up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re going to try,” She climbed to her knees, and then grasping the edge of the marble mantel, climbed to her feet.
She took his hand, nice tight grip. “Come on, stand up, don’t think about it, just do it, call on your body to know, the musculature is there, that’s what differentiates you completely from a newborn, you have the skeleton and musculature of a man.”
“All right, I’ll try,” he said. He looked frightened and also strangely delighted. Shuddering, he struggled to his knees first, as she had done, and then to his feet, only to tumble backwards, catching himself from falling with one hasty back step after another.
“Ooooh … ” He sang it out. “I’m walking, I am, I’m walking … ”
She rushed towards him and wrapped her arm around him and let him cling to her. He grew quiet looking down at her, and then raised his hand and stroked her cheek, the gesture imperfectly coordinated, rather like a drunken gesture, but the fingers silky and tingling.
“My beautiful Rowan,” he said. “Look, the tears are rising in my eyes. Real tears. Oh, Rowan.”
He tried to stand freely and to bend down to kiss her. She caught him and steadied him as his lips closed over hers, and that same powerful sensual shock passed through her that had always come with his touch.
“Rowan,” he moaned aloud, crushing her against him, then slipping backwards until she brought him up short again in her arms.
“Come, we haven’t much time,” she said. “We have to find some place safe, some place completely unknown … ”
“Yes, darling, yes … but you see it’s all so new and so beautiful. Let me hold you again, let me kiss you … ”
“There isn’t time,” she said, but the silken baby lips had clamped on hers again, and she felt his cock pressing against her sex, pressing into the soreness. She pulled away, drawing him after her.
“That’s it,” she said, watching his feet, “don’t think about it. Just look at me and walk.”
For one second, as she found herself in the doorway, as she was conscious of its keyhole shape, and the old discussions of its significance, all the misery and beauty of her life passed before her eyes, all her struggles and all former vows.
But this was a new door all right. It was the door she’d glimpsed a million years ago in her girlhood when she’d first opened the magical volumes of scientific lore. And it was open now, quite beyond the horrors of Lemle’s laboratory, and the Dutchmen gathered around the table in a mythical Leiden.
She guided him slowly through the door and up the stairs, walking patiently, step by step, at his side.
Fifty-two
HE WAS TRYING to wake up, but every time he came near the surface, he went down again, heavy and drowsy and sinking into the soft feathery covers of the bed. The desperation would grip him and then it would go away.
It was the sickness that finally woke him. It seemed forever that he sat on the bathroom floor, against the door, vomiting so violently that a pain locked around his ribs each time he retched. Then there was nothing more to heave up, and the nausea just lay on him with no promise of relief.
The room was tilting. They had finally got the lock off the door, and they were picking him up. He wanted to say that he was sorry he’d locked it, reflex action, and he had been trying to get to the knob to open the door, but he couldn’t make the words come out.
Midnight. He saw the dial of the clock on the dresser. Midnight of Christmas Eve. And he struggled to say mere was a meaning to it, but it was impossible to do more than think of that thing standing behind the crib in the sanctuary. And he was sinking again, as his head hit the pillow.
When next he opened his eyes, the doctor was talking to him again, but he couldn’t recall just when he’d seen the doctor before. “Mr. Curry, do you have any idea what might have been in the injection?”
No. I thought she was killing me. I thought I was going to die. Just trying to move his lips made him sick. He only shook his head, and that too made him sick. He could see the blackness of night still beyond the frost on the windows.
“ … at least another eight hours,” said the doctor.
“Sleep, Michael. Don’t worry now. Sleep.”
“Everything else normal. Clear liquids if he should ask for something to drink. If there’s the slightest change … ”
Treacherous witch. Everything destroyed. The man smiling at him from above the crib. Of course it had been the time. The very time. He knew that he had lost her forever. Midnight Mass was over. His mother was crying because his father was dead. Nothing will ever be the same now.
“Just sleep it off. We’re here with you.”
I’ve failed. I didn’t stop him. I’ve lost her forever.
