They were never too far from the room. She was too weak, too tired. And her breasts no sooner filled with milk than it began to spill under her blouse and he came to drink it. He cradled her in his arms. The swooning pleasure of his nursing from her was so great that nothing else mattered when it happened. All fear left her.
That was his trump card, she figured, the comfort, the pleasure, the high-pitched glamour and joy of just being with him, listening to his rapid, often incoherent speech, watching him react to things.
But this thing, this creature, was highly organized-no Frankenstein’s monster, made of parts, no grotesque culmination of witchcraft. He knew his own properties too-that he could run very fast, that he caught scents she did not, that he gave off a scent which others caught without knowing it. That was true. Only now and then did the scent intrude on her, and when it did, she had the eerie feeling it had been engulfing her all along and even controlling her, rather like a pheromone.
More and more she kept her journal in narrative form, so that if something happened to her, if someone found it, that person could understand it.
“We’ve stayed long enough in Paris,” she said. “They might come to find us.” Two bank wires had come in. They had a fortune at their disposal and it took her all afternoon, with him at her side, to assign the money to various accounts so they could hide it. She wanted to leave, perhaps only to be warmer.
“Come now, darling dear, we have only been in ten different hotels. Stop worrying, stop checking the locks, you know what it is, it’s the serotonin in your brain, it’s a fear-flight mechanism gone wrong. You’re obsessive- compulsive, you always have been.”
“How do you know that?”
“I told you…I…” and then he stopped. He was beginning to be a little less confident, maybe “…I knew all that because once you knew. When I was spirit I knew what my witches knew. It was I…?”
“What’s the matter with you, what are you thinking?”
In the night he stood at the window and looked out at the light of Paris. He made love to her over and over, whether she was asleep or awake. His mustache had come in thick and finally soft, and his beard was now covering his entire chin.
But the soft spot in his skull was still there.
Indeed, his entire schedule of growth rates seemed programmed and different. She began to make comparisons to other species, listing his various characteristics. For example he possessed the strength of a lower primate in his arms, yet an enhanced ability with his fingers and thumbs. She would like to see what happened if he got access to a piano. His need for air was his great vulnerability. It was conceivable that he could be smothered. But he was so strong. So very strong. What would happen to him in water?
They left Paris for Berlin. He did not like the sound of the German language; it was not ugly to him, but “pointed,” he said, he couldn’t shut out the sharp intrusive sounds. He wanted to get out of Germany.
That week she miscarried. Cramps like seizures, and blood all over the bathroom before she’d realized what was happening. He stared at the blood in utter puzzlement.
“I have to rest,” she said again. If only she could rest, some quiet place, where there was no singing and no poems and nothing, just peace. But she scraped up the tiny gelatinous mass at the core of her hemorrhage. An embryo at that stage of pregnancy would have been microscopic. There was something here, and it had limbs! It repulsed her and fascinated her. She insisted that they go to a laboratory where she could study it further.
She managed three hours there before people began to question them. She had made copious notes.
“There are two kinds of mutation,” she told him, “those which can be passed on and those which cannot. This is not a singular occurrence, your birth, it’s conceivable that you are…a species. But how could this be? How could this happen? How could one combination of telekinesis…” She broke off, resorting again to scientific terms. From the clinic she had stolen blood equipment and now she drew some of her own and properly sealed the vials.
He smiled at her in a grim way. “You don’t really love me,” he said coldly.
“Of course I do.”
“Can you love the truth more than mystery?”
“What is the truth?” She approached him, put her hands on his face and looked into his eyes. “What do you remember way back, from the very beginning, from the time before humans came on the earth? You remember you talked of such things, of the world of the spirits and how the spirits had learned from humans. You spoke…”
“I don’t remember anything,” he said blankly.
He sat at the table reading over what he had written. He stretched out his long legs, crossed his ankles, cradled his head on his wrists against the back of the chair and listened to his own tape recordings. His hair now reached his shoulders. He asked her questions as if testing her, “Who was Mary Beth? Who was her mother?”
Over and over she recounted the family history as she knew it. She repeated the stories from the Talamasca files and random things she had heard from the others. She described-at his request-all the living Mayfairs she knew. He had begun to be quiet, listening to her, forcing her to speak, for hours.
This was agony.
“I am by nature quiet,” she said. “I cannot…I cannot…”
“Who were Julien’s brothers, name them and their children.”
At last, so exhausted she couldn’t move, the cramps coming again as if she had been impregnated again and was in fact already aborting, she said, “I can do this no longer.”
“Donnelaith,” he said. “I want to go there.”
He’d been standing by the window, crying. “You do love me, don’t you? You aren’t afraid of me?”
She thought a long time before she said, “Yes, I do love you. You are all alone…and I love you. I do. But I’m frightened. This is frenzy. This is not organization and work. This is mania. I am afraid…of you.”
When he bent over her, she clasped his head in her hands and guided it to her nipple; then came the trance as he sucked up the milk. Would he never tire of it? Would he nurse forever? The thought made her laugh and laugh. He would be an infant forever-an infant who walks and talks and makes love.
“Yes, and sings, don’t forget that!” he said when she told him.
He finally began to watch television in long unbroken periods. She could use the bathroom without his hovering about. She could bathe slowly. She did not bleed anymore. Oh, for the Keplinger Institute, she thought. Think of the things the Mayfair money could do, if only she dared. Surely they were looking for her, looking for them both.
She had gone about this all wrong! She should have hidden him in New Orleans and pretended that he had never been there! Blundering, mad, but she hadn’t been able to think on that day, that awful Christmas morning! God, an eternity had come and gone since then!
He was glaring at her. He looked vicious and afraid.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said.
“Tell their names,” she said.
“No, you tell me…”
He picked up one of the pages he’d so carefully written out, in narrow cluttered scrawl, and then he laid it down. “How long have we been here?”
“Don’t you know?”
He wept for a while. She slept, and when she awoke, he was composed and dressed. The bags were packed. He told her they were going to England.
They drove north from London to Donnelaith. She drove most of the time, but then he learned, and was able on the lonely stretches of country road to manage the vehicle acceptably. They had all their possessions in the car. She felt safer here than in Paris.
“But why? Won’t they look for us here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know that they expect us to go to Scotland. I don’t know that they expect you to
