Ceremonies

'You don't say!' Smiling, she leaned closer to him. 'And just what good do you think that'll do?'

'Oh, I don't know. I'll be there to talk to you, comfort you a bit. And I can always do this.'

As he put his arms around her, her nervousness returned with a rush. She couldn't understand it; she was proud of her slim body. This was supposed to have been a time of letting go, of shedding inhibitions; her natural passions were supposed to take control. Soon she would he back and become the woman she wanted to be, and Jeremy her true lover; the walls were about to be breached, the mystery revealed. Yet instead she could feel herself grow rigid against him, her heart pounding furiously, her hands beginning to tremble. What in heaven's name was the matter with her?

It wasn't as if she hadn't had time to prepare for this; she'd had nearly a quarter of a century. She knew perfectly well what would happen now, or at least what was supposed to: the things he was going to do to her, and how she was expected to respond. It was like knowing all the answers without ever having been asked any of the questions.

'Come on, now, Carol, please don't tighten up,' he said, his voice close to her ear. She'd never heard him sound so gentle before. 'Just sit back and relax. I won't hurt you, honest. I won't even budge.' His hand came to rest above her hip; she felt it pressing lightly against her robe, like a living creature that moved when she moved, breathed when she breathed. 'Come on,' he whispered. 'Talk to me.'

'What should I talk about?' Her voice dismayed her; it sounded so breathless and frightened that she barely recognized it.

'Talk about anything you like. Tell me a secret. Or tell me a dream.'

She willed herself to relax. 'I save my secrets for confession,' she said. 'And I never remember my dreams.'

'Except the one at Poroth Farm… Remember?'

'A little, yes. Not all of it.'

'It doesn't matter.' He drew her closer. The towel loosened from her hair and slipped softly to the couch. 'Go on. Tell me.'

'I'm sure it all had something to do with those weird cards Rosie gave you,' she said. 'I couldn't get some of those images out of my head.' Reluctantly she cast her mind back. 'I remember being in a kind of jungle – an awful place. The undergrowth was all ropy and thick, and the air was steamy hot and hard to breathe, and in the distance I could hear wailing flutes, and drums just hammering and hammering away without a stop. It was night, I'm sure of that much, but all around me everything was shining like it was on fire.'

She felt his hand stir almost imperceptibly.

'I didn't know who I was,' she said, 'or what I looked like. Maybe I was dead and no more than a ghost, because I seemed to be floating over the ground, gliding between the trees. The vines and bushes somehow opened up for me, and I passed right through without a scratch. The farther I went, the louder the flutes and drums kept getting, and the thicker the trees, but just before the end I began to see a kind of clearing up ahead. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of the sky. The moon was out, and… '

'And what?'

'It was shining like a spotlight on the center of the clearing.'

'All the better to see with.' Gently his hand slid toward her breast. She pressed it closer with her own.

'I wish I hadn't looked,' she said. 'It wasn't nice at all. In the center, all alone, stood a tree, and these men were gathered beneath it, watching something on the ground. Then they moved back, and I saw that at the foot of the tree was a kind of altar. There was a body on it – the body of a girl.'

'And then, I suppose, you saw that the girl was you. And woke up with a scream.' He was touching her breast, caressing it.

'No, it was nothing like that. It was much worse. Much worse.' She could feel her heart racing again; she wondered if he felt it too. 'I woke because I heard something fall onto the body, and lying there in the moonlight was this long white slippery thing, curling and uncurling… And then suddenly, as I watched, it arched up from the body and began to sway, faster and faster, and I could see that somehow it was dancing, heaving itself up and down to the music, like a great blind snake-'

'Uh-oh, you know what that means!'

She nodded and pulled away slightly. 'Yes, yes, I know. But this time I'm not sure it applies. Anyway, why does a snake always have to be a phallic symbol? What if it was simply – a snake?'

'It's possible, I guess.' She felt his hand slip beneath the robe. 'As a matter of fact, there's this crazy Bram Stoker novel-'

'Wait, Jeremy, what are you doing there?'

'Nothing.'

'That doesn't feel like nothing.'

'I'm not going to hurt you. Just lift yourself up a minute.'

'You mean… like this?'

'Mm. Do you have to keep both legs so – there, that's better.'

She watched what he was doing, still held passive by the dream.

'Try to relax,' he said. 'Tell me about the way it ended. About the altar, and the nonsymbolic snake. I'm not going to do anything you don't want me to.'

Her eyelids felt heavy. She took a deep breath and let it out. 'You don't understand,' she said. 'It turned out to be something else entirely. Something more. I only saw a part of it, I think – the part above the altar. I remember how the creature rose up and down to the music, in time with the drumbeats and the whistling of the flutes. The other end seemed buried in the ground, there was just no telling how far under it went. Somehow I sensed that it was attached down there, that all I was seeing was the tip. And then F – she caught her breath, half curious as to what Jeremy was doing, half reluctant to think about it – 'I realized that the drums must be coming from the same place, from somewhere far below me, deep inside the earth… And suddenly it occurred to me, with absolute certainty, that all the things I'd been seeing – the altar, the clearing, the whole entire jungle – were a part of something else, something huge and hateful and alive.'

She could feel her panties being tugged down over her thighs, and liked the feeling, the fact that there was nothing she herself had to do. She could let her mind wander, back to that night…

'I knew, then, beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was there and all around me, stretching from one end of the night to the other, a single monstrous creature half as big as the world. The sound of the flutes was the sound of its breathing, and the drumming was the beating of its heart. That horrible white snake that thrashed back and forth on the altar was just a tiny artery, pulsing with its blood. But hanging from the tree was the most hateful thing of all, because that's where it sat watching me, the eye and the face and the brain-'

She was jerked upright by the sound of the buzzer. Someone downstairs was ringing to get in. Yanking up her underwear and closing the robe, she hurried across the room and pressed the intercom button. 'Who is it?' she called. Her voice was trembling.

There was no reply; the intercom hissed with ghost winds roaming up and down the empty halls. Freirs stirred impatiently on the couch.

She called again, louder this time. 'Who's there?' Something crackled tinnily, and at last, from the emptiness, came a faint, familiar voice. It was Rosie.

He prays he isn't too late. Yet as he stands there panting in the entranceway, waiting for the woman to admit him, his patient little smile never wavers; and no one who's been watching him from the street could possibly realize that it masks a howl of blind demonic rage.

All day he has plotted the man's progress toward the city; he's traced him every mile of the way. He has charted the woman's reaction, has catalogued her every mood and sigh, down to the tiniest flutter of her heart. Nonetheless, he has been careless; in all his calculations he's neglected to take one small factor into account. The air is warmer, ever so slightly warmer, than he's anticipated: less than a degree, perhaps, but enough to make a difference. He knows that even on a cooler day, when men and women are brought together – human beings being human – anything might happen. What the two of them upstairs might regard as consummation will, to him, mean catastrophe; a lifetime of planning may come to nothing in the space of a single gasp, a sudden cry of pain. And possibly that very thing has already occurred.

In which case, of course, the two will have to die.

But even if he has arrived in time, there is a second problem, no less urgent, created by the unexpected heat: