untied her left wrist, released her arm. Instantly, she clawed at him, straining her whole body to reach him. He evaded her, caught her forearm.
Linden watched with a silent wail as he let Joan's nails rake the back of his right hand. Blood welled from the cuts.
Joan smeared her fingers in his blood. Then her hand jumped to her mouth, and she sucked it eagerly, greedily.
The taste of blood seemed to restore her self-awareness. Almost immediately, the madness faded from her face. Her eyes softened, turned to tears; her mouth trembled. “Oh, Tom,” she quavered weakly. “I'm so sorry. I can't-He's in my mind, and I can't get him out. He hates you. He makes-makes me- ” She was sobbing brokenly. Her lucidity was acutely cruel to her.
He sat on the bed beside her, put his arms around her. “I know.” His voice ached in the room. “I understand.”
“Tom,” she wept. “Tom. Help me.”
“I will.” His tone promised that he would face any ordeal, make any sacrifice, commit any violence. “As soon as he's ready. I'll get you free.”
Slowly, her frail limbs relaxed. Her sobs grew quieter. She was exhausted. When he stretched her out on the bed, she closed her eyes, went to sleep with her fingers in her mouth like a child.
He took a tissue from a box on a table near the bed, pressed it to the back of his hand. Then, tenderly, he pulled Joan's fingers from her mouth and retied her wrist. Only then did he look at Linden.
“It doesn't hurt,” he said. “The backs of my hands have been numb for years.” The torment was gone from his face; it held nothing now except the long weariness of a pain he could not heal.
Watching his blood soak into the tissue, she knew she should do something to treat that injury. But an essential part of her had failed, proved itself inadequate to Joan; she could not bear to touch him. She had no answer to what she had seen. For a moment, her eyes were helpless with tears. Only the old habit of severity kept her from weeping. Only her need kept her from fleeing into the night. It drove her to say grimly, “Now you're going to' tell me what's wrong with her.”
“Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose I am.”
Three: Plight
HE guided her back to the living room in silence. His hand on her arm was reluctant, as if he dreaded that mere human contact. When she sat on the sofa, he gestured toward his injury, and left her alone. She was glad to be alone. She was stunned by her failure; she needed time to regain possession of herself.
What had happened to her? She understood nothing about evil, did not even believe in it as an idea; but she had seen it in Joan's feral hunger. She was trained to perceive the world in terms of dysfunction and disease, medication and treatment, success or death. Words like good or evil meant nothing to her. But Joan-! Where did such malignant ferocity come from? And how-?
When Covenant returned, with his right hand wrapped in a white bandage, she stared at him, demanding explanations.
He stood before her, did not meet her gaze. The slouch of his posture gave him a look of abandonment; the skin at the corners of his eyes crumpled like dismay pinching his flesh. But his mouth had learned the habit of defiance; it was twisted with refusals. After a moment, he muttered, “So you see why I didn't want you to know about her,” and began to pace.
“Nobody knows”- The words came as if he were dredging them out of the privacy of his heart, — “except Berenford and Roman. The law doesn't exactly smile on people who keep other people prisoner-even in her condition. I don't have any legal rights at all as far as she's concerned. What I'm supposed to do is turn her over to the authorities. But I've been living without the benefit of law so long now I don't give a damn.”
“But what's wrong with her?” Linden could not keep her voice from twitching; she was too tightly clenched to sound steady.
He sighed. “She needs to hurt me. She's starving for it-that's what makes her so violent. It's the best way she can think of to punish herself.”
With a wrench, Linden's analytical instinct began to function again. Paranoiac, she winced to herself. He's paranoiac. But aloud she insisted, “But why? What's happened to her?”
He stopped, looked at her as if he were trying to gauge her capacity for the truth, then went back to his pacing.
“Of course,” he murmured, “that isn't how Berenford sees it. He thinks it's a psychiatric problem. The only reason he hasn't tried to get her away from me is because he understands why I want to take care of her. Or part of it. His wife is a paraplegic, and he would never consider dumping the problem off on anyone else. I haven't told him about her taste for blood.”
He was evading her question. She struggled for patience. “
Covenant hesitated, then said distantly, “He doesn't know what's going on.”
“You keep saying that. It's too convenient.”
“No,” he retorted, “it's not convenient. It's the truth. You don't have the background to understand it.”
“How can you be so goddamn sure?” The clench of her self-command made her voice raw. “I've spent half my life coping with other people's pain.” She wanted to add, Can't you get it through your head that I'm a doctor? But her throat locked on those words. She had failed-
For an instant, his gaze winced as if he were distressed by the idea that she did in fact have the necessary background. But then he shook his head sharply. When he resumed, she could not tell what kind of answer he had decided to give her.
“I wouldn't know about it myself,” he said, 'if her parents hadn't called me. About a month ago. They don't have much use for me, but they were frantic. They told me everything they knew.
'I suppose it's an old story. The only thing that makes it new is the way it hurts. Joan divorced me when we found out I had leprosy. Eleven years ago. Took Roger and went back to her family. She thought she was justified- ah, hell, for years
“But it didn't work. Deep inside her, she believed she'd betrayed me. It's hard to forgive yourself for deserting someone you love-someone who needs you. It erodes your self-respect. Like leprosy. It gnaws away at you. Before long, you're a moral cripple. She stood it for a while. Then she started hunting for cures.”
His voice, and the information he was giving her, steadied Linden. As he paced, she became conscious of the way he carried himself, the care and specificity of all his movements. He navigated past the coffee table as if it were a danger to him. And repeatedly he scanned himself with his eyes, checking in turn each hand, each arm, his legs, his chest, as if he expected to find that he had injured himself without knowing it.
She had read about such things. His self-inspection was called VSE-visual surveillance of extremities. Like the care with which he moved, it was part of the discipline he needed to keep his illness arrested. Because of the damage leprosy had done to his nerves, the largest single threat to his health was the possibility that he might bump, burn, scrape, cut, or bruise himself without realizing it. Then infection would set in because the wound was not tended. So he moved with all the caution he could muster. The furniture in his house was arranged to minimize the risk of protruding corners, obstacles, accidents. And he scanned himself regularly, looking for signs of danger.
Watching him in this objective, professional way helped restore her sense of who she was. Slowly, she became better able to listen to his indirect explanation without impatience.
He had not paused; he was saying, 'First she tried psychology. She wanted to believe it was all in her mind-and minds can be fixed, like broken arms. She started going through psychological fads the way some people trade in cars, a new one every year. As if her problem really was mental instead of spiritual.
'None of it made sense to her parents, but they tried to be tolerant, just did what they could to give Roger a stable home.
