Her eyes followed him as he skirted the room.
He held out his hands in the universal gesture of peace. 'Lara, wake up. You're dreaming. It's not real. Lara.'
She made a threatening lunge towards him, growled and stamped both feet. He jumped back. It was unreal. He couldn't feel anything, because it was so unreal.
The night had come into the room. Not darkness, but the essence of night, the absence of light. The cold of the earth before the first dawn rose.
'Lara'
She came for him then, scuttling with crablike speed across the room. She grabbed him by the shoulders and he felt the sharp prick of her fingernails. She stank of rotten meat and there was a crust around her lips. She was bleeding from the mouth. Her teeth were filed away to ragged points.
What pain she must be in. What pain
He fought back. This wasn't Lara. This was the darkness he had hidden from for so long. Perhaps it had always been here, lurking in the shadows of his house, in his memories.
She was so strong, like a tigress. She pushed him back on to the bed and straddled him. Her breasts looked heavier than they had been earlier, scored with the marks of her own fingernails. She uttered a shriek and lunged for his neck.
He should be afraid, shouldn't he? This thing , this monstrous abomination dredged from the primal soup, was feasting on him, tearing at his flesh, kneading his skin with its claws, sucking the life from him. It stank of hell. Yet he was aroused by it. He wanted her and she let him do it, her body bucking in frenzy.
And he saw it then, the tunnel into history. The rivers of blood that carried the memories of humanity. It is within all of us, he thought. We have tamed it and dressed it up in a silk suit. We have made it dead. We have contained it in books and films and lascivious dreams. We have contained it in nightmares. But ultimately, it is within us all the time. And it is alive, pulsing, warm and wet, stinking of musk and spoiled meat.
Lara wasn't stronger than Sarah. The opposite was true. Because Sarah had rejected this. It was what she had seen and felt and had never spoken of. The search for Nosferatu didn't begin in the grave, but in the reptile brain, the primordial remnant of beast within every human mind. It was demonic. It was divine.
In the late morning, with bright sunshine coming into the kitchen, they were politely formal with each other. She said she had badly chipped a tooth falling over in the dark. They didn't talk about how she'd decorated her body. The mess in the kitchen had been cleaned up by the time he had come downstairs and she was freshly showered, smelling of his patchouli body wash. She joked about her loathing of dentists as she carefully drank hot coffee. He made toast, then apologized and offered something softer: scrambled eggs perhaps? She wasn't hungry, she said.
He rubbed his neck. 'Ah well'
She had to go to work at two. Worked part-time in a local shop. Perhaps she could get an emergency dental appointment before she went in.
He had work to do too. The book would be late to his publishers otherwise. Nice day, though.
Yes, nice day.
At the door, she pecked his cheek in a brief kiss. 'We must do this again,' she said.
'Must we?' Many words hung unspoken between them.
She smiled. She looked very tired and there were purple rings beneath her eyes. 'I think I got what I wanted. Didn't you?'
'Lara'
'You can call me. Or not,' she said. 'I don't need you now, Noah, but I kind of like you.'
He watched her run down the path to the road. She had rejected a lift. He leaned his forehead on the door frame. Once your eyes are open, you can never close them. Sarah knew this.
He shouldn't see Lara again. He should attempt to forget all that had occurred. They'd been drunk. She'd broken one tooth, that's all. It had been less than he'd imagined. As if to remind him otherwise, his neck twinged painfully. He felt light-headed, sick, suddenly able to imagine the future, the long, slow, agonising stretch of it, the descent into realms he dared not think about.
He shouldn't see her again. But she was just his type, wasn't she? Just his type.
Prince of Flowers
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand lives on the coast of Maine. She is the author of six novels, including Winterlong., Glimmering, Waking the Moon and Black Light, as well as the story collection Last Summer at Mars Hill. She has also written the novelizations for films such as 12 Monkeys, The X Files movie Fight the Future, Anna and the King and The Affair of the Necklace.
With Paul Witcover, she created and wrote the 1990s DC Comics' series Anima, and she is a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World and Village Voice Literary Supplement. At present she is completing a novel called The Master Stroke. Her novels and short fiction have received the Nebula, World Fantasy, James M. Tiptree Jr and Mythopeic Society Awards .
' This was my first published story,' reveals the author, 'bought by Tappan King for The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1987; it appeared early in 1988. In a phone conversation, Tappan said that I would be a good writer for the 1990s, because my work had 'heart and also sharp little teeth' .
'At the time I was living in Washington, DC, and working at the Smithsonian Institution. The demonic puppet of the title was something I bought on my lunch hour one afternoon, walking from the Mall to a dim little shop called the Artifactory. I fell in love with the puppet and paid fifty dollars for it, a huge chunk of my meagre paycheque; but
