In the darkness, when Heather slid against him, smelling faintly of
soap from her hot bath, Jack knew he'd have to disappoint her. He
wanted her, needed her, God knew, but he remained obsessed with his
experience in the cemetery. As the memory grew rapidly less vivid, as
it became increasingly difficult to recall the precise nature and
intensity of the emotions that had been part of the encounter, he
turned it over and over more desperately in his mind, examining it
repeatedly from every angle, trying to squeeze sudden enlightenment
from it before it became, like all memories, a dry and faded husk of
the actual experience. The conversation with the thing that had spoken
through Toby had been about death--cryptic, even inscrutable, but
definitely about death. Nothing was as certain to dampen desire as
brooding about death, graves, and the moldering bodies of old
friends.
At least, that's what he thought when she touched him, kissed him, and
murmured endearments. Instead, to his surprise, he found that he was
not only ready but rampant, not merely capable but full of more vigor
than he'd known since long before the shooting back in LA.
She was so giving yet demanding, alternately submissive and aggressive,
shy yet all-knowing, as enthusiastic as a bride embarking on a new
marriage, velvet and silken and alive, so wonderfully alive.
Later, as he lay on his side and she drifted asleep with her breasts
pressed to his back, the two of them a pair of spoons, he understood
that making love with her had been a rejection of the frightening yet
alluring presence in the cemetery.
A day of brooding about death had proved to be a perverse
aphrodisiac.
He was facing the windows. The draperies were open. Ghosts of snow
whirled past the glass, dancing white phantoms spinning to the music of
the fluting wind, waltzing spirits, pale and cold, waltzing and pale,
cold and spinning, spinning..in cloying blackness, blindly feeling his
way toward the Giver, toward an offer of peace and love, pleasure and
joy, an end to all fear, ultimate freedom, his for the taking, if only
he could find the way, the path, the truth.
The door. Jack knew he had only to find the door, to open it, and a
world of wonder and beauty would lie beyond. Then he understood that
the door was within himself, not to be found by stumbling through
eternal darkness. Such an exciting revelation. Within himself.
Paradise, paradise. Joy eternal. Just open the door within himself
and let it in, let it in, as simple as that, just let it in. He wanted
to accept, surrender, because life was hard when it didn't have to
be.
But some stubborn part of him resisted, and he sensed the frustration
of the Giver beyond the door, frustration and inhuman rage. He said, I
can't, no, can't, won't, no. Abruptly the darkness acquired weight,
compacting around him with the inevitability of stone forming around a
fossil over millennia, a crushing and unrelenting pressure, and with
that pressure came the Giver's furious assertion: Everything becomes,
everything becomes me, everything, everything becomes me, me, me. Must
