Sleep No More

She pulled him to his feet and ran back toward the master bedroom, pulling him behind her. “I’m going in the bathroom for a sec,” she said. “Get in bed and wait for me.”

She disappeared behind the bathroom door, leaving him alone in the room where he had known only frustration in the past. He removed his shirt and pants and dropped them to the floor. Lily would normally make a point of picking them up and hanging them in the closet when she came out of the bathroom, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t even notice today, or at least would let it go if she did.

He pulled back the bedcovers and started to get beneath them, but something held him back. He wanted to know what she was doing in the bathroom. Walking up to the half-open door, he leaned slowly to his left.

Lily was standing naked before her mirror, one breast in each hand, as though testing their weight. She smiled to herself, then ran her hands down to her hips, where a pink blemish marred the white skin over her right hipbone. Taking some makeup from a blue container by the sink, she rubbed a bit on her finger and covered the blemish. Then she surveyed herself again, turning her back to the mirror and looking over her shoulder.

Fascinated by this glimpse of his wife alone with her vanity-something he hadn’t seen for far too long-Waters took a half-step backward so that she wouldn’t catch sight of him. As he watched, she turned to face the mirror again, looking quite satisfied with what she saw. He was about to tiptoe back to the bed when Lily raised her right hand to her neck and entwined one of the newly chopped locks around her forefinger and began to twist it into a tight curl.

His skin rippled from his toes to his scalp, and his scrotum withdrew as fear flushed adrenaline into his system. There was hardly enough hair to twist, but Lily twisted it anyway, a childlike look of rapture on her face. She has no idea she’s doing that, he realized. He wanted to run from the room, but that was crazy. How would he explain it? He hurried back to the bed and slid under the covers, a film of sweat already covering his skin. He wanted to wipe the image of Lily twisting that curl from his mind, but he knew he would remember it on his deathbed. Worse, a horrifying movie began to screen itself in fast motion behind his eyes. He saw Eve flailing under him that last night, screaming at the top of her lungs, then himself waking to find her dead, fleeing the hotel like a craven killer. Then he was sitting in his office the following day, trying to puzzle out his strange disorientation, his losses of hours, the long naps. When Sybil came in with coffee, her face bled into Lily’s, red and blotchy from her shattering orgasm, the first in so long….

“Are you ready?” Lily asked, stepping naked from the bathroom.

Waters was so far from ready that he doubted he could perform.

“Last night made me remember what I’ve been missing,” she said, pulling back the covers and sliding in beside him. “I hope you’ve got a lot of stamina tonight.”

Struggling to control his wild thoughts, he tried to keep Penn’s reassurances in his mind. But all Penn’s logic weighed as nothing against the power of his own instinct.

“What’s wrong?” Lily asked, touching him beneath the covers. “A minute ago you were ready to burst.”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying not to recoil from her touch.

Lily looked at him with concern, then kissed his cheek. “Don’t you worry, baby. Mama knows how to make it all better.” She smiled and vanished beneath the covers.

When her lips touched him, his stomach heaved, and despite her efforts he remained soft. Stop! he told himself. This is what you’ve wanted for four years. Yet it wasn’t. Why it wasn’t was another question altogether. The answer his autonomic nervous system was giving him was the kind of thing they sent you to the state hospital at Whitfield for.

Desperate not to reveal his feelings, he shut down his emotions and posed a thought experiment. If I were to accept everything Eve told me as the truth, what conclusion could I draw from the way she died and all that’s happened since? The logic came as easily as stacking blocks did to a toddler. One: Mallory’s soul survived the death of her body. Two: Mallory’s goal is to be with me forever, to live the life we left unlived twenty years ago. One way to accomplish that would be to tempt me to leave my wife for “Eve Sumner.” But what if Mallory decided I would never leave Lily and Annelise for Eve? Then the most logical strategy would be for Mallory to enter Lily and remain inside her forever. And to do that, she would have to move through me first….

As Lily stroked and kissed him beneath the covers, he flashed onto Eve standing nude on the balcony of the Eola. The lightning strobed, briefly illuminating her face, and in that moment he saw total confusion in her eyes, the confusion of an amnesiac or a schizophrenic. Later, in the throes of sexual ecstasy, Eve had begun to scream and flail her arms as if in terror. He saw it much more clearly now than he had at the time, and the possible implications of what he had witnessed in those penultimate moments hit him with a wave of nausea. Had the real Eve Sumner- the “sleeping” Eve-suddenly awakened to the reality of being raped by a man she did not know? Had she literally come to her senses with a total stranger thrashing inside her? Waters shuddered with horror.

He heard a soft plop, then Lily’s voice. “Stop thinking,” she said. “You have to help a little.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

As she went back to her work, he thought, I saw Eve freak out, then I lost consciousness. When I woke up, she was dead. I was the only one in the room. My hands strangled her. But…

“That’s it,” Lily said, squeezing him forcefully.

Waters felt as though a steel band had been removed from his chest. Penn would say he was crazy for thinking this way, but for the first time, he saw a real possibility that he had not killed Eve-

“Now we’re in business,” Lily said, sliding quickly up his chest and climbing astride him. “You just stay like that, and I’ll do all the work.”

Looking up into her eyes, Waters saw a combination of emotions he had never before seen in his wife’s face: pride, triumph, lust, greed. The woman above him now knew exactly what she wanted, and she would do anything to get it. Right now she wanted sexual pleasure. As she began to move, flexing her abdominal muscles with perfect control, he thought, What will she want tomorrow?

Waters lay in the dark with his back to Lily. He was mentally alert but physically spent. Lily had been sleeping for the past hour; he knew by her snoring. For a while he’d feared she didn’t intend to sleep at all. Once aroused to orgasm, she had remained in a heightened state in which any additional stimulation brought yet another climax. Waters survived the first hour without reaching release himself, but when he finally did and thought himself done, Lily went feverishly back to work on him. She used her lips and fingers with ruthless assurance, invading his most intimate spaces with techniques she had not picked up by reading some Cosmo article in a grocery checkout line. Time blurred, and he found himself in a disturbing dimension where pleasure and pain merged into something beyond both. These sensations were not new to him. He had felt them only days ago, with Eve. And before that…twenty years ago. The effort of concealing his fear while performing sexually left him a quivering wreck, and he felt blessed relief when Lily finally collapsed onto her pillow.

Now, lying in darkness, he began to doubt his sanity. Paranoia might be the subject of endless jokes, but it was a dangerous condition. Once tuned to threatening scenarios, the paranoid mind made ominous connections between patently unrelated events. He’d seen it a thousand times in Mallory. Was the same force now at work in him? Were the fears that had gripped his mind for the past two hours merely fallout from the shock of killing Eve? Were-

Waters went rigid in the bed.

Lily had stopped snoring. He listened for breathing but heard nothing. How could there be no sound? She had to breathe. He listened harder, and the hairs on his back and neck rose to prickly stiffness. She’s watching me, he thought. He felt the pressure of her gaze upon his back like the beam of a laser. He tried to prepare himself for her touch, for the sound of her voice. What are you thinking, Johnny? Or would she go further? I know what you’re thinking…

But she couldn’t know. People couldn’t read other people’s minds. And souls could not move between bodies. Waters didn’t even believe in souls, when it came right down to it. He believed in experience. Of course, part of his experience was waking in the dark to find Mallory staring at him with the lidless gaze of a reptile. The same thing had happened with Eve. If he turned over now and found Lily staring at him like that, he might start screaming-

Turn over, he told himself. You’re not some scared kid.

He steeled himself against the sight of a nightmare made real, then rolled over and looked into Lily’s