The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack)

by F. Paul Wilson

  Obviously she hadn’t been thinking at all. Her hands trembled as she tipped the glass to her lips and let the fiery liquid slide down her throat.

  She didn’t want this. She didn’t want this at all. Because if she and Alan came together, it wouldn’t be another casual affair. It would be for keeps. The Real Thing—again. And she couldn’t bear another Real Thing, not after what had happened to Greg. She couldn’t risk that kind of loss again.

  And she would lose Alan. He had an aura of doom. He was one of those men who was going to do what he had to do, no matter what. Greg had been like that. And look what had happened to him.

  No. She couldn’t let it happen. Not again. No matter how she felt about Alan. She would keep her distance and help him out and treat him as a dear friend and that would be it. No entanglements.

  So she put on her just-good-friends face and watched him stalk the room.

  But as she watched, she felt a flame inside glowing, trying to grow and warm her, trying to ignite her need to touch him and be touched by him. She smothered it.

  She was not going to get burned again.

  Alan watched Sylvia out of the corner of his eye as he pretended to scan the titles on the library shelves. He barely saw the books. Like the song: He only had eyes for her.

  God, she was beautiful sitting there in her burgundy robe with her hair down and falling about her face. He’d always felt attracted to her, but now…fate seemed to have thrown them together. She was sitting on the sofa over there with her robe demurely tucked around her, but he had caught sight of a length of long white thigh before she had arranged herself, and it was as if one of those lightning bolts arcing across the sky outside had struck him in the groin.

  This was crazy! His life had completely fallen apart—he didn’t even have a home anymore, for Chrissake!—and all he could think about was the woman across the room from him.

  Yet where was all her banter, where were her come-ons when he needed them? He didn’t know how to handle this, what to do, what to say.

  Hi! You live around here? Come here often? What’s your sign?

  He took a gulp of the brandy and felt the fumes sear his naso-pharynx.

  Well, at last he could admit to himself that he wanted Sylvia, had wanted her for a long time. And now they were here, alone, with all the walls broken down. But instead of playing Mae West, she was suddenly Miss Manners.

  He couldn’t let the moment pass. He wanted her too much, needed her too much, especially now. Especially tonight. He needed someone to stand up with him, and he wanted Sylvia to be that someone. She had the strength to do it. He could go it alone, but it would be so much better with her beside him.

  He wandered along the wall, gazing at the spines of the books, not seeing their titles. Then he came around behind the couch where she was sitting and stood directly behind her. She didn’t turn around to look at him. She said nothing. Merely sat there like an expectant statue. He reached out toward her hair and hesitated.

  What if she turns me away? What if I’ve read her wrong all these years?

  He forced his hand forward to touch her hair, laying his fingers and open palm gently against the silky strands and stroking downward from where they fell from the center part. The tickling sensation in his palm sent a pleasurable chill up his arm. He knew Sylvia felt it too, for he could see the gooseflesh rising on the skin of her forearm where it protruded from the sleeve of her robe.

  “Sylvia—”

  She suddenly jumped up and spun around. “Need a refill?” She took his glass. “Me too.”

  He followed her over to the bar and stood at her side, desperately searching for something to say as she poured more brandy into the snifters. Alan noticed her hand trembling. Suddenly there was a deafening crash of thunder and the lights went out. He heard Sylvia wail, heard the brandy bottle drop, and then she was in his arms, clutching him in fear, trembling against him.

  He put his arms around her. God, she was quaking! This wasn’t an act. Sylvia was genuinely frightened.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” he said soothingly. “Just a near miss. The lights will go on soon.”

  She said nothing, but soon the tremors stopped.

  “I hate thunderstorms,” she said.

  “I love them!” Held her tighter. “Especially now. Because I was racking my brain for a way to get my arms around you.”

  She looked up at him. Although he could not see her expression in the darkness, he felt a change come over her.

  “Stop it!” she said. Her voice was strained.

  “Stop what?” She was still against him, but it was as if she had just pulled herself a step or two away.

  “Just stop it!”

  “Sylvia, I don’t know what—”

  “You know and don’t pretend you don’t!”

  She slammed her right fist against his chest, then her left, then she was pounding at him with both at once.

  “You’re not going to do this to me! It’s not going to happen again! I won’t let it! I won’t! I won’t!”

  Alan pulled her tightly against him, as much to comfort the pain he sensed within her as to protect himself.

  “Sylvia! What’s wrong?”

  She struggled fiercely for a moment, then slumped against him. He heard and felt her sobs.

  “Don’t do this to me!” she cried.

  “Do what?” He was baffled and shaken by her outburst.

  “Don’t make me need you and depend on you to be there. I can’t go through that again. I can’t lose one more person, I just can’t!”

  And then he understood. He tightened his arms around her.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “That’s what Greg thought.”

  “Nobody can guarantee against that kind of tragedy.”

  “Maybe not. But sometimes it seems like you’re courting disaster.”

  “I think I learned a big lesson tonight.”

  “I hope so. You could have been killed.”

  “But I wasn’t. I’m here. I want to be with you, Sylvia. And if you let me, I will be with you—tonight and every night. But especially tonight.”

  After a long pause he felt her arms wriggle out from between them and slip around his back.

  “Especially tonight?” she said in a small voice.

  “Yeah. It’s been a long time coming and I don’t think I can turn back now.”

  He waited patiently through another long pause. Finally she lifted her face to him.

  “Me neither.”

  He kissed her then and she responded, bringing her hands up to his face and then clasping her fingers behind his neck. Alan pressed her against him, nearly overwhelmed by the feelings growing within him, old feelings that had lain dormant so long he’d almost forgotten they existed. He opened the front of her robe and she parted his, and then her skin was hot against the length of him. Soon the robes had fallen to the floor and he led her to the couch where he explored every inch of her with his fingers and his lips as she explored him. Then they were together, straining against each other, strobe-lit by lightning, the thunder and pounding rain all but drowning out the sounds they made as they peaked with the storm.

  “God! Is that what it’s like?” she heard him say after they had caught their breaths and lay together on the couch.

  “You mean it’s been so long you’ve forgotten?” Sylvia asked with a laugh.

  She could almost see him smile in the dark.

  “Yeah. Seems like forever since it’s been like this. I’ve been going through the motions so long I’ve forgotten what passion feels like. I mean real passion. It’s great! It’s like being cleansed. Like being run through a wringer and hung out to dry.”

  The lights remained out. Lightning still flickered, but not as brightly, and there were increasingly longer intervals between the flashes and the rumbles.

  Alan pulled away and moved to the window. He seemed to love the storm.

  “Do you know that you’re the second woma
n I’ve ever made love to?”

  Sylvia was startled. “Ever?”

  “Ever.”

  “You must have had plenty of opportunities.”

  “I guess so. Lots of offers, anyway. I don’t know how many were serious.” She saw the silhouette of his head turn her way. “Only one offerer ever attracted me.”

  “But you never took her up on them.”

  “Not because she didn’t appeal to me.”

  “But because you were married.”

  “Yeah. The Faithful Husband. Who committed adultery every day.”

  That puzzled her. “I don’t get you.”

  “My paramour was my practice,” he said in a low voice, as if talking to himself. “She came first. Ginny had to be satisfied with what was left over. To have been the kind of husband she needed, I would have had to settle for being something less than the kind of doctor I wanted to be. I made my choice. It wasn’t a conscious decision. And I never really saw it before. But now that Ginny’s gone and the practice is gone, it’s all very clear. Too often my mind was someplace else. I cheated on her every hour of every day.”

  Is he trying to scare me off?

  “And now that they’re both gone, I feel free to be with you, and that’s the most important thing in the world right now.”

  Sylvia felt a glow upon hearing those words. “Come back over here,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear. She decided to let him talk. She sensed it was good for him. Besides, she wanted to hear what he had to say.

  “And I’m talking about how I feel. I can’t tell you the last time I opened up to anybody. Anybody. Trouble is, I feel lost. I mean, what am I going to do with myself? For the first time in my life I don’t know what I want to do. Ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted to be a doctor. And do you know why? For the money and the prestige.”

  “I don’t believe that!”

  “Actually, I wanted to be a rock star but found I had no musical talent. So I settled on medicine.” He laughed. “Seriously, though—money and prestige. Those were what were important to the kid from Brooklyn all the way through pre-med and most of med school.”

  “What changed you?”

  “No big deal. I didn’t renounce all things material and don sackcloth and ashes. I just changed. Gradually. It started during my clinical training, when I got my first contact with patients and realized they were more than just case histories—they were flesh-and-blood people. Anyway, I achieved both my goals. The prestige automatically came with the degree, and the money came, too. Like one of my professors had told us: ‘Take good care of your patients and you won’t have to worry about balancing the books.’ He was right.

  “So I came out determined to be the best goddamn doctor in the whole world. And after I got into practice, it was an all-day job to try to be that kind of doctor. But now I’m not any kind of doctor. I’m a tool. I’ve become some sort of organic healing machine. Maybe it’s time to quit.” He grunted a laugh. “You know, Tony and I used to say that when the legal jungle got too thick and the politicians made twenty minutes of paperwork necessary for each ten minutes I spent with a patient, we’d chuck it all and open a pizzeria.”

  He finally turned away from the window.

  “Speaking of pizza, I’m starved. Got anything to eat, lady?”

  Sylvia slipped into her Mae West voice. “Of course, honey. Don’t you remember? You were just—”

  “Food, lady. Food!”

  “Oh, that stuff. Come on.”

  They groped for their robes and put them on, then she took him by the hand to the kitchen. She was fumbling in a drawer for a flashlight when the lights came on.

  “Whatcha got?” Alan said, hanging over her shoulder as she peered into the refrigerator.

  The shelves were almost bare. What with taking Jeffy into the Foundation today, she hadn’t got around to shopping.

  “Nothing but hot dogs.”

  “Oh, my!” Alan said. “What would Dr. Freud say about that?”

  “He’d tell you to eat them or go hungry.”

  “Any port in a storm. Pop them in the micro wave and we’ll have byproducts-in-a-blanket.”

  “That sounds awful!”

  “Can’t be worse than the meatloaf I had last night. Made it myself. All the flavor and consistency of a Duraflame log.” He stuck his tongue out in a disgusted grimace. “Blech!”

  Sylvia leaned against him and began to laugh. This was a side of Alan she’d never known. A little-boy side that she hadn’t even dreamed existed. Whoever would have guessed that the handsome and dedicated Dr. Bulmer could be charming and witty and fun? Fun!

  She stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him. He returned the kiss. Without separating her lips from his, she tossed the package of hot dogs back into the refrigerator and closed the door. As she put her arms around his neck, he lifted her and carried her back to the library.

  Later, as they lay exhausted on the couch, she said, “We’ve got to try this in a bed sometime.”

  He lifted his face from between her breasts. “How about now?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Maybe I am,” he said with a smile. “Maybe I’m not. All I know is I feel like my life has just begun tonight. I feel giddy, high, like I can do anything. And it’s because of you.”

  “Oh now—”

  “It’s true! Look at what’s happened to me in the past few weeks. None of it matters now that I’m with you. I can’t believe it, but touching you, loving you, it shrinks all those troubles to nothing. For the first time in my life I don’t know what I’m going to be doing tomorrow and I…don’t…care!”

  He got up and put on Charles’ robe again. Seeing him in the light now, she noticed how thin he was. He couldn’t have been eating well at all since his wife walked out on him.

  “Maybe you should open that pizzeria on your own. Put some meat on your bones if nothing else.”

  “Maybe,” he said, walking back to the window.

  She put on her own robe and followed him.

  “Maybe, like hell,” she said, snaking her arms around him and snuggling against his back. The storm was gone now. Still he stared out at the sky. “You’ll never quit medicine and you know it.”

  “Not voluntarily anyway. But it looks like medicine is quitting me.”

  “You still have the Touch, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “It’s still there.”

  She still hadn’t one-hundred-percent accepted the existence of the Dat-tay-vao. She believed Alan, and she believed Ba, but she hadn’t as yet seen it work, and the idea was so far beyond anything in her experience that the jury was still out for a small part of her mind.

  “Maybe you should lay low with it for a while.”

  She felt him stiffen. “You sound like Ginny. She wanted me to deny it existed and never use it again.”

  “I didn’t say that!” She resented being compared to his wife. “I just think maybe you should back off a bit. Look what’s happened to you since you began using it.”

  “You’re probably right. I probably should let things cool down. But, Sylvia…”

  She loved to hear him say her name.

  “…I don’t know how to explain this, but I can feel them out there. All those sick and hurting people. It’s as if each one of them is sending out a tiny distress signal, and somewhere in the center of my brain is a little receiver that’s picking up every single one of them. They’re out there. And they’re waiting. I don’t know if I can stop—even if I want to.”

  She hugged him tighter. She remembered the day in the diner after they’d been to the cemetery when he’d first told her about what was happening. It had seemed like such a gift then. Now it seemed like a curse.

  He suddenly turned to face her.

  “Now that I’m here, don’t you think it’s about time I used the Touch on Jeffy?”

  “No, Alan, you can’t!”

  “Sure! Come on. I want to do this for you as well as him!” He began pull
ing her toward the stairs. “Let’s go take a look at him.”

  “Alan,” she said, her voice quavering with alarm, “he’s not here, I told you before—he’s at the McCready Foundation until Thursday.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said quickly. Perhaps too quickly. “Slipped my mind.”

  He gathered her into his arms.

  “Can I stay the night? If I may be permitted to quote Clarence Frogman Henry”—his voice changed to a deep croak—“‘I Ain’t Got No Home.’”

  “You’d better!” she laughed.

  But the laugh sounded hollow to her. How could Alan have forgotten about Jeffy being away? She didn’t know what it was, but something was wrong with him.

  33

  Charles

  Charles looked up and was shocked to see Sylvia wending her way toward him through the tables of the staff cafeteria. In the bright red and white print dress that hugged her waist and bared her shoulders, she was a breathtaking mirage floating across a wasteland of white lab coats. Her smile was bright, but it didn’t seem to be for him alone—it was for the world at large.

  “You’re early,” he said, rising as she reached his table. She hadn’t been due for another two hours.

  “I know.” She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. Her words came rapid fire. “But it’s been three days and I’ve missed Jeffy and couldn’t wait any longer. Your secretary told me you were here, told me how to get here when I asked her not to page you. What’s that you’re drinking?”

  “Tea. Want one?”

  She nodded and made a face in the direction of his cup. “But not hot and milky like that. Iced, if you don’t mind. And clear.”

  He went and got it for her, and a refill of hot for himself, conscious of all the eyes on them, wondering no doubt where Charles Axford had been hiding the lovely bird.

  She sipped it appreciatively. “Good.” She looked around, a mischievous smile playing about her lips. “Never thought of you as the type for the staff caf.”

  “Every once in a while,” he said with his best deadpan expression, “when I feel the approach of a hint of self-doubt, I find it therapeutic to move among the lesser of my fellow creatures. It restores my faith in myself.”