by Peter James
She guided it with her hands, helped it, but it was OK, it was fine on its own. It nuzzled so gently, just for a moment it tickled, but it was too big, there was no way, it was not going to be able to enter.
She cried out in fear.
Then a laser lit the man’s face a ghostly white. But his eyes were full of comfort. He held her with his dark brown eyes. And she felt the serpent starting to work its way in, burrowing, and this now, this was a great sensation, it was like it was opening her up, pushing, it was so big it was impossible, but still it kept on, levering its way in, further, further, inch by inch it was coming inside her, filling her entire body, and one moment it hurt like hell and she heard herself emptying her lungs with pain. Then the pain turned to pleasure. This serpent was gliding, surfing its way up inside her, it was pushing these huge great waves out in front of it, they were swimming up through her, one following another…
She was shimmering now, she was like heat waves rising from rippling desert dunes. She was air, her body had dissolved into gaseous vapour, she was just particles of energy, she was waves and beams. And now she felt her body again, she wanted to keep feeling it, this thing inside her, to keep feeling it for ever, never to let it go, never, ever, ever, ever.
Oh, please.
And it was still pushing up, filling her more and more. She had no idea where the head was now, it was somewhere up around her stomach and these waves, she wanted to cry out, wanted to let him know it could come further, there was room, it might not feel like there was room but there was, oh, yes, there was room, and she could make more room, and she was swimming, her whole body was liquid, it was dissolving, and then it was rippling, her body had become the ocean, there was a swell running through her and that swell was increasing, and she saw this ghostly white face, this man from Telecom, his face was right up close now, she couldn’t see anything but his face and she couldn’t feel anything else in the world, just this serpent, just the swell of the ocean, she was just exploding, she was on fire but this fire was good, she felt this electricity, it was shooting down her legs, up through her arms, great spikes of electricity were shooting up into her brain, deep down into her stomach.
And now she was still, and there was a fuse that was lit, this deep warm glow burning inside her, and she felt so safe, so wanted, and this feeling, this depth inside her, she wanted to hold it, wanted to curl up in a corner with it and live it and never let it go, but she couldn’t hold it, she could not hold the ocean together any more, it was disintegrating apart inside her, it was erupting and she was surfing, out in bright sunlight, she was surfing, the waves were inside her, beneath her, and she was screaming, her whole body was exploding joy, the ocean was erupting through every cell in her body, blowing her apart as she screamed, ‘Please, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes.’
There was a long silence.
Motion, it felt like sleeping in a train. Then Susan realised her bed was moving, it was being dragged along, she was travelling down a corridor.
She heard a harsh, intrusive sound.
Metal shutters?
A clatter.
Then darkness.
Chapter Twenty-five
Something was bothering Kündz. It had been on his mind since Tuesday night, but now it was coming at him with an urgency that was clouding all his other thoughts.
Mr Sarotzini had taught him to open himself up to his intuition, to free it from its shackles, to nurture it, to learn to trust it. So he opened himself up to it now, and Tuesday night returned to him in precise detail. The phone was ringing in the Carters’ house and Susan had answered it. Kündz knew it was this conversation she had had that was bothering him.
He keyed a search command. The tape wound back, stopped.
He played the section of the tape over, listening carefully.
‘Susan?’ The writer sounded anxious, Kündz thought. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, I need to see you urgently. Are you free tomorrow, for lunch or a drink?’
It was the tone of this man’s voice that was bothering him. And what was this urgency? Although Susan was making him rewrite huge chunks of his book, the deadline was movable – what mattered was getting the book right.
Kündz’s intuition, fuelled by the tone of this man’s voice, was screaming at him.
He played the tape again. Then again. Urgently. This word. It had got him by the balls.
For the second night running Fergus Donleavy had woken from the same nightmare.
It was a simple dream and he could recall it with clarity. He saw a baby, a tiny new-born infant, alone in a terrible darkness. It was crying, and it was this cry that was the real nightmare: there was such utter terror in it. Then in the dream he saw Susan Carter: she was fumbling around in the pitch blackness with a torch, and she was crying, she couldn’t find the baby, and she was begging Fergus to help.
And he told her, no, leave the baby, don’t try to find it, let it die. For God’s sake, let it die.
Then he woke.
He looked at his wristwatch beside the bed. There was a dull ache midway between his eyes. Jesus, what the hell had he drunk last night? He chucked his feet out of the bed and his body followed, wobbled a little but stayed upright, one benefit of four hundred thousand years of evolution as a biped, he thought, but not very clearly, then opened the curtains.
The Thames was outside, which still surprised him every morning, although it had always been outside, all the ten years he’d lived in this docklands flat.
A rusty lighter slid past, heavily laden and low in the water. The barge towing it could have been on rails fixed to the river bed, it was so unshaken by the spring ebb chop. He watched the froth, the spume, the shit-brown water then, craning his neck to the right, could just see Tower Bridge. Grey against a grey sky. It might be drizzling: it wasn’t much of a day.
He hauled on his dressing gown, found his slippers, padded through to his den, which, like the living room and dining room and everywhere else in this flat, apart from the lavatory seat, was covered with pages of the damned manuscript that this bloody woman was making him rewrite. Oh, Christ, he was bored with this book, wished he’d never started it, but he needed the money for the mortgage on this flat, which was not worth even half the fortune he’d paid, and which his university salary didn’t cover. There was no way he could afford to dump it and repay Magellan Lowry their advance.
And, don’t forget this, Fergus, this book is important, it’s needed: this book really could change people’s thinking.
Bollocks. It was just a good sales pitch, Fergus, that was all, and you know that.
And he did know that, but only the modest part of him was buying that right now. There was an immodest part, a massive, mountain-sized ego part of him that didn’t buy that at all. This part was thinking Dr Steven W. Hawking has not got it right, and the only truly great scientific mind in the world holds tenure inside the cranium of Dr J. Fergus Donleavy.
He ground coffee beans and tried again to interpret the dream. He had an entire shelf of books on dreams: he knew all the possibilities and none worked for this dream. Nothing resonated. He knew the reason, and the reason frightened him. This dream was not about symbolism.
This dream was a premonition.
This was the presentiment, the feeling he’d been having of something bad happening to Susan for these past few weeks, the feeling that had been worsening every day.
It was even stronger this morning than it had been two days ago, and it had been strong enough then to have made him call her.
What would he have told her? She didn’t want children, so how could he warn her that he had seen something really bad to do with her having a child?
She would dismiss it, reminding him that she and her husband were not going to have children.
Goddamn you, Susan Carter, stop messing with my head. He thought of her face across the table at lunch, the sleek red hair, those beautiful, intelligent eyes, the way she looked at him with humour, curiosity – and som
ething else.
Did some part of her want to go beyond a pure editor-author relationship?
Then an even wilder thought occurred. Was she making him do all this rewriting because she was trying to reject her attraction to him?
Come on, Fergus, you trashed more brain cells last night than you realised.
He poured the coffee into the machine, filled it with water and switched it on. The morning post and the Independent were on the floor. He scooped them up, glanced at the headlines, glanced at the envelopes, nothing of interest, and sat down again.
Susan hadn’t phoned him. Tuesday night, he had rung her. It was now Thursday morning. She had said she would call and she hadn’t. And she’d sounded mysterious when he had spoken to her. Going away, she said, but she didn’t say where. Surely when people are going away they say to Manchester or Paris, or wherever the hell they are going. So why hadn’t she?
Christ. Did Susan have a lover? He’d never met her husband, so he couldn’t gauge the man or the relationship. Women took lovers because their marriages were unhappy. Had all those meaningful looks she had given him been a hint? A cry for help? And he’d been too blind to see?
He felt a twinge of anguish. He had been deeply attracted to Susan from the moment they had first met. He liked everything about her. It wasn’t just her looks, it was the way she moved her hands, the way she smelt, her voice, her mind, her clothes, her confidence, and the way she cared for her work, for people, for everything. If she had a lover, and this was a big speculation, but if she did, and therefore her marriage was rocky, now was the time to make a move himself.
He shook his head. He had to switch his mind from this. He had to concentrate on the manuscript. But he kept coming back to the dream, to Susan’s red hair, her legs, her smile, those brilliant blue eyes, her freshness, her vitality.
The thought that right now she might be in bed in a hotel room with her lover was tormenting him.
But the dream tormented him just as much. It stayed with him through his shower, through his one slice of cremated toast, through the first half-hour of his work.
He wanted desperately to talk to Susan. And he needed to tell her his dream, to see whether any part of it resonated. And the parts were: darkness; a baby crying; Susan trying to find this baby with a torch. And then himself, telling her to leave it, to let it die.
He was about to pick up the phone to dial her office and see if by any chance her secretary, who had been so adamant yesterday that Susan could not be contacted, had a number for her today.
But before he could pick up the phone, it rang. Maybe it was Susan, he thought hopefully.
But it wasn’t. It was a man from British Telecom, polite and most apologetic. A line fault of some sort. The computer showed them it was coming from the equipment Fergus had installed in his flat. Would it be possible for an engineer to call? Would there, perhaps, be someone at home this morning?
Chapter Twenty-six
A sliver of light appeared in the darkness. A flat, steady monochrome, growing a little wider now but no brighter. Susan, drowsy and disoriented, watched it, trying to figure it out.
It was a window, she realised. Trails of rain were sliding down it, and the sky beyond was the colour of a television screen that was switched off. Her bedroom window. But it was in the wrong place. John must have moved it. Or moved the bed?
She closed her eyes again, but she felt a deepening disquiet. Something wasn’t right. She opened them. Pale grey walls. Hotel, she thought. We’re away somewhere. She tried to turn her head to see John. It took an enormous effort to roll it a few degrees, just far enough to be able to see that no one was beside her.
A coil of fear spiralled through her.
This isn’t a hotel, I’m in a clinic.
Something had happened that wasn’t right. Something, last night, the operation –
She tried to move, but her body was leaden, weighted down like a diver’s. It took all her energy just to turn her head again, to see if her watch was on the bedside table, or if there was a clock in the room, but after a few moments, she gave up. Her eyes returned to the wall with the window. They shifted, stopped at a painting on another wall, a copy of a Lowry, a wintry northern industrial landscape filled with matchstick people. And that was a coincidence, she thought, incongruously. She worked for Magellan Lowry and there was a painting on the wall by Lowry.
A smoke-detector sensor and the nozzles of a sprinkler system poked down from the ceiling. Somewhere a phone was ringing. Her mouth was parched and her throat was raw. She tried to think back; fragments of a dream, or a hallucination, indistinct, a bad dream, the fear was growing.
And at the edge of her peripheral vision the door was opening. A nurse came in, efficient-looking, rather hard face, dark-haired, late thirties. She stood a short distance from Susan, her mouth opened and her pale lips moved up and down, and one word at a time, with gaps in between, her voice reached Susan. A smell of food had come into the room, breakfast food, toast, eggs, which increased Susan’s nausea.
‘Ah. Good. She’s. Awake.’
The words told Susan that someone else was in the room too, but she couldn’t see who. Then a man moved right in front of her, blocking her view of the window. She had seen him before: dark hair with jet-black highlights, a Mediterranean tan, yes, Dr Ross from ER.
He looked at her without speaking, holding her with his friendly brown eyes, and then he said, ‘How. Are. You. Feeling?’
Susan felt a little queasy and she also had a raging thirst, but she didn’t want to tell him because she was too tired. She didn’t want to have to make the effort to drink. She wanted to go back to sleep. ‘OK,’ she said.
‘You’re going to be feeling a bit woozy for a while from the anaesthetic. Any tummy pains?’
She was able to shake her head. But a memory was starting to clarify, rising steadily from some great depth towards the surface, like a bloated corpse.
She shuddered.
Alarm registered in the face of Dr Mediterranean Tan from ER.
She could recall, suddenly, the violently erotic sensation inside her of the serpent, the phallus, the thing, of the man from Telecom. Christ, she could see it, could feel it so vividly, it was all rushing back now, and she was aware that her face was flushing, and she was aware, too, that it must have been a dream, something Freudian, that was all, it must have been.
With no warning, a fierce pain ripped through her abdomen; it felt as if a knife had been plunged in and twisted. She cried out, gasping, as the pain struck again.
‘It’s from the incision. We’ll just take a look at the stitches,’ the doctor said. The nurse lifted away the sheet, untied the front of her gown, then removed the dressing. Looking down at her abdomen, Susan could see the stitches and the livid flesh.
Dr Ross began explaining to her exactly what they had done in the operation, but she only half listened because she already knew. Mr Van Rhoe, the obstetrician, had already explained it to her in great detail.
Mr Van Rhoe was the man Mr Sarotzini had insisted would take care of her, and Susan had had to admit to feeling a little flattered. Miles Van Rhoe was in a different league from even Harvey Addison. For over thirty years he had delivered babies for the rich and famous, for the aristocracy and the nobility; she had read in newspapers and magazines that many members of the Royal Family would consider no one else.
And Dr Abraham Zelig, the director of this clinic, had also explained everything that would happen to her in the greatest possible detail. Dr Zelig, Mr Sarotzini had told her, was one of the world’s foremost authorities, perhaps the foremost authority, on in vitro fertilisation.
Dr Ross was patiently explaining now to her that they had made an incision, removed the eggs from her ovary, selected the healthiest-looking one, mixed it with semen provided by Mr Sarotzini, and then returned it to the womb.
As she listened, the pain gone now, and looked back into those kind eyes, she had a sudden urge to blurt out to him that he
was wrong, it hadn’t been Mr Sarotzini’s semen, it had been the man from Telecom’s semen. But she held back. Of course she’d had the operation – Christ, she had the sutures and the pain to prove it. The stuff in her dream, that crazy erotic dream, that was all just hallucination. Anaesthetics did freaky things to the brain, everyone knew that.
The effort of being awake for just these few minutes was exhausting her. She started to think about Mr Sarotzini’s semen and felt a sudden wave of repulsion. It was inside her, mixed with one of her eggs, fertilising it at this very moment. Was she pregnant?
She felt hot, then very cold. Dr Ross was there, and then he was not there. Then he was there again. She suddenly remembered that Dr Ross in ER was a paediatrician.
Of course, she needed a paediatrician now, or would soon.
The nurse was looking at her strangely. Dr Ross went out of focus then came back in again. Susan felt dizzy and desperately thirsty. She asked now if she could have a drink of water.
Shortly after six o’clock that evening, Mr Sarotzini’s chauffeur pulled up the Mercedes outside Susan’s house, and she was relieved to see that John wasn’t home yet. She dreaded facing him. She hadn’t even had the courage to return the call he’d left for her this morning at the clinic.
Mr Sarotzini had been in to see her at lunch-time, and that encounter had been awkward. He had brought her an enormous basket of fruit, which was in the trunk of the Mercedes now, but in spite of all their common interests, she had been too tired – or confused – to be able to converse with him. She had been relieved when he left.
The sky was dark and it was still raining. The automaton chauffeur only broke his rigid silence to offer to carry her overnight bag inside for her. She declined, then immediately regretted it. The basket of fruit, and her small bag were heavier than she’d realised, and pulled on the stitches in her abdomen.
