by Greg Iles
He stepped over the threshold.
“I’m glad you came,” she said, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”
He closed the door behind him.
She lifted a hand and beckoned him up the stairs.
As he ascended, he took in details of the room that served as a backdrop to her stunning figure: fourteen-foot ceilings, massive crown moldings, a carved medallion above the chandelier.
“I’m not sure why I came,” he said, reaching the top step.
She took his hand in hers, and he realized she was shaking. “You don’t have to be sure. Just be here.”
Waters looked around in wonder. The mansion was furnished with period antiques, giving him the feeling it was 1850 and that the owners had simply gone out for a carriage ride. To his left stood a massive, coffin-shaped piano, a Broadway from England, he guessed. Six doors led off of this central room, some to bedroom suites, the others to a kitchen, a marble-floored foyer, a dining room.
“We’re alone,” Eve said. “I have the only key.”
He looked at her.
“Come with me, Johnny.” She pulled him toward a half-open door. Through it he saw a short corridor, and beyond that a bedroom furnished with two tester beds. He pulled back against her hand, stopping them by a grandfather clock that stood beside the door. The heavy chimes in the clock gonged softly from the impact of their feet on the hardwood.
“Do you want to talk some more?” Eve asked, looking nervous.
“I don’t know.”
She blinked, her dark eyes still moist. “Do you want to kiss me again?”
He flashed back to the cemetery, to the kiss that had thrown him twenty years into the past. “I’ve thought about it. The way you kiss. It’s…”
“Just like her. Is that what you were going to say?”
“Yes.”
“Think of it that way, if it makes it easier. Right now I don’t care. Just kiss me again.”
Even as he shook his head, he moved forward. She dropped his hand and touched his face, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw, his lips. Her fingertip opened his mouth, and then she parted her lips and softly pressed her mouth to his. A shock like a static discharge went through him, leaving him tingling as the pressure of her lips increased. Her tongue slipped into his mouth, cautiously exploring. She bit his lower lip, tugging insistently, just as she had at the cemetery, letting him know the kiss was only a beginning, the opening movement of a symphony they both remembered. Or so she wanted him to believe. And God help him…he almost did. The desire she’d awakened yesterday had wound itself to an unbearable tension. He wanted Eve Sumner as he had not wanted a woman in more years than he could remember. He slid his hands up to her face and held her cheeks, searching her eyes for…what?
“Who are you?”
She didn’t blink. “You know.”
He shook her with sudden violence. “What do you want?”
“You, Johnny. That’s all. I want you. Right now.”
Her hand slid below his belt and gripped him with painful force. Had she done anything else, had she followed a subtler line of seduction, he would have repulsed her. But her animal directness-so unfamiliar to him now-shattered the cerebral restraint of loyalty to legal vows that had not been honored in this way for too long. All thought, all doubt flew out of his head. He bunched the yellow sundress in his hands and yanked it up over her hips. She wore nothing underneath. As he stared, she held her arms straight up, and he slid the fabric right off her.
She stood before him without a hint of self-consciousness, the way Mallory had at the falls, letting him absorb all of her. Then she pulled him to her and kissed him again, her hands working frantically at his clothes until he stood naked before her.
“In there?” he asked, nodding to the bedroom.
She shook her head and pulled his hand down, and he knew then that she’d been ready for some time. When her arms slipped around his neck, he slid his hands beneath her hips and simply lifted her onto him. There was momentary resistance, then none. They gasped and clutched each other like climbers caught in an ice storm, clinging together for warmth. He did not move within her; holding her suspended as she shivered around him was almost more sensory input than he could stand. After a time, a strange purring sound began in her chest. As it built slowly, another, deeper sound blended with a ululation in her throat, creating a strangely haunting music; it was the chimes of the grandfather clock vibrating in sympathy with their moving bodies, the waves transmitted through the seasoned floorboards. The quivering in Eve’s body suddenly focused in the pit of her belly, then radiated out through her limbs like the seizure of some hill woman about to speak in tongues. When the trapped cry finally burst from her throat, Waters’s legs trembled violently, and his vision went black as all the frustration and regret of the past four years poured into her. She was still screaming when his legs gave way, and he flung out his arms to break the impact of the floor.
They lay two feet apart, panting like winded sprinters stunned to find themselves naked together. The clock chimes still clanged on their chains, sending resonant waves through the room. Waters looked down at his hand as though at the hand of a stranger. But it was his hand, unchanged. After twelve years of fidelity, he had finally yielded to this ancient impulse, and the sky had not fallen. The earth had not opened at his feet.
Eve sat up and took his hand. She did not speak, but simply pulled him to his feet and led him down the corridor to the bedroom, where she drew back the covers on one of the three-quarter beds, gently pushed him under the sheet, and slid in beside him.
He lay on his back, looking up at the gathered fabric of the canopy, which radiated from a central circle like the rays of the sun. The light in the bedroom had a fluid consistency, as if a golden liquid were being filtered through the heavy lace curtains. Eve lay close and warm along his left side, for the bed was too small for them both.
“What are you thinking?” she asked. “Are you thinking about your wife?”
“No.”
She kissed his shoulder. “What, then?”
“This. It’s insane. The whole thing.”
“You’re wrong. This had to happen. It was always going to happen.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“I know. Johnny…look at me. Did you feel me?”
He refused to look at her. “I don’t want to talk about Mallory.”
She kissed his shoulder again. “All right. As long as you’re here. That’s all that matters. There’s time for all the rest later.”
All the rest. He turned onto his side and looked into her eyes. “I don’t know why I came here. And I don’t know what you’re doing. What you want out of this. You could be crazy for all I know. The things you say are crazy.”
She nodded, her eyes filled with patience. “But I’m not crazy. You know I’m not.”
He knew no such thing, but he saw no point in telling her that.
She took his hand and placed it over her breast. Her heart beat strongly beneath the swollen bosom.
“I know they don’t feel the same,” she said. “Not exactly the same. But this is a very nice body.” She averted her eyes for a moment. “Better than some I’ve known.”
He pulled his hand away. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I told you, Johnny. You’re not ready for the truth.”
“We just had sex. We didn’t use any precautions. How much crazier can it get?”
“Don’t worry about me getting pregnant. Eve had her tubes tied.”
Her use of the third person confused him; he shook his head, trying to keep his mind clear in the face of her delusion.
“And as far as other worries, I’ve been tested. Eve wasn’t very selective in the past, but I changed her. Slowly.”
“I feel like I’m on acid,” Waters murmured.
Eve giggled, an odd sound after all that had come before. “Johnny? You’ve done ac
id?”
“When I worked in Alaska, I did a couple of tabs. Nobody in this town would believe that, thank God.” He brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She had very fine hair; it made him think of an animal pelt.
“Mmm,” she purred.
He let his hand fall to the concave curve of her abdomen, then slid it down to the silkier hair there. She rose against his fingers, pressing into his touch. He moved his hand back up to her face and caressed her cheek.
“We’re through the looking glass,” he said. “I want to hear the rest of it. Finish the story you started in the cemetery.”
Fear flickered in her eyes. “Only if you promise not to leave. You have to let me finish.”
“Why would I leave? I’m the one asking you to tell it.”
“You’ve never heard anything like this before. It might be hard to listen to.”
“For God’s sake. Just start talking.”
She nodded hesitantly, and he lay back, letting his gaze wander along the underside of the canopy as her low voice trembled.
“I told you how it was. The rape. How at the moment I felt I was going to die, when he was strangling me and finishing, I suddenly wasn’t looking at him-I was looking at me. Mallory. I was in him, right? Looking at a woman who lay under him, not breathing. And that woman was me.”
The anxiety Waters had felt in the cemetery returned like a shadow falling over him. She spoke lunacy with absolute conviction. Yet what was the harm in listening? An absurd parallel came to him: it was 1955, she was a communist agent, and he had already slept with her. The damage was done. What difference could it possibly make if he listened to her crackpot manifesto now?
“Everything went blank after that,” Eve whispered, oblivious to his thoughts. “It was like being in a coma, I guess. Or a drugged sleep. Now and then I would wake up and see things-rooms, furniture, the interior of a car-but they were alien to me. It was like a nightmare where you’re trapped in someone else’s body. The things I saw…I eventually began to make sense of them. The man who raped me led a double life. He had a wife, a house in Marrero, a mindless job as a technician in a plant. To the people he worked with he seemed like a normal person. But inside his head, it was like…Hell. There was so much anger and pain, so much hatred. I knew all his thoughts, his memories. They would ambush me in the dark, things that were done to him as a child. It was sickening. The way he treated his wife…the way she cowered and took it. Sometimes I shut down my consciousness-went back to sleep-just so I wouldn’t have to see or feel any of it. But as time passed, that became harder to do. When I was awake, I tried to think. I didn’t understand how it had happened, but I was alive in this man. And I was growing stronger. Sometimes I’d be awake for an hour or two. And he wouldn’t know it. He didn’t remember any of it. I could tell by people’s reactions. It was like he blacked out during those times. He became terrified of the blackouts. I had no idea what I was going to do.” Eve swallowed, as though trying to keep her vocal cords working. “Then he raped another woman.”
A ball of ice formed in Waters’s stomach.
“He raped and killed her…exactly the way he had done it to me. I had to experience that, Johnny. As if I were doing it. She wasn’t as strong as I was. She just lay there, praying it would be over quickly, hoping she would be all right in the end. But she wasn’t. He strangled her. I knew he was going to do it. I knew all along, Johnny. And there was nothing I could do to stop him.”
Waters pulled the covers over his chest.
“I nearly went mad. Maybe I did, a little. I don’t know. I wanted so badly to get out of him. I imagined killing him during one of the times that I was in control. I knew I could stop him from hurting women if I did that. But I didn’t want to die. I’d seen my dead body. I’d seen that other woman, lying there like a candle someone had blown out. God forgive me…I didn’t want that to happen to me, Johnny.”
Eve wiped her eyes. Waters reached down and took her hand, and this seemed to steady her enough to go on.
“His wife was a pathetic creature, totally dependent. He abused her, but on some level she seemed to need that. He didn’t have sex with her very often. Sex to him was what he did to his victims. But when he was with his wife, it was very rough and seemed to satisfy something in her, some yearning for punishment. It was so twisted. Once, while I was thinking of suicide, he had sex with her. During the act, I started to feel like I had when he had raped me. Not the same feeling, but the same intensity of feeling. I wanted out of him so badly. And I was so near to this other person, this person who was not a monster. I was physically inside her, you know? As they thrashed against each other, she started to climax, and I felt…”
“What?”
“Like a door was opening. As she started to peak, the person she was-the individual part-began to fade away. All thought and memory was vanishing into this…nothingness. The ecstasy of her climax wiped out her individuality. Do you know what I mean? In those seconds she became like a shell-a body without a soul-and in the instant that I understood what was happening, it was over. One moment I was looking at her, the next I was looking at him. I was inside her, Johnny. In her mind. And it was like being released from prison.” Eve looked at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You’re saying that your soul-”
“I don’t know if it’s my soul! That’s beyond me. But whatever we are-whatever human consciousness is-that part of me moved from him into her, just as it had gone into him when I so desperately wanted to survive.” She squeezed his hand. “Please tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Don’t stop. Tell me the rest.”
She looked up at the canopy. “That was ten years ago. The time between then and now…I don’t want to think about.”
“Tell me.”
Eve closed her eyes and spoke in a detached voice. “The woman’s mind was much less crowded than her husband’s. She’d endured terrible things as a child too, but she hadn’t reacted the way he had. She’d turned the anger inward, against herself. That’s why she responded to his abuse. She thought she deserved it. Once I was inside her, I understood that. I could control her much better than I could him. I could stay awake for much longer periods. I could think. And the more I thought, the more I realized that I had been given a unique chance. I had no idea how, and I still don’t. But I had to do something with that chance. It was as though I’d been lost in a shipwreck. Everyone I knew thought I was dead, so the old obligations didn’t apply. My husband, my children…I was dead to them. And all I could think about was what had happened when I thought I was going to die. What I had thought of. I decided then that I would do whatever I had to do to find you.”
For the first time, Waters truly felt he was lying beside Mallory Candler. The single-minded possessiveness that had led Mallory to insanity was there in Eve’s voice. She opened her eyes and rose up on one elbow.
“I mean, I knew where you were. But I had to come to you in a way-in a form-that you would listen to. Someone you could be attracted to. Someone like I was when you knew me before.”
Waters felt her gaze upon him like heat from a candle. “Are you saying you went through many different people to get to where you are now?”
“Yes.”
He felt a manic compulsion to jump out of the bed, but he didn’t trust her to stay rational if he did.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, her voice edged with anxiety.
“I’m trying not to think. I’m just listening.”
But he was thinking. He was thinking he had read that paranoid schizophrenics were capable of constructing incredibly complex delusions, filled with detail and interwoven with reality. If it weren’t for all the secrets Eve knew about Mallory, he would be positive this was just such a delusion.
“How many people did you go through to get to Eve?”
“Nine.”
As the implications of her words hit him, his face felt cold. “And o
ne of them was Danny Buckles? That’s how you knew about the molestation at the school?”
“Yes.”
Jesus God….
“I know things about those nine people that no one in the world would ever believe. Things they’d kill themselves over if people discovered. Human beings are corrupt creatures, Johnny. I remember you talking about Thomas Hobbes when you were taking political philosophy. Well, Hobbes had human nature right.”
Her easy reference to a class he had taken twenty years ago pierced him like a blade. In this empty mansion, logic held no sway. On one hand she was telling him a story that could have been written by Poe while on opium; on the other she was casually bringing up things only Mallory could have remembered, thus lending credence to her hallucinations.
“And you can move through people at will?” he asked, not believing his own voice.
“No. Only the way I described.”
“Only during sex?”
“Not just any sex. The other person-the person I move into-has to climax. Their individuality has to be wiped out by that. So, as you’d imagine, it’s very easy for me to move into a man, but harder to pass into a woman.”
“But how could it take nine years?”
“I made some mistakes.” Bitterness had entered her voice. “I was trapped in a prison for a while. Literally in jail. In a man. There was sex there, but”-she shivered-“not with anyone who could get me out.”
Who could make up this insanity? he asked himself.
“The farther along the chain I got, the easier it became to move closer to you. But still, it was hard. It took me a long time to learn to control my…”
“What? Your what?”
“My host, I was going to say.”
Icy fingers closed around his heart. The “soul transfer” she had been describing had a direct analogue in the real world: viral infection. In Eve’s world, souls moved through people in the same way a sexually transmitted disease did. Could her whole fantastic delusion be some paranoid response to contracting the AIDS virus?
