by John Coyne
She could smell the liquor on his breath, smell his sweat, and she was knew what was coming. She knew she could not stop herself, not without help.
“Please,” she whispered.
“I think a couple of granddaddies and you’ll be just fine. Whatcha say?” He was leaning close.
“Please?” she asked. By now she was backed up against the wall of the alcove. She concentrated on sounds—the humming of the giant Coke machine, the rumbling of the ice maker. Then he touched her.
Jennifer grabbed him by the throat before he took his hand off her shoulder. She looked up and saw his pale blue eyes bulge in his face. She smiled at him so he knew she was enjoying this.
She was holding him several inches above the cement floor with one outstretched arm, marveling at her own strength. Then she turned slowly around, spinning until she realized he had lost control of his bowels. Without pausing, she slammed his face against the ice machine. The blow broke his glasses and bloodied his face, and a bucket of small cubes tumbled from the machine and cracked against the concrete floor. Still holding him with one hand, she shoved his square head into the opening of the ice maker. His head was too big for the slot and she had to press harder, tearing the flesh off his forehead and the tips of his ears before she had successfully wedged him into place.
She left him there with his head jammed in the ice maker, kneeling in his own urine and excrement, and stepped into the dark hallway where Eileen stood, trembling and terrified.
“I think we had better check out,” Jennifer said, and walked down the long hallway to their room.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
“STOP LOOKING BACK, JENNY! He’s not following us.”
“How can you be so sure?” Jennifer glanced again out the rear window of the station wagon but saw no cars or flashing police lights gaining on them. The road was blank. They were alone on the dark interstate, traveling west through Ohio. It had begun to snow slightly, and the high beams picked up the flakes blowing against the windows. Jennifer felt the car shake as it was buffeted by bursts of wind.
“He’s not about to go to the police and tell them some woman shoved his fat face into an ice machine.” Eileen started to giggle, remembering. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed in my life. Jenny, you beat the shit out of that guy! Like you were Rambo or someone!”
“More like Hulk Hogan,” Jennifer answered. She was sitting in the backseat with a car blanket wrapped around her, shivering. The cold was something that came with her power. When she calmed down, she knew, she’d feel better, and her hands would stop trembling. She wondered if it was her fear that provoked the trembling, or simply the aftermath of her rage.
“We’re okay, Jenny. I tell you, stop worrying.”
“I wish I could.” Jennifer buried her face in the thick blanket to smother her tears. She was so tired of crying. Her emotional swings, she thought, were as disturbing as her extraordinary strength. “Eileen, I don’t think I can do this. I can’t sit in this car all the way to Minnesota.”
“We’re not going to drive all the way. Right now, we’re an hour from Akron. We can leave the car there and fly to St. Paul. I’ll telephone Kathy, and she’ll have someone meet us at the airport. If we make good connections, we’ll be on the farm by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Where is it, exactly?”
“About an hour north of St. Paul. It’s beautiful country. You’ll love it!”
“Who’s there? Besides Kathy?” Jennifer pulled herself up in the backseat, realizing how little she knew about Kathy Dart. She would never have taken such a spontaneous trip if it weren’t for Eileen. It was really Eileen Gorman whom she trusted.
“There’s Aurora, Kathy’s daughter. She’s a beautiful child, so gifted, just like her mother.”
“What about her father? Kathy’s husband?” Jennifer asked. She had been so wrapped up in her own problems that she had never even considered the personal life of Kathy Dart.
In the car’s dark interior Jennifer could see Eileen shaking her head.
“I really don’t know that much. No one does. I mean, you heard what Kathy said in Washington, how she was living in California and unhappily married.” Eileen shrugged. “That’s about all any of us know. The outsiders, I mean.”
“But there must be more. There’s always more,” Jennifer said. They drove in silence for a moment. Jennifer found she did not want to look out the window. She was afraid of the dark, afraid of everything that was new to her. And that fear made her angry. It was as if part of her life had been taken away from her.
“So besides Aurora, who’s on the farm?” she asked next, breaking the silence.
“Let’s see, I’m not really sure. People come and go. When Kathy isn’t traveling, she holds sessions in the tukul. That’s the main building, where they all have their meals and hang out. And it’s the place for community meetings.”
“Is it like that place out in Oregon—that Indian cult with free love?” Maybe she had taken too much on faith.
“No! It’s nothing like that, Jennifer,” Eileen soothed. “You’re getting yourself all bent out of shape over nothing. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t do that to myself!”
“I don’t know what to think. But I do know I don’t want to get mixed up in any sort of weird movement, with chanting and wearing red and having sex with guys who shave their heads. I just want to talk to Kathy Dart.”
“And you will,” Eileen answered, encouragingly. “People consult her all the time. When I was out in September, a group of corporate types—you know, chief executives, vice presidents—were taking this human-potential training that Kathy offers. She has a one-week session called Desta, which is Ethiopian for ‘happy,’ and during the week she channels Habasha.:
“But there’s other stuff, too: role-playing, confessions, meditation. Kathy says that it’s helpful for people—especially managers—to discover their own self-defeating attitudes. And I tell you, Jenny, after a week out there, these guys were just flying! They were so excited. I remember thinking that if all Kathy Dart and Habasha ever do is bring such joy to a bunch of businessmen, well, then, channeling is worth it.”
Jennifer smiled as she listened. She had forgotten how enthusiastically Eileen embraced the world.
“Okay, business guys, who else?” she asked, trying to envision what the farm was like.
Eileen shrugged. “People like you and me.”
“That bad?”
“And worse, can you believe? Everyone has heard about Kathy, seen her on television.”
Jennifer nodded. She remembered how she had seen Kathy Dart at five o’clock in the morning. “Where do we sleep?” she asked. “They don’t have dorms, do they?”
“Oh, no. Everyone has his own room, with a single bed. Kathy believes that people need to be isolated, especially if they’re meditating. Also, she believes that everyone needs their own personal space. Especially twin-souls.”
“Twin-souls?”
“Yes. A twin-soul is someone with whom we may once have shared a lifetime. There is a tremendous attraction between twin-souls, but also great resentment. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were twin-souls. And Madonna and Sean Penn. Real twins often function like that in life. They love and hate each other simultaneously. Your problem might be because of some conflict with a twin-soul.”
“What has happened to me—is still happening to me!—is more than just a love-hate relationship.”
Eileen nodded. “I realize that, and I don’t know the reason for these outbursts, but you seem to be suddenly attracting other souls who once shared a lifetime with you. Your past lives are coming together in this one.”
“Why now?” Jennifer sat back, and for a moment they rode in silence. “I didn’t ask for any of this,” she finally said.
“I know,” Eileen admitted. “Maybe I’m the cause. I exposed you to Kathy.” She kept her eyes fixed on the road. “But Kathy can save you, too. And if not Kathy, then Habasha.”
/> Jennifer closed her eyes and was comforted with the thought that help was waiting for her in Minnesota. When she opened them again, she saw bright lights on the dark horizon. The sudden sweep of lights made her think of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the sky lit up with the arrival of the spaceship.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I believe,” said Eileen, easing her foot off the gas pedal, “that it’s downtown Akron.”
“What if there is no such thing as reincarnation?” Jennifer asked next, as Eileen pulled off the highway. “What if there are no twin-souls or collective lives or multiple personalities!”
Eileen did not take her eyes from the interstate as she answered. “Then I think you are in real trouble,” she said quietly.
“Why?” Jennifer asked.
“Because it means you are a killer. A cold-blooded killer.”
It was colder now during the day and the light of the sun disappeared before Bura and the others had time to gather wood from the valley.
Because Bura was older, having lived through thirteen winters, and strong, strong as any of the males, except for Nira, she carried a full load back along the length of the valley.
She paused on the grassy slope where they had lived as long as she could remember. As she looked into the deep caves that had been cut with flint axes into each ledge, she thought of what her mother’s mother had told her. When her mother’s mother was a girl, they had come to live in these limestone caves, spending the cold months huddled by the charcoal fires, wrapped in the skins of wolves. Only the men would go out during the few hours of sunlight to hunt, and when they returned with a beast, there would be a great feast for all their people.
Bura thought how wonderful it must have been to live in the cave. Her mother’s mother had shown her where she slept on the cold ledge, hidden from the north winds, while the old men talked, and told Bura how she used to lie awake watching the flame dance against the rock walls, huddled there beside her sisters.
But now they lived in a round hut made of bones and bear skin, and now only children played in the caves during the warm months. Bura had bled from her womb, and her mother and her mother’s mother had taken her to the cave of drawings, and there she had drunk of her own blood, and her face and breasts had been marked with thick dark smears, and the women had prayed to all the spirits that her womb would flower with offspring. Her mother had said that Bura would go to live with Nira’s people, and she had gone that night to sleep in the thick warm skins with his sisters, and now it had been three days and three nights, and he had not come for her.
Bura knew that he would come that night. She had been told that the men never came to take their women on the first night, and that the longer they waited, the more powerful was their coupling. She was not afraid. She had seen her brothers coupling with their new women, heard the moans of pleasure and pain.
Bura was climbing up the cave path at dusk, bent forward to balance the driftwood on her back and shoulders, when they seized her. They had hidden themselves in the shadows of the ledge, kneeling out of sight and waiting for the women to climb up and out of the riverbed. One covered her mouth with his hand, slipped his arm around her naked waist. The second one pulled her legs out from under her, tumbling her over as if she were a thin-legged deer. They dragged her back into the forgotten caves, littered now with the bones of animals.
Bura bit the thick hand that covered her mouth and kicked out with her legs, but the two men had her between them. They had seized her skin covering and ripped it from her waist. She was naked now except for the shells she had strung around her neck, and one of the men seized them, twisting the thin cord of leather tight around her throat until she could not breathe.
They were trying to mate with her. Already she could feel the one who had her from behind, his arms wrapped around her stomach, shoving his organ into her. She twisted in his grasp until the leather cord grew even tighter around her neck. She broke one hand free and scraped her fingernails down the face of the man in front.
As the strip of leather around her neck loosened, Bura tumbled into the dirt, gasping for breath. She knelt on the ground, and when she had swallowed one long breath of air, she bolted from them, darting off like a rabbit caught in an open meadow.
They ran to catch her as she climbed up the steep limestone path. She was taller than both of them, and faster, and even in the dark, she knew the caves and ledges. If she reached the ridge, she would be all right.
Her breath was on fire in her throat, and there was a pain in her side. But if they caught her now, they would kill her. She could not see them behind her on the path, but she heard them, knew they were still after her.
She reached the top of the path, ran into the open meadow, and sighed with exhaustion and relief. She was safe. She saw the sparkling flames of the fires, twinkling like stars, and pushed forward for the safety of her mother’s hut. She could even smell the meat burning on the flame as she lengthened her stride and ran into Nira’s arms.
“Where were you?” he asked.
She tried to speak, to explain, but managed only to raise her arm, a signal that she was being followed.
He saw them at once, stumbling into the open meadow, and he leaped at them, hitting one of them at the base of the neck with his club. Bura heard the bones break, like a tree struck by sky light. She ran after Nira, jumping over the dead body of the fallen male, and followed him down the limestone path as he went after the other.
Swinging the short club with all his strength, Nira struck the other male once on the side of his face, killing him as the men of the plains killed the lynx that came down from the hills, and pushed him over the edge.
Bura ran to Nira and wrapped her arms tightly around his waist. She leaned forward to stare into the deep black pit. There was no sound, no echo that came back to them as it did when they tossed rocks off the high ridge.
She looked up at Nira and saw his black eyes studying her. She wanted him to take her into the private, forgotten caves and mate with her, but he didn’t seem to hear her silent longing, so she took his hand and brought it up to touch her naked breast.
As she brushed her bare bottom against him and felt his organ swell, she heard his breathing grow rapid and hard.
“You!” Nira said. “You bred with the Yellow Eyes.”
Bura shook her head. “No!” she said.
“Your opening is wet from them,” he told Bura, pushing her away.
“Nira, they caught me, but I got away. I ran.” She was frightened now. “I have mated with no one,” she begged, dropping to her knees.
Nira swore at her and tried to kick her away, but she clung to him, knowing that if he left her, she would be banished by his family. No one was allowed to mate with outsiders and come back to the tribe.
“No, Nira! No!” she cried, grabbing his waist and pulling herself up. Her fear gave her surprising strength, and when he wrestled her, she fought back. Her naked body, slippery with sweat, made it harder for him to push her away, but then he seized her by the hair and drew the sharp edge of his quartz stone across her breasts, marking her body, branding her as one who had mated with Yellow Eyes.
Enraged, she kicked out, aiming for his organ. He moaned and doubled over. Unable to stop her rage, Bura hit him again, and this time she seized his thick black hair in her fingers and pulled him forward toward the sheer edge of the limestone cliff. He tried to stop her, but she ducked away, and with the strength gained from long days of gathering wood, she pushed him off the edge. Nira screamed as he tried to seize the thin air, and then he dropped into the dark gorge.
Bura fell onto the hard path and cried, reaching out over the edge as if to pull him from the abyss. Now she had no man, and she knew the elders of the tribe would learn what she had done and would take her life.
All was lost. Her life was over. Standing at the rim of the deep gully, she thought briefly of her mother, of how she had disappointed her own, and then she le
aped soundlessly into the void, falling endlessly into black space.
!n the morning, word reached the highland huts, and the bodies of Nira and Bura were carried up to the high ground. As the people of the highlands moved away from the limestone cliffs, to better hunting lands farther south, new tribes came into the great meadowland and cut up the earth for planting. The old people remembered the time they left the cliffs, and some talked of the death of the young people. No one remembered their names.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
“YOU’RE SAFE NOW,” KATHY DART said, pulling Jennifer into a gentle embrace. She was smiling, but it seemed to Jennifer that she was also close to tears. “You’ve had a long journey,” she said softly, “but now you’re home.”
Kathy led her away from the front door and into the center of the living room. The house had once been a barn, and Kathy had stripped it back to its original log beams. The interior was quite grand, with stark, bare-wood walls that swept up to a cathedral ceiling.
The south end of the long room was filled with windows, and Jennifer glimpsed a lake below the house, and more buildings clustered together by a nearby evergreen grove. But her attention was quickly drawn back to the massive stone fireplace that dominated the room. Soft leather chairs and sofas were grouped around the open fireplace.
“This hour is scheduled as personal time. Everyone is off in meditation or sleeping or skating down on the lake. I’m channeling Habasha after dinner. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!” Kathy beamed as she took Jennifer’s hands in hers.
She was much more beautiful than Jennifer had remembered, with a clear, perfect complexion. Kathy Dart must be a very happy woman, Jennifer thought.
“We’ll have lots of time later to talk, Jennifer.” She glanced at Eileen. “I’ve told Simon I wanted you both in the big house with me. That way we can get together easily to talk. So let’s get you settled. You both must be exhausted.” Kathy turned and led them across the room.
“Oh, is there somewhere I can make a call to New York?” Jennifer asked. “I should check in with my office.” When they arrived in St. Paul, she had called and left a message for Tom that she had arrived safely.
