by Dan Glover
"But I thought..."
"You thought that if I exchanged bodily fluids with a human being they would perish. Is that right, darling Karen?"
"Why yes, Lily... I guess I didn’t want to be so crude, but yes."
"That only happens if we are apart afterwards. If we stay together, my presence enhances your people."
"What do you mean by enhances, Lily?"
Lily shrugged her shoulders, an all together too human gesture and yet distinctly alien enough that it vaguely unsettled Karen causing her stomach to roil and an odd humming noise to begin droning somewhere in the back of her brain.
"I mean they become like me."
"They turn into a mermaid?"
"Come on, sweet Karen. You're the doctor. You should know that is impossible. No, their life span is extended, like mine. Certain changes are effected upon their body. Old hurts are healed. Any disease they have is cured."
Lily seemed miffed that Karen was not catching on to what she was trying to tell her. She couldn't help but feel like a child in the presence of this creature. Though Karen prided herself on her knowledge of medicinal science she felt like an imposter in her own profession.
"Your life span is longer than ours, Lily?"
"I thought you knew that, precious Karen. Don’t your tests tell you so?"
"Well, no, Lily, our tests aren’t suited for that. How old are you?"
"Oh, I have no idea. My kind does not keep count of the years as your people do."
"Are you more than a hundred years old?"
Lily giggled like a child who had a secret that no one would ever guess and slowly shook her head. Karen tried again.
"Are you more than a thousand years old, Lily?"
"I told you my people do not count the years as yours do, darling Karen. I have no idea how old I am. I do know my people have legends of how we came into being when Lake Baikal formed.
"Until that moment, or so my grandfather's stories go, some of us were like you: hairless annoying monkeys living in trees. A great earthquake ripped the valley apart where those creatures lived. They found themselves deep beneath the waters. By chance a baby was born with gills. The baby survived and passed on that trait. So they evolved into what we are now.
"You should know that there were actually two distinct species that lived beneath the Lake... one of them was like me... intelligent and caring. The Others were terrible to behold... they prowled the edges of the Lake searching for monkeys who strayed too close to the waters.
"My kind was bullied into mating with the Others. The results were women who could only give birth one time, thereafter becoming sterile. This trait eventually would lead to our demise as well as the end of the Others."
"So you co-existed with another species, Lily? How interesting! We are learning how our ancestors were much more diverse than we ever dreamed... there are many extinct species that make up our lineage. They too co-existed with one another."
"Did you learn that by trapping those distinct from you and studying them?"
"I'm sorry, Lily... I know what I did wasn’t right. But I did it for science, for the sake of humanity."
"If you're sorry, darling Karen, let me go."
"I can't do that, Lily... the parasites you carry could start an epidemic that would kill hundreds of people, maybe thousands."
"I will wait, then... I have time, sweet Karen... I have been around so long it would boggle your mind were I to tell you the truth. In a blink of an eye, all of you will be dead while I am still here. I can even wait until these walls crumble back into the dust they are made from... of course you do not believe me."
She did, however. The more she talked with Lily, the greater her sense of guilt grew over taking her from her home and bringing her here to this prison. If Lily was more than a thousand years old, was she more than a million? Ten million? Twenty million?
Karen wondered how old Lake Baikal was. She chided herself for not knowing that already. She thought she had prepared herself for these interrogations of Lily but it was rapidly becoming apparent who had the upper hand. She tried a different strategy.
"So you're saying we share an evolutionary heritage, Lily?"
"Well, that seems rather obvious, doesn't it, Karen?'
Lily put her hand up to the glass indicating for Karen to do the same. Their hands were not as different as they were similar.
"Can your kind mate with human beings, Lily?"
"No one knows that for sure, Karen... our kind may not be compatible with yours so far as I know. But I did I marry a human being once."
"You were married to a man, Lily?"
"Oh yes, Karen... for quite a long time. Of course we never had any children... but then again, I did not desire them. Unlike your species, we are able to consciously control our ovulation."
"But you did have sexual relations with him?"
"What do you think, Karen? It wouldn’t have been much of a marriage otherwise, now would it?"
Lily laughed lyrically as she looked at her with such longing in her eyes that Karen was momentarily tempted to open the sealed stainless steel and plastic door that separated them and go to Lily as a lover and not as a doctor.
Lily was right... she didn’t belong here. The old guilt surfaced again, even sharper than before, like a knife cutting away at the knot in her stomach... she continued talking to cover her discomfort.
"And since you stayed with him, he didn’t sicken and die. That's fascinating, Lily."
Again, Lily shrugged her shoulders as if that information was something everyone should know. When she shook back her hair and raised her blue eyes to look Karen in the face it was as if Lily saw right into her soul... if indeed she had one.
"But you two must have spent time apart during your marriage, Lily. What happened if he left you to go to work or to take a journey?"
"He died, my darling Karen."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Lily. I should have realized..."
"I was ignorant or perhaps I merely forgot. I did not understand that we had to stay together. I didn't yet realize the consequences of him leaving me or I would have forbid it. That man always listened to me.
"Such an arrangement, a man and a woman from the Lake, was not something that ever happened among my people before, at least as far as I knew.
"I remember having strange dreams, however, of a time long before when I lived above the surface of the Lake with many different people... some were human while others were a blending of us and them.
"Sometimes I think it really happened but other times I tell myself how such times had to be impossible... our two species could never live together in harmony... we would only end up killing each other off."
"So your species can be killed but you do not age like we do... is that right, Lily?"
"Of course we can be killed, sweet Karen. This is why no one is left but me."
"That must be terrible, Lily. I'm sorry you are the last of your kind... I wish I could help you."
"Maybe you can, darling Karen... our time together is just beginning to dawn. We will share many moments together over the coming centuries."
"Now you are making fun of me, aren’t you, Lily."
"Not at all... I am something of a seer, darling Karen, or perhaps I have been here before and so I know what is to happen. Do you believe in destiny?"
"Honestly, at this moment I believe in it, yes. I am ready to open this door and let you go, but only if you take me with you. Is that part of your power over human beings?"
"I always give you a choice, darling Karen."
"What do you mean, Lily? What kind of choice do you give us?"
"If I asked you to come with me, to stay with me always, would you, sweet Karen? No one ever has, at least not yet. Perhaps you will be the first?"
"No..."
Karen emerged from her semi-trance to see Hector had fallen asleep sitting up, his balding head comically bobbing up and down in rhythm with the rails.
She rose to go i
nto the dining car where she ordered a double vodka sour. She lighted a foul-smelling Russian cigarette while watching the darkened scenery crawl past the window. She whispered to it.
"I want to live forever like you, Lily. Come back to me."
Chapter 16—Childhood
Drummond hated Nate.
He saw how the Ladies favored him. It wasn’t right the way they indulged the boy. He thrilled at bullying Nate each chance he got even though he knew he would get a thrashing if anyone ever found out. The Ladies were fearsome when aroused.
Nate never told on him, however. Rather than being grateful for that, Nate's timid actions only served to infuriate Drummond all the more. He thought of the kid as a weakling—someone to be taken advantage of—and he never missed an opportunity to put Nate in his place.
As time went by Drummond especially loved taking Nate's girlfriends away from him. If he saw a girl so much as look at Nate, Drummond made a consistent effort to bed her, to impregnate her with his seed, and to despoil her.
Lucy was his latest conquest. She was a dismal little thing with bad skin who hardly ever smiled and who seemed as infatuated with Nate as he was with her. She had a pinched face that made it look as if she just bit into something sour with thin lips barely covering her protruding front teeth.
Her ratty hair and fair skin combining with her scrawny frame lent her the appearance of a scarecrow and an ugly one at that. She had a perpetual slouch that hid an enormous chest. Drummond had no feelings for the girl other than to use her to hurt the boy who the Ladies seemed to consider their heir apparent, for it was clear that the Ladies preferred Nate over the older two boys.
He had known Kirk before they arrived at the castle on that fateful day when everyone in the village was sick and dying. Drummond was sick too.
One day he had been fishing by the polluted river that ran through town when Kirk showed up. He seemed flustered over something—in a hurry—like the time he was hiding from the police. This time, however, the boy didn’t notice him at first.
He stooped down to pick up a stone from the riverbank but rather than throwing it into the water like Drummond expected, Kirk looked at it for a long while before he put it in his pocket. Then the boy seemed to realize he was not alone.
"I need you to do me a favor, Lucich."
Drummond didn’t even know Kirk's first name so it surprised him to hear his mentioned. They weren’t friends... not even acquaintances... but if the kid needed a favor perhaps he had something to return.
"What's in it for me, Kirk?"
"How about all the fine whiskey you can drink and all the girls in the world?"
Kirk was obviously high on some kind of drugs. Still, Drummond listened to his ramblings and in the end promised to do as he asked. Everything unfolded just as Kirk described... within six months a plague began sweeping the village... people were lying dead in the streets and the police were nowhere to be found.
He remembered how he helped Kirk into the street where they both collapsed. Though the two of them went to school together—they were both twelve years old—they were not what anyone called friends: he bullied Kirk incessantly... so that random act of kindness by the riverbank on Kirk's part surprised Drummond.
How did Kirk know what was about to happen? And why did he choose Drummond to go along with him to the salvation awaiting them at Orchardton Hall? One of the reasons he drank so much was to dull the burning memories of the debt he owed Kirk... one that could never be repaid.
It was like there were two Kirks... one was a blithering idiot that he knew so well while the other was something fearsome, possessed of an intellect far superior to anything ever known before. That was the Kirk who had asked him for a favor.
He had done as Kirk requested... the day he woke to find everyone in the village either sick or dying, including himself, he set out to look for the boy. He found him in the pharmacy... right where Kirk had told him to look.
Picking him up and carrying Kirk out to the street they were nearly run down by a car speeding through the village before it screeched to a halt, the bumper centimeters from his face. A harried woman emerged from the vehicle. She helped to pull him into the back seat. He was too sick to notice if the woman gathered in Kirk as well but later he was at the castle too so it was apparent she did.
Once they arrived at the castle Drummond made a full recovery in just a few hours. The woman who rescued him told him she had bad news: the whole village was dead. Drummond feigned sorrow but in his heart he didn’t care about anyone anyway. His father got drunk and beat him daily while his mother was the village whore. He had no friends.
He discovered the woman who saved his life—a doctor, no less—also rescued two girls from the village. They were sisters—Kendra and Mindy—both younger than he was, but by the time they turned eighteen he had them both, even though Mindy was considered the girlfriend of Kirk, a stuttering fool who turned red each time the girl tried to talk to him. Drummond had no such compunctions.
When he knocked up both girls he felt like a hero who was saving the world. They both gave birth to girls, however. When he impregnated them both again not a year later, they gave birth to girls. After the third go around with them again produced girls, Dr. Karen asked him give her a sample of his sperm.
He leered as he handed it to her.
Later, however, he was devastated when Dr. Karen informed him that he was incapable of fathering a male child; his chromosomes had mutated, perhaps due to the virus which killed off everyone else. He set out to prove her wrong but after producing a dozen girls with Kendra and Mindy he began to suspect the doctor was right.
When Nate was born he wondered who the father could be. He was sure stuttering Kirk could not produce a boy child even if Lady Natalia bedded him, which Drummond knew was completely out of the realm of possibility. The three Ladies were in a whole other league compared to the People. Drummond had never even spoken to them.
Kirk was a squat boy who turned into a round man. When he noticed how he had no luck with women Drummond took to teasing him about his looks, calling him Dough-boy and Fatso. Though he was often brutal toward his friend, Kirk never seemed to take insult even though Drummond considered him the village idiot.
As Nate grew older, Drummond saw how the boy matured unusually fast and not only that, the kid was a whiz at anything he set his funky little hands to doing. By the time Nate was four years old he was tearing down an old automobile engine, repairing it, and driving himself about the grounds.
One night Drummond sneaked into the garage where the kid kept his car and poured sugar into the gas tank. It was an old trick his drunken father pulled on anyone who crossed him. Rather than getting mad about it, however, Nate simply set out to rebuild the engine again.
Drummond despised going to Siberia. They made the trip every seven years, like clockwork. Before that first trip he was asked to help clear the maintenance drive through the Chunnel of stalled cars. There were bodies inside of them and they stank of death. There were dozens of vehicles to be moved before they could get through.
Once they were on their way to Lake Baikal he got motion sickness riding in the windowless back of the van that the Ladies picked out for the trip. When he got the heaves they wouldn't stop. He puked for seven thousand kilometers.
Now they took a bus. Sitting by a window lent him a sense of horizon so that his motion sickness wasn’t as acute. He remembered the bus was sitting in a depot in the village. Leave it to Nate to repair the engine and discover a hand pump with which to refuel it at petrol stations along the way. He knew it wasn’t the kid's fault they had to go on the trip but it pissed him off anyway.
When they got to the Lake he bided his time until he saw Nate walking along the shore all by himself. Drummond ingratiated himself into the boy's good graces by suggesting they become friends. He lured the kid into the Lake by pretending to want to go wading with him.
Looking about to make sure no one else was around to see, he p
ulled Nate into deep water holding his head under the water until bubbles appeared on the surface. Drummond figured he'd tell the Ladies that the kid fell into the Lake and by the time he got there to rescue him, he had drowned.
After a full five minutes had elapsed he triumphantly pulled the kid from under the water. Instead of being a dead and a limp body, however, Nate laughed, apparently thinking Drummond was playing with him. He was so shocked that he turned the kid loose. Nate promptly dove under the water again, emerging some five hundred yards away well out into the Lake.
"The kid is a goddamned porpoise."
The incident seared itself into Drummond's mind. He sensed real magic at work in the world when the Ladies saved his life by just being around him. But a boy who breathed under water was something Drummond had never imagined in his wildest dreams.
Soon after they returned to Orchardton Hall he caught Nate and Lucy swimming in the creek below the castle. He threatened Lucy with another romp in the bushes but when he tried to grab her, the kid Nate had cold cocked him from behind. He woke to soiled blue jeans and a moon peering down on him.
Embarrassed at being waylaid by a four year old, for a time he desisted in his bullying of Nate. But as old habits died hard, when the boy began to grow eyes for the girls Drummond couldn't help but renew his old hatred. Lucy was nothing special—he had her young and he had her often—but he knew how much Nate enjoyed her companionship.
At Orchardton Hall the Ladies held a dance each and every week in the ballroom. Calendars meant nothing but like all the People Drummond believed Friday night was for dancing. The Ladies instilled their love of the dance into the girls by teaching them early how to move just so. They did the tango and the salsa and even did ballet at times. By the time they became teenagers the girls were as proficient as professionals.
The boys Drummond and Kirk did not participate as willingly though they came to the dance to hang around the edges and making fun of Nate by mocking his moves on the dance floor. Standing there over the years and watching the dance unfold Drummond noticed how often Nate chose Lucy as his dance partner.
