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That week she miscarried. Cramps like seizures, and blood all over the bathroom before she'd realized what was happening. He stared at the blood in utter puzzlement.
"I have to rest," she said again. If only she could rest, some quiet place, where there was no singing and no poems and nothing, just peace. But she scraped up the tiny gelatinous mass at the core of her hemorrhage. An embryo at that stage of pregnancy would have been microscopic. There was something here, and it had limbs! It repulsed her and fascinated her. She insisted that they go to a laboratory where she could study it further.
She managed three hours there before people began to question them. She had made copious notes.
"There are two kinds of mutation," she told him, "those which can be passed on and those which cannot. This is not a singular occurrence, your birth, it's conceivable that you are...a species. But how could this be? How could this happen? How could one combination of telekinesis..." She broke off, resorting again to scientific terms. From the clinic she had stolen blood equipment and now she drew some of her own and properly sealed the vials.
He smiled at her in a grim way. "You don't really love me," he said coldly.
"Of course I do."
"Can you love the truth more than mystery?"
"What is the truth?" She approached him, put her hands on his face and looked into his eyes. "What do you remember way back, from the very beginning, from the time before humans came on the earth? You remember you talked of such things, of the world of the spirits and how the spirits had learned from humans. You spoke..."
"I don't remember anything," he said blankly.
He sat at the table reading over what he had written. He stretched out his long legs, crossed his ankles, cradled his head on his wrists against the back of the chair and listened to his own tape recordings. His hair now reached his shoulders. He asked her questions as if testing her, "Who was Mary Beth? Who was her mother?"
Over and over she recounted the family history as she knew it. She repeated the stories from the Talamasca files and random things she had heard from the others. She described--at his request--all the living Mayfairs she knew. He had begun to be quiet, listening to her, forcing her to speak, for hours.
This was agony.
"I am by nature quiet," she said. "I cannot...I cannot..."
"Who were Julien's brothers, name them and their children."
At last, so exhausted she couldn't move, the cramps coming again as if she had been impregnated again and was in fact already aborting, she said, "I can do this no longer."
"Donnelaith," he said. "I want to go there."
He'd been standing by the window, crying. "You do love me, don't you? You aren't afraid of me?"
She thought a long time before she said, "Yes, I do love you. You are all alone...and I love you. I do. But I'm frightened. This is frenzy. This is not organization and work. This is mania. I am afraid...of you."
When he bent over her, she clasped his head in her hands and guided it to her nipple; then came the trance as he sucked up the milk. Would he never tire of it? Would he nurse forever? The thought made her laugh and laugh. He would be an infant forever--an infant who walks and talks and makes love.
"Yes, and sings, don't forget that!" he said when she told him.
He finally began to watch television in long unbroken periods. She could use the bathroom without his hovering about. She could bathe slowly. She did not bleed anymore. Oh, for the Keplinger Institute, she thought. Think of the things the Mayfair money could do, if only she dared. Surely they were looking for her, looking for them both.
She had gone about this all wrong! She should have hidden him in New Orleans and pretended that he had never been there! Blundering, mad, but she hadn't been able to think on that day, that awful Christmas morning! God, an eternity had come and gone since then!
He was glaring at her. He looked vicious and afraid.
"What's the matter with you?" he said.
"Tell their names," she said.
"No, you tell me..."
He picked up one of the pages he'd so carefully written out, in narrow cluttered scrawl, and then he laid it down. "How long have we been here?"
"Don't you know?"
He wept for a while. She slept, and when she awoke, he was composed and dressed. The bags were packed. He told her they were going to England.
They drove north from London to Donnelaith. She drove most of the time, but then he learned, and was able on the lonely stretches of country road to manage the vehicle acceptably. They had all their possessions in the car. She felt safer here than in Paris.
"But why? Won't they look for us here?" he asked.
"I don't know. I don't know that they expect us to go to Scotland. I don't know that they expect you to remember things..."
He laughed bitterly. "Well, sometimes I don't."
"What do you remember now?"
He looked hateful and solemn. His beard and the mustache were ominous on his face. Signs of obvious sexual maturity. The miscarriage. The fontanel. This was the mature animal, or was it merely adolescent?
Donnelaith.
It wasn't a town at all. It was no more than the inn, and the nearby headquarters of the archaeological project, where a small contingent of archaeological students slept and ate. Tours were offered of the ruined castle above the loch, and of the ruined town down in the glen, with its Cathedral--which could not be seen from the inn--and farther out the ancient primal circle of stones, which was quite a walk but worth it. But you could go only in the designated areas. If you roamed alone, you must obey all signs. The tours would be tomorrow in the morning.
It chilled her to look down from the window of the inn and actually see it in the dim distorting distance, the place where it had all begun, where Suzanne, the cunning woman of the village, had called up a spirit named Lasher and that spirit had attached itself forever to Suzanne's female descendants. It chilled her. And the great awesome glen was gray and melancholy and softly beautiful, beautiful as damp and green and northern places can be, like the remote high counties of Northern California. The twilight was coming, thick and shining in the damp gloom, and the entire world below appeared mysterious, something of fairy tales.
It was possible to see any car approaching the town, from any direction. There was only one road, and you could see for miles north and south. And the majority of the tourists came from nearby cities and in busloads.
Only a few die-hards stayed at the inn, a girl from America writing a paper on the lost cathedrals of Scotland. An old gentleman, researching his clan in thes
e remote parts, convinced that it led back to Robert the Bruce. A young couple in love who cared about no one.
And Lasher and Rowan. At supper he tried some of the hard food. He hated it. He wanted to nurse. He stared at her hungrily.
They had the best and most spacious room, very prim and proper with a ruffled bed beneath the low white-painted beams, a thick carpet and a little fire to take away the chill, and a sweeping view of the glen below them. He told the innkeeper they must not have a phone in the room, they must have privacy, and what meals he wanted prepared for them and when, and then he took her wrist in his terrible, painful grip and said, "We are going out into the valley."
He pulled her down the stairs into the front room of the inn. The couple sat glowering at them from a small distant table.
"It's dark," she said. She was tired from the drive and faintly sick again. "Why don't we wait until morning?"
"No," he said. "Put on your walking shoes." He turned and bent down and started to pull off her shoes. People were staring at him. It occurred to her that it wasn't at all unusual for him to behave like this. It was typical. He had a madman's judgment; a madman's naivete.
"I'll do it," she said. They went back upstairs. He watched as she dressed for the cold outdoors. She came out fit for a long night of exploration, walking shoes laced over wool socks.
It seemed they walked an endless time down the slope and then along the banks of the loch.
The half-moon illuminated the jagged and broken walls of the castle.
The cliffs were perilous, but there were well-worn paths. He climbed the path, pulling her along with him. The archaeologists had set up barriers, signs, warnings, but there was no one around. They went where they chose to go. New wooden staircases had been built in the high half-ruined towers, and down into dungeons. He crept ahead of her, very surefooted, and almost frenzied.
It occurred to her that this might be the best time for escape. That if she only had the nerve she could push him off the top of one of these fragile staircases, and down he would go and splat, he'd have to suffer like any human! His bones weren't brittle, they were mostly cartilage still, but he would die, surely he would. Even as she considered it, she began to cry. She felt she could not do it. She could not dispatch him like that. Kill him? She couldn't do it.
