Part 61 (1/2)
”You're right,” he said. ”I didn't put my question very well. What I meant to ask was whether there was anything peculiar about the birth itself, anything odd about her labor pains or her contractions, anything remarkable about the initial state of the babies when they came out of her, any abnormality, any strangeness.”
He saw the surprise enter her eyes as his question tripped a switch in her memory.
”In fact,” she said, ”there was something unusual.”
”Let me guess,” he said. ”Both of the babies were born with cauls.”
”That's right! How did you know?”
”Just a lucky guess.”
”The h.e.l.l it was.” She wagged a finger at him. ”You're smarter than you pretend to be.”
He forced himself to smile at her. He had to force it, for there was nothing about Rita Yancy that could elicit a genuine smile from him.
”Both of them were born with cauls,” she said. ”Their little heads were almost entirely covered. The doctor had seen and dealt with that sort of thing before, of course. But he thought the chances of both twins having cauls was something like a million to one.”
”Was Katherine aware of this?”
”Aware of the cauls? Not at the time. She was delirious with pain. And then for three days she was completely out of her mind.”
”But later?”
”I'm sure she was told about it,” Mrs. Yancy said. ”It's not the sort of thing you forget to tell a mother. In fact ... I remember telling her myself. Yes. Yes, I do. I recall it very clearly now. She was fascinated. You know, some people think that a child born with a caul has the gift of second sight.”
”Is that what Katherine believed?”
Rita Yancy frowned. ”No. She said it was a bad sign, not a good one. Leo had been interested in the supernatural, and Katherine had read a few books in his occult collection. In one of those books, it said that when twins were born with cauls, that was ... I can't recall exactly what she said it meant, but it wasn't good. An evil omen or something.”
”The mark of the demon?” Tony asked.
”Yes! That's it!”
”So she believed that her babies were marked by a demon, their souls already d.a.m.ned?”
”I'd almost forgotten about that,” Mrs. Yancy said.
She stared beyond Tony, not seeing anything in the parlor, looking into the past, striving to remember....
Hilary and Joshua stayed back, out of the way, silent; and Tony was relieved that they recognized his authority.
Eventually, Mrs. Yancy said, ”After Katherine told me about it being the mark of a demon, she just clammed up. She didn't want to talk any more. For a couple of days, she was as quiet as a mouse. She stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, hardly moving at all. She looked like she was thinking real hard about something. Then suddenly, she started acting so d.a.m.ned weird that I had to start wondering if I still might have to send her away to the b.o.o.by hatch.”
”Was she ranting and raving and violent like before?” Tony asked.
”No, no. It was all talk this time. Very wild, intense, crazy talk. She told me that the twins were the children of a demon. She said she'd been raped by a thing from h.e.l.l, a green and scaly thing with huge eyes and a forked tongue and long claws. She said it had come from h.e.l.l to force her to carry its children. Crazy, huh? She swore up and down that it was true. She even described this demon. A d.a.m.ned good description, too. Full of detail, very well done. And when she told me about how it raped her, she managed to give me the chills, even though I knew it was all a bunch of c.r.a.p. The story was colorful, very imaginative. At first, I thought it was a joke, something she was doing just for laughs, except she wasn't laughing, and I couldn't see anything funny in it. I reminded her that she'd told me all about Leo, and she screamed at me. Did she scream! I thought the windows would break. She denied ever having said such things. She pretended to be insulted. She was so angry with me for suggesting incest, so self-righteous, a regular little prig, so determined to make me apologize--well, I couldn't help laughing at her. And that made her even angrier. She kept saying it hadn't been Leo, though we both knew d.a.m.ned well it had. She did everything she could to make me believe it was a demon that had fathered the twins. And I tell you, her act was good! I didn't believe it for a minute, of course. All that silly stuff about a creature from h.e.l.l sticking his thing in her. What a bunch of hogwash. But I started to wonder if maybe she had convinced herself. She sure looked convinced. She was so fanatical about it. She said she was afraid that she and her babies would be burned alive if any religious people found out that she'd consorted with a demon. She begged me to help her keep the secret. She didn't want me to tell anyone about the two cauls. Then she said she knew that both twins carried the mark of the demon between their legs. She pleaded with me to keep that a secret, too.”
”Between their legs?” Tony asked.
”Oh, she was carrying on like a full-fledged looney,” Rita Yancy said. ”She insisted that both of her babies had their father's s.e.x organs. She said they weren't human between the legs, and she said she knew I'd noticed that, and she begged me not to tell anyone about it. Well, that was purely ridiculous. Both those little boys had perfectly ordinary pee-pees. But Katherine jabbered on and on about demons for almost two days. Sometimes she seemed truly hysterical. She wanted to know how much money I'd take to keep the secret about the demon. I told her I wouldn't take a penny for that, but I said I'd settle for five hundred a month to keep mum about Leo and all the rest of it, the rest of the real story. That calmed her down a little, but she still had this demon thing stuck in her head. I was just about decided that she really believed what she was saying, and I was going to call my doctor and have him examine her--and then she shut up about it. She seemed to regain her senses. Or she got tired of her joke, I guess. Anyway, she didn't say one more word about demons. She behaved herself from then on until she took her babies and left a week or so later.”
Tony thought about what Mrs. Yancy had told him.
Like a witch cuddling a feline familiar, the old woman petted the white cat.
”What if,” Tony said. ”What if, what if, what if?”
”What if what?” Hilary asked.
”I don't know,” he said. ”Pieces seem to be falling into place ... but it looks ... so wild. Maybe I'm putting the puzzle together all wrong. I've got to think about it. I'm just not sure yet.”
”Well, do you have any more questions for me?” Mrs. Yancy asked.
”No,” Tony said, getting up from the footstool. ”I can't think of anything else.”
”I believe we've gotten what we came for,” Joshua agreed.
”More than we bargained for,” Hilary said.
Mrs. Yancy lifted the cat off her lap, put it on the floor, and rose from her chair. ”I've wasted too much time on this silly d.a.m.ned thing. I should be in the kitchen. I've got work to do. I made four pie sh.e.l.ls this morning. Now I've got to mix up the fillings and get everything in the oven. I've got grandchildren coming for dinner, and each one of them has a different kind of favorite pie. Sometimes the little dears can be a tribulation. But on the other hand, I'd sure be lost without them.”
The cat leapt abruptly over the footstool, darted along the flowered runner, past Joshua, and under a corner table. Precisely when the animal stopped moving, the house shook. Two miniature gla.s.s swans toppled off a shelf, bounced without breaking on the thick carpet. Two embroidered wall hangings fell down. Windows rattled.
”Quake,” Mrs. Yancy said.
The floor rolled like the deck of a s.h.i.+p in mild seas.
”Nothing to worry about,” Mrs. Yancy said.
The movement decreased.
The rumbling, discontented earth grew quiet.
The house was still again.
”See?” Mrs. Yancy said. ”It's over now.”
But Tony sensed other oncoming shockwaves--although none of them had anything to do with earthquakes.
Bruno finally opened the dead eyes of his other self, and at first he was upset by what he found. They weren't the clear, electrifying, blue-gray eyes that he had known and loved. These were the eyes of a monster. They appeared to be swollen, rotten-soft and protuberant. The whites were stained brownred by half-dried, sc.u.mmy blood from burst vessels. The irises were cloudy, muddy, less blue than they had been in life, now more the color of an ugly bruise, dark and wounded.
However, the longer Bruno stared into them the less hideous those damaged eyes became. They were, after all, still the eyes of his other self, still part of himself, still eyes that he knew better than any other eyes, still eyes that he loved and trusted, eyes that loved and trusted him. He tried not to look at them but into them, deep down beyond the surface ruin, way down in, where (many times in the past) he had made the blazing, thrilling connection with the other half of his soul. He felt none of the old magic now, for the other Bruno's eyes were not looking back at him. Nevertheless, the very act of peering deeply into the other's dead eyes somehow revitalized his memories of what total unity with his other self had been like; he remembered the pure, sweet pleasure and fulfillment of being with himself, just he and himself against the world, with no fear of being alone.
He clung to that memory, for memory was now all that he had left.
He sat on the bed for a long time, staring down into the eyes of the corpse.
Joshua Rhinehart's Cessna Turbo Skylane RG roared north, slicing across the eastward-flowing air front, heading for Napa. Hilary looked down at the scattered clouds below and at the sere autumn hills that lay a few thousand feet below the clouds. Overhead, there was nothing but crystal-blue sky and the distant, stratospheric vapor trail of a military jet.