by Неизвестный
“When I was a little girl, I went to Our Lady of Grace School right here in Maywell. It's a lovely old school, run by the Sisters of Mercy. Sister Saint Stephen, Sister Saint Martin, Sister Saint Agnes. And Mother Star of the Sea.” She laughed. “Good old Mother Star of the Sea. I'm glad she's safely dead. Sometimes I still have nightmares about her.” Goose bumps appeared on Bonnie's arms. “Oh, God, she's waiting for me. I can feel it, she is! Mother, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Mother.”
George listened to her exploring her private fears. He thought she might be an angel, this lovely girl, an angel come to torment him with her innocence. If she had risen up and taken him and jammed him in the coils, he would have let her.
“The thing is, it's so easy for a Catholic to go to hell. I've got so many mortal sins. Hundreds.”
“You're a witch. You're in a coven.”
“Listen, a Catholic can go through a whole life, be all sorts of things. But when it comes time to die, the first thing that crosses your mind is 'Dear God, where did I put my rosary?' ”
“Sin is a relative thing, Bonnie. No church can tell you whether or not you've sinned. You have to believe it. That is one of the most freeing things I've learned from Connie.”
“You haven't learned it quite right. What she teaches is that the conscience never lies. I've sinned, George, by the lights of church and craft alike. What if some devil captures me and never lets me come back?”
George didn't like the drift of this. “Ready,” he snapped.
Bonnie took a long drag on her cigarette. “You wouldn't believe some of the things I've done. Poor Mother Star of the Sea. I'm still guilty as hell about her. I guess I always will be.”
“What happened?” Clark asked. George could have choked him.
She snorted. “Baby boy, I've done things you would not believe. Things that would blow even your wiccan mind away.”
George laughed, trying hard to lighten this conversation. Casting about in his mind, he thought he had come across a way to reassure her and regain control of the situation. “Bonnie, do yourself a favor and forget Catholic sins. How about the real sins against humanity? I mean, like murder. Have you ever murdered anybody?”
Clark shifted on his feet. “Let her talk about her sins. It could be important.”
“Dark, please be quiet! Bonnie?”
“It depends entirely on your definition of abortion. If you say it's murder, I'm six times guilty.”
That was a bad move, Georgie boy. Still, he kept fighting. “You're as innocent as any other accidental mother! Abortion isn't a crime, is it? An aborted fetus is simply somebody who didn't happen.”
“Mother Star of the Sea always taught that hell is very, very small, because the souls in it are so turned away from God, so concentrated on themselves, that they've literally gotten tiny.” She looked at her cigarette. “The whole of hell could be hidden in one corner of a little coal was the metaphor she used.”
He had to pull her back to their shared hopes or he was going to lose her. “This is science, Bonnie. Our morality is that of science and craft.”
For the longest time she kept looking at the glowing end of the cigarette. “I think I see it,” she said. “Hell has come for me. It's hiding in my cigarette.”
“I told you not to smoke. Now let's get going.”
“It's waiting for me.”
In a desperate effort to distract her, George took her cheeks in his hands, turned her face to him, and kissed her full on the mouth. He probed against her teeth with his tongue. She resisted, then she opened her mouth to him. He concentrated on the pleasure of the contact. No matter the circumstances, a kiss is a kiss.
“Bonnie, I love you. I love you too much to let anything happen to you. Let me tell you—”
“George, with all respect this isn't going to work. I don't think—”
“Hush! Don't say another word. It can work and it will. You know in your heart just what will happen when I turn off your electrical functioning. You are going to go to sleep. Black sleep. Emptiness. Nothing. Gone.”
“George, how do you know that? You can't!” “But I do! And so do you. And so does every human being. We live a little time and then we die and that is the end. Why do you think we're so afraid of death? Because in our heart of hearts we all know it's the end. No more George, no more Bonnie. Over. Done. That's what scares us, not some medieval mumbo jumbo about hell.”
“So I'll just be—like—asleep? That's what you're saying?”
“Exactly.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “I don't believe you.” A flicker of smile crossed her face. She drew George close to her, pressed her lips against his ear. “You be sure and bring me back, because if you do I am going to take you to my room and take off your clothes and love you senseless.”
“I'll get a heart attack!”
“That's me general idea, you old fart! I just want to make sure you don't give up on me. I want total motivation.”
Here was the old Bonnie again, sexy and tough and humorous. Her words had really steamed him up. Getting into her would be quite an experience. Quite remarkable.
He hoped it would actually happen. As time went on and he became more and more a beggar to the aitar of womanhood, he had learned to control such hopes. But Lord, not even as a twenty-five-year-old Lothario had he ever received such a hot proposition. Not even from Kate, and he had married her. Married her because she was soft and hard at the same time.
He wanted someone to twist the guilt out of his bowels even as they caressed him. As well as a woman, he wanted a judge.
Bonnie touched the chalked outline of her own body. “That lab bench is cold.”
“Think of how famous you'll be. You'll be on the cover of magazines. Personal appearances. TV. Lecture tours. For a while you'll probably be the most famous person in the world.”
“Maybe I'll even get to meet a few people where I'm going. Bring back the rest of Answered Prayers from Truman Capote.”
“Funny girl.” He glanced at dark, gave him a quick nod that said let's go.
Clark responded instantly. “I'm ready to wire you up, dear.” Bonnie was wearing jeans and an MSC sweatshirt. She pulled off the shirt without even a trace of embarrassment. She wore no bra, and her breasts were as succulent as the pears of autumn, dark hardly seemed to notice, making George wonder for a moment if they might not be old lovers. But they weren't, of course. They simply belonged to the unfortunate new generation, which took bodies for granted. Sex for them wasn't dirty, poor suckers.
George helped her onto the lab bench. “It's really cold in here,” she said. “Put a towel over me after you're finished, okay, Clark?”
“Yeah.” He greased her ankles and wrists and attached electrodes, then taped others down on her chest, forehead, and neck. George wished he was the one doing it, especially that blushing chest. “You're right, lemme see here.” Clark went over to the array of monitoring instruments. “Is the tape rolling, George?”
“No.”
“It's set up,” Bonnie said. “I didn't turn it on. All you have to do is press the 'play' and 'record' switches on the front of the machine.”
George found the buttons on the videotape recorder. When he pushed them down, the machine whirred. He could see the tape inside begin to spin. “It's running.”
“Right,” Clark replied. “Here I go. This is life signs monitoring for Bonnie Haver. I have the following metabolic signs. Heart rate 77, blood pressure 120 systolic, 70 diastolic. The subject weighed at the beginning of the experiment 128 pounds. She is a blond Caucasian female, eyes green, distinguishing marks a crescent-shaped scar on the left breast below the nipple. She is twenty-three years, four months, and eight days old.”
Dark was an efficient man. George nodded to him from his own station before the instrument bank. He ran the quicktest on the coils, sending a brief jolt of current through it to test connections.
“Oh! I felt that!”
“Just the test bur
st. What did you feel?”
“Like I fell right through the table.”
“Good. That means it's working.” George began to adjust power to the coils, making certain that there would be uniform voltages at all points around her body. He did not know quite what would happen if some part of it was not correctly nulled. What, for example, would be the implication of a dead heart and a living brain? He certainly did not intend to perform that experiment on a human subject.
Clark continued. “I am now going to read out the electrical status of the subject. Microvoltage loads are well within the normal range. Brain readings are as follows: alpha, .003 microvolts; beta, .014 microvolts; delta, .003 microvolts; lambda, .060 microvolts; theta, .0014 microvolts. Oscillation rate is nineteen. The brain is in deltoid activity level. All indications are normal, and suggest a resting person, somewhat tense. That completes this statement of the subject's current physical condition.”
Now it was George's turn. “Thank you, Mr. Jeffers. The condition of the null-electric apparatus is as follows: the coils are all at uniform resting voltage of .00012 microvolts, equal to the ambient charge of the atmosphere present in the laboratory, as measured by the Forest-Hayiard atmospheric voltmeter, calibrated to standard zero September 19, 1985, in this same setting. Since calibration no variances have occurred and no adjustments have been made. Thus I conclude that the instrument is accurate and the null-electric field is completely inactive at this time. A brief operational test confirmed by instrumentation and by subject perception that the field can be activated. That completes my statement of the condition of the instrumentation.” He paused a moment. “I think, at this point, we might have the privilege of hearing from the subject.”
“I feel more or less normal. My stomach's slightly acidic and I must confess that I'm tense. My breathing feels normal and unrestricted. I'm cold. I guess I'm also a little scared.”, “Bonnie, are you willing to go ahead with the experiment?”
A tiny voice. Hopefully audible to the microphone. “Yes.” At the moment the motion detector in the animal room began warbling. George felt a surge of blood; Bonnie jerked and gasped; even Clark raised his eyebrows. “Visitors?”
“I'll go,” George said. “Just stay calm. Odds are it's a false alarm.” His lie was mostly for Bonnie's sake. “Remember, that motion detector was cheap.” He had not told them of the pistol he had brought from home and he did not tell them now. But he drew his windbreaker on. The gun was in the pocket.
The door to the animal room was closed. George watched the knob to see if it was being turned from the other side. He reached into his pocket and grasped the pistol. Then he put his hand on the knob and began slowly turning it himself. He was scared, but more than that he was mad. If he found any of Brother Pierce's crazies in there, he just might start shooting.
Clark appeared beside him. “Take it easy, George. If you're planning to use that gun, take it out of your pocket. It won't do you any good where it is now.”
George was impressed not only that he had noticed the pistol, but that he seemed to know how to handle a situation like this. “You an auxiliary cop or something?”
“I'm a Burt Reynolds fan.”
George hefted the pistol. “Ready, Burt?”
“Ready.”
He opened the door.
And saw something so impossibly dreadful that it made him jerk back. All the anger boiling in his soul threatened to erupt. He hated, hated, and yet—
Cat of fire, burning across a summer night of youth, cat of torment—
It sat, as black as space and enormous, on the windowsill The window behind it was locked.
“Maybe it's a stray,” Ctark said. He went over and turned off the motion detector.
George managed to force words from a chalky mouth. “What's it doing in here?”
“Maybe it's been here all along—in a cabinet or something. Sleeping.”
George stared at it. The thing was really huge. “What is it, some kind of a throwback?”
“Probably got a little wildcat in its genetic mix.”
“Well, I'm going to get it out of here. I hate cats. They're vermin, as far as I'm concerned.” He stuffed the pistol in his pocket and moved toward the animal, which promptly arched its back and hissed. Loud.
“Unwise move, George. That cat prefers to stay.”
“I can't use the motion detector with that thing wandering around in here.” He held out his hand. “Kitty?”
Sssst!
“Most unwise move. Maybe if we went over to the gym and found a badminton net, we could throw it over him—”
“All right! I get your point. We'll lock the door between the rooms and worry about it later.”
“My thoughts exactly. The experiment will only take three minutes. Nobody's going to stop us in that short a time. They couldn't even get the door broken down. So we're home free, right? If we stop delaying.”
George closed and locked the door. He kept his windbreaker on, though, with the pistol close at hand. When he brought in the motion detector, he had checked every nook and cranny in that room for stray frogs. He had looked in the cabinets, even under them. The room had been empty.
“Okay, Bonnie, we are going to start. Please report your out-of-the-ordinary sensations, if any.”
“Nothing so far.”
George flipped the seven switches that activated the coils. He began turning the rheostats. “Establishing a voltage base at .17 microvolts.”
“Oh. Ohhh. I definitely feel that. It's a tingling.”
“Blood pressure down to 110 over 68.”
“I'm sort of—all floaty. Oh, this is weird!”
When she stopped talking, George was startled to hear the distinct growl of a cat. He frowned, tried to look over the top of his instrument panel toward the door to the animal room, Although he could only see the top half, he could tell that it was very certainly closed. God, did he ever have the jitters. Cats were loathsome creatures. They needed to be drowned, every one of them. Or to be set afire and left to run like meteors in among the old sycamores of home. How his own cruelty disgusted him.
“Microvolts to .50.”
“Blood pressure 80 over 66. Brain to alpha.”
“I'm kind of sleepy and I sort of have this tickle in the middle of my chest where my heart is. And it aches a tittle.” Her voice cracked. “All of a sudden I feel sad.”
“Microvolts to .75. Damn!” Just for an instant he had seen the eyes of a cat hanging in midair over Bonnie. Glaring down at her.
“What is it?”
“No—forget it. I thought I was getting a bad reading But it's okay. Fine.” He tried to slow down his own thundering heart, to control the sweat tickling his top lip. “Bonnie, can you hear me?”
“Mnun?”
“She's showing theta peaks now, George. Oscillation is only five. She'll be unconscious in a few more seconds.”
“Microvolts to .90.”
“Blood pressure dropping. Theta dropping out. Oscillation null. Intercranial activity null.”
“But you still have some blood pressure?”
“Twenty over five. Dropping slowly.”
“Microvolts to 1.00.”
“The heart and blood have stopped. The brain has stopped. Dr. Walker, clinically Bonnie has died.”
George looked across at the still form on the bench. She was staring sightiessly at the ceiling. On her face was an expression that stunned George silent.
Had she, too, seen the eyes of the cat?
Chapter 12
Bonnie fell out of the world. She felt her blood forget her, her heart forget her, her brain forget her, her bones forget her.
Throughout life the body holds on to the soul. Death is a forgetting, and when the body forgets, it loosens its grip, and the soul falls out.
That is the simplicity of death.
It was so dark and so hollow here. There was no noise, no smell, no feel. And yet its hollowness was very, very huge.
Someth
ing was chasing her.
“Why am I still awake?”
She answered her own question, and at once: because you expected to be. Death is whatever you expect. If you expect heaven, you get it, or hell, or nothing. And you are also your own judge: you give yourself what you deserve. The fundamentalist creates his own heli, the Catholic his purgatory, the agnostics wander empty plains, muttering to themselves.
As she had died, a cat had come leaping out of the ceiling, Now it was behind her, stalking her. She sensed that it was dangerous. If she refused to believe in it, maybe it would disappear. Maybe it would stop chasing her down the hall to hell.
Torquemada burns, Sartre stalks in gray oblivion, Milton ascends dismal glories, Blake leaps with his demons.
It is all the same to death.
Helpless to change her own deepest beliefs, Bonnie joined her fate to that of the human majority. This was the death she contrived for herself: the big black cat came leaping and snarling toward her. As it got closer it got bigger and bigger and bigger.
She could not scream, not even when its face was the size of the risen moon, and she saw galaxies behind its eyes.
It roared, and she looked down its throat. She did not see a black carnivorous maw, but rather a long corridor, somehow familiar. A woman was walking this way along the familiar green linoleum floor. Bonnie opened her eyes wide, staring in disbelief at the absolute reality of the linoleum, the glossy green paint halfway up the walls, the jittering fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling.
This was Our Lady of Grace School, circa 1973. “No, please, it can't be.”
The oncoming nun was a juggernaut of black and white, the whimple framing a face made of prunes and daggers. Bonnie wanted to hide, for she knew who this skeletal creature was.
“Mother Star of the Sea!”
“Exactly, my dear. Come with me.”
“What happened to the cat?”
“Never mind that.”
Bonnie looked at the hand held out to her, the awful hand made of weathered, gnawed bones, glowing inwardly with fire where the marrow should be. “No! Get away from me!”
“Deep in my wound. Lord, hide and shelter me!”