by Farris, John
Hassan wasn't happy either. They maintained ten paces apart, each covering the other's flank, as they walked slowly toward Eden's bungalow. A clump of fig trees on one side of the stone bungalow; otherwise there was no place for a large animal that had left no sign of its passing in the lush green of the lawn. All of the roof was visible. There was a stub of a stone chimney, thread of gray smoke visible against the Southern Cross.
The only door, oak with iron hinges, had been broken down and scattered like matchsticks. So the were-beast had gone inside. And possibly was still there.
Hassan let out a low moan as the sitting room of the bungalow became visible to them. He stopped, refused to budge with a taut shake of his head.
Tom didn't blame him. He saw it too.
Any sort of animal he'd been more or less prepared for. But not this.
She was near the hearth in near-darkness, the remaining coals in the deep fireplace glowing through the translucent, nude body. By contrast the sheaf of black hair between her shoulder blades, tapering to her tailbone, was as stark and earthy as a male lion's thick mane. She turned her head in response to their presence. Faint fire was reflected in the otherwise empty pits where eyes should have been.
Hassan moaned low in his throat. Hair crept up the back of Tom's neck.
When she turned full-front and began a slow drift away from the hearth, coming toward them, holding her hands bound in silver shackles away from the coldly beautiful, waxen body, Hassan broke. He dropped his rifle and departed with a strangled cry.
"Tom," Bertie said softly, and he'd never been so glad to hear anyone's voice. She was out on the lawn behind him. He didn't look around, but he was grateful that she'd ignored him and followed. He had had some weird experiences in Bertie's company, but this was totally beyond his ken.
Bertie spoke again.
"Ask her what they want."
"Can't you ask her?"
"This One and I, we're natural enemies. She won't speak to me."
"All right" he said, not understanding but not doubting Bertie, who had access to worlds of the afterlife where he could never go. "What do you want?" he said, his words followed by a tight involuntary grimace, the facial muscles a little out of control. Talking to a wraith.
Where is Eden?
He heard the voice in his head; his ears picked up Bertie's quick intake of breath.
"Answer her, Tom."
"What the f—"
"Please, Tom."
"I don't even know what this thing is."
"I do. Answer her."
"Eden isn't here," he said to the wraith. "She's gone away." He swallowed and added, "Nor will she be coming back to Shungwaya."
The wraith hovered three feet above the floor inside the doorway, quaking like hung silk in a faint draft. Tom felt its disapproval, then a scour of fear across his face, a burn of deep cold. God damn it, he was shaking too, and that made him angry.
Where has she gone?
"Piss off, sweetheart," Tom said, with more bravado than he felt.
Die then, the wraith responded.
She broke apart like a large frowzy cobweb as the were-beast bounded toward him from the dark of the bedroom. Tom fired and had a half second to throw up an arm to protect his face. He was wearing an old leather shooting jacket of his father's, the arms layered with strips of linoleum and steel studs. He was thrown over backward with his arm in the jaws of a hyena, a bolt of pain stabbing to his shoulder as if he were being electrocuted. Then he heard another shot and the beast spat out his arm, moaned, and used Tom's body for a springboard, leaping away from him. The force of what amounted to a body blow from a heavyweight champ drove the air from his lungs. He heard the crack of another shot.
Half a minute to get his breath back. Bertie and Hassan were bending over him. Bertie's face was pinched from pain, her right arm hanging limp.
"We know two things," she said, breathing hard herself. "It doesn't like getting shot. And it bleeds real blood."
"Where—"
"Long gone. Won't return."
"Help me up, Hassan."
"I ran, Bwana Tom," Hassan said, looking sick from shame.
"But you came back." On his feet, Tom looked at the rips in the tough leather sleeve of his jacket, the mangled strips of linoleum ripped loose from studs. Hassan helped him out of the jacket, and he had a look at his bare forearm. It was contused and swelling, but not bitten through the bones. He made a fist, then probed with two fingers of his left hand. It hurt. Couple of fractures, he thought. Nothing serious.
Tom looked at Bertie. A massive surge of adrenaline had drained away, left him feeling wobbly.
"You fired that first shot?"
"Yes. Hassan's double-Jeff. I think the recoil broke my shoulder. Hassan took the second shot." She grinned through considerable pain, pitched her voice like old Gabby's. "Shoulda seen the ornery critter jump and skedaddle on outta here."
Tom smiled at the dialogue from Roy Rogers movies. Bertie had lived with Tom and Gillian from ages twelve to eighteen, when she graduated cum laude from Columbia University. Already a darling of the editors of high-fashion magazines and working on her second million dollars.
"Reload," Tom said to Hassan, then realized the Somali would have done so even before looking to see if Tom was still alive. Tom picked up his own H and H, seeing blood on the grass. "Let's finish this," he said. He took two steps and felt his bad knee give. Shook his head in frustration and annoyance. His body no longer capable of the effort he demanded of it. Arm broken, chest badly bruised so that breathing sent shock waves to his temples.
"We both need doctoring," Bertie said. "Three of our dogs have to have surgery. You can't kill it, anyway."
"I can make a damned good try."
Etan Culver was crossing the lawn, trying to make pictures in near-darkness. "Did you get it?" he yelled.
"Tom, I think it's changed shape by now. But we'll be seeing it again."
"Why? And what does it want with Eden?"
"You mean they. Don't forget our soulless wraith with the empty eye sockets. It's Eden's soul she needs." A shudder; Bertie held her injured shoulder, gritted teeth, and looked past Tom into the bungalow Eden had occupied a few hours ago. "But if she can't have it... then Eden's body must do. That's even more terrible. The were-beast has her spoor. I think it exists only to mate with Eden. And it will if it gets another chance."
Ten-thirty in the morning.
Bertie lay in a woven hammock on the veranda beneath a cooling ceiling fan. Her arm was in a tight sling, left hand cupping her separated right shoulder. Surgery, she had been told at the clinic in Naivasha, was the obvious remedy. Healing herself was another, but that was a choice she hadn't mentioned to the attending physician. It was something she had never attempted before, because she'd never been seriously hurt.
Healing was one aspect of the Gift Bertie had possessed even before birth; it had emerged when she was three years old. Joseph Nkambe had been bitten by a black mamba and lay dying on the floor of their home by the Thika River in the Central Highlands, his body vibrating from deadly muscle toxin injected by the mamba's fangs. The mortality rate from mamba toxin, even when antivenin is promptly administered, is higher than ninety percent.
But at the concerned touch of his only daughter, Joseph's trembling ceased. He later spoke of the experience as a calming warmth that rushed the length of his swollen arm toward his fibrillating heart, from there spreading swiftly through the rest of his body.
After a nearly sleepless night Bertie was beginning to feel drowsy, her attention diverted from the CNN news on Kenyan television. She began to feel warmth in her palm, which radiated down into her hurt shoulder. And she was aware of a change in the light around her, which seemed to emanate from her solar plexus. After several minutes of this she gripped the shoulder tightly, action that a few hours before would have had her screaming, squeezed, then relaxed her hand. Swaying gently in the hammock, she breathed deeply for a while, then sat up and r
emoved the fasteners that held the sling and her arm tightly to her body. She placed her right fist in her left hand and raised the elbow higher than the formerly separated shoulder. It still felt a little stiff. She worked the shoulder carefully, without pain.
"Doing okay now?"
Bertie glanced at the slender smiling girl sitting in a cane armchair nearby, wearing a Cal State Shasta Lady Wolves' basketball practice jersey and cotton shorts. For an instant Bertie almost lost her balance and tumbled out of the hammock.
"Oh, hey! Thought you would be starting across the Atlantic by now."
She uncrossed her legs in the armchair and adjusted a favorite Masai beaded headband that held her russet hair off her forehead.
"Eden ought to be. But I'm not Eden. I'm the girl she left behind. Kind of a last-minute inspiration just before she took off at four this morning. She thought, you know, maybe I could be helpful when we all get to Rome."
"Uh-huh," Bertie said, still flustered. "Then you must be—"
"Eden's doppelganger. Pleased to meet you, after all this time." Her smile was wry, appearing to shade after a few moments to bitterness.
"Doppelganger. Right. And it is a pleasure. What do we, uh... I mean…"
"I think the best way is to forget I'm a dpg and just treat me like Eden's long-lost, lookalike sis. We don't want to spook the natives. By the way, whatever Eden knows I know too, which will save you a lot of explaining. I can find my way around the old homestead. Shangri-lala."
"Shungwaya."
"Just goofing. As you can see, I borrowed some of Eden's stuff to wear. When I'm not wearing clothes—might as well get this out of the way—I'm invisible to everyone but Eden, although animals get kind of a shadowy impression. That's pretty much my entire bag of tricks. I can't brain-lock like you can, melt glaciers with my X-ray vision, or turn into a feathered serpent. What do you call me? Guinevere. That's the name I've picked out for myself if, let's make that when, Eden decides to release me. Gwen for short.—What's the matter?"
"You've already talked more than I heard Eden talk the first two months she was here."
"Well, Eden was getting over a crap load of trauma. Also, I may be her mirror image, but I have an independent mind when I'm on assignment, like now. I'm a social animal. Naturally fun-loving and loquacious. Eden's big fault, you didn't hear it from me, is high seriousness."
"What did you mean," Bertie said, still playing catch up, "if Eden 'releases' you?"
"Oh, that. It's every doppelganger's goal. Eden is my homebody, so of course she has complete control of my destiny. But she can relinquish me to a life of my own. Ancient tradition. Eden is the Eponym, the Name-Giver, which is an aspect of her left-handed Art. The matrix of which is, of course, quantum physics."
"Of course."
Gwen looked across the lawn at the stone bungalow with the smashed door. A couple of workmen were removing shards of oak from the hinges, measuring for a new door.
"Maybe you could fill me in on what went down here last night, Bertie. Some animal peed all over Eden's bedroom. As if he was marking territory or something. What a stink."
"Well—"
Tom Sherard came out of the house, one hand on a cedar wood staff his grandfather had made seventy years ago. His right forearm was in a cast. He looked at the dpg.
"Good morning, Gwen."
"How're you, Tom?" The expression on Bertie's face had her howling with laughter. When she calmed down she said, "We met at the airport last night. Eden introduced us. I came back with Tom in the helicopter, but I guess he forgot to tell you."
"Under the circumstances," Tom said, "completely slipped my mind." He sat down carefully on the edge of the hammock, looking at Bertie's shoulder.
"I fixed it" she said. She shrugged, touched his nose with a forefinger, touched his mouth, sealed his lips, kissed him.
"So when do we leave for Rome?" the dpg asked as the kiss continued for much longer than just a friendly greeting. Bertie seemed in the mood to affirm something to herself. Tom didn't mind. The dpg began to squirm in the cane chair. "Since Eden took the Gulfstream to California, I suppose we're flying commercial."
"Yes, tonight," Tom said when Bertie reluctantly gave him space to speak. "I've just been on the phone with Katharine Bellaver. She'll meet us in Rome tomorrow."
"Eden's granny! Terrific. I've always wanted to meet Katharine. And tell her just what I think of her." Bertie was touching Tom's face again, a distant look in her eyes, mouth relaxed, even dreamy. Gwen said, "Bad enough she cheated Eden out of a mother, bet she's planning to cheat her out of her rightful inheritance. What's Eden worth, anyway? I can't believe she's never asked you."
The doppelganger flinched suddenly, stiffened, let out a cry, and grabbed her head with both hands. Bertie had gone from dreamy insouciance to a fiercer look in an instant.
"Oww! Hey! What are you doing?"
"Just something from my bag of tricks," Bertie said. "And if we're going to get along for the next few days—Gwen—you need to learn to zip it."
Chapter 14
WESTBOUND/NAIROBI-SAN FRANCISCO
GULFSTREAM N657GB
OCTOBER 15
0840 HOURS ZULU
When the door to Eden's cabin opened, letting in the white blaze of high-altitude morning light, she smelled coffee from the galley of the Gulfstream V jet and opened her eyes. The flight attendant was a Kenyan girl of mixed blood, with long tilted eyes the reddish brown of oxblood. She was too tall for the doorways and limited ceiling height of the forty-million-dollar executive jet, even though she wore flats. She bumped her noggin on the bulkhead above the doorway, smiled in apology for her presumed clumsiness.
"Miss Bell? I'm sorry, but Captain Lyle asked me to advise you that we will be landing in Lisbon at oh nine twenty to pick up a second crew before we start our transatlantic leg. Would you like breakfast now?"
Bell? Eden thought, then remembered that she was traveling on her Kenyan diplomatic passport. Legitimate, but costly; she'd never asked Tom how much money he had donated to a dozen charities dear to the hearts of government politicians—several of which were probably located in their own deep pockets. She and Tom seldom talked about money. Eden had seen her mother's will, and she knew about the trust funds. She knew that she was well off and with each passing year would become richer, in spite of the deepening global economic crisis that financial soothsayers lacked the nerve to call a depression. A little more than five months ago she had almost cleaned out a modest savings account at the Cal Shasta branch of B of A to pay for her graduation dress. Now she could walk into any of several banks from Zurich to San Francisco and be whisked immediately into one of the baronial private rooms those institutions reserved to transact business with the supremely well heeled. Or she could send an E-mail and a senior trust officer would gladly fly to her.
That kind of money.
Impressed with yourself, E. W.?
Sure. I'm zipping along at forty thousand feet in a jet with gold bathroom fixtures that belonged to a movie star who was so shocked by the initial terrorist attacks on America that he gave up his career and became a Jehovah's Witness. I'm not sure where I'm going or what I'm going to do when I get there. I can't use my own name to travel for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention. Betts is dying, and I may not be able to handle that one. I didn't even make it to Riley's burial. Riley and Betts were my parents, not some insane kid who spent half his life comatose inside a bubble and my biological mother, who I only net in my dreams. I wish Tom were here. But if he was, sooner or later I'd probably make a fool of myself like I almost did last night. Oh, the hell with this. Things get lousy sometimes. Deal with it.
Eden smiled at the flight attendant. "Thank you, Marthe. Give me a few minutes, please?"
After a quick shower in the gold and onyx bath of the master cabin, Eden approached breakfast without appetite. A glass of fresh pineapple and papaya juice woke up her taste buds; she discovered that the intermittent pain in her stomach w
as hunger. Before they landed in Lisbon Eden had cleaned up a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and sough dough French toast.
By then she also had the stomach to retrieve from between the covers of a signed first edition of Out of Africa that she was rereading the folded pages of the E-mail from Betts. A few hours ago she had stumbled through them with tears distorting her vision and a nervous, shocked heart. While they took on another flight crew she read the sometimes incomprehensible message again, with a dwindling fund of hope that Betts's situation could not be as bad as it appeared. She paused to look blankly out a window several times, the last time with a frown.
Who was Edmund Ruddy, and why had Betts never mentioned him?
Once they had taken off again, Eden asked the girl who was alternating with Marthe on the long flight for a pen and paper.
For several minutes she pondered the E-mail, circling several words. Then she composed a brief message and gave it to the flight attendant to fax.
Tom said I could depend on you if I needed help...
They were westbound over the Atlantic Ocean with the sun behind them. In San Francisco it was about one-fifteen in the morning. But Tom had said that Danny Cheng, whom he described as "like the CIA, but without the overhead," didn't keep bankers' hours.
The fax went through. Eden did some stretching exercises. The Gulfstream's captain, Reggie Lyle, and his copilot were snoozing with their shoes off in deep leather reclining chairs in the darkened compartment behind the flight deck. Eden paid a visit to the third pilot, recently retired from the French air force, who had taken over the left-hand seat in Lisbon.
"Will we be making a fuel stop?"
"Yes, in Newark."
"I wonder if we could stay there for a few hours?"
"Yes, of course, as long as you wish."