by Farris, John
Chapter 42
9:52 A.M.
Lewis Gruvver went into the bath of the master suite where Charmaine, wearing a shower cap, was luxuriating among the bath gel bubbles in the sunken tub. He sat on the rounded marble rim, looking down at her.
"You look like you didn't digest your breakfast too well," Charmaine said, squinting an eye that had a little soap in it. "Tummy still not feelin' so great?"
"What? Oh, my stomach's okay. I wasn't that hungry, but these butlers they keep shuffling in and out of here can't just bake some biscuits; they got to whup up a feast every time."
"That sounds like we are lookin' a gift horse in the mouth, if you know what I'm talking about. Un cheval cadeau?'
"Means if somebody gives you a horse, you don't go countin' to see if it has all its teeth."
"Vraiment, Lew-eeess." She extended a long leg from the pink cloud of bubbles covering most of her body, pointed her toes at the vault ceiling with its fresco of naked brown-toned Brazilians discreetly having sex behind large palm fronds. She squinted again, at flaked polish on a big toenail. "You're not out of sorts because you didn't like the lovin' you got this morning?"
"What? Oh, no. You were perfect, baby. I'm the one jumped the gun and spoiled it for you."
"No complaints here," Charmaine said. "But it's like since we got up you're not even here half the time while I'm tryin' to talk to you."
"We didn't sleep together last night, Charmaine," Gruvver reminded her.
"Told you already I don't know how it happened I fell asleep out there after my swim. So are we finally okay with that?"
"What?"
"There you go again! Gruvver, you need to hit the gym this morning, get on the rowing machine; you've got cobwebs on your brain. And will you please look at me, I am talking to you."
But that was part of Gruvver's problem; he didn't want to look at her for long because overnight her eyes had changed. They were very old eyes in a youthful face, with something sly and fiery lurking in their depths. Like the eyes his mad old great-uncle Eutaw had by the end of his ninth decade, toothless old man but still a hell-raiser. It wasn't just that Gruvver's perceptions were a little off. Charmaine had been a frenzied clawing bitch during foreplay instead of her cuddly, slow-breathing pleasure-giving self. He'd lost his load when she raked the underside of his glans with her fingernails as he tried to mount her. It still hurt. There had been nothing loving in the action of her nails; she'd rejected him, as if she had suddenly found him undesirable and wanted no more couplings.
Heavy in the heart, Gruvver said, "The gym? Yeah. Good idea. First, though, I—"
As he drifted away again Charmaine splashed him. "Don't do that. What's going on in your head, Gruvver-man?"
"Oh—I'm not sure. For some reason I need to go next door."
"Go where? That big villa with its own tennis court? What for?"
"Somebody there I need to see. I think" Gruvver said, sorely perplexed and holding his head.
"Like who?"
"Don't know who they are. They just came in this morning."
"You are not making a lot of sense. You don't know who they are, then what business you got botherin' them?"
"There's a van parked near their gate. Watch birds, I think. But private, not government. It's not a surveillance gig."
"How do you know?"
"I had a look outside few minutes ago. When it first came to me that… I should go introduce myself."
"Well, sure. Just walk on over there, tell 'em Lewis Gruvver is here, on important business to discuss if only you can remember what it is."
"Look, Charmaine, I don't even pretend to understand what's got into me since yesterday."
"Makes two of us," she said sulkily.
"But it is driving me half crazy. Maybe when I get there, I'll know what it's about."
Charmaine, deep in the tub, studied him pityingly. "Lewis, I think I know what has you out of kilter."
"Yeah?" He saw the redness in her eyes, and looked quickly away. It was only soap. He wasn't himself this morning.
"What you're telling me is some kind of powerful dream you had and can't shake off."
"Dream? Maybe that's what it was," he said, wanting to believe her. But his scalp tightened as soon as he spoke.
"Sure! I have this dream; I'm late for a test which if I don't pass means I don't graduate. But I can't remember the building I'm supposed to take the test in. I'm walkin' and walkin' and I wake up cryin'. Even after I wake up that dream hangs on for a while. Why don't you get yourself another cup of coffee while I finish up with my bath? Then we'll do something fun. Want to drive over to Boulder Dam? I heard there's dead men in there, fell in while the concrete was bein' poured, which they had to do night and day. Couldn't stop pourin' to fetch out the bodies or else the dam wouldn't hold together when it was finished?'
"That's some story," Gruvver said, although the moment Charmaine stopped speaking he couldn't remember what she'd been telling him. One thought was crowding everything else out of his mind. Have to get out of here and go next door They know what's going on. Why Charmaine isn't Charmaine anymore.
As Gruvver got up to leave Charmaine flicked soapsuds at him with a churlish smile. The suds burned hot as lava on his skin. He pawed them away in sudden fright. Redness. Boiling red in the center of her pupils, spreading threadlike through the whites of her eyes. His scalp tightened again, as if he had been gripped by otherworldly fingers that were trying to drag him away from Charmaine, out of the bathroom, through the villa, and on to safety...
But what was there to be afraid of?
Charmaine rose from the tub, a dripping hand outstretched.
Never you mind, Lewis. He can't make you do a thing. Listen to me. Do what I tell you to do.
With her voice like fingernails ripping him again, this time tearing through his frontal lobes, Gruvver fled, stumbled across the glass floor of the bedroom, fish glimmer below, stumbled like a clumsy imitation man with too many hinges in his legs. Dragged this way, pulled another.
Let him go!
In addition to conflicting voices he heard sharp clickings in his assaulted mind: pool balls striking together. He glanced through the double doorway of the recreation room and saw his half brother Cornell inside, angled against the pool table, cue stick in his hands, smoothly running a rack of balls. He looked up inquiringly at Gruvver, then laid his stick down and followed him, in no hurry. Music in the rooms. Lionel Hampton, from the big-band era.
Gruvver labored to reach the front door of the villa, the safe outdoors, sunlight. Sanity restored. Each step now as if concrete were flooding over his feet, piling against his ankles. Millions of cubic yards of concrete in a continuous pour. Day and night. Apocryphal dead men in the forms down there, couldn't stop to pull them out. Concrete a thick river and nearly up to his knees while he discovered the doors wouldn't budge. Secure as a slab on his tomb. It's like the Taj Mahal, Charmaine had exclaimed on first entering the gift villa. Uh-huh.
Just let me get out of here, God and Jesus, anybody! Don't let a man die who doesn't know what he's dying for.
Charmaine, glistening from her bath, stood beside Cornell watching Gruvver as he doggedly recrossed the grand salon, foundering in what he knew to be fresh concrete. Loaded with the stuff. He shoved open the sliding door to the garden and fell awkwardly outside.
The pool apron had been freshly hosed. Birds were hopping around beneath feather-duster palms and pepper trees. The sounds of tennis came to him from the court next door; voices of two young women.
Over the wall! Get there! They will help you.
Some force beyond his comprehension yanked Gruvver to his feet and sent him staggering headlong around the pool. A young Hispanic gardener was at work, trimming vines in one corner of the garden. He turned when he heard Gruvver gasping, laid down his clippers, lit a cigarillo, and watched in amusement Gruvver's stilted, hectic progress toward the seven-foot wall between villas. Charmaine had come outside with Corn
ell, Charmaine still in the lush altogether, not even a towel for modesty's sake, snapping her fingers, hip-rolling to the big-band jump of "Hamp's Boogie-Woogie."
Gruvver stormed the yellow wall in his madness, pulling his feet out of the grasping flow of concrete. In his clumsiness, feet triple-size from accretions, he misjudged distance, smashed his face against the stuccoed wall, and fell back bleeding.
The concrete slopped over his chest as he lay stunned in a narrow bed of ivy. His hands were covered with the gray, sludgy stuff; when he raised them weakly into his line of sight they looked like the hands of a mummy.
This isn't real. It's all an illusion. You're not helpless. Fight it!
But who the hell are you, Gruvver thought, to be giving advice, when I'm the one who's about to be sealed up in a dam for the next five hundred years!
Chapter 43
10:50 A.M.
"I hope," Lincoln Grayle said when Gwen walked out onto the terrace where he was studying plans for upcoming illusions, "that you're going to tell me you feel like a new woman. If you haven't seen yourself already, let me be the first to say how gorgeous you look this morning."
Gwen stopped a few feet from the glass-topped table and said, eyes narrow in hard sunlight, "What did that creep Woolwine do to me?" She was wearing a soft yellow bathrobe; her feet were bare. Newly aware of the music from unseen speakers on the terrace, she grimaced. Grayle was listening to Brenda Lee's tongue-in-cheek "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."
"Christmas music? How long was I out, a month?"
"Fourteen hours, give or take. This is the first day of your new life. How about brunch? It's time for me to eat. Dress rehearsal's at four-thirty. I usually have only two meals a day, six hours before a show, then after, when I really need to put away the calories."
"What new life, damn you?"
"Woolwine said you'd be a little agitated at first, uncertain about your status."
"My status? I'm a dpg until Eden says I'm not, period."
"Not entirely true. Dr. Woolwine, the eminent whatever-he-is, has wrought some beneficial changes. Worked a little, quote, magic to alter your biomagnetic makeup. That's the reason for the little patch you'll find behind your right ear." He waited while Gwen, dismayed, groped with her fingertips. "A small incision. Should heal in four or five days. You still have the best features of a doppelganger, but your dependency relationship with Eden is effectively over. Here's an analogy: if Eden were a disease, you'd have complete immunity."
"Not possible."
"You'll soon realize it's true. There is no contact between the two of you in an otherworldly sense. I suppose you could give her a call on her cell phone, but I'm sure you won't, once you become used to your new independence."
"Thanks for what you obviously assume is hospitality," Gwen said in a deep glower, "but I'll just be on MY way."
Gwen unbelted the robe, shrugged it off, and kicked it aside. She turned and walked away from the table, looking back at him, anticipating confusion and consternation. Instead she was a little shocked to see Grayle looking straight at her, smiling, as if she hadn't vanished at the instant of discarding her robe.
"That's another difference," Grayle said. "The new Gwen can't disappear on a whim. You've lost your invisibility. See for yourself." He pointed to the glass doors of the terrace, in which they were both clearly reflected.
Gwen looked slowly around. For a few seconds she couldn't believe she was seeing her nude self in the solar-gain glass. Then, her face reddening, she made a grab for the robe she'd discarded and put it back on.
"The total visibility effect lasts for about four weeks; then you'll need another treatment. Nothing harmful. It's like spending a relaxing day at a good spa."
"Omigod—what else have you geniuses done to me?"
"That's about it," Grayle said pleasantly. "You can, we hope, still do all of your other doppelganger things. Which we now need to talk about. Would you care to sit down? We both have a busy weekend ahead of us. You're going to save my soul and I'm going to become a daddy."
Chapter 44
11:06 PM.
Bertie chased down a long sideline smash from Eden, but her backhand return was weak and she netted the ball. Again. They had agreed not to keep score, play the game on the level of noncompetitive fun, because Eden showed no mercy when it came to games of any kind. For all of the power she could put behind a serve, Bertie lacked Eden's lateral quickness and bewildering variety of shots. But at least playing her was instructive.
"Time out" Bertie said, gasping a little. She put her racket down and pulled off the cable knit sweater she no longer needed as the temperature rose into the sixties.
Eden nodded and twirled her racket in the air, caught it deftly behind her back. "Do we have any Gatorade?"
"How about a couple of wine coolers?" Charmaine suggested. She was perched on the wall where, for the last half hour, she helpfully had been serving as line judge and impartial rooter, applauding every good shot.
"I could go for that," Eden admitted. Bertie gave her a mild questioning look tempered with a smile. In the past few weeks Eden had become something of a drinker, but in present circumstances Bertie didn't begrudge her. Eden never got shit-faced, although on a couple of occasions, trying to match Tom drink for drink during long evenings of talk at Shungwaya, she had come close. It wasn't just nerves. Bertie knew precisely what was going on with Eden where Tom was concerned, and although she felt bleak about the potential for a nasty situation, she tried never to let her misgivings—and jealousy, of course—affect the valuable chemistry of their triad; the vital bond they all needed and depended upon.
"Give you a hand," Bertie called to Charmaine.
"Oh, thanks."
"I'm gonna take a bathroom break, see if we have any calls," Eden said to Bertie.
Bertie used clinging vines for handholds and scaled the seven-foot wall, dropped onto grass on the other side.
"Where did you say you were from?" Bertie asked Charmaine, who was wearing a cream suede tunic with embroidered blue jeans and cork-soled sandals that brought her to within a couple of inches of Bertie's imposing height.
"Atlanta."
"Go to school there?" Bertie said, making, a guess about Charmaine's age.
"I'm a senior at Clark Atlanta. You look familiar to me, Bertie, sort of like Whitney before she got wrecked on drugs."
"People tell me that. I do some modeling."
"That may be where I saw you! Swimsuits?"
"Yeah, Sports Illustrated. I got the cover this year."
"Oh, you're famous! Célèbre. I remember now. My old boyfriend, before Lewis, he never missed an issue of Sports Illustrated."
They walked into the villa. "Is this a honeymoon trip for you, Charmaine?" Bertie asked, looking casually around.
"Oh, no, we're not that far along. Can you believe this place? Lewis isn't exactly a high-roller, but he doesn't think anything about dropping fifty thousand in a high-stakes poker game." Charmaine shrugged and sighed and led Bertie to the kitchen. "Which is mostly what he's been doing since we got here. I don't mean losing. Just playing poker, all night, every night." Sigh. "Does make a girl feel, you know, second-best? And I don't know a soul here in Las Vegas." She opened one of the restaurant-type refrigerators and began handing bottles of wine coolers to Bertie. "We'll find us somethin' to carry those in. Six enough?"
"I should think."
"I feel like I know your friend Eve from somewhere too," Charmaine said, but Bertie just smiled inscrutably. "It's nice of you guys to let me hang out. I get lonesome for somebody to talk to, you know?"
"Glad to have you, Charmaine."
Charmaine looked in some kitchen cabinets and came up with a picnic hamper. They loaded it with the chilled bottles and went back outside.
"Is Eve a model too?"
"No, just a good friend."
"Are you all spending much time in Vegas?"
"Depends."
Bertie went to the top of the wal
l first. Charmaine handed up the basket and seemed not to notice Bertie's helping hand as she climbed over herself. The two young women settled down in the semi-shade of a beautifully furnished orangerie. Nearby the surface of the pool flashed in the sun whenever a breeze passed over it. Charmaine tried to remove a stubborn twist-off cap from a bottle of wine cooler and grimaced at Bertie.
"You'll ruin a nail," Bertie advised her. "I'll get an opener. Right back."
Inside the duplex villa she met Eden coming down a free-standing spiral staircase. She'd had a fast shower and changed clothes. Crisp white resort wear with a sleeveless cashmere sweater.
"Tom should have called by now" Eden fretted. She rubbed the mastoid bone behind her left ear.
"Too soon. He's only been gone a couple of hours. What's the matter?"
"I don't know; it hurts here. Like I'm raising a boil." She tilted her head to one side. "See anything?"
Eden stopped rubbing the spot where Gwen had had a small magnetic device implanted, behind her right ear.
"Well, I wish Tom would keep us up-to-date, at least. What if he doesn't find you-know-who."
"You'll have to think of something. She's your dpg."
Eden shrugged. "It is my fault for thinking she could be helpful. But she's like a jinx. Maybe I just ought to say, you know, the 'G' word; then she won't be my responsibility anymore."
"She would still be your mirror image. How desirable is that? Give Tom some time and try not to worry."
Eden offered a deliberately goofy smile. "Me, worry?"
"If we're not playing any more tennis, I'll take a shower too. If you don't mind entertaining Charmaine."
"She seems easy to amuse. What do you make of her?"
"For one thing, she has less of an aura than a pilot light gas flame. Sometimes none at all."
"What do you think that means?"
"Either she's walking dead, or she's suppressing her aura."