by Farris, John
"That's why Luke was so mad, you know. Doctors have X-ray eyes. He looked in my womb when I was sleeping and saw that it was an alien's child I'm carrying. It made him very jealous, Lillian."
"Well, you—just lie down on your back, and think good thoughts, Charlene, because—I know everything's to work out all right. Bless you."
"Thank you, Lillian. You're so good to me. I don't deserve it."
Lillian took the hairbrush from Charlene's limp hand, put it back in the travel case she'd brought from the house and helped her lie down on the redwood picnic table. It was a painful process; Charlene couldn't put weight on her raw elbows, and her fanny was tender from the scouring bricks of the veranda.
When she was as comfortable as the hard surface allowed, Charlene sighed and her eyes closed.
"I must've killed a billion spiders. I could see their red eyes in the dark. That's what saved me. I beat them with the shovel until they were all dead." The memory of this frantic effort produced a shudder, and a twitching of her lips. "They're all dead now, aren't they?"
"Reckon they must be. You're a good spider-killer. Now, I'll leave the lamp. And I'll be right back. You rest."
Charlene's eyes had closed. She said something indistinct. Then something that sounded like, "Can't be late." Then her body jumped. Lillian stroked her damp forehead with a calming hand, until Charlene's breathing slowed and she snored suddenly, a loud glottal sound.
Lillian closed the toolshed door quietly and shuffled toward the house more than a hundred yards away. The wind was nearly enough to drive her to her knees. She prayed for the strength to get her safely back and forth this long night, but she was frail, and tending to Charlene's wounds had depleted her.
Back in her kitchen, off her aching feet, Lillian slumped in a chair, thinking to rest for just a minute, long enough for her heart to slow down. The minutes passed, then half an hour; finally she roused herself and set about warming a can of consommé on one of the stoves. From her own room she took a pillow and blanket, poured the soup into a thermos and set out again for the toolshed, this time facing the wind, which threatened to knock her down with every step. Hard to fetch a decent breath in a wind like that. She clutched the pillow, blanket and thermos against her chest and pushed doggedly on, moaning to herself.
The side door to the toolshed was banging in the wind when she got there. The interior was dark, as if the hurricane lamp had gone out. But she knew there'd been fuel for hours. Lillian stumbled inside, across the floor, bumped against the redwood table.
There was enough light from Malibu lamps along the garden paths for Lillian to make out the interior of the toolshed. Charlene wasn't lying on the table, and she hadn't fallen off to the floor. Both the lamp and her travel case were missing. Charlene had taken them, and she was gone.
Lord have mercy, Lillian thought. What next?
Joe was awake on the sisal mat in the beach house. He was shaking, because the door was open and the air had turned colder as the hurricane continued, at fifteen miles per hour, toward Chicora Island. He had no idea what time it was. The lights were on, but they flickered as the house was pummeled by the wind. Sand and bits of shell picked up from the beach made spitting sounds against the screened windows and the front of the house. The air inside the house was heavy; even though he seemed to be lying on his back, he experienced a little difficulty in breathing. It was even more of a chore to open his eyes; they felt as if some of the wind-blown sand had drifted beneath the lids.
So far all sounds and sensations were identifiable, if not reassuring. He raised his right hand to rub his eyes. This small exertion caused his heart to pound suddenly; he broke out in a sweat. With no evidence to support his fear, he felt that something dreadful was happening, or had already happened, to his body. There was no internal cohesion; he had been reduced, scatter on the wind.
He was in Lucas Thomason's infirmary. The doctor was there with Flora Birdsall. They had strapped him to the table. Flora looked down at him gravely. When her mouth moved, as if she were speaking to him, all he heard was the ticking of a clock. Thomason handed her a laboratory bottle with a glass stopper. Joe's heart congealed. Flora pulled out the stopper; acidic fumes rose into the air.
Joe raised his head and looked down at his naked body, bound with leather straps. Don't do it, Flora, he pleaded.
She started with his left foot, pouring the liquid in the laboratory bottle slowly, almost drop by drop, over the toes, the instep. He felt nothing. Flesh and bone didn't dissolve, they simply disappeared. First his foot, then his ankle, then his lower leg to the knee. Gone.
Interesting stuff, said Dr. Lucas Thomason. It doesn't leave a trace.
Don't take all of me, Flora, Joe pleaded. Leave something!
But the pouring continued, past midthigh. The leather straps that bound him were not affected by the erasing liquid; they remained in place, still taut, as he disappeared out from under them. That was a clue, he thought frantically, but how was he to interpret it?
With no apparent transition he was back in the beach house. The screen door slapped rhythmically in the wind that seemed to suck the air from the house, creating a vacuum in which breathing was now so difficult he thought he was going to implode.
Something stirred near him. In the dream-interval the lights in the beach house had gone out. He held the lid of one eye open with his right hand, knowing that the left hand was no longer there, it had been erased. Along with much of his body. He didn't feel badly about the loss, because he couldn't remember what it had been like to be whole. Possibly he'd never been whole. Oh, once, when he was a small boy. That didn't count.
"Joe?"
In the oceanic gloom a light appeared to his extreme right side, the flickering flame of a hurricane lamp with a smoke-grayed chimney. There was a wedding band on the hand that held the lamp, and a platinum setting for a large diamond that was missing now.
Charlene kneeled slowly beside him as he opened both eyes. He started and screamed in terror, because half of Charlene was missing. The left half.
"Joe? What's wrong?"
"Go away! Please."
"But I have to be here. This is where I need to wait for them."
He was nauseated by the sight of her, so grotesquely bisected. Even though half of her mouth was missing, she still spoke normally. But he couldn't be entirely sure that part of Charlene was really missing. Maybe she had never been whole either; that what he saw now was all there had ever been of her. Reality and dreaming had been reversed, the laws of perception revoked, thought and space were hopelessly out of whack, and there was nothing he could do....
He couldn't go insane. He was already insane. But that had no meaning, either, in this universe of perceptual disinformation.
"Joe." His eyes were closed, but he felt her hand on him, shaking him.
"Leave me alone!" he cried.
"Wake up."
"I am awake. I just don't want to look at you."
I am awake. That was so. Intuition, the ghost in the attic of his intellect, stirred.
"It's something he gave me."
"Who?" Charlene asked. "Are you sick?"
"No. I'm drugged."
His eyes were closed, but he knew that she had risen with her lamp. He heard her walking around, heard her stifled cry of distress.
"What… is it, Charly?"
"It'sAdele," she said.
Oh, yes. Oh, God. " He shot her. Not Luke. There was another man. It's supposed to look as if… I did it."
Charlene moaned terribly, then began to cry. He heard her walking around again, aimlessly.
If he had been drugged, then eventually it had to wear off. Even the Tetrodotoxin analogue Thomason had been poisoning Abby with began to lose potency in a week and had to be given to her again and again.
Joe forced himself to sit up. He still refused to open his eyes to inconceivable terrors. He shuddered like a child, and heard Charlene's footsteps as wind from the sea battered the house. Metal deck fur
niture had begun to fly around the porch.
"I'm not afraid," Charlene said. "I'm not afraid."
"Do you believe me, Charly?"
"I'm not afraid," she said again, her words weighted by an immensity of doom that transcended fear.
Joe opened his eyes, holding his breath as if he were under water. He couldn't find her. Half of the first floor of the beach house was gone. Not blotted out, just missing. He couldn't be sure that it had ever been there.
"Charly, where are you? I need help. Listen to me!"
And suddenly she appeared from his left. Half of her stepping out of the void with the lamp, or half of the lamp, held near her breast. Her appearance, as if she were an apparition, was so shocking that he almost screamed again.
"What's wrong with you?"
"I can't remember. But I'm sure your husband... drugged me. I can only see half of you, Charly. The left half."
She stared at him with her single eye, puffed and reddened from weeping. He made himself look at her, and soon it seemed normal, that Charlene was only half there. His nausea subsided. He was able to look down at himself, to verify that half was indeed missing, as he had dreamed. Or else the left side of him had never existed at all. It didn't seem to matter. He began to laugh.
"Half of me?" Charlene said, sorely perplexed. "Stop making things up."
"There's a name for this. But I can't remember… half-vision. It's in the brain...." He couldn't think; he was convulsed with jittery amusement, like a child about to fly out of control.
"Stop laughing!" Charlene set the lamp down and began to explore her face with the fingers of her right hand, part of which promptly disappeared. "It's there. I'm all there."
"No, you're not, Charly. But I'm like you. I'm not... all here either."
"Goddam bastard! Don't say that!" She lit intoJoe. He felt the blows of two fists, but saw only one. He toppled over, and she sprawled on top of him. "Wake up, wake up!"
It was so funny, half of him wrestling half of Charlene, that he nearly became hysterical. Her own terror mounted as she tried to beat the nonsense out of him.
Half-vision. Hemianopsia, that was it! The condition sometimes resulted from severe migraine. But in his case it had been drug-induced.
He held her tightly against him. "Charly, let's calm down. I need… I don't know, maybe a cold shower would help. Get me upstairs. I've got to… Somebody'll come. Sheriff's deputies. They'll take me to jail, and I'll never get out of this fix. Help me, Charly."
She lay on his breast, heaving and sobbing, incoherent. He thought he heard her say something about a baby.
"Are you going to have a baby, Charly?"
"Yes! But I can't have it here. It has to be born on the Mother Ship."
"What… what are you talking about?"
She told him. All about the voices she heard sometimes when she was under the hair drier at the beautician's in town, the blue-tinted aliens who walked through her bedroom walls, and the fetus that had been implanted in her womb. The Mother Ship thatwas traveling toward them in the center of the hurricane so it couldn't be detected, to take her and her baby to a galaxy far, far away. Where Luke could never find them.
"God, Charly. What has he done to you? To all of us."
"It's all true," she wailed.
"Okay, I believe you. But we… we're in trouble. I've got to start functioning, somehow: What time is it?"
"I don't know."
"My wristwatch. Left wrist. It isn't there for me. But you can see it. Tell me the time."
"The time… I think it's... almost ten-thirty."
"Ten-thirty? So late? Get up. Get up, Charly; the hurricane's going to make landfall in a few hours."
"They'll be here then," Charlene said gratefully.
"In the meantime, we've got trouble."
He sat up, and half-Charlene sat up beside him. He had to close his eyes then, because he was sure there was no way he could stand and balance himself with half his body missing. Even though his rational mind had accepted the hypothesis that he was hemianopsic, he had to see his other half to believe in its continued existence.
And if the left half of him still existed, it should be simple to prove it. All he needed to do was open his eyes, then turn his head to the left.
Simple to think about. But it required an excruciating effort of will while fear pounded in his heart like the rain that was beginning on the roof of the beach house.
Inch by inch, as he turned his head, more of the first floor of the house came into view, and fear turned to exhilaration. He dared to look down, and there was his left leg and foot... his left hand on his knee. Nearby, an old blued revolver with the butt wrapped in grimy tape. He lifted his gaze, and found Adele in the rattan chair, knees apart, her head back against the chair cushion with the lumpish rusted stain on it.
Charlene's hand touched his right arm. "Joe?"
"It's… better now. I think I can deal with it. A cold, cold, shower, that's what I need. Or a plunge in the ocean."
"Wait," she said. He turned his head as she was getting up, and as she walked away from him toward the front windows she became whole for the first time, since she occupied only the right half of his visual field. Charlene opened the plantation shutters and looked out. "No. The water's too high. It's halfway up the beach already."
"Charlene, we need to do something about Adele. And the gun. It was fired twice, once with my finger on the trigger so I'd have gunshot residue on my hand. But that will wash off."
He turned his head to the left again, relocating the revolver. As he was reaching for it Charlene walked over, picked the revolver up before he could touch it and held it by the butt the way a woman will hold something nasty she is about put into the garbage. She looked at Joe, and at the body of Adele. Then she turned and went to the door, which blew open as soon as she turned the knob. The screen door bulged snakily inward from the force of the wind against it. Charlene pushed against the frame and more or less fell outside to the porch, where she hunched herself primitively against the horizontal, slashing rain.
Joe rose inexpertly to his feet, balancing on his right, taking a quick look to make sure his left was there, or something that resembled a left foot, then shifting his weight. He found that he could walk, but with a quirky, limping gait, overcompensating for what his conscious mind was still trying to tell him didn't exist. There was an existential term for the way he felt: "inauthentic." The conflict between there and not there used a lot of primal, survival energy. His heart was overworked, he was a swamp of perspiration.
Before he made it to the door Charlene, her clothes soaked and strands of platinum hair wrapped around and around her face so that it looked like a shelled cooked egg in a string basket, stumbled back inside and forced the door shut again. She was still clutching the revolver.
"What did you do, Charly?"
"You said to get rid of it. I was going to throw it in the ocean. I played third base on my school softball team. I could throw harder than anybody." Her voice quavered. "But not against a wind like this."
She leaned against him, shuddering, and Joe had to turn his head quickly to keep all of her face in view. Charlene had spoken of a practical thing in a matter-of-fact voice. But the bones of her skull appeared to be thrusting through the delicate albumen of her skin; her dark drifting toneless eyes seemed related to a deeply seated mania, or dementia.
"I saw lights up the beach road. Blue lights. I guess they're coming this way. Checking all the beach houses to make sure everybody leaves. I can hide the gun. But what should we do with Adele?"
Chapter Forty-Three
With Hurricane Honey stubbornly on course, bearing 270 degrees and headed for Nimrod's Chapel, the sea islands as far south as Edisto and as far north as Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina had been evacuated. Lucas Thomason was awake early to supervise the boarding-up of the Barony, and he had no time to speculate on what might have happened to Charlene. None of the plantation vehicles, including the Range
Rover she usually drove, were missing.
"She sneaked back into the house," he said to Lillian, "and she's hiding herself in one of the old servants' rooms up on the third floor. She'll come down when she gets hungry, or the wind really starts to blow. Have you heard from Walter Lee?"
"His sister say he was at the funeral home all night, sitting up with Frosty. They couldn't get him to go home to sleep."
"I'll stop in when I'm in town and talk to Walter Lee. You're sure we've got plenty of hurricane lamps?"
Lillian nodded, unwilling to look at him. But he'd already had enough of her reproachful gaze. He went upstairs to look in on Abby, who was watching the progress of the storm on the Weather Channel. They had their own satellite dish, which probably wasn't going to make it through the worst of the storm, although it was located on the protected west side of the Barony.
Abby and Lizzie were playing Trivial Pursuit. Abby had circles under her eyes after a restless night. Without even saying good morning she asked if Joe had shown up.
Thomason said, "He'll probably be along. Of course he might not know enough about hurricanes to get his tail off the beach."
"I can't call, there's no dial tone. The lines may be down already. Maybe I should drive over there."
"If you're that worried, I'll go myself."
"Would you, Luke? Thank you."
"Are we going to be all right here?" Lizzie said. "The Barony's stood fast through some big blows. This isn't the worst hurricane on record."
"It seems to be getting stronger, though," Abby said, glumly watching the TV. Both of her legs were jittering in the wheelchair. She looked as exhausted as if she'd danced all night. He could hear each breath she took. But with barometric pressure falling, it was difficult for any of them to fill their lungs without conscious effort.
Before he was halfway to Nimrod's Chapel a hard, driving rain began, in which trees melted away like root-bound phantoms. At Kirkeby's Corners the lot in front of the general store was packed with cars and pickups as the islanders who were sticking it out loaded up with batteries, flashlights, canned goods, bottled water and candles. As he was making a left turn toward Nimrod's Chapel Thomason thought he saw Mr. Phipps's old Diamond T truck pull out of the store lot and continue east toward the Barony. At least it looked very much like the pickup, but he couldn't see who was driving. And Mr. Phipps, whose business here was finished, should have been home in his seldom-visited corner of Horry County entangled with the captive anatomy of one of his woeful catamites.