Alien's Concubine, The (5 page)

“
I’ll be fine,” she said
finally, hoping she would be and that they wouldn’t find her dead
body the next morning. Or find her blubbering like an
idiot.

“
I could stay here for a
little while and keep you company if you’d like.”

Surprise flickered through her. Guilty
conscience, she wondered? “The mosquitoes will carry you off—or
suck you dry. But thanks anyway. I think I’ll explore this room a
little more now that I have more light.”

“
You need to be careful
with batteries,” he cautioned.

“
If I have to sit in the
dark, I’d like to know what, if anything, is in here with me before
the lights go out,” she pointed out.

“
You sure you don’t want
company for a while?”

Gaby sighed. “Not unless you want to
join me down here,” she muttered under her breath. She decided not
to voice the comment loud enough for him to hear it, though. He
might take it as a different sort of invitation. “It’s hard to talk
like this, but thanks anyway.”

She didn’t wait to see if she could
hear him leave. Kneeling, she untied the bundle to examine the
contents. As she’d hoped, he’d tossed in the small bag of personal
items she’d brought with her that included a small jar of petroleum
jelly, which she used for everything from chapped lips to scrapes
and minor cuts.

This was not the sort of place where
one wanted to ignore even minor injuries. They were too prone to
infection.

Settling on top of the bag once she’d
emptied it, she examined herself carefully and discovered her pants
had torn at the knee on the trip down, which explained the stinging
knee. When she’d cleaned the scraped areas—chin, knee, elbow, and
palms--with a moist wipe, she carefully applied a thin layer of
petroleum jelly and then topped it with self-stick bandages to keep
from smearing jelly everywhere. It soothed the minor discomfort at
once, which brought her mind to another discomfort.

She was going to have to squat. She
didn’t want to and it had nothing to do with discomfort of
desecrating a holy place, pagan or not. But she’d bust a bladder if
she tried to hold it till she was rescued.

Grabbing the lantern and her tissues,
she moved down the wall to the corner, examined the floor and the
walls and finally shucked her pants and backed into it. She began
to get the prickling sensation of being watched the moment she took
her pants off. She cast several glances toward the statute at the
other end of the room, certain that must be what was giving her the
feeling of being watched. She couldn’t see it of course. The
lantern light didn’t reach even nearly that far.

It made her wonder how and why she’d
gotten the sensation of being watched before. She hadn’t known the
thing was there at that time. And it wasn’t as if it was a live
person.

When she’d finished and put her
panties back on, she decided against the pants. No one was coming
down tonight, and it was too damned hot to wear them when she
didn’t feel she needed the protection. Folding them instead, she
returned to her sleeping bag.

She hadn’t seen a sign of crawlies,
but she didn’t like the idea of sitting flat on the floor, or
sleeping on it, and laying awake all night so that she’d know if
anything crawled on her. The flashlight Mark had sent down to her,
she discovered with her first touch of pleasure, was a floodlight.
Setting it up, she switched it on and got her first good look at
her surroundings, because this light was powerful enough to chase
the shadows all the way into the corners and even the shadows
weren’t dark and deep—except around the alcove where the horny god
sat.

After staring at the altar—she knew
that must be what it was—that was blocking a good bit of the light,
she took the lantern and went to examine it more closely. It was a
solid slab, she discovered when she’d waved the lantern over the
top.

She didn’t see any signs of dark
stains that told of a gruesome usage for the thing. Setting the
lantern down on top, she went back to gather the rest of her
things. When she’d carefully examined each article to make certain
nothing had crawled into it, she set them all on top of the altar,
then walked around the thing in search of a foot hold to climb
up.

If it was an altar, she reasoned, it
would have a way up.

There were several steep stairs carved
into the stone on one side, she discovered.

Climbing up, she opened her ‘cosmetic’
pouch and pulled out the can of aerosol lubricant she’d brought on
the advice of one of her co-workers at the museum. It wasn’t a
lovely smell, but by the time she’d sprayed a narrow barrier all
the way around the edges of the altar she felt secure in the
knowledge that there wasn’t a crawling thing alive that could climb
slick stone further slickened with oil.

She could sleep.

If she could just ignore the god
staring down at her.

She tried. Climbing up again, she
arranged her sleeping bag and drank a little water. The packaged
food they usually ate wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. She
kept glancing toward the temple god while she ate, still feeling
that peculiar sensation of being watched.

The floodlight threw the upper portion
of his body into bold relief.

He was wearing a mask, but instead of
blank orbs where the eye holes were in the mask, she could see
winking green gems set into carved eyes.

Why, she wondered, would any people
from this region give their god green eyes? It defied reason when
the aborigines were dark skinned and had dark eyes.

The mask seemed off, for that matter.
Instead of the bizarre faces primitives generally created, the mask
was perfectly blank, and the face behind it looked human. The whole
lower half of his face was exposed and the nose, mouth, jaw and
chin looked like a normal human face.

Actually, a better than average
handsome human face, she decided.

That was strange enough since
primitives usually feared their gods and made them ‘terrible’ to
behold. But the mask seemed to be decorated with peacock
feathers.

She doubted peacocks had been around
that long. They weren’t even native to the continent.

Maybe it was just the plumes of a
similar bird, though? She wasn’t a wild life specialist. There were
probably hundreds of animals that existed now, or had in the past,
that she didn’t have any clue about. For that matter, it might not
be ‘natural’ feathers. The mask—and she knew the stone mask was
very likely a depiction of a mask actually used at some point—might
have had eyes painted on it to represent their god’s
omnipotence.

Shaking her head, she finished her
meal, drank a little more water, and finally settled in the
sleeping bag, staring up at the darkened ceiling above
her.

Everything about the temple seemed
strange. Nothing inside it seemed to follow any of the ‘rules’. Of
course they didn’t know that the temple was pyramid in shape since
they hadn’t uncovered the whole thing, but the art wasn’t
primitive. It looked more modern than Aztec. The god wasn’t clunky
and primitive looking.

It was all very, very bizarre, she
thought feeling strangely tired, foggy headed, almost as if she’d
been drinking liquor instead of water.

She was just tired, she assured
herself. She’d had a shock. It stood to reason after all that
emotional upheaval that she’d be exhausted the moment she settled
and it all caught up with her.

She didn’t actually feel tired and
sleepy, though. She felt … drugged.

Chapter Three

He sensed her fear, smelled it even
above the musty, stale air of the chamber. It disturbed him that
she was afraid, but not enough to make him regret drawing her to
him. They were always afraid. He had come to accept that they
always would be … of him because he was not as they were and they
feared and hated anything that was different from them.

They wanted the things that only he
could give them, though. They fawned upon him and flattered him
until they had convinced him to give it to them, but underneath the
smiles and adulteration, beneath the earnest entreaties and
promises of appreciation, they still feared him and they hated
him.

In any case, it was the fear that drew
the best, or worst, from them and he had determined long ago that
he would never allow himself to be moved by one of them to help
again unless he found that they were truly worthy.

It did not matter if she feared him.
It did not matter if she hated him because he made her afraid. It
only mattered that she prove to him that she was worthy of the gift
he was inclined to give her. It only mattered if he knew that she
would cherish it as it should be cherished.

Now he would know if she was as
beautiful as he believed she was, or if she had enthralled him,
blinding him to ugliness she hid so deeply inside that even he
could not see it until she brought it to the light.

As she had.

The thought rippled through his psyche
in a disturbing, unpleasant current, bringing memories with it that
he had thought he had buried long ago, memories he had thought had
long ago lost their power to bring pain.

He was at fault. He had finally had to
accept that no one was more to blame than he was for the evil that
was done. He had allowed her to blind him. Truth be told, he had
wanted her to because he had not wanted to look beyond the beauty
of her façade. He had become so enamored with the passion she
stirred in him, he had allowed his desire for her to blind him,
ignored the instincts that had tried to warn him that it was
nothing but a thin façade, poorly disguised at best.

And he had entrusted her with the one
thing most precious in all the world to him and she had not valued
it, had not protected it, had drawn down upon herself the violence
that had taken it from him.

It made him ill that he had even
mourned her loss at all.

It annoyed him that the moment he had
emerged from the nothingness he had cultivated so long that the
memories crept back to haunt him. But they did not have the power
they had once had to wound. Time had dulled the ache and Gabrielle
had given him something else to focus upon, something that breathed
the energy of life and purpose into him.

Dismissing the unpleasant memories
after only a moment, he watched her and was pleased with her
determination to hold her fear at bay, pleased that she mastered it
and did not allow it to master her, waiting for the moment when she
would at last look upon the form he had discarded long ago with the
memories he had tried to discard.

How would she perceive him? he
wondered, feeling a burgeoning sense of anticipation that he did
not even recognize for what it was, at first.

Would that shell please her as it had
seemed to please the others?

Or would she find it too … alien to
her?

It seemed likely, he realized, annoyed
at the disappointment that realization spawned within
him.

She had not liked the people, he
realized, and he was once much as they were now. She had distrusted
… with good reason. He had not liked the thoughts that flickered
through their minds as they watched her either.

He had almost been tempted to divert
their minds in a wholly unpleasant way.

But he had refrained … at least from
anything overt.

Mostly because he found the thought of
entering their minds was far too distasteful, not because he was
not tempted to punish them.

Gabrielle was a different matter
altogether. She drew him like a lodestone.

She surprised him when she came at
last to study the graven image of the man he once was. He sensed no
revulsion in her, no distaste. Instead, he saw that she was
curious, intrigued, found pleasure in gazing at the
form.

She always surprised him.

And it was always in a way that
pleased him.

She’d been afraid long enough. He gave
her peace, separation from the fear, because he didn’t want her to
be afraid when he came to her.

* * * *

A twisting thread of blue light
appeared near the ceiling. Gaby stared at the thin string of light
in confusion. It must be from the floodlight, she decided,
wondering why she hadn’t noticed the effect before now. The impulse
struck her to sit up and see if it was a dust mote or something of
that sort that caused the effect, but somehow she just wasn’t that
interested.

When she blinked and opened her eyes
again, another thread had joined the first. Now, instead of merely
dancing and wiggling, the two lights moved together, entwining
sinuously. After watching the strange lights for several moments,
she glanced around the ceiling to see if she could determine what
was moving to cause the lights to seem to dance. She saw then that
there were others, many others, and they were moving around her,
rotating almost like a child’s mobile.

She followed the movement as far as
she could, doing nothing more than turning her head and rolling her
eyes in their direction, and then turned to see if the lights she’d
first noticed had moved as the other lights had. The lights were
longer now, broader.