The Captive (2 page)

On the streets again, I found another sort of night  creature. As I passed a dark doorway, a woman whose face was painted into a parody of femininity asked me for a cigarette. As I replied that I had none, I felt her hand touch my thigh intimately and realized what she was. For a few moments I was interested, remembering stories Charles had heard, but as she made her overtures, stroking and pressing against me, I could smell her body. Even in that human form I could smell that she had been with others recently. There was also a hint of something sick in the odor. I backed away.

"What'sa matter, big boy?" the woman said, moving toward me again.

"I, uh, I have no money," I said.

"In that silk suit? Listen, honey, you don't con me that way, and I can tell you need it tonight. Come on with Sally now and she'll show you something you won't forget."

"You smell bad," I said, backing away again.

"Why you shitty hick," she suddenly screamed. And there were more cursings and obscenities as I turned and ran away, feeling stupid and offended at the same time. I would rather, as I have these last few nights, indulge myself with any other creature. That thought cheers me in these foul streets, the memory of excited bitches, the shuddering union of horses, the happy and bellowing cow as she is mounted. And how the rush of sensation at the climax  always sweeps me back into my natural form with an  explosion of sensory delight as the shift occurs.

Now I wait for the moon, and then back to my Family, to Renee this time, the dark sister of Vaire, Little Robert's childhood love.

Something connects me to the Family as if they were my lost progenitors. I have no coherent memories beyond a year ago when I came into my first human form. Before that is an unformed mass, the speechless life of the young animal. I came into existence with the three rules in my mind: I am, and there is no time when I am not. Need creates form. Alone is safe. But now the sky lightens and I feel the moon as much as see its early radiance. I feel the pull it always extends when it is full, the delicate foreboding, as if there were a promise to be fulfilled. I rise and shake myself, stretch and begin trotting along the sand. Once away from the streets and the sounds of traffic I follow the shoreline around, taking to the water when I must to avoid piers and resort houses. The night is warm, the water an icy excitement  as I plunge in to swim past dark buildings. The moon is high when I turn eastward and leave the lake behind, and I feel that I am going home.

***

In the outlying district of another city, this one smaller than Chicago, I have spent two nights lying close beneath the windows of their house, sensing their lives, listening to each word spoken, the angry man, the quiet woman who seems pulled in two directions by her loyalties, the little girl who is a happy presence in this troubled house. In the days I have slept in a draintile under the highway, and now I grope in a vast emptiness for the Person who will serve my need. The name comes to me as a sudden beacon out of darkness. I say it in my mouth, holding my consciousness to its quintessence in a blinding point of light. I shift. The Third Person appears.

The blond haired, eager looking young man sauntered down the long subdivision street trying to distinguish the right house out of the identical row. He smiled up at the overcast sky, seeming a bit awkward, almost childlike in his careless happiness with the world. A dog rushed out to bark at him, but the young man made a simple movement, his head cocked to one side, and the dog romped around him, yelping as if he were an old friend. His dark blue suit was just a half size too small, giving him an innocent, countrified look. His hat was set at a jaunty angle, and he whistled bits of song occasionally, looking at each mailbox along the curb.

He found the right one finally, block letters: WILLIAM HEGEL. He stopped in the warm dusk, listening to the woman's voice from an upstairs window singing softly to the little girl.

I went to the animal fair,
The birds and the beasts were there,
The big baboon by the light of the moon
Was combing her auburn hair.
The monkey he got drunk,
And sat on the elephant's trunk,
The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees,
And that was the end of the monk, the monk, the monk.

He could hear the little girl laughing as the woman's voice carried into the part about the monkey. She had a lovely voice: Renee, sister to the beautiful, golden haired Vaire whom Little Robert had adored when he lived at the farm. But that was not his memory, and he paused, confused by the intrusion into his mind of that former time, remembered not by him but by that power hidden inside him that had not quite subsided into its customary quiescence. He walked up the narrow sidewalk toward the white frame house with the little trellis around the front door.

The porch light went on after he had pressed the door buzzer. The door opened, revealing a bulky, square faced man in a rumpled white shirt who stood blocking the  opening. He looked like a disheveled palace guard who had not had time to put on his uniform coat. He glared at the stranger from beneath heavy, dark brows that met over his nose.

"Hi. You're Mr. Hegel?"

"Yeah. But if you're selling something, I don't -"

"No." The stranger laughed in a disarming way. "I'm only after some information about my lost nephew." He paused for the big man to catch up with the situation and then went on. "Maybe you remember him, a six year old boy, brown hair, skinny, named Robert Lee Burney?"

"Little Robert? Yeah, the kid that ran away from my sister-in-law's house almost a year ago." The big man  allowed the door to swing wider and took a step back as if he had been accused of something.

"Right. That's who I'm looking for. The sheriff of Cassius County said you folks might be able to help."

"Renee," the square faced man called over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from the stranger's face. Then, as he heard his wife's footsteps, he seemed more certaini of  himself, as if regaining his place in the world. "Renee, this man wants to know something about Little Robert." He stepped back and said, in what sounded like an imitation of civility, "Won't you come in, Mister, ah -"

"Golden, Barry Golden. Yes, thank you." Barry stepped past the big man, handing him his hat which he placed  carefully on a hall table. "And you are Renee," Barry said, aware that he was being a bit forward in so quickly  addressing her.

She had perfectly black, glossy hair, and the contrast with the whiteness of her skin was startling. She was wearing what he at first took to be some kind of pajamas, but later realized was an oriental style lounging suit with flared  trousers and a tight fitting smock embroidered with a large dragon. It became her beautifully. She had a calm, impassive expression, as if any powerful emotions she might possess had withdrawn to a different world. But when she spoke, her dark brown eyes looked straight into his, and he felt rather than saw there a passionate desperation.

"Please come in, Mr. Golden," she said, holding out her hand. "We'll help you if we can."

He felt his heart hitting his ribs heavily as he took her hand by way of greeting, holding it in his as if it were a gift.

"Mrs. Hegel, I'm sorry to bother you and your family, but I'd like to think that I've done everything I could to clear up the mystery. I hope you don't mind."

"Not at all," she said, looking down at her hand that Barry still held and flushing slightly.

Her husband stepped almost between them, looming and urging them into the small living room.

"We didn't really know Little Robert," Renee said,  turning and walking ahead of the two men. "He lived with my mother and then my sister in Cassius." Her voice trailed off as she smiled back at him.

"Robert Burney is, or was, my nephew," Barry said. "My brother's little boy."

Her mouth was like her sister's, the same enticing curve with the upturned corners. He stayed at her shoulder as they walked to the sofa in the living room. The place looked uncomfortable, chairs too modern and square, hard looking backs too low and seats too long. Over the cheap sofa was an ugly modern painting full of sharp noses and doubled eyes that one could not avoid looking at unless one sat directly under it. She sat on one end of the sofa, and Barry sat with a decent distance between them, hearing the sharp intake of her husband's breath behind him as he stopped at the couch. Hegel turned so abruptly behind them that his shoe squeaked on the polished floor, and he walked across to the chair by the window that faced the couch. His square face was a combination of grudging acceptance and what appeared to be poorly concealed hatred of anything outside his normal routine. Perhaps Barry's looks did not please him. He seemed always on the edge of the chair, his arms hanging at his sides as if he were getting ready to leap. Barry ignored him after a brief look, directing his comments to Renee, but the husband's presence remained in the corner of his vision like an ominous block of stone balanced on a height.

"Was that you I heard singing as I came down the street?" Barry asked her.

She smiled, her lips parting slightly so that he shivered, finding himself almost falling into a daze watching her face as she spoke. "'The Animal Fair'?" she said.

"Yes, something about an unfortunate monkey and an elephant."

"It's very popular," she smiled. "Surely you've heard it. I sang it for Mina's bedtime song."

Barry made an effort to concentrate on his supposed  purpose, for her low voice was as exciting to him as the clean odor of her hair, the white of her teeth glimpsed between her lips, the smooth, alive pressure of her hand in his.

"Mina is our daughter. She is five, and she loves all sorts of animals."

"Are you saying that the little boy, Robert Burney, was a relative of yours?" Hegel said in a cracked voice. He cleared his throat as if that speech contained the greatest number of words he had spoken for weeks.

"Yes. His parents, my brother and his wife, were killed last year, and Robert disappeared at the same time." Barry looked troubled. "We thought they had all been killed  together. Natural enough to think so under the circumstances. They -"

"You ought to talk to my wife's sister," Hegel said sourly. "She kept the boy for a couple of months last  summer. We don't know much about it."

Barry felt Renee's anger at her husband's rudeness, but he faced the man. "Yes, I realize that," he said, looking down as if in apology. "But the sheriff down there said that things weren't exactly ... uh, he said it was sort of a touchy subject." Barry paused, looking to the woman for help. She responded at once.

"The sheriff has known our family for years. He's very kind, and my mother, well, did you know that while your little nephew was staying with my parents their home was entered by some vagrants and my father was killed?" She paused, wondering how to fill in so much of that strange story. "It was such a terrible time. Mother and Dad were very close, and she really couldn't accept some things about the tragedy. We were all so shaken by it, but it was strange to hear her talk later about what happened. And my sister Vaire actually said she had seen it." Renee stopped, looking across to her husband for help. He said nothing, keeping his eyes on the other man as if he were memorizing his face.

"It?" Barry said. "What happened to the little boy?"

"Oh he was all right. He disappeared for a few days, and they thought the animal had carried him off, but he said he had been hiding in the barn." She stopped again, but this time she did not look at her husband.

"Yes, the story about the animal was pretty odd, I thought," Barry said. "I got on the trail of my lost nephew from a news clipping a friend gave me. He, I mean the friend, clips for a news service in Albuquerque where I used to live, and he called me one night with this story from the
Grand Rapids Examiner
about a boy named Robert Burney. We had thought he was dead." Watching Renee's face, he saw the chance to help her by giving her more time with his own side of the story.

"Let me fill in my own background a bit. I'm trying to be a free-lance writer, live in the Southwest, mostly Phoenix now, and my brother and his wife were at a dig in  Guatemala, a Mayan ruin there. He was finishing his graduate work in archeology at the University of New Mexico, and his wife and little boy had gone down to the dig to be with him. They wrote such fascinating letters about the people and their ancestors. They had found a small lake full of treasures, they thought, and were excavating what they  believed was a pre-Mayan site, and then, May sixth of last year there was an earthquake. It wasn't a bad quake as those things go in Central America, but it opened a fissure into the lake that flooded the whole excavation in a matter of seconds, according to the report. My brother and his wife were both drowned, and I had assumed their little boy with them. I went down there." Barry stopped and put his hand to his face, surprised to find his eyes filled with tears.

"How terrible," Renee murmured.

"Guatemala?" said the husband, clearing his throat again. "The little boy came all the way from Guatemala?"

"Apparently," Barry said, using his handkerchief. Far back in his mind he felt astonishment at this uprush of  emotion. Was he so caught up in his own lies that he believed them? "I guess we'll never know how he made it all that way up here, if it really was my brother's boy who was here. I went down to Xachitito, the nearest village to where it happened, and they couldn't find the native woman who had been caring for the boy. I assumed then that she and the boy had been killed also, although some of the bodies were never found. The excavation had caved in badly and was part of the lake by that time. We thought they were down there somewhere. It's almost supernatural to think the boy would turn up here." He stopped again, fixing his attention on the woman sitting next to him, pulling together his  feelings again from that unaccountable lapse into sorrow - as if it were all true, this fabrication he was using as an excuse to get back into the family circle again. Something was amused far down inside him, amused to find him caught up in his own lies.