The Captive (3 page)

"Supernatural," Renee said. "That's what Mother thinks." She was about to go on when Hegel interrupted again.

"How come his name's Burney and yours is Golden," the big man said, leaning forward.

Barry was aware of a sudden tension from Renee, but he spoke easily. "We, I mean Leonard and I, had the same mother and father, but our mother married again after our father died. I took his name, Golden. Leonard kept our real father's name, which was Burney." He smiled innocently.

"Bill," Renee said, her voice tight and careful, "would you get us something to drink? Mr. Golden, would you care for something, wine? a whiskey?"

"A glass of wine would be great, thanks," Barry said.

The husband heaved himself out of the chair and almost stomped from the room. Barry wondered if he had entered in the midst of an argument, or if the man was habitually so ill at ease, almost surly in the presence of a stranger. Renee had taken a cigarette out and was lighting it. He could not offer a light, since the clothes he had stolen had no lighter or matches in them. He watched her frankly as she lit the cigarette, noting the sleek satin of the oriental smock glisten like water as she moved. She was fascinating to him, perhaps as much so as her sister had been to the little boy, but then that was a different life, not something he even remembered directly.

"Do you believe in the supernatural?" she said suddenly, startling him.

He smiled. It was so naive a question that he was at once drawn to her innocence, wanting to take her hands as if she were a child, say to her, my dear lovely woman, what have you asked of this creature sitting beside you, this young man who is the visible extension of a monster who would petrify you with fright? Can you really suppose the universe is  limited to the range of your own senses? But he put on a thoughtful frown.

"You mean ghosts, that sort of thing? I'm not at all sure that I don't," he said with a smile at the end of it, as if discovering his own thoughts suddenly to himself.

"I'm trying to think of a way, Mr. Golden," she said, "to tell you what you are going to run into when you meet my mother and my sister." She smoked nervously, in little sips, with a lot of tapping of the cigarette on the ashtray, and waving the smoke away as if she didn't like it even though she was responsible for it. "They seem to believe that the little boy, your nephew, was some sort of  supernatural, um, thing."

She stopped and squashed the cigarette in the ashtray  angrily. Between her brows were two vertical marks, which he watched, fascinated by the subtle change they wrought in her calm expression.

"In my work, Mrs. Hegel, I do a lot of researching in newspaper morgues, and there are plenty of unexplained happenings. Of course, sometimes they are just lousy  reporting or hoaxes or hysterical people. But you say your family, who took my nephew in and kept him for, what? two or three months? thought he was a ghost or something?" He pushed his hand through his thick blond hair as if amazed.

"I'm so, I mean it's not an easy thing to talk about, really," she said. In her need to find some way of explaining it, she reached out one hand and gently touched the back of Barry's right hand where it rested on his knee. The touch sent an electric thrill through him, although she was so caught up in her attempt to articulate the situation that she hardly noticed she had touched him. He wanted to put his palm very softly against that white cheek, press the fingers back into the black hair. He caught himself and carefully repressed the rising awareness of that force inside himself.

"I guess there's no way but to tell you what they said."

At that moment her husband returned, placed a glass of red wine before Barry on the low table, handed a glass of whiskey and water to Renee and carried his own drink, which appeared to be straight whiskey with ice, back to his chair by the window. His presence seemed to make things harder for the woman. She looked once at her husband as she took a sip of the drink, but Barry could detect no  expression as she looked at him, almost a controlled absence of expression. Her face became more determined as she turned to Barry again.

"They thought, at least my mother thought, that the little boy was really a supernatural monster, an incarnation of evil." She picked up her glass and held it half way to her lips, lost for the moment in the strangeness of that time.

Barry picked up his own glass and held it in a similar fashion, sipping from it and watching Renee's face to see if she would respond to the mirrored position. It was a  pleasant game, but she did not notice. And then he answered.

"The boy was barely six, I think. Let's see, he would have been six last June. And your mother thought ...?" He hesitated, looking at Renee and then across at her husband, who sat with his legs wide apart, elbows on his knees, studying them with his brow furrowed.

"Funny business," the dour man said, looking at Barry as if he were the one engaged in it. "I never believed that story about the stray dog that mangled those men. The one man died, and the other one can't walk. If that was a dog, it was a monstrous big one."

Barry looked across at the frowning man with some  attention. He was not the usual sort of fool, even though he was something of a boor.

"Do you think too that my nephew is some kind of  supernatural thing?"

Hegel shook his head. "Nothing ghostly about those  injuries, or my father-in-law's getting shot either. But it's not the simple minded thing Walter says it is."

"Walter?"

"My sister's husband," Renee said. "Mr. Golden, I'm afraid we are beginning to seem ..."

"Slap-happy." said Bill Hegel, drinking down the  whiskey in his glass.

Renee looked at her husband with such plain hatred that Barry saw at least one cause for his moroseness. "It's not funny, Billy," she said.

"I didn't say it was," he said, getting up.

"You're having another drink?" Renee said to him with a sharp tone.

"Join me?" he said, passing beside the sofa.

"No thanks," she said, very definite.

There was an embarrassing hiatus for the space of two breaths. Barry was unsure whether the conversation would go on or if there would be a marital scene, but the big man walked on out of the room and could be heard making clinking  noises in the kitchen. Renee looked back at Barry, her face assuming again an unruffled coolness.

"My sister and my mother are neither of them superstitious  fanatics, or believers in spirits or anything like that." She looked down and then met his eyes again. "At least my mother wasn't before my father was killed. Now, I don't know. Since the little boy ran away, she has felt even more sure that he was some kind of demon. She had brought in a spiritualist who hypnotized the boy one evening at Vaire and Walter's house, and the man claimed he had brought out the demon and that it had clawed him. He did have some scratches on his hands, but Walter said he did it himself. It was pretty awful."

Listening to her, Barry allowed the memory that drifted up to him from the Beast's own recollection to play through his mind, so that he hardly noticed Bill Hegel enter the room and sit down again with another drink in his hand.

"And then the boy ran away. Vaire had the police out all over Michigan looking for him but he was gone, vanished. Mother has been just impossible on the subject since then. I tried once to talk with her. Well, to give you an idea, when our grandmother Stumway took in a young boy down in Illinois, a boy about thirteen who asked her for work and a place to stay, she let him live in her house while he went to school. Mother sent my grandmother a magic amulet to ward off evil in case that poor boy was a demon in disguise. She wears one herself around her neck."

"I understand this is pretty hard for you to talk about," Barry said sympathetically.

"Pretty damn tough on the kids, I'd say," Bill put in.

"Your mother still thinks my nephew was a demon?" Barry said.

"I suppose so. It's been months since I've seen her. She's on the farm again with old John who used to help Dad years ago, and they're trying to run it. Vaire won't even talk about it because Walter makes such a fuss whenever she tries to say anything." She turned and looked across at her husband and said, "Walter is a person with strong opinions."

"He's a dope is what he is," Bill said, his drink half gone.

"He's a nice guy," Renee said quickly, "and Vaire and he have a good home, but he won't think about some things. Mr. Golden, this isn't helping you, is it?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact it is," Barry said gallantly,  smiling and taking the chance to look straight into her eyes for a long look. He was rewarded this time by her eyes faltering and a flush creeping into her cheeks.

"It's all been strange since Leonard and Caroline died. I don't know if you get what I mean, but their deaths have changed things. It's not the same world it was a year or so ago. I had never thought of Leonard dying. He was always there. We had no other family, and I haven't married. He and I were the family, and it's not the same world without him. I feel like it couldn't really have happened." Barry found himself genuinely moved again and wiped the corner of one eye. He took another sip of wine, glancing up, not directly at Renee but catching her look of intense compassion.  He felt a warmth rising inside him at this first real sign of communication. She was still looking at him sadly when he looked into her eyes again. This time they did not falter.

"Yes, Mr. Golden, I know. My father was such a fine person, and it wasn't time for him to die. I have to admit that I was glad those men were hurt and that the man who shot him died too, although it was terrible. Dad was the best person on earth." And now it was her turn to get misty eyed.

"Renee," Bill Hegel said from somewhere outside the suddenly closed orbit of the two bereaved people. But he said no more, just got up and headed for the kitchen again. She did not even look up as he went by.

They talked then for what must have been hours, while Bill Hegel made more trips to the kitchen and increasingly sounded uneven as he walked back to his chair by the  window. Barry kept forgetting that the husband was in the room, as if the big man were fading back into the darkness of the window. Finally he made a very unsteady trip, bumping  against chairs and the sides of doors, and did not return. Renee and Barry had detoured bereavements, talking of  supernatural events, things they had done as children, finding little coincidences, events to laugh about quietly, and now they were relaxed, leaning back on the small, hard sofa, his arm hanging over the back of it, hers lying along it, seeming to point at him with her slender fingers. Her head lay along her arm now, the black hair shadowing her face, and he wanted almost uncontrollably to touch her cheek, to trace the line of her fine lips with a delicate fingertip, to simply touch the outlines of her face, her neck, as if he were  drawing her on a canvas. When he spoke then, his voice sounded changed, as if the words were rising from some passionate depth.

"I feel I have known you before, Renee," he said. When he said her name his tone must have given him away, for she looked up from under her dark lashes and smiled faintly.

"You walked into my house this evening," she said softly while he was aware of his heart beating lopsidedly in his chest. "And I had never heard of you before. But yes, it does seem like that." She sighed and closed her eyes. "And here we are, sitting here at midnight, and my husband is drunk and passed out again."

He raised his arm slowly, put his hand on hers, which turned over to receive it and clasped his hand with a warm, steady pressure. It seemed to him later that they both leaned forward at the same moment, and he surprised her, for  instead of meeting her lips with his, he did what he had wanted to do all evening. He traced the outline of her cheek with one very light finger, the line along her lips with a bit more pressure, flattened his hand against her other cheek and pushed his fingers back into her hair. They were both  trembling as they came very slowly together and their lips met. Delicately at first, as if tasting, their senses heightened with passion, they touched each other with their lips. And then her lips opened lightly, and he felt her breath and kissed her harder while his hand dropped to her arm, the satin smooth as warm water, the hand moving to her neck, the fine white skin softer and more electrifying than the satin, and then to her breast as she moved to come nearer and he took her by the waist and pulled her to him and they kissed again.

Mounting into the now familiar pounding of the blood, I feel at the same time a new sense of restraint, a feeling that prolongs my rise into awareness. The human personality is much stronger than the beast's I have used. Yes, for this is not a use so much as a sharing, and the quick animal lust and consummation seems pale in comparison to what is now growing more complex with sensation as the man and woman touch each other and breathe nonsense words.  Images form in my mind as Barry reacts to the touch of the woman's body when she moves against him, touches his lips with hers when he would speak, lies back so that their bodies may embrace each other, so that he may feel the heat of the woman's loins against his own. But he is strong in his lust, stronger than I expected from one of my own Persons, and I resign my claim as his personality surges over my own. I may also enjoy without exerting my power. I submerge and wait.

Somewhere back there in reality was her husband, Barry thought, maybe not really passed out but waiting for this kind of thing, and he felt less than wholly committed. If an enraged husband appeared with a knife or gun, the seducer should not be entirely helpless. His mind persisted in its fear, leaving him split when he should have been totally enthralled by this passionate woman to whom he had been talking, whom he had been desiring since first seeing her, and who now was more than half undressed, her breasts against his bare chest, her fingers caressing his back as they lay against each other on that difficult and ugly modern sofa. He could not stand for it to be less than complete.

"Where is he?"

"Dead drunk, I know."

"At least," he began, but she stopped his mouth with hers again, and he felt her hands being very passionate and clever with his body, so that he no longer worried about the other man, or even remembered that there were other people in the world. And then it began to move very quickly, almost in a frenzy as she helped him undress and he helped her, and they became vague-faced with passion, digging into each other's flesh as all thought stopped and they began earnestly to make hard, violent love to each other's bodies. She  embraced him with her body, with every part, ready, and raising her hips wholly off the sofa as he entered her, and both of them groaned with pleasure. The movements were hard, as if they had waited so long they could only be violent, and between each groan as he went into her she would whisper, her head back, "Harder!" And he would press harder, her legs wound around him, their senses merged, bodies hitting against each other so that now there were no more groans, only panting and the ecstasy of first loving without thought or even the images that would come later to enhance their love making, with only the harsh gasping and the animal movements from both of them as they made increasingly one, one body, one mind, one self seeking its center, the center that was rising within them, and now her mouth snapped open and her eyes went blank as she writhed and pulsed around him and he too, with her in that perfect death in which Barry Golden held to that last shred of his exploded personality, managed in that moment, in those infinite  seconds and minutes, not to shift, to remain himself while the Beast writhed in its own passionate climax within him. It was that accomplishment, later, that he thought back on with surprise, with a sense of his own individuality, of  something beyond the power that he took to be the source of his being.