Monster (21 page)

“Hurry,”
Jim
shouted.

“OK,”
she said, mostly to herself. It would be
OK.

She jumped in.

T
he shock was so complete she didn't register it at first.
Her
feet sank down without touching the bottom. She
kicked
up vigorously and broke the surface. Then the cold
hit her;
she could have landed on an iceberg
.

“Ah!”
she yelled.

Far
out in the ice pool
Jim
snorted. “
Swim!
”
he called
. “It will warm you up.”

He
was wrong about that. The further she swam from
shore, the colder she got.
She suspected she was losing
body
heat faster than any form of exercise would gener
ate it
. There was no way she could stay in more than a
minute.

But
then
Jim
met her and pulled her towards him and
kissed h
er again. She could feel his body against hers and
realized M
r
.
Shining Feather was wrong about this guy
and
how cold he was. Too hot to be cold was all she
could
think as his mouth pressed against hers. A powerful
warm
th flowed beneath her shivering flesh, sucking the
blood
deep into nerve endings she never imagined lived
inside her body. She t
ilted her head back and went lim
p
in
his arm
s
, letting him hold her afloat as his tongue slid o
ver
her throat. Straight overhead she could see the moon
, cut
in two by the shadow of space, and she felt somehow
cut in
pieces because try as she might she couldn't squeeze hi
m
close enough to quench her longing for him. He was o
ne
huge steak as
r
are as God made them, and she was lu
cky
above all the gi
rls on the planet to find him.

“
Sweet,
” she whispered aloud.

Jim
suddenly snapped her head back on to his mouth, and her ecstasy deepened beyond recovery even with
the
sha
rp pain that st
abbed into her mouth. She had bit h
er
tongue, or maybe h
e
had done it. But the taste of blood in her mouth was the taste of pleasure. The pounding in he
r
head that had plagued her all day returned a thousandfold
,
but now she fed it with
a
juice she had never dreamed of
.
It seemed to come out of
Jim
and into her mouth, where
blood swam around their tongues
l
ike
a
forbidden el
ixir
swirled in a sacred chalice. Yet there was so much of it that she couldn't imagine that it all belonged to her. Bu
t
that was the heart of this seduction. Nothing belonged to anybody. Throw your body and soul into the temp
tat
ion;
let
it all come back in tremors of sa
ti
sfaction. Kissing him
was
such joy that the pounding in her brain was drowned by
the
sensation, swept away on a wet wind that blew from out
of
tim
e, a wind that washed away her l
ast thread of innocent and left her naked in the centre of the cold lake.

How long he held her she wasn't sure. It seemed
an
eon
had elapsed when he finally led her by her hand out of the water and up on to her balcony. Her skin
was
white marble; the drops of water that clung to it we
re
like shards of ice. Yet she no longer shivered
.
She was
n’t
even sure if she still breathed.

They went into her b
edroom and lay on the sheets be
si
de
each other. He looked at her, and she stared at him
. His
eyes were deep and wide;
she could see space inside them
that belonged to anoth
er dimension. They were also her
own eyes
–
newborn twins
–
seen in unnatural reflection
. She
watched her own alien landscape unfolding in them as she closed her eyes and fell into darkness.

She
was in the mind of the immortal World, but she was
not on th
e World. Her body wa
s being sent away to feed. Her b
ody
,
not her soul. She didn't have or need one of
the
la
tt
er. She had the mind of the World, and the World
was
always hungry. As she flew through the black abyss she
dreamed
of sa
ti
sfying her cravings on the flesh of those
who
had been called brother and sister, but who were now enemies, only to be destroyed.

After some ti
me she felt the wind on her face. The sun,
a huge
ball of fire in the sky, stung her eyes. Everything
seem
ed
strange to her, and yet she knew this place. Her
body
had grown up here. This was the Earth, and this had
bee
n
home before she
had been consumed by the World.
S
he felt
no nostalgia upon returning, only her need to
fe
ed.

In
the distance she sa
w human beings approach. She smil
ed and waved at them as she stepped away from the
veh
icle that had brought
her to Earth. She spoke to them.
T
h
ey
were happy to see her again. They thought she was
the
one who had left the Earth months earlier to explore
the
World.
They didn't know t
hat the whole time she spoke to t
hem she thought only of
h
ow they would taste. Later,
in
the dark, she would know.

T
he sun was too bright. It made her feel weak
.

S
he was anxious to get inside and sleep.

And
dream.

S
he dreamed many dreams. That was all there was in the
mind
of the World. Nightmare upon nightmare. There was
no
need
to
awake,
it
constantly whispered
.

B
ut her body eventually awoke and went forward with a
ven
geance
.

Time passed. Nights of feeding. Days of deception
. Night
s of stalking. Then, in the end, days of hiding, of
fleeing.
Because in time all the close friends of the body
she
inhabited were dead and eaten, or else they were like
herself, running from
t
hose who had begun
to
suspect th
at
the far-off World was not a place to build
a
second ho
me but a place to die a death that never ended.

I
n the end hiding became much more difficult becau
se
as time passed the body changed into a thing that broug
h
t terror
to those who laid eyes upon it.
Yet thi
s
new bo
dy
was superior in many ways. It was stronger; it could fly. She could feed in one spo
t
and be many miles aw
ay a
short time later. But she had also changed in
a
manner different from anything that walked the Earth. She could no longer disguise herself or her true purpose. Fe
eding became difficult, then next
to impossible. She began to weaken. The sun became intolerable, and she shunned it in the depths of the Earth. But that was a mistake, for she boxed herself in. With a group of those she had transformed she was cornered in a black cave. Humans in red uniforms broke in. Hand-held weapons that fired beams of burning ruby
l
ight flashed before her eyes
. One of her kind was hauled int
o the circle of weapons and decapitated by a be
am that cut down everything in it
s
path. Then another of her kind was killed, and still another, until she was all that remained. The humans gathered round her, and there was triumph in their eyes. But she did not beg for mercy. She was a part of the World
.
It would live forever. More humans would travel from the third planet to the fifth, and more of her kind would take birth. The seeds of the World would spread. In the end its hunger would be satisfied.

Which was her last thought as her head was sliced fr
om off her body.

Angela awoke and opened her eyes. She lay all alone
on
top of her bed.
She was
freezing cold and had to pull the
blankets over her. As she did so she saw
Jim
sitting
naked on the balcony, staring o
ut at the dark water of the lake.

“
Jim
,” she called. “
Come back to bed
.”

He ignored her. His body was so ghostly in
the light
of the moon it could have been made of imaginati
on. She’d talk t
o him in a minute. Now she was hungry. Getting
up, she crept into the kitchen.

The
clock read exactly twelve midnight, but the second
-hand
did not move as she watched it. Broken, she thought
– it felt
much later than midnight. She opened the icebox
a
nd took
out two steaks. They sizzled in the pan as she
turned
up the flame
of the stove, but she didn't let
them
cook long. She just wanted to t
ake the chill off, make them
taste as
if
t
hey had been alive
not
long before.

She
ate both steaks without asking
Jim
if he wanted
one.

He
could get his own food, she thought
.

La
ter,
when she returned to the bedroom,
Jim
was no
lon
ger
on the balcony, or anywhere else. She stepped out
into
the night and pee
red at the water, watching the ri
pples
rock
back and forth. They were strong in the immediate
area;
it was
as if someone had just dived in.

“Ji
m?”
she called
.

Sh
e had heard no spla
sh.

And
as she waited nobody surfaced.

“Sethia,”
she whispered. The word filled her with dread
yet
seemed to bring her back to her senses. She turned
and
walked back into the house. In the bathroom she took
the
amulet Shining Feather had given her and placed it
round
her neck. Almost immediately she remembered
her
nightmare and her
l
ong, cold swim with
Jim
. Her
tong
ue ached in her mouth. He had bitten her. Or had
she
bitten both
of them? She could not be sure.

On
ce more, as it had the previous night, her stomach
lurched,
and she thought she
'd
vomit up the meat she had
just
eaten. Bu
t
the steaks stayed down, and soon she was
able
to get back into bed and cover herself. She fell asleep
hold
ing on
to the decapitated bat. Horrible as the gold
carving
was, it seemed to keep away the bad dreams.