The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (51 page)

He thought of victims of hypothermia; the first step, he had read, was to get their temperature back up to normal, any way possible. Hot water bottle? He didn’t own one. Hot bath? He stood over the girl and shook his head slightly. Water might be toxic to her. And that was the problem; she was an alien with unknown needs, unknown dangers. And she was freezing.

With reluctance he touched her arm, still cool in spite of all the covering over her. Like a hothouse plant, he thought then, brought into a frigid climate, destined to die of cold. Moving slowly, with even greater reluctance than before, he began to pull off his trousers, his shirt, and when he was down to undershirt and shorts, he gently shifted the sleeping girl and lay down beside her, drew her to the warmth of his body.

The house temperature by then was close to eighty-five, much too warm for a man with all the fat that Eddie had on his body; she felt good next to him, cooling, even soothing. For a time she made no response to his presence, but gradually her shivering lessened, and she seemed to change subtly, lose her rigidity; her legs curved to make contact with his legs; her torso shifted, relaxed, flowed into the shape of his body; one of her arms moved over his chest, her hand at his shoulder, her other arm bent and fitted itself against him. Her cool cheek pressed against the pillows of flesh over his ribs. Carefully he wrapped his arms about her and drew her closer. He dozed, came awake with a start, dozed again. At nine he woke up completely and began to disengage himself. She made a soft sound, like a child in protest, and he stroked her arm and whispered nonsense. At last he was untangled from her arms and legs and stood up and pulled on his clothes again. The next time he looked at the girl, her eyes were open, and he felt entranced momentarily. Large, round, golden eyes, like pools of molten gold, unblinking, inhuman. He took a step away from her.

“Can you talk?”

There was no response. Her eyes closed again and she drew the covers high up onto her face, buried her head in them.

Wearily Eddie went to the kitchen and poured coffee. It was hot and tasted like tar. He emptied the coffee maker and started a fresh brew. Soon Mary Beth would return and they would make the plans that had gone nowhere during the night. He felt more tired than he could remember and thought ruefully of what it was really like to be forty-two and a hundred pounds overweight and miss a night’s sleep.

“You look like hell,” Mary Beth said in greeting at ten. She looked fine, excited, a flush on her cheeks, her eyes sparkling. “Is it okay? Has it moved? Come awake yet?” She charged past him and stood in the doorway to the bedroom. “Good. I got hold of Homer Carpenter, over in Portland. He’s coming over with a video camera around two or three. I didn’t tell him what we have, but I had to tell him something to get him over. I said we have a coelacanth.”

Eddie stared at her. “He’s coming over for that? I don’t believe it.”

She left the doorway and swept past him on her way to the kitchen. “Okay, he doesn’t believe me, but he knows it’s something big, something hot, or I wouldn’t have called him. He knows me that well, anyway.”

Eddie thought about it for a second or two, then shrugged. “What else did you find out?”

Mary Beth got coffee and held the cup in both hands, surveying him over the top of it. “Boy oh boy, Eddie! I don’t know who knows what, or what it is they know, but there’s a hunt on. They’re saying some guys escaped from the pen over at Salem, but that’s bull. Roadblocks and everything. I don’t think they’re telling anyone anything yet. The poor cops out there don’t know what the hell they’re supposed to be looking for, just anything suspicious, until the proper authorities get here.”

“Here? They know she’s here?”

“Not
here
here. But somewhere on the coast. They’re closing in from north and south. And that’s why Homer decided to get his ass over here, too.”

Eddie remembered the stories that had appeared on the wire services over the past few weeks about an erratic comet that was being tracked. Stuart Winkle, the publisher and editor in chief, had chosen not to print them, but Eddie had seen them. And more recently the story about a possible burnout in space of a Soviet capsule. Nothing to worry about, no radiation, but there might be bright lights in the skies, the stories had said. Right, he thought.

Mary Beth was at the bedroom door again, sipping her coffee. “I’ll owe you for this, Eddie. No way can I pay for what you’re giving me.” He made a growly noise, and she turned to regard him, suddenly very serious.

“Maybe there is something,” she said softly. “A little piece of the truth. You know you’re not the most popular man in town, Eddie. You’re always doing little things for people, and yet, do they like you for it, Eddie? Do they?”

“Let’s not do any psychoanalysis right now,” he said coldly. “Later.”

She shook her head. “Later I won’t be around. Remember?” Her voice took on a mocking tone. “Why do you suppose you don’t get treated better? Why no one comes to visit? Or invites you to the clambakes, except for office parties, anyway? It’s all those little things you keep doing, Eddie. Overdoing maybe. And you won’t let anyone pay you back for anything. You turn everyone into a poor relation, Eddie, and they begin to resent it.”

Abruptly he laughed. For a minute he had been afraid of her, what she might reveal about him. “Right,” he said. “Tell that to Ruthie Jenson.”

Mary Beth shrugged: “You give poor little Ruthie exactly what she craves – mistreatment. She takes it home and nurtures it. And then she feels guilty. The Boland kid you intended to rescue. You would have had her, her sister and their mother all feeling guilty. Truman Cox. How many free drinks you let him give you, Eddie? Not even one, I bet. Stuart Winkle? You run his paper for him. You ever use that key to his cabin? He really wants you to use it, Eddie. A token repayment. George Allmann. Harriet Davies . . . it’s a long list, Eddie, the people you’ve done little things for. The people who go through life owing you, feeling guilty about not liking you, not sure why they don’t. I was on that list, too, Eddie, but not now. I just paid you in full.”

“Okay,” he said heavily. “Now that we’ve cleared up the mystery about me, what about her?” He pointed past Mary Beth at the girl on his bed.

“It, Eddie. It. First the video, and make some copies, get them into a safe place, and then announce. How does that sound?”

He shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

She grinned her crooked smile and shook her head, at him. “Forget it, Eddie. I’m paid up for years to come. Look, I’ve got to get back to the office. I’ll keep my eyes on the wires, anything coming in, and as soon as Homer shows, we’ll be back. Are you okay? Can you hold out for the next few hours?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” He watched her pull on her coat and walked to the porch with her. Before she left, he said, “One thing, Mary Beth. Did it even occur to you that some people like to help out? No ulterior motive or anything, but a little human regard for others?”

She laughed. “I’ll give it some thought, Eddie. And you give some thought to having perfected a method to make sure people leave you alone, keep their distance. Okay? See you later.”

He stood on the porch, taking deep breaths. The air was mild; maybe the sun would come out later on. Right now the world smelled good, scoured clean, fresh. No other house was visible. He had let the trees and shrubbery grow wild, screening everything from view, it was like being the last man on Earth, he thought suddenly. The heavy growth even screened out the noise from the little town. If he listened intently, he could make out engine sounds, but no voices, no one else’s music that he usually detested, no one else’s cries or laughter.

Mary Beth never had been ugly, he thought then. She was good-looking in her own way even now, going on middle age. She must have been a real looker as a younger woman. Besides, he thought, if anyone ever mocked her, called her names, she would slug the guy. That would be her way. And he had found his way, he added, then turned brusquely and went inside and locked the door after him.

He took a kitchen chair to the bedroom and sat down by her. She was shivering again. He reached over to pull the covers more tightly about her, then stopped his motion and stared. The black mantle thing did not cover her head as completely as it had before. He was sure it now started further back. And more of her cheeks was exposed. Slowly he drew away the cover and then turned her over. The mantle was looser, with folds where it had been taut before. She reacted violently to being uncovered, shuddering long spasmlike movements.

He replaced the cover.

“What the hell are you?’ he whispered. “What’s happening to you?”

He rubbed his eyes hard and sat down, regarding her with a frown. “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? They’ll take you somewhere and study you, try to make you talk, if you can, find out where you’re from, what you want, where there are others . . . They might hurt you. Even kill you.”

He thought again of the great golden pools that were her eyes, of how her skin felt like silk over a firm substance, of the insubstantiality of her body, the lightness when he carried her.

“What do you want here?” he whispered. “Why did you come?”

After a few minutes of silent watching, he got up and found his dry shoes in the closet and pulled them on. He put on a plaid shirt that was very warm, and then he wrapped the sleeping girl in the blanket and carried her to his car and placed her on the back seat. He went back inside for another blanket and put that over her, too.

He drove up his street, avoiding the town, using a back road that wound higher and higher up the mountain. Stuart Winkle’s cabin, he thought. An open invitation to use it any time he wanted. He drove carefully, taking the curves slowly, not wanting to jar her, to roll her off the back seat. The woods pressed in closer when he left the road for a log road. From time to time he could see the ocean, then he turned and lost it again. The road clung to the steep mountainside, climbing, always climbing; there was no other traffic on it. The loggers had finished with this area; this was state land, untouchable, for now anyway. He stopped at one of the places where the ocean spread out below him and watched the waves rolling in forever and ever, unchanging, unknowable. Then he drove on. The cabin was high on the mountain. Up here the trees were mature growth, mammoth and silent, with deep shadows beneath them, little understory growth in the dense shade. The cabin was redwood, rough, heated with a wood stove, no running water, no electricity. There was oil for a lamp, and plenty of dry wood stacked under a shed, and a store of food that Stuart had said he should consider his own. There were twin beds in the single bedroom and a couch that opened to a double bed in the living room. Those two rooms and the kitchen made up the cabin.

He carried the girl inside and put her on one of the beds; she was entirely enclosed in blankets like a cocoon. Hurriedly he made a fire in the stove and brought in a good supply of logs. Like a hothouse orchid, he thought; she needed plenty of heat. After the cabin started to heat up, he took off his outer clothing and lay down beside her, the way he had done before, and as before, she conformed to his body, melted into him, absorbed his warmth. Sometimes he dozed, then he lay quietly thinking of his childhood, of the heat that descended on Indiana like a physical substance, of the tornadoes that sometimes came, murderous funnels that sucked life away, shredded everything. He dozed and dreamed and awakened and dreamed in that state also.

He got up to feed the fire and tossed in the film Mary Beth had given him to guard. He got a drink of water at the pump in the kitchen and lay down by her again. His fatigue increased, but pleasurably. His weariness was without pain, a floating sensation that was between sleep and wakefulness. Sometimes he talked quietly to her, but not much, and what he said he forgot as soon as the words formed. It was better to lie without sound, without motion. Now and then she shook convulsively and then subsided again. Twilight came, darkness, then twilight again. Several times he aroused enough to build up the fire.

When it was daylight once more, he got up, reeling as if drunken; he pulled on his clothes and went to the kitchen to make instant coffee. He sensed her presence behind him. She was standing up, nearly as tall as he was, but incredibly insubstantial, not thin, but as slender as a straw. Her golden eyes were wide open. He could not read the expression on her face.

“Can you eat anything?” he asked. “Drink water?”

She looked at him. The black mantle was gone from her head; he could not see it anywhere on her as she faced him. The strange folds of skin at her groin, the boneless appearance of her body, the lack of hair, breasts, the very color of her skin looked right now not alien, not repellent. The skin was like cool silk, he knew. He also knew this was not a woman, not a she, but something that should not be here, a creature, an it.

“Can you speak? Can you understand me at all?”

Her expression was as unreadable as that of a wild creature, a forest animal, aware, intelligent, unknowable.

Helplessly he said, “Please, if you can understand me, nod. Like this.” He showed her, and in a moment she nodded. “And like this for no,” he said. She mimicked him again.

“Do you understand that people are looking for you?”

She nodded slowly. Then very deliberately she turned around, and instead of the black mantle that had grown on her head, down her back, there was an iridescence, a rainbow of pastel colors that shimmered and gleamed. Eddie sucked in his breath as the new growth moved, opened slightly more.

There wasn’t enough room in the cabin for her to open the wings all the way. She stretched them from wall to wall. They looked like gauze, filmy, filled with light that was alive. Not realizing he was moving, Eddie was drawn to one of the wings, reached out to touch it. It was as hard as steel and cool. She turned her golden liquid eyes to him and drew her wings in again.

“We’ll go someplace where it’s warm,” Eddie said hoarsely; “I’ll hide you. I’ll smuggle you somehow. They can’t have you!”