The Pillow Friend (45 page)
Authors: Lisa Tuttle
THE SILVER BOUGH
on sale April 25, 2006
A
shley Kaldis leaned her head against the cool glass and gazed through the bus window at the famously beautiful Loch Lomond. She remembered learning a song about it in elementary school: a lifetime ago, in another century. The scenery beyond the bus window belonged to an even more distant past; it looked like something in a movie, and she felt rather as if she was watching one now, as if this bus were a theme park ride and everything outside created to give pleasure. It was even her favorite kind of weather, cool, cloudy and mysterious, with the tops of the hills—or were they mountains?—hidden in low cloud.
The road narrowed and began to wind through the craggy heights. The bus slowed and grumbled with effort. Her ears popped.
Some of the slopes were barren landscapes, the huge boulders jutting out of the thin soil reminding her of an illustration from a geology textbook. She decided they were definitely too steep to be hills, so they must be mountains, the first she'd ever seen in real life. Hardy shrubs and tough grasses sprouted between the rocks and were nibbled by big-horned, bedraggled-looking sheep or goats. Some of them looked up as the bus lumbered past, staring across the distance from slotted yellow devil's eyes. Veils of mist shivered and parted, floating away like ghostly spirits. At any moment, she thought, a couple of animatronic skeletons should lurch out at them, clanking and moaning to give the passengers a pleasurable fright.
Finally, the bus stopped laboring so hard as the road leveled out, but then, almost immediately, it began winding downwards in a long, slow descent. She looked down at a mountainside covered in dark green pines like a pelt of thick fur, and up at a glittering, roaring cascade of water that tumbled steeply down over rocks. There were no buildings anywhere. It was all wilderness, with nothing man-made in sight but the long and winding road.
Except for the traffic, there was nothing to fix you to a particular era. The scene was magically timeless. Wander off across that rocky meadow, or into the shelter of that dark forest, far enough to lose the sight and sound of the highway, and you might find yourself in another century, meeting some hunky, shaggy, kilted Highlander. . . .
The fantasy was barely taking shape when she noticed the solitary figure of a man walking by the roadside ahead of the bus. He had a purposeful stride, like a man who had been walking a long time with a clear aim in view, yet he wasn't dressed like a recreational hiker. He wasn't wearing a rucksack or a brightly colored windbreaker or hiking boots. His clothes were nondescript but wrong for the setting; like his leather slip-ons, they belonged to an indoor life. He might have dashed out like that to pick up a pizza, but what was he doing out here in the mountains? Where was his car?
She leaned forward, pressing her face close to the window, wondering if he'd signal to the bus driver to pick him up. Sure enough, she saw him stop and half-turn, looking up at the noisy approach. But his look was not for the driver. Instead, it skated across the passenger windows until it found hers.
The feeling—
Later, trying to describe it to herself, she compared it to the description in one of the Harry Potter books of the effect of the magical Portkey. She remembered Harry's feeling that a hook just behind his navel had been yanked to pull him forward—yes, it was like that, something at once magical and visceral, although for herself the location of the hook was somewhat lower down.
It happened in an instant, when his eyes met hers, and it was over almost as quickly—and unlike the fictional Portkey, it did not carry her out of the bus and to another place. It couldn't have lasted, that connection, more than a second or two, because by then the bus had roared past, and although she twisted around in her seat to keep him in view, in a matter of moments, tilting vertiginously, the bus swept around another bend, and the walking man was out of sight.
She fell back in her seat and tried to breathe normally. She felt herself throbbing all over.
What the hell was that?
But she knew, all right.
Lust. Pure lust.
She put her hand on the empty seat beside her, imagining Freya's raucous laughter.
Get over it! He was a hunk, so what? Do you think he spoke English? There'll be another one along in about fifteen minutes, if you can wait that long.
Maybe this was another product of jet lag and sleep deprivation, an emotion out of the same stable as the remote detachment with which she'd viewed Glasgow. It was movietime again, where a single, sexually charged look between strangers turned into the tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet
.
Or maybe . . . maybe it hadn't happened at all. Maybe she'd been asleep and dreaming.
Frowning, she sat up straighter. Now that was ridiculous. She would know if she'd been asleep. He had been real. She remembered a pair of dark, rather narrow eyes, and how they'd found hers. Like an aftershock, she felt the power of his look again: the feeling had been mutual.
Yet, although she remembered how the sight of him, and his look, had affected her, she found it oddly difficult to recall what he had looked like. How would she describe him to someone? How would she draw him?
A
stranger,
she thought. She felt sure he wasn't Scottish—not with that dark, almost honey-colored skin and those faintly slanting eyes—but she'd be hard-pressed to assign him to any particular race. Maybe he was an American drop-out, hitch-hiking around the world; maybe he was one of the Romany, heading for his people's encampment down some hidden by-way; maybe he was an asylum seeker fleeing an opressive foreign regime, a romantic exile. . . .
She closed her eyes, and took herself back to her first sighting of the solitary figure, determined to know more. She saw his back, wide shoulders in a drab-colored shirt worn over a dark T-shirt and straight-legged khaki pants. No hat; short, thick, straight black hair. Loafers on his feet.
He stopped and turned as the bus approached and looked up, giving her a perfectly clear view of his face in the moment before his eyes burned into hers. . . .
THE PILLOW FRIEND
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
White Wolf hardcover edition published September 1996
Bantam Spectra trade paperback edition / January 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1996 by Lisa Tuttle
“The Evidence,” copyright © 1973, 2001, Erica Mann Jong, all rights reserved, used by permission of the poet
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tuttle, Lisa
The pillow friend / Lisa Tuttle
p. cm.
eISBN: 0-553-90224-5
1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Multiple personality—Fiction. 3. Mothers—Death—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.U85 P55 2006 2005048269
813'.54 22
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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