Twilight Eyes (18 page)

She sat down on the grass, and I beside her.

She seemed to want silence again.

I obliged.

Sitting beneath the vault of night, listening to far crickets and the quiet splash of fish taking insects off the surface of the water, conversation was again quite unnecessary. It was enough for me to be at her side, separated from her by less than the length of an arm.

I was struck by the contrast between this place and those in which I had spent the rest of this day. First Yontsdown, with its smokestacks and medieval buildings and omnipresent sense of impending doom, then the midway with its gaudy pleasures and swarms of marks. It was a relief, now, to pass a little time in a place where there was no proof of man's existence other than the dirt road leading in, which we kept at our backs and which I tried to put out of mind. Gregarious by nature, there nevertheless were occasions when I became as weary of the company of other human beings as I was repelled and disgusted by the goblins. And sometimes, when I saw men and women being as cruel to one another as the marks had been in Joel Tuck's sideshow tent that very day, it seemed to me that we
deserved
the goblins, that we were a tragically flawed race incapable of adequately appreciating the miracle of our existence and that we had earned the vicious attentions of the goblins by our own despicable actions against one another. After all, many of the gods we worshiped were, to one degree or another, judgmental and demanding and capable of heart-stopping cruelty. Who could say that they might not visit a plague of goblins on us and call it just punishment for sins indulged? Here, in the tranquillity of the forest, however, a cleansing energy washed through me, and gradually I began to feel better, in spite of all the talk of graveyards and nightmares with which we had occupied ourselves.

Then, after a while, I became aware that Rya was weeping. She made no sound, and her body was not racked with silent sobs. I was alerted to her condition only when I began to receive a psychic impression of that terrible sadness, welling up anew in her. Looking sidewise, I saw a glistening tear tracking down her smooth cheek, another spot of silver in the moonlight.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Don't want to talk?”

She shook her head again.

Acutely aware that she needed comforting, that she had come to me expressly
for
comforting, but not knowing how to provide it, I turned my eyes from her and looked out at the oily blackness of the lake. She shorted out my logic circuits, damn it. She was different from anyone I had ever known, with puzzling depths and dark secrets, and it seemed to me that I dared not respond to her as casually and forthrightly as I would have responded to anyone else. I felt as if I were an astronaut making first contact with an alien from another world, overwhelmed by an appreciation for the gulf between us, afraid to proceed lest the initial communication be misunderstood. Therefore I found myself unable to respond at all, unable to act. I told myself that I had been foolish to dream of heating the coolness between us, that I had been an idiot for imagining that a close relationship with her was possible, that I had gotten in over my head with this one, that these waters were too dark and strange, that I would never understand her and—

—and then she kissed me.

She pressed her pliant lips to mine, and her mouth opened to me, and I returned her kiss with a passion I had never experienced before, our tongues seeking and melting together until I could not tell hers from mine. I put both hands in her glorious hair—an auburn-blond mix in daylight but now argentine—and let it run through my fingers. It felt the way spun moonlight might feel if it could be fashioned into a cool and silken thread. I touched her face, and the texture of her skin sent a shiver through me. I slid my hands lower, along her neck, holding her by the shoulders as our kisses deepened, then at last cupping her full breasts.

From the moment she had leaned against me and had given that first kiss, she had been shaking. I sensed that these were not tremors of erotic anticipation, but were evidence of an uncertainty, awkwardness, shyness, and fear of rejection not dissimilar to my own state of mind. Now, suddenly, a stronger shiver passed through her. She pulled away from me and said, “Oh, hell.”

“What?” I asked, breathless.

“Why can't . . .”

“What?”

“. . . two people . . .”

“What?”

Tears streamed down her face now. Her voice quavered: “. . . just reach out to each other . . .”

“You reached, I reached.”

“. . . and push aside that barrier . . .”

“There's no barrier. Not now.”

I sensed that sadness in her, a well of loneliness too deep to be plumbed, a grayness, an
apartness
, and I was afraid that it was going to overwhelm her at the worst possible moment, force upon us the very estrangement that she professed to fear.

She said, “It's there . . . always there . . . always so hard to make any real contact . . . any real . . .”

“It's easy,” I said.

“No.”

“We're more than halfway.”

“. . . a pit, a gulf . . .”

“Shut up,” I said as gently and lovingly as I had ever said two words, and I took hold of her again, kissed her again.

We kissed and caressed with rapidly increasing fervor but with a determination to savor this first exploration. Although we must have sat there on the grass for no more than five or ten minutes, it seemed that whole days passed unheeded. When she again pulled away from me, I started to protest. But she said, “Hush,” in such a way that I knew I should be quiet. She rose to her feet, and with none of the frustrating fumbling with buttons-clasps-zippers that could sometimes bring a chill to ardor, her clothes slipped away from her, and she stood thrillingly revealed.

Even at night in this dark woods, she seemed to be the daughter of the sun, for moonglow was nothing more than a reflection of solar light, and now every beam of that secondhand sunshine appeared to find its way to her. The rays of the moon made her skin translucent and accentuated the exquisitely sensuous curves and planes, convexities and concavities, of her faultless body. Eros in a fluid interfolding of black and silver: the frost-silver sphere of firm buttocks, perfectly cleft by darkness; a frostlike film molded to the enticing musculature of one thigh; a few crisp, shiny pubic hairs touched by a glint of silver; the concavity of her belly, curving from the pearly touch of moonlight into a smooth little pocket of shadow, then swelling back into the pearliness again before reaching the darkness beneath the heavy breasts; and—oh, yes—her breasts, uptilted, heartrendingly contoured, the turgid nipples painted half silver and half black. Milky light, snowy light, platinum light shone upon—and seemingly from within—her elegant, smooth shoulders, traced the delicate line of her throat, and licked along the fragile ridges and folds of one shell-like ear.

She descended like some celestial entity, as from a great height, with slow grace, and lay upon the thick, soft grass.

I undressed.

I made love to her with hands, with lips, with tongue, and before I even considered entering her, I had brought her twice to climax. I was not a great lover—far from it; my sexual experience was limited to two women at other carnivals before this one. But through my sixth sense I always seemed to know what was wanted, what would please.

Then, as she lay sprawled on that bed of black grass, I parted her sleek thighs and moved between them. The initial moment of penetration was the usual and unremarkable anatomical mechanics, but as we joined, the experience ceased to be usual, ceased to be unremarkable, was elevated from mechanics to mysticism, and we became not merely lovers but a simple organism, instinctively and mindlessly pursuing some half-glimpsed, mysterious, but desperately desired apotheosis of both spirit and body. Her responsiveness to me seemed as psychic as mine to her. As she clung to me, she never moved in disruptive opposition, or murmured the wrong word, or in any way disturbed the deeply satisfying and astonishingly complex rhythms of our passion, but matched each flex and counterflex, each thrust and counterthrust, each shuddering pause, each throb and stroke, until we had achieved and then surpassed flawless harmony. The world receded. We were one; we were all; we were the only.

In that sublime and almost holy condition, ejaculation seemed like a gross affront, not a natural conclusion to our coupling but a crude intrusion of base biology. But it was inevitable. Indeed it was not only inescapable, but also not long in arriving. I had been within her perhaps four or five minutes when I felt the eruption building and realized, with some embarrassment, that it was uncontainable. I began to withdraw from her, but she clasped me closer, entwining me with her slender legs and arms, her sex tightening heatedly around mine, and I managed to gasp out the impending danger of impregnation, but she said, “It's all right, Slim, it's all right, I can't have babies, anyway, no babies, it's all right, just come in me, honey, please, come in me, fill me,” and with the last few words she was shaken by another orgasm, and she arched her body against me, pressed her breasts against my chest, tremors racking her, and suddenly I was unknotted and untied, and long, fluid ribbons of sperm spooled out of me, unraveled within her.

We were a long time regaining a sense of the world around us and even longer parting. But at last we lay side by side, on our backs in the grass, staring up at the night sky, holding hands. We were silent because, for now, all that needed to be said had already been said without resorting to words.

Perhaps five long, warm minutes passed before she said, “Who
are
you, Slim MacKenzie?”

“Just me.”

“Somebody special.”

“Are you kidding? Special? I couldn't control myself. Went off like fireworks. Jeez. I promise more control next time. I'm no great lover, no Casanova, that's for sure, but I usually have more endurance than—”

“Don't,” she said softly. “Don't bring it down like that. Don't pretend it wasn't the most natural, the most exciting . . . the most
most
you ever knew. Because it was. It
was
.”

“But I—”

“It lasted long enough. Just long enough. Now shush.”

I shushed.

The filigree of clouds had blown away. The sky was crystalline. The moon was a Lalique globe.

This extraordinary day of contrasts had encompassed the most appalling ugliness and horror, but it had also been filled with beauty that was almost excruciating in its intensity. The leering goblins in Yontsdown. To compensate for them: Rya Raines. The grim grayness of that miserable city. To balance: this splendid canvas of moon and stars under which I now lay, satiated. The visions of fire and death at the elementary school. On the other hand: the memory of her moonlight-kissed body descending to the grass with a promise of joy. Without Rya it would have been a day of unimaginably stark and unrelieved despair. There on the shore of that dark lake, she seemed, at least in that moment, to be the embodiment of all that had gone
right
in the divine architect's plans for the universe, and if I could have located God right then, I would have yanked insistently on the hem of His robe and kicked at His shins and would have made a general nuisance of myself until He agreed that He would reconstruct those vast portions of His creation that He had screwed up the first time, and that during the reconstruction He would use Rya Raines as the supreme example of what was possible if only He would put all His mind and talent behind the project.

Joel Tuck was wrong. I was not infatuated with her.

I was in love with her.

God help me, I was in love with her. And although I did not know it then, the time was rapidly approaching when, because of my love for her, I would desperately need God's help merely to survive.

After a while she let go of my hand and sat up, drew her knees up, clasped her arms around her bent legs, and stared out at the lightless lake, in which a fish splashed once and then swam on in silence. I sat up beside her, and still we felt no need to be any more talkative than the swimming fishes.

Another distant splash.

A rustle of wind-stirred reeds at water's edge.

Cricket song.

Mournful mating calls of lonely frogs.

In time I realized that she was weeping again.

I put a hand to her face, moistened a fingertip in a tear.

“What?” I asked.

She said nothing.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Don't,” she said.

“Don't what?”

“Talk.”

I was silent.

She was silent.

Eventually the frogs were silent.

When she finally spoke, she said, “The water looks inviting.”

“Looks wet is all.”

“Appealing.”

“Probably covered with algae, and the bottom's mud.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “in Gibtown, Florida, during the off-season, I go out to the beach and take long walks, and sometimes I think how nice it would be to swim out into the sea, out and out, just keep on and never come back.”

There was a shocking spiritual and emotional weariness in her, a distressing melancholy. I wondered if it had something to do with her inability to have children. But mere barrenness seemed insufficient cause for this black despondency. At this moment her voice was that of a woman whose heart had been corroded by a bitter sadness of such purity and acidic strength that the source of it defied imagination.

I could not understand how she could plummet from ecstasy to despondency so quickly. Only minutes ago she had told me that our lovemaking had been the most
most
. Now she was almost
gladly
sinking back into despair, into an utterly hopeless, sapping, sunless, private desolation that scared the hell out of me.