A ball of ice formed in Waters’s stomach.
“He raped and killed her…exactly the way he had done it to me. I had to experience that, Johnny. As if I were doing it. She wasn’t as strong as I was. She just lay there, praying it would be over quickly, hoping she would be all right in the end. But she wasn’t. He strangled her. I knew he was going to do it. I knew all along, Johnny. And there was nothing I could do to stop him.”
Waters pulled the covers over his chest.
“I nearly went mad. Maybe I did, a little. I don’t know. I wanted so badly to get out of him. I imagined killing him during one of the times that I was in control. I knew I could stop him from hurting women if I did that. But I didn’t want to die. I’d seen my dead body. I’d seen that other woman, lying there like a candle someone had blown out. God forgive me…I didn’t want that to happen to me, Johnny.”
Eve wiped her eyes. Waters reached down and took her hand, and this seemed to steady her enough to go on.
“His wife was a pathetic creature, totally dependent. He abused her, but on some level she seemed to need that. He didn’t have sex with her very often. Sex to him was what he did to his victims. But when he was with his wife, it was very rough and seemed to satisfy something in her, some yearning for punishment. It was so twisted. Once, while I was thinking of suicide, he had sex with her. During the act, I started to feel like I had when he had raped me. Not the same feeling, but the same intensity of feeling. I wanted out of him so badly. And I was so near to this other person, this person who was not a monster. I was physically inside her, you know? As they thrashed against each other, she started to climax, and I felt…”
“What?”
“Like a door was opening. As she started to peak, the person she was—the individual part—began to fade away. All thought and memory was vanishing into this…nothingness. The ecstasy of her climax wiped out her individuality. Do you know what I mean? In those seconds she became like a shell—a body without a soul—and in the instant that I understood what was happening, it was over. One moment I was looking at her, the next I was looking at him. I was inside her, Johnny. In her mind. And it was like being released from prison.” Eve looked at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You’re saying that your soul—”
“I don’t know if it’s my soul! That’s beyond me. But whatever we are—whatever human consciousness is—that part of me moved from him into her, just as it had gone into him when I so desperately wanted to survive.” She squeezed his hand. “Please tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Don’t stop. Tell me the rest.”
She looked up at the canopy. “That was ten years ago. The time between then and now…I don’t want to think about.”
“Tell me.”
Eve closed her eyes and spoke in a detached voice. “The woman’s mind was much less crowded than her husband’s. She’d endured terrible things as a child too, but she hadn’t reacted the way he had. She’d turned the anger inward, against herself. That’s why she responded to his abuse. She thought she deserved it. Once I was inside her, I understood that. I could control her much better than I could him. I could stay awake for much longer periods. I could think. And the more I thought, the more I realized that I had been given a unique chance. I had no idea how, and I still don’t. But I had to do something with that chance. It was as though I’d been lost in a shipwreck. Everyone I knew thought I was dead, so the old obligations didn’t apply. My husband, my children…I was dead to them. And all I could think about was what had happened when I thought I was going to die. What I had thought of. I decided then that I would do whatever I had to do to find you.”
For the first time, Waters truly felt he was lying beside Mallory Candler. The single-minded possessiveness that had led Mallory to insanity was there in Eve’s voice. She opened her eyes and rose up on one elbow.
“I mean, I knew where you were. But I had to come to you in a way—in a form—that you would listen to. Someone you could be attracted to. Someone like I was when you knew me before.”
Waters felt her gaze upon him like heat from a candle. “Are you saying you went through many different people to get to where you are now?”
“Yes.”
He felt a manic compulsion to jump out of the bed, but he didn’t trust her to stay rational if he did.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, her voice edged with anxiety.
“I’m trying not to think. I’m just listening.”
But he was thinking. He was thinking he had read that paranoid schizophrenics were capable of constructing incredibly complex delusions, filled with detail and interwoven with reality. If it weren’t for all the secrets Eve knew about Mallory, he would be positive this was just such a delusion.
“How many people did you go through to get to Eve?”
“Nine.”
As the implications of her words hit him, his face felt cold. “And one of them was Danny Buckles? That’s how you knew about the molestation at the school?”
“Yes.”
Jesus God….
“I know things about those nine people that no one in the world would ever believe. Things they’d kill themselves over if people discovered. Human beings are corrupt creatures, Johnny. I remember you talking about Thomas Hobbes when you were taking political philosophy. Well, Hobbes had human nature right.”
Her easy reference to a class he had taken twenty years ago pierced him like a blade. In this empty mansion, logic held no sway. On one hand she was telling him a story that could have been written by Poe while on opium; on the other she was casually bringing up things only Mallory could have remembered, thus lending credence to her hallucinations.
“And you can move through people at will?” he asked, not believing his own voice.
“No. Only the way I described.”
“Only during sex?”
“Not just any sex. The other person—the person I move into—has to climax. Their individuality has to be wiped out by that. So, as you’d imagine, it’s very easy for me to move into a man, but harder to pass into a woman.”
“But how could it take nine years?”
“I made some mistakes.” Bitterness had entered her voice. “I was trapped in a prison for a while. Literally in jail. In a man. There was sex there, but”—she shivered—“not with anyone who could get me out.”
Who could make up this insanity? he asked himself.
“The farther along the chain I got, the easier it became to move closer to you. But still, it was hard. It took me a long time to learn to control my…”
“What? Your what?”
“My host, I was going to say.”
Icy fingers closed around his heart. The “soul transfer” she had been describing had a direct analogue in the real world: viral infection. In Eve’s world, souls moved through people in the same way a sexually transmitted disease did. Could her whole fantastic delusion be some paranoid response to contracting the AIDS virus?
“Is that what you’re doing now?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “Controlling Eve?”
“Yes.”
“Is Eve ever really Eve anymore?”
She bit her lip and turned her face away. “Sometimes.”
“What does she feel like when she is?”
“She’s afraid. She went to a doctor about it. He referred her to a psychiatrist, who put her on medication. That didn’t work, of course. Eve’s confused, and sometimes she breaks through when I least expect it. She’s a strong personality. Some people are easy to dominate. Others…it’s exhausting. I’m never quite myself—not completely—because part of my energy is always devoted to maintaining control of the person.”
Waters nodded as though it all made perfect sense, but there was a scream behind his lips.
Suddenly Eve turned back to him and squeezed his shoulder. “Johnny, what are you feeling?” She clung to him as though sensing he wanted to le
ave. “Tell me.”
As he searched for some innocuous lie, he suddenly realized that deception was ridiculous. He looked her in the eyes and took her hand. “Eve, are you ill? I want you to be completely honest with me. You said you were tested before. You didn’t tell me the result. Has someone made you sick?”
She pulled away, her eyes filled with hurt. “Do you really think I would do that to you? Put you at risk like that?”
“I don’t know. Think about everything you’ve just told me.”
“I know it sounds crazy. But think for a minute, Johnny. Millions of people go to church every Sunday and profess faith in their immortal souls. Christianity is built around that. Do those people believe what they say or not? Because if they do, they’re admitting that something exists apart from the body, some force. And if that’s true, then why is what I’ve described so crazy? Are you only your body, Johnny? If during the good times between us, I’d been paralyzed in a car wreck, would you have left me?”
She had clearly thought about this much more deeply than he had.
“You know you wouldn’t have. I know it. Well, this is like that. My old body is useless now, it’s gone. But I’m still here. And I need you.”
He sat up in the bed.
Eve got onto her knees and grasped his arm. “Are you leaving?”
He looked at his watch. “I need to.”
“Don’t go yet. Please. I don’t know how you feel. Where you are.”
“I don’t either.”
“Will you see me again?”
He looked toward the corridor. His clothes lay strewn on the antique rug outside the door. “I don’t know.”
Eve closed her eyes tight, as though suppressing panic. “Please don’t say that, Johnny. Please.”
Her reaction threw him back twenty years, to the worst times with Mallory. This yo-yo journey between present and past had been happening ever since the soccer field, and it left him dizzy, like a man trapped on a carnival ride. As soon as Eve opened her eyes, he would calm her down, then make his exit.
While he waited, she raised her right hand to her neck and twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger. Instead of releasing it, she pulled tighter and tighter, clearly hard enough to cause pain. With deep shock spreading through his chest, Waters reached across her body and took hold of her left wrist, exposing the inner forearm. Eve’s eyes popped open, but she did not release her hair. He scanned the length of the forearm but saw only smooth skin. Eve gave him an eerie smile.
The watch, he thought. She wore a large watch for a woman, a platinum Rolex. Before she could stop him, he grabbed the watch and yanked it two inches up her arm, keeping his fingers beneath the band to hold the arm still. Where the face of the watch had been, he saw four parallel scars in the skin. A cold wave of dread rolled through him. The scars were not fresh, but deep cuts had made them. Not just four, but cuts over cuts. Repetitive lacerations and scratches in the same place, a spot no one would see.
As Eve watched him with a mixture of shame and triumph, he jerked the covers off her nude body and looked at her legs. She didn’t try to hide. On her inner thighs, a few inches below her vulva, he found a crosshatched pattern of scars. Some were old, others made perhaps a week ago. He pulled the covers back up and sat motionless on the bed.
The scars were not evidence of suicide attempts, but part of a complex coping phenomenon of self-mutilation practiced by many adolescent girls. Mallory had cut herself in secret for much of her life, but Waters had been her lover for six months before he discovered this. At the time, he could find no information on the subject. Now he knew that self-mutilators inflicted pain on themselves to drown out a deeper pain, something inexpressible in any other way. Cutting was usually a later phase of the phenomenon. It often began as scratching, banging one’s head against the floor, or even hair-pulling. Mallory’s had begun that way, but even after she stumbled on cutting, she continued her hair-twisting as a public substitute for the bloody ritual that gave her relief in private.
“I didn’t want to show you that,” Eve said quietly.
Waters could not speak. The implications of the scars had shut down part of his nervous system. He simply could not process what he had seen. A man with any sense would run, but how could you escape from something in your head? Knowledge was inescapable, irrevocable. The sight of the scars had scrambled his sense of time, of history, of identity.
“Johnny?”
He turned and slid his legs off the bed. Before he could get up, Eve draped her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. Her breasts compressed against his shoulder blades, and her voice sounded in his ear.
“Do you really have to go?”
“Yes.”
She licked the back of his neck, then slid her tongue up behind his ear. “Do you want to go?”
Her tongue entered his ear, then disappeared. Despite the insanity of the situation—or perhaps because of it—he felt himself stir again. She let go of him then, and backed away on the bed. Turning, he saw her kneeling three feet behind him, her eyes glowing with heat.
“Come here,” she said.
“I have to go.”
“No. You need me.”
Her body seemed to generate some sort of magnetic field. And though he tried not to see them, the small scars on her thighs seemed to blaze like fresh wounds. “I can’t do this.”
She reached out and took his hand, pulling until he lifted his legs back onto the bed. “Get like me,” she said, tugging his wrist.
He got up onto his knees.
She leaned forward and kissed him, lightly running her fingers across his chest, down his stomach. He felt himself swelling again.
“Eve—”
“Don’t say that,” she whispered, enfolding him in her hands.
“Don’t say what?”
She closed her eyes and squeezed him. “That name. I listen to it all day. Not from you…please.”
Suddenly she turned away, leaving him staring at her finely muscled back and the cleft of her behind. The sudden disappearance of her hands left him quivering with desire to be inside her.
“Remember?” she said to the wall.
His face felt hot. He could not move.
Eve slid backward, reaching for his hand as she neared him. “You know what I like.” She caught his hand and pulled his arm over her shoulder, then leaned into him. “And I know what you need.”
“Eve—”
“Shhh.” She threw herself forward, pulling him across her back as she went down on all fours. “You remember,” she said, her voice hoarse now. “Come on, Johnny.”
Sweat filmed his face, cold at the temples as she pressed back against him, leaving no doubt about where she wanted him.
“Are you sure?”
She turned and looked back at him, her eyes filled with dark knowledge, her lips curved in a serene smile. “I’m totally relaxed. Do it.”
He shut his eyes and obeyed.
It was dusk when he swung the Land Cruiser out of the narrow drive and onto Wall Street. As he crossed to the next block, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her black Lexus nose out of the drive, then pull into the street. He looked at his cell phone and thought of calling home, but decided against it. Rose would be gone by now. Lily and Annelise would be in the kitchen, talking about homework, wondering where Daddy was. Daddy was wondering the same thing.
His arms and legs felt shaky, as though he couldn’t trust them. Memories of his last hour with Eve flashed through his mind like flares in the darkness, blanking out his thoughts. She came back to him in pieces, like quick cuts in a film. The nape of her neck, beaded with pearls of sweat. Her hip, already bruised in the pattern of his fingertips. And the sounds…her mouth at his ear, whispering, urging, taunting, begging. Nonsense words. Profanity. Prayers. But always she returned to the same three words: a pleading command, a mantra, the soundtrack to her remarkable movement, her controlled abandon. “Say my name, Johnny….”
“Eve,” he’d grunted.
She shook her head and splayed her fingers against the wall to brace herself against him. “No. Say it.”
“Eve…”
“No! Say my name!
“I did.”
“Say it!” Anger now, as she thrust violently backward, using her well-muscled arms to anchor herself on the wall. “You know me now! You remember!”
He shook his head, unable to vocalize anything, though the word she wanted so desperately was swelling in his mouth like a balloon, bursting to be freed with all its transformative power.
“Say my name, damn it!” she screamed. A river of sweat ran down the valley created by the muscles on either side of her spine. His eyes tracked up her arm to the four scars her watch had concealed. “I can’t feel my head,” she panted. “Johnny? I can’t…say it…say my name!”
He never did.
chapter 9
He saw Eve every day for the next two weeks. In the beginning he tried to resist, but it was pointless. The awareness that she was within a few miles of him yet not with him made it impossible to concentrate on the smallest things. His work did not suffer, because he did not work. When forced to be in his office, he stared out the window at the river or riffled through the portfolio he kept in the locked desk drawer.
Then his cell phone would chirp. He developed a Pavlovian reaction to the sound. Out of silence it came, and before the first chirp ended, his heartbeat had accelerated, his respiration had gone shallow, his self-awareness had tripled in intensity. Then Eve would speak, her voice a clipped command.