She could see lights from Covenant’s house. The building lay flickering against a line of dark trees like a gleam about to be swallowed by the woods and the night. The moon only confirmed this impression; its nearly-full light made the field a lake of silver, eldritch and fathomless, but could not touch the black trees, or the house which lay in their shadow. Linden shivered at the damp air, and drove with her hands tight on the wheel and her senses taut, as if she were approaching a crisis.
Twenty yards from the house, she stopped, parked her car so that it stood in the open moonlight.
Be true.
She did not know how.
The approach of her headlights must have warned him. An outside lamp came on as she neared the front door. He stepped out to meet her. His stance was erect and forbidding, silhouetted by the yellow light at his back. She could not read his face.
“Dr. Avery.” His voice rasped like a saw. “Go away.”
“No.” The uncertainty of her respiration made her speak abruptly, one piece at a time. “Not until I see her.”
“Her?” he demanded.
“Your ex-wife.”
For a moment, he was silent. Then he grated, “What else did that bastard tell you?”
She ignored his anger. “You need help.”
His shoulders hunched as if he were strangling retorts. “He’s mistaken. I don’t need help. I don’t need you. Go away.”
“No.” She did not falter. “He’s right. You’re exhausted. Taking care of her alone is wearing you out. I can help.”
“You can’t,” he whispered, denying her fiercely. “She doesn’t need a doctor. She needs to be left alone.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
He tensed as if she had moved, tried to get past him. “You’re trespassing. If you don’t go away, I’ll call the Sheriff.”
The falseness of her position infuriated her. “Goddamn it!” she snapped. “What are you afraid of?”
“You.” His voice was gravid, cold.
“Me? You don’t even know me.”
“And you don’t know me. You don’t know what’s going on here. You couldn’t possibly understand it. And you didn’t choose it.” He brandished words at her like blades. “Berenford got you into this. That old man—” He swallowed, then barked, “You saved him, and he chose you, and you don’t have any idea what that means. You haven’t got the faintest idea what he chose you for. By hell, I’m not going to stand for it! Go away.”
“What does it have to do with you?” She groped to understand him. “What makes you think it has anything to do with you?”
“Because I do know.”
“Know what?” She could not tolerate the condescension of his refusal. “What’s so special about you? Leprosy? Do you think being a leper gives you some kind of private claim on loneliness or pain? Don’t be arrogant. There are other people in the world who suffer, and it doesn’t take being a leper to understand them. What’s so goddamn special about you?”
Her anger stopped him. She could not see his face; but his posture seemed to twist, reconsidering her. After a moment, he said carefully, “Nothing about me. But I’m on the inside of this thing, and you aren’t. I know it. You don’t. It can’t be explained. You don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“Then tell me. Make me understand. So I can make the right choice.”
“Dr. Avery.” His voice was sudden and harsh. “Maybe suffering isn’t private. Maybe sickness and harm are in the public domain. But this is private.”
His intensity silenced her. She wrestled with him in her thoughts, and could find no way to take hold of him. He knew more than she did—had endured more, purchased more, learned more. Yet she could not let go. She needed some kind of explanation. The night air was thick and humid, blurring the meaning of the stars. Because she had no other argument, she challenged him with her incomprehension itself. “ ‘Be true,’ ” she articulated, “isn’t the only thing he said.”
Covenant recoiled. She held herself still until the suspense drove him to ask in a muffled tone, “What else?”
“He said, ‘Do not fear. You will not fail, however he may assail you.’ ” There she halted, unwilling to say the rest. Covenant’s shoulders began to shake. Grimly she pursued her advantage. “Who was he talking about? You?”
He did not respond. His hands were pressed to his face, stifling his emotion.
“Or was it somebody else? Did somebody hurt Joan?”
A shard of pain slipped past his teeth before he could lock them against himself.
“Or is something going to happen to me? What does that old man have to do with me? Why do you say he chose me?”
“He’s using you.” Covenant’s hands occluded his voice. But he had mastered himself. When he dropped his arms, his tone was dull and faint, like the falling of ashes. “He’s like Berenford. Thinks I need help. Thinks I can’t handle it this time.” He should have sounded bitter; but he had momentarily lost even that resource. “The only difference is, he knows—what I know.”
“Then tell me,” Linden urged again. “Let me try.”
By force of will, Covenant straightened so that he stood upright against the light. “No. Maybe I can’t stop you, but I as sure as hell don’t have to let you. I’m not going to contribute to this. If you’re dead set on getting involved, you’re going to have to find some way to do it behind my back.” He stopped as if he were finished. But then he raged at her, “And tell that bastard Berenford he ought to try trusting me for a change!”
Retorts jumped into her throat. She wanted to yell back, Why should he? You don’t trust anybody else! But as she gathered force into her lungs, a scream stung the air.
A woman screaming, raw and heinous. Impossible that anybody could feel such virulent terror and stay sane. It shrilled like the heart-shriek of the night.
Before it ended, Linden was on her way past Covenant toward the front door.
He caught her arm: she broke the grip of his half-hand, flung him off. “I’m a doctor.” Leaving him no time for permission or denial, she jerked open the door, strode into the house.
The door admitted her to the living room. It looked bare, in spite of its carpeting and bookcases; there were no pictures, no ornaments; and the only furniture was a long overstaffed sofa with a coffee table in front of it. They occupied the center of the floor, as if to make the space around them navigable.
She gave the room a glance, then marched down a short passage to the kitchen. There, too, a table and two straight-backed wooden chairs occupied the center of the space. She went past them, turned to enter another hall. Covenant hurried after her as she by-passed two open doors—the bathroom, his bedroom—to reach the one at the end of the hall.
It was closed.
At once, she took hold of the knob.
He snatched at her wrist. “Listen.” His voice must have held emotion—urgency, anguish, something—but she did not hear it. “This you have to understand. There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”
She gripped the knob with her free hand. He let her go.
She opened the door, went into the room.
All the lights were on.
Joan sat on an iron-frame bed in the middle of the room. Her ankles and wrists were tied with cloth bonds which allowed her to sit up or lie down but did not permit her to bring her hands together. The long cotton nightgown covering her thin limbs had been twisted around her by her distress.
A white gold wedding ring hung from a silver chain around her neck.
She did not look at Covenant. Her gaze sprang at Linden, and a mad fury clenched her face. She had rabid eyes, the eyes of a demented lioness. Whimpers moaned in her throat. Her pallid skin stretched tightly over her bones.
Intuitive revulsion appalled Linden. She could not think. She was not accustomed to such savagery. It violated all her conceptions of illness or harm, paralyzed her responses. This was not ordinary
human ineffectuality or pain raised to the level of despair; this was pure ferocity, concentrated and murderous. She had to force herself forward. But when she drew near the woman and stretched out a tentative hand, Joan bit at her like a baited cat. Involuntarily Linden recoiled.
“Dear God!” she panted. “What’s wrong with her?”
Joan raised her head, let out a scream like the anguish of the damned.
Covenant could not speak. Grief contorted his features. He went to Joan’s side. Fumbling over the knot, he untied her left wrist, released her arm. Instantly she clawed at him, straining her whole body to reach him. He evaded her, caught her forearm.
Linden watched with a silent wail as he let Joan’s nails rake the back of his right hand. Blood welled from the cuts.
Joan smeared her fingers in his blood. Then her hand jumped to her mouth, and she sucked it eagerly, greedily.
The taste of blood seemed to restore her self-awareness. Almost immediately, the madness faded from her face. Her eyes softened, turned to tears; her mouth trembled. “Oh, Tom,” she quavered weakly. “I’m so sorry. I can’t—He’s in my mind, and I can’t get him out. He hates you. He makes—makes me—” She was sobbing brokenly. Her lucidity was acutely cruel to her.
He sat on the bed beside her, put his arms around her. “I know.” His voice ached in the room. “I understand.”
“Tom,” she wept. “Tom. Help me.”
“I will.” His tone promised that he would face any ordeal, make any sacrifice, commit any violence. “As soon as he’s ready. I’ll get you free.”
Slowly her frail limbs relaxed. Her sobs grew quieter. She was exhausted. When he stretched her out on the bed, she closed her eyes, went to sleep with her fingers in her mouth like a child.
He took a tissue from a box on a table near the bed, pressed it to the back of his hand. Then, tenderly, he pulled Joan’s fingers from her mouth and retied her wrist. Only then did he look at Linden.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “The backs of my hands have been numb for years.” The torment was gone from his face; it held nothing now except the long weariness of a pain he could not heal.
Watching his blood soak into the tissue, she knew she should do something to treat that injury. But an essential part of her had failed, proved itself inadequate to Joan; she could not bear to touch him. She had no answer to what she had seen. For a moment, her eyes were helpless with tears. Only the old habit of severity kept her from weeping. Only her need kept her from fleeing into the night. It drove her to say grimly, “Now you’re going to tell me what’s wrong with her.”
“Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose I am.”
THREE: Plight
He guided her back to the living room in silence. His hand on her arm was reluctant, as if he dreaded that mere human contact. When she sat on the sofa, he gestured toward his injury, and left her alone. She was glad to be alone. She was stunned by her failure; she needed time to regain possession of herself.
What had happened to her? She understood nothing about evil, did not even believe in it as an idea; but she had seen it in Joan’s feral hunger. She was trained to perceive the world in terms of dysfunction and disease, medication and treatment, success or death. Words like good or evil meant nothing to her. But Joan—! Where did such malignant ferocity come from? And how—?
When Covenant returned, with his right hand wrapped in a white bandage, she stared at him, demanding explanations.
He stood before her, did not meet her gaze. The slouch of his posture gave him a look of abandonment; the skin at the corners of his eyes crumpled like dismay pinching his flesh. But his mouth had learned the habit of defiance; it was twisted with refusals. After a moment, he muttered, “So you see why I didn’t want you to know about her,” and began to pace.
“Nobody knows”—the words came as if he were dredging them out of the privacy of his heart—“except Berenford and Roman. The law doesn’t exactly smile on people who keep other people prisoner—even in her condition. I don’t have any legal rights at all as far as she’s concerned. What I’m supposed to do is turn her over to the authorities. But I’ve been living without the benefit of law so long now I don’t give a damn.”
“But what’s wrong with her?” Linden could not keep her voice from twitching; she was too tightly clenched to sound steady.
He sighed. “She needs to hurt me. She’s starving for it—that’s what makes her so violent. It’s the best way she can think of to punish herself.”
With a wrench, Linden’s analytical instinct began to function again. Paranoiac, she winced to herself. He’s paranoiac. But aloud she insisted, “But why? What’s happened to her?”
He stopped, looked at her as if he were trying to gauge her capacity for the truth, then went back to his pacing.
“Of course,” he murmured, “that isn’t how Berenford sees it. He thinks it’s a psychiatric problem. The only reason he hasn’t tried to get her away from me is because he understands why I want to take care of her. Or part of it. His wife is a paraplegic, and he would never consider dumping the problem off on anyone else. I haven’t told him about her taste for blood.”
He was evading her question. She struggled for patience. “Isn’t it a psychiatric problem? Hasn’t Dr. Berenford been able to rule out physical causes? What else could it be?”
Covenant hesitated, then said distantly, “He doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“You keep saying that. It’s too convenient.”
“No,” he retorted, “it’s not convenient. It’s the truth. You don’t have the background to understand it.”
“How can you be so goddamn sure?” The clench of her self-command made her voice raw. “I’ve spent half my life coping with other people’s pain.” She wanted to add, Can’t you get it through your head that I’m a doctor? But her throat locked on those words. She had failed—
For an instant, his gaze winced as if he were distressed by the idea that she did in fact have the necessary background. But then he shook his head sharply. When he resumed, she could not tell what kind of answer he had decided to give her.
“I wouldn’t know about it myself,” he said, “if her parents hadn’t called me. About a month ago. They don’t have much use for me, but they were frantic. They told me everything they knew.
“I suppose it’s an old story. The only thing that makes it new is the way it hurts. Joan divorced me when we found out I had leprosy. Eleven years ago. Took Roger and went back to her family. She thought she was justified—ah, hell, for years I thought she was justified. Kids are more susceptible to leprosy than adults. So she divorced me. For Roger’s sake.
“But it didn’t work. Deep inside her, she believed she’d betrayed me. It’s hard to forgive yourself for deserting someone you love—someone who needs you. It erodes your self-respect. Like leprosy. It gnaws away at you. Before long, you’re a moral cripple. She stood it for a while. Then she started hunting for cures.”
His voice, and the information he was giving her, steadied Linden. As he paced, she became conscious of the way he carried himself, the care and specificity of all his movements. He navigated past the coffee table as if it were a danger to him. And repeatedly he scanned himself with his eyes, checking in turn each hand, each arm, his legs, his chest, as if he expected to find that he had injured himself without knowing it.
She had read about such things. His self-inspection was called VSE—visual surveillance of extremities. Like the care with which he moved, it was part of the discipline he needed to keep his illness arrested. Because of the damage leprosy had done to his nerves, the largest single threat to his health was the possibility that he might bump, burn, scrape, cut, or bruise himself without realizing it. Then infection would set in because the wound was not tended. So he moved with all the caution he could muster. The furniture in his house was arranged to minimize the risk of protruding corners, obstacles, accidents. And he scanned himself regularly, looking for signs of danger.
Watching him in this objective, professional way helped restore her sense of who she was. Slowly she became better able to listen to his indirect explanation without impatience.
He had not paused; he was saying, “First she tried psychology. She wanted to believe it was all in her mind—and minds can be fixed, like broken arms. She started going through psychological fads the way some people trade in cars, a new one every year. As if her problem really was mental instead of spiritual.
“None of it made sense to her parents, but they tried to be tolerant, just did what they could to give Roger a stable home.
“So they thought she was finally going to be all right when she suddenly gave that up and went churchy. They believed all along that religion was the answer. Well, it’s good enough for most people, but it didn’t give her what she needed. It was too easy. Her disease was progressing all the time. A year ago, she became a fanatic. Took Roger and went to join a commune. One of those places where people learn the ecstasy of humiliation, and the leader preaches love and mass suicide.
“She must have been so desperate—For most of her life, the only thing she really wanted to believe was that she was perfectly all right. But after all those years of failure, she didn’t have any defenses left. What did she have to lose?”
Linden was not wholly convinced. She had no more use for God than for conceptions of good and evil. But Covenant’s passion held her. His eyes were wet with violence and grief; his mouth was as sharp as a blade. He believed what he was saying.
Her expression must have betrayed some of her doubt; his voice took on an echo of Joan’s ferocity. “You don’t have to believe in God to grasp what she was going through. She was suffering from an affliction for which there’s no mortal cure. She couldn’t even arrest the way it rotted her. Maybe she didn’t know what it was she was trying to cure. She was looking for magic, some power that could reach into her and heal—When you’ve tried all the salves in the world and they don’t work, you start thinking about fire. Burn out the pain. She wanted to punish herself, find some kind of abnegation to match her personal rot.”