Act II: The Explication
(“Pictures at an Exposition”)
Twenty minutes after Chris had bolted from Saki dormitory, Janis trotted wearily up the stairs, found his door unlocked, and walked right in. She was tired from her plane ride and queasy from the overheated Overman limo that had brought her home, and a tickle at the back of her throat made her think that she might be coming down with a cold—undoubtedly the result of three nights spent on a bus station floor, followed by a nap in a warehouse with wet hair. Not to mention whatever it was that they had done to her to make sure she stayed asleep while their nasty little elves had been at work cleaning up the place.
She needed coffee. She needed food. She desperately needed a good night's sleep. And at some point, she supposed, she was going to need to process what had happened to her in Utah.
Even more than all of these things, however, Janis needed to get laid.
It had never once occurred to her that her abrupt departure from Herschberg on the very day of her roommate's murder might have aroused some suspicion. Or, for that matter, that given who she was, her disappearance at the best of times might be a cause for some consternation in certain government circles. It had simply never crossed her mind. Janis was adept at not thinking about things, possibly by virtue of having been forcibly prevented from thinking about the vast majority of her life.
On her way home from Utah, she had utilized this skill. She was not, she had decided, going to think about it. Any of it. Not until later. All she was going to think about, she had resolved, was getting herself home without running into anyone she knew, and then going to Chris' room, and then fucking him until they both passed out cold.
Janis hadn't even noticed passing Matilda on her way across campus to Saki, nor the way that Matilda's gaze had first fixed on her and then gone vague, turned aside, focused elsewhere. She hadn't noticed the way that the group of students in Saki's lounge had determinedly not looked at her as she had made her way past them on route to the staircase.
And in truth, she needn't have worried about falling under suspicion of Jill's murder. In all of Herschberg, Minnesota, there were only three people—one of whom was Dave Harrison—who were even capable of thinking about Jill Mankevich's roommate for any length of time whatsoever. It had been that way ever since she had left town with only one overriding thought, the concern she had expressed to Norbert Ajax in the Minneapolis Greyhound Station: that no one in Herschberg trouble themselves too much about her, or give too much thought to her absence. She had got her wish. Over the course of the past week, even Janis' boyfriend Chris had only occasionally managed to remember that she had gone missing at all.
Had she realized this, she might have been a bit less surprised and disappointed to find Chris not at home when she shouldered her way into his room. As it was, however, she frowned and dropped her backpack on the floor with a sulky thump.
Well, shit, she thought. She spared a glance for the box he had left open on the floor, sighed, and flopped down on his unmade bed. He'd probably gone out to do one of his special Arb things. Or spend the night with one of the other women that he thought she didn't know about. Whatever. She was horny as hell. She'd just wait.
Janis had never been able to figure out just what it was that she found so desperately attractive about Chris. He was cute enough, she supposed, but aesthetically, she really thought that she preferred more athletic men. And the way that he dressed was kind of pretentious, really. And he could be awfully humorless sometimes. Not to mention unstable. He wasn't even faithful. And yet, the first time she had laid eyes on him, back when he'd still been Jill's boyfriend, Janis had found herself thinking that she'd like to ride him like a pony. Not even in quite those terms, either. In far cruder ones.
In the bus station, Janis had told the Narc—no, Norbert, she corrected herself: his name is Norbert, the poor bastard—that she loved Chris, but she didn't think that she did, really. Sometimes she didn't even think that she liked him all that much. At times she comforted herself with the belief that it was just like that for everyone, but she wasn't really convinced. Other couples seemed to like to hug and kiss and all that shit, for one thing, whereas while she was willing to put up with that, what she really wanted, with Chris at least, was to get to the fucking. She wanted him to screw her. To nail her. To bone her. There just wasn't a term vulgar enough for what she wanted from him, and to get that, it seemed, she was willing to put up with all the rest: his neuroses, his affectations, that time she had caught him with Matilda, his lame-ass excuses ("I don't know how to explain it, Janis...it was like some kind of temporary insanity!"), all of his other infidelities. She considered him profoundly unreliable in every conceivable way, and yet this paled to insignificance in the face of her overwhelming and inexplicable desire.
It frightened her sometimes, this…this lust. It was a little creepy, really. And she didn't really think that it had very much to do with love.
Oh well, she told herself. Just another way in which you're abnormal. You probably aren't even capable of love.
Where the hell was he, anyway? She paced the room impatiently, looking for something to distract her. On the night table were a couple of dirty plastic champagne glasses, one of them still half-full. He'd been entertaining while she'd been away, then. No great surprise there. On his desk, a pile of photographs were spread in a messy array. He'd been sorting them, she guessed. Chris liked photos. Especially ones of himself.
Janis sat down at the desk and looked over the pictures. They seemed to be snapshots from last year's Wodehouse Formal, a yearly event which, despite its moniker, was actually a costume party, held by long-standing Herschberg tradition on the first day of Winter Break. Generations of students had lied to their parents about exactly when the semester ended just so that they wouldn't miss it, and Janis supposed that she would do the same. Not attending the Wodehouse Formal was simply unthinkable.
She picked up a photograph and held it to the light, smiling. Yes, there was the gorgeous Victorian interior of Wodehouse dormitory, more usually known as The Wode House, home only to the luckiest of upperclassmen, lavished with private endowments, and—in these pictures—festooned with Yuletide decorations and stuffed to bursting with costumed students celebrating the end of their exams.
Janis wondered what she should go as. She'd have to start thinking about her costume soon. It looked like last year Elgin had gone as a bumblebee. That was pretty cute, actually; it was sort of a pity that his glasses had caught and reflected the glare of the flash, otherwise it would be a decent picture of him. And there was Jens, in a pirate costume. He was gripping the neck of a bottle of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum and grinning maniacally at the camera...oh, okay, she got it now: he was supposed to be Captain Morgan. Cute idea, but he really should have worn a wig: his hair wasn't right for it.
Where was Mark? Oh, there he was, dressed up as a doctor (typical, that: Mark had wanted to go into medicine since he'd been around four years old) and standing with his arm around a dark-skinned woman in a cat costume. Janis guessed that this must be Mark's ex Marcy, otherwise known as The Conniving Bitch From Hell, whose perfidy in breaking up with Mark right before commencement Janis had heard way too much about.
Something about the woman in the cat costume troubled Janis briefly, but she shoved it out of her mind. Nope, she thought. Not thinking about that now. Now I'm looking at pictures, and then I'm getting laid, and only then will I consider thinking about that. Later.
She looked at the costumes of all of the people in the background, people she did not know. Pirates, bums, clowns and hookers. A woman in a Rockettes uniform, her face a ghoulish mask, wearing a banner which read "The Ghost of ERA Passed." (Some private joke, I guess, thought Janis, who had a vague idea that ERA was the name of a real estate agency.) A couple of ghosts. A couple of nuns. Some guy dressed up as the Pope.
Blasphemy, it seemed, had been a popular motif last year. There were quite a lot of nuns, actually, by no means all of them female, and in addition to the Pope, there were also a couple of priests, one monk, a Hare Krishna complete with shaved head, a Hasidic Jew, and a very plain older student who had done an excellent job of masquerading as Sister Prudence, a crazed ex-Shaker-turned-evangelist who came to Herschberg periodically to inform the student body of the torments which awaited them in hell if they did not cease their For-Ni-CAY-Shun and Re-PENT! Sister Prudence, who rather resembled the woman in Grant Wood's American Gothic, was a local celebrity in Herschberg. Everyone pretended to find her funny while secretly finding her terrifying; no one could describe the torments of hell with quite so much descriptive relish as Sister Prudence. Prudence would not have approved of the blasphemous costumes of many of the Herschberg students and indeed, the student dressed as her had managed to replicate not only her costume, but also her expression: she squinted suspiciously at the Pope standing next to her, lips pursed in disapproval, clutching her oversized black bible primly in front of her.
On the other side of Sister Prudence stood a Joan of Arc, and behind her, a gypsy fortune teller. A guy doing Carmen Miranda dominated the foreground. There were a lot of men in drag, and many zombies, and even more vampires—some of the old-fashioned cloak-and-fang variety, still more of the sexy Anne Rice type—and one of those two-person horse costumes you always saw in old sit-coms. And there was Marcy the Cat again, talking to some guy wearing a pink body suit and a bathing cap with what looked like a nipple on top. Janis had no idea what he was supposed to be; she was new enough to the college scene to be as yet blissfully unaware that at every collegiate costume party, there always has to be that one moron who thinks it devastatingly clever to come dressed as a condom.
It suddenly occurred to Janis that if Marcy were here, then there might well be a picture of Lori as well. Lori was—had been, rather—Jill's best friend. The two of them had been roommates last year and would have been this year as well, if only Lori had spent just a bit more time on her academics and a bit less on her extracurricular Wiccan activities. Although Janis and Lori had never met, Janis adored her, partly because she felt obligated to like Jill's best friend, but mainly because thanks to Lori's negligence, Janis herself had acquired both a super upperclassman roomie and a space in one of Saki's much-coveted fourth floor dorm rooms.
Lori wrote—had written, rather—to Jill regularly. Janis was familiar with her looping hand and the green ink she favored; she had read selected parts of her letters; she had even spoken to her on the phone once or twice; but she hadn't the slightest idea what Lori actually looked like. Unlike Chris, Jill had hated photographs. She had believed that they stole the soul, and consequently kept none.
All the same, Janis thought that Chris had probably managed to snap her when she wasn't looking, and when he had, Lori had probably been with her. She flipped rapidly through the photographs, scanning for Jill. Ah. There she was, one of the many nuns. She was standing near the refreshment table, talking to Evelyn's druggie friend Susan, who had come to the party dressed as a seductive and vampish vampiress. It was neither Susan nor Jill who caught Janis' attention, however, but Stephanie, who was standing nearby.
"Wow," she said, out loud.
A freshman last year, Stephanie had evidently been under the misapprehension that the Wodehouse Formal was a fancy dress ball, an old-style masquerade. She had rented—at least, Janis assumed rented, and at God only knew what expense—one of those eighteenth century French ballgowns, complete with wig and parasol, and she looked...well, stunning. Janis doubted that she would have even recognized her, had it not been for the characteristic tense smile and the somewhat awkward hunch of her shoulders. When Steph had rented her costume, she had apparently not realized just how low-cut it really was. Or maybe it was just that what had seemed a daring décolletage at home in front of the mirror had felt quite different in a crowded room full of strangers. Janis smiled sympathetically, thinking: Oh, but she really is gorgeous. She frowned, seizing upon this thought and scrutinizing it for signs of jealousy, but found only a mild envy (Yeah, I would love to look like Stephanie, but it's really no big deal) and satisfied, let it go.
Looking at this picture, it occurred to Janis that perhaps Jill had been right after all about photographs. The camera emphasized the purely visual, while reducing the things most intrinsic to people to mere incidental detail: a slight hunch of the shoulders, a cast of the eye, a facial expression caught by chance, if at all. It was a kind of soul-stealing. Here, for example: another one of Stephanie. This time the camera had caught her unawares, and it looked as if Jill had just said something to make her laugh. Unguarded, smiling in earnest, her décolletage momentarily forgotten, she looked like someone who could never fail to be at the center of attention in any social gathering, somebody who radiated confidence and courage. She didn't look like Stephanie at all.
Well, Janis thought, at least when the camera sucks Steph's soul, she benefits from it. Could be worse.
Intrigued by this new perspective, she returned to the previous photographs. Yes, there was Elgin, and it wasn't just the bee costume which made it seem such a cute picture; more to the point, the camera had stripped all of his irritating pomposity away. And while Jens' dorkiness had come through just fine in the Captain Morgan picture, here was another one of him in which it was gone—and actually, Jens was pretty good looking, wasn't he? Yeah, he had classical features that Janis had simply never noticed before. And Jens' friend Alan, here a beaming Santa Claus—he really was that fat, wasn't he? Janis had never realized before that he was that fat. And—
Ah-hah! That must be Lori, the tall woman in the flapper costume, sharing a laugh with Jill in her bunny outfit. No, but wait…
Janis frowned in confusion. That was definitely Jill. She knew that bunny costume; she had seen it hanging in their closet. But if that was Jill, then…
She flipped back to a previous photograph, stared at it for a moment, and then suddenly laughed. What a stupid mistake to make! That wasn't Jill at all, in the nun costume, standing between Susan and Stephanie. Of course it wasn't: Jill hadn't even known Stephanie last year. That was—was it? yes, it was—it was Evelyn, of all people. Janis had never seen her out of her punk get-up before; that was why she hadn't recognized her. And naturally that would be Evelyn standing next to Stephanie: Evelyn and Stephanie had been roommates their freshman year as well. Janis didn't know how she could have mistaken her for Jill, though. Evelyn didn't look anything like Jill.
She does, though, she thought, and wondered why this idea should make her feel so uneasy. She does look like Jill, once you get her out of her leathers, and when you can't see her punky hair. Just imagine that face with Jill's hair. And then take away some of the muscle and add a few pounds...
No. That was silly. Everyone looked the same in a wimple, was all it was.
The oil can in her dream, what had it said?
For the category of best Jill imitation for 1990...
Janis' smile vanished. She took a deep breath.
Not thinking about that now, she told herself firmly. No. Later.
And gripping her resolve, she continued to look through Chris' photographs.
•
Jill Mankevich's fourth, third and second cousin, depending on which part of her family tree you were looking at—
(—but then, why would anyone be looking at all? This was the New World, after all; this was where people forged their own destinies and paddled their own canoes; this was where people changed their names and threw away their photographs. This was where people moved on average every five years, sometimes even to Cleveland. This was where people had a constitutional right to convert to whatever religion they damn well pleased whenever it damn well pleased them to do so. This was a land that believed in freedom, and in choice, and in the individual, and in True Love. This was America, dammit, and the Medieval Church's obsession with degrees of separation held no sway here, not here, where tracing genealogies was for poncy old aristocrats and not for this fresh and clean and constantly reinvented populace...
This was a place, in other words, that had served its purpose well.)
Jill Mankevich's relation, and Jane Caulfield's as well, was spending the wee hours of November the twenty-second having the worst trip of her entire life.
She had fallen to the ground, which had whirled and spun away from her, clawing madly at it as she felt herself plummet and plummet and plummet...and now here she was, hours? minutes? days? later, curled at the foot of an enormous granite sculpture, her fingernails ripped ragged and encrusted with grime, feeling exhausted and queasy and sore, but thankfully no longer falling.
Evelyn sat up and looked around her. It was still night. It had grown bitterly cold. It seemed very still out here. The ground beneath her, which had been a vortex, a swirling void, was now once more just the ground. She could see the gouge marks she had made, clawing at it, and the tufts of sod she had pulled up. It no longer seemed a thing of interest at all. More relevant, she now felt, were the lights: the lights of the University, which she could see beyond the art building, and the lights of the trailer park, outside of college grounds, dimly visible through the woods that surrounded the campus. There they were: college here, community there. Here the Ivory Tower, and there the Big Bad World. And she herself, sitting near to the border between them.
Yeah, she thought. Good. Go with that. Those are fine trip thoughts, just fine. And please God, let that have been the peak. Please God, from here on out, I am coming down.
You dare pray to God when you contemplate a mortal sin?
Evelyn moaned. She had been so close there. So close to nice, pleasant, happy trip thoughts. And she'd just known this was going to happen. This had been the reason that she had been trying to stay the fuck away from hallucinogens for the past couple of weeks. Ever since she had known for sure. Because she'd been afraid of this. Of thinking about it. About the...the thing. The tumor. The clot. The parasite. The impediment.
Work with it, she thought. You won't be able to get rid of it now, so just work with it. Happy trip thoughts.
Yeah, she told herself. Sure. See, there's a time for everything. That's what the lights mean. To everything a season. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to be a student, and a time to join the real world. And I'm on the student side, you can see that, right? I'm near to the border, but I'm on this side of the border. Not the baby side of the border. Got it? So it's all just really fucking cool, okay?
Trying to feel really fucking cool, Evelyn leaned back against the cold granite base of the sculpture behind her.
"You may not lean on my cross," a voice from behind and above her said. "Until you are ready to take up your own."
Oh, fuck. She'd forgotten that thing was a crucifixion. That was such bad news.
"I'll lean wherever the fuck I want, asshole," she told it, out loud, without even turning around to look. The thing with god hallucinations was, you just had to be firm with them. But shit, these were vivid auditories. She'd never had them quite like this before, and she wasn't liking it much. For one thing, they'd just made her speak out loud, and that was a definite no-no in the trip department. That was just not good.
"Please don't kill me, Mommy," the little tumor now whispered in her head, sounding for all the world like one of those stupid Right to Life movies they used to show at school, the ones that actually expected you to be a big enough moron to believe that the simpering voice-over was really some fucking embryo talking. "Please don't kill me. I want to live."
Yeah? Evelyn thought. Well, you and about a million poor slobs in Cambodia. Lots of people want to live and don't get to. Life's a real bitch that way. Tough shit, kiddo.
"I died for your sins, Evelyn," the voice from behind her now said. "You can do this one thing for me. Please don't murder your baby."
All right. That was just about fucking enough. Evelyn jumped to her feet and whirled around to face the sculpture.
"Look, fuck OFF!" she yelled at it. "I'll kill whatever babies I WANT! I LOVE killing babies! I like to EAT them, okay? So BITE me, dead boy!"
Jesus had no response to that. Evelyn took a moment to give silent thanks to the unknown sculptor, whose preference for non-representation had spared her His Sorrowful Gaze.
"Hey, but why not give me a chance?" the little clot murmured. Evelyn closed her eyes in exasperation. "After all, you just never know. You might hit the jackpot with me. I could be the first woman president. I could write the Great American Novel. I could discover the cure for cancer."
Yeah, Evelyn told it silently, willing herself not to speak out loud again. Or you could be the next Hitler.
"Well, sure!" chirped the little cherub, and let out a chilling laugh. "Why not? Or Lo! I could become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds. Then again, I just might be the Second Coming. So why not take the gamble? Otherwise you'll never know. You'll never know, unless..."
Impossibly, unbelievably, Evelyn heard music. Full orchestra. A...oh, God, no, this could not be happening!
"Unleeeeesssss..." The impediment struck a vocal attitude.
It was happening. It really was happening. Oh god oh shit oh no...
"Unleeesssss..."
She had always feared that this day might come.
"Unleeeeeeessss..."
It had come. It was going to be a show tune.
"...you roll the dice or pull the arm," the embryo launched happily into song. "To see if good will come or harm. Just call the bluff and show your hand..."
"I really hope you understand," sang Jesus.
"She does. She will. Her day will come. You like a gamble, don't you, Mum?"
"I don't—" Evelyn gasped.
"You do. It's in your blood. And how was Chris, that randy stud?"
"And how was Chris that randy stud and how was Chris that randy stud and how was Chris that randy randy stuuuuuuud?" trilled the chorus, a hundred voices or more, coming from everywhere at once, from the trees, from the art building, from the sky above and the ground below.
Evelyn clapped her hands over her ears. Oh, she had so not wanted to think about that. What had come over her, anyway? Sex, with Stephanie's geeky weird little friend. Yeccchh! And unprotected sex, at that. With Stephanie's geeky, weird, and inexplicably promiscuous little friend. God! She must have been out of her mind! She must have been completely insane!
"You're not insane," the clot sang to her. "At least, not yet! But I think that might come, in time. ‘Cause we can do that—oh, you bet!"
"Or do you like to think in rhyme?" sneered Jesus.
Evelyn stared helplessly up at the sculpture. The somewhat cubist formation was changing, shuffling, rearranging itself into a face. Not the suffering, sorrowful face she had feared, but a different one: smirking, lean, sly, with cold eyes.
Slowly, she began to back away from the sculpture. As she did so, she became aware that the music had stopped. But not permanently. Oh, no. She could tell that. There was an expectant hush. The orchestra was waiting, as was the chorus.
It was, apparently, her line.
I'm not going to give them the satisfaction, she thought, and deliberately turning her back on the sculpture, began to walk away.
This, she thought, is a really bad trip.
But that must have been the very line they were waiting for, as the instant she thought it, the orchestra leapt back into the fray.
"You aren't tripping, not as such," Jesus sang after her, as she covered her ears again and began to run, desperately, blindly.
"It seems a lot like that, we know," agreed the fetus. "But we can only do so much to contact you from here below."
"We have our means, we have our ends," sang a chestnut tree.
"We have our good points, and our bad," a birch added in a high tenor.
"So say that we can be your friends," urged the fetus.
"Or else you really will go mad!" the chorus roared. "Or else you really will go mad, you just don't want to make us mad, or else we'll drive you really really maaaaaaad..."
Evelyn realized for the first time that she had run heedlessly into the woods at the edge of campus. The lights of the trailer park shone ahead, through the trees. She let out a single incoherent cry and turned the other way, crashing through the woods, feeling the branches lash past her face, batting at them wildly, stumbling over stones and deadfall buried in the leaves. A root tripped her, and she fell sprawling at the foot of a large willow tree, which sang:
"It isn't all that much we ask. You know just what you have to do."
"It's really such a simple task," sang the fetus, as she clawed her way back to her feet.
"If Mary did it," hissed the voice of the sneering Jesus, "so can you."
"If Mary did it so can you if Mary did it so can you..." Evelyn struck out for the art building again, but now the trees seemed to be closing ranks, preventing her from moving in that direction, herding her back. "If Mary did it, so can so can yoooouuuuu...."
I'd really like to come down now, Evelyn thought, slipping on the slimy frosted dead leaves. Oh please I'd like to come down now. A branch whipped her across the face, and she cried out.
"We aren't going to disappear," sang a tree, as another branch lashed across the backs of her thighs.
"You won't ‘come down,' so don't forget—"
"We're waiting for your answer, dear," a sapling trilled, cracking itself at her like a whip as she flinched away.
"And now let's have the Alphabet!" chirped the fetus, as the music reached a bridge, and promptly launched into the Alphabet Song.
"A T G C A T G..." it sang, in a horrible lisping little toddler voice, getting the letters all wrong, as Evelyn fell to the ground, throwing up her arms to ward off the blows of the vicious trees, which were now everywhere, striking out at her from all directions.
"C A T G CATGC..."
"Mutagen and estrogen," the trees chanted in contrapuntal harmony to the embryo's tune, in rhythm with the stinging blows they aimed at whatever part of her body she left uncovered. "Chromosome, progesterone." Evelyn scrabbled, whimpering, through the leaf mould, cringing and rolling away from the branches. "Cytosine and Adenine—"
"AND LITTLE BABY TYROSINE!" boomed a giant oak, in basso profundo.
"STOP!" Evelyn screamed, curling over her knees with her arms over her head. "OKAY! All RIGHT!" she yelled. "I'll have the fucking baby, if that's what you want! Just leave me alone! Leave me the fuck alone!"
The orchestra settled to silence. She heard nothing but the quiet rumble of far-off traffic, and the hum of the high voltage lights at the entrance to the trailer park, and herself, her breathing ragged and harsh as she gasped for air. And then a soft voice.
"What's the magic word, Evelyn?" it asked her.
"Please," she said. "Please."
"Please allow me to have my baby," it prompted.
Evelyn removed her arms from around her head and looked about her. It seemed she had made it as far as the road. She was kneeling in the gravel of the soft shoulder among the roadside litter: cigarette butts, fast food wrappers. A single pink fuzzy bunny slipper. Her arms were red with welts and her jeans torn in a dozen different places. There was a trickle of what she thought might be blood running down the back of her knee. She took a deep breath.
"Please allow me to have my baby," she repeated dutifully.
"Sing it."
She stared in frank disbelief. A figure stepped from the shadows of the trees at the road's edge. He smiled at her, and she recognized the sly expression, the cold eyes.
"I...I beg your pardon?" she managed.
"I said, sing it, Evelyn. Any key will do." He waited. "Or would you prefer accompaniment?" He raised his arm, and she could see that he held a conductor's baton in one hand.
"I..." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a sumac sapling rear itself back eagerly, expectantly. She took another deep breath, then sang the words "pleaseallowmetohavemybaby" in a strange quavering soprano that bore no resemblance to what she usually thought of as her real voice. The man let his arm drop.
"Excellent. A bit thick on the tremulo, perhaps, but no matter. Good girl." He regarded her with amusement. "You may rise," he told her. "And have my pardon."
Evelyn looked down at herself, kneeling by the side of the road, then back up at him.
I'll kill him, she thought numbly.
"Yeah. Thanks, Jesus," she muttered and stumbled to her feet, brushing at the bits of gravel and leaf mould sticking to what was left of her jeans. As she did so, the headlights of an approaching car swept over them, illuminating the wood's edge. The figure vanished in the light. A cold rush of air as the car whizzed past, and then he faded back into view.
"You're a shadow," Evelyn said, startled and disappointed. It seemed she wasn't going to be able to beat the crap out of him after all. "You're just a shadow. Cast by the lights from the trailer park."
"Oh, I am a shadow," Jesus agreed, still wearing that sly smile. "But there's no ‘just' about it." He stepped forward, holding something out to her. A business card. She blinked at it, then took a quick step toward him to snatch it out of his hand before moving away again. She stood, unable to read it in the dim light, running her finger over its edge, raking the back lightly with her fingernails. It was embossed.
Tactiles. Full fucking tactiles. If this turned out to be some flashback from that wolfsbane, she really was going to kill Susan. And Claude. And Jim too, just for good measure.
"Now, Evelyn," the shadow chided her. "You know that this isn't wolfsbane. You know that."
Yeah. She guessed that she did know that, really. She just really wanted this to be wolfsbane.
"You will bear your child to term," he informed her, his smile disappearing. "You will contact us at that number tomorrow morning, and thereafter once a week, to keep us informed of your progress. And you will not," he added, the smile briefly returning, "have to live in a trailer park. Girls even lazier and less motivated than you have managed to complete their studies under similar circumstances. What is that major that you've concocted for yourself again? An independent degree in Contemporary Culture?" He shook his head reprovingly. "Come now, Evelyn. It's hardly rocket science, is it?"
She glared at him.
"I asked you a question, Evelyn."
"No," she said. "No, all right. It isn't rocket science."
"No." He switched the smile off again. "You will, of course, have to make some special arrangements. For the ninth month. I'm sure your professors will be willing to accommodate you in some way. We would prefer to keep you under observation during that period, you understand. Until the blessed event."
"Uh-huh. What..." Her mouth was very dry. She swallowed. "What, um, what happens to me then? I mean, after? After the, uh, the blessed event?"
"Why, you return to your studies, Evelyn. If you still wish to, that is. You will naturally be free to follow whatever course your heart dictates. You needn't worry: we have no particular interest in you. And your child will be well cared for, you can rest assured on that point. I think that you may come to find that we can be as—"
Another car rounded the curve, and his voice trailed off as he dissipated in the light of its headbeams. When it had passed, he resolidified, still speaking:
"—as we can be...unpleasant with those who insist on being difficult. But you aren't going to be difficult now, are you, Evelyn? We have a deal, am I right?"
"Uh-huh." She nodded. "Yeah, sure. Whatever. A deal. Okay."
"I'm relieved to hear it. As you ought to be. But just in case you were thinking of reneging..." He flourished. A long scroll of parchment appeared, delicately balanced in the crook of his arm. In his left hand, he now held an oversized quill pen.
"A signature is customary, Evelyn," he told her as she gaped. "When two parties agree to a contract. We won't insist on blood, I think. Not seeing as you're such a modern girl." He stepped towards her, offering the pen, which Evelyn could now see was not really a quill at all, but only a ballpoint fixed into a giant synthetic feather. She took it from him and stared at it as if she'd never seen one before. Which, as a matter of fact, she hadn't. At least, not one quite so tacky.
"You sign on the dotted line," the shadow prompted. "At the bottom, Evelyn." He held out the bottom of the parchment for her. She looked down at it. It was a dotted line. In fact, the entire document looked as if it had been run off on an old dot matrix printer.
"I assure you," he said, when she still made no move for the contract. "We'll give your baby a good home. And the very best education. You can count on that. No parochial school," he sniggered, "as I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear."
Evelyn smiled in spite of herself. "Oh, well, you know," she said. "Parochial school wasn't really so bad." She turned the pen around and around in her hands, listening to something off in the distance, a faint rumbling sound.
"Indeed? Well. Then perhaps you really ought to be thanking me, Evelyn. For saving you. From your mortal sin."
She looked up at him.
"You called me a gambler," she told him, and now she could feel it, could feel the ground trembling slightly at its approach, and could feel also the hot, wild grin beginning to spread itself across her face. "In that fucking song. I'm a fucking gambler, right?" She took two steps back away from him, baring her teeth. Something wary appeared in his eyes. "Well, about mortal sin?"
His wariness turned to alarm, but she took another step back, and as he sprang towards her, he vanished under the high headbeams shining around the corner.
"I'm willing to bet that this isn't one," she yelled, screaming to make herself heard over the truck bearing down on them. "ASSHOLE!" And squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she hurled herself backwards, screaming against the deafening blast of the horn and the shriek of the air brakes and the thunderous rumble of its massive wheels.
•
Stephanie Seymour shivered on her bed in 231 O'Henry dormitory, listening to the sounds around her and wishing that she had spent the night at Mark's place.
Somewhere above her, on the third floor, someone was breaking something: a harsh, repetitive splintering noise, punctuated by what sounded like strangled sobs. From outside her window, she thought she heard a scream. Elsewhere outside, someone was laughing, a high mad cackle. Footsteps pounded up and down the stairs at the end of her hall.
Stephanie looked over to her roommate's bed—empty, of course, as it would be this time of night—and then at the brand new alarm clock she had bought to replace the one that Evelyn had smashed last week. It was a quarter after three in the morning.
"Ev?" she said, uncertainly.
Another scream, this time from quite far off. Abruptly, Stephanie pushed herself off of her bed and walked across the room to the phone. She put her hand on the receiver, then paused, listening. The splintering noise from upstairs had stopped now, finally. Maybe it had just been the pipes.
Oh, right, she thought.
She picked up the phone and punched in the first three digits of Mark's number, then hung up as unbidden, the image arose in her mind. Mark's phone, ringing. A figure stirring sleepily beside him on his bed, raising itself up on one elbow, dark hair falling over a bare shoulder, the curve of a breast.
Don't be silly, she told herself crossly. Mark isn't seeing her anymore. When he said that he had work to do tonight, he meant just that: work. He's stressed about getting into med school. And besides, Janis would never do that to Chris. Or to you.
But this last was unconvincing somehow. Although Janis had always been perfectly nice to her, there was just something about her. Something that Stephanie didn't quite trust.
"Oh God," someone moaned, two or three doors down, sounding shockingly close by. "Oh, God."
Stephanie looked over to Evelyn's empty bed again, then at the windows. She bit her lip. Then, quickly, before she could change her mind, she picked up the receiver and punched in seven digits fast.
It rang nine times before someone picked up.
"‘Lo?" Mark, mumbling. Half asleep. Or wanting to sound as if he were.
"Mark? It's me." She paused for a moment, added "Stephanie," and then wished that she hadn't.
He made an incoherent interrogative noise. Are you alone, Mark? she felt like screaming. Are you really alone over there? But she forced it back.
"I'm sorry to call this late," she said. "But I...It's Evelyn. I think something may have happened to her."
"What?" Yes, he had definitely been asleep. Not cheating: asleep. All the same, she found herself straining to hear, listening for the sound of someone else beside him, breathing, waking. "What? Evelyn?" He was waking up now. "What's happened? Is she okay?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. I think...Mark, could you come pick me up and walk with me to the hospital? I'm...it's kind of a weird night."
There was a long silence.
"A weird night?" he repeated, and yes, he was really waking up now. He was looking at his clock and registering the time. He was wondering why she couldn't just get someone on her hall to walk with her. He was thinking that she was stupid, and clinging, and weak. She could sense him now, getting annoyed with her, formulating a polite refusal.
"I know it's a lot to ask," she said.
"No, it's..." he trailed off. Now he's seen the time, Stephanie thought. Now is when he asks me exactly what's going on, and I say: I don't know, I just have this feeling... And then he gets really annoyed with me. But if I were Janis, he wouldn't hesitate. If I were Janis, he'd be here like a shot.
"I'm really scared," she whispered. "Please, Mark."
"Sure," he said. "Yeah, okay. Let me just put something on. I'll be there as soon as I can."
"Thanks." For a moment, she feared she might burst into tears. "Thank you."
"Not a problem," he said, and hung up.
Stephanie put the receiver slowly back down on its cradle. Oh, she told herself, you are really so stupid. She sat back down on her bed to wait for him, hugging herself and shivering. And listening. And gazing at her roommate's empty bed with clear and troubled eyes.
•
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