TWELVE

I DON’T REMEMBER the ride home. Suddenly, I was pulling into my drive, and the day that had begun bright and warm had turned dismal and gray, a thick layer of marine clouds sliding in over the deep blue, resembling some infinite gray curtain God was drawing over the world. I felt shrouded in misery.

As soon as I passed through my gate, I saw the detective’s car parked in front of the house. I recalled his saying he would return to take me to dinner, but he was here far too early. I found him seated comfortably on the sofa, his feet up on a hassock and Richard’s diary in his hands. He had made himself a drink as well and looked quite at home. After all I had been through, his complacent demeanor annoyed me.

“Where’s Sylvia?” I demanded. She knew better than to let him in without me.

“She’s gone.” He smiled. “There was no one here when I arrived.”

“Gone? How did you get in here then?” I asked without disguising my displeasure. Despite the intimacy we had shared, I detested the presumption on his part.

“Police powers,” he replied, that self-satisfied smirk embedded in his face. “Actually,” he said, “I’m just as surprised seeing you as you are seeing me.” He held up the diary. “I was expecting to see Richard come through that door.”

“You had no right coming into this house without me, and you had no right to take that and read it until I had given it to you,” I snapped. I wasn’t in the mood for any of his humor.

“It’s evidence now. Especially now,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“He killed Nicholas today, didn’t he?” he said, not changing expression. “That’s why I was expecting him and not you. Yes,” he said in reply to my look of surprise, “I discovered what he had done, but I didn’t call it in yet. I was hoping to wrap it all up tonight.” He narrowed his eyes and scrutinized me.

“Why did you permit the metamorphose? Did you want him to kill Nicholas?” he asked.

I stood there, staring.

“And what is your car doing at the bottom of that gully? It’s all tied together somehow, isn’t it? You might as well come clean,” he said. “There’s no point in holding anything back now, no point in playing games with each other.” He leaned forward. “How did you survive that automobile crash, anyway? Androgynous powers?”

“I was lucky. I didn’t enjoy any assistance,” I added, recalling Richard’s stubbornness within me.

“What happened?”

“The brakes gave out as I was going downhill. I managed to turn the car off the road and slow it down. After I had stopped the car, I got out, but it rolled again and went over the hill.”

He nodded.

“I see. Someone had tampered with your brakes. You put two and two together, realized Nicholas was behind it, and released Richard—sent him over there like some attack dog,” he concluded.

“No! I told you—Androgyne don’t kill their own.”

“So why has Richard withdrawn again?” he asked, ignoring me. “He’s doing what he’s always done, is that it? Hide inside you after a kill?”

“He didn’t kill Nicholas,” I said.

He shook his head and returned his gaze to the diary. I could see he had gone through most if not all of it.

“From what I’ve been reading here, Richard was always jealous of Nicholas, jealous of the way you and Nicholas got along. I think it’s clear he expected Nicholas would someday do to you what he had done to Alison. Am I right?”

“Richard didn’t kill him,” I repeated with more insistence.

“Do you know how Richard comes across in this?” he asked patting the diary. “Like a mad, jealous, incestuous brother. There’s not a love affair of yours he approves of, whether it be with an Androgyne or an inferior. No one is good enough for you; no one should put a hand on you, and if you so much as indicate pleasure or happiness with someone else, he becomes enraged or mocks it. Incestuous madness,” he repeated. “It’s true and it’s clear as can be in this letter, his final letter,” he said pulling it out of his breast pocket.

“You shouldn’t have taken that out of the diary!”

“Why not?” He smiled. “What you really mean is, I shouldn’t have read it, right? You were never going to read this to me,” he said unfolding the paper.

“Put it back,” I insisted.

“Dear Clea,” he read, ignoring me.

“Stop.” I put my hands over my ears.

“I am writing this with bloodied hands and a bloodied heart. I know you will hate me at first for what I have done, but in time, you will realize I did it for both of us. You know that I do nothing for myself anyway. Even when I experience ecstatic sexual pleasure, I am experiencing it for you as well as for me. Whenever I chose a victim, I always considered whether you would approve, whether you would be happy too.

“I know you wonder how I can expect you to appreciate and to approve of what I have done, but you know that the male side of us is the more androgynous and knows what is best for our race, our existence. You must depend on my instincts.

“I would have done this earlier and prevented things from growing as bad as they did, but I was afraid that you would hate me with the same passion with which you love me. Now, I understand that was a weakness on my part. An Androgyne must be strong enough to withstand any emotional pain and then convert that pain into a strength, into another section of armor with which to withstand what Shakespeare called, ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’

“The more you loved this man, the more you denied and hated who you were. In time I began to realize what was happening. You were being tormented, tempted to deny your essence. You were committing one of the worst sins we could commit: self-denial. It was then that I realized who Michael Barrington was, who he had become or more precisely, who had possessed his form to defeat you and thus me—that same horrendous creature who has haunted us since our time began, the same one who took our loving mother, who tempted her to the edge as well.

“Then I knew I had to save you, save us.

“I live for the day you fully understand and forgive me. Love, Richard.”

Even hearing the detective read the letter in his sarcastic, cruel tone of voice brought tears to my eyes.

“Love Richard,” he said. “What drool. What paranoia. The great Evil Eye again … the truth is he had just butchered and mashed a human being to death, your lover, a lover he corrupted on his journey to destroy your romance because he couldn’t stand your loving anyone, anything else but him.”

“No!” I cried, even though in my heart I had felt that to be true.

“Yes.” He held the letter up. “You skipped a lot of this when you read to me, didn’t you?”

“I did nothing of the sort,” I said, throwing my purse down and going to the bar. My heart felt as though it were growing thorns, the sharp ends of which were threatening to burst out of my chest.

“Of course, you did. You know what else I think?” he said, turning to me. “I think Richard killed your mother.”

“Killed my mother? That’s ridiculous. You don’t know how ridiculous that is.”

“She was beyond metamorphosis, no longer an Androgyne. She had become an embarrassment to you, so he killed her.”

“Ridiculous,” I repeated.

“But matricide, even for an Androgyne, is horrendous. He couldn’t live with what he had done; that’s why he went rampaging around. He wasn’t looking for the great Evil Eye so he could kill him, take revenge; he wanted the great Evil Eye to do away with him instead; he wanted and needed punishment.”

I had to laugh.

“You don’t know how stupid that theory is. Stick to your simple street murders, detective.”

I poured myself a glass of vodka and drank it straight.

“You knew it all along, but couldn’t face it, denied it. Finally, you couldn’t deny it any longer and that’s when you decided to come to me to confess. Somehow, you expected this confession would ease the burden.

“Well, I’m no priest. I can assign you no penance. You must turn Richard over to me. That’s the only solution.”

I stared into my glass, swirled the vodka, and then downed the remainder. The heat in my chest was comforting.

“I really don’t have time for you right now,” I said. “I can’t waste time humoring you and playing your stupid games. Your theories are wrong; you shouldn’t have read the diary without me; you didn’t understand what you read.”

I turned to him.

“Now if you will be so kind as to put it on the table there and then leave…”

He shook his head.

“I can’t leave without Richard, no matter how long it takes.”

“It’s not time,” I said.

“What’s the difference when I take him?” he responded quickly. “You came to me originally for that purpose, didn’t you?

I glared at him.

“Didn’t you?” he repeated when I didn’t reply.

“Yes, but I can’t do it just yet.”

“Why not?” He waited. The walls of my house suddenly seemed so confining and the air was so oppressive, I felt trapped. The detective’s words twirled around me and became the chains that held me fast. He lifted his arms, turning his palms toward me so that he resembled a volunteer for crucifixion. I felt Richard’s desire to pound nails through his palms.

“I just can’t.”

He shook his head.

“I need him,” I explained.

“Need him? I don’t understand. My impression was he was more of a burden at this point. Your whole existence was a burden. After what’s happened now—Nicholas gone, Alison gone, I just assumed you would want a quick end. It’s beyond your control.

“Prolonging it by reading this diary to me won’t help,” he said. “It will go on forever. When you come to the end, you’ll create another tale and another.

“You’re like Scheherazade, looking for a reprieve through storytelling, hoping to hold off the inevitable. Well, you can’t tell this tale forever. It must come to an end. Make peace with yourself.”

“Why do you want me to end it now? I was under the impression you had grown fond of me.” I tilted my head suspiciously.

He smiled.

“We had a good time, but good times by definition end. Otherwise, it would all be the same and we wouldn’t know what was good and what wasn’t.”

“Still the philosophical detective.”

“It’s the effect you have on me. Look, there’s been another murder, albeit the murder of an Androgyne, but my people won’t know that. They will think another ordinary human being was killed. I’m on this investigation, but I can’t be on it for the rest of my life,” he protested.

“You know I’m right,” he added softly. “You can’t live with it anymore. Even people you cared for are being destroyed. What’s left? It’s over. Do the right thing.”

I stared at him. Maybe he was right; maybe I was prolonging what I had known all along was inevitable.

“I’ve got to think.”

“Don’t think. The longer you think, the more you procrastinate and prolong the agony.

“Look,” he said standing, “I’m not being completely honest. I can’t stand this anymore myself. I’m falling in love with you and I can’t let that happen.”

I looked up at him curiously. How quickly his expressions changed. He was a chameleon—coldly realistic, hard, demanding at one moment, and then soft, loving, sensitive at another. Maybe we weren’t so different, inferiors and Androgyne. Maybe we all had many separate identities and what God had done was simply exaggerate one aspect of humanity to create us.

“I haven’t been able to think about anything or anyone else but you since you first entered my office,” he said. “I know that doesn’t surprise you; you think all inferior men are vulnerable to your charms, and maybe they are, but it comes as a surprise to me. Now, all I want to do is be the one who brings you some relief, does something good for you. I think that’s the best way, the most significant way I can express my love for you. At least in a way you can appreciate,” he added and took a deep breath. “You’re too beautiful to suffer any more, Clea. I mean that.”

“My detective,” I said, smiling through my tears. “My philosophical detective.”

He smiled and stepped forward. I ran my hand through his hair, and he closed his eyes. Then, we kissed. It was a long, passionate kiss, a good-bye kiss in which the lips refuse to obey the commands of the mind. They press on and on trying to deny the reality of what is to follow.

“I’d ask you to make love with me one more time,” he whispered, still holding me closely, “but that would only do what I’ve accused you of doing: prolonging the inevitable, unraveling the day’s weaving.” He kissed the tip of my nose and backed away.

I nodded.

“All right,” I said. “You’re right; the time has come.”

He grew serious.

“How do we do this?”

“I’ll go to Richard’s room and lie down in his bed. You wait here. I’ll call to you when it begins and you will be there as it happens so you can take him by surprise, quickly, swiftly, without any struggles.”

“All right.” He stepped back and when he did so, his jacket opened sufficiently for me to see his pistol.

I placed my emptied glass on the bar and started down the corridor toward Richard’s room. I was tempted to look back, but thought if I did, I might not be able to continue.

“You’re only doing what you had intended,” I told myself, “doing what you set out to do. If you weaken, think only of Michael’s battered body.”

I paused before Richard’s bedroom door, took a deep breath, and then entered.

I hadn’t been in Richard’s bedroom since I had gone in to erase every remnant of him in a desperate attempt to reduce his hold over me. True, all of his personal things had been swept away—his clothing, his jewelry, his bathroom articles, down to his toothpaste, but the moment I stepped into his room, I felt his presence anyway.

When I moved farther in and gazed into the wall mirror, I did not see my own reflection; I saw Richard’s, and suddenly, I felt myself looking at this room not as a visitor, but as its occupant. I understood that once the metamorphosis was begun, it would happen very quickly, perhaps too quickly to call the detective. I couldn’t hesitate, not a second.

I closed and opened my eyes, forcing myself to see myself in the mirror, for I realized that this would be the very last time I would look upon myself, stare lovingly at my own image and feel a woman’s vanity.

It occurred to me that all living things might very well enter the portal of death with the thought that it was merely a hibernation, a sleep and then an awakening. We are deceived and thus we surrender to it rather than, as Dylan Thomas urged his father, “rage against the dying of the light.” We are given to believe that whatever pain and suffering we are experiencing at that moment will pass, will be diluted and eliminated by the great sleep, the panacea which cures us of all the agony associated with life itself.

I would, like some ancient Indian, set myself down on the funeral pyre and permit Death to embrace me. Perhaps I would even smile as he put his deceivingly warm arms around me to lift me into his bosom. Could I die to the beat of my own heart drumming in my ears?

I headed for Richard’s bed and began to take off my clothing, but to my surprise, he didn’t begin his approach. He didn’t step up to the doorway of identity and hover with anticipation. He lingered in the shadows and spoke to me from the deepest depths of our androgynous being. Of course, he knew I was delivering him, delivering us both; but his reluctance had more cause.

I hesitated.

He was urging me to open my eyes as Clea, to remain as Clea a little longer so that I would understand.

But understand what?

As if he had stepped out of me to turn my shoulders, I spun around and looked toward the doorway, and suddenly, perhaps because he had directed me to, because he had cleared my brain and washed the mist from my window on reality, I smelled it—the raw, wild flavor of blood. How could I have missed it before? It trickled from my nose to my tongue and my stomach churned.

Quietly, I slipped out of Richard’s room and, pausing first in the hallway to listen, continued down the corridor toward one of our guest suites. The door was shut, but like a bird that sensed something alien had been in its nest, I knew that other fingers, the hands of predators, had closed this door. My fingers fluttered about the knob, hesitant. It was Richard within me, insisting, pressing me forward, that finally made me grasp the knob and turn it. I opened the door and entered, moving quietly over the rug, moving slowly through the room, my eyes shifting from side to side, sweeping the furniture, the bed. The scent of fresh death was strong, putrescent. It drew me to the bathroom and I opened the door.

I entered and stood there, my heart pounding. Then I reached forward and pulled back the shower curtain.

There Sylvia lay in the tub, her arms twisted out of their joints, her legs turned so far to the right, they were obviously broken. A thin red line marked where her wrenched neck had been split. The bosom of her white uniform was splattered with the ruby red drops that had fallen from her mouth and nose. Her upper lip was lifted in a sneer, but other than that, Sylvia’s face was unremarkable. Her dead eyes had the same bland, lifeless glint they had always had. She didn’t look like someone who had been in any particular pain. She had died with the same lack of passion with which she had lived.

Richard came clamoring down the tunnel that separated us from each other. “Do you see?” he screamed. “Do you understand now? He’s here! He’s always been here!”

Confused, dizzy, I spun about and reached out for the sink to catch my balance. My detective had said that Sylvia wasn’t here when he had arrived. Obviously, he hadn’t searched the house or he would have found her. He probably went right for the diary and made himself comfortable, I thought quickly. I must go to him and explain the danger we are both in now.

“I must warn the detective,” I muttered.

Richard’s laughter was like fingernails drawn across a chalk blackboard. My spine cringed.

“You fool, you romantic, blind fool. Think, recall, replay his words,” Richard urged me.

I gazed at Sylvia’s corpse. I knew it had to be the workings of my terrified mind, the twisted machinations of a distorted imagination, but it appeared that Richard, in order to impress what was true on me, slipped from me to Sylvia.

Suddenly, her head moved and then turned on her broken neck. The twisting caused new blood to spurt from the thin incision and tiny, hairlike streams streaked down and under the blouse of her uniform. Her curled upper lip slid back over her teeth and her dead eyes blinked. Then she spoke to me in Richard’s voice.

“He said Nicholas was dead, that I had killed him. But anyone who found the body would have found Alison not Nicholas. In death Nicholas changed instantly back to Alison. Only the killer could know it was originally Nicholas who had been shot.”

Sylvia’s corpse collapsed. I gasped and looked toward the doorway.

The detective? My detective?

I could hear my mother’s warnings, a child’s story, a fable, and then the lessons.

“Remember, Clea. He’s always out there, waiting in the form we would least expect, waiting to take advantage of our weaknesses. He’s patient; he has all the time in the world.”

My God, I thought, I had told him so much and put so many of our kind in jeopardy.

“Of course,” I muttered to myself as well as to Richard, who I felt waiting just under the surface of my being, “he was so perceptive; he seemed to know so much and knew the right questions. And his powers of lovemaking…

I had told Diana I was almost at the point where I would welcome him and she had said that was what he hoped for. She had told me to stop denying who I was, to stop hating myself or I would be his victim.

That’s what had brought me to him in the first place; that’s why he had possessed the detective. He knew I would come.

That’s why he was out there now, waiting.

I stepped away from the sink and began my journey back.

As I walked down the corridor, I felt it begin. This time, because of my own anger and my own aggression, it was a far greater rush than it had ever been. It was as if Richard were emerging from beneath my feet, seeping up through my soles, absorbing, changing, molding as he climbed toward my heart. I sensed a thickening in my ankles and a tightening and stiffening in my calf muscles and thighs. As Richard’s being overtook mine, I began the androgynous retreat to that limbo, the waiting room of souls in which we rested and prepared for our rebirth. I felt myself sliding back to the womb, curling up into a fetal position, welcoming the warmth, the security, the oblivious existence in which there was no turmoil. Never had I welcomed it with so much enthusiasm as I did now.

Richard rushed past me, his eyes passing through mine. His were fixed with the hunter’s glare, focused intently on the kill. I could hear his quickened breath, feel his pulse thumping as his blood flowed over my own, hastening my retreat, pressing me back protectively as he clawed his way to the surface of our being. In seconds it was over and the darkness swept across my consciousness, closing off my immediate existence.

What followed came in the form of a dream, and as with many of my dreams, I was an observer standing on the threshold, more a witness than a participant.

The detective was sitting forward on the sofa, his pistol drawn. He was leaning on his thighs, staring down, waiting. Once in a while, the tip of his tongue moved over his lips. It looked like the head of a tiny snake peering out, exploring the surface of its nest and then quickly retreating. It didn’t surprise me. Surely snakes and rats, vermin and reptiles of all sorts lived within the caverns of this horrendous creature, this tumor on the face of creation. The detective was merely the shell around it now.

As if to emphasize that very fact, the detective’s head began to rise. I saw the skin on his neck stretch with the strain. Finally, the skin snapped. He didn’t bleed. All of his blood had been sucked in to the feed the rodents and the reptiles. When he lowered his neck again, his head dropped off and shattered on the floor, the eyes rolling away like two marbles. Bones and teeth shattered to gray-white slivers.

Out of the opening in his neck emerged a raw, red, bullet-shaped glob of pulsating flesh embossed with green and blue veins. It bubbled at the surface and began to take form. Diamond-shaped bone-white eyes appeared. Beneath them, the flesh sunk in two small circles to form what looked to be a nose. The mouth came more slowly as the flesh ripped apart. Strings of it held on as if to keep it from forming. Gradually, they snapped and the opening grew larger. Teeth appeared—long, very white, yet not quite fangs. Within, the tongue curled and twisted like a writhing worm that had had half of its body crushed into the ground.

It was fitting that he would be this ugly, as ugly as nightmares, as ugly as sin. Janice once told me he takes so many different forms because he has no form he can call his own; he is whatever we see him as, whatever evil is within us—that’s the evil we see, and since we all have different sorts of evil and different amounts of it, he is different to each of us.

He lifted his hands from his thighs and the ends of his fingers popped off to make way for the emerging gray nails, each looking sharper than the one before it. In fact, everywhere the detective’s skin was visible, it split or peeled to make way for him. His hot body burned through the possessed one. He no longer had reason to keep himself hidden.

Steam rose from the shoulders of the detective’s jacket and out from under the cuffs in his pants. The air around him simmered. The furniture and the floor began to smoke as his blistering body singed and burned. He had brought a piece of hell with him. It was as Janice had said: “Everywhere he goes, there is hell. It’s his baggage; he carries purgatory on his shoulders.”

When he opened his mouth wider, I saw fires burning. I could hear the screams of agony coming from the souls he had captured and swallowed. I realized that with every acquisition, he grew more powerful, more vibrant and more formidable. Fearful in my dream, I stepped back from the window. I was afraid he could see me and had the power even to reach through dreams to grasp souls.

But when Richard entered the room from behind him, he did not see him as I saw him. He saw him as the detective, just a man as vulnerable as any other man. I wanted to shout out to warn him, but it was better for Richard that he did not see him as I saw him. He experienced no fear, only anger.

Swiftly, he moved across the room and came up behind the detective. Just before he brought his arm around the detective’s neck, the detective began to stand and turn. But Richard didn’t hesitate. He caught him in a choke hold and drew him back quickly. The detective raised his pistol and fired blindly, missing. With his other hand, Richard seized the gun and the struggle centered on that first.

Richard’s strength was far greater than the detective’s, even with the devil possessing him. He turned the gun down and the next time it fired, the bullet shattered the detective’s breast. His resistance waned. Richard tightened his choke hold, and the detective’s eyes began to bulge. His face reddened, but he was able to manage a cry.

Pathetically, because the devil faced defeat and began to withdraw, my detective cried out my name.

“Clea!”

I covered my ears when he cried out again. My poor detective—charming, vulnerable, witty, strong—everything I had dreamed my lover should be. I wondered about that last kiss we had shared. Had it been the devil’s or my poor detective’s? I would never know for sure.

And I would never know love, not the way the inferiors knew it, I thought. It saddened me to understand even though it was that very same longing that had brought me to this point. Our dreams, our hopes were really our particular curses. Pain came only from what we longed for and could not have. If we longed for nothing, we would suffer nothing.

But then we would be like the Stoics, like Sylvia’s kind, never unhappy, true; but never happy. The paradox was our curse, a curse we shared with the inferiors.

I laughed, a mad laugh. One of the greatest lovers on earth, I would never know love the way I longed to know it. My mother had come to realize the same thing, and when she had realized it, she had embraced death, choosing to live in eternal damnation for one moment of earthly love.

I turned from the window of my dream grateful for Richard, rejoicing now in what we were. I was stronger than my mother. I embraced myself instead of the phantom, the illusion of perfect love. Instead, I returned to self-love in the greatest form it could take. I returned to the Androgyne.

I awoke in my own bed. I felt invigorated, well rested. I had no idea how long I had been asleep after metamorphosis until I looked at the clock and realized it was the next day. After I showered and dressed, I went to Richard’s room and found it had been restored. All his things were back in place and it was as neat and as clean as ever—the towels properly folded, his suits and pants pressed and clean. Even his toothpaste was as it had been. It was almost as if everything that had happened since I had come into this room and taken it apart was merely a dream.

I went to the guest bedroom and looked in the bathroom, but Sylvia’s body was gone. There wasn’t even a trace of blood on the tub.

Of course, there was no sign of the detective, nothing to indicate he had ever been there. Except … Richard’s diary was on the table by the sofa where the detective had been reading it. The last letter was back in the diary.

I went to the front door and looked outside and saw my car had been replaced with one just like it. Richard’s Thunderbird was parked alongside it. Everything seemed to be as it had been; everything in place, ready, waiting.

I looked up; it was a warm day. The sun was peeping through the haze, burning it off. It would be a wonderful day. I was filled with so much energy, so much eagerness to do things, go places.

There were dozens of people to see. I had to call the studio to let them know I would be in; I was all right. I couldn’t wait to act again. Suddenly, the camera, the lights, the makeup and sets, all the illusions were more exciting than ever.

I closed the door and went back through the house, making a mental list of all the things I had to do today. I had to find someone, preferably another Stoic, to replace Sylvia, of course; that is, if Richard hadn’t already. I suspected he might have. He seemed to have taken care of everything.

Sure enough, when I walked into the kitchen, I found a note on the kitchenette.

“I made some inquiries and interviewed a prospective replacement for Sylvia. Her name is Bianca and she appears to be quite adequate. She will be here this afternoon. Don’t worry. She has a key.”

The note was signed, “Love, Richard.”

We would truly look after each other until time took him from me and me from him.