Chapter 20

 

Jared

 

 

Jared lifted her limp hand to the thumb pad at her door and carried her into her house, where the only sound was that damned fly, now circling over the desk and the fallen desk chair. Cara probably had a fly swatter somewhere, but he wanted her in bed, asleep, before he did anything else.

He pulled down the quilt and the top sheet one-handed and laid her in the bed. She didn't move, not even an eyelash; she was, at last, truly resting, he thought. Working carefully, making sure he didn't wake her, he took off her shoes and unfastened the pants and pulled them off and went looking for a nightgown; he thought, under the circumstances, she might like a layer of fabric between herself and him until she was feeling stronger. He had every intention of starting over again then, and he hoped she was willing, but he was confident that he could work through any hesitation on her part.

And that was for later. Now he opened the folding doors at the end of the room where a selection of tailored pants and skirts and buttoned-down shirts hung, and located a nightgown on a hook just inside, practical near-cotton, with a faded design of blue and yellow flowers and a limp ribbon at the neck. He worked it over her head and her arms and smoothed it down over her body and pulled up top sheet and quilt, and paused to look at the soft colors of her face and the shadow of her lashes on her cheeks and the way her hair spread over the pillow. He wished he was in bed beside her. He wished the accident had happened later, even just an hour later; that would have been enough time, he thought, as ready as she seemed, as eager to plunge in now that he had proved she wasn't quite as cold as she had imagined.

Back in the living room, there was the desk chair, which he rolled into place where it belonged, noting that the impressions worn in the seat cushion could not possibly have been hers. And he picked up the lamp, still lit by the fuel cell, and set it beside the desk. It was a heavy thing, metal, something like iron; if it had hit her it might have done as much damage as the desk corner. He gathered the handful of data cubes and tossed them back onto the desk. The patch on the floor where her blood had dripped was clean and damp with a faint soap smell, and all the hairpins were gone; the cleaners had done good work.

The fly was hovering around the archway into the hall, within sight of the bedroom. The buzz was annoying; he glanced down the hall, which ended with the back bedroom, door closed, and went the other way, into a small dining room with a polished table and four chairs and a silver tea service gleaming from the buffet, which was as massive as the desk. Wondering if she polished the silver on a regular schedule, he took a second look and saw dust on the sugar bowl and the creamer, proving that she forgot even to send the cleaner after it.

So she wasn't a silver tea service person, but the table was dusted, and the kitchen was clean, perhaps a little too clean, as if she didn't use it that much. Curious, he opened the food keeper inventory and found it full, a little heavy on prepared foods to be heated in the cooker. But all basics were dutifully in place, including juice, which might be a good thing right now. She needed fluids, or she would when she woke up.

First things first; he found a small utility room just off the kitchen, with the laundry unit and a pile of shirts loosely folded in the Cycle Finished chute, and a snow clearer, stored with its power cell removed, and a pair of snow boots and a very old coat on a hook. And on a shelf over the laundry supplies he found what he was looking for, a fly swatter, which obligingly hummed with power when he flicked the switch.

He carried it into the kitchen with him and set it down on the little kitchen table while he looked through the cabinets. She had not one but three pitchers with temperature controls, and a row of plastic cups with spill-proof valved lids. "They think I'm a doddering old fool," said Maud in his memory, waving a scornful hand at the cup on the table beside her hospital bed. There were plastic plates, compartmentalized and temperature controlled, and an extensive collection of plastic tableware with oversized handles for an invalid with a poor grip, along with long-handled spoons with coated bowls to prevent damage to teeth or gums when the patient was being fed. This patient had left impressions of toothmarks on several of the spoons, he saw.

He filled one of the pitchers with coculi juice and set it to "Cold", and got down a regular glass, and carried them both into the bedroom, under the fly who was bumping around the ceiling by the lamp. Cara didn't stir; he put the pitcher and the glass on the nightstand and went back to the kitchen. The coffee maker was filled and ready. He found a cup; her dishes, the everyday ones on the lower shelves, were not the most attractive ones he had ever seen, thick ceramic things painted a muddy brown and gray, which didn't seem like her any more than the brown couch did, or the hulking desk. There was a set of old-fashioned china on an upper shelf, a little dusty, seldom used, he supposed, probably an heirloom like the tea service.

He filled the cup; the cup was ugly but the coffee smelled good. If it kept him awake that was fine; he was watching Cara. Unfortunately it seldom had any effect on him. Watching Cara would be enough to keep him awake all by itself. He could not remember ever being so hard hit before, even with Maud; he had been able, for at least a short while, to fight his attraction to Maud, to remind himself that she was much older and much richer and altogether from a much different world and in no way someone he should love – but of course he had loved her anyway, proving that logic and reason had nothing to do with it.

Cara wasn't a much more likely lover. She had come from a privileged background, Dr. Margo Lindstrom's only child. Privately educated. Attending the University full-time, no doubt funded by her mother. What their personal relationship had been, he didn't know, but she had thought enough of her mother to care for her in her own house. Jared had taken care of Ava, but that was a different matter, in a different world in all senses of the word. Ava on that old stained mattress on the floor, naked, of course; she was either dressed to go out, or not dressed at all, and by the time he was eight he knew more about the female body than boys twice his age. Ava, eyes closed, gasping for breath, and the stink of vomit and excrement and sometimes blood, and trying to get her up, and cleaned, and something in the way of food inside her, and once she was half straight again she was out the door and back on the streets, because she had to have the credits; he shook the past away and focused on the problems of the present.

Not that they were big problems. With three doses of painkiller, Cara was apt to sleep for awhile. He could get one of her readers, move a chair up by the bed. He would probably spend more time watching her than reading.

Taking his cup, he turned to pick up the fly swatter and felt the familiar shift of the pendant against his skin, under his shirt. It had been Maud's love token, a copy of her own pendant; he had worn it for so many years, taking it off only when he was with clients. He had not thought of putting it away even when Maud died; it was a symbol of a union he thought would never be matched. Indeed, whatever he was entering into now would not be the same as what he had with Maud, he knew that, but even now at the beginning he had a sense of the possibilities, the potential. He would never stop loving Maud, but Maud was no longer there and their affair was ended. This affair, however unlikely, was beginning, and – that lovely young woman with the perfect figure and the blond hair fanning out against the pillow around her head and the bright blue eyes, sparkling even in pain – she deserved his full heart, he thought, the door closed on past loves, gently, with regret, but closed.

He should take off the pendant. As soon as he sat down, he would put the pendant into his jacket pocket, and store it in his dresser drawer when he got home.

The fly, with the uncanny ability of all pests to sense threats, had got itself out of the way once he found the swatter, so it was quiet in the living room, and Cara slept in the bedroom with the lights dialed down to a night light glow, in case the headache was still there.

There was one more thing he wanted to do, a little snooping; he ought to be ashamed of it but he wasn't. He put the swatter and the coffee cup on the dresser and went through the bathroom, closing the door behind him to keep any stray sound from waking Cara.

The third door in the bathroom was closed but not locked; he opened it into a room with windows darkened almost all the way. Night lights came up as he passed the sensors. The air, the still stale air of a closed room, smelled of dust, he thought several months’ worth. There was a wheelchair under the south window, expensive super-powered fuel cell removed from its housing and set on the padded seat, and under it and around it was a large brown stain, something that had soaked into the flooring and could not be scrubbed out. There was a scarred table, what looked like a couple of folded cots, probably for night nurses, and a reclining chair with a big slash in one arm, oozing upholstery stuffing. Someone had tried to mend it with tape, he noticed, and the tape had peeled loose. Against the wall on the bathroom side was the hospital bed, left in a sitting position, covered with an old sheet, but he thought there were stains on the mattress, too.

The walls, he saw, were scarred. There were gouges in the paint and the plaster. The one by the door out to the hall looked exactly as if someone had thrown a knife at it, point first. All that blood, he thought, remembering what Cara had said.

But the room was silent and empty now, and he turned toward the bathroom door and something swooped down at him, a snarling buzz, causing him to jump back, startled. Get out of here, man whore, go away, leave the stupid bitch alone, hissed a voice in perfect Earthian, and then it was gone.

He looked through the only open door, the door to the bathroom, and there was that insect, that fly, dipping under the light fixture, moving without haste into the hall.

For a moment tales of ghosts and other fairy-tale creatures went through his mind, all kinds of childhood superstitions, but he wasn't superstitious, and he wasn't delusional. He was quite sure he heard what he thought he heard, and now he remembered that little hot fast meteor shrieking between him and Cara, so that she stepped back, running into the lamp and then the desk, the accident that had her in bed alone. In the blood and the pain and the worry he had actually forgotten how it had all started.

It made no sense at all, not the attack, if that's what it was, not the voice. There was no one here but the two of them and that damned fly. Still, if it was real, and he thought it was, he needed to deal with it whether he understood it or not.

"Go to hell,” he told the speaker, whoever it was. "I’m staying. And watch your mouth."

The fly vanished into the hall with a nasty buzz, and after a moment Jared followed, closing the connecting doors as he went. A voice; it suggested some sort of intelligence, but whose? Why? What sort of creature was it; was it connected with that bug? He thought it was. He had never heard of such a thing, but he thought it was. It might be worth it, he thought, to spend some time insect-hunting. But he couldn’t see or hear the thing, and he didn't like leaving Cara by herself, with whatever this was loose in the house. He had the swatter in the bedroom; if the fly came in there he could get rid of it, and in this way find out if it did have anything to do with the voice and the shriek and the whole accident.

There was an elderly recliner between the bed and the window, somewhere she might have dozed while awaiting whatever call came from the other bedroom, time for medication, time for feeding. He wasn't tired and they weren't on an invalid's schedule, but he could sit there and see her face as she slept. He didn't have much appetite yet. He’d grab a sandwich later, perhaps when he fixed something for her when she woke up. He remembered making soup for Ava, soup from whatever was left in the food keeper or the cut-rate leftovers from Max’s Grocery, soup she could usually keep down. It had been good training, he thought.

Ava wobbling on her feet, leaning on his shoulder; he had been shorter than she was in those days, and he got a blast of second-hand alcohol and rotting teeth when she breathed in his direction. The complex emotions had settled over the years into aching sympathy and a deep but quiet sorrow; he understood what had happened, and he had dealt long ago with his own reaction to it, as much as anyone could. Whatever legacy Cara’s mother had left, she had not yet had time to deal with it, he reflected, looking at the pale face on the pillow.

 

Three doses ought to have put her out for the night, but in another hour Cara was stirring restlessly, shifting her head on the pillow as if trying to find a comfortable position. Jared had the lights down and the windows darkened and the only sound was that damned fly bumping around in the living room, but she wasn't sleeping soundly anyway, and in another half hour her eyes opened. She put a hand to her head, proving that the headache wasn't gone yet, and then looked around as if remembering something important.

Before he could get out of the chair, she had found him; she gave him a look of such surprised pleasure that he couldn't help smiling. "I told you I'd be here," he reminded her.

"But you can't want to stay," she said. "I mean, how boring, just sitting there – "

"I'm not bored," he said.

"You must have other things to do," she murmured. "I'm sure I could call someone – "

"You don't want me?" He was pretty sure that she did, and the look she gave him confirmed it. He sat down on the edge of the bed, taking care not to jostle her, and tried looking into her eyes, which were big and beautifully blue and told him nothing about her headache. She was, he thought, a little warm, but he didn't think it was a major fever. He ran a hand over the sealed wound on her side and found no unusual swelling; there was always a little, but it would go down in another day.

"It's just – it can't be anything you want to do," she said. "Honestly, I can take care of myself."

"I want to be with you," he said. "I wish you didn't have that headache, because I don't like seeing you so uncomfortable, but I don't have any other complaints."

"You're lying," she said at once, that spark of mischief popping into her eyes again.

"Oh, no. Sweetheart, we have plenty of time. Hell, this time yesterday I knew nothing about you but your name. We've already gone light years beyond that. I think we can wait a day or two before we go any further."

"Besides," she said, almost straight-faced, "we both know I don't like sex."

"Very true. Such a shame."

"Maybe I won't. If we really do it. And I'll go join a celibate service order across the ocean."

"I'm sure they'd love to have you. So you'll have options, if you don't like it," he agreed, "but I wouldn't lay a lot of credits on it." He bent to kiss her lips again, very gently, and heard that fly buzzing in the hall, as if it were moving in for a better view. He hadn't tried to chase it yet; he should do that, he thought. Close the bedroom to keep out the noise, and turn on the swatter and zap the thing into permanent silence.

As for that voice – it made him uneasy. He couldn't explain it, and it made him uneasy. He was not going to leave her by herself for any length of time.

He gave her two of the painkillers and one of the antibiotics with juice; she was thirsty but not hungry. She urged him to make something for himself; she'd just ordered groceries, she said, so the keeper was full. But she only wanted more juice, and then the pills and the infusions still in her system kicked in and she dozed.

She seemed to be doing well; feeling better, Jared made himself a quick sandwich to take back to the recliner in the bedroom so that she could see him when she woke again, know that he hadn’t walked away as she slept. And he needed to take off that pendant, he thought. He'd forgotten that. Standing in the kitchen, he fished for the chain, pulled it out of the neck of his T-shirt.

There was a sound like a tea kettle or a humidifier with a head of steam, and something smashed against his chest, against the pendant, hard enough to cause him to stagger backward.

Filth, filth, get out of my house! Get that crap out of my house!

It was the same voice he had heard in the second bedroom. He looked around, up toward the ceiling, and there it was, that damned fly, hovering over the cooker, and as he looked it gathered itself with a furious buzzing and swooped down at him again; he dodged aside and it pulled up against the wall and stayed there, giving him the clear impression it was eyeing him.

It really was the fly. And he had, of course, left the swatter in the bedroom.

"What the hell?" he said, to himself, to the fly, to the indifferent heavens.

Get out, get out, get out, get your ass down the road, lover boy, and take your filth with you!

If some part of this made sense, thought Jared, he was missing out on it. But this bizarre attack had begun when he pulled out the pendant, and the first swoop of the fly had been aimed at it. "You’re talking about this?" said Jared, lifting the pendant, and the fly launched itself from the wall again and he stepped back and let it shoot past him. It landed on the control panel of the laundry appliance and eyed him again. "You have a problem with my jewelry?" he said, not sure whether he wanted to swear or laugh. "Or maybe it’s the design; you aren’t into ancient Celtic symbols? Or perhaps it’s the silver?" Werewolves and vampires, he thought; could this get any stranger?

Get out. You don’t belong here. The slut isn't yours. And don’t think that thing gives you any protection from me.

"The thought never crossed my mind," he assured the fly, "and don’t think you have any protection from the fly swatter, either. I’m staying. Watch your mouth, and get used to it."

Fucking filth! The fly shot past Jared’s left ear and vanished into the darkness of the utility room. He fought down a desire to laugh; really, the situation was too weird for laughing. He listened but he couldn’t hear any buzzing; he was sure it was still around, though, and he remembered that the bedroom door was open and Cara, sleeping, was vulnerable. But there didn’t seem to be a fly in the bedroom or in the bathroom, and after as much of a search as he dared to try without waking her, he reluctantly sat down in the recliner, making sure he had the swatter in reach.

Nahno’s magic did not work this time; he could not keep his mind on the reader. Instead he searched his mind for any information at all about talking flies, or bees, or any other insect, for that matter, whether in scholarly zoological tomes or the wildest of folklore. He couldn't, at this moment, come up with anything.

It was ridiculous; as far as he knew, flies did not even have the equipment – mouth parts, lungs, vocal cords – for speech. It wasn't something he had ever researched – he had never thought he would need to – but he didn't think they possessed the kind of brain that used the verbal symbols of language. And while large for one of its kind, the fly was small compared to an Earthian; where had that good-sized voice come from? He doubted the creature could do much physical harm – striking his pendant was about the most it was likely to be able to do and that had been more startling than damaging. But the intent was malign, and there was more than physical damage possible.

He thought of Cara, hesitating in the car as she eyed the house; he thought of her looking quickly through it as he admired her shelves of readers. Was she aware she was, against all sense and sanity, harboring a talking fly? Did she know what it was, he wondered, or where it came from? How long had it been in her house, and what were its intentions, other than to drive him away?