29

Irene felt the pain turning, a sheet that blew in the wind, sometimes reflecting angry light, and sometimes softness, shadow. If she moved, she knew, she would die of pain. So, she reasoned to herself, I will not move, for a very long time.

But she could not help wondering where she was. Where she was, and why she was wet. It could not be blood, she told herself. It is too cold for blood. I must, she decided, open my eyes, and look.

Perhaps she slept. When she woke again, she found herself with her eyes opening, and seeing light glitter off a wall. It was a stone wall, and moss was green in the crack of light. She was underground. There was a beautiful sound, like the chattering of budgies. It was, she decided, the musical tinkle of water.

So now I am in a very strange place, she thought. And how did I get here, alone? She stretched an arm to touch the wall, and then her arm shrank back.

She was not alone. There was someone here. But there was something very wrong. So wrong she could not think it for a moment.

There was a body there, just beyond her head. But the body was not breathing. Then, she told herself, if the body is not breathing, it is dead.

The body moved. It was the whisper of leather, the hiss of coarse weave being drawn with the movement, the sound, too, somewhere muffled, of metal rotating, clicking into place. As though the person with her had a metal skeleton.

But it was breathing, she told herself. Listen to it. Long, slow breaths, perhaps one every minute, more like something pretending to breathe than a human being sustaining himself on air. Breathing because it remembered that is what the living do.

Irene was almost never afraid. There was simply no use, she knew, in being afraid now. She sat up suddenly. There was bright, savage pain, and then something worse.

A snakelike arm wrapped around her neck, and squeezed her until she could not breathe. She felt the fury of this Man, this ancient fury that would not let her go. She struggled with both hands, and then felt the strength bleed from her body.

The arm was a leather cord around her neck. This was how she would die, she thought, wrestling with the being she could not see, falling back onto the wet earth.

The arm let her go. He does not want me dead, she thought. He wants my warmth. He wants to keep me alive and near him, as a man might keep a fire burning. He only needs my warmth.

But she was up again, calling Davis’s name, struggling to be free of this leather blanket, this living, slithering leather frame that engulfed her, and covered her mouth with its hands.

She could not move. Her pain and the Man’s embrace knotted her. It was a long struggle, and with every movement the leather embrace tightened.

It was then that she thought she heard it. How amusing the mind could be. Even then she appreciated the humor of it. She thought she heard Davis call her name. Just once. It was exactly like his voice, wondering, earnest, doubtful. Would this be her last thought? Imagining that she heard the sound of Davis’s voice?

Only when she felt the leather hands touch her skin again, and not only the skin of her face, but the skin under her blouse, feeling her, needing the warmth of her body, did she begin to scream.