And when he asked me about the photos, I should have been prepared but I–I don't know why; I must have been an idiot! — but I had become convinced that the photos Franklin had taken were harmless and pointless, that I had no reason to conceal them.
And, well, I told him where they were.
Do you know, it took me years afterward to realize that it was even odd I should have told him where the pictures were? Whenever I thought about the session my mind kept slipping and sliding off the memory of the pictures, every which way. I'm still disturbed by how I could have been so foolish, so easily fooled. I wonder if he hypnotized me?
Brandon came back in at some point and took me home. I don't remember that part too clearly.
When we got home, Clara and Jessica were nowhere to be seen. I had a high fever by then, and was freezing cold, quaking like an aspen leaf. My joints ached. Brand took the pictures out of the desk, then undressed me, put me in bed and looked through the photos. He made a call on the phone, sitting on the bed.
"Pan? Brand. I found them right where she told us. Yeah, he got some shots of the exchange but nothing too incriminating. I think we can destroy them and leave it at that. I'll take care of them."
A pause. "I'll make sure she doesn't cause any more trouble. Isn't that right, Joan?" he asked me, gripping me by my sweat-soaked hair. Pain spread inward from the loci of his knuckles. I moaned.
He released me and spoke into the phone again. "OK. How about tomorrow evening? You can have supper with us." Pause. "Fine. Seven thirty. See you then."
Next he set fire to the photos, one by one, and dropped them, flaming, into a crystal serving bowl. Except for several explicit ones of him and Marilyn. Those he waved at me.
"Perhaps I'll start my own scrap book with these."
He eyed the photos for a moment, gave me a look, then threw back his head and laughed. I was struck at how honest and open that laugh sounded. He hadn't sounded so open in years.
"God, Joan. It's great to be free at last. Free to tell you how much I hate you. Your jealousies and suspicions, your pettiness, your clinging and complaining and prudishness and controlling, bitchy nature — you've made my life a living hell.
"But that's over now. From now on, you are Clara's mother and that's all. You have nothing to say to me, nor I to you. You'll be my wife to the public eye, but there's nothing between us any more. And if you ever try anything like this again," he waved the picture at me, "I swear I'll kill you."
He put them in his wallet and then picked up the phone again.
"Hi. It's me." I could tell by how his voice grew husky and by how a bulge swelled in his trousers whom he'd called.
"I arranged for our babysitter to take Clara overnight," he said. "She's sick with the flu. I need a place to stay. I need to see you."
Pause. "Can't you find a sitter?"
Another pause. "I read about it in the papers. I'm so sorry. But, you know, he is a threat to our work, with his position on the wild card."
A pause. "Who told you? Wait — don't hang up. Damn it!"
He slammed the phone down and rubbed his face, looking at me. Anguish was stamped on his face like someone's shoeprint. He really loved her. I was curled into a tight ball, riding out the fireball of pain spreading through me, and couldn't focus on him, even to taunt him.
I don't remember him leaving.
That night, I became intimate with the virus. It was the longest night, the worst pain I have ever lived through.
The next morning I awoke to Frou Frou's yaps, welcoming Jessica and Clara into the apartment.
The night's agony was fading, though a thousand aches and twinges tormented me along my body. I had that lightheaded, floating clarity one feels after a high fever breaks, and also a terrible, cavernous hunger. Morning sunlight streamed in through the sheer curtains. Jessica clattered about in the kitchen, making breakfast. Clara's voice rose and fell in a dialog with Frou Frou in the living room.
Clara. I wondered if the prior day's torture had been a dream. I wanted Clara in my arms. I propped myself up on my elbows.
Great tufts of my hair lay strewn about my pillow. With a strangled gasp I touched my scalp and felt — baldness. Brushing backward, the skin was smooth and cool and dry; brushing forward it felt like sandpaper. My arms were covered in scales, in a pattern that vaguely mimicked the roses and dark green leaves twined on the comforter.
Throwing off the comforter, I meant to put my feet on the floor. But when I tried to swing my legs out from under the sheets nothing happened. My toes were down there somewhere; I could even wiggle them, but whatever was moving in there wasn't my toes.
I strained to lift my legs again. Nothing happened except the sheet moving. I was afraid to lift the sheet.
I heaved with all my might. My lower torso slid out from under the sheet — and slid, and slid, and collapsed onto the floor in a single looping, rubbery limb: a growing, sinuous tangle. The weight of it pulled the rest of me off the bed.
I grabbed at the bedsheets to keep from striking my head on the bedside table. Then I twisted around to see what I had become.
No legs. No toes. I felt them but they weren't there. My torso, my navel, even my genitalia — or so I thought then — gone.
From below my breasts, I was all snake, eighteen feet of scaled coils about the thickness of one of my former thighs and mottled now like our carpet, gleaming moonstone and sand. Even the flesh of my nipples was scaled, a slightly darker brown. My lips, too, felt scaled. How beautiful the scales were: luminous, translucent, like semiprecious stones. Beautiful, and horrible. My fingernails were long, horny claws, a lizard's claws.
My lace nightie had slipped off my shrunken shoulders and gotten tangled in the loops of snake flesh. I struggled with the nightie, sliding it over the coils, heaving portions of myself back and forth, till I could pull it off over my head. That small exertion exhausted me and I had to rest for a moment.
Then, hand over hand, I dragged myself over to the mirror by the door and propped myself upright, supported by shaky arms. From the breasts up the thing in the mirror was mostly me, though the wrong color, scaled and hairless, with an altered nose, mouth, and ears, shrunken shoulders and arms. From there down, I'd become monstrous.
I reared back in horror and shock, and my lower body clenched into a mass of coils. The thing in the mirror bobbed like a cobra about to strike. Its color — and mine — went a brilliant parrot blue with yellow, black, and red striping, as a cobra hood spread behind its head. Its reptile eyes dilated. A bitter taste bled from my lengthened canine teeth as a milky substance leaked from the mirror thing's canines.
It wore my face. A scaled, reptilian face, but unmistakably mine. The colors were fading now to a softer, smoky blue as I studied it, with sand-, ash-, and rust-colored stripes.
I ran my tongue over my lips and saw it had lengthened and forked at the end. After extruding it, when I brushed the tongue against my pallet, it could — taste the air, smell it; neither of those words is right, but it was a little like both. It could taste the scent of Brand's belongings and mine, and taste faintly the presence of Jessica and Clara and Frou Frou in the other room, of frying eggs and bacon and toast.
Hands over my face, I lurched away from the mirror with a soft cry.
First I thought, a dream. A nightmare spawned by my fever.
I But I knew differently. What Dr. Isaacs had said would come to pass, had come to pass. My body had been stolen from me during the night. Some malevolence had traded it for this mass of heaving, scaled coils. I'd become in body the predator I'd always had in my heart. I'd become a lamia.