“No, no,” she said, hurriedly. “Everything is fine. Just fine. I’m sure.” An appointment with a doctor would mean drugs and drugs would mean no going outside and that would mean that perhaps just as Ryv managed to elude vigilance, he wouldn’t find her. She didn’t want to hurt him.
The next morning in the garden, she’d just completed the third trunk and started on the green leaves of the clustered trees, when she heard his step behind her.
Turning, she saw him, tall and muscular and perfect. She stood up, her heart beating fast, fast, fast, her breath coming in gasps, joy in seeing Ryv again joining with relief at his still being there, with curiosity about his absence, with pride at his still wanting her, all tied up with her dreams of release, her dreams of a future.
They didn’t speak. Winged feet closed the distance between them.
She nestled in his arms, her head on his strong chest, against the black silk tunic he wore, feeling his warm, warm flesh, hearing his heart beat.
His mouth came down to meet hers.
She realized she heard three heart beats, three much-too fast hearts, beneath the fabric against which her face rested. That fabric changed, shifted, its pleasant coolness becoming cold, cold, colder, till the cold burned her skin, the cold penetrated her lips through those sensuous lips that rested on them.
Opening her eyes, she saw Ryv’s eyes fill with unholy mirth, and she knew that if she could only pull back from that cold, cold mouth that devoured her, she would hear him laughing.
She pushed away with futile effort, against his powerful arms that suddenly appeared not to have any joints.
Memory shattered walls carefully built over the several years of her therapy and she remembered. She remembered that this had happened before.
Her heart thudding, her sight blurring, she remembered where she’d met Ryv. He was the young ambassador who’d come for a visit her father. His impeccable credentials and romantic appearance had won her heart, his obvious wealth had won her hand.
After their honeymoon, they’d set up a home near her father’s house. Her father had promised to speed up Ryv’s appointment to his own world.
But Ryv had disappeared for a month. And when he’d come back, he’d shifted in her welcoming arms. He’d become
The boneless, slug-like creature holding her contorted, so that more of its skin touched her body and held her in an impossibly tight embrace.
Yellow slime oozed from the grey skin, covering Kratrina’s dress, freezing her.
She fought and screamed, as much against what held her as against the memories of its other appearances. She remembered the other homes, and how it had always managed to find her, and how it always came to this wrenching scene, and how this had happened before, so many times, so many other
Two hours later, when Kratrina didn’t come in, two of the alien caretakers came and found her unconscious.
They knew, by the trail of yellowish slime around her, that their security had been breached. And they knew, too, upon interviewing Kratrina under deep hypnosis, that the creature had disappeared for a week. Long enough to lay its eggs. Somewhere.
When they found it, beneath the loose sand outside the ponderosa pines, and killed it, they knew they were too late.
Though Kratrina was kept sedated, but even that, they knew, was late. The creature’s body, autospied, confirmed their suspicions that Kratrina’s anguish during the week of the creature’s apparent disappearance had caused it to spawn and her surge of emotion at the obscene embrace of the sluglike alien, had allowed the larvae to become spaceborn and to hatch in the cold void.
The administrator of the house took it upon himself to order the sponging of Kratrina’s memories to prevent any residual emotion from seeping out, to feed those creatures. Or rather, that creature, since they were born by gemiparition each a replica of its parent.
The administrator also undertook to write to Kratrina’s father. He wrote on old fashioned paper and with pen, communication between planets still depending on such messages carried by spaceships.
After an elaborate salutation, the Kelter elder who ran the home, gave the ambassador Cryssa bad news about his daughter, and proceeded to attempt to exculpate his establishment, “Though humans are undoubtedly the most advanced species in all the worlds,” he wrote with slavish abandonment. “Yet, the Ortroden seem to have latched onto humans—or a certain type of emotionally needy human—as the perfect host. And, once latched, it is hard to prevent another contact, by the descendants/clones, of the original Ortrode, that the emotional distress of the human subject has helped hatch. We, for all our wish to serve and help the human race, find ourselves unable to prevent the Ortroden approach. Being shape-changers, they always seem to get everywhere, somehow, and the best we can do is delay them. Their ability to make themselves invisible to surveillance equipment makes even that task arduous.
“This one, having got its fangs into your eminence’s daughter, can, somehow, follow her everywhere and it is our opinion that only her death or human success in wiping out every Ortrode’s litter will release your daughter from her emotional torture-chamber.
“Though we erased as much as possible of her memory, I fear that we were late and that the spawned larvae had already received enough emotional energy from her shock and horror, to survive to functional adulthood.
“This Ortrode came in disguised as a nurse, to be exact the nurse who was supposed to be watching your daughter secretly during her carefully controlled moments of solitude.” The administrator sighed, looked ahead for a moment. “Nurses will, of course, be better examined from now on. However, it is too late for your daughter. For her security Lady Cryssa should not remain with us. She will be moved to the rest home in Drivas. Perhaps the icy climate will manage to keep the creature away as the heat didn’t. But it is to be feared that with their shape-shifting ability, the Ortroden will adapt.”
Kratrina sat in the little conservatory, shivering in her white fur cloak. Outside, a snow storm raged. She held her embroidery frame and worked on a detailed picture of a fairy-tale palace, done all in pastels and metallic thread.
“Lady, do you wish me to bring you a warm drink?” someone asked, just behind and to the side of her.
She turned. He didn’t look like any of the male patients she’d met in this place.
Crawling Between Heaven and Earth
This story takes place in the time line of my Shakespearean novels entitled (as of this writing at least) Ill Met By Moonlight (published October 2001), and (upcoming) All Night Awake and Any Man So Daring. It would happen between the second and third novel. The fact that Shakespeare had a much younger brother who, emulating him, went to London to try to be an actor was too interesting a detail to pass up. One has to wonder if he had the same talent and what would have happened if he’d got to use it.
The winter of 1602 lay like cold death upon London, turning the great Thames into a frozen blue vein and putting waxen whiteness on the facades of the five-storied buildings.
St. Paul’s yard, that great market of books and pamphlets, lay hushed under the great frost, its few customers hurried and harried, exchanging their few coins for the latest play by Master William Shakespeare, that sweet swan of the Avon, or the latest moral excoriation by puritan preachers.
Within St. Paul’s Cathedral, the heart of London, less temple than meeting place and horse market and foreign currency exchange, street urchins urinated on the stone floor for to make it slick with ice and to watch the burgesses and bawds and dandies slip and fall.