Quickly Eunice shut the rear door, and made certain it was firmly locked.
What had the creature been?—a raccoon, perhaps? Suffering some sort of mange, hairless. Prematurely wakened from its winter hibernation. Desperate for food. Lucky for Eunice, it had not been rabid.
And so for the second night Eunice slept with the dream-catcher at the foot of her bed. Somehow she’d forgotten it was there, and as she drifted off to sleep, remembering it, with a pang of apprehension, she was incapable of getting up to remove it, her limbs paralyzed in sleep.
Even if you don’t believe. Something will happen.
Again her sleep was heavy, ponderous. Her head ached, her heart beat erratically and painfully. Yet this was not dreaming—was it? Someone, or something, was in the bed with her, beneath the bedclothes where no one had ever been. A short, stunted creature, with a veined, knobby forehead, jagged teeth. A bat, clambering upon her. Yes, it had wings, leathery webbed wings, and not arms—it was a bat, yet also a man. Eunice shook her head violently from side to side—No! no!—but she could not cast off the loathsome creature. It—he—was pressing his mouth against hers, slick with saliva. And rubbing himself against her breasts, belly, thighs. A rubbery rod, a penis, sprouting from his groin—as soon as Eunice became aware of it, to her horror and revulsion it rapidly hardened, like a plastic hose into which water began to flow. No!—leave me alone! In disbelief, her eyes open and blind, Eunice felt the creature prodding between her thighs, forcing her thighs apart; felt the penis like a living thing, blind, groping, seeking an opening into her body. Eunice screamed but it was too late—a sudden sexual sensation rose swift and needlelike in her loins. She grunted, and shuddered, and threw the creature off—except, as she woke, it vanished. It was gone. Alone, panting, Eunice sat up in bed, knuckles pressed against her mouth. Her heart was beating so violently she feared it would burst.
About her, in the handsome old mahogany four-poster bed Eunice had inherited from her parents, the sheets were damp and rumpled. A sharp odor as of decaying peaches lifted from them.
Now you know you’ve had a dream, now you know what a dream is—yet, early in the morning, waking again before dawn from a thin, wretched sleep, Eunice understood that the hideous bat-creature in her bed had not been a dream.
She heard him, downstairs: an intermittent whining, murmurous singsong. He was in the rear porch, or possibly in the kitchen.
Quietly, slipping on her robe, Eunice made her way downstairs. Her hair was sticky against her forehead and the nape of her neck; her body was covered in an acrid film of perspiration; the tender skin of the insides of her thighs chafed. Yes, he was in the kitchen: the strange sound was coming from there. Eunice hesitated a moment before pushing open the door, boldly entering. This is my house, my life. He’s come to me. Why should I be fearful!
This time, Eunice saw clearly that the creature was human: batlike about the head, with a monkey’s long spindly arms, but obviously human. And male.
Obviously, male.
Eunice had surprised him in the act of pawing open a box of uncooked macaroni. He’d climbed up onto the kitchen counter and had managed to open one of the cupboard doors.
They stared at each other. The creature was crouched, but Eunice could see he had grown to about the size of a ten or eleven-year-old boy. He was starkly naked, his ribs showed, his chest rapidly rising and falling as he panted. His head was disproportionately large for his shoulders; his legs were stunted, bowed as if from malnutrition; his skin was olive-dark, with that pallor beneath, and covered in fine, near-invisible black hairs like iron filings. His shrunken genitalia hung shyly between his thighs like skinned fruit. His eyes were fierce, shining, frightened, defiant.
Eunice said, in a voice of surprising calm, “Poor thing!—you’re starving.”
Never in her life had Eunice felt such a sensation of pity, compassion, urgency. As the naked creature, crouched on her counter, made a bleating, pleading sound, she felt her breasts ache, throbbing with the need to nurse.
But it was solids Eunice fed the creature, for he had teeth now, however rudimentary, set sparely and unevenly in his tender gums. Eunice wrapped him in a quilt, found an old pair of furry slippers for his knobby-toed feet, sat him in the breakfast nook (which alarmed him initially—his instinct was to resist being cornered, trapped) and spoon-fed him three soft-boiled eggs, most of a pint container of cottage cheese, a tangerine. How hungry he was!—and what pleasure in sating that hunger! His eyes brimmed with tears, like Eunice’s own, as rapidly he chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Eunice said, “Don’t ever be frightened again! Nothing bad will happen to you. I promise. I promise with my life.”
Eunice’s voice fairly vibrated with excitement yet she spoke practicably, calmly. Her years of authority as professor and administrator stood her well in such an emergency.
As before, Eunice left the creature sleeping on the old sofa-swing in the porch, for he was resistant to coming farther into the house, even into the living room where it was warm. Groggy after his feeding, he seemed virtually to collapse, to become boneless, very like a human infant as Eunice half carried him out onto the porch and laid him gently on the sofa-swing. How astonished she would have been, as a girl growing up in this house, sitting on this swing years ago and reading one of her innumerable books, to imagine what the future held: what fellow creature would one day lie on this very piece of furniture! Beneath the quilt the creature curled up at once, knees to chest, face pushed against knees, sinking into the deep, pulsating sleep of an infant. For many minutes Eunice crouched beside him, her hand against his bony forehead, which seemed to her overwarm, feverish. Unless it was she who was feverish. I promise. With my life.
Frequently he was gone when Eunice returned from the Academy and forlornly she walked through the empty house calling, “Where are you? Are you hiding?”—her manner stern, to disguise the abject sound of worry. To disguise her helplessness—so female. There was no name for the creature she could utter save you; to herself, she thought of him as he, him.
In the kitchen, she might find the remains of his feeding, for by degrees he’d become capable of feeding himself, though messily: a gnawed rind of cheddar cheese might be lying on the floor, part of a banana (he had not yet learned to peel bananas, though Eunice had tried to instruct him—he bit into both fruit and peel, and chewed as best he could), an emptied container of raw hamburger. Though Eunice had not yet succeeded in coaxing him into a bathtub, for the sound of running water, perhaps the very smell of water, as well as the confinement of a bathroom, threw him into a panic, it seemed to her that his odor was less defined now. At any rate, she had ceased to notice it.
(Though one day, at the Academy, a colleague who had entered Eunice’s office quite visibly glanced around, sniffing, puzzled—did she notice the elusive scent? Without breaking their train of conversation, Eunice unobtrusively rose from her desk and opened a window and the offensive odor vanished. Or so Eunice thought.)
By night he might suddenly reappear. One moment the brown-stone was empty of all inhabitants save Eunice, the next—the creature was waiting in the shadows on the stairway landing, his eyes gleaming agate-bright and sly as she ascended into their beam; or he was gliding noiselessly, barefoot along the carpeted hall outside her bedroom. He’d learned to laugh, somehow—a low, guttural, thrilling chuckle. Thick black hairs now sprouted on his head, on his chest and beneath his arms; Eunice would never have looked, but knew that his pubic region bristled with such hairs. He was growing, maturing rapidly, nourished by her care. His shining eyes glanced level with hers. He could speak, not words exactly but sounds—“Eeee?—eeee? Eeeeeyah?” which Eunice believed she could interpret.