“Does that feel better?” he asked. “Much.”
“Someone like Madame Blavatsky would say that your auric field was disrupted by the possession. Being in the healing presence of my intact auric field will make you feel more secure. I shall think repairing thoughts to activate the appropriate colors of my auric spectrum. And perhaps I should hum also. ‘Aum’? Or is it ‘Om’?”
“Oh, shut up,” said Glory. “It’s just nice to be hugged.” They laughed quietly, afraid to wake the others.
“Clark?”
“Yes?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I’m afraid I’m as lost as you are,” he said. “For the longest time, I’ve tried to maintain a Buddhist kind of detachment to the problems of the world, believing everything to be some layer of illusion. But I never would have imagined that imagination and reality would collide like this.”
“If you were me, would you go with them?” ,
“I suppose I’d have little choice.. I can predict what would happen if you went to the authorities with a story of what you’ve been through.”
“I’ve never liked the authorities anyway,” said Glory. She closed her eyes for a moment to feel the faint heat of the fire against her eyelids. “Clark, would you mind if I asked you to touch my skin? With your skin?”
Smith was quiet for a moment, and then he moved his other hand up to stroke her cheek. “How’s that?”
“Mmm. It feels like my body again where you touch me,” she said drowsily. “Touch me all over, Clark.”
“Glory?”
“I know what I said.”
“We can hardly do that here with Bob and HP.”
“How about that moonlight stroll you mentioned earlier?” Glory stood up, leading Smith by the hand. She kept both of them enfolded in the blanket as she walked out of the compound into the clearing, toward the tree line in the east. Away from the fire, their eyes adjusting to the dark, they realized it was later than they had imagined. The sky was already the flat gray of false dawn, and they could see the silhouettes of the trees ahead. Glory took the blanket, folded it in half, and laid it flat on the dew-covered grass. She shivered as she unbuttoned her blouse.
“Glory, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Oh, I’m sure,” she said. “I’m possessed, Clark.” She laughed sweetly when she saw the look of alarm in his eyes, and she threw her blouse down as she embraced him, to feel the touch of his flesh against hers, to make her feel real again.
Had they been listening attentively, they might have heard a sharp intake of breath, a hard clench of the jaw. From the edge of the compound, Howard crouched behind the trunk of a blue oak, watching them. When he was sure they could not see him, he knelt and crawled to get closer. Birds were already chirping in the still air. Howard drew as close as he dared, and then he parted the blades of grass in front of his eyes and peered through. He was angry, excited, and embarrassed, all in equal measure as he watched their bodies join and unjoin in the cold. He heard the little noises that made him bite his tongue in jealousy.
Their silhouettes were nearly black against the rising sun, and to Howard, still carrying the touch of sleep, Glory’s shape above Smith’s seemed to transform into a sleek sea creature. As she moved up and down to the increasingly intense rhythm of some invisible ocean, she arched backwards and flung her head, cascading her hair behind her like the shadow of spraying water, and the shape of her breasts, as she moved again, arching farther backward, merged together until they formed a single conical triangle like the dorsal fin of a leaping dolphin.
Howard heard the roaring sound of the surf beating against the shore.
His breath caught momentarily, and then he suddenly realized it was only the rush of blood behind his own ears. He shook his head to clear himself of this vision and crawled slowly backward in the wet grass until he was sure they couldn’t see him. Shivering with cold and emotion, he walked quickly back to camp and bundled himself back into his sleeping bag on the cot, pretending he had never left. It was hard, because he was soaked with the cold dew of morning, and he could not get the images he had just seen to leave his mind.
On the other cot, Lovecraft turned over and closed his own eyes to reenter his own pretense of sleep.
AFTER A HASTY BREAKFAST, Howard loaded up the Chevy with a sense of urgency that caused Lovecraft to make a few sharp noises of annoyance. While the two of them argued about what should go in the trunk and what should remain in the backseat, Glory stepped back to Smith. “Clark,” she whispered, “I want to come back. After this is all over and I’ve seen to my sister, I want to come back.”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” Smith replied. “As ever a poet waited for a nymph.”
They only exchanged the briefest of hugs and a lingering friendly kiss, but the air between them held a charge of intense affect. Howard, looking up from the car, did not fail to notice.
“Good-bye,” Glory whispered as she walked back to the car under Howard’s watchful eye.
“Good-bye and Godspeed!” Smith called. He waved at the sedan as it tumbled down the dusty drive back toward the road. Glory waved back through the rear window which glimmered like clear water in the sunlight, and through the passenger’s front window, Lovecraft’s arm flapped a few times like a featherless bird’s wing as the Chevy traversed the ruts and bumps.
It was a clear day, the sky a milky sort of blue. White puffs of cumulus floated like giant, tom cotton balls above the horizon toward the west. But when Smith looked in the direction his friends would be going, he had a certain premonition of foul weather.
As Smith stepped back in through the front door, remembering Glory all voluptuous in the soft moonlight, he sensed something in his. study. He hesitated, wondering if he should run out and try to call back the others, but by then he was at the threshold, and he could see the two dark shapes silhouetted against the window. For a split second, he thought his parents had returned, but then he knew exactly who they were. They were dressed in black, or at least appeared to be on the surface. Their features were indistinct-not obscured in shadow, but shadow itself. To a typical man they might have maintained the illusion of humanness, but to Smith, absorbed in the arcane, they leaked their true and terrible forms: claws, not hands; creased and fleshy wings, not suit lapels. He was struck momentarily by a strong vertigo as he entered their inhuman aura; he expected ill intention, hostility, evil, but what he felt, instead, was an unexpected diplomacy and a distant sense of reverence. It must be the proximity of the book, he thought. They could kill me or do things far worse, and yet they are behaving as if they are in some holy place. He did not know what to do or what to say, so he forced himself to be calm and rational.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
The figures were silent for a long moment, then the one on the left, the one whose black aura extended farther into the alien dimension, replied: “Hello. Gentle. Man. I. Have. Heard. A. Lot. About. You.”
“Really?” said Smith, forcing a smile. Behind him, the door swung shut in a gust of cold wind.
16
WHILE GLORY AND LOVECRAFT DROWSED, Howard drove without a word down from the foothills of Auburn into Sacramento, joining Highway 99 southbound through the Central Valley. He tried to keep his mind focused on the task at hand, a favor that had somehow escalated into an unbelievable quest, but he couldn’t help flashing back, again and again, to the image of Glory and Smith in the meadow. He had to relax his grip on the wheel periodically when he noticed the fingertips of his injured hand turning white.