She lay paralyzed in the black, muttering dream. Small, soft nubs prodded her. Hands, or things like hands, reached out to touch her rice-paper flesh.
She saw it all. She saw time tick backward, death bloom into life, whole futures swallowed deep into the belly of history.
In the night she awoke to the sound of him crying.
He no longer lay in bed with her. He sat naked in the dark at an Edgewood secretary, its mahogany writing lid opened.
A hand-dipped candle flickered.
"What? What's the matter?" she said.
Sleep had refreshed her. Even the dream, so oddly terrifying, seemed to rekindle her. His crying had thrust her into consciousness. Into strangeness. Not the dream.
"Stephen?"
"I'll lose you," he said.
"No you won't."
"Of course I will."
"Come to bed. You're not going to lose me."
A pause in the fluttering light. "You'll be the first then," he said. "Yes. I'll be the first. Now come to bed."
The Windsor chair creaked when he rose. The candlelight licked his skin. She stopped him as he crossed the room.
"And bring the masks," she said.
Then later, lamb and wolf.
He was the wolf.
Nanticoke, she guessed. Or Wicomico or Conoye. Tribes which had thrived along the Chesapeake from 10,000 B.C. until the 1600s, when England had christened the New World with metallurgy, gunpowder, and smallpox. These masks were possibly all that remained of them.
She was the lamb — in rut, squirming beneath the cunning predator. The masks clicked when their faces touched. They were wood, hand-carved a thousand years ago by shark-tooth awls gingerly tapped with hammers of flat slate. Both, again, had been laced to the linen-covered insert plates, the eyeholes of which matched exactly those of the masks.
The wolf's eyes hovered over her. They seemed strangely murky-blue, not like his eyes at all, nor a wolf's. For a moment they stopped her. She looked at the eyes behind the mask as if studying something acrostic. Sumerian cuneiform. Druidic glyphs. The Runes of the ancient Norse.
Mindless now. Something as dead as all those languages.
She sensed sapor and heat. She felt the flavor of his sweat and tasted the sound of his panting breath. She lay impaled, pinned to the bed, writhing beneath him, staring up into the otherness of his eyes. And then suddenly he reached up, tore the wolf-mask from his head and his mouth was at her breast — suckling her, suckling at the lamb and pulling hard and long, drawing the breastflesh deep and then deeper into his mouth and raking her nipple with his teeth, squeezing the breast with his hand, milking her, so that she felt something give and rise inside her, a small thick pulsing flow. Her eyes rolled upward, her teeth crimped her lower lip.
Then the lamb was felled.
Sated, the wolf rolled off her, slaked. The veneer of sweat cooled her skin as it dried. She continued to orgasm briefly, little pelvic stutterings, long after he'd withdrawn. Her breast ached. The tracery of scratches on her body felt luminous, sensorial glitter running along her nerves.
Jesus, she thought, her breath husky beneath the mask. She glanced over and saw a thick drool across his lips. Her own milk like semen on his face. Blood of the Lamb.
She fell asleep…
…and dreamed again. The strange, milky-blue eyes peered querulously at her. She lay naked, procumbent now. The lamb before the slaughter?
No, this wasn't like that. Beyond the scape of sheer black, she heard muttering. It seemed echoic, sullen. Small, soft things entered her, not simply her orifices, but between her fingers, between her lacquered toes. Then, wet speckling. Cold. Hands, or things like hands, smoothed over her sleek back, down her thighs, the backs of her calves, the bottoms of her feet.
One climax after the next, subtle yet strangely powerful and so different. Her mind felt like a labyrinth now, an Eighth Century Chinese puzzle box only now beginning to open.
What had he said?
You'll be the first, then.
The climaxes seemed to be extracted from her, a long string of warm beads, little animals let loose…
And the black muttering drew on and on.
Later she wakened again, her face hot behind the mask. She didn't want to remove it though. She didn't know why. Stephen slept silently beside her. The candle had burned to a stub, its light diminished. She slid out of bed, padded barefoot past countless relics of countless times and out of the room.
Down the carpeted hall.
In the den stood a Federal-Period highboy, circa 1760. Over it hung a British "Brown Bess" musket and below that a blunderbuss whose hand-forged barrel must have been made a century before that.
She noted the Stradivari in its frame, complete with rosined bow. On the facing wall hung a crude iron mask of Xipe, the Aztec god of good fortune. And beside it, Quetzelcoatl.
Would these be the masks they wore next?
Or would there even be a next?
And why had she wondered that?
She parted the French doors, stepped out into the evening's sultry heat. A moon the color of jack cheese blundered above a reef of lit clouds. She stretched on the balcony, feeling her muscles loosen, offering her nakedness to the moon. The street below remained half-alive — only stragglers from parties and bars and whatever, the tired sad dregs of the city out at four in the morning — but up here?
No one could see her but the gods.
Her dark nipples stood erect. She rubbed her navel with her finger and flinched. An electric sensation. Then she touched herself lower and sighed.
In the pearlescent moonlight she let her hands open over the tight contours of her body. More electricity. Through the double-layered eyeholes of the mask, she gazed upward.
The moon shifted to a blur.
The sky turned black-pink.
A hundred dead cultures, she thought. A thousand. They've all looked at this same moon. A century ago or fifty centuries.
Her mind flowed; something gripped her. She knew she loved him. She had no idea exactly how or exactly why. Only that she loved him more than she'd ever loved anyone in her life. It wasn't just passion, it was all of it. His sheer unknowable depth, his grasp of life and the flow of time and cultures. Even his strangeness, crying in the dark. And she thought that perhaps the loves of her past weren't loves at all but just a long line of spoor leading to the point of time in which she now stood. Naked. Satiated. Giddy and exuberant.
Her vision shifted, gazing high into the dark. Not a dream this time, but a waking scape of abstraction. The black muttering kissed at her ears. She rose on her tiptoes when she sensed the tiny proddings. She felt so different now and she knew it was because of him, because of Stephen.
The man of her dreams? Nothing quite so trite. A man forged of the world, a man with sensations so far removed from the fodder of flesh that was her past.
A man to love, to be a part of.
She let the night's caress release her, then drifted back inside. The mask — thick carved wood plus the insert — should have felt heavy by now, but instead it felt like translucent skin. Her gaze roved the room.
From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah, she thought as her eyes strayed over his relics.
He's been everywhere. Everywhere on earth.
She stopped before a Shogun mirror with fabric inlays. Her image — her masked image — looked back.
She was beautiful, but…
The eyes.
Blue as the ocean, with a skein of milk.
Not her eyes at all.
Unsettled, she whisked the mask off. Tricks of candlelight and scintillant passions. Her senses, right now, couldn't be trusted.
The Asian carpet felt warm under her bare feet. She still felt too restless to return to bed. She wandered back to the highboy, opened the center drawer set with mother of pearl and flower petals of white pine.