She was in the room with him in this dream, and that was a first—when he had dreamed of her in England and France he had always seemed to meet her on an island where ruins shouldered up between ancient olive trees, and the two of them had made love on a floor of marble tiles that was streaked by alternate bands of moonlight and the shadows of broken pillars. Always her skin was cold, and after she had drained him she slithered away so rapidly into the viny shrubbery that he knew her shape could no longer be human … and it had maddened him, every time, to be unable to follow her, for in the dream he was somehow convinced that her reptilian shape would prove to be as erotically beautiful as her human one.
Tonight she seemed to come in as a mist between the casements, but she was in her human form by the time he looked fully at her. She was naked, as always before, and he was so dazzled by the sight of her that he hardly noticed her arm snake out and turn his shaving mirror to face the wall. Then her white fingers reached out and unbuttoned his shirt, and his lungs seemed to clog full with ice when her cold nipples pressed against his chest.
He fell backward onto the bed and she followed and straddled him, and he realized, with no feeling except gratitude, that it was she he had made love to in the hours before the dawn when he found Julia’s body. Now she bent down to give him a passionate kiss—her hair fell in coils around his ears, and he abandoned himself to her.
Her flesh warmed around him as the hours were achingly chiselled away, and when at last she rose from the bed she was actually glowing faintly, like the bricks lining a smithy’s stove. She leaned down and took his limp hand as if to kiss it, but when she lifted it to her lips it was only to bite the stump of his missing finger. The blood spurted rackingly into her mouth, and the strained bed joints squealed as he convulsed into unconsciousness.
He cringed when the morning sunlight touched his face, and though the effort made his legs shake and sent him gasping and sweating back to bed, he managed to drag the curtain across the torturing bright gap. The bedsheet was blotted brown with blood from his freshly torn finger stump.
Only after sunset was he able to venture outside, and at twilight he found himself on a ledgelike walkway notched across the lake-facing side of an ancient stone house, and after leaning on the iron railing for half an hour, watching silent lightning play over the mountains beyond the far shore, he noticed a boat out on the face of the water.
It was a small sailboat, its mainsail blue under the salmon sky, skating toward him on the breeze that twitched at his coat collar and made the water’s sky-reflecting skin flutter like a sheet of gold-leaf held up to a whisper. There was one solitary figure aboard.
A set of stone steps slanted down to the water at Crawford’s left, and when it became clear that the boat was headed directly toward him he found himself slowly walking to the steps and then descending them. By the time the boatman was close enough to swing broadside to the wind and loose the sail, Crawford was waiting for him on the stone dock at the water’s edge, and he caught the painter-rope the boatman tossed to him.
Crawford tugged the boat in to the dock, and as he crouched to loop the rope around a weathered wooden post, Percy Shelley stepped agilely from the rocking boat onto the unmoving stone.
The line secured, Crawford straightened up. It was the first time he’d seen Shelley’s face under normal conditions, and he flinched.
“The resemblance is not coincidental,” Shelley said with a kind of grim amusement. “She’s my half sister.”
Crawford didn’t have to ask who he meant … and he remembered some of the things Shelley had said during his heat-stroke delirium. “Half sister? Who—who was her father?”
Shelley’s face was haggard but merry. “Can I trust you?”
“I—don’t know. Yes.”
Shelley leaned against the wooden post. “I’m pretty sure I can trust you in exactly the same way I can trust a flower to turn toward the sun.” He made a slight bow. “That will suffice.”
Crawford frowned at that, and wondered why he should believe anything that Shelley might tell him. Well, he thought, he is her brother—visibly he’s her brother.
“You asked about her father,” Shelley was saying. “Well, to start with, father isn’t really the right word. These things are … can assume either sex. It was … Christ, there’s no point in trying to define it. It looked like a giant tortoise, as often as not, and if it had any more motivations than do the animalcules that you can see through a microscope in a drop of vinegar, it’s news to me. I’ve studied … his … species for years, but I still can’t see motivations behind the consistencies.”
Crawford thought of the cold woman, of her ageless beauty. “Which of you is the elder?”
Shelley’s grin widened, but looked even less cheerful. “That’s hard to say. Our mother gave birth to both of us on the same day, so you could say we’re twins. But her seed was implanted in my mother’s womb long before mine was—these things must have a longer gestation period—so it would be just as valid to say she’s older. But then again she lived as a sort of encysted stone in my abdomen for nineteen years, until 1811, when I managed to cut her out of myself—you must have noticed, the other day, the scar from my ‘caesarean'—so you could say she’s younger than I am. The only thing I can say with any assurance is that we did have the same mother.” He laughed and shook his head ruefully. “At least for you it wasn’t incest.”
Crawford was suddenly light-headed with jealousy. “You—” he choked, “when did you—”
“The stones have ears. Let’s talk out on the lake.” Shelley waved toward the boat.
Crawford turned to the knobby post around which the painter was tied, and for the first time noticed that the top of it had been crudely carved into the form of a grimacing human head, and that several long iron nails had been pounded into the face … long ago, to judge by the black rust-lines that streaked the splintered visage like tears.
“That’s a mazze,” called Shelley, from behind him. “The word’s Italian for ‘club.’ You see a lot of them in the Valais, southeast of here.”
Crawford was gingerly untying the rope from around the thing. “What’s it for?”
“Back in the fifteenth century, when the Swiss were breaking free of the
Hapsburgs, those things were a sort of roster for the rebels; if you wanted to go fight the oppressors, you indicated it by pounding a nail—an eisener breche, they called them—into one of these heads.”
Crawford touched one of the nails. It rocked in its hole, and impulsively he pulled it out of the face and put it into his pocket.
Shelley was taking in the freed rope, and Crawford stepped aboard before the vessel could drift out of reach. The wooden hoops around the mast clattered as the sail was raised, and then, even as Crawford settled himself comfortably on the thwart, Shelley was deftly working the sheet to put the bow around into the wind and begin tacking out away from shore. The sky had already darkened to the color of wet ash.