Michael drove another left into its chest, feeling the crunch of bones.
“Yeah, you like it, you evil thing, you greedy son of a bitch, die!” He spit at it, driving his left fist into it again, even as it clung to his right wrist, like an unfurling flag tied to him. The blood squirted out of its mouth. “Yeah! You’re in the flesh-now die in it!”
“I’m losing patience with you!” the creature howled, glaring down at the blood dripping from its lip all over its shirt. “Oooh, look what you’ve done, you angry father, you righteous parent!” It jerked Michael forward, off balance, its grip on his wrist like iron.
“You like it?” Michael cried. “You like your bleeding flesh,” he roared, “my child’s flesh, my flesh!” Wringing his right hand and unable to free it, he closed his left fingers around the thing’s smooth throat, jabbing his thumb into its windpipe while his knee rammed into its scrotum. “Oh, she made you really complete, didn’t she, right down to the outdoor plumbing!”
In a flash he saw Rowan again, but it was the thing that knocked her down this time as it let go of Michael at last. She fell against the balustrade.
The thing was shrieking in pain, the blue eyes rolling in its head. Before Rowan could get to her feet, it shot backwards, shoulders rising like wings, and then lowering its head, it cried, “You are teaching me, Father. Oh yes, you’re teaching me well!” A growl overrode the words, and it ran at Michael, butting him in the chest with its head, striking him one fine blow that hurled him off his feet and out over the swimming pool.
Rowan gave a deafening cry, far louder and more shrill than the siren of the alarm.
But Michael had crashed into the icy water. He sank down, down, into the deep end, the blue surface glittering high above him. The freezing temperature shocked the breath out of him. He was motionless, scalded by the cold, unable even to move his arms, until he felt his body scrape along the bottom.
Then in a desperate convulsion he started for the top, his clothes like fingers grabbing him and holding him down. And as his head passed through the surface into the blinding light, he felt another thudding blow and sank again, rising, only to be held under, his hands up in the air, free in the air, clawing futilely at the thing that held him, his mouth swallowing gulp after gulp of cold water.
Happening again, drowning again, this cold cold water. No, not like this, not again. He tried to close his mouth, but the exploding pain in his chest was too great and the water poured into his lungs. His hands could feel nothing above; and he could no longer see either color or light, or even sense up from down. And in a flash he saw the Pacific again, endless and gray, and the lights of the Cliff-House dimming and vanishing as the waves rose around him.
Suddenly his body relaxed; he wasn’t struggling desperately to breathe or to rise, not clawing at anything. In fact, he wasn’t in his body at all. He knew this feeling, this weightlessness, this sublime freedom.
Only he wasn’t traveling upward, not rising buoyant and free the way he had that long-ago day, right up into the leaden gray sky and the clouds, from which he could see all the earth down there below with its millions upon millions of tiny beings.
He was in a tunnel this time, and he was being sucked down, and it was dark and close and there seemed no end to the journey. In a great rush of silence, he plummeted, completely without will, and full of vague wonder.
At last a great splashing red light surrounded him. He had fallen into a familiar place. Yes, the drums, he heard the drums, the old familiar Mardi Gras cadence of marching drums, the sound of the Comus parade moving swiftly through the winter dark on the tired dreary edge of Mardi Gras night, and the flicker of the flames was the flicker of the flambeaux beneath the twisted elbows of the oaks, and his fear was the all-knowing little boy’s fear of long ago, and it was all here, everything he’d feared, happening at last, not a mere glimpse on the edge of dream, or with Deirdre’s nightgown in his hands, but here, around him.
His feet had struck the steaming ground, and as he tried to stand up, he saw the branches of the oaks had gone right up through the plaster roof of the parlor, catching the chandelier in a tangle of leaves, and brushing past the high mirrors. And this was really the house. Countless bodies writhed in the dark. He was stepping on them! Gray, naked shapes fornicating and twisting in the flames and in the shadows, the smoke billowing up to obscure the faces of all those surrounding him and looking at him. But he knew who they were. Taffeta skirts, cloth brushing him. He stumbled and tried to get his balance but his hand just passed right through the burning rock, his feet went down into the steaming muck.
In a circle the nuns were coming, tall black-robed figures with stiff white wimples, nuns whose names and faces he knew from childhood, rosaries rattling, their feet pounding on the heart pine floor as they came, and they closed the circle around him. Stella stepped through the circle, eyes flashing, her marcelled hair shining with pomade, and suddenly reached for him and tugged him towards her.
“Let him alone, he can climb up on his own,” said Julien. And there he was, the man himself with his curling white hair and his small glittering black eyes, his clothes immaculate and fine, and his hand rising as he smiled and beckoned:
“Come on, Michael, get up,” he said, with the sharp French accent. “You’re with us now, it’s quite finished, and stop fighting at once.”
“Yes, get up, Michael,” said Mary Beth, her dark taffeta skirt brushing his face, a tall stately woman, hair shot through and through with gray.
“You’re with us now, Michael.” It was Charlotte with her radiant blond hair, bosom bulging over her taffeta décolletage, lifting him, though he struggled to get away. His hand went right through her breast.
“Stop it, get away from me!” he cried. “Get away.”
Stella was naked except for the little chemise falling off her shoulder, the whole side of her head dripping with blood from the bullet.
“Come on, Michael darling, you’re here now, to stay, don’t you see, it’s finished, darling. Job well done.”
The drums were thudding closer and closer, battering at the keening song of a Dixieland band, and the coffin lay open at the end of the room, with the candles around it. The candles were going to catch the drapes and burn the place down!
“Illusion, lies,” he cried. “It’s a trick.” He tried to stand up straight, to find some direction in which to run, but everywhere he looked he saw the nine-paned windows, the keyhole doors, the oak branches piercing the ceiling and the walls and the whole house like a great monstrous trap re-forming around the struggling gnarled trees, flames reflected in the high narrow mirrors, couches and chairs overgrown with ivy and blossoming camellias. The bougainvillea swept over the ceiling, curling down by the marble mantels, tiny purple petals fluttering into the smoking flames.
The nun’s hand suddenly came down like a board against the side of his face, the pain shocking him and maddening him. “What do you say, boy! Of course you’re here, stand up!” That bellowing coarse voice. “Answer me, boy!”
“Get away from me!” He shoved at her in panic, but his hand passed through her.
Julien was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. And behind Julien stood handsome Cortland, with his father’s same expression and his father’s same mocking smile.
“Michael, it should be perfectly obvious to you that you have performed superbly,” said Cortland, “that you bedded her, brought her back, and got her with child, which is exactly what we wanted you to do.”