Chapter Sixteen

HER HEAD WAS WHIRLING, her ears ringing, the whole room shaking. Jonathan seemed to dart and flicker as if caught in some sort of strobe light. Then his hands slapped against the helmet with a stunning clap and he tore it from her head.

She blacked out. She knew that something was terribly wrong with her. She could feel her body jerking in spasm, her tongue filling the back of her throat. And she was spinning, spinning fast, out of control, falling. A great bell was booming somewhere.

Then it wasn't a bell at all, it was Jonathan's voice. He was crying and screaming, cradling her in his arms.

Quite suddenly, all was quiet.

"Patricia?"

His face was shadowed by the glare of the fluorescent tubes above him. "Jonathan—"

"Darling, darling, darling. I'm so stupid, so damn stupid." He embraced her and she let herself be swept up into his arms. They were strong and good and she was glad.

"I feel better. I think I'm going to be okay."

A haunted expression came into his eyes. It alarmed her; it was the expression of somebody with a guilty secret.

"Did you hurt me, honey? Is there something I don't know?"

"I don't think so."

Another thought occurred to her. "Did you find out?" Her own voice sounded so small.

She turned her head to avoid the glaring ceiling lights.

He stared down at her.

Love me tonight. . . . She became aware, dimly, of something quick and gleaming that stank of flyblow, chasing her through her dream country. Catching her.

Oh, God, how horrible! She heard herself gasp. She felt another scream coming. The thing she had glimpsed was so ugly and so utterly cold, the very opposite of all she loved of humanity and life. It was Death coming through the high grass, Death rising from its hiding place in the soul. "Oh! Oh! No, Jonathan!"

"Patricia! Sh! Sh! It's over, I turned it off. You were right; I won't ask any more questions. I'm so sorry."

"Oh, darling, it was so ugly!" Were there people in the world who were not quite people? What had that thing been, straddling her, staring down with the blank eyes of a snake?

She was going to throw up. "Jonathan—" Her mouth opened. He grabbed for a wastepaper basket, thrust it beneath her face, and held her. Her stomach seemed to pull off its moorings. For an instant she was sinking in a fast elevator. Then the lights were above her again, glaring, humming tubes of brilliance, and beneath them Jonathan's face, his lips slack with fear and his eyes still hidden in the dark of his brows.

He bent to her, lifted her in his arms, and embraced her. "I thought it would work out differently."

The world had just changed for her. Her memory of that terrible moment was now clear. She could remember what had raped her, and it was not a human being.

What evil has been wrought in the dark of this world?

"First I heard music, a sort of humming, very low, like a swarm of flies."

"Hush, honey, hush."

"I will not!" She reached out and snatched up the tangled pile of graph paper. "What does this say?"

"I pulled off the helmet."

"Before you did that you asked me what really happened. And I had a vivid image. Was it a memory or wasn't it?"

"I don't know. The reading isn't reliable."

She wouldn't stand for that. "Jonathan, you opened something up in me and it feels like a memory. Now I'm the one who has to know."

"Whatever it was sent you into convulsions, I don't think we should fool with it."

That wasn't acceptable. "You tell me—dream or memory?"

He took her hands, pressed them to his lips. "I can't be sure. There's something wrong with the readout."

She could smell it, could taste its filthy, rotten kisses. "Jonathan, Jonathan, look at you. You poor man, you're so innocent. Do you still think you did it?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, he bowed his head. He was slick with sweat. "I know." The words were a bare murmur.

"Don't be an ass. You didn't. You couldn't possibly."

He dropped to the couchette beside her. His hands, holding hers, were cold and wet.

She tossed her head, wishing she could get the image of the thing out of her mind, could somehow replace it forever with Jonathan's beauty.

But that thing existed.

"Darling, we have to take a reading on me as well."

"What? Have you lost your mind, Jonathan Banion?"

"Just a short reading. And you'll have to run the computer."

"I can't run a computer, and I wouldn't even if I could!"

He glanced again at the chart of her own reading, made a sad kind of sighing sound. Suddenly he grabbed her shoulders. He brought his face close to hers and she saw him clearly, without shadows. His eyes were staring, fixed, his lips dry. He was trembling steadily, with the frantic rhythm of a small animal. "You get over there and run it!" He picked up the graph and shook it at her. "Do you realize what this - no, you couldn't possibly." He jumped up, went to the computer terminal with a single stride, began jabbing at keys. It beeped, the screen came to green life, then he grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her over.

"Once the helmet is on, the computer will want to adjust to the exact frequencies of my thought patterns. There will be a series of numbers coming across the screen. Each time it pauses, press the key marked 'return.' Got that?"

"Darling—"

"Got that? Got that?"

"Okay! Got it."

"Then it will ask you a question—which measurement? You will type in the answer, 'waves by harmonic type.' Then press 'return' again."

"I've got it. 'Waves by harmonic type.' "

"Then press 'return.' You see the return key?"

She put her finger on it. "Jonathan, what if something happens to you?"

"Do just what I did—you press this orange key marked 'reset,' then you pull the helmet off my head. But nothing will happen because this is a passive test. We aren't fooling with thy hypnotic barriers."

"So we are hypnotized. You know that for certain?"

"Oh, yes. And the barriers are powerful. More so than I dreamed possible. One more question, baby, and bang—the next step was brain death."

"Death by hypnosis? I didn't think—"

"Don't ask me how it's done because I don't know. Now come on, let's get this over with."

He fitted the silver, cable-strewn helmet onto his own head and lay down on the couchette. After a moment a string of numbers shot across the screen, and she began following her instructions.

Soon the numbers stopped and the machine asked its question. She typed in the reply, then kept one finger hovering over the reset button and the other over 'return.' She looked at Jonathan. He was lying on the couchette, his eyes closed. He seemed fine. She pressed 'return.'

Silence. Jonathan didn't move. She kept her finger over the orange button, began watching his chest. He was breathing steadily.

Soon paper started streaming out of the graph. Then the machine sounded a bell and stopped. "Jonathan, did I do something wrong?"

He sat up, pulled off the helmet. "You were fine," he muttered. "That's all there was to it." He lunged for the graph paper, ripped it off the roll, studied it almost frantically.

When he looked up at her again, his face was pallid with shock. The paper dropped from his hands.

"Jonathan, what is it?"

He shook his head. Then he came to her, almost reverently, and took her head in his hands. "Darling, our brains show an incredible, radical departure from the normal wave pattern."

Was that all? "Well, are we okay anyway?" She could think of nothing else to ask.

He laughed silently, mirthlessly. "Dearest, we're fine. But don't you see what this means? We've got eighteen separate waves. Normal people have seven."

"Does it mean—have we got a disease?"

"In a funny kind of way. Our disease is that we aren't human beings."

"We—what?" She was mystified. "Of course we are!"

"No. We're too far from the norm. Oh, we're human stock all right. I mean, the basic pattern—alpha, beta, delta—it's there. But we are not people. We've got an alpha high harmonic, a delta parallel, and a whole cluster of little waves down in the low frequencies."

"It must be the hypnosis. It's got to be!"

"No way. I'm talking about brain structures, not transitory effects like that. I mean, we are real first-class freaks!"

That word slashed through her composure and made her shriek. She couldn't help it; freak is a horrible word. "No, I'm not a freak. I hate it! I am not a freak!"

I was raped by a freak with the skin of a snake and yellow-green reptile eyes.

"Honey, come on, be quiet."

"I will not be quiet? I am not a freak! Don't you ever, ever, ever call either of us that, because we are normal. I'm telling you we are normal and we can have a good life! You'll see, Jonathan Banion, I'll make a nice home for you, you'll see!"

"Come on! Pull yourself together. We've got to think this out."

She stopped, but only by jamming her own feelings down into her guts and holding them there with a fierce effort of will she doubted she could sustain for long.

"We are mutants. The other word was unfortunate." He sounded calm, and that helped a little. "Genetically we must be very different from other people." He shook his head. "God knows what we are. Halfway between Homo sapiens and—well, something else. I cannot imagine what our children will be like. A virtual new species."

"But we're people!"

"Not really. Close, yes, but you and I are not people."

She was losing her home, her family, her happy life. She knew it—she could feel it all being destroyed by that one awful word. Freak. "But we look like people, we act like people!"

He nodded agreement. "We're a close mutation." He looked at his hands, felt his cheeks. "Amazing. Me. You. That we would be this . . . whatever we are."

"Are you sure it's not the hypnosis?"

He took her hands. "I know how to read my charts, We may be under hypnosis. In fact I'm sure we are. But the overriding finding is the high degree of abnormality in our brains' electrical functions. That means—"

"Don't say it again! Don't say that word!"

She let him hug her. Gratefully she buried her face in his chest. She remembered the monster again, and felt all at once the absolute coldness of the unknown. How little she really knew, even about herself. "We look like people!"

"Yeah. We can probably mate with people too. Have human-like kids. But if we mate with each other our children won't be remotely human."

She couldn't stand to hear that. "Just stop it! Stop talking that way. Look, we can go away somewhere. Nobody will ever know, nobody needs to know. Whatever we are inside, we can keep it secret, we can hide it! We'll be able to get married and all, and things'll work out. They will, I know it!"

He held her more tightly. "Baby," he said, his voice quaking, "somebody already knows all about us."

He could only mean the Night Church. There flashed in her mind again an image of the revolting thing on the altar. She let herself weep into his shoulder, and she thought, We're in the middle of God knows what, and we're getting more lost by the second.

She held him, and he held her, and for a precious moment (hat was all there was.

We two.