Greg Iles - Sleep No More

He lay on his back, looking up at the gathered fabric of the canopy, which radiated from a central circle like the rays of the sun. The light in the bedroom had a fluid consistency, as if a golden liquid were being filtered through the heavy lace curtains. Eve lay close and warm along his left side, for the bed was too small for them both.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. “Are you thinking about your wife?”

“No.”

She kissed his shoulder. “What, then?”

“This. It’s insane. The whole thing.”

“You’re wrong. This had to happen. It was always going to happen.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“I know. Johnny…look at me. Did you feel me?”

He refused to look at her. “I don’t want to talk about Mallory.”

She kissed his shoulder again. “All right. As long as you’re here. That’s all that matters. There’s time for all the rest later.”

All the rest. He turned onto his side and looked into her eyes. “I don’t know why I came here. And I don’t know what you’re doing. What you want out of this. You could be crazy for all I know. The things you say are crazy.”

She nodded, her eyes filled with patience. “But I’m not crazy. You know I’m not.”

He knew no such thing, but he saw no point in telling her that.

She took his hand and placed it over her breast. Her heart beat strongly beneath the swollen bosom.

“I know they don’t feel the same,” she said. “Not exactly the same. But this is a very nice body.” She averted her eyes for a moment. “Better than some I’ve known.”

He pulled his hand away. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I told you, Johnny. You’re not ready for the truth.”

“We just had sex. We didn’t use any precautions. How much crazier can it get?”

“Don’t worry about me getting pregnant. Eve had her tubes tied.”

Her use of the third person confused him; he shook his head, trying to keep his mind clear in the face of her delusion.

“And as far as other worries, I’ve been tested. Eve wasn’t very selective in the past, but I changed her. Slowly.”

“I feel like I’m on acid,” Waters murmured.

Eve giggled, an odd sound after all that had come before. “Johnny? You’ve done acid?”

“When I worked in Alaska, I did a couple of tabs. Nobody in this town would believe that, thank God.” He brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She had very fine hair; it made him think of an animal pelt.

“Mmm,” she purred.

He let his hand fall to the concave curve of her abdomen, then slid it down to the silkier hair there. She rose against his fingers, pressing into his touch. He moved his hand back up to her face and caressed her cheek.

“We’re through the looking glass,” he said. “I want to hear the rest of it. Finish the story you started in the cemetery.”

Fear flickered in her eyes. “Only if you promise not to leave. You have to let me finish.”

“Why would I leave? I’m the one asking you to tell it.”

“You’ve never heard anything like this before. It might be hard to listen to.”

“For God’s sake. Just start talking.”

She nodded hesitantly, and he lay back, letting his gaze wander along the underside of the canopy as her low voice trembled.

“I told you how it was. The rape. How at the moment I felt I was going to die, when he was strangling me and finishing, I suddenly wasn’t looking at him-I was looking at me. Mallory. I was in him, right? Looking at a woman who lay under him, not breathing. And that woman was me. ”

The anxiety Waters had felt in the cemetery returned like a shadow falling over him. She spoke lunacy with absolute conviction. Yet what was the harm in listening? An absurd parallel came to him: it was 1955, she was a communist agent, and he had already slept with her. The damage was done. What difference could it possibly make if he listened to her crackpot manifesto now?

“Everything went blank after that,” Eve whispered, oblivious to his thoughts. “It was like being in a coma, I guess. Or a drugged sleep. Now and then I would wake up and see things-rooms, furniture, the interior of a car-but they were alien to me. It was like a nightmare where you’re trapped in someone else’s body. The things I saw…I eventually began to make sense of them. The man who raped me led a double life. He had a wife, a house in Marrero, a mindless job as a technician in a plant. To the people he worked with he seemed like a normal person. But inside his head, it was like…Hell. There was so much anger and pain, so much hatred. I knew all his thoughts, his memories. They would ambush me in the dark, things that were done to him as a child. It was sickening. The way he treated his wife…the way she cowered and took it. Sometimes I shut down my consciousness-went back to sleep-just so I wouldn’t have to see or feel any of it. But as time passed, that became harder to do. When I was awake, I tried to think. I didn’t understand how it had happened, but I was alive in this man. And I was growing stronger. Sometimes I’d be awake for an hour or two. And he wouldn’t know it. He didn’t remember any of it. I could tell by people’s reactions. It was like he blacked out during those times. He became terrified of the blackouts. I had no idea what I was going to do.” Eve swallowed, as though trying to keep her vocal cords working. “Then he raped another woman.”

A ball of ice formed in Waters’s stomach.

“He raped and killed her…exactly the way he had done it to me. I had to experience that, Johnny. As if I were doing it. She wasn’t as strong as I was. She just lay there, praying it would be over quickly, hoping she would be all right in the end. But she wasn’t. He strangled her. I knew he was going to do it. I knew all along, Johnny. And there was nothing I could do to stop him. ”

Waters pulled the covers over his chest.

“I nearly went mad. Maybe I did, a little. I don’t know. I wanted so badly to get out of him. I imagined killing him during one of the times that I was in control. I knew I could stop him from hurting women if I did that. But I didn’t want to die. I’d seen my dead body. I’d seen that other woman, lying there like a candle someone had blown out. God forgive me…I didn’t want that to happen to me, Johnny.”

Eve wiped her eyes. Waters reached down and took her hand, and this seemed to steady her enough to go on.

“His wife was a pathetic creature, totally dependent. He abused her, but on some level she seemed to need that. He didn’t have sex with her very often. Sex to him was what he did to his victims. But when he was with his wife, it was very rough and seemed to satisfy something in her, some yearning for punishment. It was so twisted. Once, while I was thinking of suicide, he had sex with her. During the act, I started to feel like I had when he had raped me. Not the same feeling, but the same intensity of feeling. I wanted out of him so badly. And I was so near to this other person, this person who was not a monster. I was physically inside her, you know? As they thrashed against each other, she started to climax, and I felt…”

“What?”

“Like a door was opening. As she started to peak, the person she was-the individual part-began to fade away. All thought and memory was vanishing into this…nothingness. The ecstasy of her climax wiped out her individuality. Do you know what I mean? In those seconds she became like a shell-a body without a soul-and in the instant that I understood what was happening, it was over. One moment I was looking at her, the next I was looking at him. I was inside her, Johnny. In her mind. And it was like being released from prison.” Eve looked at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”