Greg Iles - Sleep No More

“Where?”

She opened her housecoat at the waist, revealing her left hip, which was mottled with dark blue spots. “Both hips are like this. Bruises like hand marks.”

He swallowed. “I did that.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

Confusion clouded her eyes. “I don’t remember. But at least it explains some things.”

“Like what?”

“This morning when I woke up and went to the bathroom, I felt like…no, I knew that I’d had sex. And it frightened me.”

“And you don’t remember it at all?”

“No. And the same thing happened this afternoon. Did we make love this morning?”

Waters closed his eyes in anguish. “No.”

“But…did you do this?” She pulled open her housecoat at the chest, and Waters saw two purple suck marks above her breasts. “No,” he whispered. “I didn’t.”

She stiffened. “Then how did they get there?”

He took her hand and squeezed it. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. This is going to be the hardest conversation of our lives.”

“You’re scaring me, John.”

“I know. We’re in trouble, Lily. And we won’t get out of it unless we do it together.”

“Tell me. Don’t make me wait like this!”

He was still unsure how to start. “What I’m going to say will sound crazy to you. But I want you to promise to keep an open mind and hear me out until the end. All right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember that day at the soccer field when I asked you about Eve Sumner? I didn’t know who she was.”

“Of course. And then we saw her at the Mardi Gras party. She asked about selling our house.” Lily’s long-term memory was clearly still up to the mark. “What is it? Do you know something about Eve’s death?”

“Yes.”

Just as with Penn, he started his story at the soccer field, but this time he did not end at the Eola Hotel. He told it all the way up to the agreement he’d made with Mallory about finding a new host. He did not break his narrative with apologies or pleas for forgiveness; it would not alter what he had done or Lily’s perception of it. He thought she would interrupt long before he got to the end, but she didn’t. She sat like a woman forced to watch the execution of her family, pale and blank-faced, until he described Lily dangling the butcher knife over Annelise’s head. Tears poured from her eyes, and she began to shake so badly that Waters finally stopped speaking.

“Tell me the first thing that comes into your head,” he said. “Anything. I don’t care what. Tell me you think I’m insane.”

Lily closed her eyes and wiped away her tears. “Were you in love with Eve?”

“No. I thought she was Mallory.”

A hysterical laugh burst from her lips. “I guess I asked the wrong question, didn’t I? Were you still in love with Mallory?”

“I don’t think so. I think I was just lonely in a way that hadn’t been dealt with in a very long time.”

“And you thought that Mallory could relate to that part of you?”

He felt like he might throw up, and they hadn’t even begun to deal with the true horror of the situation.

“I suppose so.”

She shut her eyes again, and more tears flowed.

“I know you think I’m crazy with this talk of possession. I only risked telling you because I know enough has happened to you in the past couple of days that you might believe it.”

“There’s more you haven’t told me, isn’t there?”

“Lily…last night we put Annelise to bed, and then we had sex.”

She flinched as though he had slapped her. “So you and Mallory ‘make love,’ but we ‘have sex’?”

“What we did last night wasn’t making love. Lily, there’s no way you’ll believe what I’m about to tell you unless I show you something. Can you stand to watch something painful?”

“How could it get any worse?”

“If you watch, you’ll know.”

“Is it a tape of you and Eve?”

“No. You and me.”

She wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “Show me.”

He went to his dresser drawer and removed the Sony video camera and remote. One cord was all it took to connect the small camera to the bedroom television. Then he removed the Mini-DV tape from his back pocket, loaded it into the camera, and went to sit beside Lily.

A ghostly green bedroom scene lit the television screen, much like news footage shot at night during Desert Storm and the Afghanistan war. The infrared beam from the Sony was not very powerful, but sufficient to illuminate the two naked bodies kneeling on the bed.

“I can’t see her face,” Lily said. “Is that me?”

Waters took her hand. It was as limp as a coma patient’s. “You tell me.”

Onscreen, Waters turned to face the camera and mouthed, Lily, I’m sorry.

“What did you just say?”

“‘Lily, I’m sorry.’”

She stared as though hypnotized at the haunting green image. When her husband took hold of the hips of the woman kneeling in front of him and went into her, the woman turned toward the camera in a caricature of startled pleasure. Waters felt Lily’s body jerk when she recognized herself. In tomblike silence they watched Lily perform acts she had never spoken of in her life, and probably had not even known were possible. First in handcuffs, then freed from them, she copulated with a manic energy and abandon that the man onscreen looked hard put to match. As the tape spooled across the heads, Lily’s hand remained motionless in his. Waters had known this experience would traumatize his wife, but he saw no other way to shock her into belief.

“Is there sound?” Lily whispered.

“I didn’t want to put you through that. I thought the picture would be enough.”

“Turn it up.”

“Lily-”

“Turn it up!”

He picked up the remote and raised the sound to an audible level. Guttural grunts that had never before issued from Lily’s throat filled the bedroom, but the most shocking was Waters’s voice crying Mallory! as he urged his partner to greater depravity. When Lily pulled her hand out of his and began rocking slowly back and forth, Waters switched off the camera.

Lily looked dazed, like the victim of a violent crime. Which was exactly what she was. Only no law had ever been written to cover the crime she had suffered, except perhaps in some medieval manuscript.

“Those things on the tape,” she murmured. “Have you been wanting me to do those things all these years?”

“No.” Waters realized he wasn’t telling the complete truth, and he didn’t want to lie to Lily ever again. “Sometimes,” he admitted. “It’s not that I want you to do those things…but to try new things. I want you to want to please me the way I want to please you. But it’s been so long since we’ve had even a basic-”

“I know that. I was trying to change when…”

“When this happened. I know.”

At last she looked him in the face, and the abject fear in her eyes shook him in a way that nothing in his life ever had. “I don’t remember doing that,” she said in a monotone. “Any of it.”

“I know.”

“Did you give me drugs or something?”

“No.”

“Then why…” The whites of her eyes grew as the implications of Waters’s story of possession broke through her last defense mechanisms.

“Oh God,” she whispered.

Waters reached out to her, but she jerked away from his hand.

“Don’t touch me!”

“I won’t.”

Lily jumped to her feet and looked around as if to find somewhere to run, but there was nowhere. In her own home there was no sanctuary.

“Why did you tell me this?” she screamed. “You’re trying to drive me crazy! That’s what this is!”