John Saul - Creature

"Can't you keep your voice down?" Sharon asked, her own dropping to a harsh whisper. "We don't have to tell the whole neighborhood we're having a fight, do we?"

It was a mistake. Sharon knew it was as soon as she'd uttered the words. Blake's jaw tightened and his eyes glinted with anger. "No," he said, "we certainly don't. In fact, we don't have to have a fight at all. I'll see you later."

Before Sharon could say anything else, he was gone. She listened as he stamped down the stairs and the front door slammed. From the curved window of the turret she watched him walk away from the house, his shoulders hunched, his head down. He was walking quickly, and she was certain she knew where he was going.

To theHarrises, where Jerry would assure him that he had indeed done the right thing, whatever his wife might think.

She turned away from the window and added a log to the fire as if the gesture itself would put a period to the fight. She wasn't being fair, she chided herself. If Jerry thought Blake was wrong, he wouldn't hesitate to say so.

She curled herself up in a small chintz-covered chair in front of the fire and tried to sort her thoughts out rationally, firmly putting aside the anger she felt over Blake's failure to consult her before sending Mark out to Marty Ames.

Overall, she had to admit that Blake was right-certainly the doctor had done Mark no harm; indeed, from all appearances, he had done him a lot of good.

And from what Mark had said on the way home, Ames hadn't really done all that much. In fact, in retrospect she found herself chuckling at Mark's exasperation when she'd pressed him for details as to precisely what had happened at the sports center.

It wasn't any different from asking Kelly what had happened at school on a given day.

"Nothing" was her daughter's invariable answer, as it had been Mark's when he was the same age.

Finally, as she'd driven him home that afternoon, he'd turned to her with a teenager's scorn for his mother's silliness clear in his eyes.

"I keep telling you, Mom, nothing happened at all," he insisted. "Dr. Ames checked me over and gave me a shot of codeine for my ribs, and then I did some exercises. That was all."

"Exercises?" Sharon had echoed, glancing at him doubtfully out of the corner of her eye. "My God, Mark, you've got three cracked ribs. It must have hurt like-"

"It didn't hurt at all," Mark interjected, not about to admit to his mother that he'd actually passed out for a minute while working on a rowing machine. She'd go nuts and put him to bed for the rest of the day. Besides, it hadn't been any big deal. He'd just opened his eyes, and one of Marty Ames's assistants had been grinning at him. For a moment he'd wondered what had happened, then his memory had come back to him in bits and pieces.

He had no idea that those memories were only the ones carefully and subliminally planted in his subconscious during his long hours on the metal table in the treatment room. Of that ordeal he had no memory at all.

Sharon had finally dropped the subject as she turned into their driveway and pulled the car into the garage.Chivas, lying sleepily by the back door, had gotten lazily to his feet. As Mark got out of the passenger seat of the car, the retriever barked joyfully at the unexpected appearance of his master. He'd bounded forward, his tail wagging, then suddenly stopped.

His tail dropped and the fur on the nape of his neck had risen slightly as an uncertain growl bubbled in his throat.

"Hey,fella, don't you recognize me?" Mark asked. He squatted down, andChivas, dropping low to the ground, had slunk forward, sniffing warily at Mark's outstretched hand.

"What's wrong with him?" Sharon asked.

Mark reached out and scratched the dog's neck, then grinned up at his mother.

"I'm supposed to be at school, and I bet I smell really weird after a night in the hospital. I probably smell just like the vet's office, and you know how he hates that."

Sharon had all but forgotten the incident until dinnertime, when Mark, who had been closeted in his room most of the afternoon, had come down to the dining room table. Throughout dinner Sharon noticed that Kelly seemed unusually subdued. Several times she caught her daughter eyeing Mark surreptitiously, her expression puzzled. It wasn't until the two of them were alone in the kitchen, washing the dishes, that Sharon finally asked Kelly about it.

"I don't know," Kelly had said, gazing up at her mother through serious-looking eyes. "He just looks sort of different, I guess."

"Well, of course he does," Sharon replied. "He's got a black eye and a bad cut."

"I don't mean that," Kelly protested. "It's just the way he looks. He's just not the same."

That was the real reason behind her argument with Blake, Sharon decided now, as she sat staring into the fire. She'd tried to tell him about it, tried to explain what had happened withChivas and what Kelly had said after dinner, but he'd brushed it all aside.

"Of course Mark's different," he'd said. "He got beat up and bandaged up, and even if the injuries didn't change him, you can bet the fight did. You don't get pounded the way he did without it changing you inside."

"But it's not inside," Sharon had insisted. "Chivassaw it, and Kelly saw it, and I think I can see it, too. He's just not the same as he was."

In the end she hadn't been able to put her finger on just what it was about Mark that had changed, and finally she'd given up trying to make Blake see what she herself couldn't describe. If the truth be known, she finally admitted to herself, perhaps there really was nothing at all. Perhaps she wanted to see something, simply to justify her anger toward Blake for having sent Mark to Ames without talking to her about it first.

She took a deep breath and stood up, making an almost physical effort to shake off the last vestiges of her anger and her vague, indescribable misgivings. Certainly Mark had seemed perfectly happy all day, and not the least concerned about his hours at the sports center. If anything, he had actually enjoyed them. So why should she keep on fretting?

She poked at the fire, settling the burning log well back against the fire wall, then arranging a screen on the hearth. Going downstairs, she saw Kelly standing at the living room window, gazing wistfully out at the snow. Reading her mind, Sharon smiled at her daughter. "Want to go for a walk in it?" she asked.

Kelly's eyes glowed eagerly. "Can we?"

"Come on," Sharon replied. Several minutes later, bundled up in the parkas Sharon had purchased only a few days earlier, mother and daughter stepped out into the snowy evening. The flakes were large and fluffy, and as they started down the sidewalk, the cold air stung their cheeks and they were quickly enveloped in the gentle silence that always comes with the first snow of the year.

Kelly reached out and took her mother's hand. "I love it here," she said, gazing around in happy wonder. "Aren't you glad we moved?"

Sharon said nothing for a moment, then the peacefulness of the snowfall overcame her as well.

"Yes," she said. "I guess I am."

Yet even as she said the words, she wondered.

CharlotteLaConner shivered as she gazed out at the snow slowly building on the front lawn. Under normal circumstances she would have been thrilled to see it, for it meant the skiing season was almost upon them, and that Christmas- always her favorite season-was just around the corner. Tonight, though, the whiteness outside only reflected the chill she was feeling in her own soul, and at last she turned away from the window to face her husband. Her eyes, she knew, had turned an angry bloodshot red, and her cheeks were still stained with tears.

"But it's not right," she pleaded once more. "I'm his mother, Chuck. Don't I have a right to see him?"