Graham Masterton - Descendant

I’ll never forget, though, that summer morning in 1977 when he came into my study and stood there for a long time, saying nothing, and the way that the sun shone red through his ears reminded me of Ann De Wouters’s little boy, kneeling in front of the window in Antwerp, all those years before.

He looked so much like Jill — dark-haired and almost too pretty, for a boy.

“What am I?” he asked me. Not “ who am I?” but “ what am I?”

I looked up from the papers on my desk and smiled at him in amusement. “You’re a twelve-year-old boy. Haven’t you looked in the mirror lately?”

“No, but what am I?”

I leaned back in my chair. “You’re an American. But you’re part Burmese, and part Romanian, and part Irish.”

“I feel as if I’m something else.”

“Something else like what?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Well, tell me what it’s like, this feeling.”

He frowned. “It’s like being alone. It’s like being different. It’s like being inside somebody else’s head.”

I ruffled his hair. “You’re growing up, that’s all. You’re a boy now, but there’s a young man inside you, trying to get out.”

But I remembered his words three years later. It was just past 11:00 in the evening. I was sitting in the armchair in the corner of our bedroom, trying to finish the cryptic crossword that I had started earlier that day, and cooling off after my shower. Jill was sitting in front of her dressing table brushing her hair.

“Do you know what I’d like to do for my birthday this year?” she asked me. “I’d like to go to Mexico.”

“You know I hate Mexican food. All those beans. All those burritos.”

“Molly and David went to Mexico and they loved it.”

“OK,” I said, dropping my newspaper on the floor and standing up behind her. “If you want to go to Mexico, we’ll go to goddamned Mexico.”

I kissed her on top of her head. But it was then that I thought: she’s going to be forty-nine years old next birthday. Forty-nine years old and she doesn’t have a single gray hair or a single line on her forehead. In fact, she looks exactly the same as she did when I flew back to England in 1961, eighteen years ago.

“What’s the matter?” she said, looking at me in her dressing table mirror. “You look like something’s bothering you.”

“Nothing, no.” But then I thought: her figure is just the same, too. She has no cellulite on her thighs, her stomach is flat, her breasts are still big and firm. I had seen men turning around to look at her in the street, and I had always taken it for granted that they were looking at her because she was so attractive. But supposing they were wondering what a woman who had the face and the figure of a thirty-one-year-old was doing with a gray-haired man of sixty-one?

For the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I hated myself for being so disloyal, but the thought wouldn’t leave me alone.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she asked me, over breakfast. “You don’t have money worries you’re not telling me about, do you?”

“No, no. Everything’s fine.”

“But you’ve hardly spoken to me for the past two days, and you keep staring at me in this really strange way. It’s almost like you’ve forgotten who I am.”

I haven’t forgotten who you are , I thought. Maybe I never knew who you were to begin with .

I went upstairs, opened up my bedroom closet, and took down my Kit. I looked at it for a long time before I opened it up. I loved Jill so much and this was an act of betrayal, no matter what I found out. But I had to know for sure, or else I was going to spend the rest of my life wondering what I was sharing my bed with.

She was still sitting at the kitchen table when I came down, holding a cup of coffee in both hands, watching television. The sun was shining on her hair and on her pink satin robe. She looked so beautiful that I almost went straight back upstairs, without doing what I had come down to do.

“Bill?” she said. She always called me “Bill” in case she accidentally slipped up and called me “Jim” in front of our friends. “Come and take a look at this.”

“Hold on,” I told her. I stood to one side of the kitchen door and held up the pure silver mirror that I had taken out of my Kit. My hand was trembling so much that at first I couldn’t focus properly. But then I steadied it against the door frame, and angled it so that I could see Jill’s profile.

It took only a split-second glance to tell me what I needed to know. The woman sitting at the kitchen table had hair that was streaked with gray. There were wrinkles around her eyes, and her hands were patterned with liver spots.

I came into the kitchen and sat down next to her. “This is hilarious,” she said. “This woman thinks that her husband is having an affair with another woman, but all the time — ”

She stopped, and stared at me. “Jim?” she said. “Jim, what’s happened? You look terrible.”

“I had to find out sooner or later, didn’t I?” I told her. My throat was constricted, and I found it very difficult to speak.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You had to find out what ?”

“Come on, Jill, how much longer did you think you could keep it from me? You’re going to be fifty in a couple of years. What happens when you get to sixty, and you still look just as young as you do now?”

She lowered her coffee cup. “I couldn’t tell you. I tried to, lots of times. But I love you, Jim. I knew what you would do if I told you.”

“What did Duca do to you?” I asked her.

Her eyes filled with tears. “Can’t we just go on like we are? Can’t we just pretend?”

“Tell me what Duca did to you.”

“Jim — think about Mark. Please. Think about us. We can still be happy, can’t we?”

I stood up and went to the window. Next door, Fred Nordstrom was lathering his new green Buick Electra. He saw me and waved his soapy sponge.

Jill said, “It asked me to lie on the couch. It stood next to me, and at first I didn’t think it was going to do anything. It just talked to me, very quietly. I don’t even remember what it said.”

“Then what?”

“Jim, please! There was nothing I could do to stop it!”

I turned around. “I know,” I told her. “It was all my fault, not yours. I shouldn’t have expected you to do it.”

I tore off a sheet of kitchen tissue and handed it to her, so that she could wipe her eyes.

“I felt as if I didn’t have any willpower at all. I was lying there and I simply couldn’t move. I wasn’t unconscious or anything. I simply couldn’t make my muscles work.”

“It’s a form of hypnosis,” I said. “Some Screechers use it to stop their victims from resisting them. If you practice it for as long as Duca must have been practicing it, I guess you can make a person do whatever you want.”

“It opened up its pants. It was hard, and I was sure that it was going to rape me. I tried to call you, but I couldn’t make my voice work.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I was dreading to hear what she was going to say next.

“Duca picked up a scalpel. He showed it to me, held it right in front of my face, and it was smiling. Then it sliced the end of its penis, right across. All this blood came spurting out. Duca held its penis over my lips so that the blood dripped into my mouth.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, as if she could still taste it. “That was when it heard you upstairs, and it stopped.”

I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down next to her. I didn’t take her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”