The Birthing House Page 30
The Grums. The police. They would have scoured Eddie’s trailer. They could have evidence linking him to the crime scene by now.
No, the authorities would have been here, and he would have come back to life in a hospital, or a cell. The yard would look like the site of an archeological dig, and the neighbors would be lining up with torches to burn the house to the ground.
Not yet, but they would be here soon.
He said a prayer asking for her forgiveness and turned away from the dirt. He walked in agony back up the path, over the deck, and up the stairs into the house. As he focused on each step, wincing at the fire of his wounds reopening, some trunk in his mind unlocked itself and asked the final question.
For the first time since coming back to life, he wondered if his wife was here too or in some other place, with Nadia.
41
When he reached the kitchen he saw that the living room was blinking with red and white light. His skin crawled and his heart tripped. The blood began to pool at his waist, soaking the bandages anew. He moved forward, swaying, and clutched the mantle in the living room to keep from fainting. There were no sirens yet, but through the front window, through the gauzy curtains, he could see the cars parked in front of the Grums’. The lights on top were sliding in flat rows, greetings from an alien craft.
He closed his eyes.
They knew you were lying, and they are coming for you tonight.
Another siren squelched, and then a woman screamed from the front lawn.
I’m sorry, Gail. I’m so sorry.
Elsewhere his dogs began to moan, and he knew they were not upset about what was coming, but what was already here.
42
He turned away from the windows and the red lights. The dogs were standing in the foyer where Jo had come to rest, whining with their tails tucked low. He heard footsteps above and the dogs began to bay. With his neck arched back he could see directly up the stairway and under the black maple banister to the master bedroom hallway.
Her pale legs moved under a swishing dirty hemline, her bare foot turning away from the posts as she entered the bedroom.
‘Stay,’ he bid them, taking the stairs.
And, as he went up to meet the author of his resurrection, they did.
THREAD
As he climbed the stairs he felt like a dead man reborn.
He had come back, but as what? His skin felt porous and his feet light, as if he were already a ghost, all spirit ready to flee the flesh. But this notion was brief and with his next step obliterated by the stabbing pain in his torn belly and the warm blood that still trickled from his near-fatal wound. In a panic he reached for his chest and found his heart beating strong, audible in the silence of his ascent. He had survived, and now he wanted to live, no matter the cost. Beyond that, he knew only that the house was dark and he was finally going to meet her with clarity and purpose. He focused on the stairs one at a time, moving slowly, absorbed in every detail even as one fated moment slid away to make room for the next.
This is my house. These are my feet. See them climbing the stairs. See them carrying me to where at last my love will be revealed. For whatever she has become, she is the final product of my love. I will go to her, and I am going to her with a heart only she can mend.
Seven stairs, eight.
Nine.
Tonight I go to her. Tonight I go to be a man. To do man’s work.
Oh yes, I’m still alive.
Here at the top of the stairs are the walls and the floorboards stained with the tears of childbirth. Life has emerged through this house and life has passed out of it. There is a crack in the floor and it is the crack of the world, the house’s hot canal, forever giving birth. From the home we are born and to the home we return. All that lies between is the hearth and the dying embers of the fire that once burned inside.
Tonight we will feel warm again, together. One last time.
When he entered the bedroom it was as if he had stepped back in time with Holly. They were intruders in a home they had claimed as their own, owners by the rights granted new love. Candles burned from nightstands and dressers and ledges and window sills. She had remembered their night, and made it so that he would remember. She wanted to please him. And so that even in the dark of night he could see her clearly. He stood on the threshold of the master bedroom and studied her as she lay in waiting on the bed. She was his Holy girl on the night she had conceived his lost child, weeping for what they had done. But he didn’t want to go back to the pain and the loss, only forward.
With that wish, to his relief, Holly was gone.
In her place was Nadia, the curve of her milky white belly glowing, a shy smile on her lips. But he had never loved Nadia, not this way. Not with the depths of knowledge and sorrow the house had unlocked in him. Their common history and shared suffering. He had never known love such as this, because his love was always shifting. You love one with an intensity that can kill, and then she goes away and another comes to take her place. You grow full of love and then lose it and you shrivel and die, and then you awaken. The heart has needs and the heart needs the body. You change, adapt, and find love again. It is survival. This one you wed and declare the one, the final, the ultimate. But she dies too, and yet you survive. Your love survives because your love needs a home.
Eventually there is the last love, and then only death.
Nadia was dead. As soon as he accepted that without deception, Nadia was no longer the woman on his bed.
In her place was a long form, the full six feet of her, the womanly sway of her curves. The second chance that could not be. His departed wife, Joanna. The candles flickered as a summer breeze lifted the curtains and she glowed in the dim light the way he had always dreamed her waiting for him in this house. The way he’d imagined her the night after the unpacking, when he’d thought he was bedding his wife and managed only to awaken a much older presence in the house. He let himself study her as long as it lasted, but summer was ending and what wind blew through the window was now cool as the breath of autumn. The imagination has power but the heart has more, and when his heart desired the final truth it was granted.
All his expectations slipped away and he saw her.
His woman in the back row, the one who scowled because she was not like the others. Alma reborn, at first ethereal and later, after feeding on him, corporeal.
Daughter of Eve, the All Mother, cruel as Mother Nature Herself.
Alma.
Leon had done his best by her, but his best had not been enough to keep the fair maiden at bay. She had taken her toll on the Laski children - a maiming here, a stillborn there - and eventually driven his shattering clan from the house. If Our Eden had once been blessed with life, then its history of darkly human deeds had spawned Alma, and its healing power now came at a cost. A cost tallied not by God or nature but by the goddess who still resided here. She had waited until she could wait no more, until she found one who shared her pain, then gambled on his need, his tired lust. Perhaps God or Dr Hobarth’s debunked theory of parthenogenesis had been responsible for Shadow’s miracle clutch of python eggs. But God’s had not been the vengeful hand at work in his wife’s demise, in the gruesome termination of Nadia and her unborn. Alma, who had suffered God and man’s wrath too long, had long grown tired of the miracle of life. Alma desired only the miracle of her life, a miracle that produced life for her.
He understood now that she would keep exacting her pound of flesh until she was given one to call her own. If fate had delivered him to her, his longing opened the door for her. Each taking new life from their darkest couplings. She had fed on him, then Nadia, and finally Jo. Alma had fed until she was finally strong enough to claim Jo and finish her work. Tonight she had offered him one last glimpse of the other mothers - Holly, Nadia, Jo - and one final choice.
The ghosts of women past, or the flesh of the ghost incarnate.
He chose Alma.
She was raven-haired and tall and her pose
was stiff, her arms and legs resting in the parallel lines of a corpse on the autopsy table. Her skin was not gray - that had been a trick of the light. She was white. Startlingly so from lack of sun and loss of life and blood. Her back bowed proudly and her breasts were large and round, with wide rose tips. Her nipples were stiff and, though she made no attempt to cover herself, she was shivering. Her sex was full and black, the color of her love. With his eyes he traced the curve of her hips, the familiar lines of the woman she had been.
He knew this body well, this body she had taken. What was once illusion was now a cold and cruel reality. The skin and hair and the rest of her shell was Jo, but the spirit, everything that was the soul inside and staring back at him, was Alma. In this house she had lived for a century and he only a summer, but to each it remained the only home they’d ever known.
Husband and wife, until death do us part.
Outside these walls, the car doors began to slam and the voices became a chorus of shouts and orders barked. Their footsteps pounded over the porch boards, shaking the front of the house.
Conrad ignored them as his clothes fell to the floor in a whisper. When he lay down beside her his heart beat stronger, and he was not surprised to feel his arousal quickening toward the familiar. He thought of murder and revenge and blood gushing between his fingers as they sank into her neck to end the thing that had taken Jo and Nadia and the other mother with the red hair of fire and her child, but Alma stalled all such dreams when she rolled to one side and pressed her cold shape against him. He saw stars under clenched eyelids until she pried his fingers loose from the bedding, and her touch was a welcome balm.
When he looked into her eyes and saw himself reflected in the black liquid pools, his fear began to ebb. She had saved him when he no longer deserved saving, when all others had abandoned him. She was offering him forgiveness.
He pulled her tightly against him, wishing to make her warm. To know that she was alive too. He wanted to stay with her forever. As if to prove her vitality and further allay his fears, her limbs stirred and claimed him, rolling him onto his back to sit astride his hips. Her lips were firm and he saw the fissure scar above as he kissed her there upon her healing. He tasted her cool tongue warming, warming even now, pushing into his mouth at the same moment that he pushed past her slick opening and deeper, to the end.
She pulled away before he could taste her breath, or know that she was breathing at all. But her chest expanded as she began to rock, wetting his lap, and their hearts began to beat in unison. He felt one last spike of the blackness, the fear and lust and hunger for violent revenge, certain that none of this would last and that he would die here, alone.
His thoughts swung between two choices, as they had for all men.
Love and death.
Life and murder.
An end and a beginning.
The front door burst open with a thunderous crash and the men were shouting his name, ordering him to come out, to reveal his sin. The voices fanned out through the house and the dogs sang as they set upon the interlopers.
She took his hands, folding them in prayer. She held him until her warmth spread through his fingers but he clung to the darkness, the grief, the anger.
His fingers crawled over her breasts and along her throat and she moaned, reading his intention as if reading his mind.
Without slowing she opened his palms and slid them down, lower, lower, placing them flat against her belly, showing him his work, holding his new world inside her body until he could feel what was to come, what he had never felt before, that which he had been searching for since it had been stolen from him years and years ago, when he was seventeen.
The men with guns beat a heavy drum up the stairs.
Any second now, in a sliver of time, a span within which life might blossom or be smothered, the law would fall on them and its weight and judgment would be mighty. Knowing this, he entertained visions of cold courtrooms and colder prison cells, of foster parents for the dogs and endless grief for the parents, of earth tilled for burial and graves wreathed with flowers, all of them strands of a future flowing from this human contest to go on.
But those were only visions, realities yet to be born. Until they cast him inexorably toward such a fate, he refused to allow them shelter. For at last his home was full, its hearth so very warm.
Inside her womb he felt the affirmation of his power to create, the other side of the darkness, his only purpose in this world, his final beginning.
The stirring within, its tiny beating heart.
Soon she would be a mother, and he a father.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
HOLLY
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
HOLLY
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
HOLLY
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
HOLLY
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
THREAD