It was not the voyeur in him which caused his agitation. He was too old even for that. It was sheer intellectual excitement, the feeling of finding something. At eighty-two he was being given a second chance, and the coincidence of it was so striking that he had a very good feeling about it all. It was as if some kind god looked down and said, “Irving King, you blew it once. Now here’s your second chance.”
He could, of course, be aware of the erotic aspect. She was obviously enjoying it. And there was a certain element of perversion, since she and the teen-age boy atop whom she was performing had an audience, another teen-ager who watched as he slowly dressed.
Apparently he had arrived just in time for the last scene of the last act. He could hear her breathing, even from the distance, and then she fell atop the boy and lay still for a moment. The boy, apparently, was ready to go. He pushed her off. She rolled onto the grass and lay there with her eyes closed as the boy quickly pulled on his jeans and shirt. Then she was alone, the two boys having plunged into the thick growth on the far side of the pond. King continued to watch. She rose and walked slowly to the edge of the water, paused, and then plunged in to bathe the sweats and fluids of excess from her body. He waited. She stood, dripping, with her back toward him, her feet planted in shallow water.
“Ah,” he said, as she began a slow, steady swaying motion, her arms loose, at her sides, her face tilted heavenwards.
He walked toward her, making no special effort to be quiet. However, she did not hear him. He stood behind her, only feet away. He cleared his throat. She continued to sway slowly.
“Gwen,” he said softly. “Gwen.”
She turned slowly, without surprise. Her eyes looked into his unblinkingly. “I didn’t mean to spy, Gwen,” he said.
“You saw then?”
“Yes.”
She walked past him and stooped gracefully to pick up her clothing. Her splendidly youthful body was still wet. She slipped into her clothing unhurriedly. “Let’s sit on the balcony. You must be tired after your drive.”
“A bit,” he said, trying to match her coolness. He followed her and sat in a comfortable deck chair. She curled her feet under her on the lounge.
“Would you like to talk about it?” he asked, after a long silence.
“Please don’t tell George,” she said simply. She was not begging, she was merely making a request.
“Perhaps you will have to tell him. Someday.”
“Yes. Someday.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke moodily. “I can’t expect you to understand.”
“Perhaps I do. A little.” He had an eerie feeling of having talked with her, about the same things, before. He drew on that feeling. “It eases the pain.”
Her expression told him he’d hit the mark. However, she regained control quickly. “How did you know? You can’t feel the pain. We’re female. Only we feel it.”
Elation mixed with his genuine concern for her. He was the most fortunate of all psychiatrists, to have found two almost identical cases of such great interest. First Evelyn Rogers, in 1937, thinking she could feel the pain of a tree being felled, and then, in his last years, Gwen Ferrier with an identical fantasy.
“But that was why you were, ah, entertaining those lads, wasn’t it? So that you could forget the pain, at least for a few moments?”
She nodded.
“Is the pain so terrible?”
She shuddered. “We are so helpless. We can’t run. We can only wait, knowing that the pain is coming, that death moves toward us. We anticipate the rending, the tearing, the crushing. We do feel, you know. We have life, feelings, emotions. If you could only know.”
“I cannot, of course, actually know without feeling, can I? Human speech isn’t the definitive form of communication, is it? I mean, it’s so imprecise. Yet, I can understand that you are genuinely disturbed. I find your, uh, communications with the vegetable kingdom to be fascinating, Gwen. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
She shrugged.
“Do all plants have awareness?”
“Yes.”
“Some more than others?”
She looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Why do you ask?”
“Curiosity. Interest. Concern for you.”
“Bullshit.” Her unladylike response exploded from her lips. “You don’t care. You can’t feel.”
He glanced at his watch, estimating the time remaining before George arrived. She had to be opened up, but carefully. “But I can understand, at least somewhat. I can believe you.” He waited and when she didn’t speak he said, “It must be quite terrible to be the only one to feel the pain.”
“There are others,” she said.
“But not alive.” He was taking a shot in the dark.
This gave her pause. She stubbed out her cigarette before looking up, unblinkingly, into his eyes. “Not alive in the sense you understand life.”
“Isn’t there just one form of life?”
“You see,” she said. “You can’t possibly understand.”
“You say there are others, living in some fashion. I recall another young woman, much like you. She is most certainly dead, by our human standards. She first killed her family.”
“She did only what she was forced to do,” Gwen said. “She cannot be condemned for doing what she had to do.”
It was King’s turn to be startled. How much did she know about Evelyn Rogers? How could she know? “You excuse her actions?” he asked, trying to gain time for thought.
“I praise her actions,” Gwen said. “She exchanged pain for pain. It was an unequal exchange, true, but she gave terminal pain to six of them.”
King felt his ancient heart begin to accelerate. He needed a pill, but he dared not break the mood. “There were only four,” he said. “Four loggers. Then her family.”
“Six,” Gwen said softly. “Two were never found.”
“The children,” King said. “Did she have to murder her children?” He was stunned, at a loss for words. He had merely assumed that Evelyn Rogers had killed the four loggers. Now this lovely young woman was confirming it, out of a self-confident store of knowledge which caused confusion in his mind, and, moreover, was adding to the grisly score.
“That was sad,” Gwen said. “She weeps for them. But she couldn’t leave them behind.”
“Are they, ah, wherever she is?”
“No.” No explanation.
“May I ask,” King said, gathering his thoughts, “how you know about her?”
“Evelyn?” The name had not, as yet, been mentioned. “I know.”
“You’ve heard tales?”
“I’ve heard the story,” Gwen said, smiling.
“Yes,” King said. “She was my patient.” That was not what he had wanted to say. He had wanted to ask how Gwen had heard the story.
“Yes,” Gwen said. “I know. And I am not your patient, Dr. King.”
“Should you be?” he asked, his voice soft and kind.
“For my sake or yours?” She lit another cigarette without haste. “For your sake I stopped seeing you.”
“For my sake?”
“We were afraid you’d make the connection.”
“But you came to me of your own accord,” he said.
“Before I knew Evelyn.”
The sun was low. George would be home soon. King had a desperate desire to know, to explore, to probe into her mind. “You can’t talk with George about it, for obvious reasons. Wouldn’t you like to talk with someone? Would it help if you talked with me?”
She considered. “No,” she said. “It would be useless.”
“Not to me,” he said. “With Evelyn I came close to something, Gwen, something I couldn’t understand. We doctors think we know the extent of the human mind. We pride ourselves on being able to take long, extended voyages inside a fellow human’s head, but, frankly, we’ve never gone past the membrane of the brain, except with artificial surgical tools. I’m an old man. I failed to discover whatever it was that made Evelyn Rogers different. I failed to save her.” He paused. “I am not necessarily implying that you are in need of salvation, you understand, although some of your actions have certain aspects of self-destruction. Let’s just say that I’m burningly curious. For example, I saw you standing in the shallow water. You swayed in the wind. Were you, for that period of time, a plant?” He knew he was being too direct, but time was short.