Coming toward the highway along a familiar residential road, he was startled to see a house with windows blazing yellow light… even more startled when he recognized it as the house where Jim and Lillian Bix had lived for the last ten years.
He looked at his watch, fretted a moment, then pulled over to the curb.
The house wasn’t fortified against the storm. The windows weren’t taped or shuttered. Matt hoped the building was simply unoccupied, the lights left burning for no good reason—but then he saw a shadow against the downstairs curtains, a motion there and gone again.
He sighed and climbed out of the car. He was instantly wet, wetter than before, the rain drilling through his topcoat. He ran to the shelter of the porch, knocked once, waited, and knocked again.
Jim Bix opened the door.
Matt recognized him immediately, although his friend had changed.
The last time he had seen Jim Bix was when they argued over Lillian’s pregnancy, Jim insisting she didn’t need prenatal medical care: the Travellers would protect her. And Jim had cut his hand, and the blood had been viscous and very dark.
Now Jim stood in the doorway, haphazardly dressed, as tall and ugly as he had ever been… but thinner and inhumanly pale. His skin, Matt thought, didn’t look like skin at all; it looked like some much finer membrane, a transparent sheath drawn over bones as delicate as seashells. His eyes, in their china hollows, were like dusty blue marbles, as if the color of the irises had bled into the whites. The pupils, fixed and small, were the bottomless black of night shadows.
Matt thought of the empty skin he had inspected at Tom Kindle’s house. It looked like his old friend wasn’t far from that condition.
“Thank you for stopping,” Jim said. His voice was a husky whisper. “But it’s not necessary, Matt. We’re fine. You should get under shelter.”
He said, somewhat breathlessly, “So should you.”
“Really—we’re fine.”
“Is Lillian here?”
Jim hesitated, still blocking the doorway. Matt called out, “Lillian? Are you all right?”
No answer—or if there was, it was masked by the roar of the wind along the overflowing eaves.
Lillian would have been three months from her due date by now. “The baby,” Matt said. “Is that why you’re still here when everyone else is gone? Jim, for Christ’s sake, is it the baby?”
The thing that had been Jim Bix peered frowning at him but failed to answer. Frustrated, frightened, Matt pushed past him into the house.
Jim fell away instantly from the pressure, and Matt sensed his lightness, the terrible lack of solid weight behind his ribs.
“Lillian?”
“Matt,” Jim said. “It would be better if you left. Will you leave?”
“I want to see her.”
“She doesn’t need medical care.”
“So you say. I haven’t examined her since Contact.”
“Matt—” His friend looked at him mournfully. “You’re right. It was the baby that kept us here. Lillian wanted to finish the pregnancy. But the storm—it would be awkward to linger past tonight. This is a private moment, Matt. Please leave.”
“What do you mean, finish the pregnancy? You mean she’s having the baby?”
“Not exactly. We—”
“Where is she?”
“Matt, don’t force this on yourself.”
The front door was still open. Distantly, from somewhere down the street, came the sharp sound of a window shattered by the wind.
He felt driven by the need to see Lillian and speak to her; or, if not, to know what had overtaken her, know precisely what maze of transformation she had stumbled into. Maybe he wasn’t being reasonable. He didn’t care. She was his patient.
“Lillian?” He stepped into the kitchen; it was empty. “Lillian!” Shouting up the stairs.
Jim, too fragile to stop this, stood aside and gazed at him with a vast sadness in his cavernous eyes. “Matt,” he said finally. “Matt, please stop. She’s in the bedroom off the hallway.”
He hurried there and threw open the door.
Lillian was naked on the bed.
Her ribs were stark against her papery flesh, and her eyes were as strange as her husband’s, though browner. She raised her head to look at him and seemed unsurprised by his entrance.
Her legs were spread. There was no blood, but Matt recognized with horror that she had delivered… something.
It resembled a shriveled homunculus—a monkey fetus, perhaps, as preserved on the shelf of some medieval apothecary. It was quite dry, quite motionless.
His horror was overtaken by an immense, weary sorrow. He looked at Lillian. Her face was bland. She had wanted a baby very badly. “Lillian,” he whispered. “Dear God.”
“Matt,” she said calmly. “You don’t understand. This is not the baby. You must understand that. This is only an end product. The baby is with us! He’s been with us for some months now. A boy. He’s alive, Matt, do you understand me?” She tapped her head. “Alive here.” And spread her arms. “Here.” The Greater World.
She smiled a bloodless, paper-thin smile. “We named him Matthew.”
He arrived at Miriam Flett’s small house grateful for the anesthetizing noise of the storm. The roar of the wind had become so intense it was hard to think. Which was good. He didn’t want to think.
Miriam met him at the door, a small woman, her spine curved with what Matt diagnosed as a mild osteoporosis. Her expression was grim. “You’re late.”
“I had some trouble on the way over.”
“You look sick, Dr. Wheeler. Are you sick?”
“Miriam, I may very well be, but we don’t have time to worry about it. We have to get you to shelter.”
“I told Abby on the phone—I have shelter.”
It was an invitation to argue that Matt did not accept. “Are these your bags?” Two pale gray Tourister cases.
“Yes,” she admitted. He picked them up. “Well,” she said. “All right. But they’re heavy. Be careful.”
He carried them to the trunk of the car, came back to help her into a bright yellow raincoat. He took her arm, but she resisted. “My journals!”
“What?” The door was open and the wind was shrieking.
“My journals.”
“Miriam, we don’t have time!”
“We would have had time if you hadn’t been late.” She stamped her foot. “I won’t leave without my journals!”
Have mercy, Matt thought. How many minutes back to the hospital? And what were his chances, in that time, of staying on the road? “Damn it, we simply can’t—”
“There’s no call for profanity!” Shouting to make herself heard.
He closed his eyes. “Where are they?”
“What?”
“The journals! Where are they?”
She took him to the kitchen, where it was marginally quieter, and pointed to three shelves of bound notebooks so full of newspaper clippings they were bent as round as bread loaves.
Matt gathered up an armful.
“No!” Miriam shrieked. “They’ll get wet!”
“I can carry them to the car. I can’t make it stop raining.”
“Don’t be testy! Here.” She shrugged out of her raincoat and draped it over the journals.
“Miriam—you’ll be soaked to the bone.”
“I’ll dry out,” she said.
He took her to the car, helped her inside, and piled the journals at her feet. She slammed the door to keep the rain away from the books, narrowly missing the fingers of Mart’s left hand.