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.
He climbed in behind the wheel and advised her to fasten her seat belt. The engine stuttered a little when he cranked it, as if some moisture had crept in where it didn’t belong.
He said as they pulled away from the curb, “Have you talked to Abby? She must be worried.”
The wipers, on double-speed, did very little to improve visibility. The road in front of him was a liquid blur.
“I would have liked to talk to Abby,” Miriam said, “but the phone stopped working twenty minutes ago. Dr. Wheeler, may I ask why you were so late?”
“Believe me, Miriam, it isn’t something you want to know.” She examined him over the rims of her eyeglasses and rendered a judgment: “Maybe you’re right.”
He took a different route back to the hospital, longer but higher; he was afraid of flooding down by the marina. The road rose along the foothills of Mt. Buchanan and Matt was forced to crawl along in the breakdown lane, away from the winds that had begun to sweep up the hillside with devastating force. Many of the houses he passed were already windowless and the road surface was littered with broken glass. Debris rolled past the car at a constant rate—loose garbage bins, cardboard boxes, green matter.
At the apex of the drive, where the road began a descent into the hospital district, the battering rain suddenly eased. Matt spared a glance to the west. The clouds, skimming overhead at a dizzying speed, had briefly lifted. He could see the water of the bay driven up beyond the marina and nearly to Commercial Street, the hulls of overturned pleasure boats bobbing level with the roofs of warehouses and restaurants. The bay itself was a furious caldron, though calmer than the sea beyond, where waves the size of houses battered the stony southern tip of Crab Pot Island. The last daylight came from the west—seemed to come from the storm itself, a strange, weak radiance.