Whose voice!? Bolting straight up, Russell stared down to the foot of the bed and felt his breath rush out of him. His flesh drew up and pimpled and he felt immediately chilled. There was a figure, a young girl, bathed in a shimmering aura of spectral light, facing him. Her hair was long and dark, and her eyes seemed like empty holes in her face. Her thin, bronzed arms were reaching out to him…
“It can’t be…” whispered Russell, his voice hoarse and full of uncontrollable fear, a fear he had never known.
Second-Papa, said Tnen-Ku. I would have been happy. I would have been grateful to you forever. I would have come to you… like this… for make you happy… not sad.
Russell blinked, looked over at Mitzi, who was still sleeping. For an instant, he wondered why she had not heard the child; then he realized that he was only hearing the words in his mind.
“Why?” he whispered. “What do you mean? Why are you doing this?”
I would have given you this…
Russell stared at the young girl, watching her hands move slowly to her waist, to the simple knot which held the wraparound skirt about her body. With a deliberate slowness, Tnen-Ku worked at the knot.
No! thought Russell, as a conflicting rush of feelings jolted him. He wanted to look away from the vision, but something held him. The shining figure had taken on a strangely erotic, yet fearsome aspect, and he was transfixed.
As the knot loosened, Russell found himself entranced by the deep tan of her flesh, and as the cloth began to slowly fall away, he became fascinated by the suggestion of flaring hips, the roundness of her soon-to-be-a-woman’s belly. He felt himself becoming sexually aroused as he had never in his life, and a fire seemed to be raging in his groin. Tnen-Ku held the fabric of the skirt by a small corner so that it hung limply in front of her, flanked by her naked hips and thighs.
Russell felt that he would explode from the throbbing pressure inside his trembling body, and watching her fingers release the skirt, he screamed involuntarily.
Instantly the vision of the girl disappeared, cloaking the bedroom in darkness and the echo of his scream. Mitzi had jumped up, grabbing him.
“Russell, what’s the matter with you? You’re soaking wet! What happened?”
Still trembling, Russell continued to stare at the foot of the bed. “Bad dream,” he said weakly. “Bad dream… I’ll be okay.”
But he was not okay and was never okay again.
For the first few days after the vision of Tnen-Ku, Russell Southers had convinced himself that it had not actually happened, that he had witnessed nothing more than a singularly, realistic dream of some of his darker subconscious desires. He found that he could not rid his mind, however, of the disturbing image of the young girl untying her native skirt. He was thinking of her constantly as though becoming obsessed. While commuting to work, while at the office in Manhattan, and even at home with Mitzi watching TV, Russell was plagued by the vision of Tnen-Ku at the foot of his bed. When he concentrated on it, he could hear her voice calling out his name.
But that was only the beginning.
While watching the evening news after his daily martini, while Mitzi prepared dinner, Russell was shocked to see a bulletin teletype-overlay snake across the screen while the commentator spoke of a warehouse fire in Brooklyn:
TNEN-KU IS WATCHING YOU SECOND-PAPA RUSSELL
“Jesus Christ!” yelled Russell, sitting straight up, staring at the TV screen, waiting for the message to roll across the bottom of the picture again. Impossible! I didn’t see it! But you did see it… He felt a lump in his throat as he sat gripping the arms of his chair, waiting for a repeat of the words which did not come. He thought that he was starting to lose his sanity, and that scared him too. He was thinking about that little sexy brat too much, that was it. Got to stop thinking about it, that’s all.
Shaken, he watched the news commentator drone on about more local happenings, but he heard little of it. He toyed with the idea of telling Mitzi what had been happening but thought that she would think he was losing his marbles. Mitzi had always depended on him to be strong and pragmatic and rational; he shuddered to think of how she would react to him showing such obvious signs of mental weakness. No, Mitzi should not know anything. Russell was going to have to handle this himself.
But it did bother him that Mitzi was not sharing in his… his what? His delusions? His guilt? She was blithely rolling along, having totally forgotten the Spare the Child Program in turn for some new, fleeting, but always enjoyable project. And it was Mitzi who had gotten him into the whole mess in the first place. It wasn’t fair, thought Russell…
That night she returned to him and he sat up in bed, transfixed and captivated by her little brown body, wrapped in a shimmering cloak of light. She held something in her hands, which she slowly placed on the covers of his bed, then quickly disappeared.
Russell’s throat was so tight that he could not swallow, could not have uttered a sound if he had wanted to. His hands were trembling badly, keeping pace with the thumping of his heart and his ragged breath. His mind was slipping away from him, and he sat in the darkness, resolved to see a psychiatrist the next day. Take the afternoon off and see one of his golf partners, Dr. Venatoulis.
Then he noticed something on the covers of the bed, something where the image of the girl had placed her hands, and he felt the fear grip him again. Pushing back the sheets, Russell groped about on the softness of the quilt and felt something hard and solid. What the hell…?
It was a small, hand-carved box with a fitted top which slid open. Shaking it, something rattled inside, and he feared for a moment that the sound might awaken Mitzi. Quickly, Russell slipped out of bed and went into the bathroom, switching on the fluorescent lights around the mirror, and shutting the door. The box, when he opened it, contained scores of small white sticks, about half the size of kitchen matches, of uneven shapes. They seemed to be polished smooth and resembled ivory… or perhaps bone. The thought held him for an instant as Russell stared at the box, realizing fully and for the first time that the presence of the box was physical proof that he was not delusional, that he was not imagining things, and that, somehow, Tnen-Ku had actually been inside his bedroom, ten thousand miles away from her island home.
No! His mind screamed out the rejection of such a thought. And yet he stared at the evidence with eyes that were starting to water and sting from nervous tension.
The little white sticks were scattered across the top of the vanity formica, and as Russell watched them, they began to move. Vibrating ever so slightly at first, tingling as if touched by a slight breeze, the bones—and Russell knew now that they were indeed bones—moved like iron filings over a magnet to form a caricature of a skull.
Screaming involuntarily, he swept the pieces off the counter scattering them across the bathroom tile. It was getting too crazy, too unbelievable!
“Russell, is that you…!” Mitzi was knocking loudly at the bathroom door.
“No!… I mean, yes, it’s me! Who the hell do you think it would be!”
“Russell, are you all right? What’s the matter with you?” Mitzi tried the knob, but it was locked. “Russell?!”
“Oh Christ, what?! Yes, Mitzi, I’m all right. Go back to bed, will you please? I’ve got an upset stomach that’s all…”