‘God Almighty,’ he said.
‘Preetorius had friends,’ said the other, and its ringers touched the edge of the wound. The gesture recalled a-picture of the wall of his mother’s house. Christ in Glory – the Sacred Heart floating inside the Saviour – while his fingers, pointing to the agony he’d suffered, said: This was for you.’
‘Why aren’t you dead?’
‘Because I’m not yet alive,’ it said.
Not yet: remember that, Gavin thought. It has intimations of mortality.
‘Are you in pain?’
‘No,’ it said sadly, as though it craved the experience, ‘I feel nothing. All the signs of life are cosmetic. But I’m learning.’ It
smiled. ‘I’ve got the knack of the yawn, and the fart.’ The idea was both absurd and touching; that it would aspire to farting, that a farcical failure in the digestive system was for it a precious sign of humanity.
‘And the wound?’
‘ – is healing. Will heal completely in time.’
Gavin said nothing.
‘Do I disgust you?’ it asked, without inflection.
‘No.’
It was staring at Gavin with perfect eyes, his perfect eyes.
‘What did Reynolds tell you?’ it asked.
Gavin shrugged.
‘Very little.’
That I’m a monster? That I suck out the human spirit?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘More or less.’
‘More or less,’ Gavin conceded.
It nodded. ‘He’s right,’ it said. ‘In his way, he’s right. I need blood: that makes me monstrous. In my youth, a month ago, I bathed in it. Its touch gave wood the appearance of flesh. But I don’t need it now: the process is almost finished. All I need now…
It faltered; not, Gavin thought, because it intended to lie, but because the words to describe its condition wouldn’t come.
‘What do you need?’ Gavin pressed it.
It shook its head, looking down at the carpet. ‘I’ve lived several times, you know. Sometimes I’ve stolen lives and got away with it. Lived a natural span, then shrugged off that face and found another. Sometimes, like the last time, I’ve been challenged, and lost – ‘
‘Are you some kind of machine?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘I am what I am. I know of no others like me; though why should I be the only one? Perhaps there are others, many others: I simply don’t know of them yet. So I live and die and live again, and learn nothing – ‘ the word was bitterly pronounced, ‘ – of myself. Understand? You know what you are because you see others like you. If you were alone on earth, what would you know? What the mirror told you, that’s all. The rest would be myth and conjecture.’
The summary was made without sentiment.
‘May I lie down?’ it asked.
It began to walk towards him, and Gavin could see more clearly the fluttering in its chest-cavity, the restless, incoherent forms that were mushrooming there in place of the heart. Signing, it sank face-down on the bed, its clothes sodden, and closed its eyes.
‘We’ll heal,’ it said. ‘Just give us time.’
Gavin went to the door of the flat and bolted it. Then he dragged a table over and wedged it under the handle. Nobody could get in and attack it in sleep: they would stay here together in safety, he and it, he and himself. The fortress secured, he brewed some coffee and sat in the chair across the room from the bed and watched the creature sleep.
The rain rushed against the window heavily one hour, lightly the next. Wind threw sodden leaves against the glass and they clung there like inquisitive moths; he watched them sometimes, when he tired of watching himself, but before long he’d want to look again, and he’d be back staring at the casual beauty of his outstretched arm, the light flicking the wrist-bone, the lashes. He fell asleep in the chair about midnight, with an ambulance complaining in the street outside, and the rain coming again.
It wasn’t comfortable in the chair, and he’d surface from sleep every few minutes, his eyes opening a fraction. The creature was up: it was standing by the window, now in front of the mirror, now in the kitchen. Water ran: he dreamt water. The creature undressed: he dreamt sex. It stood over him, its chest whole, and he was reassured by its presence: he dreamt, it was for a moment only, himself lifted out of a street through a window into Heaven. It dressed in his clothes: he murmured his assent to the theft in his sleep. It was whistling: and there was a threat of day through the window, but he was too dozy to stir just yet, and quite content to have the whistling young man in his clothes live for him.