Instead, she said, “Was it good for you?”
Puzzled, I said, “What do you mean?”
She laughed again, more softly than before.
“Susan?”
“I’ve gone down the White Rabbit’s hole for sure, all the way to the bottom this time.”
Rather than explain her first statement, which I had found puzzling, she slipped away from me into sleep, breathing shallowly through her parted lips.
Outside, the fat moon vanished into the western horizon, like a silver coin into a drawstring purse.
The panoply of summer stars swelled brighter with the passing of the lunar disc.
An owl called from its perch on the roof.
In quick succession, three meteors left brief bright tails across the sky.
The night seemed to be full of omens.
My time was coming.
My time was coming at last.
The world would never be the same.
Was it good for you?
Suddenly, I understood.
I had impregnated her.
In a curious way, we’d had sex.
Was it good for you?
She had made a joke.
Ha, ha.
TWENTY THREE
Susan spent most of the following four weeks eating voraciously or sleeping as if drugged.
The exceptional, rapidly developing foetus in her womb required her to eat at least six full meals a day, eight thousand calories. Sometimes her need for nourishment was so urgent that she ate as ravenously as a wild animal.
Incredibly, in that short time, her belly swelled until she appeared to be six months pregnant. She was surprised that her body could stretch so much so rapidly.
Her breasts grew tender, her nipples sore.
The small of her back ached.
Her ankles swelled.
She experienced no morning sickness. As if she dared not give back even the smallest portion of the nourishment that she had taken in.
Although her food consumption was enormous and her belly round, her total body weight fell four pounds in four days.
Then five pounds by the eighth day.
Then six by the tenth day.
The skin around her eyes gradually darkened. Her lovely face quickly became drawn, and her lips were so pale by the end of the second week that they took on a bluish cast.
I worried about her.
I urged her to eat even more.
The baby seemed to require such fearful amounts of sustenance that it appropriated for itself all the calories that Susan consumed each day and, in addition, ate away with termite persistence at the very substance of her.
Yet, although hunger gnawed at her constantly, there were days when she became so repulsed by the quantity of what she was eating that she could not force a single additional spoonful between her lips. Her mind rebelled so strenuously that it overrode even the physical need.
The kitchen pantry was well stocked, but I was forced to send Shenk out more days than not to purchase the fresh vegetables and fruit that Susan craved. That the baby craved.
Shenk’s strange and tortured eyes could be concealed easily with a pair of sunglasses. Nevertheless, his appearance was otherwise so remarkable that he could not help but be noticed and remembered.
Several federal and state police agencies had been searching frantically for him since he’d broken out of the underground labs in Colorado. The more often he left the house, the more likely he was to be spotted.
I still needed his hands.
I worried about losing him.
Furthermore, there were Susan’s bad dreams. When she was not eating, she was sleeping, and she could not sleep without nightmares.
Upon waking, she could never recall many details of the dreams: just that they were about twisted landscapes and dark places slick with blood. They wrung rivers of sweat from her, and occasionally she remained disoriented for as long as half an hour after waking, plagued by vivid but disconnected images that flashed back to her from the nightmare realm.
She felt the baby move only a few times.
She didn’t like what she felt.
It didn’t kick as she expected a baby ought to kick. Rather, periodically it felt as though it was coiling inside her, coiling and writhing and slithering.
This was a difficult time for Susan.
I counselled her.
I reassured her.