Luchóg said, “They wanted to leave, and it was only a matter of time. I only hope that the poor things find home in the world and weren’t sent off to live in a zoo or put under the microscope by a mad scientist.”
We never heard of them again. Vanished, as if an airy nothing.
More than ever, Béka insisted we live in darkness, but he did allow us nights away from the diminished clan. When the chance arose over those next few years, Speck and I would steal away to sleep in relative peace and luxury beneath the library. We threw ourselves into our books and papers. We read the Greeks in translation, Clytemnestra in her grief, Antigone’s honor in a thin coating of earth. Grendel prowling the bleak Danish night. The pilgrims of Canterbury and lives on the road. Maxims of Pope, the rich clot of humanity in all of Shakespeare, Milton’s angels and aurochs, Gulliver big, little, yahoo. Wild ecstasies of Keats. Shelley’s Frankenstein. Rip Van Winkle sleeping it off. Speck insisted on Austen, Eliot, Emerson, Thoreau, the Bront?s, Alcott, Nesbitt, Rossetti, both Brownings, and especially Alice down the rabbit hole. We worked our way right up to the present age, chewing through the books like a pair of silverfish.
Sometimes, Speck would read aloud to me. I would hand her a story she had never before seen, and almost without a beat, she made it hers. She frightened me from the word Once in Poe’s “The Raven.” She brought me to tears over Ben Jonson’s drowned cat. She made the hooves thunder in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the waves roar in Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” I loved the music of her voice and watching her face as she read, season after season. In the summertime her bared skin darkened, and her dark hair brightened in the sunshine. During the cold part of the year, she disappeared beneath layers, so that sometimes all I could see was her wide forehead and dark brows. On winter nights in that candlelit space, her eyes shone out from the circles beneath her eyes. Although we had spent twenty years together, she secreted away the power to shock or surprise, to say a word and break my heart.
? CHAPTER 25 ?
I had a name, although at times Gustav Ungerland was no more real to me than Henry Day. The simple solution would have been to track down Tom McInnes and ask him for more details about what had been said under hypnosis. After finding the article in the library, I tried to locate its author but had no more to go on than the address in the magazine. Several weeks after receiving my letter, the editor of the defunct Journal of Myth and Society replied that he would be glad to forward it on to the professor, but nothing came of it. When I called his university, the chairman of the department said McInnes had vanished on a Monday morning, right in the middle of the semester, and left no forwarding address. My attempts at contacting Brian Ungerland proved equally frustrating. I couldn’t very well pester Tess for information about her old boyfriend, and after asking around town, someone told me that Brian was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the U.S. Army, studying how to blow things up. There were no Ungerlands in our local phone book.
Fortunately, other things occupied my thoughts. Tess had talked me into going back to school, and I was to begin in January. She changed when I told her my plans, became more attentive and affectionate. We celebrated registering for classes by splurging on dinner and Christmas shopping in the city. Arm in arm, we walked the sidewalks downtown. In the windows of Kaufmann’s Department Store, miniature animatronic scenes played out in an endless loop. Santa and his elves hammered at the same wooden bicycle. Skaters circled atop an icy mirror for all eternity. We stopped and lingered before one display—a human family, baby in the bassinet, proud parents kissing under the mistletoe. Our own images reflected on and through the glass, superimposed over the mechanicals’ domestic bliss.
“Isn’t that adorable? Look at how lifelike they made the baby. Doesn’t she make you want to have one yourself?”
“Sure, if they were all as quiet as that one.”
We strolled by the park, where a ragtag bunch of children queued up to a stand selling hot chocolate. We bought two cups and sat on a cold park bench. “You do like children, don’t you?”
“Children? I never think about them.”
“But wouldn’t you want a son to take camping or a girl to call your own?”
“Call my own? People don’t belong to other people.”
“You’re a very literal person sometimes.”
“I don’t think—”