Quayle must have slept, because when he opened his eyes the tones of the room had altered, and the shadows were not as they had been. The Pale Child was standing on the patterned rug by the end of the bed. It was naked and sexless, its chest flat and its head entirely bald, lending it a resemblance to an overgrown, unfinished doll. The Pale Child’s joints were bent backward at the knee, like the hind legs of a horse, and its elbows were bent forward, as though the three points of articulation had once been broken and deliberately reset in a state of extreme dislocation. The nails on its fingers and toes were yellow and twisted, and neither iris nor pupil was visible in the whiteness of its eyes. Instead a hollow remained at the center of each, so that if one were offered an appropriate angle, and a sufficiency of illumination, an examination of the interior of its skull might have been possible.
Quayle did not stir from his chair. He regarded the Pale Child as one might a moth that had flitted into one’s room: a presence without any intrinsic novelty in and of itself, but a distraction nonetheless. The Pale Child opened and closed its mouth, and its head bobbed in a pecking motion. Now, to Quayle, it seemed more like a featherless bird, a fledgling fallen from its nest and seeking succor from one who had none to offer.
A soft knocking came on the door connecting Quayle’s room to its neighbor.
‘Come in,’ he said.
The door opened, and Pallida Mors was revealed. Like the Pale Child, Mors was naked, although Mors’s proportions were entirely those of an adult woman. Her body was extraordinarily white, its mortuary expanse broken only by the faint tracery of veins revealed by the lamplight, like distant rivers cutting through snow, and the hairs at her pubis, the mere into which these tributaries might feed. A small circular gouge mark, previously concealed by white makeup, was now visible on her right cheek. The mark was recent, and deep – a souvenir of the failed attempt to dispose of one of Dobey’s waitresses – but did not appear infected.
Mors could not see the Pale Child – her nature was not like Quayle’s – but she had grown adept at sensing the presence of the chthonic, the seeping of pollutants from one reality into another. She paused on the border between their rooms, as though reluctant to risk an incursion into unknown realms.
‘What is it?’ she asked, and Quayle was struck by the coarseness of her voice, a detuned instrument capable only of communicating the mundane and the ugly.
‘A child. Or something like a child.’ His eyes flicked to Mors. ‘But it’s gone now. You must have scared it away.’
If any insult was intended, Mors chose to ignore it, or perhaps failed to recognize it entirely. Even after all their years together, the workings of her mind were often alien to Quayle. One might as well have tried to understand the thoughts of a spider or wasp: a predatory, hungry organism.
‘I’ll return to my room, if you’d prefer,’ she said.
‘No, you can stay.’
She walked to his bed, climbed beneath the sheets, and watched as Quayle removed his clothing. His body was without reserves of fat, an assemblage of muscle, sinew, and bone that resembled less a living being than an anatomical illustration, like some creation of Vesalius or Albinus given only the thinnest of epidermal cloaks for concealment.
He came to her then, and she shivered at his touch, for he was so very cold. When he entered her it was as though she were being penetrated by a shard of ice; and as she held him to her, she thought that her skin must surely adhere to his, so profound was his algor; and when they separated, sections of her dermal layer would remain fixed to his, leaving her to lie with redness exposed. As he came inside her, she felt his seed spread with an anesthetic chill, proceeding beyond the chasm of her sex into her belly and her chest, her arms and her legs, until finally it found the red glow of her consciousness and dulled it to yellow, then white, then—
Quayle removed himself from her and reclined against his pillow. Mors was already breathing deeply beside him, although the stink of her exhalations went unnoticed by him; Quayle had long since lost his senses of taste and smell, and ate only for sustenance, not pleasure, just as he took little sexual gratification from any congress with Mors. It was her warmth he desired, her energy in those moments permeating the ice and permafrost of his being to connect with whatever residual heat might yet reside in the tephra of the self. Coldness was the curse for living so long, if such prolonged agony could even be termed a life.
Quayle turned his head and looked to the corner of the room nearest the window, where the shadows were deepest. From them stepped the Pale Child, which had been present for all that had transpired, sucking in the sight of congress through the recesses of its sockets. It sniffed at the air of the room, and its musky residue of sex.
‘When all is done,’ said Quayle, ‘and this world is altered, you can have her. You and your kind can have them all.’
28
The storm swept along the coast during the night, and woke Parker by rattling the slates on his roof and testing the security of his windows and doors, like a formless entity seeking passage to new territories. When he rose the next morning, his yard was littered with broken branches, and an old bird’s nest lay strangely intact on his lawn, but the day was the warmest yet, and only occasional pockets of dirty white remained in the lee of trees. Parker wiped down one of the chairs on his porch, and breakfasted on cereal and coffee with his feet on the rail, the call of birdsong for his listening pleasure.
He felt the urge to speak with Sam, his daughter, but he knew she would be preparing for school, and he did not wish to interrupt her routine. He and Rachel, Sam’s mother, were now in a state of uneasy truce. Rachel had suspended legal proceedings intended to leave Parker with only supervised access to his child, a consequence of his vocation and the violent proclivities of those with whom it brought him into contact. The disorder of his own life had bled into his daughter’s existence, to the legitimate concern of her mother, and Rachel had believed herself to be left with no choice but to seek protection for Sam from the courts.
Then, almost as suddenly as the issue had arisen, it subsided again, with Rachel unwilling to offer any excuse for her change of heart. Parker was content to let sleeping dogs lie. It was enough to enjoy time with Sam without another adult intruding, to be there for her without precondition or regulation when she needed him, even if the depths of his daughter’s nature remained as mysterious to him as the remotest of ocean chasms.
He sometimes woke to Sam’s voice speaking to him in the night, as clearly as though she were standing beside him in the room. On those occasions he would wonder if, in missing her daily physical presence in his life, he might be creating imaginary discourses in his sleep as recompense for her absence. But sometimes when he was awake he heard her in conversation with another child, their words carried to him as an echo from Vermont, and Parker had no doubts about the identity of the second figure, because he had heard Sam speak her name in the past.
‘Jennifer.’
Sam and Jennifer: the living daughter speaking to the dead.
The world could grow no more curious, Parker felt, even as he found solace in the knowledge that in time he would close his eyes in this world and open them in another, and there Jennifer would be waiting for him, and she would lead him to her god.
It was seven thirty in the morning. Parker washed his cup and bowl, got in his car, and drove to St Maximilian Kolbe, where he arrived just in time for the start of morning mass. He took a seat at the back of the church, where he always felt most comfortable. He was not a regular attendee, but his childhood Catholicism had never left him and he still derived comfort from a place of worship. On this spring morning he allowed the liturgy to wash over him, the familiarity of its calls and responses itself a form of meditation, and he prayed for his children, the living and the dead; for his wife, now gone from him; for Rachel, whom he still loved; and for the anonymous woman in the woods, and the child to whom she had given birth at the end of her life, that, alive or dead, they might both be at peace.