“I. Don’t. Want. To. Die.”
After a silence, with pity that had an edge of contempt, he said, “Then prove it by dealing with me.”
She was lying prostrate, head turned to the right. The injured left side of her face pressed against the stone floor. Her bleeding ear began to burn and throb again as the chaotic effect of the latest Tasering wore off and coherent messaging returned to her nervous system.
“Proving yourself to yourself doesn’t mean you’ll survive,” Coy said. “You could still easily end up dead. Or insane. But dealing with me is a start. Deal with me.”
Lying in the reception hall of a building in which a new world of fascist fury was being designed, she thought about what needed to be done. Editing. Revision.
From behind her came a rustle, a couple of soft thumps. As if some length of drapery had slipped off a rod, though the room had no draperies.
She waited. She listened. She heard nothing more.
When with an effort Bibi sat up and turned her head, she saw Chubb Coy’s discarded shoes and clothing, a puddle of fabric in the jumble of which his shoulder holster and pistol and Taser could be seen. He seemed to have disrobed and disarmed and walked off naked, though she had heard no door open or close.
Earlier, in the motel, studying the London, O’Connor, and Wilder quotations, she had begun to realize not only that Chubb Coy had spoken out of character, but also that he was a character. One of her creation. The quest for Ashley Bell would have collapsed right there if she had not cut the words from the books and burned them in the bathroom sink, using the memory trick to preserve this world, which was now too fully formed to easily dissolve.
To an observer, she might have appeared defeated as she crawled on her hands and knees to the tall black-granite desk and sat on the floor with her back against its polished-slab front. She had lost her baseball cap. Her hair tumbled in disarray. If her battered face was as pale as her hands, pale almost to ash-gray, she must have looked at once weak and wild.
She was not weak, however, and wild only to the extent that she did not know what jungles waited within her or what powers, native to them, she would soon discover. She was not defeated. But she was in the cold grip of fright.
Pax and Pogo stood with Bibi’s parents, arrayed around her bed, watching her shudder and twitch under the bedclothes, as her exposed hands, palsied and plucking, seemed to flick something offensive from her fingertips, as though washing through the room were currents of stinging power that only she could feel.
The bizarre display alarmed Nancy to tears, but Murphy withheld the nurse-call button from her. Although no less distressed than his wife, he remained in the thrall of father’s intuition, convinced that his daughter was for the moment not in danger, but instead that in essence, in mind and soul, she occupied a mysterious place more real than dreams and safer than the depths of coma.
The shaking and erratic movements subsided, and then faded away completely. She lay quiet and composed. The cardiac monitor, which had recorded a mild increase in her heartbeat, now reported an equally mild decrease. As during the episode, the five brain waves continued pumping at optimal strength and in optimal patterns.
Having heard the contents of the microcassette, Pax and Pogo had more reason than Murphy to believe that his hope was rational. They also had good reason to fear there was a mortal threat to Bibi that came from within herself, that perhaps no other human being had ever faced.
They recounted the salient points of their day. The lockbox and the items in it other than the tape, including the dog collar bearing the name JASPER. The visit to Dr. St. Croix. The reason Bibi had been forced out of the writing program. The panther-and-gazelle notebook, the lines of Bibi’s handwriting that appeared before their eyes. The visit to Toba Ringelbaum. The identity of Ashley Bell: a fictional character based on fact, survivor of Dachau, brain-cancer specialist.
Nancy and Murphy were electrified by those discoveries and more than a little mystified, full of questions and keen for answers.
“We don’t have all the answers,” Pogo said. “But what’s on the tape—it comes at you like a fully macking behemoth. Beebs is all we thought she was, but a whole lot more.”