Page 24
“I’m yours, Amy,” he said. “I always will be. Whatever comes, you know that.”
And with these words, Lucius made his way across the deck of the Mariner and climbed back through the window.
* * *
7
Amy returned to awareness to find herself on all fours in the dirt. Her hands were gloved; a plastic flat of impatiens rested on the ground close by and, beside it, a rusty trowel.
“You all right there, Miss Amy?”
Carter was sitting on the patio, legs akimbo beneath the wrought-iron table, fanning his face with his big straw hat. On the table were two glasses of iced tea.
“That man takes good care of us,” he said, and sighed with satisfaction. “Haven’t eaten my fill like that since I don’t remember when.”
Amy rose unsteadily to her feet. A deep lassitude enveloped her, as if she had just awoken from a long nap.
“Come and sit a minute,” Carter said. “Give the body a chance to digest. Feeding day like a day off round here. Them flowers can wait.”
Which was true; there were always more flowers. As soon as Amy finished planting a flat, a new one would appear by the gate. It was the same with the tea: one minute the table was bare; in the next, two sweating glasses awaited. By what unseen agency these things arrived, Amy did not know. It was all part of this place and its own particular logic. Every day a season, every season a year.
She removed her gloves and crossed the lawn to sit across from Carter. The greasy taste of blood lingered in her mouth. She sipped the tea to clear it away.
“It’s good to keep your strength up, Miss Amy,” Carter said. “Ain’t no prize for starving yourself.”
“I just don’t…like it.” She looked at Carter, who was still fanning himself with his hat. “I tried to kill him again.”
“Lucius knows the situation well enough. I doubt he takes it personal.”
“That’s not the point, Anthony. I need to learn to control it the way you do.”
Carter frowned. He was a man of compact expression, small gestures, thoughtful pauses. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You ain’t had but three years to get used to things. You still just a baby in the way of being what we are.”
“I don’t feel like a baby.”
“What you feel like then?”
“A monster.”
She’d spoken too sharply; she glanced away, feeling ashamed. After feeding, she always passed through a period of doubt. How strange it all was: she was a body in a ship, but her mind lived here, with Carter, among the plants and flowers. Only when Lucius brought the blood did these two worlds touch each other, and the contrast was disorienting. Carter had explained that this place was nothing particular to the two of them; the difference was that they could see it. There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another—a deeper reality that ordinary people could glimpse only fleetingly, if at all. A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams.
Amy knew this to be so. She felt as if she’d always known it—that even as a little girl, a purely human girl, she had sensed the existence of this other realm, this world-behind-the-world, as she had come to call it. She supposed that many children did the same. What was childhood if not a passage from light to dark, of the soul’s slow drowning in an ocean of ordinary matter? During her time in the Chevron Mariner, a great deal of the past had become clear. Vivid recollections had inched their way back to her, approaching on memory’s delicate feet, until things that had happened ages past felt like recent occurrences. She recalled a time, long ago, in the innocent period she thought of as “before”—before Lacey and Wolgast, before Project NOAH, before the Oregon mountaintop where they had made their home and then her long, solo wanderings in a peopleless world with only the virals for company—when animals had spoken to her. Larger animals, like dogs, but also smaller ones that nobody paid attention to—birds and even insects. She’d thought nothing of this at the time; it was simply the way things were. Nor did it trouble her that nobody else seemed to hear them; it was part of the world’s arrangement that the animals spoke only to her, always addressing her by name, as if they were old friends, telling her stories about their lives, and it made her happy to be the recipient of the special gift of their attention when so much else in her life seemed to make no sense at all: her mother’s lurching emotions and long absences, their drifting from place to place, the strangers that came and went with no apparent purpose.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24 (Reading here)
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130
- Page 131
- Page 132
- Page 133
- Page 134
- Page 135
- Page 136
- Page 137
- Page 138
- Page 139
- Page 140
- Page 141
- Page 142
- Page 143
- Page 144
- Page 145
- Page 146
- Page 147
- Page 148
- Page 149
- Page 150
- Page 151
- Page 152
- Page 153
- Page 154
- Page 155
- Page 156
- Page 157
- Page 158
- Page 159
- Page 160
- Page 161
- Page 162
- Page 163
- Page 164
- Page 165
- Page 166
- Page 167
- Page 168
- Page 169
- Page 170
- Page 171
- Page 172
- Page 173
- Page 174
- Page 175
- Page 176
- Page 177
- Page 178
- Page 179
- Page 180
- Page 181
- Page 182
- Page 183
- Page 184
- Page 185
- Page 186
- Page 187
- Page 188
- Page 189
- Page 190
- Page 191
- Page 192
- Page 193
- Page 194
- Page 195
- Page 196
- Page 197
- Page 198
- Page 199
- Page 200
- Page 201
- Page 202
- Page 203
- Page 204
- Page 205
- Page 206
- Page 207
- Page 208
- Page 209
- Page 210
- Page 211
- Page 212
- Page 213
- Page 214
- Page 215
- Page 216
- Page 217
- Page 218
- Page 219
- Page 220
- Page 221
- Page 222
- Page 223
- Page 224
- Page 225
- Page 226
- Page 227
- Page 228
- Page 229
- Page 230
- Page 231
- Page 232
- Page 233
- Page 234
- Page 235
- Page 236
- Page 237
- Page 238
- Page 239
- Page 240
- Page 241
- Page 242
- Page 243
- Page 244
- Page 245
- Page 246
- Page 247
- Page 248
- Page 249
- Page 250
- Page 251
- Page 252
- Page 253
- Page 254
- Page 255
- Page 256
- Page 257
- Page 258
- Page 259
- Page 260
- Page 261
- Page 262
- Page 263
- Page 264
- Page 265
- Page 266
- Page 267
- Page 268
- Page 269
- Page 270
- Page 271
- Page 272
- Page 273
- Page 274
- Page 275
- Page 276
- Page 277
- Page 278
- Page 279
- Page 280
- Page 281
- Page 282
- Page 283
- Page 284
- Page 285
- Page 286