Gemini Rising. Brian McNaughton
I popped into the office to finish up some specs. Took a roundabout way home, still looking. No dice. I wouldn’t get my hopes up, honey. Thieves put a premium on Dobies, and Lucy would be easy to steal.”
Ken knocked back his drink in two swallows, then went to the kitchen to mix some more. Marcia took a sip of hers and shivered. She wondered why the drink had seemed so desirable in anticipation and now she didn’t like the taste of the martini at all. She felt very tired.
CHAPTER FIVE
A piercing scream wrenched Marcia into awareness.
“Whuzz?” Ken grunted. She hadn’t heard him come to bed.
“Go back to sleep,” she snapped as she sat upright, listening hard, and the bed sagged beside her as Ken complied.
In the darkness, her feet found the slippers beside the bed. A light rain pattered against the windows. The glowing green dial of the bedside clock said four. Ken snored softly, scenting the air with gin.
“No no, no!”
That was Melody, and Marcia was on her feet and through the door before the scream reached its hysterical peak. She assumed it was merely a nightmare, because she hadn’t heard Lucifer bark. She was halfway to her daughter’s door before she remembered that Lucifer was gone, that a flesh-and-blood menace might await her. The thought didn’t slow her down.
But the blast of light as Marcia flipped the switch revealed Melody alone, crouching in a corner of her room, staring wide-eyed and frightened at her wildly tangled bed.
“Melody!”
“No, don’t touch me—no!”
Marcia didn’t know what to do, but she followed her instinct without question and tried to shake her daughter into full consciousness. Melody fought against her for only an instant, then sagged limply into her arms.
“It was a dream, honey. It was only a dream. Come lie down.”
“No!” Melody almost screamed. Her whole body tensed like a steel spring at the breaking point as she thrust Marcia from her. “Sleep…it’s worse than dying. It’s like there’s nobody home, it’s like going out and leaving a door unlocked, and anything can come in and take you over.…”
Marcia’s neck prickled at this morbid fantasy, at the conviction in Melody’s tone as she spoke.
“Honey, it’s all right. You’re safe. Those things don’t happen, except in dreams. You were having a bad dream. It wasn’t real.”
Melody was wide-awake now and well on her way toward composing the inscrutable, cat-like mask that she presented to the waking world. But Marcia could see that even now, wide-awake, her daughter was still terrified.
“It was a nightmare,” Marcia insisted. “It’s what you get for watching all those horror flicks on TV. Nothing can take over your body while you sleep. It just doesn’t happen.”
Melody smiled shyly as she apparently came to realize the foolishness of her fantasy.
“It was one hell of a dream,” she said softly. I can remember it now as if I’d really been there.”
“Sit up and tell me about it, if you want to,” Marcia urged, drawing her to her feet. “I’ll make your bed for you.”
Marcia was momentarily shocked by the condition of the sheets. They were soaking wet. As a child, Melody had never wet the bed. Then she realized that they must be soaked with sweat. Melody’s nightgown was wet, too, and her hair hung dark and limp with perspiration. She went to feel the girl’s forehead, but she had no fever. Her skin was cool, even clammy.
Marcia stripped the bed and wrestled the damp mattress over to present its dry side. She thought of suggesting that Melody take a shower, but that was ridiculous. The important thing was to get her settled down for sleep again quickly. Maybe it would be a good idea to keep her home from school in the morning. Well, that decision could be postponed. She wanted to get some more sleep herself before morning.
“Change your nightgown, dear,” she said, handing her a fresh one from the dresser. “I’ll get clean sheets.”
In the hallway, Marcia paused at the door of the linen closet and listened to the rain. She was drawn to the window at the end of the hall. It was raining much harder. She peered into the blackness. Would the rain wash out scents that might help Lucifer find his way home?
She returned to find Melody nude, in the act of reaching for her clean nightgown. Embarrassed, she delayed her entrance, but she couldn’t help watching, touched by a confusing mixture of motherly admiration and—could it be envy? Melody had passed beyond the trembling brink of adolescence to full womanhood. Her breasts and buttocks were taut with youthful musculature. She was fitted as snugly as possible into her healthily glowing skin. Probably this newly acquired nubility was the cause of her late-night hysterics. Marcia’s emotion changed to sadness at the passing of Melody’s childhood, not untinged with sadness at the passing of her own youth.
“Tell me about your dream, sweetheart,” she said, entering briskly with the crisp sheets.
“I had this brother,” Melody began thoughtfully, smoothing her nightdress as she perched on the arm of the easy chair by the window. “Only not exactly a brother. I can’t explain that very well, but I understood it in the dream. And he lived in, like, another world. Another planet, maybe, because everything was different in a crazy way that I can’t really find the words for.”
Marcia only half heard her. The details of the dream were unimportant; the important thing was to encourage Melody to talk. Meanwhile, her mind was chewing on a question she had put aside earlier: why had Ken dressed with such casual elegance to go looking for a stray dog?
“…like in this world, we just take for granted that angles are put together in a certain way, as they taught us in Geometry. Only in that other world, the angles are all fucked up—”
“Melody!”
“Sorry. The angles are all different, you know? Like you turn a corner, and instead of being where you expect to be, you wind up in the middle of the next block. My brother understood all this; he was used to it, and he tried to calm me down and explain it. And I said walking, I think, but that’s wrong, too, because we got from one place to another by…a different way. I can’t explain that.”
Ken was forty-two years old, further than she was from youth; perhaps foolish enough to try to recapture it by pretense. Marcia made the sheet crack vigorously as she floated it above the bed, then slid it to rest in position.
“There were mountains that went up so high you had to bend your head way back to see the tops of them, like jagged black fangs against an icy-green sky. And there was a lake of cold fire, only when I scooped it up, it wasn’t fire, or water, either, it was some stuff that broke apart in a million little diamonds and clung to my arms.”
“What did this brother of yours look like?” Marcia asked, when Melody had remained silent for a time.
“He…he didn’t like for me to see him. That business with the angles had something to do with it. He was very clever about standing in just the right place so that I could never look at him directly. Like someone who stands right behind your shoulder, only it was more complicated than that. I got a glimpse, though, when I got used to the way things were set up. It was…well, he was pretty awful. Kind of stretched-out in a funny way, all long legs and skinny arms. Hairy, all covered with fur, like an animal.”
“Sounds pretty disgusting.”
“No. That was the funny part. He was disgusting by our standards, sure, but that didn’t bother me. I could sense that he was really very fond of me, that he knew me from way back, that we’d always been—well, brother and sister. And in the dream, I just accepted the way he was; I didn’t even question it.”
Marcia stepped back from the bed. “You ought to lie down now.”
Melody