think James is still in the body? he asked, the eyebrows lifting again, precisely as David always lifted them when he spoke, the head tipping forward ever so slightly, and the mouth on the edge of a smile.
David in that face! The timbre of the voice was almost exactly the same.
Ah ... what... oh, yes, James. Yes, James is in the body! David, it was a blow to the head! You remember our discussion. If I was to kill him, it ought to be a swift blow to the head. He was stammering something about his mother. He wanted her. He kept saying to tell her that Raglan needed her. He was in that body when I left the room.
I see. This means the brain is functioning but the brain is severely impaired.
Exactly! Don't you see He thought he would stop me from hurting him because it was your body. He had taken refuge in your body! Oh, he figured wrong! Wrong! And to try to lure me into the Dark Trick! What vanity! He should have known better. He should have confessed his little scheme the moment he saw me. Damn him. David, if I haven't killed your body, I've wounded it beyond repair.
He had drifted into his thoughts precisely the way he always did in the midst of conversation, the eyes soft and wide and looking off into the distance through the floor-length windows, and over the dark bay.
I must go to the hospital, mustn't I? he whispered.
For God's sakes, no. Do you want to be plunged into that body as it dies! You can't be serious.
He climbed to his feet with an easy grace, and moved to the windows. He stood there staring out into the night, and I saw the characteristic posture in him, I saw the unmistakable expression of David in troubled reflection in the new face.
What absolute magic it was to see this being with all his poise and wisdom shining from within this young form. To see the soft intelligence behind the clear young eyes as he looked down at me again.
My death's waiting for me, isn't it? he whispered.
Let it wait. It was an accident, David. It's not an inevitable death. Of course there is one alternative. We both know what
What? he asked.
We go there together. We get into the room somehow by bewitching a few medical persons of various rank. You push him out of the body, and you go into it, and then I give you the blood. I bring you to me. There is no conceivable injury that the full infusion of blood won't heal.
No, my friend. You should know better by now than to suggest it. That I cannot do.
I knew you'd say it, I said. Then don't go near the hospital. Don't do anything to rouse him from his stupor!
And then we both fell silent, looking at one another. The alarm was fast draining out of me. I was no longer trembling. And I realized quite suddenly that he had never been alarmed.
He wasn't alarmed now. He did not even look sad. He was looking at me, as if asking me silently to understand. Or perhaps he wasn't thinking of me at all.
Seventy-four years old he was! And he had gone out of a body full of predictable aches and pains and dulling vision and into this hardy and beautiful form.
Why, I could have no idea at all of what he was really feeling! I'd swapped a god's body for those limbs! He had swapped the body of an aged being, with death ever present at his shoulder, a man for whom youth was a collection of painful and tormenting memories, a man so shaken by those memories that his peace of mind was fast crumbling away entirely, threatening to leave him bitter and discouraged in the few years he had left.
Now he had been given back his youth! He might live another whole lifetime! And it was a body that he himself had found enticing, beautiful, even magnificent-a body for which he himself had felt carnal desire.
And here I'd been crying anxiously about the aged body, battered and losing its life drop by drop, in a hospital bed.
Yes, he said, I'd say that is the situation, exactly. And yet I know that I should go to that body! I know that it is the proper home of this soul. I know that every moment I wait, I risk the unimaginable-that it will expire, and I will