a human being could survive without food and water. She ought to know that. Every neurosurgeon ought to know something as simple as that. But since most of us do not tie people to beds and leave them captive for days on end, we don’t have need of that specific information.
She was casting back through her memory—of the heroic stories she’d read, wondrous tales of those who had not starved when others had starved around them, those who had walked miles through heavy snow when others would have died. She had will. That was true. But something else was very wrong with her. She’d been sick when he’d tied her here. She had been sick off and on since they’d left New Orleans together. Nausea, dizziness—even lying flat she sometimes felt she was falling—and an ache in her bones.
She turned, twisting, and then moved her arms the little bit that she could, up and down, up and down, and worked her free leg, and twisted the other one in the strap of tape. Would she be able to stand up when he returned?
And then the obvious thought came. What if he does not return? What if he chooses not to return; or what if something prevents him? He was blundering out there like a mad creature, intoxicated with everything he saw, and no doubt making his characteristic ludicrous errors in judgment. Well, there really wasn’t much to think about if he didn’t come back. She’d die.
Nobody would ever find her here.
This was a perfectly isolated place. A high empty office tower, crowded among hundreds of others—an unrented and undeveloped “medical building” which she had chosen herself for their hiding place, deep in the middle of this sprawling ugly southern metropolis—a city chock-full of hospitals and clinics and medical libraries, where they’d be hidden as they did their experiments, like two leaves on a tree.
She’d arranged the utilities for the entire building herself, and all of its fifty floors were probably still lighted as she had left them. This room was dark. He’d snapped off the lights. And that had proved a mercy as the days passed.
When darkness fell, she could see the dense, charmless sky-scrapers through the broad windows. Sometimes the dying sun made the silvery glass buildings glow as if they were burning, and beyond against the ruby-red sky rose the high dense ever-rolling white clouds.
The light, that was the thing you could always watch, the light. But at full dark when the lights came on, silently, all around her, she felt a little better. People were near, whether they knew she was there or not. Someone might come. Someone…Someone might stand at an office window with a pair of binoculars, but why?
She began to dream again, thank God, to feel the bottom of the cycle again—“I don’t care”—and imagine that she and Michael were together and walking through the field at Donnelaith and she was explaining everything to him, her favorite fancy, the one into which she could sink when she wanted to suffer, to measure, to deny all at the same time.
“It was one wrong judgment call after another. I had only certain choices. But the mistake was pride, to think I could do this thing, to think I could handle it. It’s always been pride. The History of the Mayfair Witches was pride. But this came to me wrapped in the mysteries of science. We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless. And I knew this, I knew but I forgot. That was my mistake.”
She pictured the grass; conjured the ruins; saw the tall fragile gray arches of the Cathedral rising from the glen, and it seemed she was really there and free.
A sound jolted her.
It was the key in the lock.
She grew still and quiet. Yes, the key turning. The outer door was closed loudly and fearlessly, and then she heard his tread on the tile floor. She heard him whistling, humming.
Oh, God, thank you, God.
Another key. Another lock, and that fragrance, the soft good fragrance of him as he drew close to the bed.
She tried to feel hate, to grow rigid with it, to resist the compassionate expression on his face, his large glistening eyes, so very beautiful as only eyes can be, and filled with sorrow as he looked at her. His beard and