It was her teenaged flat voice, bored with the stupidity of others and making no concession to the marvelous. She went on:
“She left with him. This long-haired guy, this is the man. This thin mutant guy, that’s who he is. The ghost, the Devil, Lasher. Michael had a fight with him out by the pool, and he knocked Michael into the water. There’s a smell out there that comes from him. And the smell is in the living room where he was born.”
“You’re imagining things,” said Ryan, so wrathfully that it was almost a whisper. “I told you to stay out of this.”
“When he and Rowan left,” said Mona, “she turned the alarm on so help would come for Michael. Or he did it himself, the man. Any moron can see now from all this—that that is what happened.”
“Mona, I am telling you to leave this room now,” said Ryan.
“No,” she answered.
Michael said nothing. He had heard all these words, but he could think of no way to respond to them. He wanted to say that Rowan had tried to stop the man from throwing him in the pool. But what was the purpose? Rowan had left him drowning in the pool, or had she? Rowan was being coerced!
Ryan made a small sound of exasperation.
“Allow me to say,” said Aaron with patience, “that Dr. Larkin has a great deal of information which we do not have. He has X rays of hands, feet, spinal cord, pelvis, as well as PET scans of the brain, and other such tests. The creature’s not human. It has a confusing genetic makeup. It is a mammal. It is a primate. It is warm-blooded. It looks like us. But it isn’t human.”
Pierce was staring at his father, as if afraid his father would come unglued at any moment. Ryan merely shook his head. “I’ll believe this when I see it, when that Dr. Larkin tells me himself.”
“Dad,” said Pierce, “if you look at the forensic reports, it’s the same picture. They said, contaminated, or tampered with, or spoiled, because otherwise it’s the blood and tissue of something with a nonhuman genetic makeup.”
“It’s what Mona said,” said Michael. His voice had dropped very low. He roused himself a little and looked at Ryan and then at Mona.
Something in Aaron’s manner was disturbing him, had been all along, but he didn’t know what it was, and he hadn’t known he was disturbed until he failed to look at Aaron.
“I came home,” said Michael, “and he was here. He looked like her. He looked like me. He might have come from…our child. Our baby. Rowan had been pregnant.”
He stopped. He let, out a long slow breath, shaking his head a little and then realizing he ought to go on.
“This man-thing was newborn,” he said. “He was very strong. He taunted me. He…he was moving like the straw man in The Wizard of Oz…clumsily, falling down, laughing, climbing back up. I should have been able to wring his neck. I wasn’t. He was much much stronger than he looked. I connected more than once. Should have pulverized a few facial bones. No damage except a cut. Rowan did try to stop the fight, but it wasn’t clear to me then…and it isn’t now…whom Rowan was trying to protect. Me? Or him.”
He hated hearing these words from his own mouth. But it was time to get it all out, for everything to be shared, the pain and the defeat included.
“Did she help him knock you in the pool?” Mona asked.
“Mona, shut up,” said Ryan. Mona ignored him utterly. She was looking at Michael.
“No, she didn’t,” said Michael. “And he shouldn’t have been able to do it alone. I’ve been decked once or twice in my life. It took big men and lucky punches to do it. He was thin, delicate, he was sliding on the ice out there; but he shoved me and into the pool I went. I remember him looking at me as I went down. He has blue eyes. He has very black hair. I told you that already. His skin is very pale, and kind of beautiful. At least it was then.”
“Like the skin of an infant,” said Aaron softly.
“And all of you are trying to tell me,” said Ryan nervously, anxiously, “that this is not a human being?”
“We’re talking science, man,” said Aaron, “not voodoo. This is a creature, so to speak, of flesh and blood. But its genetic blueprint is not human.”