talk to reporters personally from his hospital bed. Reuben only noted the "bite" in passing, because Stuart had only noted it in passing. No one was attaching significance to the fact that Reuben himself had been bitten. The drama of the bite was not playing out in the public eye.
Reuben and Laura went upstairs, got into the high-backed bed, and cuddled together watching a beautiful French film, Cocteau,s Beauty and the Beast, and Reuben,s eyes grew heavy with sleep. It disturbed him actually to see the Beast talking so eloquently in French to Beauty. The Beast wore velvet clothes and fine lace shirts, and had glistening eyes. Beauty was fair and gentle like Laura.
He began to dream, and in his dream he was running in full wolf-coat through an endless field of blowing grass, his forelegs bounding effortlessly before him. And beyond lay the forest, the great dark never-ending forest. There were cities mixed up in the forest, glass towers rising as high as the Douglas fir and the giant sequoia, buildings festooned with ivy and trailing vines, and the great oaks swarming over many-storied houses with peaked roofs and smoking chimneys. All the world had become the forest of trees and towers. Ah, this is paradise, he sang as he climbed higher and higher.
He wanted to wake and tell Laura about the dream, but he,d lose the dream if he woke, if he stirred at all, because the dream was as fragile as mist and yet utterly real to him. Night came, and the towers were covered in glowing lights, sparkling and winking amid the dark trunks of the trees and the immense branches.
"Paradise," he whispered.
He opened his eyes. She was leaning on her elbow looking down at him. The ghostly light from the television illuminated her face, her moist lips. Why would she want him the way he was now, just a young man, a very young man, with hands as delicate as his mother,s?
But she did. She began to kiss him roughly, her fingers closing on his left nipple, shocking him with immediate desire. She was playing with his skin as he,d played with hers. Her oval-tipped fingernails scratched playfully at his face, fingers finding his teeth, pinching a little at his lips. Her weight felt good to him, the tickle of her hair falling down. It felt good, naked flesh against naked flesh, and this soft moist slippery flesh, yes, against his flesh, yes. I love you, Laura.
He awoke just as the sun was rising.
This was the tenth night since the transformation had first happened, and this was the first night that he had not experienced the change. He was relieved, but he felt curiously unsettled, that he had missed something of vital importance, that he had been expected somewhere and he had failed to appear, that he was not being true to something inside him that felt like, but was not, conscience.
Chapter Thirty-Two
SEVEN NIGHTS PASSED before Reuben got in to see Stuart again.
Reuben was able to get his own final rabies shot from Dr. Cutler as agreed, but Dr. Cutler just couldn,t let anyone near Stuart until the fever was under control, among other things. She was in contact with Grace, and very grateful to Reuben for that connection.
If Grace had not been attending the boy from then on, even coming up to Santa Rosa to see him personally and confer with Reuben personally, Reuben would have gone mad from the suspense. Dr. Cutler took his calls, and was more than friendly, but she wasn,t going to chat freely. She did let slip that Stuart was experiencing a remarkable growth spurt and she couldn,t quite figure it out. Of course the boy was only sixteen. The epiphyseal plates hadn,t closed yet, but still, she,d never seen anyone physically grow the way this boy was growing. And the growth spurt was affecting his hair too.
Reuben was frantic to see him, but absolutely nothing he said could change Dr. Cutler,s mind.
Grace was infinitely more forthcoming as long as not a single word of what she confided saw print. Reuben swore absolute confidentiality. I just want him to be all right, to live, to survive, to be as if none of this happened to him.
Feverish, at times incoherent, Stuart was not only surviving but thriving, Grace said, exhibiting all the same symptoms Reuben had exhibited, bruises vanishing, ribs completely healed, skin glistening with health, and the boy,s body experiencing the baffling growth spurt, as Dr. Cutler had