to him as if she was drowning, as if some invisible wave might sweep her away.
The man,s remains were hairless now, as if there had never been any hair at all. Only a coarse and barely visible dust covered him and the surrounding carpet.
For a long moment, they remained still, Laura crying ever more softly, exhausting herself in her tears, and then finally growing quiet.
"I have to bury him now," said Reuben. "There are shovels back there in that shed."
"Bury him! Reuben, you can,t." Laura looked up at him as if awakened from a nightmare. She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. "Reuben, you can,t simply bury him. Surely you realize how valuable, how utterly priceless, this body is - to you!"
She climbed to her feet and looked down at the man from a little ways off as if she was afraid to go closer. The head now lay on its side, the left eye half closed and yellowish. The flesh of the face and body was faintly yellowish too.
"In this body are all the cellular secrets of this power," Laura said. "If ever you are to find out, if ever you are to know. Why, you can,t discard this thing. That,s unthinkable."
"And who,s going to do the studying of this body, Laura?" asked Reuben. He was so exhausted that he feared the change would come, too soon. He needed his strength to dig a hole deep enough for this being,s grave. "Who,s going to biopsy the organs, remove the brain, do the autopsy? I can,t do those things. You can,t do those things. Who can?"
"But there has to be some way to preserve it, to save it so that someone eventually can."
"What? Stow it in a freezer? Risk having somebody find it here, connect it to us? You are seriously suggesting we conceal this body on the premises of this house where we live?"
"I don,t know," she said frantically. "But Reuben, you can,t simply take this thing, this mysterious thing, and consign it to the dirt, you can,t just bury it. My God, this is an unimaginable organism, of which the world knows nothing. It points the way to understanding - ." She broke off. She stood quiet for a moment, her hair tumbling down on either side of her face like a veil. "Could it be put somewhere ... where someone else would find it? I mean miles from here."
"Why, to what purpose?" Reuben asked.
"What if it were found, and analyzed and blamed for all the crimes that have occurred?" She looked at Reuben. "Just think about it for a minute. Don,t say no. This thing tried to kill us. Say, we left it somewhere off the highway, in plain sight, so to speak, and what if they found some strange mixture of human DNA and wolf fluids ... the Chrism, as he called it - ."
"Laura, the mitochondrial component of the DNA would prove that this wasn,t the being who slaughtered the others," Reuben said. "Even I know that much science."
He stared at the head again. It seemed even more shriveled than before, and to be darkening slightly like a piece of fruit ripening into decay. The body too was shrinking and darkening, the trunk particularly, though the feet were shriveling to nubs. Just nubs.
"And do you realize what this creature told us?" said Reuben, patiently. "He sentenced me to death for the trouble I caused, the ,prodigious achievements,, as he called them, the fact that I,d attracted notice. These things want secrecy; they depend on it. And how do you think the other Morphenkinder would respond if I dumped this body unceremoniously into the public domain?"
She nodded.
"There are others, Laura! This thing managed to tell us a great deal."
"You,re right, on all counts," she said. She too was watching the subtle changes in the body and the head. "I could swear it,s ... disappearing," she said.
"Well, shriveling, drying up."
"Disappearing," she said again.
She came back to him and sat down beside him. "Look at it," she said. "The bones inside are disintegrating. It,s flattening out. I want to touch it, but I can,t."
Reuben didn,t answer.
The body and the head were deflating, flattening; she was right. The flesh now looked powdery and porous.
"Look!" she said. "Look at the carpet. Look where the blood - ."
"I see it," he whispered. The blood was a tissue-thin glaze on the surface of the rug. And the glaze was silently cracking into a million tiny bits and pieces.