Shadows 7 (7 page)

I hadn't expected that. My pulse started to hammer faster. "Yeah. I've got a studio apartment a couple of blocks from here. I'm a photographer," I added for no good reason.

"Oh?" Her fingers drummed lightly on the table.

"Yeah. Uh . . . I'd like to take some pictures of you." Oh Jesus! I winced inwardly to hear that tired old line come out of my mouth.

"I'll bet you would." She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray, stood up, and reached for her raincoat. My heart sank; she was leaving. She put her coat on and fluffed that wonderful hair out around her shoulders. I sat staring up, hypnotized by her. She was older than I thought at first, pushing forty but still an incredibly beautiful woman. I would have said younger when she first came in, perhaps a trick of the light. But now she was leaving, the kind of woman ministers leave home for, and I'd never see her again. Jesus.

She smiled at me. "Your place?"

I couldn't believe it.

I was all thumbs and stupid remarks as I tried to appear suave while attacking the suddenly impossible task of putting on my raincoat. She leaned against the booth with a tired patience and glanced up at the clock. She finally helped me with the coat before someone had to cut me out of the damned thing. We walked out of the bar with her in the lead, and I gave a few friends a debonair wave, as if leaving with the finest fox in the house was old stuff for me. Taking her hand, I couldn't help thinking how I'd almost let her get away from me.

My studio apartment was quite naturally a mess. I turned on a light and watched her as she picked her way through a maze of lightstands and reflectors. My furnishings were rather sparse, but I did have a studio couch and a couple of easy chairs. The kitchen area was in the rear corner of the big room, away from the window. The sink was full of vintage dishes and maybe some new life forms.

She moved around and studied the pictures on the walls as I fixed a couple of drinks and turned on the stereo. "Very pretty women. How many have you slept with?"

"All" would have been a great answer, "half" would have been half true. "None of them," I muttered.

"I love honesty," she laughed. Then in a husky whisper as she came to me: "It makes me feel so warm toward a man."

We were standing in the middle of my front-room studio with the stereo low and the dim light struggling against the chilled gloom of the big room. She took my hand and guided me to the bedroom in the back of the apartment.

I kissed her full lips. They felt soft and full of promise, parting under mine, searching with her tongue, bringing me to quick readiness. I didn't rush. I'd been waiting a lifetime for this and I was going to enjoy the hell out of it. We undressed each other, pausing to caress favorite parts. Her large breasts were straining to be touched. She stroked and teased me and I pushed her gently back onto the bed—not in a hurry. Hell, I could have foreplayed with her until the cows came home. She was the one in a rush. She cried out then, a sound of relief and hope and something like fear, wrapping her legs around me as we rocked together in abandon. She held me like a vise with her arms and legs, squeezing me tight.

"No, honey, stay. I want it all."

I came and felt a surge of relief flood through me. For her that was it: show's over. She rolled me off her and stood up. "Thank you."

Odd thing to say after an interlude like that. I rolled over and found myself staring up into the wickedest gun barrel I'd ever seen.

"I don't get it. We were having a good time. What gives?"

She stood naked before me, unsmiling, with the pistol leveled at my head. She looked stricken. "Please. I haven't much time and I'm going to need your help. Don't ask questions, I don't have the answers. You have to deliver my baby."

I must have looked classically stupid with my jaw down around my ankles. "You're not pregnant."

"I am now and you're the father."

I managed a laugh like a choking gargle. "Aren't we a little premature? I mean like this stuff usually takes nine months." I laughed again, feeling ridiculous, sitting on the edge of the bed naked as a baseball. But there was nothing funny about her rage or the fear it came out of.

"Stop laughing, goddamnit! I—" She gasped in pain. The pistol dropped from her hand and she fell face forward, curling into a fetal position, holding her stomach. I picked the gun up and dropped it into a drawer. Rolling her over onto her back, I couldn't help notice that she looked even older than I thought the last time. I couldn't explain any of it, the whole thing was beyond me, but I had the feeling that what was happening here was as unique as it was awful.

I showered and dressed. She was moaning and rubbing her stomach when I got back to her. I stood by the bed looking down at her. There was a grotesque aspect to the situation now. I watched in helpless horror as the woman's belly began to swell—a little at first, then faster, as if someone were blowing her up with an air pump. And all the while her hair was graying like flickers of light in the dark mass of it. Sagging, wrinkled skin and brittle bones, long past the ability to stretch against the obvious labor pains, punished themselves to do what they were made for. She looked—she
was
now—sixty years old, the sound of her breathing like a saw in wood.

"Help me, please! Oh God, it's almost too late!"

She gave a low animal growl and drew her knees up against her breasts, her hands clamped on the headboard. The gasps were coming every couple of seconds—and then I could see the first sign of a small head.

She'd asked me to help. Me? In a normal birth I would have been useless as pants on a bird. Here I was a blithering idiot. I could only stand frozen and helpless as the nightmare unfolded in front of me. The baby's head and shoulders protruded now; the woman writhed like a trapped fish. Unintelligible gibberish escaped from her withering lips. Then, somehow shaking out of the trance, I grasped the slippery little shoulders and began tugging, pulling life out of death. The woman was actually shrinking now, falling in on herself, seventy-five, eighty years old. She'd stopped moving by now, gone stiff, gone beyond that,
way
beyond it, and the smell emanating from the decaying mess of her was almost too much to bear. I had the baby almost all the way out. Only the feet were inside. By the time I cleared them, the thing on the bed had been dead a very long time. The smell was sickening. I fought the need to vomit, stumbling into the bathroom for a fresh razor blade to cut the umbilical cord binding the baby to something that didn't quite make it out of the body.

It was a girl. Remembering old movies, I held her up by the little feet and gave the tiny buttocks a sharp smack. Her gasp and yowl started her breathing.

My daughter.

I carried her into the bathroom and washed her down with lukewarm water. Then, messed with blood and other matter I'd rather not think about, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. He looked like I felt, every bit of it. And he was a father.

I wrapped the baby in a blanket and the now unrecognizable remains of my date in the sheets. What to do with the gruesome bundle was a problem. I couldn't take it to the police . . . Sure, they'd believe me. Sure they would . . .

The baby was crying. It was hungry. I collapsed by the picture window in the front-room studio with her in my arms as she nursed at the makeshift bottle I scrounged from my photo equipment, some milk from the icebox and—hell, why not?—an unused condom from a pack in the dresser.

What the hell was I to do? The shock was wearing off, replaced by exhaustion. I wearily placed the bundle on the floor next to my chair, adjusted the bottle for her to work at it, and sat back with a very deep sigh. I'd had a hard night.

I watched the rain sifting past the streetlights as the drops splashed on the pavement. Cars plowed through puddles and sent sheets of dirty water up on the deserted sidewalks. The clock across the street said midnight. I yawned and looked down at the baby. She was happily pulling away on her bottle, watching me with clear blue eyes. A little while ago they were barely open and still milky, unfocused. God help me—she'd grown.

I fell asleep in the chair, lulled by the soft drumming of the rain against the window. I must have slept for over three hours when I snapped awake suddenly, more out of a sense of guard duty than from any particular noise. The rain had stopped but the streets were shining wet, and I caught the reflection of the stoplight on the corner in the damp sheen of the sidewalk. I remembered and sat up.

The blanket was empty and the bottle lay next to it. Behind me I heard faintly the soft tread of tiny feet. Turning, I could just make out the small form coming toward me out of the dark. My hair rose; I jumped up, knocking over the chair. She approached with careful child-precision. She was wrapped in a sheet that trailed behind her, and her dark hair was tousled down around her bare shoulders, and she pulled at my pants leg, urgent and trusting.

"I'm hungry, Daddy."

I went into the bedroom, picked up the bundle of bedding, and carried it down to the dumpster in the back alley. And I disposed of the remains of that thing I had made love to. The mother of that thing in my apartment. I wasn't thinking; clear-cut thought was impossible. I walked back into the apartment. The little girl was standing by the window, peering out.

"Where'd you go, Daddy?"

"I just threw your mother in the garbage. From what I knew of her, she ought to feel right at home."

Her eyes weren't that young anymore. She pulled her curls away from her shoulders and shook her head. A beautiful child. She didn't look anything like me. I made her a sandwich and a glass of milk, watching her as she ate—six or seven years old, only I knew better. She wasn't that many hours old. I retreated to my chair by the window and stared hopelessly out into the wet streets. Then she was at my side.

"What was my mother like?"

"I don't know. We didn't spend much time cultivating a relationship."

She giggled, pressing my hand in her two small ones. "I love you, Daddy. You talk funny."

She leaned over and kissed me with a little hug. I felt myself go soft but I couldn't let her know it. We held onto each other as a fresh sheet of rain beat against the windows and made little wet rainbows out of the blurry neon signs across the street. We talked together about nothing much until finally, just before daylight, we both drifted off to sleep.

The roar of a bus outside the front window woke me with a start. I yawned and stretched; a glance at the clock across the street said it was a little after 8 A.M.

"You want something to eat, Dad?"

A pretty adolescent girl carried a plate of eggs into the dining area. "C'mon, Dad. I know you're hungry. The one without the sausage is mine. I hate sausage."

I wasn't in shock anymore but still not ready to accept this thing as it was. She sat down and scraped eggs off into her plate from the skillet.

"What are you staring at, Dad? You act like you've never seen me before. C'mon—eat up before it gets cold."

While I ate, I studied her: seventeen or eighteen now, well formed, rapidly becoming the woman I had been with the night before. She devoured her food hungrily and downed a glass of milk in one pull, leaving a white mustache on her upper lip. I leaned over and wiped it off.

"Thanks, I'm always so messy. Okay if I do the dishes later?
All Quiet on the Western Front
is on TV, and I've never seen it. It's a classic."

Whoever, whatever, from wherever, these things were born with some memories. I waved my hand helplessly. She could do whatever she wanted as far as I was concerned. The only thing she couldn't do was leave this apartment. I'd have to see to that. Until whatever was going to happen . . . happened . . . I'd just sit tight.

The morning passed in front of the television as we watched Lew Ayres in a dated but vivid story of a doomed German infantryman in World War I. She sat with her eyes glued to the screen. I couldn't help admire the beauty budding, blooming in front of me. She was full-bodied now, the woman I'd loved and watched give birth to her about sixteen hours before. The same woman.

The movie ended. She stood up and stretched, her breasts straining against the sheet that fit her a lot better now. She caught my glance. "Like what you see?"

I felt the surge of heat. I must have blushed. "Sorry. You're very beautiful. But I shouldn't have been staring."

"Were you in the war?"

"I was in Korea," I mumbled, glad for the change of subject.

She sat down again, drawing the sheet up around her. "Men don't have much to look forward to, going off to war all the time. I'm glad I'm a woman."

I thought,
Honey, they've got a lot more to look forward to than you do, any way you slice it.

In a moment she went over to the stereo, sifting through the records, smiling over her shoulder at me. "Got an idea." She put on a record and came to me, holding out her hands in invitation. "Let's dance, Daddy."

I moved with her to the music, feeling the same power begin to sap at me as the night before. She pressed against me and hummed in my ear. I wrapped my fingers in that lush head of hair and pressed my face to hers, completely lost to the moment. She tilted her head back and looked up dreamily through seductive half slits of eyes. Her lovely mouth was so close to mine.

"I love you, Daddy," she whispered.

Her mouth came up and I mashed mine down on it. That one second none of the sick, bizarre truth of this thing was going to rob me of the one moment a guy like me remembers all his life. Then, as she writhed her body against me, I felt something else, something cold. As if I were detached, across the room watching, I saw myself pressing back against her urgently thrusting body, sucking at her mouth, the mouth I remembered. A flash of her mother darted through my mind, the woman, the old woman, decaying before she was even dead. The same woman kissing me now. I saw the whole monstrous thing for what it was and pushed away from her so hard that she fell backward onto the floor, frightened.

"Get off of me!" I screamed. "Don't touch me. What are you? I don't think there's a
word
for you."