Whispers of the Flesh (29 page)

It took a moment for the implications to start sorting themselves out. Hitch realized he was standing there with his mouth hanging open, but he couldn’t seem to close it.

“I’d always suspected that Isabel was fathered by another man.” Finally, Emmett straightened up and turned to look Hitch in the eye.

There came the muffled trill of a phone from somewhere on the other side of the courtyard. It started to ring again, but somebody picked up.

Emmett smiled. “I’m actually quite gratified to know that it was you. Your DNA is no doubt top drawer.”

Hitch was reeling like he’d just gotten a liter of bourbon pumped directly into his veins. “Isabel . . . ? She’s my . . .” He slumped against the railing, pummeled by warring emotions, not the least being gratitude that Emmett—good old, unflappable, stiff-upper-lip Emmett—was making this easy on him.

Easier than he deserved.

Hitch said, “You have a right to be pissed off, you know.”

“That would be so banal.”

“Emmett . . . Oh, God. Listen, I want you to know why it happened, me and . . .” He couldn’t even say her name. “And . . . and why I didn’t tell you about it at the—”

“There’s no need,”Emmett said. “It was a long time ago, and I assume it happened that weekend, before Maddie and I were even involved. As Inigo says, ‘No harm, no foul,’ eh?”

“No, you deserve to know,” Hitch said, “if only because I kept it a secret from you all these years.”

Soberly Emmett said, “We all have our secrets, friend. There are things I’ve never told you about Grotte Cachée, about Elic and Lili and—”

“Emmett.” Hitch pulled a chair out from the table for Emmett and another one for himself. “Will you please just sit down and listen?”

Ten

I
SPRINTED THROUGH THE cave, along a sort of corridor that would have been black as hell if they hadn’t installed electric lights, one every hundred feet or so.

About a quarter mile in, I came to something that made me stop and stare. Through a wide opening rimmed in ornate cave formations was a domed chamber on the back wall of which stood a huge, crude sculpture of a . . . Well, it had breasts, but male genitals, too. He/she wore rings of iron around the neck, ankles, and wrists, and was holding aloft a pair of cups. The androgynous figure—some kind of fertility symbol, probably—stood on a platform on which had been carved the word
DUSIVÆSUS
, with something indecipherable scratched over it.

A fertility symbol. Perfect. Was it real, or just more evidence that I was completely deranged?

I entered the chamber over a little bridge spanning the cave stream that flowed across its entrance, went up to the statue, and touched it. It felt rough. It felt real.

I sat on the base of the statue, leaning on my elbows while my heart slowed, wondering how a man could just crack like this all of a sudden, with no warning. Well, that was stupid. There’d been years of warning. Nothing happened in a vacuum.

I stretched out on the stone platform, closed my eyes, and watched a kaleidoscope of incredibly vivid images play out in my mind. Puffs of smoke on the ground far below my Phantom, exploding in another world,
puff puff puff
. . . fingers tapping on black-painted walls,
tap tap tap
. . . Dancing top hats singing about trying to make some girl, but they’re on a losing streak, come back next week . . . Lucinda laughing her silly laugh behind a veil of patchouli-scented smoke . . . demons dancing around a bonfire . . .

I could actually feel the heat of the bonfire, that was how vivid the hallucination was. It stung my face, my scalp, filled my skull . . . And as I watched the naked girls silhouetted against the flames, twirling and laughing and beckoning to me, it pooled in my groin, pooled deep, so deep I actually started getting a little hard.

Me, hard?

I opened my eyes to find a man crouching over me, one hand hovering over my head, the other over my crotch.

“What the
fuck
?” I leapt up off the platform, heart slamming.

He was gone. There was no one there. There never had been.

“Oh, Jesus.” I sank down onto the platform, my head in my hands, shaking. “Oh, fuck.” I
was
crazy. There was no doubt about it now. Proof positive.

I shook my head, clawing through my hair. What now? A mental institution? Would I ever be normal again, or was this it?

“Hitch.”

I looked up to find Madeleine crossing the little bridge, looking like an angel wearing a corona of sapphire light. Her hair seemed to radiate, it was so fantastically red; her skin glowed, too, with the luster of white marble.

“Listen to me,” she said, crouching in front of me to take both of my hands in hers. “They told me what they did, Bernie and his cronies. They put a hit of windowpane in your beer, the one they gave me to bring to you.”

“Windowpane? LSD? Are you kidding?” I slumped back against the statue, reeling with relief.

“Listen, I know you’re feeling pretty funky,” she said. “They told me you seemed kind of out of it, but it’s just the acid. You’re tripping. It’ll be over in a few hours, and I’ll stay with you till you’re feeling okay again. Just remember it’s only a drug. The things you’re thinking and seeing aren’t real. You’re not crazy.”

“No, I’m crazy, all right,” I said with a grim little chuckle. “But at least I’m not crazy with a capital K.”

Sitting next to me on the platform, she said, “You’re not crazy at all, Hitch.”

“There’s an Air Force shrink who might disagree with you.”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“No, I spent some time in the hospital after I got back from Hanoi, and it wasn’t just my body that was messed up. I was kind of a basket case.”
Tap tap tap tap tap.

“But you seem so normal. Almost too normal. Even now, I’d never know you were tripping your teeth out.”

“You should have seen me a few minutes ago. I think it’s you being here, saying all the right things. I do have my demons, just like Bernie said, but most of the time, I can keep them under lock and key and act like nothing is wrong.”

“We all have those demons. We’re all putting on an act of one sort or another.”

She stroked my back, and I remembered that day in eighth grade when she came home early from school with cramps from her period; it was
her
memory, not mine, but I remembered it all the same. She went up to her room, and as she was passing by her parents’ bedroom door, she saw him hanging there, her dad, the one person in the world who really loved and understood her . . . She saw his twisted neck, his blackened face. Her head hit the floor, and that was the last thing she could recall for some time.

She said, “I think you really are an old soul, Hitch. I think that’s why you’re getting it together like this. It’s because you have a deep well of wisdom to draw upon.”

She leaned over and kissed my cheek.

I took her face in my hands and kissed her on the mouth, a long, deep kiss, thinking a woman’s lips had never felt like this, so amazingly hot and soft, but of course I was tripping, but still . . .

A feeling uncoiled in my groin, a heaviness, a heat . . .

I kissed her harder, my heart hammering, thinking
This isn’t possible.
But it was happening. I was getting hard. Was it the acid making it happen? Would it still be possible when the drug wore off?

It didn’t matter. Permanent or temporary, it was a miracle as far as I was concerned.

I unlaced the front of Madeleine’s dress and caressed her breasts. She unzipped me, freed my cock—a full-on, ironclad hard-on, my first in over three years.

I laughed through my groan of ecstasy as she stroked me.

“What’s so funny?” she asked as she reached under her dress to pull her panties off.

“Nothing, I’m just . . . I don’t know. Happy.”

“Well, let’s make you even happier.”

She straddled my lap and positioned herself.

“Go slow,” I said, gripping her hips. “I want to feel everything.”

The thrill of penetration was even more acute than when I lost my virginity, not just because of my altered state, but because of my gratitude at being able to experience this again. As a horny nineteen-year-old, I’d assumed I would have a lifetime of sex ahead of me.

I savored every bit of it—her gasping breaths, her slippery heat. The sensation as she rode me, my cock sliding in and out of her, was heart-stopping. It was as if every nerve in my body were clustered in that one organ, quivering faster and faster as our thrusts grew sharp and frantic . . .

She came right before I did, her internal spasms igniting my own orgasm. I went off like a payload of cluster bombs, yelling till I was hoarse.

As we were holding each other, letting our hearts and lungs resume their normal rhythm, me still inside her, she said, “Oh, my God, we didn’t use anything. I never do that.”

“Lost in the moment,” I said, but she looked sincerely anxious, and little wonder. Slipups like this impacted the woman a hell of a lot more than the man. Turning her chin so that she was looking me in the eye, I said, “I actually still believe in doing the right thing. If anything happens, it’s your call. If you decide to have the baby, you’ll have my support, my money, whatever you need. You’ll have a wedding ring, too, if you want it—promise.”

“Wow, you really are Mr. Honor and Duty. Good thing you don’t have a girlfriend.”

I pictured Lucinda in my mind, hoping to God I didn’t have to follow through on that promise.

“Oh, my God,” she said, fixing me with a keen gaze. “You do have a girlfriend.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. How about
Yeah, if she’ll take me back after I tried my damnedest to burn her off?

She kissed me. “You’re a good man, Hitch. There aren’t too many of them left out there.”

As we were tidying ourselves up, I said, “Listen, um, one thing. Don’t tell Emmett about this, okay?”

“Why would I tell him?” she asked as she shimmied into her panties.

“I mean, I don’t want him to find out. You know he’s got a thing for you, right?”

“Yeah, I kind of guessed that. He’s sweet.”

Sweet. Emmett, you poor bastard.

I said, “He’s crazy about you. I mean, head over heels. I need you to promise, Madeleine. I mean,
really
promise that you’ll never let it slip.”

I held out my hand.

She looked at it as if she’d never been offered a handshake before, and maybe she hadn’t. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing her crowd would be into.

She took my hand and met my gaze squarely. “I promise.”

Who did we encounter as we ducked out of the cave but Bernie and his minions standing right in front of us, passing a joint around, with everybody else still lazing around in bacchanalian euphoria.

Madeleine and I must not have tidied up as well as we’d thought, because he took one look at us and said, “Spreading them for the baby killer now, Maddy? I guess drippy little snatches like yours can’t afford to be too particular.”

I walked up to Bernie with my hand fisted, and slammed it into his face. His posse watched like a trio of baby birds as he hit the ground in front of them. He lay still for a second, and then he stirred, a whiny little whimper issuing from his bloodied nose.

I looked at his friends.

They stepped back in unison, as if they’d rehearsed the move.

Most everybody else in the bathhouse stood up and applauded. Some actually offered me a sharp salute.

“You see?” Madeleine said. “I told you he has no idea what grown-up men are about. He didn’t see that coming.”

“I knew that when I did it. I guess I should feel bad about that.” I smiled at her. “But I don’t.”

It was past midnight before Emmett’s car pulled up in front of the château. The library had a sort of terrace that looked out onto the front drive, so I sat there while I waited for him to return. The effects of the drug were much diminished, which I wouldn’t have expected so soon from what Madeleine had told me, but I wasn’t questioning it.

To tell Emmett, or not to tell him, that was the question I pondered as I sat there, smoking and thinking. Having secured Madeleine’s promise of silence gave me the option to go either way. I didn’t like to lie, and I most definitely didn’t like to lie to a close friend who’d taken me under his wing and kept me from becoming a gibbering lunatic these past two years.

But telling him . . . I rehearsed it in my mind.
Emmett, I’ve got something to tell you. You know the girl you’re wild for, the one you can’t stop talking about? The one you just told me yesterday you’ve fallen in love with? Well, funny thing . . .

It would be like sticking a knife in his chest and twisting it, not something you wanted to do to a friend.

Of course, I could simply not bring it up, but that was tantamount to lying. It’d be like that time when I was a kid and my bully of an older cousin wanted night crawlers to fish with. He’s turning over stones in my yard and not having any luck at all, and I could have rolled aside that fallen log over by the back fence and shown him about a million of them. But I didn’t.

Emmett looked weary when he got out of his car and handed the keys to the guard, his T-shirt rumpled, jeans grimy—an unusual state of affairs for the crisply pleated flight lieutenant. I waved to him, and in a few minutes, he joined me on the terrace carrying a bottle of cognac and two snifters.

“Cheers.” We clinked glasses. The cognac was warm and nutty and felt pleasantly hot sliding down my throat.

“Sorry to have abandoned you,” he said. “I had no idea it would take so long to get the electricity sorted out over there. I had to call in these people, but they made a complete hash of it, so I called this other guy who didn’t even show up. I don’t want to talk about it any more than you want to hear it. So, how did you fare among the lotus-eaters?”

“I knocked Bernie Pease unconscious.”

“Who?” Emmett asked as he lit a Dunhill.

“Starbuck.”

“Well done.” He raised his glass.

“With any luck, I broke his nose and it’ll heal ugly.”

“Anything else happen while I was gone?” he asked. “Not to come off like some pathetic, lovesick prat, but did Madeleine ask about me?”

I took a long swallow of cognac, and then another one, staring out into the night.

“Well, did she or—”

“No.”I shook my head, still not looking at him. “ ’Fraid not. Sorry, pal.” It was the truth.

If you didn’t look under the log.