Psyche (38 page)

In the autumn, on a day unmarked on any calendar she had ever seen, she would be twenty. Seventeen years since Mag had discovered her on the doorstep of the shack. To stare back across a gulf as wide as that was to stare at nothing. Even so short a time ago as the previous day, this knowledge would have hurt and depressed her. Now it was simply a fact to be accepted. I am an adult, she thought, and it is up to me to see that this is not an end but a beginning.

She came to a stop on a corner where neon lights burned, multi-coloured, against brick buildings flowing one into another, all individuality lost in the waning light. I must have somewhere to go, she thought. Where can I go with any good reason?

She drew back against an unlit shop front to avoid being jostled by the passers-by, and looked up at a sky shuttered by heavy clouds that refused any possibility of an afterglow. It was unlikely to rain soon, but when it did, it would rain hard.

She did not see the gaunt grey wolf of a man who, furtive even in a crowd, passed in front of her, his eyes fixed on the pavement beneath his feet, his left hand massaging a twitching muscle in his cheek.

There will be no moon tonight, she thought, as there was no sun today. And, thinking this, she knew suddenly where she would go.

A dark wind from the west caught at her open coat, causing her to shiver involuntarily as she turned and set off swiftly toward the east, her eyes sombre blue pools in an expressionless face. She had no wish to do what she was doing, but, in an instant, it had become something she must do before she could feel free to re-route her life into what would be, for the first time, a channel of her own choosing.

Ordered echelons of street lights admitted the defeat of another day when Psyche reached a high stone wall beyond which spread unilluminated acres with no defense against the night; a no-man's land shrouded in thick twilight, enfolded in a silence more compelling than the stir of the living world from which it had been isolated.

Skirting the wall in search of the gate that must break it at some point, she was alone on a street undisturbed by anything other than the sound of her own footsteps and the quiet whimpering of the gusty wind.

The black iron scroll-work gates were locked. Rising to more than twice her height, broad enough when open to permit the passing of a funeral cortège, they stood a barrier, until the sun should rise again, against any pretense of communication between life and death.

She lifted her hands in order to hold on to iron as cold and insensate as those it guarded, scarcely realizing that she did so because she needed the physical support. I should never have come to this place, she thought. To have imagined even for a moment that by so doing she could re-establish some ephemeral connection between herself and Kathie was to have allied herself with the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages. Kathie's body might be buried here, but Kathie herself was not here, and never had been.

Psyche knew that she would have felt this even more strongly if she had been able to enter amongst white tombstones and black clipped cedar and yew. Yet she clung to the gates without the strength or will to tear herself away.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”

Faint, suddenly dizzy, she stared down dark aisles where white marble and black foliage were now diffused and blurred as if by the shadow of death itself. And it was several minutes before she realized that her vision was being tricked by sheets of rain.

I must find some shelter, she thought confusedly.

Her hands still held out in front of her, she turned away from
the cemetery gates, afraid that at any moment she would actually faint.

She saw the sign on the opposite side of the street when she was a little less than half a block from the locked iron gates. Lit by a yellow light, bold black letters offered her the sanctuary she so badly needed—“Strangers Welcomed”.

As she stepped off the curb on to the road, the wet slur of her shoes sounded as she imagined a tide must sound, running out fast, sucking futilely at the insecurity of constantly shifting sands. She never saw the heavy truck, even when it loomed above her, when its brakes screamed a warning too late for her to hear.

Nick's wife, Alice, opening her own front door, recognized Sharon at once, although she had never seen her before
.

“He has come back, hasn't he?” Sharon asked, and she had difficulty in keeping her voice even. “He isn't still away?”

Alice, in full possession
of
the Story in so far as Sharon herself knew it, and knowing also as much as Nick had seen
fit to
tell her, said gently, “Yes, he's back.”

“Can I see him now?” Now—this minute—sooner. I have waited a week, a week in which I have scarcely slept. Don't, for the love of God, keep me waiting any longer!

Alice, looking at the face so like the one she had seen in Nick's paintings, recognizing the desperate anxiety in blue eyes oddly familiar, was suddenly really angry with Nick for having refused to wait at the house, for having gone to the studio
.

“I'm sorry,” she said, even more gently. “He is at the studio. Come in while I sketch out the route for you. It isn't easy to find.”

Sharon managed a travesty of a smile. “Thank you. He didn't say anything?”

“I think you had better wait and talk to him.”

Less than an hour later Sharon was walking rapidly across a daisy-strewn field toward a red-roofed barn
.

Still later that day she slammed behind her, with uncharacteristic
fury, a door bearing a false door-knocker beneath a faded legend that read “Community Shelter”. “Bitch!” she murmured, sick and white with anger and frustration
.

The following morning, Dwight at her side, her hand close held in his, she descended a tarnished, treeless slope toward a weatherbeaten tar-paper shack
.

1

T
HE
eyes, dark, brilliant, compelling, seemed to hang disembodied against a grey mist that surged without dissipating. eyes like twin lancets, sharp as the keenest scalpel, that probed mercilessly into herbare and unprotected brain.

Psyche, twisting her head to and fro on the pillow, could hear her own voice answering questions, but the questions themselves were inaudible to her conscious mind. It was as if those hypnotic eyes were capable of making their own demands without recourse to words, of dragging forth things she did not even know about herself.

My head hurts, she thought. Why should my head hurt? A name—a name—you are asking me for a name now, but this time I will be too clever for you. A name—you want Bel's name. Bel said never to give her name to anybody—ever—ever—ever.

“Ever—ever—ever,” she whispered.

Didn't you hear me? I gave you your answer. Now leave me alone.

But the question was repeated, and repeated again, until she knew that the response she had made was not adequate, that she would have to find a more acceptable one. A name, she must give a name. Not Bel's name. Not the name of anyone she had ever known—a name belonging to nobody.

“Sharon!” she cried out in anguish, and slipped back into the unconsciousness that had claimed her off and on for over five weeks.

The doctor, his eyes still fixed on her face, continued to lean across the end of the high hospital bed for some time. Then, taking a gold pencil and a note-book from the pocket of his suit, he wrote steadily, filling three pages with small precise handwriting. Not until this was done did he move around to the side of the bed to lay his hand first on Psyche's forehead and then on her wrist. Satisfied, he rang for a nurse, and, while waiting for one to come, whistled softly under his breath as he looked with clinical detachment at a patient who was of extraordinary interest to him.

He was a handsome man, but a cold one, the brilliance of his intellect shedding no warmth over his manner or his long, ascetic face. Tall and spare, at forty-five he stood securely on the summit of his own particular mountain peak, from which vantage point he looked down, not without contempt, on the mental, emotional, and nervous aberrations he made it his business to dissect. His success pleased but in no way surprised him. Ambitious, unhampered by sympathy, he had climbed to the top of his profession with a minimum of waste effort, combining brain surgery, for its greater material gains, with the psycho-physiology that was his ruling passion. Seeing his own mind as a perfectly equipped operating table on which to take apart lesser minds, he expected to leave a lasting mark on research in the fields of memory and heredity.

“You rang. Doctor?” The nurse sounded breathless, for she was more than a little afraid of this man whose large, deep-set eyes could impale one like a butterfly on a pin.

“Your patient will regain normal consciousness within the next twenty-four hours. When this happens, you are to advise me at once. Please see that the nurse on night duty is given the same instructions.”

“Yes, Doctor,” she said, and found that she was speaking to a distinguished back that was already halfway across the room.

She closed the door after him, something that he did not expect
to have to do for himself, and went over to the bed. Looking down at a strained white face and tangled blonde hair, she thought rebelliously, “Why can't he leave her alone until she's feeling better. It's a wonder he hasn't killed her instead of curing her.” But even as she thought this, she knew that no other man on the continent could have lifted the depressed area at the back of Psyche's skull with the same delicate skill and precision.

Going to the bathroom for a wash-cloth, absently pausing before the mirror to straighten a white cap on thick auburn curls, she considered the story that, in bits and pieces, had emerged from a long delirium, and was forced to admit that she herself was intensely curious to know the whole of it. Her curiosity, however, was offset by sympathy that caused her to align herself, in this case, with patient rather than doctor. To study, and attempt to question, someone who did not know this was being done, seemed to her utterly unfair, if not actually dishonest, and she was secretly pleased that so far, to the best of her knowledge, the doctor had been unable to unearth anything as factual as names and places. He had discovered the girl's own name, now written on her chart, and that was all. Odd, how she had guarded these things, almost as if she had prepared herself in advance for an inquisition before which they must under no circumstances be disclosed. She might have dropped from Mars for all they knew about her that could be put to any practical use. She had been brought in without a purse, without identification of any kind, and every Moran in the telephone book had denied all knowledge of her. Lucky for her that there had been witnesses to her accident, that the trucking company, because the truck had been running without lights, had been made to accept full responsibility. Otherwise she would have landed in a public ward, rather than in Private Patients with a private nurse who—she grinned at herself in the mirror—should be getting back to her job.

Very gently wiping perspiration from a damp white forehead, she allowed her glance to wander to the chart on the table beside the bed, and small teeth bit the underlip of a pretty mouth. It just doesn't seem right, she thought. It was not, however, the chart
itself, with its temperature graph descending to normal, that bothered her, but the name at the top. Maggie Moran. I suppose I'm silly about names, she thought, but they usually do fit somehow, and this one doesn't. She isn't one bit like a Maggie Moran. I wonder if there can be some mistake about it.

Psyche's wide-open eyes, fastened on her face in steady inquiry, startled her so much that she jumped visibly. She had seen the blue eyes open before, but not like this, not with depths in them.

“I'vebeen sick?”

The young nurse had herself in hand again. Professional, competent, she said quietly, “Yes. Quite sick. You are almost better. Now don't talk. Just lie there without talking, and I'll call the doctor.”

I must have been partly conscious before this. Psyche thought rapidly, because I know I am in a hospital and I am not surprised. When did I come here? Yesterday, or the day before?

“Don't call him yet—not for a minute.”

Her hand hovering just above the bell, the nurse hesitated. “Ihave orders”

The perspiration was breaking out on Psyche's forehead again. “Give me just a moment first.”

The nurse looked at the open window, at a patch of sky reflecting late afternoon light, and then at her watch. Nearly six o'clock. In three minutes she would be going off duty. “All right,” she said, “but don't ever tell anyone. If Svengali finds out that someone even said boo to you before he did, it will be the end.”

“Svengali?”

The nurse's cheeks were pink. “That slipped out. Forget it. You're sure you feel strong enough to talk now. Miss Moran?”

Psyche's flicker of surprise at being addressed by name, and by that name, was so slight that the nurse, if she had not been expecting it, would have missed it. I was right, she thought triumphantly, it isn't her name. She isn't sufficiently oriented yet to have been surprised simply because we knew her name.

“I seem to have rather a headache,” Psyche said, “but otherwise
I feel all right. Tell me, how long have I been here? What happened?”

“You were in a traffic accident, and you've been here just over five weeks.”

“Five weeks!”

“I know. It doesn't seem possible, does it? You were hit by a truck, and you've been more or less unconscious ever since. But don't worry. You're perfectly all right now. A few weeks' convalescence and you'll be as good as new.”

Lifting her hand to her head, Psyche thought, it doesn't look like my hand; it's too thin, too colourless. “Does—does anyone know I'm here?”