The Captive, page 23
"Barry," she whispered fiercely as they embraced and his crutches fell one on each side. They held each other a long time, saying nothing, feeling only the closeness.
"You're going to wear out his good leg that way," Judy Rossi said, laughing and handing Barry back his crutches.
When they had gone inside and everyone had talked about the adventure, Mina supplying stories about the Big Pussy Cat, Renee telling about the absurd Nazis, and Barry about the police and his detective work with Vaire, when it was dying down and the familiarity of the house came stealing over them again and Judy said she had better get home, then Barry and Renee felt almost shy with each other, looking with half-hidden glances at each other and then laughing, tears in their eyes, Mina laughing at them and hugging each in turn, and Judy calling them ridiculously in love, then it was time to begin their lives again. And they felt almost unable to start until the joy had died down, as if their fullness with each other would not allow such things as suppers and bedtimes, but only the long looks and the very serious hand holding and the sudden tearful embraces that left them all breathless.
But there were certain realities that had to be taken care of, and when they had agreed to call the police tomorrow, to have what Judy had brought over for supper, and to think about very little else, there was still something in Renee's mind that would not stop, something that itched, irritated like an insect bite, like a pebble in the shoe, a mote in the eye.
"Your leg," she began, as they sat at the table drinking coffee after supper."
"An unlucky shot," Barry said, grinning. "Not so bad, though, when you remember those idiots shooting up the place like that." His smile faded as he saw her frown, a very slight tightening of her brows.
She wouldn't ask it, couldn't think it really, but she did. "That big animal, it was shot too, in the same leg." When she found she had said it, making a connection by mere juxtaposition in time, by the mere ordering of utterances, she felt her face go cold and saw by the expression on her husband's face that a thing had been said, a connection made that should not have been. She felt a sudden terror inside, as if she wanted to go back twenty seconds, go back and not say it, run the film backwards just this once, not say what she had said. Not even those two words.
Barry sat very still, holding his coffee cup and looking at his wife, his eyes fixed on one spot, as if he had petrifled. She had said it, opened the door for all the unwanted memories to come crowding in, all the coincidences involving the strange beast that had plagued her family, the beast in the cage, the green eyes that reminded her of someone, and she looked with horror at her husband's deep green eyes as he stared back at her. She pulled her gaze away and turned slowly, as if she were under water, seeing things dimly, to look at her daughter who sat in her chair with the same half-frightened, petrified expression she saw on Barry's face. I won't believe this, she thought. I will ask a direct question, and seem insane to them, anything to put the world back where it was, to keep from thinking these crazy things. But she couldn't speak for a moment, feeling the eyes of her daughter and her husband resting on her like weights, the silence in the room suffocating her. Finally, taking a strangled breath, she lifted her head.
"You both know something I don't," she said, feeling lightheaded and with her mind floating uneasily above nothingness.
"Yes," Barry said, very low, "but it's hard to believe, and I wanted to never have to tell you."
"Tell me now," Renee said, leaning back, her arms hanging stiaight down as if she were asleep in her chair.
"The Beast and I," Barry said very softly, "we are in the same space, we occupy the same space, the same body."
She did not move, not even when her daughter came over to her chair and picked up her hand and held it.
"I was hoping," Barry said, his hands clasped as if praying, the knuckles white with pressure, "hoping I could find a way to never have it come out, maybe with an amulet, maybe some other way, but I don't think there is a way." He raised his shoulders helplessly. "I'm part of the thing, maybe not a real person at all."
When there was no response from his wife, Barry went on, letting it come out, the truth at last, not knowing if she was taking this in, believing it, thinking him crazy, what.
"I had some hope when I picked up memories of an earlier time than one year ago when I became the Third Person the Beast has created. I remembered sometimes things that happened earlier in my life, just as if I were a real person - places, people. But they are probably fakes, imitation memories that come with the creation of the Person. I don't know about that, I was only hoping." He looked up at Renee with his eyes wide.
"I'm a human being, I'm as human as you are. But when it needs to, or when I let it, the Beast replaces me and goes about its own business."
Renee lifted her eyes slowly, looked remarkably sane and direct as he said the last words. "And it was Little Robert too, wasn't it? And that was the beast in the cage we saw last year, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"But they're really not the same," Mina said suddenly. "The Big Pussy Cat isn't like Barry. He's my new Daddy, and the -"
Renee shushed her daughter by raising her hand quickly. She looked across at Barry's hopeless face, the pain of her expected horror already present in the slight flinching around the eyes, the tight-held lips. "It saved our lives," Renee said, reaching over to take her husband's hand. "You saved our lives."
"The Beast loves Mina, I think," Barry said, thinking back. "We, I mean the creature and I, don't really share all experiences, at least I don't think - hell, I don't know what it knows about me and how I think, but yes, we both saved you."
"Can't you ever get away from it?" Renee said, her eyes narrowing now as she began to think about a problem that had just minutes before been unthinkable.
"The Second Person, Charles, found an amulet, and your mother had one too, that kept the Beast from appearing as long as the person wore it or had it in his home. But both of them were lost. That's the only way I know of keeping my own body and mind."
"But you said you had memories," Renee said.
"They could be false. It's like I have a complete past, I think, but I don't know what part of it is made up for the occasion and what part might be real."
"But if somebody else verifled that you had been a real person," Renee said, her voice rising in excitement. "If somebody else remembered Barry Golden from more than a year ago, then you'd know that at least."
"Sure, but I haven't found anybody," Barry said. "And I don't know if I was a writer living in the Southwest, if I had a brother named Leonard, if any of that story is really true. I haven't met anybody ..."
"Frank Rossi knew you," Renee said, her face steady and unsmiling as she thought back, trying to pin down the memory of what Frank had said. That night the Rossis had been at the house, months ago now, when she and Frank were in the kitchen making drinks and he had dropped the ice tray, and then she remembered.
"He said you must have forgotten that you wrote an editorial in college that he picked up for the Journal, and that was more than seven years ago!"
Barry looked stunned. "You sure he said it was me?"
"That's why he hired you, silly," Renee said. "He knew your work from somewhere else too, it seems like."
"Well hell, why didn't he say something," Barry said, setting his cast up on a chair and massaging the leg above the plaster.
"Who would know a person had amnesia unless the person said so?" Renee said. "And that's what you've got, amnesia. Whatever this thing is that has taken you over, it blocks out your memory and makes you think you're part of it."
"Maybe we can find out," Barry said quietly. "There are files of newspapers from those years, maybe other writing I did." He began to feel the hopelessness again. "But it can't help unless I can get away from this thing, whatever it is, supposing I'm not just a fake person it uses. And I can't get away because we occupy the same space and time. I talked to it one time, and it said we were in the same time and space and couldn't be separated, that it would be like trying to separate the front and back of a page, the two sides of a coin."
Renee jumped up from her chair so it skidded across the polished floor. "That's not true!" she almost shouted, kneeling down at Barry's side and hugging him, kissing his face and neck. "Oh, Barry, it lied to you, I know it lied."
He caressed the gleaming black hair and inhaled the scent of her, wondering if she would ever be able to face it when he couldn't face it himself. "No, it's true."
"No, it isn't! Up there on the mountain, don't you remember?"
"After the shootout at the car, I only shifted out once, when Lowden grabbed you. I couldn't stand by and see him dragging you around like that."
"That's it," Renee said, shaking his face between her hands. "Don't you remember?" She looked at her daughter, who was standing by Barry's other side. "Sweetheart, you remember, don't you, when the Big Pussy Cat rescued you from that man who grabbed you away in the dark, when those lights went on?"
Mina nodded and said, "The Big Pussy Cat gave the man a terrible bite, and then the lights went on." She paused, trying to remember.
"Did you see Barry anywhere?" Renee prompted.
"He was over beside you, killing Mr. Lowden," she said, looking at Barry wonderingly. "How did you do that?"
"I couldn't have," Barry said, his eyes looking from wife to daughter and back again. "It couldn't be."
"It was," Renee said. "I saw you both. The beast was over by Mina, at least twenty or thirty feet away, and you were right beside me."
"That's right," Barry said. "I remember hitting Lowden, but it was at the same time ..." His face looked down into Renee's, an incredulous expression growing as he began to believe it. "Separate," he said slowly. "We were separate."
Later, when Mina was asleep and they had renewed their love in spite of supernatural creatures or hell itself, Barry said, "If I'd told you this long ago, we might have begun working on it together."
"That's what wives are for, among other things," Renee said. She sounded sleepy, but there was something else she wanted to say. Barry could feel her wanting to say it and waited.
"Besides," she said and yawned a long yawn, "you've got to be a real human because I think I'm about to miss my third period in a row, and that's going to make you a daddy."
***
The house is quiet again. I shift and lie beside the woman for a moment, sensing her fully. The glow of life vibrations envelops me, the honey scent of her body after making love. It is a full life to be human, I realize, thinking of these three people whose lives I share. I slip from the bed and hobble outside where I can think in the cool air. At the edge of the Rio Grande I lie down on the sand and consider what these people have discovered, the inexplicable shifting out of my Person into a separate space. The woman is right. I remember.
I know also that my love for Mina has in some way obliterated the need to compel other creatures to my will. It is not that I might not do this thing, but that I no longer want to. She has filled some space I did not know was empty. But what of Barry? And what of this human situation, the woman's pregnancy? I feel a great compassion now for these people who are indeed my family, for I wish to help them if I can. That is the change I feel. There must be a fourth lesson that I could not learn until I reached it: love gives meaning.
As I hobble back to the house under the cottonwoods, I feel a quickening of my heart even before my spatial sense picks out her presence. Mina waits for me by the swing in the darkness. She is like my own cub, I think, hurrying into the dark yard to greet her.
"I don't want to ride tonight," she says, pulling at my neck to make me lie beside her. I feel her breath in my ear, her little arm around my neck in the fur. She nuzzles me for a time.
"I bet I'm the only girl in the whole world with a man daddy and a Big Pussy Cat daddy," she says at last.
We borh love you, Mina, I say to her, half-knowing what she will ask of me now.
"And I clon't want you to go away," she says, caressing my ears. "But Mommy and Barry are my really true family, especially now that I'm going to have a brother or sister."
You want me to be part of your family? (I feel a sinking sensation inside as I realize what I am about to do for the sake of this little child.)
"Couldn't you let Barry be my only daddy now?" she says, sitting back and trying to look into my eyes. I feel her mind probing my own. She has great undeveloped power in her mind. "And then you could be real at the same time and run and hunt and play whenever you wanted to."
Your daddy and I cannot be separated. (Was it an illusion?) I don't know how it can be done, Mina. But I love you, Mina, and will help you and Barry and Renee to be a real family.
She understands what I mean, for her mind is almost one with my own. She sighs, and I feel her body relax against my side. After a time I sense she is going to sleep and I rise, pick her up in my arms and carry her in to her own bed. She rolls over and sleeps soundly without a word.
Outside again in the cooling dust of the ditch bank I lie like a tired housecat and watch the late moon rise. It is on the wane, and I feel no particular fascination with its mottled face as I usually do. I have agreed to subdue myself for the sake of my family. With that thought I feel somewhere the soft closing of a portal. Something is slipping away from me, perhaps the wildness; perhaps this is what it means to grow up, to take on responsibility for loved ones. This is my family. I have saved them from death. As the resolve makes itself in my mind, I recall Aunt Cat who thought I was a demon, and Charles who called me The Beast. But I have only wanted to learn human love, to learn what they seem to do withont effort. It seems to me now that I have made that transition, taken the step from heedless beast to awareness and compassion. Yes, I will do this thing, for love.
I rise and hobble into the house where my family sleeps.
From the back cover:
THE ORPHAN OF ANOTHER TIME AND SPACE HAS COME TO LIVE WITHIN US.
THE BEAST...
Listen - you'll hear him chasing the frightened night creatures; breathe - you'll smell the musk of his scent. You know what he is not... but not what he is. A golden bear. A great cat. A more-than-human being who can bend your will to his.
ASSUMES HUMAN FORM...
He becomes a man who knows not what he is, but still he fights for an identity - while the Beast within uses him, drives him in a search that may kill them both.
AND BECOMES A CAPTIVE!
But the Man-Beast has broken the rule of Solitude... and now he will become a prisoner of a force even greater than his own - a force all too human for bestial understanding.
The Captive
The Second Book of the Beast
Robert Stallman, The Captive
