Sleep No More

Chapter 8

Sited on half a city block on the north side of town, Bienville was a world unto itself. The foundation of the Greek Revival mansion had been laid into a hill twenty feet above the street, and high stucco walls rising from the sidewalk presented a blank face to passersby. Only a narrow gravel drive that tunneled off Wall Street through thick foliage led up to the terraced gardens behind the mansion, a sun-dappled world of spreading oaks, shrubs, azaleas, jasmine, and banana trees.

Eve’s black Lexus was parked near an opening in the garden wall. Waters pulled his Land Cruiser in behind her, blocking her exit, and walked through the gate. To his right rose the rear elevation of the mansion. Its scored concrete walls were relieved by jib windows, and its steeply sloped roof had several chimneys. To his left lay intricate gardens laced with brick walkways and shadowy paths, the centerpiece a fountain surrounded by statuary inspired by German fairy tales. The frozen figures of boys and girls had nothing in common with the stone angels from the cemetery; they captured an elusive quality of childhood, wonder mixed with boredom, a feeling that time had no meaning beyond the present moment.

As Waters approached the house, something made him look up. Through one of the jib windows, he saw the silhouette of a standing woman. She leaned forward and spread her palm against the pane like a starfish. His heart stuttered. Through the distorting blur of the century-old glass, she could be Mallory Candler. Her palm left the pane, and a forefinger pointed downward. A door stood immediately below the window, one of three in the back wall of the house. When he looked back up at the window, the figure had vanished.

He walked to the door, then hesitated with his hand on the knob. He felt like a man walking into a brothel, or a hospital, or a monastery. Once he walked through this door, he would never be the same. Some part of him even feared that he might not come out again.

The knob turned in his hand, and he jerked back his arm. He half-expected the door to open, but it remained closed. After several moments, he turned the knob and pushed open the door.

It led to a narrow, carpeted staircase. Looking up, he saw Eve Sumner standing at the top of the steps. Gone were the navy skirt suit and heels. She wore a bright yellow sundress that looked like something a St. Croix islander might wear. Her feet were bare, and her hair was tied back with a ruby scarf, exposing her fine neck and jaw. Waters was sure he remembered Mallory wearing a dress exactly like it on their Yucatan trip. Eve did not speak but watched him intently. She was waiting for him to enter on his own.

He stepped over the threshold.

“I’m glad you came,” she said, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

He closed the door behind him.

She lifted a hand and beckoned him up the stairs.

As he ascended, he took in details of the room that served as a backdrop to her stunning figure: fourteen-foot ceilings, massive crown moldings, a carved medallion above the chandelier.

“I’m not sure why I came,” he said, reaching the top step.

She took his hand in hers, and he realized she was shaking. “You don’t have to be sure. Just be here.”

Waters looked around in wonder. The mansion was furnished with period antiques, giving him the feeling it was 1850 and that the owners had simply gone out for a carriage ride. To his left stood a massive, coffin-shaped piano, a Broadway from England, he guessed. Six doors led off of this central room, some to bedroom suites, the others to a kitchen, a marble-floored foyer, a dining room.

“We’re alone,” Eve said. “I have the only key.”

He looked at her.

“Come with me, Johnny.” She pulled him toward a half-open door. Through it he saw a short corridor, and beyond that a bedroom furnished with two tester beds. He pulled back against her hand, stopping them by a grandfather clock that stood beside the door. The heavy chimes in the clock gonged softly from the impact of their feet on the hardwood.

“Do you want to talk some more?” Eve asked, looking nervous.

“I don’t know.”

She blinked, her dark eyes still moist. “Do you want to kiss me again?”

He flashed back to the cemetery, to the kiss that had thrown him twenty years into the past. “I’ve thought about it. The way you kiss. It’s…”

“Just like her. Is that what you were going to say?”

“Yes.”

“Think of it that way, if it makes it easier. Right now I don’t care. Just kiss me again.”

Even as he shook his head, he moved forward. She dropped his hand and touched his face, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw, his lips. Her fingertip opened his mouth, and then she parted her lips and softly pressed her mouth to his. A shock like a static discharge went through him, leaving him tingling as the pressure of her lips increased. Her tongue slipped into his mouth, cautiously exploring. She bit his lower lip, tugging insistently, just as she had at the cemetery, letting him know the kiss was only a beginning, the opening movement of a symphony they both remembered. Or so she wanted him to believe. And God help him…he almost did. The desire she’d awakened yesterday had wound itself to an unbearable tension. He wanted Eve Sumner as he had not wanted a woman in more years than he could remember. He slid his hands up to her face and held her cheeks, searching her eyes for…what?

“Who are you?”

She didn’t blink. “You know.”

He shook her with sudden violence. “What do you want?”

“You, Johnny. That’s all. I want you. Right now.”

Her hand slid below his belt and gripped him with painful force. Had she done anything else, had she followed a subtler line of seduction, he would have repulsed her. But her animal directness-so unfamiliar to him now-shattered the cerebral restraint of loyalty to legal vows that had not been honored in this way for too long. All thought, all doubt flew out of his head. He bunched the yellow sundress in his hands and yanked it up over her hips. She wore nothing underneath. As he stared, she held her arms straight up, and he slid the fabric right off her.

She stood before him without a hint of self-consciousness, the way Mallory had at the falls, letting him absorb all of her. Then she pulled him to her and kissed him again, her hands working frantically at his clothes until he stood naked before her.

“In there?” he asked, nodding to the bedroom.

She shook her head and pulled his hand down, and he knew then that she’d been ready for some time. When her arms slipped around his neck, he slid his hands beneath her hips and simply lifted her onto him. There was momentary resistance, then none. They gasped and clutched each other like climbers caught in an ice storm, clinging together for warmth. He did not move within her; holding her suspended as she shivered around him was almost more sensory input than he could stand. After a time, a strange purring sound began in her chest. As it built slowly, another, deeper sound blended with a ululation in her throat, creating a strangely haunting music; it was the chimes of the grandfather clock vibrating in sympathy with their moving bodies, the waves transmitted through the seasoned floorboards. The quivering in Eve’s body suddenly focused in the pit of her belly, then radiated out through her limbs like the seizure of some hill woman about to speak in tongues. When the trapped cry finally burst from her throat, Waters’s legs trembled violently, and his vision went black as all the frustration and regret of the past four years poured into her. She was still screaming when his legs gave way, and he flung out his arms to break the impact of the floor.

They lay two feet apart, panting like winded sprinters stunned to find themselves naked together. The clock chimes still clanged on their chains, sending resonant waves through the room. Waters looked down at his hand as though at the hand of a stranger. But it was his hand, unchanged. After twelve years of fidelity, he had finally yielded to this ancient impulse, and the sky had not fallen. The earth had not opened at his feet.

Eve sat up and took his hand. She did not speak, but simply pulled him to his feet and led him down the corridor to the bedroom, where she drew back the covers on one of the three-quarter beds, gently pushed him under the sheet, and slid in beside him.

He lay on his back, looking up at the gathered fabric of the canopy, which radiated from a central circle like the rays of the sun. The light in the bedroom had a fluid consistency, as if a golden liquid were being filtered through the heavy lace curtains. Eve lay close and warm along his left side, for the bed was too small for them both.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. “Are you thinking about your wife?”

“No.”

She kissed his shoulder. “What, then?”

“This. It’s insane. The whole thing.”

“You’re wrong. This had to happen. It was always going to happen.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“I know. Johnny…look at me. Did you feel me?”

He refused to look at her. “I don’t want to talk about Mallory.”

She kissed his shoulder again. “All right. As long as you’re here. That’s all that matters. There’s time for all the rest later.”

All the rest. He turned onto his side and looked into her eyes. “I don’t know why I came here. And I don’t know what you’re doing. What you want out of this. You could be crazy for all I know. The things you say are crazy.”

She nodded, her eyes filled with patience. “But I’m not crazy. You know I’m not.”

He knew no such thing, but he saw no point in telling her that.

She took his hand and placed it over her breast. Her heart beat strongly beneath the swollen bosom.

“I know they don’t feel the same,” she said. “Not exactly the same. But this is a very nice body.” She averted her eyes for a moment. “Better than some I’ve known.”

He pulled his hand away. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I told you, Johnny. You’re not ready for the truth.”

“We just had sex. We didn’t use any precautions. How much crazier can it get?”

“Don’t worry about me getting pregnant. Eve had her tubes tied.”

Her use of the third person confused him; he shook his head, trying to keep his mind clear in the face of her delusion.

“And as far as other worries, I’ve been tested. Eve wasn’t very selective in the past, but I changed her. Slowly.”

“I feel like I’m on acid,” Waters murmured.

Eve giggled, an odd sound after all that had come before. “Johnny? You’ve done acid?”

“When I worked in Alaska, I did a couple of tabs. Nobody in this town would believe that, thank God.” He brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She had very fine hair; it made him think of an animal pelt.

“Mmm,” she purred.

He let his hand fall to the concave curve of her abdomen, then slid it down to the silkier hair there. She rose against his fingers, pressing into his touch. He moved his hand back up to her face and caressed her cheek.

“We’re through the looking glass,” he said. “I want to hear the rest of it. Finish the story you started in the cemetery.”

Fear flickered in her eyes. “Only if you promise not to leave. You have to let me finish.”

“Why would I leave? I’m the one asking you to tell it.”

“You’ve never heard anything like this before. It might be hard to listen to.”

“For God’s sake. Just start talking.”

She nodded hesitantly, and he lay back, letting his gaze wander along the underside of the canopy as her low voice trembled.

“I told you how it was. The rape. How at the moment I felt I was going to die, when he was strangling me and finishing, I suddenly wasn’t looking at him-I was looking at me. Mallory. I was in him, right? Looking at a woman who lay under him, not breathing. And that woman was me.”

The anxiety Waters had felt in the cemetery returned like a shadow falling over him. She spoke lunacy with absolute conviction. Yet what was the harm in listening? An absurd parallel came to him: it was 1955, she was a communist agent, and he had already slept with her. The damage was done. What difference could it possibly make if he listened to her crackpot manifesto now?

“Everything went blank after that,” Eve whispered, oblivious to his thoughts. “It was like being in a coma, I guess. Or a drugged sleep. Now and then I would wake up and see things-rooms, furniture, the interior of a car-but they were alien to me. It was like a nightmare where you’re trapped in someone else’s body. The things I saw…I eventually began to make sense of them. The man who raped me led a double life. He had a wife, a house in Marrero, a mindless job as a technician in a plant. To the people he worked with he seemed like a normal person. But inside his head, it was like…Hell. There was so much anger and pain, so much hatred. I knew all his thoughts, his memories. They would ambush me in the dark, things that were done to him as a child. It was sickening. The way he treated his wife…the way she cowered and took it. Sometimes I shut down my consciousness-went back to sleep-just so I wouldn’t have to see or feel any of it. But as time passed, that became harder to do. When I was awake, I tried to think. I didn’t understand how it had happened, but I was alive in this man. And I was growing stronger. Sometimes I’d be awake for an hour or two. And he wouldn’t know it. He didn’t remember any of it. I could tell by people’s reactions. It was like he blacked out during those times. He became terrified of the blackouts. I had no idea what I was going to do.” Eve swallowed, as though trying to keep her vocal cords working. “Then he raped another woman.”

A ball of ice formed in Waters’s stomach.

“He raped and killed her…exactly the way he had done it to me. I had to experience that, Johnny. As if I were doing it. She wasn’t as strong as I was. She just lay there, praying it would be over quickly, hoping she would be all right in the end. But she wasn’t. He strangled her. I knew he was going to do it. I knew all along, Johnny. And there was nothing I could do to stop him.”

Waters pulled the covers over his chest.

“I nearly went mad. Maybe I did, a little. I don’t know. I wanted so badly to get out of him. I imagined killing him during one of the times that I was in control. I knew I could stop him from hurting women if I did that. But I didn’t want to die. I’d seen my dead body. I’d seen that other woman, lying there like a candle someone had blown out. God forgive me…I didn’t want that to happen to me, Johnny.”

Eve wiped her eyes. Waters reached down and took her hand, and this seemed to steady her enough to go on.

“His wife was a pathetic creature, totally dependent. He abused her, but on some level she seemed to need that. He didn’t have sex with her very often. Sex to him was what he did to his victims. But when he was with his wife, it was very rough and seemed to satisfy something in her, some yearning for punishment. It was so twisted. Once, while I was thinking of suicide, he had sex with her. During the act, I started to feel like I had when he had raped me. Not the same feeling, but the same intensity of feeling. I wanted out of him so badly. And I was so near to this other person, this person who was not a monster. I was physically inside her, you know? As they thrashed against each other, she started to climax, and I felt…”

“What?”

“Like a door was opening. As she started to peak, the person she was-the individual part-began to fade away. All thought and memory was vanishing into this…nothingness. The ecstasy of her climax wiped out her individuality. Do you know what I mean? In those seconds she became like a shell-a body without a soul-and in the instant that I understood what was happening, it was over. One moment I was looking at her, the next I was looking at him. I was inside her, Johnny. In her mind. And it was like being released from prison.” Eve looked at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You’re saying that your soul-”

“I don’t know if it’s my soul! That’s beyond me. But whatever we are-whatever human consciousness is-that part of me moved from him into her, just as it had gone into him when I so desperately wanted to survive.” She squeezed his hand. “Please tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Don’t stop. Tell me the rest.”

She looked up at the canopy. “That was ten years ago. The time between then and now…I don’t want to think about.”

“Tell me.”

Eve closed her eyes and spoke in a detached voice. “The woman’s mind was much less crowded than her husband’s. She’d endured terrible things as a child too, but she hadn’t reacted the way he had. She’d turned the anger inward, against herself. That’s why she responded to his abuse. She thought she deserved it. Once I was inside her, I understood that. I could control her much better than I could him. I could stay awake for much longer periods. I could think. And the more I thought, the more I realized that I had been given a unique chance. I had no idea how, and I still don’t. But I had to do something with that chance. It was as though I’d been lost in a shipwreck. Everyone I knew thought I was dead, so the old obligations didn’t apply. My husband, my children…I was dead to them. And all I could think about was what had happened when I thought I was going to die. What I had thought of. I decided then that I would do whatever I had to do to find you.”

For the first time, Waters truly felt he was lying beside Mallory Candler. The single-minded possessiveness that had led Mallory to insanity was there in Eve’s voice. She opened her eyes and rose up on one elbow.

“I mean, I knew where you were. But I had to come to you in a way-in a form-that you would listen to. Someone you could be attracted to. Someone like I was when you knew me before.”

Waters felt her gaze upon him like heat from a candle. “Are you saying you went through many different people to get to where you are now?”

“Yes.”

He felt a manic compulsion to jump out of the bed, but he didn’t trust her to stay rational if he did.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, her voice edged with anxiety.

“I’m trying not to think. I’m just listening.”

But he was thinking. He was thinking he had read that paranoid schizophrenics were capable of constructing incredibly complex delusions, filled with detail and interwoven with reality. If it weren’t for all the secrets Eve knew about Mallory, he would be positive this was just such a delusion.

“How many people did you go through to get to Eve?”

“Nine.”

As the implications of her words hit him, his face felt cold. “And one of them was Danny Buckles? That’s how you knew about the molestation at the school?”

“Yes.”

Jesus God….

“I know things about those nine people that no one in the world would ever believe. Things they’d kill themselves over if people discovered. Human beings are corrupt creatures, Johnny. I remember you talking about Thomas Hobbes when you were taking political philosophy. Well, Hobbes had human nature right.”

Her easy reference to a class he had taken twenty years ago pierced him like a blade. In this empty mansion, logic held no sway. On one hand she was telling him a story that could have been written by Poe while on opium; on the other she was casually bringing up things only Mallory could have remembered, thus lending credence to her hallucinations.

“And you can move through people at will?” he asked, not believing his own voice.

“No. Only the way I described.”

“Only during sex?”

“Not just any sex. The other person-the person I move into-has to climax. Their individuality has to be wiped out by that. So, as you’d imagine, it’s very easy for me to move into a man, but harder to pass into a woman.”

“But how could it take nine years?”

“I made some mistakes.” Bitterness had entered her voice. “I was trapped in a prison for a while. Literally in jail. In a man. There was sex there, but”-she shivered-“not with anyone who could get me out.”

Who could make up this insanity? he asked himself.

“The farther along the chain I got, the easier it became to move closer to you. But still, it was hard. It took me a long time to learn to control my…”

“What? Your what?”

“My host, I was going to say.”

Icy fingers closed around his heart. The “soul transfer” she had been describing had a direct analogue in the real world: viral infection. In Eve’s world, souls moved through people in the same way a sexually transmitted disease did. Could her whole fantastic delusion be some paranoid response to contracting the AIDS virus?

“Is that what you’re doing now?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “Controlling Eve?”

“Yes.”

“Is Eve ever really Eve anymore?”

She bit her lip and turned her face away. “Sometimes.”

“What does she feel like when she is?”

“She’s afraid. She went to a doctor about it. He referred her to a psychiatrist, who put her on medication. That didn’t work, of course. Eve’s confused, and sometimes she breaks through when I least expect it. She’s a strong personality. Some people are easy to dominate. Others…it’s exhausting. I’m never quite myself-not completely-because part of my energy is always devoted to maintaining control of the person.”

Waters nodded as though it all made perfect sense, but there was a scream behind his lips.

Suddenly Eve turned back to him and squeezed his shoulder. “Johnny, what are you feeling?” She clung to him as though sensing he wanted to leave. “Tell me.”

As he searched for some innocuous lie, he suddenly realized that deception was ridiculous. He looked her in the eyes and took her hand. “Eve, are you ill? I want you to be completely honest with me. You said you were tested before. You didn’t tell me the result. Has someone made you sick?”

She pulled away, her eyes filled with hurt. “Do you really think I would do that to you? Put you at risk like that?”

“I don’t know. Think about everything you’ve just told me.”

“I know it sounds crazy. But think for a minute, Johnny. Millions of people go to church every Sunday and profess faith in their immortal souls. Christianity is built around that. Do those people believe what they say or not? Because if they do, they’re admitting that something exists apart from the body, some force. And if that’s true, then why is what I’ve described so crazy? Are you only your body, Johnny? If during the good times between us, I’d been paralyzed in a car wreck, would you have left me?”

She had clearly thought about this much more deeply than he had.

“You know you wouldn’t have. I know it. Well, this is like that. My old body is useless now, it’s gone. But I’m still here. And I need you.”

He sat up in the bed.

Eve got onto her knees and grasped his arm. “Are you leaving?”

He looked at his watch. “I need to.”

“Don’t go yet. Please. I don’t know how you feel. Where you are.”

“I don’t either.”

“Will you see me again?”

He looked toward the corridor. His clothes lay strewn on the antique rug outside the door. “I don’t know.”

Eve closed her eyes tight, as though suppressing panic. “Please don’t say that, Johnny. Please.”

Her reaction threw him back twenty years, to the worst times with Mallory. This yo-yo journey between present and past had been happening ever since the soccer field, and it left him dizzy, like a man trapped on a carnival ride. As soon as Eve opened her eyes, he would calm her down, then make his exit.

While he waited, she raised her right hand to her neck and twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger. Instead of releasing it, she pulled tighter and tighter, clearly hard enough to cause pain. With deep shock spreading through his chest, Waters reached across her body and took hold of her left wrist, exposing the inner forearm. Eve’s eyes popped open, but she did not release her hair. He scanned the length of the forearm but saw only smooth skin. Eve gave him an eerie smile.

The watch, he thought. She wore a large watch for a woman, a platinum Rolex. Before she could stop him, he grabbed the watch and yanked it two inches up her arm, keeping his fingers beneath the band to hold the arm still. Where the face of the watch had been, he saw four parallel scars in the skin. A cold wave of dread rolled through him. The scars were not fresh, but deep cuts had made them. Not just four, but cuts over cuts. Repetitive lacerations and scratches in the same place, a spot no one would see.

As Eve watched him with a mixture of shame and triumph, he jerked the covers off her nude body and looked at her legs. She didn’t try to hide. On her inner thighs, a few inches below her vulva, he found a crosshatched pattern of scars. Some were old, others made perhaps a week ago. He pulled the covers back up and sat motionless on the bed.

The scars were not evidence of suicide attempts, but part of a complex coping phenomenon of self-mutilation practiced by many adolescent girls. Mallory had cut herself in secret for much of her life, but Waters had been her lover for six months before he discovered this. At the time, he could find no information on the subject. Now he knew that self-mutilators inflicted pain on themselves to drown out a deeper pain, something inexpressible in any other way. Cutting was usually a later phase of the phenomenon. It often began as scratching, banging one’s head against the floor, or even hair-pulling. Mallory’s had begun that way, but even after she stumbled on cutting, she continued her hair-twisting as a public substitute for the bloody ritual that gave her relief in private.

“I didn’t want to show you that,” Eve said quietly.

Waters could not speak. The implications of the scars had shut down part of his nervous system. He simply could not process what he had seen. A man with any sense would run, but how could you escape from something in your head? Knowledge was inescapable, irrevocable. The sight of the scars had scrambled his sense of time, of history, of identity.

“Johnny?”

He turned and slid his legs off the bed. Before he could get up, Eve draped her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. Her breasts compressed against his shoulder blades, and her voice sounded in his ear.

“Do you really have to go?”

“Yes.”

She licked the back of his neck, then slid her tongue up behind his ear. “Do you want to go?”

Her tongue entered his ear, then disappeared. Despite the insanity of the situation-or perhaps because of it-he felt himself stir again. She let go of him then, and backed away on the bed. Turning, he saw her kneeling three feet behind him, her eyes glowing with heat.

“Come here,” she said.

“I have to go.”

“No. You need me.”

Her body seemed to generate some sort of magnetic field. And though he tried not to see them, the small scars on her thighs seemed to blaze like fresh wounds. “I can’t do this.”

She reached out and took his hand, pulling until he lifted his legs back onto the bed. “Get like me,” she said, tugging his wrist.

He got up onto his knees.

She leaned forward and kissed him, lightly running her fingers across his chest, down his stomach. He felt himself swelling again.

“Eve-”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered, enfolding him in her hands.

“Don’t say what?”

She closed her eyes and squeezed him. “That name. I listen to it all day. Not from you…please.”

Suddenly she turned away, leaving him staring at her finely muscled back and the cleft of her behind. The sudden disappearance of her hands left him quivering with desire to be inside her.

“Remember?” she said to the wall.

His face felt hot. He could not move.

Eve slid backward, reaching for his hand as she neared him. “You know what I like.” She caught his hand and pulled his arm over her shoulder, then leaned into him. “And I know what you need.”

“Eve-”

“Shhh.” She threw herself forward, pulling him across her back as she went down on all fours. “You remember,” she said, her voice hoarse now. “Come on, Johnny.”

Sweat filmed his face, cold at the temples as she pressed back against him, leaving no doubt about where she wanted him.

“Are you sure?”

She turned and looked back at him, her eyes filled with dark knowledge, her lips curved in a serene smile. “I’m totally relaxed. Do it.”

He shut his eyes and obeyed.

It was dusk when he swung the Land Cruiser out of the narrow drive and onto Wall Street. As he crossed to the next block, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her black Lexus nose out of the drive, then pull into the street. He looked at his cell phone and thought of calling home, but decided against it. Rose would be gone by now. Lily and Annelise would be in the kitchen, talking about homework, wondering where Daddy was. Daddy was wondering the same thing.

His arms and legs felt shaky, as though he couldn’t trust them. Memories of his last hour with Eve flashed through his mind like flares in the darkness, blanking out his thoughts. She came back to him in pieces, like quick cuts in a film. The nape of her neck, beaded with pearls of sweat. Her hip, already bruised in the pattern of his fingertips. And the sounds…her mouth at his ear, whispering, urging, taunting, begging. Nonsense words. Profanity. Prayers. But always she returned to the same three words: a pleading command, a mantra, the soundtrack to her remarkable movement, her controlled abandon. “Say my name, Johnny….”

“Eve,” he’d grunted.

She shook her head and splayed her fingers against the wall to brace herself against him. “No. Say it.”

“Eve…”

“No! Say my name!

“I did.”

“Say it!” Anger now, as she thrust violently backward, using her well-muscled arms to anchor herself on the wall. “You know me now! You remember!”

He shook his head, unable to vocalize anything, though the word she wanted so desperately was swelling in his mouth like a balloon, bursting to be freed with all its transformative power.

“Say my name, damn it!” she screamed. A river of sweat ran down the valley created by the muscles on either side of her spine. His eyes tracked up her arm to the four scars her watch had concealed. “I can’t feel my head,” she panted. “Johnny? I can’t…say it…say my name!”

He never did.