Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [58]
“The brain radio,” Michael Diamond grinned. He
kept his hand on her forehead. She felt a warm gentle pressure from it, but the headache she’d had began to dissolve.
“It’s what Livy—Olivia—my daughter—calls it when she hears things.” Then, Julie realized that was inadequate as an explanation. “She thinks she talks to people with it. Or hears songs on the radio even when the radio isn’t on.”
“She talks to your husband. Sometimes.”
“When he was alive. They had a pretend game like that.”
“Do you listen to what your daughter says about it?”
“It’s usually silly, fun stuff.”
“Your husband was murdered.”
Julie gasped. She glanced toward her mother and sister, who sat at the far end of the couch. The bright lights and the anonymous eye of the camera seemed to wall her in. “Yes. He was.”
“It’s terrible,” Michael Diamond said. “You’ve been fumbling through things since then. You’ve seen movies? Movies of some kind. There’s a place. A place in the city. A number and a letter. You won’t face what others want you to face. You…you haven’t listened. No. No, that’s not true. You’ve tried to listen. You just don’t know what it is you’re hearing. Your daughter. Your daughter needs you. She needs you. Someone else needs you. Needs her. Someone needs both of you. Someone desperately wants you. Male. Someone male. Someone wants you to understand. Badly. But death is all around you. Fear of death is inside you. Ah,” he said this last part as if catching his breath upon seeing something— something that left him awestruck.
And then, she felt it.
No longer in the studio, no longer with lights and camera and mother and sister and audience and sofa—
She felt as if he had pressed his warm hand beneath her breast, and rested it just along the thumping halo of blood encircling her heart—as if he had reached within her, and emanated a strange warmth that took her back to her dreams of Hut:
Making love to Hut in the warm bath, candles glowing all around the tub, Hut pressing into her, as she gasped and felt love in a way she had not thought possible—
Giving birth to Livy, the way Hut had clutched her hand tightly, had breathed with her, and kissed her on the forehead as Livy arrived into the world—
Holding Livy for the first time, a bloody, hideous baby that was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen, and Hut there, his happiness extreme as he laughed with her, with the exhaustion at the end of labor, with the surrender that childbirth demanded—
And then, a moment in time that had been long forgotten—but it came to sudden life within her mind as she felt an electric shock—seeing Hut in the shower, water cascading over his body, his muscles taut, drawing back the shower curtain and seeing the look on his face, the seething anger, and he turned to face the tile wall, and then, seeing the scratches along his back, and wondering if he had been in an accident, and then she realized it was something else—something about why Hut hadn’t been home in three days—
And then, her vision turned red, and Hut, not vibrant Hut, but the dead man from the metal table, milky eyes, shiny maggoty skin, his arms around her, pummeling her with his hips, driving himself into her, turning her over onto her stomach, taking her like that—and she felt ecstasy as he whispered filthy things, his lips pressed into her earlobe, his tongue etching fire as he said things she’d never heard a man say.
Julie felt as if her consciousness were shot out of the barrel of a gun—it hurt to open her eyes. She had to force them open, feeling as if heavy weights kept them closed, kept her in the darkness of her own mind.
Open. She saw the others there. The watchers. The audience.
She flushed with embarrassment. She felt shame the likes of which she hadn’t felt since she’d been a child, caught naked with a little boy, playing doctor. She felt as if all her secrets had been announced on loudspeakers, and the people in the audience had used what was in her mind as entertainment, something for their amusement: her shame.
Her breathing felt labored. It was as if she’d been