Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [96]
“I don’t listen to dead people,” Julie said. “I don’t listen to mumbo-jumbo.”
She reached out to touch the edge of Livy’s hand.
“It’s not some religion,” Eleanor said. But it was as if she were off in some fog at the edge of the room. “It’s not something as silly as faith.”
“It’s science,” the blond man said. “Pure and simple. It’s a truth that’s been locked away.”
“Locked away by crap mysticism and Christian hogwash,” Eleanor added. “And just plain ignorance. There is no God. There’s no Devil. No heaven. No hell. There is nothing but animal life. We are animals. But we have developed the ability to take this beyond our lifetimes, Julie. Our single lifetimes. To wipe away thousands of years of ignorant mysticism, of this ridiculous Christian magical thinking about life and death.”
“Can’t blame Christianity alone,” the blond man said. “You just can’t. Other religions, too. They just…”
But their voices receded into the dark background of her mind. They babbled on, she knew, but she leaned forward toward her daughter, her beautiful Livy, and remembered the first moment she had known Livy was in her body, and the first moment Livy had cried out at birth, and how, as a baby, Hut had helped change diapers, and how Julie had somehow believed that her family was wonderful and that she and Hut were a team, and that Livy was going to grow up to be a doctor like her daddy or a nurse like mommy or to be an actress like Livy wanted to, or grow into a teenager who would go to her prom, fall in love, go to college, experience the world, travel, and she, her mother, would have all those years with her, would watch her as she grew and changed and became the wonder that Julie knew she would become.
Julie lay down on the bed, cradling her daughter’s lifeless body.
Around her, she saw others draw together in the shadows. She ignored them. All that mattered was Livy.
She is all that remains.
Let them burn away, let the world burn away for all I care, she thought.
She kissed the edge of her daughter’s fragrant hair: chrysanthemums and lilacs, musky and sweet mixed together. She didn’t want to think about how they’d killed her. About how they needed to create fear before death to make their ritual work right. She didn’t want to think about her baby crying out for her Mommy while they did something awful and monstrous to her in her last minutes of life.
Julie closed her eyes, blocked out the others in the room, and held her child tightly.
Perhaps minutes had passed, or hours. Perhaps she drank the chai they brought her, and perhaps she nibbled on some cheddar crackers that Eleanor set down on a plate with some cream cheese. Perhaps it was a day that passed. She slept, she woke, she clutched the gun, but no one bothered her. No one tried to move her or take her weapon away. She got up once or twice to use the bathroom in the hall, and when she did, she felt them watching her but she refused to look them in the eyes. She had blocked the others out, and only knew her child’s body, pressed against her own. She lay on the bed, slept, woke, tried to feel that inside feeling with her daughter that she’d felt with Michael Diamond.
Then, she felt life stirring in Livy’s body.
Eleanor’s voice, beyond the darkness of Julie’s mind, “Look. Look.”
It’s not real. It’s not real.
Julie felt the warmth and the pulsing heartbeat along her daughter’s side, and even the smell of life emanated from her.
The slight heat of her daughter’s breath against her cheek. Had she imagined it? The warmth? The trickle of air?
Eleanor whispered something that almost sounded like a prayer.
Julie opened her eyes and gazed at her daughter’s face.
Remembering what Michael Diamond had told her.
“There’s always hope,” he said. “That’s the last thing to go in life. It’s a blessing and a curse. But sometimes, it’s all we have. Yet, when faced with this, there is no hope. There can be no hope. Do not let hope cloud your resolve.”
“But what hope?” she wanted to ask him now. “What hope?”
And then, his voice was