Krysalis: Krysalis (41 page)

But she didn’t feel so brave today. David’s life was under threat. Anna couldn’t eradicate the fear that extended through every crevice of her brain whenever she thought of his peril, which she did constantly. And the worst of it was, she lacked the power to help him.

Once at the church she looked behind her, expecting to see either Barzel or the other guard, whose name she now knew was Stange; but the path remained empty. Should she make a run for it? No. Even if she could not see them, they were there, waiting for her to do just that; and her only hope, however faint, lay in building up their trust.

Anna entered the church to find the remnants of yesterday’s candle burned away to a sozzled heap. She cleaned out the holder and was about to light a fresh one, when she remembered having seen huge altar candles standing in a corner of the vestry the day before. She carried one into the church and, not without difficulty, mounted it on a brass candlestick to the right of the altar, before sitting down with her back against the wall and her legs folded, a hand on each knee. The red eye of God continued to watch her, malevolently, benevolently, Anna didn’t know. She found herself wondering who tended the lamp and kept it burning through the dark ages which had come again. Yorgos, perhaps.

Although she lacked all religious belief, was faithless in a most fundamental sense, the red eye in the Greek church seemed to vibrate something inside her, like a glass that is struck. She dropped to her knees and prayed. Her petition was very simple: save David, she repeated over and over again. Save him, God …

A quarter of an hour ticked away while Anna alternately prayed and listened with half an ear for the sound of Kleist’s footsteps on the path. She did not doubt he would come. He wanted to hypnotize her, as a way of consolidating his control. Since she had deliberately implanted that very idea in his mind the day before, the prospect didn’t daunt her. For the first time, hypnosis would become not a therapy but a weapon. A two-edged weapon.

Long ago, Kleist had told her of a famous doctor who once said something profound about hypnotherapy, “When a physician employs hypnosis with a patient it is wise always to be aware of who may be hypnotizing whom.”

At last the footsteps came. “Good morning,” he said, radiating confidence. He spoke as if he had some inkling of what lay before them.

Anna put Miss Cuppidge down on the floor beside her. “I hope you slept well?” Her voice was as formal as the sentiment it expressed. Her feelings toward him had undergone a subtle change since the previous day. The knowledge of danger overshadowing David’s life had wiped out that treacherous brush of sympathy mixed with lust. Kleist was an uncomplicated enemy, now.

“Very well, thank you,” he said. “You?”

She nodded.

“Yesterday you said something about wanting a trance. Do you still feel that way?”

No preliminaries. She had him hooked. “What do you think?”

“It can do no harm. As you pointed out, I need to erase the instructions I gave you to prevent your leaving.”

“Up to you,” Anna said, with a shrug, but at the same time she was arranging herself on the floor as comfortably as she could. She closed her eyes. Her heart was beating fast enough to make her afraid for her own well-being.

“It is peaceful here in the church,” he began, “very quiet, very safe …”

She thought he must realize that it wasn’t right. He used to be susceptible to all her vibrations. But when he said nothing to indicate awareness, she remained silent. She knew what she had to do: persuade him of her total submission, so that he would cease to guard her and tell Barzel that she no longer posed a threat.

“I want you to relax every muscle in your body….”

This morning he took his time over the introduction. Anna knew he was preparing her for something special and made a supreme effort not to tense. Part of her wanted to run away, how dare she enter the lions’ den, fight him on his own territory? But she knew the answer. Only by doing this could she escape; and besides, it would prevent him from injecting those terrible drugs. Use the lesser evil to ward off the greater….

At last he was counting her down to extinction of self with his customary slick skill. But she closed her mind against him and did not go under. It was a sort of under, without ever becoming the real thing. Although
she knew the euphoria, the lightness of soul and of body which accompanied a true trance state, she was conscious of all that she did and said. So she lay quietly, not daring to open her eyes, no longer irked by the hardness of the stone floor but afloat on an ocean thousands of fathoms deep. Her business was to stay there, on the surface, his was to drag her down.

“I’d like us to go back in time,” Kleist murmured. “You are growing younger now, further and further back, year by year. To the moment when you first met David.”

“Yes. I remember.” She was struggling to articulate her thoughts; but they came easier today, because the trance seemed light and she still had control.

“You were tiring of me. You realized that you could be happy with him.”

Anna laughed. It was easy to laugh in a trance, even in a half-trance, surrounded by all that light and lightness of being. “Yes. I was ready to accept happiness again. At last.”

“You married him. And were happy. Until quite recently.” He paused. “Why do you think you regressed?”

The fringes of the light canopy shivered, just for an instant. Anna struggled to act in character, not knowing how she usually behaved when in a deep trance. Should she deny that she had regressed? No, he was testing her, and anyway, she knew very well what he meant.
Say something!

“I … I felt so … afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Losing … David.”

“Why would that be so terrible?”

“He … made me worthy. In my own eyes.”

“Why?”

Why, why why?
she wanted to scream, don’t you know any other words? “David … he … made everything all right.”

“How?”

“How?”

“What did he do to make everything all right?”

“He … liked me.”

“Why?”

Anna swallowed her resentment and said, “I suppose … he liked me because I’d put up a front, as usual. And he couldn’t see through it.”

“Front?”

“Successful, calm, no hangups.”

“Ah, yes.” Kleist allowed a long pause to develop. Anna would have given anything to be able to open her eyes, find out what he was doing. Had she fooled him?
Had she?

She could smell danger, without being able to identify the source, knew how witnesses felt in court when she was still two questions away from springing her trap.

After what seemed an interminable time, Kleist spoke again. “But of course this man David, this nice man, liked and respected you for the image you tried to project, not the reality beneath, which would have shocked him?”

A long silence.

“It would have shocked him,” Kleist repeated, with studied emphasis. “Wouldn’t it?”

Anna’s chest was heaving. Her head rocked from side to side. The waves of that fathomless ocean were sucking at her now, drawing her into its depths.

“Even today, after all those years of marriage, it would still shock him, if he found out.”

She felt despair brush her consciousness. Tears were very near.

“I’m going to tell you the time now, Anna. I need to look at my watch. It’s my best watch, the gold one. The Omega …”

A lead shutter came down between her eyelids and her brain, bang! Suddenly she was no longer afloat on the surface of an ocean, she was in a fog without metes or bounds. She did not know who she was or where she might be, not even the dimension of time and space she occupied. Everything was nothing. And yet part of her brain still registered that this was familiar, although she had never consciously experienced any of it before.

Somewhere in the distance a child was calling her.

There were other voices in the grayness, several of them, all speaking at once, and something had gone wrong with her ears, as when she had a cold and woke at night with aural catarrh soldering her into a landlocked world.

Wake up,
cried the child.

Kleist’s voice asserted itself over the rest, but even so it echoed inside her head as if from a whispering gallery.

“There were mitigating circumstances,” she heard him say. “Adoption and a repressed childhood had conspired to damage your personality, long ago. You were exhausted, without money, husband, or hope. On the day of the crime, life held nothing for you.”

“Nothing.”

Had she said that? It sounded like her. And it was true. That day, she had nothing….

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

No, that wasn’t so, she had a daughter. A bundle of joy. A screaming, sleepless, vomit-and-shit-dispensing, smelly, ugly, bad-tempered …

Kleist again: “You had no one … except Juliet. Your own child. And here we have the nub of the problem, don’t we, mm?”

Anna wanted to speak. Alive inside her was this vast, all-comprehensive explanation that would make everything right if only she could manage to articulate it. But the words remained trapped inside her, like a stillborn infant.

“Because if there are points to be raised in your defense, there are aggravating factors as well.”

Anna opened her mouth and discovered she could speak, but the words that came out were different from those she intended to utter. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, let me help you, then.” Kleist no longer whispered; his voice sounded in her left ear as if he were lying down next to her.

“Your life at that time was, when viewed objectively, good. People envied you for your education, your looks, your comfortable, secure, middle-class home. You had been blessed with a healthy child. Your first husband, Eddy, was a mistake, you were well shut of him. You had no
excuse
to be unhappy, there was no reason for it. Yet you despaired.”

Anna’s head felt as though it would explode. She wanted to scream,
“That’s what I always told you! And you said
I
was wrong, wrong, wrong! You said I was suffering from postnatal depression!”
But no words came out. When two tears trickled down her cheeks she was powerless to wipe them away.

“So now we will go back, together, to that day, just before you and I first met.”

“No. I don’t want …”

“It is evening. You are at your parents’ house.”

She was dimly aware of a sensation in her hands. As they clenched and unclenched, the nails were grinding into her palms. “Don’t …”

“Yes? What did you say, Anna?”

“Don’t … do … this …
please!”

“But we must. You are there, at the house in Ferring. Your parents have gone to bed. You are in your room, with Juliet. Just the two of you. Alone.”

“Don’t …”

“You can see what you saw then. Feel what you felt then. Hear what happened then.”

“No.”

“Yes,
Anna.”

Her heart was beating uncontrollably. Tears flowed down her cheeks, a poisonous migraine throbbed inside her skull.

“Juliet is lying in the bed, beside you. She is helpless, utterly dependent on you. She has been crying; you have been nursing her.”

“Nursing her …”

“Tell me what you feel, Anna.”

“Nursing her …”

“Tell me what you feel.”

“I … can’t reject her.”

“No, you can’t.” His voice had a new note in it now, telling her he’d scented victory. “But you want to, don’t you?”

“Can’t do what my mother did to me. Can’t … give her away.”

“So what
do
you do?”

“No!”

“What do you do?”

“You
promised!
Gerhard! Never again, you needn’t go back to it ever again….”

“What do you do!”

“I …”

“Yes?”

“Put my hands … desperate … oh Christ, I’m so unhappy, so depressed. She won’t take my milk … won’t feed.”

“What … do … you …
do!”

“I put my hands …”

“Where do you put your hands?”

Anna cried out, but Kleist was remorseless.
“Where?”

“Around … Juliet’s … throat.”

She began to keen, beating her clenched fists against the floor, but still unable either to rise or to open her eyes.

“And then your mother came in, didn’t she?
Didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“And your baby was saved. Your innocent, beautiful child, who’d never done anything wrong, was saved. So that David need never know who you really were, what kind of woman you were.”

She saw him then, quite suddenly, even though her eyes stayed closed. She could see every lineament of his twisted face, each of the hundred tiny details that betrayed his need to destroy her before she did the same to him.

He wanted to render her harmless. He was prepared to do anything, and he had chosen the weapons with which he was most familiar.

No. There was more to it. He wanted
her.
He had to eradicate David. Once he’d done that he could take her
to Berlin and hold her there, his creature, for the rest of time.

Anna’s hands pounded the floor as if she were having a fit. Suddenly one of them made contact with the roughness of the corn-stock doll and—
Wake up,
the child’s voice screamed. Juliet. Her daughter.

“Anna? Anna, why don’t you answer?”

Silence.

“Anna.” Gerhard’s voice was low, coaxing. “Anna, can you still hear me? If you can, raise the middle finger of your right hand.”

But she did nothing of the kind. Instead, she slowly opened her eyes. She emerged into the light.

“You can’t do that to me.” Her voice, astonishingly, was perfectly calm. “You can’t say it. I love David. And he loves me. In spite of what you’ve done.”

Kleist looked at her, his face expressionless. Anna understood what he could see: not a tired, frightened woman on the edge of forty, but a threat to all his hopes, of everything he’d worked for, the Krysalis file, the protection of his masters, and the hope of the good life to come. Anna saw these things through his eyes and braced herself.

He pounced with a clumsiness born of his own awkward leap from the floor, wrenching her shoulder muscles. At first, all she could think about was the pain, she closed her eyes against it and tried to raise a hand to protect the spot from further damage. But Kleist, intent on achieving his twin goals of revenge and punishment, dashed her hand aside, twisting two of the fingers until she screamed.