Read Online Ghosts and Other Lovers by Lisa Tuttle - Free Book Online Page B

black perched on a seat beside a frail old woman. His face was turned away to the window, as if he was watching the passing scene. Later, she saw him huddled in a doorway between two shabby tramps with a bottle of wine, and another day he leaned solicitously over a baby in a pram, and dogged the footsteps of a heavy-set young man. Death was everywhere, and no matter how she tried, Alida could not blind herself to his dark presence. Even when she did not see the man in black she sensed him near.
    She was sitting at her father's bedside, knitting a sweater while he slept fitfully, when a chill premonition of pain made her look up.
    Death came in sideways, his face turned away from her. He crept in like a crab, presenting the smooth black cloth on his back, his face against the pale green wallpaper as if he expected to merge with it unnoticed.
    The tenor of her father's breathing changed, becoming rasping and shallow, and Alida opened her mouth to call her mother, but no sound emerged. The ball of wool rolled under the bed as she lurched to her feet, and she found her legs too weak to carry her to safety, weak with that remembered, crippling pain. She stared at the intruder as he sidled along the wall, aware that in another moment he would reach the headboard, and then he would be able to lean down to touch her father.
    There was no conscious decision. She was thinking of escape, of the pain she could not bear to experience again, and not of self-sacrifice. But she could not stand by and watch her father suffer. It was almost an instinctive, physical response, to push Death away --
    So she flung herself across the bed, threw herself for the second time into Death's outstretched arms, taking the embrace meant for someone else. And embrace him she did, rather than push him away; clutched him tight as if he were a long-lost lover.
    His whole body was charged. As she embraced him, she felt her flesh sear wherever his touched it. It was as if a powerful electric current ran from him to her, melding their two beings into one. She felt him imprinted upon her surface, and then etching deeper. She felt the flesh melting from her bones, dripping off like hot fat, sizzling. She felt his arms binding her like chains heated white-hot, searing through her arms, her ribs, reaching her interior where her heart burst into flame.
    Yet she was still alive. Alida realized she had emerged from the other side of pain, and did not understand how, when her flesh had been melted away and her bones gone to ash, mere consciousness could have survived. She became aware of her aching body, which lay across the foot of her father's bed. She felt it begin to heal, felt her blood cool and flow again, felt her bones reconstitute themselves, felt her raw, liquid flesh solidify, and at last she raised herself up, looking timidly around the room.
    There was no sign of the man in black. As for her father, he was sleeping peacefully, breathing regularly, and looked better than he had for days. The terrifying translucent quality she had noticed about his face was gone, leaving him her familiar, living father. She had taken his death, she thought, and they had both survived. She closed her eyes on tears of joy.
    As the days passed, Alida's father grew stronger. He began to eat more, and no longer complained of pain. The doctors were wary of offering hope, and seemed to view the idea of total remission as skeptically as they would the miracle Alida knew had occurred. But she knew the truth. She had won him back from death. The immediate danger had passed, and now he would live to be an old man.
    Alida's pleasure in this was complicated by what it told her about herself, and she withdrew from family and friends to brood on it.
    She had saved her father, as well as a stranger's child, from death, and she did not doubt that she had the power to do the same thing for others. It was an awesome responsibility, a godlike role she had not asked for and did not want. Was she