Eric van Lustbader - Nicholas Linnear 06 by Second Skin

Author:Second Skin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

And yet

What was it about Michael that made him seem to her as if he were a kindred spirit? All alone in the night, she dreamed of him. In her dream, they stood in a glade of a vast woods. All around them was cluttering darkness where beasts of prey prowled. The glade shone whitely in moonlight, but the dense canopy of treetops would not let the light penetrate the woods.

Michael stood tall and handsome and absolutely unafraid,

but she could feel her terror like a second skin, crawling

over her like a skein being drawn by an invisible insect

He smiled at her with that peculiar, goofy smile he directed only at her.

Michael! She screamed, more loudly.

But he could not hear her, and now she realized that she was mute. She heard the rhythmic liturgical chanting of Latin prayers, and she grabbed Michael’s hand and fled with him into the darkness of the woods.

And in that darkness, she could hear the twin beatings of their hearts, synchronized and harmonized, like the choral voices of the liturgical song. Deeper and deeper into the dangerous woods she drew him until both glade and moonlight were but a memory. Why? Why? What was she seeking?

She awoke knowing they were about to be attacked, and the thought in her head, revolving like a wheel: I’ve done this to him. It’s all my fault.

This dream was alive and glowing in her mind that hot June night in 1961 when she found Michael up on the roof of their apartment building in Ozone Park. Grandpa had given him a telescope, the perfect present for a boy longing to outpace the boundaries of his limited world. But then Grandpa always seemed to know just what his grandchildren wanted most. On her last birthday, Valentine’s Day, when she had turned nineteen, he had given her a book on the birth of Italy. For Caesare’s birthday, he had chosen a gun.

There was a peculiar kind of fever coming off Michael that night, as if he, too, possessed that second skin beneath which a hitherto unknown person was thirsting to emerge. That night, he was by turns avid and unresponsive, as if a central question in his mind had not yet been resolved.

She had evinced an interest in the stars even though they seemed as remote and dead as Latin. But even Latin, when sung in chant, possessed a certain formal beauty that the stars, in their coldness, could not. They were far too alien for her. Still, she was desperate to talk and she did not know how else to prolong her presence up on the roof. Michael liked to be alone; perhaps he even thrived in his solitude. This was another element about him that frightened her. Solitude was too demanding; it required a certain concentration she was only now beginning to explore with Bernice in her studies at Santa Maria.

She had been so stupid that night! She had gotten so close to him, she could feel all her defenses crumbling.

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