I'm on a bed, in a dreamscape room enveloped in pastel fog, watching a Melania butterfly the size of a man pump his massive orange and black wings above me. His voice is mellifluous, hypnotic, and I feel the soft wind of his wings against my face, cooling, scented, enveloping. It is the softness of eternal peace.
"Your body is a realm of fertility," he is saying, his tones echoing in the shadowy haze around me, sonorous and caring. "You are special." Then, iridescent blues and purples shimmering off his wings, his face evolves into the orange and black mask of a jaguar. "You are one of the special ones. Together we will create life."
Did he say "special"? Marcelina said I was… like Sarah…
Now his eyes are boring in and I'm thinking of the Chinese… Am I human, dreaming I'm a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I'm human?
As he moves over me, the rest of his butterfly form disappears and he's become a lithe jaguar whose lips are touching mine. The sheet over me melts into my skin as the soft spotted fur of his underbelly presses onto me. And his face has turned even more feline and sensuous, with dark eyes that look directly through me. I can feel his whiskers against me as he sniffs down my body, then explores my groin with his probing tongue.
Before I realize what's happening, his thighs press against mine and he knowingly insinuates himself into me. It all happens so naturally and effortlessly I scarcely… I see only an intense twitch of his animal ears, erect and directed toward me, as he enfolds me completely, his hot male breath urgent. As he grinds his thighs against mine, he emits growls, low in his throat, then nips lightly and lovingly at my cheek, his pale fangs benign and delicious.
I cling to him, bathed in sweat, falling into him, wanting him, but now…
He's changing… My God. No! He's…
His face is becoming a jade mask with eyes that burn a fiery red, a spirit of evil. He's plunging something deep into me, metal, cold and cutting. Far inside, reaching, while my mind fights through the waves of pain that course down my lower body. I struggle back, but my arms just pass through empty air. Stop. The eyes, the hard metal… Time turns fluid, minutes are hours, lost, and I don't know…
Finally-it could be years later-he growls one last time and the room begins fading to darkness. Then a blessed numbness washes over me. He's gone…
And I dream I am dead.
Sometime, probably hours later, I sensed my consciousness gradually returning. Around me the room was still dark and, remembering the "dream," I came fully awake with a start, my heart pounding. What had… it done to me? I was shivering, with a piercing, pointed ache in my groin. I needed air.
I rose up unsteadily and reached out, and realized I was in a hospital bed with metal bars along one side.
What! How did I come to be in this? Then I began remembering. I was at Baalum, in Alex Goddard's Ninos del Mundo clinic. And I'd been trying to get Sarah and take her home.
Instead, I'd passed out and then… an attack, some unspeakably evil…
Get out of here. Now.
I settled my feet onto the floor with a surge of determination, and that was when I sensed I was in a different place from where I'd… Where-!
I gazed around in the dark, then reached out and felt something on a table beside the bed. It was a clay bowl full of wax. What… a candle. And next to it I touched a plain book of matches. My hand was trembling from the pain in my groin, but I managed to light the candle, a flickering glow.
My wristwatch was lying nearby on the table. Someone must have taken it off and placed it there. I picked it up and held it by the candle, and for a moment I was confused by the seconds ticking off. Then I realized the time was… How could that be! It read 4:57 A.M. Had I been out for hours?
I gasped, then raised the candle and gazed around. The walls were brown stone-or maybe they just looked like stone. Yes, now I recognized it. I was in the fiberglass-walled operating room I'd seen on Alex Goddard's closed-circuit monitor.
What was I doing in here?
My arm brushed against the table and I felt an odd sensation. Glancing down, I realized there was a Band-Aid on the inside of my left wrist. What was that about? Earlier he'd taken blood from my right arm, but then he'd just swabbed it, so why this bandage? And what in hell was I doing in an operating room? I hadn't agreed to any procedures. Did he come back for a second-?
Or… that was what he'd done. He'd injected me with an IV drug. The bizarre vision I'd had was his cover for some perverse invasion of my body. My God, I'd been unconscious since yesterday afternoon. During all that time, what could he have done to me?
I was fist-clenching furious. Looking around the "operating room," I wanted to rip the place apart.
When I tried to stand, I realized my groin was tender and sore as hell, all across my panty-line, only somewhere deep, deep inside, in my reproductive… It was like after he'd given me those shots up at Quetzal Manor. I checked and saw no red needle-punctures this time, but the pain was much worse. That sick butterfly-jaguar dream was no dream. I'd been raped by… The bastard.
I pushed aside the pain, edged across to the door, and tested it. Unlocked. Good. Go find the SOB right now. Tear his head off.
I pulled back the door, took a deep breath, and checked out the hallway.
Whoa! How did they get here? In the dim light I made out two uniformed Army privates down at the end near the slatted windows, dozing in folding metal chairs, their AK- 47's propped against the plaster wall.
Why were they here? Just a cool, breezy place to hang out? Or were they in place to guard me?
The breeze was causing the candle's flame to cast flickering shadows across the hall, so I quickly re-closed the door.
Now what? I was trembling as I returned the candle bowl to the table and sat down on the bed. Soldiers with guns were outside my room at five in the morning. In the farthest end of Guatemala. What was I going to do?
I gazed around at the "stone" walls and tried to think. My mind still felt clouded from whatever drug he'd given me, but it was beginning to…
Wait. I saw Alex Goddard come into this very room with embryos from the lab, which is connected by the steel door to his office…
Where there was a phone.
Time to call the embassy, get some help to get the hell out of here.
I sat there thinking. All right. I'd need to wait an hour or so-now I'd get some low-level flunkie stuck with the graveyard shift-but there was something I was damned well going to do immediately. With the lab right next door, I could try to find out why Goddard had just performed medical rape on me. There had to be some connection. According to him, the lab was for "plant research." But if that was all he was doing, why was the Army here? Right outside my door? I felt a pump of adrenaline that made me forget all about my pain. Before I got the hell out of Baalum, I was going to know what he was really up to here.
God, I feel miserable. I really hurt. All the more reason…
I took the candle, stood up, and moved to the opposite wall to begin looking for an opening in the fiberglass "stone." It appeared to have been made from impressions from the room atop the pyramid, rows and rows of those little cartoon-face glyphs, mixed in with bas-reliefs, but there had to be a door somewhere. I'd seen him walk right through it. As I ran my hand along the surface, I was struck by how their hardness felt like stone. But it couldn't be.
What was I looking for? There certainly were no doorknobs. I came across a hard crack, next to the bas-relief of a feather-festooned warrior, but as I slid my hand down, it ended and again there was more rough "stone." Solid.
Damn. I stood back and studied the wall with my candle. He'd come in from the left, which would be about…
I moved over and started again. This time my fingernail caught in a crevice that ran directly down to the floor. Then I discovered another, about two and a half feet farther along. It had to be the door.
I felt along the side, wondering how to open it, till I noticed that one of the little "stone" glyphs gave way when I pressed it. When I put my hand against it harder and rotated it, the panel clicked backward, then swung inward. Yes!
And there it was: the lab, CRT screens above the incubators, gas chromatograph in the corner. This, according to him, was where he tested the rainforest plants the shamans and midwives brought in. But what about what he'd just done to me?
I was still worried about the Army guys outside, but I walked in, trying to be as quiet as I could. The first thing I did was head for the row of black boxes above the bench. Those, I assumed, were being used to maintain a micro-environment for incubating plant specimens. And sure enough, the dimly lit windows revealed rows and rows of petri dishes. They were clear, with circular indentations in the center…
But wait a minute. Those weren't just any old lab dishes. And no plant extracts were in them either, just clear liquid. That was odd, very fishy.
I stood there puzzling, and then I remembered seeing pictures of lab dishes like these being used for artificially fertilized embryos. At the beginning, freshly extracted human ova are placed in an incubator for several hours, afloat in a medium that replicates the inside of a female Fallopian tube, to mature them in preparation for fertilization. Goddard had said something about tests on the blastocyst, the first cellular material created after fertilization. So was he using actual fetuses? My God. I felt like I was starting to know, or guess, a lot more than he wanted me to.
My thoughts were churning as I looked up and studied the video screens above the boxes. It took a moment, but then I figured out the petri dishes and their chemicals had been placed in the incubators between 4:00 P.M. and 7:30 P.M. Last evening. What-?
I started counting. They were in racks, stacked, in sets of four by four. Let's see. Five in this incubator, five in the next, five in the… There were over two hundred dishes in all!
Impossible. I looked down at them again, feeling a chill. Nothing seemed to be in them yet, at least as far as I could tell, but then human eggs are microscopic. So if ova were…
When he supposedly was doing that in vitro on the Mayan woman, was he actually extracting eggs?
Get serious. That was not where they came from.
By then I was well along the Kubler-Ross scale, past denial and closing in on anger, but still… so many! How could they all-
I turned and examined the row of plastic-covered jugs at the back of the lab, lined up, six in all. Now I had to know what was in them.
I was still shaky, but I steadied myself, walked over, pulled back the plastic, and touched one. It was deathly cold, sweating in the moist air. When I flipped open its Frisbee-sized top, I saw a faint wisp of vapor emerge into the twilight of the room…
Then it dawned on me. Of course. They were cryo-storage containers. He'd need them to preserve fertilized eggs, embryos.
I lifted off the inside cover and placed it carefully onto the bench, where it immediately turned white, steaming with mist. Then I noticed a tiny metal rod hooked over the side of the opening. When I pulled it up, it turned out to be attached to a porous metal cylinder containing rows of glass tubes.
What's…?
Feeling like I was deep in a medical fourth dimension, I took out one of the freezing tubes. It was notched and marked with a code labeled along the side: "BL -1 la," "BL -1 lb," "BL-1 lc," and so it went, all the way to "g." But nothing was there.
I began checking the other tubes. They all were empty too. So why was he freezing empty containers?
Go with the simple answer. He's getting them ready for new embryos.
I slid the rod back into the cryo-tank, then walked over and hoisted myself onto the lab bench next to the Dancing Shiva, creator and destroyer. And when I did, I again felt a stab of pain in my groin. The bastard. I was shaking, in the early stages of shock. More than anything, I just wanted to find him and kill him…
I thought I heard a scraping noise somewhere outside, in the hall, and I froze. Was he about to come in and check on his "experiments"? Then I realized it was just the building, his house of horrors, creaking from the wind.
I took one final look at the incubators, and all the pain came back. The whole thing was too much for my body to take in. I sat there trying to muster my strength.
Don't stop now. Keep going.
I got back onto my feet. The phone. Use the telephone. Find Steve, alert the embassy, then get Sarah. Do it now, while you still can.
I was holding my breath as I walked over and pushed open the door to the office and looked in. It was empty and dark. Good. I headed straight for the black case of the Magellan World Phone.
When I picked up the handset and switched it on, the diodes went through their techno-dance of greens and yellows and then stabilized giving me a dial tone. Thank you, merciful God.
I decided to start off by calling the hotel in Belize again, on the long shot that Steve had managed to get the hell out of Guatemala. Baby, please be there. My watch said the time was five-twenty in the morning, but he once told me they manned the desk around the clock. No problem getting through, though the connection had a lot of static. But then came the news I'd been dreading: no Steve Abrams.
"He still not come back, mon."
Where was he? I wanted to scream, but I was determined to keep a grip.
All right, try the Camino Real and hope you can get somebody awake who speaks English. Maybe he went back. Please, God.
I had the number memorized, so I plugged it in, and I recognized the voice of the guy who picked up, the owner's son, who was trying his best to learn English.
"Hi, this is Morgan James. Remember me? I'm just calling to see if there's a Steve Abrams staying there now?"
"Hey, que pasa, Senora James. Very early, yes? Momento." There was a pause as he checked. Come on, Steve, be there. Please, please be somewhere.
Then the voice came back: "No, nobody by that name stays here."
"Okay… gracias." Shit. It was like a pit had opened somewhere deep in my stomach.
I replaced the handset, feeling grateful that at least the phone still worked, my last link to sanity. My next call was going to be to the embassy, but I couldn't risk using up my opening shot with the graveyard shift. Maybe by 6 A.M. somebody with authority to do something would be there. Just a few more minutes.
Now what? I felt the aching soreness in my groin again, along with a wave of nausea. I had to do something, anything, just to keep going, to beat back an anxiety attack.
That was when I turned and stared at the computers, the little ducks drifting across the screens.
All right, you know what he's doing; now it's time to try and find out why. The real why. There must be records of what he's up to stored there. What else would he have them for?
"Clang, clang, clang." A noise erupted from somewhere outside the window. In spite of myself, I jumped.
Then I realized it was just the odd call of some forest bird. God, I wasn't cut out for this. Now my head was hurting, stabs of pain, but I rubbed at my temples and sat down at the first terminal.
I'm a Mac fan, hate Windows, so I had to start out by experimenting. In the movies people always know how to do this, but I had to go with trial and error, error compounding error.
After endless false starts that elicited utility screens I couldn't get rid of, I finally brought up an index of files, which included a long list of names.