She didn't seem in the least uneasy, so maybe she hadn't yet noticed the discoloration or didn't understand it. But she would notice it, and come to understand it, and when she did, the evil that she was concealing was going to explode to the surface, because this woman could not be what she seemed. Hidden beneath that pretty surface, there lurked a monster.

Then she was face-to-face with David.

"Thank you for granting me my freedom," she said to him, after Katie had gone. "How is Linda?"

"She had a mild heart attack. She'll be fine."

"Will she?"

"You think not?"

"I don't think anything. I asked a question."

"Which had implications."

"I don't do implications. I say what I mean."

He sipped the coffee. His prop, in lieu, she supposed, of a pipe.

"David, do you have any idea who I am?"

"Caroline Light."

"Why did I come here?"

"The same reason people usually come to the hospital. You were suffering and you wanted relief."

"You know more than that. Do you know we were childhood sweethearts?"

"I know about the cla.s.s. I know who you are and I know about ... something. The gold. Sort of. But I'm lost. And I don't know you. You're like a stranger who's sharing a compartment on a train or something."

"I need you to wake up," she said.

He gestured with the coffee cup. "I'm wide awake."

"I'm going to say something," she told him, "and you can take it however you're going to take it."

"Okay."

"I dreamed you made love with Nurse Katie last night. I dreamed I watched you."

So much blood drained out of his face that he seemed to turn to wax.

"You feel a need to tell me this?"

She decided to force the matter even further.

"I saw you tangled in blue sheets, in the light of a beautiful Tiffany lamp-so s.e.xy, I didn't know he did erotics-and, oh, G.o.d, I felt such incredible jealousy, because, David, you need to face the truth, and the truth is that even though we were children when we made our vows, they counted, and even though you don't remember right now, last night you were cheating on me!"

The waxen face slowly filled with the color of a deep flush. He blinked rapidly. He picked up his pencil and put it down. Then his chin lowered, his fingers stopped toying with the pencil and grasped it tightly. There was an odd sense that they were moving down a tunnel, racing away from each other. She feared that she had made a major mistake.

He jumped to his feet, came out from behind the desk, and stood over her.

She felt the menace in it. She said, "I'm sorry I slapped you."

"I am, too. It hurt."

"I'm a punisher. It's a fault. But you're hurting me, David, you're hurting me terribly."

He loomed and she could feel him suppressing his own violence. Then he strode across the room and threw himself down in one of the sumptuous chairs that stood before the fireplace. He was muttering, and she could not hear the details.

"I'm sorry," she said, going toward him. "I've touched a nerve and I'm very sorry."

Slowly, his head turned toward her. His face was sunken and gray now, skeletal with fury.

"Will you please tell me which member of my staff allowed you access to my bedroom?"

"I-n.o.body. The door was unlocked."

"d.a.m.n you! d.a.m.n d.a.m.n you!" you!"

She tried another sort of shock. "You have a mission, David. Face it! You have to lead us out of this mess."

As if the chair was burning him, he leaped up and strode away again. She realized that he knew. Inside himself, he knew it all. It wasn't that he couldn't remember, but that he couldn't face it.

"Were you also out the first night you were here?"

What should she say? One of their fellow cla.s.smates had released her from her looked room, and she had gone to fetch the tiny amount of ancient white powder gold she had brought with her. She had hidden it near the gate until she was sure she wasn't walking into a trap. That gold was star stuff, what NASA had found when they went searching for stardust, and what was found in the crop circles of haunted England. Without a little of the ancient material, new material could not be made.

He returned, a stalking lion. "How stupid do you think I am?"

"David, the whole nature of reality is changing and there's work to do. You have to accept this."

"And I suppose the ridiculous, bloodthirsty, mad Aztec G.o.ds are coming back, too, and we're all going to be sacrificing children soon!"

"The G.o.ds don't exist."

He gestured toward the glyphs above the door. "A couple of days ago you sounded like an evangelist."

"The old G.o.ds are the mythologized principles of a lost science. As human knowledge declined after the last cataclysm, science became myth, and myth became religion. They ended up worshiping subtle principles as meaningless G.o.ds. That's all religion is. Worship of the powers of a science that existed before Egypt."

He glared at her in silence.

"David, you know this! We were taught it. We sat side by side."

He looked long at her. "Yes," he said softly, "I know." But he seemed to sink into himself, his face growing ugly-eyes bloodshot, cheeks seething purple, lips twisted back-a face savage with amazing depths of rage.

"Now wait," she said helplessly, "it's all right." How soft and full of grace that face had been when he was a boy of twelve. "Be as little children-"

"I'm an adult!" Seeming to overcome something deep within himself, he pulled away from her and stalked off again. This was a cage and he was an animal.

"David, all you have to do is embrace your role. Then you'll see how important our love is."

"We were kids. The loves of childhood don't survive."

"Our bond is essential to our mission, and it was meant to survive."

"Well, I've remembered a lot of things, but not that."

She came close, and he did not stop her. "Start again then."

"Now? There's no time. Not for feelings."

"All this pacing you're doing-you're trying to run away, but you can't, David. There's no place to go."

"There had better be, because we have very little food left and almost no fuel, and I don't know how to save the situation."

She did something she had last done in the bas.e.m.e.nt of this very house, when they were still just kids. She kissed him ... but not with the gingerly innocence of those days, not this time.

For a moment, they were frozen like that. And then, slowly, he pulled away from her. His face was popping sweat. She slipped close to him, and drew her arms around him. They became as still as statues, two people in the ancient, tentative posture of unfolding love.

She lifted her face, and found him looking down at her, and felt the same delectable weakness go through her that she had known when they were innocent.

"Let me show you something," she said.

For an instant he closed his eyes, and his face was as narrowed and sculptural as an old painting of a saint enduring martyrdom. When he opened them again, they were on her, boring into her.

"What's going on?" he asked vaguely, muttering as if in a dream.

They lay on the floor, going down by mutual consent, saying nothing.

Then, suddenly, his l.u.s.t came and he tore at her clothes, his eyes wild, his body thrusting, she thought, uncontrollably. In another moment his pants were off and he was pushing, seeking, and she turned a little, opened her legs a little, and the shock of his entry into her was by a thousand light-years the most intense experience she had ever had in her life.

He arched his back and cried out, his teeth bared, and then drew himself out and she tore at him, grabbing his thighs, and he entered her again, and this time it was more than s.e.x, it was beyond all physical experience, it was the moment of death amplified to a great, roaring, abandoned surrender of body, mind, and soul.

They lay, then, in soft gra.s.s, and from the billowing woods nearby there came birdsong.

"Oh, G.o.d," he whispered. "Oh, G.o.d, where are we, what is this place?"

"This is the future," she said, "if you want it. But it takes love. To come here takes fear, but to stay, there must be love."

He thrust and thrust and thrust, and every time he did, a wave of heart-stopping pleasure shot from her curling toes to her shuddering scalp. Then he kissed her, his tongue like fire boring into her and setting everything inside on fire, and the birds made their music, and a soft breeze caressed them, and the sun crossed the sky and went low, and in the long shadows, they heard, like distant bells, the secret harmonies of the human soul.

It ended then, in a series of declining thrusts. Surely now he would remember their love, and they would gain from it the energy they needed to pa.s.s through the time gate and not fall back.

There was no sound that marked their inevitable descent back into the familiar world, nothing but a gentle, subtle change from cool, pliant gra.s.s to the old rug they'd started their journey on.

"It was your painting, Caroline, the one you're doing in the art room. It was like we were in it."

"Yes. We went there."

"Then it's not a painting."

"No, it's a navigation tool and it worked just as it's supposed to. We couldn't control our movement, though. We fell back. You and I should be able to cross easily by now, to prepare the way for others."

"Why can't we?"

"There must be love, David."

His hand withdrew from hers. He sat up.

She saw that he'd enjoyed himself with her. l.u.s.t, though, was all that it had been for him, the l.u.s.t of a soldier on his way to die.

She was down to the final card, she saw. No matter Mr. Acton's instructions, she must play it now because if she didn't, she would lose him here, now, forever.

Without love, the journey across time-the physical journey-would last no longer than it had just now, the flicker of a eye.

"I have something for you," she said.

She drew her purse open. This letter, in its fading envelope, had come to her from her father's hand, as he had wished her well on her quest. "My knight," he had said, "with no armor. My beautiful girl." Being held by her father, this man in profound trans.m.u.tation, was the most sacred experience that she knew. She feared so for him, off there in the Virginia countryside with no guards and no guns.

"This is for you," she said. He looked down at the envelope. Then back up at her. "It's from Herbert Acton," she said. "It was written over a hundred years ago."

He took it, then turned on the magnificent desk lamp, in which Louis Comfort Tiffany, himself a master alchemist, had reproduced, as if they were a swirling rainbow, all the colors of alchemical transformation, from the black of the ground through red to creamy white to green and yellow, then to the radiant white of monatomic matter and the ruby red of super consciousness, to the violet of night and wisdom, the color of the Great Elixir itself. In the lamp, fairies danced.

As he opened the letter, the dry old paper crackled. For a cold instant, she feared that it might turn to dust. Anything could happen now, in these enormous moments, beyond even the reach of visionaries like Herbert Acton.

He read in silence.

"What does it say?"

"You don't know? I thought you'd know."

"It's never been opened before, not since the day Herbert Acton wrote your name on it and sealed it."

In his eyes she saw flickers of the Great Elixir, shimmering and shuddering faintly, living violet in the blue that had long ago captured her heart. She allowed herself to hope.

He read aloud, " 'David Ford, this will come to you from the hand of the woman you love. Surrender and learn. But quickly, David, for nothing is decided. Goliath follows her close behind.' " He made a little sound in his throat. "That's all." He held the letter out. "And there's today's date."

" 'From the woman you love,' David. He knew what was supposed to be between us."

"Caroline ..." His voice faded. Then she realized that he wasn't looking at her anymore, he was looking past her.

When she turned, she found herself confronting Katrina Starnes and waves of hate unlike any she had ever felt, and she knew that this was the pure hate of darkness and, even worse, the hate of a scorned woman.

"I was just leaving," she said faintly.

"Oh, no," Katie snarled. "f.u.c.k him again. f.u.c.k him on the floor, you rich, spoiled filthy b.i.t.c.h b.i.t.c.h."