Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page A

laughed. "You must mean Willard's. It's famous all up and down the coast."
    "I shall find them very strange and quite edible," he announced. "Until tomorrow." At the door he touched her cheek with his lips, no more than an avuncular caress, a kind of parent to child kiss. Her skin flinched away from him, her face flamed, and she gave thanks for the darkness of the hall and for the fact that he picked up the Box and left, not turning to look back at her as she shut the door between them.
    She did not see him set the Box down on the stair and wipe his hands fastidiously on his handkerchief. Sweat beaded his upper lip, and he shook his head, mouth working, as though to spit away some foul taste. For a moment, when he had opened the Box, he had felt as though astray in nightmare. One did not expect to smell such corruption in the pleasant apartment of an innocent—oh, yes, make no mistake about that—innocent young woman. Yet he had smelled it, tasted it. Makr Avehl Zahmani had some experience with wickedness. As a leader of his people, it was part of his duty to diagnose evil and protect against it. What he felt rising from the Box had a skulking obscenity of purpose, a stench of decay. His face sheened with sweat at the self-control it took to lift the Box and carry it. He drew a pen from his pocket, used it to jot a quick shorthand of symbols and letters on each of the six faces of the Box. Then he picked it up once more, a bit more easily, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at the door at the top of the stairs.
    Behind that door, Marianne was conscious of nothing but shame and fear, shame at the feel of hard nipples pressing against her blouse, shame at the brooding, liquid heat in her groin, fear at the greedy demands of a desire which had am-bushed her out of nowhere and was swallowing her into some endless gut of hungry sensation.
    She clung to the door, cringing under a lash of memory.
    There had been Cloud-haired mama dead in the next room, cold and white and forever gone. How did she die, Marianne had demanded, over and over. She was young! She wasn't sick! How could she have died? There had been no answers, not from Papa Zahmani, not from Harvey who had only looked at her strangely, expressionlessly, as though he did not know her. There had been whispering, shouts from behind closed doors, Dr. Brown saying, "I would have said she died of suffocation, Haurvatat. I can't explain it. I don't know why. Sometimes hearts just fail." And Marianne crying, crying endlessly, finally seeking Harvey out and throwing herself into his arms in the late, dark night.... And then had come the frightening thing. And after the housekeeper had come in and interrupted him, he had hissed at her, "Bitch princess. You're as soft and usable as your mad mama was...."
    She leaned against the door, digging her nails into her palms.
    "I'm not like that!" she screamed at herself silently. "I'm not like that at all." Demon voices in her mind hissed, "Soft, usable, bitch!" An obscene heat enveloped her, and she was back in the old house, returned to Harvey's holding her, touch-ing her, starting to undress her with fingers busy under her clothes, and herself responding to him in a kind of dazed frenzy which had no thought in it, no perception except of a hoped-for forgetfulness, a much desired unconsciousness. And then he had been interrupted, and the shame had come, the shame of his using Mama's name, defiling her death, defiling her child—
    and Mama's child involved in the defilement, cooperating in it.
    "No, no, no," she screamed now as she had then. "I am not like that. Mama wasn't like that. I won't, won't, won't!"
    Somewhere inside herself she found the calmer voices. "This man is not Harvey. This man is someone else. He has Harvey's face, but he has not Harvey's sins. He is attractive, you are attracted, but this hot shame is only memory, Marianne. It is not now, not real, only memory. And you, Marianne, you are well enough alone. So.