The Sphinx (21 page)

Lorie was
pulling him by the hand, and as they came nearer to the cage at the end of the
line where the huge male lion was kept, she seemed to tug him along faster and
faster, as if she could hardly wait to get there.

Finally, they
stood in front of the lion’s cage. Lying in the center of the boarded floor,
his shaggy head lifted, the lion watched them approach. His slanted eyes closed
then widened again, then watched them steadily and with total cruel confidence
as they admired him from beyond his bars.

“There,”
breathed Lorie. “Isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he just magnificent?”

Gene squinted
into the cage. “He looks fine to me. Yes, he’s pretty good-looking.”

“Oh, he’s more
than good-looking,” said Lorie, in a hushed, enthralled voice that he had never
heard her use before. “He’s like a king. He’s like a god. Look at those
muscles. Look at that gorgeous fur.

Look at those
claws.”

Gene coughed.
“I don’t know. He seems pretty mangy round the edges. Do you know what I mean?”

Lorie hardly
seemed to listen. “He’s been caged up, haven’t you, my fine brutal darling?
He’s been locked up for so long. Do you know how much a beautiful lion like
that weighs?”

“Two hundred
pounds? Come on, Lorie. It’s cold. We ought to be going.”

The lion
growled, and shook its head. Lorie embraced herself hi her arms, and closed her
eyes.

“Lorie,” said
Gene, irritably. “It’s time we left. I haven’t eaten anything all day, except
for that lousy hotdog, and I’m about as cold as a polar bear’s pickax.?

Lorie’s eyes
stayed closed, and she smoothed the fur. on her sleeves as if she was caressing
herself. The lion growled again, and lowered its massive head on to its paws.

“Lorie,” said
Gene. “Will you please say goodbye to your friend and come home?”

Lorie gradually
opened her eyes and turned around. “You can’t mock him, you know,” she
whispered. “He may be locked up in a cage, but you can’t mock him. He is too
magnificent for that.”

“Look, Tm not
mocking him. What should I want to mock him for? I’m just asking you to come
along home.”

“Wait Just one
moment”

She stepped
right up to the bars of the cage. The lion watched her closely, squeezing its
eyes open and shut in narrow slits. Gene was about to warn her about standing
so close to the bars, but something inside him said no, she knows what she’s
doing. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

The lion lifted
its head again, and then stood tip. It was a powerful and fully grown male,
dull and out of condition because of its life in a cage but still coursing with
muscles and rippling with strength. It had a deep, musky smell about it.

Slowly, its
tail swinging, the lion paced up to the bars where Lorie stood. It pulled back
its lips in a slight snarl, and growled again, but Lorie stayed where she was.
Finally, the beast came right up to her, and sniffed at=her tentatively,
clawing the floor with its pads. Lorie stood there for a moment, tense and
upright, and then she took one step back and bowed. A deep, sweeping bow,
almost to the ground.

“Lorie,” Gene
said, sharply.

She finished
her bow and stood straight again. “He’s wonderful,” she said. “I have to show
him that I consider him superb. I have to make my obeisance.”

“Obeisance? To
a goddamn lion? Lorie, for Christ’s sake.”

Lorie
stiffened. “You’re forgetting something, Gene.”

“I’m not
forgetting anything. I just don’t want you making curtseys to any mangy
animals, -that’s all.”

Lorie was about
to say something, but she- contained herself. “All right, Gene,” she said
quietly,

“I’m sorry. But
don’t forget that I’m half lion myself. This beast is my kin, as well as a
beautiful beast.”

“Lorie, I know
that. Don’t you think. I’ve had my nose rubbed in that for a month? But you
promised me that you’d try and forget about the lion part of your personality,
and relate yourself to human things, to human ideals. This... king of the
jungle... well, he may be terrific as fat as lions go, but I don’t want you
making bows in front of him. Do you get that? He’s an animal, and we’re humans,
and that makes us superior to him. It’s nothing to do with kinship. It’s a fact
of natural history.”

Lorie turned
back and looked at the lion. She shook her head slowly and the lion growled and
settled itself down again.

“Do you
understand what I’m saying?” asked Gene.

“Yes,” said
Lorie, “I understand.”

“But you don’t
agree with me?”

“Do you want me
to?”

“I can’t force
you. But I’d rather you did.”

Lorie took his
arm, and they walked away from the rows of lion cages and back over the rough
grass toward the parking lot. On the cloverleaf, the ceaseless traffic rumbled
and roared, and brake lights blinked red through the frosty night.

“Gene,” said
Lorie, “you won’t ever think that I don’t love you, will you? You won’t ever
think that what I feel for you is false?”

“Why should I
think that?”

She stopped,
and suddenly held him close. “You shouldn’t ever think it, because it will
never be true. I love you more than you’ll ever understand.”

He gently
kissed her soft hair, and nuzzled against her. He wished he didn’t feel so
tired.

“As long as you
love me more than you love lions,” he said quietly.

She raised her
head, and looked at him. “There is an expression in the old Ubasti language,”
she said. “It is hakhim-al farikka, and it means ‘the two loves in the one
love.’ One day you will understand what that means, and how strong a love it
is.”

He kissed her
again. “You learn something every day,” he said gently. “Come on, let’s get
home.”

At one in the
morning, just before he was ready to switch off his bedroom lamp and go to
sleep, he remembered Maggie. He picked up the phone by his bed and dialed her
.number. It rang fifteen or sixteen times before she answered, and she sounded
sleepy.

“Hallo,” she
mumbled.

‘Tm sorry,”
Gene said. ‘I woke you again.”

“Is that you,
Gene?”

“Listen, I can
call back in the morning.”

“No, no,” she
said quickly. “Don’t do that. Just give me a second to wake up.”

He picked at
his teeth with a match. After they’d come home from the circus, he had made
himself a cold beef sandwich, with pickles, and there were shreds stuck in his
gums. “Are you all right? You sound kind of strange.”

“I’m fine,” she
said, “but I went down to that library today and I found all kinds of weird
stuff.”

“Can’t it wait
until the morning?”

“Well, it
could. But there’s some things here I think you ought to know. Hold on a
moment. Here they are. I found them in a really crusty old book called
Forbidden Religions of the Nile. There’s a whole chapter on the Ubasti,
although someone’s torn the illustrations out. The librarian reckons they were
saucy or some:-thing.”

Gene coughed.
“Does it say anything new? Anything we don’t know already?”

“Well, there’s
a bit here that really worried me,” said Maggie. “It goes on about Tell Besta,
and the worship of the lion-god Bast, and some of the rituals, Which were
positively sickening, but there!? this bit that says something about their
marriages.”

“Can you read
it?”

“Sure. It says:
‘According to the strict command of the Lion-God Bast, the women of the cult
were charged with protecting the species of Ubasti for ever and ever. They were
to do this by mating alternately by generations with lions and with humans. In
other words, if a Ubasti woman mated with a lion, her daughter would be obliged
to mate with a man, and so forth, alternately, thus keeping the strength of
this curious mixed race strong, both lion and human.”

Gene listened.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Well, Lorie’s
mother married Jean Semple, who was a human being, and Lorie’s married me, and
I’m a human being, too.”

“You haven’t
slept with her yet, though, have you? She’s not your mate.”

“Well, no, but
as soon as she’s recovered from the plastic surgery...”

“Wait, Gene.
Just listen to what it says here. After all this business about carrying on the
line by alternately mating with lions and humans, it says this: ‘The Ubasti
ritual of mating is complex and always carried out strictly according to the
divine instructions laid down by the Great Lion-God Bast. If a woman is to mate
with a man, then she must offer the man money and jewels, and sacrifice a lion
in his name. But if a woman is to mate with a lion, then she must offer to the
lion, as his sacrifice, a man.”

“Maggie...”
interrupted Gene.

“Wait, there’s
more. Listen to this. ‘After a woman has mated with a man, she must preserve
the secrecy of her descent and of what has happened by silencing him forever.
This is usually done by the lion-woman biting off his tongue.’“

Gene was
silent. He could hear Maggie breathing on the other end of the phone. He
scratched his forehead carefully; but inside his mind his thoughts were
plummeting down a thousand miles of empty uncertainty.

“Are you sure
about this?” he asked hoarsely.

“It’s in the
book. And the book is cross-quoted in, several other books that are very
respectable and distinguished.”

He let out a
long breath. “Do you think it’s true?” he asked her. “Or do you think that it’s
just a legend?”

“I don’t know,
Gene. I’m sorry. I wish I did. I simply thought you ought to know.”

“Maggie,” he
said quietly, “we went to the circus today.”

“I thought you
hated circuses.”

“I do, but
Lorie insisted. After it was all over, she took me around to see the lions.”

“And?”

He couldn’t say
it. He couldn’t tell even Maggie-What was on his mind. But if, as the legend
said, it was Lorie’s turn to mate with a lion, then the lion was there, waiting
for her. And if the words of the book were really true, then she hadn’t married
Gene for love, or for anything to do with affection or trust or respect. She
had deliberately enticed him, wooed him, and married him, so that she could
offer him as bait to her real intended mate. Perhaps that was what Mathieu had
really meant by “Smith’s gazelle.” Gene Keiller was Lorie Semple’s wedding gift
to the beast that was going to father her children.

He laid the
phone down numbly in his lap. So much of it fitted together, so logically, that
he felt as if the world had been kicked away from under his feet. Maybe Lorie
had genuinely loved him at the beginning, and that was why she had tried to
discourage him so much. She had known what would happen if they fell in love
and married. She had known, even more surely then she knew that she loved him,
that she would have to surrender him up as a sacrifice.

In his own
blind persistence, he had actually fought his way into the trap. As soon as
Mrs. Semple had seen him, neither he nor Lorie had stood a chance of not
getting married. She had cajoled and encouraged Gene to go out with Lorie, and
as Lorie’s mother and elder in the religion of the Lion-God Bast, she had
presumably found it easy to command Lorie to go along with the inevitable
ritual.

Between them,
Lorie and her mother had done everything they could to keep him at the Semple
mansion, and to prepare him for the role he was finally going to have to play.
Maybe Lorie’s hunt for blood on the night after their wedding had been a
mistake, but he could see now how smoothly Mrs. Semple had lulled him into
believing that it was all an unfortunate lapse, and that Lorie would soon “get
better.”

She would never
“get better.” She was a daughter of the Ubasti, and like all the daughters of
the Ubasti, she was committed to the sacred and ancient mission of preserving
the race of the Lion-God Bast. It would be easier to try to “rehabilitate” a
dedicated Moslem, or a devout Catholic.

“Gene?” said
Maggie. “Gene, are you there?”

“Yes, Maggie.
I’m here.”

“Gene, are you
thinking what I’ve been thinking? I mean, I didn’t like to say it, but...”

He coughed. “I
don’t know, Maggie. It just seems to fit, that’s all. It just seems to answer
all the questions.”

“If it’s true,
Gene, you ought to get out of there. I mean, quick.”

“And what if it
isn’t?”

“Gene, if
they’re going to offer you up to some lion, then I don’t think you really have
the time to quibble.”

“But what if
it’s true? What if it’s some hoary old legend? If I walk out of here now, I’m
going to lose Lorie for good. Things are strained enough as it is.”

Maggie was
silent for a moment. “Why don’t you go find Mathieu, and ask him?”

“Mathieu?”

“You remember
what he told you about the sons of Bast. Well, doesn’t it seem logical that-that’s
what the sons of Bast are? They’re lions, Gene. Actual lions.”

“But why
should...”

He stopped
himself. He frowned. “Maggie,” he said, “read that bit again. That bit about
preserving the secrecy of the lion-people.”

Maggie shuffled
papers, and then read: “‘After a woman has mated with a man, she must preserve
the secrecy of her descent and of what has happened by silencing him forever.
This is usually done by the ion-woman biting off his tongue.’“

Gene listened,
and then nodded. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he said quietly.

“What did you
say?”

“It all fits.
Mathieu isn’t Mathieu at all. He’s Lorie’s father. Can you get me a photograph
of Jean Semple from the newspaper morgue first thing tomorrow? If it isn’t
Mathieu, then I don’t know who the hell it is.”

“But if he
knows about the lion-people, if they actually bit off his tongue, surely he
would have tried to escape?”