From part two....
Turning to Clark, he continued: "But you, Clark Kent, can save her. But only if you are willing to give yourself to her, as she has already given herself to you. As she may even sacrifice her life for you. Remember, Clark Kent. I am the Lord of Dreams. If you fail her - if you recoil from her in fear - I will make her haunt your dreams forever. And if she will not be my instrument of torture I will spin my web of nightmares around you myself. So tight will I spin it that morning light will not release you. Remember, Clark Kent. I am the brother of Death."
As he spoke, the blizzard died down, and the clouds parted, letting the stars shine through. Rustling curtains of green Northern lights rippled across the Arctic sky, and meteors traced a delicate latticework of ephemeral lines and starry soundless explosions across the heavens, as the majestic Big Dipper arched itself over the glittering expanses below. A red balloon, dark in the pale moonlight, lay half-buried under the snow, and a woman’s broken body lay sprawled beside it, her blood tracing a delicate calligraphy of love letters in the snow.
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Now read on....
”Kent! Lane! My office!”
Clark Kent had somehow expected it. All morning wild images had been tumbling through his mind, overwhelming erotic memories of himself and Lois from last night, mingled with a painful knot of anxiety and foreboding which had lodged itself in the pit of his stomach, and which was causing his hands to shake. He rose heavily from his chair and walked slowly into Perry’s office, like a defendant from a trial fearfully awaiting the jury’s decision.
”Kent? Where’s Lois?”
For reasons entirely unknown to him, cold fingers of panic lodged themselves around his heart.
”I… I don’t know, Chief.”
”Oh? When was the last time you saw her?”
The fingers around his heart twisted and squeezed. He felt his cheeks grow beet red, while the blood was draining from his brain. Would he faint? Did Superman faint?
”La… last night, Chief.”
”Last night? Did you spend the night with her?”
The room was swaying, the walls and floor alternately launching themselves at him and receding.
”Yes…. No…. Not all night, Chief.”
Perry rose from his chair, put a heavy hand on Clark’s shoulder, and leaned in so close that his face was only inches away from Clark’s. For a second, his eyes seemed to change, taking on an oddly gleaming cast.
”Listen, Kent. Lois is like a daughter to me. No one treats her badly when I’m around. No one breaks her heart. If you’ve misplaced her this morning, if you’ve made her run away, you’d better get out and locate her for me. And you don’t return here until you’ve found her.”
Reeling, Clark turned around to get away from Perry and from the prying, gleeful stares from the people in the newsroom. They would dissect him like a frog, if they could…. They would peel apart his life, drag him in the mud and jeer at all his shame. Shame… disaster… shame… If he could only run away, hide himself forever, cover his face and never let them see... But the knot in his stomach insisted he find out all about the horrors he was guilty of, the demons he’d set free the night before. He had to ask, even though his mouth was dry and his knees were trembling in anticipation of the verdict.
”Chief…. What was it… you were going to tell me?”
”Oh.” Perry waved an impatient hand. ”It was about that young intern, Monica Pearson, poor girl…. She was killed right outside the Daily Planet building just last night. Round two a.m., the coroner said. I’m almost surprised that Superman wasn’t there to save her. I was going to assign you and Lois to look into her murder, but that can wait, Kent, until you find out where Lois is.”
This time the floor lurched so badly that Clark really had to lean against the nearest wall to prevent himself from falling. Two a.m. …. That was when he and Lois had been crawling all over one another on her couch, her top and his shirt both missing. God… her skin…his hands feeling her breasts… and her fingers tracing paths of fire across his back, his shoulders, his chest, and her tongue licking him…. And right at that moment a young girl, Monica Pearson, was murdered, perhaps sliced… stabbed… bleeding… screaming… and he had been oblivious to her, his brain befuddled and his body panting… breathing… licking…. Oh, the shame, the shame of it….
You don’t… you don’t lose control, not ever. Not if you are Superman. Not if you are the protector of this world… where you do not belong. Not if you are an alien, holding tentative citizenship on the Earth only because you’ve pledged your powers to the protection of the human race. You don’t pretend you are one of them…. You don’t seek one of them out, a woman… you don’t let people die because your alien hands are caressing her human flesh.
He should… he should tear open his shirt, right now. Let them all see the pathetic game he had been playing, but would never play again. Never again let them laugh or whisper, never let them blame him for their fellow human’s death, wondering about what soft female flesh he had been burying his alien anatomy in. He should expose the contemptible Clark Kent to the world and then renounce him, accept only the stoic solitude of Superman and exile himself in the Arctic. Do penance in a world of ice and snow.
”Kent? Why are you still hanging around here? Go find Lois for Chrissakes!”
Lois! Oh, God, Lois! His head swam again, and then he saw her, half-buried in a landscape of unrelenting snow. In that eternal whiteness of frozen desolation, a fallen Icaros of a crashed balloon… red. A broken-looking woman, her short red hair a counterpoint to the scarlet brazenness of the balloon. Her blood, red as her hair and her balloon, red as her life and love, delicately tracing a gnostic gospel of love letters in the snow…. Oh, God! God!
He knew where she was. In the Arctic. Where he would have hidden himself. Where, one way or another, he had hidden himself. She’d come to save him, to retrieve him, and she had paid for his life with her own….
No. She was alive, just barely. Somehow he could sense her. He could go to her, ease her gently onto a stretcher and fly her to Star Labs for treatment. Doctor Klein would save her, with the help of her father, skilled surgeon Sam Lane.
Launching himself into the air, Superman swooshed past Metropolis General, unceremoniously helping himself to several blankets and a stretcher. Then, flying straight to the place in Greenland where he would have gone to hide, where he had gone to hide, he soon spotted the wrecked balloon. And Lois.
He felt her presence reach out to him as he approached her. Even in unconsciousness, behind closed eyelids, her eyes still smiled at him. Even in the heaviness of sleep, her arms still opened to welcome him. Her love enveloped him. Like a man lost in the eternity of blackness between stars, and spotting the soft sweet glow of the only place that was his home, Clark touched down beside the woman who had taken him into her heart, and had given him a home in the universe.
As he cradled her in his arms, she opened her eyes and looked at him. In those weakly smiling brown depths were total recognition, total knowledge, total acceptance of him. And total love.
Struggling as to move the stars out of their orbits she lifted up her hand to touch his cheek. His lips.
And at last he knew that this could not be bad. He would never run away from her again, and never be ashamed again of their kisses and caresses. Never again deny the intimacy between them. He had come home, and his home was in this woman’s arms.
He gently eased her onto the stretcher and carefully flew his precious cargo to Star Labs and Sam Lane and Doctor Klein.
Somewhere beneath him, a tall dark figure, radiating darkness like an inverted sun, slowly strode away across the white barrenness of snow.
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tbc....
Ann
