The Wounded Land by Stephen R. Donaldson

grimness defied her. “I understand it well enough. I’m the only one who can help her.”
    Frustration boiled up in her. “Understand
what?
”
    He jerked to his feet. He was a figure of passion, held erect and potent in spite of weakness by the intensity of his heart. His eyes were chisels; when he spoke, each word fell distinctly, like a chip of granite.
    “She is possessed.”
    Linden blinked at him. “Possessed?” He had staggered her. He did not seem to be talking a language she could comprehend. This was the twentieth century; medical science had not taken
possession
seriously for at least a hundred years. She was on her feet. “Are you out of your mind?”
    She expected him to retreat. But he still had resources she had not plumbed. He held her glare, and his visage—charged and purified by some kind of sustaining conviction—made her acutely aware of her own moral poverty. When he looked away, he did not do so because he was abashed or beaten; he looked away in order to spare her the implications of his knowledge.
    “You see?” he murmured. “It’s a question of experience. You’re just not equipped to understand.”
    “By God!” she fumed defensively, “that’s the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard. You stand there spouting the most egregious nonsense, and when I question you, you just naturally assume there must be something wrong with me. Where do you get the gall to—?”
    “Dr. Avery.” His voice was low, dangerous. “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with you.”
    She did not listen to him. “You’re suffering from classic paranoia, Mr. Covenant.” She bit each word mordantly. “You think that everybody who doubts you isn’t quite right in the head. You’re a textbook case.”
    Seething irrationally, she turned on her heel, stamped toward the door—fleeing from him, and fighting furiously to believe that she was not fleeing. But he came after her, caught hold of her shoulders. She whirled on him as if he had assaulted her.
    He had not. His hands dropped to his sides, and twitched as if they ached to make gestures of supplication. His face was open and vulnerable; she saw intuitively that at that moment she could have asked him anything, and he would have done his best to answer. “Please,” he breathed. “You’re in an impossible situation, and I haven’t made it any easier. But please. At least consider the chance that I know what I’m doing.”
    A retort coiled in her mouth, then frayed and fell apart. She was furious, not because she had any right to be, but because his attitude showed her how far she had fallen into the wrong. She swallowed to stifle a groan, almost reached out toward him to apologize. But he deserved something better than an apology. Carefully she said, “I’ll consider it.” She could not meet his eyes. “I won’t do anything until I talk to you again.”
    Then she left the house, frankly escaping from the exigency of his incomprehensible convictions. Her hands fumbled like traitors as she opened the door of her car, slid behind the wheel.
    With failure in her mouth like the taste of sickness, she drove back to her apartment.
    She needed to be comforted; but there was no comfort in those grubby walls, in the chipped and peeling floorboards which moaned like victims under her feet. She had accepted that apartment precisely because it offered her no comfort; but the woman who had made that decision was a woman who had never watched herself buckle under the demands of her profession. Now for the first time since that moment of murder fifteen years ago, when her hands had accepted the burden of blood, she yearned for solace. She lived in a world where there was no solace.
    Because she could think of no other recourse, she went to bed.
    Tension and muggy sheets kept her awake for a long time; and when she finally slept, her dreams were sweat and fear in the hot night. The old man, Covenant, Joan—all babbled of
He
, trying to warn her.
He
who