The Witching Hour

  Turning, he snatched up one jar after another. She stood beside him. They were peering through the glass, the shimmer of the images almost blinding him to what he meant to see, but he was determined to see. Heads with brown hair, and look, a blond head with streaks of brown in it, and look, the face of a black man, with blotches of white skin on it, and streaks of lighter hair, and here another, with the white hair streaked with brown.

  "Dear God, don't you see? He not only went into them, he changed the tissues, he caused the cells to react, he changed them but he couldn't keep them alive."

  Heads, heads, heads. He wanted to smash all the jars.

  "You see that? He caused a mutation, a new cell growth! But it was nothing, nothing compared to being alive! They rotted. He couldn't stop them! And they won't tell me what they want me to do!"

  His slippery fingers closed in a fist. He smashed at one of the jars and saw it fall. She didn't try to stop him. But she had her arms around him. And she was begging him to come out of the room with her, dragging him. If she didn't watch it, they were both going to go down in this muck, for sure, this filthy muck.

  "But look! You see that!" Far back on the shelf, behind the jar he'd just broken. The finest of them, the liquid clear, the thick seal tarlike and intact. Through the flicker of meaningless indistinguishable images and sounds he heard her:

  "Open it, break it," she said.

  He did. The glass fell away soundlessly into the ashy layer of whispering voices, and he held this head, no longer even caring about the stench, or the spongy, moldering texture of the thing he held.

  Again the bedroom, Marguerite at the dressing table, tinywaisted, big skirts, turning to smile at him, toothless, eyes dark and quick, hair like a great ugly cascade of Spanish moss, and Julien reed thin and white-haired and young with his arms folded, you devil. Let me see you, Lasher. And then the body on the bed, beckoning for her to come, and then her lying down beside him and the dead rotting fingers tearing open her bodice, and touching her living breast. The dead cock erect between his legs. "Look at me, change me, look at me, change me."

  Had Julien turned his back? No such luck. He stood at the foot of the bed, his hands on the pillars of the bed, his face beating with the faint light of the candle blowing in the wind from the open windows. Fascinated, fearless.

  Yes, and look at this thing in your hands, now, this was his face, wasn't it? His face! The face you saw in the garden, in the church, in the auditorium, the face that you saw all those many times. And the brown hair, oh yes, the brown hair.

  He let it slide to the floor with the others. He backed away from it, but the eye pits were staring up at him, and the lips were moving. Did Rowan see it?

  "Do you hear it talking?"

  Voices all around him, but there was only one voice, one clear searing soundless voice:

  You cannot stop me. You cannot stop her. You do my bidding. My patience is like the patience of the Almighty. I see to the finish. I see the thirteen. I shall be flesh when you are dead.

  "He's speaking to me, the devil's speaking to me! You hear it?"

  He was out of the door and down the stairs before he realized what he was doing, or that his heart was thundering in his ears, and that he couldn't breathe. He couldn't endure it any longer, he had always known it would be like this, the plunging into the nightmare, and that was enough, wasn't it, what did they want of him, what did she want? That bastard had spoken to him! That thing he had seen standing in the garden had spoken to him, and through that rotted head! He was no coward, he was a human man! But he couldn't take any more of it.

  He'd torn off his coat and thrown it away in the corner of the hallway. Ah, the muck on his fingers, he couldn't wipe it off.

  Belle's room. Clean and quiet. I'm sorry about the filth, please let me lie down on the clean bed. She was helping him, thank God for that, not trying to stop him.

  The bedspread was clean and white and full of dust but the dust was clean, and the sun coming through the opened windows was beautiful and full of dust, Belle. Belle is what he touched now, the soft sweet spirit of Belle.

  He was lying on his back. She had the gloves for him. She was wiping his hands with the warm washcloth, so lovingly, and her face was full of concern. She pressed her fingers to his wrist.

  "Lie quiet, Michael. I have the gloves here. Lie quiet."

  What was that cold hard thing near his cheek? He reached up. Belle's rosary, and it was tangling painfully in his hair when he pulled it loose, but that was OK. He wanted it.

  And there was Belle. Oh, how lovely.

  He tried to tell Rowan Belle was standing there. Rowan was listening to his pulse. But Belle was gone. He had a rosary in his hands; he'd felt its cold beads next to his face, and Belle had been right there, talking to him.

  There she was.

  "Rest, Michael," Belle said. Sweet tremulous voice like Aunt Viv. She was fading but he could still see her. "Don't be afraid of me, Michael, I'm not one of them, that's not why I'm here."

  "Make them talk to me, make them tell me what they want. Not them, but the ones who came to me. Was it Deborah?"

  "Lie quiet, Michael, please."

  What did you say, Rowan? His mouth hadn't moved.

  "We aren't meant to have these powers," he said. "They destroy the human in us. You're human when you're at the hospital. I was human when I had the hammer and nails in my hands."

  Everything was sliding. How could he explain to her, it had been like scaling a mountain, it had been like all the physical work he'd ever put his hands to, and his back to, done in a single hour. But she wasn't there. She'd kissed him and laid a quilt over him and gone out because he was asleep. Belle was sitting at the dresser, such a lovely picture. Sleep, Michael.

  "Are you going to be here when I wake up?"

  "No, darling, I'm not really here now. It's their house, Michael. I'm not one of them."

  Sleep.

  He clutched at the rosary beads. Millie Dear said, Time to go to church. The rooms are so clean and quiet. They love each other. Pearl gray gabardine. It has to become our house. That's why I loved it so when I was small and I'd walk here. Loved it. Our house. Never any quarrel between Belle and Millie Dear. So nice ... Something almost adorable about Belle with her face so pretty in old age, like a flower pressed in a book, tinted still and fragrant.

  Deborah said to him, ... incalculable power, power to transmute ...

  He shuddered.

  ... not easy, so difficult you can scarce imagine it, the hardest thing perhaps that you ...

  I can do this!

  Sleep.

  And through his sleep, he heard the comforting sound of breaking glass.

  When he awoke, Aaron was there. Rowan had brought him a change of clothes from the hotel, and Aaron helped him into the bathroom, so that he could wash and change. It was spacious and actually comfortable.

  Every muscle in him ached. His back ached. His hands burned. He had the antsy awful feeling that he'd had all those weeks on Liberty Street, until he pulled the gloves back on and took a swallow of the beer Aaron gave him at his request. The pain in his muscles was awful, and even his eyes were tired, as if he'd been reading for hours by a poor light.

  "I'm not going to get drunk," he told both of them.

  Rowan explained that his heart had been racing, that whatever had happened it had been an extreme physical exertion, that a pulse reading like that was something you expected after a man had run a four-minute mile. It was important that he rest, and that he not remove the gloves again.

  OK by him. He would have loved nothing better than to encase his hands in concrete!

  They went back to the hotel together, ordered supper, and sat quietly in the living room of the suite. For two hours, he told them everything he had seen:

  He told them about the little snatches of the visions that were coming back to him even before he'd taken off the gloves. He told them about the first vision when he held Deirdre's nightgown, and how it
was Julien he'd seen in the hellish place, and how he'd seen him upstairs.

  He told and he told. He described and described. He wished Aaron would speak, but he understood why Aaron did not.

  He told them about Lasher's ugly prophecy, and the weird feeling of intimacy he had with the thing now though he had not really touched it but merely that rotted stinking head.

  He told them finally about Belle, and then exhausted from the telling, he sat there, wanting another beer, but afraid they'd think he was a drunk if he drank another, then giving in and getting up and getting it out of the refrigerator no matter what they thought.

  "I don't know why I'm involved, any more than I did before," he said. "But I know they're there, in that house. You remember Cortland said he wasn't one of them. And Belle said to me she wasn't one of them ... if I didn't imagine it ... well, the others who are part of it are there! And that thing altered matter, just a little but it did it, it possessed the dead bodies and worked on the cells.

  "It wants Rowan, I know it does. It wants Rowan to use her power to alter matter! Rowan has more of that power than any of the others before her. Hell, she knows what the cells are, how they operate, how they're structured!"

  Rowan seemed struck by those words. Aaron explained that after Michael had gone to sleep, and Rowan was sure his pulse was normal, that she had called Aaron and asked him to come to the house. He'd brought crates of ice in which to pack the specimens in the attic, and together they had opened each jar, photographed the contents, and then packed it away.

  The specimens were at Oak Haven now. They were frozen. They'd be shipped to Amsterdam in the morning, which was what Rowan wanted. Aaron had also removed Julien's books, and the trunk of dolls, and they too would go to the Motherhouse. But Aaron wanted to photograph the dolls first and he wanted to examine the books, and of course Rowan had agreed to all this, or it wouldn't have happened.

  So far, the books appeared to be no more than ledgers, with various cryptic entries in French. If there was an autobiography such as Richard Llewellyn had indicated, it had not been in that attic room.

  It gave Michael an irrational relief to know those things were no longer in the house. He was on his fourth beer now, as they sat together on the velvet couches. He didn't care what they thought about it. Just one night's peace, for Chrissakes, he thought. And he had to slow down his brain so he could think it through. Besides, he wasn't getting drunk. He didn't want to be drunk.

  But what was one more beer now, and besides they were here where they were safe.

  At last, they fell quiet. Rowan was staring at Michael, and suddenly for the whole disaster Michael felt mortally ashamed.

  "And how are you, my dear?" asked Michael. "After all this madness. I'm not being very much help to you, am I? I must have scared you to death. Do you wish you'd followed your adoptive mother's advice and stayed in California?"

  "You didn't scare me," she said affectionately, "and I liked taking care of you. I told you that once before. But I'm thinking. All the wheels in my head are turning. It's the strangest mixture of elements, this whole thing."

  "Explain."

  "I want my family," she said. "I want my cousins, all nine hundred of them or however many there are. I want my house. I want my history--and I mean the one Aaron gave to us. But I don't want this damned thing, this secret mysterious evil thing. I don't want it, and yet it's so ... so seductive!"

  Michael shook his head. "It's like I told you last night. It's irresistible."

  "No, not irresistible," she said, "but seductive."

  "And dangerous?" Aaron suggested. "I think we are more certain of that now than ever. I think we know we are talking of a creature which can change matter."

  "I'm not so sure," said Rowan. "I examined those stinking things as best I could. The changes were insignificant; they were changes in the surface tissue. But of course the samples were hopelessly old and corroded ... "

  "But what about the one with the face like Lasher?" Michael asked. "The duplicate?"

  She shook her head. "No evidence to indicate it wasn't a look-alike person," she said. "Julien looked like Lasher. Remarkably so. Again the changes may have been skin deep. Impossible to tell."

  "OK, skin deep, but what about that?" Michael pressed. "You ever heard of a thing that could do that? We aren't talking about a blush, we're talking about something permanent! Something there after a century."

  "You know what the mind can do," said Rowan. "I don't have to tell you that people can control their bodies to an amazing extent by thought. They can make themselves die if they want to. They've been known to make themselves levitate, if you believe the anecdotal evidence. Stilling heart rates, raising temperatures, that's all well documented. The saints in their trances could make the wounds of the stigmata open in their hands. They can also make these same wounds close. Matter is subject to mind, and we are only beginning to understand the extent of it. And besides, we know that when this thing materializes it has a solid body. At least it seems solid. So the thing changed the subcutaneous tissue of a corpse. What of it? It wasn't even a live body, from what you've told me. It's all rather crude and imprecise."

  "You amaze me," said Michael almost coldly.

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. I'm sorry. But I have a horrible feeling it's all planned that you're who you are, that you're a brilliant doctor! It's all planned."

  "Calm down, Michael. There are too many flaws in this whole story for everything to be planned. Nothing's planned in this family. Consider the history."

  "It wants to be human, Rowan," said Michael, "that's the meaning of what it said to Petyr van Abel and to me. It wants to be human, and it wants you to help it. What did the ghost of Stuart Townsend say to you, Aaron. It said, 'It's all planned.' "

  "Yes," said Aaron thoughtfully, "but it's a mistake to over-interpret that dream. And I think Rowan is right. You cannot assume that you know what is planned. And by the way, for what it's worth, I don't think this thing can become human. It wants to have a body, perhaps, but I don't think that it would ever be human."

  "Oh, that's beautiful," said Michael, "just beautiful. And I do think it planned everything. It planned for Rowan to be taken away from Deirdre. That's why it killed Cortland. It planned for Rowan to be kept away until she'd become not only a witch, but a witch doctor. It planned the very moment of her return."

  "But again," said Rowan, "why did it show itself to you? If you're to intervene, why did it show itself to you?"

  He sighed. With a sinking heart he thought about his pleas to Deborah, about touching the old doll of Deborah, and not seeing her or hearing her voice. The delirium came back to him, the stench of the room, and the ugliness of the rotted specimens. He thought of the mystery of the doorway. Of the spirit's strange words, I see the thirteen.

  "I'm going on with my own plan," said Rowan calmly. "I'm going to claim the legacy and the house, just as I told you. I still want to restore the house. I want to live in it. I won't be deterred from it." She looked at him, expecting him to say something. "And this being, no matter how mysterious he is, is not going to get in the way of that, if I have something to say about it. I told you it's overplayed its hand."

  She looked at Michael, almost angrily. "Are you with me?" she demanded.

  "Yes, I'm with you, Rowan. I love you! And I think you're right to go ahead. We can start on the house any damn time you want. I want that too."

  She was pleased, immensely pleased, but still her calm distressed him. He looked at Aaron.

  "What do you think, Aaron?" he asked. "About what the creature said, about my role in this? You have to have an interpretation."

  "Michael, what's important is that you interpret. That you regain an understanding of what happened to you. I have no certain interpretation of anything.

  "This may sound frightfully strange to you, but as a member of the Talamasca, as the brother of Petyr, and Arthur and Stuart, I've already accomplished my most important goals here.
I've made successful contact with both of you. The Mayfair history has been given to Rowan. And you have some knowledge now, fragmentary and biased as it may be to assist you."

  "You guys are a bunch of monks," said Michael grumpily. He lifted his beer in a careless toast. " 'We watch, and we are always here.' Aaron, why did all this happen?"

  Aaron laughed good-naturedly, but he shook his head. "Michael, Catholics always want us to offer the consolations of the church. We can't do it. I don't know why it's happened. I do know that I can teach you to control the power in your hands, to shut it off at will so it stops tormenting you."

  "Maybe," said Michael wearily. "Right now I wouldn't take off these gloves to shake hands with the president of the United States."

  "When you want to work with it," said Aaron, "I'm at your service. I'm here for both of you." He looked at Rowan for a long moment and then back to Michael. "I don't have to warn you to be careful, do I?"

  "No," said Rowan. "But what about you? Has anything else happened since the traffic accident?"

  "Little things," said Aaron. "They're not important in themselves. And it might very well be my imagination. I'm as human as the next man, as far as that goes. I feel I'm being watched however, and menaced in a rather subtle way."

  Rowan started to interrupt, but he gestured for silence.

  "I have my guard up. I've been in these situations before. And one very odd aspect of the whole thing is this: when I'm with you--either of you--I don't feel this ... this presence near me. I feel completely safe."

  "If it harms you," said Rowan, "it makes its final tragic error. Because I shall never address it or recognize it in any way. I'll try to kill it when I see it. All its schemes will be in vain."

  Aaron reflected for a moment.

  "Do you think it knows that?" asked Rowan.

  "Possibly," said Aaron. "But it's like everything else. A puzzle. A pattern can be a puzzle. It can involve great and intricate order; or it can be a labyrinth. I honestly don't know what it knows. I do believe that Michael is entirely right. It wants a human body. There seems no doubt of it. But what it knows and what it doesn't know ... I can't say. I don't know what it really is. I don't guess anyone knows."