The Witching Hour

  He took a sip of his coffee and then moved the cup away. Then he looked at Rowan.

  "There's no doubt it will approach you, of course. You realize this. This antipathy you feel won't keep it at bay forever. I doubt it's keeping it at bay now. It's simply waiting for a proper opportunity."

  "God," Michael whispered. It was like hearing that an assailant would soon attack the person he loved most in all the world. He felt a crippling jealousy and anger.

  Rowan was looking at Aaron. "What would you do if you were me?" asked Rowan.

  "I'm not sure," Aaron answered. "But I cannot emphasize enough that it is dangerous."

  "The history told me that."

  "And that it's treacherous."

  "The history told me that too. Do you think I should try to make contact with it?"

  "No. I don't. I think letting it come to you is the wisest thing you can do. And for the love of God, try to remain in complete control always."

  "There's no getting away from it, is there?"

  "I don't think so. And I can make a guess as to what it will do when it approaches, you."

  "What?"

  "It will demand your secrecy and your cooperation. Or it will refuse to reveal itself or its purposes fully."

  "It will divide you from us," said Michael.

  "Exactly," Aaron went on.

  "Why do you think it will do that?"

  Aaron shrugged. "Because that is what I would do if I were it."

  "What's the chance of driving it out? Of a straight-out exorcism?"

  "I don't know," said Aaron. "Those rituals certainly do work, but I myself don't know how to make them work, and I don't know what the effect would be upon an entity this powerful. You see, that is the remarkable thing. This being is a monarch among its kind. A sort of genius."

  She laughed softly.

  "It's so cunning and unpredictable," Aaron said. "I'd be dead right now if it wanted me to be dead. Yet it doesn't kill me."

  "For God's sake, Aaron," Michael said, "don't challenge it."

  "It knows I would hate it," said Rowan, "if it hurt you."

  "Yes, that may explain why it hasn't gone farther. But there we are again, at the beginning. Whatever you do, Rowan, never lose sight of the history. Consider the fate of Suzanne, and Deborah, and Stella, and Antha and Deirdre. Maybe if we knew the full story of Marguerite or Katherine, or Marie Claudette or the others from Saint-Domingue their stories would be just as tragic. And if any one character in the drama can be held responsible for so much suffering and death, it is Lasher."

  Rowan seemed lost in her thoughts for a moment. "God, I wish it would go away," she murmured.

  "That would be too much to ask for, I think," said Aaron. He sighed and took out his pocket watch, and then rose from the couch. "I'm going to leave you now. I'll be upstairs in my suite if you need me."

  "Thank God you're staying," said Rowan. "I was afraid you'd go back to Oak Haven."

  "No. I have Julien's books upstairs, and I think I should like to be in town just now. As long as I don't crowd you."

  "You don't crowd us at all," said Rowan.

  "Let me ask you one more thing," Michael said. "When you were in the house, what did it feel like?"

  Aaron gave a little laugh and shook his head. He considered for a minute. "I think you can imagine," he said gently. "But one thing did surprise me--that it was so beautiful; so grand and yet so inviting, with all the windows opened and the sun coming in. I suppose I thought it would be forbidding. But nothing could have been farther from the truth."

  This was the answer Michael had hoped to hear, but the mood was still on him from the long ordeal of the afternoon, and it failed to cheer him.

  "It's a wonderful house," said Rowan, "and it's already changing. We're already making it ours. How long will it take, Michael, to bring it back to what it was meant to be?"

  "Not long, Rowan, two, three months, maybe less. By Christmas it could be finished. I'm itching to do it. If I could just lose this feeling ... "

  "What feeling?"

  "That it's all planned."

  "Forget about that," said Rowan crossly.

  "Let me make a suggestion," Aaron said. "Get a good night's sleep, then proceed with what you really want to do--with the legal questions at hand, with the settling of the estate, with the house perhaps--all the good things you want to do. And be on guard. Be on guard always. When our mysterious friend approaches, insist upon your own terms."

  Michael sat sullenly staring at the beer as Rowan walked Aaron to the door. She came back, settled down beside him, and slipped her arm around him.

  "I'm scared, Rowan," he said, "and I hate it. Positively hate it."

  "I know, Michael," she said, "but we're going to win."

  *

  That night, after Rowan had been asleep for hours, Michael got up, went into the living room, and took the notebook out of his valise which Aaron had given him at the retreat house. He felt normal now. And the abnormalities of the day seemed strangely distant. Though he was still sore all over, he felt rested. And it was comforting to know Rowan was only a few feet away, and that Aaron slept in the suite above.

  Now Michael wrote down everything he had told them. He went through it in writing as he had gone through it in words, only more slowly, and perhaps more thoughtfully, and he talked about it with himself in the notebook as he would in a diary because that is what the notebook had become.

  He wrote down all he could remember of the little fragments that had come back before he had taken off the gloves. And it was not surprising that he could remember almost nothing at all. And then the beginning of the catastrophe when he'd held Deirdre's nightgown in his hand:

  "Same drums as the Comus Parade. Or any such parade. The point is, an awful frightening sound, a sound to do with some sort of dark and potentially destructive energy."

  He stopped. Then went on. "I remember something else too, now. At Rowan's house in Tiburon. After we made love. I woke up thinking the place was on fire and there were all kinds of people downstairs. I remember now. It was the same ambience, the same lurid sort of light, the same sinister quality.

  "And the fact of the matter was, that Rowan was just down there by the fire she'd lighted in the fireplace.

  "But it was the same feeling. Fire and people there, many many people, crowded together, a commotion in the flickering light.

  "And I had no sense of recognition when I saw Julien upstairs, or when I saw Charlotte, or Mary Beth, or Antha, poor, tragic Antha scrambling over that roof. To see something like that is to feel it; it swallows you. There's nothing left of you inside while you're seeing it. But they weren't in my visions. None of them. And Deborah was just a body crumpled on the pyre. She wasn't standing there with them. Now surely that means something in itself."

  He reread what he had written. He wanted to add more but he was leery of embellishment. He was leery of logic. Deborah's not one of them? That's why she wasn't there?

  He went on to describe the rest. "Antha was wearing a cotton dress. I saw the patent leather belt she wore. When she crawled across the roof, she tore her stockings. Her knees were bleeding. But her face, that was the unforgettable part, her eye torn out of the socket. And the sound of her voice. I'll carry that sound to the grave with me. And Julien. Julien looked as solid as she did while he was watching. Julien wore black. And Julien was young. Not a boy, by any means. But a vigorous man, not an old man. Even in the bed he wasn't old."

  Again he paused. "And what else did Lasher say that was new. Something about patience, about waiting ... and then that mention of the thirteen.

  "But the thirteen what? If it's a number on a doorway, I haven't seen it. The jars, there weren't thirteen jars. There were more like twenty, but I'll verify this with Rowan."

  Again, he stopped, thought about embellishments, but didn't add them.

  "The cheerful fiend didn't say a damn thing about a doorway," he wrote. "No, just his threat that I'd be dead while he
'd be flesh and blood."

  Dead. Tombs. Something Rowan had said before the day was shattered, like a piece of glass. Or like a glass jar. Something about a keyhole doorway carved on the Mayfair tomb.

  "I'll go there tomorrow, and see for myself. If the number thirteen is carved somewhere on that doorway, I hope to God it brings me more enlightenment than what happened today.

  "Whatever happens, no matter what I see, or what I think it means, I begin some serious work tomorrow. And so does Rowan. She goes downtown early with Ryan and Pierce to talk about the legacy. I start to talk to the other contractors in town. I start real, true, honest work on the house.

  "And that feels better than any other course of action. It feels like a form of salvation.

  "Let's see how Lasher likes it. Let's see what he chooses to do."

  He left the notebook on the table and went back to bed.

  In sleep, Rowan was so smooth and expressionless that she was like a perfect wax mannequin beneath the sheets. The warmth of her skin surprised him when he kissed her. Stirring slowly, she turned and wound her arms around him, and nuzzled against his neck. "Michael ... " she whispered in a dreamy voice. "St. Michael, the archangel ... " Her fingers touched his lips, as if groping in the dark to know that he was really there. "Love you ... "

  "I love you, too, darlin'," he whispered. "You're mine, Rowan." And he felt the heat of her breasts against his arm, as he drew her close to him. She turned over and her soft fleecy sex was a little flame against his thigh, as she settled back into sleep.

  Thirty-two

  THE LEGACY.

  It had come into her mind sometime during the night: a half dream of hospitals and clinics, and magnificent laboratories, peopled by brilliant researchers ...

  And all of this you can do.

  They wouldn't understand. Aaron would and Michael would. But the rest of them wouldn't because they didn't know the secrets of the file. They didn't know what had been in the jars.

  They knew things but they didn't know all the way back over the centuries to Suzanne of the Mayfair, midwife and healer in her filthy Scottish village, or Jan van Abel at his desk in Leiden, drawing his clean ink illustration of a flayed torso to reveal the layers of muscle and vein. They didn't know about Marguerite and the dead body flopping on the bed, and roaring with the voice of a spirit, or Julien watching, Julien who had put the jars in the attic instead of destroying them almost a century ago.

  Aaron knew and Michael knew. They would understand the dream of hospitals and clinics and laboratories, of healing hands laid upon sore and aching bodies by the thousands.

  What a joke on you, Lasher!

  Money was no mystery to her; she was not frightened by the legacy. She could already imagine to the limits that it might allow. She'd never been charmed by money as she had been by anatomy and microsurgery, by biophysics or neurochemistry. But it was no mystery. She'd studied it before, and she'd study it now. And the legacy was something that could be mastered like any other subject ... and converted into hospitals, clinics, laboratories ... lives saved.

  If only she could get the memory of the dead woman out of the house. For that was the real ghost to her, not the ghosts whom Michael had seen, and when she thought of his suffering she could scarcely bear it. It was like seeing everything she loved in him dying inside. She would have driven all the demons in the world back away from him if only she'd known how to do it.

  But the old woman. The old woman lay in the rocker still as if she would never leave it. And her stench was worse than the stench of the jars, because it was Rowan's murder. And the perfect crime.

  The stench corrupted the house; it corrupted the history. It corrupted the dream of the hospitals. And Rowan waited at the door.

  We want in, old woman. I want my house and my family. The jars have been smashed and the contents are gone now. I have the history in my hand, brilliant as a jewel. I shall atone for it all. Let me in so that I can fight the battle.

  Why were they not friends, she and the old woman? Rowan had only contempt for the evil, spiteful voice which had taunted Michael from the contents of the broken jars.

  And the spirit knew she loathed it. That when she remembered its secretive touch, she loathed it.

  Alone yesterday, hours before Michael had come, she had sat there, waiting for Lasher, listening to every creak and whisper in the old walls.

  If you think you can frighten me, you are tragically mistaken. I have no fear of you, and no love either. You are mysterious. Yes. And I am curious. But that is a very cold thing for a scientific mind such as mine. Very cold. You stand between me and the things I could love warmly.

  She should have destroyed the jars then. She should have never urged Michael to take off the gloves, and she never would again, of that she was certain. Michael couldn't endure this power in his hands. He couldn't really endure his memory of the visions. It made him suffer, and it filled her with dread to see him afraid.

  It was the fact of the drowning that had brought them together, not these mysterious dark forces that lurked in the house. Voices speaking from rotted heads in jars. Ghosts in taffeta. His strength and her strength, that had been the origin of their love, and the future was the house, the family, the legacy which could bring the miracles of medicine to thousands, even millions.

  What were all the dark ghosts and legends on earth compared to those hard and glittering realities? In her sleep, she saw the buildings rise. She saw the immensity. And the words of the history ran through her dreams. No, never meant to kill the old woman, the one awful flaw. To have killed. To have done something so wrong ....

  *

  At six o'clock, when her breakfast arrived, the newspaper came with it.

  SKELETON FOUND IN FAMOUS GARDEN DISTRICT HOUSE

  Well, that was inevitable, wasn't it? Seems Ryan had warned her that they couldn't quash it. Numbly, she scanned the several paragraphs, amused in spite of herself, at the gothic tale unfolding in a quaint old-fashioned journalistic style.

  Who could argue with the statement that the Mayfair mansion had always been associated with tragedy? Or that the one person who might have shed light upon the demise of Texan Stuart Townsend was Carlotta Mayfair, who had died the very night that the remains were discovered, after a long and distinguished legal career?

  The rest was an elegy to Carlotta, which filled Rowan with coldness and guilt.

  Surely someone from the Talamasca was clipping this story. Perhaps Aaron was reading it in his rooms above. What would he write in the file about it? It comforted her to think of the file.

  In fact, she was a lot more comfortable now than a sane person ought to be. For no matter what was happening, she was a Mayfair, among all the other Mayfairs; and her secret sorrows were tangled with older, more intricate sorrows.

  Even yesterday when Michael had been smashing the jars and wrestling with the power, it had not been the worst for her, not by any means. She had him, she had Aaron, she had all the cousins. She wasn't alone. Even with the murder of the old woman, she wasn't alone.

  She sat still for a long time after reading the story, her hands clasped on top of the folded newspaper, as rain came down hard outside, and the food on the breakfast table grew cold.

  No matter what else she felt, she ought to grieve in silence for the old woman. She ought to let the misery coagulate in her soul. And the woman was going to be dead forever now. Wasn't she?

  The truth was, so much was happening to her, and so rapidly, that she could no longer catalog her responses; or even manifest any response at all. She passed in and out of emotion. Yesterday when Michael was lying on the bed, his pulse racing and his face flushed, she had been frantic. She had thought, If I lose this man, I'll die with him. I swear it. And an hour after, she had broken one jar after another, spilling the contents into the white dishpan, and poking at it with an ice pick as she examined it, before handing it over to Aaron to be packed in the ice. Clinical as any doctor. No difference at all.


  In between these moments of crisis, she was drifting, watching, remembering, because it was all too different, too purely unusual, and finally too much.

  This morning, waking at four A.M., she had not known where she was. Then it all came back to her, the mingled flood of curses and blessings, her dream of the hospitals, and Michael beside her, and the desire for him like a drug.

  Not his fault really that his every gesture, word, movement, or facial expression was electrically erotic to her, no matter what else might be going on. He was a sex object and delightfully oblivious to it, because in his innocence he didn't really understand the greed of her desire.

  Sitting up in bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, she had wondered if this wasn't somehow worse for a woman than a man, because a woman could find the smallest things about a man violently erotic, such as the way his curly hair was mashed down now on his forehead, or the way it curled on the back of his neck.

  Weren't men a little more direct about things? Did they go mad over a woman's ankle? Seems Dostoyevski said they did. But she had doubted it. It was excruciating for her to look at the dark fleece on the back of Michael's wrist, to see his gold watch-band cutting into it, to imagine his arm later, with the white cuff rolled up, which for some reason made it even more sexy than when the arm was naked, and the flash of his fingers as he lighted his cigarettes. All directly genitally erotic. Everything done with a sharp edge, a punch. Or his low growly voice, full of tenderness, when he talked on the phone to his Aunt Viv.

  When he'd been on his knees in that foul, ugly room, he'd been battling, striking out. And on the dusty bed after, he had been irresistible to her in his exhaustion, his large, strong hands curled and lying empty on the counterpane. Loosening his thick leather belt and the zipper of his jeans, all erotic, that tins powerful thing was suddenly dependent upon her. But then the terror had gripped her when she felt his pulse.

  She'd sat with him for a long tense time, until the pulse returned to normal; until his skin had cooled. Until he was breathing in regular sleep. So coarsely and perfectly beautiful he'd been, the white undershirt stretched tight over his chest, just a real man and so exquisitely mysterious to her, with that dark hair on his chest and on the backs of his arms, and the hands so much bigger than hers.