The Witching Hour

  And before my eyes, the shape grew denser and more vivid, and I saw the aspects of a particular man. Thin of nose, dark of eye, and dressed in the very same garments I had spied for but an instant years ago in Scotland, a leather jerkin and coarse-cut breeches, and a homespun shirt of bag sleeves.

  Yet even as I surmised these things, it seemed that the nose became plainer, and the dark eyes more vivid, and the leather of the jerkin more plainly leather.

  "Who are you, spirit?" I asked. "Tell me your true name, not the name my Deborah gave you."

  A terrible bitter expression came over its face; or no, it was only that the illusion had begun to crumple, and the air was filled with lamentation, a terrible soundless crying. And the thing faded away.

  "Come back, spirit!" I declared. "Or more truly, if you love Charlotte, go away! Go back into the chaos from which you came and leave my Charlotte alone."

  And I could have sworn that in a whisper the being spoke again to say, "I am patient, Petyr von Abel. I see very far. I shall drink the wine and eat the meat and know the warmth of the woman when you are no longer even bones."

  "Come back!" I cried. "Tell me the meaning of this! I saw you, Lasher, as clearly as the witch saw you, and I can make you strong."

  But there was only silence. And I fell back upon the pillow, knowing that this was the strongest spirit I have ever beheld. No ghost has ever been stronger, more truly visible. And the words spoken to me by the demon had nothing to do with the will of the witch.

  Oh, if only I had my books with me. If only I had had them then.

  Once more in my mind's eye I see the circle of stones at Donnelaith. I tell you there is some reason that the spirit came from that spot! This is no mean daimon, no familiar, no Ariel ready to bow to Prospero's wand! So feverish was I finally that I drank the wine again so that it would dull my pain.

  And so there, Stefan, you have but the first day of my captivity and wretchedness.

  How well I came to know the little house. How well I was to know the cliff beyond from which no path led down to the beach. Even if I had had a seaman's rope, wrapped about the balustrade, I could not have made that awful descent.

  But let me go on with my tale.

  It was noon perhaps before Charlotte came to me, and when I saw the mulatto maids enter with her I knew that I had not created them out of my imagination, and only watched them in cold silence as they put fresh flowers about the room. They had my shirt clean and ironed for me and more clothing, of the lighter fabrics worn in these places. And a large tub they brought, sliding it across the sandy earth like a boat, with two heavily muscled male slaves to guard them lest I rush out the door.

  This they filled with hot water, and said that I might have a bath whenever I chose.

  I took it, hoping to wash away my sins, I guess, and then when I was clean and dressed and my beard and mustache properly trimmed, I sat down and ate the food given me without looking at Charlotte who alone remained.

  Finally, putting the plate aside, I asked: "How long do you mean to keep me in this place?"

  "Until I have conceived a child by you," she said. "And I may have a sign of that very soon."

  "Well, you have had your chance," I said, but even as the words came out, I felt last night's lust again, and saw myself, as if in a dream, ripping her pretty silk frock from her and tearing loose her breasts again so that I might suckle them savagely as a babe. There came again the delicious idea that she was wicked and therefore I might do anything to her and with her, and I should avail myself of that opportunity as soon as I could.

  She knew. Undoubtedly she knew. She came and sat on my lap, and looked into my eyes. A very tender little weight indeed. "Rip the silk if you like," she said. "You cannot get out of here. So do what you can in your prison."

  I reached for her throat. At once I was thrown back upon the floor. The chair was turned over. Only she had not done it, she had merely moved aside so as not to be hurt.

  "Ah, so he is here," I said with a sigh. I could not see him, but then again I could, a gathering as it were just over me, and then the dispersal as the billowy presence grew broader and thinner and then disappeared. "Make yourself a man as you did this morning," I said. "Speak to me as you did this morning, little coward, little spirit!"

  All the silver in the place began to rattle. A great ripple ran through the mosquito netting. I laughed. "Stupid little devil," I said, climbing to my feet and brushing off my clothes. The thing struck me again, but I caught the back of the chair. "Mean little devil," I said. "And such a coward, too."

  Amazed, she watched all this. I could not tell what it was in her face, suspicion or fear. Then she whispered something under her breath, and I saw the netting hung from the windows move as though the thing had flown out. We were alone.

  She turned her face away from me, but I could see her cheeks burning, and see the tears in her eyes. She looked so tender then. I hated myself for wanting her.

  "Surely you do not blame me for trying to hurt you," I said politely to her. "You hold me here against my will."

  "Don't challenge him again," she said fearfully, her lip trembling. "I would not have him hurt you."

  "Oh, and cannot the powerful witch restrain him?"

  Lost she seemed, clinging to the bedpost, her head bowed. And so beguiling! So seductive! She did not need to be a witch to be a witch.

  "You want me," she said softly. "Take me. And I shall tell you something that will warm your blood better than any drug I can give you." Here she looked up, her lip trembling as if she would cry.

  "What is that?" I said to her.

  "That I want you," she said. "I find you beautiful. I find I ache for you as I lie beside Antoine."

  "Your misfortune, daughter," I said coldly, but what a lie.

  "Is it?"

  "Steel yourself. Remember that a man does not have to find a woman beautiful to ravage her. Be as cold as a man. It suits you better, for you hold me here against my will."

  She said nothing for a moment, and then she came towards me and began her seduction again, with soft daughterly kissing, and then her hand seeking me out, and her kisses growing more ardent. And I was just as much a fool as before.

  Only my anger would not permit it, so I fought her. "Does your spirit like it?" I asked, looking up and around in the emptiness. "That you let me touch you when he would touch you?"

  "Don't play with him!" she said fearfully.

  "Ah, for all his touching of you, caressing of you, kissing of you, he cannot get you with child, can he? He is not the incubus of the demonologies who can steal the seed from sleeping men. And so he suffers me to live until I get you with child!"

  "He will not hurt you, Petyr, for I will not allow it. I have forbidden it!"

  Her cheeks grew red again as she looked at me, and now she searched the emptiness around her.

  "Keep that thought in your mind, daughter, for he can read what you think, remember. And he may tell you that he does what you wish, but he does what he wishes. He came to me this morning; he taunted me."

  "Don't lie to me, Petyr."

  "I never lie, Charlotte. He came." And I described to her the full apparition, and I confessed his strange words. "Now, what can that mean, my pretty? You think he has no will of his own? You are a fool, Charlotte. Lie with him instead of me!" I laughed at her, and seeing the pain in her eyes, I laughed more. "I should like to see it, you and your daimon. Lie there and call him to come now."

  She struck me. I laughed all the more, the sting feeling sweet to me, suddenly, and again she slapped me, and again, and then I had what I wanted, which was the rage to take hold of her by her wrists and hurl her onto the bed. And there I tore loose her dress and the ribbons binding her hair. With the fine clothes her maids had put on me, she was just as rough, and we were together in it as hot as before.

  Finally it was over three times, and as I lay in half sleep, she left me in silence, with only the roar of the sea to keep me company.

/>   By late afternoon, I knew that I could not get out of the house, for I had tried. I had tried to batter down the door, using the one chair in the place to help me. I had tried to climb around the edges of the walls. I had tried to fit through the small windows. All in vain. This place had been carefully made as a prison. I tried even to get up on the roof, but that too had been studied and provided for. The slope was impossibly steep, and the tiles slippery, and the climb far too long and too great. And as twilight came, a supper was brought to me, being put, plate by plate, through one of the small windows, which after a long hesitation, I did take, more out of boredom and near madness than hunger.

  And as the sun sank in the sea, I sat by the balustrade, drinking wine and looking at it, and looking at the dark blue of the waves, as they broke with their white foam upon the clean beach below.

  No one ever came or went there on the beach in all my captivity I suspect that it is a spot which could be reached only by sea. And anyone reaching it would have died there, for there was no way up the cliff, as I have said.

  But it was most beautiful to look at. And getting drunker and drunker I fell into watching the colors of the sea and the light change, as if in a spell.

  When the sun had vanished, a great fiery layer lay upon the horizon from end to end of the world. That lasted perhaps an hour and then the sky was but a pale pink and at last a deep blue, blue as the sea.

  I resolved, naturally, that I should not touch Charlotte again, no matter what the provocation, and that finding me useless to her she would soon allow me to go. But I suspected that she would indeed kill me, or that the spirit would kill me. And that she could not stop him, I did not doubt.

  I do not know when I fell to sleep. Or how late it was when I awoke and saw that Charlotte had come, and was seated inside by the candle. I roused myself to pour another glass of wine, for I was now completely taken up with drinking, and conceived an insupportable thirst within minutes of the last drink.

  I said nothing to her, but I was frightened by the beauty she held for me, and that at the very first sight of her, my body had quickened and wanted her, and expected the old games to begin. I gave myself stern lectures in silence; but my body is no schoolboy.

  It laughed in my face, so to speak. And I shall never forget the expression on her face as she looked at me, and looked into my heart.

  I went to her, as she came to me. And this affection humiliated us both.

  Finally when we were finished with it again, and sitting quietly, she began to talk to me.

  "There are no laws for me," she said. "Men and women are not merely cursed with weaknesses. Some of us are cursed with virtues as well. And my virtue is strength. I can rule those around me. I knew it when I was a child. I ruled my brothers, and when my mother was accused, I begged to remain in Montcleve, for I felt certain I could turn their testimony to her side.

  "But she would not allow it, and she I never could rule. I rule my husband and have from our first meeting. I rule the house so skillfully that the other planters remark upon it, and come to me for advice. One might say that I rule the parish, as I am the richest planter in it, and I could rule the colony perhaps if I chose.

  "I have always had this strength, and I see that you too have it. It is the strength which enables you to defy all civil and church authority, to go into villages and towns with a pack of lies, and believe in what you do. You have submitted to but one authority on earth, and that is the Talamasca, and you are not entirely in submission even to them."

  I had never thought of this, but it was true. You know, Stefan, we have members who cannot do the work in the field for they haven't the skepticism regarding pomp and ceremony. And so she was right.

  I did not tell her so, however. I drank the wine, and looked out over the sea. The moon had risen and made a path across it. I wondered that I had spent so little time in my life regarding the sea.

  It seemed I had been a long time on the edge of this cliff in my little prison, and there was nothing remarkable about it now.

  She continued to talk to me. "I have come to the very place in which my strength can be best used," she said. "And I mean to have many children before Antoine dies. I mean to have many! If you remain with me as my lover, there is nothing that you cannot have."

  "Don't say such things. You know that cannot be."

  "Consider it. Envision it. You learn by observation. Well, what have you learned by observing things here? I could make a house for you on my land, a library as large as you like. You could receive your friends from Europe. You could have whatever you wish."

  I thought for a long time before I answered, as this was her request.

  "I need more than what you offer me," I said. "Even if I could accept that you are my daughter and that we are outside the laws of nature, so to speak."

  "What laws," she sneered.

  "Allow me to finish and then I shall tell you," I explained. "I need more than the pleasures of the flesh, and even more than the beauty of the sea, and more than my every wish granted. I need more than money."

  "Why?"

  "Because I am afraid of death," I said. "I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing, I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give to my life. The saving of witches, the study of the supernatural, these are my lasting pleasures; they make me forget that I do not know why we are born, or why we die, or why the world is here.

  "Had my father not died, I would have been a surgeon, and studied the workings of the body, and made beautiful drawings of my studies as he did. And had not the Talamasca found me after my father's death, I might have been a painter, for they make worlds of meaning on the canvas. But I cannot be those things now, as I have no training in them, and it is too late for that, and so I must return to Europe and do what I have always done. I must. It is not a matter of choice. I should go mad in this savage place. I should come to hate you more than I already do."

  This greatly intrigued her, though it hurt her and disappointed her. Her face took on the look of soft tragedy as she studied me, and never did my heart go out to her so much as it did at that moment, when she heard my answer and sat there pondering it before me, without a word.

  "Talk to me," she said. "Tell me all your life."

  "I will not!"

  "Why?"

  "Because you want it, and you hold me against my will."

  She thought again in silence, her eyes very beautiful in their sadness as before.

  "You came here to sway me and to teach me, did you not?"

  I smiled at her, for it was true. "All right, then, daughter. I'll tell you everything I know. Will it do the trick?"

  And at that moment, on my second day in this prison, it was changed, changed until the very hour many days later when I went free. I did not yet realize it, but it was changed.

  For after that, I fought her no more. And I fought no more my love for her, and my lust for her, which were not always mingled, but always very much alive.

  Whatever happened in the days that followed, we talked together by the hour, I in my drunkenness and she in her pointed sobriety, and all the story of my life came out for her to examine and discuss and a great deal which I knew of the world.

  It seemed then that my life was nothing but drunkenness, making love to her, and talking to her; and then those long periods of dreaminess in which I continued my studies of the changing sea.

  Some time and I do not know how long it was after--perhaps five days, perhaps more--she brought pen and paper to me and asked that I write for her what I knew of my lineage--of my father's people, and how he had come to be a physician as was his father, and how they had both studied at Padua, and what they had learnt and written. And the names of my father's books.

  This I did with pleasure, though I was drunk so much that it took me hours, and after I lay, trying to remember my former self as she took my writing away.

  Meantime, she had had fine clothes made for me, and she had her
maids dress me each day, though I lay now indifferent to such things, and in a similar indifference I allowed them to pare my fingernails and trim my hair.

  I suspected nothing in this, only that it was their regular meticulous attention to which I had become accustomed, but she then revealed to me a cloth mannequin made from the shirt I had worn when I first came to her, and explained to me that within its various knots were my fingernails, and that the hair affixed to its head was my hair.

  I was stuporous then, as she had planned, no doubt. And in silence I watched as she slit my finger with her knife, and let my blood fall into the body of this doll. Nay, all of it she stained with my blood until it was a red thing with blond hair.

  "What do you mean to do with this hideous thing?" I asked her.

  "You know what I mean to do," she said.

  "Ah, then my death is assured."

  "Petyr," she said most imploringly, the tears springing to her eyes, "it may be years before you die, but this doll gives me power."

  I said nothing. When she had gone I took up the rum which had always been there for me, and which was naturally much stronger than the wine, and I drank myself into horrid dreams with that.

  But late in the night, this little incident of the doll produced in me a great horror, and so I went once more to the table, and took up my pen, and wrote for her all I knew of daimons, and this time it was with no hope of warning her, so much as guiding her.

  I felt she must know that:

  --the ancients had believed in spirits as we do, but they believed that they might grow old and die away; and there was in Plutarch the story of the Great Pan dying finally and all the daimons of the world weeping for they realized they would one day die as well.

  --when a people of ancient times were conquered, it was believed that their fallen gods became daimons and hovered about the ruins of their cities and temples. And she must remember that Suzanne had called up the daimon Lasher at the ancient stones in Scotland, though what people had assembled those stones no one knows.

  --the early Christians believed that the pagan gods were daimons, and that they could be called up for curses and spells.

  And that in summary, all of these beliefs have to them a consistency, for we know that daimons are strengthened by our belief in them. So naturally, they might become as gods to those who invoke them, and when their worshipers are conquered and scattered, the daimons would once more lapse back into chaos, or be but minor entities answering the occasional magician's call.