The Witching Hour

2) The man's background is remarkable, especially his formal education. Gander confirms background in history, especially European history. We need that kind of person, desperately.

  He is weak in languages, but everyone today is weak in languages.

  3) But the main question regarding Curry is this: How do I get to see him? I wish the entire Mayfair family would go away for a while. I don't want to think of Rowan while I am on Curry ...

  Michael quickly leafed through the rest of the last folder. All articles on him, and articles he had read before. Two large glossy United Press International photographs of him. A typewritten biography of him, compiled mostly from the attached materials.

  Well, he knew the file on Michael Curry. He put all this aside, lighted a fresh cigarette, and returned to the handwritten account of Aaron's meeting in the Parker Meridien with the doctor.

  It was very easy to read Aaron's fine script. The descriptions of Lasher's appearances were neatly underlined. He finished the account, agreeing with Aaron's remarks.

  Then he got up from the porch chair, taking the folder with him, and went inside, to the desk. His leather-covered notebook lay there where he'd left it. He sat down, staring blindly at the room for a moment, not really seeing that the river breeze was blowing the curtains, or that the night was utter blackness outside. Or that the supper tray lay on the ottoman before the wing chair, just as it had since it arrived, with the food beneath its several silver-domed covers untouched.

  He lifted his pen and began to write:

  "I was six years old when I saw Lasher in the church at Christmas behind the crib. That would have been 1947. Deirdre would have been the, same age, and she might have been in the church. But I have the strongest feeling that she wasn't there.

  "When Lasher showed himself to me in the Municipal Auditorium, she might have been there too. But again--we can't know, to quote Aaron's favorite clause.

  "Nevertheless the appearances per se have nothing to do with Deirdre. I have never seen Deirdre in the garden of First Street, nor anywhere, to my knowledge.

  "Undoubtedly Aaron has already written up what I've told him. And the same suggestion is relevant: Lasher appeared to me when he was not in the vicinity of the witch. He can probably materialize where he wants to.

  "The question is still why. Why me? And other connections are even more tantalizing and nerve-racking.

  "For example--this may not matter much--but I know Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan. I was with her and Marie Louise on the riverboat the night she got drunk with her boyfriend, Terry O'Neill. For that she was sent to St. Ro's, where she met Deirdre Mayfair. I remember Rita Mae going to St. Ro's.

  "Does this mean nothing?

  "And something else too. What if my ancestors worked in the Garden District? I don't know that they did or didn't. I know my father's mother was an orphan, reared at St. Margaret's. I don't think she had a legal father. What if her mother had been a maid in the First Street house ... but my mind is just going crazy.

  "After all, look what these people have done in terms of breeding. When you do this with horses and dogs, it's called inbreeding or line breeding.

  "Over and over again, the finest male specimens have inbred with the witches, so that the genetic mix is strengthened in terms of certain traits, undoubtedly including psychic traits, but what about others? If I read this damn thing properly, Cortland wasn't just the father of Stella and Rowan. He could have been the father of Antha too, though everybody thought it was Lionel.

  "Now if Julien was Mary Beth's father, ah, but they ought to do some kind of computer thing just on that aspect of it, the inbreeding. Make a chart. And if they have the photographs, they can get into more genetic science. But I have to tell all this to Rowan. Rowan will understand all this. When we were talking Rowan said something about genetic research being so unpopular. People don't want to admit what they can determine about human beings genetically. Which brings me to free will, and my belief in free will is part of why I'm going crazy.

  "Anyway, Rowan is the genetic beneficiary of all this--tall, slim, sexy, extremely healthy, brilliant, strong, and successful. A medical genius with a telekinetic power to take life who chooses instead to save life. And there it is, free will, again. Free will.

  "But how the hell do I fit in with my free will intact, that is? I mean what is 'all planned' to use Townsend's words in the dream. Christ!

  "Am I perhaps related somehow to these people through the Irish servants that worked for them? Or is it simply that they outcross when they need stamina? But any of Rowan's police/fire fighter heroes would have done the job. Why me? Why did I have to drown, if indeed, they accomplished the drowning, which I still don't believe they did--but then Lasher was revealing himself alone to me all the way back to my earliest years.

  "God, there is no one way to interpret any of this. Maybe I was destined for Rowan all along, and my drowning wasn't meant, and that's why the rescue happened. If the drowning was meant, I can't accept it! Because if that was meant, then too much else could be meant. It's too awful.

  "I cannot read this history and conclude that the terrible tragedies here were inevitable--Deirdre to die like that.

  "I could write on like this for the next three days, rambling, discussing this point or that. But I'm going crazy. I still haven't a clue to the meaning of the doorway. Not a single thing in what I've read illuminates this single image. Don't see any specific number involved in this either. Unless the number thirteen is on a doorway, and that has some meaning.

  "Now the doorway may simply be the doorway to First Street; or the house itself could be some sort of portal. But I'm reaching. There is no feeling of rightness to what I say.

  "As for the psychometric power in my hands, I still don't know how that is to be used, unless I am to touch Lasher when he materializes, and thereby know what this spirit really is, whence he comes and what he wants of the witches. But how can I touch Lasher unless Lasher chooses to be touched?

  "Of course I will remove the gloves and lay my hands on objects related to this history, to First Street, if Rowan, who is now the mistress of First Street, will allow. But somehow the prospect fills me with terror. I can't see it as the consummation of my purpose. I see it as intimacy with countless objects, surfaces, and images ... and also ... for the first time I'm afraid of touching objects which belonged to the dead. But I must attempt it. I must attempt everything!

  "Almost nine o'clock. Still Aaron isn't here. And it's dark and creepy and quiet out here. I don't want to sound like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, but the crickets make me nervous in the country too. And I'm jumpy in this room, even with its nice brass lamps. I don't want to look at the pictures on the wall, or in the mirrors for fear something's going to scare me.

  "I hate being scared.

  "And I can't stand waiting here. Perhaps it's unfair to expect Aaron to arrive the minute I finish reading. But Deirdre's funeral is over, and here I sit waiting for Aaron, with Mayfairs on the brain and pressing on my heart, but I wait! I wait because I promised I would, and Aaron hasn't called, and I have to see Rowan.

  "Aaron is going to have to trust me on this, he really is. We'll talk tonight, tomorrow, and the next day, but tonight I am going to be with Rowan!

  "One final note: if I sit here and close my eyes, and I think back on the visions. If I evoke the feeling, that is, for all the facts are gone, I still find myself believing that the people I saw were good. I was sent back for a higher purpose. And it was my choice--free will--to accept that mission.

  "Now I cannot attach any negative or positive feeling to the idea of the doorway or the number thirteen. And that is distressing, deeply distressing. But I continue to feel that my people up there were good.

  "I don't believe Lasher is good. Not at all. The evidence seems incontrovertible that he has destroyed some of these women. Maybe he has destroyed everyone who ever resisted him. And Aaron's question, What is the agenda of this being? is the pertinent one. This creature does th
ings on his own. But why am I calling him a creature? Who created him? The same person who created me? And who is that, I wonder. Go for entity.

  "This entity is evil.

  "So why did he smile at me in the church when I was six? Surely he can't want me to touch him and discover his agenda? Or can he?

  "Again the words 'meant' and 'planned' are driving me mad. Everything in me revolts against such an idea. I can believe in a mission, in a destiny, in a great purpose. All those words have to do with courage and heroism, with free will. But 'meant' and 'planned' fill me with this despair.

  "Whatever the case, I don't feel despair right now. I feel crazed, unable to stay in this room much longer, desperate to reach Rowan. And desperate to put all these pieces together, to fulfill the mission I was given out there, because I believe that the best part of me accepted that mission.

  "Why do I hear that guy in San Francisco, Gander or whatever his name was, saying, 'Conjecture!'

  "I wish Aaron were here. For the record, I like him. I like them. I understand what they did here. I understand. None of us likes to believe that we are being watched, written about, spied upon, that sort of thing. But I understand. Rowan will understand. She has to.

  "The resulting document is just too nearly unique, too important. And when I think about how deeply implicated in all this I am, how involved I've been from the moment that entity looked out at me through the iron fence--well, thank God, they're here, that they 'watch,' as they say. That they know what they know.

  "Because otherwise ... And Rowan will understand that. Rowan will understand perhaps better than I understand, because she will see things I don't see. And maybe that's what's planned, but there I go again.

  "Aaron! Come back!"

  Twenty-eight

  SHE STOOD BEFORE the iron gate as the cab crawled away, the rustling silence closing in around her. Impossible to imagine a house that was any more desolate or forbidding. The merciless light of the street lamp poured down like the full moon through the branches of the trees--on the cracked flags and the marble steps banked with dead leaves, and on the high thick fluted columns with their peeling white paint and black patches of rot, on the crumbling boards of the porch which ran back unevenly to the open door and the dull pale light from within wobbling ever so faintly.

  Slowly she let her eyes roam the shuttered windows, the dense overgrown garden. A thin rain had begun to fall even as she left the hotel, and it was so very faint now that it was little more than a mist, giving its shine to the asphalt street, and hovering in the gleaming leaves above the fence, and just touching her face and shoulders.

  Here my mother, lived out her life, she thought. And here her mother was born, and her mother before her. Here in this house where Ellie sat near Stella's coffin.

  For surely it had been here, though all the late afternoon long, over the cocktails and the salad and the highly spiced food, they had spoken only superficially of such things. "Carlotta will want to tell you ... " " ... after you talk to Carlotta."

  Was the door open for her now? Had the gate been pushed back to welcome her? The great wooden frame of the door looked like a giant keyhole, tapering as it did from a flared base to a narrower top. Where had she seen that very same doorway shaped like a keyhole? Carved on the tomb in the Lafayette Cemetery. How ironic, for this house had been her mother's tomb.

  Even the sweet silent rain had not alleviated the heat. But a breeze came now, the river breeze they had called it when they had said their farewells only blocks away at the hotel. And the breeze, smelling of the rain, flowed over her as deliciously as water. What was the scent of flowers in the air, so savage and deep, so unlike the florist scents that had surrounded her earlier?

  She didn't resist it. She stood dreaming, feeling light and almost naked in the fragile silk garments she had just put on, trying to see the dark house, trying to take a deep breath, trying to slow the stream of all that had happened, all she'd witnessed and only half understood.

  My life is broken in half, she thought; and all the past is the discarded part, drifting away, like a boat cut loose, as if the water were time, and the horizon was the demarcation of what would remain meaningful.

  Ellie, why? Why were we cut off? Why, when they all knew? Knew my name, knew yours, knew I was her daughter! What was it all about, with them there by the hundreds and speaking that name, Mayfair, over and over?

  "Come to the office downtown after you've talked," the young Pierce had said, Pierce with his rosy cheeks who was already a partner in the firm founded so long ago by his great-grandfather. "Ellie's grandfather, too, you know," said Ryan of the white hair and the carefully chiseled features who had been Ellie's first cousin. She did not know. She did not know who was who or whence they came, or what it meant, and above all why no one had ever told her. Flash of bitterness! Cortland this, and Cortland that ... and Julien and Clay and Vincent and Mary Beth and Stella and Antha and Katherine.

  Oh, what sweet southern music, words rich and deep like the fragrance she breathed now, like the heat clinging to her, and making even the soft silk shirt she wore feel suddenly heavy.

  Did all the answers lie beyond the open door? Is the future beyond the open door? For after all, why could this not become, in spite of everything, a mere chapter of her life, marked off and seldom reread, once she had returned to the outside world where she had been kept all these years, quite beyond the spells and enchantments which were now claiming her? Oh, but it wasn't going to be. Because when you fell prey to a spell this strong, you were never the same. And each moment in this alien world of family, South, history, kinship, proffered love, drove her a thousand years away from who she'd been, or who she had wanted to be.

  Did they know, did they guess for a second, how seductive it was? How raw she'd felt as they offered their invitations, their promises of visits and conversations yet to come, of family knowledge and family loyalty and family intimacy.

  Kinship. Could they guess how indescribably exotic that was after the barren, selfish world in which she'd spent her life, like a potted plant that had never seen the real sun, nor the real earth, nor heard the rain except against double-paned glass?

  "Sometimes I'd look around," Michael had said of California, "and it all seemed so sterile here." She had known. She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing.

  I went into medicine to find the visceral world, she thought, and only in the waiting rooms and corridors outside the Emergency Room have I ever glimpsed the gatherings of clans, the generations weeping and laughing and whispering together as the angel of death passes over them.

  "You mean Ellie never even told you her father's name? She never spoke to you about Sheffield or Ryan or Grady or ... ?" Again and again, she had said no.

  Yet Ellie had come back, to stand in that very cemetery at Aunt Nancy's funeral, whoever the hell Aunt Nancy had been, and afterwards in that very restaurant had shown them Rowan's photograph from her wallet! Our daughter the doctor! And dying, in a morphine dream, she had said to Rowan, "I wish they would send me back down home, but they can't. They can't do that."

  There had been a moment after they'd left her off at the hotel, and after she had gone upstairs to shower and change on account of the muggy heat, when she had felt such bitterness that she could not reason or rationalize or even cry. And of course, she knew, knew as surely as she knew anything else, that there were countless ones among them who would have loved nothing more than to escape it all, this immense web of blood ties and memories. Yet she couldn't really imagine it.

  All right, that had been the sweet side, overwhelming as the perfume of this flower in the dark, all of them there opening their arms.

  But what truths lay ahead behind this door, about the child woman in the casket? For a long time, as they talked, voices splashing together like champagne, she had thought, D
o any of you by any miracle know the name of my father?

  "Carlotta will want to ... well, have her say."

  " ... so young when you were born."

  "Father never actually told us ... "

  From here, in the electric moonlight on the broken flags, she could not see the side gallery which Ryan and Bea had described to her, the gallery on which her mother had sat in a rocking chair for thirteen years. "I don't think she suffered."

  But all she had to do now was open this iron gate, go up the marble steps, walk across the rotted boards, push back the door that had been left open. Why not? She wanted to taste the darkness inside so badly that she did not even miss Michael now. He couldn't do this with her.

  Suddenly, as if she'd dreamed it, she saw the light brighten behind the door. She saw the door itself moved back, and the figure of the old woman there, small and thin. Her voice sounded crisp and clear in the dark, with almost an Irish lilt to it, somber and low as it was:

  "Are you coming in or not, Rowan Mayfair?"

  She pushed at the gate, but it didn't give, and so she moved past it. The steps were slippery, and she came up slowly and felt the soft boards of the wooden porch give ever so slightly under her.

  Carlotta had disappeared, but as Rowan entered the hallway now she saw her small dim figure far, far away at the entrance to a large room where the lone light was shining that illuminated all of the dim high-ceilinged distance before her.

  She walked slowly after the old woman.

  She walked past a stairway, rising straight and impossibly high to a dark second floor of which she could see nothing, and on past doors to the right opening onto a vast living room. The lights of the street shone through the windows of this room beyond, making them smoky and lunar white, and revealing a long stretch of gleaming floor, and a few indefinable pieces of scattered furniture.

  At last passing a closed door to the left, she moved on into the light and saw that she had come into a large dining room.

  Two candles stood on the oval table, and it was their faintly dancing flames which gave the only interior illumination to everything. Amazingly even it seemed, rising thinly to reveal the murals on the walls, great rural scenes of moss-hung oaks, and furrowed farmland. The doors and the windows soared to some twelve feet above her head; indeed as she looked back down the long hallway, the front door seemed immense, its surrounding frame covering the entire wall to the shadowy ceiling.