The Witching Hour

  Rowan studied her face. She seemed neither playful nor vicious now, only solitary, wondering and thoughtful.

  "You aren't afraid of the dark?" Carlotta asked.

  "No."

  "You can see well in the dark."

  "Yes, better than most people."

  The woman turned around, and went on to the tall door at the foot of the stairs and pressed the button. With a muffled clank the elevator descended to the lower floor and stopped heavily and jerkily; the woman turned the knob, opening the door and revealing a gate of brass which she folded back with effort.

  Inside they stepped, onto a worn patch of carpet, enclosed by dark fabric-covered walls, a dim bulb in the metal ceiling shining down on them.

  "Close the doors," said the woman, and Rowan obeyed, reaching out for the knob and then pushing shut the gate.

  "You might as well learn how to use what is yours," she added. A subtle fragrance of perfume rose from her clothes, something sweet like Chanel, mingled with the unmistakable scent of powder. She pressed a small black rubber button to her right. And up they went, fast, with a surge of power that surprised Rowan.

  The hallway of the second floor lay in even thicker darkness than the lower corridor. The air was warmer. No open doorway or window gave even a seam of light from the street, and the candle light burst weakly on the many white-paneled doors and yet another rising stairway.

  "Come into this room," the old woman said, opening the door to the left and leading the way, her cane thumping softly on the thick flowered carpet.

  Draperies, dark and rotting like those of the dining room below, and a narrow wooden bed with a high half roof, carved it seemed, with the figure of an eagle. A similar deeply etched symmetrical design was carved into the headboard.

  "In this bed your mother died," said Carlotta.

  Rowan looked down at the bare mattress. She saw a great dark stain on the striped cloth that gave off a gleam that was almost a sparkling in the shadows. Insects! Tiny black insects fed busily on the stain. As she stepped forward, they fled the light, scurrying to the four corners of the mattress. She gasped and almost dropped the candle.

  The old woman appeared wrapped in her thoughts, protected somehow from the ugliness of it.

  "This is revolting," said Rowan under her breath. "Someone should clean this room!"

  "You may have it cleaned if you like," said the old woman, "it's your room now."

  The heat and the sight of the roaches sickened Rowan. She moved back and rested her head against the frame of the door. Other smells rose, threatening to nauseate her.

  "What else do you want to show me?" she asked calmly. Swallow your anger, she whispered within herself, her eyes drifting over the faded walls, the little nightstand crowded with plaster statues and candles. Lurid, ugly, filthy. Died in filth. Died here. Neglected.

  "No," said the old woman. "Not neglected. And what did she know of her surroundings in the end? Read the medical records for yourself."

  The old woman turned past her once more, returning to the hallway. "And now we must climb these stairs," she said. "Because the elevator goes no higher."

  Pray you don't need my help, Rowan thought. She shrank from the mere thought of touching the woman. She tried to catch her breath, to still the tumult inside her. The air, heavy and stale and full of the faintest reminders of worse smells, seemed to cling to her, cling to her clothes, her face.

  She watched the woman go up, managing each step slowly but capably.

  "Come with me, Rowan Mayfair," she said over her shoulder. "Bring the light. The old gas jets above have long ago been disconnected."

  Rowan followed, the air growing warmer and warmer. Turning on the small landing, she saw yet another shorter length of steps and then the final landing of the third floor. And as she moved up, it seemed that all the heat of the house must be collected here.

  Through a barren window to her right came the colorless light of the street lamp far below. There were two doors, one to the left and one directly before them.

  It was the left door which the old woman opened. "See there, the oil lamp on the table inside the door," she said. "Light it."

  Rowan set down the candle and lifted the glass shade of the lamp. The smell of the oil was faintly unpleasant. She touched the burning candle to the burnt wick. The large bright flame grew even stronger as she lowered the shade. She held up the light to let it fill a spacious low-ceilinged room, full of dust and damp, and cobwebs. Once more tiny insects fled the light. A dry rustling sound startled her, but the good smell of heat and wood was strong here, stronger even than the smell of rotted cloth and mold.

  She saw that trunks lay against the walls; packing crates crowded an old brass bed in the far corner beneath one of two square windows. A thick mesh of vines half covered the glass, the light caught in the wetness from the rain which still clung to the leaves, making them ever more visible. The curtains had long ago fallen down and lay in heaps on the windowsills.

  Books lined the wall to the left, flanking the fireplace and its small wooden mantel, shelves rising to the ceiling. Books lay helter-skelter upon the old upholstered chairs which appeared soft now, spongy with dampness and age. The light of the lamp glinted on the dull brass of the old bed. It caught the dull gleaming leather of a pair of shoes, tossed it seemed against a long thick rug, tied in a lumpy roll and shoved against the unused fireplace.

  Something odd about the shoes, odd about the lumpy roll of rug. Was it that the rug was bound with rusted chain, and not the rope that seemed more probable?

  She realized the old woman was watching her.

  "This was my uncle Julien's room," said the old woman. "It was through that window there that your grandmother Antha went out on the porch roof, and fell to her death below, on the flagstones."

  Rowan steadied the lamp, grasping it more firmly by the pinched waist of its glass base. She said nothing.

  "Open the first trunk there to your right," said the old woman.

  Hesitating just a moment, though why she didn't know, Rowan knelt down on the dusty bare floor, and set the lamp beside the trunk, and examined the lid and the broken lock. The trunk was made of canvas and bound with leather and brass tacks. She lifted the lid easily and threw it back gently so as not to scar the plaster wall.

  "Can you see what's inside?"

  "Dolls," Rowan answered. "Dolls made of ... of hair and bone."

  "Yes, bone, and human hair, and human skin, and the parings of nails. Dolls of your female ancestors so far back there are no names for the oldest dolls, and they'll fall to dust when you lift them."

  Rowan studied them, row after row set out carefully on a bed of old cheesecloth, each doll with its carefully drawn face and long hank of hair, some with sticks for arms and legs, others soft-bodied, and almost shapeless. The newest and finest of all the dolls was made of silk with a bit of pearl stitched to its little dress, its face of shining bone with nose and eyes and mouth drawn in dark brown ink, perhaps, even in blood.

  "Yes, blood," said the old woman. "And that is your great-grandmother, Stella."

  The tiny doll appeared to grin at Rowan. Someone had stuck the black hair to the bone skull with glue. Bones protruded from the hem of the little tube of a silk dress.

  "Where did the bones come from?"

  "From Stella."

  Rowan reached down, then drew back, her fingers curling. She couldn't bring herself to touch it. She lifted the edge of the cheesecloth tentatively, seeing beneath yet another layer, and here the dolls were fast becoming dust. They had sunk deep into the cloth, and probably could not be lifted intact from it.

  "All the way back to Europe they go. Reach in. Take the oldest doll. Can you see which one it is?"

  "It's hopeless. It will fall to pieces if I touch it. Besides, I don't know which one it is." She laid the cloth back, smoothing the top layer gingerly. And when her fingers touched the bones, she felt a sudden jarring vibration. It was as if a bright light had flashed befo
re her eye. Her mind registered the medical possibilities ... temporal lobe disturbance, seizure. Yet the diagnosis seemed foolish, belonging to another realm.

  She stared down at the tiny faces.

  "What's the purpose? Why?"

  "To speak to them when you would, and invoke their help, so they can reach out of hell to do your bidding." The woman pressed her withered lips into a faint sneer, the light rising and distorting her face unkindly. "As if they would come from the fires of hell to do anyone's bidding."

  Rowan let out a long low derisive sigh, looking down again at the dolls, at the horrid and vivid face of Stella.

  "Who made these things?"

  "They all did, all along. Cortland crept down in the night and cut the foot off my mother, Mary Beth, as she lay in the coffin. It was Cortland who took the bones from Stella. Stella wanted to be buried at home. Stella knew what he would do, because your grandmother Antha was too little to do it."

  Rowan shuddered. She lowered the lid of the trunk, and lifting the lamp carefully, rose to her feet, brushing the dust from her knees. "This Cortland, this man who did this, who was he? Not the grandfather of Ryan at the funeral?"

  "Yes, my dear, the very same," said the old woman. "Cortland the beautiful, Cortland the vicious, Cortland the instrument of him who has guided this family for centuries. Cortland who raped your mother when she clung to him for help. I mean the man who coupled with Stella, to father Antha who then gave birth to Deirdre, who by him conceived you, his daughter and great-granddaughter."

  Rowan stood quiet, envisioning the scheme of births and entanglements.

  "And who has made a doll of my mother?" she asked, as she stared into the old woman's face which now appeared ghastly in the light of the lamp playing on it.

  "No one. Unless you yourself care to go to the cemetery and unscrew the stone and take her hands out of the coffin. Do you think you could do that? He will help you do it, you know, the man you have already seen. He'll come if you put on the necklace and call him."

  "You have no cause to want to hurt me," Rowan said. "I am no part of this."

  "I tell you what I know. Black Magic was their game. Always. I tell you what you must know to make your choice. Would you bow to this filth? Would you continue it? Would you lift those wretched pieces of filth and call upon the spirits of the dead so that all the devils in hell could play dolls with you?"

  "I don't believe in it," Rowan said. "I don't believe that you do."

  "I believe what I have seen. I believe what I feel when I touch them. They are endowed with evil, as relics are endowed with sanctity. But the voices who speak through them are all his voice, the voice of the devil. Don't you believe what you saw when he came to you?"

  "I saw a man with dark hair. He wasn't a human being. He was some sort of hallucination."

  "He was Satan. He will tell you that is not so. He will give you a beautiful name. He will talk poetry to you. But he is the devil in hell for one simple reason. He lies and he destroys, and he will destroy you and your progeny if he can, for his ends, for his ends are what matter."

  "And what are they?"

  "To be alive, as we are alive. To come through and to see and feel what we see and feel." The woman turned her back, and moving her cane before her, walked to the left wall, by the fireplace, stopping at the lumpy roll of rug, and then looking up at the books that lined the shelves on either side of the paneled chimney above the mantel.

  "Histories," she said, "histories of all those who came before, written by Julien. This was Julien's room, Julien's retreat. In here he wrote his confessions. How with his sister Katherine he lay to make my mother, Mary Beth, and then with her he lay to make my sister Stella. And when he would have lain with me, I spit into his face. I clawed at his eyes. I threatened to kill him." She turned to look fixedly at Rowan.

  "Black magic, evil spells, records of his petty triumphs as he punished his enemies and seduced his lovers. Not all the seraphim in heaven could have satisfied his lust, not Julien's."

  "This is all recorded there?"

  "All this and more. But I have never read his books, and I never shall. It was enough to read his mind as he sat day by day in the library below, dipping his pen and laughing to himself, and giving vent to his fantasies. That was decades and decades ago. I have waited so long for this moment."

  "And why are the books still here? Why didn't you burn them?"

  "Because I knew that if you ever came, you would have to see for yourself. No book has the power of a burned book! No .... You must read for yourself what he was, for what he says in his own words can't do anything else but convict and condemn him." She paused. "Read and choose," she whispered. "Antha couldn't make the choice. Deirdre couldn't make the choice. But you can make it. You are strong and clever and wise already in your years, wise. I can see this in you."

  She rested both hands on the crook of her cane and looked away, out of the corner of her eyes, pondering. Once again, her cap of white hair seemed heavy around her small face.

  "I chose," she said softly, almost sadly. "I went to church after Julien touched me, after he sang me his songs and told me his lies. I honestly think he believed his charms would win me over. I went to the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came through to me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image--it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural." She looked up at Rowan. "I said, 'God, stand by me. Holy Mother, stand by me. Let me use my power to fight them, to beat them, to win against them.' "

  Again her eyes moved off, gazing back into the past perhaps. For a long moment they lingered on the rug at her feet, bulging in its circles of rusted chain. "I knew what lay ahead, even then. Years after I learned what I needed. I learned the same spells and secrets they used. I learned to call up the very lowly spirits whom they commanded. I learned to fight him in all his glory, with spirits bound to me, whom I could then dismiss with the snap of my fingers. In sum, I used their very weapons against them."

  She looked sullen, remote, studying Rowan's reactions yet seemingly indifferent to them.

  "I told Julien I would bear no incestuous child by him. To show me no fantasies of the future. To play no tricks on me, changing himself to a young man in my arms, when I could feel his withered flesh, and knew it was there all along. 'Do you think I care if you are the most beautiful man in the world? You or your evil familiar? Do you think I measure my choices by such vanity and self-indulgence?' That's what I said to him. If he touched me again, I promised I would use the power I had in me to drive him back. I would need no human hands to help me. And I saw fear in his eyes, fear even though I myself hadn't learned yet how to keep my threats, fear of a power in me which he knew was there even when I was uncertain of it. But maybe it was only fear of one he couldn't seduce, couldn't confuse, couldn't win over." She smiled, her thin lips revealing a shining row of even false teeth. "That is a terrible thing, you know, to one who lives solely by seduction."

  She lapsed into silence, caught perhaps in remembering.

  Rowan took a deep long breath, ignoring the sweat that clung to her face and the warmth of the lamp. Misery was what she felt, misery and waste and long lonely years, as she looked at the woman. Empty years, years of dreary routine, and bitterness and fierce belief, belief that can kill ...

  "Yes, kill," sighed the woman. "I have done that. To protect the living from him who was never living, and would possess them if he could."

  "Why us?" Rowan demanded. "Why are we the playthings of this spirit you are talking about, why us in all the world? We aren't the only ones who can see spirits."

  The old woman gave a long sigh.

  "Did you ever speak to him?" Rowan asked. "You said he c
ame to you when you were a child, he spoke in your ears words that no one could hear. Did you ever ask who he was and what he really wanted?"

  "Do you think he would have told me the truth? He won't tell you the truth, mark my words. You feed him when you question him. You give him oil as if he were the flame in that lamp."

  The old woman drew closer to her suddenly.

  "He'll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He'll weave a web of deceits so thick you won't see the world through it. He wants your strength and he'll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You're the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he'll go back to hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don't you see? He's created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he had to do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan!"

  "Witch? You spoke the word witch?" Rowan asked.

  "They were witches, every one, don't you see?" The old woman's eyes searched Rowan's face. "Your mother, her mother, and her mother before her, and Julien, that evil despicable Julien, the father of Cortland who was your father. I was marked for it myself until I rebelled."

  Rowan clenched her left hand, cutting her palm with her nails, staring into the old woman's eyes, repelled by her yet unable to draw away from her.

  "Incest, my dear, was the least of their sins, but the greatest of their schemes, incest to strengthen the line, to double up the powers, to purify the blood, to birth a cunning and terrible witch in each generation, going so far back it's lost in European history. Let the Englishman tell you about that, the Englishman who came with you to the church, the Englishman who held your arm. Let him tell you the names of the women whose dolls lie in that trunk. He knows. He'll sell you his brand of the black arts, his genealogy."

  "I want to get out of this room," Rowan whispered. She turned around, throwing the beam of the light on the landing.