The Witching Hour

"I do want to understand," she said. "I do. But that wouldn't keep me here by itself. Besides, it doesn't matter to this being whether or not we're in Montcleve, France, or Tiburon, California, or Donnelaith, Scotland. And as for what matters to those beings you saw, they're going to have to come back and tell you what matters! You don't know."

  She paused, deliberately and obviously trying to soften her words as if she feared she'd become too sharp.

  "Michael," she said, "if you want to stay, make up your mind based on something else. Like maybe wanting to be here for me or because it's where you were born, or because you think you'd be happy here. Because it was the first place you loved, this neighborhood, and maybe you could love it again."

  "I never stopped loving it."

  "But don't do anything else to give in to them! Do things in spite of them."

  "Rowan, I'm here now in this room because of them. Don't lose sight of that fact. We did not meet at the yacht club, Rowan."

  She let out a long breath.

  "I insist on losing sight of it," she said.

  "Did Aaron talk to you about all this? Was this his advice to you?"

  "I didn't ask him for his advice," she said patiently. "I met with him for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to talk with him again, and confirm for myself that he was an honest man."

  "And?"

  "He's everything you said he was. But I had to see him again, really talk to him." She paused. "He's a bit of a spellbinder, that man."

  "I know."

  "I felt this when I saw him at the funeral; and there was the other time, when I met him at Ellie's grave."

  "And you feel all right about him now?"

  She nodded. "I know him now," she said. "He's not so different from you and me."

  "How do you mean?"

  "He's dedicated," she said. She gave a little shrug. "Just the way I'm a dedicated surgeon, and you're dedicated when you're bringing a house like this back to life." She thought for a minute. "He has illusions, the way you and I have illusions."

  "I understand."

  "The second thing was--I wanted to tell him that I was grateful for what he'd given me in the history. That he didn't have to worry about resentment or a breach of confidence from me."

  He was so relieved that he didn't interrupt her, but he was puzzled.

  "He filled in the largest and the most crucial blank in my life," she said. "I don't think even he understands what it meant to me. He's too wary. And he doesn't really know about loneliness. He's been with the Talamasca ever since he was a boy."

  "I know what you mean. But I think he does understand."

  "But still he's wary. This thing--this charming brown-haired apparition, or whatever he is--really tried to hurt him, you know."

  "I know."

  "But I tried to make him understand how grateful I was. That I wasn't challenging him in any way. Two days ago I was a person without a past or a family. And now I have both of those things. The most agonizing questions of my life have been answered. I don't think the full meaning of if has really sunk in. I keep thinking of my house in Tiburon and each time I realize 'You don't have to go back mere, you don't have to be alone there anymore.' And it's a wonderful shock all over again."

  "I never dreamed you'd respond that way. I have to confess. I thought you'd be angry, maybe even offended."

  "Michael, I don't care what Aaron did to get the information. I don't care what his colleagues did, or what they've done all along. The point is, the information wouldn't be there in any form whatsoever if he hadn't collected it. I'd be left with that old woman, and the vicious things she said. And all the shiny-faced cousins, smiling and offering sympathy, and incapable of telling the whole story because they don't know it. They only know little glittering parts." She took a deep breath. "You know, Michael, some people can't receive gifts. They don't know how to claim them and make use of them. I have to learn how to receive gifts. This house is a gift. The history was a gift. And the history makes it possible for me to accept the family! And God, they are the greatest gift of all."

  Again he was relieved, profoundly relieved. Her words held a charm for him. Nevertheless he could not get over his surprise.

  "What about the part of the file on Karen Garfield?" he asked. "And Dr. Lemle? I was so afraid for you, reading that."

  The flash of pain in her face this time was stronger, brighter. Instantly he regretted his bluntness. It seemed suddenly unforgivable to have blurted out these words.

  "You don't understand me," she said, her voice as even as before. "You don't understand the kind of person I am. I wanted to know whether or not I had that power! I went to you because I thought if you touched me with your hands you could tell me if this power was really there. Well, you couldn't. But Aaron has told me. Aaron has confirmed it. And nothing, nothing could be worse than suspecting it and being unsure."

  "I see."

  "Do you?" She swallowed, her face working hard suddenly to preserve its expression of tranquillity. And then her eyes went dull for a moment, and only brightened again with an obvious act of will. In a dry whisper, she said, "I hate what happened to Karen Garfield. I hate it. Lemle? Lemle was sick already. He'd had a stroke the year before. I don't know about Lemle, but Karen Garfield ... that was my doing, all right, and Michael, it was because I didn't know!"

  "I understand," he said softly.

  For a long moment, she struggled silently to regain her composure. When she spoke again, her voice was weary and a little frayed.

  "There was still another reason I had to see Aaron."

  "What?"

  She thought for a moment, then:

  "I'm not in communication with this spirit, and that means I can't control it. It hasn't revealed itself to me, not really. And it may not."

  "Rowan, you've already seen it, and besides--it's waiting for you."

  She was pondering, her hand playing idly with a little thread on the edge of her shirt.

  "I'm hostile to it, Michael," she said. "I don't like it. And I think it knows. I've been sitting here for hours alone, inviting it to come, yet hating it, fearing it."

  Michael puzzled over this for a moment.

  "It may have overplayed its hand," she said.

  "You mean, the way it touched you ... "

  "No. I mean in me, it may have overplayed its hand. It may have helped to create the very medium who can't be seduced by it, or driven crazy by it. Michael, if I could kill a flesh and blood human being with this invisible power of mine, what do you think my hostility feels like to Lasher?"

  He narrowed his eyes, studying her. "I don't know," he confessed.

  Her hand shook just a little as she swept her hair back out of her face, the sunlight catching it for one moment and making it truly blond.

  "My dislikes run very deep. They always have. They don't change with time. I feel an inveterate dislike for this thing. Oh, I remember what you said last night, about wanting to talk to it, reason with it, learn what it wants. But the dislike is what's strongest right now."

  Michael watched her for a long silent moment. He felt a curious, near inexplicable, quickening of his love for her.

  "You know, you're right in what you said before," he said. "I don't really understand you, or what kind of person you are. I love you, but I don't understand you."

  "You think with your heart," she said, touching his chest gently with her left fist. "That's what makes you so good. And so naive. But I don't do that. There's an evil in me equal to the evil in people around me. They seldom surprise me. Even when they make me angry."

  He didn't want to argue with her. But he was not naive!

  "I've been thinking for hours about all this," she said. "About this power to rupture blood vessels and aortas and bring about death as if with a whispered curse. If this power I have is good for anything, maybe it's good for destroying this entity. Maybe it can act on the energy controlled by him as surely as it acts upon flesh and blood cells."

  "That never even c
rossed my mind before."

  "That's why we have to think for ourselves," she said. "I'm a doctor, first and foremost. Only a woman and a person, second. And as a doctor, it's perfectly easy for me to see that this entity is existing in some continuous relationship with our physical world. It's knowable, what this being is. Knowable the way the secret of electricity was knowable in the year 700 though no one knew it."

  He nodded. "Its parameters. You used that word last night. I keep wondering about its parameters. If it's solid enough when it materializes for me to touch it."

  "Right. Exactly. What is it when it materializes? I have to learn its parameters. And my power also works according to the rules of our physical world. And I have to learn the parameters of my power, too."

  The pain came back into her face, again like a flash of light, somehow distorting her expression, and then broadening until her smooth face threatened to rumple like that of a doll in a flame. Only gradually did she go blank again, calm and pretty and silent. Her voice was a whisper when she resumed.

  "That's my cross, the power. Just as your cross is the power in your hands. We'll learn to control these things, so that we decide when and where to use them."

  "Yeah, that's exactly what we have to do."

  "I want to tell you something about that old woman, Carlotta, and about the power ... "

  "You don't have to, if you don't want to."

  "She knew I was going to do it to her. She foresaw it, and then she calculatedly provoked me. I could swear she did."

  "Why?"

  "Part of her scheme. I go back and forth thinking about it. Maybe she meant to break me, break my confidence. She always used guilt to hurt Deirdre, and she used it probably with Antha. But I'm not going to get drawn into the lengthy pondering of her scheme. This is the wrong thing for us to do now, talk about them and what they want--Lasher, the visions, that old woman--they've drawn a bunch of circles for us and I don't want to walk in circles."

  "Yeah, do I ever know what you mean."

  He let go of her eyes slowly, and rummaged in his pocket for his cigarettes. Three left. He offered her one, but she shook her head. She was watching him.

  "Some day, we can sit at the table," she said, "drink white wine together, beer, whatever, and talk about them. Talk about Petyr van Abel, and about Charlotte, and about Julien and all that. But not now. Now I want to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the substantial from the mystical. And I wish you would do the same thing."

  "I follow you," he said. He searched for his matches. Ah, no matches. Gave them to that old man.

  She slipped her hand in her pants pocket, drew out a slender gold lighter, and lighted his cigarette.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "Whenever we do focus on them," she said, "the effect is always the same. We become passive and confused."

  "You're right," he said. He was thinking about all the time he'd spent in the darkened bedroom on Liberty Street, trying to remember, trying to understand. But here he was in this house at last and except for two instances last night--when he'd touched Townsend's remains and when he'd touched the emerald--he hadn't removed the gloves. The mere thought of it scared him. Touching the door frames and the tables and the chairs that had belonged to the Mayfairs, touching the older things, the trunk of dolls in the attic, which Rowan had described to him, and the jars, those stinking jars ...

  "We become passive and confused," she said again, commanding his attention, "and we don't think for ourselves, which is exactly what we must do."

  "I agree with you," he said. "I only wish I had your calmness. I wish I could know all these half truths and not go spinning off into the darkness trying to figure things out."

  "Don't be a pawn in somebody's game," she said. "Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on."

  "You mean strive to be perfect," he said.

  "What?"

  "You said in California that you thought we should all aim to be perfect."

  "Yes, I did, didn't I? Well, I believe that. I'm trying to figure the perfect thing to do. So don't act like I'm a freak if I don't burst into tears, Michael. Don't think I don't know what I did to Karen Garfield or Dr. Lemle, or that little girl. I know. I really do."

  "I didn't mean--"

  "Oh, yeah, you did too," she said with slight sharpness. "Don't like me better when I cry than when I don't."

  "Rowan, I didn't--"

  "I cried for a year before I met you. I started crying when Ellie died. And then I cried in your arms. I cried when the call came from New Orleans that Deirdre was dead, and I'd never even known her or spoken to her or laid eyes on her. I cried and I cried. I cried when I saw her in the coffin yesterday. I cried for her last night. And I cried for that old woman, too. Well, I don't want to go on crying. What I have here is the house, the family, and the history Aaron has given me. I have you. A real chance with you. And what is there to cry about, I'd like to know."

  She was glaring at him, obviously sizzling with anger and with the conflict in herself, gray eyes flashing at him in the half light.

  "You're gonna make me cry, Rowan, if you don't stop," he said.

  She laughed in spite of herself. Her face softened beautifully, her mouth twisting unwillingly into a smile.

  "All right," she said. "And there is one thing more that could make me cry. I should tell you that, in order to be perfectly truthful. And that is ... I'd cry if I lost you."

  "Good," he whispered. He kissed her quickly before she could stop him.

  She made a little gesture for him to sit back, to stay serious, and to listen. He nodded and shrugged.

  "Tell me--what do you want to do? I mean what do you want to do? I'm not talking about what these beings want you to do. What's inside you now?"

  "I want to stay here," he said. "I wish to hell I hadn't stayed away so long. I don't know why I did."

  "OK, now you're talking," she said. "You're talking about something real."

  "No doubt about it," he said. "I've been walking--back there, in the old streets, where I grew up. It's not the old neighborhood now. It was never beautiful, but it's squalid and ruined and ... all gone."

  He saw the concern in her eyes immediately.

  "Yeah, well it's changed," he said with a little weary and accepting gesture. "But New Orleans never was just that neighborhood to me. It was, never Annunciation Street. It was here, the Garden District, and it was uptown, it was down in the French Quarter, it was all the other beautiful parts. And I love it. And I'm glad I'm back here. I don't want to leave again."

  "OK," she said. She smiled, the light glinting on the curve of her cheek and the edge of her mouth.

  "You know, I kept thinking, I'm home. I'm home. And no matter what does happen with all the rest--I don't want to leave home."

  "The hell with them, Michael," she said. "The hell with them, whoever they are, until they give us some reason to feel otherwise."

  "Well put," he said. He smiled.

  How mysterious she was, such a baffling mixture of sharpness and softness. Maybe his mistake was that he had always confused strength and coldness in women. Maybe most men did.

  "They'll come to us again," she said. "They have to. And when they do, then we'll think and we'll decide what to do."

  "Yeah, right," he said. And what if I took off the gloves? Would they come to me now?

  "But we're not holding our breath until then."

  "No." He gave a little laugh.

  He grew quiet, filled with excitement, and yet filled with worry though every word she spoke gladdened him and made him feel that this anxiety would lift any second.

  He found himself looking off to the mirror at the far end of the room, and seeing their tiny reflection there, and the repeated chandeliers, caught in the two mirrors, marching on, countless, in a blur of silver light, to eternity.

  "Do you like loving me?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "Do you
like it?" Her voice had a decided tremor in it for the first time.

  "Yeah, I love loving you. But it's scary, because you aren't like anyone else I've ever known. You're so strong."

  "Yes, I am," she said thickly. "Because I could kill you right now if I wanted to. All your manly strength wouldn't do you any good."

  "No, that isn't what I meant," he said. He turned and looked at her, and for one moment in the shadows her face looked unspeakably cold and cunning, with her eyelids at half mast, and her eyes gleaming. She looked malicious the way she had for one instant in the house in Tiburon in the cold light coming through the glass into a darkened room.

  She sat up slowly, with a soft rustle of cloth, and he found himself shrinking from her, instinctively, every hair standing on end. It was the hard wariness you feel when you see a snake in the grass two inches from your shoe, or you realize the man on the next bar stool has just turned towards you and opened a switchblade knife.

  "What the hell's the matter with you?" he whispered.

  But then he saw. He saw she was shaking and her cheeks were blotched with pink yet deathly white, and her hands reached out for him and then shrank back and she looked at them and then clasped them together, as if trying to contain something unspeakable. "God, I didn't even hate Karen Garfield," she whispered. "I didn't! So help me God, I ... "

  "No, it was all a mistake," he said, "a terrible mistake, and you won't ever make that mistake again."

  "No, never," she said. "Even with that old woman, I swear, I didn't really believe it."

  Desperately he wanted to help her but he didn't know what to do. She was quivering like a flame in the shadows, her teeth stabbing her lower lip, her right hand clenching her own left hand cruelly.

  "Stop, honey, stop--you're hurting yourself," he said. But she felt like something made of steel, unbending, when he touched her.

  "I swear, I didn't believe it. It's like an impulse, you know and you don't really believe you can possibly ... I was so angry with Karen Garfield. It was outrageous, her coming there, her walking into Ellie's house, so stupidly outrageous!"

  "I know, I understand."

  "What do I do to neutralize it? Does it come back inside me and burn me from within?"

  "No."

  She turned away from him, drawing up her knees and peering out into the room dully, a little calmer now, though her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her fingers were still working anxiously.