Seduction

Thirty-five

Ash left for the bank. Minerva went to her office. Eva stayed, sitting at the table, alone, nursing a second cup of coffee.

Jac found Theo in the library studying the tide tables.

He said that because of the tides they couldn’t try to visit the cave for another hour or so. But there was one other monument he wanted to show her, and he led her out to the car.

The ten-minute drive that took them through picturesque countryside ended when Theo parked the car by the side of an inauspicious road. There was nothing around to indicate they’d arrived at a destination.

“We have to go the rest of the way on foot,” Theo explained. “This place is called La Pouquelaye de Faldouet.”

“Faldouet means fast-running stream, doesn’t it, but what’s pouquelaye?”

“Some think the first part of the name comes from Shakespeare’s Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, who was one of the ‘little people’ or dare I say ‘fairies,’ and laye can be deciphered as ‘place.’ So we get ‘fairy place of the fast-running stream.’ ”

Turning a corner, they came upon a group of towering stones.

“This is astonishing!” Jac said. More than a dozen monoliths formed a pathway that led to a large circular chamber, beyond which was a second chamber with a gigantic capstone.

“That stone is over twenty-four tons,” Theo said. “It comes from an area half a kilometer away from here. How did they move it? And why did they move it?”

“Like Stonehenge, there are only guesses about what these sites were. So many of them are burial grounds,” she said.

Jac’s work continually exposed her to reminders of loss, secrets gone, history covered over and forgotten. People who would never speak again. Their souls like fragrances that linger in the air for a few moments and then disappear forever.

And all these gravesites… this site… brought Jac’s own losses to the forefront. Always they had made her think of her mother, and now in addition there was the loss of her lover, and the pregnancy…

For a moment the idea of a baby-of her and Griffin’s baby-was so real that she lost a step. She put her hand out and touched the wall. Stood still. Trying to get her bearings. The grief was like fog.

“This area has been excavated several times,” Theo was saying. “Starting in the mid-eighteen hundreds. They’ve found the bones of two children and three or more adults here.”

Jac shivered. She had seen so many excavations, she could picture the scene they had come upon.

“One skeleton was in a seated position in one of the side chambers,” Theo continued. “They also found utensils and household items. Some bowls, stone axes, greenstone pendants, tools made of flint. I’ve read that the household goods weren’t buried ceremoniously but instead seemed to be positioned as if they were in use. No one is quite sure if the site was a graveyard, a temple or a dwelling.”

“This place is aligned with the solar equinox, isn’t it?” Jac asked as she tried to focus. Be present, as Robbie would say.

Theo nodded. “Yes. Most of the sites on the island are. Is that common?”

“Yes, Neolithic-period temples and burial sites often are aligned on ley lines. Have you heard anything else out of the ordinary about this one?”

“About thirty years ago, some strange occurrences were noticed in many houses west of here. Objects seemed to be moving around. A chair was no longer next to the fireplace but halfway across a room. A plate from a coffee table was found on a shelf. A painting no longer hung on the wall but leaned against a door. Because the local black-magic circle used this place as a sacred site to hold meetings, the rector of the Anglican church was called in to help. He worked here for three days, exorcising the spirits from the dolmens. After that none of the residents reported any more poltergeists, but I’ve heard from some of the guides that they still find remnants of witch covens here. Stubs of burnt-out candles left on standing stones. Grass wreaths studded with flowers on the floor. There’s even gossip that, around the time of the equinoxes, there’s been evidence of blood sacrifices being carried out. According to people who study paranormal activity, through ceremonies and chanting, the area’s ley lines might have been reenergized or overenergized.”

Jac heard the intensity in Theo’s voice that she’d come to recognize when he talked about the ancient sites. Did his passion border on obsession? Was Ash right? Was Theo preoccupied with the past to the point of distraction? Was there something wrong with how fixated he was on these ancient monuments? Was he, as Eva had suggested, haunted?

Jac walked around the dolmen. “Look at it from this angle. See the way the dirt is mounded?” She pointed. “There’s a theory that these kinds of sites represent the pregnant stomach of Mother Earth.” She felt a butterfly in her own stomach. Why had she brought this up? Keep talking, she thought. Work through this. Get past it. “The main chamber represents the womb, and the entrance and the passageway represent the birth canal. The ancients believed all life came from the Earth Mother, so this formation could be recreating the scene for a birth in reverse. If at your death you were buried in a symbolic womb, it might facilitate your rebirth into the next life.”

“That’s fascinating,” Theo said. “I’ve never heard that before.”

“There’s something else, though.” She was walking the length of the ruin. “I don’t think that’s the key reason this monument was built this way.”

“How do you know?”

She shrugged. “No idea. But I can feel it. Almost as if this place is alive. As if it’s trying to talk to me.”

“I believe that. No matter where we go, there’s a past on the island that is just waiting to come alive again,” Theo said. “I can feel it too. I always have. I think Hugo felt it also. I think that the island rekindled his fascination with reincarnation. Jersey is rich with past-life mythology.”

“If Malachai were here now, he would remind us that it’s no coincidence.”

Theo frowned. “I wish you wouldn’t bring him up so much. You see him as some kind of hero, but he’s manipulative too, Jac. He has his own agenda.”

Theo’s anger at Malachai was pronounced. “You rely on him too much,” Theo continued.

“I don’t think I do.”

“You need to dissociate yourself from him.”

“Why?”

“I know he didn’t want you to come here. He doesn’t think you should be with me. Isn’t that true?”

Thinking of her recent phone call with Malachai and his concerns, Jac felt a shiver of apprehension.

“Yes, but I didn’t listen to him, did I?”

Theo stepped toward her, and before she realized what he was doing, he leaned forward and kissed her hard and long. This was not a good-night kiss. His lips were cold on hers. His arm went around her back and pulled her with too much force. This didn’t feel right.

She pulled away. Stumbled backward.

“It’s been a long time for me since I’ve kissed anyone,” he said, embarrassed. “I hope I remembered how to do it.”

She laughed but it sounded artificial.

“We belong together, Jac.”

“No, not in that way, Theo. I don’t think so.” A wave of sadness coursed through her. Did she belong with anyone but Griffin?

“Are you sure? Can’t you give it a chance?”

The sun was shining in her eyes. He was backlit and she couldn’t see his face clearly. In the shadows, he became threatening. Something about how he smelled alerted her that there was potential danger here. Then with horror she saw the air around her waver the same way it had so many times in her life-the visual precursor to an episode, or what Malachai liked to call a memory lurch. An intense burst of scent assaulted her. She smelled sage, hazel, juniper, frankincense and that odd amber from Fantine’s workshop.

Jac felt herself starting to stumble. She was seeing the same scene but there were other people there. Ghostlike at first, but then becoming flesh. Having substance. And sound.

A throng of people were lined up and waiting to come into the dolmen. All of them were dressed in natural-colored robes-white, cream or brown linens. Both the men and the women were chanting. Many were holding wooden plates of vegetables, fruits and flat round disks of bread. The air was perfumed with roses and cloves. Sweet and spicy. Fresh and pungent.

The woman called Gwenore was with her son, Brice. Looking at the boy, Jac felt pride, deep and complete.

If you feel yourself starting to float off, pull yourself back… you have a lifeline to the present now…

Jac fingered the scarlet thread. Concentrated on the silk next to her skin. It was working. The scene was dissipating.

“Are you all right?”

She was sitting on the ground. She’d fallen, a physical parallel to her psychic mishap.

Theo was beside her. Staring at her. Watching her.

But she wasn’t just seeing Theo. She was seeing Owain, too. The man whose thoughts she’d just been thinking. She had been seeing Gwenore and Brice through Owain’s eyes. Looking at the tall, gangly boy, Jac’s heart had swelled as she felt a kind of love she’d never before felt. She’d been feeling what Owain felt for his son. A love that was pure in a way that romantic love can never be, without the pain of passion but fraught with something much more absorbing.

Suddenly Jac understood. Theo was the reincarnation of Owain. Jac had, as Malachai had explained, truly been reliving a past that belonged to someone else. A past that belonged to Theo. She had been remembering for him.

The thread wound around her wrist. She followed its route with her fingertips as if it were a road she was traveling. She closed her eyes. Just concentrated on the silk. What was happening to her? She should be afraid, and part of her was. But there was something else too. Jac felt energized by what had happened.

The double image of the two men superimposed on each other burned into her retina.

“Are you all right?”

Opening her eyes, she was relieved to see only Theo.

“Jac?”

“I’m all right. I had-I don’t know-a flash, I suppose. Not what happened yesterday, but just a glimmer.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “Are you safe? I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you.”

His concern was comforting. She didn’t make friends easily. Not because she didn’t want to or because people weren’t attracted to her, but because she wasn’t very good at the kind of sharing that bonds people.

Her hallucinatory episodes in childhood, losing her mother to suicide, the year she’d spent visiting doctors to try to find a cause for her problems, the twelve months at Blixer Rath, then meeting Griffin and losing him too-you don’t discuss those things at casual dinner parties. As she became close with people, intimacy was so hard fought and so hard won, she shied away from attempting it most of the time.

It was difficult for her to relate to most people and for most people to relate to her. But Theo was different. He’d been at Blixer. He shared her history. They both had suffered from debilitating psychological trauma and survived. She didn’t have to worry about his not understanding her demons. He had them too. She didn’t have to be afraid of telling him that sometimes she thought she was crazy. He thought the same about himself. He’d known her at her most vulnerable, as she had known him at his.

“We were very young at the clinic,” she said.

He nodded. “And troubled. That was a bleak time. You know you were the first person I’d ever met who seemed to understand. You were a miracle.”

“For me too.”

“You were the first person I met who made me feel like myself,” Theo said. “As if we were the same somehow, and you would accept me for who I was. It was a very important discovery.”

What he was saying was important, Jac thought. It was key to what was going on with her, but she didn’t quite understand it yet.

“What did you discover?” she asked.

“That I could like myself. Or at least I liked the person I was with you.”

“What about yourself did you like?” She didn’t know why, but she was sure this was a critical question-a clue to a puzzle she hadn’t even known existed.

“Other people would have asked me why I didn’t like myself, not what I liked. But you’re not like other people. You never were. I’m relieved you still aren’t.”

“You still haven’t told me.” She needed to know.

“You were the first person I’d met whom I wanted to help. You were in so much pain. I wanted to take care of you.”

“Because if you could take care of me and lessen my pain, it would lessen your own?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure.” She looked away from Theo. At the stones. She reached out and touched one. It was warm from the sun. “I think I’ve had dreams about a place that looks like this,” she said quietly. Almost not wanting it to be true. “I always call them my stone dreams.”

“Maybe because of my drawings that you saw at Blixer Rath? I drew this place all the time too. I drew all these monuments.”

“We all dream in mythology,” she said, echoing something Malachai had told her so many times. “I’ve never been able to attach a myth to my stone dreams the way I have to other dreams.”

They’d started walking, and Theo had led her away over a stream and beyond it to another ruin-an archway built of stone. Ivy climbed the walls.

“What have you dreamed about since you’ve been here?” he asked.

“The last few nights I’ve dreamed about threads. I saw someone from the episode I had, tied up in threads. And another dream of Moira, the goddess of fate with her beautiful silks in shimmering colors-gold, silver, aqua, cobalt, purple, rose. All of them thin-too thin to be so strong. She sat cutting the threads, weeping, singing. I even remember the words to her song. We are the keeper of the threads.”

“And what do you think it means?”

“I think I was thrown by the incident in the cave. All I want is to have control over what I see. Over my hallucinations. That and being influenced by your aunt’s loom.”

He nodded.

“Tell me about your dreams?” Jac asked.

“I used to have dreams about being sacrificed to the Minotaur when I was at Blixer Rath. I was one of the teenagers brought into the labyrinth to feed him.” Theo actually shuddered, and it made the hair on the back of Jac’s neck tingle. “I stopped having them,” he continued, “and then… when my wife died they came back. More lurid and frightening than ever.”

For a few moments neither of them said anything.

“Are you still having them?”

He nodded. “I never sleep a night through.”

She touched his hand. Felt how cold his skin was.

“It’s because I feel guilty. I’m responsible for what happened to her,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He took a deep breath. “I killed her.”