The witching hour

One

THE DOCTOR WOKE up afraid. He had been dreaming of the old house in New Orleans again. He had seen the woman in the rocker. He’d seen the man with the brown eyes.

And even now in this quiet hotel room above New York City he felt the old alarming disorientation. He’d been talking again with the brown-eyed man. Yes, help her. No, this is just a dream. I want to get out of it.

The doctor sat up in bed. No sound but the faint roar of the air conditioner. Why was he thinking about it tonight in a hotel room in the Parker Meridien? For a moment he couldn’t shake the feeling of the old house. He saw the woman again-her bent head, her vacant stare. He could almost hear the hum of the insects against the screens of the old porch. And the brown-eyed man was speaking without moving his lips. A waxen dummy infused with life-

No. Stop it.

He got out of bed and padded silently across the carpeted floor until he stood in front of the sheer white curtains, peering out at black sooty rooftops and dim neon signs flickering against brick walls. The early morning light showed behind the clouds above the dull concrete facade opposite. No debilitating heat here. No drowsing scent of roses, of gardenias.

Gradually his head cleared.

He thought of the Englishman at the bar in the lobby again. That’s what had brought it all back-the Englishman remarking to the bartender that he’d just come from New Orleans, and that certainly was a haunted city. The Englishman, an affable man, a true Old World gentleman it seemed, in a narrow seersucker suit with a gold watch chain fixed to his vest pocket. Where did one see that kind of man these days? – a man with the sharp melodious inflection of a British stage actor, and brilliant, ageless blue eyes.

The doctor had turned to him and said: “Yes, you’re right about New Orleans, you certainly are. I saw a ghost myself in New Orleans, and not very long ago-” Then he had stopped, embarrassed. He had stared at the melted bourbon before him, the sharp refraction of light in the base of the crystal glass.

Hum of flies in summer; smell of medicine. That much Thorazine? Could there be some mistake?

But the Englishman had been respectfully curious. He’d invited the doctor to join him for dinner, said he collected such tales. For a moment, the doctor had been tempted. There was a lull in the convention, and he liked this man, felt an immediate trust in him. And the lobby of the Parker Meridien was a nice cheerful place, full of light, movement, people. So far away from that gloomy New Orleans corner, from the sad old city festering with secrets in its perpetual Caribbean heat.

But the doctor could not tell that story.

“If ever you change your mind, do call me,” the Englishman had said. “My name is Aaron Lightner.” He’d given the doctor a card with the name of an organization inscribed on it: “You might say we collect ghost stories-true ones, that is.”

THE TALAMASCA

We watch

And we are always here.

It was a curious motto.

Yes, that was what had brought it all back. The Englishman and that peculiar calling card with the European phone numbers, the Englishman who was leaving for the Coast tomorrow to see a California man who had lately drowned and been brought back to life. The doctor had read of that case in the New York papers-one of those characters who suffers clinical death and returns after having seen “the light.”

They had talked about the drowned man together, he and the Englishman. “He claims now to have psychic powers, you see,” said the Englishman, “and that interests us, of course. Seems he sees images when he touches things with his bare hands. We call it psychometry.”

The doctor had been intrigued. He had heard of a few such patients himself, cardiac victims if he rightly recalled, who had come back, one claiming to have seen the future. “Near Death Experience.” One saw more and more articles about the phenomenon in the journals.

“Yes,” Lightner had said, “the best research on the subject has been done by doctors-by cardiologists.”

“Wasn’t there a film a few years back,” the doctor had asked, “about a woman who returned with the power to heal? Strangely affecting.”

“You’re open-minded on the subject,” the Englishman had said with a delighted smile. “Are you sure you won’t tell me about your ghost? I’d so love to hear it. I’m not flying out till tomorrow, sometime before noon. What I wouldn’t give to hear your story!”

No, not that story. Not ever.

Alone now in the shadowy hotel room, the doctor felt fear again. The clock ticked in the long dusty hallway in New Orleans. He heard the shuffle of his patient’s feet as the nurse “walked” her. He smelled that smell again of a New Orleans house in summer, heat and old wood. The man was talking to him …

The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans. And the old house really did have white fluted columns on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek Revival style they called it-a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District, its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were made in a rose pattern and much festooned with vines-purple wisteria, the yellow Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink.

He liked to pause on the marble steps and look up at the Doric capitals, wreathed as they were by those drowsy fragrant blossoms. The sun came in thin dusty shafts through the twisting branches. Bees sang in the tangle of brilliant green leaves beneath the peeling cornices. Never mind that it was so somber here, so damp.

Even the approach through the deserted streets seduced him. He walked slowly over cracked and uneven sidewalks of herringbone brick or gray flagstone, under an unbroken archway of oak branches, the light eternally dappled, the sky perpetually veiled in green. Always he paused at the largest tree that had lifted the iron fence with its bulbous roots. He could not have gotten his arms around the trunk of it. It reached all the way from the pavement to the house itself, twisted limbs clawing at the shuttered windows beyond the banisters, leaves enmeshed with the flowering vines.

But the decay here troubled him nevertheless. Spiders wove their tiny intricate webs over the iron lace roses. In places the iron had so rusted that it fell away to powder at the touch. And here and there near the railings, the wood of the porches was rotted right through.

Then there was the old swimming pool far beyond the garden-a great long octagon bounded by the flagstones, which had become a swamp unto itself with its black water and wild irises. The smell alone was frightful. Frogs lived there, frogs you could hear at dusk, singing their grinding, ugly song. Sad to see the little fountain jets up one side and down the other still sending their little arching streams into the muck. He longed to drain it, clean it, scrub the sides with his own hands if he had to. Longed to patch the broken balustrade, and rip the weeds from the overgrown urns.

Even the elderly aunts of his patient-Miss Carl, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy-had an air of staleness and decay. It wasn’t a matter of gray hair or wire-rimmed glasses. It was their manner, and the fragrance of camphor that clung to their clothes.

Once he had wandered into the library and taken a book down from the shelf. Tiny black beetles scurried out of the crevice. Alarmed he had put the book back.

If there had been air-conditioning in the place it might have been different. But the old house was too big for that-or so they had said back then. The ceilings soared fourteen feet overhead. And the sluggish breeze carried with it the scent of mold.

His patient was well cared for, however. That he had to admit. A sweet old black nurse named Viola brought his patient out on the screened porch in the morning and took her in at evening.

“She’s no trouble at all, Doctor. Now, you come on, Miss Deirdre, walk for the doctor.” Viola would lift her out of the chair and push her patiently step by step.

“I’ve been with her seven years now, Doctor, she’s my sweet girl.”

Seven years like that. No wonder the woman’s feet had started to turn in at the ankles, and her arms to draw close to her chest if the nurse didn’t force them down into her lap again.

Viola would walk her round and round the long double parlor, past the harp and the Bösendorfer grand layered with dust. Into the long broad dining room with its faded murals of moss-hung oaks and tilled fields.

Slippered feet shuffling on the worn Aubusson carpet. The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young-a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?

On the library bookshelves were leather-bound ledgers with old dates marked on the spines in faded purple ink: 1756, 1757, 1758 … Each bore the family name of Mayfair in gold lettering.

Ah, these old southern families, how he envied them their heritage. It did not have to lead to this decay. And to think, he did not know the full names of his own great-grandparents or where they had been born.

Mayfair-a vintage colonial clan. There were old paintings on the walls of men and women in eighteenth-century dress, as well as daguerreotypes and tintypes and faded photographs. A yellowed map of Saint-Domingue-did they call it that still? – in a dirty frame in the hallway. And a darkening painting of a great plantation house.

And look at the jewels his patient wore. Heirlooms surely, with those antique settings. What did it mean that they put that kind of jewelry on a woman who hadn’t spoken a word or moved of her own volition in over seven years?

The nurse said she never took off the chain with the emerald pendant, not even when she bathed Miss Deirdre.

“Let me tell you a little secret, Doctor, don’t you ever touch that!”

“And why not?” he wanted to ask. But he had said nothing. He watched uneasily as the nurse put on the patient’s ruby earrings, her diamond ring.

Like dressing a corpse, he thought. And out there the dark oaks wind their limbs towards the dusty window screens. And the garden shimmers in the dull heat.

“And look at her hair,” said the nurse lovingly. “Have you ever seen such beautiful hair?”

It was black all right, and thick and curly and long. The nurse loved to brush it, watching the curls roll up as the brush released them. And the patient’s eyes, for all their listless stare, were a clear blue. Yet now and then a thin silver line of saliva fell down from the side of her mouth, making a dark circle on the bosom of her white nightgown.

“It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t tried to steal those things,” he said half to himself. “She’s so helpless.”

The nurse had given him a superior, knowing smile.

“No one who’s ever worked in this house would try that.”

“But she sits all alone on that side porch by the hour. You can see her from the street.”

Laughter.

“Don’t worry about that, Doctor. No one around here is fool enough to come in that gate. Old Ronnie mows the lawn, but that’s because he always did, done it for thirty years now, but then old Ronnie isn’t exactly right in the head.”

“Nevertheless … ” But he had stopped himself. What was he doing, talking like this right in front of the silent woman, whose eyes only now and then moved just a little, whose hands lay just where the nurse had placed them, whose feet rested limply on the bare floor. How easy it was to forget oneself, forget to respect this tragic creature. Nobody knew what the woman understood.

“Might get her out in the sun sometime,” the doctor said. “Her skin is so white.”

But he knew the garden was impossible, even far away from the reek of the pool. The thorny bougainvillea burst in clumps from beneath the wild cherry laurel. Fat little cherubs, streaked with slime, peered out of overgrown lantana like ghosts.

Yet once children had played here.

Some boy or girl had carved the word Lasher into the thick trunk of the giant crepe myrtle that grew against the far fence. The deep gashes had weathered so that they gleamed white against the waxy bark. Strange word that. And a wooden swing was still hanging from the branch of the distant oak.

He’d walked back to that lonely tree, and sat down on the swing for a moment, felt the rusted chains creak, then move as he pushed his foot into the crushed grass.

The southern flank of the house looked mammoth and overwhelmingly beautiful to him from this perspective, the flowering vines climbing together all the way up past the green shuttered windows to the twin chimneys above the third floor. The dark bamboo rattled in the breeze against the plastered masonry. The glossy banana trees grew so high and dense they made a jungle clear back to the brick wall.

It was like his patient, this old place-beautiful yet forgotten by time, by urgency.

Her face might be pretty still if it were not so utterly lifeless. Did she see the delicate purple clusters of wisteria, shivering against the screens, the writhing tangle of other blooms? Could she see all the way through the trees to the white columned house across the street?

Once he had ridden upstairs with her and her nurse in the quaint yet powerful little elevator with its brass gate and worn carpet. No change in Deirdre’s expression as the little car began to rise. It made him anxious to hear the churning machinery. He could not imagine the motor except as something blackened and sticky and ancient, coated with dust.

Of course he had questioned the old doctor at the sanitarium.

“I remember when I was your age,” said the old doctor. “I was going to cure all of them. I was going to reason with the paranoiacs, and bring the schizophrenics back to reality, and make the catatonics wake up. You give her that shot every day, son. There’s nothing there anymore. We just do our best to keep her from getting worked up now and then, you know, the agitation.

Agitation? That was the reason for these powerful drugs? Even if the shots were stopped tomorrow it would be a month before the effects had fully worn off. And the levels used were so high they might have killed another patient. You had to build up to a dosage like that.

How could anyone know the true state of the woman when the medication had gone on for so long? If only he could run an electroencephalogram …

He’d been on the case about a month when he sent for the records. It was a routine request. No one noticed. He sat at his desk at the sanitarium all afternoon struggling with the scrawl of dozens of other physicians, the vague and contradictory diagnoses-mania, paranoia, complete exhaustion, delusions, psychotic break, depression, attempted suicide. It went all the way back to the girl’s teens apparently. No, even before. Someone had seen her for “dementia” when she was ten years old.

What were the specifics behind these abstractions? Somewhere in the mountain of scribble he found that she had borne a girl child at eighteen, given it up, suffered “severe paranoia.”

Is that why they had given her shock treatments in one place and insulin shock in another? What had she done to the nurses who over and over again quit on account of “physical attacks”?

She had “run away” at one point, been “forcibly committed” again. Then pages were missing, whole years uncharted. “Irreversible brain damage” was noted in 1976. “Patient sent home, Thorazine prescribed to prevent palsy, mania.”

It was an ugly document, telling no story, revealing no truth. And it discouraged him, finally. Had a legion of other doctors talked to her the way he did now when he sat beside her on the side porch?

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Deirdre?” Ah, the breeze here, so fragrant. The scent of the gardenias was suddenly overpowering, yet he loved it. Just for a moment, he closed his eyes.

Did she loathe him, laugh at him, even know he was there? There were a few streaks of gray in her hair, he saw that now. Her hand was cold, unpleasant to touch.

The nurse came out with a blue envelope in her hand, a snapshot.

“It’s from your daughter, Deirdre. See? She’s twenty-four years old now, Deirdre.” She held the snapshot out for the doctor to see too. A blond girl on the deck of a big white yacht, hair blowing in the wind. Pretty, very pretty. “On San Francisco Bay, 1983.”

Nothing changed in the woman’s face. The nurse brushed the black hair back from her forehead. She thrust the picture at the doctor. “See that girl? That girl’s a doctor, too!” She gave him a great superior nod. “She’s an intern, going to be a medical doctor just like you some day, that’s the truth.”

Was it possible? Had the young woman never come home to see to her own mother? He disliked her suddenly. Going to be a medical doctor, indeed.

How long had it been since his patient had worn a dress or a real pair of shoes? He longed to play a radio for her. Maybe she would like music. The nurse had her television soap operas on all afternoon in the back kitchen.

He came to distrust the nurses as he distrusted the aunts.

The tall one who wrote the checks for him-“Miss Carl”-was a lawyer still though she must have been in her seventies. She came and went from her offices on Carondelet Street in a taxicab because she could no longer climb up on the high wooden step of the St. Charles car. For fifty years, she had told him once when he had met her at the gate, she had ridden the St. Charles car.

“Oh, yes,” the nurse said one afternoon as she was brushing Deirdre’s hair very slowly, very gently. “Miss Carl’s the smart one. Works for Judge Fleming. One of the first women ever to graduate from the Loyola School of Law. She was seventeen years old when she went to Loyola. Her father was old Judge McIntyre, and she was ever so proud of him.”

Miss Carl never spoke to the patient, not that the doctor had ever seen. It was the portly one, “Miss Nancy,” who was mean to her, or so the doctor thought.

“They say Miss Nancy never had much chance for an education,” the nurse gossiped. “Always home taking care of the others. There used to be old Miss Belle here too.”

There was something sullen and almost common about “Miss Nancy.” Dumpy, neglected, always wearing her apron yet speaking to the nurse in that patronizing artificial voice. Miss Nancy had a faint sneer on her lips when she looked at Deirdre.

And then there was Miss Millie, the eldest of them all, who was actually some sort of cousin-a classic in old lady black silk and string shoes. She came and went, never without her worn gloves and her small black straw hat with its veil. She had a cheery smile for the doctor, and a kiss for Deirdre. “That’s my poor dear sweetheart,” she would say in a tremulous voice.

One afternoon, he had come upon Miss Millie standing on the broken flags by the pool.

“Nowhere to begin anymore, Doctor,” she had said sadly.

It was not his place to challenge her, yet something quickened in him to hear this tragedy acknowledged.

“And how Stella loved to swim here,” the old woman said. “It was Stella who built it, Stella who had so many plans and dreams. Stella put in the elevator, you know. That’s just the sort of thing that Stella would do. Stella gave such parties. Why, I remember hundreds in the house, tables over the whole lawn, and the bands that would play. You’re too young, Doctor, to remember that lively music. Stella had those draperies made in the double parlor, and now they’re too old to be cleaned anymore. That’s what they said. They’d fall apart if we tried to clean them now. And it was Stella who had paths of flagstones laid here, all along the pool. You see, like the old flags in the front and along the side … ” She broke off, pointing down the long side of the house at the distant patio so crowded by weeds. It was as if she couldn’t speak any more. Slowly she looked up at the high attic window.

He had wanted to ask, But who is Stella?

“Poor darling Stella.”

He had envisioned paper lanterns strung through the trees.

Maybe they were simply too old, these women. And that young one, the intern or whatever she was, two thousand miles away …

Miss Nancy bullied the silent Deirdre. She’d watch the nurse walking the patient, then shout in the patient’s ear.

“Pick up your feet. You know damn good and well you could walk on your own if you wanted to.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Miss Deirdre’s hearing,” the nurse would interrupt her. “Doctor says she can hear and see just fine.”

Once he tried to question Miss Nancy as she swept the upstairs hallway, thinking, well, maybe out of anger she’ll shed a little light.

“Is there ever the slightest change in her? Does she ever speak … even a single word?”

The woman squinted at him for a long moment, the sweat gleaming on her round face, her nose painfully red at the bridge from the weight of her glasses.

“I’ll tell you what I want to know!” she said. “Who’s going to take care of her when we’re no longer here! You think that spoilt daughter out in California is going to take care of her? That girl doesn’t even know her mother’s name. It’s Ellie Mayfair who sends those pictures.” She snorted. “Ellie Mayfair hasn’t set foot in this house since the day that baby was born and she came to take that baby out of here. All she wanted was that baby because she couldn’t have a baby of her own, and she was scared to death her husband would leave her. He’s some big lawyer out there. You know what Carl paid Ellie to take that baby? To see to it that girl never came home? Oh, just get her out of here, that was the idea. Made Ellie sign a paper.” She gave a bitter smile, wiping her hands on her apron. “Send her to California with Ellie and Graham to live in a fancy house on San Francisco Bay with a big boat and all, that’s what happened to Deirdre’s daughter.”

Ah, so the young woman did not know, he thought, but he said nothing.

“Let Carl and Nancy stay here and take care of things!” The woman went on. “That’s the song in this family. Let Carl write the checks and let Nancy cook and scrub. And what the hell has Millie ever done? Millie just goes to church, and prays for us all. Isn’t that grand? Aunt Millie’s more useless than Aunt Belle ever was. I’ll tell you what Aunt Millie can do best. Cut flowers. Aunt Millie cuts those roses now and then, those roses growing wild out there.”

She gave a deep ugly laugh, and went past him into the patient’s bedroom, gripping the broom by its greasy handle.

“You know you can’t ask a nurse to sweep a floor! Oh, no, they wouldn’t stoop to that, now, would they? Would you care to tell me why a nurse cannot sweep a floor?”

The bedroom was clean all right, the master bedroom of the house it appeared to be, a large airy northern room. Ashes in the marble fireplace. And what a bed his patient slept in, one of those massive things made at the end of the last century, with the towering half tester of walnut and tufted silk.

He was glad of the smell of floor wax and fresh linen. But the room was full of dreadful religious artifacts. On the marble dresser stood a statue of the Virgin with the naked red heart on her breast, lurid, and disgusting to look at. A crucifix lay beside it, with a twisting, writhing body of Christ in natural colors even to the dark blood flowing from the nails in his hands. Candles burned in red glasses, beside a bit of withered palm.

“Does she notice these religious things?” the doctor asked.

“Hell, no,” Miss Nancy said. Whiffs of camphor rose from the dresser drawers as she straightened their contents. “Lot of good they do under this roof!”

There were rosaries hung about the carved brass lamps, even through their faded satin shades. And it seemed nothing had been changed here for decades. The yellow lace curtains were stiff and rotted in places. Catching the sun they seemed to hold it, casting their own burnt and somber light.

There was the jewel box on the marble-top bedside table. Open. As if the contents weren’t priceless, which of course they were. Even the doctor, with his scant knowledge of such things, knew those jewels were real.

Beside the jewel box stood the snapshot of the pretty blond-haired daughter. And beneath it a much older and faded picture of the same girl, small but even then quite pretty. Scribble at the bottom. He could only make out: “Pacific Heights School, 1966.”

When he touched the velvet cover of the jewel box, Miss Nancy had turned and all but screamed at him.

“Don’t you touch that, Doctor!”

“Good Lord, woman, you don’t think I’m a thief.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about this house and this patient. Why do you think the shutters are all broken, Doctor? Almost fallen off their hinges? Why do you think the plaster’s peeling off the brick?” She shook her head, the soft flesh of her cheeks wobbling, her colorless mouth set. “Just let somebody try to fix those shutters. Just let someone climb a ladder and try to paint this house.”

“I don’t understand you,” said the doctor.

“Don’t ever touch her jewels, Doctor, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t touch a thing around here you don’t have to. That swimming pool out there, for instance. All choked with leaves and filth like it is, but those old fountains run into it still, you ever think about that? Just try to turn off those faucets, Doctor!”

“But who-?”

“Leave her jewels alone, Doctor. That’s my advice to you.”

“Would changing things make her speak?” he asked boldly, impatient with all this, and not afraid of this aunt the way he was of Miss Carl.

The woman laughed. “No, it wouldn’t make her do anything,” Nancy answered with a sneer. She slammed the drawer into the bureau. Glass rosary beads tinkled against a small statue of Jesus. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to clean out the bathroom, too.”

He looked at the bearded Jesus, the finger pointing to the crown of thorns around his heart.

Maybe they were all crazy. Maybe he would go crazy himself if he didn’t get out of this house.

Once, when he was alone in the dining room, he’d seen that word again-Lasher-written in the thick dust on the table. It was done as if by fingertip. Great fancy capital L. Now, what could it possibly mean? It was dusted away when he came the following afternoon, the only time in fact that he had ever seen the dust disturbed there, where the silver tea service on the sideboard was tarnished black. Faded the murals on these walls, yet he could see a plantation scene if he studied them, yes, that same house that was in the painting in the hall. Only after he had studied the chandelier for a long time did he realize it had never been wired for electricity. There was wax still on the candle holders. Ah, such a sadness, the whole place.

At night at home in his modern apartment overlooking the lake, he couldn’t stop brooding on his patient. He wondered if her eyes were open as she lay in bed.

“Maybe I have an obligation-” But then what obligation? Her doctor was a reputable psychiatrist. Wouldn’t do to question his judgment. Wouldn’t do to try anything foolish-like taking her out for a ride in the country, or bringing a radio to the porch. Or stopping the sedatives to see what would happen?

Or picking up a phone and contacting that daughter, the intern. Made Ellie sign a paper. Twenty-four years old was plenty old enough to be told a few things about one’s own mother.

And surely common sense dictated a break in Deirdre’s medication once in a while. And what about a complete reevaluation? He had to at least suggest it.

“You just give her the shots,” said the old doctor. “Visit with her an hour a day. That’s what you’re asked to do.” Slight coldness this time around. Old fool!

No wonder he was so glad the afternoon he had first seen the man visiting her.

It was early September, and still warm. And as he turned in the gate, he saw the man on the screen porch beside her, obviously talking to her, his arm resting on the back of her chair.

A tall, brown-haired man, rather slender.

The doctor felt a curious possessive feeling. A man he didn’t know with his patient. But he was eager to meet him actually. Maybe the man would explain things that the women would not. And surely he was a good friend. There was something intimate in the way he stood so close, the way he inclined towards the silent Deirdre.

But when the doctor came out on the porch there was no visitor. And he could find no one in the front rooms.

“You know, I saw a man here awhile ago,” he said to the nurse when she came in. “He was talking to Miss Deirdre.”

“I didn’t see him,” the nurse had said offhandedly.

Miss Nancy, shelling peas in the kitchen when he found her, stared at him for a long moment, then shook her head, her chin jutting. “I didn’t hear anybody come in.”

Well, isn’t that the damnedest thing! But he had to confess, it had only been for an instant-a glimpse through the screens. No, but he saw the man there.

“If only you could speak to me,” he said to Deirdre when they were alone. He was preparing the injection. “If only you could tell me if you want to have visitors, if it matters … ” Her arm was so thin. When he glanced at her, the needle ready, she was staring at him!

“Deirdre?”

His heart pounded.

The eyes rolled to the left, and she stared forward, mute and listless as before. And the heat, which the doctor had come to like, seemed suddenly oppressive. The doctor felt light-headed in fact, as though he was about to faint. Beyond the blackened, dusty screen, the lawn seemed to move.

Now, he’d never fainted in his life, and as he thought that over, as he tried to think it over, he realized he’d been talking with the man, yes, the man was here, no, not here now, but just had been. They had been in the middle of a conversation, and now he’d lost the thread, or no, that wasn’t it, it was that he suddenly couldn’t remember how long they’d been talking, and it was so strange to have been talking all this time together, and not recall how it started!

He was suddenly trying to clear his head, and have a better look at the guy, but what had the man just said? It was all very confusing because there was no one there to talk to, no one but her, but yes, he’d just said to the brown-haired man, “Of course, stop the injections … ” and the absolute rectitude of his position was beyond doubt, the old doctor-“A fool, yes!” said the brown-haired man-would just have to listen!

This was monstrous all this, and the daughter in California …

He shook himself. He stood up on the porch. What had happened? He had fallen asleep in the wicker chair. He had been dreaming. The murmur of the bees grew disconcertingly loud in his ears and the fragrance of the gardenias seemed to drug him suddenly. He looked down over the railing at the patio to his left. Had something moved there?

Only the limbs of the trees beyond as the breeze traveled through them. He’d seen it a thousand times in New Orleans, that graceful dance, as if one tree releases the breeze to another. Such lovely embracing heat. Stop the injections! She will wake.

Slowly, awkwardly, a monarch butterfly climbed the screen in front of him. Gorgeous wings. But gradually he focused upon the body of the thing, small and glossy and black. It ceased to be a butterfly and became an insect-loathsome!

“I have to go home,” he said aloud to no one. “I don’t feel right exactly, I think I should lie down.”

The man’s name. What was it? He’d known it just a moment ago, such a remarkable name-ah, so that’s what the word means, you are-Actually, quite beautiful-But wait. It was happening again. He would not let it!

“Miss Nancy!” He stood up out of the chair.

His patient stared forward, unchanged, the heavy emerald pendant gleaming against her gown. All the world was filled with green light, with shivering leaves, the faint blur of the bougainvillea.

“Yes, the heat,” he whispered. “Have I given her the shot?” Good Lord. He had actually dropped the syringe, and it had broken.

“You called for me, Doctor?” said Miss Nancy. There she stood in the parlor door, staring at him, wiping her hands on her apron. The colored woman was there too, and the nurse behind her.

“Nothing, just the heat,” he murmured. “I dropped it, the needle. But I have another, of course.”

How they looked at him, studied him. You think I’m going crazy, too?

It was on the following Friday afternoon that he saw the man again.

The doctor was late, he’d had an emergency at the sanitarium. He was sprinting up First Street in the early fall dusk. He didn’t want to disturb the family dinner. He was running by the time he reached the gate.

The man was standing in the shadows of the open front porch. He watched the doctor, his arms folded, his shoulder against the porch column, his eyes dark and rather wide, as though he were lost in contemplation. Tall, slender, clothes beautifully fitted.

“Ah, so there you are,” the doctor murmured aloud. Flush of relief. He had his hand out as he came up the steps. “Dr. Petrie is my name, how do you do?”

And-how to describe it? There was simply no man there.

“Now, I know this happened!” he said to Miss Carl in the kitchen. “I saw him on that porch and he vanished into thin air.”

“Well, what business is it of ours what you saw, Doctor?” said the woman. Strange choice of words. And she was so hard, this lady. Nothing feeble about her in her old age. She stood very straight in her dark blue gabardine suit, glaring at him through her wire-rimmed glasses, her mouth withered to a thin line.

“Miss Carl, I’ve seen this man with my patient. Now the patient, as we all know, is a helpless woman. If an unidentified person is coming and going on these premises-”

But the words were unimportant. Either the woman didn’t believe him or the woman didn’t care. And Miss Nancy, at the kitchen table, never even looked up from her plate as she scraped up the food noisily onto her fork. But the look on Miss Millie’s face, ah, now that was something-old Miss Millie so clearly disturbed, her eyes darting from him to Carl and back again.

What a household.

He was irritated as he stepped into the dusty little elevator and pressed the black button in the brass plate.

The velvet drapes were closed and the bedroom was almost dark, the little candles sputtering in their red glasses. The shadow of the Virgin leapt on the wall. He couldn’t find the light switch immediately. And when he did, only a single tiny bulb went on in the lamp beside the bed. The open jewel box was right next to it. What a spectacular thing.

When he saw the woman lying there with her eyes open, he felt a catch in his throat. Her black hair was brushed out over the stained pillowcase. There was a flush of unfamiliar color in her cheeks.

Did her lips move?

“Lasher … ”

A whisper. What had she said? Why, she’d said Lasher, hadn’t she? The name he’d seen on the tree trunk and in the dust of the dining table. And he had heard that name spoken somewhere else … That’s why he knew it was a name. It sent the chills up his back and neck, this catatonic patient actually speaking. But no, he must have been imagining it. It was just the thing he wanted so to happen-the miracle change in her. She lay as ever in her trance. Enough Thorazine to kill somebody else …

He set down the bag on the side of the bed. He filled the syringe carefully, thinking as he had several times before, what if you just didn’t, just cut it down to half, or a fourth, or none and sat by her and watched and what if- He saw himself suddenly picking her up and taking her out of the house. He saw himself driving her out into the country. They walked hand in hand on a path through the grass until they’d come to the levee above the river. And there she smiled, her hair blowing in the wind-

What nonsense. Here it was six thirty, and the shot was long overdue. And the syringe was ready.

Suddenly something pushed him. He was sure of it, though where he had been pushed he couldn’t say. He went down, his legs buckling, and the syringe went flying.

When he caught himself he was on his knees in the semidark, staring at motes of dust gathered on the bare floor beneath the bed.

“What the hell-” he’d said aloud before he could catch himself. He couldn’t find the hypodermic needle. Then he saw it, yards away, beyond the armoire. It was broken, smashed, as if someone had stepped on it. All the Thorazine had oozed out of the crushed plastic vial onto the bare boards.

“Now, wait a minute!” he whispered. He picked it up and stood holding the ruined thing in his hands. Of course he had other syringes, but this was the second time this sort of thing … And he found himself at the bedside again, staring down at the motionless patient, thinking, now how exactly did this-I mean, what in God’s name is going on?

He felt a sudden intense heat. Something moved in the room, rattling faintly. Only the rosary beads wound about the brass lamp. He went to wipe his brow. Then he realized, very slowly, even as he stared at Deirdre, that there was a figure standing on the other side of the bed. He saw the dark clothes, a waistcoat, a coat with dark buttons. And then he looked up and saw it was the man.

In a split second his disbelief changed to terror. There was no disorientation now, no dreamlike unreality. The man was there, staring at him. Soft brown eyes staring at him. Then the man was simply gone. The room was cold. A breeze lifted the draperies. The doctor caught himself in the act of shouting. No, screaming, to be perfectly frank.

At ten o’clock that night, he was off the case. The old psychiatrist came all the way out to the lakefront apartment house to tell him in person. They had gone down to the lake together and strolled along the concrete shore.

“These old families, you can’t argue with them. And you don’t want to tangle with Carlotta Mayfair. The woman knows everybody. You’d be amazed how many people are beholden to her for one thing and another, or to Judge Fleming. And these people own property all over the city, if you only … ”

“I tell you I saw this!” the doctor found himself saying.

But the old psychiatrist was dismissing him. There was a thinly concealed suspicion in his eyes as they measured the younger doctor up and down, though the agreeable tone of his voice never changed.

“These old families.” The doctor was never to go to that house again.

The doctor said nothing more. The truth was, he felt foolish. He wasn’t a man who believed in ghosts! And he could not now bring himself to mount any intelligent argument about the woman herself, her condition, the obvious need for some periodic evaluation. No, his confidence had been dashed altogether.

Yet he knew he’d seen that figure. Seen it three times. And he could not forget the afternoon of the hazy, imagined conversation. The man had been there, too, yes, but insubstantial! And he had known the man’s name, and yes, it was … Lasher!

But even if he discounted the dreamlike conversation-blamed it on the quiet of the place and the infernal heat, and the suggestion of a word carved into a tree trunk-the other times could not be discounted. He had seen a solid, living being there. No one would ever get him to deny it.

As the weeks passed and he failed to distract himself sufficiently with his work at the sanitarium, he began to write about the experience, describe it in detail. The man’s brown hair had been slightly wavy. Eyes large. Fair skin like the poor sick woman. The man had been young, no more than twenty-five at best. The man had been without discernible expression. The doctor could even remember the man’s hands. Nothing special about them, just nice hands. It struck him that the man, though thin, had been well proportioned. Only the clothes seemed unusual, and not the style of them, which was ordinary enough. It was the texture of the clothing. Unaccountably smooth like the face of the man. As if the whole figure-clothes, flesh, face-were made from the same thing.

One morning, the doctor awoke with the curiously clear thought: the mysterious man hadn’t wanted her to have those sedatives! He’d known they were bad. And the woman was defenseless of course; she could not speak in her own behalf. The specter was protecting her!

But who in God’s name will ever believe all this? the doctor thought. And he wished he were home, in Maine, working in his father’s clinic and not in this damp and alien city. His father would understand. But then, no. His father would only be alarmed.

He tried to “keep busy.” But the truth was, the sanitarium was a boring place. He had little to do. The old psychiatrist gave him a few new cases, but they were not challenging. Yet it was essential that the doctor continue, that he erase all suspicion from the old psychiatrist’s mind.

As fall turned to winter, the doctor began to dream of Deirdre. And in his dreams, he saw her cured, revitalized, walking swiftly down a city street, her hair blowing in the wind. Now and then when he woke up from such a dream, he found himself wondering if the poor woman hadn’t died. That was the more likely thing.

When spring came around, and he had been in the city a full year, he found he had to see the house again. He took the St. Charles car to Jackson Avenue and walked from there as he had always done in the past.

It was all exactly the same, the thorny bougainvillea in full bloom over the porches, the overgrown garden swarming with tiny white winged butterflies, the lantana with its little orange blossoms pushing through the black iron fence.

And Deirdre sitting in the rocker on the side porch behind her veil of rusted screens.

The doctor felt a leaden anguish. He was as troubled, perhaps, as he’d ever been in his life. Somebody’s got to do something for that woman.

He walked aimlessly after that, emerging finally on a dirty and busy street. A shabby neighborhood tavern caught his eye. He went into it, grateful for the icy air-conditioning and the relative quiet in which only a few old men talked in low voices along the bar. He took his drink to the last wooden table in the back.

The condition of Deirdre Mayfair tortured him. And the mystery of the apparition only made it worse. He thought of that daughter in California. Did he dare to call her? Doctor to doctor … But then he did not know the young man’s name.

“Besides, you have no right to interfere,” he whispered aloud. He drank a little of his beer, savoring the coldness. “Lasher,” he whispered. Speaking of names, what sort of name is Lasher? The young California intern would think him a madman! He took another deep drink of the beer.

It seemed to him suddenly that the bar was getting warm. It was as if someone had opened the door on a desert wind. Even the old men talking over their beer bottles seemed to notice it. He saw one of them wipe his face suddenly with a dirty handkerchief, then go on arguing as before.

Then as the doctor lifted his glass, he saw straight in front of him the mysterious man seated at the table near the door to the street.

The same waxen face, brown eyes. The same nondescript clothes of that unusual texture, so smooth they shone faintly in the subdued light.

Even as the men nearby went on with their conversation, the doctor felt the keening terror he had known in Deirdre Mayfair’s darkened room.

The man sat perfectly still gazing at him. Not twenty feet separated him from the doctor. And the white daylight from the front windows of the bar fell quite distinctly over the man’s shoulder, illuminating the side of his face.

Really there. The doctor’s mouth was filling with water. He was going to be sick. Going to pass out. They’d think he was drunk in this place. God only knew what would happen-He struggled to steady his hand on the glass. He struggled not to panic completely as he had done in Deirdre’s room.

Then, without warning, the man appeared to flicker as if he were a projected image, then vanish before the doctor’s eyes. A cold breeze swept through the bar.

The bartender turned to keep a soiled napkin from blowing away. A door slammed somewhere. And it seemed the conversation grew louder. The doctor felt a low throbbing in his head.

“ … Going mad!” he whispered.

No power on earth could have persuaded him to pass Deirdre Mayfair’s house again.

But the following night, as he was driving home to the lakefront, he saw the man again, standing under a street lamp by the cemeteries on Canal Boulevard, the yellow light shining full upon him against the chalk white graveyard wall.

Just a glimpse but he knew he wasn’t mistaken. He began to tremble violently. It seemed for a moment he could not remember how to work the controls of his car, and then he drove it recklessly, stupidly, as if the man were pursuing him. He did not feel safe until he had shut his apartment door.

The following Friday, he saw the man in broad daylight, standing motionless on the grass in Jackson Square. A woman passing turned to glance at the brown-haired figure. Yes, there, as he had been before! The doctor ran through the French Quarter streets. Finding a cab at a hotel door, he ordered the driver to get him out of there, just to take him anywhere, he did not care.

As the days passed, the doctor had ceased to be frightened so much as horrified. He couldn’t eat or sleep. He could concentrate on nothing. He moved perpetually in utter gloom. He stared in silent rage at the old psychiatrist whenever their paths crossed.

How in God’s name could he communicate to this monstrous thing that he would not come near the miserable woman in the porch rocker? No more needles, no more drugs from him! I am no longer the enemy, don’t you see!

To ask the help or understanding of anyone he knew was to risk his reputation, even his entire future. A psychiatrist going mad, like his patients. He was desperate. He had to escape this thing. Who knew when it might next appear to him? What if it could come into these very rooms!

Finally on Monday morning, his nerves frayed, his hands shaking, he found himself in the old psychiatrist’s office. He had not made up his mind what he would say, only that he could stand the strain no longer. And he soon found himself rattling on about the tropical heat, headaches and sleepless nights, the need for quick acceptance of his resignation.

He drove out of New Orleans that very afternoon.

Only when he was safe in his father’s office in Portland, Maine, did he at last reveal the whole story.

“There was never anything menacing in the face,” he explained. “On the contrary. It was strangely unlined. It was as bland as the face of Christ in the portrait on the wall of her room. Just staring at me. But it didn’t want me to give her the injection! It was trying to scare me.”

His father was a patient man. He did not answer at once. Then slowly he began to talk of the strange things he’d witnessed over the years in psychiatric hospitals-doctors seemingly infected with the neuroses and psychoses of their patients. He’d seen a doctor go catatonic one day in the midst of his catatonic patients.

“The important thing. Larry, is that you rest,” his father said. “That you let the effects of this whole thing wear off. And that you don’t tell anyone else about it.”

Years had passed. The doctor’s work in Maine had gone well. And gradually he had built a solid private practice independent of his father.

As for the specter, he had left it behind him in New Orleans, along with the memory of Deirdre Mayfair, sitting eternally in that chair.

Yet there remained in him a lingering fear that he might someplace or other see the thing again. There was the lingering fear that if such a thing had happened once, it might happen another time for entirely different reasons. The doctor had tasted real horror in those damp, dark New Orleans days, and his view of the world had never been the same.

Now, as he stood beside the window in the darkened hotel room in New York, he found the whole affair overwhelming him again. And as he had done a thousand times before, he analyzed the strange tale. He searched for its deeper meaning.

Was the thing really stalking him in New Orleans, or had the doctor misunderstood the silent specter?

Maybe the man had not tried to scare him at all. Maybe it had in fact been pleading with him not to forget that woman! Perhaps in some way it was a bizarre projection of the woman’s own desperate thoughts, an image sent to him by a mind which knew no other means of communication.

Ah, there was no comfort in such an idea. Too awful to imagine the helpless woman pleading with him through a spectral emissary, who, for reasons never to be known, could not speak, but only appear for brief moments.

But who could interpret these strange elements? Who would venture to say the doctor was right?

Aaron Lightner, the Englishman, the collector of ghost stories, who had given him the card with the word Talamasca? He had said that he wanted to help the drowned man in California: “Maybe he doesn’t know that it has happened to others. Maybe I am needed to tell him that others have also come back from the edge of death with such gifts.”

Yes, that would help, wouldn’t it? To know that others had seen ghosts too?

But that was not the worst of it, seeing a ghost. Something worse than fear had taken him back to that screen porch and to the wan figure of the woman in the rocker. It was guilt, guilt he would bear all his life-that he had not tried harder to help her, that he had never called that daughter out west.

The morning light was just breaking over the city. He watched the change in the sky, the subtle illumination of the soiled walls opposite. Then he went to the closet and removed the Englishman’s card from his coat pocket.

THE TALAMASCA

We watch

And we are always here.

He picked up the telephone.

It was an hour in the telling, which surprised him, but all those details had come tumbling back. He had not minded the little tape recorder going, with its tiny red eye blinking. After all he had used no names, no street numbers, not even any dates. New Orleans, an old house, he had said. And on and on he had talked. He realized now that he had never touched his breakfast, except to empty the coffee cup over and over again.

Lightner had proved an excellent listener, responding gently without ever interrupting. But the doctor did not feel better. In fact, he felt foolish when it was over. As he watched Lightner gather up the little recorder and put it in his briefcase, he had half a mind to ask for the tape.

It was Lightner who broke the silence as he laid down several bills over the check.

“There’s something I must explain to you,” he said. “I think it will ease your mind.”

What could possibly do that?

“You remember,” Lightner said, “that I told you I collect ghost stories.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I know of that old house in New Orleans. I’ve seen it. And I’ve recorded other stories of people who have seen the man you described.”

The doctor was speechless. The words had been said with utter conviction. In fact, they had been spoken with such authority and assurance that the doctor believed them without doubt. He studied Lightner in detail for the first time. The man was older than he seemed on first inspection. Perhaps sixty-five, even seventy. The doctor found himself captivated again by Lightner’s expression, so affable and trusting, so inviting of trust in return.

“Others,” the doctor whispered. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve heard other accounts, some very like your own. And I tell you this so you can understand that you didn’t imagine it. And so that it doesn’t continue to prey on your mind. You couldn’t have helped Deirdre Mayfair, by the way. Carlotta Mayfair would never have allowed it. You ought to put the entire incident out of your mind. Don’t ever worry about it again.”

For a moment the doctor felt relief, as if he’d been in the Catholic confessional and the priest had spoken the words “I absolve.” Then the full import of Lightner’s revelations struck him.

“You know these people!” he whispered. He felt his face color. This woman had been his patient. He was suddenly and completely confused.

“No. I know of them,” Lightner answered. “And I shall keep your account entirely confidential. Please be assured. Remember, we did not use names on the tape recording. We did not even use your name or mine.”

“Nevertheless, I must ask you for the tape,” the doctor said, flustered. “I’ve broken confidentiality. I had no idea you knew.”

At once Lightner removed the small cassette and placed it in the doctor’s hand. The man seemed entirely unruffled. “Of course you may have it,” he said. “I understand.”

The doctor murmured his thanks, the confusion intensifying. Yet the relief was not altogether gone. Others had seen that creature. This man knew it. He wasn’t lying. The doctor was not, and had never been, out of his mind. A faint bitterness surfaced inside him, bitterness towards his superiors in New Orleans, towards Carlotta Mayfair, towards that ghastly Miss Nancy …

“The important thing,” said Lightner, “is that you do not worry about it any more.”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “Horrible, all of it. That woman, the drugs.”

No, don’t even … He went quiet, staring at the cassette, and then at his empty coffee cup. “The woman, is she still-”

“The same. I was there last year. Miss Nancy died, the one you disliked so much. Miss Millie went some time ago. And now and then I hear from people in the city, and the report is that Deirdre has not changed.”

The doctor sighed. “Yes, you do indeed know of them … all the names,” he said.

“Then please do believe me,” Lightner said, “when I tell you others have seen that vision. You weren’t mad, not at all. And you mustn’t worry foolishly about such things.”

Slowly the doctor studied Lightner again. The man was fastening his briefcase. He examined his airline ticket, appeared to find it satisfactory, and then slipped it into his coat.

“Let me say one thing further,” said Lightner, “and then I must catch my plane. Don’t tell this story to others. They won’t believe you. Only those who have seen such things believe in them. It’s tragic, but invariably true.”

“Yes, I know it is,” said the doctor. So much he wanted to ask, yet he could not. “Have you …?” He stopped.

“Yes, I’ve seen him,” said Lightner. “It was frightening, indeed. Just as you described.” He rose to go.

“What is he? A spirit? A ghost?”

“I don’t know, actually, what he is. All the stories are very similar. Things don’t change there. They go on, year after year. But I must go, and again I thank you, and if you should ever wish to talk to me again, you know how to reach me. You have my card.” Lightner extended his hand. “Good-bye.”

“Wait. The daughter, what became of her? The intern out west?”

“Why, she’s a surgeon, now,” Lightner said, glancing at his watch. “Neurosurgeon, I believe. Just passed her examinations. Board-certified, is that what they call it? But then I don’t know her either, you see. I only hear about her now and then. Our paths did cross once.” He broke off, then gave a quick almost formal smile. “Good-bye, Doctor, and thank you again.”

The doctor sat there, thinking, for a long time. He did feel better, infinitely better. There was no denying it. He had no regret that he had told the tale. In fact, the entire encounter seemed a gift to him, something sent by fate to lift from his shoulders the worst burden he’d ever borne. Lightner knew and understood the whole case. Lightner knew the daughter in California.

Lightner would tell that young neurosurgeon what she ought to know, that is, if he hadn’t done it already. Yes, the burden was lifted. The burden was gone. Whether it weighed upon Lightner didn’t matter.

Then the most curious afterthought came to the doctor, something which hadn’t occurred to him for years. He’d never been in that big Garden District house during a rainstorm. Why, how lovely it would have been to see rain through those long windows, to hear rain on those porch roofs. Too bad about that, missing such a thing. He’d thought about it often at the time, but he always missed the rain. And rain in New Orleans was so beautiful.

Well, he was letting go of it all, was he not? Again, he found himself responding to Lightner’s assurances as if they had been words spoken in the confessional, words with some religious authority. Yes, let it all go.

He signaled the waitress. He was hungry. He would like a breakfast now that he could eat. And without thinking much about it, he took Lightner’s card out of his pocket, glanced at the phone numbers-the numbers he might call if he had questions, the numbers he never intended to call-and then he tore the card into little pieces and put them in the ashtray, and then he set them afire with a match.