The witching hour

Twenty-nine

WELL, SHE THOUGHT to herself, silent, hunched over, sitting alone at the dining table, the supposed victim of the horrors in this dark house-I am becoming one of those women now who just falls into a man’s arms and lets him take care of everything.

But it was beautiful to watch Michael in action. He made the calls to Ryan Mayfair, and to the police, to Lonigan and Sons. He spoke the language of the plainclothesmen who came up the steps. If anyone noticed the black gloves he wore, they did not say so, maybe because he was talking too fast, explaining things, and moving things along to hasten the inevitable conclusions.

“Now she just got here, she does not have the faintest idea who in the hell this guy is up in the attic. The old woman didn’t tell her. And she’s in shock now. The old woman just died out there. Now this body in the attic has been there a long time, and what I’m asking you is not to disturb anything else in the room, if you can just take the remains, and she wants to know who this man was as much as you want to know.

“And look, this is Ryan Mayfair coming. Ryan, Rowan is in there. She’s in awful shape. Before Carlotta died, she showed her a body upstairs.”

“A body. Are you serious?”

“They need to take it out. Could you or Pierce go up there, see that they don’t touch all those old records and things? Rowan’s in there. She’s exhausted. She can talk in the morning.”

At once Pierce accepted the mission. Thunder of people going up the old staircase.

In hushed voices Ryan and Michael talked. Smell of cigarette smoke in the hall. Ryan came into the dining room and spoke to Rowan in a whisper.

“Tomorrow, I’ll call you at the hotel. Are you sure you don’t want to come with me and with Pierce out to Metairie?”

“Have to be close,” she said. “Want to walk over in the morning.”

“Your friend from California is a nice man, a local man.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Even to old Eugenia, Michael had been the protector, putting his arm around her shoulder as he escorted her in to see “old Miss Carl” before Lonigan lifted the body from the rocker. Poor Eugenia who cried without making a sound. “Honey, do you want me to call someone for you? You don’t want to stay tonight in the house alone, do you? You tell me what you want to do. I can get someone to come here and stay with you.”

With Lonigan, his old friend, he fell right into stride. He lost all the California from his voice, and was talking just like Jerry, and just like Rita, who had come out with him in “the wagon.” Old friends, Jerry drinking beer with Michael’s father on the front steps thirty-five years ago, and Rita double-dating with Michael in the Elvis Presley days. Rita threw her arms around him. “Michael Curry.”

Roaming to the front, Rowan had watched them in the glare of the flashing lights. Pierce was talking on the phone in the library. She had not even seen the library. Now a dull electric light flooded the room, illuminating old leather and Chinese carpet.

“ … well, now, Mike,” said Lonigan, “you have to tell Dr. Mayfair this woman was ninety years old, the only thing keeping her going was Deirdre. I mean we knew it was just a matter of time once Deirdre went, and so she can’t blame herself for whatever happened here tonight, I mean, she’s a doctor, Mike, but she ain’t no miracle worker.”

No, not much, Rowan had thought.

“Mike Curry? You’re not Tim Curry’s son!” said the uniformed policeman. “They told me it was you. Well, hell, my dad and your dad were third cousins, did you know that? Oh, yeah, my dad knew your dad real well, used to drink beer with him at Corona’s.”

At last the body in the attic, bagged and tagged, was taken away, and the small dried body of the old woman had been laid on the white padded stretcher as if it were alive, though it was only being moved into the undertaker’s wagon-perhaps to lie on the same embalming table where Deirdre had lain a day earlier.

No funeral, no interment ceremony, no nothing, said Ryan. She had told him that herself yesterday. Told Lonigan too, the man said. “There will be a Requiem Mass in a week,” said Ryan. “You’ll still be here?”

Where would I go? Why? I found where I belong. In this house. I’m a witch. I’m a killer. And this time I did it deliberately.

“ … And I know how terrible this has been for you.”

Wandering back into the dining room, she heard young Pierce in the library door.

“Now, she isn’t considering staying in this house, tonight, is she?”

“No, we’re going back to the hotel,” Michael said.

“It’s just that she shouldn’t be here alone. This can be a very unsettling house. A truly unsettling house. Would you think me crazy if I told you that just now when I went into the library there was a portrait of someone over the fireplace and that now there’s a mirror?”

“Pierce!” said Ryan wrathfully.

“I’m sorry, Dad, but … ”

“Not now, son, please.”

“I believe you,” said Michael with a little laugh. “I’ll be with her.”

“Rowan?” Ryan approached her again carefully-she the bereaved, the victim, when in fact she was the murderer. Agatha Christie would have known. But then I would have had to do it with a candle stick.

“Yes, Ryan.”

He settled down at the table, careful not to touch the dusty surface with the sleeve of his perfectly tailored suit. The funeral suit. The light struck his thoroughbred face, his cold blue eyes, much lighter blue than Michael’s. “You know this house is yours.”

“She told me that.”

Young Pierce stood respectfully in the doorway.

“Well, there’s a lot more to it,” said Ryan.

“Liens, mortgages?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about anything of that sort as long as you live. But the point is, that whenever you want you can come downtown and we’ll go over it.”

“Good God,” said Pierce, “is that the emerald?” He had spied the jewel case in the shadows at the other end. “And with all these people just trooping through there.”

His father gave him a subdued, patient look. “Nobody’s going to steal that emerald, son,” he said with a sigh. He glanced anxiously at Rowan. He gathered up the jewel case and looked at it as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“What’s wrong?” Rowan asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Did she tell you about this?”

“Did anyone ever tell you?” she asked quietly, unchallengingly.

“Quite a story,” he said, with a subtle, forced smile. He laid the jewel box down in front of her and patted it with his hand. He stood up.

“Who was the man in the attic, do they know?” she asked.

“They will soon. There was a passport, and other papers with the corpse, or what was left of it.”

“Where’s Michael?” she asked.

“Here, honey, over here. Look, you want me to leave you alone?” In the dark, his gloved hands were almost invisible.

“I’m tired, can we go back? Ryan, can I call you tomorrow?”

“When you want, Rowan.”

Ryan hesitated at the door. Glanced at Michael. Michael made a move to leave. Rowan reached out and caught his hand, startled by the leather.

“Rowan, listen to me,” said Ryan, “I don’t know what the hell Aunt Carl told you, I don’t know how that body got upstairs, or what that’s about, or what she’s told you about the legacy. But you have to clean out this old place, you’ve got to burn the trash up there, get people to come here, maybe Michael will help you, and throw things out, all those old books, those jars. You have to let the air in and take stock. You don’t have to go through this place, examining every speck of dust and dirt and ugliness. It’s an inheritance but it isn’t a curse. At least it doesn’t have to be.”

“I know,” she said.

Noise at the front door.

The two young black men who had come to collect Grandma Eugenia were now standing in the hallway. Michael went upstairs to help her. Ryan and then Pierce swept down to kiss Rowan on the cheek. Rather like kissing the corpse, it seemed to her suddenly. Then she realized it was the other way around. They kissed the dead people here the way they kissed the living.

Warm hands, and the parting flash of Pierce’s smile in the dark. Tomorrow, phone, lunch, talk, et cetera.

Sound of the elevator making its hellish descent. People did go to hell in elevators in the movies.

“And you have your key, Eugenia, you just come on over tomorrow, you come in as you always did, if you need or want anything. Now, honey, do you need any money?”

“I got my pay, Mr. Mike. Thank you, Mr. Mike.”

“Thank you, Mr. Curry,” said the younger black man. Smooth, educated voice.

The older policeman came back. He must have been in the very front hall because she could barely hear him. “Yeah, Townsend.”

“ … passport, wallet, everything right there in the shirt.”

Doors closed. Darkness. Quiet.

Michael coming back the hallway.

And now we are two, and the house is empty. He stood in the dining room doorway looking at her.

Silence. He drew a cigarette out of his pocket, mashing the pack back into it. Couldn’t be easy with the gloves, but they did not seem to slow him down.

“What do you say?” he asked. “Let’s get the hell out of here for tonight.” He packed his cigarette on the face of his watch. Explosion of a match, and the flash of light in his blue eyes as he looked up, taking in the dining room again, taking in the murals.

There are blue eyes and blue eyes. Could his black hair have grown so much in such a short time? Or was it just the moisture in the warm air that made it so thick and curly?

The silence rang in her ears. They were actually all gone.

And the whole place lay empty and vulnerable to Rowan’s touch, with its many drawers and cabinets and closets and jars and boxes. Yet the idea of touching anything was repugnant. It wasn’t hers, it was the old woman’s, all of it. Dank and stale, and awful, like the old woman. And Rowan had no spirit to move, no spirit to climb the stairs again, or to see anything at all.

“His name was Townsend?” she asked.

“Yeah. Stuart Townsend.”

“Who the hell was he, do they have any idea?”

Michael thought for a moment, flicked a tiny bit of tobacco off his lip, shifted his weight from one hip to another. Pure beefcake, she thought. Downright pornographic.

“I know who he was,” he said with a sigh. “Aaron Lightner, you remember him? He knows all about him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You want to talk here?” His eyes moved over the ceiling again, like antennae. “I’ve got Aaron’s car outside. We could go back to the hotel, or downtown somewhere.”

His eyes lingered lovingly on the plaster medallion, on the chandelier. There was something furtive and guilty about the way he was admiring it in the middle of this crisis. But he didn’t have to hide it from her.

“This is the house, isn’t it?” she asked. “The one you told me about in California.”

His eyes homed to her, locked.

“Yeah, it’s the one.” He gave a little sad smile and a shake of his head. “It’s the one all right.” He tapped the ash into his cupped hand, and then moved slowly away from the table towards the fireplace. The heavy shift of his hips, the movement of his thick leather belt, all distractingly erotic. She watched him tip the ashes into the empty grate, the invisible little ashes that probably would have made no difference at all, had they been allowed to drift to the dusty floor.

“What do you mean, Mr. Lightner knows who that man was?”

He looked uncomfortable. Extremely sexy and very uncomfortable. He took another drag off the cigarette, and looked around, figuring.

“Lightner belongs to an organization,” he said. He fished in his shirt pocket, and drew out a little card. He placed it on the table. “They call it an order. Like a religious order, but it isn’t religious. The name of it is the Talamasca.”

“Dabblers in the black arts?”

“No.”

“That’s what the old woman said.”

“Well, that’s a lie. Believers in the black arts, but not dabblers or practitioners.”

“She told a lot of lies. There was truth in what she said, too, but every damned time it was entangled with hate, and venom and meanness, and awful awful lies.” She shuddered. “I’m hot and I’m cold,” she said. “I saw one of those cards before. He gave one to me in California. Did he tell you that? I met him in California.”

Michael nodded uneasily. “At Ellie’s grave.”

“Well, how is that possible? That you’re his friend, and that he knows all about this man in the attic? I’m tired, Michael. I feel like I might start screaming and never be able to stop. I feel like if you don’t start telling me … ” She broke off, staring listlessly at the table. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said.

“That man, Townsend,” said Michael apprehensively, “he was a member of the order. He came here in 1929 trying to make contact with the Mayfair family.”

“Why?”

“They’ve been watching this family for three hundred years, compiling a history,” Michael said. “It’s going to be hard for you to understand all this … ”

“And just by coincidence, this man’s your friend?”

“No. Slow down. None of it was coincidence. I met him outside this house the first night I got here. And I saw him in San Francisco, too, you saw him, remember, the night you picked me up at my place, but we both thought he was a reporter. I had never spoken to him, and before that night I’d never seen him before.”

“I remember.”

“And then outside this house, he was there. I was drunk, I’d gotten drunk on the plane. Remember I promised you I wouldn’t, well, I did. And I came here, and I saw this … this other man in the garden. Only it wasn’t a real man. I thought it was, and then I realized it wasn’t. I’d seen that guy when I was a kid. I’d seen him every time I ever passed this house. I told you about him, do you remember? Well, what I have to somehow explain is … he’s not a real man.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen him.” The most electrical feeling passed through her. “Keep talking. I’ll tell you about it when you finish, please.”

But he didn’t keep talking. He looked at her anxiously. He was frustrated, worried. He was leaning on the mantel, looking down at her, the light from the hallway half illuminating his face, his eyes darting over the table, and finally returning to her. It aroused a complete tenderness in her to see the protectiveness in him, to hear in his voice the gentleness and the fear of hurting her.

“Tell me the rest,” she said. “Look, don’t you understand, I have some terrible things I have to tell you because you’re the only one I can tell. So you tell me your story because you’re actually making it easier for me. Because I didn’t know how I was going to tell you about seeing that man. I saw him after you left, on the deck in Tiburon. I saw him at the very moment my mother died in New Orleans, and I didn’t know she was dying then. I didn’t know anything about her.”

He nodded. But he was still confused, stymied.

“If I can’t trust you, for what it’s worth, I don’t want to talk to anybody. What are you holding back? Just tell me. Tell me why that man Aaron Lightner was kind to me this afternoon at the funeral when you weren’t there? I want to know who he is, and how you know him. Am I entitled to ask that question?”

“Look, honey, you can trust me. Don’t get mad at me, please.”

“Oh, don’t worry, it takes more than a lover’s quarrel for me to blow somebody’s carotid artery.”

“Rowan, I didn’t mean … ”

“I know, I know!” she whispered. “But you know I killed that old woman.”

He made a small, forbidding gesture. He shook his head.

“You know I did.” She looked up at him. “You are the only one who knows.” Then a terrible suspicion came into her mind. “Did you tell Lightner the things I told you? About what I could do?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head earnestly, pleading with her quietly and eloquently to believe him. “No, but he knows, Rowan.”

“Knows what?”

He didn’t answer. He gave a little shrug, and drew out another cigarette, and stood there, staring off, considering, apparently, as he pulled out his matchbook, and without even noticing it, did that wonderful one-handed match trick of bending out one book match, and closing the book and then bending that match and striking it and putting the flame to the cigarette.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he said. “Maybe at the beginning.” He let out the smoke, resting his elbow on the mantel again. “I love you. I really do. I don’t know how all this came about. I have a lot of suspicions and I’m scared. But I love you. If that was meant, I mean destined, well, then I’m a lost man. Really lost, because I can’t accept the destined part. But I won’t give up the love. I don’t care what happens. Did you hear what I said?”

She nodded. “You have to tell me everything about these other people,” she said. But she also said without words, Do you know how much I love you and desire you?

She turned sideways in the chair, the better to face him. She rubbed the back of her arms, again, and hung the heel of her shoe on the chair rung. Looking up at him, she saw his hips again, the slant of his belt, the shirt tight across his chest. She couldn’t stop wanting him physically. Best to get it over with, wasn’t it? Oh, all right, let’s eat all this delicious ice cream just to get rid of it. And so you can tell me what you’re talking about with all this, and I can tell you. About the man on the plane. And the old woman’s question. Was it better than a mortal man?

His face darkened as he looked at her. Loved her. Yes. This man, just the best man she had ever known or touched or wanted ever. What would all this have been like without him?

“Michael, talk straight to me, please,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. But Rowan, don’t freak out on me. Just listen to what I have to say.”

He picked up one of the dining room chairs from along the wall, swung it around so that the back faced her, and straddled it cowboy style, folding his arms on the back of it, as he looked at her. That was pornographic too.

“For the last two days,” he said, “I’ve been holed up about sixty miles from here, reading the history of the Mayfair family compiled by these people.”

“The Talamasca.”

He nodded. “Now, let me explain to you. Three hundred years ago, there was this man named Petyr van Abel. His father had been a famous surgeon at the University of Leiden in Holland. There are books still in existence that were written by this doctor, Jan van Abel.

“I know who he is,” she said. “He was an anatomist.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Well, he’s your ancestor, babe. You look like his son. At least that’s what Aaron says. Now when Jan van Abel died, Petyr was orphaned and he became a member of the Talamasca. He could read minds, he could see ghosts. He was what other people might have called a witch, but the Talamasca gave him shelter. Eventually, he went to work for them, and part of his work was saving people accused in other countries of witchcraft. And if they had real gifts, you know, the gifts that I have and you have and Petyr van Abel had, well, he would help those people to reach the Motherhouse of the Talamasca in Amsterdam.

“Now, this Petyr van Abel went to Scotland to try to intervene in the trial of a witch named Suzanne Mayfair. But he came too late, and all he was able to do, which was plenty as it turned out, was take her daughter Deborah away from the town where she might eventually have been burnt too, and bring her to Holland. But before he did, he saw this man, this spirit. He saw too that the child Deborah saw it, and Petyr conjectured that Deborah had made it appear, which proved to be accurate.

“Deborah didn’t stay with the order. Eventually she seduced Petyr, and by him had a child named Charlotte. Charlotte went to the New World and it was she who founded the Mayfair family. But when Deborah died in France, a convicted witch, that brown-haired man, that spirit, went to Charlotte. So did this emerald necklace that is lying right here in this box. It passed along with the spirit, to Charlotte.

“All the Mayfairs since are Charlotte’s descendants. And in each generation of those descendants down to the present time at least one woman has inherited the powers of Suzanne and Deborah, which included, among other things, the ability to see this brown-haired man, this spirit. And they are what the Talamasca calls the Mayfair Witches.”

She made a little sound, half amazement, half nervous amusement. She drew herself up in the chair, and watched the little changes in his face, as he silently sorted all the things he wanted to tell. Then she decided to say nothing.

“The Talamasca,” he said, choosing his words with care. “They’re scholars, historians. They’ve documented a thousand sightings of that brown-haired man in and around this house. Three hundred years ago in Saint-Domingue, when Petyr van Abel went there to talk to his daughter Charlotte, this spirit drove him mad. It eventually killed him.”

He took another drag off the cigarette, eyes moving around the room again, but not seeing it this time, rather seeing something else, and then returning to her.

“Now as I explained before,” he said, “I’ve seen that man since I was six years old. I saw him every time I ever passed this house. And unlike the countless people interviewed by the Talamasca over the years, I’ve seen him other places. But the point is … the other night when I came back here, after all these years, I saw that man again. And when I told Aaron what I saw, when I told him that I’d been seeing that man since I was yea high, and when I told him that it was you who rescued me, well, then he showed me the Talamasca’s file on the Mayfair Witches.”

“He hadn’t known I was the one who pulled you out of the ocean?”

Michael shook his head. “He’d come to San Francisco to see me because of my hands. That’s their territory, so to speak, people who have special powers. It was routine. He was reaching out to me, as routinely perhaps as Petyr van Abel went to try to intervene in the execution of Suzanne Mayfair. And then he saw you outside my house. He saw you come to pick me up, and do you know he thought you’d hired me to come back here? He thought you’d hired a psychic to come back here and investigate your background.”

He took a final drag off the cigarette and pitched it into the grate. “Well, for a while anyway, he thought that. Until I told him why you’d really come to see me, and how you’d never seen this house, or even seen a picture of it. But there you have it, you see.

“And what you have to do now is read the File on the Mayfair Witches. But there’s more to it … as far as I’m concerned, I mean more to it that has to do with me.”

“The visions.”

“Exactly.” He smiled, his face warm and beautiful. “Exactly! Because you remember I told you I saw a woman and there was a jewel … ”

“And you’re saying it’s the emerald.”

“I don’t know, Rowan. I don’t know. And then I do know. I know as surely as I know I’m sitting here that it was Deborah Mayfair I saw out there, Deborah, and she was wearing the emerald around her neck, and I was sent here to do something.”

“To fight that spirit?”

He shook his head. “It’s more complicated. That’s why you have to read the File. And Rowan, you have to read it. You have to not be offended that such a file exists. You have to read it.”

“What does the Talamasca get from all this?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he answered. “To know. Yes, they’d like to know. They’d like to understand. It’s like, you know, they’re psychic detectives.”

“And filthy rich, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Filthy rich. Loaded.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, they’ve got money like you’ve got. They’ve got money like the Catholic Church has got. Like the Vatican. Look, it’s got nothing to do with their wanting anything from you … ”

“OK, I believe it. It’s just you’re naive, Michael. You really are. You really are naive.”

“What in the hell makes you say that, Rowan! Christ, where do you get the idea that I am naive! You said this before and this is really crazy!”

“Michael, you are. You really are. OK, tell me the truth, do you still believe that these visions were good? That these people who appeared to you were higher beings?”

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“This black-haired woman, this convicted witch, as you called her, with the jewel was good … the one who knocked you off the rock right into the Pacific Ocean where … ”

“Rowan, no one can prove a chain of controlled events like that! All I know … ”

“You saw this spirit man when you were six? Let me tell you something, Michael, this man is not good. And you saw him here two nights ago? And this black-haired woman is not good either.”

“Rowan, it’s too early for you to make these interpretations.”

“OK. All right. I don’t want to make you mad. I don’t want to make you angry even for one second. I’m so glad you’re here, you can’t know how glad I am that you’re here, that you’re here with me in this house, and you understand all this, that you’re … oh, it’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m glad I’m not in it alone. And I want you here, that’s the whole truth.”

“I know, I understand, and the important thing is, I am here, and you aren’t alone.”

“But don’t you make too many interpretations either. There is something terribly evil here, something I can feel like the evil in me. No, don’t say anything. Just listen to me. There’s something so bad that it could spill out and hurt lots of people. More than it’s ever hurt in the past. And you’re like some starry-eyed knight who just rode over the drawbridge out of the castle!”

“Rowan, that is not true.”

“All right. OK. They didn’t drown you out there. They didn’t do that. And your knowing all these people, Rita Mae and Jerry Lonigan, it’s all not connected.”

“It’s connected, but the question is, how is it connected? It’s crucial not to jump to conclusions.”

She turned back towards the table, resting her elbows on it and holding her head in her hands. She had no idea now what time it was. The night seemed quieter than before; now and then something in the house would snap or creak. But they were alone. Completely alone.

“You know,” she said, “I think about that old woman, and it’s like a cloud of evil descending on me. It was like walking with evil to be with her. And she thought she was the good one. She thought she was fighting the devil. It’s tangled, but it’s tangled even more obscurely than that.”

“She killed Townsend,” he said.

She turned and looked at him again. “You know that for sure?”

“I laid my hands on him. I felt the bone. She did it. She tied him up in that rug. He was maybe drugged at the time, I don’t know. But he died in the rug, I know that much. He chewed a hole in it.”

“Oh, God!” She closed her eyes, her imagination filling in the implications too vividly.

“And there were people in this house all the time and they couldn’t hear him. They didn’t know he was dying up there, or if they did they didn’t do anything about it.”

“Why would she do it!”

“ ’Cause she hated us. I mean she hated the Talamasca.”

“You said ‘us.’ ”

“That was a slip, but a very informative one. I feel like I’m part of them. They’ve come to me and they’ve asked me to be, more or less. They’ve taken me into their confidence. But maybe what I really meant, is that she hated anyone from outside who knew anything. There are dangers still to anybody from outside. There’s danger to Aaron. You asked me what the Talamasca stands to get out of this. It stands to lose another member.”

“Explain.”

“On the way home from the funeral, coming back out to the country to get me, he saw a man on the road and swerved, rolled over twice, and just got out of the damned car before it exploded. It was that spirit thing. I know it was. So does he. I guess whatever this big plan is, this entanglement, Aaron has served his purpose.”

“Is he hurt?”

Michael shook his head. “He knew what was going down, even as it was happening. But he couldn’t take a chance. Suppose it hadn’t been an apparition and he’d run down a real man. Just couldn’t chance it. He was belted in, too. I think he got slammed on the head pretty bad.”

“Did they take him to a hospital?”

“Yes, Doctor. He’s OK. That is why I took so long to get here. He didn’t want me to come. He wanted you to come to them, out there in the country, read the file out there. But I came on anyway. I knew that thing wasn’t going to kill me. I haven’t served my purpose yet.”

“The purpose of the visions.”

“No. He has his purpose, and they have theirs. And they don’t work together. They work against each other.”

“What happens if you try to run away to Tibet?” she asked.

“You want to go?”

“If I go with you, you’re not running away. But really, what if you do run away?

“I don’t know. I don’t intend to, so it doesn’t compute. They want me to fight him, to fight him and the little scheme he’s been laying down all along. I’m convinced of it.”

“They want you to break the chain,” she said. “That’s what the old woman said. She said, ‘Break the chain,’ meaning this legacy that comes all the way down from Charlotte, I guess, though she didn’t talk about anyone that far back. She said she herself had tried. And that I could do it.”

“That’s the obvious answer, yes. But there has to be more to it than that, having to do with him, and why he’s shown himself to me.”

“OK,” she said. “You listen to me now. I’m going to read the File, every page of it. But I’ve seen this thing too. And it doesn’t simply appear. It affects matter.”

“When did you see it?”

“The night my mother died, at the very hour. I tried to call you. I rang the hotel, but you weren’t there. It scared the hell out of me. But the apparition isn’t the significant part. It’s what else happened. It affected the water around the house. It made the water so turbulent that the house was swaying on its pilings. There was absolutely no storm that night on Richardson Bay or San Francisco Bay or any earthquake or any natural reason for that to happen. And there’s something else too. The next time, I felt this thing touch me.”

“When did that happen?”

“On the plane. I thought it was a dream. But it wasn’t. I was sore afterwards, just as if I’d been with a large man.”

“You mean it …?”

“I thought I was asleep, but the distinction I’m trying to make is, this thing isn’t limited to apparitions. It’s involved with the physical in some very specific way. And what I have to understand is its parameters.”

“Well, that’s a commendable scientific attitude. Could I ask whether or not its touching you evoked any other, less scientific response?”

“Of course it did. It was pleasurable, because I was half asleep. But when I woke up, I felt like I’d been raped. I loathed it.”

“Oh, lovely,” he said anxiously. “Just lovely. Well, look, you’ve got the power to stop this thing from that sort of violation.”

“I know, and now that I know that’s what it is, I will. But if anybody had tried to tell me day before yesterday that some invisible being was going to slip under my clothes on a flight to New Orleans, I wouldn’t have been any more prepared than I was because I wouldn’t have believed it. But we know it doesn’t want to hurt me. And we are fairly certain that it doesn’t want to hurt you. What we have to keep in mind is that it does want to hurt anyone who interferes with its plans, apparently, and now this includes your friend Aaron.”

“Right,” Michael said.

“Now you look tired, like you’re the one who needs to be taken back to the hotel and put to bed,” she said. “Why don’t we go there?”

He didn’t answer. He sat up, and rubbed the back of his neck with his hands. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

“What?”

“And I’m not saying it either.”

“Well then say it,” she said softly, patiently.

“Don’t you want to talk to him? Don’t you want to ask him yourself who he is and what he is? Don’t you think you can communicate with him better and more truly maybe than any of the rest of them? Maybe you don’t. But I do. I want to talk to him. I want to know why he showed himself to me when I was a kid. I want to know why he came so close to me the other night that I almost touched him, touched his shoe. I want to know what he is. And I know, that no matter what Aaron’s told me, or what Aaron will tell me, I think I’m smart enough to get through to that thing, and to reason with it, and maybe that’s exactly the kind of pride it expects to find in everyone who ever sees it. Maybe it counts on that.

“Now, if you haven’t felt that, well, then, you’re smarter and stronger than I am, by a long, long way. I never really talked to a ghost or a spirit, or whatever he is. And boy, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity, not even knowing what I know, and knowing what he did to Aaron.”

She nodded. “Yeah, you’ve covered it all right. And maybe it does play on that, the vanity in some of us that we won’t run the way the others did. But there’s something else between me and this thing. It touched me. And it left me feeling raped. I didn’t like it.”

They sat there in silence for a moment. He was looking at her, and she could all but hear the wheels turning in his head.

He stood up and reached for the jewel case, sliding it across the smooth surface of the table. He opened it and looked at the emerald.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Touch it.”

“It doesn’t look like the drawing I made of it,” he whispered. “I was imagining it when I made the drawing, not remembering it.” He shook his head. He seemed about to close the lid of the box again; then he removed his glove, and laid his fingers on the stone.

In silence she waited. But she could tell by his face that he was disappointed and anxious. When he sighed and closed the box, she didn’t press him.

“I got an image of you,” he said, “of your putting it around your neck. I saw myself standing in front of you.” He put the glove back on, carefully.

“That’s when you came in.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I didn’t even notice that you were wearing it.”

“It was dark.”

“I saw only you.”

“What does that matter?” she shrugged. “I took it off and put it back in the case.”

“I don’t know.”

“Just now, when you touched it. Did you see anything else?”

He shook his head. “Only that you love me,” he said in a small voice. “You really do.”

“You only have to touch me to discover that,” she said.

He smiled, but the smile was sad, and confused. He shoved his hands in his pockets, as if he were trying to get rid of them, and he bowed his head. She waited for a long moment, hating to see him miserable.

“Come on, let’s go,” she said. “This place is getting to you worse than me. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

He nodded. “I need a glass of water,” he said. “Do you think there’s some cold water in this house? I’m dry and I’m hot.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know if there’s a kitchen. Maybe there’s a well with a moss-covered bucket. Maybe there’s a magic spring.”

He laughed softly. “Come on, let’s find some water.”

She got up and followed him out of the rear door of the dining room. Some sort of butler’s pantry, it was, with a little sink in it, and high glassed cabinets filled with china. He took his time passing through. He seemed to be measuring the thickness of the walls with his hands.

“Back here,” he said, passing through the next door. He pushed in an old black wall button. A dingy overhead bulb flashed on, weak and dismal, revealing a long split-level room, the upper portion a sterile workplace, and the lower, two steps down, a small breakfast room with a fireplace.

A long series of glass doors revealed the overgrown yard outside. It seemed the song of the frogs was louder here, clearer. The dark outline of an immense tree obscured the northern corner of the view completely.

The rooms themselves were very clean and very streamlined in an old-fashioned way. Very efficient.

The built-in refrigerator covered half the inside wall, with a great heavy door like the doors of walk-in vaults in restaurants.

“Don’t tell me if there’s a body in there, I don’t want to know,” she said wearily.

“No, just food,” he said smiling, “and ice water.” He took out the clear glass bottle. “Let me tell you about the South. There’s always a bottle of ice water.” He rummaged in one of the cabinets over the corner sink, and caught up two jelly glasses with his right hand and set them down on the immaculate counter.

The cold water tasted wonderful. Then she remembered the old woman. Her house, really, her glass, perhaps. A glass from which she’d drunk. She was overcome with revulsion, and she set the glass in the small steel sink before her.

Yes, like a restaurant, she thought, detaching herself slowly, rebelliously. The place was that well equipped long long ago when someone had ripped out the Victorian fixtures they so love these days in San Francisco. And put in all this shining steel.

“What are we going to do, Michael?” she said.

He stared down at the glass in his hand. Then he looked at her, and at once the tenderness and the protectiveness in his eyes went to her heart.

“Love each other, Rowan. Love each other. You know, as sure as I am about the visions. I’m sure that it isn’t part of anyone’s plan that we really love each other.”

She stepped up to him and slipped her arms around his chest. She felt his hands come up her back and close warmly and tenderly on her neck and her hair. He held her deliciously tight, and buried his face in her neck, and then kissed her again on the lips gently.

“Love me, Rowan. Trust me and love me,” he said, his voice heartbreakingly sincere. He drew back, and seemed to retreat into himself a little, and then he took her hand, and led her slowly towards the French door. He stood looking out into the darkness.

Then he opened the door. No lock on it. Maybe there was no lock on any of them. “Can we go outside?” he asked.

“Of course, we can. Why do you ask me?”

He looked at her as if he wanted to kiss her but he didn’t do it. And then she kissed him. But at the mere delicious taste of him, all the rest of it returned. She snuggled against him for a long moment. And then she led the way out.

They found that they had come onto a screened porch, much smaller than the one on which the old woman had died, and they went out another door, like many an old-fashioned screened door, even to the spring that caused it to shut behind them. They went down the wooden steps to the flagstones.

“All this is OK,” he said, “it’s not in bad repair really.”

“But what about the house itself? Can it be saved, or is it too far gone?”

“This house?” He smiled, shaking his head, his blue eyes shining beautifully as he glanced at her and then up at the narrow open porch high overhead. “Honey, this house is fine, just fine. This house will be here when you and I are gone. I’ve never been in such a house. Not in all my years in San Francisco. Tomorrow, we’ll come back and I’ll show you this house in the sunlight. I’ll show you how thick these walls are. I’ll show you the rafters underneath if you want.” He stopped, ashamed it seemed of relishing it so much, and caught again in the unhappiness and the mourning for the old woman, just as she had been.

And then there was Deirdre, and so many questions yet unanswered about Deirdre. So many things in this history he described, and yet it seemed the darkest journey … Much rather look at him and see the excitement in him as he looks up at the walls, as he studies the door frames and the sills and the steps.

“You love it, don’t you?”

“I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid,” he said. “I loved it when I saw it two nights ago. I love it now even though I know all kinds of things that happened in it, even what happened to that guy in the attic. I love it because it’s your house. And because … because it’s beautiful no matter what anybody has done in it, or to it. It was beautiful when it was built. It will be beautiful a hundred years from now.”

He put his arm around her again, and she clung to him, nestling against him, and feeling him kiss her hair again. His gloved fingers touched her cheek. She wanted to rip off the gloves. But she didn’t say so.

“You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said. “In all my years in California, I worked on many a house. And I loved them all. But none of them ever made me feel my mortality. They never made me feel small. This house makes me feel that. It makes me feel it because it is going to be here when I’m gone.”

They turned and walked deeper into the garden, finding the flagstones in spite of the weeds that pressed against them, and the bananas that grew so thick and low that the great bladelike leaves brushed their faces.

The shrubs closed out the kitchen light behind them as they climbed the low flagstone steps. Dark it was here, dark as the rural dark.

A rank green smell rose, like the smell of a swamp, and Rowan realized that she was looking out at a long pool of water. They stood on the flagstone lip of this great black pool. It was so heavily overgrown that the surface of the water showed only in dim flashes. The water lilies gleamed boldly in the faintest light from the far-off sky. Insects hummed thickly and invisibly. The frogs sang, and things stirred the water so that the light skittered on the surface suddenly, even deep among the high weeds. There came a busy trickling sound as though the pond were fed by fountains, and when she narrowed her eyes, she saw the spouts, pouring forth their thin sparkling streams.

“Stella built this,” he said. “She built it over fifty years ago. It wasn’t meant to be like this at all. It was a swimming pool. And now the garden’s got it. The earth has taken it back.”

How sad he sounded. It was as if he had seen something confirmed that he did not quite believe. And to think how that name had struck her when Ellie said it in the final weeks of fever and delirium. “Stella in the coffin.”

He was looking off towards the front of the house, and when she followed his gaze, she saw the high gable of the third floor with its twin chimneys floating against the sky, and the glint of the moon or the stars, she didn’t know which, in the square windows high up there, in the room where the man had died, and where Antha had fled Carlotta. All the way down past those iron porches she had fallen-all the way down to the flagstones, before her cranium cracked on the flagstones, and the soft tissue of the brain was crushed, the blood oozing out of it.

She pressed herself more closely against Michael. She locked her hands behind his back, resting her weight against him.

She looked straight up at the pale sky and its few scattered yet vivid stars, and then the memory of the old woman came back again, and it was like the evil cloud wouldn’t let go of her. She thought of the look on the old woman’s face as she’d died. She thought of the words. And the face of her mother in the casket, slumbering forever on white satin.

“What is it, darlin’?” he asked. A low rumble from his chest.

She pressed her face against his shirt. She started to shiver as she had been doing on and off all night, and when she felt his arms come down tighter and almost hard, she loved it.

The frogs were singing here, that loud grinding woodland song, and far away a bird cried in the night. Impossible to believe that streets lay near at hand, and that people lived beyond the trees, that the distant tiny yellow lights twinkling here and there through the glossy leaves were the lights of other people’s houses.

“I love you, Michael,” she whispered. “I do. I love you.”

But she couldn’t shake the evil spell. It seemed to be part of the sky and the giant tree looming over her head, and the glittering water down deep in the rank and wild grass. But it was not part of any one place. It was in her, part of her. And she realized, her head lying still against his chest, that this wasn’t only the remembrance of the old woman and her brittle and personal malice, but a foreboding. Ellie’s efforts had been in vain, for Rowan had known this foreboding long ago. Maybe even all her life, she’d known that a dread and dark secret lay ahead, and that it was a great and immense and greedy and multilayered secret, which once opened would continue to unfold forever. It was a secret that would become the world, its revelations crowding out the very light of ordinary life.

This long day in the balmy tropical city of old-fashioned courtesies and rituals had merely been the first unfolding. Even the secrets of the old woman were the mere beginning.

And it draws its strength, this big secret, from the same root from which I draw my strength, both the good and the bad, because in the end, they cannot be separated.

“Rowan, let me get you away from here,” he said. “We should have left before. This is my fault.”

“No, it doesn’t matter, leaving here,” she whispered. “I like it here. It doesn’t matter where I go, so why not stay here where it’s dark and quiet and beautiful?”

The soft heavy smell of that flower came again, the one the old woman had called the night jasmine.

“Ah, do you smell it, Michael?” She looked at the white water lilies glowing in the dark.

“That’s the smell of summer nights in New Orleans,” he answered. “Of walking alone, and whistling, and beating the iron pickets with a twig.” She loved the deep vibration of his voice coming from his chest. “That’s the smell of walking all through these streets.”

He looked down at her, struggling to make out her face, it seemed. “Rowan, whatever happens, don’t let this house go. Even if you have to go away from it and never see it again, even if you come to hate it. Don’t let it go. Don’t let it ever fall into the hands of anyone who wouldn’t love it. It’s too beautiful. It has to survive all this, just as we do.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t confess this dark fear that they weren’t going to survive, that somehow everything that had ever given her consolation would be lost. And then she remembered the old woman’s face, upstairs in the death room where the man had died years and years ago, and the old woman saying to her, “You can choose. You can break the chain!” The old woman, trying to break through her own crust of malice and viciousness and coldness. Trying to offer Rowan something which she herself perceived to be shining and pure. And in the same room with that man who had died, bound helplessly in that rug, while life went on in the rooms below.

“Let’s go, darling dear,” he said. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I insist. And let’s just get into one of those big soft hotel beds and snuggle together.”

“Can we walk, Michael? Can we walk slowly through the dark?”

“Yes, honey, if you want to.”

They had no keys to lock up. They left the lights shining behind soiled or draped windows. They went down the path and out the rusted gate.

Michael unlocked the car and took out a briefcase and showed it to her. It was the whole story, he said, but she couldn’t read it before he explained a few things. There were things in there that were going to shock her, maybe even upset her. Tomorrow, they’d talk about it over breakfast. He had promised Aaron that he wouldn’t put it into her hands without explanations, and it was for her that he was doing this. Aaron wanted her to understand.

She nodded. She had no distrust of Aaron Lightner. It wasn’t possible for people to fool her, and Lightner had no need to fool anyone. And when she thought of him now, remembering his hand on her arm at the funeral, she had the uneasy feeling that he too was an innocent, an innocent like Michael. And what made them innocent was that they really didn’t understand the malice in people.

She was so tired now. No matter what you see or feel or come to know, you get tired. You cannot grieve on and on hour after hour day after day. Yet glancing back at the house she thought of the old woman, cold and small, and dead in the rocker, her death never to be understood or avenged.

If I had not killed her, I could have hated her with such freedom! But now I have this guilt on account of her, as well as all the other doubts and misery she brought to the fore.

Michael stood stranded, staring at the front door. She gave a little tug to his sleeve as she drew close to him.

“Looks like a great keyhole, doesn’t it?” she asked.

He nodded, but he seemed far away, lost in his thoughts. “That’s what they called that style-the keyhole doorway,” he murmured. “Part of the Egyptian Greek Italianate mishmash they loved so much when they built this house.”

“Well, they did a good job of it,” she said wearily. She wanted to tell him about the door being carved on the tomb in the cemetery but she was so tired.

They walked on slowly together, winding over to Philip Street and then up to Prytania and over to Jackson Avenue. They passed lovely houses in the dark; they passed garden walls. Then down to St. Charles they walked, past the shut-up stores and bars, and past the big apartment houses, and towards the hotel, only an occasional car slipping by, and the streetcar appearing once with a great iron clatter as it rounded the bend, and then roared out of sight, its empty windows full of butter yellow light.

In the shower, they made love, kissing and touching each other hastily and clumsily, the feel of the leather gloves exciting Rowan almost madly when they touched her naked breasts and went down between her legs. The house was gone now; so was the old woman; and the poor sad beautiful Deirdre. Just Michael, just this hard chest of which she’d been dreaming, and his thick cock in her hands, rising out of its nest of dark glossy curling hair.

Years ago some idiot friend had told her over coffee on the campus that women didn’t find men’s bodies beautiful, that it was what men did that mattered. Well, she had always loved men for both what they did, and their bodies. She loved this body, loved its hardness and its tiny silky soft nipples, and the hard belly, and this cock, which she took into her mouth. She loved the feel of these strong thighs under her fingers, the soft hair in the curve of this backside. Silky and hard, that’s what men were.

She ran her hands down Michael’s legs, scratching the backs of his knees, and squeezing the muscles of his calves. So strong. She shoved him back against the tile, sucking in longer more delicious strokes, her hands up to cup his balls, and lift them and bind them against the base of the cock.

Gently, he tried to lift her. But she wanted him to spill in her mouth. She brought his hips more tightly against her. She wouldn’t let him go, and then he spilled over, and the moan was as good as everything else.

Later when they climbed into the bed, warm and dry, with the air-conditioning blowing softly, Michael stripped off the gloves and they began again. “I can’t stop touching you,” he said. “I can’t stand it, and I want to ask you what it was like when that thing happened, but I know I shouldn’t ask you that, and you know, it’s like I’ve seen the face of the man who touched you … ”

She lay back on the pillow, looking at him in the dark, loving the delicious crush of his weight against her, and his hands almost pulling her hair. She made a fist of her right hand and rubbed her knuckles along the dark shadowy stubble on his chin.

“It was like doing it yourself,” she said softly, reaching up and catching his left hand and bringing it down so that she could kiss the palm of it. He stiffened, his cock poking against her thigh. “It wasn’t the thunder and crackle of another person. It wasn’t living cells against living cells.”

“Hmmmm, I love these living cells,” he purred in her ear, kissing her roughly. He mauled her with his kisses, her mouth coming back at him as disrespectful and hungry and demanding as his own.

When she awoke it was four o’clock. Time to go to the hospital. No. Michael was deep asleep. He didn’t feel the very gentle kiss she laid on his cheek. She put on the heavy white terry-cloth robe she found hanging in the closet and went silently out into the living room of the suite. The only light came from the avenue.

Deserted down there. Quiet as a stage set. She loved early morning streets when they were like that, when you felt you could go down and dance on them if you wanted as if they were stages, because their white lines and signal lights meant nothing.

She felt clearheaded and all right, and safe here. The house was waiting, but the house had waited for a long time.

The switchboard told her there was no coffee yet. But there was a message for her and for Mr. Curry, from a Mr. Lightner, that he would return to the hotel later that day and could be reached this morning at the retreat house. She jotted down the number.

She went into the small kitchen, found a pot, and coffee, and made it herself, and then went back and carefully shut the bedroom door, and the door to the little hallway between the bedroom and the living room.

Where was the File on the Mayfair Witches? What had Michael done with the briefcase he’d taken from the car?

She searched the little living room with its skirted chairs and couch. She searched the small den and the closets and even the kitchen. Then she slipped back into the hallway and watched him sleeping there in the light from the window. Curly hair on the back of his neck.

In the closet, nothing. In the bathroom nothing.

Clever, Michael. But I’m going to find it. And then she saw the very edge of the briefcase. He had slipped it behind the chair.

Not very trusting, but then I’m doing just what I more or less promised I wouldn’t, she thought. She drew it out, stopping to listen to the pace of his deep breathing, and then she shut the door, and tiptoed down the hall and shut the second door, and laid the briefcase on the coffee table in the light of the lamp.

Then she got her coffee, and her cigarettes, and sat down on the couch and looked at her watch. It was four fifteen. She loved this time, absolutely loved it. It was a good time to read. It had been her favorite time, too, for driving to the hospital, running one red light after another in the great quiet vacuum, her mind filled with orderly and detailed thoughts of the operations waiting for her. But it was an even better time to read.

She opened the briefcase and removed the great stack of folders, each of which carried the curious title: The File on the Mayfair Witches. It made her smile.

It was so literal. “Innocent,” she whispered. “They are all innocent. The man in the attic probably innocent. And that old woman, a witch to the core.” She paused, taking her first drag off the cigarette and wondering how she understood it so completely, and why she was so certain that they-Aaron and Michael-did not.

The conviction remained with her.

Flipping quickly through the folders, she sized up the manuscript, the way she always did the scientific texts she wanted to devour in one sitting, and then she scanned one page at random for the proportion of abstractions to concrete words, and found it very comfortable, the latter outnumbering the former to an extremely high degree.

A snap to cover this in four hours. With luck, Michael would sleep that long. The world would sleep. She snuggled back on the couch, put her bare feet against the rim of the coffee table, and began to read.

At nine o’clock, she walked slowly back First Street until she reached the corner of Chestnut. The morning sun was already high in the sky, and the birds were singing almost furiously in the leafy canopy of branches overhead. The sharp caw of a crow cut through the softer chorus. Squirrels scurried along the thick heavy branches that reached out low and far over the fences and the brick walls. The clean swept brick sidewalks were deserted; and the whole place seemed to belong to its flowers, its trees, and its houses. Even the noise of the occasional traffic was swallowed by the engulfing stillness and greenness. The clean blue sky shone through the web of overhead foliage, and the light even in the shade seemed somehow bright and pure.

Aaron Lightner was already waiting for her at the gate, a small-boned man in light, tropical clothing, with a prim British look to him, even to the walking stick in his hand.

She had called him at eight and asked for this appointment, and she could see even from a distance that he was deeply worried about her reaction to what she’d read.

She took her time crossing the intersection. She approached him slowly, her eyes lowered, her mind still swimming with the long story and all the detail which she’d so quickly absorbed.

When she found herself standing in front of him, she took his hand. She had not rehearsed what she meant to say. It would be an ordeal for her. But it felt good to be here, to be holding his hand, pressing it warmly, as she studied the expression on his open and agreeable face.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice sounding weak and inadequate to her. “You’ve answered all the worst and most tormenting questions of my life. In fact, you can’t know what you’ve done for me. You and your watchers-they found the darkest part of me; and you knew what it was, and you turned a light on it-and you connected it to something greater and older, and just as real.” She shook her head, still holding his hand, struggling to continue. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say,” she confessed. “I’m not alone anymore! I mean me, all of me, not merely the name and the part that the family wants. I mean who I am.” She sighed. The words were so clumsy, and the feelings behind them so enormous, as enormous as her relief. “I thank you,” she said, “that you didn’t keep your secrets. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

She could see his amazement, and his faint confusion. Slowly he nodded. And she felt his goodness, and above all his willingness to trust.

“What can I do for you now?” he asked, with total and disarming candor.

“Come inside,” she said. “Let’s talk.”