The witching hour

Thirty

ELEVEN O’CLOCK. He sat up in the dark, staring at the digital clock on the table. How ever did he sleep that long? He’d left the drapes open so the light would wake him. But somebody had closed them. And his gloves? Where were his gloves? He found them and slipped them on, and then climbed out of bed.

The briefcase was gone. He knew it before he looked behind the chair. Foiled.

At once he put on his robe and walked down the little hallway to the living room. No one here. Just the scorched smell of old coffee coming from the kitchen, and the lingering perfume of a cigarette. Made him want one immediately.

And there on the coffee table, the empty sack of a briefcase, and the file-manila folders in two neat stacks.

“Ah Rowan,” he groaned. And Aaron was never going to forgive him. And Rowan had read the part about Karen Garfield and Dr. Lemle dying after they had seen her. She’d read all the delicious gossip gleaned over the years from Ryan Mayfair and from Bea and from others whom she had most surely met at the funeral. That, and a thousand other things he couldn’t even think of at the moment.

If he went into the bedroom and discovered that all her clothes were gone … But her clothes weren’t here anyway, they were in her room.

He stood there scratching his head, uncertain what to do first-ring her room, call Aaron, or go screaming crazy. And then he saw the note.

It was right beside the two stacks of manila folders-a single sheet of hotel stationery covered in a very clear, straight hand.

Eight thirty A.M.

Michael,

Read the file. I love you. Don’t worry. Going to nine o’clock appointment with Aaron. Can you meet me at the house at three o’clock? I need some time alone mere. I’ll be looking for you around three. If not, leave word for me here.

The Witch of Endor

“The Witch of Endor.” Who was the Witch of Endor? Ah, the woman to whom King Saul had gone to conjure the faces of his ancestors? Don’t overinterpret. It means she has survived the file. The whiz kid. The brain surgeon. Read the file! It had taken him two days. Read the file!

He peeled off his right glove and laid his hand on the note. Flash of Rowan, dressed, bending over the desk in the little room off this parlor. Then a flash of someone who’d put the stationery here days ago, a uniformed maid, and other foolish things, cascading in, none of which mattered. He lifted his fingers, waited until the tingling stopped. “Give me Rowan,” he said, and touched the paper again. Rowan and Rowan not angry, but deeply secretive and … what? In the midst of an adventure?

Yes, what he was sensing was a strange, defiant excitement. And this he understood perfectly. He saw her again, with shocking clarity, only it was someplace else, and at once the image was confused, and then he lost it, and he put back on the glove.

He sat there for a moment, drawing back into himself, instinctively hating this power, yet thinking about the question of excitement. He remembered what Aaron had told him last night. “I can teach you how to use it; but it will never be precise; it will always be confusing.” God, how he hated it. Hated even the sharp sense of Rowan that had invaded him and wouldn’t leave him; he would have much preferred the visceral memories of the bedroom and her lovely deep grosgrain voice speaking to him so softly and honestly and simply. Much preferred to hear it from her own lips. Excitement!

He called Room Service.

“Send me a big breakfast, Eggs Benedict, grits, yeah, a big bowl of grits, extra side of ham, toast, and a full pot of coffee. And tell the waiter to use his key. I’ll be getting dressed, and add a twenty percent tip for the waiter, please, and bring me some cold cold water.”

He read the note again. Aaron and Rowan were together now. This filled him with apprehension. And now he understood how fearful Aaron had been when he himself had begun to read the materials. And he hadn’t wanted to listen to Aaron. He had wanted to read. Well, he couldn’t blame Rowan.

He couldn’t shake this uneasiness either. She didn’t understand Aaron. And he certainly didn’t understand her. And she thought he was naive. He shook his head. And then there was Lasher. What did Lasher think?

Last night, before he’d left Oak Haven, Aaron had said, “It was the man. I saw him in the headlights. I knew it was a trick, but I couldn’t chance it.”

“So what are you going to do?” Michael had asked.

“Be careful,” said Aaron. “What else can I do?”

And now she wanted him to meet her at the house at three o’clock, because she needed some time alone there. With Lasher? How was he going to put a lid on his emotions until three o’clock?

Well, you’re in New Orleans, aren’t you, old buddy? You haven’t been back to the old neighborhood. Maybe it’s time to go.

He left the hotel at eleven forty-five, the engulfing warm air surprising and delighting him as he stepped outside. After thirty years in San Francisco, he had been braced for the chill and the wind reflexively.

And as he walked in the direction of uptown, he found he had been braced for a hill climb or hill descent in the same subconscious fashion. The flat wide pavements felt wonderful to him. It was as if everything was easier-every breath he took of the warm breeze, every step, the crossing of the street, the gentle looking around at the mature black-barked oaks that changed the cityscape as soon as he had crossed Jackson Avenue. No wind cutting his face, no glare of the Pacific coast sky blinding him.

He chose Philip Street for the walk out to the Irish Channel, and moved slowly as he would have in the old days, knowing the heat would get worse, that his clothes would get heavy, and that even the insides of his shoes would become moist after a little while, and he’d take off this khaki safari jacket sooner or later and sling it over his shoulder.

But he soon forgot about all that; this was the landscape of too many happy memories. It drew him away from worrying about Rowan; it drew him away from worrying about the man; and he was just sliding back into the past, drifting by the old ivy-covered walls, and the young crepe myrtles growing thin and weedy and full of big floppy blossoms. He had to slap them back as he went on. And it came to him again, as strongly as it had before, that longing had embellished nothing. Thank God so much was still here! The tall Queen Anne Victorians, so much larger than those of San Francisco, were still standing right beside the earlier antebellum houses with their masonry walls and columns, as sturdy and magnificent as the house on First Street.

At last, he crossed Magazine, wary of the speeding traffic, and moved on into the Irish Channel. The houses seemed to shrink; columns gave way to posts; the oaks were no more; even the giant hackberry trees didn’t go beyond the corner of Constance Street. But that was all right, that was just fine. This was his part of town. Or at least it had been.

Annunciation Street broke his heart. The fine renovations and fresh paint jobs he had glimpsed on Constance and Laurel were few and far between on this neglected street. Garbage and old tires littered the empty lots. The double cottage in which he’d grown up was abandoned, with big slabs of weathered plywood covering all its doors and windows; and the yard in which he’d played was now a jungle of weeds, enclosed by an ugly chain-link fence. He saw nothing of the old four o’clocks which had bloomed pink and fragrant summer and winter; and gone were the banana trees by the old shed at the end of the side alley. The little corner grocery was padlocked and deserted. And the old corner bar showed not the slightest sign of life.

Gradually he realized he was the only white man to be seen.

He walked on deeper it seemed into the sadness and the shabbiness. Here and there was a nicely painted house; a pretty black child with braided hair and round quiet eyes clung to the gate, staring up at him. But all the people he might have known were long gone.

And the dreary decay of Jackson Avenue at this point hurt him to see it. Yet on he walked, towards the brick tenements of the St. Thomas Project. No white people lived in there anymore. No one had to tell him that.

This was the black man’s town back here now, and he felt cold appraising eyes on him as he turned down Josephine Street towards the old churches and the old school. More boarded-up wooden cottages; the lower floor of a tenement completely gutted. Ripped and swollen furniture piled at a curb.

In spite of what he had seen before, the decay of the abandoned school buildings shocked him. There was glass broken out from the windows of the rooms in which he’d studied in those long-ago years. And there, the gymnasium he had helped to build appeared so worn, so past its time, so utterly forgotten.

Only the churches of St. Mary’s and St. Alphonsus stood proud and seemingly indestructible. But their doors were locked. And in the sacristy yard of St. Alphonsus, the weeds grew up to his knees. He could see the old electrical boxes open and rusted, the fuses torn out.

“Ya wanna see the church?”

He turned. A small balding man with a rounded belly and a sweating pink face was talking to him. “Ya can go in the rectory and they’ll take ya in,” the man said.

Michael nodded.

Even the rectory was locked. You had to ring a bell and wait for the buzzer; and the little woman with the thick glasses and the short brown hair spoke through a glass.

He drew out a handful of twenty-dollar bills. “Let me make a donation,” he said. “I’d love to see both churches if I could.”

“You can’t see St. Alphonsus,” she said. “It isn’t used now. It isn’t safe. The plaster’s falling.”

The plaster! He remembered the glorious murals on the ceiling, the saints peering down at him from a blue sky. Under that roof, he had been baptized, made his First Communion, and later Confirmation. And that last night here, he had walked down the aisle of St. Alphonsus in his white cap and gown, with the other high school graduates, not even thinking to take a last slow look around because he was excited to be going with his mother out west.

“Where did they all go?” he asked.

“Moved away,” she said, as she beckoned for him to follow her. She was taking him through the priest house itself into St. Mary’s. “And the colored don’t come.”

“But why is it all locked?”

“We’ve had one robbery after another.”

He couldn’t conceive of it, not being able to wander into a quiet, shadowy church at any hour. Not being able to escape the noisy sun-cooked street, and sit in the dim quiet, talking to the angels and the saints, while old women in flowered dresses and straw hats knelt whispering with dried lips their rosaries.

She led him through the sanctuary. He had been an altar boy here. He had prepared the sacramental wine. He felt a little throb of happiness when he saw the rows and rows of wooden saints, when he saw the long high nave with its successive Gothic arches. All splendid, all intact.

Thank God this was still standing. He was getting choked up. He shoved his hands in his pockets and lowered his head, only looking up slowly under his brows. His memories of Masses here and Masses across the street at St. Alphonsus mingled completely. There had been no German-Irish quarrel by his time, just all the German and Irish names jumbled together. And the grammar school had used the other church for morning Mass. The high school had filled up St. Mary’s.

It took no imagination to see again the uniformed students filing out of the rows to go to Communion. Girls in white blouses and blue wool skirts, boys in their khaki shirts and trousers. But memory scanned all the years; when he was eight years old he’d swung the smoking incense here, on these steps, for Benediction.

“Take your time,” the little woman said. “Just come back through the rectory when you’re finished.”

For a half hour he sat in the first pew. He did not know precisely what he was doing. Memorizing, perhaps, the details he could not have called forth from his recollections. Never to forget again the names carved in the marble floor of those buried under the altar. Never to forget perhaps the painted angels high above. Or the window far to his right in which the angels and the saints wore wooden shoes! How curious. Could anyone now have explained such a thing? And to think he’d never noticed it before, and when he thought of all those hours spent in this church …

Think of Marie Louise with her big breasts beneath the starched white uniform blouse, reading her missal at Mass. And Rita Mae Dwyer, who had looked like a grown woman at fourteen. She wore very high heels and huge gold earrings with her red dress on Sunday. Michael’s father had been one of the men who moved down the aisles with the collection basket on its long stick, thrusting it into row after row, face appropriately solemn. You did not even whisper in a Catholic church in those days unless you had to.

What did he think, that they would have all been here, waiting for him? A dozen Rita Maes in flowered dresses, making a noon visit?

Last night, Rita Mae had said, “Don’t go back there, Mike. Remember it the way it used to be.”

Finally he climbed to his feet. He wandered up the aisle to wards the old wooden confessionals. He found the plaque on the wall listing those who had in the recent past paid for restoration. He closed his eyes, and just for a moment imagined he heard children playing in the school yards-the noontime roar of mingled voices.

There was no such sound. No heavy swish of the swinging doors as the parishioners came and went. Only the solemn empty place. And the Virgin under her crown on the high altar.

Small, far away, the image seemed. And it occurred to him intellectually that he ought to pray to it. He ought to ask the Virgin or God why he had been brought back here, what it meant that he’d been snatched from the cold grip of death. But he had no belief in the images on the altar. No memory of childlike belief came back to him.

Instead the memory that came was specific and uncomfortable, and shabby and mean. He and Marie Louise had met to exchange secrets right inside one of these tall front doors. In the pouring rain it had been. And Marie Louise had confessed, reluctantly, that no, she wasn’t pregnant, angry for being made to confess it, angry that he was so relieved. “Don’t you want to get married? Why are we playing these stupid games!”

What would have happened to him if he had married Marie Louise? He saw her big, sullen brown eyes again. He felt her sourness, her disappointment. He could not imagine such a thing.

Marie Louise’s voice came back again. “You know you’re going to marry me sooner or later. We’re meant for each other.”

Meant. Had he been meant to leave here, meant to do the things he’d done in his life, meant to travel so far? Meant to fall from the rock into the sea and drift slowly out, away from all the lights of land?

He thought of Rowan-not merely of the visual image, but of everything Rowan was to him now. He thought of her sweetness and sensuality, and mystery, of her lean taut body snuggled against his under the covers, of her velvety voice and her cold eyes. He thought of the way she looked at him before they made love, so unself-conscious, forgetting her own body completely, absorbed in his body. In sum, looking at him the way a man looked at a woman. Just as hungry and just as aggressive and yet yielding so magically in his arms.

He was still staring at the altar-staring at the whole vast and gorgeously ornamented church.

He wished he could believe in something. And then he realized that he did. He still believed in his visions, in the goodness of the visions. He believed in them and their goodness as surely as people believed in God or saints, or the God-given lightness of a certain path, as truly as they believed in a vocation.

And this seemed as foolish as the other beliefs. “But I saw, but I felt, but I remember, but I know … ” So much stammering. After all he still couldn’t remember. Nothing in the entire Mayfair history had really brought him back to those precious moments, except the image of Deborah, and for all his certainty that she had been the one who had come to him, he had no real details, no truly remembered moments or words.

On impulse, his eyes still fixed on the altar, he made the sign of the cross.

How many years had it been since he’d done that every day, three times a day? Curiously, thoughtfully, he did it again. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” his eyes still fixed on the Virgin.

“What do they want of me?” he whispered. And trying to reinvoke what little he could of the visions, he realized in despair that the image of the dark-haired woman he had seen was now replaced by the descriptive image of Deborah in the history. One had blotted out the other! He had lost through his reading, not gained.

After a little while more, of standing there in silence, his gloved hands shoved in his pockets, he went slowly back down the aisle, until he had come to the altar rail, and then he walked up the marble steps, crossed the sanctuary, and found his way out through the priest house.

The sun was beating down on Constance Street the way it always had. Merciless and ugly. No trees here. And the garden of the priest house hidden behind its high brick wall, and the lawn beside St. Mary’s burned and tired and dusty.

The holy store on the far corner, with all its pretty little statues and holy pictures, was no more. Boards on the windows. A real estate sign on the painted wooden wall.

The little bald man with the sweaty red face sat on the rectory steps, his arms folded on his knees, eyes following a gust of gray-winged pigeons as they flew up the dreary peeling façade of St. Alphonsus.

“They oughtta poison them birds,” he said. “They dirty up everything.”

Michael lighted a cigarette, offered one to the man. The man took it with a nod. Michael gave him the near empty matchbook.

“Son, why don’t you take off that gold watch and slip it inside your pocket?” the man said. “Don’t walk around here with that thing on your wrist, ya hear?”

“They want my watch,” Michael said, “they’re gonna take my wrist with it, and the fist that’s attached to it.”

The old man just shrugged and shook his head.

Up on the corner of Magazine and Jackson Michael went in a dark, evil-looking bar, in the sorriest old sagging wooden clapboard building. In all his years in San Francisco, he had never seen such a run-down place. A white man hung like a shadow at the far end, staring at him with glittering eyes out of a cracked and caved-in face. The bartender too was white.

“Give me a beer,” Michael said.

“What kind?”

“I don’t give a damn.”

He timed it perfectly. At three minutes before three he was crossing Camp Street, walking slowly, so the heat would not kill him, and soothed once more by the sweet shade and random beauty of the Garden District. Yes, all this was as it had always been. And at once he felt good; at once he felt he was where he wanted to be, and maybe even where he ought to be, if one could chart a course of one’s own.

At three P.M. exactly he stood at the open gate. This was the first time he had seen the house in the sunlight, and his pulse quickened. Here, yes. Even in its neglect it was dignified, grand, merely slumbering beneath the overhanging vines, its long shutters caked with flaking green paint yet still hanging straight on their iron hinges. Waiting …

A giddiness overtook him as he looked at it, a swift delight that for whatever reasons, he had come back. Doing what I am supposed to be doing …

He went up the marble steps, and pushed at the door, and when it opened he walked into the long broad hallway. Never in San Francisco had he been in such a structure, had he stood under such a high ceiling, or looked at doorways so graceful and tall.

A deep luster clung to the heart pine boards in spite of the margin of sticky dust that ran along the walls. Paint flaked from the high crown moldings but they themselves were sound. He felt love for everything he saw-love for the workmanship of the tapering keyhole doorways, and the fine newel post and balusters of the long stairway. He liked the feel of the floor beneath his feet, so solid. And the warm good wood smell of the house filled him with a sudden welcome contentment. A house smelled like this in only one place in the whole world.

“Michael? Come in, Michael.”

He walked to the first of the two living room doors. Dark and shadowy still, though she had opened all the drapes. The light was slatted coming through the shutters, and dim and soft pouring through the dirty screens of the porch beyond the side windows. Whiff of honeysuckle. So sweet and good. And was that the Queen’s Wreath bursting in little bright pink sprigs along the screens? He had not seen that lovely wild vine in all this time.

She was sitting, small and very pretty, on the long brown velvet couch with its back to the front of the house. Her hair was falling down beautifully against her cheek. She had on one of those loose wrinkled cotton overshirts that is as light as silk, and her face and throat looked darkly tanned against the white T-shirt under it. Legs long in the white pants, her toes naked and surprisingly sexy, with a thin flash of red polish, in her white sandals.

“The Witch of Endor,” he said, swooping down to kiss her cheek and hold her face in his left hand, warm, tender.

She took hold of both his wrists, clinging to him, kissing him roughly and sweetly on the mouth. He could feel the tremor in her limbs, the fever in her.

“You’ve been here all alone?”

She sat back as he took his place beside her.

“And why the hell not?” she asked in her slow deep voice. “I quit the hospital officially this afternoon. I’m going to apply for a job here. I’m going to stay here, in this house.”

He let out a long whistling sigh and smiled. “You mean it?”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know. All the way over here … coming back from the Irish Channel, I kept thinking maybe you’d be here with your bag packed to go back.”

“No. Not a chance. I’ve already discussed three or four different hospitals here with my old boss in San Francisco. He’s making calls for me. But what about you?”

“What do you mean what about me?” he asked. “You know why I’m here. Where am I going to go? They brought me here. They’re not telling me to go anyplace else. They’re not telling me anything. I still can’t remember. I read four hundred pages of the history and I can’t remember. It was Deborah I saw, I know that much, but I don’t really know what she said.”

“You’re tired and hot,” she said, touching her hand to his forehead. “You’re talking crazy.”

He gave a little surprised laugh. “Listen to you,” he said, “the Witch of Endor. Didn’t you read the history? What’s going on, Rowan? Didn’t you read all that? We’re in a big spiderweb, and we don’t know who’s done the weaving.” He held out his gloved hands, looking down at his fingers. “We just don’t know.”

She gave him a quiet, remote look, which made her face seem very cold, even though it was flushed, and her gray eyes were picking up the light wonderfully.

“Well, you read it, didn’t you? What did you think when you read it? What did you think?”

“Michael, calm down,” she said. “You’re not asking me what I think. You’re asking me what I feel. I’ve been telling you what I think. We’re not stuck in any web, and nobody’s doing the weaving. And you want my advice? Forget about them. Forget about what they want, these people you saw in your visions. Forget them from now on.”

“What do you mean ‘forget’?”

“OK, listen to me. I’ve been sitting here thinking for hours, thinking about it all. This is my decision. I’m staying here, and I’m staying here because this is my house and I like it. And I like the family I met yesterday. I like them. I want to know them. I want to hear their voices and know their faces, and learn what they have to teach. And also, I know I wouldn’t be able to forget that old woman and what I did to her no matter where I went.” She stopped, a flash of sudden emotion transfiguring her face for a second, then gone again, leaving it taut and cool. She folded her arms lightly, one foot up on the edge of the small coffee table. “Are you listening?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“OK, I want you to stay here, too. I hope and pray you will stay here. But not because of this pattern or this web or whatever it is. Not because of these visions or because of the man. Because there is absolutely no way to figure out what these things mean, Michael, or what’s meant, to use the word you wrote in your notes, or why you and I were thrown together. There is no way to know.”

She paused, her eyes scanning him intently. Then she went on:

“So I’ve made my decision,” she said, her words coming more slowly, “based on what I can know, and what I can see, and what I can define and understand, and that is, that this place is where I belong, because I want to belong.”

He nodded. “I hear you,” he said.

“What I’m saying is that I’m staying here in spite of this man and this seeming pattern, this coincidence of me pulling you up out of the ocean and you being what you are.”

He nodded again, a little hesitantly, and then sat back taking a deep breath, his eyes not letting go of hers. “But you can’t tell me,” he said, “that you don’t want to communicate with this thing, that you don’t want to understand the meaning of all this … ”

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

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

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

“I never stopped loving it.”

“But don’t do anything else to give in to them! Do things in spite of them.”

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

She let out a long breath.

“I insist on losing sight of it,” she said.

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

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

“And?”

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

“I know.”

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

“And you feel all right about him now?”

She nodded. “I know him now,” she said. “He’s not so different from you and me.”

“How do you mean?”

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

“I understand.”

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

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

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

“I know what you mean. But I think he does understand.”

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

“I know.”

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

“I never dreamed you’d respond that way. I have to confess. I thought you’d be angry, maybe even offended.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I see.”

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

“I understand,” he said softly.

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

“There was still another reason I had to see Aaron.”

“What?”

She thought for a moment, then:

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

“Rowan, you’ve already seen it, and besides-it’s waiting for you.”

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

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

Michael puzzled over this for a moment.

“It may have overplayed its hand,” she said.

“You mean, the way it touched you … ”

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

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “I don’t know,” he confessed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That never even crossed my mind before.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, that’s exactly what we have to do.”

“I want to tell you something about that old woman, Carlotta, and about the power … ”

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”

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

“Why?”

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

“Yeah, do I ever know what you mean.”

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

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

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

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

“Thanks,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean strive to be perfect,” he said.

“What?”

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

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

“I didn’t mean-”

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

“Rowan, I didn’t-”

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

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

“You’re gonna make me cry, Rowan, if you don’t stop,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“OK, now you’re talking,” she said. “You’re talking about something real.”

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

He saw the concern in her eyes immediately.

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

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

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

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

“Well put,” he said. He smiled.

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

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

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

“But we’re not holding our breath until then.”

“No.” He gave a little laugh.

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

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

“Do you like loving me?” she asked.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he whispered.

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

“No, it was all a mistake,” he said, “a terrible mistake, and you won’t ever make that mistake again.”

“No, never,” she said. “Even with that old woman, I swear, I didn’t really believe it.”

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

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

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

“I know, I understand.”

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

“No.”

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

“I’m surprised you haven’t hit upon the obvious answer,” she said, “the one that is so clear and so neat.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe your purpose is simple. It’s to kill me.”

“God, how could you think of such a thing?” He drew closer to her, brushing her hair back out of her face, and gathering her near to him.

She looked at him as if from a long long distance away.

“Honey, listen to me,” he said. “Anybody can take a human life. It’s easy. Very easy. There are a million ways. You know ways I don’t know because you’re a doctor. That woman, Carlotta, small as she was, she killed a man strong enough to strangle her with one hand. When I sleep next to any woman, she can kill me if she wants to. You know that. A scalpel, a hat pin, a bit of lethal poison. It’s easy. And we don’t do those things, nothing on earth can make most of us ever even think of them, and that’s how it’s been all your life with you. And now you find you’ve got a mutant power, something that exceeds the laws of choice and impulse and self-control, something that calls for a more subtle understanding, and you have that understanding. You have the strength to know your own strength.”

She nodded; but she was still shaking all over. And he could tell that she didn’t believe him. And in a way, he wasn’t sure he believed himself. What was the use of denying it? If she didn’t control this power, she would inevitably use it again.

But there was something else he had to say, and it had to do with the visions and the power in his hands.

“Rowan,” he said, “you asked me to take off the gloves the first night we met. To hold your hands. I’ve made love to you without the gloves. Just your body and my body, and our hands touching and my hands touching you all over, and what is it I see, Rowan? What do I feel? I feel goodness and I feel love.”

He kissed her cheek. He kissed her hair and brought it back off her forehead with his hand.

“You’re right in many things you’ve said, Rowan, but not in that. I’m not meant to hurt you. I owe my life to you.” He turned her head towards him and kissed her, but she was still cold and trembling, and far far beyond his reach.

She took his hands and moved them down and away from her, gently, nodding, and then she kissed him gently, but she didn’t want to be touched now. It didn’t do any good.

He sat there for a while, thinking, looking at the long ornate room. Looking at the high mirrors in their dark carved frames, and the dusty old Bözendorfer piano at the far end, and the draperies like long streaks of faded color in the gloom.

Then he climbed to his feet. He couldn’t sit still any longer. He paced the floor in front of the couch, and found himself at the side window, looking out over the dusty screen porch.

“What did you say a moment ago?” he asked, turning around. “You said something about passivity and confusion. Well, this is it, Rowan, the confusion.”

She didn’t answer him. She was sitting crouched there, staring at the floor.

He went back to her and gathered her up, off the couch and into his arms. Her cheeks were still splotched with pink, and very pale. Her lashes were dark and long as she looked down.

He pressed his lips against her mouth softly, feeling no resistance, almost no awareness, as if it were the mouth of someone unconscious or deep asleep. Then slowly she came back to life. She slipped her hands up around his neck, and kissed him back.

“Rowan, there is a pattern,” he whispered in her ear. “There is a great web and we’re in it, but I believe now as I believed then, they were good, the people who brought us together. And what they want of me is good. I gotta figure it out, Rowan. I have to. But I know it’s good. Just as I know that you are good, too.”

He heard her sigh against him, felt the lift of her warm breasts against his chest. When at last she slipped away, it was with great tenderness, kissing his fingers as she let them go.

She walked out towards the center of the long room. She stood under the high broad archway that divided the space into two parlors, and she looked up at the beautiful carving in the plaster, and at the way the arch curved down to meet the cornices at either end. She seemed to be studying this, to be lost in contemplating the house.

He felt bruised and quiet. The whole exchange had hurt him. He couldn’t shake a feeling of misery and suspicion, though it was not suspicion of her.

“Who gives a damn!” she whispered as if she were talking to herself, but she seemed fragile and uncertain.

The dusty sunlight crept in from the screened porch and showed the amber wax on the old boards. The motes of dust swirled around her.

“Talk, talk, talk,” she said. “The next move is theirs. You’ve done everything you could. And so have I. And here we are. And let them come to us.”

“Yes, let them come.”

She turned to him, inviting him silently to draw closer, her face imploring and almost sad. A split second of dread shocked him, and left him empty. The love he felt for her was so precious to him, and yet he was afraid, actually afraid.

“What are we going to do, Michael?” she said. And suddenly she smiled, a very beautiful and warm smile.

He laughed softly. “I don’t know, honey.” He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You know what I want from you right now?”

“No. But whatever it is, you can have it.”

She reached out for his hand. “Tell me about this house,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “Tell me everything you know about a house like this, and tell me if it really can be saved.”

“Honey, it’s just waiting for that, just waiting. It’s solid as any castle in Montcleve or Donnelaith.”

“Could you do it? I don’t mean with your own hands … ”

“-I’d love to do it with my own hands.” He looked at them suddenly, these wretched gloved hands. How long since he’d held a hammer and nails, or the handle of a saw, or laid a plane to wood. And then he looked up at the painted arch above them, at the long sweep of the ceiling with its fractured and peeling paint. “Oh, how I’d love to,” he said.

“What if you had carte blanche, what if you could hire anybody and everybody you wanted-plasterers, painters, roofers, people to bring it all back, to restore every nook and cranny … ”

Her words went on, slow yet exuberant. But he knew everything she was saying, he understood. And he wondered if she could possibly understand all that it really meant to him. To work on a house like this had always been his greatest dream, but it wasn’t merely a house like this, it was this house. And back and back he traveled in memory, until he was a boy again, outside at the gate, a boy who went off to the library to pull down off the shelves the old picture books which had this house inside them, this very room and that hallway, because he never dreamed he would see these rooms except in books.

And in the vision the woman had said, converging upon this very moment in time, in this house, in this crucial moment when …

“Michael? You want to do it?”

Through a veil, he saw her face had lighted up like the face of a child. But she seemed so far away, so brilliant and happy and far away.

Is that you, Deborah?

“Michael, take off the gloves,” Rowan said, her sudden sharpness startling him. “Go back to work! Go back to being you. For fifty years nobody’s been happy in this house, nobody’s loved in this house, nobody’s won! It’s time for us to love here and to win here, it’s time for us to win the house back itself. I knew that when I finished the File on the Mayfair Witches. Michael, this is our house.”

But you can alter … Never think for a moment that you do not have the power, for the power derives from …

“Michael, answer me.”

Alter what? Don’t leave me like this. Tell me!

But they were gone, just as if they’d never come near, and here he stood, with Rowan, in the sunshine and on the warm amber-colored floor, and she was waiting for him to answer.

And the house waited, the beautiful house, beneath its layers of rust and soil, beneath its shadows and its tangled ragged vines, and in its heat and its dampness, it waited.

“Oh, yes, honey, yes,” he said as if waking from a dream, his senses flooded suddenly with the fragrance of the honeysuckle on the screens, and the singing of the birds outside, and the warmth of the sun itself coming in on them.

He turned around in the middle of the long room. “The light, Rowan, we have to let in the light. Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s see if these old shutters still open.”

Thirty-one

QUIETLY, REVERENTLY, THEY began to explore the house. At first it was as if they had crept away from the guards in a museum, and dared not abuse their accidental freedom.

They were too respectful to touch the personal belongings of those who had once lived here. A coffee cup lying on a glass table in the sun room. A magazine folded on a chair.

Rather they traveled the rooms and the hallways, opening the drapes and shutters, merely peeking now and then into closets and cabinets and drawers, with the greatest care.

But slowly, as the shadowy warmth became more and more familiar, they grew bolder.

In the library alone, they browsed for an hour, examining the spines of the leather-bound classics and the old plantation ledgers from Riverbend, saddened when they saw the pages were spongy and ruined. Almost nothing of the old accounts could be read.

They did not touch the papers on the desk which Ryan Mayfair would collect and examine. They studied the framed portraits on the walls.

“That’s Julien, it has to be.” Darkly handsome, smiling at them as they stood in the hallway. “What is that in the background?” It had darkened so badly Michael couldn’t make it out. Then he realized. Julien was standing on the front porch of this house.

“Yes, and there, that old photograph, that’s apparently Julien with his sons. The one closest to Julien is Cortland. That’s my father.” Once again, they were grouped on the porch, smiling through the faded sepia, and how cheerful, even vivacious, they seemed.

And what would you see if you touched them, Michael? And how do you know it isn’t what Deborah wants you to do?

He turned away quickly. He wanted to follow Rowan. He loved the way Rowan walked, her long loose strides, the way her hair swayed with the rhythm. She turned in the dining room doorway and smiled back at him. Coming?

In the small high-ceilinged pantry, they discovered shelves on top of shelves of gorgeous china: Minton, Lenox, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton-flowered patterns, Oriental patterns, patterns bordered in silver and gold. Old white ware and Oriental porcelain, antique Blue Willow, and old Spode.

There were chests upon chests of sterling, heavy ornate pieces by the hundreds, nestled in felt, including very old sets with the English marks and the initial M in the European style engraved on the back.

Michael was the one who knew such things; his long love affair with Victoriana in all forms stood him well. He could identify the fish knives and the oyster forks and the jelly spoons, and dozens of other tiny special items, of which there were a countless number in a dozen different ornate patterns.

Sterling candlesticks they found, elaborate punch bowls and serving platters, bread plates and butter dishes and old water pitchers, and coffee urns and teapots and carafes. Exquisite chasing. Magically the darkest tarnish gave way to a hard rub of the finger, revealing the old luster of pure silver beneath.

Cut-glass bowls of all sizes were pushed to the back of the cabinets, leaded crystal dishes and plates.

Only the tablecloths and the piles of old napkins were too far gone, the fine linen and lace having rotted in the inevitable damp, the letter M showing proudly still here and there beneath the dark stain of mildew.

Yet even a few of these had been carefully preserved in a dry cedar-lined drawer, wrapped in blue paper. Heavy old lace that had yellowed beautifully. And tumbled among them were napkin rings of bone and silver and gold.

Touch them? Did the MBM stand for Mary Beth Mayfair? And here, here is a ring with the letters JM and you know to whom that must have belonged. He put it back, gloved fingers now as agile as bare fingers, though his hands were hot and uncomfortable, and the cross as she called it was biting into him with its weight.

The late afternoon sun came in long slanting rays through the dining room windows. Look at her again in this setting. Rowan Mayfair. The murals sprang to life, revealing a whole population of little figures lost in the dreamy plantation fields. The great oblong table stood sturdy and fine as it had perhaps for a century. The Chippendale chairs, with their intricately carved backs, lined the walls.

Shall we dine here together soon with high flickering candles?

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes!”

Then in the butler’s pantry they found the delicate glassware, enough for a royal banquet. They found thin fine-spun goblets and thick-bottomed tumblers etched with flowers-sherry glasses, glasses for brandy, for champagne, for white wine and red wine, and shot glasses, and dessert glasses, and decanters to go with them, with glass stoppers, and crystal cut-glass pitchers, and pretty dishes again, stacks of them, glimmering in the light.

So many treasures, Michael thought, and all of them waiting it seemed for the touch of a wand to bring them back into service.

“I’m dreaming of parties,” Rowan said, “of parties like in the old days, of bringing them all together, and piling the table with food. Of Mayfairs and Mayfairs.”

Michael gazed in silence at her profile. She held a delicate stem glass in her right hand, letting it catch the fragile sun.

“It’s all so graceful, so seductive,” she said. “I didn’t know life could be the way that it seems here. I didn’t know there were houses like this anywhere in America. How strange it all is. I’ve traveled the whole world, and never been to a place like this. It’s as if time forgot this place completely.”

Michael couldn’t help but smile. “Things change very slowly here,” he said. “Thank God for that.”

“Yet it’s as if I dreamed of these rooms, and of a way of life that can be lived here, and never remembered on waking. But something in me, something in me must have remembered. Something in me felt alien and lost in the world we made out there.”

They wandered out into the sunshine together, roaming around the old pool and through the ruined cabana. “This is all solid,” Michael explained as he examined the sliding doors, and the washbasin and shower. “It can be repaired. Look, this is built of cypress. And the pipes are copper. Nothing destroys cypress. I could fix that plumbing in a couple of days.”

Back into the high grass they walked, where the old outbuildings had once stood. Nothing remained but one lone sad tumbledown wooden structure on the very inside edge of the rear lot.

“Not so bad, not so bad at all,” Michael said, peering through the dusty screens. “Probably the menservants lived out here, it’s a sort of garçonniére.”

Here was the oak tree in which Deirdre had sought refuge, soaring to perhaps eighty feet over their heads. The foliage was dark and dusty and tight with the heat of the summer. It would break into a glorious mint green in the spring. Great clumps of banana trees sprang like monstrous grass in patches of sunlight. And a long beautifully built brick wall stretched across the back of the property, overgrown with ivy and tangled wisteria right to the hinges of the Chestnut Street gates.

“The wisteria is still blooming,” Michael said. “I love these purple blossoms-how I used to love to touch them when I went walking, to see the petals shiver.”

Why the hell can’t you take off the gloves for a moment, just to feel those tender little petals in your hand?

Rowan stood with her eyes closed. Was she listening to the birds? He found himself staring at the long back wing of the main house, at the servants’ porches with their white wooden railings and white privacy lattice, and just the sight of this lattice subdued him and made him feel happy. These were all the random colors and textures of home.

Home. As if he had ever lived in such a place. Well, had any wandering observer ever loved it more? And in a way he had always lived in it, it was the place he had longed for when he went away, the place he had dreamed of …

You cannot imagine the strength of the assault …

“Michael?”

“What is it, honey?” He kissed her, catching the delicious smell of the sun in her hair. The warmth gave a glisten to her skin. But the frisson of the visions lingered. He opened his eyes wide, letting the burnt afternoon light fill them, letting the soft hum of the insects lull him.

tangle of lies …

Rowan went before him in the high grass.

“There are flagstones here, Michael.” Her voice so thin in the great openness. “All of this is flagstone. It’s covered over.”

He wandered after her, back into the front garden. They found little Greek statues, cement satyrs beautifully weathered, peeping with blind eyes from beneath the overgrown boxwood; a marble nymph lost in the dark waxen leaf camellias, and the tiny yellow lantana blooming beautifully wherever the sun broke in.

“Bacon and eggs, we called this little flower,” he said, picking a sprig of it for her. “See the tiny brown and yellow petals, mingled with the orange. And there, there’s the blue kind. And see that flower, that’s impatiens, and look, that’s hollyhock-the big blue flowers growing by the porch, but we always called it althaea.”

“Althaea, that’s so lovely.”

“That vine there is the Queen’s Wreath, or the Coral Wreath, but we called it Rose of Montana.”

They could just see the white streak of Deirdre’s old rocking chair above the lace of the vines. “They must have trimmed them for her to see out,” he said. “See how they’ve grown up the other side, fighting the bougainvillea? Ah, but it’s the queen of the wall, isn’t it?”

Almost violent the fluorescent purple bracts that everyone thought were flowers.

“Lord God, how many times did I try to make all this in some little backyard in California, before I turned over the key to the new owner. After I’d hung the Quaker Lace curtains on the windows, and done the floors with Minwax Golden Oak, and found the claw-footed tub from the salvage yard. And here the place looms, the genuine article … ”

“And it’s yours, too,” she said. “Yours and mine.” How innocent she seemed now, how full of eager sincerity her soft smile.

She wound her arm around him again, squeezed his gloved hand with her naked fingers. “But what if it’s all decayed inside, Michael? What would it take to cure everything that’s wrong?”

“Come here, stand back here, and look,” he said. “See the way the servants’ porches run completely straight up there? There’s no weakness in the foundation of this house at all. There are no leaks visible on the first floor, no dampness seeping through. Nothing! And in the old days those porches were the hallways by which the servants came and went. That’s why there are so many floor-length windows and doors, and by the way every window and door I’ve tried is level. And the house is all open on this side to catch the river breeze. All over the city, you’ll see that, houses open on the river side, to catch the river breeze.”

She gazed up at the windows of Julien’s old room. Was she thinking again of Antha?

“I can feel the curse lifting from this place,” she whispered. “That’s what was meant, that you and I should come, and love each other here.”

Yes, I believe mat, he thought, but somehow or other he didn’t say it. Maybe the stillness around him seemed too alive; maybe he was afraid to challenge something unseen that watched and listened.

“All these walls are solid brick, Rowan,” he went on, “and some of them as much as twenty inches thick. I measured them with my hands when I walked through the various doorways. Twenty inches thick. They’d been plastered over outside to make the house look like stone because that was the fashion. See the scoring in the paint? To make it look like a villa built of great blocks of stone?

“It’s a polyglot,” he confessed, “with its cast-iron lace and Corinthian columns and Doric and Ionic columns, and the keyhole doorways-”

“Yeah, keyholes,” she said. “And I’ll tell you about another place where I saw a doorway like that. It’s on the tomb. At the very top of the Mayfair tomb.”

“How do you mean at the top?”

“Just the carving of a doorway, like the doorways in this house. I’m sure that’s what it was, unless it’s really meant to be a keyhole. I’ll show you. We can walk over there today or tomorrow. It’s right off the main path.”

Why did that fill him with uneasiness? A doorway carved on the tomb? He hated graveyards, he hated tombs. But sooner or later he had to see it, didn’t he? He went on talking, stifling the feeling, wanting to have the moment and the sight of the house before him, bathed in the lovely sun.

“Then there are those curved Italianate windows on the north side,” he said, “and that’s another architectural influence. But it’s all of a piece, finally. It works because it works. It’s built for this climate with its fifteen-foot ceilings. It’s a great trap for light and cool breezes, a citadel against the heat.”

Slipping her arm around him, she followed him back inside and up the long shadowy stairs.

“See, this plaster is firm,” he explained. “It’s almost surely the original, but it was done by master craftsmen. They probably ran those crown moldings by hand. There aren’t even the minimum cracks you’d expect from settlement. When I get under the house I’m going to find these are chain walls that go clear down to the ground, and that the sills that support this house are enormous. They have to be. Everything is level, firm.”

“And I thought it was hopeless when I first saw it.”

“Take this old wallpaper down with your imagination,” he said. “Paint the walls in your mind’s eyes with bright warm colors. See all this woodwork shining white and clean.”

“It’s ours now,” she whispered. “Yours and mine. We’re writing the file from now on.”

“The File on Rowan and Michael,” he said with a faint smile. He paused at the top of the stairs. “Things up here on the second floor are simpler. The ceilings are about a foot lower, and you don’t have the ornate crown moldings. It’s all a smaller scale.”

She laughed and shook her head. “And how high are these smaller rooms, thirteen feet, perhaps?”

They turned and went down the hall to the first bedroom on the very front of the house. Its windows opened both to the front and the side porches. Belle’s prayer book lay on the chest of drawers, with her name engraved in the cover in gold letters. There were photographs in gilt frames behind dim glass hanging on dulled and rusted chains.

“Julien again. Has to be,” said Michael. “And Mary Beth, look, that woman looks like you, Rowan.”

“So they told me,” she said softly.

Belle’s rosary, with her named engraved on the back of the crucifix, lay still on the pillow of the four-poster bed. Dust rose from the feather comforter when Michael touched it. A wreath of roses peered down at him from the satin tester above.

Gloomy it all seemed with its fading flowered paper, and the heavy armoires tilting ever so slightly forward, and the carpet threadbare and the color of dust itself. The branches of the oaks looked like ghosts beyond the pongee curtains. The bathroom was clean and very plain-tile from Stella’s time, Michael figured. A great old tub such as one still finds now and then in old hotels, and a high pedestal lavatory, and stacks of towels, layered with dust, on a wicker stand.

“Oh, but Michael, this is the best room,” Rowan said behind him. “This is the one that opens to the south and the west. Help me with this window.”

They forced the stubborn sash. “It’s like being in a tree house,” she said as she stepped outside on the deep front gallery. She laid her hand on the fluted Corinthian column and looked into the twisted branches of the oaks. “Look, Michael, there are ferns growing in the branches, hundreds of little green ferns. And there, a squirrel. No, there are two of them. We’ve frightened them. This is so strange. It’s like we’re in the woods, and we can jump out there and start climbing. We could just wander heavenward through this tree.”

Michael tested the rafters underneath. “Solid, just like everything else. And the iron lace isn’t rusted, not really. All it needs is paint.” No leaks in the roof above either.

Just waiting, waiting all this time to be restored. He stopped, and slipped off his khaki jacket. The heat was getting to him finally, even here where the river breezes did flood by.

He slung the jacket over his shoulder and held it with one hooked finger.

Rowan stood, with arms folded, leaning on the cast-iron railing. She looked out over the quiet still corner.

He was looking down through the tangle of the little sweet olive trees, at the front gate. He was seeing himself as a boy standing there, just seeing himself so clearly. She clasped his hand suddenly and drew him after her back inside.

“Look, that door connects to the next bedroom. That could be a sitting room, Michael. And both lead on to that side porch.”

He was staring at one of the oval photographs. Stella? Had to be Stella.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” she was saying. “It has to be the sitting room.”

He glanced down again at the white leather cover of the prayer book with the words Belle Mayfair inscribed in gold. Just for a second, he thought, Touch it. And to think, Belle was so sweet, so good.

How could Belle hurt you? You’re in this house and not using the power.

“Michael?”

But he couldn’t do it. If he began, how could he stop? And it would kill him, those electrical shocks passing through him, and the blindness, the inevitable blindness when the images swam around him like murky water, and the cacophony of all the voices. No. You don’t have to. Nobody has told you that you have to.

The thought suddenly that someone might make him do it, might tear off the glove and force his hand on these objects, made him cringe. He felt cowardly. And Rowan was calling him. He looked down at the prayer book as he moved away.

“Michael, this must have been Millie’s room. It has a fireplace, too.” She stood before a high dresser, holding a small monogrammed handkerchief. “These rooms are like shrines,” she said.

Beyond the long window, the bougainvillea grew so thick over the side porch that the lower railings could no longer be seen. This was the porch above Deirdre’s porch. Open, because only that lower part had been screened in.

“Yes, all these rooms have fireplaces,” he said absently, his eyes on the fluorescent purple blossoms of the bougainvillea. “I’m going to have a look at the firebricks in the chimneys. These little shallow grates were never used for wood, they were used for coal.”

Now they housed gas heaters, and he rather liked that, for in all this time, he’d never seen a little gas heater blazing away in the cozy winter dark, with all those tiny blue and gold flames.

Rowan stood at the closet door. “What is that smell, Michael?”

“Lord, Rowan Mayfair, you never smelled camphor in an old closet?”

She laughed softly. “I’ve never even seen an old closet, Michael Curry. I’ve never lived in an old house, nor visited an old hotel. State of the art was my adoptive father’s motto. Rooftop restaurants and brass and glass. You can’t imagine the lengths to which he went to maintain those standards. And Ellie couldn’t stand the sight of anything old or used. Ellie threw out all her clothes after a year’s wear.”

“You must think you slipped off the planet.”

“No, not really. Just slipped into another interpretation,” she said, her voice trailing off. Thoughtfully she touched the old clothes hanging there. All he saw were shadows.

“And to think,” she whispered, “the century is almost over, and she lived all her life right here in this room.” She stepped back. “God, I hate this wallpaper. Look, there’s a leak up there.”

“Nothing major, honey. Just a little leak. There’s bound to be one or more in a house this size. That’s nothing. But I think the plaster’s dead up there.”

“Dead? The plaster is dead?”

“Too old to take a patch. See the way it’s crumbled. So we’ll put in a new ceiling,” he said, shrugging. “Two days work.”

“You’re a genius.”

He laughed and shook his head.

“Look, there’s an old bathroom there,” she said. “Each room has its own bathroom. I’m trying to see everything cleaned and finished … ”

“I see it,” he said. “I see it all with every step I take.”

Carlotta’s room was the last major room at the end of the hallway-a great gloomy cavern it seemed, with its black four-poster bed and its faded taffeta ruffles, and a few dreary slip-covered chairs. A stale smell rose around them. A bookshelf held law texts and reference books. And there, the rosary and the prayer book as if she’d only just laid them down. Her white gloves in a tangle, and a pair of cameo earrings, and a string of jet beads.

“We used to call those Grandma beads,” he said with vague surprise. “I forgot all about those.” He moved to touch them and then drew back his gloved hand as if he’d drawn near to something hot.

“I don’t like it in here, either,” Rowan whispered. She was hugging the backs of her arms again in that chilled, miserable gesture. Scared maybe. “I don’t want to touch what belonged to her,” she said, looking vaguely repelled by the items strewn on the dresser, repelled by the old furniture, beautiful as it was.

“Ryan will take care of it,” she murmured, becoming ever more uneasy. “He said that Gerald Mayfair will come and take away her things. She left her personal things to Gerald’s grandmother.” At last she turned as if something had startled her, then stared almost angrily at the mirror between the side windows. “There’s that smell again, that camphor. And something else.”

“Verbena, and rose water,” he said. “See the bottle? They plant little things like that now in quaint northern California bed-and-breakfast hotels. I’ve planted them on many a marble-top table. And there they sit. The real thing.”

“It’s too real,” she whispered, “it’s dreary and unhappy.”

They moved on to the rear door of the room which opened onto a little corridor and a short stairs, and then two small rooms, following one upon the other.

“The maids slept here in the old days,” Michael explained. “Eugenia has that room back there now. Technically we are looking into the servants’ wing, and they would never have used this connecting door, because it wasn’t here until recent years. They cut through the brick wall to put it in. In the old days the servants would have come into the main house by means of the porch.”

At the far end of the wing, they could see a dull light burning. “That’s the stairway that leads down to the kitchen. And that old bathroom back there was Eugenia’s. In the old days southern people had the black servants use a different bathroom. You’ve heard enough about all that, I imagine.”

They turned back into the larger room. Rowan moved carefully across the faded rug, and Michael followed her to the window and gently pushed back the soft frail curtain, so that they could look down on the brick sidewalks of Chestnut Street, and the artful façade of the grand house across the way.

“See, open to the river side,” said Michael, looking at the other building. “And look at the oak trees on that property and the old carriage house is still standing. See the stucco peeling from the bricks. It, too, was made to look like stone.”

“From every window you see the oaks,” Rowan said, speaking low as if not to disturb the dust. “And the sky, such a deep blue. Even the light is different here. It’s like the soft light of Florence or Venice.”

“That it is,” Michael said.

Again, he found himself staring apprehensively at the belongings of this woman. Maybe Rowan’s uneasiness had communicated itself to him. He imagined, compulsively and painfully, having to take off his glove and lay his naked hand upon things that had been hers.

“What is it, Michael?”

“Let’s go,” he said under his breath, clasping her hand again and moving back into the main hall.

Only reluctantly did she follow Michael into Deirdre’s old room. Here her confusion and revulsion seemed to deepen. Yet he knew she was compelled to make this journey. He saw the way her eyes moved hungrily over the framed photographs, and the little Victorian cane-seated chairs. Michael hugged her close as she stared down at the vicious stain on the mattress.

“That’s awful. I’ve got to call someone,” he said, “to clean that up.”

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“No, I will. You asked downstairs if I could take over, hire the people I needed to restore the whole place. Well, I can take care of that too.”

He looked at the stain, a great oval of brown, the center of it sticky. Had the woman hemorrhaged when she was dying? Or had she lain there with her waste seeping out in the heat of this awful old room?

“I don’t know,” Rowan whispered, though he hadn’t voiced the question. She gave a ragged sigh. “I’ve already asked for the records. Ryan’s requesting everything through legal channels. I talked to him today. I called the doctor. I talked to the nurse, too, Viola. Sweet old woman. She told it like Dickens. All the doctor said was that there was no reason to take her to the hospital. The whole thing was crazy. He didn’t like my asking him questions. He suggested that I was wrong to ask him. He said it was the humane thing to let her die.”

He held her more tightly, grazing her cheek with his lips.

“What are those candles?” she asked, staring at the little bedside altar. “And that awful statue. What’s that?”

“The Blessed Mother,” he said. “When there’s a naked heart on it like that I guess you call it the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I don’t really remember. The candles are blessed candles. I saw them flickering up here, when I was outside that first night. I never dreamed she was dying. If I’d known I … I don’t know. I didn’t even know who lived here when I first came.”

“But why did they burn these blessed candles?”

“It’s to comfort the dying. The priest comes. He gives her what they call the Last Sacraments. I went with the priest a couple of times when I was an altar boy.”

“They did that for her, but they didn’t take her to the hospital.”

“Rowan, if you had known, if you had come, do you think she could have been brought around? I don’t think so, honey. I don’t think it matters now.”

“Ryan says no. She was hopeless. He says that once about ten years ago, Carlotta took her off the drugs. There was no response to any stimulus except reflex. Ryan says they did everything they could, but then Ryan is covering Ryan, isn’t he? But I’ll know when I see the records, and then I’ll feel better … or worse.”

She moved away from the bed, her eyes drifting more sluggishly over the room. She seemed to be forcing herself to evaluate it the way they had evaluated everything else.

Tentatively he pointed out to her that only in this room was there the ornamentation that was common to the lower floor. He drew her attention to the scrollwork crowning the windows. A crystal chandelier, covered with dust, hanging from an ornate plaster medallion. The bed itself was huge and vaguely ugly.

“It’s not like the others, the four-posters,” she said.

“It’s newer, machine made,” he explained, “It’s American. That was the kind they bought by the millions near the end of the last century. Probably Mary Beth bought it and it was very much the thing.”

“She stopped time, didn’t she?”

“Mary Beth?”

“No, that hateful Carlotta. She stopped time here. She made everything grind to a halt. Think of young girls growing up in a house like this. There isn’t a scrap of evidence that they ever had anything beautiful or special or contemporary of their own.”

“Teddy bears,” Michael whispered. Hadn’t Deirdre said something about teddy bears in the garden in Texas?

Rowan had not heard him. “Well, her reign is over,” she said, but it was without triumph or resolution.

She suddenly moved forward and picked up the plaster Virgin with the exposed red heart, and pitched it across the room. It landed on the marble floor of the open bathroom, the body breaking into three uneven pieces. She stared at it as if shocked by what she’d done.

He was astonished. Something purely irrational and completely superstitious shook him. The Virgin Mary broken on the bathroom floor. He wanted to say something, some magic words or prayers to undo it; like tossing salt over your shoulder or knocking on wood. Then his eye caught something glittering in the shadows. A heap of tiny glittering things on the table at the far side of the bed.

“Look, Rowan,” he said softly, slipping his fingers around the back of her neck. “Look, on the other table, over there.”

It was the jewel box, and it stood open. It was the velvet purse. Gold coins heaped everywhere, and ropes of pearls, and gems, hundreds of small glittering gems.

“Good God,” she whispered. She moved around the bed, and stared down at it as if it were alive.

“Didn’t you believe it?” he asked her. But he wasn’t sure now whether he had believed it himself. “They look fake, don’t they? Like a motion-picture treasure. Couldn’t possibly be real.”

She looked at him across the barren empty bed. “Michael,” she said softly, “would you touch them? Would you … lay your hands on them?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to, Rowan,” he said.

She stood silent, drawing into herself, it seemed, her eyes becoming vague and unfocused. She hugged her arms again, the way she always did it seemed when she was upset, as if her interior misery made her cold.

“Michael,” she said again softly, “would you touch something of Deirdre’s? Her nightgown. Maybe the bed.”

“I don’t want to, Rowan. We said we wouldn’t … ”

She looked down, her hair tumbling over her eyes so that he couldn’t see them.

“Rowan, I can’t interpret it. It will just be confusion. I’ll see the nurse that helped her dress, or maybe the doctor, or maybe a car that passed when she was sitting out there, watching. I don’t know how to use it. Aaron’s taught me a little. But I’m still not very good. I’ll see something ugly and I’ll hate it. And it scares me, Rowan, because she’s dead. I touched all kinds of things for people in the beginning. But I can’t now. Believe me, I … I mean when Aaron teaches me … ”

“What if you saw happiness? What if you saw something beautiful like that woman in London saw, who touched her robe for Aaron?”

“Did you believe in that, Rowan? They aren’t infallible, these people in the Talamasca. They’re just people.”

“No, they aren’t just people,” she said. “They’re people like you and me. They have preternatural powers like you and I have preternatural powers.”

Her voice was mild, unchallenging. But he understood what she felt. He stared again at the blessed candles, and then at the broken statue, which he could just see in the shadows behind her on the bathroom floor. Flash of the May procession and the giant statue of the Virgin tilting as it was carried through the streets. Thousands of flowers. And he thought again of Deirdre, Deirdre in the botanical garden, talking in the dark to Aaron. “I want normal life.”

He moved around the bed and went to the old-fashioned dresser. He opened the top drawer. Nightgowns of soft white flannel, whiff of sachet, very sweet. And lighter summer garments of real silk.

He lifted one of these nightgowns-a thin sleeveless thing sewn with pale pastel flowers. He laid it down in a wrinkled heap on the dresser, and he took off his gloves. For a second he clasped his hands together tightly and then he picked up the garment in both hands. He closed his eyes. “Deirdre,” he said, “only Deirdre.”

An enormous place gaped before him. Through the lurid flickering glare he saw hundreds of faces, he heard voices wailing and screaming. An unbearable sound. A man came towards him stepping over the bodies of the others! “No. Stop!” He had dropped the nightgown. He stood there with his closed eyes trying to remember what he’d just glimpsed, though he couldn’t bear to be surrounded by it again. Hundreds of people shifting and turning, and someone speaking to him in a rapid ugly mocking voice. “Christ, what was it?” He stared down at his hands. He had heard a drum behind all of it, a marching cadence, a sound he knew.

Mardi Gras, years ago. Rushing through the winter street with his mother. “Going to see the Mystic Krewe of Comus.” Yes, that had been the very drum song. And the glare had been the glare of the flickering reeking flambeaux.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“What are you saying?”

“I didn’t see anything that made any sense.” He looked down angrily at the nightgown. Slowly he reached out for it. “Deirdre, in the last days,” he said. “Only Deirdre in the last days.” He touched the soft wrinkled cloth very gently. “I’m seeing the view from the porch, the garden,” he whispered. Yes, the Queen’s Wreath vine, and that is a butterfly climbing the screen, and his hand right there beside her. “Lasher’s there, she’s glad he’s there, and he’s right beside her.” And if he turned his head and looked up from the rocker he’d see Lasher. He set the nightgown down again. “And it was all sunlight and flowers, and she was … was all right.”

“Thank you, Michael.”

“I don’t want to do it again, Rowan, I’m sorry I can’t do it. I don’t want to.”

“I understand,” she said. She came towards him. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was low and sincere and soothing, but her eyes were full of bewilderment. What had he seen that first time around, she wanted to know.

So did he. But what chance had he of knowing?

Yet he was here, inside the house, and he had the power, which had been given to him, presumably by them! And he was being a coward with the power, he, Michael Curry, a coward, and he kept saying he meant to do what they wanted him to do.

Hadn’t they wanted him to come here? Didn’t they want him to touch things? And she wanted him to. How could she not?

He reached out and touched the foot of Deirdre’s bed. Flash of midday, nurses, a cleaning woman pushing a tired vacuum, someone complaining, ceaselessly, a whine. It came so fast finally it was blurred; he ran his fingers along the mattress: her white leg like a thing made out of dough, and Jerry Lonigan there, lifting her, saying under his breath to his assistant, Look at this place, will you look at it, and when he touched the walls, her face suddenly, Deirdre, idiot smile, drool on her chin. He touched the door to the bathroom, a white nurse bullying her, telling her to come now, and move her feet, she knew that she could, pain inside Deirdre, pain eating her insides, a man’s voice speaking, the cleaning woman coming, going, the flush of the toilet, the hum of the mosquitoes, the sight of a sore on her back, good God, look at it, where she has rubbed against the rocker over the years, a festering sore, caked with baby powder, are you people crazy, and the nurse just holds her on the toilet. I can’t …

He turned and pushed past Rowan, brushing her hand away as she tried to stop him. He touched the post of the stairs. Flash of a cotton dress passing him, beat of footsteps on the old carpet. Someone screaming, crying.

“Michael!”

He ran up the steps after them. The baby was roaring in the cradle. It echoed all the way up the three flights from the parlor.

Stench of chemicals, rotted filth in those jars. He’d glimpsed it last night, she’d told him about it, but now he had to see it, didn’t he? And touch it. Touch Marguerite’s filthy jars. He’d smelled it last night when he’d come up to find Townsend’s body, only it wasn’t the body. His hand on the railing, caught a flash of Rowan with the lamp in her hand. Rowan angry and miserable and trying to escape the old woman, who was beating her with words, viciousness, and then the black woman with her dust mop, and a carpenter putting a pane of glass in this window that looked out over the roof. God, that is an awful smell up here, lady. Just do your job. Deirdre’s bedroom, shrill clang of other voices, rising to a peak, then washing away, and another wave coming. And the door, the door straight ahead, someone laughing, a man speaking French, what he’s saying, let me hear one distinct word, the stench is behind it.

But no, first Julien’s room, Julien’s bed. The laughing grew louder, but a baby’s crying was mixed up with it, someone rushing up the stairs just behind him. The door gave him Eugenia again, dusting, complaining about the stench, Carlotta’s voice droning on, the words indistinguishable, and then that awful stain there in the darkness where Townsend died, drawing his last breath through the hole in the carpet, and the mantel, wavering flash of Julien! The same man, yes, the same man he’d seen when he held Deirdre’s nightgown, yes, you, Julien, staring at him, I see you, and then footsteps running, no, I don’t want to see this, but he reached out for the windowsill, grabbed the little cord of the shade, and up it ran, rattling at the top, revealing the dirty windowpanes.

She flew past him, Antha, through the glass, scuttling out on the roof, terrified, tangle of hair over her wet face, her eye, look at her eye, it’s on her cheek, dear God. Sobbing, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me! Lasher, help me!”

“Rowan!”

And Julien, why didn’t he do something, why did he stand there crying silently, doing nothing. “You can call on the devil in hell and the saints in heaven, they won’t help you,” said Carlotta, her voice a snarl as she climbed through the window.

And Julien helpless. “Kill you, bitch, kill you, you will not … ”

She’s gone, she’s fallen, her scream unfurling like a great billowing red flag against the blue sky. Julien with his face in his hands. Helpless. Shimmering gone, a ghost witness. The chaos again, Carlotta fading. He clamped his hands on the iron bed, Julien sitting there, wavering yet distinct for an instant, I know you, dark eyes, smiling mouth, white hair, yes, you, don’t touch me! “Eh bien, Michel, at last!”

His hand struck the packing crates lying on the bed, but he couldn’t see them. He could see nothing but the light wavering and forming the image of the man sitting there under the covers, and then it was gone, and then it was there. Julien was trying to get out of the bed … No, get away from me.

“Michael!”

He had shoved the boxes off the bed. He was stumbling over the books. The dolls, where were the dolls? In the trunk. Julien said that, didn’t he? He said it in French. Laughter, a chorus of laughter. Rustle of skirts around him. Something broke. His knee struck something sharp, but he crawled on towards the trunk. Latches rusted, no problem, throw back the lid.

Wavering, vanishing, Julien stood there, nodding, pointing down into the trunk.

The rusted hinges broke completely as the lid slammed back into the old plaster and fell loose. What was that rustling, like taffeta all around him, feet scraping the floor around him, figures looming over him, like flashes of light through shutters, here and then gone, let me breathe, let me see. It was like the rustle of the nuns’ skirts when he was in school and they came thundering down the hallway to hit the boys, to make the boys get back in line, rustling of beads and cloth and petticoats …

But there are the dolls.

Look, the dolls! Don’t hurt them, they are so old and so fragile, with their dumb scribble scratch faces looking at you, and look, that one, with the button eyes, and the braids of gray, in her tiny little perfect man clothes of tweed to the very trousers. God, bones inside!

He held it. Mary Beth! The flapping gores of her skirts came against him; if he looked up he’d see her looking down; he did see her, there was no limit to what he could see, he could see the backs of their heads as they closed in on him, but nothing would hold steady even for an instant. It was all gossamer, and solid for one second and then nothing, the room full of dusty nothing and crowded to overflowing. Rowan came through as if through the tear in a fabric, grabbing him by the arm, and in a glimmering flash he saw Charlotte, knew it was Charlotte. Had he touched the doll? He looked down, they were all higgledy piggledy and so fragile on the layer of cheesecloth.

But where is Deborah? Deborah, you have got to tell me … He folded back the cloth, tumbling the newer dolls on each other, were they crying, somebody was crying, no, that was the baby screaming in the cradle, or Antha on the roof. Or both of them. Flash of Julien again, talking rapidly in French, down on one knee beside him, I can’t understand you. One millimeter of a second, and gone. You’re driving me crazy, what good am I to you or to anyone if I am crazy?

Get these skirts away from me! It was so much like the nuns.

“Michael!”

He groped under the cloth-where? – easy to tell for there lay the oldest, a mere stick thing of bones and one over from it, the blond hair of Charlotte, and that meant that the frail little thing between them was his Deborah. Tiny beetles raced from beneath it as he touched it. Its hair was disintegrating, oh, God, it’s falling apart, even the bones are turning to dust. And in horror, he drew back. He had left the print of his finger in its bone face. The blast of a fire caught him, he could smell it; her body all crumpled up like a wax thing on top of the pyre, and that voice in French ordering him to do something, but what?

“Deborah,” he said, touching it again, touching its little ragged dress of velvet. “Deborah!” It was so old his breath was going to blow it away Stella laughed. Stella was holding it. “Talk to me,” she said with her eyes squeezed shut, the young man beside her laughing. “You don’t really think this is going to work!”

What do you want of me?

The skirts pushed closer around him, mingling voices in French and English. He tried to catch Julien this time. It was like trying to catch a thought, a memory, something flitting through your mind when you listened to music. His hand lay on the little Deborah doll, crushing it down into the trunk, the blond hair doll tumbling against him. I’m destroying them.

“Deborah!”

Nothing, nothing.

What have I done that you won’t tell me!

Rowan was calling him. Shaking him; he almost hit her.

“Stop it!” he shouted. “They’re all here, in this house! Don’t you see? They’re waiting, they’re … they’re … there’s a name for it, they’re hovering … earthbound!”

How strong she was. She wouldn’t stop. She pulled him to his feet. “Let me go.” He saw them everywhere he looked, as if they were woven into a veil that was moving in the wind.

“Michael, stop it, it’s enough, stop … ”

Have to get out of here. He grabbed for the door frame. When he looked back at the bed he saw only the packing crates. He stared at the books. He had not touched the books. The sweat was pouring down his face, his clothes, look at his clothes, he ran his naked hands over his shirt, trembling, flash of Rowan, shimmer of them all around him again, only he couldn’t see their faces and he was tired of looking for their faces, tired of the draining zapping feelings running through him, “I can’t do this, goddamn it!” he shouted. This was like being underwater, even the voices he heard as he clamped his hands to his ears were like wavering hollow voices under water. And the stench, not possible to avoid it. The stench from the jars that were waiting, the jars …

Is this what you wanted of me, to come back here and to touch things and to know and to find out? Deborah, where are you?

Were they laughing at him? Flash of Eugenia with her dust mop. Not you! Go away. I want to see the dead not the living. And that was Julien’s laughter, wasn’t it? Someone was definitely crying, a baby crying in a cradle, and a dull low voice cursing in English, kill you, kill you, kill you.

“It’s enough, stop, don’t … ”

“No, it isn’t. The jars are there. It is not enough. Let me do it, once and for all, with all of it.”

He pushed her aside, amazed again at the strength with which she tried to stop him, and shoved open the door to the room of the jars. If only they would shut up, if only that baby would stop crying, and the old woman cursing, and that voice in French … “I can’t … ”

The jars.

A gust of air came up the stairway and moved the sluggish stench for an instant. He was standing with his hands over his ears looking at the jars. He took a deep breath, but the stench went into his lungs. Rowan was watching him. Is this what you want me to touch? And they wanted to come back, like a great sloppy veil again closing around him, but he wouldn’t let them. He sharpened his focus. The jars only. He took another breath.

The smell was enough to kill you, but it can’t. It can’t really hurt you. Look. And now in the swimming ugly light, he put his hand on the dingy glass, and through his splayed fingers saw an eye looking at him. “Christ,” it’s a human head, but what was he getting from the jar itself, through his tortured fingers, nothing, nothing but images so faint they were like the thing inside, a cloud surrounding him, in which the visual and the audial were blended and ever dissolving, and trying to be solid and breaking apart again. The jar was there, shining.

These were his fingers scratching at the wax seal.

And the beautiful flesh and blood woman in the door was Rowan.

He broke the seal open, and plunged his hand into the liquid, while the fumes from it went up his nose like poison gas. He gagged, but that didn’t stop him. He grabbed the head inside by the hair though it fell away in his fingers, slipped like seaweed.

The head was slimy and falling to pieces. Chunks of it rose against the glass, pushing against his wrist. But he had a hold of it, his thumb sinking into the putrid cheek. He drew it up out of the jar, knocking the jar on the floor so that the stinking liquid splattered on him. He held the head-dim flash of the head speaking, the head laughing, the features mobile though the head was dead, and the hair was brown hair, the eyes bloodshot but brown, and blood seeping from the dead mouth that talked.

Aye, Michael, flesh and blood when you are nothing but bones.

The whole man sat on the bed, naked, and dead, yet alive with Lasher in him, the arms thrashing and the mouth opening. And beside him Marguerite, with her hag hair and her hands on his shoulders, her big wide taffeta skirts out like a circle of red light around her, holding the dead thing, just as Rowan was trying to hold him now.

The head slipped out of his hands. It slid in the muck on the floor. He went down on his knees. God! He was sick. He was going to vomit. He felt the convulsion, and the pain in a circle around his ribs. Vomit. I can’t help it. He turned towards the corner, tried to crawl away … It poured out of him.

Rowan held him by the shoulder. When you’re this sick you don’t give a damn who’s, touching you, but again, he saw the dead thing on the bed. He tried to tell her. His mouth was sour and full of vomit. God. Look at his hands. The mess was all over the floor, on his clothes.

But he got to his feet, his fingers slipping off the doorknob. Pushing Julien out of the way, and Mary Beth, and then Rowan, and groping for the fallen head, squashed fruit on the floor, breaking apart like a melon.

“Lasher,” he said to her, wiping at his mouth. “Lasher, in that head, in the body of that head.”

And the others? Look at them, filled with heads. Look at them! He snatched at another, smashed it against the wood of the shelf, so that the greenish remains slid down soft and rotten, like a giant greenish egg yoke onto the floor, oozing off the skull that emerged dark and shrunken as he caught it and held it, the face just dripping away.

Aye, Michael, when you are nothing but bones, like the bones you hold in your hands.

“Is this flesh?” he cried. “Is this flesh!” He kicked the rotten head on the floor. He threw down the skull and kicked the skull. Like rubber. “You aren’t going to get her, not for this, not for anything.”

“Michael!”

He was sick again, but he wasn’t going to let it come. His hand caught the edges of the shelf. Flash of Eugenia.

“Sure hate the smell of this attic, Miss Carl.” “You leave it, Eugenia.”

He turned around and wiping both his hands on his coat, wiping them furiously, he said to Rowan, “He came into the dead bodies. He possessed them. He looked through their eyes and he spoke through their vocal cords, and used them, but he couldn’t make them come alive again, he couldn’t make the cells begin to multiply again. And she saved the heads. He came into the heads, long after the bodies were gone, and he looked through the eyes.”

Turning, he snatched up one jar after another. She stood beside him. They were peering through the glass, the shimmer of the images almost blinding him to what he meant to see, but he was determined to see. Heads with brown hair, and look, a blond head with streaks of brown in it, and look, the face of a black man, with blotches of white skin on it, and streaks of lighter hair, and here another, with the white hair streaked with brown.

“Dear God, don’t you see? He not only went into them, he changed the tissues, he caused the cells to react, he changed them but he couldn’t keep them alive.”

Heads, heads, heads. He wanted to smash all the jars.

“You see that? He caused a mutation, a new cell growth! But it was nothing, nothing compared to being alive! They rotted. He couldn’t stop them! And they won’t tell me what they want me to do!”

His slippery fingers closed in a fist. He smashed at one of the jars and saw it fall. She didn’t try to stop him. But she had her arms around him. And she was begging him to come out of the room with her, dragging him. If she didn’t watch it, they were both going to go down in this muck, for sure, this filthy muck.

“But look! You see that!” Far back on the shelf, behind the jar he’d just broken. The finest of them, the liquid clear, the thick seal tarlike and intact. Through the flicker of meaningless indistinguishable images and sounds he heard her:

“Open it, break it,” she said.

He did. The glass fell away soundlessly into the ashy layer of whispering voices, and he held this head, no longer even caring about the stench, or the spongy, moldering texture of the thing he held.

Again the bedroom, Marguerite at the dressing table, tinywaisted, big skirts, turning to smile at him, toothless, eyes dark and quick, hair like a great ugly cascade of Spanish moss, and Julien reed thin and white-haired and young with his arms folded, you devil. Let me see you, Lasher. And then the body on the bed, beckoning for her to come, and then her lying down beside him and the dead rotting fingers tearing open her bodice, and touching her living breast. The dead cock erect between his legs. “Look at me, change me, look at me, change me.”

Had Julien turned his back? No such luck. He stood at the foot of the bed, his hands on the pillars of the bed, his face beating with the faint light of the candle blowing in the wind from the open windows. Fascinated, fearless.

Yes, and look at this thing in your hands, now, this was his face, wasn’t it? His face! The face you saw in the garden, in the church, in the auditorium, the face that you saw all those many times. And the brown hair, oh yes, the brown hair.

He let it slide to the floor with the others. He backed away from it, but the eye pits were staring up at him, and the lips were moving. Did Rowan see it?

“Do you hear it talking?”

Voices all around him, but there was only one voice, one clear searing soundless voice:

You cannot stop me. You cannot stop her. You do my bidding. My patience is like the patience of the Almighty. I see to the finish. I see the thirteen. I shall be flesh when you are dead.

“He’s speaking to me, the devil’s speaking to me! You hear it?”

He was out of the door and down the stairs before he realized what he was doing, or that his heart was thundering in his ears, and that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t endure it any longer, he had always known it would be like this, the plunging into the nightmare, and that was enough, wasn’t it, what did they want of him, what did she want? That bastard had spoken to him! That thing he had seen standing in the garden had spoken to him, and through that rotted head! He was no coward, he was a human man! But he couldn’t take any more of it.

He’d torn off his coat and thrown it away in the corner of the hallway. Ah, the muck on his fingers, he couldn’t wipe it off.

Belle’s room. Clean and quiet. I’m sorry about the filth, please let me lie down on the clean bed. She was helping him, thank God for that, not trying to stop him.

The bedspread was clean and white and full of dust but the dust was clean, and the sun coming through the opened windows was beautiful and full of dust, Belle. Belle is what he touched now, the soft sweet spirit of Belle.

He was lying on his back. She had the gloves for him. She was wiping his hands with the warm washcloth, so lovingly, and her face was full of concern. She pressed her fingers to his wrist.

“Lie quiet, Michael. I have the gloves here. Lie quiet.”

What was that cold hard thing near his cheek? He reached up. Belle’s rosary, and it was tangling painfully in his hair when he pulled it loose, but that was OK. He wanted it.

And there was Belle. Oh, how lovely.

He tried to tell Rowan Belle was standing there. Rowan was listening to his pulse. But Belle was gone. He had a rosary in his hands; he’d felt its cold beads next to his face, and Belle had been right there, talking to him.

There she was.

“Rest, Michael,” Belle said. Sweet tremulous voice like Aunt Viv. She was fading but he could still see her. “Don’t be afraid of me, Michael, I’m not one of them, that’s not why I’m here.”

“Make them talk to me, make them tell me what they want. Not them, but the ones who came to me. Was it Deborah?”

“Lie quiet, Michael, please.”

What did you say, Rowan? His mouth hadn’t moved.

“We aren’t meant to have these powers,” he said. “They destroy the human in us. You’re human when you’re at the hospital. I was human when I had the hammer and nails in my hands.”

Everything was sliding. How could he explain to her, it had been like scaling a mountain, it had been like all the physical work he’d ever put his hands to, and his back to, done in a single hour. But she wasn’t there. She’d kissed him and laid a quilt over him and gone out because he was asleep. Belle was sitting at the dresser, such a lovely picture. Sleep, Michael.

“Are you going to be here when I wake up?”

“No, darling, I’m not really here now. It’s their house, Michael. I’m not one of them.”

Sleep.

He clutched at the rosary beads. Millie Dear said, Time to go to church. The rooms are so clean and quiet. They love each other. Pearl gray gabardine. It has to become our house. That’s why I loved it so when I was small and I’d walk here. Loved it. Our house. Never any quarrel between Belle and Millie Dear. So nice … Something almost adorable about Belle with her face so pretty in old age, like a flower pressed in a book, tinted still and fragrant.

Deborah said to him, … incalculable power, power to transmute …

He shuddered.

… not easy, so difficult you can scarce imagine it, the hardest thing perhaps that you …

I can do this!

Sleep.

And through his sleep, he heard the comforting sound of breaking glass.

When he awoke, Aaron was there. Rowan had brought him a change of clothes from the hotel, and Aaron helped him into the bathroom, so that he could wash and change. It was spacious and actually comfortable.

Every muscle in him ached. His back ached. His hands burned. He had the antsy awful feeling that he’d had all those weeks on Liberty Street, until he pulled the gloves back on and took a swallow of the beer Aaron gave him at his request. The pain in his muscles was awful, and even his eyes were tired, as if he’d been reading for hours by a poor light.

“I’m not going to get drunk,” he told both of them.

Rowan explained that his heart had been racing, that whatever had happened it had been an extreme physical exertion, that a pulse reading like that was something you expected after a man had run a four-minute mile. It was important that he rest, and that he not remove the gloves again.

OK by him. He would have loved nothing better than to encase his hands in concrete!

They went back to the hotel together, ordered supper, and sat quietly in the living room of the suite. For two hours, he told them everything he had seen:

He told them about the little snatches of the visions that were coming back to him even before he’d taken off the gloves. He told them about the first vision when he held Deirdre’s nightgown, and how it was Julien he’d seen in the hellish place, and how he’d seen him upstairs.

He told and he told. He described and described. He wished Aaron would speak, but he understood why Aaron did not.

He told them about Lasher’s ugly prophecy, and the weird feeling of intimacy he had with the thing now though he had not really touched it but merely that rotted stinking head.

He told them finally about Belle, and then exhausted from the telling, he sat there, wanting another beer, but afraid they’d think he was a drunk if he drank another, then giving in and getting up and getting it out of the refrigerator no matter what they thought.

“I don’t know why I’m involved, any more than I did before,” he said. “But I know they’re there, in that house. You remember Cortland said he wasn’t one of them. And Belle said to me she wasn’t one of them … if I didn’t imagine it … well, the others who are part of it are there! And that thing altered matter, just a little but it did it, it possessed the dead bodies and worked on the cells.

“It wants Rowan, I know it does. It wants Rowan to use her power to alter matter! Rowan has more of that power than any of the others before her. Hell, she knows what the cells are, how they operate, how they’re structured!”

Rowan seemed struck by those words. Aaron explained that after Michael had gone to sleep, and Rowan was sure his pulse was normal, that she had called Aaron and asked him to come to the house. He’d brought crates of ice in which to pack the specimens in the attic, and together they had opened each jar, photographed the contents, and then packed it away.

The specimens were at Oak Haven now. They were frozen. They’d be shipped to Amsterdam in the morning, which was what Rowan wanted. Aaron had also removed Julien’s books, and the trunk of dolls, and they too would go to the Motherhouse. But Aaron wanted to photograph the dolls first and he wanted to examine the books, and of course Rowan had agreed to all this, or it wouldn’t have happened.

So far, the books appeared to be no more than ledgers, with various cryptic entries in French. If there was an autobiography such as Richard Llewellyn had indicated, it had not been in that attic room.

It gave Michael an irrational relief to know those things were no longer in the house. He was on his fourth beer now, as they sat together on the velvet couches. He didn’t care what they thought about it. Just one night’s peace, for Chrissakes, he thought. And he had to slow down his brain so he could think it through. Besides, he wasn’t getting drunk. He didn’t want to be drunk.

But what was one more beer now, and besides they were here where they were safe.

At last, they fell quiet. Rowan was staring at Michael, and suddenly for the whole disaster Michael felt mortally ashamed.

“And how are you, my dear?” asked Michael. “After all this madness. I’m not being very much help to you, am I? I must have scared you to death. Do you wish you’d followed your adoptive mother’s advice and stayed in California?”

“You didn’t scare me,” she said affectionately, “and I liked taking care of you. I told you that once before. But I’m thinking. All the wheels in my head are turning. It’s the strangest mixture of elements, this whole thing.”

“Explain.”

“I want my family,” she said. “I want my cousins, all nine hundred of them or however many there are. I want my house. I want my history-and I mean the one Aaron gave to us. But I don’t want this damned thing, this secret mysterious evil thing. I don’t want it, and yet it’s so … so seductive!”

Michael shook his head. “It’s like I told you last night. It’s irresistible.”

“No, not irresistible,” she said, “but seductive.”

“And dangerous?” Aaron suggested. “I think we are more certain of that now than ever. I think we know we are talking of a creature which can change matter.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Rowan. “I examined those stinking things as best I could. The changes were insignificant; they were changes in the surface tissue. But of course the samples were hopelessly old and corroded … ”

“But what about the one with the face like Lasher?” Michael asked. “The duplicate?”

She shook her head. “No evidence to indicate it wasn’t a look-alike person,” she said. “Julien looked like Lasher. Remarkably so. Again the changes may have been skin deep. Impossible to tell.”

“OK, skin deep, but what about that?” Michael pressed. “You ever heard of a thing that could do that? We aren’t talking about a blush, we’re talking about something permanent! Something there after a century.”

“You know what the mind can do,” said Rowan. “I don’t have to tell you that people can control their bodies to an amazing extent by thought. They can make themselves die if they want to. They’ve been known to make themselves levitate, if you believe the anecdotal evidence. Stilling heart rates, raising temperatures, that’s all well documented. The saints in their trances could make the wounds of the stigmata open in their hands. They can also make these same wounds close. Matter is subject to mind, and we are only beginning to understand the extent of it. And besides, we know that when this thing materializes it has a solid body. At least it seems solid. So the thing changed the subcutaneous tissue of a corpse. What of it? It wasn’t even a live body, from what you’ve told me. It’s all rather crude and imprecise.”

“You amaze me,” said Michael almost coldly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. But I have a horrible feeling it’s all planned that you’re who you are, that you’re a brilliant doctor! It’s all planned.”

“Calm down, Michael. There are too many flaws in this whole story for everything to be planned. Nothing’s planned in this family. Consider the history.”

“It wants to be human, Rowan,” said Michael, “that’s the meaning of what it said to Petyr van Abel and to me. It wants to be human, and it wants you to help it. What did the ghost of Stuart Townsend say to you, Aaron. It said, ‘It’s all planned.’ ”

“Yes,” said Aaron thoughtfully, “but it’s a mistake to over-interpret that dream. And I think Rowan is right. You cannot assume that you know what is planned. And by the way, for what it’s worth, I don’t think this thing can become human. It wants to have a body, perhaps, but I don’t think that it would ever be human.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” said Michael, “just beautiful. And I do think it planned everything. It planned for Rowan to be taken away from Deirdre. That’s why it killed Cortland. It planned for Rowan to be kept away until she’d become not only a witch, but a witch doctor. It planned the very moment of her return.”

“But again,” said Rowan, “why did it show itself to you? If you’re to intervene, why did it show itself to you?”

He sighed. With a sinking heart he thought about his pleas to Deborah, about touching the old doll of Deborah, and not seeing her or hearing her voice. The delirium came back to him, the stench of the room, and the ugliness of the rotted specimens. He thought of the mystery of the doorway. Of the spirit’s strange words, I see the thirteen.

“I’m going on with my own plan,” said Rowan calmly. “I’m going to claim the legacy and the house, just as I told you. I still want to restore the house. I want to live in it. I won’t be deterred from it.” She looked at him, expecting him to say something. “And this being, no matter how mysterious he is, is not going to get in the way of that, if I have something to say about it. I told you it’s overplayed its hand.”

She looked at Michael, almost angrily. “Are you with me?” she demanded.

“Yes, I’m with you, Rowan. I love you! And I think you’re right to go ahead. We can start on the house any damn time you want. I want that too.”

She was pleased, immensely pleased, but still her calm distressed him. He looked at Aaron.

“What do you think, Aaron?” he asked. “About what the creature said, about my role in this? You have to have an interpretation.”

“Michael, what’s important is that you interpret. That you regain an understanding of what happened to you. I have no certain interpretation of anything.

“This may sound frightfully strange to you, but as a member of the Talamasca, as the brother of Petyr, and Arthur and Stuart, I’ve already accomplished my most important goals here. I’ve made successful contact with both of you. The Mayfair history has been given to Rowan. And you have some knowledge now, fragmentary and biased as it may be to assist you.”

“You guys are a bunch of monks,” said Michael grumpily. He lifted his beer in a careless toast. “ ‘We watch, and we are always here.’ Aaron, why did all this happen?”

Aaron laughed good-naturedly, but he shook his head. “Michael, Catholics always want us to offer the consolations of the church. We can’t do it. I don’t know why it’s happened. I do know that I can teach you to control the power in your hands, to shut it off at will so it stops tormenting you.”

“Maybe,” said Michael wearily. “Right now I wouldn’t take off these gloves to shake hands with the president of the United States.”

“When you want to work with it,” said Aaron, “I’m at your service. I’m here for both of you.” He looked at Rowan for a long moment and then back to Michael. “I don’t have to warn you to be careful, do I?”

“No,” said Rowan. “But what about you? Has anything else happened since the traffic accident?”

“Little things,” said Aaron. “They’re not important in themselves. And it might very well be my imagination. I’m as human as the next man, as far as that goes. I feel I’m being watched however, and menaced in a rather subtle way.”

Rowan started to interrupt, but he gestured for silence.

“I have my guard up. I’ve been in these situations before. And one very odd aspect of the whole thing is this: when I’m with you-either of you-I don’t feel this … this presence near me. I feel completely safe.”

“If it harms you,” said Rowan, “it makes its final tragic error. Because I shall never address it or recognize it in any way. I’ll try to kill it when I see it. All its schemes will be in vain.”

Aaron reflected for a moment.

“Do you think it knows that?” asked Rowan.

“Possibly,” said Aaron. “But it’s like everything else. A puzzle. A pattern can be a puzzle. It can involve great and intricate order; or it can be a labyrinth. I honestly don’t know what it knows. I do believe that Michael is entirely right. It wants a human body. There seems no doubt of it. But what it knows and what it doesn’t know … I can’t say. I don’t know what it really is. I don’t guess anyone knows.”

He took a sip of his coffee and then moved the cup away. Then he looked at Rowan.

“There’s no doubt it will approach you, of course. You realize this. This antipathy you feel won’t keep it at bay forever. I doubt it’s keeping it at bay now. It’s simply waiting for a proper opportunity.”

“God,” Michael whispered. It was like hearing that an assailant would soon attack the person he loved most in all the world. He felt a crippling jealousy and anger.

Rowan was looking at Aaron. “What would you do if you were me?” asked Rowan.

“I’m not sure,” Aaron answered. “But I cannot emphasize enough that it is dangerous.”

“The history told me that.”

“And that it’s treacherous.”

“The history told me that too. Do you think I should try to make contact with it?”

“No. I don’t. I think letting it come to you is the wisest thing you can do. And for the love of God, try to remain in complete control always.”

“There’s no getting away from it, is there?”

“I don’t think so. And I can make a guess as to what it will do when it approaches, you.”

“What?”

“It will demand your secrecy and your cooperation. Or it will refuse to reveal itself or its purposes fully.”

“It will divide you from us,” said Michael.

“Exactly,” Aaron went on.

“Why do you think it will do that?”

Aaron shrugged. “Because that is what I would do if I were it.”

“What’s the chance of driving it out? Of a straight-out exorcism?”

“I don’t know,” said Aaron. “Those rituals certainly do work, but I myself don’t know how to make them work, and I don’t know what the effect would be upon an entity this powerful. You see, that is the remarkable thing. This being is a monarch among its kind. A sort of genius.”

She laughed softly.

“It’s so cunning and unpredictable,” Aaron said. “I’d be dead right now if it wanted me to be dead. Yet it doesn’t kill me.”

“For God’s sake, Aaron,” Michael said, “don’t challenge it.”

“It knows I would hate it,” said Rowan, “if it hurt you.”

“Yes, that may explain why it hasn’t gone farther. But there we are again, at the beginning. Whatever you do, Rowan, never lose sight of the history. Consider the fate of Suzanne, and Deborah, and Stella, and Antha and Deirdre. Maybe if we knew the full story of Marguerite or Katherine, or Marie Claudette or the others from Saint-Domingue their stories would be just as tragic. And if any one character in the drama can be held responsible for so much suffering and death, it is Lasher.”

Rowan seemed lost in her thoughts for a moment. “God, I wish it would go away,” she murmured.

“That would be too much to ask for, I think,” said Aaron. He sighed and took out his pocket watch, and then rose from the couch. “I’m going to leave you now. I’ll be upstairs in my suite if you need me.”

“Thank God you’re staying,” said Rowan. “I was afraid you’d go back to Oak Haven.”

“No. I have Julien’s books upstairs, and I think I should like to be in town just now. As long as I don’t crowd you.”

“You don’t crowd us at all,” said Rowan.

“Let me ask you one more thing,” Michael said. “When you were in the house, what did it feel like?”

Aaron gave a little laugh and shook his head. He considered for a minute. “I think you can imagine,” he said gently. “But one thing did surprise me-that it was so beautiful; so grand and yet so inviting, with all the windows opened and the sun coming in. I suppose I thought it would be forbidding. But nothing could have been farther from the truth.”

This was the answer Michael had hoped to hear, but the mood was still on him from the long ordeal of the afternoon, and it failed to cheer him.

“It’s a wonderful house,” said Rowan, “and it’s already changing. We’re already making it ours. How long will it take, Michael, to bring it back to what it was meant to be?”

“Not long, Rowan, two, three months, maybe less. By Christmas it could be finished. I’m itching to do it. If I could just lose this feeling … ”

“What feeling?”

“That it’s all planned.”

“Forget about that,” said Rowan crossly.

“Let me make a suggestion,” Aaron said. “Get a good night’s sleep, then proceed with what you really want to do-with the legal questions at hand, with the settling of the estate, with the house perhaps-all the good things you want to do. And be on guard. Be on guard always. When our mysterious friend approaches, insist upon your own terms.”

Michael sat sullenly staring at the beer as Rowan walked Aaron to the door. She came back, settled down beside him, and slipped her arm around him.

“I’m scared, Rowan,” he said, “and I hate it. Positively hate it.”

“I know, Michael,” she said, “but we’re going to win.”

That night, after Rowan had been asleep for hours, Michael got up, went into the living room, and took the notebook out of his valise which Aaron had given him at the retreat house. He felt normal now. And the abnormalities of the day seemed strangely distant. Though he was still sore all over, he felt rested. And it was comforting to know Rowan was only a few feet away, and that Aaron slept in the suite above.

Now Michael wrote down everything he had told them. He went through it in writing as he had gone through it in words, only more slowly, and perhaps more thoughtfully, and he talked about it with himself in the notebook as he would in a diary because that is what the notebook had become.

He wrote down all he could remember of the little fragments that had come back before he had taken off the gloves. And it was not surprising that he could remember almost nothing at all. And then the beginning of the catastrophe when he’d held Deirdre’s nightgown in his hand:

“Same drums as the Comus Parade. Or any such parade. The point is, an awful frightening sound, a sound to do with some sort of dark and potentially destructive energy.”

He stopped. Then went on. “I remember something else too, now. At Rowan’s house in Tiburon. After we made love. I woke up thinking the place was on fire and there were all kinds of people downstairs. I remember now. It was the same ambience, the same lurid sort of light, the same sinister quality.

“And the fact of the matter was, that Rowan was just down there by the fire she’d lighted in the fireplace.

“But it was the same feeling. Fire and people there, many many people, crowded together, a commotion in the flickering light.

“And I had no sense of recognition when I saw Julien upstairs, or when I saw Charlotte, or Mary Beth, or Antha, poor, tragic Antha scrambling over that roof. To see something like that is to feel it; it swallows you. There’s nothing left of you inside while you’re seeing it. But they weren’t in my visions. None of them. And Deborah was just a body crumpled on the pyre. She wasn’t standing there with them. Now surely that means something in itself.”

He reread what he had written. He wanted to add more but he was leery of embellishment. He was leery of logic. Deborah’s not one of them? That’s why she wasn’t there?

He went on to describe the rest. “Antha was wearing a cotton dress. I saw the patent leather belt she wore. When she crawled across the roof, she tore her stockings. Her knees were bleeding. But her face, that was the unforgettable part, her eye torn out of the socket. And the sound of her voice. I’ll carry that sound to the grave with me. And Julien. Julien looked as solid as she did while he was watching. Julien wore black. And Julien was young. Not a boy, by any means. But a vigorous man, not an old man. Even in the bed he wasn’t old.”

Again he paused. “And what else did Lasher say that was new. Something about patience, about waiting … and then that mention of the thirteen.

“But the thirteen what? If it’s a number on a doorway, I haven’t seen it. The jars, there weren’t thirteen jars. There were more like twenty, but I’ll verify this with Rowan.”

Again, he stopped, thought about embellishments, but didn’t add them.

“The cheerful fiend didn’t say a damn thing about a doorway,” he wrote. “No, just his threat that I’d be dead while he’d be flesh and blood.”

Dead. Tombs. Something Rowan had said before the day was shattered, like a piece of glass. Or like a glass jar. Something about a keyhole doorway carved on the Mayfair tomb.

“I’ll go there tomorrow, and see for myself. If the number thirteen is carved somewhere on that doorway, I hope to God it brings me more enlightenment than what happened today.

“Whatever happens, no matter what I see, or what I think it means, I begin some serious work tomorrow. And so does Rowan. She goes downtown early with Ryan and Pierce to talk about the legacy. I start to talk to the other contractors in town. I start real, true, honest work on the house.

“And that feels better than any other course of action. It feels like a form of salvation.

“Let’s see how Lasher likes it. Let’s see what he chooses to do.”

He left the notebook on the table and went back to bed.

In sleep, Rowan was so smooth and expressionless that she was like a perfect wax mannequin beneath the sheets. The warmth of her skin surprised him when he kissed her. Stirring slowly, she turned and wound her arms around him, and nuzzled against his neck. “Michael … ” she whispered in a dreamy voice. “St. Michael, the archangel … ” Her fingers touched his lips, as if groping in the dark to know that he was really there. “Love you … ”

“I love you, too, darlin’,” he whispered. “You’re mine, Rowan.” And he felt the heat of her breasts against his arm, as he drew her close to him. She turned over and her soft fleecy sex was a little flame against his thigh, as she settled back into sleep.