The Witching Hour (103 page)

“I’ve heard those words before,” I answered.

“I want you to go away,” she said. “You’re a nice man. I like you. I don’t want him to hurt you. I’ll tell him that he mustn’t—” She stopped, confused.

“Deirdre, I believe I can help you … ”

“No!”

“I can help you fight him if that’s your decision. I know people in England who … ”

“No!”

I waited, then said softly, “If you ever need my help, call me.” She didn’t answer. I could feel her utter exhaustion. Her near despair. I told her where I was staying in Denton, that I would be there until tomorrow, and that if I didn’t hear from her I would go. I felt an utter failure, but I could not hurt her any more! I gazed off into the whispering bamboo. It was getting darker and darker. And there were no lights in this rank garden.

“But your aunt is wrong about us,” I said, unsure of her attention. I stared up at the little bit of sky above which was now quite white. “We want to tell you what we know. We want to give you what we have. It’s true we care about you because you are a special person, but we care far more about you than we care about him. You could come to our house in London. Stay there as long as you like. We’ll introduce you to others who’ve seen such things, battled them. We’ll help you. And who knows, perhaps we can somehow make him go away. And any time you want to go, we’ll help you to go.” (She didn’t answer.) “You know I’m speaking the truth,” I said. “And I know that you know.”

I looked at her, quite afraid to see the pain in her face. She was staring at me exactly the way she had been before, her eyes sad and glazed with tears, and her hands limp in her lap. And directly behind her,
he stood
, not even an inch from her, brilliantly realized, staring with his brown eyes at me.

I cried out before I could stop myself. Like a fool, I leapt to my feet.

“What is it!” she cried. She was terrified. She sprang up off the bench and threw herself in my arms. “Tell me! What is it?”

He was gone. A gust of heated breeze moved the towering shoots of bamboo. Nothing but shadows there. Nothing but the rank closeness of the garden. And a gradual drop in temperature. As if the door to a furnace room had been swung shut.

I closed my eyes, holding her as firmly as I could, trying not to shake right out of my shoes, and to comfort her, while I
memorized what I had seen. A malicious young man, smiling coldly as he stood behind her, clothes prim and dark and without detail as if the entire energy of the being were absorbed in the lustrous eyes and the white teeth and the gleaming skin. Otherwise he had been the man whom so many others had described.

She was now quite hysterical. Her hand was clamped over her mouth, and she was swallowing her sobs. She pushed away from me roughly. And ran up the small overgrown stairs to the path.

“Deirdre!” I called out. But she was already out of sight in the darkness. I glimpsed a smear of white through the distant trees, and then I did not even hear her footfall any longer.

I was alone in the old botanical garden, and it was dark, and I was mortally afraid for the first time in my life. I was so afraid that I became angry. I started to follow her, or rather the path she had taken, and I forced myself not to run, but to take one firm step after another until at last I saw the distant lights of the dormitories, and the service road behind them, and heard the traffic, and felt once again that I was safe.

Entering the freshman dormitory, I inquired of the gray-haired woman at the desk as to whether Deirdre Mayfair had just come in. She had. Safe and sound, I thought.

“It’s supper now, sir. You can leave a message if you like.”

“Yes, of course, I’ll call her later.” I took out a small plain envelope, wrote Deirdre’s name on it, then wrote a note explaining once more that I was at the hotel if she wished to contact me, and placing my card in the envelope with the note, I sealed the envelope and gave it to the woman for delivery, and went out.

Without mishap I reached the hotel, went to my room, and rang London. It was an hour before my call could be put through, during which time I lay there on the bed, with the phone beside me, and all I could think was, I’ve seen him. I’ve seen “the man.” I’ve seen “the man” for myself. I’ve seen what Petyr saw and what Arthur saw. I’ve seen Lasher with my own eyes.

Scott Reynolds, our director, was calm but adamant when I finally made the connection.

“Get the hell out of there. Come home.”

“Take a deep breath, Scott. I haven’t come this far to be frightened off by a spirit we have studied from afar for three hundred years.”

“This is how you use your own judgment, Aaron? You who know the history of the Mayfair Witches from beginning to end? The thing isn’t trying to frighten you. It’s trying to entice you. It wants you to torment the girl with your inquiries. It’s losing her, and you’re its hope of getting her back. The aunt, whatever
else she may be, is on to the truth. You make that girl talk to you about what she’s been through and you’ll give that spirit the energy it wants.”

“I’m not trying to make her do anything, Scott. But I don’t think she is winning her battle. I’m going back to New Orleans. I want to be near at hand.”

Scott was on the verge of ordering me to leave when I pulled rank. I was older than he was. I had declined the appointment as director. Hence he’d received it. I was not going to be ordered off this case.

“Well, this is like offering a bromide to a person who’s burning to death, but don’t drive back to New Orleans. Take the train.”

That was a surprisingly welcome suggestion. No dark dismal shoulderless roads through the Louisiana swampland. But a nice cheerful, crowded train.

The following day, I left a note for Deirdre that I would be at the Royal Court in New Orleans. I drove the rental car to Dallas and took the train back to New Orleans from there. It was only an eight-hour trip, and I was able to write in my diary the entire way.

At length I considered what had happened. The girl had renounced her history and her psychic powers. Her aunt had reared her to reject the spirit, Lasher. But for years she’d been losing the battle, quite obviously. But what if we gave her our assistance? Might the hereditary chain be broken? Might the spirit depart the family like a spirit fleeing a burning house which it has haunted for years?

Even as I wrote out these thoughts, I was dogged by my remembrance of the apparition. The thing was so powerful! It was more seemingly incarnate and powerful than any such phantom I had ever beheld. Yet it had been a fragmentary image.

In my experience only the ghosts of people who have very recently died appear with such seeming substance. For example, the ghost of a pilot killed in action may appear on the very day of his death in his sister’s parlor, and she will say after, “Why, he was so real. I could see the mud on his shoes!”

Ghosts of the long departed almost never had such density or vividness.

And discarnate entities? They could possess bodies of the living and of the dead, yes, but appear on their own with such solidity and such intensity?

This thing liked to appear, didn’t it? Of course it did. That was why so many people saw it. It liked to have a body if only for a split second. So it didn’t just speak with a soundless voice
to the witch, or make an image which existed entirely in her mind. No, it made itself somehow material so that others saw it and even heard it. And with great effort—perhaps very great effort, it could make itself appear to cry or smile.

So what was the agenda of this being? To gain strength so that it might make appearances of greater and greater duration and perfection? And above all what was the meaning of the curse, which in Petyr’s letter had read: “I shall drink the wine and eat the meat and know the warmth of the woman when you are no longer even bones”?

Lastly, why was it not tormenting me or enticing me now? Had it used the energy of Deirdre to make this appearance, or my energy? (I had seen very few spirits in my life. I was not a strong medium. In fact, at that point, I had never seen an apparition which could not have been explained as some sort of illusion created by light and shadow, or an overactive mind.)

Perhaps foolishly I had the feeling that as long as I was away from Deirdre it couldn’t do me harm. What had happened with Petyr van Abel had to do with his powers of mediumship and how the thing manipulated them. I had very little of that sort of power.

But it would be a very bad mistake to underestimate the being. I needed to be on guard from here on out.

I arrived in New Orleans at eight in the evening, and strange unpleasant little things began to happen at once. I was nearly run down by a taxi outside Union Station. Then the taxi which took me to my hotel nearly collided with another car as we pulled up to the curb.

In the small lobby of the Royal Court, a drunken tourist bumped into me and then tried to start a brawl. Fortunately, his wife diverted him, apologizing repeatedly, as the bellhops assisted her in getting the man upstairs. But my shoulder was bruised from this small incident. I was shaken from the close calls in the cab.

Imagination, I thought. Yet as I climbed the stairs to my first-floor room, a weak portion of the old wooden railing came loose in my hands. I almost lost my balance. The bellhop was immediately apologetic. An hour later, as I was noting all these things in my diary, a fire broke out on the third floor of the hotel.

I stood in the cramped French Quarter street with other uncomfortable guests for the better part of an hour before it was determined that the small blaze had been put out without smoke or water damage to any other rooms. “What was the cause?” I asked. An embarrassed employee murmured something about
rubbish in a storage closet, and assured me that everything was all right.

For a long time, I considered the situation. Really, all this might have been coincidence. I was unharmed, and so was everyone else involved in these little incidents, and what was required of me now was a stalwart frame of mind. I resolved to move just a little bit more slowly through the world, to look around myself with greater care, and to try to remain conscious of all that was going on around me at all times.

The night passed without any further mishap, though I slept very uneasily and woke often. And the following morning after breakfast, I called our investigative detectives in London, asked them to hire a Texas investigator and to find out as discreetly as possible what he could about Deirdre Mayfair.

I then sat down and wrote a long letter to Cortland. I explained who I was, what the Talamasca was, and how we had followed the history of the Mayfair family since the seventeenth century during which one of our representatives had rescued Deborah Mayfair from serious jeopardy in her native Donnelaith. I explained about the Rembrandt of Deborah in Amsterdam. I went on to explain that we were interested in Deborah’s descendants because they seemed to possess genuine psychic powers, manifesting in every generation, and we were desirous of making contact with the family, with a view to sharing our records with those who were interested, and in offering information to Deirdre Mayfair, who seemed to be a person deeply burdened by her ability to see a spirit who in former times was called Lasher and might still be called Lasher to this day.

“Our representative, Petyr van Abel, first glimpsed this spirit in Donnelaith in the 1600s. It has been seen countless times since in the vicinity of your home on First Street. I have only just seen it in another location, with my own eyes.”

I then copied out the identical letter to Carlotta Mayfair, and after much consideration, put down the address and phone number of my hotel. After all, what was the point of hiding behind a post office box?

I drove up to First Street, placed Carlotta’s letter in the mailbox, and then drove out to Metairie, where I put Cortland’s letter through the slot in his door. After that, I found I was overcome by foreboding, and though I went back to my hotel, I did not go up to my room. Rather I told the desk I would be in the first-floor bar, and there I remained all evening, slowly savoring a good sample of Kentucky sipping whiskey and writing in my diary about the whole affair.

The bar was small and quiet, and opened onto a charming
courtyard, and though I sat with my back to this view, facing the lobby doors for reasons I cannot quite explain, I enjoyed the little place. The feeling of foreboding was slowly melting away.

At about eight o’clock, I looked up from my diary to realize that someone was standing very near my table. It was Cortland.

I had only just completed my narrative of the Mayfair file, as indicated. I had studied countless photographs of Cortland. But it was not a photograph of Cortland which came to mind as our eyes met.

The tall, black-haired man smiling down at me was the image of Julien Mayfair, who had died in 1914. The differences seemed unimportant. It was Julien with larger eyes, darker hair, and perhaps a more generous mouth. But Julien nevertheless. And quite suddenly the smile appeared grotesque. A mask.

I made a mental note of these odd thoughts, even as I invited the man to sit down.

He was wearing a linen suit, much like my own, with a pale lemon-colored shirt and pale tie.

Thank God it’s not Carlotta, I thought, at which point he said: “I don’t think you will hear from my cousin Carlotta. But I think it’s time you and I had a talk.” Very pleasant and completely insincere voice. Deeply southern but in a unique New Orleans way. The gleam in the dark eyes was charming and faintly awful.

This man either hated me or regarded me as a damnable nuisance. He turned and signaled the bartender. “Another drink for Mr. Lightner, please, and a sherry for me.”

He sat opposite me across the little marble table, his long legs crossed and turned to one side. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you, Mr. Lightner? Thank you.” He withdrew a beautiful gold cigarette case from his pocket, laid it down, offered me a cigarette, and when I refused, lit one for himself. Again his cheerful demeanor struck me as entirely contrived. I wondered how it might appear to a normal person.