The Witching Hour (132 page)

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?”