The Witching Hour (133 page)

“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.”