The Witching Hour (162 page)

She watched Beatrice go down the marble steps, and out the gate, the cold air gusting into the hallway. Then she shut the front door.

She stood quiet for a long time, her head bowed, letting the warmth seep around her, and then she walked back in the parlor and stared at the enormous green tree. Just beyond the arch it stood, touching the ceiling. A more perfectly triangular Christmas tree she’d never seen. It filled the whole window to the side porch. And only a small sprinkling of needles lay beneath it on the polished floor. Wild, it looked, primitive, like part of the woods come inside.

She went to the fireplace, knelt down, and placed another small log on the blaze.

“Why have you tried to hurt Michael?” she whispered, staring into the flames.

“I have not tried to hurt him. ”

“You are lying to me. Have you tried to hurt Aaron too?”

“I do as you command me to do, Rowan.” The voice was soft and deep as always. “My world is pleasing you.”

She rested back on her heels, arms folded, eyes misting, so that the flames were softened into a great flickering blur.

“He is not to suspect anything, do you hear me?” she whispered.

“I always hear you, Rowan.”

“He is to believe everything is as it was.”

“That is my wish, Rowan. We are in accord. I dread his enmity because it will make you unhappy. I will do only as you wish.”

But it couldn’t go on forever, and suddenly the fear that gripped her was so total that she couldn’t speak or move. She couldn’t attempt to disguise her feelings. She could not retreat into an inner sanctum of her mind as Aaron had told her to do. She sat there, shivering, staring at the flames.

“How will it end, Lasher? I don’t know how to do what you want of me.”

“You know, Rowan.”

“It will take years of study. Without a deeper understanding of you, I can’t hope to begin.”

“Oh, but you know all about me, Rowan. And you seek to deceive me. You love me but you do not love me. You would lure me into the flesh if you knew how in order to destroy me.”

“Would I?”

“Yes. It is an agony to feel your fear and your hatred, when I know what happiness waits for both of us. When I can see so far.”

“What would you have? The body of a man already alive? With consciousness knocked out of him through some sort of trauma, so that you could begin your fusion unimpeded by his mind? That’s murder, Lasher.”

Silence.

“Is that what you want? For me to commit murder? Because we both know it could be done that way.”

Silence.

“And I won’t commit that crime for you. I won’t kill one single living being so that you can live.”

She closed her eyes. She could actually hear him gathering, hear the pressure building, hear the draperies rustling as he moved against them, writhing and filling the room around her, and brushing against her cheeks and her hair.

“No. Let me alone,” she sighed. “I want to wait for Michael.”

“He will not be enough for you now, Rowan. It causes me pain to see you weep. But I am speaking the truth.”

“God, I hate you,” she whispered. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Through the blur of her tears she looked at the huge green tree.

“Ah, but you don’t hate me, Rowan,” he said. Fingers caressing her hair, stroking it back away from her forehead, tiny fingers stroking her neck.

“Leave me alone now, Lasher,” she pleaded. “If you love me, leave me alone.”

Leiden. She knew it was the dream again and she wanted to wake up. Also the baby needed her. She could hear it crying. I want to leave the dream. But they were all gathered at the windows, horrified by what was happening to Jan van Abel, the mob tearing him limb from limb.

“It wasn’t kept secret,” said Lemle. “It’s impossible for ignorant people to understand the importance of experimentation. What you do when you keep it secret is merely take the responsibility on yourself.”

“In other words, protecting them,” said Larkin.

He pointed to the body on the table. How patiently the man lay there, with his eyes open and all the tiny budlike organs shivering inside. Such little arms and legs.

“I can’t think with the baby crying.”

“You have to see the larger picture, the greater gain.”

“Where is Petyr? Petyr must be frantic after what’s happened to Jan van Abel.”

“The Talamasca will take care of him. We’re waiting for you to begin.”

Impossible. She stared at the little man with the truncated arms and legs and the tiny organs. Only the head was normal. That is a normal-sized head.

“One fourth of the size of the body, to be exact.”

Yes, the familiar proportion, she thought. Then the horror seized her as she stared down at it. But they were breaking the windows. The mob was streaming into the corridors of the University of Leiden, and Petyr was running towards her.

“No, Rowan. Don’t do it.”

She woke up with a start. Footsteps on the stairs.

She climbed out of the bed. “Michael?”

“I’m here, honey.”

Just a big shadow in the darkness, smelling of the winter cold, and then his warm trembling hands on her. Roughened and tender, and his face pressed against her.

“Oh, God, Michael, it’s been forever. Why did you leave me?”

“Rowan, honey … ”

“Why?” She was sobbing. “Don’t let me go, Michael, please. Don’t let me go.”

He cradled her in his arms.

“You shouldn’t have gone, Michael. You shouldn’t have.” She was crying and she knew he couldn’t even understand what she was saying, and that she shouldn’t say it, and finally she just covered him with kisses, savoring the saltiness and roughness of his skin, and the clumsy gentleness of his hands.

“Tell me what’s the matter, what’s really the matter?”

“That I love you. That when you’re not here, it’s … it’s like you aren’t real.”

She was half awake when he slipped away. She didn’t want that dream to come back. She’d been lying next to him, snuggled against his chest, spoon fashion, holding tight to his arm, and now as he got out of bed, she watched almost furtively as he pulled on his jeans, and brought the tight long-sleeved rugby shirt down over his head.

“Stay here,” she whispered.

“It’s the doorbell,” he said. “My little surprise. No, don’t get up. It’s nothing really, just something that I brought with me from San Francisco. Why don’t you go on and sleep?”

He bent to kiss her, and she tugged at his hair. She brought him down close to her with insistent fingers, until she could smell the warm skin of his forehead, and kiss him on that
smoothness, the bone underneath like a hard stone. She didn’t know why that felt so good to her, his skin so moist and warm and real. She kissed him hard on the mouth.

Even before his lips left her, the dream returned.

I don’t want to see that manikin on the table. “What is it? It can’t be alive.”

Lemle was gowned and masked and gloved for the surgery. He peered at her from under his mossy eyebrows. “You’re not even sterile. Get scrubbed, I need you.” The lights were like two merciless eyes trained on the table.

That thing with its tiny organs and its big eyes.

Lemle held something in his tongs. And the little body split open in the steaming incubator beside the table was a fetus, slumbering on with its chest gaping. That was a heart in the tongs, wasn’t it? You monster, that you would do that. “We’re going to have to work fast while the tissue is at its optimum … ”

“It’s very hard for us to come through,” said the woman.

“But who are you?” she asked.

Rembrandt was sitting by the window, so tired in his old age, his nose rounded, his hair in wisps. He looked up at her sleepily when she asked him what he thought, and then he took her hand in his fingers, and he placed it on her own breast.

“I know that painting,” she said, “the young bride.”

She woke up. The clock had struck two. She had waited in her sleep, thinking there would be more chimes, perhaps ten in number, which meant she’d slept late; but two? That was so late.

She heard music from far away. A harpsichord was playing and a low voice was singing, a slow mournful carol, an old Celtic carol about a child laid in the manger. Smell of the Christmas tree, sweetly fragrant, and of the fire burning. Delicious in the warmth.

She was lying on her side, looking at the window, at the crust of frost forming on the panes. Very slowly a figure began to take shape—a man, with his back to the glass and his arms folded.

She narrowed her eyes, observing the process—the darkly tanned face coming into focus, billions of tiny cells forming it, and the deep glistening green eyes. The perfect replica of jeans and a shirt. Detailed like a Richard Avedon photograph in which every hair of the head is distinct and shining. He relaxed his arms and came toward her. She could hear and see the movement of his garments. As he bent over her, she saw the pores in his skin.

So we are jealous, are we? She touched his cheek, touched
his forehead the way she had touched Michael, and felt a throb beneath it, like a body really there.

“Lie to him,” he said in a low voice, the lips barely moving. “If you love him, lie to him.”

She could almost feel breath against her face. Then she realized she was seeing through the face, seeing the window behind it.

“No, don’t let go,” she said. “Hold on.”

But the whole image convulsed; then it wavered like a paper cutout caught in a draft. She felt his panic in spasms of heat.

She reached out to take his wrist, but her hand closed on nothing. The hot draft swept over her and over the bed, and the draperies ballooned for a moment, and the frost rose and turned white on the panes.

“Kiss me,” she whispered, closing her eyes. Like wisps of hair across her face and her lips. “No. That’s not enough. Kiss me.” Only slowly did the density increase, and the touch become more palpable. He was tired from the materialization. Tired and slightly frightened. His cells and the other cells had almost undergone a molecular fusion. There must be a residue somewhere, or the minuscule bits of matter had been scattered so finely that they had penetrated the walls and the ceiling the same way he penetrated them. “Kiss me!” she demanded. She felt him struggling. And only now did he make invisible lips with which to do it, pushing an unseen tongue into her mouth.

Lie to him.

Yes, of course. I love you both, don’t I?

He didn’t hear her come down the steps. The draperies were all closed and the hallway was dark and hushed and warm. The fire was lighted in the front fireplace of the parlor. And the only other illumination came from the tree, which was now strung with countless tiny, twinkling lights.

She stood in the doorway watching him as he sat on the very top of the ladder, making some little adjustment, and whistling softly to himself with the recording of the old Irish Christmas song.

So mournful. It made her think of a deep, ancient wood in winter. And his whistling was such a small, easy, almost unconscious sound. She’d known that carol once. She had some dim memory of listening to it with Ellie, and it had made Ellie cry.

She leaned against the door frame, merely looking at the immense tree, all speckled with its tiny lights like stars, and breathing its deep woodsy perfume.

“Ah, there she is, my sleeping beauty,” he said. He gave her
one of those utterly loving and protective smiles that made her feel like rushing into his arms. But she didn’t move. She watched as he came down off the ladder with quick easy movements, and approached her. “Feel better now, my princess?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s so very beautiful,” she said. “And that song is so sad.”

She put her arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder as she looked up at the tree. “You’ve done a perfect job.”

“Ah, but now comes the fun part,” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek and drawing her into the room and towards the small table by the windows. A cardboard box stood open, and he gestured for her to look inside.

“Aren’t they lovely!” She picked up a small white bisque angel with the faintest blush to its cheeks, and gilded wings. And here was the most beautiful detailed little Father Christmas, a tiny china doll dressed in real red velvet. “Oh, they’re exquisite. Wherever did they come from?” She lifted the golden apple, and a lovely five-pointed star.

“Oh, I’ve had them for years. I was a college kid when I started collecting them. I never knew they were for this tree and this room, but they were. Here, you choose the first one. I’ve been waiting for you. I thought we’d do it together.”

“The angel,” she said. She lifted it by the hook and brought it close to the tree, the better to see it in the soft light. It held a tiny gilded harp in its hands, and even its little face was correctly painted with a fine reddened mouth and blue eyes. She lifted it as high as she could reach and slipped the curved hook over the thick part of the shivering branch. The angel quivered, the hook nearly invisible in the darkness, and hung suspended, as if poised like a hummingbird in flight.

“Do you think they do that, angels, they stop in midair like hummingbirds?” she asked in a whisper.

“Yeah, probably,” he said. “You know angels. They’re probably show-offs, and they can do anything they want.” He stood behind her, kissing her hair.

“What did I ever do without you here?” she said. As his arms went around her waist she clasped them with her hands, loving the sinewy muscles, the large strong fingers holding her so tight.

For a moment the fullness of the tree and the lovely play of twinkling light in the deep shadowy green branches utterly filled her vision. And the sad music of the carol filled her ears. The moment was suspended, like the delicate angel. There was no future, no past.

“I’m so glad you’re back,” she whispered closing her eyes.

“It was unbearable here without you. Nothing makes any sense without you. I never want to be without you again.” A deep throb of pain passed through her—a fierce terrible quaking that she locked inside her, as she turned to lay her head once more on his chest.

D
ECEMBER 23
. H
ARD
freeze tonight. Lovely, when all the Mayfairs were expected for cocktails and carol singing. Think of all those cars sliding on the icy streets. But it was wonderful to have this clean cold weather for Christmas. And they were predicting snow.