The Witching Hour (171 page)

When he closed his eyes, he saw them all again, in the flames and the smoke, the Mayfair Witches. He heard the beat of the drums, and he smelled the stench of the flames, and he heard Stella’s piercing laughter.

Then it would slip away.

The quiet would return, and he would be back in his early childhood, walking up First Street that long-ago Mardi Gras night with his mother, thinking, Ah, what a beautiful house.

Some time later, when Ryan had stopped talking and sat patiently in the room merely studying Michael, a load of questions obviously crowding Ryan’s brain, all of which he was afraid to voice, Michael asked if the family hated his being in the house. If they wanted him to relinquish it.

Ryan explained that they did not hate it at all. That they hoped Michael would live in the house. That they hoped Rowan would return, that some sort of reconciliation could be effected. And then Ryan seemed at a loss. Embarrassed and obviously deeply distressed, he said in a raw voice that the family “just couldn’t understand what had happened.”

A number of possible responses ran through Michael’s mind. From a cool distance, he imagined himself making mysterious remarks that would richly feed the old family legends; obscure allusions to the thirteen and to the door, and to “the man”; remarks that would be discussed for years to come perhaps, on lawns and at dinners, and in funeral parlors. But it was really unthinkable to do that. In fact, it was absolutely crucial to remain silent.

Then he heard himself say, with extraordinary conviction, “Rowan will come back.” And he didn’t say anything after that.

Early the next day, when Ryan came again, Michael did make one request—that his Aunt Vivian move into the house, if she
wanted to. He didn’t see any reason now for her to be alone in her apartment on the avenue. And if Aaron could be his guest at the house, that too would make him happy.

Ryan went into a long-drawn-out lawyerly confirmation that the house was Michael’s house, and that Michael need ask no one’s permission or approval to implement his smallest or greatest wish with regard to things at First Street. To this Ryan added his own deepest concern that Michael call upon him for “absolutely anything.”

Finally in the silence which ensued, Ryan broke down. He said he couldn’t understand where he and the family had failed Rowan. Rowan had begun shifting enormous sums of money out of their hands. The plans for Mayfair Medical had been put on hold. He simply couldn’t understand what had happened.

Michael said, “It wasn’t your fault. You had nothing to do with it.” And after a long time, during which Ryan sat there, apparently ashamed of his outburst, and looking confused and defeated, Michael said again: “She’ll come back. You wait and see. It isn’t over.”

On February 10, Michael was released from the hospital. He was still very weak, which was frustrating to him, but his heart muscle had showed remarkable improvement. His overall health was good. He rode uptown in a black limousine with Aaron.

The driver of the car was a pale-skinned black man named Henri, who would be living in the back
garçonnière
behind Deirdre’s oak, and taking care of everything for Michael.

The day was clear and warm. There had been a bitter freeze again right after Christmas, and several inundating rains, but the weather was now like spring, and the pink and red azaleas were blooming all over the property. The sweet olive had regained all of its beautiful green leaves in the aftermath of the freeze, and a new bright color was coming out on the oak trees.

Everybody was happy, explained Henri, because Mardi Gras was “just around the corner.” The parades would be starting any day now.

Michael took a walk around the garden. All the dead tropical plants had been cleared away, but the new banana trees were already springing up from the dark freeze-killed stumps, and even the gardenias were coming back, dropping their shriveled brown leaves and breaking out in dark glossy new foliage. The bony white crepe myrtle trees were still bare, but that was to be expected. All along the front fence the camellias were covered with dark red blossoms. And the tulip magnolias had only just
dropped their great saucerlike blooms; the flagstones were littered with their large pink petals.

The house itself was shining clean and in perfect order.

Aunt Vivian had taken the bedroom which had belonged to Carlotta, and Eugenia was still at the very far end of the second floor, near the kitchen stairway. Aaron slept in the second bedroom in the front, the room that had once belonged to Millie Dear.

Michael did not want to return to the front room, and they had readied the old northside master bedroom for him. It was quite inviting—even with the high-backed wooden bed in which Deirdre had died, now heaped with white down comforters and pillows. He liked in particular the small northside front porch on which he could go out and sit at the iron table and look out over the corner.

For days there was a procession of visitors. Bea came with Lily, and then Cecilia and Clancy and Pierce, and Randall came by with Ryan who had various papers to be signed, and others dropped in, whose names he had trouble remembering. Sometimes he talked to them; sometimes he didn’t. Aaron was very good at taking care of things for him. Aunt Vivian was very proficient at receiving people as well.

But he could see how deeply the cousins were troubled. They were chastened, restrained, and above all, bewildered. They were uneasy in the house, even at times a little jumpy.

Not so Michael. The house was empty, and clean as far as he was concerned. And he knew every little repair that had been done; every shade of paint that had been used; every bit of restored plaster or woodwork. It was his greatest accomplishment, right up to the new copper gutters, and down to the heart pine floors he’d stripped and stained himself. He felt just fine here.

“I’m glad to see you’re not wearing those awful gloves anymore,” Beatrice said. It was Sunday, and the second time she had come, and they were sitting in the bedroom.

“No, I don’t need them now,” said Michael. “It’s the strangest thing, but after the accident in the pool, my hands went back to normal.”

“You don’t see things anymore?”

“No,” he said. “Maybe I never used the power right. Maybe I didn’t use it in time. And so it was taken away from me.”

“Sounds like a blessing,” said Bea, trying to conceal her confusion.

“Doesn’t matter now,” said Michael.

Aaron saw Beatrice to the door. Only by chance did Michael wander past the head of the steps, and happen to hear her saying
to Aaron, “He looks ten years older.” Bea was crying, actually. She was begging Aaron to tell her how this tragedy had come about. “I could believe it,” she said, “that this house is cursed. It’s full of evil. They should never have planned to live in this house. We should have stopped them. You should make him get away from here.”

Michael went back into the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

When he looked into the mirror of Deirdre’s old dresser, he decided that Bea was right. He did look older. He hadn’t noticed the gray hair at his temples. There was a little sparkle of gray mixed in with all the rest too. And he had perhaps a few more lines in his face than he’d had before. Maybe even a lot of them. Especially around his eyes.

Suddenly he smiled. He hadn’t even noticed what he put on this afternoon. Now he saw that it was a dark satin smoking jacket, with velvet lapels, which Bea had sent to him at the hospital. Aunt Viv had laid it out for him. Imagine, Michael Curry, the Irish Channel boy, wearing a thing like that, he thought. It ought to belong to Maxim de Winter at Manderley. He gave a melancholy smile at his image, with one eyebrow raised. And the gray at his temples making him look, what? Distinguished.

“
Eh bien
, Monsieur,” he said, striving to sound to himself like the voice of Julien he’d heard on the street in San Francisco. Even his expression had changed somewhat. He felt he had a touch of Julien’s resignation.

Of course this was his Julien, the Julien he had seen on the bus, and whom Richard Llewellyn had once seen in a dream. Not the playful smiling Julien of his portraits, or the menacing laughing Julien of the dark hellish place full of smoke and fire. That place hadn’t really existed.

He went downstairs, slowly, the way the doctor recommended, and went into the library. There had never been anything in the desk since it was cleaned out after Carlotta’s death, and so he had made it his, and he kept his notebook there. His diary.

It was the same diary he’d started to keep on his first visit to Oak Haven. And he continued to write in it—making entries almost every day, because it was the only place that he could express what he really felt about what had happened.

Of course he had told Aaron everything. And Aaron was the only person he would ever tell.

But he needed this quiet, contemplative relationship with the blank page in which to voice his soul completely. It was beautiful
to sit here, only now and then looking up through the lace curtains at the passersby who were headed up to St. Charles Avenue to see the Venus parade. Only two more days until Mardi Gras.

But the one thing he didn’t like was that he could sometimes hear the drums in the quiet. That had happened yesterday, and he hated it.

When he was tired of writing, he took his copy of
Great Expectations
off the shelf, sat down at the end of the leather couch nearest the fireplace, and started reading. In a little while, Eugenia or Henri would come, he figured, and bring him something to eat. And maybe he’d eat it and maybe he wouldn’t.

“T
UESDAY
, F
EBRUARY 27
, Mardi Gras Night.

“I will never believe that what I saw the second time was a true vision. I maintain now and always will that it was Lasher’s doing. Those weren’t the Mayfair Witches, because they are not here, earthbound and waiting to pass through the door, though that might have been a lie he told them during their individual lives, and part of the pact which he used to gain their cooperation.

“I believe that as each one of them died, he or she either ceased to exist or attained a greater wisdom. And there was no intent to cooperate with any plan on this earth. If anything, attempts were made to thwart it.

“Such an attempt was made when Deborah and Julien came to me the first time. They told me about the plan and that I had to intervene, to subvert Rowan so that Rowan could not be seduced by Lasher and his deceptions. And in San Francisco, when they told me to go home, they were trying to get me to intervene again.

“I believe this because there is no other sensible explanation. I would never have agreed to do anything so evil as father the child by which that greedy monster could come through. And if I had even been privy to such a horror, I would have awakened
not with a sense of zeal and purpose, but in an utter panic, and with a deep revulsion against those who tried to use me.

“No. It was all Lasher’s doing, that last hallucinatory vision of hellish earthbound souls and their ugly, ignorant morality. And the tip-off, of course, and I don’t know why Aaron can’t see it, was the appearance of the nuns in the vision. For the nuns most certainly didn’t belong there. And the drums of Comus—they didn’t belong there either. They were from my childhood fears.

“The whole hellish spectacle was drawn from my childhood fears and dreads; and Lasher tumbled them all up with the Mayfair Witches, to create a hell for me that would keep me dead and drowned and in despair.

“If his plan had worked, I would have really died, of course, and his vision of hell would have vanished, and maybe, just maybe, in some life after I would have found the true explanation.

“It’s difficult to think about that last part, however. Because I didn’t die. And what I have now, for what it’s worth, is a second chance to stop Lasher, simply by being alive, and being here.

“After all, Rowan knows I’m here, and I can’t believe that every vestige of love for me in Rowan is dead. It doesn’t check with the evidence of my senses.

“On the contrary, Rowan not only knows I’m waiting, she wants me to wait, and that is why she’s given the house to me. In her own way she has asked me to remain here and continue to believe in her.

“My worst fear, however, is now that that greedy thing is in the flesh, it will hurt Rowan. It will reach some point where it doesn’t need her anymore, and it will try to get rid of her. I can only hope and pray that she destroys it before that time comes, though the more I think things over, the more I come to realize how hard it will be for her to do that.

“Rowan always tried to warn me that she had a propensity for evil that I didn’t have. Of course I’m not the innocent that she supposed. And she isn’t really evil. But what she is—is brilliant and purely scientific. She’s in love with the cells of that thing, I know she is, from a purely scientific point of view, and she’s studying them. She’s studying the whole organism and how it performs and how it moves through the world, and concentrating on whether or not it is indeed an improved version of a human being, and if so, what that improvement means, and how it can eventually be used for good.

“Why Aaron can’t accept that, I don’t know either. He is so
sympathetic but so persistently noncommittal. The Talamasca really are a bunch of monks, and though he keeps pleading with me to go to England, it’s just not possible. I could never live with them; they are too passive; and much too theoretical.

“Besides, it is absolutely essential that I wait here for Rowan. After all, only two months have passed, and it may be years before Rowan can finally resolve this. Rowan is only thirty years old, and that is really young in this day and age.

“And knowing her as I do, being the only one who knows her at all, I am convinced that Rowan will move eventually towards true wisdom.

“So that is my take on what happened. The Mayfair Witches as an earthbound coven don’t exist and never did, and the pact was a lie; and my initial visions were of good beings who sent me here in the hopes of ending a reign of evil.