The Witching Hour (22 page)

Curry was on page three, a good head shot, looking a little grimmer than before, perhaps a little less trusting. Dozens of people had now witnessed his strange psychometric power. He wished that people would understand it was nothing but a “parlor trick.” He couldn’t help them.

All that concerned him now was the forgotten adventure, that is, the realms he’d visited when he was dead. “There was a reason I came back,” he said, “I know there was. I had a choice, and I made the decision to return. There was something very important that I had to do. I knew this, I knew the purpose. And it had something to do with a doorway, and a number. But I can’t remember the number or what the number meant. Truth is, I can’t recall any of it. It’s as if the most important experience of my entire life has been wiped out. And I don’t know any way to recover it.”

They’re making him sound crazy, she thought. And it was probably a routine “near death” experience. We know now that people have these all the time. What’s wrong with the people around him?

As for his hands, she was a little too fascinated by that part, wasn’t she? She perused the various witness accounts. She wished she had five minutes to look at the tests they’d run on him.

She thought again of him lying on the deck, of the firmness of his grip, of the expression on his face.

Had he felt something at that moment through his hand? And what would he feel now, were she to go there, tell him what she remembered about the accident, sit on the bed beside him, and ask him to do his parlor trick—in other words, barter her meager information for what everybody else wanted from him? No.

Repellent that she should make such a demand. Repellent that she, a doctor, should think not of what he might need, but of what she wanted. It was worse than wondering what it would be like to take him to bed, to drink coffee with him at the table in the little cabin at three in the morning.

She’d call Dr. Morris when she had time. See how he was, though when that would be, she couldn’t say. She was the walking dead herself right now from lack of sleep, and she was needed right now in Recovery. Maybe she ought to leave Curry entirely alone. Maybe that was the best thing she could do for both of them.

At the end of the week the San Francisco
Chronicle
ran a long feature story on the front page.

He was forty-eight, a contractor by profession, a specialist in renovating old Victorian houses, owner of a company called Great Expectations. Seems he was a legend in San Francisco for turning ruins into mansions, a stickler for authenticity right down to the wooden pegs and square nails. He owned a little shop in the Castro full of claw-foot tubs and pedestal lavatories. His detailed drawings for restorations were famous. In fact, a book of them had been published called
Grand Victorian Inside and Out.
He’d done the award-winning Barbary Coast Bed and Breakfast on Clay Street, and the Jack London Hotel on Buena Vista West.

But he wasn’t doing anything now. Great Expectations was temporarily closed. Its owner was too busy trying to remember
what had been revealed to him during that crucial hour when he’d been “dead in the water.”

“It was no dream,” he said. “I know that I talked to people. They explained what they meant for me to do, and I accepted, I asked to come back.”

As for the new psychic ability, that had nothing to do with it, he maintained. It seemed to be no more than some accidental side effect. “Look, all I get is a flash—a face, a name. It’s totally unreliable.”

That night in the hospital coffee room, she caught him on the TV news—the vivid three-dimensional man. There were those unforgettable blue eyes again, and the wholesome smile. Something innocent about him, actually, his simple straightforward gestures indicative of one who has long ago given up on dishonesty, or of trying to fox the complications of the world in any way.

“I’ve got to go home,” he said. Was it a New York accent? “Not home here, I mean, but home where I was born, back in New Orleans.” (Ah, so that was the accent!) “I could swear it’s got something to do with what happened. I keep getting these flashes of home.” Again, he gave a little shrug. He seemed like a damned nice guy.

But nothing had come back to him as yet about the near death visions. The hospital hadn’t wanted to release him, but they had to admit that he was physically fit.

“Tell us about the power, Michael.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Shrug. He looked at his black-gloved hands. “I want to talk to the people who rescued me—the Coast Guard who brought me, that skipper who picked me up at sea. I wish those people would get in touch. You know that’s why I’m doing this interview.”

The camera cut away to a pair of studio reporters. Banter about “the power.” Both had seen it for themselves.

For a moment Rowan did not move or even think. New Orleans … and he was asking for her to contact him. New Orleans … Well, that settled it. Rowan had an obligation. She had heard his plea from his own lips. And this question of New Orleans, she had to clarify it. She had to talk to him … or write.

As soon as she reached home that night, she went to Graham’s old desk, pulled out some stationery, and wrote Curry a letter.

She told him in detail all that she had observed regarding the accident from, the moment she spotted him at sea until they took him up on the stretcher. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she added her home phone and address and a little postscript.

“Mr. Curry, I too am from New Orleans, though I never lived there. I was adopted the day I was born, and immediately taken away. It is probably no more than a coincidence that you are a southerner, too, but I thought you should know this. On the boat, you held my hand quite tightly and for some time. I would not want your situation confused by some vague telepathic message you received in that instant, something which may not be relevant at all.

“If you need to talk to me,” she finished, “call me at University Hospital or at my home phone.”

This was mild enough, neutral enough surely. She had only indicated that she believed in his power, and that she was there if he needed her. No more than that, no demand. And she would see to it that she remained responsible, no matter what transpired.

Yet she couldn’t get it out of her head—the idea of being able to place her hand in his, of just asking: “I’m going to think about something, something specific that happened once, no, three times in my life; and all I want is that you tell me what you see. Would you do that? I cannot say you owe me this for saving your life … ”

That’s right, you can’t. So don’t do it!

She sent the letter directly to Dr. Morris, via Federal Express.

Dr. Morris called her the next day. Curry had walked out of the hospital the preceding afternoon, right after a television press conference.

“He’s crazy as a loon, Dr. Mayfair, but we had no legal grounds to hold him. I told him what you told me, by the way, that he hadn’t said anything. But he’s too obsessed to give up on this whole thing. He’s determined he’s going to remember what he saw out there, you know, the big reason for it all, the secret of the universe, the purpose, the doorway, the number, the jewel. You never heard such stuff. I’ll send the letter on to his house, but chances are, it won’t get through. The mail’s coming in by the sackful.”

“This thing with the hands, is it real?”

Silence. “You want to know the truth? It’s one hundred percent accurate, as far as I ever saw. If you ever see it for yourself, it will scare the hell out of you.”

The story made the supermarket tabloids the following week. Two weeks later variations of it appeared in
People
and
Time.
Rowan clipped the stories and the pictures. Photographers were obviously following Curry wherever he went. They caught him
outside his business on Castro Street. They caught him on the steps of his house.

A fierce protective feeling for him was growing in Rowan. They really ought to leave this man alone.

And you have to leave him alone, too, Rowan.

He himself wasn’t granting any interviews anymore, that became clear by the first week in June. The tabloids fed off exclusives from the witnesses to his power—“He touched the purse and he told me all about my sister, what she’d said when she gave the purse to me. I was tingling all over, and then he said, ‘Your sister is dead.’ ”

Finally the local CBS channel said Curry was holed up in his house on Liberty Street, incommunicado. Friends were concerned. “He’s disillusioned, angry,” said one of his old buddies from college. “I think he’s just retired from the world.” Great Expectations was closed indefinitely. Doctors at San Francisco General had not seen their patient. They were worried as well.

Then in July, the
Examiner
declared that Curry was “missing.” He had “disappeared.”

A reporter from television “News at Eleven” stood on the steps of a huge Victorian house pointing to a pile of unopened mail flowing from the garbage can by the side gate.

“Is Curry holed up inside the grand Victorian on Liberty Street which he restored himself so lovingly many years ago? Is there a man sitting or lying alone upstairs in the lighted attic room?”

In disgust Rowan snapped off the program. It had made her feel like a voyeur. Simply awful to drag that camera crew to the man’s very door.

But what stayed in her mind was that garbage can full of unopened letters. Had her communication gone, inevitably, into that pile? The thought of him locked in that house, afraid of the world, in need of counsel was a little more than she could handle.

Surgeons are men and women of action—people who believe they can do something. That’s why they have the moxie to cut into people’s bodies. She wanted to do something—go there, pound on the door. But how many other people had done that?

No, he didn’t need another visitor, especially not one with a secret agenda of her own.

In the evenings, when she came home from the hospital and took her boat out alone, she invariably thought of him. It was almost warm in the sheltered waters off Tiburon. She took her time before she moved into the colder winds of San Francisco
Bay. Then she hit the violent current of the ocean. It was erotic, that great shift, as she pointed the boat westward, throwing back her head to gaze up as she always did at the soaring pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge. The great heavy cruiser moved slowly but steadily forward, pushing back the indistinct horizon.

So indifferent the great dull rolling Pacific. Impossible to believe in anything but oneself when you looked at the endlessly tessellated surface, heaving and shifting under a colorless sunset where sea met sky in a dazzling haze.

And he believed that he had been sent back for a purpose, did he, this man who restored beautiful dwellings, who drew pictures that were published in books, a man who ought to be too sophisticated to believe in something like that.

But then he had really died, had he not? He had had that experience of which so many had written, of rising upwards, weightless, and gazing down with a sublime detachment at the world below.

No such thing had ever happened to her. But there were other things, things just as strange. And while the whole world knew about Curry’s adventure, no one knew the strange secret things that Rowan knew.

But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made. It was like dipping a stick into the ocean and trying to write something—all the little people of the world spinning out little patterns that lasted no more than a few years, and meant nothing at all. Surgery had seduced her because she got them up and back on their feet and they were alive and they said “Thank you!” and you had served life and driven back death, and that was the only incontrovertible value to which she could give her all.
Doctor, we never thought she’d walk again.

But a great purpose for living, for being reborn? What could such a thing possibly be? What was the purpose for the woman who died of a stroke on the delivery table while her newborn cried in the doctor’s arms? What was the purpose for the man struck by the drunk driver on his way home from church?

There had been a purpose all right for the fetus she had once seen, a living breathing thing, its eyes still sealed shut, its little mouth like that of a fish, wires running in all directions from its horrid oversized head and tiny arms, as it slumbered in the special incubator, waiting for its tissue to be harvested—while it continued to live and breathe, of course—for the transplant recipient who waited two floors upstairs.

But if that was purpose, the discovery that you could, in spite of all laws to the contrary, keep those little aborted things alive in a secret laboratory in the middle of a giant private hospital, slicing them up at will, for the benefit of a Parkinson’s disease patient who had already clocked in sixty good years before he started to die of the illness which the fetal tissue transplant could cure, well, she’d take the knife to the gunshot wound fresh up from Emergency any day.

Never would she forget that cold, dark Christmas Eve and Dr. Lemle leading her up through the deserted floors of the Keplinger Institute. “We need you here, Rowan. I could finesse your leaving University. I know what to say to Larkin. I want you here. And now I’m going to show you something you’ll appreciate which Larkin would never appreciate, something you will never see at University, something that you will understand.”

Ah, but she didn’t. Or rather she understood too perfectly the horror of it.

“It isn’t viable in the strict sense of the word,” he’d explained, this doctor, Karl Lemle, whose brilliance had so enticed her, brilliance and ambition, and vision, yes, that too. “And technically of course it is not even alive. It’s dead, quite dead, because its mother aborted it, you see, in the clinic downstairs, and so technically it is a nonperson, a non-human being. So who is to say, Rowan, that we have to shove it in a plastic trash bag when we know that through keeping this tiny body alive, and keeping others like it alive—these little gold mines of unique tissue, so flexible, adaptable, so unlike any other human tissue, swarming with countless tiny extraneous cells which would eventually have been discarded in the normal fetal process—we can make discoveries in the field of neurological transplants that make Shelley’s
Frankenstein
read like a bedtime story.”