The Witching Hour (23 page)

Yes, right on that score, exactly. And there was little doubt that he spoke the truth when he predicted a future of entire brain transplants, when the organ of thought would be lifted safely and completely out of one worn-out body into a young and fresh one, a world in which altogether new brains might be created as tissue was added here and there to supplement nature’s work.

“You see, the important thing about fetal tissue is, the recipient doesn’t reject it. Now you know that, but have you thought about it, what it really means? One tiny implant of fetal cells into the eye of an adult human, and the eye accepts those cells; the cells continue to develop, adapting themselves to the new tissue. My God, don’t you realize this allows us to participate in the evolutionary process? Why, we are only on the verge … ”

“Not us, Karl. You.”

“Rowan, you are the most brilliant surgeon I have ever worked with. If you … ”

“I will not do this! I will not kill.”
And if I don’t get out of here, I’ll start screaming. I have to. Because I have killed.

Yes, that was purpose all right, purpose taken, as they say, to the max.

She had not blown the whistle on Lemle, of course. Doctors don’t do things like that to other doctors, especially not when they are residents and their enemies are powerful and famous researchers. She had simply backed off.

“And besides,” he had said over coffee later before the fire in Tiburon, the Christmas lights reflected in the glass walls around them, “this is going on everywhere, this research with live fetuses. There wouldn’t be a law against it if it were not.”

No surprise actually. It was too tempting. In fact the strength of the temptation was exactly equal to the strength of her revulsion. What scientist—and a neurologist was most definitely a scientist—had not dreamed such dreams?

Watching
Frankenstein
on the late show she had longed to be the mad scientist. How she would have loved her own mountain laboratory, and yes, she wanted to see what would happen if you only had the nerve to take the living human brain as a laboratory specimen, divorced of all moral—but no, she would not.

What a horrid Christmas present that revelation, and yet her dedication to trauma surgery had redoubled. Seeing that tiny monster gasping for breath in the artificial light, she’d been reborn herself, her life narrowing and gaining inestimable power as she became the miracle worker of University, the one they called when the brains were oozing out on the stretcher, or when the patient blundered in off the street with the ax still lodged in his head.

Maybe the wounded brain was to her the microcosm for all tragedy: life mutilated continuously and haphazardly by life. When Rowan had killed—and killed she had—the act had been just as traumatic: the brain assaulted, its tissue mangled, the way she so often found it now in victims of whom she knew nothing. There had been nothing anyone could do for those she killed.

But it wasn’t to argue about purpose that she wanted to see Michael Curry. And it wasn’t to drag him into her bed. She wanted the same thing from him everybody else wanted, and that was why she hadn’t gone to San Francisco General to see him, to check on his recovery on her own.

She wanted to know about those killings, and not what the autopsies could tell her. She wanted to know what he saw and
he felt—if and when she held his hand—while she thought about those deaths. He’d sensed something the first time he touched her. But maybe that too had been stricken from his memory, along with the things he saw when he was dead.

She understood all this. She had understood, at least in the back of her mind, all along. And it wasn’t any less repellent to her as the months passed, that she wanted to use Michael Curry for her own ends.

Curry was inside that house on Liberty Street. She knew it. He needed help.

But what would it matter to Curry if she said, I’m a doctor, and I believe in your visions, as well as the power in your hands, because I know myself that there are things such as that, psychic things which no one can explain. I myself have just such an illicit and confusing and sometimes utterly uncontrollable power—the power to kill at will.

Why should he care? He was surrounded by people who believed in what he could do, wasn’t he? But that wasn’t helping him. He’d died and come back, and he was going crazy. But still, if she told him her story … and the idea was now most definitely a full-blown obsession, he might be the one person in the entire world who would believe what she said.

Perhaps it was madness to dream of telling the whole story to anybody. And there were times she tried to convince herself that she was wrong. Sooner or later she was going to talk to someone, she knew it. Sooner or later the silence of her thirty years would he shattered, if she didn’t start talking, by a never-ending cry that would blot out all words.

After all, no matter how many heads she patched up she could not forget those three murders. Graham’s face as the life bled out of him; the little girl convulsing on the tarmac; the man pitching forward over the wheel of his Jeep.

As soon as she had started her internship, she had managed through official channels to obtain those three autopsy reports. Cerebrovascular accident, subarachnoid hemorrhage, congenital aneurysm. She had read over all the details.

And what it spelled out in the layman’s language was a secret weakness in the wall of an artery, which for no discernible reason finally ruptured, causing totally unforeseen and sudden death. No way to predict, in other words, that a six-year-old child would suddenly go into seizures on the playground, a six-year-old who’d been healthy enough to be kicking six-year-old Rowan and pulling her hair only moments before. Nothing anybody could do for the child either, as the blood poured out of her nose and her ears, and her eyes rolled up into her head. On
the contrary, they’d protected the other children, shielding their eyes from the spectacle as they took them into the schoolroom.

“Poor Rowan,” said the teacher, later. “Darling, I want you to understand it was something in her head that killed her. It was medical. It had nothing to do with the fight.”

And that’s when Rowan had known, absolutely, what the teacher would never know. She did it. She caused that kid to die.

Now, that you could dismiss easily enough—a child’s natural guilt for an accident she didn’t understand. But Rowan had felt something when it happened. She had felt something inside herself—a great pervasive sensation which was not unlike sex when she thought about it; it had washed through her and seemingly out of her at the moment the child fell over backwards. And then there had been the diagnostic sense, operative even then, which had told her that the child would die.

Nevertheless, she forgot the incident, Graham and Ellie, in the manner of good California parents, took her to a psychiatrist. She played with his little girl dolls. She said what he wanted her to say. And people died of “strokes” all the time.

Eight years passed before the man got out of his Jeep on that lonely road in the hills of Tiburon and clapped his hand over her mouth and said in that awful intimate and insolent voice: “Now, don’t you scream.”

Her adoptive parents never made a connection between the little girl and the rapist who had died as Rowan struggled, as the same blazing anger galvanized her, passing into that exquisite sensation which rendered her body suddenly rigid as the man let go of her and fell forward over the wheel.

But she had made the connection. Quietly and certainly she’d made it. Not then, when she had forced open the door of the Jeep and run down the road screaming. No, she had not even known she was safe. But later, as she lay alone in the dark after the Highway Patrol and the homicide detectives had left them, she knew.

Almost a decade and a half had elapsed before it happened with Graham. And Ellie was too sick with cancer by then to think of much of anything. And surely Rowan wasn’t going to pull up a chair to her bedside and say, “Mama, I think I killed him. He was cheating on you constantly. He was trying to divorce you. He couldn’t wait the bloody goddamned two months it’s going to take for you to die.”

It was all a pattern, as surely as a spiderweb is a pattern, but a pattern does not imply a purpose. Patterns exist everywhere,
and purpose is at its safest when it is spontaneous and short-lived.

You will not do this. You will not take life.
It was remembering heresy to remember slapping that little girl, even fighting the man in the Jeep. And it was too perfectly awful to remember the argument with Graham.

“What do you mean you’re having her served with the papers! She’s dying! You’re going to stick it out with me.”

He’d grabbed her by the arms, tried to kiss her. “Rowan, I love you, but she isn’t the woman I married … ”

“No? Not the woman you’ve cheated on for thirty years?”

“She’s just a thing in there, I want to remember her the way she used to be … ”

“You talk that crap to me!”

That had been the instant that his eyes fixed and the expression washed out of his face. People always die with such peaceful countenances. On the brink of rape, the man in the Jeep had just gone blank.

Before the ambulance had come, she had knelt beside Graham, put her stethoscope to his head. There was that sound, so faint that some doctors could not hear it. But she heard it—the sound of a great deal of blood rushing to one spot.

No one ever accused her of anything. How could they? Why, she was a doctor, and she’d been with him when the “awful thing” happened, and God knows, she did everything she could.

Of course everybody knew Graham was a thoroughly second-rate human being—his law partners, his secretaries, even his last mistress, that stupid little Karen Garfield person who had come over wanting some keepsake, everybody knew. Except, that is, Graham’s wife. But there wasn’t the slightest suspicion. How could there be? It was just death by natural causes when he was about to make away with the fortune made through his wife’s inheritance and a twenty-eight-year-old idiot who had already sold her furniture and bought their airline tickets for St. Croix.

But it wasn’t death by natural causes.

By this time she knew and understood the diagnostic sense; she’d practiced it and strengthened it. And when she had laid her hand on his shoulder, the diagnostic sense had said: no natural death.

That in itself ought to have been enough. Yet maybe she was mistaken. Maybe it was the great deceptiveness of pattern which we call coincidence. And nothing more than that.

But suppose she met with Michael Curry. Suppose he held her hand as she closed her eyes and thought about those deaths?
Would he see only what she had seen, or would some objective truth be known to him?
You killed them.
It was worth a try.

What she realized tonight, as she wandered slowly and almost aimlessly through the hospital, as she took detours through vast carpeted waiting rooms and down long wards where she was not known, and would never be known, was that she had felt an overwhelming desire just to talk to Michael Curry for a long time. She felt connected to Michael Curry. As much by the accident at sea as by these psychic secrets. She wanted, perhaps for reasons she didn’t fully understand, to tell him and him alone what she’d done.

It wasn’t easy for her to face this weakness. Absolution for murder came only when she operated. She was at the altar of God when the nurses held out the sterile gown for her, when they held up the sterile gloves.

And all her life she’d been a solitary person, a good listener, but invariably colder than those around her. That special sense, the one that aided her so as a physician, had always made her too keenly aware of what others truly felt.

She’d been ten or twelve years old before she realized other people didn’t have it, sometimes not even a particle of it. That her beloved Ellie, for instance, didn’t have the slightest idea that Graham did not love her so much as he needed her, and needed to denigrate her and lie to her and to depend on her always being there, and being inferior to him.

Rowan had sometimes wished for that kind of ignorance—not to know when people envied you, or disliked you. Not to know that many people lied all the time. She liked the cops and the fire fighters because they were to some extent perfectly predictable. Or maybe it was simply that their particular brand of dishonesty didn’t bother her so much; it seemed harmless compared to the complex, insidious, and endlessly malicious insecurity of more educated men.

Of course diagnostic usefulness had redeemed this special psyche sense completely.

But what could ever redeem the ability to kill at will? To atone was another matter. To what proper use could a telekinetic ability like that ever be put?

And such a power was not beyond scientific possibility, that was the truly terrifying part. Like the psychometric power of Michael Curry, such things might have to do with measurable energy, complex physical talents which might someday be as definable as electricity or microwaves, or high-frequency sounds. Curry was capturing an impression from the objects he handled,
and that impression was very likely the product of energy. Very likely every object in existence—every surface, every definable bit of matter—contained such stored “impressions.” They existed in a measurable field.

But parapsychology wasn’t Rowan’s love. She was mesmerized by what could be seen in test tubes, slides, and graphs. She didn’t care to test or analyze her own killing power. She wanted only to believe that she had never used it, that maybe there was some other explanation for what had happened, that maybe somehow she was innocent.

And the tragic thing was, maybe nobody could ever tell her what had really occurred with Graham, and the man in the Jeep and the kid on the playground. And all she could hope for was to tell someone, to unburden and exorcise, as everybody else did, through talk.

Talk, talk, talk.

That’s exactly what Rowan wanted. She knew.

Only once before had this desire to confide nearly overcome her. And that had been quite an unusual event. In fact, she had almost told a perfect stranger the entire story, and there were times since when she wished that she had done just that.