The Witching Hour (65 page)

“I have always had this strength, and I see that you too have
it. It is the strength which enables you to defy all civil and church authority, to go into villages and towns with a pack of lies, and believe in what you do. You have submitted to but one authority on earth, and that is the Talamasca, and you are not entirely in submission even to them.”

I had never thought of this, but it was true. You know, Stefan, we have members who cannot do the work in the field for they haven’t the skepticism regarding pomp and ceremony. And so she was right.

I did not tell her so, however. I drank the wine, and looked out over the sea. The moon had risen and made a path across it. I wondered that I had spent so little time in my life regarding the sea.

It seemed I had been a long time on the edge of this cliff in my little prison, and there was nothing remarkable about it now.

She continued to talk to me. “I have come to the very place in which my strength can be best used,” she said. “And I mean to have many children before Antoine dies. I mean to have many! If you remain with me as my lover, there is nothing that you cannot have.”

“Don’t say such things. You know that cannot be.”

“Consider it. Envision it. You learn by observation. Well, what have you learned by observing things here? I could make a house for you on my land, a library as large as you like. You could receive your friends from Europe. You could have whatever you wish.”

I thought for a long time before I answered, as this was her request.

“I need more than what you offer me,” I said. “Even if I could accept that you are my daughter and that we are outside the laws of nature, so to speak.”

“What laws,” she sneered.

“Allow me to finish and then I shall tell you,” I explained. “I need more than the pleasures of the flesh, and even more than the beauty of the sea, and more than my every wish granted. I need more than money.”

“Why?”

“Because I am afraid of death,” I said. “I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing, I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give to my life. The saving of witches, the study of the supernatural, these are my lasting pleasures; they make me forget that I do not know why we are born, or why we die, or why the world is here.

“Had my father not died, I would have been a surgeon, and studied the workings of the body, and made beautiful drawings
of my studies as he did. And had not the Talamasca found me after my father’s death, I might have been a painter, for they make worlds of meaning on the canvas. But I cannot be those things now, as I have no training in them, and it is too late for that, and so I must return to Europe and do what I have always done. I must. It is not a matter of choice. I should go mad in this savage place. I should come to hate you more than I already do.”

This greatly intrigued her, though it hurt her and disappointed her. Her face took on the look of soft tragedy as she studied me, and never did my heart go out to her so much as it did at that moment, when she heard my answer and sat there pondering it before me, without a word.

“Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me all your life.”

“I will not!”

“Why?”

“Because you want it, and you hold me against my will.”

She thought again in silence, her eyes very beautiful in their sadness as before.

“You came here to sway me and to teach me, did you not?”

I smiled at her, for it was true. “All right, then, daughter. I’ll tell you everything I know. Will it do the trick?”

And at that moment, on my second day in this prison, it was changed, changed until the very hour many days later when I went free. I did not yet realize it, but it was changed.

For after that, I fought her no more. And I fought no more my love for her, and my lust for her, which were not always mingled, but always very much alive.

Whatever happened in the days that followed, we talked together by the hour, I in my drunkenness and she in her pointed sobriety, and all the story of my life came out for her to examine and discuss and a great deal which I knew of the world.

It seemed then that my life was nothing but drunkenness, making love to her, and talking to her; and then those long periods of dreaminess in which I continued my studies of the changing sea.

Some time and I do not know how long it was after—perhaps five days, perhaps more—she brought pen and paper to me and asked that I write for her what I knew of my lineage—of my father’s people, and how he had come to be a physician as was his father, and how they had both studied at Padua, and what they had learnt and written. And the names of my father’s books.

This I did with pleasure, though I was drunk so much that it took me hours, and after I lay, trying to remember my former self as she took my writing away.

Meantime, she had had fine clothes made for me, and she had her maids dress me each day, though I lay now indifferent to such things, and in a similar indifference I allowed them to pare my fingernails and trim my hair.

I suspected nothing in this, only that it was their regular meticulous attention to which I had become accustomed, but she then revealed to me a cloth mannequin made from the shirt I had worn when I first came to her, and explained to me that within its various knots were my fingernails, and that the hair affixed to its head was my hair.

I was stuporous then, as she had planned, no doubt. And in silence I watched as she slit my finger with her knife, and let my blood fall into the body of this doll. Nay, all of it she stained with my blood until it was a red thing with blond hair.

“What do you mean to do with this hideous thing?” I asked her.

“You know what I mean to do,” she said.

“Ah, then my death is assured.”

“Petyr,” she said most imploringly, the tears springing to her eyes, “it may be years before you die, but this doll gives me power.”

I said nothing. When she had gone I took up the rum which had always been there for me, and which was naturally much stronger than the wine, and I drank myself into horrid dreams with that.

But late in the night, this little incident of the doll produced in me a great horror, and so I went once more to the table, and took up my pen, and wrote for her all I knew of daimons, and this time it was with no hope of warning her, so much as guiding her.

I felt she must know that:

—the ancients had believed in spirits as we do, but they believed that they might grow old and die away; and there was in Plutarch the story of the Great Pan dying finally and all the daimons of the world weeping for they realized they would one day die as well.

—when a people of ancient times were conquered, it was believed that their fallen gods became daimons and hovered about the ruins of their cities and temples. And she must remember that Suzanne had called up the daimon Lasher at the ancient stones in Scotland, though what people had assembled those stones no one knows.

—the early Christians believed that the pagan gods were daimons, and that they could be called up for curses and spells.

And that in summary, all of these beliefs have to them a consistency,
for we know that daimons are strengthened by our belief in them. So naturally, they might become as gods to those who invoke them, and when their worshipers are conquered and scattered, the daimons would once more lapse back into chaos, or be but minor entities answering the occasional magician’s call.

I wrote further about the power of daimons. That they can create illusions for us; that they can enter bodies as in possession; that they can move objects; that they can appear to us, though whence they gather their bodies we do not know.

As for Lasher, it was my belief that his body was made of matter and held together by his power, but this could only be done by him for a short spell.

I did further describe how the daimon had appeared to me, and the strange words he said to me, and how I had puzzled over them, and how she must be aware that this thing might be the ghost of some long dead person—earthbound and vengeful, for all the ancients believed that the spirits of those who died in youth, or by violence, might become vengeful daimons, whereas the spirits of the good go out of this world.

Whatever else I wrote—and there was much—I no longer now remember, for I was utterly given over to drunkenness, and perhaps what I placed into her tender hands the next day was no more than a sorry scrawl. But many things I did attempt to explain to her, over her protests, though she claimed I had said them all before.

As for Lasher’s words to me that morning, his strange prediction, she only smiled at this, and told me whenever I did mention it, that Lasher took his speech from us in fragments and much that he said did not make sense.

“That is only partly true,” I warned her. “He is unaccustomed to language, but not to thinking. That is your mistake.”

More and more as the days passed, I gave myself over to the rum and to sleeping. I would open my eyes only to see if she was there.

And just when I was maddened by her absence, nay, ready to beat her in a rage, she would appear without fail. Beautiful, yielding, soft in my arms, the embodiment of all poetry, the very face I would endlessly paint were I Rembrandt, the very body the Succubus would take to win me to the Devil complete and entire.

I was satiated in all ways, yet always craving for more. I did crawl from bed now and then to watch the sea. And I woke often to see and study the falling of the rain.

For the rain in this place was most warm and gentle, and I
loved the song of it on the rooftop, and the sheet of it, catching the light as the breeze carried it at an angle past the doors.

Many thoughts came to me, Stefan, thoughts nourished by loneliness and warmth and the singing of the birds in the distance and the sweet fresh air from the waves roaring gently on the beach below.

In my little prison, I knew what I had wasted in life, but it is so simple and sad to put it into words. At times I fancied myself mad Lear on the moors, putting the flowers in his hair, having become king of nothing but the wilderness.

For I, in this savage place, had become so simplified, the grateful scholar of the rain and of the sea.

At last one afternoon late when the light was just dying, I was wakened by the savory aroma of a hot supper, and I knew that I had been drunk for a full day round the clock, and that she had not come.

I devoured the supper, as liquor never stops my hunger, and then I dressed in fresh clothes, and sat to thinking of what had become of me, and trying to calculate how long I had been in this place.

I thought it was twelve days.

I resolved then that no matter how despondent I became, I would drink nothing further. That I must be released or go mad.

And feeling disgust for all my weakness, I put on my boots, which I had not touched in all this time, and the new coat brought to me long ago by Charlotte, and went to the balustrade to look out over the sea. I thought, surely she will kill me rather than let me go. But it must be known one way or the other. This I can no longer endure.

Many hours passed; I drank nothing. Then Charlotte came. She was weary from her long day of riding and tending to the plantation, and when she saw that I was dressed, when she saw that I wore my boots and my coat, she sank down into the chair and wept.

I said nothing, for surely it was her decision whether or not I should leave this place, not mine.

Then she said: “I have conceived; I am with child.”

Again, I made no answer. But I knew it. I knew that it was the reason she had been away for so long.

Finally when she would do nothing but sit there, dejected, and sad, with her head down, crying, I said:

“Charlotte, let me go.”

At last she said that I must swear to her to leave the island at once. And that I must not tell anyone what I knew of her or her mother or of anything that had passed between us.

“Charlotte,” I said, “I will go home to Amsterdam on the first Dutch ship I can find in the harbor, and you will see me no more.”

“But you must swear to tell no one—not even your brethren in the Talamasca.”

“They know,” I said. “And I shall tell them all that has taken place. They are my father and my mother.”

“Petyr,” she said. “Haven’t you the good sense even to lie to me?”

“Charlotte,” I said. “Either let me go or kill me now.”

Again, she wept, but I felt cold towards her, cold towards myself. I would not look at her, lest my passion be aroused again.

At last she dried her eyes. “I have made him swear that he will never harm you. He knows that I shall withdraw all love and trust from him if he disobeys my command.”

“You have made a pact with the wind,” I said.

“But he protests that you will tell our secrets.”

“That I shall.”

“Petyr, give me your pledge! Give it to me so that he can hear.”

I considered this, for I wanted so to be free of this place, and to live, and to believe that both were still possible, and finally I said:

“Charlotte, I will never do you harm. My brothers and sisters in the Talamasca are not priests or judges. Nor are they witches. What they know of you is secret in the true sense.”

She looked at me with sad tear-filled eyes, and then she came to me, and kissed me, and though I tried to make of myself a wooden statue, I could not do it.

“Once more, Petyr, once more, from your heart,” she said, her voice full of sorrow, and longing. “And then you may leave me forever, and I will never look into your eyes again until I look some day into the eyes of our child.”

I fell to kissing her again, for I believed her that she would let me go. I believed her that she did love me; and I believed for that last hour as we lay together, that perhaps there were no laws for us, as she had said, and that there was a love between us which perhaps no one else would ever understand.

“I love you, Charlotte,” I whispered to her as she lay beside me, and I kissed her forehead. But she would not answer. She would not look at me.

And as I dressed once more, she turned her face into the pillow and cried.