The Witching Hour Read online

  When she'd been describing the rescue to him in more detail, she had said a strange thing. She had said that a person loses consciousness almost immediately in very cold water. Yet she had been pitched right into it, and she hadn't lost consciousness. She had said only, "I don't know how I reached the ladder, I honestly don't."

  "Do you think it was that power?" he asked.

  She had reflected for a moment. Then she had said, "Yes, and no. I mean maybe it was just luck."

  "Well, it was luck for me, all right," he'd responded, and he had felt an extraordinary sense of well-being when he said it, and he wasn't so sure why.

  Maybe she knew because she said, "We're frightened of what makes us different." And he had agreed.

  "But lots of people have these powers," she said. "We don't know what they are, or how to measure them; but surely they are part of what goes on between human beings. I see it in the hospital. There are doctors who know things, and they can't tell you how. There are nurses who are the same way. I imagine there are lawyers who know infallibly when someone is guilty; or that the jury is going to vote for or against; and they can't tell you how they know.

  "The fact is, for all we learn about ourselves, for all we codify and classify and define, the mysteries remain immense. Take the research into genetics. So much is inherited by a human being--shyness is inherited, the liking for a particular brand of soap may be inherited, the liking for particular given names. But what else is inherited? What invisible powers come down to you? That's why it's so frustrating to me that I don't really know my family. I don't know the first thing about them. Ellie was a third cousin once removed or something like that. Why, hell, that's hardly a cousin ... "

  Yes, he had agreed with all that. He talked a little about his father and his grandfather, and how he was more like them than he cared to admit. "But you have to believe you can change your heredity," he said. "You have to believe that you can work magic on the ingredients. If you can't there's no hope."

  "Of course you can," she'd replied. "You've done it, haven't you? I want to believe I've done it. This may sound insane, but I believe that we ought to ... "

  "Tell me ... "

  "We ought to aim to be perfect," she said quietly. "I mean, why not?"

  He had laughed but not in ridicule. He had thought of something one of his friends once said to him. The friend had been listening to Michael rattle on one night about history, and how nobody understood it or where we were headed because we didn't know history, and the friend had said, "You are a peculiar talker, Michael," explaining that the phrase was from Orpheus Descending, a Tennessee Williams play. He had treasured the compliment. He hoped she would too.

  "You're a peculiar talker, Rowan," he had said, and he had explained it as his friend explained it to him.

  That had made her laugh, really break up. "Maybe that's why I'm so quiet," she said. "I don't even want to get started. I think you've said it. I'm a peculiar talker and that's why I don't talk at all."

  He took a drag off the cigarette now, thinking it all over. It would be lovely to stay with her. If only the feeling would leave him, that he had to go home.

  "Put another log on the fire," she said, interrupting his reverie. "Breakfast is ready."

  She laid it out on the dining table near the windows. Scrambled eggs, yogurt, fresh sliced oranges sparkling in the sun, bacon and sausage, and hot muffins just out of the oven.

  She poured the coffee and the orange juice for them both. And for five minutes solid, without a word, he just ate. He had never been so hungry. For a long moment he stared at the coffee. No, he didn't want a beer, and he wasn't going to drink one. He drank the coffee, and she refilled the cup.

  "That was simply wonderful," he said.

  "Stick around," she said, "and I'll cook you dinner, and breakfast tomorrow morning too."

  He couldn't answer. He studied her for a moment, trying not to see just loveliness and the object of his considerable desire, but what she looked like. A true blonde, he thought, smooth all over, with almost no down on her face or her arms. And lovely dark ashen eyebrows, and dark eyelashes which made her eyes seem all the more gray. A face like a nun, she had, actually. Not a touch of makeup on it, and her long full mouth had a virginal look to it somehow, like the mouths of little girls before they've worn lipstick. He wished he could just sit here with her forever ...

  "But you are going to leave anyway," she said.

  He nodded. "Have to," he said.

  She was thoughtful. "What about the visions?" she asked.

  "Do you want to talk about them?"

  He hesitated. "Every time I try to describe them, it ends in frustration," he explained, "and also, well, it turns people off."

  "It won't turn me off," she said. She seemed quite composed now, her arms folded, her hair prettily mussed, the coffee steaming in front of her. She was more like the resolute and forceful woman he'd first met last night.

  He believed what she said. Nevertheless, he had seen the look of incredulity and then indifference in so many faces. He sat back in the chair, staring out for a moment. Every sailing ship in the world was on the bay. And he could see the gulls flying over the harbor of Sausalito like tiny bits of paper.

  "I know the whole experience took a long time," he said, "that time itself was impossible to factor into it." He glanced at her. "You know what I mean," he said. "Like in the old days when people would be lured by the Little People. You know, they'd go off and spend one day with the Little People, but when they came back to their villages they discovered they'd been gone for fifty years."

  She laughed under her breath. "Is that an Irish story?"

  "Yeah, from an old Irish nun, I heard that one," he said. "She used to tell us the damnedest things. She used to tell us there were witches in the Garden District in New Orleans, and that they'd get us if we went walking in those streets ... " And think how dark those streets were, how darkly beautiful, like the lines from "Ode to a Nightingale," "Darkling I listen ... " "I'm sorry," he said, "my mind wandered."

  She waited.

  "There were many people in the visions," he said, "but what I remember most distinctly is a dark-haired woman. I can't see this woman now, but I know that she was as familiar to me as someone I'd known all my life. I knew her name, everything about her. And I know now that I knew about you. I knew your name. But I don't know if that was in the middle of it, or just at the end, you know, before I was rescued, when maybe I knew somehow that the boat was coming and you were there." Yes, that was a real puzzle, he thought.

  "Go on."

  "I think I could have come back and lived even if I had refused to do what they wanted me to do. But I wanted the mission, so to speak, I wanted to fulfill the purpose. And it seemed ... it seemed that everything they wanted of me, everything they revealed, well, it was all connected with my past life, who I'd been. It was all-encompassing. Do you follow me?"

  "There was a reason they chose you."

  "Yes, that's it exactly. I was the one for this, because of who I was. Now, make no mistake. I know this is nuthouse talk again; I'm so damned good at it. This is the talk of schizophrenics who hear voices telling them to save the world, I'm aware of that. There's an old saying about me among my friends."

  "What is it?"

  He adjusted his glasses and flashed his best smile at her. "Michael isn't as stupid as he looks."

  She laughed in the loveliest way. "You don't look stupid," she said. "You just look too good to be true." She tapped the ash off her cigarette. "You know how good-looking you are. I don't have to tell you. What else can you recall?"

  He hesitated, positively electrified by that last compliment. Wasn't it time to go to bed again? No, it wasn't. It was almost time to catch a plane.

  "Something about a doorway," he said, "I could swear it. But again, I can't see these things now. It's getting thinner all the time. But I know there was a number involved in it. And there was a jewel. A beautiful jewel. I can't even call t
his recollection now. It's more like faith. But I believe all those things were mixed up with it. And then it's all mixed up with going home, with this sense of having to do something tremendously important, and New Orleans is part of it, and this street where I used to walk when I was a kid."

  "A street?"

  "First Street. It's a beautiful stretch, from Magazine Street, near where I grew up, to St. Charles Avenue, about five blocks or so, and it's an old old part of town they call the Garden District."

  "Where the witches live," she said.

  "Oh, yes, right, the witches of the Garden District," he said, smiling. "At least according to Sister Bridget Marie."

  "Is it a gloomy witchy place, this neighborhood?" she asked.

  "No, not really," he said. "But it is like a dark bit of forest in the middle of the city. Big trees, trees you wouldn't believe. There's nothing comparable to it here. Maybe nowhere in America. And the houses are town houses, you know, close to the sidewalks, but they're so large, and they're not attached, they have gardens around them. And there's this one house, this house I used to pass all the time, a really high narrow house. I used to stop and look at it, at the iron railings. There's a rose pattern in the railings. Well, I keep seeing it now--since the accident--and I keep thinking I have to go back, you know, it's so urgent. Like even now I'm sitting here, but I feel guilty that I'm not on the plane."

  A shadow passed over her face. "I want you to stay here for a while," she said. Lovely deep grosgrain voice. "But it isn't just that I want it. You're not in good shape. You need to rest, really rest without the booze."

  "You're right, but I can't do it, Rowan. I can't explain this tension I feel. I'll feel it till I get home."

  "That's another thing, Michael. Why is that home? You don't know anyone back there."

  "Oh, it's home, honey, it is. I know." He laughed. "I've been in exile for too long. I knew it even before the accident. The morning before, it was the funniest thing, I woke up and I was thinking about home. I was thinking about this time we all drove to the Gulf Coast, and it was warm at sundown, positively warm ... "

  "Can you stay off the booze when you leave here?"

  He sighed. He deliberately flashed her one of his best smiles--the kind that had always worked in the past--and he winked at her. "Want to hear Irish bullshit, lady, or the truth?"

  "Michael ... " It wasn't just disapproval in her voice, it was disappointment.

  "I know, I know," he said. "Everything you're saying is right. Look, you don't know what you've done for me, just getting me out the front door, just listening to me. I want to do what you're telling me to do ... "

  "Tell me more about this house," she said.

  He was thoughtful again, before beginning. "It was the Greek Revival style--do you know what that is?--but it was different. It had porches on the front and on the sides, real New Orleans porches. It's hard to describe a house like that to someone who's never been in New Orleans. Have you ever seen pictures--?"

  She shook her head. "It was a subject Ellie couldn't talk about," she said.

  "That sounds unfair, Rowan."

  She shrugged.

  "No, but really."

  "Ellie wanted to believe I was her own daughter. If I asked about my biological parents, she thought I was unhappy, that she hadn't loved me enough. Useless to try to get those ideas out of her head." She drank a little of the coffee. "Before her last trip to the hospital she burned everything in her desk. I saw her doing it. She burned it all in that fireplace. Photographs, letters, all sorts of things. I didn't realize it was everything. Or maybe I just didn't think about it, one way or the other. She knew she wasn't coming back." She stopped for a minute, then poured a little more coffee in her cup and in Michael's cup.

  "Then after she died, I couldn't even find an address for her people down there. Her lawyer didn't have a scrap of information. She'd told him she didn't want anyone down there to be contacted. All her money went to me. Yet she used to visit the people in New Orleans. She used to call them on the phone. I could never quite figure it all out."

  "That's too sad, Rowan."

  "But we've talked enough about me. About this house again. What is it that makes you remember it now?"

  "Oh, houses there aren't like the houses here," he said. "Each house has a personality, a character. And this one, well, it's somber and massive, and sort of splendidly dark. It's built right on the corner, part of it touching the sidewalk of the side street. God knows I loved that house. There was a man who lived there, a man right out of a Dickens novel, I swear it, tall and sort of consummately gentlemanly, if you know what I mean. I used to see him in the garden ... " He hesitated; something coming so close to him, something so crucial--

  "What's the matter?"

  "Just that feeling again, that it's all got to do with him and that house." He shuddered as if he were cold, but he wasn't. "I can't figure it out," he said. "But I know the man has something to do with it. I don't think they did mean for me to forget, the people I saw in the visions. I think they meant for me to act fast, because something's going to happen."

  "What could that something be?" she asked gently.

  "Something in that house," he said.

  "Why would they want you to go back to that house?" she asked. Again, the question was gentle, not challenging.

  "Because I have a power to do something there; I have a power to affect something." He looked down at his hands, so sinister in the black gloves. "Again, it was like everything fitted together. Imagine the whole world made up of tiny fragments--and suddenly a great many of those tiny fragments are lights and you see a ... a ... "

  "Pattern?"

  "Yeah, exactly, a pattern. Well, my life has been part of a greater pattern." He drank another swallow of the coffee. "What do you think? Am I insane?"

  She shook her head. "It sounds too special for that."

  "Special?"

  "I mean specific."

  He gave a little startled laugh. No one in all these weeks had said anything like that to him.

  She crushed out the cigarette.

  "Have you thought about that house often, in the past few years?"

  "Almost never," he said. "I never forgot it, but I never thought about it much either. Oh, now and then, I suppose whenever I thought about the Garden District, I'd think about it. You could say it was a haunting place."

  "But the obsession didn't begin until the visions."

  "Definitely," he said. "There are other memories of home, but the memory of the house is the most intense."

  "Yet when you think of the visions, you don't remember speaking of the house ... "

  "Nothing so clear as that. Although ... " There it was again, the feeling. But he feared the power of suggestion suddenly. It seemed all the misery of the last few months was coming back. Yet it felt good to be believed by her, to be listening to her. And he liked her easy air of command, the first characteristic of her he had noticed the night before.

  She was looking at him, looking just as if she was listening still though he had ceased to speak. He thought about these strange vagrant powers, how utterly they confused things, rather than clarifying them.

  "So what's wrong with me?" he asked. "I mean as a doctor, as a brain doctor, what do you think? What should I do? Why do I keep seeing that house and that man? Why do I feel I ought to be there now?"

  She sank into thought, silent, motionless, her gray eyes large and fixed on some point beyond the glass, her long, slender arms again folded. Then she said:

  "Well, you should go back there, there's no doubt of that. You aren't going to rest easy till you do. Go look for the house. Who knows? Maybe it's not there. Or you won't have any special feeling when you see it. In any case, you should look. There may be some psychological explanation for this idee fixe, as they call it, but I don't think so. I suspect you saw something all right, you went somewhere. We know many people do that, at least they claim they did when they come back. But you might be putt
ing the wrong interpretation on it."

  "I don't have much to go on," he admitted. "That's true."

  "Do you think they caused the accident?"

  "God, I never really thought of that."

  "You didn't?"

  "I mean I thought, well, the accident happened, and they were there, and suddenly the opportunity was there. That would be awful, to think they caused it to happen. That would change things, wouldn't it?"

  "I don't know. What bothers me is this. If they are powerful, whatever they are, if they could tell you something important with regard to a purpose, if they could keep you alive out there when you should have died, if they could work a rescue into it, well, then why couldn't they have caused the accident, and why couldn't they be causing your memory loss now?"

  He was speechless.

  "You really never thought of that?"

  "It's an awful thought," he whispered. She started to speak again, but he asked her with a little polite gesture to wait. He was trying to find the words for what he wanted to say. "My concept of them is different," be said. "I've trusted that they exist in another realm; and that means spiritually as well as physically. That they are ... "

  "Higher beings?"

  "Yes. And that they could only come to me, know of me, care about me, when I was close to them, between life and death. It was mystical, that's what I'm trying to say. But I wish I could find another word for it. It was a communication that happened only because I was physically dead."

  She waited.

  "What I mean is, they're another species of being. They couldn't make a man fall off a rock and drown in the sea. Because if they could do such things in the material world, well, why on earth would they need me?"

  "I see your point," she said. "Nevertheless ... "

  "What?"

  "You're assuming they're higher beings. You speak of them as if they're good. You're assuming that you ought to do what they want of you."