The Witching Hour Page 30

  For five hours, she did not think of Michael at all.

  It was two o'clock when she reached home. The house was dark and cold as she expected it to be when she came in. But for the first time since Ellie's death she did not find herself brooding over Ellie. She didn't think uneasily and painfully of Graham.

  No message on her machine from Michael. She was disappointed but not surprised. She had a vivid image of him staggering off the plane, drunk. It was four o'clock in New Orleans, she figured. She couldn't ring the Pontchartrain Hotel now.

  Best not to think too much about it, she reasoned as she went up to bed once more.

  Best not to think about the paper in the safe that said she couldn't go back to New Orleans. Best not to think about getting on a plane and going to him. Best not to think about Andrew Slattery, her colleague, who still hadn't been hired at Stanford, and who might be all too happy to fill in for her at University for a couple of weeks. Why the hell had she asked Lark tonight about Slattery, calling him just after midnight, to ask specifically whether Slattery had found a job. Something was going on in her feverish little brain.

  It was three o'clock when next she opened her eyes. Someone was in the house. She did not know what noise or vibration had caused her to waken, only that someone else was there. The numerals of the digital clock were the only illumination other than the distant lights of the city. A great gust of wind hit the windows suddenly and with it a shower of glittering spray.

  She realized the house was moving violently on its pilings. There was the faint rattle of glass.

  She rose as quietly as she could, removed a .38-caliber pistol from the dresser drawer, cocked it, and went to the head of the stairs. She held the gun with two hands as Chase, her cop friend, had taught her to do. She had practiced with this gun and she knew how to use it. She was not afraid so much as angry, deeply angry, and quietly alert.

  She heard no footsteps. She heard only the wind, howling distantly in the chimney, and making the thick glass walls ever so faintly groan.

  She could see the living room directly below, in the usual glaze of bluish lunar light. Another volley of droplets struck the windows. She heard the Sweet Christine slam dully against the rubber tires fixed along the northern pier.

  Quietly she went down, step by step, her eyes sweeping the empty rooms with each curve of the staircase, until she reached the lower floor. There was not a crevice of the house she could not see from where she stood, except the bathroom behind her. And seeing only emptiness everywhere she looked, and the Sweet Christine rocking awkwardly, she moved cautiously towards the bathroom door.

  The little room was empty. Nothing disturbed there. Michael's coffee cup on the vanity counter. Scent of Michael's cologne.

  Looking out once more through the front rooms, she rested back against the frame of the door. The ferocity of the wind slamming the glass walls alarmed her. She had heard it in the past, many a time, however. And only once had it been strong enough to break the glass. Such a storm had never come during the month of August. It had always been a winter phenomenon, coupled with the heavy rains that poured down on the hills of Marin County, washing mud into the streets, and sometimes washing houses off their foundations as well.

  Now she watched, vaguely fascinated as the water splashed and spattered onto the long decks, staining them darkly. She could see a frost of drops on the windshield of the Sweet Christine. Had this sudden storm deceived her? She sent out her invisible antennae. She listened.

  Beyond the groaning of glass and wood, she heard no alien sound. But something was wrong here. She wasn't alone. And the intruder was not on the second floor of the house, she was certain of that. He was near. He was watching her. But where? She could find no explanation for what she felt.

  The digital clock in the kitchen made a tiny, near imperceptible clicking sound as it rolled over to reveal that the time was five minutes after three A.M.

  Something moved in the corner of her eye. She did not turn to stare at it. She chose not to move at all. And gradually, shifting her gaze sharply to the left without moving her head, she took in the figure of a man standing on the western deck.

  He appeared to be slight of build, white-faced, with dark hair. His posture was not furtive or threatening. He stood unaccountably straight, arms natural at his sides. Surely she wasn't seeing this figure clearly, for the clothes seemed improbable to the point of impossibility--formal, and elegantly cut.

  Her rage grew stronger, and a cold calm settled over her. Her reasoning was instantaneous. He could not gain entrance to the house through the deck doors. He could not batter his way through the thick glass either. And if she fired the gun at him, which she would have loved to do, shed put a hole in the glass. Of course he might fire a gun at her as soon as he saw her. But why would he do it? Intruders want to get in. Besides, she was almost certain that he had already seen her, that he'd been watching her, and was watching her now.

  Very slowly she turned her head. However dark the living room might have appeared to him, there was no doubt that he could see her, that he was looking at her, in fact.

  His boldness infuriated her. And her sense of the danger of the situation mounted. She watched coldly as he moved towards the glass.

  "Come on, you bastard, I'll cheerfully kill you," she whispered, feeling the hairs rise on her neck. A delicious chill passed through her whole body. She wanted to kill him, whoever he was, trespasser, madman, thief. She wanted to blow him right off the deck with the .38-caliber bullet. Or to put it simply, with any power she had at her command.

  Slowly, with both hands, she lifted the gun. She pointed it directly at him and stretched out her arms as Chase had taught her to do.

  Undeterred, the intruder continued to look at her, and through her quiet, iron-cold fury, she marveled at the physical details that she could make out. The dark hair was wavy, the face wan and thin, and there seemed something sad and beseeching in the shadowy expression. The head turned gently on the neck as though the man were pleading with her, speaking to her.

  Who in God's name are you? she thought. The incongruity of it struck her slowly, along with a completely alien thought. This is not what it appears to be. This is some form of illusion I'm looking at! And with a sudden interior shift, her anger passed into suspicion and finally fear.

  The dark eyes of the being implored her. He raised his pale hands now and placed his fingers on the glass.

  She could neither move nor speak. Then, furious at her helplessness and at her terror, she cried:

  "You go back to hell where you came from!" her voice sounding loud and terrible in the empty house.

  As if to answer her, to unsettle her and vanquish her totally, the intruder slowly disappeared. The figure went transparent, then dissolved utterly, and nothing was left but the faintly horrible and completely unsettling sight of the empty deck.

  The immense pane of glass rattled. There came another boom from it as though the wind had pushed against it head on. Then the sea seemed to settle. The rushing of water died away. And the house grew still. Even the Sweet Christine settled uneasily in the channel beside the pier.

  Rowan continued to look at the empty deck. Then she realized her hands were wet with perspiration, and shaking. The gun felt enormously heavy and dangerously uncontrollable. In fact, she was shaking all over. Nevertheless, she went directly to the glass wall. Furious at her defenselessness against this thing, she touched the glass where the being had touched it. The glass was faintly but distinctly warm. Not warm as it might be from a human hand, for that would be too subtle a thing to warm such a cold surface, but warm as if heat had been directed at it.

  Again she studied the bare boards. She stared out at the dark, faceted water and the distant cozy lights of Sausalito on the other side of the bay.

  She moved swiftly to the kitchen counter, set down the gun, and picked up the phone.

  "I have to reach the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans. Please dial it," she said, her voic
e quaking. And the only thing she could do to calm herself as she waited was to listen, to reassure herself of what she already knew, that she was completely alone.

  Useless to check locks and latches. Useless to go poking in drawers and nooks and crannies. Useless, useless, useless.

  She was frantic by the time the hotel answered. "I have to speak to Michael Curry," she said. He was to have checked in that night, she explained. No, it didn't matter that it was five-twenty in New Orleans. Please ring his room.

  It seemed forever that she stood there alone, too shaken to question the selfishness of waking Michael at this hour. Then came the operator again: "I'm sorry, but Mr. Curry is not answering."

  "Try him again. Send someone up to the room, please. I have to talk to him."

  Finally, when they had failed to rouse him altogether, and refused of course to enter the suite without his permission--and for that she couldn't blame them--she left an urgent message, hung up and sank down on the hearth, and tried to think.

  She was certain of what she'd seen, absolutely certain of it. An apparition there on the deck, looking at her, drawing close to her, examining her! Some being that could appear and disappear entirely at will. Yet why had she seen the gleam of light on the edge of his collar; why the droplets of moisture in his hair? Why was the glass warm to the touch? She wondered if the thing had substance to it when it was visible, and if that substance dissolved when the creature "appeared to disappear."

  In sum, her mind ran to science as it always had, and she knew this was her tack, but it could not stop the panic in her, the great awful feeling of helplessness that had come over her and stayed with her now, making her afraid in her own safe place, where she'd never been afraid before.

  Why had the wind and the rain been part of it, she wondered. Surely she hadn't imagined that part. And why, above all else, had this creature appeared to her?

  "Michael," she whispered. It was like a prayer dropping from her lips. Then she gave a little whispered laugh. "I'm seeing them, too."

  She rose from the hearth and went about the house slowly, with steady steps, turning on every light.

  "All right," she said calmly, "if you come back, it will have to be in a blaze of illumination." But this was absurd, wasn't it? Something that could move the very waters of Richardson Bay could trip a circuit breaker easily enough.

  But she wanted these lights on. She was scared. She went into the bedroom, locked the door behind her, locked the door of the closet, and closed the door of the bathroom, and then lay down, plumping the pillows under her head, and placing the gun within reach.

  She lit a cigarette, knowing it was dreadful to smoke in bed, checked out the tiny winking red light on the smoke alarm, and then continued to smoke.

  A ghost, she thought. Imagine it, I have seen one. I never believed in them, but I've seen one. It had to be a ghost. There's nothing else it could have been. But why did this ghost appear to me? Again, she saw its imploring expression, and the vividness of the experience returned to her.

  It made her miserable suddenly that she couldn't reach Michael, that Michael was the only one in the whole world who might believe what had happened, that Michael was the only one she trusted enough to tell.

  The fact was, she was excited; it was curiously like her feeling after the rescue that night. I have been through something awful and thrilling. She wanted to tell someone. She lay there, wide-eyed in the bright shadowless yellow light of the bedroom thinking, Why did it appear to me?

  So curious the way it had walked across the deck and peered through the glass at her. "You would have thought I was the strange one."

  And the excitement continued. But she was very relieved when the sun finally rose. Sooner or later, Michael would wake up out of his drunken sleep. He'd see the message light on his phone; and surely, he would call.

  "And here I am wanting something from him again, reaching out to him right in the midst of whatever is happening there, needing him ... "

  But now she was drifting off, in the warm sweet safety of the sunlight pouring through the glass, snuggling into the warm pillows and pulling the patchwork quilt over her, thinking about him, about the dark fleecy hair on the backs of his arms and his hands, about his large eyes again peering at her through the glasses. And only on the cusp of dream did she think, Could this ghost possibly have something to do with him?

  The visions. She wanted to say, "Michael, is it something to do with the visions?" Then the dream swung into absurdity, and she wakened, resisting the irrelevance and the grotesqueness as she always did, consciousness being so much better, thinking--of course, Slattery could fill in for her, and if Ellie existed somewhere she no longer cared whether Rowan went back to New Orleans, certainly, for we had to believe that, didn't we? That what was beyond this plane was infinitely better; and then she fell back into exhausted sleep again.

  Nine

  MICHAEL AWOKE ABRUPTLY, thirsting, and hot in the bed covers though the air in the room was quite cool. He was wearing his shorts and his shirt, cuffs unbuttoned, collar undone. He was also wearing his gloves.

  A light burned at the end of the little carpeted corridor. Over the soft engulfing roar of the air conditioner, he heard what sounded like the rustle of papers.

  Good heavens, where am I? he thought. He sat up. At the end of the little hallway, there appeared to be a parlor, and a baby grand piano of pale and lustrous wood standing against a bank of flowered drapes. His suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel, it had to be.

  He had no memory of coming here. And he was instantly angry with himself for having gotten so drunk. But then the euphoria of the earlier evening returned to him, the vision of the house on First Street beneath the violet sky.

  I'm in New Orleans, he thought. And he felt a surge of happiness which effaced all his present confusion and guilt. "I'm home," he whispered. "Whatever else I've done, I'm home."

  But how had he managed to get into this hotel? And who was in the parlor? The Englishman. His last clear memory was of speaking to the Englishman in front of the First Street house. And with that little recollection came another: he saw the brown-haired man behind the black iron fence again, staring down at him. He saw the glittering eyes only a few feet above him, and the strangely white and impassive face. A curious feeling passed over him. It wasn't fear precisely. It was more purely visceral. His body tensed as it might against a threat.

  How could that man have changed so little over the years? How could he have been there one minute and gone the next?

  It seemed to Michael that he knew the answers to these questions, that he'd always understood the man was no ordinary man. But his sudden familiarity with such a completely unfamiliar notion almost made him laugh.

  "You're losing it, buddy." he whispered.

  But he had to get his bearings now, in this strange place, and find out what the Englishman wanted, and why he was still here.

  Quickly he surveyed the room. Yes, the old hotel. A feeling of comfort and security came to him as he saw the slightly faded carpet, the painted air conditioner beneath the windows, and the heavy old-fashioned telephone sitting on the small inlaid desk with its message light pulsing in the darkness.

  The door of the bath stood open revealing a dim slash of white tile.

  To his left, the closet, and his suitcase, opened on its stand, and wonder of wonders, on the table beside him an ice bucket, beaded over beautifully with tiny drops of moisture, and crammed into the ice three tall cans of Miller's beer.

  "Well, isn't that just about perfect?"

  He removed his right glove and touched one of the beer cans. Immediate flash of a uniformed waiter, same old load of distracting, irrelevant information. He put the glove back on and opened the can. He drank down half of it in deep cold swallows. Then he climbed to his feet and went into the bathroom and pissed.

  Even in the soft morning light coming through the slatted blinds, he could see his shaving kit laid out on the marble dresser. He took out his
toothbrush and toothpaste and brushed his teeth.

  Now he felt a little less headachy, hung over, and downright miserable. He combed his hair, swallowed the rest of the can of beer, and felt almost good.

  He changed into a fresh shirt, pulled on his trousers, and taking another beer from the ice bucket, he went down the hallway and stood looking into a large, elegantly furnished room. Beyond a gathering of velvet couches and chairs, the Englishman sat at a small wooden table, bent over a mass of manila folders and typewritten pages. He was a slightly built man with a heavily lined face and rather luxuriant white hair. He wore a gray velvet smoking jacket, tied at the waist, and gray tweed trousers, and he was looking at Michael with an extremely friendly and agreeable expression.

  He rose to his feet.

  "Mr. Curry, are you feeling better?" he asked. It was one of those eloquent English voices which make the simplest words take on new meaning, as if they've never been properly pronounced before. He had small yet brilliant blue eyes.

  "Who are you?" Michael asked.

  The Englishman drew closer, extending his hand.

  Michael didn't take it, though it hurt him to be this rude to somebody who looked so friendly and earnest and sort of nice. He took another sip of the beer.

  "My name's Aaron Lightner," the Englishman said. "I came from London to see you." Softly spoken, unobtrusive.

  "My aunt told me that part. I saw you hanging around my house on Liberty Street. Why the hell did you follow me here?"

  "Because I want to talk to you, Mr. Curry," the man said politely, almost reverentially. "I want to talk to you so badly that I'm willing to risk any discomfort or inconvenience I might incur. That I've risked your displeasure is obvious. And I'm sorry for it, truly sorry. I only meant to be helpful in bringing you here, and please allow me to point out that you were entirely cooperative at the time."

  "Was I?" Michael found he was bristling. Yet this guy was a real charmer, he had to give him that. But another glance at the papers spread out on the table made Michael furious. For fifty bucks, or considerably less, the cab driver would have lent him a hand. And the cab driver wouldn't be here now.

  "That's quite true," said Lightner in the same soft, well-tempered voice. "And perhaps I should have retired to my own suite above, but I wasn't certain whether or not you'd be ill, and frankly I was worried on another count."