“Then you’ll come again soon,” she said firmly.
“Yes, please do,” said Devarre. “It’s not every night I get an education like this. I’ve just learned you can live with a woman twenty-four years and suddenly find out that all the time she’s been two people, one of whom you never met—and a witch to boot.”
As Boudrie hurried off into the cloudy night, she suddenly called, “Monsieur le cure!” He turned to see them standing in the doorway, arms linked, and again he felt a pang of regret for what might once have been his.
“It has to do with water,” she said. “Tainted somehow. Evil.”
The unease in his spirit moved like a restless creature beneath the surface of the earth, one that would neither come up and show itself nor lie still.
** ** **
For a full minute neither of them spoke. The only movements were Linden’s trembling inhalations of smoke. Then she crushed the butt, rising in the same motion to lean toward him. Her hand slapped the grimoire.
“This,” she said, “is what you have been doing up there? Besides screwing the maid, I mean.” Her glittering gaze held his, then dropped. ‘“If a man wishes a faithful servant,’” she read contemptuously, “‘if he wishes to drink the blood of his enemies, if he would cheat the hand of death, it is necessary that he salute Lord Belial—’ my God, have you gone crazy? This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever come across in my life. Where did you get it? Why didn t you tell me?”
McTell stood unmoving, jaw taut, hands open beside his thighs. They felt as heavy as slabs of oak. Suddenly she scooped up the grimoire and hurled it at him. With a grunt, he caught it to his chest.
“You bastard! Is there anything you haven’t lied to me about?”
Carefully, he smoothed the rumpled pages.
“If you’re going to have an affair, you could at least go through the motions of deceit. I told you I would call, and the phone rang and rang until I was sure something must have happened to you. So back I came, leaving Mona, scared to death, speeding the whole way, and then I find you and your little friend. By the way, how long has this been going on?”
“Just today,” he said. His voice was thick and hoarse. “It was—an accident.”
“I see,” she said icily. “The two of you accidentally fell upstairs, out of your clothes, and into bed. Conveniently, when I just happened to be gone.”
He shook his head. There was no use trying to explain.
She lit another cigarette. When she spoke, she was calmer. “Listen to me. I don’t know what it is about this place, and I don’t know what this”—her hand scattered the papers—“has to do with it, but Bertie was right, something is very wrong here. I never told you this, but I almost drowned in the pool the other afternoon. It was like something was holding me under. I tried to ignore it then, but I can’t ignore it now. I want us out of here tonight. We don’t even have to pack—just take what we need to travel. We’ll have the rest sent on. We can go to Paris, or London, or home if you want. As long as it’s far away.”
McTell pressed a hand to his head. His left eye was throbbing, a drumbeat of blood.
“How old is she, John? Sixteen? Seventeen? There are laws against that sort of thing in this country too, you know. Christ, how long do you think you could keep that secret in a place like this?”
He stepped forward, reaching for the papers on the table. She caught his hand, stared at the mark. “What,” she breathed, “is that?”
He raised his palm before his face. It was unmistakable now, like a faint but clear brand: the outline of the symbol on the grimoire’s cover. “When I was climbing,” he said in the same thick tone. “I scraped it.” He turned and walked toward the stairs.
“You’ll start packing?” she called anxiously.
He did not answer. Feeling her gaze on his back, he climbed heavily, with the tingling in his palm flaring into a ferocious surge of power through his body.
McTell placed the grimoire on the desk, opened it to the Book of the Pilgrim, and looked at the newest line of writing: Solitudo tiliae viatori intellectum tribuit.
The linden’s solitude brings understanding to the pilgrim.
Distantly, he realized that he had read the Latin as effortlessly as if he had been speaking it all his life.
The moon slipped out from behind the restless clouds: pale, swollen full, too heavy for its own weight. McTell placed his hands on the windowsill and gazed at it with his eyes, but his mind looked inward.
To never see the girl again.
Or to subject his wife—his wife—to whatever shock had undone Mona.
If only he had time.
A tap came at the study door. He flipped the book closed and stood with his back to the desk. Linden’s jaw was set, but her fingers twisted a handkerchief, and the defiance in her voice did not hide its tremor. “I came to say that if you’re not ready in twenty minutes, I’m going straight to that priest and tell him what happened.”
McTell stared at her. She swallowed. “I love you,” she said, “I love the man I married. But something’s been changing you. You even look different. It’s for your own good, John. Start packing.”
“All right,” he said.
She waited, eyes wary.
“All right,” he said again. “Twenty minutes.”
Her shoulders drooped with relief.
He waited until her footsteps had gone down the hall to the bedroom. Then, palming the keys to the car, he walked noiselessly downstairs and out into the drive.
CHAPTER 13
Etien Boudrie had once seen a photograph of several young Masai warriors who had just completed their initiation into manhood. They sat in a row, most with drooping heads, faint with exhaustion from the arduous tests they had undergone.
But one was looking straight into the camera. Boudrie remembered clearly how, in glancing at the photo, he had stopped short with a most unpleasant shock. The being that looked out from the young man’s eyes, he understood instantly and instinctively, was something more—or less—than human. The gaze held the embodiment of a calm, gloating evil; the lips were curved in a sly smile; and Boudrie could almost hear the whispered thought, “Now my time has come.”
Whether this was the young man’s true nature or an aberration brought on by his initiation trials, Boudrie could not know; nor whether there really were such beings as fallen angels dedicated to the destruction of mankind. But that evil existed, that it sometimes walked the earth in human form, he had no doubt. What else could Gilles de Rais, Tor-quemada, Vlad the Impaler, the more recent devil’s children of the Third Reich, have been?
Or a man like Guilhem de Courdeval.
So. There it was at last, out in the open. And mad though the thought was, there was no denying that the story Philippe Taillou had told him matched in every particular the legend that had come down through the centuries. The tomb had been opened—and its seal of holy water broken.
Was it even thinkable that a man could, through some process beyond the grasp of the intellect, have survived physical death? That his spirit could have existed through centuries of imprisonment like a genie in a lamp, biding its time, plotting, waiting for the moment of its release, when it could resume its career of destruction? That it could send ominous visions to one woman, throw another into a coma, frighten a third nearly to death; shock a grown man into a stroke and haunt his son; even eviscerate a dog?
Almost as if that spirit, that will, were destroying all obstacles in its path? But to what?
Sins of the fathers.
Blood of a flower.
The drowned man.
The first two may have meant nothing, at least nothing apparent. But the third—
It has to do with water. Tainted somehow. Evil.
She was psychic, he reminded himself. She could have been unconsciously reading a mind, perhaps even his own. It was true that Courdeval had been in his thoughts since his talk with the Americans. Again he remembered the man McTell’s too eager curiosity.
Angrily, he glared around the room, gulped from his glass, began to stalk. And what if it was true? To what did it add up? A series of events, unpleasant to be sure, but events that could be connected only by a madman or a child. You are old, Etien, he told himself cynically; the liquor that has been your life’s blood is at last taking its toll.
But the ugly fear lying just beneath the surface of his consciousness—like a corpse in a shallow grave haunting a murderer’s memory—rose at last.
Was not the real heart of the matter that some deep part of him longed for the final, actual encounter: to look up and see it standing before him in all its hooved and horned menace, just so he would at last be certain beyond all doubt? Uneasily, he tried to push the thought away; to court it was the first step toward making it come true. A priest who failed in an exorcism, so legend had it, would himself be tormented by that spirit until his death—and after that, who knew?
He downed the last of the brandy and started off to bed. Weary though he was, he feared that sleep was yet a long way off. He mumbled a prayer that he might not pass another night tossing until dawn, his imagination fueled by this business—or grappling hopelessly with another dream of fire.
In the hallway he reached to turn out the light, but his hand hesitated. A little ashamedly, he left it on and went to his bedroom to put on the light there first. He had begun to undress when he heard the pounding at the door. Clumping back down the hall, he threw it open.
Mme. Durtal stood before him, holding her coat together as if it had no buttons. Her hands were thin and white, and there was fright in her eyes. “It’s Amalie, monsieur,” she said in agitation. “She is tossing as if her soul struggled to leave her body—”
He started for his visiting bag, with the thought flitting through his mind that he would have to go to the cathedral to get the oils for the administration of the Last Rites. Not until later did he wonder at his immediate certainty that the time for that had come.
“. . . trying to speak,” the woman was saying, “words that make no sense, but seem torn from her. Alysse, too, is unwell—”
“You’ve called Devarre?”
Her face took on a stubborn, miserly, peasant look. “We have no telephone—”
So you chose instead to get the priest, whom you will not have to pay, he thought. “Wait in the car,” he snapped. She turned back into the night. Numb with apprehension, Boudrie gripped the phone. He closed his eyes while it rang, hoping they had not gone out.
“It’s me, Etien!” he yelled when the receiver was lifted. “La Perrin is dying.”
“Five minutes,” Devarre said, and hung up.
Boudrie slammed the door and set off at a clumsy run for the cathedral. Of all the times to worry about money! And what was it she had said? “Alysse, too, is unwell what did that mean?
“Je uous salus, Marie, pleine de grace, le Seigneur est avec vous,” he mumbled as he flipped through his key ring. Dimly, he realized he had associated the action of his fingers with the rosary. At last he got the door open. The oils rested in an oak chest hundreds of years old. Forcing himself to overcome his impatience, he crossed himself, knelt, prayed briefly. When he rose, he lunged for the chest.
Outside again, he broke into an all-out run for the car.
** ** **
Linden strode around the bedroom, emptying drawers and tossing their contents into suitcases, trying to keep her mind numb. Superimposed upon everything she had seen all evening was a single picture: her husband in bed, slumbering deeply, with a pretty teenaged girl nestled beside him. Beneath the surge of shock and disbelief and, yes, rage, there had been a fear that made her weak—too weak to scream, to leap upon them as she knew she should have done—and that left her capable only of turning and walking back downstairs to wait, as if she were in calm control.
But the infidelity itself was not what had frightened her most. It was the contentment on his sleeping face, the passion she had sensed even in the relaxed muscles of the arm that cradled his bedmate. Somehow, she knew he did not look like that when he slept with her. She yanked open the closet and began emptying its contents by the armload.
Then there was this insanity about magic. A grown man. A distinguished professor. She had been running her mind back along the list of his relatives, trying to remember if there was any hint of mental instability that might be hereditary.
Where had he gotten that book? It was obviously very ancient. Even before she had read any of it, she had been strangely reluctant to touch it, quick to put it down. The feel of it was somehow bad.
Nerves. Whatever had gotten into him was working on her too. Doubtless he had found the book in the course of his work; he was always coming across such things.
But that did not explain why he was translating it, and why he had kept it a secret. Nor did it explain what Mona had told her. Was that nerves too? She remembered the terror in her sister’s eyes, the choked, faint voice that had whispered the story. A demon, of all things. More insanity.
But what had it been?
The sound of a car engine starting brought her to herself. She gazed blankly at the doorway, tom from her vision of Mona’s face.
Then she realized that the car was their BMW.
Dropping a pile of clothes, she hurried downstairs—stunned at first, then breaking into a run—and threw open the main door just in time to see the disappearing taillights.
“You miserable bastard,” she breathed. But as she stood in the windy night, her anger gave way to uncertainty. She stepped back inside, closed the door, and locked it.
Now what? Call the police? And complain about what: that she and her husband had had a fight, and he had driven off in his own car? There was no one else to call—certainly not Mona and Skip. She was stuck.
Wait for him to come back, then—if he did. And if not?
She folded her arms and walked back to the living room. There she paused, and suddenly she was hovering on the edge of tears, for loving a man who too often seemed not to need her, and now, even to want her.
But beneath her grief and rage remained the cold, creeping fear that he had truly gone mad. Perhaps it had been foolish to speak so sternly to him; she had not realized the extent of the problem. She would take care not to do it again; she would coax him if necessary, play along—whatever it took to get him to professional help.
In the meantime, there was nothing to do but wait. She touched her eyes with her handkerchief and went to pour herself a little brandy.
Suddenly from deep in the forest came a strange whistle. It sounded very far away and close at the same time; quiet and yet piercing, with a mysterious, haunting quality. She waited, listening; it did not come again. Some night bird, no doubt, though she had never heard anything like it. For no reason it increased her uneasiness. Realizing that the glass door to the patio was partly open, and only screened, she went to lock it. Her gaze flicked over the moonlit pool outside.
She inhaled sharply.
Something in it was moving.
For long seconds she stared, telling herself it was the wind rippling the water, the reflected clouds passing before the moon.
But there it was again, a slow, steady, rhythmic movement.
Timidly, hardly breathing, she stepped closer. “Who’s there?” she called, and heard the quaver in her voice. “Qui est la?”
The movement continued, but only the wind answered back, with a sudden gust that sent leaves skittering across the patio. Slowly, she slid open the screen, leaning out into the night, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
As if the pool’s dark glassy surface were a screen and the moonlight a beam projected onto it, two silhouetted figures seemed to be moving toward her. One was a man, very tall, with an enormous sword in one hand. The second came not quite to his waist, and was muffled in some sort of garment wi
th a hood. It was the man’s legs that were moving, in a steady menacing stride. The other creature seemed rather to glide. Wildly, her gaze flicked around the patio, to the forest, to the moon, to wherever the figures really were—to the source of this trick her eyes were playing on her.
But the figures were nowhere else. They were in the moonlight on the water, and they were getting bigger.
She whirled, fingers fumbling at the door latch. It refused to close.
The lights in the house flickered and died.
Fighting back the terror that leaped in her throat, she began to move, edging along the wall toward the phone, holding her breath, straining to hear. Something was rasping at the screen with what might have been claws. She moved faster, holding the wall for support.
The sound of the door slowly sliding open nearly made her scream. Moonlight cast a creeping, rising shadow that followed her own. It rustled, like something heavy being dragged. She reached the hallway. Her fingers groped around the corner for the phone.
Instead they touched something soft, rubbery, loathsome.
She crouched, unable to pull her hand away, while her disbelieving mind struggled to identify it. Then it moved.
The scream she had been holding burst from her lungs, and she fled blindly through the darkness, crashing into furniture and walls. A doorway loomed before her, a gaping patch of black. She plunged through, barely saving herself from falling headlong down the cellar stairs, and slammed the door behind. Her heels caught on the steps; she kicked off her shoes and stumbled on down, trying to silence her gasping breath. The stone walls were cold and rough against her hands, until she reached a corner and could go no farther. Distantly, as if it were happening to someone else, she realized what she had done: There was no way out. She sank into a crouch and, with her ears straining, waited.
From the top of the stairs came the creak of hinges, a wedge of dim light. A thick dark shadow appeared, casting its head this way and that.
Then, with the same rustling sound, it began to descend. From behind came another sound, and though Linden had never heard it before, she recognized the clanking of a man in armor.
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