The witching hour lotmw-1

by Anne Rice

  But he wasn’t doing anything now. Great Expectations was temporarily closed. Its owner was too busy trying to remember what had been revealed to him during that crucial hour when he’d been “dead in the water.”

  “It was no dream,” he said. “I know that I talked to people. They explained what they meant for me to do, and I accepted, I asked to come back.”

  As for the new psychic ability, that had nothing to do with it, he maintained. It seemed to be no more than some accidental side effect. “Look, all I get is a flash-a face, a name. It’s totally unreliable.”

  That night in the hospital coffee room, she caught him on the TV news-the vivid three-dimensional man. There were those unforgettable blue eyes again, and the wholesome smile. Something innocent about him, actually, his simple straightforward gestures indicative of one who has long ago given up on dishonesty, or of trying to fox the complications of the world in any way.

  “I’ve got to go home,” he said. Was it a New York accent? “Not home here, I mean, but home where I was born, back in New Orleans.” (Ah, so that was the accent!) “I could swear it’s got something to do with what happened. I keep getting these flashes of home.” Again, he gave a little shrug. He seemed like a damned nice guy.

  But nothing had come back to him as yet about the near death visions. The hospital hadn’t wanted to release him, but they had to admit that he was physically fit.

  “Tell us about the power, Michael.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Shrug. He looked at his black-gloved hands. “I want to talk to the people who rescued me-the Coast Guard who brought me, that skipper who picked me up at sea. I wish those people would get in touch. You know that’s why I’m doing this interview.”

  The camera cut away to a pair of studio reporters. Banter about “the power.” Both had seen it for themselves.

  For a moment Rowan did not move or even think. New Orleans … and he was asking for her to contact him. New Orleans … Well, that settled it. Rowan had an obligation. She had heard his plea from his own lips. And this question of New Orleans, she had to clarify it. She had to talk to him … or write.

  As soon as she reached home that night, she went to Graham’s old desk, pulled out some stationery, and wrote Curry a letter.

  She told him in detail all that she had observed regarding the accident from, the moment she spotted him at sea until they took him up on the stretcher. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she added her home phone and address and a little postscript.

  “Mr. Curry, I too am from New Orleans, though I never lived there. I was adopted the day I was born, and immediately taken away. It is probably no more than a coincidence that you are a southerner, too, but I thought you should know this. On the boat, you held my hand quite tightly and for some time. I would not want your situation confused by some vague telepathic message you received in that instant, something which may not be relevant at all.

  “If you need to talk to me,” she finished, “call me at University Hospital or at my home phone.”

  This was mild enough, neutral enough surely. She had only indicated that she believed in his power, and that she was there if he needed her. No more than that, no demand. And she would see to it that she remained responsible, no matter what transpired.

  Yet she couldn’t get it out of her head-the idea of being able to place her hand in his, of just asking: “I’m going to think about something, something specific that happened once, no, three times in my life; and all I want is that you tell me what you see. Would you do that? I cannot say you owe me this for saving your life … ”

  That’s right, you can’t. So don’t do it!

  She sent the letter directly to Dr. Morris, via Federal Express.

  Dr. Morris called her the next day. Curry had walked out of the hospital the preceding afternoon, right after a television press conference.

  “He’s crazy as a loon, Dr. Mayfair, but we had no legal grounds to hold him. I told him what you told me, by the way, that he hadn’t said anything. But he’s too obsessed to give up on this whole thing. He’s determined he’s going to remember what he saw out there, you know, the big reason for it all, the secret of the universe, the purpose, the doorway, the number, the jewel. You never heard such stuff. I’ll send the letter on to his house, but chances are, it won’t get through. The mail’s coming in by the sackful.”

  “This thing with the hands, is it real?”

  Silence. “You want to know the truth? It’s one hundred percent accurate, as far as I ever saw. If you ever see it for yourself, it will scare the hell out of you.”

  The story made the supermarket tabloids the following week. Two weeks later variations of it appeared in People and Time. Rowan clipped the stories and the pictures. Photographers were obviously following Curry wherever he went. They caught him outside his business on Castro Street. They caught him on the steps of his house.

  A fierce protective feeling for him was growing in Rowan. They really ought to leave this man alone.

  And you have to leave him alone, too, Rowan.

  He himself wasn’t granting any interviews anymore, that became clear by the first week in June. The tabloids fed off exclusives from the witnesses to his power-“He touched the purse and he told me all about my sister, what she’d said when she gave the purse to me. I was tingling all over, and then he said, ‘Your sister is dead.’ ”

  Finally the local CBS channel said Curry was holed up in his house on Liberty Street, incommunicado. Friends were concerned. “He’s disillusioned, angry,” said one of his old buddies from college. “I think he’s just retired from the world.” Great Expectations was closed indefinitely. Doctors at San Francisco General had not seen their patient. They were worried as well.

  Then in July, the Examiner declared that Curry was “missing.” He had “disappeared.”

  A reporter from television “News at Eleven” stood on the steps of a huge Victorian house pointing to a pile of unopened mail flowing from the garbage can by the side gate.

  “Is Curry holed up inside the grand Victorian on Liberty Street which he restored himself so lovingly many years ago? Is there a man sitting or lying alone upstairs in the lighted attic room?”

  In disgust Rowan snapped off the program. It had made her feel like a voyeur. Simply awful to drag that camera crew to the man’s very door.

  But what stayed in her mind was that garbage can full of unopened letters. Had her communication gone, inevitably, into that pile? The thought of him locked in that house, afraid of the world, in need of counsel was a little more than she could handle.

  Surgeons are men and women of action-people who believe they can do something. That’s why they have the moxie to cut into people’s bodies. She wanted to do something-go there, pound on the door. But how many other people had done that?

  No, he didn’t need another visitor, especially not one with a secret agenda of her own.

  In the evenings, when she came home from the hospital and took her boat out alone, she invariably thought of him. It was almost warm in the sheltered waters off Tiburon. She took her time before she moved into the colder winds of San Francisco Bay. Then she hit the violent current of the ocean. It was erotic, that great shift, as she pointed the boat westward, throwing back her head to gaze up as she always did at the soaring pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge. The great heavy cruiser moved slowly but steadily forward, pushing back the indistinct horizon.

  So indifferent the great dull rolling Pacific. Impossible to believe in anything but oneself when you looked at the endlessly tessellated surface, heaving and shifting under a colorless sunset where sea met sky in a dazzling haze.

  And he believed that he had been sent back for a purpose, did he, this man who restored beautiful dwellings, who drew pictures that were published in books, a man who ought to be too sophisticated to believe in something like that.

  But then he had really died, had he not? He had had that experience of which so many had written, of rising
upwards, weightless, and gazing down with a sublime detachment at the world below.

  No such thing had ever happened to her. But there were other things, things just as strange. And while the whole world knew about Curry’s adventure, no one knew the strange secret things that Rowan knew.

  But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made. It was like dipping a stick into the ocean and trying to write something-all the little people of the world spinning out little patterns that lasted no more than a few years, and meant nothing at all. Surgery had seduced her because she got them up and back on their feet and they were alive and they said “Thank you!” and you had served life and driven back death, and that was the only incontrovertible value to which she could give her all. Doctor, we never thought she’d walk again.

  But a great purpose for living, for being reborn? What could such a thing possibly be? What was the purpose for the woman who died of a stroke on the delivery table while her newborn cried in the doctor’s arms? What was the purpose for the man struck by the drunk driver on his way home from church?

  There had been a purpose all right for the fetus she had once seen, a living breathing thing, its eyes still sealed shut, its little mouth like that of a fish, wires running in all directions from its horrid oversized head and tiny arms, as it slumbered in the special incubator, waiting for its tissue to be harvested-while it continued to live and breathe, of course-for the transplant recipient who waited two floors upstairs.

  But if that was purpose, the discovery that you could, in spite of all laws to the contrary, keep those little aborted things alive in a secret laboratory in the middle of a giant private hospital, slicing them up at will, for the benefit of a Parkinson’s disease patient who had already clocked in sixty good years before he started to die of the illness which the fetal tissue transplant could cure, well, she’d take the knife to the gunshot wound fresh up from Emergency any day.

  Never would she forget that cold, dark Christmas Eve and Dr. Lemle leading her up through the deserted floors of the Keplinger Institute. “We need you here, Rowan. I could finesse your leaving University. I know what to say to Larkin. I want you here. And now I’m going to show you something you’ll appreciate which Larkin would never appreciate, something you will never see at University, something that you will understand.”

  Ah, but she didn’t. Or rather she understood too perfectly the horror of it.

  “It isn’t viable in the strict sense of the word,” he’d explained, this doctor, Karl Lemle, whose brilliance had so enticed her, brilliance and ambition, and vision, yes, that too. “And technically of course it is not even alive. It’s dead, quite dead, because its mother aborted it, you see, in the clinic downstairs, and so technically it is a nonperson, a non-human being. So who is to say, Rowan, that we have to shove it in a plastic trash bag when we know that through keeping this tiny body alive, and keeping others like it alive-these little gold mines of unique tissue, so flexible, adaptable, so unlike any other human tissue, swarming with countless tiny extraneous cells which would eventually have been discarded in the normal fetal process-we can make discoveries in the field of neurological transplants that make Shelley’s Frankenstein read like a bedtime story.”

  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 t
o 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.