The witching hour lotmw-1

by Anne Rice

  Though Ellie was supposed to be telepathic, it was a parlor-game type of thing. She knew who it was when the phone rang. She could tell you what playing card you were holding in your hand. Otherwise there was nothing unusual about this woman, except perhaps that she was very pretty, resembling many other descendants of Julien Mayfair, and had her great-grandfather’s ingratiating manner and seductive smile.

  The last time I myself saw Ellie was at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair in New Orleans in January of 1988; she was at that time sixty-three or four, a beautiful woman, about five feet six inches in height, with darkly tanned skin and jet black hair. Her blue eyes were concealed behind white-rimmed sunglasses; her fashionable cotton dress flattered her slender figure, and indeed, she had something of the glamour of a film actress, to wit a California patina. Within half a year, she was dead.

  When Ellie died, Rowan inherited everything, including Ellie’s family trust fund, and an additional trust fund which had been set up-Rowan knew nothing about it-when Rowan was born.

  As Rowan was then, and is now, an extremely hardworking physician, her inheritance has made almost no appreciable difference in her day-to-day life. But more on that in the proper time.

  ROWAN MAYFAIR FROM CHILDHOOD TO THE PRESENT TIME

  Nonobtrusive surveillance of Rowan indicated that this child was extremely precocious from the beginning, and may have had a variety of psychic powers of which her adoptive parents appeared unaware. There is also some evidence that Ellie Mayfair refused to acknowledge anything “strange” about her daughter. Whatever the case, Rowan seems to have been “the pride and joy” of both Ellie and Graham.

  As already indicated, the bond between mother and child was extremely close until the time of Ellie’s death. However, Rowan never shared her mother’s love of parties, lunches, shopping sprees, and other such pursuits, and was never, even in later adolescence or young adulthood, drawn into Ellie’s wide circle of female friends.

  Rowan did share her parents’ passion for boating. She accompanied the family on boat trips from her earliest years, learning to manage Graham’s small sailboat, The Wind Singer, on her own when she was only fourteen. When Graham bought an ocean-going cruiser named the Great Angela, the whole family took long trips together several times a year.

  By the time Rowan was sixteen, Graham had bought her her own seaworthy twin-engine full displacement hull yacht, which Rowan named the Sweet Christine. The Great Angela was at that time retired, and the whole family used the Sweet Christine, but Rowan was the undisputed skipper. And over everyone’s advice and objections, Rowan frequently took the enormous boat out of the harbor by herself.

  For years it was Rowan’s habit to come directly home from school and to go out of San Francisco Bay into the ocean for at least two hours. Only occasionally did she invite a close friend to go along.

  “We never see her till eight o’clock,” Ellie would say. “And I worry! Oh, how I worry. But to take that boat away from Rowan would be to kill her. I just don’t know what to do.”

  Though an expert swimmer, Rowan is not a daredevil sailor, so to speak. The Sweet Christine is a heavy, slow, forty-foot Dutch-built cruiser, designed for stability in rough seas, but not for speed.

  What seems to delight Rowan is being alone in it, out of sight of land, in all kinds of weather. Like many people who respond to the northern California climate, she seems to enjoy fog, wind, and cold.

  All who have observed Rowan seem to agree that she is a loner, and an extremely quiet person who would rather work than play. In school she was a compulsive student, and in college a compulsive researcher. Though her wardrobe was the envy of her classmates, it was, she always said, Ellie’s doing. She herself had almost no interest in clothes. Her characteristic off-duty attire has been for years rather nautical-jeans, yachting shoes, oversized sweaters and watch caps, and a sailor’s peacoat of navy blue wool.

  In the world of medicine, particularly that of neurosurgery, Rowan’s compulsive habits are less remarkable, given the nature of the profession. Yet even in this field, Rowan has been seen as “obsessive.” In fact, Rowan seems born to have been a doctor, though her choice of surgery over research surprised many people who knew her. “When she was in the lab,” said one of her colleagues, “her mother had to call her and remind her to take time out to sleep or eat.”

  One of Rowan’s early elementary-school teachers noted in the record, when Rowan was eight, that “this child thinks she is an adult. She identifies with adults. She becomes impatient with other children. But she is too well behaved to show it. She seems terribly, terribly alone.”

  TELEPATHIC POWERS

  Rowan’s psychic powers began to surface in school from the time she was six years old. Indeed, they may have surfaced long before that, but we have not been able to find any evidence before that time. Teachers queried informally (or deviously) about Rowan tell truly amazing stories about the child’s ability to read minds.

  However, nothing we have discovered indicates that Rowan was ever considered an outcast or a failure or maladjusted. She was throughout her school years an overachiever and an unqualified success. Her school pictures reveal her to have been an extremely pretty child, always, with tanned skin and sun-bleached blond hair. She appears secretive in these pictures, as if she does not quite like the intrusion of the camera, but never affected, or ill at ease.

  Rowan’s telepathic abilities became known to teachers rather than to other students, and they follow a remarkable pattern:

  “My mother had died,” said a first-grade teacher. “I couldn’t go back to Vermont for the funeral, and I felt terrible. Nobody knew about this, you understand. But Rowan came up to me at recess. She sat beside me and she took my hand. I almost burst into tears at this tenderness. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she said. She sat there with me in silence. Later when I asked her how she knew, she said, ‘It just popped into my head.’ I think that child knew all kinds of things that way. She knew when the other kids were envious of her. How lonely she always was!”

  Another time, when a little girl was absent from school for three days without explanation and school authorities could not reach her, Rowan quietly told the principal there was no reason to be alarmed. The girl’s grandmother had died, said Rowan, and the family had gone off to the funeral in another state, completely forgetting to call the school. This turned out to be true. Again Rowan could not explain how she had known except to say “It just came into my head.”

  We have some two dozen stories similar to this one, and what characterizes almost all of them is that they involve not only telepathy, but empathy and sympathy on the part of Rowan-a clear desire to comfort or minister to a suffering or confused person. That person was invariably an adult. The telepathic power is never connected with tricks, frightening people, or quarrels of any kind.

  In 1966, when Rowan was eight, she used this telepathic ability of hers for the last time as far as we know. During her fourth-grade term at a private school in Pacific Heights, she told the principal that another little girl was very sick and ought to see a doctor, but Rowan didn’t know how to tell anyone. The little girl was going to die.

  The principal was horrified. She called Rowan’s mother and insisted that Rowan be taken to a psychiatrist. Only a deeply disturbed little girl would say “something like that.” Ellie promised to talk with Rowan. Rowan said nothing further.

  However, the little girl in question was diagnosed within a week as having a rare form of bone cancer. She died before the end of the term.

  The principal has told the story over dinner countless times. She deeply regretted her censure of Rowan. She wished in particular that she had not called Mrs. Mayfair, because Mrs. Mayfair became so terribly upset.

  It may have been concern on Ellie’s part which put an end to this sort of incident in Rowan’s life. Ellie’s friends all knew about it. “Ellie was damned near hysterical. She wanted Rowan to be normal. She said she didn’t want a daughter with stra
nge gifts.”

  Graham thought the whole thing was a coincidence, according to the principal. He bawled out the woman for calling and telling Ellie when the poor little girl died.

  Coincidence or not, this entire affair seems to have put an end to Rowan’s demonstrations of her power. It is safe to assume that she shrewdly decided to “go underground” as a mind reader. Or even that she deliberately suppressed her power to the point where it became nonexistent or extremely weak. Try as we might, we find nothing about her telepathic abilities from then on. People’s memories of her all have to do with her quiet brilliance, her indefatigable energy, and her love of science and medicine.

  “She was that girl in high school who collected the bugs and the rocks, calling everything by a long Latin name.”

  “Frightening, absolutely frightening,” said her high school chemistry teacher. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had reinvented the hydrogen bomb one weekend in her spare time.”

  It has been speculated within the Talamasca that Rowan’s suppression of her telepathic power may have something to do with the growth of her telekinetic power, that she rechanneled her energy, so to speak, and that the two powers represent both sides of the same coin. To put it differently, Rowan turned away from mind and toward matter. Science and medicine became her obsessions from her junior high school years on.

  Rowan’s only real boyfriend during her teenage years was also brilliant and reclusive. He seems to have been unable to take the competition. When Rowan was admitted to U.C. Berkeley and he was not, they broke up bitterly. Friends blamed the boyfriend. He later went east and became a research scientist in New York.

  One of our investigators “bumped into him” at a museum opening, and brought the conversation around to psychics and mind readers. The man opened up about his old high school sweetheart who had been psychic. He was still bitter about it. “I loved that girl. Really loved her. Her name was Rowan Mayfair and she was very unusual-looking. Not pretty in an ordinary way. But she was impossible. She knew what I was thinking even before I knew it. She knew when I’d been out with someone else. She was so damned quiet about it, it was eerie. I heard she became a neurosurgeon. That’s scary. What will happen if the patient thinks something negative about her before he goes under the anesthesia? Will she slice the thought right out of his head?”

  The fact is, no one reporting on Rowan mentions pettiness in connection with her. She is described as “formidable,” just as Mary Beth Mayfair was once described, but never small-minded or vindictive, or unduly aggressive in any personal way.

  By the time Rowan entered U.C. Berkeley in 1976, she knew that she wanted to be a doctor. She was a straight A student in the premedicine program, took courses every summer (though she still went on vacation often with Graham and Ellie), skipped an entire year, and graduated at the top of her class in 1979. She entered medical school when she was twenty, apparently believing that neurological research would be her life’s work.

  Her academic progress during this period was thought to be phenomenal. Numerous teachers speak of her as “the most brilliant student I have ever had.”

  “She isn’t just smart. She’s intuitive! She makes astonishing connections. She doesn’t just read a book. She swallows it, and comes up with six different implications of the author’s basic theory of which the author never dreamed.”

  “The students have nicknamed her Dr. Frankenstein because of her talk about brain transplants and creating whole new brains out of parts. But the thing about Rowan is, she’s a real human being. No need to worry about brilliance without a heart.”

  “Oh, Rowan. Do I remember Rowan? You have to be kidding! Rowan could have been teaching the class instead of me. You want to know something funny-and don’t you ever tell anyone this! I had to go out of town at the end of the term, and I gave Rowan all the class papers to grade. She graded her own class! Now if that ever gets out I’m ruined, but we struck a bargain, you see. She wanted a key to the laboratory over the Christmas break, and I said, ‘Well, how about grading these papers?’ And the worst part of it was it was the first time I didn’t get a single student complaint about a grade. Rowan, I wish I could forget her. People like Rowan make the rest of us feel like jerks.”

  “She isn’t brilliant. That’s what people think, but there’s more to it. She’s some sort of mutant. No, seriously. She can study the research animals and tell you what’s going to happen. She would lay her hands on them and say, ‘This drug isn’t going to do it.’ I’ll tell you something else she did too. She could cure those little creatures. She could. One of the older doctors told me once that if she didn’t watch it, she could upset the experiments by using her powers to cure. I believe it. I went out with her one time, and she didn’t cure me of anything, but boy, was she ever hot. I mean literally hot. It was like making love to somebody with a fever. And that’s what they say about faith healers, you know, the ones who’ve been studied. You can feel a heat coming from their hands. I believe it. I don’t think she should have gone into surgery. She should have gone into oncology. She could have really cured people. Surgery? Anybody can cut them up.”

  (Let us add that this doctor himself is an oncologist, and non-surgeons frequently make extremely pejorative statements about surgeons, calling them plumbers and the like; and surgeons make similar pejorative remarks about non-surgeons, saying things such as “All they do is get the patients ready for us.”)

  ROWAN’S POWER TO HEAL

  As soon as Rowan entered the hospital as an intern (her third year of medical school), stories of her healing powers and diagnostic powers became so common that our investigators could pick and choose what they wanted to write down.

  In sum, Rowan is the first Mayfair witch to be described as a healer since Marguerite Mayfair at Riverbend before 1835.

  Just about every nurse ever questioned about Rowan has some “fantastic” story to tell. Rowan could diagnose anything; Rowan knew just what to do. Rowan patched up people who looked like they were ready for the morgue.

  “She can stop bleeding. I’ve seen her do it. She grabbed a hold of this boy’s head and looked at his nose. ‘Stop,’ she whispered. I heard her. And he just didn’t bleed any more after that.”

  Her more skeptical colleagues-including some male and female doctors-attribute her achievements to the “power of suggestion.” “Why, she practically uses voodoo, you know, saying to a patient, Now we’re going to make this pain stop! Of course it stops, she’s got them hypnotized.”

  Older black nurses in the hospital know Rowan has “the power,” and sometimes ask her outright to “lay those hands” on them when they are suffering severe arthritis or other such aches and pains. They swear by Rowan.

  “She looks into your eyes. ‘Tell me about it, where it hurts,’ she says. And she rubs with those hands, and it don’t hurt! That’s a fact.”

  By all accounts, Rowan seems to have loved working in the hospital, and to have experienced an immediate conflict between her devotion to the laboratory and her newfound exhilaration on the wards.

  “You could see the research scientist being seduced!” said one of her teachers sadly. “I knew we were losing her. And once she stepped into the Operating Room it was all over. Whatever they say about women being too emotional to be brain surgeons, no one would ever say such a thing about Rowan. She’s got the coolest hands in the field.”

  (Note the coincidental use of cool and hot in reference to the hands.)

  There are indications that Rowan’s decision to abandon research for surgery was a difficult, if not traumatic one. During the fall of 1983, she apparently spent considerable time with a Dr. Karl Lemle, of the Keplinger Institute in San Francisco, who was working on cures for Parkinson’s disease.

  Rumors at the hospital indicated that Lemle was trying to lure Rowan away from University, with an extremely high salary and ideal working conditions, but that Rowan did not feel she was ready to leave the Emergency Room or the Operating Room or
the wards.

  During Christmas of 1983, Rowan seems to have had a violent falling out with Lemle, and thereafter would not take his calls. Or so he told everyone at University over the next few months.

  We have never been able to learn what happened between Rowan and Lemle. Apparently Rowan did agree to see him for lunch in the spring of 1984. Witnesses saw them in the hospital cafeteria where they had quite an argument. A week later Lemle entered the Keplinger private hospital having suffered a small stroke. Another stroke followed and then another, and he was dead within the month.

  Some of Rowan’s colleagues criticized her severely for her failure to visit Lemle. Lemle’s assistant, who later took his place at the Institute, said to one of our investigators that Rowan was highly competitive and jealous of his boss. This seems unlikely.

  No one to our knowledge has ever connected the death of Lemle with Rowan. However, we have made the connection.

  Whatever happened between Rowan and her mentor-she frequently described him as such before their falling out-Rowan committed herself to neurosurgery shortly after 1983, and began operating exclusively on the brain after she completed her regular residency in 1985. She is at the time of this writing completing her residency in neurosurgery, and will undoubtedly be Board-certified, and probably hired as the Staff Attending at University within the year.