Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  Slowly the doctor studied Lightner again. The man was fastening his briefcase. He examined his airline ticket, appeared to find it satisfactory, and then slipped it into his coat.

  ‘Let me say one thing further,’ said Lightner, ’and then I must catch my plane. Don’t tell this story to others. They won’t believe you. Only those who have seen such things believe in them. It’s tragic, but invariably true.’

  ‘Yes, I know it is,’ said the doctor. So much he wanted to ask, yet he could not. ‘Have you…?’ He stopped.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen him,’ said Lightner. ‘It was frightening, indeed. Just as you described.’ He rose to go.

  ‘What is he? A spirit? A ghost?’

  ‘I don’t know, actually, what he is. All the stories are very similar. Things don’t change there. They go on, year after year. But I must go, and again I thank you, and if you should ever wish to talk to me again, you know how to reach me. You have my card.’ Lightner extended his hand. ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Wait. The daughter, what became of her? The intern out west?’

  ‘Why, she’s a surgeon now,’ Lightner said, glancing at his watch. ‘Neurosurgeon, I believe. Just passed her examinations. Board-certified, is that what they call it? But then I don’t know her either, you see. I only hear about her now and then. Our paths did cross once.’ He broke off, then gave a quick almost formal smile. ‘Good-bye, Doctor, and thank you again.’

  The doctor sat there, thinking, for a long time. He did feel better, infinitely better. There was no denying it. He had no regret that he had told the tale. In fact, the entire encounter seemed a gift to him, something sent by fate to lift from his shoulders the worst burden he’d ever borne. Lightner knew and understood the whole case. Lightner knew the daughter in California.

  Lightner would tell that young neurosurgeon what she ought to know, that is, if he hadn’t done it already. Yes, the burden was lifted. The burden was gone. Whether it weighed upon Lightner didn’t matter.

  Then the most curious afterthought came to the doctor, something which hadn’t occurred to him for years. He’d never been in that big Garden District house during a rainstorm. Why, how lovely it would have been to see rain through those long windows, to hear rain on those porch roofs. Too bad about that, missing such a thing. He’d thought about it often at the time, but he always missed the rain. And rain in New Orleans was so beautiful.

  Well, he was letting go of it all, was he not? Again, he found himself responding to Lightner’s assurances as if they had been words spoken in the confessional, words with some religious authority. Yes, let it all go.

  He signaled the waitress. He was hungry. He would like a breakfast now that he could eat. And without thinking much about it, he took Lightner’s card out of his pocket, glanced at the phone numbers — the numbers he might call if he had questions, the numbers he never intended to call - and then he tore the card into little pieces and put them in the ashtray, and then set them afire with a match.

  TWO

  NINE P.M. The room was dark, save for the bluish light of the television. Miss Havisham, was it not, a wraith in a wedding dress from his beloved Great Expectations.

  Through the clear, unadorned windows he could see the lights of downtown San Francisco when he chose to look - a constellation burning through the thin fog, and just below, the peaked roofs of the smaller Queen Anne houses across Liberty Street

  . How he loved Liberty Street

  . His house was the tallest on the block, a mansion once perhaps, now only a beautiful house rising majestically among humbler cottages, above the noise and the bustle of the Castro.

  He had ‘restored’ this house. He knew every nail, every beam, every cornice. Shirtless in the sun, he had laid the tiles of the roof. He had even poured the concrete of the sidewalk.

  Now he felt safe in his house, and safe nowhere else. And for four weeks he had not been out of this room, except to enter the small adjacent bathroom.

  Hour by hour, he lay in bed, hands hot inside the black leather gloves which he could not and would not take off, staring at the ghostly black-and-white television screen in front of him. He was letting the television shape his dreams through the various video tapes he loved, the video tapes of the movies he’d watched years ago with his mother. They were ‘the house movies’ to him now, because all of them had not only wonderful stories and wonderful people who had become his heroes and heroines, but wonderful houses. Rebecca had Manderley. Great Expectations had Miss Havisham’s ruined mansion. Gaslight had the lovely London town house on the square. The Red Shoes had the mansion by the sea where the lovely dancer went to hear the news that she would soon be the company’s prima ballerina.

  Yes, the house movies, the movies of childhood dreams, of characters as great as the houses. He drank beer after beer as he watched. He drifted in and out of sleep. His hands positively hurt in the gloves. He did not answer the phone. He did not answer the door. Aunt Vivian took care of it.

  Now and then Aunt Vivian would come into his room. She would give him another beer, or some food. He rarely ate the food. ‘Michael, please eat,’ she would say. He would smile. ‘Later, Aunt Viv.’

  He would not see or speak to anyone except Dr Morris, but Dr Morris couldn’t help him. His friends couldn’t help him either. And they didn’t want to talk to him anymore. They were tired of hearing him talk about being dead for an hour and then coming back. And he certainly did not want to talk to the hundreds who wanted to see a demonstration of his psychic power.

  He was sick to death of his psychic power. Didn’t anyone understand? It was a parlor trick, this taking off his gloves and touching things and seeing some simple, mundane image. ‘You got this pencil from a woman in your office yesterday. Her name’s ‘Gert,’ or ‘This locket’. This morning, you took it out and you decided you’d wear it but you didn’t really want to. You wanted to wear the pearls, and you couldn’t find them.’

  Just a physical thing, this, an antenna that maybe all human beings had thousands of years ago.

  Didn’t anyone appreciate the real tragedy? That he could not remember what he saw when he was drowned. ‘Aunt Viv,’ he would say, still trying now and then to explain it to her, ‘I really did see people up there. We were dead. All of us were dead. And I had a choice about coming back. And I was sent back for a purpose.’

  Pale shadow of his dead mother, Aunt Vivian would only nod her head. ‘I know, darling. Maybe in time, you’ll remember.’

  In time.

  His friends had gotten more harsh at the end. ‘Michael, you’re talking crazy. This happens that people drown and they’re brought back. There’s no special purpose.’

  ‘That’s nuthouse talk, Mike.’

  Therese had cried and cried. ‘Look, there’s no use me being here, Michael. You’re not the same person.’

  No. Not the same person. That person drowned. Over and over he tried to remember the rescue — the woman who had got him up out of the water and brought him around. If only he could talk to her again, if only Dr Morris would find her… He just wanted to hear it from her own lips that he’d said nothing. He just wanted to take off his gloves and hold her hand in his when he asked her. Maybe through her he could remember…

  Dr Morris wanted him to come in for further evaluation.

  ‘Leave me alone. Just find that woman. I know you can reach her. You told me she called you. She told you her name.’

  He was through with hospitals, with brain scans and electroencephalograms, through with shots and pills.

  The beer he understood. He knew how to pace it. And the beer sometimes brought him close to remembering…

  … And it was a realm he’d seen out there. People - so many of them. Now and then it was there again, a great gossamer whole. He saw her… who was she? She said… And then it was gone. ‘I will, I’ll do it. If I die again trying, I’ll do it.’

  Had he really said that to them? How could he have imagined such things, things so very far afield of
his own world, which was full of the solid and the real, and why these odd flashes of being far away, back home, in the city of his boyhood?

  He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything that mattered anymore.

  He knew he was Michael Curry, that he was forty-eight years old, that he had a couple of million socked away, and property that amounted to almost that, which was a very good thing because his construction company was shut down, cold. He could no longer run it. He’d lost his best carpenters and painters to the other crews around town. He’d lost the big job that had meant so much, the restoration of the old bed-and-breakfast hotel on Union Street

  .

  He knew that if he took off his gloves and started touching anything - the walls, the floor, the beer can, the copy of David Copperfield which lay open beside him - he’d started getting these flashes of meaningless information and he’d go crazy. That is, if he wasn’t already crazy.

  He knew he had been happy before he drowned, not perfectly happy, but happy. His life had been good.

  The morning of the big event, he had awakened late, needing a day off, and it was a good time for it. His men were doing just fine out there, and maybe he wouldn’t check on them. It was May I and the oddest memory came back to him - of a long drive out of New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast to Florida when he was a boy. It must have been the Easter vacation, but he really didn’t know for sure, and all those who would have known - his mother, his father, his grandparents - were dead.

  What he remembered was the clear green water on that white beach, and how warm it had been, and that the sand was like sugar under his feet.

  They had all gone down to the waves to swim at sunset; not the slightest chill in the air; and though the great orange sun still hung in the blue western sky, there was a half-moon shining straight overhead. His mother had pointed it out to him. ‘Look, Michael,’ Even his father seemed to love it, his father who never noticed such things had said in a soft voice that it was a beautiful place.

  It had hurt him to remember this. The cold in San Francisco was the one thing he powerfully resented, and he could never tell anyone why afterwards - that such a memory of southern warmth had inspired him to go out that day to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Was there any place colder in all of the Bay Area than Ocean Beach? He had known how drab and forbidding the water would look under the bleached and sullen sky. He had known how the wind would cut through his clothes.

  Nevertheless he’d gone. Alone to be at Ocean Beach on this dim, colorless afternoon with visions of southern waters, of driving with the top down on the old Packard convertible through the soft caressing southern wind.

  He didn’t turn on the car radio as he drove through town.

  So he didn’t hear the high tide warnings. But what if he had? He knew Ocean Beach was dangerous. Every year people were washed out, natives as well as tourists.

  Maybe he’d been thinking a little about that when he went out on the rocks just below the Cliff House Restaurant. Treacherous, yes, always, and slippery. But he wasn’t much afraid of falling, or of the sea, or of anything. And he was thinking about the south again, about summer evenings in New Orleans when the jasmine was blooming. He was thinking of the smell of the four o’clocks in his grandmother’s yard.

  The wave must have knocked him unconscious. He had no memory at all of being washed out. Just that distinct recollection of rising into space, of seeing his body out there, tossed on the surf, of seeing people waving and pointing, and others rushing into the restaurant to call for assistance. Yes, he knew what they were doing, all of these people. Seeing them was not really like looking down on people from above. It was like knowing all about them. And how purely buoyant and safe he’d felt up there; why, safe didn’t even begin to describe it. He was free, so free he could not comprehend their anxiety, why they were so concerned about his body being tossed about.

  Then the other part began. And that must have been when he was really dead, and all the wonderful things were shown to him, and the other dead were there, and he understood, understood all the simplest and the most complex things, and why he had to go back, yes, the doorway, the promise, shot down suddenly and weightlessly into the body lying on the deck of the ship, the body that had been dead drowned for an hour out there, into the aches and the pains, and come back alive staring up, knowing it all, ready to do exactly what they had wanted of him. All that splendid knowledge!

  In those first few seconds, he tried desperately to tell of where he’d been and the things he’d seen, the great long adventure. Surely he had! But all he could remember now was the intensity of the pain in his chest, and in his hands and his feet, and the dim figure of a woman near him. A fragile being with a pale delicate face, all of her hair hidden by a dark cap, her gray eyes flickering for a second like lights in front of him. In a soft voice, she’d told him to be calm, that they would take care of him.

  Impossible to think that this little woman had gotten him out of the sea, and pumped the water out of his lungs. But he had not understood that she was his savior at that moment.

  Men were lifting him, putting him on a stretcher, and strapping him down, and he was filled with pain. The wind was whipping his face. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The stretcher was rising in the air.

  Confusion after that. Had he blacked out again? Had that been the moment of true and total forgetting? No one could confirm or deny, it seemed, what had happened on the flight in. Only that they had rushed him to shore, where the ambulance and the reporters were waiting.

  Cameras flashing, that he did recall, people saying his name. The ambulance itself, yes, and someone trying to stick a needle into his vein. He thought he heard his Aunt Vivian’s voice. He begged them to stop. He had to sit up. They couldn’t strap him down again, no!

  ‘Hold on, Mr Curry, just hold on. Hey, help me here with this guy!’ They were strapping him down again. They were treating him as if he were a prisoner. He fought. But it was no use; they’d shot something into his arm, he knew it. He could see the darkness coming.

  Then they came back, those he had seen out there; they began to talk again. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t let it happen. I’ll go home. I know where it is. I remember…"

  When he had awakened, it was to bright artificial light. A hospital room. He was hooked to machines. His best friend, Jimmy Barnes, was sitting next to the bed. He tried to speak to Jimmy, but then the nurses and the doctors surrounded him.

  They were touching him, his hands, his feet, asking him questions. But he couldn’t concentrate on the proper answers. He kept seeing things — fleeting images of nurses, orderlies, hospital hallways. What is all this? He knew the doctor’s name - Randy Morris - and that he’d kissed his wife, Deenie, before he left home. So what? Things were literally popping into his head. He couldn’t stand it. It was like being half awake and half asleep, feverish, worried.

  He shrugged, trying to clear his head. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m trying.’ After all, he knew what this was all about, the touching, that he’d been drowned and they wanted to see if there had been any brain damage. ‘But you needn’t bother. I’m fine. I’m all right. I’ve got to get out of here, and get packed. I have to go back home immediately…’

  Plane reservations, closing the company… The doorway, the promise, and his purpose, which was absolutely crucial…

  But what was it? Why did he have to get back home? There came another flash of images — nurses cleaning this room, somebody wiping the chrome bar of the bed a few hours ago while he’d been asleep. Stop it.’ Have to get back to the point, the whole purpose, the

  Then he realized it. He couldn’t remember the purpose! He couldn’t remember what he’d seen while he was dead! The whole thing, all of it — the people, the places, all he’d been told — he couldn’t remember any of it. No, this couldn’t be. It had been wondrously clear. And they were depending on him. They’d said, Michael, you know you do not have to return, you can refuse, and he’d said t
hat he would, that he… that he what? It was going to come back in a flash, like a dream you forget and then completely remember!

  He had sat up, brushing one of the needles out of his arm, and asked for a pen and paper.

  ‘You have to lie still.’

  ‘Not now. I have to write it down.’ But there was nothing to write! He remembered standing on the rock, thinking of that long-ago summer in Florida, of the warm waters… Then the wet soaked cold aching thing that he was, on the stretcher.

  All of it gone.

  He had shut his eyes, trying to ignore the strange warmth in his hands, and the nurse pushing him back against the pillows. Somebody was asking Jimmy to go out of the room. Jimmy didn’t want to go. Why was he seeing all these strange irrelevant things - flashes of orderlies again, and the nurse’s husband, and these names, why did he know all these names?

  ‘Don’t touch me like that,’ he said. It was the experience out there, over the ocean, that’s what mattered!

  Suddenly he reached for the pen. ‘If you’ll be very quiet…’

  Yes, an image when he touched the pen, of the nurse getting it out of the drawer at the hallway station. And the paper, image of a man putting the tablet in a metal locker. And the bedside table? Image of the woman who’d last wiped it clean, with a rag full of germs from another room. And some flash of a man with a radio. Somebody doing something with a radio.

  And the bed? The last patient in it, Mrs Ona Patrick, died at eleven a.m. yesterday, before he’d even decided to go to Ocean Beach. No. Turn it off! Flash of her body in the hospital morgue. ‘I can’t stand this!’

  ‘What’s wrong, Michael?’ said Dr Morris. ‘Talk to me.’ Jimmy was arguing in the hall. He could hear Stacy’s voice, Stacy and Jimmy were his best friends.

  He was trembling. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he whispered to the doctor. ‘I’ll talk to you. Just so long as you don’t touch me.’

  In desperation he had put his hands on his own head, run his fingers through his own hair, and mercifully he felt nothing. He was drifting into sleep again, thinking, well, it will come as it did before, she’ll be there and I’ll understand. But even as he nodded off, he realized he didn’t know who this she was.