Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  ‘No, nothing blunts it,’ he said. ‘It’s coming at me from everywhere.’

  ‘Is it coming at you from me?’

  ‘Well, no. But I want to be with you, you see.’ He took another drink, hand out to brace himself against the dash as she made the downhill turn towards the Haight. ‘I’m not a complainer by nature, Dr Mayfair,’ he said. ‘It’s just that since the accident I’ve been living my life without any protective skin on me. I can’t concentrate. I can’t even read or sleep.’

  ‘I understand, Mr Curry. When I get you home, you can go on the boat, do what you want. But I’d really like it if you’d let me fix you some food.’

  ‘It won’t do any good, Dr Mayfair. Let me ask you something, how dead was I when you picked me up?’

  ‘Completely clinically dead, Mr Curry. No detectable vital signs. Without intervention, irreversible biological death would have soon set in. You didn’t get my letter, did you?’

  ‘You wrote me a letter?’

  ‘I should have come to the hospital,’ she said.

  She drove the car like a race driver, he thought, playing out each gear until the engine was screaming before she shifted to the next.

  ‘But I didn’t say anything to you, you told that to Dr Morris…"

  ‘You said a name, a word, something, you just murmured it. I couldn’t hear syllables. I heard an L sound -’

  - An L sound… A great hush drowned out the rest of her words. He was falling. He knew on the one hand that he was in the car, that she was speaking to him, and that they had crossed Lincoln Avenue and were burrowing through Golden Gate Park towards Park Presidio Drive, but he wasn’t really there. He was on the edge of a dream space where the word beginning with L meant something crucial, and something extremely complex and familiar. A throng of beings surrounded him, pressing close to him and ready to speak. The doorway…

  He shook his head. Focus. But it was already disintegrating. He felt panic.

  When she braked for the stop light at Geary Street, he was flung back against the leather seat.

  ‘You don’t operate on people’s brains the way you drive this car, do you?’ he asked. His face was hot all over.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,’ she said. She started out from the light a little more slowly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I seem full of apologies, I’ve been apologizing to people since it happened. There’s nothing wrong with your driving. It’s me. I used to be… ordinary before that accident. I mean, just one of those happy people, you know…’

  Was she nodding?

  She appeared distracted when he looked at her, drawn into her own thoughts. She slowed as they approached the toll gate. The fog hung so heavily over the bridge that the traffic seemed to disappear into it.

  ‘You want to talk to me?’ she asked, eyes on the traffic vanishing ahead of them. She pulled a dollar bill out of her coat and gave it to the tollgate keeper. ‘You want to tell me what’s been going on?’

  He sighed. That seemed an impossible task. But the worst aspect of it was, if he started he wouldn’t stop. ‘The hands, you know, I see things when I touch things, but the visions…"

  ‘Tell me about the visions.’

  ‘I know what you think. You’re a neurologist. You’re thinking it’s temporal lobe difficulty, some crap like that.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I think,’ she said.

  She was driving faster. The great ugly shape of a truck appeared ahead, its taillights like beacons. She fell into place safely behind it, pushing to fifty-five, to keep up.

  He downed the rest of the beer in three quick swallows, shoved the can in the sack, and then took off his glove. They were off the bridge, and magically the fog had disappeared, as so often happened. The clear bright sky astonished him. The dark hills rose like shoulders nudging them as they climbed the Waldo Grade.

  He looked down at his hand. It seemed unappealingly moist and wrinkled. When he rubbed his fingers together, a sensation passed through him which was vaguely pleasant.

  They were cruising now at sixty miles an hour. He reached for Dr Mayfair’s hand, which rested on the gear-shift knob, long pale fingers relaxed.

  She didn’t move to resist him. She glanced at him, then back at the traffic ahead as they entered the tunnel. He lifted her hand off the knob and pressed his thumb into her naked palm.

  A soft whispering sound enveloped him, and his vision blurred. It was as if her body had disintegrated and then surrounded him, a whirling cloud of particles. Rowan. He was afraid for a minute that they were going off the road. But she wasn’t the one feeling this, he was, he was feeling her moist warm hand, and this throbbing heartbeat coming through it and this sense of the being at the core of this great airy presence that had enveloped him and was caressing him all over, like falling snow. The erotic arousal was so intense that he could do nothing to curb it.

  Then in an obliterating flash he was in a kitchen, a dazzling modern affair with shining gadgets and appliances, and a man lay dying on the floor. Argument, screaming; but that was something that had happened moments before. These intervals of time were sliding over one another, crashing into each other. There was no up or down; no right nor left. Michael was in the very middle of it. Rowan, with her stethoscope, knelt beside the dying man. Hate you. She closed her eyes, pulled the stethoscope out of her ears. Couldn’t believe her luck that he was dying.

  Then everything stopped. The traffic was slowing. She’d pulled her hand loose from Michael, and shifted with a hard, efficient motion.

  It felt like skating on ice to him, the way they traveled along, turning right and right again, but it didn’t matter. It was an illusion that they were in danger, and now the facts came, the things he always knew about these visions, the things that were simply there in his mind now, as if they’d always been, like his address, and his phone number, and the date of his birth.

  It had been her adoptive father, and she had despised him, because she feared she was like him - decisive, fundamentally unkind and uncaring. And her life had been founded upon not being like him, but being like her adoptive mother, an easygoing, sentimental creature with a great sense of style, a woman loved by all and respected by no one.

  ‘So what did you see?’ she asked. Her face was wondrously smooth in the wash of the passing lights.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘God, I wish this power would go away. I wish I had never felt it. I don’t want to know these things about people.’

  ‘Tell me what did you see?’

  ‘He died on the floor. You were glad. He didn’t divorce her. She never knew he was planning to do it. He was six feet two inches tall, born in San Rafael, California, and this was his car.’ Now where did all that come from? And he could have gone on; he had known from the very first night that he could go on, if he was only willing to do it. ‘That’s what I saw. Does it matter to you? Do you want me to talk about it? Why did you want me to see it, that’s what I should be asking you. What good is it that I know it was your kitchen, and that when you got back from the hospital where they took him and coded him which was plain stupid because he was dead on arrival, that you sat down and ate the food he’d cooked before he’d died.’

  Silence, then:

  ‘I was hungry,’ she whispered.

  He shook himself all over. He cracked open a fresh beer. The delicious malty aroma filled the car.

  ‘And now you don’t like me very much, do you?’ he asked.

  She didn’t respond. She was just staring at the traffic.

  He was dazed by the headlights looming at him. Thank God they were turning off the main highway onto the narrow road that led into Tiburon.

  ‘I like you a lot,’ she answered finally. Voice low, purring, husky.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said. T was really afraid… I’m just glad. I don’t know why I said all those things…’

  ‘I asked you what you saw,’ she said simply.

  He laughed, taking a deep dri
nk of the beer.

  ‘We’re almost home,’ she said. ‘Would you slow down on the beer? It’s a doctor asking.’

  He took another deep drink. Again the kitchen, the smell of roast in the oven, the open red wine, the two glasses.

  … it seems brutal but there is absolutely no reason for me to subject myself to her dying, and if you choose to stay around and watch a woman die of cancer, well, then you have to ask why you want to subject yourself to that kind of thing, why you love that sort of suffering, what’s wrong with you that…

  Don’t hand me that crap, not me!

  Something more to it, much more. And all you have to do to see it is to keep thinking about it. Gave you everything you ever wanted, Rowan. You know you were always the thing holding us together. 1 would have left a long time ago if it wasn’t for you. Did Ellie ever tell you that? She lied to me. She said she could have children. She knew it was a lie. I would have packed it in if it hadn’t been for you.

  They made a right turn, west, he figured, into a dark wooded street that climbed a hill and then descended. Flash of the great clear dark sky again, full of distant uninteresting stars, and across the black midnight bay, the great lovely spectacle of Sausalito tumbling down the hills to its crowded little harbor. She didn’t have to tell him they were almost there.

  ‘Let me ask you something, Dr Mayfair.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you… are you afraid of hurting me?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘I just got the strangest idea, that you were trying… just now when I held your hand… you were trying to throw me a warning.’

  She didn’t answer. He knew he’d shaken her with the statement.

  They drove down and onto the shoreline street. Small lawns, pitched roofs barely visible above high fences, Monterey cypress trees cruelly twisted by the relentless western winds. An enclave of millionaire dwellings. He almost never saw such wonderful modern houses.

  He could smell the water even more keenly than he had on the Golden Gate.

  She pulled into a paved drive, and killed the motor. The lights flooded a great double redwood gate. Then went out. Of the house beyond, he could see nothing but darkness against a paler sky.

  ‘I want something from you,’ she said. She sat there quietly staring forward. Her hair swung down to veil her profile as she bowed her head.

  ‘Well, I owe you one,’ he answered without hesitation. He took another deep foamy drink of the beer. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘That I go in there and I lay my hands on the kitchen floor and tell you what happened when he died, what actually killed him?’

  Another jolt. Silence in the dark cockpit of the car. He found himself sharply aware of her nearness, of the sweet clean fragrance of her skin. She turned to face him. The street lamp threw its light in yellow patches through the branches of the tree. First he thought her eyes were lowered, almost closed. Then he realized they were open and looking at him.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I want,’ she said. ‘That is the sort of thing I want.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he answered. ‘Bad luck for it to happen during an argument like that. You must have blamed yourself.’

  Her knee grazed his. Chills again.

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘You can’t bear the thought of hurting anyone,’ he said.

  ‘That’s naive.’

  ‘I may be crazy, Doctor’ - he laughed - ’but naive I ain’t. The Currys never raised any naive children.’ He drank the rest of the can of beer in a long swallow. He found himself staring at the pale line of the light on her chin, her soft curling hair. Her lower lip looked full and soft and delicious to kiss…

  Then it’s something else,’ she said. ‘Call it innocence if you like.’

  He scoffed at that without answering. If only she knew what was in his mind just now as he looked at her mouth, her sweet full mouth.

  ‘And the answer to that question is yes,’ she said. She got out of the car.

  He opened the door and stood up. ‘What the hell question is that?’ he asked. He blushed.

  She pulled his suitcase out of the back. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said.

  ‘I do not!’

  She shrugged as she started towards the gate. ‘You wanted to know if I would go to bed with you. The answer’s yes, as I just told you.’

  He caught up with her as she went through the gate. A broad cement path led to the black teakwood double doors.

  ‘Well, I wonder why the hell we even bother to talk,’ he said. He took the suitcase from her as she fumbled for the key.

  She looked a little confused again. She gestured for him to go inside. As she took the sack of beer from him, he scarcely noticed.

  The house was infinitely more beautiful than he had imagined. Countless old houses he’d known and explored. But this sort of house, this carefully crafted modern masterpiece, was something unfamiliar to him.

  What he saw now was a great expanse of broad plank floor, flowing from dining room to living room to game room without division. Glass walls opened on a broad apron of wooden decking to the south and to the west and to the north, a deep roofless porch softly illuminated from above by an occasional dim floodlamp. Beyond, the bay was simply black and invisible. And the small twinkling lights of Sausalito to the west were delicate and intimate compared to the distant splendid southern view of the crowded and violently colored skyline of San Francisco.

  The fog was only a thin slash of mist now against the brilliance of the night, thinning and vanishing even as he gazed at it.

  He might have looked at the view forever, but the house struck him as similarly miraculous. Letting out a long sigh, he ran his hand along the tongue and groove wall, admiring the same fine inlay of lofty ceiling beyond its heavy beams which rose steeply to a central point. All wood, beautifully grained wood, pegged and fitted and polished and preserved exquisitely. Wood framed the massive glass doors. Wood furnishings stood here and there, with dim flashes of glass or leather, chair and table legs reflected in the sheen of the floor.

  In the eastern corner of the house stood the kitchen he had seen in the early flashing vision — a large alcove of dark wooden cabinets and countertops, and shining copper pots strung from overhead hooks. A kitchen to be looked at as well as worked in. Only a deep stone fireplace, with a high broad hearth - the kind of hearth you could sit on - separated this kitchen from the other rooms.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d like it,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, but it’s wonderful.’ He sighed. ‘It’s made like a ship. I’ve never seen a new house so finely made.’

  ‘Can you feel it moving? It’s made to move, with the water.’

  He walked slowly across the thick carpet of the living room. And only then saw a curving iron stairs behind the fireplace. A soft amber light fell from an open doorway above. He thought of bedrooms at once, of rooms as open as these, of lying in the dark with her and the glimmer of city lights. His face grew hot again.

  He glanced at her. Had she caught this thought, the way she claimed to have caught his earlier question? Hell, any woman could have picked up on that.

  She stood in the kitchen before an open refrigerator door, and for the first time in the clear white light he really saw her face. Her skin had almost an Asian smoothness, only it was too purely blond to be Asian. The skin was so tight that it made two dimples in her cheeks now when she smiled at him.

  He moved towards her, keenly aware of her physical presence again, of the way the light was glancing off her hands, and the glamorous way her hair moved. When women wear their hair that way, so full and short, just sweeping the collar as it sways, it becomes a vital part of every gesture, he figured. You think of them and you think of their pretty hair.

  But as she shut the refrigerator door, as the clear white light went out, he realized that through the northern glass wall of the house, far to his left and very near the front door, he could see a mammoth white cabin cruiser at ancho
r. A weak flood’ lamp illuminated its immense prow, its numerous portholes, and the dark windows of its wheelhouse.

  It seemed monstrously large, an altogether impossible thing — like a whale beached on the site — grotesquely close to the soft furnishings and scattered rugs that surrounded him. A near panic rose in him. A curious dread, as though he had known a terror on the night of his rescue that was part of what he’d forgotten.

  Nothing to do but go to it. Nothing to do but lay his hands on the deck. He found himself moving towards the glass doors; then he stopped, confused, and watched as she pulled back the latch and slid the heavy glass door open.

  A gust of cold salty wind struck him. He heard the creaking of the huge boat; and the weak lunar light of the flood seemed grim and distinctly unpleasant to him. Seaworthy, they had said. He could believe it when he looked at this craft. Explorers had crossed the oceans of the world in boats much smaller than that. Again, it appeared grotesque to him, frighteningly out of scale.

  He stepped out on the pier, his collar blowing against his cheek, and moved towards the edge. The water was perfectly black down below, and he could smell it, smell the dank odor of inevitable dead things of the sea.

  Far across the bay he could just glimpse the Sausalito lights, but the penetrating cold came between him and anything picturesque just now, and he realized that all he so hated in this western clime was coalesced in this moment. Never the rugged winter, nor the burning summer; only this eternal chill, this eternal inhospitable harshness.

  He was so glad that he would soon be home, so glad that the August heat would be there waiting for him, like a warm blanket. Garden District streets, trees swaying in a warm and inoffensive wind

  But this was the boat, and this was the moment. Now to get on this thing with its portholes and its slippery-looking decks, rocking gently now against the black rubber tires nailed to the long side of the pier. He didn’t like it very much, that was for certain. And he was damned glad he had on his gloves.

  His life on boats had been limited exclusively to large ones -old river ferries in his boyhood, and the big powerful tourist cruisers that carried hundreds back and forth across San Francisco Bay. When he looked at a boat like this all he thought about was the possibility of falling off.