Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Lightner knows who that man was?’

  He looked uncomfortable. Extremely sexy and very uncomfortable. He took another drag off the cigarette, and looked around, figuring.

  ‘Lightner belongs to an organization,’ he said. He fished in his shirt pocket, and drew out a little card. He placed it on the table. ‘They call it an order. Like a religious order, but it isn’t religious. The name of it is the Talamasca.’

  ‘Dabblers in the black arts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what the old woman said.’

  ‘Well, that’s a lie. Believers in the black arts, but not dabblers or practitioners.’

  ‘She told a lot of lies. There was truth in what she said, too, but every damned time it was entangled with hate, and venom and meanness, and awful awful lies.’ She shuddered. ‘I’m hot and I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I saw one of those cards before. He gave one to me in California. Did he tell you that? I met him in California.’

  Michael nodded uneasily. ‘At Ellie’s grave.’

  ‘Well, how is that possible? That you’re his friend, and that he knows all about this man in the attic? I’m tired, Michael. I feel like I might start screaming and never be able to stop. I feel like if you don’t start telling me…" She broke off, staring listlessly at the table. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying,’ she said.

  ‘That man, Townsend,’ said Michael apprehensively, ’he was a member of the order. He came here in 1929 trying to make contact with the Mayfair family.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They’ve been watching this family for three hundred years, compiling a history,’ Michael said. ‘It’s going to be hard for you to understand all this…"

  ‘And just by coincidence, this man’s your friend?’

  ‘No. Slow down. None of it was coincidence. I met him outside this house the first night I got here. And I saw him in San Francisco, too, you saw him, remember, the night you picked me up at my place, but we both thought he was a reporter. I had never spoken to him, and before that night I’d never seen him before.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And then outside this house, he was there. I was drunk, I’d gotten drunk on the plane. Remember I promised you I wouldn’t, well, I did. And I came here, and I saw this… this other man in the garden. Only it wasn’t a real man. I thought it was, and then I realized it wasn’t. I’d seen that guy when I was a kid. I’d seen him every time I ever passed this house. I told you about him, do you remember? Well, what I have to somehow explain is… he’s not a real man.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen him.’ The most electrical feeling passed through her. ‘Keep talking. I’ll tell you about it when you finish, please.’

  But he didn’t keep talking. He looked at her anxiously. He was frustrated, worried. He was leaning on the mantel, looking down at her, the light from the hallway half illuminating his face, his eyes darting over the table, and finally returning to her. It aroused a complete tenderness in her to see the protectiveness in him, to hear in his voice the gentleness and the fear of hurting her.

  Tell me the rest,’ she said. ‘Look, don’t you understand, I have some terrible things I have to tell you because you’re the only one I can tell. So you tell me your story because you’re actually making it easier for me. Because I didn’t know how I was going to tell you about seeing that man. I saw him after you left, on the deck in Tiburon. I saw him at the very moment my mother died in New Orleans, and I didn’t know she was dying then. I didn’t know anything about her.’

  He nodded. But he was still confused, stymied.

  ‘If I can’t trust you, for what it’s worth, I don’t want to talk to anybody. What are you holding back? Just tell me. Tell me why that man Aaron Lightner was kind to me this afternoon at the funeral when you weren’t there? I want to know who he is, and how you know him. Am I entitled to ask that question?’

  ‘Look, honey, you can trust me. Don’t get mad at me, please.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, it takes more than a lovers’ quarrel for me to blow somebody’s carotid artery.’

  ‘Rowan, I didn’t mean…"

  ‘I know, I know!’ she whispered. ‘But you know I killed that old woman.’

  He made a small, forbidding gesture. He shook his head.

  ‘You know I did.’ She looked up at him. ‘You are the only one who knows.’ Then a terrible suspicion came into her mind. ‘Did you tell Lightner the things I told you? About what I could do?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head earnestly, pleading with her quietly and eloquently to believe him. ‘No, but he knows, Rowan.’

  ‘Knows what?’

  He didn’t answer. He gave a little shrug, and drew out another cigarette, and stood there, staring off, considering, apparently, as he pulled out his matchbook, and without even noticing it, did that wonderful one-handed match trick of bending out one book match, and closing the book and then bending that match and striking it and putting the flame to the cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he said. ‘Maybe at the beginning.’ He let out the smoke, resting his elbow on the mantel again. ‘I love you. I really do. I don’t know how all this came about. I have a lot of suspicions and I’m scared. But I love you. If that was meant, I mean destined, well, then I’m a lost man. Really lost, because I can’t accept the destined part.

  But I won’t give up the love. I don’t care what happens. Did you hear what I said?’

  She nodded. ‘You have to tell me everything about these other people,’ she said. But she also said without words, Do you know how much I love you and desire you?

  She turned sideways in the chair, the better to face him. She rubbed the back of her arms, again, and hung the heel of her shoe on the chair rung. Looking up at him, she saw his hips again, the slant of his belt, the shirt tight across his chest. She couldn’t stop wanting him physically. Best to get it over with, wasn’t it? Oh, all right, let’s eat all this delicious ice cream just to get rid of it. And so you can tell me what you’re talking about with all this, and I can tell you. About the man on the plane. And the old woman’s question. Was it better than a mortal man?

  His face darkened as he looked at her. Loved her. Yes. This man, just the best man she had ever known or touched or wanted ever. What would all this have been like without him?

  ‘Michael, talk straight to me, please,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yeah. But Rowan, don’t freak out on me. Just listen to what I have to say.’

  He picked up one of the dining room chairs from along the wall, swung it around so that the back faced her, and straddled it cowboy style, folding his arms on the back of it, as he looked at her. That was pornographic too.

  ‘For the last two days,’ he said, ‘I’ve been holed up about sixty miles from here, reading the history of the Mayfair family compiled by these people.’

  ‘The Talamasca.’

  He nodded. ‘Now, let me explain to you. Three hundred years ago, there was this man named Petyr van Abel. His father had been a famous surgeon at the University of Leiden in Holland. There are books still in existence that were written by this doctor, Jan van Abel.’

  ‘I know who he is,’ she said, ’he was an anatomist.’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘Well, he’s your ancestor, babe. You look like his son. At least that’s what Aaron says. Now when Jan van Abel died, Petyr was orphaned and he became a member of the Talamasca. He could read minds, he could see ghosts. He was what other people might have called a witch, but the Talamasca gave him shelter. Eventually, he went to work for them, and part of his work was saving people accused in other countries of witchcraft. And if they had real gifts, you know, the gifts that I have and you have and Petyr van Abel had, well, he would help those people to reach the Motherhouse of the Talamasca in Amsterdam.

  ‘Now, this Petyr van Abel went to Scotland to try to intervene in the trial of a witch named Suzanne Mayfair. But he came too late, and all he was a
ble to do, which was plenty as it turned out, was take her daughter Deborah away from the town where she might eventually have been burnt too, and bring her to Holland. But before he did, he saw this man, this spirit. He saw too that the child Deborah saw it, and Petyr conjectured that Deborah had made it appear, which proved to be accurate.

  ‘Deborah didn’t stay with the order. Eventually she seduced Petyr, and by him had a child named Charlotte. Charlotte went to the New World and it was she who founded the Mayfair family. But when Deborah died in France, a convicted witch, that brown-haired man, that spirit, went to Charlotte. So did this emerald necklace that is lying right here in this box. It passed along with the spirit, to Charlotte.

  ‘All the Mayfairs since are Charlotte’s descendants. And in each generation of those descendants down to the present time at least one woman has inherited the powers of Suzanne and Deborah, which included, among other things, the ability to see this brown-haired man, this spirit. And they are what the Talamasca calls the Mayfair Witches.’

  She made a little sound, half amazement, half nervous amusement. She drew herself up in the chair, and watched the little changes in his face, as he silently sorted all the things he wanted to tell. Then she decided to say nothing.

  ‘The Talamasca,’ he said, choosing his words with care. ‘They’re scholars, historians. They’ve documented a thousand sightings of that brown-haired man in and around this house. Three hundred years ago in Saint-Domingue, when Petyr van Abel went there to talk to his daughter Charlotte, this spirit drove him mad. It eventually killed him.’

  He took another drag off the cigarette, eyes moving around the room again, but not seeing it this time, rather seeing something else, and then returning to her.

  ‘Now as I explained before,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen that man since I was six years old. I saw him every time I ever passed this house. And unlike the countless people interviewed by the Talamasca over the years, I’ve seen him other places. But the point is… the other night when I came back here, after all these years, I saw that man again. And when I told Aaron what I saw, when I told him that I’d been seeing that man since I was yea high, and when I told him that it was you who rescued me, well, then he showed me the Talamasca’s file on the Mayfair Witches.’

  ‘He hadn’t known I was the one who pulled you out of the ocean?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘He’d come to San Francisco to see me because of my hands. That’s their territory, so to speak, people who have special powers. It was routine. He was reaching out to me, as routinely perhaps as Petyr van Abel went to try to intervene in the execution of Suzanne Mayfair. And then he saw you outside my house. He saw you come to pick me up, and do you know he thought you’d hired me to come back here? He thought you’d hired a psychic to come back here and investigate your background.’

  He took a final drag off the cigarette and pitched it into the grate. ‘Well, for a while anyway, he thought that. Until I told him why you’d really come to see me, and how you’d never seen this house, or even seen a picture of it. But there you have it, you see.

  ‘And what you have to do now is read the File on the Mayfair Witches. But there’s more to it… as far as I’m concerned, I mean more to it that has to do with me.’

  ‘The visions.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He smiled, his face warm and beautiful. ‘Exactly! Because you remember I told you I saw a woman and there was a jewel…’

  ‘And you’re saying it’s the emerald.’

  ‘I don’t know, Rowan. I don’t know. And then I do know. I know as surely as I know I’m sitting here that it was Deborah Mayfair I saw out there, Deborah, and she was wearing the emerald around her neck, and I was sent here to do something.’

  To fight that spirit?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s more complicated. That’s why you have to read the File. And Rowan, you have to read it. You have to not be offended that such a file exists. You have to read it.’

  ‘What does the Talamasca get from all this?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘To know. Yes, they’d like to know. They’d like to understand. It’s like, you know, they’re psychic detectives.’

  ‘And filthy rich, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘Filthy rich. Loaded.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No, they’ve got money like you’ve got. They’ve got money like the Catholic Church has got. Like the Vatican. Look, it’s got nothing to do with their wanting anything from you…"

  ‘OK, I believe it. It’s just you’re naive, Michael. You really are. You really are naive.’

  ‘What in the hell makes you say that, Rowan! Christ, where do you get the idea that I am naive! You said this before and this is really crazy!’

  ‘Michael, you are. You really are. OK, tell me the truth, do you still believe that these visions were good? That these people who appeared to you were higher beings?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he said.

  ‘This black-haired woman, this convicted witch, as you called her, with the jewel was good… the one who knocked you off the rock right into the Pacific Ocean where…"

  ‘Rowan, no one can prove a chain of controlled events like that! All I know…"

  ‘You saw this spirit man when you were six? Let me tell you something, Michael, this man is not good. And you saw him here two nights ago? And this black-haired woman is not good either.’

  ‘Rowan, it’s too early for you to make these interpretations.’

  ‘OK. All right. I don’t want to make you mad. I don’t want to make you angry even for one second. I’m so glad you’re here, you can’t know how glad I am that you’re here, that you’re here with me in this house, and you understand all this, that you’re… oh, it’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m glad I’m not in it alone. And I want you here, that’s the whole truth.’

  ‘I know, I understand, and the important thing is, I am here, and you aren’t alone.’

  ‘But don’t you make too many interpretations either. There is something terribly evil here, something I can feel like the evil in me. No, don’t say anything. Just listen to me. There’s something so bad that it could spill out and hurt lots of people. More than it’s ever hurt in the past. And you’re like some starry-eyed knight who just rode over the drawbridge out of the castle!’

  ‘Rowan, that is not true.’

  ‘All right. OK. They didn’t drown you out there. They didn’t do that. And your knowing all these people, Rita Mae and Jerry Lonigan, it’s all not connected.’

  ‘It’s connected, but the question is, how is it connected? It’s crucial not to jump to conclusions.’

  She turned back towards the table, resting her elbows on it and holding her head in her hands. She had no idea now what time it was. The night seemed quieter than before; now and then something in the house would snap or creak. But they were alone. Completely alone.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think about that old woman, and it’s like a cloud of evil descending on me. It was like walking with evil to be with her. And she thought she was the good one. She thought she was fighting the devil. It’s tangled, but it’s tangled even more obscurely than that.’

  ‘She killed Townsend,’ he said.

  She turned and looked at him again. ‘You know that for sure?’

  ‘I laid my hands on him. I felt the bone. She did it. She tied him up in that rug. He was maybe drugged at the time, I don’t know. But he died in the rug, I know that much. He chewed a hole in it.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ She closed her eyes, her imagination filling in the implications too vividly.

  ‘And there were people in this house all the time and they couldn’t hear him. They didn’t know he was dying up there, or if they did they didn’t do anything about it.’

  ‘Why would she do it!’

  "Cause she hated us. I mean she hated the Talamasca.’

  ‘You said "us."’

  ‘That was a slip, but a very informative on
e. I feel like I’m part of them. They’ve come to me and they’ve asked me to be, more or less. They’ve taken me into their confidence. But maybe what I really meant, is that she hated anyone from outside who knew anything. There are dangers still to anybody from outside. There’s danger to Aaron. You asked me what the Talamasca stands to get out of this. It stands to lose another member.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘On the way home from the funeral, coming back out to the country to get me, he saw a man on the road and swerved, rolled over twice, and just got out of the damned car before it exploded. It was that spirit thing. I know it was. So does he. I guess whatever this big plan is, this entanglement, Aaron has served his purpose.’

  ‘Is he hurt?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘He knew what was going down, even as it was happening. But he couldn’t take a chance. Suppose it hadn’t been an apparition and he’d run down a real man. Just couldn’t chance it. He was belted in, too. I think he got slammed on the head pretty bad.’

  ‘Did they take him to a hospital?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor. He’s OK. That is why I took so long to gethere. He didn’t want me to come. He wanted you to come to them, out there in the country, read the file out there. But I came on anyway. I knew that thing wasn’t going to kill me. I haven’t served my purpose yet.’

  ‘The purpose of the visions.’

  ‘No. He has his purpose, and they have theirs. And they don’t work together. They work against each other.’

  ‘What happens if you try to run away to Tibet?’ she asked.

  ‘You want to go?’

  ‘If I go with you, you’re not running away. But really, what if you do run away?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t intend to, so it doesn’t compute. They want me to fight him, to fight him and the little scheme he’s been laying down all along. I’m convinced of it.’

  ‘They want you to break the chain,’ she said. ‘That’s what the old woman said. She said, "Break the chain," meaning this legacy that comes all the way down from Charlotte, I guess, though she didn’t talk about anyone that far back. She said she herself had tried. And that I could do it.’