Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  ‘That’s the obvious answer, yes. But there has to be more to it than that, having to do with him, and why he’s shown himself to me.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You listen to me now. I’m going to read the file, every page of it. But I’ve seen this thing too. And it doesn’t simply appear. It affects matter.’

  ‘When did you see it?’

  ‘The night my mother died, at the very hour. I tried to call you. I rang the hotel, but you weren’t there. It scared the hell out of me. But the apparition isn’t the significant part. It’s what else happened. It affected the water around the house. It made the water so turbulent that the house was swaying on its pilings. There was absolutely no storm that night on Richardson Bay or San Francisco Bay or any earthquake or any natural reason for that to happen. And there’s something else too. The next time, I felt this thing touch me.’

  ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘On the plane. I thought it was a dream. But it wasn’t. I was sore afterwards, just as if I’d been with a large man.’

  ‘You mean it…?’

  ‘I thought I was asleep, but the distinction I’m trying to make is, this thing isn’t limited to apparitions. It’s involved with the physical in some very specific way. And what I have to understand is its parameters.’

  ‘Well, that’s a commendable scientific attitude. Could I ask whether or not its touching you evoked any other, less scientific response?’

  ‘Of course it did. It was pleasurable, because I was half asleep. But when I woke up, I felt like I’d been raped. I loathed it.’

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ he said anxiously. ‘Just lovely. Well, look, you’ve got the power to stop this thing from that sort of violation.’

  ‘I know, and now that I know that’s what it is, I will. But if anybody had tried to tell me day before yesterday that some invisible being was going to slip under my clothes on a flight to New Orleans, I wouldn’t have been any more prepared than I was because I wouldn’t have believed it. But we know it doesn’t want to hurt me. And we are fairly certain that it doesn’t want to hurt you. What we have to keep in mind is that it does want to hurt anyone who interferes with its plans, apparently, and now this includes your friend Aaron.’

  ‘Right,’ Michael said.

  ‘Now you look tired, like you’re the one who needs to be taken back to the hotel and put to bed,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we go there?’

  He didn’t answer. He sat up, and rubbed the back of his neck with his hands. ‘There’s something you’re not saying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And I’m not saying it either.’

  ‘Well then say it,’ she said softly, patiently.

  ‘Don’t you want to talk to him? Don’t you want to ask him yourself who he is and what he is? Don’t you think you can communicate with him better and more truly maybe than any of the rest of them? Maybe you don’t. But I do, I want to talk to him. I want to know why he showed himself to me when I was a kid. I want to know why he came so close to me the other night that I almost touched him, touched his shoe. I want to know what he is. And I know, that no matter what Aaron’s told me, or what Aaron will tell me, I think I’m smart enough to get through to that thing, and to reason with it, and maybe that’s exactly the kind of pride it expects to find in everyone who ever sees it. Maybe it counts on that.

  ‘Now, if you haven’t felt that, well, then, you’re smarter and stronger than I am, by a long, long way. I never really talked to a ghost or a spirit, or whatever he is. And boy, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity, not even knowing what I know, and knowing what he did to Aaron.’

  She nodded. ‘Yeah, you’ve covered it all right. And maybe it does play on that, the vanity in some of us that we won’t run the way the others did. But there’s something else between me and this thing. It touched me. And it left me feeling raped. I didn’t like it.’

  They sat there in silence for a moment. He was looking at her, and she could all but hear the wheels turning in his head.

  He stood up and reached for the jewel case, sliding it across the smooth surface of the table. He opened it and looked at the emerald.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Touch it.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like the drawing I made of it,’ he whispered. ‘I was imagining it when I made the drawing, not remembering it.’ He shook his head. He seemed about to close the lid of the box again; then he removed his glove, and laid his fingers on the stone.

  In silence she waited. But she could tell by his face that he was disappointed and anxious. When he sighed and closed the box, she didn’t press him.

  ‘I got an image of you,’ he said, ’of your putting it around your neck. I saw myself standing in front of you.’ He put the glove back on, carefully.

  ‘That’s when you came in.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘I didn’t even notice that you were wearing it.’

  ‘It was dark.’

  ‘I saw only you.’

  ‘What does that matter?’ she shrugged. ‘I took it off and put it back in the case.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Just now, when you touched it. Did you see anything else?’

  He shook his head. ‘Only that you love me,’ he said in a small voice. ‘You really do.’

  ‘You only have to touch me to discover that,’ she said.

  He smiled, but the smile was sad, and confused. He shoved his hands in his pockets, as if he were trying to get rid of them, and he bowed his head. She waited for a long moment, hating to see him miserable.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ she said. ‘This place is getting to you worse than me. Let’s go back to the hotel.’

  He nodded. ‘I need a glass of water,’ he said. ‘Do you think there’s some cold water in this house? I’m dry and I’m hot.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if there’s a kitchen. Maybe there’s a well with a moss-covered bucket. Maybe there’s a magic spring.’

  He laughed softly. ‘Come on, let’s find some water.’

  She got up and followed him out of the rear door of the dining room. Some sort of butler’s pantry, it was, with a little sink in it, and high glassed cabinets filled with china. He took his time passing through. He seemed to be measuring the thickness of the walls with his hands.

  ‘Back here,’ he said, passing through the next door. He pushed in an old black wall button. A dingy overhead bulb flashed on, weak and dismal, revealing a long split-level room, the upper portion a sterile workplace, and the lower, two steps down, a small breakfast room with a fireplace.

  A long series of glass doors revealed the overgrown yard outside. It seemed the song of the frogs was louder here, clearer. The dark outline of an immense tree obscured the northern corner of the view completely.

  The rooms themselves were very clean and very streamlined in an old-fashioned way. Very efficient.

  The built-in refrigerator covered half the inside wall, with a great heavy door like the doors of walk-in vaults in restaurants.

  ‘Don’t tell me if there’s a body in there, I don’t want to know,’ she said wearily.

  ‘No, just food,’ he said smiling, ’and ice water.’ He took out the clear glass bottle. ‘Let me tell you about the South. There’s always a bottle of ice water.’ He rummaged in one of the cabinets over the corner sink, and caught up two jelly glasses with his right hand and set them down on the immaculate counter.

  The cold water tasted wonderful. Then she remembered the old woman. Her house, really, her glass, perhaps. A glass from which she’d drunk. She was overcome with revulsion, and she set the glass in the small steel sink before her.

  Yes, like a restaurant, she thought, detaching herself slowly, rebelliously. The place was that well equipped long long ago when someone had ripped out the Victorian fixtures they so love these days in San Francisco. And put in all this shining steel.

  ‘What are we going to do, Michael?’ she said.

  He stared down at th
e glass in his hand. Then he looked at her, and at once the tenderness and the protectiveness in his eyes went to her heart.

  ‘Love each other, Rowan. Love each other. You know, as sure as I am about the visions, I’m sure that it isn’t part of anyone’s plan that we really love each other.’

  She stepped up to him and slipped her arms around his chest. She felt his hands come up her back and close warmly and tenderly on her neck and her hair. He held her deliciously tight, and buried his face in her neck, and then kissed her again on the lips gently.

  ‘Love me, Rowan. Trust me and love me,’ he said, his voice heartbreakingly sincere. He drew back, and seemed to retreat into himself a little, and then he took her hand, and led her slowly towards the French door. He stood looking out into the darkness.

  Then he opened the door. No lock on it. Maybe there was no lock on any of them. ‘Can we go outside?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course, we can. Why do you ask me?’

  He looked at her as if he wanted to kiss her but he didn’t do it. And then she kissed him. But at the mere delicious taste of him, all the rest of it returned. She snuggled against him for a long moment. And then she led the way out.

  They found that they had come onto a screened porch, much smaller than the one on which the old woman had died, and they went out another door, like many an old-fashioned screened door, even to the spring that caused it to shut behind them. They went down the wooden steps to the flagstones.

  ‘All this is OK,’ he said, ’it’s not in bad repair really.’

  ‘But what about the house itself? Can it be saved, or is it too far gone?’

  ‘This house?’ He smiled, shaking his head, his blue eyes shining beautifully as he glanced at her and then up at the narrow open porch high overhead. ‘Honey, this house is fine, just fine. This house will be here when you and I are gone. I’ve never been in such a house. Not in all my years in San Francisco. Tomorrow, we’ll come back and I’ll show you this house in the sunlight. I’ll show you how thick these walls are. I’ll show you the rafters underneath if you want.’ He stopped, ashamed it seemed of relishing it so much, and caught again in the unhappiness and the mourning for the old woman, just as she had been.

  And then there was Deirdre, and so many questions yet unanswered about Deirdre. So many things in this history he described, and yet it seemed the darkest journey… Much rather look at him and see the excitement in him as he looks up at the walls, as he studies the doorframes and the sills and the steps.

  ‘You love it, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid,’ he said. ‘I loved it when I saw it two nights ago. I love it now even though I know all kinds of things that happened in it, even what happened to that guy in the attic. I love it because it’s your house. And because… because it’s beautiful no matter what anybody has done in it, or to it. It was beautiful when it was built. It will be beautiful a hundred years from now.’

  He put his arm around her again, and she clung to him, nestling against him, and feeling him kiss her hair again. His gloved fingers touched her cheek. She wanted to rip off the gloves. But she didn’t say so.

  ‘You know, it’s a funny thing,’ he said. ‘In all my years in California, I worked on many a house. And I loved them all. But none of them ever made me feel my mortality. They never made me feel small. This house makes me feel that. It makes me feel it because it is going to be here when I’m gone.’

  They turned and walked deeper into the garden, finding the flags in spite of the weeds that pressed against them, and the bananas that grew so thick and low that the great bladelike leaves brushed their faces.

  The shrubs closed out the kitchen light behind them as they climbed the low flagstone steps. Dark it was here, dark as the rural dark.

  A rank green smell rose, like the smell of a swamp, and Rowan realized that she was looking out at a long pool of water. They stood on the flagstone lip of this great black pool. It was so heavily overgrown that the surface of the water showed only in dim flashes. The water lilies gleamed boldly in the faintest light from the far-off sky. Insects hummed thickly and invisibly. The frogs sang, and things stirred the water so that the light skittered on the surface suddenly, even deep among the high weeds. There came a busy trickling sound as though the pond were fed by fountains, and when she narrowed her eyes, she saw the spouts, pouring forth their thin sparkling streams.

  ‘Stella built this,’ he said. ‘She built it over fifty years ago. It wasn’t meant to be like this at all. It was a swimming pool. And now the garden’s got it. The earth has taken it back.’

  How sad he sounded. It was as if he had seen something confirmed that he did not quite believe. And to think how that name had struck her when Ellie said it in the final weeks of fever and delirium. ‘Stella in the coffin.’

  He was looking off towards the front of the house, and when she followed his gaze, she saw the high gable of the third floor with its twin chimneys floating against the sky, and the glint of the moon or the stars, she didn’t know which, in the square windows high up there, in the room where the man had died, and where Antha had fled Carlotta. All the way down past those iron porches she had fallen - all the way down to the flags, before her cranium cracked on the flags, and the soft tissue of the brain was crushed, the blood oozing out of it.

  She pressed herself more closely against Michael. She locked her hands behind his back, resting her weight against him.

  She looked straight up at the pale sky and its few scattered yet vivid stars, and then the memory of the old woman came back again, and it was like the evil cloud wouldn’t let go of her. She thought of the look on the old woman’s face as she’d died. She thought of the words. And the face of her mother in the casket, slumbering forever on white satin.

  ‘What is it, darlin’?’ he asked. A low rumble from his chest.

  She pressed her face against his shirt. She started to shiver as she had been doing on and off all night, and when she felt his arms come down tighter and almost hard, she loved it.

  The frogs were singing here, that loud grinding woodland song, and far away a bird cried in the night. Impossible to believe that streets lay near at hand, and that people lived beyond the trees, that the distant tiny yellow lights twinkling here and there through the glossy leaves were the lights of other people’s houses.

  ‘I love you, Michael,’ she whispered. ‘I do. I love you.’

  But she couldn’t shake the evil spell. It seemed to be part of the sky and the giant tree looming over her head, and the glittering water down deep in the rank and wild grass. But it was not part of any one place. It was in her, part of her. And she realized, her head lying still against his chest, that this wasn’t only the remembrance of the old woman and her brittle and personal malice, but a foreboding. Ellie’s efforts had been in vain, for Rowan had known this foreboding long ago. Maybe even all her life, she’d known that a dread and dark secret lay ahead, and that it was a great and immense and greedy and multilayered secret, which once opened would continue to unfold forever. It was a secret that would become the world, its revelations crowding out the very light of ordinary life.

  This long day in the balmy tropical city of old-fashioned courtesies and rituals had merely been the first unfolding. Even the secrets of the old woman were the mere beginning.

  And it draws its strength, this big secret, from the same root from which I draw my strength, both the good and the bad, because in the end, they cannot be separated.

  ‘Rowan, let me get you away from here,’ he said. ‘We should have left before. This is my fault.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter, leaving here,’ she whispered. ‘I like it here. It doesn’t matter where I go, so why not stay here where it’s dark and quiet and beautiful?’

  The soft heavy smell of that flower came again, the one the old woman had called the night jasmine.

  ‘Ah, do you smell it, Michael?’ She looked at the white water lilies glowing in the dark.


  ‘That’s the smell of summer nights in New Orleans,’ he answered. ‘Of walking alone, and whistling, and beating the iron pickets with a twig.’ She loved the deep vibration of his voice coming from his chest. ‘That’s the smell of walking all through these streets.’

  He looked down at her, struggling to make out her face, it seemed. ‘Rowan, whatever happens, don’t let this house go. Even if you have to go away from it and never see it again, even if you come to hate it. Don’t let it go. Don’t let it ever fall into the hands of anyone who wouldn’t love it. It’s too beautiful. It has to survive all this, just as we do.’

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t confess this dark fear that they weren’t going to survive, that somehow everything that had ever given her consolation would be lost. And then she remembered the old woman’s face, upstairs in the death room where the man had died years and years ago, and the old woman saying to her, ‘You can choose. You can break the chain!’ The old woman, trying to break through her own crust of malice and viciousness and coldness. Trying to offer Rowan something which she herself perceived to be shining and pure. And in the same room with that man who had died, bound helplessly in that rug, while life went on in the rooms below.

  ‘Let’s go, darling dear,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel. I insist. And let’s just get into one of those big soft hotel beds and snuggle together.’

  ‘Can we walk, Michael? Can we walk slowly through the dark?’

  ‘Yes, honey, if you want to.’

  They had no keys to lock up. They left the lights shining behind soiled or draped windows. They went down the path and out the rusted gate.

  Michael unlocked the car and took out a briefcase and showed it to her. It was the whole story, he said, but she couldn’t read it before he explained a few things. There were things in there that were going to shock her, maybe even upset her. Tomorrow, they’d talk about it over breakfast. He had promised Aaron that he wouldn’t put it into her hands without explanations, and it was for her that he was doing this. Aaron wanted her to understand.