Damon knocked the ashes from his pipe. “You know, she may have something there. Mass hypnosis. That’s fairly well documented.”
“So is the phenomenon of possession,” Dr. Brun said, entering. “Call it what you will—hysteria or actual demonic manifestation, it does exist. She fell asleep almost immediately,” he added, answering my unspoken question.
“Oesterreich has written about possession,” Damon conceded. “And there are many Catholic treatises on the subject, but I consider those highly unreliable. Catholics love their myths.”
Dr. Brun smiled slightly. “Would you accept the word of Cotton Mather, that most dedicated of Protestant Puritans? He wrote in his Memorable Providences about four children in Boston who were bewitched by an Irish washerwoman. He and his wife took the oldest child, Martha, into their home to pray for her deliverance.”
“Strange thing,” he continued, “Rowan’s symptoms tonight were nearly identical—the imaginary horse, the contortions, her hands and feet fastened together, the impalement to the ground, the voices, the swelling in her throat—Cotton Mather records all those manifestations.”
“Superstitious hogwash,” Damon said. “That old buzzard Mather was a witch hunter; naturally he’d lie to make himself look good.”
“Mather was hardly an old buzzard—he was in his twenties at the time, and I don’t believe he was lying,” Dr. Brun said mildly. “I’ve treated similar cases. One in Zurich involved a young man who suffered seizures in which he became violent and would babble in Arabic, a language of which he had no knowledge—”
Damon rose and took his wife by the arm. “Let’s go,” he rasped. “I’d forgotten we have a writer here who will apparently go to any length for sensationalism—even if he has to re-create The Exorcist.”
Dr. Brun gave him a puzzled look. “Exorcist? What is that? A book?”
Now, as I lay in my bed, I wondered what had made Rowan take Cariad and run away? Maybe Ward had the right idea. I certainly hoped she wasn’t taking revenge on me. Had something frightened her? Had someone lured her out? Dr. Brun? Lucian?
Upset by my suspicions, I climbed out of bed and grabbed my robe, intending to get some fresh air, and determined to shake the anxiety that gripped me.
Two figures stood in the country mist between the Phoenix and Dana’s house, and as I approached, I heard Dana’s distinct tones.
“Anyway,” she was saying, “it’s not respectable to be possessed in Peacehaven. The people here have been trying too long to prove their ancestors weren’t witches… Mitti! Is anything wrong?”
“No,” I replied, joining them, “I just couldn’t sleep.”
Dr. Brun led us over to the steps to sit down, and I felt a rush of despair.
“What is the town going to think about Rowan—about what happened tonight?”
“They were too much a part of it, this time,” he tried to reassure me. “You saw five men unable to lift her.”
“Yet you did,” I observed. “Take care they don’t label you a wizard, Dr. Brun.”
“Oh, I’m quite certain they have long ago.”
“Did Rowan say anything about why she ran away like that?”
He shook his head. “She was so sleepy I didn’t want to question her. Does she ever sleepwalk?”
“I’ve never known her to. Damon wants to do some tests and send her to a psychiatrist. Do you think it’s necessary?”
“I do think it would be wise for her to take a Rorschach test.”
My fingernails were stabbing my palms. “Would it have to be done right away? With moving and all, everything is so upset—”
“But, of course! Take your time! We’ll watch her closely, and if other things occur… But this may be stress-induced—just an isolated incident.”
“As for blood tests,” I hurried on, “Rowan had a complete physical just before we left New York. I wanted her own pediatrician to do it. Everything was normal.”
“There are more sophisticated tests—” he began.
“No!” I was adamant. “I won’t have it! I can still see the blood spurting from that little girl’s neck in The Exorcist. I won’t have Rowan subjected to gruesome tests like that. By themselves they’d be enough to push a sensitive child over the edge.” My nails were inflicting genuine pain now, but my hands refused to unclasp.
Dr. Brun laid his hand over my clenched fists. Warmth stole into them and slowly they relaxed. “I agree, Mitti. The best course is to wait and see, and try as much as possible to make her forget the whole incident. Not that she’ll remember what happened out there—she won’t, but others will undoubtedly talk to her about it.”
My tension was easing. “You don’t really believe in demons, do you?” I asked.
He touched his eye-patch lightly. “I owe that to a demon in the Amazon. The kindest, gentlest man you could imagine began to show classic symptoms of possession. Like you, I didn’t believe in such things, and I tried to treat him as a psychiatrist and medical man would. I lost an eye and gained wisdom. So I tried exorcism and the man was cured.”
“Oh well, in primitive cultures people are easily suggestible,” I observed. “They only have to know that someone’s sticking pins in their image or has put a curse on them and they curl up and die of fright.”
“And those telephone calls you get don’t affect you?” he asked.
“Not enough to cause me to be possessed.”
“Yet if it were to be carried to an extreme, you might not only become fear-ridden, but vulnerable to psychic attack.”
“Couldn’t this possession thing be a handy excuse for certain kinds of behavior?”
“In some cases, yes. But to all my patients I stress that we must be responsible for the actions of the entities we choose to harbor, be they angels or demons.”
“In other words—we still have free will. Do you think Rowan has deliberately opened herself up to demonic possession? I can’t believe that.”
“She’s done it unthinkingly. However, she wasn’t alone in it tonight. Rowan was a sounding board for the imperfections in all of us. She’s a sensitive child and I suspect she’s still suffering from the trauma of her father’s death.”
More than you know, I thought, as a thousand questions in my mind clamored to be heard. “I have such a strange feeling about Peacehaven,” I said. “It’s as if this tiny town has been suspended in a particular spot in time, with all sorts of coincidences, that aren’t coincidences at all, rushing in upon it—as if all the forces of the universe were converging here for some terrible event just as they did in Salem nearly three hundred years ago. You, Dr. Brun, why are you here? To explore our caves? That may be your reason, but maybe God has another. The same for Greg and Lucian. And perhaps it was all part of the same plan for Aunt Bo to reverse her will, bringing me and my daughters here at this moment. All of us fulfilling one divine—or infernal—purpose. It’s like sitting on the San Andreas fault, waiting for California to drop into the ocean.”
“Or Peacehaven to fall into the river,” he said.
* * * *
Dana and I sat without talking for some time after Dr. Brun left us. I longed for bed, but was too tired to make the effort to get there.
Dana spoke first. “Look, the mist is lifting!”
It was indeed. The old house with its faceted windows was emerging to the rear and west of the parking lot. I became aware of a dull, metallic clank against the fenced-in enclosure behind the house.
“Come, I’ll introduce you to Caper,” Dana said, reaching out her hand.
“Oh—the goat,” I remembered. “How is he, by the way?”
“Fine, except for a wounded ego now his beard is gone.”
The little goat came trotting out of his pen toward me, reaching out his black head for me to pet. I gingerly held
out my hand, and he immediately caught hold of the sleeve of my robe.
“Caper, behave!” Dana commanded. He obeyed, relinquishing my sleeve intact.
“He’s a gentleman,” she said, stroking him. “A gentleman ‘it,’ that is, which keeps him smelling sweet. He earns his room and board by grazing the dandelions and burdock and other weeds, although I’ve kept him penned up since he wandered into town and ate one of Elspeth’s plum trees.”
As I put out my hand again, Caper spooked, sidling away toward the back door of the Phoenix.
“He’d like to be let in for a few minutes, but it’s too late now,” she explained.
“You let Caper in the house?” I asked, taken aback.
“Just into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal now and then.” Then, seeing the dismay in my face, she added, “He’s housebroken.”
About this time Caper wheeled about and started back toward me. I retreated, envisioning a well-aimed butt, but just as he got to me he put on the brakes, lowered his head and rubbed his face against my robe. He was a gentleman!
“You intrigue me, Dana,” I said as we turned back to the house. “Tell me about yourself. I know you took wonderful care of Aunt Bo. And you well deserved that,” I said, pointing to the old house which was now hers. In the mercury light it looked black, but it was really a dark brown.
“Some people resent her bequest,” Dana said. “They think it should have stayed in the family.”
I took her hand. “You are family now, Dana. Try to remember that. Please tell me more about yourself.”
“There isn’t much to tell. My mother was resented by my father’s people, partly because she was a white woman, but more because she was known to have the Sight. Winnebagoes fear witches. So we left the reservation and came here to live. Father said this land once belonged to his people—they’d held councils here on this bluff.”
“All the more reason for you to have the house,” I said.
“Father took odd jobs, but never did prosper. Then, after my mother died, your Aunt Bo took us in. She gave my father a steady job and let him build a little cabin back in the woods. When he died, she sent me to college to study teaching and nursing, after which I returned to the reservation to help my people. I married a Winnebago man, but he died young and we had no children. I continued to teach for many years until one of my students died suddenly. Then the gray-haired women of the tribe remembered my mother—and they accused me of being a witch and stealing the child’s unused years so I might live longer. I didn’t blame them. I knew this had happened so that I could go to your aunt and say, ‘Aunt Bo’—for that is what I called her, too—‘I am no longer of any use to my people, so let me stay with you!’ You see, I couldn’t tell her she wasn’t able to take care of herself anymore. She had to feel she was taking care of me.”
“No wonder Aunt Bo loved you so much, Dana,” I said softly.
“Thank you for that, Mitti. Now, at last, I feel the house is really mine.”
She spoke with pride and I followed her gaze over to the house Joshua Martin had built. It loomed tall and forbidding with its high, narrow gables, dark brown clapboarding and mullioned windows. It was said that Martin had deliberately copied the House of Seven Gables in Salem—although it wasn’t known as that then, since it was before Hawthorne had immortalized it. Martin even slanted the doors in the way the old sea captain had in the original house so they would always swing closed unless someone propped them open. And he, too, had a hidden staircase beside the chimney that led to a secret room upstairs. Little did he know it would come in handy before the Civil War for hiding fugitive slaves.
“There is a problem though,” Dana went on. “In a town like Peacehaven, if Dr. Brun and I stay there alone—even at our age—there’s bound to be talk, and that might be hard for you.”
“It would be no one’s business,” I scoffed.
“No,” she said firmly. “You have Rowan and Cari to think of. I have a plan in mind which I hope you’ll approve—I know Aunt Bo would.”
Sly fox!
“There’s an old woman in town, who is crippled with arthritis and needs care. Her house on the river is threatened with collapse. Her son wants to send her to a nursing home, but since there are none in Peacehaven, she’d be sent away where she’d have no friends. I have a large room where she could stay and keep her treasures, and her friends could visit her.”
“Oh, Dana, after all those years of taking care of Aunt Bo!” The enormity of her generosity stunned me. “I should think you’d want some freedom.”
Her chin lifted. “I’ve always been free and this is something I wish to do.”
“Mightn’t you be accused of operating a nursing home without a license?”
“I checked into that. She will ‘rent’ a room from me. She has Social Security and Medicare. But her son might object.”
“Why? Nursing homes are expensive.”
“Not in his case. He deals constantly with nursing homes and social agencies.”
Who was this insensitive son? I wondered angrily.
“I do not understand this,” she continued. “Among my people it is an honor to be old, for with age comes wisdom. Agh, I talk too much.” She turned toward her house.
“Wait, Dana,” I stopped her. “You haven’t told me—who is this old lady? Do I know her?” A suspicion rose in my mind. “Not Damon’s mother!”
“But she worked so hard to put him through medical school!” I exclaimed when she admitted it was. Damon’s grandfather had once owned nearly half the town, most of which was now under the river. What was left of his fortune Damon’s father had squandered. Mrs. Carrier, a slight, frail woman, had taken in laundry, baked and sewed and cleaned—anything to scrape together the money for Damon to complete his education. “There’s plenty of room in his home.”
“He says she and Charity would never get on. To tell the truth, I think he’s ashamed of his mother. He seldom visits her. And because she’s lonely and in pain she’s taken to drinking in secret and has been seen drunk in public several times.”
“Mightn’t an alcoholic be too much to handle?”
“She’s not an alcoholic!” The reprimand was implicit. “Just lonely. She won’t need to drink here because she’ll be among friends—I hope.”
I winced at her scorn. “I didn’t mean it that way, Dana. Have her here, by all means.” Damon would be furious, but that rather enhanced the idea.
“You say that easily, but when it happens you may regret it.”
“Why should I? It’s very Christian of you.”
“People here do not think of me as a Christian, Mitti.”
“I’d call it Christian charity,” I floundered.
“You think Christians have a monopoly on charity?” she asked.
“Well, no,” I stammered. “However, when I spoke of Christian charity I used the wrong term. I meant a deed of love, such as Christ might have performed.” Who was this woman who was alternately Indian and inscrutable, warm and impulsive as the Celtic blood in her, and as coolly intellectual as her Anglo-Saxon heritage?
“Christ is another matter,” she said simply, then shrugged. “It is not the hour for religious discussion.”
No, it wasn’t. I wrapped my robe tighter around me as I became aware of the night chill. Somewhere down in the town a dog barked. We should both get to bed, yet I lingered. “Has Dr. Brun explored our cave at the back of the bluff, Dana?”
I felt a withdrawal in her. “Yes. He found nothing.”
“I remember a deep drop-off right at the entrance. My cousins and I had to put planks across to get into the cave. But I—well I thought I saw footholds in the steep wall. There could be a lower level. I wanted to try climbing down with a rope, but Ward said it was too dangerous.”
“And right he w
as,” she said severely. “Dr. Brun has had several narrow escapes in other caves. I hope he won’t take any risks in ours.”
There was no use pursuing the subject. I turned back toward the Phoenix. A cow lowed somewhere in the distance. Suddenly I felt desolate—frightened. This was so different from the Peacehaven I’d known.
“Oh, Dana,” I burst out, “nothing here is the way I expected it to be!”
“Nothing ever is,” she replied. “Time doesn’t give us reruns.”
“No, but—” I stopped. The phone was ringing in my house. I instinctively clutched her arm. “I—I don’t want to answer that.”
“I’ll get it,” she said.
“Hello?”
Click!
She hung up, giving me a long look. “Leave it off the hook tonight,” she suggested. “You need your sleep.”
“Who could it be, Dana?” I whispered.
But her eyes were fixed on something far away.
“I can’t see it yet,” she came back to me at last. “I tried, but I can’t get through.” Then she brightened. “But neither can the other person now, so go to bed.”
Chapter Six
Two weeks passed before I finally climbed the circular staircase to Aunt Bo’s tower. To be truthful, deep at the back of my mind was the thought of Aunt Bo dying there. It wasn’t the physical death that frightened me, but so many disturbing things had happened in this first week in Peacehaven that I had begun to doubt my own powers of perception. I don’t know what I expected to find. Perhaps I feared seeing her shade appearing and disappearing? Whatever it was, I was unable to shake my unease.
Now, as I gazed out over the panorama of river valley and crag-crested bluffs ranged around the horizon, and luxuriated in the cool breeze sweeping through the circuit of windows, I laughed at myself. Aunt Bo’s great black leather chair was there, but no ghostly apparition—only a natural sagging from use, and on her vast mahogany desk the papers and newspaper clippings were neatly stacked, probably by Dana, as Aunt Bo never straightened anything.
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 13
