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THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 20 page

Very slowly she turned her head. However dark the living room might have appeared to him, there was no doubt that he could see her, that he was looking at her, in fact.

His boldness infuriated her. And her sense of the danger of the situation mounted. She watched coldly as he moved towards the glass.

“Come on, you bastard, I’ll cheerfully kill you,” she whispered, feeling the hairs rise on her neck. A delicious chill passed through her whole body. She wanted to kill him, whoever he was, trespasser, madman, thief. She wanted to blow him right off the deck with the .38-caliber bullet. Or to put it simply, with any power she had at her command.

Slowly, with both hands, she lifted the gun. She pointed it directly at him and stretched out her arms as Chase had taught her to do.

Undeterred, the intruder continued to look at her, and through her quiet, iron-cold fury, she marveled at the physical details that she could make out. The dark hair was wavy, the face wan and thin, and there seemed something sad and beseeching in the shadowy expression. The head turned gently on the neck as though the man were pleading with her, speaking to her.

Who in God’s name are you? she thought. The incongruity of it struck her slowly, along with a completely alien thought. This is not what it appears to be. This is some form of illusion I’m looking at! And with a sudden interior shift, her anger passed into suspicion and finally fear.

The dark eyes of the being implored her. He raised his pale hands now and placed his fingers on the glass.

She could neither move nor speak. Then, furious at her helplessness and at her terror, she cried:

“You go back to hell where you came from!” her voice sounding loud and terrible in the empty house.

As if to answer her, to unsettle her and vanquish her totally, the intruder slowly disappeared. The figure went transparent, then dissolved utterly, and nothing was left but the faintly horrible and completely unsettling sight of the empty deck.

The immense pane of glass rattled. There came another boom from it as though the wind had pushed against it head on. Then the sea seemed to settle. The rushing of water died away. And the house grew still. Even the Sweet Christine settled uneasily in the channel beside the pier.

Rowan continued to look at the empty deck. Then she realized her hands were wet with perspiration, and shaking. The gun felt enormously heavy and dangerously uncontrollable. In fact, she was shaking all over. Nevertheless, she went directly to the glass wall. Furious at her defenselessness against this thing, she touched the glass where the being had touched it. The glass was faintly but distinctly warm. Not warm as it might be from a human hand, for that would be too subtle a thing to warm such a cold surface, but warm as if heat had been directed at it.

Again she studied the bare boards. She stared out at the dark, faceted water and the distant cozy lights of Sausalito on the other side of the bay.

She moved swiftly to the kitchen counter, set down the gun, and picked up the phone.



“I have to reach the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans. Please dial it,” she said, her voice quaking. And the only thing she could do to calm herself as she waited was to listen, to reassure herself of what she already knew, that she was completely alone.

Useless to check locks and latches. Useless to go poking in drawers and nooks and crannies. Useless, useless, useless.

She was frantic by the time the hotel answered. “I have to speak to Michael Curry,” she said. He was to have checked in that night, she explained. No, it didn’t matter that it was five-twenty in New Orleans. Please ring his room.

It seemed forever that she stood there alone, too shaken to question the selfishness of waking Michael at this hour. Then came the operator again: “I’m sorry, but Mr. Curry is not answering.”

“Try him again. Send someone up to the room, please. I have to talk to him.”

Finally, when they had failed to rouse him altogether, and refused of course to enter the suite without his permission—and for that she couldn’t blame them—she left an urgent message, hung up and sank down on the hearth, and tried to think.

She was certain of what she’d seen, absolutely certain of it. An apparition there on the deck, looking at her, drawing close to her, examining her! Some being that could appear and disappear entirely at will. Yet why had she seen the gleam of light on the edge of his collar; why the droplets of moisture in his hair? Why was the glass warm to the touch? She wondered if the thing had substance to it when it was visible, and if that substance dissolved when the creature “appeared to disappear.”

In sum, her mind ran to science as it always had, and she knew this was her tack, but it could not stop the panic in her, the great awful feeling of helplessness that had come over her and stayed with her now, making her afraid in her own safe place, where she’d never been afraid before.

Why had the wind and the rain been part of it, she wondered. Surely she hadn’t imagined that part. And why, above all else, had this creature appeared to her?

“Michael,” she whispered. It was like a prayer dropping from her lips. Then she gave a little whispered laugh. “I’m seeing them, too.”

She rose from the hearth and went about the house slowly, with steady steps, turning on every light.

“All right,” she said calmly, “if you come back, it will have to be in a blaze of illumination.” But this was absurd, wasn’t it? Something that could move the very waters of Richardson Bay could trip a circuit breaker easily enough.

But she wanted these lights on. She was scared. She went into the bedroom, locked the door behind her, locked the door of the closet, and closed the door of the bathroom, and then lay down, plumping the pillows under her head, and placing the gun within reach.

She lit a cigarette, knowing it was dreadful to smoke in bed, checked out the tiny winking red light on the smoke alarm, and then continued to smoke.

A ghost, she thought. Imagine it, I have seen one. I never believed in them, but I’ve seen one. It had to be a ghost. There’s nothing else it could have been. But why did this ghost appear to me? Again, she saw its imploring expression, and the vividness of the experience returned to her.

It made her miserable suddenly that she couldn’t reach Michael, that Michael was the only one in the whole world who might believe what had happened, that Michael was the only one she trusted enough to tell.

The fact was, she was excited; it was curiously like her feeling after the rescue that night. I have been through something awful and thrilling. She wanted to tell someone. She lay there, wide-eyed in the bright shadowless yellow light of the bedroom thinking, Why did it appear to me?

So curious the way it had walked across the deck and peered through the glass at her. “You would have thought I was the strange one.”

And the excitement continued. But she was very relieved when the sun finally rose. Sooner or later, Michael would wake up out of his drunken sleep. He’d see the message light on his phone; and surely, he would call.

“And here I am wanting something from him again, reaching out to him right in the midst of whatever is happening there, needing him … ”

But now she was drifting off, in the warm sweet safety of the sunlight pouring through the glass, snuggling into the warm pillows and pulling the patchwork quilt over her, thinking about him, about the dark fleecy hair on the backs of his arms and his hands, about his large eyes again peering at her through the glasses. And only on the cusp of dream did she think, Could this ghost possibly have something to do with him?

The visions. She wanted to say, “Michael, is it something to do with the visions?” Then the dream swung into absurdity, and she wakened, resisting the irrelevance and the grotesqueness as she always did, consciousness being so much better, thinking—of course, Slattery could fill in for her, and if Ellie existed somewhere she no longer cared whether Rowan went back to New Orleans, certainly, for we had to believe that, didn’t we? That what was beyond this plane was infinitely better; and then she fell back into exhausted sleep again.

Nine

 

MICHAEL AWOKE ABRUPTLY, thirsting, and hot in the bed covers though the air in the room was quite cool. He was wearing his shorts and his shirt, cuffs unbuttoned, collar undone. He was also wearing his gloves.

A light burned at the end of the little carpeted corridor. Over the soft engulfing roar of the air conditioner, he heard what sounded like the rustle of papers.

Good heavens, where am I? he thought. He sat up. At the end of the little hallway, there appeared to be a parlor, and a baby grand piano of pale and lustrous wood standing against a bank of flowered drapes. His suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel, it had to be.

He had no memory of coming here. And he was instantly angry with himself for having gotten so drunk. But then the euphoria of the earlier evening returned to him, the vision of the house on First Street beneath the violet sky.

I’m in New Orleans, he thought. And he felt a surge of happiness which effaced all his present confusion and guilt. “I’m home,” he whispered. “Whatever else I’ve done, I’m home.”

But how had he managed to get into this hotel? And who was in the parlor? The Englishman. His last clear memory was of speaking to the Englishman in front of the First Street house. And with that little recollection came another: he saw the brown-haired man behind the black iron fence again, staring down at him. He saw the glittering eyes only a few feet above him, and the strangely white and impassive face. A curious feeling passed over him. It wasn’t fear precisely. It was more purely visceral. His body tensed as it might against a threat.

How could that man have changed so little over the years? How could he have been there one minute and gone the next?

It seemed to Michael that he knew the answers to these questions, that he’d always understood the man was no ordinary man. But his sudden familiarity with such a completely unfamiliar notion almost made him laugh.

“You’re losing it, buddy.” he whispered.

But he had to get his bearings now, in this strange place, and find out what the Englishman wanted, and why he was still here.

Quickly he surveyed the room. Yes, the old hotel. A feeling of comfort and security came to him as he saw the slightly faded carpet, the painted air conditioner beneath the windows, and the heavy old-fashioned telephone sitting on the small inlaid desk with its message light pulsing in the darkness.

The door of the bath stood open revealing a dim slash of white tile.

To his left, the closet, and his suitcase, opened on its stand, and wonder of wonders, on the table beside him an ice bucket, beaded over beautifully with tiny drops of moisture, and crammed into the ice three tall cans of Miller’s beer.

“Well, isn’t that just about perfect?”

He removed his right glove and touched one of the beer cans. Immediate flash of a uniformed waiter, same old load of distracting, irrelevant information. He put the glove back on and opened the can. He drank down half of it in deep cold swallows. Then he climbed to his feet and went into the bathroom and pissed.

Even in the soft morning light coming through the slatted blinds, he could see his shaving kit laid out on the marble dresser. He took out his toothbrush and toothpaste and brushed his teeth.

Now he felt a little less headachy, hung over, and downright miserable. He combed his hair, swallowed the rest of the can of beer, and felt almost good.

He changed into a fresh shirt, pulled on his trousers, and taking another beer from the ice bucket, he went down the hallway and stood looking into a large, elegantly furnished room. Beyond a gathering of velvet couches and chairs, the Englishman sat at a small wooden table, bent over a mass of manila folders and typewritten pages. He was a slightly built man with a heavily lined face and rather luxuriant white hair. He wore a gray velvet smoking jacket, tied at the waist, and gray tweed trousers, and he was looking at Michael with an extremely friendly and agreeable expression.

He rose to his feet.

“Mr. Curry, are you feeling better?” he asked. It was one of those eloquent English voices which make the simplest words take on new meaning, as if they’ve never been properly pronounced before. He had small yet brilliant blue eyes.

“Who are you?” Michael asked.

The Englishman drew closer, extending his hand.

Michael didn’t take it, though it hurt him to be this rude to somebody who looked so friendly and earnest and sort of nice. He took another sip of the beer.

“My name’s Aaron Lightner,” the Englishman said. “I came from London to see you.” Softly spoken, unobtrusive.

“My aunt told me that part. I saw you hanging around my house on Liberty Street. Why the hell did you follow me here?”

“Because I want to talk to you, Mr. Curry,” the man said politely, almost reverentially. “I want to talk to you so badly that I’m willing to risk any discomfort or inconvenience I might incur. That I’ve risked your displeasure is obvious. And I’m sorry for it, truly sorry. I only meant to be helpful in bringing you here, and please allow me to point out that you were entirely cooperative at the time.”

“Was I?” Michael found he was bristling. Yet this guy was a real charmer, he had to give him that. But another glance at the papers spread out on the table made Michael furious. For fifty bucks, or considerably less, the cab driver would have lent him a hand. And the cab driver wouldn’t be here now.

“That’s quite true,” said Lightner in the same soft, well-tempered voice. “And perhaps I should have retired to my own suite above, but I wasn’t certain whether or not you’d be ill, and frankly I was worried on another count.”

Michael said nothing. He was fully aware that the man had just read his mind, so to speak. “Well, you just caught my attention with that little trick,” he said. And he thought, Can you do it again?

“Yes, if you like,” said the Englishman. “A man in your frame of mind is, unfortunately, quite easy to read. Your increased sensitivity works both ways, I fear. But I can show you how to hide your thoughts, how to throw up a screen if you wish. On the other hand, it isn’t really necessary. Because there aren’t very many people like me walking about.”

Michael smiled in spite of himself. All this was said with such genteel humility that he was a little overwhelmed and definitely reassured. The man seemed completely truthful. In fact, the only emotional impression received by Michael was one of goodness, which surprised him somewhat.

Michael walked past the piano to the flowered draperies and pulled the cord. He loathed being in an electrically lighted room in the morning, and he felt immediately happy again when he looked down on St. Charles Avenue, on the wide band of grass and the streetcar tracks, and the dusty foliage of the oaks. He had not remembered the leaves of the oaks as being so darkly green. It seemed everything he saw was remarkably vivid. And when the St. Charles car passed beneath him, moving slowly uptown, the old familiar roar—a sound like no other—brought the excitement back to him. How drowsy and wonderfully familiar it all seemed.

He had to get back outside, walk over to the First Street house again. But he was keenly aware of the Englishman watching him. And again, he could detect nothing but honesty in the man, and nothing but a sort of wholesome goodwill.

“OK, I’m curious,” he said turning around. “And I’m grateful. But I don’t like all this. I really don’t. So out of curiosity and in gratitude, if you follow me, I’ll give you twenty minutes to explain who you are, and why you are here, and what this is all about.” He sat down on the velvet couch opposite the man and the messy table. He switched off the lamp. “Oh, and thanks for the beer. I really appreciate the beer.”

“There’s more in the refrigerator in the kitchen behind me,” said the Englishman. Unflappably pleasant.

“Thoughtful,” said Michael. He felt comfortable in this room. He could not remember it really from childhood, but it was pleasant with its dark papered walls and soft upholstered pieces and low brass lamps.

The man seated himself at the table, facing Michael. And for the first time Michael noticed a small bottle of brandy and a glass. He saw that the man’s suit coat was on the back of the other chair. A briefcase, the briefcase Michael had seen in the airport, was standing by the chair.

“You wouldn’t care for a little cognac?” the man asked.

“No. Why do you have the suite just overhead? What’s going on?”

“Mr. Curry, I belong to an old organization,” said the man. “It’s called the Talamasca. Have you ever heard the name?”

Michael thought for a moment. “No.”

“We go back to the eleventh century. More truly, we go back before that. But sometime during the eleventh century we took the name Talamasca, and from that time on we had a constitution, so to speak, and certain rules. What we are in modern parlance is a group of historians interested primarily in psychic research. Witchcraft, hauntings, vampires, people with remarkable psychic ability—all of these things interest us and we keep an immense archive of information regarding them.”

“You’ve been doing this since the eleventh century?”

“Yes, and before, as I said. We are in many respects a passive group of people; we do not like to interfere. As a matter of fact, let me show you our card and our motto.”

The Englishman drew the card out of his pocket, gave it to Michael, and returned to his chair.

Michael read the card:

THE TALAMASCAWe watch
And we are always here. There were phone numbers given for Amsterdam, Rome, and London.

“You have headquarters in all those places?” Michael asked.

“Motherhouses, we call them,” said the Englishman. “But to continue, we are largely passive, as I said. We collect data; we correlate, cross-reference, and preserve information. But we are very active in making our information available to those who might benefit from it. We heard about your experience through the London papers, and through a contact in San Francisco. We thought we might be able to … be of assistance to you.”

Michael took off his right glove, tugging slowly at each finger, and then laid the glove aside. He picked up the card again. Jarring flash of Lightner putting several such cards in his pocket in another hotel room. New York City. Smell of cigars. Noise of traffic. Flash of some woman somewhere, speaking to Lightner fast in a British accent …

“Why not ask it a specific question, Mr. Curry?”

The words brought Michael out of it. “All right,” he said. Is this man telling me the truth? The load continued, debilitating and discouraging, voices growing louder, more confused. Through the din, Michael heard Lightner speak to him again:

“Focus, Mr. Curry, extract what you want to know. Are we good people or are we not?”

Michael nodded, repeating the question silently, then he couldn’t take all this any longer. He set the card down on the table, careful not to brush the table itself with his fingertips. He was shaking slightly. He slipped his glove back on. His vision cleared.

“Now, what do you know?” asked Lightner.

“Something about the Knights Templar, you stole their money,” Michael said.

“What?” Lightner was flabbergasted.

“You stole their money. That’s why you have all these Motherhouses all over kingdom come. You stole their money when the king of France arrested them. They gave it to you for safekeeping and you kept it. And you’re rich. You’re all filthy rich. And you’re ashamed of what happened with the Knights Templar, that they were accused of witchcraft and destroyed. I know that part, of course, from the history books. I was a history major. I know all about what happened to them. The king of France wanted to crack their power. Apparently he didn’t know about you.” Michael paused. “Very few people really know about you.”

Lightner stared in what seemed innocent amazement. Then his faced colored. His discomfort seemed to be increasing.

Michael laughed, though he tried not to. He moved the fingers of the right glove. “Is that what you mean by focus and extract information?”

“Well, I suppose that is what I meant, yes. But I never thought you would extract such an obscure—”

“You’re ashamed of what happened with the Knights Templar. You always have been. Sometimes you go down into the basement archives in London and you read through all the old material. Not the computer abstracts, but the old files, written in ink on parchment. You try to convince yourself there was nothing that the order could have done to help the Knights.”

“Very impressive, Mr. Curry. But, Mr. Curry, if you know your history, you’ll know that no one except the Pope in Rome could have saved the Knights Templar. We certainly were not in a position to do it, being an obscure and small and completely secret organization. And frankly, when the persecutions were over, when Jacques de Molay and the others had been burnt alive, there wasn’t anyone left to whom the money could be returned.”

Michael laughed again. “You don’t have to tell all this to me, Mr. Lightner. But you’re really ashamed of something that happened six hundred years ago. What an odd bunch of guys you must be. By the way, for what it’s worth, I did write a paper once on the Knights, and I agree with you. Nobody could have helped them, not even the Pope, as far as I can figure. If you guys had surfaced, they would have burnt you at the stake too.”

Again, Lightner flushed. “Undoubtedly,” he said. “Are you satisfied that I’ve been telling you the truth?”

“Satisfied? I’m impressed!” Michael studied him for a long moment. Again, the distinct impression of a wholesome human being, one who shared the values which mattered very much to Michael himself. “And this work of yours is the reason you followed me,” Michael asked, “enduring, what was it, discomfort and inconvenience, and my displeasure?” Michael picked up the card, which took some doing with his gloved fingers, and slipped the card into the pocket of his shirt.

“Not entirely,” said the Englishman. “Though I want to help you very much, and if that sounds patronizing or insulting, I’m sorry. Truly sorry. But it’s true, and it’s pointless to lie to someone like you.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it will come as any surprise to you that there have been times in the last few weeks when I have prayed out loud for help. I’m a little better off now than I was two days ago, however. A good deal better off. I’m on my way to doing … what I feel I have to do.”

“You have an enormous power, and you don’t really understand it,” Lightner said.

“But the power is unimportant. What I’m talking about is the purpose. Did you read the articles on me in the papers?”

“Yes, everything in print that I could find.”

“Well, then you know I had these visions when I was dead; and that they involved a purpose in my coming back; and that somehow or other, the entire memory has been wiped out. Well, almost the entire memory.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Then you know the thing about the hands doesn’t matter,” said Michael. Uneasiness. He took another deep swallow of beer. “Nobody much believes about the purpose. But it’s been over three months since the accident happened, and the feeling I have is the same. I came back here on account of the purpose. It has something to do with that house I went to last night. That house on First Street. I intend to keep trying to figure out what that purpose is.”

The man was scanning him intently. “It does? The house is connected to the visions you saw when you were drowned?”

“Yes, but don’t ask me how. For months, I’ve seen that house over and over again in my mind. I’ve seen it in my sleep. It’s connected. I came two thousand miles because it’s connected. But again, don’t ask me how or why.”

“And Rowan Mayfair, how is she connected?”

Michael set the beer down slowly. He took a hard appraising look at the man. “You know Dr. Mayfair?” he asked.

“No, but I know a great deal about her, and about her family,” said the Englishman.

“You do? About her family? She might be very interested to know that. But how do you know about her family? What is her family to you? I thought you said you were waiting outside my house in San Francisco because you wanted to talk to me.”

Lightner’s face darkened for a moment. “I’m very confused, Mr. Curry. Perhaps you’ll enlighten me. How did Dr. Mayfair happen to be there?”

“Look, I’m getting sick of your questions. She was there because she was trying to help me. She’s a doctor.”

“She was there in her capacity as a doctor?” Lightner asked in a half whisper. “I’ve been laboring under a misimpression. Dr. Mayfair didn’t send you here?”

“Send me here? Good Lord, no. Why the hell would she do that? She wasn’t even in favor of my coming, except that I’d get it out of my system. The truth is, I was so drunk when she picked me up it’s a wonder she didn’t have me committed. I wish I was that drunk right now. But why would you have an idea like that, Mr. Lightner? Why would Rowan Mayfair send me here?”

“Indulge me for a moment, won’t you?”

“I don’t know if I will.”

“You didn’t know Dr. Mayfair before you had the visions?”

“No. Not till five minutes afterwards.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“She’s the one who rescued me, Lightner. The one who pulled me out of the sea. That’s the first time I ever laid eyes on her, when she brought me around on the deck of her boat.”

“Good Lord, I had no idea.”

“Well, neither did I until Friday night. I mean I didn’t know her name or who she was or anything about her. The Coast Guard flubbed it. They didn’t get her name or the registry of the boat when the call came in. But she saved my life out there. She’s got some kind of powerful diagnostic sense, some sort of sixth sense about when a patient’s going to live or die. She started trying to revive me immediately. I sometimes wonder if the Coast Guard had spotted me, whether or not they would even have tried.”

Lightner lapsed into silence, staring at the carpet. He seemed deeply troubled.

“Yes, she is a remarkable physician,” he whispered, but this did not seem to be a full expression of his thoughts. He seemed to be struggling to concentrate. “And you told her about these visions.”

“I wanted to get back on her boat. I had this idea, that maybe if I knelt down on the deck and touched the boards, well, something might come through my hands. Something that might jog my memory. And the amazing thing was, she went along with it. She’s not an ordinary doctor at all.”

“No, I quite agree with you there,” said Lightner. “And what happened?” he asked.

“Nothing, that is, nothing except that I got to know Rowan.”

He paused. He wondered if this man could guess how it was between him and Rowan. He was not going to say.

“Now I think you owe me some answers,” Michael said. “Exactly what do you know about her and her family, and what made you think she sent me here? Me, of all people. Why the hell would she send me here?”

“Well, that’s what I was trying to discover. I thought perhaps it had to do with the power in your hands, that she’d asked you to do some secretive research for her. Why, it was the only explanation I could think of. But Mr. Curry, how did you know about this house? I mean, how did you make the connection between what you saw in the visions and … ”

“I grew up here, Lightner. I loved that house when I was a little kid. I used to walk past it all the time. I never forgot it. Even before I drowned I used to think about that house. I aim to find out who owns it and what this all means.”

“Really … ” said Lightner, again in a half whisper. “You don’t know who owns it?”

“No, I just said I aim to find out.”

“You don’t have any idea … ”

“I just told you, I aim to find out!”

“You tried to climb over the fence last night.”

“I remember. Now would you mind telling me a few things, please? You know about me. You know about Rowan Mayfair. You know about the house. You know about Rowan’s family—” Michael stopped, staring fixedly at Lightner. “Rowan’s family!” he said. “They own that house?”

Gravely, Lightner nodded.

“That’s really true?”

“They have for centuries,” said Lightner quietly. “And if I’m not sadly mistaken that house will belong to Rowan Mayfair, upon her mother’s death.”

“I don’t believe you,” Michael whispered. But in truth he did. Once again the atmosphere of the visions enveloped him, only to dissolve immediately as it always did. He stared at Lightner, unable to form any of the questions teeming in his head.

“Mr. Curry. Indulge me again. Please. Explain to me in detail how the house is connected with the visions. Or more specifically, how you came to know it and remember it when you were a child.”


Date: 2015-12-18; view: 560


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