THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 5 page

“Why do you say that!” Rowan whispered urgently. Something in the old woman’s change of demeanor terrified her. “Why do you look at me like that?”

The woman only smiled. “Come,” she said. “Bring the candle if you will. Some of the lights still burn. Others are burnt out or the wires have long ago frayed and come loose. Follow me.”

She rose from the chair, and carefully unhooked her wooden cane from the back of it, and walked with surprising certainty across the floor, past Rowan who stood watching her, guarding the tender flame of the candle in the curve of her left hand.

The tiny light leapt up the wall as they proceeded down the hallway. It shone for a moment on the gleaming surface of an old portrait of a man who seemed suddenly to be alive and to be staring at Rowan. She stopped, turning her head sharply to look up, to see that this had only been an illusion.

“What is it?” said Carlotta.

“Only that I thought … ” She looked at the portrait, which was very skillfully done and showed a smiling black-eyed man, most certainly not alive, and buried beneath layers of brittle, crazed lacquer.

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rowan said, and came on, guarding the flame as before. “The light made him look as though he’d moved.”

The woman looked back fixedly at the portrait as Rowan stood beside her. “You’ll see many strange things in this house,” she said. “You’ll pass empty rooms only to double back because you think you’ve seen a figure moving, or a person staring at you.”

Rowan studied her face. She seemed neither playful nor vicious now, only solitary, wondering and thoughtful.

“You aren’t afraid of the dark?” Carlotta asked.

“No.”

“You can see well in the dark.”

“Yes, better than most people.”

The woman turned around, and went on to the tall door at the foot of the stairs and pressed the button. With a muffled clank the elevator descended to the lower floor and stopped heavily and jerkily; the woman turned the knob, opening the door and revealing a gate of brass which she folded back with effort.

Inside they stepped, onto a worn patch of carpet, enclosed by dark fabric-covered walls, a dim bulb in the metal ceiling shining down on them.

“Close the doors,” said the woman, and Rowan obeyed, reaching out for the knob and then pushing shut the gate.

“You might as well learn how to use what is yours,” she added. A subtle fragrance of perfume rose from her clothes, something sweet like Chanel, mingled with the unmistakable scent of powder. She pressed a small black rubber button to her right. And up they went, fast, with a surge of power that surprised Rowan.

The hallway of the second floor lay in even thicker darkness than the lower corridor. The air was warmer. No open doorway or window gave even a seam of light from the street, and the candle light burst weakly on the many white-paneled doors and yet another rising stairway.

“Come into this room,” the old woman said, opening the door to the left and leading the way, her cane thumping softly on the thick flowered carpet.

Draperies, dark and rotting like those of the dining room below, and a narrow wooden bed with a high half roof, carved it seemed, with the figure of an eagle. A similar deeply etched symmetrical design was carved into the headboard.

“In this bed your mother died,” said Carlotta.

Rowan looked down at the bare mattress. She saw a great dark stain on the striped cloth that gave off a gleam that was almost a sparkling in the shadows. Insects! Tiny black insects fed busily on the stain. As she stepped forward, they fled the light, scurrying to the four corners of the mattress. She gasped and almost dropped the candle.

The old woman appeared wrapped in her thoughts, protected somehow from the ugliness of it.

“This is revolting,” said Rowan under her breath. “Someone should clean this room!”

“You may have it cleaned if you like,” said the old woman, “it’s your room now.”

The heat and the sight of the roaches sickened Rowan. She moved back and rested her head against the frame of the door. Other smells rose, threatening to nauseate her.

“What else do you want to show me?” she asked calmly. Swallow your anger, she whispered within herself, her eyes drifting over the faded walls, the little nightstand crowded with plaster statues and candles. Lurid, ugly, filthy. Died in filth. Died here. Neglected.

“No,” said the old woman. “Not neglected. And what did she know of her surroundings in the end? Read the medical records for yourself.”

The old woman turned past her once more, returning to the hallway. “And now we must climb these stairs,” she said. “Because the elevator goes no higher.”

Pray you don’t need my help, Rowan thought. She shrank from the mere thought of touching the woman. She tried to catch her breath, to still the tumult inside her. The air, heavy and stale and full of the faintest reminders of worse smells, seemed to cling to her, cling to her clothes, her face.

She watched the woman go up, managing each step slowly but capably.

“Come with me, Rowan Mayfair,” she said over her shoulder. “Bring the light. The old gas jets above have long ago been disconnected.”

Rowan followed, the air growing warmer and warmer. Turning on the small landing, she saw yet another shorter length of steps and then the final landing of the third floor. And as she moved up, it seemed that all the heat of the house must be collected here.

Through a barren window to her right came the colorless light of the street lamp far below. There were two doors, one to the left and one directly before them.

It was the left door which the old woman opened. “See there, the oil lamp on the table inside the door,” she said. “Light it.”

Rowan set down the candle and lifted the glass shade of the lamp. The smell of the oil was faintly unpleasant. She touched the burning candle to the burnt wick. The large bright flame grew even stronger as she lowered the shade. She held up the light to let it fill a spacious low-ceilinged room, full of dust and damp, and cobwebs. Once more tiny insects fled the light. A dry rustling sound startled her, but the good smell of heat and wood was strong here, stronger even than the smell of rotted cloth and mold.

She saw that trunks lay against the walls; packing crates crowded an old brass bed in the far corner beneath one of two square windows. A thick mesh of vines half covered the glass, the light caught in the wetness from the rain which still clung to the leaves, making them ever more visible. The curtains had long ago fallen down and lay in heaps on the windowsills.

Books lined the wall to the left, flanking the fireplace and its small wooden mantel, shelves rising to the ceiling. Books lay helter-skelter upon the old upholstered chairs which appeared soft now, spongy with dampness and age. The light of the lamp glinted on the dull brass of the old bed. It caught the dull gleaming leather of a pair of shoes, tossed it seemed against a long thick rug, tied in a lumpy roll and shoved against the unused fireplace.

Something odd about the shoes, odd about the lumpy roll of rug. Was it that the rug was bound with rusted chain, and not the rope that seemed more probable?

She realized the old woman was watching her.

“This was my uncle Julien’s room,” said the old woman. “It was through that window there that your grandmother Antha went out on the porch roof, and fell to her death below, on the flagstones.”

Rowan steadied the lamp, grasping it more firmly by the pinched waist of its glass base. She said nothing.

“Open the first trunk there to your right,” said the old woman.

Hesitating just a moment, though why she didn’t know, Rowan knelt down on the dusty bare floor, and set the lamp beside the trunk, and examined the lid and the broken lock. The trunk was made of canvas and bound with leather and brass tacks. She lifted the lid easily and threw it back gently so as not to scar the plaster wall.

“Can you see what’s inside?”

“Dolls,” Rowan answered. “Dolls made of … of hair and bone.”

“Yes, bone, and human hair, and human skin, and the parings of nails. Dolls of your female ancestors so far back there are no names for the oldest dolls, and they’ll fall to dust when you lift them.”

Rowan studied them, row after row set out carefully on a bed of old cheesecloth, each doll with its carefully drawn face and long hank of hair, some with sticks for arms and legs, others soft-bodied, and almost shapeless. The newest and finest of all the dolls was made of silk with a bit of pearl stitched to its little dress, its face of shining bone with nose and eyes and mouth drawn in dark brown ink, perhaps, even in blood.

“Yes, blood,” said the old woman. “And that is your great-grandmother, Stella.”

The tiny doll appeared to grin at Rowan. Someone had stuck the black hair to the bone skull with glue. Bones protruded from the hem of the little tube of a silk dress.

“Where did the bones come from?”

“From Stella.”

Rowan reached down, then drew back, her fingers curling. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it. She lifted the edge of the cheesecloth tentatively, seeing beneath yet another layer, and here the dolls were fast becoming dust. They had sunk deep into the cloth, and probably could not be lifted intact from it.

“All the way back to Europe they go. Reach in. Take the oldest doll. Can you see which one it is?”

“It’s hopeless. It will fall to pieces if I touch it. Besides, I don’t know which one it is.” She laid the cloth back, smoothing the top layer gingerly. And when her fingers touched the bones, she felt a sudden jarring vibration. It was as if a bright light had flashed before her eye. Her mind registered the medical possibilities … temporal lobe disturbance, seizure. Yet the diagnosis seemed foolish, belonging to another realm.

She stared down at the tiny faces.

“What’s the purpose? Why?”

“To speak to them when you would, and invoke their help, so they can reach out of hell to do your bidding.” The woman pressed her withered lips into a faint sneer, the light rising and distorting her face unkindly. “As if they would come from the fires of hell to do anyone’s bidding.”

Rowan let out a long low derisive sigh, looking down again at the dolls, at the horrid and vivid face of Stella.

“Who made these things?”

“They all did, all along. Cortland crept down in the night and cut the foot off my mother, Mary Beth, as she lay in the coffin. It was Cortland who took the bones from Stella. Stella wanted to be buried at home. Stella knew what he would do, because your grandmother Antha was too little to do it.”

Rowan shuddered. She lowered the lid of the trunk, and lifting the lamp carefully, rose to her feet, brushing the dust from her knees. “This Cortland, this man who did this, who was he? Not the grandfather of Ryan at the funeral?”

“Yes, my dear, the very same,” said the old woman. “Cortland the beautiful, Cortland the vicious, Cortland the instrument of him who has guided this family for centuries. Cortland who raped your mother when she clung to him for help. I mean the man who coupled with Stella, to father Antha who then gave birth to Deirdre, who by him conceived you, his daughter and great-granddaughter.”

Rowan stood quiet, envisioning the scheme of births and entanglements.

“And who has made a doll of my mother?” she asked, as she stared into the old woman’s face which now appeared ghastly in the light of the lamp playing on it.

“No one. Unless you yourself care to go to the cemetery and unscrew the stone and take her hands out of the coffin. Do you think you could do that? He will help you do it, you know, the man you have already seen. He’ll come if you put on the necklace and call him.”

“You have no cause to want to hurt me,” Rowan said. “I am no part of this.”

“I tell you what I know. Black Magic was their game. Always. I tell you what you must know to make your choice. Would you bow to this filth? Would you continue it? Would you lift those wretched pieces of filth and call upon the spirits of the dead so that all the devils in hell could play dolls with you?”

“I don’t believe in it,” Rowan said. “I don’t believe that you do.”

“I believe what I have seen. I believe what I feel when I touch them. They are endowed with evil, as relics are endowed with sanctity. But the voices who speak through them are all his voice, the voice of the devil. Don’t you believe what you saw when he came to you?”

“I saw a man with dark hair. He wasn’t a human being. He was some sort of hallucination.”

“He was Satan. He will tell you that is not so. He will give you a beautiful name. He will talk poetry to you. But he is the devil in hell for one simple reason. He lies and he destroys, and he will destroy you and your progeny if he can, for his ends, for his ends are what matter.”

“And what are they?”

“To be alive, as we are alive. To come through and to see and feel what we see and feel.” The woman turned her back, and moving her cane before her, walked to the left wall, by the fireplace, stopping at the lumpy roll of rug, and then looking up at the books that lined the shelves on either side of the paneled chimney above the mantel.

“Histories,” she said, “histories of all those who came before, written by Julien. This was Julien’s room, Julien’s retreat. In here he wrote his confessions. How with his sister Katherine he lay to make my mother, Mary Beth, and then with her he lay to make my sister Stella. And when he would have lain with me, I spit into his face. I clawed at his eyes. I threatened to kill him.” She turned to look fixedly at Rowan.

“Black magic, evil spells, records of his petty triumphs as he punished his enemies and seduced his lovers. Not all the seraphim in heaven could have satisfied his lust, not Julien’s.”

“This is all recorded there?”

“All this and more. But I have never read his books, and I never shall. It was enough to read his mind as he sat day by day in the library below, dipping his pen and laughing to himself, and giving vent to his fantasies. That was decades and decades ago. I have waited so long for this moment.”

“And why are the books still here? Why didn’t you burn them?”

“Because I knew that if you ever came, you would have to see for yourself. No book has the power of a burned book! No .… You must read for yourself what he was, for what he says in his own words can’t do anything else but convict and condemn him.” She paused. “Read and choose,” she whispered. “Antha couldn’t make the choice. Deirdre couldn’t make the choice. But you can make it. You are strong and clever and wise already in your years, wise. I can see this in you.”

She rested both hands on the crook of her cane and looked away, out of the corner of her eyes, pondering. Once again, her cap of white hair seemed heavy around her small face.

“I chose,” she said softly, almost sadly. “I went to church after Julien touched me, after he sang me his songs and told me his lies. I honestly think he believed his charms would win me over. I went to the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came through to me. Didn’t matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image—it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural.” She looked up at Rowan. “I said, ‘God, stand by me. Holy Mother, stand by me. Let me use my power to fight them, to beat them, to win against them.’ ”

Again her eyes moved off, gazing back into the past perhaps. For a long moment they lingered on the rug at her feet, bulging in its circles of rusted chain. “I knew what lay ahead, even then. Years after I learned what I needed. I learned the same spells and secrets they used. I learned to call up the very lowly spirits whom they commanded. I learned to fight him in all his glory, with spirits bound to me, whom I could then dismiss with the snap of my fingers. In sum, I used their very weapons against them.”

She looked sullen, remote, studying Rowan’s reactions yet seemingly indifferent to them.

“I told Julien I would bear no incestuous child by him. To show me no fantasies of the future. To play no tricks on me, changing himself to a young man in my arms, when I could feel his withered flesh, and knew it was there all along. ‘Do you think I care if you are the most beautiful man in the world? You or your evil familiar? Do you think I measure my choices by such vanity and self-indulgence?’ That’s what I said to him. If he touched me again, I promised I would use the power I had in me to drive him back. I would need no human hands to help me. And I saw fear in his eyes, fear even though I myself hadn’t learned yet how to keep my threats, fear of a power in me which he knew was there even when I was uncertain of it. But maybe it was only fear of one he couldn’t seduce, couldn’t confuse, couldn’t win over.” She smiled, her thin lips revealing a shining row of even false teeth. “That is a terrible thing, you know, to one who lives solely by seduction.”

She lapsed into silence, caught perhaps in remembering.

Rowan took a deep long breath, ignoring the sweat that clung to her face and the warmth of the lamp. Misery was what she felt, misery and waste and long lonely years, as she looked at the woman. Empty years, years of dreary routine, and bitterness and fierce belief, belief that can kill …

“Yes, kill,” sighed the woman. “I have done that. To protect the living from him who was never living, and would possess them if he could.”

“Why us?” Rowan demanded. “Why are we the playthings of this spirit you are talking about, why us in all the world? We aren’t the only ones who can see spirits.”

The old woman gave a long sigh.

“Did you ever speak to him?” Rowan asked. “You said he came to you when you were a child, he spoke in your ears words that no one could hear. Did you ever ask who he was and what he really wanted?”

“Do you think he would have told me the truth? He won’t tell you the truth, mark my words. You feed him when you question him. You give him oil as if he were the flame in that lamp.”

The old woman drew closer to her suddenly.

“He’ll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He’ll weave a web of deceits so thick you won’t see the world through it. He wants your strength and he’ll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You’re the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he’ll go back to hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don’t you see? He’s created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he had to do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan!”

“Witch? You spoke the word witch?” Rowan asked.

“They were witches, every one, don’t you see?” The old woman’s eyes searched Rowan’s face. “Your mother, her mother, and her mother before her, and Julien, that evil despicable Julien, the father of Cortland who was your father. I was marked for it myself until I rebelled.”

Rowan clenched her left hand, cutting her palm with her nails, staring into the old woman’s eyes, repelled by her yet unable to draw away from her.

“Incest, my dear, was the least of their sins, but the greatest of their schemes, incest to strengthen the line, to double up the powers, to purify the blood, to birth a cunning and terrible witch in each generation, going so far back it’s lost in European history. Let the Englishman tell you about that, the Englishman who came with you to the church, the Englishman who held your arm. Let him tell you the names of the women whose dolls lie in that trunk. He knows. He’ll sell you his brand of the black arts, his genealogy.”

“I want to get out of this room,” Rowan whispered. She turned around, throwing the beam of the light on the landing.

“You know that it’s true,” said the old woman behind her. “You’ve always known deep inside that an evil lived in you.”

“You choose your words badly. You speak of the potential for evil.”

“Well, know that you can put it to a finish! That can be the significance of your greater strength, that you can do as I have done and turn it against him. Turn it against all of them!”

She pushed past Rowan, the hem of her dress scraping Rowan’s ankle, her cane thudding lightly as before, as she walked out onto the landing, gesturing for Rowan to follow.

Into the only remaining door on the third floor they went, a noxious overpowering smell flooding out over them. Rowan drew back, scarcely able to breathe. Then she did what she knew she had to do. She breathed in the stench, and swallowed it, because there was no other way to tolerate it.

Lifting the lamp high, she saw this was a narrow storage chamber. It was filled with jars and bottles on makeshift shelves and the jars and bottles were filled with blackish, murky fluid. Specimens in these containers. Rotting, putrid things. Stench of alcohol and other chemicals, and most of all of putrefying flesh. Unbearable to think of these glass containers broken open and the horrid smell of their exposed contents.

“They were Marguerite’s,” said the old woman, “and Marguerite was Julien’s mother and the mother of Katherine, who was my grandmother. I don’t expect you to remember these names. You can find them in the ledger books in the other room. You can find them in the old records in the downstairs library. But mark what I say. Marguerite filled these jars with horrors. You’ll see when you pour out the contents. And mind me, do it yourself if you don’t want trouble. Horrible things in those jars .… and she, the healer!” She almost spat the word with contempt. “With the same powerful gift that you have now, to lay hands on the ill, and bring together the cells to patch the rupture, or the cancer. And that’s what she did with her gift. Bring your lamp closer.”

“I don’t want to see this now.”

“Oh? You’re a doctor, are you not? Haven’t you dissected the dead of all ages? You cut them open now, do you not?”

“I’m a surgeon. I operate to preserve and lengthen life. I don’t want to see these things now … ”

Yet even as she spoke she was peering at the jars, looking at the largest of them in which the liquid was still clear enough to see the soft, vaguely round thing floating there, half shrouded in shadow. But that was impossible what she saw there. That looked just like a human head. She drew back as if she’d been burnt.

“Tell me what you saw.”

“Why do you do this to me?” she said in a low voice, staring at the jar, at the dark rotted eyes swimming in the fluid and the seaweed hair. She turned her back on it and looked at the old woman. “I saw my mother buried today. What do you want of me?”

“I told you.”

“No, you punish me for coming back, you punish me for merely wanting to know, you punish me because I violated your schemes.”

Was that a grin on the old woman’s face?

“Don’t you understand that I am alone out there now? I want to know my people. You can’t make me bend to your will.”

Silence. It was sweltering here. She did not know how long she could stand it. “Is that what you did to my mother?” she said, her voice burning out in her anger. “You made her do your will?”

She stepped backwards, as if her anger was forcing her away from the old woman, her hand tightening uncomfortably on the glass lamp which was now hot from the burning wick, so hot she could scarcely hold it any longer.

“I’m getting sick in this room.”

“Poor dear,” said the woman. “What you saw in that jar was a man’s head. Well, look closely at him when the time comes. And at the others you find there.”

“They’re rotted, deteriorated; they’re so old they’re no good for any purpose if they ever were. I want to get out of here.”

Yet she looked back at the jar, overcome with horror. Her left hand went to her mouth as if it could somehow protect her, and gazing at the clouded fluid she saw again the dark hole of a mouth where the lips were slowly deteriorating and the white teeth shone bright. She saw the gleaming jelly of the eyes. No, don’t look at it. But what was in the jar beside it? There were things moving in the fluid, worms moving. The seal had been broken.

She turned and left the room, leaning against the wall, her eyes shut, the lamp burning her hand. Her heart thudded in her ears, and it seemed for a moment the sickness would get the better of her. She’d vomit on the very floor at the head of these filthy stairs, with this wretched vicious woman beside her. Dully, she heard the old woman passing her again. She heard her progress as she went down the stairs, steps slower than before, gaining only a little speed as the woman reached the landing.

“Come down, Rowan Mayfair,” she said. “Put out the lamp, but light the candle before you do, and bring it with you.”

Slowly Rowan righted herself. She pushed her left hand back through her hair. Fighting off another wave of nausea, she moved slowly back into the bedroom. She set down the lamp, on the little table by the door from which she’d taken it, just when she thought her fingers couldn’t take the heat anymore, and for a moment she held her right hand to her lips, trying to soothe the burn. Then slowly she lifted the candle and plunged it down the glass chimney of the lamp, because she knew the glass of the chimney was too hot to touch now. The wick caught, wax dripping on the wick, and then she blew out the lamp, and stood still for a moment, her eyes falling on that rolled rug and the pair of leather shoes tossed against it.

No, not tossed, she thought. No. Slowly she moved towards the shoes. Slowly, she extended her own left foot until the toe of her shoe touched one of those shoes, and then she kicked the shoe and realized that it was caught on something even as it fell loose and she saw the gleaming white bone of the leg extending from the trouser within the rolled carpet.

Paralyzed, she stared at the bone. At the rolled rug itself. And then walking along it, she saw at the other end what she could not see before, the dark gleam of brown hair. Someone wrapped in the rug. Someone dead, dead a long time, and look, the stain on the floor, the blackish stain on the side of the rug, near the bottom where the fluids long ago flowed out and dried up, and see, even the mashed and tiny insects fatally caught in the sticky fluid so long ago.

Rowan, promise me, you will never go back, promise me.

From somewhere far below, she heard the old woman’s voice, so faint it was no more than a thought. “Come down, Rowan Mayfair.”

Rowan Mayfair, Rowan Mayfair, Rowan Mayfair …

Refusing to hurry, she made her way out, glancing back once more at the dead man concealed in the rug, at the slender spoke of white bone protruding from it. And then she shut the door and walked sluggishly down the stairs.

The old woman stood at the open elevator door, merely watching, the ugly gold light from the elevator bulb shining full on her.

“You know what I found,” Rowan said. She steadied herself as she reached the newel post. The little candle danced for a moment, throwing pale translucent shadows on the ceiling.

“You found the dead man, wrapped in the rug.”

“What in God’s name has gone on in this house!” Rowan gasped. “Are you all mad?”

How cold and controlled the old woman seemed, how utterly detached. She pointed to the open elevator. “Come with me,” she said. “There is nothing more to see and only a little more to say … ”

“Oh, but there’s a lot more to say,” Rowan said. “Tell me—did you tell my mother these things? Did you show her those horrible jars and dolls?”

“I didn’t drive her mad if that’s your meaning.”

“I think anyone who grew up in this house might go mad.”

“So do I. That’s why I sent you away from it. Now come.”

“Tell me what happened with my mother.”

She stepped after the woman into the small dusty chamber again, closing the door and the gate angrily. As they moved down, she turned and stared at the woman’s profile. Old, old, yes, she was. Her skin as yellow all over as parchment, and her neck so thin and frail, the veins standing out under her fragile skin. Yes, so fragile.

“Tell me what happened to her,” Rowan said, staring at the floor, not daring to look closely at the woman again. “Don’t tell me how he touched her in her sleep, but tell me what happened, really happened!”

The elevator stopped with a jerk. The woman opened the gate, and pushed back the door, and walked out into the hallway.

As Rowan closed the door, the light died out as if the elevator and its bare bulb had never existed. The darkness swept in close and faintly cool, and smelling of the rain from beyond the open front door. The night gleamed outside, noisy with comforting sounds.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 490