The witching hour

Twenty-eight

SHE STOOD BEFORE the iron gate as the cab crawled away, the rustling silence closing in around her. Impossible to imagine a house that was any more desolate or forbidding. The merciless light of the street lamp poured down like the full moon through the branches of the trees-on the cracked flags and the marble steps banked with dead leaves, and on the high thick fluted columns with their peeling white paint and black patches of rot, on the crumbling boards of the porch which ran back unevenly to the open door and the dull pale light from within wobbling ever so faintly.

Slowly she let her eyes roam the shuttered windows, the dense overgrown garden. A thin rain had begun to fall even as she left the hotel, and it was so very faint now that it was little more than a mist, giving its shine to the asphalt street, and hovering in the gleaming leaves above the fence, and just touching her face and shoulders.

Here my mother, lived out her life, she thought. And here her mother was born, and her mother before her. Here in this house where Ellie sat near Stella’s coffin.

For surely it had been here, though all the late afternoon long, over the cocktails and the salad and the highly spiced food, they had spoken only superficially of such things. “Carlotta will want to tell you … ” “ … after you talk to Carlotta.”

Was the door open for her now? Had the gate been pushed back to welcome her? The great wooden frame of the door looked like a giant keyhole, tapering as it did from a flared base to a narrower top. Where had she seen that very same doorway shaped like a keyhole? Carved on the tomb in the Lafayette Cemetery. How ironic, for this house had been her mother’s tomb.

Even the sweet silent rain had not alleviated the heat. But a breeze came now, the river breeze they had called it when they had said their farewells only blocks away at the hotel. And the breeze, smelling of the rain, flowed over her as deliciously as water. What was the scent of flowers in the air, so savage and deep, so unlike the florist scents that had surrounded her earlier?

She didn’t resist it. She stood dreaming, feeling light and almost naked in the fragile silk garments she had just put on, trying to see the dark house, trying to take a deep breath, trying to slow the stream of all that had happened, all she’d witnessed and only half understood.

My life is broken in half, she thought; and all the past is the discarded part, drifting away, like a boat cut loose, as if the water were time, and the horizon was the demarcation of what would remain meaningful.

Ellie, why? Why were we cut off? Why, when they all knew? Knew my name, knew yours, knew I was her daughter! What was it all about, with them there by the hundreds and speaking that name, Mayfair, over and over?

“Come to the office downtown after you’ve talked,” the young Pierce had said, Pierce with his rosy cheeks who was already a partner in the firm founded so long ago by his great-grandfather. “Ellie’s grandfather, too, you know,” said Ryan of the white hair and the carefully chiseled features who had been Ellie’s first cousin. She did not know. She did not know who was who or whence they came, or what it meant, and above all why no one had ever told her. Flash of bitterness! Cortland this, and Cortland that … and Julien and Clay and Vincent and Mary Beth and Stella and Antha and Katherine.

Oh, what sweet southern music, words rich and deep like the fragrance she breathed now, like the heat clinging to her, and making even the soft silk shirt she wore feel suddenly heavy.

Did all the answers lie beyond the open door? Is the future beyond the open door? For after all, why could this not become, in spite of everything, a mere chapter of her life, marked off and seldom reread, once she had returned to the outside world where she had been kept all these years, quite beyond the spells and enchantments which were now claiming her? Oh, but it wasn’t going to be. Because when you fell prey to a spell this strong, you were never the same. And each moment in this alien world of family, South, history, kinship, proffered love, drove her a thousand years away from who she’d been, or who she had wanted to be.

Did they know, did they guess for a second, how seductive it was? How raw she’d felt as they offered their invitations, their promises of visits and conversations yet to come, of family knowledge and family loyalty and family intimacy.

Kinship. Could they guess how indescribably exotic that was after the barren, selfish world in which she’d spent her life, like a potted plant that had never seen the real sun, nor the real earth, nor heard the rain except against double-paned glass?

“Sometimes I’d look around,” Michael had said of California, “and it all seemed so sterile here.” She had known. She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing.

I went into medicine to find the visceral world, she thought, and only in the waiting rooms and corridors outside the Emergency Room have I ever glimpsed the gatherings of clans, the generations weeping and laughing and whispering together as the angel of death passes over them.

“You mean Ellie never even told you her father’s name? She never spoke to you about Sheffield or Ryan or Grady or …?” Again and again, she had said no.

Yet Ellie had come back, to stand in that very cemetery at Aunt Nancy’s funeral, whoever the hell Aunt Nancy had been, and afterwards in that very restaurant had shown them Rowan’s photograph from her wallet! Our daughter the doctor! And dying, in a morphine dream, she had said to Rowan, “I wish they would send me back down home, but they can’t. They can’t do that.”

There had been a moment after they’d left her off at the hotel, and after she had gone upstairs to shower and change on account of the muggy heat, when she had felt such bitterness that she could not reason or rationalize or even cry. And of course, she knew, knew as surely as she knew anything else, that there were countless ones among them who would have loved nothing more than to escape it all, this immense web of blood ties and memories. Yet she couldn’t really imagine it.

All right, that had been the sweet side, overwhelming as the perfume of this flower in the dark, all of them there opening their arms.

But what truths lay ahead behind this door, about the child woman in the casket? For a long time, as they talked, voices splashing together like champagne, she had thought, Do any of you by any miracle know the name of my father?

“Carlotta will want to … well, have her say.”

“ … so young when you were born.”

“Father never actually told us … ”

From here, in the electric moonlight on the broken flags, she could not see the side gallery which Ryan and Bea had described to her, the gallery on which her mother had sat in a rocking chair for thirteen years. “I don’t think she suffered.”

But all she had to do now was open this iron gate, go up the marble steps, walk across the rotted boards, push back the door that had been left open. Why not? She wanted to taste the darkness inside so badly that she did not even miss Michael now. He couldn’t do this with her.

Suddenly, as if she’d dreamed it, she saw the light brighten behind the door. She saw the door itself moved back, and the figure of the old woman there, small and thin. Her voice sounded crisp and clear in the dark, with almost an Irish lilt to it, somber and low as it was:

“Are you coming in or not, Rowan Mayfair?”

She pushed at the gate, but it didn’t give, and so she moved past it. The steps were slippery, and she came up slowly and felt the soft boards of the wooden porch give ever so slightly under her.

Carlotta had disappeared, but as Rowan entered the hallway now she saw her small dim figure far, far away at the entrance to a large room where the lone light was shining that illuminated all of the dim high-ceilinged distance before her.

She walked slowly after the old woman.

She walked past a stairway, rising straight and impossibly high to a dark second floor of which she could see nothing, and on past doors to the right opening onto a vast living room. The lights of the street shone through the windows of this room beyond, making them smoky and lunar white, and revealing a long stretch of gleaming floor, and a few indefinable pieces of scattered furniture.

At last passing a closed door to the left, she moved on into the light and saw that she had come into a large dining room.

Two candles stood on the oval table, and it was their faintly dancing flames which gave the only interior illumination to everything. Amazingly even it seemed, rising thinly to reveal the murals on the walls, great rural scenes of moss-hung oaks, and furrowed farmland. The doors and the windows soared to some twelve feet above her head; indeed as she looked back down the long hallway, the front door seemed immense, its surrounding frame covering the entire wall to the shadowy ceiling.

She turned back, staring at the woman who sat at the end of the table. Her thick wavy hair looked very white in the dark, massed more softly around her face than before, and the candlelight made two distinct and frightening flames in her round glasses.

“Sit down, Rowan Mayfair,” she said. “I have many things to say to you.”

Was it stubbornness that caused her to take one last slow look around her, or merely her fascination which wouldn’t be interrupted? She saw that the velvet curtains were almost ragged in some places, and the floor was covered with threadbare carpet. A smell of dust or mold rose from the upholstered seats of the carved chairs. Or was it from the carpet, perhaps, or the sad draperies?

Did not matter. It was everywhere. But there was another smell, another delicious smell that made her think of wood and sunlight, and strangely, of Michael. It smelled good to her. And Michael, the carpenter, would understand that smell. The smell of the wood in the old house, and the heat which had built up in it all day long. Faintly blended with the whole was the smell of the wax candles.

The darkened chandelier above caught the candlelight, reflecting it in hundreds of crystal teardrops.

“It takes candles,” said the old woman. “I’m too old now to climb up to change them. And Eugenia is also too old. She can’t do it.” With a tiny gesture of her head, she pointed to the far corner.

With a start Rowan realized that a black woman was standing there, a wraith of a creature with scant hair and yellowed eyes and folded arms, seemingly very thin, though it was hard to tell in the dark. Nothing was visible of her clothes but a soiled apron.

“You can go now, dear,” said Carlotta to the black woman. “Unless my niece would like something to drink. But you don’t, do you, Rowan?”

“No. No thank you, Miss Mayfair.”

“Call me Carlotta, or Carl if you will. It doesn’t matter. There are a thousand Misses Mayfair.”

The old black woman moved away, past the fireplace, and around the table and out the door into the long hall. Carlotta watched her go, as if she wanted to be completely alone before she said another word.

Suddenly there was a clanging noise, oddly familiar yet completely undefinable to Rowan. And then the click of a door being shut, and a dull deep throb as of a great motor churning and straining within the depths of the house.

“It’s an elevator,” Rowan whispered.

The old woman appeared to be monitoring the sound. Her face looked shrunken and small beneath the thick cap of her hair. The dull clank of the elevator coming to a halt seemed to satisfy her. She looked up at Rowan, and then gestured to a lone chair on the long flank of the table.

Rowan moved towards it, and sat down, her back to the windows that opened on the yard. She turned the chair so that she might face Carlotta.

More of the murals became visible to her as she raised her eyes. A plantation house with white columns, and rolling hills beyond it.

She looked past the candles at the old woman and was relieved to see no reflection any more of the tiny flames in her glasses. Only the sunken face, and the glasses gleaming cleanly in the light, and the dark flowered fabric of the woman’s long-sleeved dress, and her thin hands emerging from the lace at the sleeves, holding with knotted fingers what seemed a velvet jewel box.

This she pushed forward sharply towards Rowan.

“It’s yours,” she said. “It’s an emerald necklace. It’s yours and this house is yours and the land upon which it stands, and everything of any significance contained in it. Beyond that, there is a fortune some fifty times beyond what you have now, perhaps a hundred times, though that is now beyond my reckoning. But listen to what I say before you lay claim to what is yours. Listen to all I have to tell you.”

She paused, studying Rowan’s face, and Rowan’s sense of the agelessness of the woman’s voice, indeed of her manner altogether, deepened. It was almost eerie, as if the spirit of some young person inhabited the old frame, and gave it a fierce contradictory animation.

“No,” said the woman. “I’m old, very old. What’s kept me alive is waiting for her death, and for the moment I feared above all, the moment of your coming here. I prayed that Ellie would live a long life, that Ellie would hold you close in those long years, until Deirdre had rotted in the grave, and until the chain was broken. But fate has dealt me another little surprise. Ellie’s death. Ellie’s death and not a word to tell me of it.”

“It was the way she wanted it,” Rowan said.

“I know.” The old woman sighed. “I know what you say is true. But it’s not the telling of it, it’s the death itself that was the blow. And it’s done, and couldn’t be prevented.”

“She did what she could to keep me away,” Rowan said simply. “She insisted I sign a promise that I’d never come. I chose to break it.”

The old woman was silent for a moment.

“I wanted to come,” Rowan said. And then as gently, as imploringly as she could, she asked: “Why did you want me kept away? Was it such a terrible story?”

The woman sat silent regarding her. “You’re a strong woman,” she said. “You’re strong the way my mother was strong.”

Rowan didn’t answer.

“You have her eyes, did they tell you that? Were there any of them old enough to remember her?”

“I don’t know,” Rowan answered.

“What have you seen with your eyes?” asked the old woman. “What have you seen that you knew should not be there?”

Rowan gave a start. At first she had thought she misunderstood the words; then in a split second she realized she had not, and she thought instantly of the phantom who had appeared at three o’clock, and confused with it suddenly and inexplicably was her dream on the plane of someone invisible touching her and violating her.

In confusion she saw the smile spread over the old woman’s face. But it wasn’t bitter or triumphant. It was merely resigned. And then the face went smooth again and sad and wondering. In the dim light, the old woman’s head looked like a skull for a moment.

“So he did come to you,” she said with a soft sigh, “and he laid his hands on you.”

“I don’t know,” Rowan said. “Explain this to me.”

But the woman merely looked at her and waited.

“It was a man, a thin elegant man. He came at three o’clock. At the hour of my mother’s death. I saw him as plainly as I see you, but it was only for a moment.”

The woman looked down. Rowan thought she had closed her eyes. Then she saw the little gleam of light beneath her lids. The woman folded her hands before her on the table.

“It was ‘the man’,” she said. “It was ‘the man’ who drove your mother mad, and drove her mother mad before her. ‘The man’ who served my mother who ruled all those around her. Did they speak of him to you, the others? Did they warn you?”

“They didn’t tell me anything,” she said.

“That’s because they don’t know, and at last they realize they don’t know, and now they leave the secrets to us, as they should have always done.”

“But what did I see? Why did he come to me?” Once again, she thought of the dream on the plane, and she could find no answer for connecting the two.

“Because he believes that you are his now,” said the woman. “His to love and his to touch and his to rule with promises of servitude.”

Rowan felt the confusion again, and a dull heat in her face. His to touch. The haunting ambience of the dream came back.

“He will tell you it’s the other way around,” said the old woman. “When he speaks into your ear so that no one can hear, he will say he is your slave, that he’s passed to you from Deirdre. But it’s a lie, my dear, a vicious lie. He’ll make you his and drive you mad if you refuse to do his will. That is what he’s done to them all.” She stopped, her wrinkled brows tightening, her eyes drifting off across the dusty surface of the table. “Except for those who were strong enough to rein him in and make him the slave he claimed to be, and use him for their own ends … ” Her voice trailed off. “Their own endless wickedness.”

“Explain it to me.”

“He touched you, did he not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh yes you do. The color flies into your cheeks, Rowan Mayfair. Well, let me ask you, my girl, my independent young girl who has had so many men of her own choice, was it as good as a mortal man? Think before you speak. He’ll tell you that no mortal man could give you the pleasure he gives. But was it true? It carries a terrible price, that pleasure.”

“I thought it was a dream.”

“But you saw him.”

“That was the night before. The touching was in a dream. It was different.”

“He touched her until the very end,” said the woman. “No matter how much drugs they gave her. No matter how stupid her stare, how listless her walk. When she lay in bed at night he came, he touched her. Like a common whore she writhed on the bed, under his touch … ” She bit down on her words, then the smile came again playing on her lips, like the light. “Does that make you angry? Angry with me that I tell you this? Do you think it was a pretty sight?”

“I think she was sick and out of her mind, and it was human.”

“No, my dear, their intercourse was never human.”

“You want me to believe that this is a ghost I saw, that he touched my mother, that I have somehow inherited him.”

“Yes, and swallow back your anger. Your dangerous anger.”

Rowan was stunned. A wave of fear and confusion passed over her. “You’re reading my mind, you’ve been doing it all along.”

“Oh yes, as best as I can, I do. I wish I could read it better. Your mother was not the only woman in this house with the power. Three generations before I was the one meant for the necklace. I saw him when I was three years old, so clear and strong that he could slip his warm hand in mine, he could lift me in the air, yes, lift my body, but I refused him. I turned my back on him. I told him, You go back to the hell from which you came. And I used my power to fight him.”

“And this necklace now, it comes to me because I can see him?”

“It comes to you because you are the only girl child and choice is not possible. It would come to you no matter how weak your powers were. But that doesn’t matter. Because your powers are strong, very strong, and always have been.” She paused, considering Rowan again, her face unreadable for a moment, perhaps devoid of any specific judgment. “Imprecise, yes, and inconsistent, of course, and uncontrolled perhaps-but strong.”

“Don’t overestimate them,” said Rowan softly. “I never do.”

“Long ago, Ellie told me all about it,” said the old woman. “Ellie told me you could make the flowers wither. Ellie told me you could make the water boil. ‘She’s a stronger witch than ever Antha was, or Deirdre was,’ that’s what she told me, crying and begging me for advice as to what she could do! ‘Keep her away!’ I said. ‘See that she never comes home, see that she never knows! See that she never learns to use it.’ ”

Rowan sighed. She ignored the dull pain at the mention of Ellie, of Ellie speaking to these people about her. Cut off alone. And all of them here. Even this wretched old woman here.

“Yes, and I can feel your anger again, anger against me, anger for what you think you know that I did to your mother!”

“I don’t want to be angry with you,” said Rowan in a small voice. “I only want to understand what you’re saying, I want to know why I was taken away … ”

Again, the old woman lapsed into a thoughtful silence. Her fingers hovered over the jewel case and then folded down upon it and lay still, all too much like the flaccid hands of Deirdre in the casket.

Rowan looked away. She looked at the far wall, at the panorama of painted sky above the fireplace.

“Oh, but don’t these words bring you even the slightest consolation? Haven’t you wondered all these years, were you the only one in the world who could read others’ thoughts, the only one who knew when someone near you was going to die? The only one who could drive a person back away from you with your anger? Look at the candles. You can make them go out and you can light them again. Do it.”

Rowan did nothing. She stared at the little flames. She could feel herself trembling. If only you really knew, if only you knew what I could do to you now …

“But I do, you see, I can feel your strength, because I too am strong, stronger than Antha or Deirdre. And that is how I have kept him at bay in this house, that is how I have prevented him from hurting me. That is how I have put some thirty years between him and Deirdre’s child. Make the candles go out. Light them again. I want to see you do it.”

“I will not. And I want you to stop playing with me. Tell me what you have to tell. But stop your games. Stop torturing me. I have never done anything to you. Tell me who he is, and why you took me from my mother.”

“But I have. I took you from her in order to get you away from him, and from this necklace, from this legacy of curses and wealth founded upon his intervention and power.” She studied Rowan, and then went on, her voice deepening yet losing nothing of its preciseness. “I took you away from her to break her will, and separate her from a crutch upon which she would lean, and an ear into which she would pour her tortured soul, a companion she would warp and twist in her weakness and her misery.”

Frozen in anger, Rowan gave no answer. Miserably, she saw in her mind’s eyes the black-haired woman in her coffin. She saw the Lafayette Cemetery in her mind, only shrouded with the night, and still and deserted.

“Thirty years you’ve had to grow strong and straight, away from this house, away from this history of evil. And what have you become, a doctor the like of which your colleagues have never seen, and when you’ve done evil with your power, you’ve drawn away in righteous condemnation of yourself, in shame that drove you on to greater self-sacrifice.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I see. What I see is imprecise, but I see. I see the evil, though I cannot see the acts themselves, for they’re covered up in the very guilt and shame that advertises them.”

“Then what do you want of me? A confession? You said yourself I turned my back on what I’ve done that was wrong. I sought for something else, something infinitely more demanding, something finer.”

“ ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ” whispered the woman.

A shock of raw pain passed through Rowan, and then in consternation she watched the woman’s eyes grow wide, mocking her. In confusion, Rowan understood the trick, and felt defenseless. For in a split second the woman had, with her utterance, provoked the very image in Rowan’s mind for which the old woman had been searching.

You have killed. In anger and rage, you have taken life. You have done it willfully. That is how strong you are.

Rowan sank deeper into herself, peering at the fiat round glasses as they caught the light and then let it go, and the dark eyes scarcely visible behind them.

“Have I taught you something?” the woman asked.

“You try my patience,” Rowan said. “Let me remind you that I have done nothing to you. I have not come to demand answers of you. I have made no condemnation. I haven’t come to claim this jewel or this house or anything in it. I came to see my mother laid to rest, and I came through that front door because you invited me to do so. And I am here to listen. But I won’t be played with much longer. Not for all the secrets this side of hell. And I don’t fear your ghost, even if he sports the cock of an archangel.”

The old woman stared at her for a moment. Then she raised her eyebrows and laughed, a short, sudden little laugh, that had a surprisingly feminine ring to it. She continued to smile. “Well put, my dear,” she said. “Seventy-five years ago, my mother told me he could have made the Greek gods weep with envy, so beautiful was he, when he came into her bedroom.” She relaxed slowly in her chair, pursing her lips, then smiling again. “But he never kept her from her handsome mortal men. She liked the same kind of men you do.”

“Ellie told you that too?”

“She told me many things. But she never told me she was sick. She never told me she was dying.”

“When people are dying, they become afraid,” said Rowan. “They are all alone. Nobody can die for them.”

The old woman lowered her eyes. She remained still for a long moment, and then her hands moved over the soft dome of the jewel box again, and grasping it, she snapped it open. She turned it ever so slightly so that the light of the candles blazed in the emerald that lay inside, caught on a bed of tangled golden chain. It was the largest jewel Rowan had ever seen.

“I used to dream of death,” Carlotta said, gazing at the stone. “I’ve prayed for it.” She looked up slowly, measuring Rowan, and once again her eyes grew wide, the soft thin flesh of her forehead wrinkling heavily above her gray brows. Her soul seemed closed and sunk in sadness, and it was as if for a moment, she had forgotten to conceal herself somehow, behind meanness and cleverness, from Rowan. She was merely staring at Rowan.

“Come,” she said. She drew herself up. “Let me show what I have to show you. I don’t think there’s much time now.”

“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.

“Tell me what happened,” Rowan said again, softly, bitterly.

Through the long front parlor they walked, the old woman leading the way, listing slightly to the left as she followed her cane, Rowan coming patiently behind her.

The pale light of the candle slowly crept throughout the whole room, lighting it thinly to the ceiling. Even in decay, it was a beautiful room, its marble fireplaces and high mantel mirrors shining in the dreary shadows. All its windows were floor-length windows. Mirrors at the far ends gazed across the length of the room into each other. Dimly Rowan saw the chandeliers reflected again and again and into infinity. Her own small figure was there, repeated over and over and vanishing finally in darkness.

“Yes,” said the old woman. “It is an interesting illusion. Darcy Monahan bought these mirrors for Katherine. Darcy Monahan tried to take Katherine away from all the evil around her. But he died in this house of yellow fever. Katherine wept for the rest of her life. But the mirrors stand today, there and there, and over the fireplaces, just as Darcy fixed them.”

She sighed, once more resting her two hands on the crook of her cane.

“We have all … from time to time … been reflected in these mirrors. And you see yourself in them now, caught in the same frame.”

Rowan didn’t respond. Sadly, distantly, she longed to see the room in the light, to see the carvings in the marble fireplaces, to see the long silk draperies for what they really were, to see the plaster medallions fixed to the high ceilings.

The old woman proceeded to the nearest of the two side floor-length windows. “Raise it for me,” she said. “It slides up. You are strong enough.” She took the candle from Rowan and set it on a small lamp table by the fireplace.

Rowan reached up to unsnap the simple lock, and then she raised the heavy nine-paned window, easily pushing it until it was almost above her head.

Here was the screened porch, and the night outside, and the air fresh as it was warm, and full of the breath of the rain again. She felt a rush of gratitude, and stood silently letting the air kiss her face and her hands. She moved to the side as the old woman passed her.

The candle, left behind, struggled in an errant draft. Then went out. Rowan stepped out into the darkness. Again that strong perfume came on the breeze, drenchingly sweet.

“The night jasmine,” said the old woman.

All around the railings of this porch vines grew, tendrils dancing in the breeze, fine tiny leaves moving like so many little insect wings beating against the screen. Flowers glimmered in the dark, white and delicate and beautiful.

“This is where your mother sat day after day,” said the old woman. “And there, out there on the flagstones is where her mother died. Where she died when she fell from that room above which had been Julien’s. I myself drove her out of that window. I think I would have pushed her with my own hands if she hadn’t jumped. With my own hands I’d scratched at her eyes, the way I’d scratched at Julien’s.”

She paused. She was looking out through the rusted screen into the night, perhaps at the high faint shapes of the trees against the paler sky. The cold light of the street lamp reached long and bright over the front of the garden. It fell upon the high unkempt grass. It even shone on the high back of the white wooden rocking chair.

Friendless and terrible the night seemed to Rowan. Awful and dismal this house, a terrible engulfing place. Oh, to live and die here, to have spent one’s life in these awful sad rooms, to have died in that filth upstairs. It was unspeakable. And the horror rose like something black and thick inside her, threatening to stop her breath. She had no words for what she felt. She had no words for the loathing inside her for the old woman.

“I killed Antha,” the old woman said. Her back was turned to Rowan, her words low and indistinct. “I killed her as surely as if I did push her. I wanted her to die. She was rocking Deirdre in the cradle and he was there, by her side, he was staring down at the baby and making the baby laugh! And she was letting him do it, she was talking to him in her simpering, weak little voice, telling him he was her only friend, now that her husband was dead, her only friend in this whole world. She said, ‘This is my house. I can put you out if I want to.’ She said that to me.

“I said, ‘I’ll scratch your eyes out of your head if you don’t give him up. You can’t see him if you don’t have eyes. You won’t let the baby see him.’ ”

The old woman paused. Sickened and miserable, Rowan waited in the muffled silence of the night sounds, of things moving and singing in the dark.

“Have you ever seen a human eye plucked out of its socket, hanging on a woman’s cheek by the bloody threads? I did that to her. She screamed and sobbed like a child, but I did that. I did it and chased her up the stairs as she ran from me, trying to hold her precious eye in her hands. And do you think he tried to stop me?”

“I would have tried,” Rowan said thickly, bitterly. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you wanted to know! And to know what happened to one, you must know what happened to the one before her. And you must know, above all, that this is what I did to break the chain.”

The woman turned and stared at Rowan, the cold white light shining in her glasses and making them blind mirrors suddenly. “This I did for you, and for me, and for God, if there is a God I drove her through that window. ‘Let’s see if you can see him if you’re blind,’ I cried. ‘Then can you make him come!’ And your mother, your mother screaming in the cradle in that very room there I should have taken her life. I should have snuffed it out then and there while Antha lay dead outside on the flagstones. Would to God I had had the courage.”

Again the old woman paused, raising her chin slightly, the thin lips once again spreading in a smile. “I feel your anger I feel your judgment.”

“Can I help it?” Rowan whispered.

The old woman bowed her head. The light of the street lamp settled on her white hair, her face in shadow. “I couldn’t kill such a small thing,” she said wearily. “I couldn’t bring myself to take the pillow and put it over Deirdre’s face I thought of the stones from the old days of the witches who had sacrificed babies, who’d stirred the baby fat in the cauldron at the Sabbats. We are witches, we Mayfairs. And was I to sacrifice this tiny thing as they had done? There I stood ready to take the life of a small baby, a crying baby, and I could not bring myself to do what they had done.”

Silence once again.

“And of course he knew I couldn’t do it! He would have ripped the house apart to stop me had I tried.”

Rowan waited, until she could wait no longer, until the hate and anger in her were silently choking her. In a thick voice, she asked:

“And what did you do to her later on-my mother-to break the chain, as you’ve said?”

Silence.

“Tell me.”

The old woman sighed. She turned her head slightly, gazing through the rusted screen.

“From the time she was a small child,” she said, “playing in that garden there, I begged her to fight him. I told her not to look at him. I schooled her in turning him away! And I had won my fight, won over her fits of melancholy and madness and crying, and sickening confessions that she had lost the battle and let him come into her bed, I had won, until Cortland raped her! And then I did what I had to do to see that she gave you up and she never went after you.

“I did what I had to do to see that she never gained the strength to run away, to search for you, to claim you again and bring you back into her madness, and her guilt and her hysteria. When they wouldn’t give her electric shock at one hospital, I took her to another. And if they wanted to take her off the drugs at that hospital, I took her to another. And I told them what I had to tell them to make them tie her to her bed, and give her the drugs, and give her the shock. I told her what I had to tell her to make her scream so they would do it!”

“Don’t tell me any more.”

“Why? You wanted to know, didn’t you? And yes, when she writhed in her bedcovers like a cat in heat, I told them to give her the shots, give them to her-”

“Stop!”

“-twice a day or three times a day. I don’t care if you kill her, but give it to her, I won’t have her lie there, his plaything writhing in the dark, I won’t-”

“Stop it. Stop.”

“Why? Till the day she died, she was his. Her last and only word was his name. What good was it all, except that it was for you, for you, Rowan!”

“Stop it!” Rowan hissed at her, her own hands rising helplessly in the air, fingers splayed. “Stop it. I could kill you for what you are telling me! How dare you speak of God and life when you did that to a girl, a young girl that you had brought up in this filthy house, you did that to her, you did that to her when she was helpless and sick and you … God help you, you are the witch, you sick and cruel old woman, that you could do that to her, God help you, God help you, God damn you!”

A look of sullen shock swept the old woman’s face. For one second in the weak light, she seemed to go blank, with her round blank glass eyes shining like two buttons, and her mouth slack and empty.

Rowan groaned, her own hands moved to the sides of her head, slipping into her hair, her lips pressed shut to stop her words, to stop her rage, to stop the hurt and pain. “To hell with you for what you did!” she cried, half swallowing the words, her body bent with the rage she couldn’t swallow.

The old woman frowned. She reached out, and the cane fell from her hand. She took a single shuffling step forward. And then her right hand faltered, and plunged towards the left knob of the rocking chair in front of her. Her frail body twisted slowly and sank down into the chair. As her head fell back against the high slats, she ceased to move. Then her hand slipped off the arm of the chair and dangled beside it.

There was no single noise in the night. Only a dim continuous purring as if the insects sang and the frogs sang and the faraway engines and cars, wherever they were, sang with them. It seemed a train passed somewhere close, clicking rhythmically and fast beneath the song. And there came the dull faraway sound of a whistle, like a guttural sob in the darkness.

Rowan stood motionless, her hands dropped at her sides, limp and useless, as she stared dumbly through the rusted mesh of the screen, at the soft lacy movement of the trees against the sky. The deep singing of the frogs slowly broke itself away from the other night songs, and then faded. A car came down the empty street beyond the front fence, headlights piercing the thick wet foliage.

Rowan felt the light on her skin. She saw it flash over the wooden cane lying on the floor of the porch, over Carlotta’s black high-top shoe, bent painfully in as if the thin ankle had snapped.

Did anyone see through the thick shrubs the dead woman in the chair? And the tall blond woman figure behind her?

Rowan shuddered all over. She arched her back, her left hand rising and gripping a hank of her hair and pulling it until the pain in her scalp was sharp, so sharp she couldn’t quite bear it.

The rage was gone. Even the faintest most bitter flash of anger had died away; and she stood alone and cold in the dark, clinging to the pain as she held her own hair tight in her trembling fingers, cold as if the warm night were not there, alone as if the darkness were the darkness of the abyss from which all promise of light was gone, and all promise of hope or happiness. The world gone. The world with all its history, and all its vain logic, and all its dreams, and accomplishments.

Slowly, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, sloppily like a child, and she stood looking down at the limp hand of the dead woman, her own teeth chattering as the cold ate deep into her, truly chilling her. Then she went down on her knee and lifted the hand and felt for the pulse, which she knew wasn’t there, and then laid it down in the woman’s lap, and looked at the blood trickling down from the woman’s ear, running down her neck and into her white collar.

“I didn’t mean to … ” she whispered, barely forming the words.

Behind her the dark house yawned, waited. She couldn’t bear to turn around. Some distant unidentifiable sound shocked her. It filled her with fear; it filled her with the worst and only real fear she’d ever known of a place in all her life, and when she thought of the dark rooms, she couldn’t turn around. She couldn’t go back into it. And the enclosed porch held her like a trap.

She rose slowly and looked out over the deep grass, over a tangle of vine that clawed at the screen, and shivered now against it with its tiny pointed leaves. She looked up at the clouds moving beyond the trees, and she heard an awful little sound issuing from her own lips, a kind of awful desperate moaning.

“I didn’t mean to … ” she said again.

This is when you pray, she thought miserably and quietly. This is when you pray to nothing and no one to take away the terror of what you’ve done, to make it right, to make it that you never never came here.

She saw Ellie’s face in the hospital bed. Promise me, you’ll never never …

“I didn’t mean to do it!” It came so low, the whisper, that nobody but God could have heard. “God, I didn’t mean to. I swear it. I didn’t mean to do this again.”

Far away somewhere in another realm other people existed. Michael and the Englishman and Rita Mae Lonigan, and the Mayfairs gathered at the restaurant table. Even Eugenia, lost somewhere within the house, asleep and dreaming perhaps. All those others.

And she stood here alone. She, who had killed this mean and cruel old woman, killed her as cruelly as she herself had ever killed, God damn her for it. God damn her into hell for all she said and all she’d done. God damn her. But I didn’t mean it, I swear …

Once again, she wiped her mouth. She folded her arms across her breasts and hunched her shoulders and shivered. She had to turn around, walk through the dark house. Walk back to the door, and leave here.

Oh, but she couldn’t do that, she had to call someone, she had to tell, she had to cry out for that woman Eugenia, and do what had to be done, what was right to be done.

Yet the agony of speaking to strangers now, of telling official lies, was more than she could endure.

She let her head fall lazily to one side. She stared down at the helpless body, broken and collapsed within its sack of a dress. The white hair so clean and soft-looking. All her paltry and miserable life in this house, all her sour and unhappy life. And this is how it ends for her.

She closed her eyes, bringing her hands up wearily to her face, and then the prayers did come, Help me, because I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I’ve done, and I can’t undo it. And everything the old woman said was true, and I’ve always known, known it was evil inside me and inside them and that’s why Ellie took me away. Evil.

She saw the thin pale ghost outside the glass in Tiburon. She felt the invisible hands touching her, as she had on the plane.

Evil.

“And where are you?” she whispered in the darkness. “Why should I be afraid to walk back into this house?”

She raised her head. In the long parlor, there came another faint, cracking noise behind her. Like an old board creaking under a step. Or was it just a rafter breathing? So faint it might have been a rat in the dark, creeping along the boards with its tiny repulsive feet. But she knew it wasn’t. With every instinct in her, she felt a presence there, someone near, someone in the dark, someone in the parlor. Not the old black woman. Not the scratching of her slippers.

“Show yourself to me,” she whispered, the last of her fear turning to anger. “Do it now.”

Once again she heard it. And slowly she turned around. Silence. She looked down one last time at the old woman. And then she walked into the long front room. The high narrow mirrors stared at one another in the shadowy stillness. The dusty chandeliers gathered the light to themselves sullenly in the gloom.

I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of anything here. Show yourself as you did before.

The very furniture seemed alive for one perilous instant, as if the small curved chairs were watching her, as if the bookcases with their glass doors had heard her vague challenge, and would bear witness to whatever took place.

“Why don’t you come?” she whispered aloud again. “Are you afraid of me?” Emptiness. A dull creak from somewhere overhead.

With quiet even steps she made her way into the hallway, painfully aware of the sound of her own labored breathing. She gazed dumbly at the open front door. Milky the light from the street, and dark and shining the leaves of the dripping oaks. A long sigh came out of her, almost involuntarily, and then she turned and moved away from this comforting light, back through the hallway, against the thick shadows and towards the empty dining room, where the emerald lay, waiting, in its velvet box.

He was here. He had to be.

“Why don’t you come?” she whispered, surprised at the frailty of her own voice. It seemed the shadows stirred, but no shape materialized. Maybe a tiny bit of breeze had caught the dusty draperies. A thin dull snap sounded in the boards under her feet.

There on the table lay the jewel box. Smell of wax lingering in the air. Her fingers were trembling as she raised the lid, and touched the stone itself.

“Come on, you devil,” she said. She lifted the emerald, vaguely thrilled by its weight, in spite of her misery, and she lifted it higher, until the light caught it, and she put it on, easily manipulating the small strong clasp at the back of her neck.

Then, in one very strange moment, she saw herself doing this. She saw herself, Rowan Mayfair, ripped out of her past, which had been so far removed from all of this that it now lacked detail, standing like a lost wanderer in this dark and strangely familiar house.

And it was familiar, wasn’t it? These high tapering doors were familiar. It seemed her eyes had drifted over these murals a thousand times. Ellie had walked here. Her mother had lived and died here. And how otherworldly and irretrievable seemed the glass and redwood house in faraway California. Why had she waited so long to come?

She had taken a detour in the dark gleaming path of her destiny. And what were all her past triumphs to the confrontation of this mystery, and to think, this mystery in all its dark splendor belonged by right to her. It had waited here all these years for her to claim it and now at last she was here.

The emerald lay against the soft silk of her blouse heavily. Her fingers seemed unable to resist it, hovering about it as if it were a magnet.

“Is this what you want?” she whispered.

Behind her, in the hallway, an unmistakable sound answered her. The whole house felt it, echoed it, like the case of a great piano echoes the tiniest touch to a single string. Then again, it came. Soft but certain. Someone there.

Her heart thudded almost painfully. She stood stranded, her head bowed, and as if in dreamy sleep, she turned and raised her eyes. Only a few feet away, she made out a dim and indistinct figure, what seemed a tall man.

All the smallest sounds of the night seemed to die away and leave her in a void as she struggled to pick this thing out from the murky dark that enmeshed it. Was she deceiving herself or was that the scheme of a face? It seemed that a pair of dark eyes was watching her, that she could just make out the contour of a head. Perhaps she saw the white curve of a stiff collar.

“Don’t play games with me,” she whispered. Once again, the whole house echoed the sound with its uncertain creaks and sighs. And then wondrously, the figure brightened, confirmed itself magically, and yet even as she gasped aloud, it began to fade.

“No, don’t go!” she pleaded, doubting suddenly that she had ever seen anything at all.

And as she stared into the confusion of light and shadow, searching desperately, a darker form suddenly loomed against the dull faint light from the distant door. Closer it came, through the swirling dust, with heavy distinct footfalls. Without any chance of mistake she saw the massive shoulders, the black curly hair.

“Rowan? Is that you, Rowan?”

Solid, familiar, human.

“Oh Michael,” she cried, her voice soft and ragged. She moved into his waiting arms. “Michael, thank God!”