“You saw this spirit man when you were six? Let me tell you something, Michael, this man is not good. And you saw him here two nights ago? And this black-haired woman is not good either.”
“Rowan, it’s too early for you to make these interpretations.”
“OK. All right. I don’t want to make you mad. I don’t want to make you angry even for one second. I’m so glad you’re here, you can’t know how glad I am that you’re here, that you’re here with me in this house, and you understand all this, that you’re … oh, it’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m glad I’m not in it alone. And I want you here, that’s the whole truth.”
“I know, I understand, and the important thing is, I am here, and you aren’t alone.”
“But don’t you make too many interpretations either. There is something terribly evil here, something I can feel like the evil in me. No, don’t say anything. Just listen to me. There’s something so bad that it could spill out and hurt lots of people. More than it’s ever hurt in the past. And you’re like some starry-eyed knight who just rode over the drawbridge out of the castle!”
“Rowan, that is not true.”
“All right. OK. They didn’t drown you out there. They didn’t do that. And your knowing all these people, Rita Mae and Jerry Lonigan, it’s all not connected.”
“It’s connected, but the question is, how is it connected? It’s crucial not to jump to conclusions.”
She turned back towards the table, resting her elbows on it and holding her head in her hands. She had no idea now what time it was. The night seemed quieter than before; now and then something in the house would snap or creak. But they were alone. Completely alone.
“You know,” she said, “I think about that old woman, and it’s like a cloud of evil descending on me. It was like walking with evil to be with her. And she thought she was the good one. She thought she was fighting the devil. It’s tangled, but it’s tangled even more obscurely than that.”
“She killed Townsend,” he said.
She turned and looked at him again. “You know that for sure?”
“I laid my hands on him. I felt the bone. She did it. She tied him up in that rug. He was maybe drugged at the time, I don’t know. But he died in the rug, I know that much. He chewed a hole in it.”
“Oh, God!” She closed her eyes, her imagination filling in the implications too vividly.
“And there were people in this house all the time and they couldn’t hear him. They didn’t know he was dying up there, or if they did they didn’t do anything about it.”
“Why would she do it!”
“ ’Cause she hated us. I mean she hated the Talamasca.”
“You said ‘us.’ ”
“That was a slip, but a very informative one. I feel like I’m part of them. They’ve come to me and they’ve asked me to be, more or less. They’ve taken me into their confidence. But maybe what I really meant, is that she hated anyone from outside who knew anything. There are dangers still to anybody from outside. There’s danger to Aaron. You asked me what the Talamasca stands to get out of this. It stands to lose another member.”
“Explain.”
“On the way home from the funeral, coming back out to the country to get me, he saw a man on the road and swerved, rolled over twice, and just got out of the damned car before it exploded. It was that spirit thing. I know it was. So does he. I guess whatever this big plan is, this entanglement, Aaron has served his purpose.”
“Is he hurt?”
Michael shook his head. “He knew what was going down, even as it was happening. But he couldn’t take a chance. Suppose it hadn’t been an apparition and he’d run down a real man. Just couldn’t chance it. He was belted in, too. I think he got slammed on the head pretty bad.”
“Did they take him to a hospital?”
“Yes, Doctor. He’s OK. That is why I took so long to get here. He didn’t want me to come. He wanted you to come to them, out there in the country, read the file out there. But I came on anyway. I knew that thing wasn’t going to kill me. I haven’t served my purpose yet.”
“The purpose of the visions.”
“No. He has his purpose, and they have theirs. And they don’t work together. They work against each other.”
“What happens if you try to run away to Tibet?” she asked.
“You want to go?”
“If I go with you, you’re not running away. But really, what if you do run away?
“I don’t know. I don’t intend to, so it doesn’t compute. They want me to fight him, to fight him and the little scheme he’s been laying down all along. I’m convinced of it.”
“They want you to break the chain,” she said. “That’s what the old woman said. She said, ‘Break the chain,’ meaning this legacy that comes all the way down from Charlotte, I guess, though she didn’t talk about anyone that far back. She said she herself had tried. And that I could do it.”
“That’s the obvious answer, yes. But there has to be more to it than that, having to do with him, and why he’s shown himself to me.”
“OK,” she said. “You listen to me now. I’m going to read the File, every page of it. But I’ve seen this thing too. And it doesn’t simply appear. It affects matter.”
“When did you see it?”
“The night my mother died, at the very hour. I tried to call you. I rang the hotel, but you weren’t there. It scared the hell out of me. But the apparition isn’t the significant part. It’s what else happened. It affected the water around the house. It made the water so turbulent that the house was swaying on its pilings. There was absolutely no storm that night on Richardson Bay or San Francisco Bay or any earthquake or any natural reason for that to happen. And there’s something else too. The next time, I felt this thing touch me.”
“When did that happen?”
“On the plane. I thought it was a dream. But it wasn’t. I was sore afterwards, just as if I’d been with a large man.”
“You mean it …?”
“I thought I was asleep, but the distinction I’m trying to make is, this thing isn’t limited to apparitions. It’s involved with the physical in some very specific way. And what I have to understand is its parameters.”
“Well, that’s a commendable scientific attitude. Could I ask whether or not its touching you evoked any other, less scientific response?”
“Of course it did. It was pleasurable, because I was half asleep. But when I woke up, I felt like I’d been raped. I loathed it.”
“Oh, lovely,” he said anxiously. “Just lovely. Well, look, you’ve got the power to stop this thing from that sort of violation.”
“I know, and now that I know that’s what it is, I will. But if anybody had tried to tell me day before yesterday that some invisible being was going to slip under my clothes on a flight to New Orleans, I wouldn’t have been any more prepared than I was because I wouldn’t have believed it. But we know it doesn’t want to hurt me. And we are fairly certain that it doesn’t want to hurt you. What we have to keep in mind is that it does want to hurt anyone who interferes with its plans, apparently, and now this includes your friend Aaron.”
“Right,” Michael said.
“Now you look tired, like you’re the one who needs to be taken back to the hotel and put to bed,” she said. “Why don’t we go there?”
He didn’t answer. He sat up, and rubbed the back of his neck with his hands. “There’s something you’re not saying.”
“What?”
“And I’m not saying it either.”
“Well then say it,” she said softly, patiently.
“Don’t you want to talk to him? Don’t you want to ask him yourself who he is and what he is? Don’t you think you can communicate with him better and more truly maybe than any of the rest of them? Maybe you don’t. But I do. I want to talk to him. I want to know why he showed himself to me when I was a kid. I want to know why he came so close to me the other night that I almost touched him, touched his shoe. I want to know what he is. And I know, that no matter what Aaron’s told me, or what Aaron will tell me, I think I’m smart enough to get through to
