own terms.”
Michael sat sullenly staring at the beer as Rowan walked Aaron to the door. She came back, settled down beside him, and slipped her arm around him.
“I’m scared, Rowan,” he said, “and I hate it. Positively hate it.”
“I know, Michael,” she said, “but we’re going to win.”
That night, after Rowan had been asleep for hours, Michael got up, went into the living room, and took the notebook out of his valise which Aaron had given him at the retreat house. He felt normal now. And the abnormalities of the day seemed strangely distant. Though he was still sore all over, he felt rested. And it was comforting to know Rowan was only a few feet away, and that Aaron slept in the suite above.
Now Michael wrote down everything he had told them. He went through it in writing as he had gone through it in words, only more slowly, and perhaps more thoughtfully, and he talked about it with himself in the notebook as he would in a diary because that is what the notebook had become.
He wrote down all he could remember of the little fragments that had come back before he had taken off the gloves. And it was not surprising that he could remember almost nothing at all. And then the beginning of the catastrophe when he’d held Deirdre’s nightgown in his hand:
“Same drums as the Comus Parade. Or any such parade. The point is, an awful frightening sound, a sound to do with some sort of dark and potentially destructive energy.”
He stopped. Then went on. “I remember something else too, now. At Rowan’s house in Tiburon. After we made love. I woke up thinking the place was on fire and there were all kinds of people downstairs. I remember now. It was the same ambience, the same lurid sort of light, the same sinister quality.
“And the fact of the matter was, that Rowan was just down there by the fire she’d lighted in the fireplace.
“But it was the same feeling. Fire and people there, many many people, crowded together, a commotion in the flickering light.
“And I had no sense of recognition when I saw Julien upstairs, or when I saw Charlotte, or Mary Beth, or Antha, poor, tragic Antha scrambling over that roof. To see something like that is to feel it; it swallows you. There’s nothing left of you inside while you’re seeing it. But they weren’t in my visions. None of them. And Deborah was just a body crumpled on the pyre. She wasn’t standing there with them. Now surely that means something in itself.”
He reread what he had written. He wanted to add more but he was leery of embellishment. He was leery of logic. Deborah’s not one of them? That’s why she wasn’t there?
He went on to describe the rest. “Antha was wearing a cotton dress. I saw the patent leather belt she wore. When she crawled across the roof, she tore her stockings. Her knees were bleeding. But her face, that was the unforgettable part, her eye torn out of the socket. And the sound of her voice. I’ll carry that sound to the grave with me. And Julien. Julien looked as solid as she did while he was watching. Julien wore black. And Julien was young. Not a boy, by any means. But a vigorous man, not an old man. Even in the bed he wasn’t old.”
Again he paused. “And what else did Lasher say that was new. Something about patience, about waiting … and then that mention of the thirteen.
“But the thirteen what? If it’s a number on a doorway, I haven’t seen it. The jars, there weren’t thirteen jars. There were more like twenty, but I’ll verify this with Rowan.”
Again, he stopped, thought about embellishments, but didn’t add them.
“The cheerful fiend didn’t say a damn thing about a doorway,” he wrote. “No, just his threat that I’d be dead while he’d be flesh and blood.”
Dead. Tombs. Something Rowan had said before the day was shattered, like a piece of glass. Or like a glass jar. Something about a keyhole doorway carved on the Mayfair tomb.
“I’ll go there tomorrow, and see for myself. If the number thirteen is carved somewhere on that doorway, I hope to God it brings me more enlightenment than what happened today.
“Whatever happens, no matter what I see, or what I think it means, I begin some serious work tomorrow. And so does Rowan. She goes downtown early with Ryan and Pierce to talk about the legacy. I start to talk to the other contractors in town. I start real, true, honest work on the house.
“And that feels better than any other course of action. It feels like a form of salvation.
“Let’s see how Lasher likes it. Let’s see what he chooses to do.”
He left the notebook on the table and went back to bed.
In sleep, Rowan was so smooth and expressionless that she was like a perfect wax mannequin beneath the sheets. The warmth of her skin surprised him when he kissed her. Stirring slowly, she turned and wound her arms around him, and nuzzled against his neck. “Michael … ” she whispered in a dreamy voice. “St. Michael, the archangel … ” Her fingers touched his lips, as if groping in the dark to know that he was really there. “Love you … ”
“I love you, too, darlin’,” he whispered. “You’re mine, Rowan.” And he felt the heat of her breasts against his arm, as he drew her close to him. She turned over and her soft fleecy sex was a little flame against his thigh, as she settled back into sleep.
Thirty-two
It had come into her mind sometime during the night: a half dream of hospitals and clinics, and magnificent laboratories, peopled by brilliant researchers …
They wouldn’t understand. Aaron would and Michael would. But the rest of them wouldn’t because they didn’t know the secrets of the file. They didn’t know what had been in the jars.
They knew things but they didn’t know all the way back over the centuries to Suzanne of the Mayfair, midwife and healer in her filthy Scottish village, or Jan van Abel at his desk in Leiden, drawing his clean ink illustration of a flayed torso to reveal the layers of muscle and vein. They didn’t know about Marguerite and the dead body flopping on the bed, and roaring with the voice of a spirit, or Julien watching, Julien who had put the jars in the attic instead of destroying them almost a century ago.
Aaron knew and Michael knew. They would understand the dream of hospitals and clinics and laboratories, of healing hands laid upon sore and aching bodies by the thousands.
What a joke on you, Lasher!
Money was no mystery to her; she was not frightened by the legacy. She could already imagine to the limits that it might allow. She’d never been charmed by money as she had been by anatomy and microsurgery, by biophysics or neurochemistry. But it was no mystery. She’d studied it before, and she’d study it now. And the legacy was something that could be mastered like any other subject … and converted into hospitals, clinics, laboratories … lives saved.
If only she could get the memory of the dead woman out of the house. For that was the real ghost to her, not the ghosts whom Michael had seen, and when she thought of his suffering she could scarcely bear it. It was like seeing everything she loved in him dying inside. She would have driven all the demons in the world back away from him if only she’d known how to do it.
But the old woman. The old woman lay in the rocker still as if she would never leave it. And her stench was worse than the stench of the jars, because it was Rowan’s murder. And the perfect crime.
The stench corrupted the house; it corrupted the history. It corrupted the dream of the hospitals. And Rowan waited at the door.
