remember things…”
He laughed bitterly. “Well, sometimes I don’t.”
“What do you remember now?”
He looked hateful and solemn. His beard and the mustache were ominous on his face. Signs of obvious sexual maturity. The miscarriage. The fontanel. This was the mature animal, or was it merely adolescent?
Donnelaith.
It wasn’t a town at all. It was no more than the inn, and the nearby headquarters of the archaeological project, where a small contingent of archaeological students slept and ate. Tours were offered of the ruined castle above the loch, and of the ruined town down in the glen, with its Cathedral-which could not be seen from the inn- and farther out the ancient primal circle of stones, which was quite a walk but worth it. But you could go only in the designated areas. If you roamed alone, you must obey all signs. The tours would be tomorrow in the morning.
It chilled her to look down from the window of the inn and actually see it in the dim distorting distance, the place where it had all begun, where Suzanne, the cunning woman of the village, had called up a spirit named Lasher and that spirit had attached itself forever to Suzanne’s female descendants. It chilled her. And the great awesome glen was gray and melancholy and softly beautiful, beautiful as damp and green and northern places can be, like the remote high counties of Northern California. The twilight was coming, thick and shining in the damp gloom, and the entire world below appeared mysterious, something of fairy tales.
It was possible to see any car approaching the town, from any direction. There was only one road, and you could see for miles north and south. And the majority of the tourists came from nearby cities and in busloads.
Only a few die-hards stayed at the inn, a girl from America writing a paper on the lost cathedrals of Scotland. An old gentleman, researching his clan in these remote parts, convinced that it led back to Robert the Bruce. A young couple in love who cared about no one.
And Lasher and Rowan. At supper he tried some of the hard food. He hated it. He wanted to nurse. He stared at her hungrily.
They had the best and most spacious room, very prim and proper with a ruffled bed beneath the low white- painted beams, a thick carpet and a little fire to take away the chill, and a sweeping view of the glen below them. He told the innkeeper they must not have a phone in the room, they must have privacy, and what meals he wanted prepared for them and when, and then he took her wrist in his terrible, painful grip and said, “We are going out into the valley.”
He pulled her down the stairs into the front room of the inn. The couple sat glowering at them from a small distant table.
“It’s dark,” she said. She was tired from the drive and faintly sick again. “Why don’t we wait until morning?”
“No,” he said. “Put on your walking shoes.” He turned and bent down and started to pull off her shoes. People were staring at him. It occurred to her that it wasn’t at all unusual for him to behave like this. It was typical. He had a madman’s judgment; a madman’s naivete.
“I’ll do it,” she said. They went back upstairs. He watched as she dressed for the cold outdoors. She came out fit for a long night of exploration, walking shoes laced over wool socks.
It seemed they walked an endless time down the slope and then along the banks of the loch.
The half-moon illuminated the jagged and broken walls of the castle.
The cliffs were perilous, but there were well-worn paths. He climbed the path, pulling her along with him. The archaeologists had set up barriers, signs, warnings, but there was no one around. They went where they chose to go. New wooden staircases had been built in the high half-ruined towers, and down into dungeons. He crept ahead of her, very surefooted, and almost frenzied.
It occurred to her that this might be the best time for escape. That if she only had the nerve she could push him off the top of one of these fragile staircases, and down he would go and splat, he’d have to suffer like any human! His bones weren’t brittle, they were mostly cartilage still, but he would die, surely he would. Even as she considered it, she began to cry. She felt she could not do it. She could not dispatch him like that. Kill him? She couldn’t do it.
It was a cowardly and rash thing to imagine, far more rash than leaving with him had been. But that had been rash also. She realized it now. She was mad to think she could manage or control or study him on her own; what a fool, what a fool, what a fool. To leave that house alone with this wild and domineering demon, to be so obsessed in pride and hubris with her own creation!
But would he have let it happen any other way? When she looked back on it, had he not rushed her, had he not pushed her, had he not said Hurry to her countless times? What did he fear? Michael, yes, Michael had been something to fear.
But it was my error. I could have contained the whole situation! I could have had this thing under control.
And in the pool of moonlight falling on the grassy floor of the castle’s gutted main hall, she found it easier to blame herself, to castigate herself, to hate herself, than to hurt him.
It was doubtful she could have done it anyway. The one time she accelerated her step behind him on the stairs, he turned and grabbed hold of her and put her up in front of him. He was ever vigilant. He could lift her effortlessly with one of his long gibbonlike arms, and deposit her on her feet wherever he wished. He had no fear of falling.
But something in the castle made him afraid.
He was trembling and crying as they left the castle. He said he wanted to see the Cathedral. The moon had drifted behind the clouds, but the glen was still washed in an even pale light, and he knew the way, ignoring the preordained path and cutting down through the slopes from the base of the castle.
At last they came to the town itself, to the excavated foundations of its walls, its battlements, its gates, its little main street, all roped off and marked, and there, there loomed the immense ruin of the Cathedral, dwarfing every other structure, with its four standing walls and their broken arches reaching like arms to enclose the lowering heavens.
He went down on his knees in the grass, staring into the long roofless nave. One could see half the circle of what had once been the lofty rose window. But no glass survived among these stones, many of which had been newly put in place and plastered to re-create walls that apparently had tumbled down. Great quarries of stones lay to the left and to the right, obviously brought from other places to reassemble the building.
He rose, grabbed her and dragged her with him, past the barrier and the signs, until they stood in the church itself, gazing up and up past the arches on either side, at the cloudy sky and the moon giving just a teasing light through the clouds that had no shape to it. The Cathedral had been Gothic, vast, overreaching perhaps for such a place, unless in those times there had been hordes of the faithful.
He was trembling all over. He had his hands to his lips, and then he began to give off that humming, that singing, and rock on his feet.
He walked doggedly, against his own mood, along the wall and then pointed up at one high narrow empty window. “There, there!” he cried. And it seemed he spoke other words, or tried to and was then weary and agitated again. He sank down, drawing up his knees, and hugged her close to him, his head on her shoulder, and then nuzzling down onto her breasts. Rudely he pushed up the sweater and began to suckle. She lay back, all will leaving her. Staring up at the clouds. Begging for stars but there were no stars, only the dissolving light of the moon, and the lovely illusion that it was not the clouds which moved but the high walls and the empty arched windows.
In the morning, when she awoke, he was not in the room! But neither was there a phone anymore, and when she opened the window, she saw it was a straight drop some twenty feet or more to the grass below. And what would she do if she did manage to get down there? He had the keys to the car. He always carried them. Would she run to others for help, explain she was being kept prisoner? Then what would he do?
She could think it through, all the possibilities. They went round like horses on a carousel in her mind until she gave up.
She washed, dressed, and wrote in her diary. Once again, she listed all the little things she had observed: that his skin was maturing, that his jaw was now firm, but not the top of his head, but mostly she recounted what had happened since they had come to Donnelaith, his curious reactions to the ruins.
In the great room of the inn downstairs, she found him at the table with the old innkeeper in fast conversation. The man stood for her, respectfully, and pulled out her chair.
