FORTY-SIX
They sit at the table in the hotel room, Luke and Lanny, a coffee service of elegant white porcelain spread before them with a plate of croissants, untouched. Four packs of cigarettes, ordered along with the rest of the room service, rest in a silver bowl.
Luke takes another sip of coffee, heavy with cream. Last night was rough, with the drinking and smoking pot, and while the fatigue shows on his face, Lanny’s visage reveals nothing except pert, soft, smooth skin. And sadness.
“I suppose you’ve tried to learn about this spell,” Luke says at some length. His question brings a bemused sparkle to Lanny’s face.
“Of course I did. It’s not easy to find an alchemist, a real one. Every town I went to, I looked for the dark ones, you know, people with a dark inclination. And they are in every town, some out in the open, some driven underground.” She shakes her head. “In Zurich, I found a shop on a narrow back street just off the main thoroughfare. It sold rare artifacts, ancient skulls with inscriptions chiseled into the bone, scripts bound in human skin and filled with words no longer understood. I thought if anyone would know the necromancer’s true art, it would be the people who owned this shop, who put their lives into tracking down arcane magic. But they only knew rumor. It came to nothing.
“It wasn’t until this century, about fifty years ago, that I finally heard something with the slightest ring of truth to it. It was in Rome, at a dinner party. I met a professor, a historian. His specialty was the Renaissance, but his personal avocation was alchemy. When I asked if he’d heard of a potion to confer immortality, he explained that a true alchemist wouldn’t need a potion for immortality because the real purpose of alchemy was to transform the
“This professor assumed the spirit that filled the dead person or the object came from the demon world,” she says, crackling with self-loathing. “A demon meant to do someone’s bidding. That was all I could bear to hear. I haven’t gone looking for explanations since then.”
They sit quietly and watch the traffic a dozen flights below them. The morning sun is starting to break through clouds, setting the cutlery and silver bowl on fire. Everything is white and silver and glass, clean and sterile, and everything they have been talking about-darkness, death-seems a million miles away.
Luke picks up a cigarette, rolls it between two fingers before putting it aside, unlit. “So you left Adair walled in the mansion. Did you ever go back to see if he got out?”
“I worried about him escaping, of course,” she says, nodding almost imperceptibly. “The feeling, our connection, was gone, though. I had nothing to go on. I went back once, twice-I was afraid of what I’d find, you know-to see if the house was still standing. It was. For the longest time it was used as a home. I’d circle the block, trying to feel Adair’s presence. Nothing. Then one time I went back and saw that it had been made into a funeral home, if you can believe it. The neighborhood had fallen on hard times… I could picture the rooms where they’d work on the bodies, in the basement, steps away from where Adair was entombed. The uncertainty was too much…” Lanny tamps out the spent cigarette in her hand and immediately lights another. “So I had my lawyer contact the funeral home with an offer to buy it. As I said, there was a recession; it was a better price than the owners hoped to see in their lifetime… They accepted.
“As soon as they moved out, I went in by myself. It was hard to imagine as the house I had known, so much had been changed. The part of the cellar under the front stairs had been updated. Cement floor, furnace, and hot water heaters. But the back half had been left alone. No electricity ran back there. It was left dark and damp.
“I went to the spot where-we’d put Adair. You couldn’t tell where the original wall left off and where the part Jonathan built began. It had all aged together by then. Still, no feeling from behind the stone. No presence. I didn’t know what to think. I was almost tempted-almost-to have the wall torn down. It’s like that perverse voice in your head that tells you to jump off the balcony when you get too close to the edge.” She smiles ruefully. “I didn’t, of course. As a matter of fact, I had the wall reinforced with rebar and cement. Had to be careful; I didn’t want the wall to be damaged during the construction. It’s sealed good and tight now. I sleep much better.” But she doesn’t sleep well; Luke has learned this much in the short time they’ve been together.
He needs to lead her away from the place he has left her, the dark cellar with the man she condemned. Luke reaches across the table and takes her hand. “Your story… it’s not finished yet, is it? So you and Jonathan left Adair’s house together-what happened next?”
Lanny seems to ignore the question for a moment, studying the nub of the cigarette in her hand. “We remained together for a few more years. At first, we stayed together because it was, ostensibly, the best thing to do. We could look out for each other, watch each other’s back, as it were. Those were adventurous times. We traveled constantly because we had to, because we didn’t know how to survive. We learned to create new identities for ourselves, how to become anonymous-though it was hard for Jonathan not to attract attention. People were always drawn to his great beauty. But then it became more and more apparent that we remained together because it was what I wanted. An ersatz marriage, only without intimacy. We were like an old couple in a loveless pact, and I’d forced Jonathan into the role of the philandering husband.”
“He didn’t have to stray,” Luke objects.
“It was in his nature. And the women who were interested in him-it was relentless.” She knocks ash into the saucer they are using for an ashtray. “We were both miserable. It got to the point where it was painful to be in each other’s presence; we had wronged each other so, and said hurtful things to each other. Sometimes I hated him and wished he would just go. I knew he would have to be the one to leave because I would never have the strength to leave him.
“Then one day, I woke up to find a note on the pillow beside me.” She smiles ironically, as though used to watching her pain from a distance. “He wrote, ‘Forgive me. This is for the best. Promise me you won’t come looking for me. If I change my mind, I will find you. Please honor my wish. Your dearest, J.’”
She pauses, crushing the cigarette in the saucer. Her expression is stark and faintly amused as she stares out the tall windows. “He finally found the courage to go. It was as if he’d read my mind. Of course, his leaving was agony. I wanted to die, sure that I would never see him again. But we go on, don’t we? Anyway, I had no choice, but it helps to pretend that you do.”
Luke remembers how it feels to be exhausted by tension, recalls those days when he and Tricia couldn’t stand to be in the same room. When he’d sit in the dark and try to imagine how it would feel if they split up, the peace that would come over him. There was no question that she’d be the one to leave-he couldn’t be expected to walk away from his children or his childhood home-but when his family had left and it was just him in the farmhouse, it wasn’t like being alone at all. It was as though something had been violently taken away from him, as though a piece of him had been amputated.
He gives her a moment to fold up her pain and tuck it back in its place. “But it wasn’t over, was it? Obviously, you saw each other again.”
Her expression is inscrutable, light and dark. “Yes, we did.”
FORTY-SEVEN
