Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

"You didn't see anything at all?" he said.

He followed her out and down the hall.

"I caught that scent," she said. "I think it was the scent that woke me up, and then I heard the noise of the window."

How calm she was. He was in a blaze of protective fury.

He opened the front door, and went out first, to the edge of the porch. Anyone could have hidden anywhere out there, behind the oaks, across the street behind a wall, even low down among the big elephant ears and palms that crowded his own garden. My own garden.

"I'm going, Michael, I'll call you later," she said.

"You must be nuts, you think I'm going to let you walk off home like this in the dark? Are you crazy?"

She stopped on the steps. She had been about to protest, but then she too cast a wary eye on the shadows that surrounded them. She looked thoughtfully up into the branches and at the dark shadows of Chestnut Street. "I've got an idea. You follow me. Then when he springs out, whoever he is, you kill him with your hammer. You have your hammer?"

"That's ridiculous. I'll drive you home," he said. He pulled her in and shut the door.

Henri was in the kitchen, just as he ought to have been, in white shirt and suspenders and drinking his whiskey from a white china cup so no one would know it. He put down the newspaper, and stood up. He would take the child home, of course. Or to the hospital? Certainly. Whatever Miss Mona wanted. He reached for his coat, which was ever ready on the chair behind him.

Michael walked out with them to the drive, distrustful of the darkness, and saw them safely to the car. Mona waved, a smear of red hair at the window. He felt an ache for her as they drove away, that he had let her go without a parting embrace, and then he was ashamed of it.

He went back inside, locking the kitchen door behind him.

He went back to the hall closet. His old tool chest was here, on the first floor under the stairs. This house was so big you had to have a tool chest for every floor of it. But these were his old tools, his favorites, and this was the claw hammer with the chewed-up old wooden handle, the one he had owned all his years in San Francisco.

A strange awareness came over him and he clutched it tight, and went to peer through the library window again. This had been his dad's hammer. He'd taken it out to San Francisco when he was a boy, with all his dad's tools. Nice to have something of his dad's amid all the great carefully inventoried Mayfair wealth, just one simple tool or two. He lifted the hammer. Love to bash it through the burglar's skull, he thought. As if we don't have enough trouble in this house, and some bastard tries to break in the library window!

Unless...

He switched on the light nearest the corner and examined the little gramophone. Covered with dust. No one had touched it. He didn't know whether or not he could touch it. He knelt down, put his fingers on the soft felt turntable. The records of La Traviata were in their thick old faded album. The crank lay beside the thing. It looked impossibly old. Who had made the waltz play twice now in this house, when this thing itself lay inert and dust-covered?

There was a sound in the house, a creaking as if someone was walking. Perhaps Eugenia. Or perhaps not.

"Goddamnit," he said. "Son of a bitch is in this place?"

He set out at once to make a search. He covered the whole first floor room by room, listening, watching, studying the tiny lights in the control boxes of the alarm which told him if anything was moving in rooms beyond him. Then he went upstairs, and covered the second floor as well, poking into closets and bathrooms that he had not entered in all this time, and even into the front bedroom, where the bed was all made and a vase of yellow roses stood on the mantel.

Everything seemed all right. Eugenia was not here. But from the servants' porch he could see the distant guest house in back, ail aglow as if there were a party going on. That was Eugenia. She always turned on all the lights. She and Henri swapped shifts now, and so this was her turn to be alone back there, with the radio playing in the kitchen and the television tuned to "Murder, She Wrote."

The dark trees shifted in the wind. He could see the still lawn, the swimming pool, the flags. Nothing stirred but the trees themselves, making the lights of the distant guest house twinkle deceptively.

On to the third floor. He had to check every crevice and crack.

He found it still and dark. The little landing at the top of the stairs was empty. The street lamp shone through the window. The storage room lay with its door open, all empty shelves clean and white and waiting for something. He turned and opened the door of Julien's old room, his own workroom.

The first thing he saw was the two windows opposite, the window on the right, beneath which Julien had died in his narrow bed, and the window on the left, through which Antha had fled only to fall to her death from the edge of the porch roof. Like two eyes, these windows.

The shades were up; the soft light of early evening flooded in on the bare boards and on his drafting table.

Only those were not bare boards. On the contrary, a threadbare rug lay there, and where his drafting table should have been was the narrow brass bed, which had long ago been moved out of here.

He groped for the light.

"Please don't turn it on." The voice was frayed and soft, French.

"Who the hell are you?"

"It's Julien," came the whispered response. "For the love of heaven. I am not the one who came to the library door! Come in now while there is still time, and let me talk to you."

He shut the door behind him. His face was teeming with heat. He was sweating and his grip had tightened on the hammer. But he knew it was Julien's voice, because he had heard it before, high high above the sea, in another realm, the very same voice, speaking to him softly and rapidly, putting the case to him, so to speak, and telling him he could refuse.

It seemed the veil would lift; he would see the shining Pacific again, his own drowned body on the heaving waves, and he would remember everything. But no such thing occurred. What occurred was infinitely more frightening and exciting! He saw a dark figure by the fireplace, arm on the mantel, long thin legs. He saw the soft hair, white in the light from the windows.

"Eh bien, Michael, I am so tired. It is so hard for me."

"Julien! Did they burn the book? Your life story."

"Oui, mon fils," he said. "My beloved Mary Beth burnt every page of those books. All my writing..." His voice was soft with sad wonder, eyebrows rising slightly. "Come in, come closer. Take the chair there. Please. You must listen to me.

Michael obeyed, taking the leather chair, the one which he knew to be real, lost now among so many alien dusty objects. He touched the bed. Solid. He heard the creak of the springs! He touched the silken quilt. Real. He was dazed, and marveling.

On the mantelpiece stood a pair of silver candlesticks, and the figure had turned and, with the sharp sudden scratch of a match, was putting a light to the wicks. His shoulders were narrow but very straight; he seemed ageless, tall, graceful.

When he faced Michael again, the warm yellow light spread out behind him. Perfectly realized, he stood, his blue eyes rather cheerful and open, his face almost rapt.

"Yes, my boy," he said. "Look at me! Hear me. You must act now. But let me speak my piece. Ah, do you hear it? My voice is getting stronger."

It was a beautiful voice, and not a syllable was lost on Michael, who all his life had loved beautiful voices. It was an old-fashioned voice, like the cultured voices of those long-ago film stars he so cherished, the actors who made an art of simple speech, and it occurred to him in his strange daze that perhaps this was all more of his own fancy.

"I don't know how long I have," the ghost said. "I don't know where I've been as I've waited for this moment. I am the earthbound dead."

"I'm here, I'm listening to you. Don't go. Whatever you do, don't go!"

"If only you knew how hard it has been to come through, how I have tried, and your own soul has shut me out."

"I'm afraid of ghosts,

" Michael said. "It's an Irish trait. But you know that now."

Julien smiled and stood back against the mantel, folding his arms, and the tiny candle flames danced, as if he really were solid flesh and he had stirred the air. And solid enough he seemed in his black wool coat and silk shirt. He wore long trousers and old-fashioned button shoes, polished to a perfect luster. As he smiled, his gently lined face with its curling white hair and blue eyes seemed to grow ever more vivid.

"I'm going to tell my tale," he said, as a gentle teacher might. "Condemn me not. Take what I have to give."

Michael was flooded by an inexplicable combination of trust and excitement. The thing he had feared all this time, the thing which had haunted him, was now here, and it was his friend, and he was with it. Only Julien had never really been the thing to fear.

"You are the angel, Michael," said Julien. "You are the one who still has a chance."