The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"Michael ... " It wasn't just disapproval in her voice, it was disappointment.

"I know, I know," he said. "Everything you're saying is right. Look, you don't know what you've done for me, just getting me out the front door, just listening to me. I want to do what you're telling me to do ... "

"Tell me more about this house," she said.

He was thoughtful again, before beginning. "It was the Greek Revival style--do you know what that is?--but it was different. It had porches on the front and on the sides, real New Orleans porches. It's hard to describe a house like that to someone who's never been in New Orleans. Have you ever seen pictures--?"

She shook her head. "It was a subject Ellie couldn't talk about," she said.

"That sounds unfair, Rowan."

She shrugged.

"No, but really."

"Ellie wanted to believe I was her own daughter. If I asked about my biological parents, she thought I was unhappy, that she hadn't loved me enough. Useless to try to get those ideas out of her head." She drank a little of the coffee. "Before her last trip to the hospital she burned everything in her desk. I saw her doing it. She burned it all in that fireplace. Photographs, letters, all sorts of things. I didn't realize it was everything. Or maybe I just didn't think about it, one way or the other. She knew she wasn't coming back." She stopped for a minute, then poured a little more coffee in her cup and in Michael's cup.

"Then after she died, I couldn't even find an address for her people down there. Her lawyer didn't have a scrap of information. She'd told him she didn't want anyone down there to be contacted. All her money went to me. Yet she used to visit the people in New Orleans. She used to call them on the phone. I could never quite figure it all out."

"That's too sad, Rowan."

"But we've talked enough about me. About this house again. What is it that makes you remember it now?"

"Oh, houses there aren't like the houses here," he said. "Each house has a personality, a character. And this one, well, it's somber and massive, and sort of splendidly dark. It's built right on the corner, part of it touching the sidewalk of the side street. God knows I loved that house. There was a man who lived there, a man right out of a Dickens novel, I swear it, tall and sort of consummately gentlemanly, if you know what I mean. I used to see him in the garden ... " He hesitated; something coming so close to him, something so crucial--

"What's the matter?"

"Just that feeling again, that it's all got to do with him and that house." He shuddered as if he were cold, but he wasn't. "I can't figure it out," he said. "But I know the man has something to do with it. I don't think they did mean for me to forget, the people I saw in the visions. I think they meant for me to act fast, because something's going to happen."

"What could that something be?" she asked gently.

"Something in that house," he said.

"Why would they want you to go back to that house?" she asked. Again, the question was gentle, not challenging.

"Because I have a power to do something there; I have a power to affect something." He looked down at his hands, so sinister in the black gloves. "Again, it was like everything fitted together. Imagine the whole world made up of tiny fragments--and suddenly a great many of those tiny fragments are lights and you see a ... a ... "

"Pattern?"

"Yeah, exactly, a pattern. Well, my life has been part of a greater pattern." He drank another swallow of the coffee. "What do you think? Am I insane?"

She shook her head. "It sounds too special for that."

"Special?"

"I mean specific."

He gave a little startled laugh. No one in all these weeks had said anything like that to him.

She crushed out the cigarette.

"Have you thought about that house often, in the past few years?"

"Almost never," he said. "I never forgot it, but I never thought about it much either. Oh, now and then, I suppose whenever I thought about the Garden District, I'd think about it. You could say it was a haunting place."

"But the obsession didn't begin until the visions."

"Definitely," he said. "There are other memories of home, but the memory of the house is the most intense."

"Yet when you think of the visions, you don't remember speaking of the house ... "

"Nothing so clear as that. Although ... " There it was again, the feeling. But he feared the power of suggestion suddenly. It seemed all the misery of the last few months was coming back. Yet it felt good to be believed by her, to be listening to her. And he liked her easy air of command, the first characteristic of her he had noticed the night before.

She was looking at him, looking just as if she was listening still though he had ceased to speak. He thought about these strange vagrant powers, how utterly they confused things, rather than clarifying them.

"So what's wrong with me?" he asked. "I mean as a doctor, as a brain doctor, what do you think? What should I do? Why do I keep seeing that house and that man? Why do I feel I ought to be there now?"

She sank into thought, silent, motionless, her gray eyes large and fixed on some point beyond the glass, her long, slender arms again folded. Then she said:

"Well, you should go back there, there's no doubt of that. You aren't going to rest easy till you do. Go look for the house. Who knows? Maybe it's not there. Or you won't have any special feeling when you see it. In any case, you should look. There may be some psychological explanation for this idee fixe, as they call it, but I don't think so. I suspect you saw something all right, you went somewhere. We know many people do that, at least they claim they did when they come back. But you might be putt

ing the wrong interpretation on it."

"I don't have much to go on," he admitted. "That's true."

"Do you think they caused the accident?"

"God, I never really thought of that."

"You didn't?"

"I mean I thought, well, the accident happened, and they were there, and suddenly the opportunity was there. That would be awful, to think they caused it to happen. That would change things, wouldn't it?"

"I don't know. What bothers me is this. If they are powerful, whatever they are, if they could tell you something important with regard to a purpose, if they could keep you alive out there when you should have died, if they could work a rescue into it, well, then why couldn't they have caused the accident, and why couldn't they be causing your memory loss now?"

He was speechless.

"You really never thought of that?"

"It's an awful thought," he whispered. She started to speak again, but he asked her with a little polite gesture to wait. He was trying to find the words for what he wanted to say. "My concept of them is different," be said. "I've trusted that they exist in another realm; and that means spiritually as well as physically. That they are ... "

"Higher beings?"

"Yes. And that they could only come to me, know of me, care about me, when I was close to them, between life and death. It was mystical, that's what I'm trying to say. But I wish I could find another word for it. It was a communication that happened only because I was physically dead."

She waited.

"What I mean is, they're another species of being. They couldn't make a man fall off a rock and drown in the sea. Because if they could do such things in the material world, well, why on earth would they need me?"

"I see your point," she said. "Nevertheless ... "

"What?"

"You're assuming they're higher beings. You speak of them as if they're good. You're assuming that you ought to do what they want of you."