"Come on, let's go," she said. "This place is getting to you worse than me. Let's go back to the hotel."
He nodded. "I need a glass of water," he said. "Do you think there's some cold water in this house? I'm dry and I'm hot."
"I don't know," she said. "I don't even know if there's a kitchen. Maybe there's a well with a moss-covered bucket. Maybe there's a magic spring."
He laughed softly.
"Come on, let's find some water."
She got up and followed him out of the rear door of the dining room. Some sort of butler's pantry, it was, with a little sink in it, and high glassed cabinets filled with china. He took his time passing through. He seemed to be measuring the thickness of the walls with his hands.
"Back here," he said, passing through the next door. He pushed in an old black wall button. A dingy overhead bulb flashed on, weak and dismal, revealing a long split-level room, the upper portion a sterile workplace, and the lower, two steps down, a small breakfast room with a fireplace.
A long series of glass doors revealed the overgrown yard outside. It seemed the song of the frogs was louder here, clearer. The dark outline of an immense tree obscured the northern corner of the view completely.
The rooms themselves were very clean and very streamlined in an old-fashioned way. Very efficient.
The built-in refrigerator covered half the inside wall, with a great heavy door like the doors of walk-in vaults in restaurants.
"Don't tell me if there's a body in there, I don't want to know," she said wearily.
"No, just food," he said smiling, "and ice water." He took out the clear glass bottle. "Let me tell you about the South. There's always a bottle of ice water." He rummaged in one of the cabinets over the corner sink, and caught up two jelly glasses with his right hand and set them down on the immaculate counter.
The cold water tasted wonderful. Then she remembered the old woman. Her house, really, her glass, perhaps. A glass from which she'd drunk. She was overcome with revulsion, and she set the glass in the small steel sink before her.
Yes, like a restaurant, she thought, detaching herself slowly, rebelliously. The place was that well equipped long long ago when someone had ripped out the Victorian fixtures they so love these days in San Francisco. And put in all this shining steel.
"What are we going to do, Michael?" she said.
He stared down at the glass in his hand. Then he looked at her, and at once the tenderness and the protectiveness in his eyes went to her heart.
"Love each other, Rowan. Love each other. You know, as sure as I am about the visions. I'm sure that it isn't part of anyone's plan that we really love each other."
She stepped up to him and slipped her arms around his chest. She felt his hands come up her back and close warmly and tenderly on her neck and her hair. He held her deliciously tight, and buried his face in her neck, and then kissed her again on the lips gently.
"Love me, Rowan. Trust me and love me," he said, his voice heartbreakingly sincere. He drew back, and seemed to retreat into himself a little, and then he took her hand, and led her slowly towards the French door. He stood looking out into the darkness.
Then he opened the door. No lock on it. Maybe there was no lock on any of them. "Can we go outside?" he asked.
"Of course, we can. Why do you ask me?"
He looked at her as if he wanted to kiss her but he didn't do it. And then she kissed him. But at the mere delicious taste of him, all the rest of it returned. She snuggled against him for a long moment. And then she led the way out.
They found that they had come onto a screened porch, much smaller than the one on which the old woman had died, and they went out another door, like many an old-fashioned screened door, even to the spring that caused it to shut behind them. They went down the wooden steps to the flagstones.
"All this is OK," he said, "it's not in bad repair really."
"But what about the house itself? Can it be saved, or is it too far gone?"
"This house?" He smiled, shaking his head, his blue eyes shining beautifully as he glanced at her and then up at the narrow open porch high overhead. "Honey, this house is fine, just fine. This house will be here when you and I are gone. I've never been in such a house. Not in all my years in San Francisco. Tomorrow, we'll come back and I'll show you this house in the sunlight. I'll show you how thick these walls are. I'll show you the rafters underneath if you want." He stopped, ashamed it seemed of relishing it so much, and caught again in the unhappiness and the mourning for the old woman, just as she had been.
And then there was Deirdre, and so many questions yet unanswered about Deirdre. So many things in this history he described, and yet it seemed the darkest journey ... Much rather look at him and see the excitement in him as he looks up at the walls, as he studies the door frames and the sills and the steps.
"You love it, don't you?"
"I've loved it ever since I was a kid," he said. "I loved it when I saw it two nights ago. I love it now even though I know all kinds of things that happened in it, even what happened to that guy in the attic. I love it because it's your house. And because ... because it's beautiful no matter what anybody has done in it, or to it. It was beautiful when it was built. It will be beautiful a hundred years from now."
He put his arm around her again, and she clung to him, nestling against him, and feeling him kiss her hair again. His gloved fingers touched her cheek. She wanted to rip off the gloves. But she didn't say so.
"You know, it's a funny thing," he said. "In all my years in California, I worked on many a house. And I loved them all. But none of them ever made me feel my mortality. They never made me feel small. This house makes me feel that. It makes me feel it because it is going to be here when I'm gone."
They turned and walked deeper into the garden, finding the flagstones in spite of the weeds that pressed against them, and the bananas that grew so thick and low that the great bladelike leaves brushed their faces.
The shrubs closed out the kitchen light behind them as they climbed the low flagstone steps. Dark it was here, dark as the rural dark.
A rank green smell rose, like the smell of a swamp, and Rowan realized that she was looking out at a long pool of water. They stood on the flagstone lip of this great black pool. It was so heavily overgrown that the surface of the water showed only in dim flashes. The water lilies gleamed boldly in the faintest light from the far-off sky. Insects hummed thickly and invisibly. The frogs sang, and things stirred the water so that the light skittered on the surface suddenly, even deep among the high weeds. There came a busy trickling sound as though the pond were fed by fountains, and when she narrowed her eyes, she saw the spouts, pouring forth their thin sparkling streams.
"Stella built this," he said. "She built it over fifty years ago. It wasn't meant to be like this at all. It was a swimming pool. And now the garden's got it. The earth has taken it back."
How sad he sounded. It was as if he had seen something confirmed that he did not quite believe. And to think how that name had struck her when Ellie said it in the final weeks of fever and delirium. "Stella in the coffin."
He was looking off towards the front of the house, and when she followed his gaze, she saw the high gable of the third floor with its twin chimneys floating against the sky, and the glint of the moon or the stars, she didn't know which, in the square windows high up there, in the room where the man had died, and where Antha had fled Carlotta. All the way down past those iron porches she had fallen--all the way down to the flagstones, before her cranium cracked on the flagstones, and the soft tissue of the brain was crushed, the blood oozing out of it.
She pressed herself more closely against Michael. She locked her hands behind his back, resting her weight against him.
She looked straight up at the pale sky and its few scattered yet vivid stars, and then the memory of the old woman came back again, and it was like the evil cloud wouldn't let go of her. She thought of the look on the old woman's face as she'd died. She thought of the words. And the face of her mother in the casket, slumbering forever on white satin.
"What is it, darlin'?" he asked. A low rumble from his chest.
She pressed her face against his shirt. She started to shiver as she had been doing on and off all night, and when she felt his arms come down tighter and almost hard, she loved it.
The frogs were singing here, that loud grinding woodland song, and far away a bird crie
d in the night. Impossible to believe that streets lay near at hand, and that people lived beyond the trees, that the distant tiny yellow lights twinkling here and there through the glossy leaves were the lights of other people's houses.
"I love you, Michael," she whispered. "I do. I love you."
But she couldn't shake the evil spell. It seemed to be part of the sky and the giant tree looming over her head, and the glittering water down deep in the rank and wild grass. But it was not part of any one place. It was in her, part of her. And she realized, her head lying still against his chest, that this wasn't only the remembrance of the old woman and her brittle and personal malice, but a foreboding. Ellie's efforts had been in vain, for Rowan had known this foreboding long ago. Maybe even all her life, she'd known that a dread and dark secret lay ahead, and that it was a great and immense and greedy and multilayered secret, which once opened would continue to unfold forever. It was a secret that would become the world, its revelations crowding out the very light of ordinary life.
This long day in the balmy tropical city of old-fashioned courtesies and rituals had merely been the first unfolding. Even the secrets of the old woman were the mere beginning.
And it draws its strength, this big secret, from the same root from which I draw my strength, both the good and the bad, because in the end, they cannot be separated.
"Rowan, let me get you away from here," he said. "We should have left before. This is my fault."
"No, it doesn't matter, leaving here," she whispered. "I like it here. It doesn't matter where I go, so why not stay here where it's dark and quiet and beautiful?"
The soft heavy smell of that flower came again, the one the old woman had called the night jasmine.
"Ah, do you smell it, Michael?" She looked at the white water lilies glowing in the dark.
"That's the smell of summer nights in New Orleans," he answered. "Of walking alone, and whistling, and beating the iron pickets with a twig." She loved the deep vibration of his voice coming from his chest. "That's the smell of walking all through these streets."
He looked down at her, struggling to make out her face, it seemed. "Rowan, whatever happens, don't let this house go. Even if you have to go away from it and never see it again, even if you come to hate it. Don't let it go. Don't let it ever fall into the hands of anyone who wouldn't love it. It's too beautiful. It has to survive all this, just as we do."