The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

The little bald man with the sweaty red face sat on the rectory steps, his arms folded on his knees, eyes following a gust of gray-winged pigeons as they flew up the dreary peeling facade of St. Alphonsus.

"They oughtta poison them birds," he said. "They dirty up everything."

Michael lighted a cigarette, offered one to the man. The man took it with a nod. Michael gave him the near empty matchbook.

"Son, why don't you take off that gold watch and slip it inside your pocket?" the man said. "Don't walk around here with that thing on your wrist, ya hear?"

"They want my watch," Michael said, "they're gonna take my wrist with it, and the fist that's attached to it."

The old man just shrugged and shook his head.

Up on the corner of Magazine and Jackson Michael went in a dark, evil-looking bar, in the sorriest old sagging wooden clapboard building. In all his years in San Francisco, he had never seen such a run-down place. A white man hung like a shadow at the far end, staring at him with glittering eyes out of a cracked and caved-in face. The bartender too was white.

"Give me a beer," Michael said.

"What kind?"

"I don't give a damn."

He timed it perfectly. At three minutes before three he was crossing Camp Street, walking slowly, so the heat would not kill him, and soothed once more by the sweet shade and random beauty of the Garden District. Yes, all this was as it had always been. And at once he felt good; at once he felt he was where he wanted to be, and maybe even where he ought to be, if one could chart a course of one's own.

At three P.M. exactly he stood at the open gate. This was the first time he had seen the house in the sunlight, and his pulse quickened. Here, yes. Even in its neglect it was dignified, grand, merely slumbering beneath the overhanging vines, its long shutters caked with flaking green paint yet still hanging straight on their iron hinges. Waiting ...

A giddiness overtook him as he looked at it, a swift delight that for whatever reasons, he had come back. Doing what I am supposed to be doing ...

He went up the marble steps, and pushed at the door, and when it opened he walked into the long broad hallway. Never in San Francisco had he been in such a structure, had he stood under such a high ceiling, or looked at doorways so graceful and tall.

A deep luster clung to the heart pine boards in spite of the margin of sticky dust that ran along the walls. Paint flaked from the high crown moldings but they themselves were sound. He felt love for everything he saw--love for the workmanship of the tapering keyhole doorways, and the fine newel post and balusters of the long stairway. He liked the feel of the floor beneath his feet, so solid. And the warm good wood smell of the house filled him with a sudden welcome contentment. A house smelled like this in only one place in the whole world.

"Michael? Come in, Michael."

He walked to the first of the two living room doors. Dark and shadowy still, though she had opened all the drapes. The light was slatted coming through the shutters, and dim and soft pouring through the dirty screens of the porch beyond the side windows. Whiff of honeysuckle. So sweet and good. And was that the Queen's Wreath bursting in little bright pink sprigs along the screens? He had not seen that lovely wild vine in all this time.

She was sitting, small and very pretty, on the long brown velvet couch with its back to the front of the house. Her hair was falling down beautifully against her cheek. She had on one of those loose wrinkled cotton overshirts that is as light as silk, and her face and throat looked darkly tanned against the white T-shirt under it. Legs long in the white pants, her toes naked and surprisingly sexy, with a thin flash of red polish, in her white sandals.

"The Witch of Endor," he said, swooping down to kiss her cheek and hold her face in his left hand, warm, tender.

She took hold of both his wrists, clinging to him, kissing him roughly and sweetly on the mouth. He could feel the tremor in her limbs, the fever in her.

"You've been here all alone?"

She sat back as he took his place beside her.

"And why the hell not?" she asked in her slow deep voice. "I quit the hospital officially this afternoon. I'm going to apply for a job here. I'm going to stay here, in this house."

He let out a long whistling sigh and smiled. "You mean it?"

"Well, what do you think?"

"I don't know. All the way over here ... coming back from the Irish Channel, I kept thinking maybe you'd be here with your bag packed to go back."

"No. Not a chance. I've already discussed three or four different hospitals here with my old boss in San Francisco. He's making calls for me. But what about you?"

"What do you mean what about me?" he asked. "You know why I'm here. Where am I going to go? They brought me here. They're not telling me to go anyplace else. They're not telling me anything. I still can't remember. I read four hundred pages of the history and I can't remember. It was Deborah I saw, I know that much, but I don't really know what she said."

"You're tired and hot," she said, touching her hand to his forehead. "You're talking crazy."

He gave a little surprised laugh. "Listen to you," he said, "the Witch of Endor. Didn't you read the history? What's going on, Rowan? Didn't you read all that? We're in a big spiderweb, and we don't know who's done the weaving." He held out his gloved hands, looking down at his fingers. "We just don't know."

She gave him a quiet, remote look, which made her face seem very cold, even though it was flushed, and her gray eyes were picking up the light wonderfully.

"Well, you read it, didn't you? What did you think when you read it? What did you think?"

"Michael, calm down," she said. "You're not asking me what I think. You're asking me what I feel. I've been telling you what I think. We're not stuck in any web,

and nobody's doing the weaving. And you want my advice? Forget about them. Forget about what they want, these people you saw in your visions. Forget them from now on."

"What do you mean 'forget'?"

"OK, listen to me. I've been sitting here thinking for hours, thinking about it all. This is my decision. I'm staying here, and I'm staying here because this is my house and I like it. And I like the family I met yesterday. I like them. I want to know them. I want to hear their voices and know their faces, and learn what they have to teach. And also, I know I wouldn't be able to forget that old woman and what I did to her no matter where I went." She stopped, a flash of sudden emotion transfiguring her face for a second, then gone again, leaving it taut and cool. She folded her arms lightly, one foot up on the edge of the small coffee table. "Are you listening?"

"Yeah, of course."

"OK, I want you to stay here, too. I hope and pray you will stay here. But not because of this pattern or this web or whatever it is. Not because of these visions or because of the man. Because there is absolutely no way to figure out what these things mean, Michael, or what's meant, to use the word you wrote in your notes, or why you and I were thrown together. There is no way to know."

She paused, her eyes scanning him intently. Then she went on:

"So I've made my decision," she said, her words coming more slowly, "based on what I can know, and what I can see, and what I can define and understand, and that is, that this place is where I belong, because I want to belong."

He nodded. "I hear you," he said.

"What I'm saying is that I'm staying here in spite of this man and this seeming pattern, this coincidence of me pulling you up out of the ocean and you being what you are."

He nodded again, a little hesitantly, and then sat back taking a deep breath, his eyes not letting go of hers. "But you can't tell me," he said, "that you don't want to communicate with this thing, that you don't want to understand the meaning of all this ... "