The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"Yes, the heat," he whispered. "Have I given her the shot?" Good Lord. He had actually dropped the syringe, and it had broken.

"You called for me, Doctor?" said Miss Nancy. There she stood in the parlor door, staring at him, wiping her hands on her apron. The colored woman was there too, and the nurse behind her.

"Nothing, just the heat," he murmured. "I dropped it, the needle. But I have another, of course."

How they looked at him, studied him. You think I'm going crazy, too?

It was on the following Friday afternoon that he saw the man again.

The doctor was late, he'd had an emergency at the sanitarium. He was sprinting up First Street in the early fall dusk. He didn't want to disturb the family dinner. He was running by the time he reached the gate.

The man was standing in the shadows of the open front porch. He watched the doctor, his arms folded, his shoulder against the porch column, his eyes dark and rather wide, as though he were lost in contemplation. Tall, slender, clothes beautifully fitted.

"Ah, so there you are," the doctor murmured aloud. Flush of relief. He had his hand out as he came up the steps. "Dr. Petrie is my name, how do you do?"

And--how to describe it? There was simply no man there.

"Now, I know this happened!" he said to Miss Carl in the kitchen. "I saw him on that porch and he vanished into thin air."

"Well, what business is it of ours what you saw, Doctor?" said the woman. Strange choice of words. And she was so hard, this lady. Nothing feeble about her in her old age. She stood very straight in her dark blue gabardine suit, glaring at him through her wire-rimmed glasses, her mouth withered to a thin line.

"Miss Carl, I've seen this man with my patient. Now the patient, as we all know, is a helpless woman. If an unidentified person is coming and going on these premises--"

But the words were unimportant. Either the woman didn't believe him or the woman didn't care. And Miss Nancy, at the kitchen table, never even looked up from her plate as she scraped up the food noisily onto her fork. But the look on Miss Millie's face, ah, now that was something--old Miss Millie so clearly disturbed, her eyes darting from him to Carl and back again.

What a household.

He was irritated as he stepped into the dusty little elevator and pressed the black button in the brass plate.

The velvet drapes were closed and the bedroom was almost dark, the little candles sputtering in their red glasses. The shadow of the Virgin leapt on the wall. He couldn't find the light switch immediately. And when he did, only a single tiny bulb went on in the lamp beside the bed. The open jewel box was right next to it. What a spectacular thing.

When he saw the woman lying there with her eyes open, he felt a catch in his throat. Her black hair was brushed out over the stained pillowcase. There was a flush of unfamiliar color in her cheeks.

Did her lips move?

"Lasher ... "

A whisper. What had she said? Why, she'd said Lasher, hadn't she? The name he'd seen on the tree trunk and in the dust of the dining table. And he had heard that name spoken somewhere else ... That's why he knew it was a name. It sent the chills up his back and neck, this catatonic patient actually speaking. But no, he must have been imagining it. It was just the thing he wanted so to happen--the miracle change in her. She lay as ever in her trance. Enough Thorazine to kill somebody else ...

He set down the bag on the side of the bed. He filled the syringe carefully, thinking as he had several times before, what if you just didn't, just cut it down to half, or a fourth, or none and sat by her and watched and what if-- He saw himself suddenly picking her up and taking her out of the house. He saw himself driving her out into the country. They walked hand in hand on a path through the grass until they'd come to the levee above the river. And there she smiled, her hair blowing in the wind--

What nonsense. Here it was six thirty, and the shot was long overdue. And the syringe was ready.

Suddenly something pushed him. He was sure of it, though where he had been pushed he couldn't say. He went down, his legs buckling, and the syringe went flying.

When he caught himself he was on his knees in the semidark, staring at motes of dust gathered on the bare floor beneath the bed.

"What the hell--" he'd said aloud before he could catch himself. He couldn't find the hypodermic needle. Then he saw it, yards away, beyond the armoire. It was broken, smashed, as if someone had stepped on it. All the Thorazine had oozed out of the crushed plastic vial onto the bare boards.

"Now, wait a minute!" he whispered. He picked it up and stood holding the ruined thing in his hands. Of course he had other syringes, but this was the second time this sort of thing ... And he found himself at the bedside again, staring down at the motionless patient, thinking, now how exactly did this--I mean, what in God's name is going on?

He felt a sudden intense heat. Something moved in the room, rattling faintly. Only the rosary beads wound about the brass lamp. He went to wipe his brow. Then he realized, very slowly, even as he stared at Deirdre, that there was a figure standing on the other side of the bed. He saw the dark clothes, a waistcoat, a coat with dark buttons. And then he looked up and saw it was the man.

In a split second his disbelief changed to terror. There was no disorientation now, no dreamlike unreality. The man was there, staring at him. Soft brown eyes staring at him. Then the man was simply gone. The room was cold. A breeze lifted the draperies. The doctor caught himself in the act of shouting. No, screaming, to be perfectly frank.

At ten o'clock that night, he was off the case. The old psychiatrist came all the way out to the lakefront apartment house to tell him in person. They had gone down to the lake together and strolled along the concrete shore.

"These old families, you can't argue with them. And you don't want to tangle with Carlotta Mayfair. The woman knows everybody. You'd be amazed how many people are beholden to her for one thing and another, or to Judge Fleming. And these people own property all over the city, if you only ... "

"I tell you I saw this!" the doctor found himself saying.

But the old psychiatrist was dismissing him. There was a thinly concealed suspicion in his eyes as they measured the younger doctor up and down, though the agreeable tone of his voice never changed.

"These old families." The doctor was never to go to that house again.

The doctor said nothing more. The truth was, he felt foolish. He wasn't a man who believed in ghosts! And he could not now bring himself to mount any intelligent argument about the woman herself, her condition, the obvious need for some periodic evaluation. No, his confidence had been dashed altogether.

Yet he knew he'd seen that figure. Seen it three times. And he could not forget the afternoon of the hazy, imagined conversation. The man had been there, too, yes, but insubstantial! And he had known the man's name, and yes, it was ... Lasher!

But even if he discounted the dreamlike conversation--blamed it on the quiet of the place and the infernal heat, and the suggestion of a word carved into a tree trunk--the other times could not be discounted. He had seen a solid, living being there. No one would ever get him to deny it.

As the weeks passed and he failed to distract himself sufficiently with his work at the sanitarium, he began to write about the experience, describe it in detail. The man's brown hair had been slightly wavy. Eyes large. Fair skin like the poor sick woman. The man had been young, no more than twenty-five at best. The man had been without discernible expression. The doctor could even remember the man's hands. Nothing special about them, just nice hands. It struck him that the man, though thin, had been well proportioned. Only the clothes seemed unusual, and not the style of them, which was ordinary enough. It was the texture of the clothing. Unaccountably smooth like the face of the man. As if the whole figure--clothes, flesh, face--were made from the same thing.

One morning, the doctor awoke with the curiously clear thought: the mysterious man hadn't wanted her to have those sedatives! He'd known they were bad. An

d the woman was defenseless of course; she could not speak in her own behalf. The specter was protecting her!

But who in God's name will ever believe all this? the doctor thought. And he wished he were home, in Maine, working in his father's clinic and not in this damp and alien city. His father would understand. But then, no. His father would only be alarmed.

He tried to "keep busy." But the truth was, the sanitarium was a boring place. He had little to do. The old psychiatrist gave him a few new cases, but they were not challenging. Yet it was essential that the doctor continue, that he erase all suspicion from the old psychiatrist's mind.

As fall turned to winter, the doctor began to dream of Deirdre. And in his dreams, he saw her cured, revitalized, walking swiftly down a city street, her hair blowing in the wind. Now and then when he woke up from such a dream, he found himself wondering if the poor woman hadn't died. That was the more likely thing.

When spring came around, and he had been in the city a full year, he found he had to see the house again. He took the St. Charles car to Jackson Avenue and walked from there as he had always done in the past.

It was all exactly the same, the thorny bougainvillea in full bloom over the porches, the overgrown garden swarming with tiny white winged butterflies, the lantana with its little orange blossoms pushing through the black iron fence.

And Deirdre sitting in the rocker on the side porch behind her veil of rusted screens.

The doctor felt a leaden anguish. He was as troubled, perhaps, as he'd ever been in his life. Somebody's got to do something for that woman.