“Oh, lovely,” he said anxiously. “Just lovely. Well, look, you’ve got the power to stop this thing from that sort of violation.”
“I know, and now that I know that’s what it is, I will. But if anybody had tried to tell me day before yesterday that some invisible being was going to slip under my clothes on a flight to New Orleans, I wouldn’t have been any more prepared than I was because I wouldn’t have believed it. But we know it doesn’t want to hurt me. And we are fairly certain that it doesn’t want to hurt you. What we have to keep in mind is that it does want to hurt anyone who interferes with its plans, apparently, and now this includes your friend Aaron.”
“Right,” Michael said.
“Now you look tired, like you’re the one who needs to be taken back to the hotel and put to bed,” she said. “Why don’t we go there?”
He didn’t answer. He sat up, and rubbed the back of his neck with his hands. “There’s something you’re not saying.”
“What?”
“And I’m not saying it either.”
“Well then say it,” she said softly, patiently.
“Don’t you want to talk to him? Don’t you want to ask him yourself who he is and what he is? Don’t you think you can communicate with him better and more truly maybe than any of the rest of them? Maybe you don’t. But I do. I want to talk to him. I want to know why he showed himself to me when I was a kid. I want to know why he came so close to me the other night that I almost touched him, touched his shoe. I want to know what he is. And I know, that no matter what Aaron’s told me, or what Aaron will tell me, I think I’m smart enough to get through to that thing, and to reason with it, and maybe that’s exactly the kind of pride it expects to find in everyone who ever sees it. Maybe it counts on that.
“Now, if you haven’t felt that, well, then, you’re smarter and stronger than I am, by a long, long way. I never really talked to a ghost or a spirit, or whatever he is. And boy, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity, not even knowing what I know, and knowing what he did to Aaron.”
She nodded. “Yeah, you’ve covered it all right. And maybe it does play on that, the vanity in some of us that we won’t run the way the others did. But there’s something else between me and this thing. It touched me. And it left me feeling raped. I didn’t like it.”
They sat there in silence for a moment. He was looking at her, and she could all but hear the wheels turning in his head.
He stood up and reached for the jewel case, sliding it across the smooth surface of the table. He opened it and looked at the emerald.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Touch it.”
“It doesn’t look like the drawing I made of it,” he whispered. “I was imagining it when I made the drawing, not remembering it.” He shook his head. He seemed about to close the lid of the box again; then he removed his glove, and laid his fingers on the stone.
In silence she waited. But she could tell by his face that he was disappointed and anxious. When he sighed and closed the box, she didn’t press him.
“I got an image of you,” he said, “of your putting it around your neck. I saw myself standing in front of you.” He put the glove back on, carefully.
“That’s when you came in.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I didn’t even notice that you were wearing it.”
“It was dark.”
“I saw only you.”
“What does that matter?” she shrugged. “I took it off and put it back in the case.”
“I don’t know.”
“Just now, when you touched it. Did you see anything else?”
He shook his head. “Only that you love me,” he said in a small voice. “You really do.”
“You only have to touch me to discover that,” she said.
He smiled, but the smile was sad, and confused. He shoved his hands in his pockets, as if he were trying to get rid of them, and he bowed his head. She waited for a long moment, hating to see him miserable.
“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.