“Where are you?” he whispered. The visions hung thick over him suddenly. He felt himself fall forward against the fence, and heard its iron tendons groan. A soft rustling came from the foliage on the other side, just exactly to his right. He turned; movement in the leaves. Camellia blossoms, bruised and falling on the soft earth. He knelt and reached through the fence and caught one of them, red, broken. Was the cab driver talking to him?
“It’s OK, buddy,” Michael said, looking at the broken camellia in his hand, trying the better to see it in the gloom. Was that the gleam of a black shoe right in front of him, on the other side? Again came the rustling. Why, he was staring at a man’s pant leg. Someone was standing only an inch away. He lost his balance as he looked up. And as his knees struck the flagstones, he saw a figure looming over him, peering through the fence at him, eyes catching only a spark of light. The figure appeared frozen, wide-eyed, perilously close to him, and violently alert and focused upon him. A hand reached out, no more than a streak of white in the shadows. Michael moved away on the flags, the alarm in him instinctive and unquestioned. But now as he stared at the overgrown foliage, he realized that there was no one there.
The emptiness was as terrifying suddenly as the vanished figure. “God help me,” he whispered. His heart was knocking against his ribs. And he could not get up. The cab driver tugged on his arm.
“Come on, son, before a patrol car passes here!”
He was pulled, swaying dangerously, to his feet.
“Did you see that?” he whispered. “Christ almighty, that was the same man!” He stared at the cab driver. “I tell you it was the same man.”
“I’m telling you, son, I gotta take you back to the hotel now. This is the Garden District, boy, don’t you remember? You can’t go staggering drunk around here!”
Michael lost his footing again. He was going over. Heavily he backed off the flags into the grass, and then turned, reaching out for the tree but there was no tree. Again the driver caught him. Then another pair of hands steadied him. He spun round. If it was the man again, he was going screaming crazy.
But of all people, it was that Englishman, that white-haired fellow in the tweed suit who’d been on the plane.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Michael whispered. But even through his drunkenness he caught the man’s benign face, his reserved and refined demeanor.
“I want to help you, Michael,” the man said, with the utmost gentleness. It was one of those rich and limitlessly polite English voices. “I’d be so grateful if you’d allow me to take you back to the hotel.”
“Yeah, that seems to be the appropriate course of action,” Michael said, keenly aware that he could hardly make the words come out clear. He stared back at the garden, at the high facade of the house again, now quite lost in the darkness, though the sky in bits and pieces beyond the oak branches still carried a latent gleam. It seemed that the cab driver and the Englishman were talking together. It seemed the Englishman was paying the fare.
Michael tried to reach into his pants pocket for his money clip, but his hand kept sliding right past the cloth again and again. He moved away from the two men, falling forward and then against the fence once more. Almost all the light was gone from the lawn now, from the distant encroaching shrubs. The trellis and its weight of vines was a mere hooded shape in the night.
Yet beneath the farthest crepe myrtle, quite distinctly, Michael could make out a thin human shape. He could see the pale oval of the man’s face, and to his disbelieving eye came clear the same stiff white collar of the old days, the same silk tie at the throat.
Like a man right out of a novel. And he had seen these very same details only moments before in his panic.
“Come on, Michael, let me take you back,” said the Englishman.
“First you have to tell me something,” Michael said. He was beginning to shake all over. “Look, tell me, do you see that man?”
But now he saw only the various shades of darkness. And out of memory, there came his mother’s voice, young and crisp and painfully immediate. “Michael, now you know there is no man there.”
Eight
AFTER MICHAEL LEFT, Rowan sat on the western deck for hours, letting the sun warm her, and thinking in a rather incoherent and sleepy way about all that had taken place. She was slightly shocked and bruised by what had happened, rather deliciously bruised.
Nothing could efface the shame and guilt she felt for having burdened Michael with her doubts and her grief. But this was of no real concern to her now.
One did not become a good neurosurgeon by dwelling for very long on one’s mistakes. The appropriate thing, and the instinctive thing for Rowan, was to assess the error for what it was, consider how to avoid it in the future, and then to go on from there.
And so she took stock of her aloneness, her sadness, the revelation of her own need, which had caused her to fall into Michael’s arms, and she took stock also of the fact that Michael had enjoyed comforting her, that it had drawn the two of them together, deeply coloring their new relationship in a wholly unforeseen way.
Then she moved on to thinking about him.
Rowan had never loved a man of Michael’s age; she had never imagined the degree of selflessness and simplicity which was evident in Michael’s most spontaneous words or gestures. She had been unprepared for and quite enthralled by Michael’s mellowness of soul. As for his lovemaking, well, it was damn near perfect. He liked it rough and tumble the way she did; rather like a rape from both sides, it seemed to her. She wished they could do it again right now.
And for Rowan, who had so long kept her spiritual hungers and her physical hungers completely separated, satisfying the first through medicine and the second through near anonymous bed partners, the sudden convergence of the two in one good-hearted, intelligent, irresistibly huggable and charmingly cheerful and handsome figure with a captivating combination of mysterious psychological and psychic problems was just about more than she could handle. She shook her head, laughing softly to herself, then sipping her coffee. “Dickens and Vivaldi,” she whispered aloud. “Oh, Michael, please come back to me. Come back soon.” This was a gift from the sea, this man.
But what the hell was going to happen to him, even if he did come back right away? This idée fixe about the visions and the house and the purpose was destroying him. And furthermore, she had the distinct feeling that he wasn’t going to come back.
There wasn’t any doubt in her mind, as she sat half dreaming in the clear afternoon sun, that Michael was drunk by now and that he would get drunker before he ever reached his mysterious house. It would have been a lot better for him if she had gone with him, to look after him and to try to steady him through the shocks of this trip.
In fact, it occurred to her now that she had abandoned Michael twice-once when she had given him up too soon and too easily to the Coast Guard; and this morning, when she had let him go on to New Orleans alone.
Of course no one would have expected her to go with him to New Orleans. But then nobody knew what she felt for Michael, or what Michael had felt for her.
As for the nature of Michael’s visions, and she thought about these at length, she had no conclusive opinion except that they could not be attributed to a physiological cause. And again, their particularity-their eccentricity-startled her and frightened her somewhat. And there persisted in her a sense of Michael’s dangerous innocence, his naivete, which seemed to her to be connected to his attitudes about evil. He understood good better than he did evil.
Yet why, when they’d been driving over from San Francisco, did he ask her that curious question: had she been trying to throw him some sort of warning?