There was a silence, while Lara took a long, meditative draw on her cigarette. Then she said, "And Sarah couldn't cope?"
Noah pressed the fingers of one hand briefly against his eyes. He could hear her screams even now. "It was too overwhelming, too alien . We always did these sessions by the light of one candle, so we couldn't see much, but it was as if the night just surged into the room. We were surrounded by a presence, not evil exactly, but beyond good and evil. It was amoral, and we were nothing to it. Even I could sense it, and I'm no great psychic. In moments, I realized how we'd been playing with something inconceivably huge and beyond us, something immeasurably powerful. We'd pulled at its skirts too insistently and now it had noticed us."
"What happened?"
"Well, once Sarah started screaming, I just leaped up and put the lights on. If something really had been there, it disappeared." He finished off the warm lager left in his glass and shook his head. "Sarah was writhing on the floor. I didn't know what to do. The noises were hideous. In the end, I slapped her. It's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? And she kind of came out of it. But even if the thing had gone, it left a taint behind."
"Did it kill her?" Lara asked bluntly.
Noah detected a faint note of scorn in her voice. "No, no. Of course not. Sarah was an experienced psychic, but she was damaged by what she'd felt and seen. It changed her and there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing. She became paranoid, jealous and afraid. It destroyed us."
"It wasn't your fault," Lara said, reaching out to touch one of Noah's hands.
He laughed cynically. "They all said that, but it's not true. I was so eager to discover the truth, I didn't think about the dangers. I just kept pushing and pushing. After we split up, Sarah lost her job. She just lost it, big-time. The last I heard she'd admitted herself to hospital. She dropped all her old friends."
"It wasn't your fault," Lara insisted. "Sarah just wasn't strong enough."
"She was," Noah said. " It was stronger than both of us."
"I don't believe that."
"You weren't there. Even as a writer, I don't have the words to describe to you how terrible that night was, how real the entity that came to us. This wasn't Christopher Lee in a silk cape, Lara. This wasn't a nice, safe little meditation like all those we did today. This was the most raw and primeval energy; it could snuff you out like that!" He snapped his fingers before her face, but she did not flinch.
"I want it," she said.
He laughed shakily. "What?"
"It's what I want. I need to know the truth. I'm not afraid."
Noah raised his hands and shook his head emphatically. "No. You don't know what you're asking for. The vampires you're so enamoured of, they're just fashion accessories, a romantic myth. You don't want the truth of it, believe me."
"How dare you!" Lara snapped. "You make me sound like some stupid little girl who's just into looking weird. I'm not enamoured by anything." She thumped her chest with a closed fist. "I've lived with this stuff all my life, felt it tugging at the corners of my mind, trying to make itself known to me. Their carrion smell has always been strong to my senses. When I read Nosferatu , I thought I'd found someone who would understand, who wouldn't think I was mad." She put her hands against her head, scraped them through her sleek, confined hair, pulling strands of it free. "If you really are so against it, why did you put all those coy clues in the book?"
Noah thought she now looked demented, with her hair beginning to fall over her face, a hectic flush along her cheekbones and those wild, wide eyes. But she was breathtakingly beautiful and, in those moments, he could believe she was as strong as she claimed to be. "You'd better tell me what you mean by saying you've lived with it," he said.
Lara ducked her head in assent and then summoned a waiter to order more drinks.
"No," Noah said. "I'm driving. Let's get the bill. We can talk at my place."
They were silent in the car on the drive home. Lara sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring through the windscreen. Noah wondered what he was doing. He guessed what would come. In was as inexorable as a tidal wave, and he could already see it massing on the horizon. He could stop it now, take her home.
They passed the turn-off that would lead to her road. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. In ten minutes, he was parking the car outside his house.
Inside, Lara wandered around the living-room, touching lightly the ancient artefacts that clustered on every available surface. Sarah had collected most of them, but hadn't wanted to take them with her when she left. She hadn't taken anything, or exercised her rights to have half of the house. She'd just wanted out, to cast off any vestige of her life with Noah, desperate to live in the here and now, in safe mundanity. But it was denied her. No one else should go to the place where Sarah was. No one.
Noah made coffee in the vast silent kitchen, where modern appliances gleamed on the spotless work surfaces. Sarah had had the kitchen installed, paid for it herself. The cutlery and crockery Noah had used for his lunch still lay in the sink, but generally he kept the house tidy out of respect for her, as if she were still around in an etheric kind of way, and might disapprove of clutter and mess. On the way back to the living-room, he took a bottle of brandy and two huge globe glasses out of his liquor cupboard and placed them on to the tray next to the cafetière and mugs.
Lara was curled up in the big leather armchair by the hearth and had lit the log-effect gas fire. She had also managed to find the tiny ashtray that Noah kept reluctantly for guests. "You're so lucky," she said, as Noah came into the room. "This place is great. Tons of books and things. How many bedrooms has it got?"
"Five," Noah answered.
"I'm in the wrong job!" Lara said, laughing. She seemed just like an ordinary girl now, gamine and flirtatious.
Noah set down the tray on the coffee table and set about pouring drinks. "We got this place for a song," he said, rather apologetically. "It was a dump. Sarah did it up." He looked around the room. "It's worth a bit now, of course, but all I'd need is a couple of bad years and I'd have to sell it. Writing is not the millionaire's game it's made out to be, you know."
"I'm surprised to hear you say that," Lara said.
"Most people are. They think we all live like Jackie Collins."
"No, I meant that you know how to change fate, how to make things happen. Why don't you use it for yourself, so that you don't get any of those 'bad years'?"
"You've lost me," Noah said, pushing a glass of brandy and a coffee across the table towards her. "I'm a writer, a researcher, not a bloody magician!"
Lara smiled, turning in her fingers a lock of hair that hung beside her face. "Oh, come on! What about the 'weird stuff'?"
"If I knew how to meditate money into existence, I'd be rich. But I don't. I just use the 'weird stuff' to delve into the past."
"But the vulture people knew how to change their world. You said so."
"Strangely enough, I have no compelling desire to drink blood and murder people." He was enjoying their exchange, sure that the undercurrent was sexual.
Lara picked up the brandy globe. "You've contacted them," she said. "How many people have done that? If you weren't scared shitless, you could use that energy for yourself." Slowly, sensuously, she drained her glass.
Noah knelt back on his heels, his hands braced against his thighs. "I think you are a dangerous young woman," he said.
"You wouldn't have to kill anybody," she said, holding out her glass for more brandy. "I'm sure the smallest of blood sacrifices would do."