Jessica drew a quick breath, the sound sharp in the straining silence.
“Wouldn’t that be dreadful, Jessica?”
Jessica shook her head slowly, eyes narrowing to pinpoints of light.
“You know how horses panic in fire,” Eric said. “If the stalls are locked, they often break their legs trying to kick their way out. The screams of horses trapped that way sound almost human. And even if they are lucky enough to have someone around to lead them out, they’re likely to bolt right back to the false security of the blazing stables. It’s happened time after time.”
Eric snapped his lighter shut, dropped it into his vest pocket. “I trust you’ll be sensible, Jessica.”
“That’s only a word, Uncle Eric. It doesn’t mean the same to everybody.”
“Don’t play games with me, Jessica. I’ll tell you what I want and there’ll be no damned discussion about it.”
He dropped the folder on her bed and pointed to it. “There’s the information you need, the names of the entries in the Grand National. You tell me the win, place, and show horses, understand? Use tea leaves, Ouija boards, or those precognitions your bloody Dr. Homewood is so awed by, I don’t give a damn. Just tell me the winners, how they’ll come in.”
“I can do that, Uncle Eric,” she said quietly, and he was too agitated by the implications of that simple statement to hear a different tone in her voice, see a look in her eye, older than her years, close to ancient mockeries. “But people don’t always know what they want, Uncle Eric,” the girl went on. “They choose without light and make mistakes.”
“I don’t need any talk of your bloody lights and colors, Jessica. I’ve told you what I want. So what is it you want? Think hard, girl. Do you want me to give the key to your room to Benny Stiff? Do you want to see a fire in the stable and hear your horse scream? If that’s what you want, I’ll sure as hell give it to you!”
“I know what I want,” Jessica said, shrugging and turning from him, a perverse smile touching her lips. In her mind there was a shimmer of radiance and through it the child saw the hill and river, Julian’s metaphor of time and fate, with currents taking away the headstrong and unwary while she watched... “Leave me now, please, and I will do your work.”
“You can, Jessica?” His voice was trembling. “You will?”
“Yes, I’ll give you what you say you want, what you’re asking for...”
Eric locked the door behind him when he left the room, holding the key tight like a talisman in his fist as he hurried down the stairs. He needed a drink now, a moment alone to savor his triumph.
In her bedroom, Jessica stood perfectly still as the figures of unrealized time began forming in her consciousness, streaking like quicksilver along the neurons of her mind.
After a moment, she picked up the manila envelope which Eric had dropped on the coverlet of her bed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
A concerned and thoughtful Charity Bostwick sat with a cup of tea in Father Malachy’s parlor.
“I’m worried sick about Jessie,” she said to the old priest.
“But it’s her own aunt and uncle you’re speaking of, Charity. Don’t be rash in your judgments.”
“Father Malachy, if you’d been there, you wouldn’t be taking this so calmly. Mr. Griffith pretended to ask Jessica if she’d care to see me. I watched him. He turned right at the top of the stairs. The child’s bedroom is left, in the opposite direction. He lied to me.”
“We’d best go easy with such reckonings...”
“Oh, my foot, Father! Do you believe that story they told Constable Riley about Mr. Brown? Before I came here, I went to see Kevin O’Dell. The poor lad told me that Brown never had a moment’s heart trouble in his life.”
“Death can come like a thief in the night, Charity.”
Yet, despite the old man’s disclaimers and attempts to remain calm and judicious, Charity Bostwick saw that he was just as troubled as she was.
The unsettling phone call had come in early that morning, prodding him from sleep, the strident male voice speaking of signs and portents, of lights in the sky that matched those in the caller’s mind, and a wild sea eagle that had settled at midnight on the roof of the cottage...
“You’re not as serene as you’re pretending, Father. I’ve called Mr. Ryan in Dublin, but the poor man’s been taken to the hospital with influenza. And why do you think they whisked the child off to London in such a rush?”
The caller that morning had said his name was Mallory, Liam Mallory. Obviously unused to telephones, he had shouted and roared into the mouthpiece, numbing the priest’s eardrums. Mallory and his wife were traveling by bus down to Athlone where they could borrow a pony and trap to cover the final miles to Ballytone.
What had chilled Father Malachy were old Liam Mallory’s words foretelling the evil, shimmering and darkling, that menaced the child Jessica.
“There are forces gathering around her and she has need of our help, Father, need of the power of the elements, the strength of archangels. She is young in her gifts, she has yet to believe in the wisdom of her powers. She needs us and we are too far away. Her enemies are crowding around her...”
At that moment, a static drummed along the wires, splintering the old man’s words and the line went dead.
As the priest thought of these things and prayed for guidance, Charity Bostwick lit a cigarette with an impatient gesture, “You can’t sit there and tell me you believe that Andrew’s loyal servants were, in fact, no more than common thieves. And if Jessica could stand straight at Andrew’s grave, do you suppose she’d take to her bed at poor Mr. Brown’s death? I don’t believe that child is sick. I think they’re lying to all of us.”
Remembering the fervor in old Mallory’s voice — the words charged with the savage beliefs of Ireland, and truth and history and superstition so impenetrably twined together in them that no human mind or fingers could unsort or unravel it — preferring a fool who believed, to a scholar blinded by arrogance, Father Malachy put his pipe aside and said, “Charity, what do you think we should do in this matter?”
“The first thing I intend to do is make a call, Father. May I use the rectory phone? It’s an overseas call to Dr. Julian in California. I’ll check with the operator for time and charges.”
“Never mind the charges, my dear. Surely we’re doing the Lord’s work now.”
Dr. Julian Homewood let himself into his apartment the evening of that same day and dropped his briefcase into a chair before pouring himself a club soda with lime. At the open doors of his terrace, he looked across the lights of Palo Alto, the Stanford campus dusky and beige in the soft twilight, the stucco facades of old California styles blending effortlessly with the glass and brick masses of modern architecture.
He had given a late lecture to a group of FBI agents from the Bay area, outlining the possibilities of precognition as a tool in criminal investigations, relating this to the research presently underway in Russia and the U.S. in the field of global target identification through clairvoyant techniques. It was one of a series he had given to CIA case officers, including Simon Cutter, the week before in Washington, but Julian knew that today his efforts had been mechanical because he had been preoccupied by an earlier telephone call from Charity Bostwick in Ballytone.
Miss Bostwick’s call had wakened him at three in the morning. He had immediately placed a call to Easter Hill; it was almost noon then in Ballytone.