“What’s the matter?”
“Just that feeling again, that it’s all got to do with him and that house.” He shuddered as if he were cold, but he wasn’t. “I can’t figure it out,” he said. “But I know the man has something to do with it. I don’t think they did mean for me to forget, the people I saw in the visions. I think they meant for me to act fast, because something’s going to happen.”
“What could that something be?” she asked gently.
“Something in that house,” he said.
“Why would they want you to go back to that house?” she asked. Again, the question was gentle, not challenging.
“Because I have a power to do something there; I have a power to affect something.” He looked down at his hands, so sinister in the black gloves. “Again, it was like everything fitted together. Imagine the whole world made up of tiny fragments-and suddenly a great many of those tiny fragments are lights and you see a … a … ”
“Pattern?”
“Yeah, exactly, a pattern. Well, my life has been part of a greater pattern.” He drank another swallow of the coffee. “What do you think? Am I insane?”
She shook her head. “It sounds too special for that.”
“Special?”
“I mean specific.”
He gave a little startled laugh. No one in all these weeks had said anything like that to him.
She crushed out the cigarette.
“Have you thought about that house often, in the past few years?”
“Almost never,” he said. “I never forgot it, but I never thought about it much either. Oh, now and then, I suppose whenever I thought about the Garden District, I’d think about it. You could say it was a haunting place.”
“But the obsession didn’t begin until the visions.”
“Definitely,” he said. “There are other memories of home, but the memory of the house is the most intense.”
“Yet when you think of the visions, you don’t remember speaking of the house … ”
“Nothing so clear as that. Although … ” There it was again, the feeling. But he feared the power of suggestion suddenly. It seemed all the misery of the last few months was coming back. Yet it felt good to be believed by her, to be listening to her. And he liked her easy air of command, the first characteristic of her he had noticed the night before.
She was looking at him, looking just as if she was listening still though he had ceased to speak. He thought about these strange vagrant powers, how utterly they confused things, rather than clarifying them.
“So what’s wrong with me?” he asked. “I mean as a doctor, as a brain doctor, what do you think? What should I do? Why do I keep seeing that house and that man? Why do I feel I ought to be there now?”
She sank into thought, silent, motionless, her gray eyes large and fixed on some point beyond the glass, her long, slender arms again folded. Then she said:
“Well, you should go back there, there’s no doubt of that. You aren’t going to rest easy till you do. Go look for the house. Who knows? Maybe it’s not there. Or you won’t have any special feeling when you see it. In any case, you should look. There may be some psychological explanation for this idée fixe, as they call it, but I don’t think so. I suspect you saw something all right, you went somewhere. We know many people do that, at least they claim they did when they come back. But you might be putting the wrong interpretation on it.”
“I don’t have much to go on,” he admitted. “That’s true.”
“Do you think they caused the accident?”
“God, I never really thought of that.”
“You didn’t?”
“I mean I thought, well, the accident happened, and they were there, and suddenly the opportunity was there. That would be awful, to think they caused it to happen. That would change things, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know. What bothers me is this. If they are powerful, whatever they are, if they could tell you something important with regard to a purpose, if they could keep you alive out there when you should have died, if they could work a rescue into it, well, then why couldn’t they have caused the accident, and why couldn’t they be causing your memory loss now?”
He was speechless.
“You really never thought of that?”
“It’s an awful thought,” he whispered. She started to speak again, but he asked her with a little polite gesture to wait. He was trying to find the words for what he wanted to say. “My concept of them is different,” be said. “I’ve trusted that they exist in another realm; and that means spiritually as well as physically. That they are … ”
“Higher beings?”
“Yes. And that they could only come to me, know of me, care about me, when I was close to them, between life and death. It was mystical, that’s what I’m trying to say. But I wish I could find another word for it. It was a communication that happened only because I was physically dead.”
She waited.
“What I mean is, they’re another species of being. They couldn’t make a man fall off a rock and drown in the sea. Because if they could do such things in the material world, well, why on earth would they need me?”
“I see your point,” she said. “Nevertheless … ”
“What?”
“You’re assuming they’re higher beings. You speak of them as if they’re good. You’re assuming that you ought to do what they want of you.”
Again, he was speechless.
“Look, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said.
“No, I think you do,” he answered. “And you’re right. I have assumed all that. But Rowan, you see, it’s a matter of impression. I awoke with the impression that they were good, that I’d come back with the confirmation of their goodness, and that the purpose was something I’d agreed to do. And I haven’t questioned those assumptions. And what you’re saying is, maybe I should.”
“I could be wrong. And maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But you know what I’ve been telling you about surgeons. We go in there swinging, and not with a fist, but with a knife.”
He laughed. “You don’t know how much it means to me just to talk about it, just to think about it out loud.” But then he stopped smiling. Because it was very disturbing to be talking about it like this, and she knew that.
“And there’s another thing,” she said.
“Which is?”
“Every time you talk about the power in your hands, you say it’s not important. You say the visions are what’s important. But why aren’t they connected? Why don’t you believe that the people in the visions gave you the power in your hands?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve thought of that. My friends have even suggested that. But it doesn’t feel right. It feels like the power is a distraction. I mean people around me here want me to use the power, and if I were to start doing that, I wouldn’t go back.”
“I see. And when you see this house, you’ll touch it with your hands?”
He thought for a long moment. He had to admit he had not imagined such a thing. He had imagined a more immediate and wonderful clarification of things. “Yeah, I guess I will. I’ll touch the gate if I can. I’ll go up the steps and I’ll touch the door.”
Why did that frighten him? Seeing the house meant something wonderful, but touching things … He shook his head, and folded his arms as he sat back in the chair. Touch the gate. Touch the door. Of course they might have given him the power, but why did he think that they hadn’t? Especially if it was all of a piece …
She was quiet, obviously puzzled, maybe even worried. He watched her for a long moment, thinking how much he hated to leave.
“Don’t go so soon, Michael,” she said suddenly.
“Rowan, let me ask you something,” he said. “This paper you signed, this pledge never to go to New Orleans. Do you believe in that sort of thing, I mean, the validity of this promise to Ellie, to a person who’s dead?”