The Descent (6 page)

“You’re wrong, Terry,” I said, trying to calm her, feeling as though I’d been pushed into a fight I didn’t want. “I’m not trying to come between you and Adair. You’ll see: once I’m gone it will go back to the way it was, and you two will have Adair to yourselves.”

She tossed back her hair, defiant. “Oh no, it won’t. Everything’s changed. Can’t you feel it? The minute you walked into the house it’s like something came between us, me and Robin and Adair. And it’s because he’s still in love with you—but you don’t need me to tell you that. You know it already.” Her face was flushed; her anger rose up like a storm inside her, fighting to get out. She looked at me sharply one more time, hatred in her flashing eyes, before bolting from the room.

It took a few minutes for me to calm down after Terry left. The house fell silent again. I sat at the table listening for noises from the floor above, straining for some sign that Adair had risen. I waited patiently until, sip by sip, I’d emptied my cup. Still, there was no indication that he was about to come downstairs. Restless, I decided I might as well go exploring.

To say the house was peculiar would be an understatement. It seemed to have once been a fort before it was converted into a residence. The house was deceptive; like a handkerchief tucked up a magician’s sleeve, you didn’t know what might be hidden inside. From the outside it looked small, but inside was another matter. As I meandered down long, lonely hallways and went up and down winding staircases, the house seemed to
unfold continuously before me as though it sprang to life from an M. C. Escher design. As best I could tell, the house’s four wings made a perfect square, with a courtyard at its center.

On the first lap, I managed to lose my way somehow, and though surprised, I was amused by my inattention. However, it stopped being funny when, on the second lap, I still hadn’t found my starting point. By the third lap, I was near panic, thinking I might never find my way through this strange, telescoping maze. That is, I
think
I made several laps of the building, but I couldn’t be sure because I never seemed to take the same hall twice. Nor could I reliably say how many floors there were, or if these were floors in the conventional sense, as some staircases were only a half flight in length before stopping abruptly and leading to yet another hallway.

I noticed something else strange about the house, too: there were no maids, no housekeeper. There was no sign that there was anyone in the house except Adair and the two women, and yet
someone
had to be taking care of the place. A house this size undoubtedly needed a number of servants; Terry and Robin hardly seemed able to handle the job, and in any case the two women didn’t seem inclined toward housekeeping, aside from the kitchen, that is. From what I’d seen the night before, they seemed quite at home there, concocting splendid meals.

I don’t know how long I’d been lost in the house and was really starting to break into a panic when I finally stumbled on a set of stairs that brought me back to my starting point. I emerged in the entry hall just as Adair was descending the main staircase. Tousle-haired, he was pulling a shirt over his chest, and the sight of his bare skin reminded me of when he used to parade around the mansion in Boston in a state of undress,
a silk banyan doing a poor job of hiding his nakedness, looking for all the world like an indolent pasha traipsing from one concubine to the next.

I must’ve looked a bit wild-eyed after being lost, because on seeing me he said, “You haven’t been exploring on your own, have you, Lanore? You really shouldn’t do that. The house has been renovated so many times and built onto over the years that there’s no longer any rhyme or reason to the layout. It’s easy to lose your way, and I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I were to say there’s a good chance we’d never find you.”

If I hadn’t just spent the better part of an hour or so lost in that maze of staircases and long, empty halls, I would’ve thought he was making it up in an effort to keep me from finding something he didn’t want me to see. Now, of course, I knew he was sincere. He led me to a cozy room past the kitchen that appeared to be his study. The far wall had a big window that looked out on a stand of pine trees, the only shady spot on the island. Two walls were dominated by shelves, each shelf full of old, leather-bound books. I glanced over the spines, wondering if these were Adair’s or had belonged to the previous owner of the island. I realized with a blush that, subconsciously, I’d been looking for titles that had something to do with alchemy or magic, signs of his past life, but there were none that I could tell. Nor was there any evidence that he was dabbling in magic again: no bottles of mysterious liquids, no glass jars of seeds or roots, or unidentifiable animal parts as I’d seen in the hidden room in the mansion in Boston all those years ago. The room was reassuringly normal.

“The two books you left with me,” I said, referring to the ancient tomes filled with his alchemical secrets that he had
given to me on the day of my departure, a token of his intent to forego magic. “I brought them with me. They’re up in my room.”

Adair wrinkled his brow. “I gave them to you. You didn’t need to return them.”

“I don’t feel right keeping them. Besides, it doesn’t matter where I put them or what I do with them, they look out of place. They’re meant to be with you, I think.” I pulled down a book, flipped the pages until I got to text. I didn’t know the language, but from the way the lines broke, I could tell it was poetry.

He crouched in front of the hearth to build a fire. “Did you sleep well last night?” he asked over his shoulder.

“I slept fine.”

“I am glad to hear that. Most people don’t when they first come here. They complain of bad dreams. The girls did.” He nodded in the direction of the kitchen. “The locals have all kinds of reasons why this is. Some people say the bad dreams are caused by vapors given off by the rocks here, that the island has these hallucinogenic properties because it is made of an unusual combination of minerals. Others say it has to do with the precise longitude and latitude being in some strange magnetic field. Still others say it’s because of its ominous past.”

“Did you have bad dreams when you arrived?” I asked, even though I couldn’t imagine he’d say that he did. I didn’t think it would be possible for Adair to have nightmares any more than I thought he could be frightened. To me, he was so intimidating that it seemed impossible for him to have those sorts of weaknesses.

He drew sheets of old, brittle newspaper from a wooden
box next to the fireplace and crumpled them for kindling. “It’s not something I like to talk about, and not something I would discuss with anyone else, but I will tell you, Lanore, since you ask. When I first came here, what I experienced was worse than bad dreams. I couldn’t close my eyes and not feel something of the terror I felt in my tomb in the house in Boston. It’s hard to explain, but it was as though whatever it was that had me in its grip there had followed me here. It felt as though the space around me would open up and try to swallow me whole.” There was an edge to his voice and I worried that I was getting into dangerous territory, since I was the one who had put him in that tomb. “It would come and go, and lasted for a few months, but eventually it went away. Maybe it was magnetic fields or vapors, and I got used to whatever was causing it.”

I went over to the window. The horned goat had appeared out of nowhere and was staring thoughtfully at the house, as though he was considering whether he had business inside. There was something surreal and hypnotic about the goats, especially the horned one, who seemed particularly devilish, and whenever they were in view I found that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them. “How did you find out about this place, anyway?” I asked Adair while still looking out the window at the goat, waiting to see what he would do. “I don’t think you could’ve picked a more obscure location if you tried.”

“It is a bit infamous,” he answered as he stacked wood on the grate. “Supposedly, the Romans sent a theurgist here in exile. He had been quite notorious, apparently, upsetting everyone with his heresy. They’d banished him to this rock without food or water, and expected him to die quickly, but legend has it that he lived on for centuries.”

So Adair wasn’t the first long-lived magician on the island. Perhaps it held a special allure for them. “Pretty nifty trick,” I said, finally breaking away from staring at the goat to watch Adair build his fire. “I wonder how he managed that.”

“With the protection of a powerful sorceress, or so the story goes.” Adair smirked at me over his shoulder. “The last person to live here had been a disciple of Aleister Crowley’s, the great English sorcerer. He had been with Crowley at his temple in Cefalù. The man came to live here after the Sicilian authorities shut down the temple and threw Crowley out of the country. The furniture, the books you see here—all in Italian and mostly having to do with magic and the occult—are his. When I bought the house, it had been untouched for fifty years.”

“The house has a very magical history,” I murmured as my stomach tightened in reflex.

“So it would seem.” Adair struck a wooden match and held it to the kindling.

No wonder he wasn’t in a hurry to get his books back from me. “So that’s why you came here: to do more research?”

He took one of the chairs by the fireplace. “That wasn’t my intention. I wanted to get away from everything, and this little island seemed exactly what I was looking for. It wasn’t until I’d decided to move here that I found out about its past. But I suppose there’s something about this place that drew me, just as it drew Crowley’s disciple.”

“So you’ve moved on from alchemy? Now you believe in magic?”

He gave me a tiny frown. “They’re both parts of occult philosophy. ‘Magic’ is just a word. I believe there are things that we don’t have the means to explain—yet.” He patted the chair
on the other side of the hearth. “But enough about that. You didn’t come all this way to talk about magic. Why don’t we continue the conversation we started last night?”

I slipped into the chair, my heart pounding. I could put it off no longer: the time had come for me to tell Adair about the nightmares. I assumed that he would be none too pleased, because the dreams involved his rival, Jonathan. Adair wouldn’t care if Jonathan was being tormented in the depths of hell—he might even get a measure of satisfaction from it—and I hadn’t yet thought of a way to make him care enough about Jonathan’s fate to help me.

“I need your help,” I said timidly. That made his face light up; my request had made him happy. He wanted to be of service to me. Perhaps he thought I’d come to ask for money or some other little thing that he could easily grant. It wasn’t going to be that simple. I took a deep breath, and began to tell him about the dreams.

FOUR

A
dair did nothing as I spoke. He kept a neutral expression fixed on his face as he listened, sitting with one leg crossed over the other, his hands clasped and index fingers steepled. Occasionally, he tapped his index fingers together or bounced his right foot up and down. His unresponsiveness made me nervous, and the possible reasons raced in the back of my mind: he must be disappointed to learn that I’d come because of Jonathan, not for him. Or maybe he thought I was foolish to presume the dreams had any meaning at all. I worried, too, that after giving him the reason for turning up unannounced on his doorstep, my audience with him would be over. Or worse, that the truth might reawaken the sleeping dragon that was his fierce temper, and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

But he didn’t appear to be angry. When I’d finished telling
him about the nightmares, my voice tapering off to embarrassed, self-conscious silence, he said, “Why, Lanore, I’m surprised that you would let something like this bother you! You said so yourself: these are dreams, nothing more than that.”

“I’m not so sure,” I replied.

“Of course they are. And you know as well as I do that you’re having these nightmares because something is bothering you. Perhaps there is something on your conscience? Something you feel guilty about?”