The Horses of the Night (30 page)

“You think you killed them, don't you?”

“I want to know the truth.”

“You don't really, Mr. Fields.”

I did not like the way the wall shivered in my vision. I did not like the way the room was too quiet.

The story was a longer one than I had thought, reaching into my childhood, my career, my love for Nona, my love of the dangerous surf. Valfort listened with a look in his eyes of genuine caring, and I found it easy to tell him all that I could.

When I was finished, Valfort took the glasses from his eyes and ran a hand over his brow, like a man who has studied too late into the night. He replaced his glasses. His eyes, when they found me again, were kind, but he said something that stung me. “Mr. Fields, you have been in tremendous danger, every moment since your first encounter in the Pacific.”

“I am afraid—even here.”

“Who—or what—do you suppose it was calling to you in the surf that night? Who took your hand?”

I did not like the sound of his voice. “What do you want me to say?”

“You're angry.”

I could not deny it. But I was confused more than angry. It was Valfort who seemed to have all the answers. I had memories, delusions.

“You have made,” he said, “one mistake—blunder is how I might describe it—after another.”

I could not respond.

“And you come into my home expecting me to help you!” he said, in a virtual whisper.

“You must help me,” I said, bending forward. “What's happening to me?”

His manner changed, once again, to that of compassion. But I could see anguish in his eyes. He reached into a notebook and withdrew a slip of paper. “Tell me what you see here,” he said with a smile.

I expected something like a Rorschach inkblot. What I saw was a photograph of a statue. The statue was an unnaturalistic depiction of a huge man—judging from the human figures around it. This giant was in a trance of some kind. “It's a Buddha.”

“Very good. Tell me, Mr. Fields, what this is.” He gave me a second photograph.

“I don't want to do this,” I said. I could not recognize my own voice.

This new picture was a crude, medieval work, utterly unrealistic, but with the charm of that sort of art. It was an icon. A mother held a grotesquely misproportioned infant to her cheek, looking out at the viewer with sad eyes. This was one of those little sheets you can pick up at St. Germain-des-Prés, or a hundred other French churches.
Prions chaque jour pour la paix du monde
read the inscription.

“What is it?” asked Valfort.

There was a vague flickering in my vision. A migraine was beginning.

Was I hesitating too long? “I don't recognize the artist. The subject is the Virgin and the infant Christ.”

He had more, pictures he withdrew from a large brown envelope. Photographs. Sacred images. He had Tibetan mandalas, crucified Christs, Romanesque saints, a handful of such samples he was prepared to hand to me, one by one, for my examination. As he handed them to me I felt an accumulation of nausea. My hands were cold.

When we were finished he said, “How do you feel about these images?”

I tried to adopt the tone with which I would decline a certain variety of mustard, or an opportunity to watch television. “I don't like them.”

“If you were going to make a work of art depicting Satan, how would he look?”

“I don't know,” I said. But I stopped myself. “Like one of those. One of those sacred images.” Like a woman in white, I nearly said.

“Are these images sacred?” he asked.

“To some people,” I said.

“You want it both ways,” he said kindly. “You want to be rational, an unbeliever. And yet you believe you can form a pact with the unseen, harness it to your desires.”

“Tell me what's been happening to me,” I said. I was impatient, perspiring, chilled. We seemed to be involved in a form of intellectual fencing.

“If Satan came to you he would disguise himself as something beautiful, wouldn't he?” said Valfort.

“Perhaps. But I don't believe in Satan.”

“That must make it all the easier,” said Valfort. “For Satan.”

“Your views are antique,” I said.

He allowed himself a smile. “You judge me too harshly. These divinities may not exist apart from us, or they may. I have discovered that it makes little difference. The angel speaks. Mary is startled. The messenger foretells a birth. It matters to the scientist whether or not the divine messenger is real. But to the Virgin—it makes no difference. The message is true.”

“There is a soul,” I said, “even if there is no soul.”

“I remember Nona Lyle very well. I loved her.”

His words startled me.

“She was a gifted student. She had the ability to understand. To listen and to hear what someone was saying. She loved children. You don't like to talk about her condition, how near to death she is.” He observed my discomfort, and added, “You are partly responsible, if only in your own mind.”

“The doctors don't understand what's wrong with her.”

“I think that there are many secrets you have hidden from yourself, Mr. Fields. And that is one of them.”

I stretched out on the settee in Valfort's sitting room. He had been solicitous, gentle, giving me a glass of sparkling water.

“Are you ready to begin?” he said, from off in a distant part of the room. He closed shutters, drew curtains over the windows, and there was the sputter of a match, and the rattle of wooden matches in a box.

He lit a candle. The candlelight threw a hush into my mind. The single candle shivered as he walked, carrying it toward me.

“I need to know if I killed DeVere. And Blake. I need to know what really happened.”

He did not argue with me, or say a word to reassure me.

“It's already too late,” I said.

“It's true,” he said, “that it can become too late. The last, magical night draws toward dawn. The question is: How far away is dawn for you, Mr. Fields?”

I wanted to know the truth.

“Let nothing disturb you,” he said. His accent made the simple words elegant: “nothing” became “nussing,” a childish, charming word.

“Lie quietly,” he said in a low voice. “Look into the candle flame. Count backward with me.”

I shaped the numbers, forming them, picturing, at his suggestion, steps leading downward. We started with the number ten. And then downward, each number a step into darkness, as he had suggested. Or, at least it seemed that he suggested it.

It wasn't working. The hypnosis was a failure. I wanted to sit up.

And I did sit up. But then relaxed, letting my body fall back again. Because there were steps, and they did lead downward. And there was a flame with a sleeve of perfect blue that coated the wick, and protected what it consumed.

All the way to the truth.

47

I sat up, and blew out the candle.

No. It wasn't possible.

Something about the garden. About my mother. Something about—

I could remember it all. And just as quickly the memory eluded me. I found myself huddled against the wall. I would not think that way. I would never think that way.

The memories were gone. I wrapped a blanket around myself, and huddled there in the dark of Valfort's sitting room. His hand must have fumbled, groped, and found a light, because there was a rattle, a lamp went on, and I blinked.

Valfort was at a distant wall, his eyes on me, his arms crossed, his entire posture communicated one powerful emotion. He was outwardly steady. He was professional. But he was afraid.

“That's enough!” I said. My words erupted, my voice ragged.

The remains of the candle smoke drifted. There was a long silence. Valfort did not make a movement, waiting, I sensed, to see what I would do.

“Did you learn anything interesting?” I asked. Why did I ask this with something like a sneer?

“It's so difficult for a man like yourself, to see the truth after such a long time,” he said.

“What did I tell you?”

He did not answer.

“Tell me!”

“You would not believe me.”

I bunched the blanket into a wad and threw it on the floor, where it swooped and drifted, skimming the surface before it fell. “I want to know the truth.”

“You might say that Satan does not exist, and that none of the powers you have contacted are supernatural. That may be only a way of describing it, a manner of thinking. But it is clear to me, Mr. Fields: a career of marvels awaits you. You will be more famous, more important, more influential than DeVere ever dreamed of being. You wanted good fortune. Now you have it.”

What sadness, I realized, embellished each one of Valfort's words.

I asked, “What do you know about me now?”

“It would be wrong for me to tell you. You will have to discover the truth you have hidden from yourself.”

He must have read my eyes. “As soon as you surrendered possession of your soul, you ceased to love. Soon Nona Lyle will mean nothing to you. You will forget.”

“Impossible,” I said, my voice hoarse.

But I may do something to hurt her
.

“Perhaps Nona was injured simply so the Powers could trap you.”

“Using her as bait. So I would agree to sell my soul. But it didn't work. She wouldn't come back to life.”

“Do you know why Nona Lyle turned to the study of the mind?”

“She was influenced by her father. He was a physician in Oakland.”

“She had a history of psychological troubles as a young girl. She had a tendency toward a hysterical reaction which made her slip into a form of trance so deep it resembles a coma. My primary work with her was to cure her. I had reasonable success. I see the look of hope in your eyes. I must caution you. Don't be reassured. What has happened to her may be worse than anything purely physical. She may have collapsed beyond hope of any recovery, forced into a preconscious state by the shock of the beating.”

“I don't want any of this—I want to go back to my old life, the way things used to be.”

“That's impossible.”

“Even Faustus in the legend could have asked for forgiveness—”

“Faustus believed. Besides, what Faustus wanted was knowledge, and experience. He wanted to know the workings of the planets, and to make love with Helen of Troy. What you want is yourself.”

He was astounding, this wiry, keen-eyed man. “What should I do?”

“There is a secret in your family. Several secrets. That you will not allow yourself to acknowledge.”

“Did I kill DeVere?”

“You believe you did.”

I could not control myself. My feelings snapped. I picked up a chair and hurled it. It stuck the solid wall and bounced off. The chair spun on one leg, and then fell to one side and was still.

“You'll never beg to be forgiven for anything, Mr. Fields,” he said. “Look at you.”

I struck the mantelpiece so hard the timbers above us vibrated. “You will help me!”

Valfort was calm. “That's what you wanted. More life. So much life you can kill. Your ambition killed DeVere and Peterson, and your old friend Blake Howard. You are responsible for what happened to Nona Lyle.”

I turned to him, and my shadow fell over him, or perhaps it was the shadow inside me, rising up and covering him as a dust storm falls upon a sole figure on a plain. I would make him stop speaking such falsehoods. What did he know, this man who had tricked me into a trance, this stranger?

There was a whisper behind me, a step, the light sound of a presence. I spun, and the young woman was there, her eyes wide with terror.

I glanced at Valfort, feeling suddenly numb, speechless. “Why are you both so upset?” I said, in something like my old manner. I shook myself. I tried to laugh. “You must forgive me.”

French money crackled in my hand, new notes, fresh from the change window at the airport. I left a bunch of the colorful currency on the table, their leaves shifting slightly after I had tossed them down. “You must think me a terrible creature,” I said with an approximation of good humor. “The way I acted just now.”

As Valfort looked on, the young woman shrank back against the doorpost. “There's no need for this display of fear,” I said. I touched her cheek, and I knew.

I knew as surely as I could see the five fingers of my hand. I would trade my soul again in an instant for another taste of the power I had experienced just now, the sensation of strength, the knowledge that my name was, in truth, going to master the world.

The world. The scope of the future occurred to me, like the taste of salt air recalling the vast empty expanse of horizon. Valfort was a little man, a weak, small man, but he had insight, a mouse's glimpse at the truth. I would lift myself out of the characterless accomplishments of my life.

“What did you do, to make me feel so wonderful?” I asked Valfort, my voice husky with lust. A lust not for woman, but for air, light—for everything.

“I spoke to your lover,” he said.

I blinked.

“The woman in white, that demon resident in you.”

“Ancient superstitions,” I said. “Ancient and glorious.”

“And true.”

I laughed. “You do have a certain courage, Valfort. And for that I will spare you.”

Valfort stood on the doorway of the sitting room. “They chose you because you were noble, Mr. Fields. Because you were loving. Because you tried to live by an old standard of conduct—to do good. But They have won you.”

“This is the way you help me?” I laughed, feeling almost merry.

“I admire you, Mr. Fields. You had a quality that is so rare.”

“I thank you for your advice.”

“Nona's hospitalization is doubly tragic because she was on the verge of a major triumph. She got wealthy and powerful people to agree to come to a meeting here in Paris. It was to have been a major achievement for her, a chance to establish an international committee to help children. It was not going to be easy to get these people of ease and power to part with their money, but Nona would be able to do it. Now, her plans are nothing.”