Zenobie (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

“Some of them are.” Galadriel pulled herself together with the speed of long practice, her face once more a non-committal mask. “Brightsky locks hers – she did even before the blood showed up all over her stuff – and so does Lumen and my dad. But Dr. Conyer has the keys to everything and there’s spares all over the house.”

  “And where have the footsteps been heard?” Antryg stepped into the room, ran his hands testingly around the door-frame, an inch or so from the wood, and then along the walls.

  “Pretty much in every one of these rooms. But the whole house creaks,” the girl added. “I’ve never heard anything in my room.”

  “Fascinating.” Antryg stepped out onto the gallery again, licked his fingerips and pressed them against the wall, then leaned his ear close to the spot, frowning as if listening to some sound within the wood. “Fascinating.” He sat down cross-legged on the gallery planks, pulled a deck of playing-cards from his pocket, and laid out one of the innumerable patterns that Joanna recognized from his Tarot readings, the Simple Ellipse. Looking down over his shoulder, Joanna could see no pattern in the hearts, clubs, diamonds…

  Would a Tarot deck tell him something different?

  He scooped them up again and stood. “Let’s have a look at the tower.”

  “Tell me about the tower.”

  “Nothing about the tower,” retorted Galadriel shortly. “It’s just a bare room.” Tension was palpable in her voice. They passed through the kitchen and into the house’s big central hall, climbed the stair to the gallery that ran around three sides of the hall at the second floor level. “That’s where the blood was.” The girl pointed to the faint, brownish stain on the stretch of plaster that separated his door from the narrow one that led to the tower stairway. “It said, ROWENA. That was the wife. The one Zénobie is supposed to have killed.”

  Antryg pressed his outspread hands, then his forehead, against the wall, and said, “Fascinating,” again.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Joanna softly, as Antryg sat down on the floor again and produced his cards.

  “Something I haven’t found yet.” He bent the deck between his fingers and scattered a reading of 52-Pickup all over the new beige wall-to-wall of the hall.

  Derisively, Galadriel watched him crawl from card to card on his hands and knees. Who IS this guy and what are you doing with him?

  “Duh. You think everybody in this stupid house doesn’t know their Teacher is sneaking Little Miss Brightsky up to his room every night? They’re all, Oh, it’s a ghost, it’s a ghost, and nobody’s about to say that it’s Lumen—” She nodded to the door that lay beyond the tower stair, “—trying to spook Brightsky, who’s about a smart as a pencil-eraser, into leaving. The only reason Lumen hasn’t started divorce proceedings against The Teacher is because he finally got my dad’s brother – who’s dad’s agent – to crack into the trust account where all mom’s divorce-money gets put for me, and buy this place. My dad’s an idiot,” she added. “But Lumen’s waiting to see if this place is going to pick up in value or not, before she makes her move. So, do you see disaster in the cards, Mr. Windrose?” she asked, the good manners that had probably been trounced into her by an expensive private school – Joanna was willing to bet – coming unexpectedly to the fore, despite the kidding sarcasm of her tone.

  “Well, in fact, I do.” Antryg sat up, gathering the cards into his hands again. “But it’s difficult to tell whether it’s in the future or the past. And please, my dear, call me Antryg… This is the door to the tower?” He opened it – narrower than the doors to the bedrooms on either side of it – and revealed a rather gray and ill-lit ascending stair.

  “You go.” Galadriel tried to look casual about it. “I’ll wait down here for you. The place creeps me out.”

  *

  “I’m not surprised it gives her the creeps,” said Lindy Moonwillow after lunch, as Joanna helped her carry to the kitchen the groceries that Chad had brought from town. Rain had started while she and Antryg were up in the tower, accompanied by sullen flashes of lightning in the northeast. It had been considered adviseable to make a grocery-run, in case the road flooded later.

  “She didn’t mention it, I suppose? One of the first indications we had that all was not well in the house was Galadriel… I suppose she must have sleepwalked. I gather it isn’t an uncommon symptom, when there’s family stress. Her mother’s father – Larry Pell, you know – made a horrible stink about her father donating the money to the Institute to buy Zénobie—”

  “Larry Pell?” Joanna stared at her in surprise. She’d heard Ben Hallard had married a wealthy groupie – wealthy enough for their child to merit a substantial trust-fund out of the divorce, evidently – but not that wealthy. Not international banking, natural-gas drilling, owns-four-resorts-and-a-major-league-baseball-team wealthy…

  “Oh, yes.” Lindy started shelving boxes of oatmeal, cartons of milk, eggs, egg-whites and organic yogurt, crates of produce and extra bags of birdseed for Lumen’s canaries (I guess Bayou Chien Mort can’t be THAT tiny a burg, if they’ve got a PetCo and a health food store) into the sizeable pantry and the two stainless-steel refridgerators that graced the kitchen. “Not that she ever sees him. Nor her mother, I’m afraid,” added Lindy, with genuine sadness, shaking her head. “Not for years, by the sound of it. I gather there was a horrendous lawsuit over custody… Would you like to help me with the baking this afternoon, sweetheart? They’re saying now that it’s going to stay raining— I think she regards it as a point of pride,” she added, with one of the flashes of perspicacity that even at her ditziest, had given Joanna a regard and respect for her mother’s friend, “not to admit that any of this troubles her.”

  Not only rain, reflected Joanna, with a glance through the windows out into the long, narrow garden between the wings of the house, but wind, whining eerily around the eaves of the house and hurling the rain intermittently against the windows of the big dining-room on the south side of the hall. Galadriel was right: as the wind increased, the whole house creaked as it swayed, very slightly, on its high foundation, and Joanna could well imagine the effect if one were sitting up late at night…

  “She didn’t say anything about sleepwalking.”

  Lindy nodded. “Drat it,” she added, as display of the micro-wave and the coffee-maker cut out, then returned, blinking 00:00 with an annoying beep. “I hope we’re not going to lose the power, after we’ve just bought all those eggs… Yes,” she went on, “she sleepwalked up to the tower. We found her up there a week ago Thursday morning. She’s just lucky the windows were shut, or goodness knows what might have happened.”

  *

  Joanna thought about the tower that evening, as the members of the Institute foregathered in the dining-room to watch Antryg lay out his Tarot cards. In keeping with the up-beat flavor of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness, the public areas of the house were illuminated with sufficient brightness to perform brain-surgery, and Dr. Conyer sat in his wing-chair, reading the Upanishads, with the benign air of Buddha listening to small children playing on the beach: Go about your foolish make-believe if it will reassure you, my little ones. But *I* know that this poor benighted spirit will eventually yield to the positive glow of cosmic affirmations.

  Brightsky, Joanna observed, had taken the chair nearest his and was reading Lal Siva Speaks, but her glance kept flickering toward the table, and Joanna had the impression that had Dr. Conyer’s soon-to-be-ex-wife not been part of the dining-table group, she – Brightsky – would have joined them. But evidently the opportunity to impress The Teacher with her own serene detachment was not one to be passed up.

  “Can you communicate with the Dead with Tarot cards?” inquired the actress Naomi Bennett, a slender blonde with enormous eyes and prodigiously augmented breasts. “My spiritual advisor – the one before Dr. Conyer, I mean – could diagnose fluctuations in my bio-field with them, and prescribe the appropriate healing herbs.”

  “Could she?” Antryg looked up, with his usual air of fas
cinated delight.

  “I keep telling Joanna,” said Starshine, with a loving smile at her daughter, “that if she’d take just one course of electronic bio-field enhancement, it would so much improve her capacity to connect with people. It certainly did for me.”

  “Oh!” cried Crystal, wiping henna-paste from her fingers, “I took that!”

  “And she could do the same thing for my car,” continued Naomi. “Tell when it was going to need repair, that is.”

  “My spiritual advisor,” put in Mrs. Durham, lowering the Wall Street Journal, “could cure me when I’d suffer attacks of negative vibrations, just by a telephone call.”

  “Is that the sort of thing they teach you in wizard school?” Starshine asked.

  “Well, most of the time it’s just memorizing lists.” He laid out a spread of cards, studied the curiously disturbing images there, then gathered them up as quickly as he’d picked up the playing cards on the gallery, and laid out another spread. He’d been doing this since dinner-time, reminding Joanna of the nights when she herself would be checking the diagnostics on a computer program that wasn’t performing correctly: open this program, open that program, hunt for an anomaly or a missing code…. “Wizard school can actually be extraordinarily dull.”

  Ben Hallard, softly noodling tunes on his acoustic guitar at the far end of the table, glanced up and grinned.

  “Is that the tower?” Crystal leaned across the table, the lemon and eucalyptus smell of the drying henna-paste (she’d been doing her own feet) mingled with the warm scent of Lindy’s latest batch of cookies. She pointed to a card in the latest spread. “That’s the third time that’s turned up in the past hour.”

  From associating with Antryg, Joanna knew that the Tower itself was a card you didn’t want to see in your spread. Was it here, she wondered, only because of the murders in the tower over a century ago? Or was it a warning – as it was in most spreads – of oncoming disaster?

  In the dreary rain-light that morning, the tower room had seemed indescribably sinister, the more so because it was exactly as Joanna had seen it in her dream. Tall, narrow windows on each wall of the twelve-by-twelve chamber had looked down on the wet landscape of monotonous dark green broken with silver: the bayou, the marsh into which the old sugar-fields had devolved, woodland ponds and sinks. A thousand glimmering puddles among the half-built guest-houses where the contractors’ men had moved to and fro.

  She had recognized the trap-door – literally a door set in the floor, opening upward – that covered the stairway down, beside which the woman had stood in her dream. Could have marked with chalk the place where, in her dream, the bodies of the woman and the girl had lain. When she’d told Antryg this he’d nodded – unsurprised – and had sat down in the center of the room and dealt out all the cards in his pack – which he’d gotten from Delta Airlines the previous day – in a circle around himself. “What do they tell you?” Joanna had asked, and he’d replied,

  “Not a thing.”

  Now Naomi said, “Could we maybe try my ouija board?” She carefully pronounced it “wee-jah” – to make it sound more scientific, Joanna guessed – rather than “weejee,” which was how Hasbro’s commercials said it on TV. “Crystal and I tried it the night after we heard the whispering in our room—”

  “Could you understand what it was saying?” asked Joanna, and Naomi shook her head.

  “You wouldn’t have been able to,” pointed out Mrs. Durham reasonably. “She was probably whispering in French.”

  “But we both heard it. I was waked up by it, and woke up Crystal—”

  The red-haired artist nodded her confirmation. “It was sort of hoarse and angry—”

  “Was it a man’s voice or a woman’s?” inquired the old lady. “Do you think we’ll be able to speak with her ourselves?”

  “It depends,” remarked Antryg, “on whether anyone here speaks French—”

  The lights flickered. In the absolute silence that followed, a soft knocking could be heard, echoing in the dark of the front hall.

  That was NOT – Joanna felt cold with shock – the creaking of the house in the wind.

  Her hand closed around Antryg’s.

  The broken chapel of the Sykerst village of Far Wilden came to her. The soft, hollow tapping of the dead thing that dwelled there in darkness.

  But that had been in Antryg’s universe, the universe of magic and shadow.

  This was here, the United States, 1988—

  Brightsky whispered, “Oh, my God—” and clutched at Dr. Conyer’s arm as he rose from his chair. She looked green with shock and horror.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” The Teacher disengaged her hand and started, very calmly, toward the door that led out into the central hall of the house.

  Lumen said, “Don’t be silly, Norman,” and Ben set his guitar aside. Both he and Cherí got to their feet to flank him.

  The lights went out. For a moment there was no sound but the soft cry of the wind, and the constant, furtive rustle of the trees around the house. Then softly, irregularly, the tapping started again, and any possible thought that it could be a branch, or a loose board, or something moving with the swift river of air pouring over the old plantation dissolved from Joanna’s mind.

  The knocking had the rhythm, the decisiveness, of human action.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Dr. Conyer repeated, speaking now not to his disciples in the room, but out into the dark of the hall. He raised his voice slightly, his light tenor easily filling the hollow blackness that rose up two floors through the house’s heart. “Zénobie, we are here with good will. We mean neither you nor any of those who dwell here—”

  His words were drowned by sudden crashing, hollow and thunderous; Chad yelped with shock and one of the girls screamed, “Fuck!” Joanna, who had been following the progress of the storm-front on the radio all afternoon and had been expecting a power-failure, dug in her pocket for a flashlight. Whatever was out there, it couldn’t be worse than the things that had flitted and scrambled through the blackness of the vault below the Citadel of Wizards—

  She hoped to hell it couldn’t, anyway.

  She flicked the light on, flashed it around through the door into the hall. The noise had been loud enough that she expected to see dents in the plaster, splinters hammered out of the doors. But there was nothing. In the terrible silence after the hammering everything looked queer and stiff by the pale glimmer of the flashlight, as if there were something waiting. Behind her in the dining-room, Cherí backed soundlessly to the door that communicated with the bathroom on that side of the house, and so through it to Brightsky’s bedroom beyond. She took the key from the inside of the door and locked it from the dining-room side.

  Like that’s going to stop a ghost…

  Antryg had joined the little group in the doorway, his head cocked, listening. Dr. Conyer started to call out into the room again, “Zénobie—” and the wizard held up his hand for silence. Far off – In the library? In the parlor? – the tapping sounded once more.

  “It doesn’t sound like there’s any pattern to it,” murmured Antryg after a few moments, and Joanna shook her head. “Stay here—” He had advanced a step into the house’s central hall, but gestured Joanna to remain behind when she would have followed him. “And stay together.” And he moved off soft-footed across the hallway, toward the double door of the parlor beyond.

  “Galadriel,” whispered Ben. “She’s in her room—”

  “Does she have enough sense to say there?” Joanna spoke over her shoulder, still watching the tall figure open the parlor door, slip through. The knocking paused, resumed…

  “She has candles,” provided Lindy. “And I honestly don’t think she thinks enough of Zénobie to go chasing around after knocking in the night.”

  “It can’t hurt her,” said Conyer firmly.

  But can it induce her to hurt herself?

  The knocking paused again, and against the black windows spa
tters of rain fell. The tropical storm was moving southeast toward Lafourche Parish, the radio had said earlier in the day – Just what we need. No lights and a hostile ghost wandering around the place…

  “How exciting!” whispered Mrs. Durham, obviously completely thrilled. “Do you think Mr. Windrose needs help? I—”

  “I think we need to follow his instructions exactly.” Joanna knelt, and on the edge of the oak floor between the dining-room door and the oriental carpet that covered the main hall, tapped with the back of her flashlight, three quick raps.

  Long silence. Then the tapping resumed. No pattern – as if whatever made it, held no regard for those who listened in the darkness to the sounds of her anger.

  *I* sure as hell wouldn’t want to be sitting in my room alone – candles or no candles – listening to that.

  But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to step outside on the dark gallery either, or cross through the blackness of the unfinished bathroom and the silent library, the black kitchen and the echoing hall, to get to the dining-room…

  The lights came up again. Suddenly, as if the breaker-switch had been thrown…

  Everyone in the dining-room made a surge toward the door into the hall and Joanna wondered if she should – or could – stop them. But a moment later Antryg emerged from the parlor doorway, three or four lustres from one of the parlor lamps in one hand and shoving his thaumatrope back into his pocket with the other.

  “Was that you who tapped three times, my dear?” He looked down at Joanna, who nodded. “It didn’t really sound like her. In fact—”

  The door at the back of the hall opened. Ben stood framed in it, his hair and the shoulders of his t-shirt flecked with rain: “Galley’s gone from her room.”

  The candles in her room hadn’t been lit, and the light had been switched off. Galadriel’s shoes stood neatly in the little rank of footwear at the bottom of the armoire, and her glasses lay, folded neatly, beside the lamp. Lindy said at once, “She’s sleepwalking—”