The Rainy Season E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: The Ghosts Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 524

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

It's a gray, wet winter in southern California, and Phil Ainsworth is alone. The sudden death of his young wife has left him shaken, and he gets eerie sensations as he roams around the big, old house he inherited from his mother. He's sure he's seen people snooping around his property, by the old well that, in this wet weather, always seems ready to overflow. How much is real and how much is in his head? That's the question. A late-night phone call brings more bad news: Phil's sister has died, leaving her ten-year-old daughter Betsy an orphan and naming Phil as guardian. It seems like a bad time to bring a child into this unhappy house, but Phil had always promised he'd take care of Betsy - and now she's all the family he has left. What he can't know is that Betsy is a very special child. She has the ability to sense the powerful emotions of the past, to hear voices of the dead, and to see the uncanny powers that are closing in around this house... James P. Blaylock has set the standard for the contemporary ghost story. The Washington Post called him "a master." Dean Koontz has hailed his writing as "first rate." A brilliant blend of psychological insight and unearthly phenomena, The Rainy Season blurs the lines between the past and the present, the living and the dead, fantasy and reality. REVIEWS: "The author of Winter Tides continues to display an uncanny talent for low-key, off-kilter drama, infusing the modern world with a supernatural tint. Blaylock's evocative prose and studied pacing make him one of the most distinctive contributors to American magical realism." -- Library Journal "This may be Blaylock's weirdest yet: intriguing, dramatic, atmospheric." -- Kirkus Reviews  

Leseprobe

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Digging Leviathan

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Stone Giant

The Paper Grail

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Zeuglodon

The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

The Shadow on the Doorstep

NOVELLAS

The Ebb Tide

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

WITH TIM POWERS

On Pirates

The Devil in the Details

Copyright © 1999 by James P. BlaylockAll rights reserved.

Cover art by Dirk Berger. Cover design by John Berlyne.

Published as an ebook in North America by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD in 2012.

ISBN: 9781936535712

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Also by James P. Blaylock

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Placentia, California, 1884

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Peralta Hills, 1884

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Mission San Juan Capistrano, 1884

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Vieja Canyon, 1884

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Santiago Canyon, 1884

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Santiago Canyon, 1958

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Santiago Canyon, 1958

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Santiago Canyon, 1958

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Epilogue

About the Author

More ebooks from James P. Blaylock

For Viki, John, and Danny

and this time,for Justine Keller

and with special thanks to Tim Powers, Denny Meyer, and Matt Keefe

“Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.”

—Gerard Manley Hopkins“Spring and Fall”

1

COASTAL SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA is a semiarid land crosshatched with mountain chains, narrow valleys, and dry riverbeds. The upper reaches of its steeply sloped canyons are nearly impenetrable—its sunny broken rises blanketed with greasewood and sumac and mesquite, dense miserly plants that survive eight or ten rainless months each year. The shady slopes, turned away from the sun, are covered with oak and fern, and at higher elevations maple and big cone pine. On the flats and along streambeds grow sycamore and alder, their roots sunk deep into the loamy alluvial soil. In rare decades when one drought year follows another, stands of alder along dry creeks wither and die as groundwater falls away deeper and deeper into the earth.

But this parched landscape is largely a surface phenomenon, for beneath its plains and arroyos and rocky gullies lie vast aquifers of water-bearing rock. Unceasing and invisible cataracts flow beneath the dry beds of intermittent streams, and where strata of granite and basalt lie close to the surface, the water above is forced upward until it lies in quiet, leafy pools in the shaded canyons, even in the driest years. Elsewhere, almost as a counterpoint to these solitary pools, creek water tumbling down rock-strewn beds might vanish suddenly into the ground as if into a chasm, and within a few short yards, what had been a flowing stream over mossy stones and boulders is a desert of dry sand and rock, littered with broken limbs and fallen leaves, its scoured stones bleached white in the sun.

And then with winter rains the groundwater rises again, and dry springs bubble to life. In the wet years, once in a decade or two, long-vanished waterfalls abruptly reappear, coursing down sheer canyon walls and feeding creeks and streams that have grown overnight into deep torrents of rushing water. In the otherwise silent darkness of the canyons, one’s sleep is troubled by the water-muffled clatter of heavy boulders shifting and rolling in swollen streams. Unwary canyon residents awaken to find themselves hopelessly stranded: crossings washed out, footbridges undermined, narrow hillside roads swept utterly away, paths blocked by fallen trees.

And even on the plains below the mountains and in the hollows of grassy foothills, shallow, spring-fed pools arise in once-dry meadows, and water seeps into long-abandoned farmhouse wells like the revived ghosts of lost and despaired-of memories. …

2

PHIL AINSWORTH DEVELOPED photographs in the darkroom at the back of the house. It was late early spring, and outside in the darkness it was raining. He often worked at night, especially on nights when his sleep was troubled, and he had a premonition that this would be that kind of night. He could hear the occasional rising of the wind like a drawn-out sigh, and the sound of the rain rose and fell, beating insistently against the windows and then diminishing to a blurry rush. He found the rain comforting. There was an element of isolation in it that he liked, although it made photographic travel into the back country difficult and sometimes impossible, especially during winters such as this one, when the rains were more or less continual.

That was really the only problem with the rain—that it impeded travel on unpaved country roads. His roof didn’t leak, the property drained well, and even if the power went out and didn’t come back on for a month, he had enough firewood for heat and enough oil lamps to brighten any room in the house. He wasn’t a hermit, but he had found it increasingly easy to live alone, out here on the edge of things—a way to stay out of emotional debt, looking out at the world through a veil of rain. Living alone, his needs were so few that he was almost never interrupted. The world was less necessary to him, and the result was that he had become equally unnecessary, which suited him.

He looked around the darkroom, which was almost cozy in the amber glow of the safelight. The long stainless steel counter and sink, the rows of chemical bottles, the enlarger, the drying racks, and the rest of the equipment and cabinets that crowded the narrow room were sepia-toned in the perpetual semidarkness, where there was no difference between noon and midnight. He had built his own drying racks out of wood and screen, and right now those racks were layered with photos of Irvine Park, a nearby regional county park, which, in this rainy winter, was cut by the waters of Santiago Creek, the same creek that ran along the back of Phil’s property. As the storm fronts moved through coastal southern California, the cloudy skies over the park and the deep shadows of its wooded hillsides kept so constantly changing that the landscape seemed almost alive with darkness and light and the on and off haze of rain.

Yesterday he had spent a moodily lonesome day out there in the park, from dawn until sunset, wandering along the mesas and through the dense foliage of the arroyo, shooting black and white film, mostly of cloud formations and flowing creek water and the slow, ghostly dance of shadow beneath the oaks and sycamores and willow. He had planned on going back earlier today, but the renewed rain kept him home.

He picked up his mug from the top of the paper safe and drank cold coffee, thought about putting on a fresh pot, and immediately abandoned the idea. He realized he was worn out, but what he wanted was sleep, and not a second wind. It was usually time to pack it in when none of his work looked any good to him, and he had pretty clearly reached that point tonight. He looked at the last print that had come out of the chemicals—a vast sky with clouds and shafts of sunlight like the end of the world above an enormous heavy-limbed oak silhouetted against the gray horizon. It was starkly spectacular, but there was something about the tone of the photo that bothered him. …

The telephone rang, a startling intrusion on a night like this. He glanced at the clock. It was late enough so that the call was either a wrong number or bad news, so he let the answering machine in the kitchen pick it up, only half listening while he looked for a different filter to darken the image. A man’s voice spoke, and Phil stopped to listen, holding his breath, recalling the man’s name at the same moment that his mind took in the message: that Phil’s sister, Marianne, was dead of a stroke.

He pushed through the darkroom door, went out through the workroom and into the kitchen, grabbing the phone and switching off the recorder.

“Yeah,” Phil said.

“Mr. Ainsworth? George Benner. Sorry to be calling so late.”

“I’m a night owl,” Phil said, his heart hammering. The wind blew rain against the kitchen windows. He saw that water was pooled up on one of the sills, and he had the strangely foolish impulse to find a towel in order to wipe it off. Marianne was his twin sister, his only living relative aside from her daughter Betsy, who was ten. He sat down in the kitchen chair and leaned against the table to steady himself. “You said a stroke?”

“Yes. I apologize for being blunt, but I assumed it would be worse to be timid, under the circumstances. I knew you’d want to know as soon as possible.”

Phil nodded his head, realized what he was doing, and asked, “When?”

“This afternoon. I just heard, though. I didn’t think it could wait until morning.”

“Of course not,” Phil said, having to think hard in order to come up with the words. He felt empty-headed and slow. “Thanks for calling.”

“I felt I had to,” Benner said. “Especially in light of Marianne’s will. I don’t know how you feel about the will, but since it names you as Betsy’s guardian, I thought you’d want to fly out here as soon as possible.”

“Yeah,” Phil said. “In the morning.” He realized with a vague dread and guilt that the news of Marianne’s death didn’t surprise him. She had been taking antidepressants off and on for years. “This wasn’t…”

“Suicide?” Benner asked. There had been no hesitation, which was troubling.

“Yeah.”

“Apparently there’s no real indication of that. They’re calling it a simple stroke, which isn’t remarkable, given her medical history. Her condition might have been aggravated by medication, but there’s no reason to suppose it was suicide.”

Lightning flashed out in the night, illuminating the rain-streaked window glass, but it seemed like a long time before he heard a distant rumble of thunder. The assurance struck him as unconvincing. “Where was Betsy when it happened?” he asked.

“At a friend’s house, apparently.”

“Thank God.”

“A neighbor’s with her now. Hannah. Darwin … ?”

“I know her,” Phil said.

“Even so, the sooner you can get a flight out here, the better. It would be good for Betsy to be on something like solid ground again.”

A minute later, after Phil had hung up the phone, he stood for a time in the kitchen, watching the rain slant past the window, illuminated by the yellow bulb of the back porch lamp. His mind was agitated but empty. He was struck with the futile desire to tell someone else, to talk to someone, but he could think of no one, and it was too late at night anyway to start making phone calls. Abruptly he thought of his father, a man whom he had never even known. There was some chance that his father was alive somewhere in the world … but then there had always been that chance, and Phil had never pursued it, and neither had Marianne.

Had he seen Marianne’s death coming? The antidepressants she had taken in the years following her husband’s death hadn’t helped her much. Phil hadn’t been able to help much, either. Because Marianne lived in Austin and he lived in California, he had been comfortably far removed from his sister’s troubles, although there was no comfort in that now.

Just last year, when Marianne and Betsy had come out to California for a visit, and Phil had agreed to let Marianne put his name in the will, his sister had seemed optimistic for the first time in years: Betsy was playing the piano and pitching softball. Marianne had a new job. Things were looking up for them. Still, she had seemed distracted by the idea of planning for Betsy. She’d had a horror of Betsy’s living with strangers, of the government deciding Betsy’s fate, and Phil was happy enough to be named her potential guardian, although he hadn’t really thought it would matter anyway. It had seemed to him to be a formality, the kind of thing a single mother would do as a matter of course, and so he had agreed to it without thinking about it for more than fifteen seconds. Now, in an instant, everything had changed.

He opened the white pages, picked up the receiver, punched in the number of Southwest Airlines, and booked an early-morning flight into Austin. When he walked back into the darkroom it was only to turn out the light. He looked at the photo on the top rack again. It needed something human, he saw now, something to balance the dark enormity of the cloudy sky and the morbid age of the drooping oaks.

3

THE PRIEST STOOD in the shadow of the old water tower and garden shed, watching the house through the rain. Vines overhung the narrow wooden roof of the latticework shed, and the musty smell of sodden leaves and wet earth rose on the air around him. Inside the house, some fifty feet away across the lawn, a light shone from the second story. It was impossible that anyone within could see anything out in the darkness, and unless the priest was immensely mistaken about the man who owned the house, there was no reason to believe that he would suspect prowlers on a rainy night like this. The priest wondered why the man was so apparently restless: he had moved from room to room for the last hour, turning lights on and off, as if he were searching for some lost thing. I hope he finds it, the priest thought, turning his attention once again to the stone-walled well that he had come to observe.

Clouds hid the moon, although now and then the clouds parted and the moon shone briefly. Tonight the priest was a student of the rain. He had made a study of rainfall over the seasons, and he had a particular knowledge of subterranean water, of intermittent streams and hillside springs, of dry wells and dry riverbeds and of all the high water years since the century had turned. Over the long years he had come to love the rain, and like a greedy man, he could never get enough of it, although that attitude was starting to look shameful to him now, since southern California would drown itself wholesale if the rains kept on like this. Already hillsides were sliding, and the Santa Ana River had twice gone over its banks despite Prado dam upriver, something it hadn’t done in sixty years. There had been wild floods in the county in 1916 and ‘26 and ‘38, but the water that had poured over the banks of the Santa Ana River and Santiago Creek in those years had been the result of devastating, passing storms. The annual rainfall had not been particularly high. Then in 1940 there had been nearly thirty-three inches of fall and winter rain, the wettest season in southern California since 1884. This year might surpass it.

He watched the well through the curtain of rain off the shed roof, aware that his shoes and trousers were soaking wet. It was senseless to invite pneumonia, since he was probably too old to survive it, but he was compelled to stay here, to wait things out. There was something out of the ordinary in the atmosphere tonight, something in the music of the rain that recalled old memories, old dreams, something that kept him here waiting for the rising of the water in the well, which, in rare decades past, had occurred very nearly on the instant, like an Old Testament miracle.

And if he was right, if something were pending, then there were likely to be others besides himself haunting these old groves at night, keeping an eye on the weather, on the water rising in backyard rain gauges. He had waited long years for a night like this, perhaps for this very night. He closed his eyes now and pictured the rainwater sinking away through the sandy well bottom, allowing his mind to empty itself, to follow the water into the deep and quiet darkness to that deep place where all waters are one water, and where everything is still, and where it seemed to him that he could sense the drifting shadows of human memory pooling in lightless subterranean caverns. Time passed as he waited in that haunted darkness for someone to whisper his name, for a woman’s upturned face to rise out of those depths like a pale, moonlit mask. …

WHEN THE PRIEST came to himself, the house was dark. He was rain-soaked and cold. One more minute, he told himself, more than ever certain that some revelation was near: the ghosts of days gone by, past time welling up, an overflow of spirits long sunken in the earth. The clouds parted, and for a moment the moon illuminated the rain-washed grove in the distance and cast the shadows of the berry vines across the fence and yard. And in that moment he was startled to see that the well was full, the water black and clear. He found that he was holding his breath, and he let it out now. He crossed himself and stepped out from under the shelter, bent over the rock wall, and submerged his arm in the cold water, all the way up to his shoulder, just to make sure that the apparent depth wasn’t an illusion, a trick of the moon’s reflection.

And then he saw that something lay in the weeds on the ground near the edge of the well, something that glowed faintly against the mossy stones. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a glove, and slipped it over his hand. He parted the weeds and found the object—what appeared to be a tiny glass paperweight, unnaturally heavy for its size. He took out a penlight and switched it on, shining the beam of light into its center. There was something frozen inside the oval of moonlit glass: a painting of a face, barely human in appearance, distorted as if from some strong and unpleasant emotion.

As if by reflex movement, he tossed the thing out into the center of the well where it sank, glowing a faint and misty green that dwindled in the black depths until it passed out of sight, and then, feeling bone weary and shivering in the damp night, he trudged tiredly back up toward the road.

4

BETSY HAD FALLEN asleep twice and awakened again in the night, both times to the thought that the house didn’t sound right. She lay in bed listening to the muttering of voices in the living room—the television turned down low: laughter now, followed by applause, and then talking again. Her mother had generally gone to bed earlier than Betsy did, and it was Betsy who had gone into her mother’s bedroom to kiss her goodnight and to tuck her in. So it simply felt wrong that the television was on. Everything had been wrong today, but she hadn’t known how wrong until she had gotten home from softball and found her teacher, Miss Cobb, sitting in the living room along with Mrs. Darwin and a woman whom Betsy had never seen before.

It had been Mrs. Darwin who had told her about her mother. Miss Cobb had cried, and that had started Betsy crying until her throat hurt. The first time she had awakened after she had gone to bed, she had cried herself back to sleep, thinking about kissing her mother goodnight, about her mother tucking her in. She quit thinking about it now, and lay there listening to the television.

Abruptly it occurred to her that this was nearly her last night in this house in Austin, Texas, in this room and in this bed. Mrs. Darwin was sleeping over tonight and tomorrow night, but after that … Betsy’s mother had told her that her Untie Phil in California would be her guardian if anything ever happened. Mrs. Darwin had said that Betsy would simply move in with him. This was confusing, but tomorrow Uncle Phil was coming, and they would work it out. What it meant, either way, was that her room wasn’t hers anymore.

She got out of bed, took her Winnie the Pooh flashlight out of her bedside stand, and opened the door, slipping noiselessly into the dark hallway. She heard snoring now—Mrs. Darwin asleep on the couch. She thought about going in and turning off the television, but that might wake her up. She stood there for a moment watching the nearly dark living room: the shadowy piano with the jumble of music and wooden metronome on top, the vase with its peacock feathers, the plant stand with its fern. Her mother had bought the fern last week—a bird’s nest fern, she had said. It was a pretty shade of green, but it didn’t look like a fern and it didn’t look like a bird’s nest. Already it was turning brown and getting wilted-looking.

Betsy turned quietly and walked farther up the hall, past the open bathroom door to her mother’s bedroom. She pushed the door open and walked in, sitting down on the bed, listening to the night sounds of the dark house, smelling the wet air through the half-open window, the scent of rain mingling with the perfume smell of the bottles on the dresser. Her throat tightened, and she blinked hard, standing up and crossing to the dresser, opening the top drawer, where her mother kept her socks. She felt in the socks, pushing them aside and shining her flashlight in among them until she found a tin box with a little lid on a hinge. The box said Pear’s Soap on the lid, and there was a picture on it of an old-fashioned woman in a bonnet. She opened the box and took out the velvet bag inside, feeling the hard glass object inside through the soft cloth.

She held her breath now, listening again for the sound of Mrs. Darwin’s snoring. Hearing it, steady and louder than ever, she left the room carrying the bag and went back into her bedroom, shutting the door and flipping on the light. Immediately her eye was drawn to a ceramic angel on her windowsill, and she shook out the contents of the velvet bag onto the bedspread—a misshapen glass inkwell about two inches high, the glass cloudy, like glass that had been through a fire. She slipped the angel into the bag, turned the light out again, and went back down the hall and into her mother’s room, anxiously putting the bag back into the tin box and the box in the drawer. She rearranged the socks, sliding the drawer shut. The clock in the living room chimed, and at the sound of it she was suddenly full of an urgent fear, and she hurried back to the darkness of her own room, where the inkwell still lay on the unmade bed, catching a ray of moonlight through the partly open curtains.

5

PHIL LAY IN bed thinking, although his thoughts were disconnected. He felt the lonesomeness of the old house, which was somehow made more lonesome by Marianne’s death. Light from the stairwell lamp faintly illuminated the hall outside the open bedroom door, and the muslin window curtains caught a suffused light. In the slight draft they shifted like airy ghosts. He closed his eyes, but in his mind he could still see the shadowy lumber of furniture in the room and the pale moving curtains. He got out of bed finally, dressed, and started toward the stairs to the attic bedroom, which would be Betsy’s bedroom in a couple of days. It had only begun to settle into his mind that his solitary life was a thing of the past, and that he would suddenly have a child around the house. The idea of it was exotic. Softball and piano lessons? School—he’d have to get her into school. He remembered the asphalt playgrounds and tetherball poles and weedy baseball diamonds of his own childhood, suddenly part of his life again.

An idea came to him, and he returned to his bedroom and took a shallow cardboard carton off the closet shelf. He went out into the hallway again, climbed the stairs, and set the carton on the bed in the attic, switching on the bedside lamp. Next to the lamp sat a mason jar that had belonged to his mother, and he stood for a moment regarding it. Inside the jar lay several trinkets, like old-fashioned carnival prizes. The lid of the jar had been dipped in wax, although there was no liquid in it and nothing in the jar that would spoil. There was an old pocketknife inside with a handle that might have been carved out of antler, although it might as easily have been chipped out of petrified wood. There was a thimble, too, misshapen and decorated with a tiny smudged picture, and a hatpin with a lump of red glass knob on top like a piece of slag. There was a thumb-sized iron animal, perhaps a horse, and a cut crystal shot glass so small that it couldn’t have held more than half an ounce of liquid. He wondered for a moment if he should put the jar away, but it was the sort of thing that Betsy would like, so he set it now on a shelf near the window before switching off the light again in order to get a view of the moonlit night. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the clouds were ragged and windblown.

From the window there was a view of the grove of avocado trees behind the house and of the creek and arroyo beyond that. A path skirted the lower edge of Santiago Creek, along the back edge of the grove. …

He was startled to see someone—two people?—moving along the path in the light of the moon. And then, almost as soon as he noted the two shadows, they disappeared, which meant that they had either slipped into the grove itself or—not as likely—had descended the wall of the muddy creekbed. He waited, barely breathing, but they didn’t reappear. The arroyo beyond the creek was overgrown with wild bamboo and willow scrub, thousands of acres of marshy bottomland that stretched away toward the foothills in the north and the park in the east. Now, in the moonlight, the scattered rocks of the sandy arroyo shone chalky pale, and the skeletons of late-winter castor bean and mesquite stood out starkly against the white ground.

In the hundred years since the house had been built, the property had never been fenced, and although it was common for people walking along the trail to pick avocados at the edge of the grove, there was something unsettling about the idea of strangers lurking among the shadowy trees at night. And for the last few weeks, since the groundwater had risen with the constant rains, nighttime visitors had been strangely frequent lurking in the darkness of the trees.

Nothing was moving now, either on the path or in the arroyo. Clouds scudded across the moon again, casting the landscape into darkness. It occurred to him that it might easily be homeless people, perhaps, with shelters in the woods, and he turned away from the window and switched on the light again, trying to see the room as Betsy would see it. The place could use curtains, maybe shutters on the windows. A new rug would help, too—something bright. But it was a comfortable place with its old bed and rocker and dresser and with its wooden ceiling angling away overhead and two tall gables looking out over the grove. A narrow balcony stood outside the windows, and it was possible to climb out over the sill of one of the windows and walk along the balcony to the other—something he and Marianne had done more than once when they were children.

A backyard pepper tree grew at the edge of the balcony, and when he was small the branches had just reached to the balcony railing. Now the balcony was nearly swallowed by the enormous tree, and if it grew any larger he would have to think about pruning it back in order to save the last of the view. He was only now getting comfortable with the idea of making any changes in the house and grounds. When his mother had died, he had driven down from where he lived in Sonoma, to find the house empty, closed up, and locked. In the attic he had found an old daguerreotype print, sitting on the sill and tilted against the edge of the window as if to catch the light. It was easily a century old, of four people, possibly in their early twenties, although the stiff poses and washed-out quality of the print made it difficult to tell. Beside the photo had sat the mason jar with the trinkets inside.

Marianne had already had a house full of her own things by that time, and although she had talked about sorting through the stuff in the house and having her share of them shipped to Texas, she had never gotten around to it. Phil had done nothing to encourage her. He had simply left everything as it had been, although he had moved the old photo to a safe place.

He opened the box that he had brought with him—odds and ends of things that had belonged to his sister when she was a child, and he sorted through them, reminded of the past. There was a framed photo of her in a girl scout uniform when she must have been about Betsy’s age, and another photo of their mother standing beside the stone well in the backyard. He set both the photos on the nightstand now, took them down again, then set them up once more. Betsey looked a lot like her mother and like her grandmother, too. He had no idea how she would react to the photos, but he decided to leave them there. He closed the half-full box, slipped it into the dresser drawer, and sat down tiredly in the rocker, gazing at the photos, his eyes closing with sleep. And right then, as he tilted back in the rocker, the front doorbell rang.

Placentia, California1884

6

THE SOCIETAS FRATERNIA, a spiritualist cult that thrived in late-nineteenth-century rural Orange County, was lodged in a three-story wooden mansion in the small town of Placentia, which bordered the north bank of the Santa Ana River. The mansion had an octagonal room at its southeast edge, and this room as well as the long dining room had curved walls to discourage spirits from hiding in corners. In lean years, malnutrition plagued the vegetarian cult—known to skeptical neighbors as “the grass eaters”—and the malnourished dead were buried in shallow graves in the gardens and groves in the dark of night. The cult disbelieved in coffins, but preferred that the decaying corpses return to the earth as hastily as possible, enriching the fruits and vegetables, especially the avocados, which the cult considered its meat.

In 1884, a year of particularly heavy rains, the spiritual leader of the cult, Hale Appleton, ordered an artesian well to be dug in the gardens. The work was done by hand with a three-inch carpenter’s auger, and the gush of spring water that poured forth cascaded twelve feet into the air for weeks following the drilling, flooding the rain-saturated gardens and the neighboring farms with a torrent of mud and unearthed human bones. It was in the winter of that year that Appleton’s own daughter lay near death in the octagon room. …

THROUGH THE SKELETAL branches of leafless trees, the mansion was dim and ghostly despite candles in the windows and oil lamps on the front porch and carriage drive. The late-evening air was chilly, with wind from the northeast, and the night was starry and moonless. Alejandro Solas stood next to his horse, waiting for an escort. He was fortunate to be here at all, at the “baptism” of Appleton’s dying daughter, and so he had to be patient. And there was little doubt but that his stay would be brief. He had an acquaintance in the Societas, who had vouched for him—for a sum of fifty dollars. Shortly, if things went well, Solas would pay him two hundred more. …

Solas knew a little bit about this sort of baptism, but what he knew he had picked up from stories told to him by the vaqueros who worked his father’s ranch in Vieja Canyon—how in the early days drowned children had been buried in seasonal springs during magical rites. The idea of ritual infanticide had intrigued him rather than frightened him, and now, all these years later, he was going to see the ritual first-hand, especially because he had found a way to profit from it. …

The practice had long been suppressed by the church, but several of the magical springs were rumored to exist even now, coming to life in the rare seasons of heavy rain, perhaps once every score of years. It was said that the dying child cast off its memory in the form of a crystal stone, a potent magical object. Solas had seen such a stone himself, in the house of a brujo where his grandmother had taken him as a boy. There had been something about it that had fascinated him immediately, perhaps its murky, animalistic shape like an ancient totem or idol, or the almost greasy feel of the thing, or the faintly garlicky smell of it.

He had found a way to be alone with the object on that strange afternoon, had handled it, even licked it. And while he was there, in the dim evening light, holding the object in his hands, he had seen something hovering like a ghost in the air before him—a vague and glimmering reflection that he could still picture in his mind these fifteen years later. He had seen, cast against the whitewashed adobe of the wall, a broad beach, with the ocean beyond and a ship standing out to sea. He had heard the echoing cry of shore birds, the sound of the breakers, and on the air of the room he had smelled salt spray and the sea wrack drying in the sun of that phantom seashore. …

He was distracted from the memory when a man stepped out of the shadows of the porch and approached him. Solas recognized him, read the uneasy look on his face, and handed him the agreed-upon fifty dollars, then followed him silently around the side of the mansion, past a scattering of wood-and-glass rain gauges and into the yard behind, where two dozen people stood in a circle around a well ringed by a cut granite wall some four feet high. Water bubbled up in the center of the dark pool, agitating a reflected moon and stars and spilling through a rectangular notch cut into one of the granite slabs in the top row of stones. The overflowing water cascaded down into a rock-lined culvert. Irrigation ditches with wooden dams angled off from the culvert, in order to carry water into the gardens and groves when the dams were opened.

A rough wooden box lay on the granite wall next to where Appleton stood intoning Latin phrases, and it dawned on Solas that the box was a small casket. Its lid, hinged like the lid of a trunk, stood open. A man with a burning stick lit an oil lamp that hung from the eaves overhead, and the sudden light fell on Appleton’s dark-bearded face. Solas saw that the man had his eyes shut, as if he couldn’t quite stand what he would see if he opened them. Solas moved closer to the well, past the backs of onlookers dressed in the flour-sack clothing of the cult. In the casket lay the body of the child, emaciated, pale in the lamplight. A rosary had been draped like a wreath across her chest, and within the circle of beads lay several gold coins, which glinted in the moonlight. Another coin was caught in the crook of the child’s elbow.

Solas studied the child’s face, which was composed and natural. Then he saw the child’s eyelids flutter, and he saw that her chest rose and fell with her rapid breathing. The sudden certainty that the girl was alive sent a thrill through him, and it occurred to him that he would be more solidly comfortable if his horse were closer. The necessity for rapid and immediate flight seemed entirely likely. …

Appleton fell suddenly quiet, and Solas became aware of the chirruping of crickets. There was another sound, too, a low moaning noise that he couldn’t at first identify. Then he knew that it was the sound of weeping, and that it issued from Appleton’s own throat. The man was crying now with his mouth closed and his head bowed, as if he were ashamed of his own emotion. He bent over and kissed the nearly lifeless lips, gave a signal with his hand, and two men set the lid of the casket, quickly driving home screws already started in the four corners of the lid. One of the two men now slipped a rope through a pair of iron rings in the end of the box, and Appleton himself tipped the casket over the side of the well, letting it carefully down into the water by the rope. It sank slowly out of sight, inching downward until it came to rest, the rope going slack. Appleton muttered something, and lifted the box off again, working it farther out into the well until it moved past whatever had obstructed it and descended again. He played out what looked to be ten feet of rope before the casket stopped again and he tied the rope to a stake driven into the ground.

He bowed his head as if in prayer, and the rest of the onlookers followed suit. Solas watched their earnest faces, caught the eye of his friend, who nodded at him implacably, as if to affirm that Solas had gotten his money’s worth, which in fact he had not. Very soon he would know that the girl was dead—if Appleton had enough courage to let her drown—but it wasn’t the girl’s death that interested him particularly. As was true of Appleton himself, Solas was interested in the crystalline memory that would live on after her death.

Moments passed while the crowd stood mute and the ripples died away on the surface of the well, leaving the still reflection of starlight on the black water. The night was silent except for the sound of water overflowing the stones, as if even the crickets were waiting. And then the water was suddenly agitated again, and a pale, white light issued from deep within the well, as if someone had unhooded a lantern beneath the water, and Solas heard Appleton gasp. The glow faded slowly, until there was nothing but the dark, calm water again, and Solas thought briefly of the now-dead girl, the shock and fear of drowning in a cold, enclosed space, and he wondered if even that memory, the drawing near of death itself, would find its way into the crystal, and what Appleton really wanted with such a thing, how he thought he could bring those memories to life once again.

With any luck, Solas’s two hundred dollars would very soon deprive Appleton of the chance. Of course, Solas would give him the opportunity to buy it back at a slightly elevated price—an opportunity which, given the circumstances of Appleton’s crime, the man could hardly refuse.

7

AT THE SHADOW-DARK edge of the trees the two boys stopped and looked into the windy darkness, hesitating before moving any deeper into the grove. Both of the boys were twelve, dressed in dark clothing, including sweatshirts with hoods. The path along Santiago Creek was visible in the moonlight behind them, twisting away down the hill toward the neighborhood where they lived. Overhead, windblown clouds drove across the sky at a frantic pace.

“You go, but I’m not,” the taller of the two boys said. “I’m waiting here.”

“The hell you are, Jeremy.”

“I’m not going over there. I’m not stupid.”

Nothing grew on the ground in the heavy shade of the trees, and so the floor of the grove was a black plain broken by patches of filtered moonlight that shifted slowly as the heavy limbs moved with the wind. A soft, pervasive rustling filled the air, along with the faint creaking of branches. Water dripped onto dead leaves and root-packed dirt.

“If I find something, I’m not sharing the money with you, so don’t even ask me to.” Saying this, the boy switched on the flashlight and walked forward alone into the trees.

Jeremy hesitated for a moment and then came along after him. “Nick, wait up,” he said.

“You hurry up.”

“Give me those barbecue tongs, and I’ll come with you.”

“You don’t even know what we’re looking for. You just have the bag ready. I’ll take care of the tongs.”

“I do too know what we’re looking for. He said a glass thing.”

“That isn’t what he said. He said like a glass thing. Small things, like somebody would drop. It might be anything. It might be a bottlecap or a coin.” Nick played the flashlight across the ground, shining it into dark, still places, watching for the telltale glint of light on glass or metal. “And remember what he said about the woman.”

Jeremy didn’t respond, but looked around them nervously.

Fifty yards ahead of them, beyond the front edge of the grove, a light shone from the attic of an old three-story farmhouse. They had often seen the house by day, but at night it looked different—bigger, strange with shadows, old. Beyond the house lay Santiago Canyon Road, which ran up into the empty, undeveloped foothills. Fifty feet of lawn separated the old back porch from a high turretlike water tower, and the dark corner of the tower itself loomed in the distance now. Adjacent to the tower stood a rock-walled well. They came to the clearing at the edge of the grove and stood looking at the tower. Its sheer wooden walls had windows in all three stories, and outside the bottom window stood an open lean-to shed. The tower windows glowed with dusty moonlight, and there were the ghosts of ragged curtains behind the glass.

The stone well, some fifteen feet across, more an enclosed pool than a well, was supposed to be haunted. Two days ago it had been a dry well, but now it was brimming with water. The boys started across the clearing toward it, both of them hunching over to keep out of sight.

“Remember what he said about how it might glow,” Nick whispered.

“He said only in the moonlight.”

“There is moonlight, Jeremy. Look at the sky. And watch for her, too. Footprints, anything.”

At the edge of the well they sat down, hidden from the house by the rock wall. Nick swept the weedy ground slowly with the flashlight. “This is where we’ll find it,” he said. “Somewhere around here. Look for anything, especially metal or glass.”

“How can it glow?”

“Never mind. Just look for something.”

The rocks at the base of the well felt damp when Nick laid his hand against them, and there was water seeping out along the perimeter of the well. Clumps of broad-leafed clover and tendrils of new vines grew out of the damp ground, pushing up urgently around the mossy stones. Nick stood up enough to see over the wall. The reflected shadow of his own face stared back out at him from a glassy field of water and stars. The ivory moon and a bank of gray-black clouds floated on the dark surface.

Right then he felt the tongs sliding out of his back pocket. He slapped his hand against his pants and spun around, but Jeremy already had them and was moving farther away. Jeremy clanked the tongs shut over his head, making a face at him, and then slid them into his own back pocket. Nick shrugged. To heck with the tongs. Jeremy bent over peering at the moonlit ground.

Nick turned back to the well, twisting the tip of his flashlight to narrow the beam, which illuminated a few inches of water at the surface. He moved the light along the rocks right at the waterline, and almost at once, directly opposite where he stood, the light glinted for a moment on something, just a pinpoint of light winking on and then off again.

A coin? He tried to find it again with the light, but right then Jeremy made a noise, as if he had found something himself, and Nick turned around sharply and shined the light in his direction. “What?” Nick asked.

“Look.” Jeremy pointed at something on the ground, a faint glow, like a firefly in the weeds. Clouds covered the moon just then, and the glow vanished. It started to rain—just the first few windblown drops—and in that moment there was the sound of a metallic clank from somewhere behind Nick. He ducked behind the edge of the well and swept the beam of the flashlight toward the corner of the tower, where he thought he saw the form of someone standing, half-hidden, nothing more than the shadowy outline of a shoulder and part of a face that had disappeared when the light had moved past.

Nick glanced uncertainly back at Jeremy, who was bent over at the waist, reaching for whatever it was that lay glinting there in the moonlight, the tongs still shoved into his back pocket. “Wait!” Nick said, starting forward, trying to stop him from picking the thing up with his hand, whatever it was. He was too late: Jeremy picked the thing up and held it in his open palm. It was round and flat, like a tiny plate, a saucer for a doll’s tea set. He remained bent over as if he had frozen there. Nick glanced again at the edge of the tower, but there was no one there. It was time to go. …

There was the sound of a low moan now—a human voice, but not Jeremy’s, and not coming from the direction of the tower, either. Nick backed up against the rock wall of the well, shining the light at his friend’s face, which was stretched and contorted into a visage that only faintly resembled Jeremy’s natural face.

“I. … don’t. … want. … ,” the voice uttered—not Jeremy’s voice at all, but it was coming from Jeremy’s mouth. At first Nick thought he meant the thing in his hand. But he seemed to be oblivious to the pale saucer, which he held in his fingers like a playing card now; he seemed instead to be looking at something in front of him, something that he recognized with a terrible dismay, that he had a fear of. But there was nothing there, no shadowy stranger, nothing but the night and the tower standing alone in the weeds. Nick stepped forward, stretching out his hand to take the tongs out of Jeremy’s pocket. He had to get the object away from him, whatever it was, take it out of his hand without touching it himself.

Jeremy screamed then. He looked Nick in the face, a blank look, his eyes unfocused, seeing something that wasn’t there, a ghost, something in the wind. Without another thought Nick threw himself forward, ducking his shoulder, slamming into his friend just above the waist and knocking him sideways, the tongs spinning away, the saucer falling into the sandy dirt.

Peralta Hills1884

8

“THEY MURDERED THE girl. They drowned her. Alejandro seemed to be amused by it when he described it to me.”

Colin O’Brian finished the coffee that Jeanette had poured into his porcelain teacup, and he sat for a moment looking blankly at the grounds in the bottom of the cup. His life so far had been spent being tempted toward monastic life while actually becoming a schoolteacher and falling in love with Jeanette. Murder and dark magic were utterly foreign to him and, he would have thought, foreign to the quiet ruralism of Orange County. “He was trying to irritate you,” Colin told her finally. “That’s what he finds amusing.” He had only known Alejandro for six months. The man’s superficial charm had worn thin after about three of those months. Still, he was surprised at what Jeanette was telling him.

She got up and went to the stove, taking up the coffeepot and pouring Colin and her friend May another cup. “He pretends to find everything amusing, but I don’t believe that the man has ever been honestly amused.”

“Perhaps Alejandro was making all this up,” Colin said hopefully. “What do you think, May? It would be typical of him to try to impress either of you with a lie.”

Colin regarded May’s face in the lamplight. She was three years older than Jeanette, more experienced, already slightly careworn, although she was only in her mid-twenties. “I wish he were lying, because there was a time when I considered him a friend.”

“Before you knew him,” Jeanette said. “Before any of us actually knew him.”

May nodded. “I’m certain he’s telling the truth. The mere fact that he lies doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do other despicable things. It makes it even more likely that he does. I believe now that the man is capable of anything. His charm is a veneer, Colin. Very thin.”

Colin found himself abruptly thinking that if he weren’t already in love with Jeanette, he could easily be in love with May. There were things in May’s past that she didn’t talk about, nor did Jeanette betray her friend by revealing those things to Colin, but in some regard that mystery simply made May even more appealing.

She noticed that he was looking at her now, and he looked away. A moment later, when he glanced at her again, she was looking down at her hands. He purposely stopped his mind from running and paid attention to Jeanette, who said, “Colin, I believe what he said about the crystal object. I saw it. I can’t explain it very well, but it had … ghosts. There was something of that little girl in the crystal. That much is certainly no lie. I don’t think he’s lying about any of it.” Jeanette’s cheek was shaded with a faint bruise where Alejandro had struck her. The idea of it made him furious, more furious than Alejandro’s being mixed up in an alleged murder. Jeanette had struck Alejandro back with a fireplace shovel. The blow to Alejandro’s pride would eat him alive, which would make him dangerous. What Colin would do about it, what he would do about any of this, was uncertain, but he would have to act quickly, before Alejandro was driven to some craven act of revenge.

“What do you mean, ghosts?” he asked. Part of him, he realized, waited with an unhealthy fascination for her answer, and he pushed his curiosity back down into the darkness.

“I could see something. At first like moving shadows, and then something more—a picture on the air. I could hear things, the neighing of a horse, a girl’s laughter.

“And it was from the girl’s memory, you think?”

“Only because there’s no reason to think anything else. He wouldn’t lie about that, would he? I had a sense at first of being in an open space. I could smell sage, wet vegetation. Then there was sunlight, moving grass. I even saw beehives. It was on a meadow. Then Alex put it away. It was absolutely haunting—frightening.”

Rain drummed on the roof now, and Colin glanced at the window and the darkness beyond, thinking about the weather. His coat and outer shirt were drying in front of the fire. The road outside was a muddy torrent. His horse was stabled in the barn, which is where he had planned to sleep tonight.

“We believe that he intends to sell it back to Hale Appleton,” May said. “He’s talked about little else but Appleton’s money for a month now.”

“I wonder if he won’t simply keep it,” Colin said. “Owning it would give him a certain esteem, wouldn’t it?” He wondered if he himself would sell it. Almost any man would have ambivalent feelings about giving up such an apparently magical object, money or no money. There was something enormously attractive about the idea of losing oneself in the memory of a child. He recalled places in his own memories of childhood where he might easily reside, perhaps forever. …

“It would quite likely get him shot,” Jeanette said.

“What?” Colin asked. “I’m sorry … what would get him shot?”

“Keeping the crystal,” May said. “Appleton will take a dangerously narrow view of this.”

Colin looked into the; fire, which had flared up. He could hear the wind outside, blowing through the eaves of the cabin. “Why would Alejandro care about Appleton’s money?” he asked. “His family owns thirty thousand acres.”

“Perhaps because he’s dependent on his father,” May said. “He’s a layabout, and everyone’s aware of that. It rankles him. And there’s very little risk, you see, of ransoming the crystal. If Appleton drowned his own daughter in order to save her, as Alejandro put it, then Appleton could hardly charge Alejandro with a crime. He wouldn’t go to the sheriff. And I don’t believe he would harm Alejandro in order to retrieve it, because that would be the end of him unless he fled. The Solas family is too powerful. Alejandro understands all of this. He knows Appleton will simply pay the ransom if it’s within his power to pay it.”

“You should have heard him talking,” Jeanette said. “He knows everything about Appleton—how much he’s worth, to the penny. He’s unbelievably smug and confident about it all, even though there’s already been a man murdered because of the theft. Alejandro had an associate inside the Societas. Surely you read about the murder?”

“The dead man in the river?” Colin asked. A man’s body had been pulled from the Santa Ana River near Placentia not even two days ago. He had been shot twice. The newspaper had said that his identity was unknown. “Appleton murdered him for helping Alejandro?”

“So Alejandro told me. He was very bold with the details. He had paid the man some small sum to steal the crystal, and shortly after that the man was murdered. Alejandro seemed to consider the man’s death simply a loose end tied up.”

At least a dozen oil lamps were lit around the room, and the effect of the lamplight and firelight and coffee was cheerful and sustaining, entirely at odds with what Jeanette had told him about the drowning of the child, about Alejandro’s stealing the crystal object that supposedly contained the girl’s cast-off memory, about the murdered man in the river …

“I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alejandro himself shot the man,” May said after a moment. She looked seriously at Colin. Her suggestion was dangerously likely. Alejandro was no doubt capable of the basest sort of betrayal, including murdering his associate.

“Describe the object to me,” he said to Jeanette.

“It’s a bit of bluish crystal, like misty glass, shaped vaguely like a crouching dog. That’s what it immediately suggested to me, although I can’t quite say why. It was rather like a shape you see in the clouds and that sets off your imagination. But I still have the distinct notion that it had that shape, if I make myself clear.”

“How large?”

“You might hold it easily in the palm of your hand. The length of a pair of spectacles, I’d say. The thickness of a book of middling length. He was quite cavalier with it, swinging it on its drawstring as if it were a bag of rocks. He suggested that the crystal actually contained the girl’s soul along with her memory. The girl had apparently been baptized in the church.”

“I thought that Appleton was some variety of spiritualist,” Colin said uneasily.

“He’s apparently a lapsed Catholic,” Jeanette said. “Alejandro found that amusing, too. What he said was that he might not sell the crystal back to Appleton at all, that he might sell it to people who would put it to uses that would horrify Appleton no matter how thoroughly he had lapsed. That’s when I lost my temper. I told him what I thought of him, how insulted I was that he thought so little of me that he’d suppose this kind of evil filth would amuse me, too. He struck me in the face without giving it a thought, as if it were the most natural reaction in the world.”

Colin shook his head but remained silent. The enormity of the crime confounded him, and he was ashamed of his own curiosity for the crystal, although at the same time these added dimensions made the object itself all that much more fascinating. Who was to say that the girl’s soul wasn’t contained within the crystal? Evidently some living part of her had been preserved. He stood up and stepped across to the fire, where he stood for a moment to dry out. He had changed his decision to sleep in the barn. He had to do something, and whatever it was wouldn’t wait for clear weather, not in a rainy season like this one. But what would he do?

“I might just go on back down the hill tonight after all,” he said, gathering up his shirt and coat.

“Where?” Jeanette asked him. “You’re not intending to confront Alejandro?”

“No,” Colin said. “I thought I’d ride down to the mission, that’s all. Alejandro can’t be allowed to carry on in this manner, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I want to talk to a priest. You’ll be watching out?”

“I told Mr. Fillmore we’d had prowlers,” Jeanette said to him. “It was a white lie, but he gave me a bell to ring in case they came back. If I ring it, he’ll come.”

“It might have been better if he’d given you a shotgun,” Colin said, but immediately wished he hadn’t said any such thing. There’d been too much of that kind of talk tonight. There was no reason to believe that Alejandro would be out on a night like this, or that there was any possible profit in more violence. Why Alejandro had confided all this to Jeanette was difficult to say—possibly just a simple matter of sinister and misplaced pride. But his involving Jeanette had involved May and Colin. Alejandro might come to regard all of them as loose ends.