Claire had always been so cool and unflappable, an oasis of cheerful common sense no matter the chaos that surrounded her, that to see her at her mother’s funeral, transfixed not by grief but by rage, had been a painful sight. Colin was pleased to think that Claire could make peace with some portion of her past. Her friendship with her young cousin Rowan seemed to have done her a world of good—Colin thought that Rowan replaced, at least in part, the family that she had hoped for with Peter and never had.
She and Rowan had written back and forth for over a year before this visit, and Colin had to admit to himself that he had particularly encouraged her to visit this summer, as it would be useful to him to have Claire on the spot to function as his Sensitive, should it be necessary.
Privately, he hoped it would not be.
At the beginning of April Colin settled in to his series of lectures. Miskatonic had an excellent library; the special collection was closed to undergraduate use, but Colin was able to put his time there to good use, refreshing his memory about Les Cultes des Goules, the sourcebook for the Church of the Antique Rite. The Cults of the Ghouls had been called “a nasty little grimoire” over two centuries ago by one of the more decadent French ecclesiastics—and perfectly deserved the title, in Colin’s opinion.
Among other things, the cult believed in metempsychosis—that the souls of dedicated cult members were freed by death to be reborn into new bodies, which would be “awakened” into the memory of their previous lives by exposure to the cult’s practices.
After seven years had passed.
The Food King in Arkham was the largest supermarket in thirty miles, but it was still tiny by modern standards: a relic of days gone by, when the “super” market was only just coming into being. The refrigerator in Colin’s cabin was highly eccentric, but fortunately, the Food King was conveniently located between his cabin and the college, so that he could buy his eggs by the half-dozen and his milk by the pint. His mind was on what he should buy to cook for dinner when he ran into an old friend.
Or to be more precise, an old friend ran into him.
He looked up, startled, at the impact of the other cart crashing into his, and his instant pleasure at the sight of a familiar face turned to a feeling of rue when he realized who it was.
I would have sworn that Paul didn’t know about his Latimer heritage—and if he did, that he would have kept it from his wife and children, especially his daughter … .
“Why, it’s Sally Latimer, isn’t it?” Colin said aloud.
Colin had not seen her for at least a year; Sally looked thin and pale, with new lines etched in her face as of grief or illness. She was with a young man who looked vaguely familiar, though Colin couldn’t place him.
“Colin!” Sally said, and the young man—obviously her young man, in the quaint old phrase—said quickly:
“I didn’t think you knew anyone in this part of the country, Sara.”
“I don’t,” Sally protested, and introductions were quickly made. The young man was Brian Standish, the new GP, here helping out his cousin James with the rigors of a rural practice.
With a faint sense of inevitability, Colin heard the rest of Sally’s news: the tragic death of her younger brother that triggered her mother’s death in turn, the freak accident that claimed her father’s life only a few days later.
As if there were something winnowing away the unwanted ones, cutting Sally loose from anything that might anchor her to sanity reality. And then bringing her here.
He searched her face as she spoke, but could see no trace in those wide green eyes of the ancient malignant soul of Witch-Sara, seven years dead and ripe for her rebirth (so the cult believed) in the body of a family member. He’d never really noticed before, not having seen her for some time, but Sally was the exact image of the pictures of the Latimer witches that Miskatonic kept in the closed stacks: red hair, pale skin, tilted green eyes, and even the small mole at the right corner of her mouth. He listened with a sinking heart as Sally innocently told him about her Great-Aunt Sara’s legacy, the house on Witch Hill Road—and about the Church of the Antique Rite, to which, apparently, she’d already been introduced … and invited.
Poor child; it was obvious from what she’d left unsaid that Sally really had no other place to go now but to her ancestral home, and to scare her with tales of backwoods demons might simply drive her further into the “Reverend” Matthew Hay’s clutches.
It was easy enough for Colin to maneuver her into extending him an invitation to visit the house at Witch Hill soon; he salved his conscience for the duplicity by inviting her and Brian to dinner as his guests. And he tried not to worry about what might happen to Sally, here where the witch-blood ran close to the surface and an ancient decadence seemed to seep from the very bedrock of the land.
It was fairly late when Colin got back to his cabin, but he phoned Claire anyway. It only took a ring or two for the phone to be answered.
“Moorcock residence.”
“Is that you, Claire? It’s Colin.”
Claire had arrived in Madison Corners at the end of April and settled quickly into the Moorcock household. Colin had warned her that they might be called upon to act, and now he was glad he had.
“You’re lucky you got through,” Claire said. “Rowan’s been on the phone most of the evening. I gather the upcoming senior prom is a matter of the keenest interest locally.” She sounded amused.
“I don’t doubt it,” Colin said. “And to think I wondered if I was calling too late. Speaking of interesting, you’ll never guess who I ran into down at the supermarket today.”
They would have to be circumspect in their conversation: one of the country customs Arkham preserved was that of the operator-assisted party line, and no telephone conversation was ever really private.
“Who?” Claire asked dutifully.
“Sally Latimer. You remember her—her father was one of my tenants back in New York?”
“Of course I do,” Claire said, and Colin could tell from the change in her voice that she had picked up the implications of that “was” easily. “But I’m glad you called. Uncle Clarence has been demanding that we have you to dinner ever since he found out you were here. How about tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there,” Colin promised. “Good night, Claire.”
The Moorcocks occupied a rambling old white farmhouse about a mile from the old graveyard on Witch Hill, but the house seemed almost to belong to a different world.
The three generations of Moorcocks were a nineties-style family; Rowan’s father Justin was Clarence Moorcock’s grandson. Justin’s father, like so many men of that generation, had died in Vietnam, leaving his son to grow up fatherless—and, sometimes, motherless. In the wake of his divorce, Justin, a professional software designer, and his then fourteen-year-old daughter Rowan had moved from Boston’s Back Bay back to Madison Corners.
Colin parked his rented Chevy in the driveway beside Clarence’s old Ford pickup, Justin’s sleek BMW, and eighteen-year-old Rowan’s practical Toyota. Rowan was already waiting in the open doorway for him, wearing the universal teenage uniform of ragged jeans and rock-band T-shirt.
“Good evening, Mr. MacLaren,” Rowan said dutifully. There were dark circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t been sleeping well.
She had earphones slung around her neck, and a Walkman in her back pocket. It was the first time he had seen her since the funeral of her great-aunt, and for a moment Colin wondered how the girl managed to look so much like every other teenager when the nearest shopping mall was no closer than Boston.
“Good evening, Rowan,” Colin said. Odd to think that many of his students had been near her age.
He stepped inside the door of the old farmhouse and felt a faint frisson of tension. There was trouble here, and whatever it was, Claire had not felt comfortable mentioning it over the phone.
“Pot roast tonight,” Rowan said, as if changing a painful subject. “Claire’s cooking. Right through there. �
�Scuze me—gotta go change.” She turned and galloped up the stairs, fitting the headphones back on her head as she went.
Colin stared after her for a moment, wondering what the problem was—intergenerational tension, or something darker?
Whatever it was, he’d know soon enough. Colin headed in the direction Rowan had indicated.
In the kitchen Claire was making last-minute preparations for dinner. Clarence sat at the kitchen table, overseeing the proceedings with satisfaction.
“Colin,” he said, getting to his feet. The hand he offered was still heavily callused from decades of farmwork, and even at eighty-something, his grip was strong. “Good to see you again. Where did Rowan get to? Did she let you in?”
“I think she had to go and change,” Colin said diplomatically.
Clarence grinned. “I’m too old and too crotchety to see girls come to the dinner table wearing pants. As Claire here will tell you.”
“Oh, yes. Uncle Clarence is quite a tyrant,” Claire agreed easily, sliding a tray of biscuits into the oven.
“When the biscuits are ready, we eat,” she said, taking the lid off the roasting pan and expertly levering the roast out onto a platter.
“I don’t need this at all,” Justin complained good-naturedly, ladling gravy over his potatoes and carrots. “It isn’t as if I were doing anything more strenuous than sitting at a computer all day.”
Rowan had reappeared, wearing a denim skirt and plain white blouse, to fetch Justin from the converted shed that served him as his workroom.
“Rowan and I cooked it,” Claire said with joking menace. “You’d better eat it.”
Colin gathered that usually Rowan and the housekeeper shared the cooking chores: from what Claire said, Rowan had made the scratch-biscuits and the pies for dessert, and Claire had contributed the Moffat family’s recipe for pot roast.
Conversation at dinner was general.
The land was no longer a working farm, but Clarence still kept up with the farm news, and Claire had been helping out Joann Winters, the district nurse, and so had some harmless snippets of local gossip to contribute. There was still another week of school to run, but by now the minds of the graduating class were firmly fixed on the senior prom and the class trip to the “big city”: Boston, Massachusetts.
And Clarence, it seemed, was far from reconciled to Rowan’s decision about college, especially since it seemed her choice had fallen to an out-of-state school.
Taghkanic.
“If you must go, what’s wrong with Miskatonic, grandchild? Martha and I both went there. It’s a good school—and you could live at home.”
“Well,” Rowan began. Her father darted a minatory glance at her, and the girl changed her mind about what she’d been going to say. “I guess I’d just like to go somewhere else,” she muttered, staring down at her napkin.
“I ran into an old friend yesterday in the Food King,” Colin said, to change the subject. “You remember that I mentioned I’d met Sally Latimer yesterday, don’t you, Claire?”
Colin quickly related Sally’s dismal news, drawing exclamations of sympathy from Claire and the Moorcocks. “So she’s staying at the old family house until she figures out what she’s going to do.”
“Witch Hill? Brrr—! I’d rather bunk in at the Bates Motel,” Claire said honestly. “Well, she’s dumped that little twerp Roderick, at any rate. I never could stand him—one of those nitpicking managing sorts who can only feel safe so long as he’s feeling superior.”
“The young man I met last night seems to be rather nice,” Colin said. “Local, too—Brian Standish?”
“Knew the mother—a Phillips she was. Town girl,” Clarence said, and the temporary awkwardness passed off.
Clarence departed to his bed immediately after supper, claiming the privilege of age and wishing Colin a very good evening. Justin had lingered to make a bit of polite conversation, before admitting that there really were one or two things he needed to finish up before FedEx came tomorrow morning to pick up the code.
Rowan stayed as long as her father did, but as soon as Justin had left, Rowan swore she wanted to do the dishes before finishing up her homework and retreated quickly to the kitchen, leaving Colin and Claire alone in the parlor, where a potbellied stove took the edge off the chill.
“When I was her age, I’d do anything rather than the dishes,” Colin said.
“Me, too,” Claire agreed. “Rowan’s a good kid. She just hasn’t been feeling herself lately.”
“So I gathered. What was all that at dinner about? It seems like an argument that’s been going on for a while.”
“Oh, it isn’t really that much of anything. Of course Clarence wants Rowan to go to Miskatonic, but both she and Justin are dead set against the idea. Last week Rowan told Uncle Clarence that she didn’t want to go to Miskatonic because she didn’t want to be either a housewife or a necromancer, and I’m afraid things were a bit strained after that. Clarence is fond of her, but she’s his great-granddaughter, and in his day women didn’t have that many choices. Not that even Clarence wants her to marry any of the local product, of course. I gather things have gone downhill around here in the last sixty years or so.”
“I’m not surprised,” Colin said. “I didn’t want to go into it at the table, but there’s just something a little too pat about the way Sally’s family died. She got the letter about Witch Hill the day she buried Paul, poor girl. Worse, she seems to have met Matthew Hay, and that puts her up to her eyebrows in the Church of the Antique Rite, whether she knows it or not.”
“Auditioning her for the part of the next High Priestess—or the last one?” Claire guessed, and shuddered. “Wasn’t she a Sara, too? Poor Sally! She must think she stepped into a time machine, coming here. I’ve only been here a few weeks, and I’ve already heard more than enough Old Lady Latimer stories—the woman seems to have been a cross between Morgan LeFay and Cruella DeVille!”
Colin stared broodingly into the flames visible through the door of the stove. “I only wish I knew how much Hay knows—or believes. The likeness is devilishly close; there are some drawings in the Special Collection that might almost be photographs of Sally … . But I’ve known that girl since she was eight years old; I can’t imagine her going along with the Antique Rite’s nasty nonsense.”
Not, at least, of her own free will … But whose will was it that had engineered the death of Sally’s parents?
Nathaniel had been right to send him here. Petty and local though they were, there were dark forces at work here in the New England countryside, and destroying those forces without destroying Sally Latimer as well would require the most careful calculation.
“Do you want me to go sniff around, Colin?” Claire asked, rousing him from his reverie.
“I’d appreciate it. Last night at dinner, Sally sounded as if she could use a few friendly faces around, and I’d like to know just what it is that we’re up against. If that old house is psychically active, for example …”
“If it is, she can’t possibly stay there,” Claire agreed. “I wonder if Uncle Clarence would welcome another houseguest?” She hesitated. “But I think we may have another problem as well: Rowan.”
Colin cocked his head, listening for the clatter of dishes in the kitchen. The girl was thoroughly occupied and unlikely to overhear. “Tell me,” he said quietly.
“You said things seemed a little strained tonight—well, it wasn’t all about Rowan’s choice of college. About a month ago—around the last full moon—she started sleepwalking.”
Colin sat forward, suddenly alert.
“Justin was working late and saw her go out. He took her back to the house and tucked her in—she didn’t even wake up—and after that we started locking the house at night. But she didn’t stop sleepwalking.”
“Did Rowan remember anything about the episodes?” Colin asked.
Claire shrugged. “She wasn’t even aware of them at first. And for a while the locked doors seemed to stop her, a
t least from getting out of the house. She’d rattle the knob for a while, wake up, and go back to bed. Of course most people sleepwalk at some point in their lives, and most of the time it’s harmless, but lately she’s been unlocking the door and … well, going out,” Claire said feebly.
“After the first time we found her gone and the back door wide open, Justin set up an infrared alarm to wake him, and he goes and gets her, but this has him worried sick. It’s pretty clear this has something to do with the fact that Rowan’s a Sensitive, but Justin doesn’t really want to acknowledge something that seems so irrational to him.”
Claire sighed, and shook her head wearily. “He may not want to admit it, but he knows, believe me. And that’s the real problem.”
“Problem?” Colin asked.
“Oh, you know, Colin—people can’t really tell the difference between ‘psychic’ and ‘Satanic,’ and Justin spent enough summers here as a boy to pick up the local superstitions about the Antique Rite, even if he won’t admit that either. He doesn’t know whether to call an exorcist or a doctor—not that either one would do him any good. And lately I think the, well, I’d have to call it the weirdness factor is getting to Rowan, too. I think she’s keeping herself awake all night so she won’t sleepwalk, and that can’t last.”
“Any notion where she’s going?” Colin asked. “That might give us a clue as to the cause.”
Claire’s face was grim. “Oh, we all know where she’s going. That’s the problem. Every time she gets out, she makes a beeline due east—right for the old burying-ground … and the Church of the Antique Rite.”
It wasn’t until Friday that Claire was able to make her promised visit to Sally Latimer.
Up until Colin’s visit she’d been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms—the house had been built for a large farm family, and there was no shortage of guest rooms—but after what Colin had told her about Sally, Claire realized that she couldn’t just wait around and hope things would get better. She told Rowan that she was going to move in with her, and was not surprised when Rowan accepted gratefully.
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