“Dr. Lyle is a woman I admire tremendously.”
This sounded like simple courtesy, but his eyes looked sharply into mine for a long moment.
Upstairs, he introduced me to a young woman in a dark blue dress. Her name was Marie, and the dress was both delightful and unfashionable, a full, pleated costume that recalled to my mind Paris of the Second World War, fashion created out of sparse wardrobes. She took my coat but did not seem to want to meet my eyes. He suggested that we work in the sitting room of the apartment, a room that adjoined this foyer and was equipped with heavy, brass-fitted doors.
“You will want to eat, and perhaps a glass of wine.” His English was markedly accented, but apparently quite fluent.
“Some coffee,” I suggested, “would be nice.”
“You aren’t hungry?”
“No.”
“Or tired at all?”
I admitted that I was not particularly tired.
“You do not mind, I hope, if I serve you coffee which has been decaffeinated.” He stepped out briefly to arrange for the coffee, and I had a moment to my own thoughts.
I did not want to be alone. My solitude frightened me.
“Why did you feel the need to see me, Mr. Fields?” His accent made the question sound both polite and sinuous, a question I should answer with care.
“Surely Nona described me—”
“In your own words,” he said, with a kind smile.
Don’t tell him, I told myself. He won’t understand. I took a deep breath. “I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
He won’t understand a word of this. I cleared my throat. “I believe that I have sold my soul.”
He leaned back in his chair across from me, gazing at the ceiling for a moment.
“You’ll think me absurd for saying this,” I continued. “Or foolish.”
His gray eyes met mine. “Before you tell me what has happened to you,” he said, “perhaps you would like to know more about me. About my work.”
“I’ve decided already that I trust you.”
“This is kind of you. But some people find my work a matter of controversy.”
“Nona mentioned this.”
He smiled thoughtfully. “I use hypnotherapy, and I have a great deal of respect for traditional beliefs.” His voice was gentle.
But something about his words disturbed me. “Traditional beliefs of what sort?” I found myself asking.
“What others call obsolete religious concepts. What could be called ‘superstition.’”
His words made me very anxious. I stood and gazed about me. I experienced a great need to change the subject. The sitting room was large, with earth-red tiles and a huge fireplace. Age-blackened oak beams supported the ceiling, and a display of flowers held court on a side table. The flowers were unseasonable, and remarkable for another reason.
They were common, ordinary flowers, not the sort of orchids one would feature in a hothouse. There were pink and delicate asters, the sort of wide-awake looking flower Collie liked to put on the breakfast table. There were grasses, and what looked like—and upon close examination were—stalks of wheat, all introduced into the same vase, a magnificent profusion.
I paced the room. “Your taste in flowers,” I said. “I admire it.”
“The grasses come from a favorite shop of mine,” he said.
I knew the shop, with its sign announcing: VEGETAUX SECHES DE TOUS LES PAYS. It had inspired me, during one visit to this city, to draw a series of sketches of dried grasses, oats, and rye. The drawings had been described as “charming” in more than one art magazine. I had burned the drawings in my fireplace with everything else.
Coffee arrived, the dark-clothed young woman hurrying from the room.
I tried to make the comment sound offhand. “She acts like she’s afraid of me.”
“Marie is a very wise woman,” he said.
We chatted easily about shops, and fashions in clothing, and for awhile he let me direct the conversation toward safe, pleasant subjects. I sat across from him again.
Then Dr. Valfort said, “I have had a very interesting experience, one that redirected my studies from ordinary psychiatry to the sort of work that I do now. Three years ago, while I was being operated on for a gall bladder.” He waited, perhaps to see if the words gall bladder communicated anything to me. “And, in the surgical theater where I lay, my heart failed. And I died.”
“How awful,” I said, my words sounding inadequate.
“Indeed.” He continued, “I recovered my life. The surgeon was very skilled. But what I saw at that moment I died, the impossible-to-express vision which I had, altered my life.”
The coffee was black, sharp, delicious. I did not want to hear what Valfort was about to tell me.
“Regardless of what you have understood in the past, Mr. Fields, regardless of what the people you know may believe, I have discovered something unavoidable. Something more real than our own lives.”
I did not like these words, but Valfort’s voice had captured me.
“I discovered our ignorance. We know nothing of Heaven. We know nothing of God, or Hell. Our ignorance is deep, almost what one would have to call magnificent.”
“I’m certainly willing to concede the possibility of that,” I said with a dry laugh.
“In traditional terms, it is not possible to sell one’s soul,” he said. “What you have done may seem to amount to the same thing: you have mortgaged your soul. You have put it up as surety. In exchange for your soul you have received something.”
“I have received quite a bit,” I said, my voice low.
“What have they given you?”
His use of the pronoun they chilled me. I had entertained some doubts regarding Valfort. I was here not because I knew or understood his work, but because I needed help badly. But now I began to wonder if Valfort knew what sort of powers I had engaged.
I had trouble speaking, but forced myself. “I have received what you would have to call career advancement. I have a new feeling of tremendous …” I could think of no better word. “Power.”
He waited, his eyes bright.
“I feel so alive.” My voice broke. “I think I am losing my mind. I can’t tell what I’m going to do. I think I might hurt the people I love.”
“And you are afraid,” he said.
I nodded, silenced by emotion.
“You have every reason to feel this way,” he said. “You are a very dangerous man.”
46
His words angered me. “I don’t even believe the soul exists.”
“But you do, Mr. Fields, or you would not have mortgaged it.”
“I don’t believe in Hell.” The word stopped me, capitalized in my mind, and standing for something out of Dante, out of the mouths of late-night preachers on television.
“Then tell me what you think is happening to you.”
It was difficult to say it. “I’m afraid I’ve killed people.”
He closed his eyes, and the slowly opened them. “Do you want me to help you?”
“Can you?”
“You don’t believe I can?”
“What will you do? Teach me to pray?”
“What would you pray for, Mr. Fields?”
The question hit me hard. “I would pray for my soul’s return. I would pray for Nona—to have her back again.”
“You think you can have your soul back so easily—by asking for it?”
“This is all academic. There is no soul.”
“Ah.” It was a simple sound, a mild exclamation which the French use to accept and dismiss at once. “Have people actually died?” There was something sly about his tone.
“You know they have. Ty DeVere was practically a cultural hero in France.”
“Of course. What you say is true. I did, though, want to hear you admit it. So something real has happened.”
His voice was soothing. “I don’t know if I can help you, Mr. Fields,” he continued. “Do you want me to try?
”
I said that I wanted him to help me.
“I could not quite hear you, Mr. Fields.”
“Please try,” I said.
“Pay attention to what I am about to tell you. I am going to listen to your personal history. Then I will put you into a trance. We will discover what has really happened to you.”
“I’m not sure I want to be hypnotized. Can’t we just talk? As we are talking now.”
“You think you killed them, don’t you?”
“I want to know the truth.”
“You don’t really, Mr. Fields.”
I did not like the way the wall shivered in my vision. I did not like the way the room was too quiet.
The story was a longer one than I had thought, reaching into my childhood, my career, my love for Nona, my love of the dangerous surf. Valfort listened with a look in his eyes of genuine caring, and I found it easy to tell him all that I could.
When I was finished, Valfort took the glasses from his eyes and ran a hand over his brow, like a man who has studied too late into the night. He replaced his glasses. His eyes, when they found me again, were kind, but he said something that stung me. “Mr. Fields, you have been in tremendous danger, every moment since your first encounter in the Pacific.”
“I am afraid—even here.”
“Who—or what—do you suppose it was calling to you in the surf that night? Who took your hand?”
I did not like the sound of his voice. “What do you want me to say?”
“You’re angry.”
I could not deny it. But I was confused more than angry. It was Valfort who seemed to have all the answers. I had memories, delusions.
“You have made,” he said, “one mistake—blunder is how I might describe it—after another.”
I could not respond.
“And you come into my home expecting me to help you!” he said, in a virtual whisper.
“You must help me,” I said, bending forward. “What’s happening to me?”
His manner changed, once again, to that of compassion. But I could see anguish in his eyes. He reached into a notebook and withdrew a slip of paper. “Tell me what you see here,” he said with a smile.
I expected something like a Rorschach inkblot. What I saw was a photograph of a statue. The statue was an unnaturalistic depiction of a huge man—judging from the human figures around it. This giant was in a trance of some kind. “It’s a Buddha.”
“Very good. Tell me, Mr. Fields, what this is.” He gave me a second photograph.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said. I could not recognize my own voice.
This new picture was a crude, medieval work, utterly unrealistic, but with the charm of that sort of art. It was an icon. A mother held a grotesquely misproportioned infant to her cheek, looking out at the viewer with sad eyes. This was one of those little sheets you can pick up at St. Germain-des-Prés, or a hundred other French churches. Prions chaque jour pour la paix du monde read the inscription.
“What is it?” asked Valfort.
There was a vague flickering in my vision. A migraine was beginning.
Was I hesitating too long? “I don’t recognize the artist. The subject is the Virgin and the infant Christ.”
He had more, pictures he withdrew from a large brown envelope. Photographs. Sacred images. He had Tibetan mandalas, crucified Christs, Romanesque saints, a handful of such samples he was prepared to hand to me, one by one, for my examination. As he handed them to me I felt an accumulation of nausea. My hands were cold.
When we were finished he said, “How do you feel about these images?”
I tried to adopt the tone with which I would decline a certain variety of mustard, or an opportunity to watch television. “I don’t like them.”
“If you were going to make a work of art depicting Satan, how would he look?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I stopped myself. “Like one of those. One of those sacred images.” Like a woman in white, I nearly said.
“Are these images sacred?” he asked.
“To some people,” I said.
“You want it both ways,” he said kindly. “You want to be rational, an unbeliever. And yet you believe you can form a pact with the unseen, harness it to your desires.”
“Tell me what’s been happening to me,” I said. I was impatient, perspiring, chilled. We seemed to be involved in a form of intellectual fencing.
“If Satan came to you he would disguise himself as something beautiful, wouldn’t he?” said Valfort.
“Perhaps. But I don’t believe in Satan.”
“That must make it all the easier,” said Valfort. “For Satan.”
“Your views are antique,” I said.
He allowed himself a smile. “You judge me too harshly. These divinities may not exist apart from us, or they may. I have discovered that it makes little difference. The angel speaks. Mary is startled. The messenger foretells a birth. It matters to the scientist whether or not the divine messenger is real. But to the Virgin—it makes no difference. The message is true.”
“There is a soul,” I said, “even if there is no soul.”
“I remember Nona Lyle very well. I loved her.”
His words startled me.
“She was a gifted student. She had the ability to understand. To listen and to hear what someone was saying. She loved children. You don’t like to talk about her condition, how near to death she is.” He observed my discomfort, and added, “You are partly responsible, if only in your own mind.”
“The doctors don’t understand what’s wrong with her.”
“I think that there are many secrets you have hidden from yourself, Mr. Fields. And that is one of them.”
I stretched out on the settee in Valfort’s sitting room. He had been solicitous, gentle, giving me a glass of sparkling water.
“Are you ready to begin?” he said, from off in a distant part of the room. He closed shutters, drew curtains over the windows, and there was the sputter of a match, and the rattle of wooden matches in a box.
He lit a candle. The candlelight threw a hush into my mind. The single candle shivered as he walked, carrying it toward me.
“I need to know if I killed DeVere. And Blake. I need to know what really happened.”
He did not argue with me, or say a word to reassure me.
“It’s already too late,” I said.
“It’s true,” he said, “that it can become too late. The last, magical night draws toward dawn. The question is: How far away is dawn for you, Mr. Fields?”
I wanted to know the truth.
“Let nothing disturb you,” he said. His accent made the simple words elegant: “nothing” became “nussing,” a childish, charming word.
“Lie quietly,” he said in a low voice. “Look into the candle flame. Count backward with me.”
I shaped the numbers, forming them, picturing, at his suggestion, steps leading downward. We started with the number ten. And then downward, each number a step into darkness, as he had suggested. Or, at least it seemed that he suggested it.
It wasn’t working. The hypnosis was a failure. I wanted to sit up.
And I did sit up. But then relaxed, letting my body fall back again. Because there were steps, and they did lead downward. And there was a flame with a sleeve of perfect blue that coated the wick, and protected what it consumed.
All the way to the truth.
47
I sat up, and blew out the candle.
No. It wasn’t possible.
Something about the garden. About my mother. Something about—
I could remember it all. And just as quickly the memory eluded me. I found myself huddled against the wall. I would not think that way. I would never think that way.
The memories were gone. I wrapped a blanket around myself, and huddled there in the dark of Valfort’s sitting room. His hand must have fumbled, groped, and found a light, because there was a rattle, a lamp went on, and I blinked.
/>
Valfort was at a distant wall, his eyes on me, his arms crossed, his entire posture communicated one powerful emotion. He was outwardly steady. He was professional. But he was afraid.
“That’s enough!” I said. My words erupted, my voice ragged.
The remains of the candle smoke drifted. There was a long silence. Valfort did not make a movement, waiting, I sensed, to see what I would do.
“Did you learn anything interesting?” I asked. Why did I ask this with something like a sneer?
“It’s so difficult for a man like yourself, to see the truth after such a long time,” he said.
“What did I tell you?”
He did not answer.
“Tell me!”
“You would not believe me.”
I bunched the blanket into a wad and threw it on the floor, where it swooped and drifted, skimming the surface before it fell. “I want to know the truth.”
“You might say that Satan does not exist, and that none of the powers you have contacted are supernatural. That may be only a way of describing it, a manner of thinking. But it is clear to me, Mr. Fields: a career of marvels awaits you. You will be more famous, more important, more influential than DeVere ever dreamed of being. You wanted good fortune. Now you have it.”
What sadness, I realized, embellished each one of Valfort’s words.
I asked, “What do you know about me now?”
“It would be wrong for me to tell you. You will have to discover the truth you have hidden from yourself.”
He must have read my eyes. “As soon as you surrendered possession of your soul, you ceased to love. Soon Nona Lyle will mean nothing to you. You will forget.”
“Impossible,” I said, my voice hoarse.
But I may do something to hurt her.
“Perhaps Nona was injured simply so the Powers could trap you.”
“Using her as bait. So I would agree to sell my soul. But it didn’t work. She wouldn’t come back to life.”
“Do you know why Nona Lyle turned to the study of the mind?”
“She was influenced by her father. He was a physician in Oakland.”
“She had a history of psychological troubles as a young girl. She had a tendency toward a hysterical reaction which made her slip into a form of trance so deep it resembles a coma. My primary work with her was to cure her. I had reasonable success. I see the look of hope in your eyes. I must caution you. Don’t be reassured. What has happened to her may be worse than anything purely physical. She may have collapsed beyond hope of any recovery, forced into a preconscious state by the shock of the beating.”
The Horses of the Night Page 23