The Horses of the Night (29 page)

One of the nurses was at the doorway as I turned to leave, and I wondered if perhaps she had been warned to keep me away from the children.

“It's so good to see you, Mr. Fields,” she said. “The children ask after you when you don't come. Especially now.”

It would be an act of mercy to kill them all
.

“I really had to stop by and see them. I think about them all the time,” I heard myself say, with the smooth tone of a diplomat, an accomplished actor, a liar.

“Do stop by again. Stuart asks for you.”

I found myself lingering in a corridor. I urged myself to go and see Nona. To say good-bye.

To take her life.

Go back and show her mercy, too
.

I stood there, breaking into sweat. Just a few quick steps to the stairway, just a quick walk across these polished tiles. Why did I hesitate?

Kill Nona
.

Part Five

45

The wind was brisk, but I found myself not needing to button my overcoat. The cabdriver at Charles de Gaulle airport was doubtful. He looked at me with his mouth turned down and his eyebrows up, but I repeated the address. He looked at his map book and put the car into gear.

I was not sleepy, after my hours of sitting in first class, declining the champagne and the claret.

A great, long barge made its way past Notre Dame, and the sky was gray. The river reflected the sky, and the wavering image of the city around it. A bus had changed lanes unexpectedly, and a Citröen had been slightly damaged. Traffic went nowhere. Police in white helmets whisked up to the scene on tiny motorcycles, blue lights flashing. The cabdriver wrestled the steering wheel one way and another, and we managed our way onto the Quai Voltaire, past some of the shops where some of my paintings, and a good deal of my furniture, had been purchased.

I had called from San Francisco, before leaving for the airport, and while I had not spoken to Valfort himself, a woman's voice had spoken clear English. I could hear her pause to make a note, and then she said that they would be expecting me.

Hadn't there been, I wondered, a certain hesitation in her voice?

It had been more than a year since I had visited Paris. I had lectured, the last time I had visited, at an institute of design and architecture on rue Dupin. My lecture had been a comparison of Frank Lloyd Wright's work in San Francisco, which consisted of the building he had designed on Maiden Lane, and the buildings he had drawn for possible construction on adjacent streets, but which had never been built. “Perhaps,” I had explained, in slow English, “in a city both charming and earthquake prone, he did not trust the landscape enough to commit his favorite work to it.”

The students had listened alertly, but my name had not been one to call forth a tremendous crowd, and I had been happy to be able to stroll toward the Luxembourg Gardens with a handful of polite students, as interested in smoking cigarettes and examining the clothes in shop windows as they were in anything I had to say.

The cabdriver was expert. As we turned from rue du Cherche Midi onto a crowded street I realized that I knew this neighborhood. And I saw that any progress was going to be impeded by the trucks double parked before us. I thrust currency into the hand of the driver, thanked him, and made it clear that I had decided to walk.

I found the street without much trouble. Rue San Mames was a tiny street, a demi-lane between fashionable apartment buildings. It was a short walk from Bon Marché, the big department store, but it was, as so often happens in Paris, in a neighborhood out of another time. There was a market in progress, aubergines and cheeses in stalls, and I could not keep from pausing, even in my great hurry, to take in the sight.

Things love what they are, the courgette, the sheaf of leeks. How little they desire, the iron-dark beets beneath the hide of root callus, the black cylinders of wine. Only humans hurry from place to place, declining this potato, that sheaf of white onions.

I walked quickly, and when I reached 19, San Mames I was not surprised to find that the heavy glass door was locked. I was, though, surprised that there was no speaker box, no way to signal one's arrival. I was on a street of considerable bustle, and could see no way to make my entrance.

The door buzzed, and I became aware of a camera high above me. The door opened easily at a push, and then closed firmly behind me, a solid and transparent door that reminded me of the windshield of my demolished Mercedes.

A voice spoke to me, a female voice in rapid French I could just catch. I marched forth my own fairly rusty French and told the intercom that I was here to see Dr. Valfort. I announced my name.

There was a long hesitation. The sounds of the Paris street were muted through the glass. I could easily guess the way my name sounded to the French ear, and could hear it, in my mind, being uttered with some distaste at the Anglo uprightness of the syllables.

But the wait went on too long. I sensed indecision, or even irritation. Or perhaps it was something worse. Perhaps Dr. Valfort knew my sort of case all too well, and received my visit, however expected, with regret.

Another buzzer released me into a courtyard, and I gazed upward at the shuttered windows, the walls stitched with ivy. Somewhere a baby was crying.

“It's so kind of you to visit us,” said a voice.

A tall, very thin man stepped toward me across the courtyard. He was gray haired, and wiry, with steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked like a kind raptor, a benevolent hawk. He had a gray mustache, closely trimmed, and wore a jacket over his shoulders. His handshake was strong.

“I'm delighted that you could spare the time to see me,” I said.

“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.”