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.