"Why would she do it!"
" 'Cause she hated us. I mean she hated the Talamasca."
"You said 'us.' "
"That was a slip, but a very informative one. I feel like I'm part of them. They've come to me and they've asked me to be, more or less. They've taken me into their confidence. But maybe what I really meant, is that she hated anyone from outside who knew anything. There are dangers still to anybody from outside. There's danger to Aaron. You asked me what the Talamasca stands to get out of this. It stands to lose another member."
"Explain."
"On the way home from the funeral, coming back out to the country to get me, he saw a man on the road and swerved, rolled over twice, and just got out of the damned car before it exploded. It was that spirit thing. I know it was. So does he. I guess whatever this big plan is, this entanglement, Aaron has served his purpose."
"Is he hurt?"
Michael shook his head. "He knew what was going down, even as it was happening. But he couldn't take a chance. Suppose it hadn't been an apparition and he'd run down a real man. Just couldn't chance it. He was belted in, too. I think he got slammed on the head pretty bad."
"Did they take him to a hospital?"
"Yes, Doctor. He's OK. That is why I took so long to get here. He didn't want me to come. He wanted you to come to them, out there in the country, read the file out there. But I came on anyway. I knew that thing wasn't going to kill me. I haven't served my purpose yet."
"The purpose of the visions."
"No. He has his purpose, and they have theirs. And they don't work together. They work against each other."
"What happens if you try to run away to Tibet?" she asked.
"You want to go?"
"If I go with you, you're not running away. But really, what if you do run away?
"I don't know. I don't intend to, so it doesn't compute. They want me to fight him, to fight him and the little scheme he's been laying down all along. I'm convinced of it."
"They want you to break the chain," she said. "That's what the old woman said. She said, 'Break the chain,' meaning this legacy that comes all the way down from Charlotte, I guess, though she didn't talk about anyone that far back. She said she herself had tried. And that I could do it."
"That's the obvious answer, yes. But there has to be more to it than that, having to do with him, and why he's shown himself to me."
"OK," she said. "You listen to me now. I'm going to read the File, every page of it. But I've seen this thing too. And it doesn't simply appear. It affects matter."
"When did you see it?"
"The night my mother died, at the very hour. I tried to call you. I rang the hotel, but you weren't there. It scared the hell out of me. But the apparition isn't the significant part. It's what else happened. It affected the water around the house. It made the water so turbulent that the house was swaying on its pilings. There was absolutely no storm that night on Richardson Bay or San Francisco Bay or any earthquake or any natural reason for that to happen. And there's something else too. The next time, I felt this thing touch me."
"When did that happen?"
"On the plane. I thought it was a dream. But it wasn't. I was sore afterwards, just as if I'd been with a large man."
"You mean it ... ?"
"I thought I was asleep, but the distinction I'm trying to make is, this thing isn't limited to apparitions. It's involved with the physical in some very specific way. And what I have to understand is its parameters."
"Well, that's a commendable scientific attitude. Could I ask whether or not its touching you evoked any other, less scientific response?"
"Of course it did. It was pleasurable, because I was half asleep. But when I woke up, I felt like I'd been raped. I loathed it."
"Oh, lovely," he said anxiously. "Just lovely. Well, look, you've got the power to stop this thing from that sort of violation."
"I know, and now that I know that's what it is, I will. But if anybody had tried to tell me day before yesterday that some invisible being was going to slip under my clothes on a flight to New Orleans, I wouldn't have been any more prepared than I was because I wouldn't have believed it. But we know it doesn't want to hurt me. And we are fairly certain that it doesn't want to hurt you. What we have to keep in mind is that it does want to hurt anyone who interferes with its plans, apparently, and now this includes your friend Aaron."
"Right," Michael said.
"Now you look tired, like you're the one who needs to be taken back to the hotel and put to bed," she said. "Why don't we go there?"
He didn't answer. He sat up, and rubbed the back of his neck with his hands. "There's something you're not saying."
"What?"
"And I'm not saying it either."
"Well then say it," she said softly, patiently.
"Don't you want to talk to him? Don't you want to ask him yourself who he is and what he is? Don't you think you can communicate with him better and more truly maybe than any of the rest of them? Maybe you don't. But I do. I want to talk to him. I want to know why he showed himself to me when I was a kid. I want to know why he came so close to me the other night that I almost touched him, touched his shoe. I want to know what he is. And I know, that no matter what Aaron's told me, or what Aaron will tell me, I think I'm smart enough to get through to that thing, and to reason with it, and maybe that's exactly the kind of pride it expects to find in everyone who ever sees it. Maybe it counts on that.
"Now, if you haven't felt that, well, then, you're smarter and stronger than I am, by a long, long way. I never really talked to a ghost or a spirit, or whatever he is. And boy, I wouldn't pass up the opportunity, not even knowing what I know, and knowing what he did to Aaron."
She nodded. "Yeah, you've covered it all right. And maybe it does play on that, the vanity in some of us that we won't run the way the others did. But there's something else between me and this thing. It touched me. And it left me feeling raped. I didn't like it."
They sat there in silence for a moment. He was looking at her, and she could all but hear the wheels turning in his head.
He stood up and reached for the jewel case, sliding it across the smooth surface of the table. He opened it and looked at the emerald.
"Go ahead," she said. "Touch it."
"It doesn't look like the drawing I made of it," he whispered. "I was imagining it when I made the drawing, not remembering it." He shook his head. He seemed about to close the lid of the box again; then he removed his glove, and laid his fingers on the stone.
In silence she waited. But she could tell by his face that he was disappointed and anxious. When he sighed and closed the box, she didn't press him.
"I got an image of you," he said, "of your putting it around your neck. I saw myself standing in front of you." He put the glove back on, carefully.
"That's when you came in."
"Yeah," he said, nodding. "I didn't even notice that you were wearing it."
"It was dark."
"I saw only you."
"What does that matter?" she shrugged. "I took it off and put it back in the case."
"I don't know."
"Just now, when you touched it. Did you see anything else?"
He shook his head. "Only that you love me," he said in a small voice. "You really do."
"You only have to touch me to discover that," she said.
He smiled, but the smile was sad, and confused. He shoved his hands in his pockets, as if he were trying to get rid of them, and he bowed his head. She waited for a long moment, hating to see him miserable.