The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (31 page)

I put our food on the table, moving aside the memorabilia. The African masks grinned at me. Before we sat down, I took a folder
from my leather case. “Justine, I have here a copy of Seabrook’s
Witchcraft.
I photocopied the reference book in full.” As she sat down, looking at the pages with curiosity, I saw her hands sweep up
the skirts—with upturned palms!

What the gesture made me remember filled me with awe and consternation. That was becoming a familiar state of mind, ever since
a young Goth had seated herself, in identical fashion, beside me at the WorldCon. It was as if a ghost, wrapped in a reality
of sweet, young flesh, belittled my wildest conjectures.

Would it have been more easily handled had I believed her demented, victim to multiple personalities, instead of struggling
to accept what I suspected might have been happening there? Oh God, this was indeed
some
kind of real!

For once, her typically piggish table habits consoled me, as she savaged the burger and fries with sickening amounts of ketchup.
I started reading to her, from the “Justine” chapters, the description of her predecessor passing into a trance during a bondage
session and having an elaborate precognitive vision.

I’d reached the point where Willie, upon discovery that she’d long been hanging free of any foot support, had rescued her.
She’d been ticked off, because she’d been enjoying her vision of the street circus, the one they were destined to witness
the following year in the city of Petrarch’s muse Laure, an alleged ancestress of Sade…

“In
Avignon,
” Justine breathed the name with a melancholy lilt, her perfection of pronunciation discernible to my ear. I just stopped
and looked at her. “You’re thinking about me complaining last night, which wasn’t fair.” Her throat trembled, “I’m gonna get
to go? Really and truly?”

“Justine, I’ve procrastinated about telling you this story for
three days.
Avignon was mentioned in the
Testament,
also the fact of the circus, right? Are you pulling my leg? Have you read this story before? It’s not in my notes, I know
that, but some of the reviewers did, I believe, synopsize it…”

Shaking her head with a very slight smile, she seemed to be looking afar off. “Dearest, don’t be contrary. Someway or other,
it gets read, but not yet.” Something in her responses was askew from any sense of immediate reality. She then brought up
the red-leather discipline mask; the mask on the little figure in the mural, which the old woman had alleged to be herself.
She described it, much as in the pages that I’d been only about to read to her, but made mention of a pair of blue, tightly
laced gloves. That rang a disparate bell.

In the mid-sixties, a young writer of Anton LaVey’s acquaintance had published a satire on pornography.
The Nightclerk,
like
Candy,
had become an underground classic. A special favorite of my wife’s had been a scene in which the female lead, named “Katy,”
was being hand-fed in a public restaurant. Her arms were immobilized in a pair of blue-leather discipline gloves.
⁶⁸

The workmanship of the gloves, among other haunting similarities, had put me in mind of Willie and Justine’s restaurant adventure
described in
Witchcraft.
That had opened a new portal of conjecture during my research. What else might that author have known? I had wondered whether
Katie, Willie’s first wife, might have been a component of a composite Justine? Katie had certainly not been a shrinking violet,
to be sure, but it was a long reach.

“Someway, this all involves a place called Evenos,” Justine was saying, absently running her tongue around the spout of the
ketchup bottle before replacing the cap. “Do you know that name? It sounds Greek.”

“The
Château d’Evenos,
near Toulon. Seabrook took a long lease, but failed to restore it. The place and its neighborhood are described in detail
in Marjorie’s book.”

“It was certainly all empty and fallen down when we were there last night. The time before, it was full of life. Like you
were describing the roadhouse, muchly.”

“I’m confused. Which of the ‘châteaux’ are we talking about?” I tried to laugh, though hairs were rising on the back of my
neck. “You’ve seen it some other way, perhaps? Babe, it’s been like that for decades.”

“Not the roadhouse, silly, the castle.” Putting down her burger, she studied intently, as though with difficulty pulling something
up from long before.

“I dreamed of riding in a huge old open-topped car. Its wheels had wooden spokes, and everything was so bumpy and dusty! Above
a dark gorge, there was an old castle with a spiral iron staircase that led nowhere. We laughed about it being the ‘stairway
to heaven.’ It was like
déjà vu,
memories coexistent with their contents. I was dreaming the remembrance of the very dream I was having, but something was
all wrong. The other time, the stairs
did
go someplace. I was so glad you were there to hold my hand. I felt like a ghost haunting the ruins.”

I remained very still for a while, hoping the fear in me would subside. Trying to follow her dreams resembled my vain quest
to correlate the literary sources. They appeared contiguous with histories, even with fictional treatments, of which she possessed
no knowledge. More, I felt a less-than-explicable reticence to grapple with an inference of relationship, in some eerie fashion,
to our present-day experience.

“No bondage gloves are associated with the mask in any of Willie’s writings that I know of. Neither is this ‘stairway to heaven,’
at least in that form. Where is that coming from?”

————————

P
LEASE GIRL,
I
PRAYED, TELL ME YOU READ IT!
What I’d said was not totally true. Marjorie had recalled a story of “… that strange iron staircase—erected on top of the
ruins by that last demented owner, the Count d’Evenos, who wanted to get a little closer to heaven when he prayed…”
⁶⁹

“Justine, did you see her vision of the street circus?” I burst out, now
needing
to know.

“The lion was in the vein of remembrance of memory. I was here now, long years after those happenings, but knowing I’d not
even yet been to Europe. So it was like, remembering things that hadn’t yet happened. You’ll be taking me soon? Maybe next
year?” Her eyes were all starlight and absinthe. Magic was in there, and I could not help but imagine that it formed the face
of another Justine—the Justine of
Witchcraft.

“Speaking of your own dreams,” she mused, “we talked all about brain waves,
sans
the spikes needful to earmark a time sequence, and such-like? You opened me up last night, so very wide…” My eyes began to
burn. “… and I feel like,
susceptible,
to dreams that had been waiting for me to have them… oh, dearest, not to worry…”

I’d drawn back, but I had no clue what she was seeing in my face. Dear God, no! Her perplexing condition was due, in part,
to my stupid games. I spilled my guts. “I’ve suspected that there’s no escape from whatever destiny of yours I’m entangled
with. I think I can accept that. But babe, you complete my life. I can’t live with having found you, just to lose you again—as
I did with your mother. And not to a damned ghost!”

“Oh, pooh!” The green eyes flared. “JJ didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to take your hand or to take command of her own
life.” She thrust her fists against her hips with exasperation. Had she not been seated, I believed she would have stamped
her foot.

“So it’s like that, after last night? How very bore-some your life would of been if you’d married her. There is positively
no comparison. If you still think that I could throw you, I’m tapped. I-am-not-JJ!
Damn!
”

Emergent, in her anger, was the persona I’d met on Sunday, and I tried to seize the moment. “That’s my point, babe, who are
you?” I directed her attention to her elaborate coiffure and makeup, her varying accents and language. “This is something
a little more extreme than accessing some scattered memories. Look, I don’t doubt the validity of Seabrook’s approach to psychic
experimentation. I’m not some little narrow-minded shrink”—she raised a disapproving eyebrow, but I pushed ahead—”who would
imagine that mere employment of the sexual motif invalidates results…”

I recounted Linda’s belief that the endorphins released by physical stress often allowed her to leave her body, enjoying watching
her plight voyeuristically. Neither had her evidence, that something more was going on, been purely subjective. Once, believing
that her back was being arched too far, she panicked. She had thrashed about and freed one ankle, but the cuff that had held
her was still closed tight and double-locked. No examination of details could explain what had taken place.

“Now, had this little Houdini stunt occurred in the
Rufai
Hall of Torture, it would be cited as anecdotal evidence of a paranormal occurrence.” I groused, “Seabrook was right. The
objections to his methods were nothing more than a cultural bias, which exists today in an even more ridiculous form. Were
we
Lakota
Sioux, torturing vision-questers at Sundance, we’d be endorsed as spiritual and even religious!”

“Your point being what?” she sighed. “If the Sioux lived close by their neighborhoods, your ‘politically correct’ would dis
them, too.”

I admitted that the digression was avoidance. “I can believe that, last night, we did open a gate to something—widened it,
anyway. I suspect something’s been going on with you in this house for a while. But we can have no control whatsoever over
what may be coming through it. Why do I doubt that you’ve ever said
‘oh pooh’
before in your entire life, or even actually heard that expression used?”

I, myself, felt that I was rambling. Still, I was almost angry with her, for laughing at my consternation. Yet her smile was
loving and compassionate when she spoke. “Dearest, you have known me for an entire
three days.
If you were now to meet a side of me you’d not yet encountered, then what would be extraordinary about that—from the most
common-sensical standpoint? You are only getting to know the woman who belongs to you, the whole little baggage.

“My great-grandmother is
not
a ghost,” in a slightly hurt tone, as if I’d insulted the old woman. “Nor do I have an identity disorder.” Her brow knitted,
but I thought her concern was probably directed at me. “I shan’t go away;
it’s still me in here.
” Her words recalling my thoughts from the pier, I was, once again, deeply chilled.

“If we’re thinking I’m possessed, it’s a welcome possession. I’m as I’ve always felt inside.” She looked at me imploringly.
“Playing dress-up was for fun. Get you stoked up ’cause you’re all, y’know, about the past?” She dropped her head, “Or not.
Behold my success.”

She was trying to pacify and comfort me without really backing off. “Babe, your great-grandmother grieved all her life for
a man she’d worshiped, a man whose story I relate to more intensely than that of any other person. But I can’t
be
him, Justine, do you understand? If you are turning into your namesake, I can’t reciprocate by somehow becoming Willie. In
a way, I wish I could; for all his faults, he didn’t waste his potential. I only wish I’d done half the things he did.

“See, I think I do believe that maybe you are becoming her, in some sense. I’m afraid because I may not be able to play the
role you need from me.” I was not moved to further expansion.

Another had once believed me capable of mending everything and held it against me when I couldn’t. Neither could I confess
the terror that my youthful posturing might have justified Linda’s grievance. I drew a deep breath. “If you’re thinking reincarnation,
it doesn’t even begin to explain everything that’s been going on, all the connections that have existed and continue to be
revealed.

“How was it that I was drawn into this thing, based on a lifetime obsession with your mother? Which I apparently confided
to your great-grandmother, when I just
happened
to become involved with her nearly thirty years ago? That, in turn, set something in motion, of which her book finding its
way to me, so that I could return it home, may be the most innocent.
Et cetera ad infinitum!
Doesn’t all this seem a little bit weird to you?”

“No, wait. Now let me see; compared to
what?
”

“Point conceded.” The tension breaking, I laughed as well. “I guess we just have to throw all the laws of probability right
out the window on this one!” I thought aloud, “Everything is moving so damned fast, it’s dizzying. I fear that as the dominoes
keep falling, in a way they never do in ordinary life, it might turn out that a Justine like her will have no interest in
me.”

She rose and walked behind me, pressing my head back against her young breasts beneath the antique Georgette film. “All I
can tell you is that I’m in love, for the first time in my life. Anything other is outta the question.”

I took her hand and kissed her palm. “And I’m in love for the last time,” I completed the line, though it was hard to voice
the finality. I had to wonder at the sweetness of the hurt—in knowing that I meant it.

“I believe,” she continued, and I heard the ring of the old Bronx again, “that whatever is left of her is all—about protecting
us, watching over us, and being kind to us.” I felt her chest heave, and there was just the slightest break in her voice,
but when I looked up, her eyes were dry. “If you think we were manipulated into this,” she entreated, “please trust my intuition
that we weren’t brought here to a bad thing.
Go
with it.”

“Go where with it? To Rhinebeck, as she would have had it?”

“We’re outta here in the
A.M.
I’m ready to go to town.” Momentarily, I thought I was listening to a weird mix of anachronisms. Then she added, “We can
chill today,” her accent again at full variance with her costume. “But hey, I still gotta get by the mall!”