There was neither answer nor movement, and after a moment, I opened my eyes. He was standing there, watching the Reverend Campbell.
Archibald Campbell lay still as death, but was not yet dead. The dark angel was coming, though; his skin had taken on the faint green tinge I had seen before in dying men. Still, his lungs moved, taking air with a high wheezing sound.
“It wasn’t an Englishman, then,” I said. My hands were wet, and I wiped them on my skirt. “An English name. Willoughby.”
“Not Willoughby,” he said sharply. “I am Yi Tien Cho!”
“Why!” I said, almost shouting. “Look at me, damn you! Why?”
He did look at me then. His eyes were black and round as marbles, but they had lost their shine.
“In China,” he said, “there are…stories. Prophecy. That one day the ghosts will come. Everyone fear ghost.” He nodded once, twice, then glanced again at the figure on the floor.
“I leave China to save my life. Waking up long time—I see ghosts. All round me, ghosts,” he said softly.
“A big ghost comes—horrible white face, most horrible, hair on fire. I think he will eat my soul.” His eyes had been fixed on the Reverend; now they rose to my face, remote and still as standing water.
“I am right,” he said simply, and nodded again. He had not shaved his head recently, but the scalp beneath the black fuzz gleamed in the light from the window.
“He eat my soul, Tsei-mi. I am no more, Yi Tien Cho.”
“He saved your life,” I said. He nodded once more.
“I know. Better I die. Better die than be Willoughby. Willoughby! Ptah!” He turned his head and spat. His face contorted, suddenly angry.
“He talks my words, Tsei-mi! He eats my soul!” The fit of anger seemed to pass as quickly as it had come on. He was sweating, though the room was not terribly warm. He passed a trembling hand over his face, wiping away the moisture.
“There is a man I see in tavern. Ask for Mac-Doo. I am drunk,” he said dispassionately. “Wanting woman, no woman come with me—laugh, saying yellow worm, point…” He waved a hand vaguely toward the front of his trousers. He shook his head, his queue rustling softly against the silk.
“No matter what gwao-fei do; all same to me. I am drunk,” he said again. “Ghost-man wants Mac-Doo, ask I am knowing. Say yes, I know MacDoo.” He shrugged. “It is not important what I say.”
He was staring at the minister again. I saw the narrow black chest rise slowly, fall…rise once more, fall…and remain still. There was no sound in the room; the wheezing had stopped.
“It is a debt,” Yi Tien Cho said. He nodded toward the still body. “I am dishonored. I am stranger. But I pay. Your life for mine, First Wife. You tell Tsei-mi.”
He nodded once more, and turned toward the door. There was a faint rustling of feathers from the dark veranda. On the threshold he turned back.
“When I wake on dock, I am thinking ghosts have come, are all around me,” Yi Tien Cho said softly. His eyes were dark and flat, with no depth to them. “But I am wrong. It is me; I am the ghost.”
There was a stir of breeze at the French windows, and he was gone. The quick soft sound of felt-shod feet passed down the veranda, followed by the rustle of spread wings, and a soft, plaintive Gwaaa! that faded into the night-sounds of the plantation.
I made it to the sofa before my knees gave way. I bent down and laid my head on my knees, praying that I would not faint. The blood hammered in my ears. I thought I heard a wheezing breath, and jerked up my head in panic, but the Reverend Campbell lay quite still.
I could not stay in the same room with him. I got up, circling as far around the body as I could get, but before I reached the veranda door, I had changed my mind. All the events of the evening were colliding in my head like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.
I could not stop now to think, to make sense of it all. But I remembered the Reverend’s words, before Yi Tien Cho had come. If there was any clue here to where Geillis Abernathy had gone, it would be upstairs. I took a candle from the table, lighted it, and made my way through the dark house to the staircase, resisting the urge to look behind me. I felt very cold.
* * *
The workroom was dark, but a faint, eerie violet glow hovered over the far end of the counter. There was an odd burnt smell in the room, that stung the back of my nose and made me sneeze. The faint metallic aftertaste in the back of my throat reminded me of a long-ago chemistry class.
Quicksilver. Burning mercury. The vapor it gave off was not only eerily beautiful, but highly toxic as well. I snatched out a handkerchief and plastered it over my nose and mouth as I went toward the site of the violet glow.
The lines of the pentacle had been charred into the wood of the counter. If she had used stones to mark a pattern, she had taken them with her, but she had left something else behind.
The photograph was heavily singed at the edges, but the center was untouched. My heart gave a thump of shock. I seized the picture, clutching Brianna’s face to my chest with a mingled feeling of fury and panic.
What did she mean by this—this desecration? It couldn’t have been meant as a gesture toward me or Jamie, for she could not have expected either of us ever to have seen it.
It must be magic—or Geilie’s version of it. I tried frantically to recall our conversation in this room; what had she said? She had been curious about how I had traveled through the stones—that was the main thing. And what had I said? Only something vague, about fixing my attention on a person—yes, that was it—I said I had fixed my attention on a specific person inhabiting the time to which I was drawn.
I drew a deep breath, and discovered that I was trembling, both with delayed reaction from the scene in the salon, and from a dreadful, growing apprehension. It might be only that Geilie had decided to try my technique—if one could dignify it with such a word—as well as her own, and use the image of Brianna as a point of fixation for her travel. Or—I thought of the Reverend’s piles of neat, handwritten papers, the carefully drawn genealogies, and thought I might just faint.
“One of the Brahan Seer’s prophecies,” he had said. “Concerning the Frasers of Lovat. Scotland’s ruler will come from that lineage.” But thanks to Roger Wakefield’s researches, I knew—what Geilie almost certainly knew as well, obsessed as she was with Scottish history—that Lovat’s direct line had failed in the 1800s. To all visible intents and purposes, that is. There was in fact one survivor of that line living in 1968—Brianna.
It took a moment for me to realize that the low, growling sound I heard was coming from my own throat, and a moment more of conscious effort to unclench my jaws.
I stuffed the mutilated photograph into the pocket of my skirt and whirled, running for the door as though the workroom were inhabited by demons. I had to find Jamie—now.
* * *
They were not there. The boat floated silently, empty in the shadows of the big cecropia where we had left it, but of Jamie and the rest, there was no sign at all.
One of the cane fields lay a short distance to my right, between me and the looming rectangle of the refinery beyond. The faint caramel smell of burnt sugar lingered over the field. Then the wind changed, and I smelled the clean, damp scent of moss and wet rocks from the stream, with all the tiny pungencies of the water plants intermingled.