The Descent

THREE

I waited a few minutes before heading to bed. I didn’t want to run into any of them again tonight. It seemed fitting that I be alone, for that had been my choice, to leave Adair for Luke. Still, I’d been jarred by the sight of Robin and Terry; I don’t know why I hadn’t thought Adair would be with someone else by now, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me, and I was left feeling unsettled. I climbed the massive staircase and padded by the closed door to their shared bedroom, their muffled voices rising and falling as I passed. I imagined they were talking about me. I started a fire in the tiny fireplace, changed quickly, and slipped into the chilly bed.

I was smothered by a sense of incredible melancholy. I should’ve known that talking about Luke would stir memories, bringing to the surface everything that I’d tucked away in the back of my mind. It was the first time I’d spoken about Luke’s death with someone who hadn’t been directly affected by it; namely: his children, Jolene and Winona; his ex-wife, Tricia, and her husband; and the doctors and nurses who’d worked with Luke at the clinic. Of all those people, I was the one who was least entitled to anyone’s condolences. Sure, Luke and I lived together as though we were husband and wife, but we’d been together for only a few years. I was practically a newcomer. Tricia had more of a claim on him than I, let alone his children. The sympathy belonged to them.

The first sign that something was wrong came when Luke collapsed at the clinic. He didn’t tell me until he got home that night. “I passed out today,” he said casually at the dinner table, not even looking up from his plate. “I woke up on the floor of my office. I don’t recall how I got there.” He tried to claim it was only light-headedness, because he hadn’t eaten lunch or because he was dehydrated, but after a few minutes of cross-examination he admitted that he’d been having headaches for days. I begged him to see a specialist, but being a man, and a doctor, he wouldn’t listen. I think it was because he had an idea of what was wrong and he didn’t want to have it confirmed.

I’ve been with a lot of people as they were dying and can attest: it’s not like it is in the movies. It’s not antiseptic or tidy. It is absolutely the lowest point in any person’s life. They’re either old and their body is starting to irrevocably fail, or they’re young but very sick or have had an accident. In either case, they’re afraid of what’s coming, afraid and confused. I’ve learned through experience that there’s nothing you can do for someone at the end except to try to keep them company so they don’t have to make that passage alone. No one wants to die alone; I’ve held the hand of many a dying man. That’s the price of immortality. It hasn’t meant that death is a stranger to me; if anything, we are reacquainted frequently at the deathbeds of others.

As a matter of fact, I’d been through the death of a close loved one so many times that, during those last weeks with Luke, I went into a kind of autopilot. I knew what was expected of me in those situations. The dying wanted unfailing support. Luke wanted me to be stoic in the face of his emotional ups and downs. He wanted me to be practical and logical, to be a rock at a time when his life was falling apart. He wanted me to be in the waiting room while he was undergoing tests. He didn’t want me to freak out when he suddenly couldn’t speak or use his right arm. He never had to ask for any of this; I just knew it was what he needed from me. He was too smart to worry that I would be unhinged by his passing; he knew I’d lost plenty of others before him.

It seemed that immortality—rather than make me more sensitive to the pain of losing a loved one—had robbed me of the ability to feel real emotion in the face of death. When my lovers and friends died, my feelings were always muted and distant. I’m not sure why this was. It might have been to protect me from being swamped by grief, so I wouldn’t relive the sadness I’d felt for each of the people I’d lost over the course of my life. Or maybe it was because I knew from experience that, soon enough, another person would come along and—if not take Luke’s place, not exactly—at least distract me from missing him. Because I had no choice but to live on and on.

Immortality had made me less human. Instead of giving me greater perspective on what it meant to be human, which you’d think would happen when you had such a long life, immortality had put me at a greater distance. No wonder Adair grew to be insensitive to the suffering of others: immortality forces you to become something other than human. I felt it happening to me, even though I didn’t like it. I came to see it was inevitable.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought back to one afternoon in the hospice. The doctors didn’t expect Luke to last more than a couple of days, and he was unconscious most of the time due to the morphine drip easing his pain. He wore a knitted cap for warmth as almost all his hair had fallen out from chemotherapy. What was left had turned shock white. He’d lost a lot of weight, too. His face was shrunken like an old man’s and his arms seemed too thin for the IV needles and the sensors that fed his vital signs to the monitors.

I’d taken to curling up in a lounge chair by the window, reading or knitting while he slept. I was grateful for the sedatives and painkillers making his last days more comfortable. After all, I’d sat with loved ones dying of tumors and tuberculosis with nothing stronger than Saint-John’s-wort and fortified wine to see them through it. The nurses, when they came in to check on him or change the drip bag, would invariably comment on my seeming calmness—backhanded compliments all; I think they thought I should be more upset, like Tricia and the girls. They couldn’t understand how I could be so detached. I’m sure they thought me cold-blooded. I wondered if Luke thought so, too.

This one afternoon, however, Luke was more lucid than usual. When I saw him shift restlessly in bed, I put down my book and went over to him. “How are you feeling?” I asked, taking his hand gingerly to avoid jarring the IV needle.

His eyes were feverishly bright. “I have a question for you. Are we alone?”

I looked through the open door toward the nurses’ station down the hall. They were engaged in their work. “Yes. What do you want to ask?”

He licked his lips. He seemed to be looking past me, as though he could no longer focus his eyes. “Lanny, I was wondering, now that I’m dying . . . if you had the power, would you make me like you?”

I hated that question. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would have expected from Luke, either. He’d always seemed too sensible, too down-to-earth. I tried not to miss a beat, however. “But I don’t have the power. You know that. . . .”

He was impatient with my evasiveness. “That’s not what I asked. I want to know if you would.”

I reached up to tuck a few loose white hairs under his cap. “Of course I would, if that’s what you wanted.”

He snorted and closed his eyes. “You’re just saying that.”

“Where is this coming from?” I asked, trying not to sound as tired as I felt. I knew why he was being peevish: he was afraid and exhausted. It was the end. It hovered in the darkness every time he closed his eyes. The waiting could bring out the worst in people.

His breath grew louder, ragged. “You know who could make me like you. Adair. He’d do it if you asked him.”

This time, I paused. Was Luke asking me to track down Adair and beg him to give me the elixir of life? It made me see Luke in a completely different light. Not only had I never suspected that he cared about living forever, I thought he would have sooner chosen death than ask me to go on his behalf to this man who frightened me so much. But death plays us cruelly at the end. “Is that what you want?” I asked, waiting.

But he’d slipped into unconsciousness. His hand went lax in mine. By the time he woke a few hours later, he’d forgotten ever asking me and I was spared from having to come up with an answer.

I remembered Luke’s question that night in the fortress, though, as I tossed and turned in bed. For here I was at Adair’s house not for Luke’s sake, not to beg for Adair’s favor so that Luke could spend eternity with me, but to ask him to help Jonathan, a man who was dead and gone and surely beyond our help.

And I did not want to ask myself why.

The house was very quiet when I rose the next morning, though I wasn’t surprised, not after listening to women’s voices and squeals of delighted laughter late into the night. I trotted down the stairs to the kitchen and made coffee, looking forward to time alone to sort out my thoughts without being reminded that Adair was finding ways to pass the time without me. My disappointment was understandable, then, when I found Terry lounging at the old farmhouse table in a pair of men’s pajama bottoms and a tank top too small to do much besides decorate her breasts. As the coffee brewed, she watched me out of the corner of her eye and popped tangerine segments into her mouth. Once the coffee was ready, I slid into a chair opposite her with a mug in my hands.

“There’s coffee,” I said, to be sociable.

She said nothing.

“It’s a lovely day,” I tried again, taking a sip from my mug.

She snorted and tore off another segment. “It’s bloody windy and cold, same as it is every day.”

“At least it’s sunny.”

“It is that,” she said, looking down at the tangerine peels, flicking them with a fingernail. Then she fixed her merciless stare on me. “So, don’t take this the wrong way . . . it’s not that Robin and I aren’t delighted to have you stay with us so completely out of the blue and all. But what made you decide to come looking for Adair, anyway?”

I could’ve pointed out that it wasn’t her house and it didn’t matter what she and her friend thought of me, but I reminded myself to look at it from her point of view. They’d all been having a wonderful time until I showed up. “I got the urge to see an old friend,” I said.

“Old friend, eh? How far back do you go, you and Adair?” Okay, that probably was the wrong excuse to use with her, given that I looked to be in my early twenties on the outside, and Adair not much older than that. As a matter of fact, we both appeared to be younger than Robin and Terry. “Are you childhood friends, then?”

“He was one of my first lovers.” It was the truth; I hoped that by letting her know we were intimate once but no longer would satisfy her. There was a time, in the beginning, when life with Adair had been thrilling. When I came to him, I was a young girl from a small, isolated town of people with Puritan forebears. I had been raised to work hard, not to question either my elders or the Bible, and to have few expectations of life. I knew nothing about desire or physical pleasure. Life under Adair’s roof turned all that upside down. Adair taught me about pleasure and showed me that it was possible to enjoy my body as well as other things in life—beautiful clothes, a fine wine, a good book, gay company—things the good folk in St. Andrew would’ve condemned as frivolous. To want such things was a sign of moral weakness. Life hadn’t always been easy in Adair’s house, but had it been any harder than the life I’d had in St. Andrew? I looked up to find Terry regarding me hostilely and added, “I haven’t come back for him, if that’s worrying you. I swear.”

Her aggression subsided upon hearing this. “I know I’m being awfully rude. It’s just—we’re having a good time here. And I’ve gotten very fond of Adair. Still, we know fuck all about him—he won’t talk about himself at all. We’d like to know more.” Her tone took on a conspiratorial warmth.

“There’s not much I can tell you,” I said, conscious that I was walking a tightrope. Adair didn’t like to be talked about behind his back. He’d impressed upon all his creations, we immortals, that we were never to share our secret with anyone outside our circle or risk terrible consequences. The result was that I tended to be tight-lipped around people. I saw in Terry the same frustration I’d seen in my friends over the years. They’d been hurt by my wariness and unable to understand why I put a barrier between us. I hadn’t been able to get close to anyone in a long time—until Luke.

I think Terry was starting to realize that what she had with Adair was all she’d ever get. It would never go on to greater intimacy; he would never let her get truly close to him. Now here I was—the first person from his past to show up on the island and probably the last. I was her one opportunity to learn more about the man she loved and, as much as she disliked me, she weighed the benefit and risk of sharing her fears with me. She nervously jammed her hands between her knees like an anxious child, before she spoke. “It’s been fun staying here with him, you know? He’s a good bloke, and we’re having a fine time, all carefree and easy. And it’s a nice place to live, isn’t it? Better than some filthy youth hostel. We thought we’d only crash here for a short while, Robin and me. That was the plan, anyway. We stayed for the laughs and”—her eyes flitted over my face—“good sex. It wasn’t love at first sight or anything. Things have changed, though. We feel differently now. He grows on you, doesn’t he? He’s so mysterious, and smart—and dead sexy, too. I’ve never met a man who could do the things he does in bed. . . .” She caught herself and gave me a brief, embarrassed smile. “Let’s just say they don’t make them like that in Bristol, where we come from.”

“They don’t make them like him anywhere,” I offered.

“Which is why we figured you came to get him back.”

I shook my head. “Adair and I found out the hard way that we’re not right for each other. We’re just friends.”

“If you say so . . .”

“Look, he’s wonderful—in some ways. He’s all the things you said of him, but there’s more to Adair than meets the eye. I’m not trying to talk him down, but . . . you can trust me on that.”

I was trying to convince her that she had nothing to fear from me, but everything I said seemed to have the opposite effect. Maybe she thought I was being patronizing, maybe she thought I was trying to trick her, for she jumped off the stool, bristling. “You talk like you’re done with him, but you’re not. I can tell. I can see it in your eyes plain enough, and if you really believe what you just told me, you don’t know your own mind. You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s over between you.”

“You’re wrong, Terry,” I said, trying to calm her, feeling as though I’d been pushed into a fight I didn’t want. “I’m not trying to come between you and Adair. You’ll see: once I’m gone it will go back to the way it was, and you two will have Adair to yourselves.”

She tossed back her hair, defiant. “Oh no, it won’t. Everything’s changed. Can’t you feel it? The minute you walked into the house it’s like something came between us, me and Robin and Adair. And it’s because he’s still in love with you—but you don’t need me to tell you that. You know it already.” Her face was flushed; her anger rose up like a storm inside her, fighting to get out. She looked at me sharply one more time, hatred in her flashing eyes, before bolting from the room.

It took a few minutes for me to calm down after Terry left. The house fell silent again. I sat at the table listening for noises from the floor above, straining for some sign that Adair had risen. I waited patiently until, sip by sip, I’d emptied my cup. Still, there was no indication that he was about to come downstairs. Restless, I decided I might as well go exploring.

To say the house was peculiar would be an understatement. It seemed to have once been a fort before it was converted into a residence. The house was deceptive; like a handkerchief tucked up a magician’s sleeve, you didn’t know what might be hidden inside. From the outside it looked small, but inside was another matter. As I meandered down long, lonely hallways and went up and down winding staircases, the house seemed to unfold continuously before me as though it sprang to life from an M. C. Escher design. As best I could tell, the house’s four wings made a perfect square, with a courtyard at its center.

On the first lap, I managed to lose my way somehow, and though surprised, I was amused by my inattention. However, it stopped being funny when, on the second lap, I still hadn’t found my starting point. By the third lap, I was near panic, thinking I might never find my way through this strange, telescoping maze. That is, I think I made several laps of the building, but I couldn’t be sure because I never seemed to take the same hall twice. Nor could I reliably say how many floors there were, or if these were floors in the conventional sense, as some staircases were only a half flight in length before stopping abruptly and leading to yet another hallway.

I noticed something else strange about the house, too: there were no maids, no housekeeper. There was no sign that there was anyone in the house except Adair and the two women, and yet someone had to be taking care of the place. A house this size undoubtedly needed a number of servants; Terry and Robin hardly seemed able to handle the job, and in any case the two women didn’t seem inclined toward housekeeping, aside from the kitchen, that is. From what I’d seen the night before, they seemed quite at home there, concocting splendid meals.

I don’t know how long I’d been lost in the house and was really starting to break into a panic when I finally stumbled on a set of stairs that brought me back to my starting point. I emerged in the entry hall just as Adair was descending the main staircase. Tousle-haired, he was pulling a shirt over his chest, and the sight of his bare skin reminded me of when he used to parade around the mansion in Boston in a state of undress, a silk banyan doing a poor job of hiding his nakedness, looking for all the world like an indolent pasha traipsing from one concubine to the next.

I must’ve looked a bit wild-eyed after being lost, because on seeing me he said, “You haven’t been exploring on your own, have you, Lanore? You really shouldn’t do that. The house has been renovated so many times and built onto over the years that there’s no longer any rhyme or reason to the layout. It’s easy to lose your way, and I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I were to say there’s a good chance we’d never find you.”

If I hadn’t just spent the better part of an hour or so lost in that maze of staircases and long, empty halls, I would’ve thought he was making it up in an effort to keep me from finding something he didn’t want me to see. Now, of course, I knew he was sincere. He led me to a cozy room past the kitchen that appeared to be his study. The far wall had a big window that looked out on a stand of pine trees, the only shady spot on the island. Two walls were dominated by shelves, each shelf full of old, leather-bound books. I glanced over the spines, wondering if these were Adair’s or had belonged to the previous owner of the island. I realized with a blush that, subconsciously, I’d been looking for titles that had something to do with alchemy or magic, signs of his past life, but there were none that I could tell. Nor was there any evidence that he was dabbling in magic again: no bottles of mysterious liquids, no glass jars of seeds or roots, or unidentifiable animal parts as I’d seen in the hidden room in the mansion in Boston all those years ago. The room was reassuringly normal.

“The two books you left with me,” I said, referring to the ancient tomes filled with his alchemical secrets that he had given to me on the day of my departure, a token of his intent to forego magic. “I brought them with me. They’re up in my room.”

Adair wrinkled his brow. “I gave them to you. You didn’t need to return them.”

“I don’t feel right keeping them. Besides, it doesn’t matter where I put them or what I do with them, they look out of place. They’re meant to be with you, I think.” I pulled down a book, flipped the pages until I got to text. I didn’t know the language, but from the way the lines broke, I could tell it was poetry.

He crouched in front of the hearth to build a fire. “Did you sleep well last night?” he asked over his shoulder.

“I slept fine.”

“I am glad to hear that. Most people don’t when they first come here. They complain of bad dreams. The girls did.” He nodded in the direction of the kitchen. “The locals have all kinds of reasons why this is. Some people say the bad dreams are caused by vapors given off by the rocks here, that the island has these hallucinogenic properties because it is made of an unusual combination of minerals. Others say it has to do with the precise longitude and latitude being in some strange magnetic field. Still others say it’s because of its ominous past.”

“Did you have bad dreams when you arrived?” I asked, even though I couldn’t imagine he’d say that he did. I didn’t think it would be possible for Adair to have nightmares any more than I thought he could be frightened. To me, he was so intimidating that it seemed impossible for him to have those sorts of weaknesses.

He drew sheets of old, brittle newspaper from a wooden box next to the fireplace and crumpled them for kindling. “It’s not something I like to talk about, and not something I would discuss with anyone else, but I will tell you, Lanore, since you ask. When I first came here, what I experienced was worse than bad dreams. I couldn’t close my eyes and not feel something of the terror I felt in my tomb in the house in Boston. It’s hard to explain, but it was as though whatever it was that had me in its grip there had followed me here. It felt as though the space around me would open up and try to swallow me whole.” There was an edge to his voice and I worried that I was getting into dangerous territory, since I was the one who had put him in that tomb. “It would come and go, and lasted for a few months, but eventually it went away. Maybe it was magnetic fields or vapors, and I got used to whatever was causing it.”

I went over to the window. The horned goat had appeared out of nowhere and was staring thoughtfully at the house, as though he was considering whether he had business inside. There was something surreal and hypnotic about the goats, especially the horned one, who seemed particularly devilish, and whenever they were in view I found that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them. “How did you find out about this place, anyway?” I asked Adair while still looking out the window at the goat, waiting to see what he would do. “I don’t think you could’ve picked a more obscure location if you tried.”

“It is a bit infamous,” he answered as he stacked wood on the grate. “Supposedly, the Romans sent a theurgist here in exile. He had been quite notorious, apparently, upsetting everyone with his heresy. They’d banished him to this rock without food or water, and expected him to die quickly, but legend has it that he lived on for centuries.”

So Adair wasn’t the first long-lived magician on the island. Perhaps it held a special allure for them. “Pretty nifty trick,” I said, finally breaking away from staring at the goat to watch Adair build his fire. “I wonder how he managed that.”

“With the protection of a powerful sorceress, or so the story goes.” Adair smirked at me over his shoulder. “The last person to live here had been a disciple of Aleister Crowley’s, the great English sorcerer. He had been with Crowley at his temple in Cefalù. The man came to live here after the Sicilian authorities shut down the temple and threw Crowley out of the country. The furniture, the books you see here—all in Italian and mostly having to do with magic and the occult—are his. When I bought the house, it had been untouched for fifty years.”

“The house has a very magical history,” I murmured as my stomach tightened in reflex.

“So it would seem.” Adair struck a wooden match and held it to the kindling.

No wonder he wasn’t in a hurry to get his books back from me. “So that’s why you came here: to do more research?”

He took one of the chairs by the fireplace. “That wasn’t my intention. I wanted to get away from everything, and this little island seemed exactly what I was looking for. It wasn’t until I’d decided to move here that I found out about its past. But I suppose there’s something about this place that drew me, just as it drew Crowley’s disciple.”

“So you’ve moved on from alchemy? Now you believe in magic?”

He gave me a tiny frown. “They’re both parts of occult philosophy. ‘Magic’ is just a word. I believe there are things that we don’t have the means to explain—yet.” He patted the chair on the other side of the hearth. “But enough about that. You didn’t come all this way to talk about magic. Why don’t we continue the conversation we started last night?”

I slipped into the chair, my heart pounding. I could put it off no longer: the time had come for me to tell Adair about the nightmares. I assumed that he would be none too pleased, because the dreams involved his rival, Jonathan. Adair wouldn’t care if Jonathan was being tormented in the depths of hell—he might even get a measure of satisfaction from it—and I hadn’t yet thought of a way to make him care enough about Jonathan’s fate to help me.

“I need your help,” I said timidly. That made his face light up; my request had made him happy. He wanted to be of service to me. Perhaps he thought I’d come to ask for money or some other little thing that he could easily grant. It wasn’t going to be that simple. I took a deep breath, and began to tell him about the dreams.