Alma Katsu - The Descent

“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.

Adair did nothing as I spoke. He kept a neutral expression fixed on his face as he listened, sitting with one leg crossed over the other, his hands clasped and index fingers steepled. Occasionally, he tapped his index fingers together or bounced his right foot up and down. His unresponsiveness made me nervous, and the possible reasons raced in the back of my mind: he must be disappointed to learn that I’d come because of Jonathan, not for him. Or maybe he thought I was foolish to presume the dreams had any meaning at all. I worried, too, that after giving him the reason for turning up unannounced on his doorstep, my audience with him would be over. Or worse, that the truth might reawaken the sleeping dragon that was his fierce temper, and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

But he didn’t appear to be angry. When I’d finished telling him about the nightmares, my voice tapering off to embarrassed, self-conscious silence, he said, “Why, Lanore, I’m surprised that you would let something like this bother you! You said so yourself: these are dreams, nothing more than that.”

“I’m not so sure,” I replied.

“Of course they are. And you know as well as I do that you’re having these nightmares because something is bothering you. Perhaps there is something on your conscience? Something you feel guilty about?”

My cheeks warmed at the thought. The list of things of which I was guilty was very long indeed. “Of course I do. I’m only human.”

He knew I was being evasive. “What I meant is: Do you feel guilty about something that deals with Jonathan? Something that also has to do with this dead man, the doctor?”

There was. It was a shameful secret that I’d carried in my heart ever since Luke helped me escape from St. Andrew four years ago. He smuggled me past the police and held me together emotionally after I’d given Jonathan the mercy killing he wanted.

I never got over the feeling that I’d used Luke in the most horrible way, charming him into becoming a fugitive in order to help me. Sure, he had wanted to do it; it wasn’t as though I could force him to do something against his will. But I saw that he was vulnerable: his wife had left him for her high-school sweetheart and moved far away with their daughters, and his parents—for whom he’d relocated to that tiny, isolated town, in order to care for them—had just died. He was alone and morbidly depressed; anyone who looked at him would’ve been able to see it.

After he transported me out of town and across the border to Canada and safety, I should’ve sent him back. I often wondered if it wouldn’t have been kinder if I’d slipped out on him while he’d slept at the motel. On waking and seeing I’d gone, he would’ve returned to St. Andrew, embarrassed and resentful for having been duped, but he’d go on to have a normal life. It would’ve been like releasing an animal back into nature instead of trying to keep him as a pet.

But Luke wasn’t the only lonely one: until Jonathan had come back into my life at the very end, my life had been empty. What had life become for me except a series of relationships, going from one companion to the next to keep loneliness at bay? When the companion was young, life would be a series of fiery distractions, nightclubs and dinner parties, teary spats and passionate reconciliations. And then when the companion grew older, if we were still together, life mellowed into quiet evenings and crossword puzzles, and then at the end the hospital, always the hospital. But I’d grown tired of it. My emotional well had run dry and, for the last stretch, I had lived alone.

So I thought—I honestly thought—that here was a chance to try again with Luke, this nice man who’d put himself on the line for me. He had proven himself dependable; why not stay with him? I owed him my loyalty—after all, he’d saved me from prison. I told myself that it didn’t matter if I didn’t love him. He didn’t love me, either—how could he when he barely knew me?

And it wasn’t as though I’d deceived him. He knew that I loved Jonathan; I’d told him so, spilling my story out to him on the drive to Quebec as we ran from the law. I confessed what an unhappy, possessed creature I’d been for two hundred years, in love with a man who could not remain faithful to me. Anyone with eyes in their head would’ve been able to see that I would be unhappy, and maybe even a little bit insane, for some time to come. You could argue that, in some ways, Luke was as much to blame as I.

When I confessed this to Adair, however, he cocked his head at me in confusion—or maybe he was only pretending to be confused. “Back in Aspen, when you were pleading with me to spare this man’s life, you told me that you loved him,” he said pointedly.

“I did. I do,” I fumbled. “I came to love him dearly.”

“But not passionately,” he countered. “So you feel guilty because you stayed with Luke, even though you didn’t love him with your entire heart and soul.”

I gave a helpless shrug.

“Because you still loved Jonathan.” His voice went flat.

If Adair could see into my heart, he’d know that it was divided. I’d loved Jonathan once, but that love had faded. I loved Luke, too, but he had never stood a chance to be the great love of my life. There was something growing in my heart now, something that had the potential to push everything else aside—but I wasn’t sure I should ever tell Adair about it, and certainly not at that moment. “Yes, because I still loved Jonathan. I’ve felt guilty about it ever since. I’d always felt as though I’d entered into a relationship with Luke under false pretenses, even if everything turned out okay in the end.”

“Did it?” I’d disappointed him and so he was being mean, poking a spot he knew was tender. “By the time he died, you loved this Luke with all your heart?”

With most of my heart—but that was not for Adair to know. “Yes.”

This was not what he wanted to hear, of course. “Then there’s no reason for you to have a guilty conscience, is there?” he said impatiently. “How did you sleep last night? Did you have one of those nightmares?”

I shook my head. “No, but that’s because I took a sleeping pill.”

“Well, there is your answer. Sleeping pills.”

“I don’t want to take sleeping pills forever,” I said sharply, almost in despair.

His beautiful eyes filled with sadness. He may have thought me a fool, a pitiful wretch for being hopelessly in love with the wrong man; he may have been moved because I sounded so utterly forlorn in asking for his mercy; or I may have been breaking his heart all over again, but he put his anger aside. “It won’t be forever,” he said, trying to reassure me. “I expect these dreams will fade away soon enough. But in the meantime, stay with me. If you have any more dreams, I’ll be right here.”

Adair’s plan was to distract me until I stopped having the dreams. The island was at my disposal, he said. I could do whatever I pleased. It was the perfect place to get away from the world, that was for sure. Its desolateness made it ideal for losing one’s self in a book or being alone with one’s thoughts. If I wanted to be distracted by crowds and foreign sights, he said he could radio for a boat to take me to Sardegna or Corsica, where there were casinos and shops, movie theaters and fancy spas. If I craved anything, food or drink, trinket or treasure, from anywhere in the world, he would be happy to send for it. All I had to do was ask.