Ширли Мерфи - The Grass Tower

Bethany began to walk slowly toward the altar.

It was an altar, she could see that now. Yes! And the words were leaping in her mind before Selma spoke them— “Take this blood and the blood of my sister,” Bethany whispered. “Make of us one blood.” Bethany had almost reached the altar, her pulse was pounding. Yes, that was the way—the blood, drink the blood. She reached forward at last and accepted the chalice from Selma’s outstretched hands.

The silver was warm from Selma’s hands. Bethany lifted the tall cup and drank from it, and she stared into the green eyes of Selma Krake as if she were staring into the eyes of the Serpent itself. The thrill in her, the surging wild thrill in her was terrible. As she turned to face the room, she thought, I can’t be doing this— But she could not resist, and no one stirred before her, not a hand moved, no weight was shifted—

“By the power,” Bethany’s voice seemed to come without her bidding, nor did she wonder how she knew the words; “kneel, Serpent, and bid the spirit which awaits reveal itself to me.” The thrill within her surged, and the air before her began to gather and to warp, to form a darkness that made her catch her breath in silence, a darkness that grew and seemed to have depth, a darkness that rose up at last to blot out the audience, then condensed slowly to form the shape of a figure; fear crawled up Bethany’s spine, but the whole of her being was concentrated on that shifting stir of air—

The shape moved toward her, seemed almost to engulf her. It was a human shape, and the feeling of power in her grew, almost lifting her— Then cold fear spun in her stomach. Her face blanched, drained of blood. What was she doing? Get out. Get out—

It was gone, the shape had disappeared; the power she had felt was gone. In its place, fear made her tremble; strangers stared at her; she was utterly alone. She felt naked and exposed. She fled for the door, wrenched it open, and ran.

She sat huddled on the grass tower, retching. What had happened to her? What had she done in there? Her hands shook, there was a shaking all through her. She closed her eyes and tried to think about how the gulls were wheeling below her, how dry the grass felt brushing her arms; but the dark insanity pushed in at her, terrifying her. Something had been in that room, something strange and remote. Something she had called. Nothing in her experience, nothing that had ever happened to her had prepared her for this. As frightening as it was to touch another’s mind, she had made that understandable to herself, mostly by reading, by finding out it was not a thing to be feared. But this—this was beyond all she understood as natural. She huddled, her arms around herself, clammy with fear.

She went down from the grass tower finally and walked along the wet tide line, needing to walk, to be doing something. She crossed the dunes and got Danny, but even Danny was no help, for suddenly she could not bear to be alone. The calm security that aloneness had always brought had quite left her. She had a terrible need to be with someone, to talk to someone. She took Danny back and walked up the hills to the house site where Reid was working. She needed his quiet strength, in spite of her shame at having to tell him.

He was sitting on a stack of two-by-fours eating his dinner, a sandwich and coffee. His brown hair had sawdust in it, and the smile lines around his mouth were touched with fine sawdust like golden pollen. She sat down next to him, the scent of resin from the new lumber rising sharply in her nostrils. She looked at him, then began to make a pattern on the ground with a stick, a five-sided pentacle. She caught her breath, rubbed it out, and flung the stick from her, then sat silent and shaken.

“I heard about it,” Reid said at last, offering her a sandwich.

“What did you hear? From who?”

“That there was something there, something in that room that—like a ghost, Joe Simm’s wife said. I had to stop in the hardware for some nails.”

She was embarrassed at his knowing. And yet hadn’t she come to talk to him? “What exactly did Mrs. Simms say?”

“That something formed in the middle of the room, in front of you. That it blocked out the people on the other side of the aisle. That you made it happen.” He looked at her with concern.

Until that moment she had almost been able to think it was her imagination; but suddenly now she was shivering again. Reid put his arm around her comfortably, letting her hide her embarrassment and fear, and they sat staring silently at the bare timbers of the unfinished house. The new lumber was bright and raw against the dark, subtle colors of the eucalyptus grove. She glanced sideways at Reid; he was very calm and steady. Someone she could trust.

“Colin wanted me to go with him. I guess I always do what Colin wants, he makes me feel sorry for him. He does it on purpose. And—and maybe I wanted to go, too. I was afraid, but I—I don’t know. I wasn’t going to stay; I almost left and then— Oh, I wish I had.” She told him all of it then, what she had felt, the terrible surge of power that had swept her. When she finished, she sat silent, waiting for him to speak. Waiting for him to tell her something that would make it all right. A breeze sloughed through the tops of the eucalyptus trees, the scent mingling with the scents of lumber and of earth. A chipmunk came silently out of his hole, his small body poised for flight, then scampered across under the flooring of the house as if he had already started a nest there in spite of Reid’s pounding.

“Well you’re not going crazy,” Reid said at last. “Other people saw it. And there’s a logical explanation for everything. I don’t believe in ghosts and spirits; there’s some explanation other than that.”

Before it happened, she would have agreed. Now, she didn’t know. And yet somehow his words calmed her.

“It might be some kind of telepathy,” he said, offering her his coffee. “You might be getting someone’s thoughts; there’s plenty of proof that it happens. There’ve even been experiments in Russia to try to use telepathy to run machines. You might have gotten the thoughts of someone who wanted a spirit to appear.”

She stared at him and felt grateful that he could think of that. That he didn’t scoff. “But how could anyone else see it if it was telepathy: how could Mrs. Simms?”

“They all could have seen it. It could have been some kind of— Well, like mass hypnotism. With everyone in the room wanting it to happen maybe—”

“But I didn’t want it to happen. I wasn’t even serious about it. Yet I was the one who— How could I have hypnotized them all?”

“Could your aunt have?”

“No. I don’t know, I don’t think so. I mean—I felt such power, Reid.”

“That could have been part of it, though. You said before, your aunt wanted to believe in that kind of thing. Maybe she, maybe her wanting—”

“Reid, sometimes I— Ever since I can remember I’ve known things. Gotten things from people. It—it’s a feeling in me. That feeling was there today.”

“You mean, gotten thoughts from other people?”

She looked at him, then nodded.

“Can you do it whenever you want?” he asked uneasily. “Can you read my mind?”

She grinned. “It’s funny, I never could. Usually I can’t make it happen, it just comes. But with you it never has.”

“I’m glad of that. But does it happen a lot? I mean— I don’t know, I just never thought about you—” He studied her, a look full of curiosity.

“It did more when I was small. But when Mama and Papa died—after they died, it didn’t happen for a long time. When I was little, though, it used to happen in school and it always upset me. I guess it made me shy and— Well I didn’t like to be with other children. I didn’t like to be in crowds, and sometimes the teachers— Do you remember Miss Spidel?”