Ширли Мерфи - The Grass Tower

A finger of cold fear touched Bethany. She didn’t know Ninea. She didn’t know anything, really. She didn’t know what they could do; she didn’t know, really, what they had done.

“I suppose in the beginning,” Grandfather mused, “the very force of Selma’s strong desire might have strengthened your powers, focused them in.”

“But the feeling of evil—”

“I don’t doubt for a minute that you tapped some dark negative force as well, the opposite to goodness. Oh, not a darkness of witches and spirits.” He smiled, and shook his head. “Bett persists in believing that your special perception is one with that kind of thing, with what she calls occult. In my view, ESP is simply a latent power that man doesn’t yet know much about. I think the ‘evidences’ of black magic and spiritualism are something else entirely, perhaps occurrences that develop from a combination of ESP and too-active imaginations. I like to think that in a thousand generations, your kind of talent will be quite common among people, but more than that, that it is part of something fundamental to what we call our spirits. I think of man’s body as a sort of dwelling place for a spirit that has come from somewhere, and will go on afterward to someplace else. And that in that world of other selves that comes after this one, more huge and more complicated than we can imagine, this kind of perception is a natural part of us, that we touch the essence of life more fully.

“But the evil is there, too,” he said slowly. “A minor kind of something creeping around among worlds like a black insidious swamp fog beneath the glory of a larger, sunswept universe.”

“The evil that we touched,” Bethany said reflectively, “I felt as if Ninea wanted it, as if she liked the darkness, as if she was reaching out to it.” She shuddered, and looked uncertainly at Grandfather.

“We can all touch it in some manner, if we will ourselves to,” Zebulon said. “But most of us shrink away from it in our desire for survival, for light and joy, for the very essence of life. If one longs for the darkness, perhaps it is because he is lost and dubious of his own real worth in the universe.” He put out his hand and touched her fingers lightly. “But if a person can touch evil, then he can touch goodness just as surely, he can grasp the strong essence of life and reality just as surely. Though it takes more courage to do so. You have no idea, none of us do, what you might accomplish, the two of you together.”

A surge of hope thrilled her. But still, the feeling of apprehension at what Ninea might want made her uneasy. “How could she— How could she want it? Like Selma does.”

Zebulon shook his head. “I don’t know. We must wait and see. With Selma, it’s something she has always yearned after, the occult, the bizarre. An almost passionate desire that the events of her childhood—” He broke off abruptly and made himself busy pouring coffee, then at last he looked across at her again. “Perhaps some great inadequacy in her own character, in her own understanding of the world, has made Selma need such things so badly. But as for Ninea, she is younger. And she has not had very much loving, I would guess. But she is eager, and strong-minded. With Selma it was a yearning after a talent she didn’t have, or had little of, a yearning after the dark things she associated with that talent. But with Ninea the ability is really there, she needs only to find herself in it, to find its true value.” He put his arm around Bethany. “Soon enough we’ll see her and have her with us. She’ll— We must trust that she’ll be all right, Bethany.” He grinned then, “We’ll have her with us if I can convince her grandmother.”

“Can you? She’s—she can’t care very much what Ninea wants.”

“She doesn’t seem to. Still, we’ll see,” Grandfather said quietly.

Perhaps it was the talk of what she and Ninea could do together that made Bethany suddenly need to come to grips with her future, to think about what she would do with her life; almost as if, if she knew, it could steady her after all the changes she had had.

But she didn’t know what work she wanted to do— except, she knew it must be something that would take all her strength, all her awareness, would satisfy her need to winnow at things until she had sorted them out—something, she hoped, that would use her special talent in a good way. Beyond that, she didn’t know; but it was comforting just to think about it, to worry at it and try to work out the possibilities and forget other things for a little while.

There was dinner at Aunt Bett’s before they left for Panama, a dinner that Bethany dreaded, visualizing Marylou and Selma and Jack, even Colin, talking about the things that, to Bethany, were still private, but which seemed somehow to have become family property. Well she couldn’t blame them, it was bizarre, as Grandfather said. Who wouldn’t want to ask questions? But the dinner was over soon enough, and Bethany, looking back, thought about how quiet Selma had been, sitting there almost as if she were alone in the room. The Church of the Zagdesha was gone, disbanded. The black drapes and the sign had been torn down, and the old mercantile stood empty and forlorn looking. It still sported self-consciously that bright red door as a sad reminder. Selma seemed drawn into herself and lost; Bethany could feel it all around Selma, a loneliness as if she had nothing left to cling to. Her church was a farce, a lie, a shoddy operation to bilk people; even Selma had had, at last, to recognize that. Dr. Claybelle was gone, and she had thought he loved her. She was, Bethany thought, like a soul drowning, and there was nothing there to grasp. Some people had a steadiness to hold onto, as if there were some deep reserve within them that held them steady and relatively unshaken. She felt sorry that Selma did not.

Walking home, Justin said, “This time tomorrow night you’ll be there.” The thought started a strange, uncomfortable feeling in Bethany’s stomach, and she did not answer. Instead she clutched wildly at herself in her mind—almost as if she thought her own self would slip away again when she reached Panama, and Ninea.

Justin took her hand. “You and Ninea may feel uncertain with each other for a while,” she said tentatively. “I don’t know quite how I would feel in such a situation.”

“Competitive,” Zebulon said, smiling a little. “Even without the things of the spirit, just on an everyday level, you are going to feel—oh, of course eager and curious, but edgy too, I would think. There may be a strange competitiveness between you that you won’t know how to handle. Simply to look at the physical image of yourself in another will be a very unsettling experience. You are both going to have to make allowances for it—I hope you can—to be extra loving and considerate.”

“Yes,” Bethany breathed. “Yes, I’ll try.” But what would Ninea be like, down inside where it counted?

She lay awake for a long time in the darkness of Justin’s room listening to the sea, and prickling with a terrible unease. Grandfather was right, she did feel competitive, though she hadn’t admitted it to herself before. Still, maybe knowing she did, she could cope with it better. Did Ninea feel the same? Grandfather’s phone call to Panama might have left Ninea in just as unsettled a state as she was in herself. Though Grandfather had talked to Ninea as well as Sra. Ruiz, Bethany had not wanted to talk. She could not say why; it was too strange, too removed from the relationship the two of them had—as if to talk on the phone would change everything, and they would have to start over. And what could they say that could not be said—directly? Though after that phone call, there had been no contact between them. As if Ninea, too, needed to prepare herself for a meeting that—that what? Well she wouldn’t think about it tonight, not any more. She curled down into a smooth dark world of her own. How had Grandfather known they would feel competitive? Maybe from raising two daughters, she thought, grinning. Maybe they had been competitive, too. And maybe because he was able to put himself in the place of another. She sighed, contented.