The Witch Queen by Jan Siegel Read Free Book Online

very rich. At the nursing home he sat in his usual chair, staring at his sister with a kind of gray patience, all thought suspended, while his life unraveled around him. There were goals that had been important to him: career success, a high earning potential, independence, self-respect. And the respect of his father. He had told himself often that this last need was an emotional cliché, a well-worn plotline that did not apply to him, but sometimes it had been easy to lapse into the pattern—easier than suspecting that the dark hunger that ate his soul came from no one but himself. And now all the strands of his existence were breaking away, leaving nothing but internal emptiness. The excess of alcohol gave him the illusion that his perceptions were sharpened rather than clouded and he saw Dana’s face in great detail: her pallor appeared yellowish against the white of the pillow, her lips bloodless. He did not touch her, avoiding the contact with flesh that felt cold and dead. Somewhere in the paralysis of his brain he thought: I need help.
    He thought aloud.
    The unfamiliar words touched a chord deeper than memory. Without realizing it, he drifted into a daydream. He was in a city—not a modern city but a city of long ago, with pillars and colonnades and statues of men and beasts, and the dome of a temple rising above it all flashing fire at the sun. He heard the creak of wooden wheels on paving, saw the slaves shoveling horse dung with the marks of the lash on their backs. There was a girl standing beside him, a girl whose black hair fell straight to her waist and whose eyes were the pure turquoise of sea shallows. “—help,” she was saying. “You must help me—“ but her face changed, dissolving slowly, the contours re-forming to a different design, and he was in the dark, and a red glimmer of torchlight showed him close-cropped hair and features that seemed to be etched in steel. The first face had been beautiful, but this one was somehow familiar; he saw it with a pang of recognition as sharp as toothache. There was a name on his lips—a name he knew well—but it was snatched away, and he was jerked abruptly, not knowing where he was, reaching for the name as if it were the key to his soul.
    One of the male nurses was leaning over him, clasping his shoulder with a scrubbed pink hand. “You called out,” he explained. “I was outside. I think you said: ‘I need help.’ “
    “Yes,” said Lucas. “I did. I do.”
    The young man smiled a smile that was reassuring—a little too reassuring, and knowing, and not quite human.
    “Help will be found,” he told Lucas.

    A damp spring ripened slowly into the disappointment of summer. Wizened countrymen read the signs—“The birds be nesting high this year,” “The hawthorn be blooming early,” “I seed a ladybird with eight spots”—and claimed it would be hot. It wasn’t. In London Gaynor moved back into her refurbished flat and stoically withstood the advances of her host of New Year’s Eve in his quest for extramarital sympathy. Will Capel returned from Outer Mongolia and invited his sister to dinner, escorting her to the threshold of the Caprice before recollecting that all he could afford was McDonald’s. Fern drank a brandy too many, picked up the tab, and went home to dream the dream again, waking to horror and a sudden rush of nausea. In Queen Square, Dana Walgrim did not stir. Lucas devoted more time to the pursuit of venture capitalism, doing adventurous things with other people’s capital, but rivals said he had lost his focus, and the specter that haunted him was not that of greed. And at Wrokeby the hovering sun ran its fingers over the façade of the house and poked a pallid ray through an upper window, withdrawing it in haste as the swish of a curtain threatened to sever it from its source.
    It was late May, and the clouds darkened the long evening into a premature dusk. The sunset was in retreat beyond the Wrokewood, its last