ALBERT E. COWDREY

WHITE MAGIC

My disappearing, Mrs. DeSaye — our block captain and

neighborhood bane —

caused a sigh of relief to pass through the quiet homes and walled

gardens of

Azalea Place in uptown New Orleans. If the case had been left up to my

neighbors,

nobody would have investigated for fear of finding her.

But the cops had their duties to

perform. I was still in a wheelchair from

injuries officially attributed to a hit.and-run

driver when a polite, pudgy

black detective called upon me. I recognized him; he had

visited Azalea Place

once before, when a severed hand had been found next door. I answered

his

questions about Mrs. DeSaye as truthfully as anybody was likely to, under the

circumstances.

Yes, I said, I was probably the last person to see her before she vanished. She

had dropped

in that afternoon at my invitation to drink coffee and eat biscotti

and chat. No, we

weren’t friends, only neighbors; her talk had all been

neighborhood gossip, nothing unusual

about it.

I think my physical condition more than my answers deflected suspicion.

Committing

murder in a body cast would be a problem to baffle Houdini. In any

case, twenty minutes

were enough to satisfy the detective’s curiosity. Then,

just before he closed his notebook,

he asked a surprising question.

“Sir, this lady have a boyfriend?”

” Boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Miz

Toups you know? Bought the old Vidakovich place next door to Miz

DeSaye? She turned in a

report couple days ago, said there was a man prowling

around the house. She said she

thought he was, uh, nude at the time. We sent a

car but they didn’t find nothing.

“A naked

prowler at the DeSaye place. Hmm.

“I’ll see you to the gate,” I said, starting the motor of

my wheelchair.

The garden, now under the care of my neighbor Angela, was in glorious

condition

and the detective turned out to be a gardener and appreciative. He liked a

purple

wisteria vine sprawling along one of the high board fences, and smiled a

little when he

noted a coil of bright concertina wire concealed among its

leaves.

“Keepin’ ‘em out, eh?” he

asked, and I gave him a friendly, slightly goofy grin

that has served me well during a long

lifetime. The explanation that I was

saving the burglars’ lives by keeping them out would

have raised entirely too

many questions.

At the gate he paused to admire my marble Foo Dog,

who goes by the name of Foo

Manchu.

“Nice,” he said appreciatively. “I like oriental stuff.

My wife and me have

dinner sometimes at the Forbidden City, you know the place? It’s

Chinese Cajun.

They do a great Szechuan alligator. Well, if anything else comes to you,

here’s

my card.”

I locked the gate behind him and turned to chug on back to the house.

Inevitably,

my mind was running on Mrs. DeSaye’s last visit — the one I had

described so truthfully,

and with such vast omissions, to the detective.

I remembered how, when the coffee and

biscotti were finished, she toyed with me

in that roundabout way of hers. I was on her

list, of course; we both knew it.

“I’m about to have a real event in my life,” she said. “I

do so hope you’ll be

around to see it.”

“Actually, I’m not planning to go anywhere.”

“Oh

plans,” she said. “They so seldom work out, do they? Now, I’ve had a plan in

mind for many

years, but it’s only lately I learned how to carry it out. Well,

I’m cooking something, so

now I’ll have to go,” she added, rising, straightening

her seams with the automatic gesture

of a large lady whose clothes ride up when

she sits.

I said something about catching my

afternoon nap, and she turned her bulging

blue eyes upon me and smilingly wished me

pleasant dreams. Of course she knew —

being the cause of them — that my dreams were

nightmares, now approaching the

point of hallucinations. She could hardly have guessed that

those words,

“Pleasant dreams,” sealed her fate.

I started the motor in my chair and

courteously allowed her to precede me into

the garden. Then I slammed the door behind her

and turned the deadbolt.

A few seconds passed before her face appeared at the window.

She

shook the bars, shouted at me, then ran to the next window and the next. Oh,

I knew what

that was like, to be in a garden surrounded by high fences and

bright wire, hearing the

lion-dog move.

How she shook the bars, wig askew, her mouth now moving soundlessly. In her

abject terror she couldn’t scream aloud, but she could project her emotions, her

hate,

anger, fear — as all her victims knew to their cost.

I felt her screaming in my brain and

whirled my wheelchair around trying to

escape the waves of terror and despair. A bad five

minutes that was, while the

creature tracked and killed her, she died not only in her own

body but inside my

head as well.

In my current battered state, just the memory was enough to

set me trembling. I

spent a while calming down, doing the Zen trick of exhaling completely

and then

letting nature do the inhaling for me. The garden helped, the butterflies, the

rustle

and chirp of sparrows, the whir of unseen wings.

After a time I chugged inside and called

Angela to give her the latest news

about the investigation. I was getting as bad as Mrs.

DeSaye when it came to

gossip — and murder by exotic means.

Angela was becoming a presence

around my house. She visited at least once a day,

fixed me light meals, listened patiently

to my anecdotes, and used my

backscratcher to relieve itches under the cast that I couldn’t

quite reach.

When the doctors cut off my cast, she helped the therapist prod, haul and push

me into something approaching normal movement again. It was a long way from

passion, but a

relationship was taking form. One evening when I was expecting

nothing special to happen,

she fixed me dinner, we drank a bottle of old wine,

and she stayed the night.

For a week

afterward I was downright silly with joy. We talked over our future.

Each of us intended to

keep our own house, at least for a while, but we called

in workmen and had a gate cut in

the fence so that we could come and go

privately. Because the new gate stood open, we

shared the guardian of the place,

too.

Angela planted a cape jasmine beside Foo Manchu, and

the thick smell of the

blossoms and the dark glossy leaves made a beautiful setting for his

purple-red

marble body, his whirling mane, and his furious, staring eyes. Angela and I left

the doors of our houses wide open whenever we pleased, enjoying a feeling of

safety and

freedom that most Americans have forgotten.

I was getting about with two stout canes when

the lawyer who had been appointed

by the court to manage Mrs. DeSaye’s estate decided to

rent her house — I

suppose to bring in money for its upkeep, until she could be declared

legally

dead. One of my first walks outside my garden since the accident took me there,

with

Angela holding tight to my left arm.

The reason was simple nosiness. We had called the

rental agent and expressed

interest on behalf of a mythical friend we said was moving to

New Orleans. A

pleasant, rather tense young woman named Deena, thin and chic as a fashion

model, met us at the door. Together we entered the house like cats, looking from

side to

side and putting down our feet with caution. We talked in low voices,

not wanting, I guess,

to wake the dead.

“I feel like such a ghoul,” whispered Angela.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. DeSaye

probably liked ghouls,” I comforted her.

I must say the house was disappointing. Contrary

to the reputation of witches,

Mrs. DeSaye had been a demon housekeeper. Most of the rooms

looked totally

unlived in, like a decorator’s exhibit. The fireplace featured clean gaslogs

in

a niche of spotless firebrick and a bright poker and tongs that had never known

the touch

of ashes. Driven by curiosity, I managed the stairs with help from

Angela and Deena. On the

second floor the only bedroom that had been in use was

equally neat, with a smiling doll

reposing against a neatly tucked bolster.

Mrs. DeSaye had actually lived in a large bright

room at the back, where the

windows gave an overview of Azalea Place. I was not surprised

to see a big,

old-fashioned pair of Zeiss binoculars standing on a table beside a camera

with

a telephoto lens. The room was a mess, with untidy leather furniture, coffee

stains,

decks of cards, two television sets and a VCR. Clutter everywhere. An

old chaise longue was

covered with dogeared romance novels. Stands held three or

four identical blonde wigs, a

closet was crammed with clothes, and a dressing

table with a three-way mirror overflowed

with an incredible array of cosmetic

tubes and bottles.

Piled around the VCR were the sort

of cheap videotapes that advertisers like to

call classic, meaning old — mainly featuring

the Forties crowd, Gable and

Garson and Cooper and Loy. Underlining Mrs. DeSaye’s

unsuspected love of the

cinema was a yellowing print in a silver frame showing an actor I

did not

recognize — some sort of matinee idol with a jutting chin and a mustache only

three

hairs wide. The inscription, signed I supposed by the thousand for a fan

club, was “Ever

Yours, Desmond.”

“I thought this mess had been cleaned up,” apologized Deena. “I promise

you, the

house will be perfect by the time a tenant moves in.”

Personally, I was glad the

cleaners hadn’t done their job. Then I’d never have

known how a bona fide witch lives.

Briefly I stuck my head in the last small

room of the house, a Victorian bathroom obviously

long out of use, with a chain

toilet and an immense tub. A cheap lamp connected by an

extension cord to a

socket in the other room held one 300-watt bulb staring down at the

tub. There

was an unpleasant smell about, as if a pot of soup had gone bad in there, and in

the bottom of the tub I saw waxy remains like leavings of old soap. Shoved back

against one

wall was an immense old leather suitcase. The window of frosted

glass threw a diffused

glare upon the floor.

Outside again, Angela and I said goodbye to Deena and then paused to

look back

at la maison DeSaye before we started for home.

“What a boring life she had,”

remarked Angela.

No, I thought, not true. Actually Mrs. DeSaye had been passionately

interested

in her life, polishing her floors, spying on her neighbors, deciding who her

next

victim would be. But I didn’t say anything. Angela, I thought, would have

been bored by a

witch’s life, and I was glad of that.

After that visit we might have put Mrs. DeSaye on our

mental shelves. We had

other things to think about, such as adjusting to each other. Then

Mrs. Toups

intervened. I picked up a ringing phone a few days later to hear a strange

hoarse

voice say, “Hello and good mornin’.”

I asked who she wanted, and she said, “You and your

lady friend, Honey. For wine

and cheese. I saw you at the DeSaye place, but you were gone

before I could run

out and intrude on you.”

I liked the touch of humor in “intrude.” Anyway,

I remembered the detective’s

words about the prowler and decided I would like to hear the

Toups version. The

upshot was that Angela and I presented ourselves about six the next

evening at

the comfortable old pink house where Tom Vidakovitch had died of a hex and Mrs.

V of urban violence.

La Toups turned out to be exactly what I had expected, a blowsy,

shrewd woman

with laugh wrinkles and an active tongue. Her husband was squat and somewhat

toadlike, with little twinkling gray eyes and an amphibian’s large lipless

mouth. They

owned a tiny toy dog, a Westy I think, which growled and made

threats against my ankles

until restrained.

“A guy, a broad, and a pooch,” Angela summed up the household, while our

hosts

were in the kitchen assembling the edibles. Then we heard Bessie exclaim,

“Whoa!”

Dashing

back into the living room, she said, “There’s that sonofabitch again.

“In one smooth

motion, she switched off the light and moved with speed and

silence to a window. I

followed.

There he was, a pale seemingly unclothed man in the gray dusk, climbing over the

railing onto the back porch next door. Maybe we made a noise; anyway, he turned

suddenly

and opened the door, which I remembered was secured by a chain. He

ducked under it, sliding

through the opening in the magical way of a roach

escaping a broom.

“How do you like that,”

asked Bessie.

No light went on next door. The prowler was evidently a nudist who liked

sitting

in the dark.

“Finished?” asked her husband, bringing in a tray that smelled

promisingly of

Stilton and red wine. Bessie flicked the light back on, and we settled down

for

munchies and gossip.

“Bessie gets a lot of fun out of that place,” Adrian observed.

“Keeps her out of

trouble. When our last kid left home, I told her, Get yourself a dog. She

did

and named him Stopgap, but he wasn’t enough.”

Stopgap, perhaps energized by hearing his

name, lifted his tiny leg and

sprinkled a gateleg table. Having marked his territory, he

growled and strutted

around. It seemed ridiculous to have that much personality confined in

ten

pounds of dogmeat and a swatch of silky hair.

Bessie was avid to know more about Mrs.

DeSaye, having already heard a lot from

the neighbors.

“She thought she could cast spells,”

I explained cautiously.

“Well, could she?”

I shook my head solemnly and deliberately put a

large cracker and a wedge of

cheese into my mouth.

“I never liked her,” Angela told Bessie,

“nobody did. At first she seemed to be

just silly, but —”

“Whoa!”

Off went the light again.

I thought the guy next door must be blind if he didn’t

know he was being watched.

Nevertheless, cane and all I was standing at the

window with Bessie as sounds of things

opening and closing came from the DeSaye

place. The stranger was searching the house — in

the dark.

“It’ll be like that all night,” she whispered. “He’s looking for something.

Lord,

I’d love to know what.”

“Shouldn’t we call the cops?” I asked.

She switched on the light

again, making a face.

“Lotta good that does,” she said. “They came the first time, didn’t

find

nothing, and never answered my calls afterward. Hell with ‘em, I’m not calling

‘em

anymore.”

As we were leaving, I gave Bessie some good advice. I liked the Toupses, and the

wine added to the humanitarian glow I felt.

“Watch out,” I said. “Mrs. DeSaye was genuinely

unpleasant. Her gentleman friend

may be unpleasant, too.”

As is my habit, I woke up at a

little after four A.M. For a while I lay there in

the dark, listening to Angela breathe.

Then I got up and walked somewhat shakily

downstairs, pulling on an old robe. I was

sleeping much better of late, but this

business of waking up in the dead pit of the predawn

darkness hung on. I’d

probably be wide awake until the first light, then fall asleep in a

chair.

I stepped outside into a universe of bugs and tree frogs. The chorus fell silent

around

me as I crunched down the gravel path, then resumed behind me. Big

cockroaches pattered

like raindrops among the leaves of the banana trees.

Something jumped: a toad, hunting

roaches.

Foo Manchu wasn’t in his usual place, and I felt a little thrill of fear, even

though

I knew that now he wasn’t after me. I leaned against a tree, wishing I

had brought my cane

because my knees still felt so weak.

Then I saw a white something slide from right to left

into view just outside the

gate — a supple white something whose limbs stretched and

contracted as it

moved. It rubbed itself against the bars like a cat, and began to squeeze

between them, though the gap was no more than three inches wide.

I just stared; I’ve no

idea what I would have done if the thing had come inside.

But I didn’t need to do anything.

With a sudden rush and growl a great solid

bulk burst out of the banana trees and crashed

against the gate with a clang

like a cell door closing. There was a thin shriek and the

visitor was gone.

Foo Manchu’s arrival had startled me almost as much as the visitor. I

hadn’t

touched him in his mobile phase since the day when he had almost killed me. I

approached

him now, trembling a little, and put my hand on his coarse mane. For

a moment he really was

a dog — or a lion —panting and giving a low, deep

rumbling growl of sheer baffled fury.

Then I felt his mane grow smooth and

harden and become cool under my fingers. And there he

sat once more, the marble

Foo Dog guarding my gate.

By now a little pale light was spinning

down from the sky in silky tendrils like

spiderweb. I found my way back to the house,

discovered I couldn’t manage the

stairs alone, collapsed on the living room couch and sank

into profound and

dreamless sleep.

Angela was upset when I told her about the visit. More

upsetting news came later

that day in a phone call from Deena.

“I had a prospect for the

DeSaye house and discovered those damn housecleaners

still hadn’t come,” she said. “Those

people are absolutely untrustworthy. Well,

I started to do some tidying up myself and I

found some things I think you ought

to see.”

She was sitting in a wooden rocker on the front

porch when I arrived. In her lap

lay her purse and a pile of photographic prints. Seeing

that I still had trouble

climbing, she came down the steps and handed me the pictures.

The

pictures documented Mrs. DeSaye’s hobby of taking snapshots of her neighbors

from the

windows of her house. She’d wanted clear images of the face. So here

was Angela’s husband

Joe in four murky versions and a clear one, from which the

face had been cut out. Her

former lover Jim Kennedy was present in half a dozen

versions, all rejects, it would seem.

(I never discovered where Mrs. DeSaye had

finally gotten the picture she needed to help

focus her destructive energy on

poor Jim.]

There were other pictures of people I didn’t know

by sight, as well as myself in

three unsatisfactory images and one with the face cut out.

“Who are they — aside from you, I mean?” asked Deena.

“The two that I knew are dead. Was

this all you found?”

“No, you haven’t seen the piece de resistance yet.”

Deena opened her

small brown purse and took out a doll a few inches long and

laid it in her hand. It was

done with no special skill, just a generalized

figure in white wax whose face was my own,

cut from the photograph.

“This was in a box a wig had come in,” said Deena. “I’ve heard

some pretty weird

stories about your late neighbor, but now I don’t think they quite did

her

justice.”

She added, “There’s something funny about the wax. It doesn’t smell like wax.”

I thanked her and we chatted for a few minutes about the various hobbies of the

late

unlamented.

“Do you think she’s gone for good?” Deena asked.

“Yes, I think so. I really

don’t believe in the dead coming back. It’s the

living who cause all the trouble in the

world.”

She sighed. “Well, I hope you’re right. I still have to show this goddamn place.

It’s my job.”

“Don’t ever go in there at night,” I told her. “There’s been a prowler and

what

I’ve seen of him, he’s pretty strange.”

“Oh, Christ.”

I walked home with my stick

rapping the concrete and the photos and the wax man

in my pocket. Angela was ready to move

to Alaska when I showed the trophies to

her.

“Why,” she demanded rhetorically, “did I ever

leave lovely Newark to live in

this nut-house of a city?”

“It’s got a warm climate. Look, I

want you to take this doll and lock it up in

your safe deposit box. Now, before the bank

closes. I don’t know whether I’d die

if something happened to it, but I don’t want to find

out.”

After my exercise I felt deeply, almost deliciously tired. When Angela had gone

I lay

down again on the couch and took a little nap, and during it something odd

and encouraging

happened. I began having deep warm dreams, of my mother, of

sleeping at her breast, of

hearing my father laugh. Then the old subconscious

did a fast forward: I was twenty-five

again, drinking red wine and eating goat

cheese with olives and looking out from an Italian

terrace over the blue

Adriatic.

Maybe dreams have healing powers, I thought, or maybe

healing expresses itself

in dreams. I woke feeling much less stiff and when Angela returned

we took a

fairly long stroll — to Audubon Park and back -leaving my cane at home. Angela

commented on my relative boyishness.

“My bones are knitting,” I said happily. “I can hear

them snapping together.”

“You are so full of it,” she said, but in fact that night I was a

more energetic

bed partner than she’d been accustomed to.

Haunts or no haunts, men of wax,

dead witches, whatever, nature was bringing me

into that sweet state of recovery when every

hour gives a sense of growing

strength, of youth recaptured.

Next day I napped again while

Angela was out shopping. I woke feeling even

better. In the afternoon she put on her

power-walking togs and I accompanied her

partway around the track in the park before

turning back for still more sleep

and recovery.

Dinner was a feast. We went to Sbisa’s and

ate ourselves silly. The French

Quarter after dark was everything I love and hate about New

Orleans, sleaze and

beauty, horrendous traffic and music bursting out of every crack in the

old

stuccoed walls. While a brief furious rain fell, we drank brandy at the Napoleon

House

and smiled at each other across a flickering candle.

“Did you know,” she asked, “there was

a witch in my family? My grandmother Nonna

called her ‘strega nostra,’ our witch.”

“Was she

burned?”

“No, on the contrary, she lived to a hundred and three. She was a healer, and

she

must have been good at it, considering how long she lasted.”

“This was in Newark?”

“No, in

Cittavecchia. I don’t think it’s possible to live to a hundred and three

in Newark. Or, for

that matter, desirable.”

I suppose I was feeling too good to see the implications of all

this. Physical

comfort makes you dense. Back at home, I made love like a young man and

slept

like a baby.

It was a good thing I did, for at two-twenty in the morning the telephone

began

tinkling away. With Angela simulating coma, I had to stumble across the room

into the

hall and pick it up.

“Hello and good morning,” said Bessie’s whiskey-and-cigarettes voice.

“Yeah,” I muttered.

“Hell of a time to call you and Adrian didn’t want to,” she said, “but

if you

could just come over for a minute —”

I was pretty well awake by now. “What’s

happened?”

“Stopgap caught the guy next door coming in the window and tore off his big toe.

Adrian thinks we should call a lawyer, but I said call you.”

So there I was, getting

dressed in the dark, putting buttons in the wrong holes

and donning socks inside out. The

Toups house was brightly lit, as I had

expected. Bessie wore a flowered nightgown, Adrian

was barefooted in pants,

braces, and a tanktop. As usual, Stopgap had to be prevented from

attacking my

ankles and Bessie held him in her arms while we all solemnly viewed the object

lying on their dining room table.

It was undoubtedly a big toe — of a sort. It had no

nail. It was dead white and

yielded no blood, though a little pale fluid resembling lymph

leaked out of the

torn end. Made of wax? Perhaps, I thought, originally. But it had

changed.

Prodding the toe with a knife Bessie brought me, I thought the stuff it was made

of had more tensile strength than wax and there was a faintly nasty organic

smell about it.

“I heard somebody fumbling at the window and grabbed my .38 snub,” explained

Adrian. “Came

in the dining room, and this character was working his way between

the bars. Well, Stopgap

came in with me and while I was still deciding if it was

legal to shoot the bastard where

he was or if I had to wait for him to come all

the way in, the dog went at him.”

“What did

the burglar do?”

“Squeaked and run.”

Bessie put Stopgap down and he rampaged around and peed

on the furniture to let

the next intruder know whose territory this was.

“Who is this guy,

anyway?” Bessie demanded.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “But I’d like to.”

I repeated this to

Angela at breakfast, over coffee. Bessie had sealed the toe

in a plastic sandwich bag that

now reposed in my freezer next to the orange

juice.

“All I can figure is he hasn’t found

what he’s looking for in the DeSaye house,

so he’s beginning to roam the neighborhood.”

“Oh,

nice. A zombie’s just what we need around here.”

I tried to explain that he looked weak,

clumsy, stupid, soft.

Angela wasn’t paying attention.

“First a witch, now a fucking zombie,”

was her response. She rarely said the

F-word, so I knew she was agitated.

Returning strength

inclined me to do something about the intruder. I figured

that if Stopgap could handle him,

I could too. So I waited until Angela was out

and then called Deena and set forth, carrying

my heaviest stick.

Deena met me at the DeSaye house and asked if I really wanted to go in.

I said

yes.

“Well, I’ve got a job to do. Lock up when you leave.”

She gave me the key and I

stepped inside, closed the door behind me and was

alone, or perhaps not quite.

Dust had

sifted in, as it will into the best-kept house. The sense of emptiness

remained but I knew

the intruder had been here. The sun slanted under roller

blinds and penetrated starched

lace curtains and struck the floor at such an

angle that I had no difficulty in seeing his

smooth, unlined footprints in the

dust.

I had long ago learned how to toss a room, as they

say. I worked my way through

the house fairly quickly, opening and shutting drawers,

turning pictures,

pulling out furniture, prodding sofas and chairs, and so forth. My cane

was a

nuisance, but I kept it close at hand throughout the process. I found nothing of

interest

downstairs.

Upstairs in the bedroom was a closet full of Mrs. DeSaye’s husband’s clothes,

all neatly pressed. He had favored double-breasted white suits with lapels six

inches wide,

a collection of ties that could have been used as warning signals,

and stiff white shirts

with great wing collars. A fashion plate, circa 1948.

Then, on a shelf of apparently unread

Great Books, I found a scrapbook. Fancy

cover, brittle gray pages, brownish snapshots. A

young Mrs. DeSaye wearing a

long bob and shoulders. Her eyes bulged as they had later; she

leaned toward the

lens and did not smile; her gaze was so direct that the eyes seemed to

follow

me. A woman of power, even when young.

Then something that amazed me: snapshots

showing her with the matinee idol whose

pinup I’d seen earlier. They posed by a flashy

Buick, by a large stucco house,

by a gushing fountain. He held her hand, she demurely took

his arm. “The Next

Clark Gable?!” queried a page torn from a movie magazine of the time,

with

another picture of the familiar jutting-jawed face. The breathless text

identified the

coming star as Desmond DeSaye. “While bringing the romantic charm

of old New Orleans to the

silver screen, handsome young Desmond DeSaye sets a

high moral tone in scandal-rocked

Hollywood by his devotion to his lovely wife

Sonia.”

Following this quaint b.s. was a list

of screen credits. Mentioned were all the

VCR tapes in the sitting room. I suspected you’d

have to look closely at any of

the movies to spot him, for even the magazine admitted that

he was “still

awaiting his First Big Break.”

The book also contained half a dozen obituary

notices glued to the back pages.

At first I couldn’t see why — just an array of accident

cases and one or two

suicides. Then I noticed that all the victims had been connected in

one way or

another with the movie industry. Mrs. DeSaye, I now felt certain, had been

advancing

her husband’s career. Perhaps this was how she had started her own

remarkable career -with a little connubial killing.

Finally, there was Desmond DeSaye’s own obit from the L.A.

Times: a masterpiece

of obfuscation which nevertheless hinted that a drug overdose might

have had

something to do with his death at twenty-eight. He had been cremated, and his

ashes

interred in a moving Christian service in a niche at Forest Lawn. At the

conclusion of the

sermon by a famous female evangelist, a white dove had been

released, symbolizing the soul

of the departed.

I closed the scrapbook in a thoughtful mood.

A few minutes after four I

reached Mrs. DeSaye’s sitting room. For a time I

poked around aimlessly. It was noticeably

neater-looking than before, but

Deena’s housework had consisted mainly in throwing

everything into the already

overfull closet and slamming the door. I began pulling things

out and the musty

smell of uncleaned cloth billowed around me, making me sneeze. I found

nothing

but the same old clutter; the wigs were just wigs; the novels held no secrets

pressed

between their pages. I didn’t play the tapes.

That left Queen Victoria’s bathroom. The

diffused light still prevailed, the

waxy leavings, the peculiar smell. I now had at least a

general idea of what the

tub had been used for, but very few things in the world are as

empty as an empty

bathtub, so I moved on with my researches. The toilet tank contained only

the

usual floats and valves, plus a garden of multicolored algae. Nothing remained

except

the big suitcase, which had been dragged along the wall and upended.

I set it flat on the

floor. The product of a more opulent age of travel, it was

nearly four feet long and a foot

thick — red leather carefully maintained with

saddle soap. It wasn’t very heavy, yet felt

somehow full — packed, you know. I

have absolute contempt for suitcase locks; I went

hunting through Mrs. DeSaye’s

cooking and eating utensils, found a fork, bent one tine, and

proceeded to snap

both locks open in two minutes flat.

Jackpot. The suitcase was full of

packages wrapped in green satin, and each

package contained one or more human bones.

The

bones were white and polished, almost elegant. The pelvic angle indicated a

male. The skull

had been separated from the mandible and both were filled with

clean white teeth, carefully

capped. I felt pretty sure that the next Clark

Gable lay before me — the more lasting part

of him, anyway.

I was wondering idly whose ashes now reposed in the Desmond DeSaye niche in

the

columbarium at Forest Lawn when a very soft sound caused me to turn. A pale,

supple

something glided into the room and came at me.

There’s a time for thinking and a time for

reflexes. I dropped the skull, seized

my cane, took a batter’s grip and made it whistle as

I hit him across the

middle. He squeaked and bent so far over the cane that he seemed to

wrap around

it, his upper parts fusing briefly to his lower body. I jerked it free and

smacked

him again across his face, which was featureless except for a shapeless

sort of mouth. He

shrank back, keening; I felt ashamed of myself, as if I’d been

beating a cripple.

He started

forward again, cringing from the blow he expected but coming on

anyway. I stepped back and

suddenly realized that I meant nothing to him. He

sank down on the floor by the scattered

bones and began to gather them up and

thrust them one by one into his lank, pasty body.

It

was fascinating to watch. He flowed around the bones, coating and then

absorbing them as if

they were falling into an oily, thick white stew. He seemed

to know by instinct where they

went, and so translucent was his waxy flesh that

I could see their shadows move inside him.

Twisting fluidly, like a snail

climbing its own shell, he drove the twenty-six bones of the

vertebral column

into his back. He pressed the still articulated pelvis into his belly and

it

sank through him until it met the spine. He took up the long, elegant femurs and

drove

them into his thighs like a fakir inserting nails. He searched frantically

through a

clutter of little bones for the five metacarpals and fourteen

phalanges of his left hand

and his still pliant right inserted them as neatly as

the pieces of a Chinese puzzle.

The

last was the head; he first drove in the lower jaw and for a moment sat

working it like

someone just released by the dentist. Then he raised the skull,

rattling with the tiny

ossicles of the ears like a gourd full of pebbles and

pressed it into his lump of a head,

and the white stuff flowed around the bone

and absorbed it and took shape from it.

He turned

and looked at me, and I saw the limits of the magic that had remade

him: he had no eyes,

only a statue-like blankness in the sockets; he had no thin

line of mustache, no beard, no

hair. His nose and ears were formless.

Yet Desmond DeSaye was becoming recognizable. The

bones gave him shape. He drew

his lips back from the gleaming teeth in what might have been

a grin or a snarl

but was probably only a kind of exercise, feeling the new interconnection

of

flesh, bone and ivory. He put out a white tongue and licked his lips, spreading

a little

pale shiny fluid as he did. In the diffused glare of the window the

absolute whiteness of

him — of everything about him, flesh, bone, blood, teeth,

even his spit — looked

unutterably strange.

Yet he seemed perfectly harmless, now that he had found what he was

looking for.

I felt embarrassed by his nakedness, so I went into the bedroom closet and

brought

him one of his suits and helped him put it on. He was submissive but

clumsy, as if the feel

and very idea of cloth was strange to him. The fit was

perfect.

By this time I thought I had

figured him out, generically at least. He was not a

human nor even a zombie, but a kind of

golem. He seemed to have no will of his

own, now that the commands embedded in his waxy

flesh had been obeyed. Surely, I

thought, he could only have been intended for a slave.

How

confused he must have been when Mrs. DeSaye failed to come home that night,

and he emerged

from the tub where the ersatz flesh (or should I be more elegant

and call it faux flesh?]

had taken form. I imagined him venturing blindly into

an incomprehensible world, knowing

only that he had to find something to make

him complete. A gelatinous man, probably able to

compress himself into a corner

under the house when the police were shining lights and

tramping around,

searching for a prowler.

I led him into the next room and sat him down on

the battered chaise longue.

Dressed in the ancient suit, he looked like a cheap department

store dummy,

white and bald and blind. He was carrying small objects in one hand, and now

began to play with them. They were two tiny bones, the phalanges of his left big

toe. Until

I fetched the toe from my freezer, he would have no place to put

them.

I left the house,

carefully locking the door behind me. I didn’t think he would

have any reason to go

prowling now, and with the hard bones inside him he would

creep between no more bars. I had

no feeling about him at all; fear was gone and

he wasn’t human enough to pity. I had

absolutely no idea what to do with him,

and I was arrogant enough to think that the

question was up to me.

Angela was enthralled and horrified by my account of Mrs. DeSaye’s

invention.

“Talk about carrying the torch,” she said. “All those years! Trucking the bones

around, looking for a way to reanimate them.”

“I doubt if romance had much to do with it,”

I objected.

“Romance had everything to do with it. Think of her novels, her tapes. All

those

cosmetics. The blonde wigs. The lady longed for love.”

“With that?”

“Certainly. He’d

look somewhat like the original. Anyway, when you’ve been

married to an actor I imagine a

goleta might be a pretty good substitute. No

ego, no chatter, and no drugs.”

It was true, I

reflected, that the creature was anatomically complete. That

didn’t mean it was functional.

Tomorrow, I thought, I would call a friend of mine at Ochsner Foundation

Hospital and turn

over to him something that would be of interest to science.

Perhaps it might even upset a

few preconceived ideas. Maybe the boys in the labs

could learn something useful.

I did not

think the goleta would last long. It seemed to have no way to take

nourishment and I

thought it would gradually weaken and die, like one of those

insects that are born without

digestive systems. I told Angela this.

“Aren’t things like that born just to mate?” she

asked pointedly.

Next morning she trotted off to the bank to do some sort of business. I

called

my friend the M.D. and threw out enough vague but enticing hints to make him

promise

to drop by and see me between lunch and his usual golf date that

afternoon.

I decided to

bring the golem his toe, to have him complete for his first medical

checkup. It was when I

was taking the chilly plastic package out of the freezer,

my mind running on the

astonishing creative power it represented, that thoughts

of my own rapid recovery suddenly

set my brain in a whirl. All at once I was

remembering Angela’s talk of witches in her

family during that happy night in

the French Quarter.

Like danger, intuition demands action.

I phoned the bank where she did her

business and asked to speak to her.

“Mrs. Barberino is

in the vault looking at her safe deposit box,” I explained.

When she came on the line I

said, “I’m glad it’s working, Angela, and I don’t

care why.”

“Then you shouldn’t interrupt

me,” she said. “I’ve been giving this goddamn wax

man an hour’s treatment of healing

thoughts a day and it’s really kind of

hypnotic. Staring at him I see you, isn’t that

weird? I can even smell you —

your sweat, that stuff you put on to try to keep your hair.

Do you suppose it’s

something in the wax, or is it just me? It’s like a hallucination, only

it’s

not, it’s real. Does that make any sense?.”

“No,” I said, “but keep at it, strega mia.”

And rang off.

I walked into the garden and saw magic everywhere. Birds were quarreling and

their bright scattered voices were the sounds of the dappled sunlight quivering

among the

leaves. The mealy earth had the exact smell of a particular day in my

childhood that

suddenly returned to me with visionary clarity. Everything echoed

everything else and the

sky exhaled a damp soft breath over the earth.

I set out cheerfully for Mrs. DeSaye’s,

patting Foo Manchu as I passed and

carefully locking the gate behind me. I started to

whistle; then the sound died

on my lips. A car I recognized was standing in front of the

DeSaye place.

Damn, damn, damn, I thought, Deena’s got another set of keys. Knowing what

she

would find, I broke into a run.

The front door stood open. I stepped inside and paused,

panting, eyes too

dazzled to see. I heard confused sounds, which alarmed me. Deena had

always

seemed a bit fragile under her brittle surface, and I expected to find her

paralyzed

with astonishment or fear. Perhaps in a faint.

I blinked and my eyes cleared and beheld a

rape tableau.

Deena was bent backwards across an overstuffed chair, shoes lost and skirt

torn,

and the bald suited creature was leaning over her. He had one hand gripping her

throat,

silencing her, and the other was tearing roughly at her clothing.

Suddenly I had a vision

of what Desmond DeSaye was like in life not a pretty boy

of the silver screen, but a

stallion bridled by a witch.

I snatched up the gleaming brass poker from the white

fireplace and cracked him

hard across the shoulderblades. That got his attention. Keeping

his left hand on

Deena’s throat, he straightened and turned his head.

Lord, but he had

changed overnight. His eyes now were dark spots under a waxy

film, primordial eyes,

light-sensitive spots that would become eyes in time. For

the first time I realized that

the bones were not there only to give him shape.

They held a treasury of DNA, the perfect

memory of what he had been. Desmond

DeSaye was in process of being reinvented — the

fundamental beast, that is,

minus everything he might have learned in his first life.

He

stared, not seeing anything but the glare of the open door behind me. He was

wondering

where the sudden blow had come from. Then I moved and he instantly

dropped Deena and spun

around. Eyes still primitive, I thought; ears working

well. Too well. Even the external

ears had unfolded, whorled like opening

leaves.

I brought out the icy plastic envelope with

his toe in it and flung it at his

face and he snatched it and began to tear the envelope

apart. He sniffed the toe

— another sense he had working — and then drew the little bones

from his

pocket and began pressing them into the flesh.

Meanwhile Deena slipped away, hands

pressed to her throat over the harsh red

marks of his fingers, her chic elegance reduced to

a smear of tears. When she

looked a question at me I gave her no more than a nod, unwilling

to make a

gesture that he might hear. In stocking feet she moved to a window and began to

open it. Instantly DeSaye turned his head. When he did, she screamed.

He started up and I

hit him again, bringing him swiveling back toward me. I

spared Deena one more glance, saw

her climbing through the window, saw beyond

her the bulk of Adrian Toups emerging from his

house with Bessie behind him.

Minute but furious barking accompanied them. Reinforcements,

I thought.

I’d need them. DeSaye shoved the toe into his pocket and came at me. He seemed

powerful, smooth, and he moved so quick I think he might have grappled with me

then, except

that he stumbled — he really needed that toe for balance.

I swung again and gave him a

smart crack on the side of the head. It was a solid

meeting of brass and bone and anything

merely human would have folded under it.

But the once and future Desmond DeSaye was

governed by other laws.

He recovered himself — I was halfway through the door by then-and sprang

after me with a hair-raising howl. He came so fast I didn’t have room to swing

again; I jabbed the poker into his face and he seized it and flung it aside. I

turned and

ran, and as I pounded through the gate I heard a metallic clang as

the poker landed

somewhere inside.

I ran gasping down the hot and sunny sidewalk of Azalea Place, where I

had been

accustomed to hobble, saunter, stroll. As I passed the Toups’ place, I saw that

Adrian had reached his front fence and that Bessie was hugging Deena. Through

the corner of

my eye I saw the fat man raise his .38 snub and a shot exploded

behind me and set echoes

careening off the housefronts.

I spared one more glance back and saw no damage to my

pursuer whatever. Goddamn

it, Adrian, I was thinking, why have a gun if you don’t know how

to shoot?

I made it up the drive as far as my own gate. Locked, of course. I was fumbling

with the keys when DeSaye arrived and grabbed my shoulder in a crushing grip. I

let his own

impetus spin us around and gave him an elbow as deeply as I could

into his belly. My elbow

sank in and there was no feeling of recovery, no

springiness in his body — the elbow

stayed in him until I jerked it out.

Yet he felt pain, I had seen that many times already,

and I left him thrashing

around beside the fence while I forced an unwilling key into the

lock and threw

the gate open. Then he was up and after me again.

Very good, I thought, and

though my lungs were heaving and half my body seemed

on fire, I held the gate open for him.

Welcome, you sonofabitch, I thought. He

came through howling, and I fell back against the

bars, slamming the gate shut

and holding it to keep myself upright.

Meanwhile DeSaye had

discovered his mistake. Starting forward in a low rush like

a charging lion, Foo Manchu

seized him by one thigh and dragged him thrashing

and squeaking with pain into the shadow

of the cape jasmine. I would no more

have interfered with what followed than I would have

tried to stop a

thunderstorm. Not that it was pleasant to watch. In spite of a tolerably

rough

life, I don’t think I ever really understood the meaning of savagery until I

watched

the second death of Desmond DeSaye.

The lion-dog first pinned him to the earth, tore off

his head, crushed it

between massive jaws and swallowed it whole. Then he dismembered the

inert body,

swallowed the limbs, and consumed the torso after raking it apart with his

claws.

The sounds were industrial — the grinding, crunching and snapping of one

methodical

machine breaking down another. Throughout, white flowers of honeyed

sweetness rained down

on slayer and slain.

By then the whole garden was sprayed with pale malodorous fluid and

scattered

with rags of cloth. For one heart-stopping moment my familiar turned on me with

nostrils flaring, smelling his enemy’s blood on me. Then he recognized me and

retreated. He

sat down in the shadow of the jasmine, and gradually froze into

immobility again. Still I

heard from his belly a dull borborygmus, like the work

of miners underground, where the

work of destruction continued.

At some point in the festivities Adrian arrived outside the

gate, puffing, and I

think asked me if I was all right. I have no idea what I answered. He

couldn’t

see what was going on, but he must have heard the noises. What he thought about

it all I’ve no idea, but he backed me up loyally a quarter of an hour later,

when the

police arrived in answer to a complaint about a shot being fired.

We claimed that a prowler

attempting rape had been interrupted by my arrival,

had pursued me but had been frightened

away by Adrian’s gun. I gave them a

generic description, later endorsed by Deena. I said,

and she agreed, that her

assailant had been a bald white man in a double-breasted suit.

That much was

true.

Angela came home to find the neighborhood in an uproar. Then, when the

excitement was seemingly over, I began to suffer from chest pains and had to be

taken to

the hospital for what was diagnosed as mild angina secondary to cardiac

insufficiency. I

was released next day with medical orders against smoking

(which I have never done) and

drinking (which I did not intend to stop).

In fact, a few days later Angela and I invited

the Toupses and Deena over to

help us drink a few bottles of old wine, in celebration of

the final exorcism of

Azalea Place. I remember very little of the party except that it was

happy and

somewhat silly. As our neighbors came through the gate, Stopgap began growling

at Foo Manchu, and Adrian picked up his little dog and muttered, “Stay in your

own league,

fella.”

Witchcraft was gone. Except, of course, for strega mia. During our time of

troubles

my witch had tried out powers she never knew she possessed, and when

the troubles were over

the consciousness of power remained.

Now when we quarrel (as we do from time to time; the

honeymoon’s over and we

have become that common oddity of our times, the long-unmarried

couple) she

smilingly recalls to my memory the wax doll she keeps in her bank box. I know

that I depend for my continued recovery and health on the treatments she gives

me through

it, as well as on the ordinary treatment embraced in what has become

a warm and

satisfactory relationship.

Hence I let her have her way in most things. Love is nice, I

think, watching my

Angela, but I have always respected power, too. Power is what the

witches seek,

and I’m glad it has come to rest at last in loving hands.