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And the first thing she does is seduce him. And the first thing he does is to be seduced. And the second thing they do is to hug their sin
in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand. Which is the myth of New England.
‘The occult?’ I could not imagine what she meant. ‘Séances? Ouija boards? Madame Blavatsky? Planchettes?’
Peter stood beside him and thought: I can’t go in there. Empty, but filled with bare rooms and the atmosphere
of whatever kind of person chose to live in them, the house seemed to be feigning stillness.
I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, he thought, and turning his back on her went out into the hall.
‘The reason was that she was all caught up in the occult. She believed in magic, evil spirits – Spanish peasant spiritualism.
For a moment he felt no more than five years old, a shivering boy helpless and with no weapons and with no hope of defeating the murderous creature waiting for him in
the car.
‘He said he was me,’ Peter said, his face distorting. ‘He said he was me, I want to kill him.’ ‘Then we’ll do it together,’ Don said.
‘And she knew it,’ Ricky said. ‘She was delighted. It pleased her, that Lewis was so shocked he could scarcely utter a word.
Now she has come back to make you pay for it. Me, too. She took a detour from me to get my brother, but she knew that eventually I’d turn up here. And then she would be able to get us one by one.’
‘Precisely. Nothing is what it seems to be. These beings can convince you that you
are losing your mind. That’s happened to each of us – we’ve seen and felt things we argued ourselves out of later. It can’t be true, we tell ourselves; such things do not happen. But they do happen, and we did see them.
Peter Barnes said they can make you see things, Don
thought, that’s all they’re doing now . .
‘And what is innocence?’ Narcissus enquired of his friend. ‘It is to imagine that your life is a secret,’ his friend
replied. ‘Most particularly, to imagine it a secret between yourself and a mirror.’ ‘I see,’ Narcissus said. ‘It is the illness for which mirror-gazing is the cure.’
Though still obviously shaken and exhausted by shock, Stella had
improved enormously during the evening; she did not look like a woman in her forties now, and perhaps she never would again, but her eyes were clear.
‘Your doctors said it was the most interesting way for a novelist to commit suicide they ever heard
‘I was completely befuddled, back in that room.’
They could for a time evoke human love, but nothing in them could return it. What you finally saw was their hollowness. They could disguise it for a time, but never finally, and that was their greatest mistake; a mistake in being.
‘They just got it all,’ David was saying, ‘they watched us so long they know us right down to the ground, you know? That’s why we can’t win – that’s why I look this way. You can get a few lucky breaks like you did back
in Milburn, but believe me, they won’t let you get away now. And it’s not so bad.’