It wasn’t only her curiosity about the other Dominions that had been dulled by contentment; her curiosity about events in her own planet was similarly cool. Though the television burbled constantly in the corner of her bedroom, its presence soporific, she attended to its details scarcely at all and would not have noticed the midafternoon news bulletin, but that an item she caught in passing put her in mind of Charlie.
Three bodies had been found in a shallow grave on Hampstead Heath, the condition of the mutilated corpses implying, the report said, some kind of ritualistic murder. Preliminary investigations further suggested that the deceased had been known to the community of cultists and black magic practitioners in the city, some of whom, in the light of other deaths or disappearances among their number, believed that a vendetta against them was under way. To round the piece off, there was footage of the police searching the bushes and undergrowth of Hampstead Heath, while the rain fell and compounded their misery. The report distressed her for two reasons, each related to one of the brothers. The first, that it brought back memories of Charlie, sitting in that stuffy little room in the clinic, watching the heath and contemplating suicide. The second, that perhaps this vendetta might endanger Oscar, who was as involved in occult practices as any man alive.
She fretted about this for the rest of the afternoon, her concern deepening still further when Oscar failed to return home by six. She put off dressing for the opera and waited for him downstairs, the front door open, the rain beating the bushes around the step. He returned at six-forty with Dowd, who had barely stepped through the door before he pronounced that there would be no opera visit tonight: Godolphin contradicted him immediately, much to his chagrin, telling Jude to go and get ready; they’d be leaving in twenty minutes.
As she dutifully headed upstairs, she heard Dowd say, “You know McGann wants to see you?”
“We can do both,” Oscar replied. “Did you put out the black suit? No? What have you been doing all day? No, don’t tell me. Not on an empty stomach.”
Oscar looked handsome in black, and she told him so when, twenty-five minutes later, he came downstairs. In response to the compliment, he smiled and made a small bow.
“And you were never lovelier,” he replied. “You know, I don’t have a photograph of you? I’d like one, for my wallet. We’ll have Dowd organize it.”
By now, Dowd was conspicuous by his absence. Most evenings he would play chauffeur, but tonight he apparently had other business.
“We’re going to have to miss the first act,” Oscar said as they drove. “I’ve got a little errand to run in Highgate, if you’ll bear with me.” “I don’t mind,” she said.
He patted her hand. “It won’t take long,” he said. Perhaps because he didn’t often take the wheel himself he concentrated hard as he drove, and though the news item she’d seen was still very much in her mind she was loath to distract him with talk. They made good time, threading their way through the back streets to avoid thoroughfares clogged by rain-slowed traffic, and arriving in a veritable cloudburst.
“Here we are,” he said, though the windshield was so awash she could barely see ten yards ahead. “You stay in the warm. I won’t be long.”
He left her in the car and sprinted across a courtyard towards an anonymous building. Nobody came to the front door. It opened automatically and closed after him. Only when he’d disappeared, and the thunderous drumming of the rain on the roof had diminished somewhat, did she lean forward to peer out through the watery windshield at the building itself. Despite the rain, she recognized instantly the tower from the dream of blue eye. Without conscious instruction her hand went to the door and opened it, as her breath quickened with denials.
“Oh, no. Oh, no. . ..”
She got out of the car and turned her face up to the cold rain and to an even colder memory. She’d let this place— and indeed the journey that had brought her here, her mind moving through the streets touching this woman’s grief and that woman’s rage—slip into the dubious territory that lay between recollections of the real and those of the dreamed. In essence, she’d allowed herself to believe it had never happened. But here was the very place, to the window, to the brick. And if the exterior was so exactly as she’d seen it, why should she doubt that the interior would be any different?