Free The Self-Enchanted by David Stacton Page A

long time with death. I’m not afraid of it. But you are. You’ll always be afraid of me, even when I’m dead.”
    “I’ll not be afraid to see you dead.”
    She opened her eyes wider. “When I die, you’ll begin to die,” she said. “I shall enjoy that. You can’t get away. So let me have my way. Let me see the house.”
    “You’re much too ill to travel.”
    She laughed. “You’re afraid to let me go there. I wonder if you know why?”
    “This time you won’t get your own way.”
    “I can wait,” she said. And her eyes frightened him, as always. They were determined, malicious, alien eyes. They gave the impression of power trapped in a body too old and weak for it. He wondered if one day he would look like that and shivered.
    Then her tone altered, and she seemed to shrivel up. “Just this one thing,” she said.
    “The trip would kill you.”
    “Do you think I care? I want to see it.” She watched him run his fingers through his hair, irresolute. “You can’t refuse me. I’m dying.”
    “No,” he shouted. His voice was shrill.
    She laughed again, but sadly. “Cancer isn’t contagious ,” she said acidly, looking out at the black sky. She felt unconsciousness swirl beneath her, empty and vast.“And a woman shouldn’t die alone. Don’t shut me out.” It was not a plea. It was a warning.
    “No.”
    She sat bolt upright in her chair. “Then get out,” she screamed. “Get out.” And her voice rumbled with contempt.
    He was afraid of her. She knew that, but she didn’t particularly like it. He rushed out of the room, slamming the door behind him angrily. She began to ring her bell, but nobody came. She rang it again and again, and it echoed through the silent house. A car roared down the drive and crashed through the iron gates. The old woman sat there, cursing under her breath, staring out at the garden, which to her eyes was a white blur, full of sounds that she did not understand. She began to scream for Angelica, and taking the bell, she raised herself up and flung itwith what strength she had at the plate-glass window. The bell shattered the glass, sending a glassy spider-web through it. And through the hole poured the sticky night tule fog, turned ghostly by the floodlights of the garden. Then she sank back in her chair, while Christopher drove towards the airport, with glass in his lap and a trickle of blood down one ear; while the gates half-wrenched from their sockets creaked in the wind. They had hated each other since his father had died, and she had hated her children even before they were born. Which was another reason why they lived that way.

VIII
    C hristopher’s house stood out on its cliff like stages of lunar madness. It was the night of the first storm, not of winter, but of that week before winter which is the last warning to all creatures to dig themselves in. The storm moved down from the high passes, electric with fury, and it left a heavy magnificence of snow on the bent evergreens as it passed, a beautiful surface of terror on the ground.
    Curt stood at the window of the Nesbitt place and watched the storm, as the house appeared and disappeared in the mists, riding it out. Only the outer works of the house remained to be finished. His work was almost done.
    He did not like the valley any more. It eluded him. There was something wrong with it. At night he seemed to suffocate, and things were happening he did not understand. Most of the workers had gone away now. But Christopher was back, and he was worse than ever. There had been more scenes at the house.
    When Curt got up to the site he found Christopher already there, looking at the departing snow clouds. He did not look as though he had slept for days, and his face was bruised. He seemed almost frightened. Curt tried to square up to whatever he might have to say.
    “We’ve got to get it finished,” said Christopher, and his fingers twitched nervously.
    “I fail to see the hurry.”
    “You’re not hired to