Green Eyes Page 0,88

She gave herself a penitential slap on the cheek. 'I'm sorry. I'm just used to dealin' with the others, and you're so nice and all. I shouldn't be talkin' to you like that.'

'I'm not offended,' said Jocundra. 'I admit I worry about it.' She sloshed the dregs of her coffee. 'We're in a difficult position with Otille.'

Danni took her hand and said it would probably be all right, that she understood.

Despite the difference in their backgrounds, Jocundra enjoyed Danni's company. Having a girlfriend made the wormy atmosphere of the house easier to bear, and Danni, too, seemed to enjoy the relationship, taking special pleasure in helping Jocundra search for clues to the estate's history among the crates and cartons. One morning, while digging through a dusty crate in a downstairs closet, they found an old book, a diary, embossed with the gilt letter A and bearing another gilt design on the foreleaf; this last, though wormtrailed beyond recognition, was obviously the remains of a veve.

'I bet that's, you know, what's his name...' Danni banged the side of her head. 'Aime! Lucanor Aime. The one who taught ol' Valcours his tricks.'

The initial entry was dated July 9, 1847, and graphically described a sexual encounter with a woman named Miriam T, which sent Danni into fits of giggles. There followed a series of brief entries, essentially a list of appointments kept, saying that the initiate had arrived and been Well received. Then Jocundra's eye was caught by the words les Invisibles midway down a page, and she went back and read the entire entry.

Sept. 19, 1847. Today I felt the need for solitude, for meditation, and to that end I closed the temple and betook myself to the levee, there spending the better part of the afternoon in contemplation of the calligraphy of eddies and ripples gliding past on the surface of the river. Yet for all my peaceful reverie, I could not arrive at a decision. Shortly before dark, I returned to the temple and found Valcours R waiting in the robing room...

'Valcours!' breathed Danni. 'I don't know if we should be lookin' at this.' She shuddered prettily.

... his noxious pit bull at his feet, salivating on the carpet. Suddenly, my decision had been made. As I met Valcours' imperturbable stare, it seemed I was reading the truth of his spirit from his wrinkled brow and stonily set mouth. Though by all he is accounted a handsome man, at the moment his handsomeness appeared to have been remolded by some subtle and invisible agency, as by a mask of the clearest glass, into a fierce and hideous countenance, thus revealing a foul inner nature. Without a word of greeting, he asked for my decision..

'No,' I said. 'What you propose is the worst form of petro. I will not trifle with les Invisibles.'

He exhibited no surprise and merely pulled on his gloves, saying, 'Next Saturday I will bring three men to the temple. Together we will penetrate the mysteries.'

'Keep your damned mysteries to yourself!' I shouted.

'Sunday,' he repeated, smiling. Then he inclined his head in one of those effete bows I find so irritating and left me, his accursed dog at his heels.

It is in my mind now that I should work spells against him, though by doing so I would in effect be practicing petro of the sort he wishes me to practice. And yet, it would be strictly in the service of the temple, and thus not a violation of my vows, only of my self-esteem. Be that as it may, there is an aura of significant evil about Valcours, such as I have not met with in all my experience, and it is time our association came to an end, one way or another.

Thereafter the diary continued in ordinary fashion, lists of appointments and more sex with Miriam T, until a third of the way through the volume, at which point the entries ceased.

Aime's account only posed new mysteries, and reading it had knotted Jocundra's muscles and set her temples to throbbing, as if it had contained the germ of an old disease. She begged off the rest of the morning, telling Danni she wanted to lie down a while, while Danni insisted on coming along and giving her a massage.

'There ain't nothin' like a massage for tension,' she said; she winked slyly. 'I learned all about it out in Hollywood.'

She accompanied Jocundra back to the room, had her remove her blouse and unhook her bra and lie flat