The apparition vanished, but we all felt its continuing presence.
We were watching what we couldn't see, sensing its movement away from Top and toward the flaring embers in the fireplace, where it paused for only a moment, just long enough for Moira to sit up straight with a determined expression, her hand strong but strangely calm in mine; Roberta, aware that Moira was now staring at her, making a move as though to get up, but thinking that Joe and Neal were not going to let her leave. I saw this realization in Roberta's face, that she must just sit there and let this violation play out.
She was looking at It, at what was not there at the fireplace, and yet was. The breaking apart of a log, a spurt of flame and a little cloud of ash, momentarily took our attention away from a sudden invisible movement. It was coming back to the table, passing Neal, and slowly, as with an awakening intention, stopping behind Roberta.
She pressed Joe's hand down on the table and said to him in a shaky voice, "You know I've protected you from your father." But he was looking at me and saying in a secretive manner, "Moira."
I was at a loss. "What?" I said stupidly, while I could feel Moira squirming because she wanted to say something but couldn't get the words out.
Then instinctively I knew what Joe meant, and what Roberta, I'm sure, had sensed the moment the spirit came up behind her. I glanced at Top and Neal. They were looking at each other indecisively. So I gazed up at the face of the apparition as its features were forming. That clear glassy face lasted only a second or two, but there was no mistaking the identity of it. The spirit was Moira's.
For some reason Joe kept looking from his mother to me.
Roberta had lost her last vestige of composure. In its ruins was a rising panic and its opposite: a depressing anger. Glaring at Moira she said: "What are you trying to prove? You little rotten bitch." Top leaned forward, like a bloodhound pointing, and said to her: "There is a little girl and a boy sitting in your bathtub."
I said to him, "Let me see it!"
He smiled at me, jovially, and his deep-set eyes glimmered as they always did when he was to share a revelation.
I had an instantaneous vision in black-and-white. The child Moira sat in a dark half-filled tub, her legs stretched out over the child Joe's legs and touching his hips with her ankles. Not Joe, really, but Josie. His brownish blond hair hung wetly to his shoulders. He wore one of his mother's bras. Just as the vision was losing coherence I sensed a man opening the bathroom door and looking in at the children. The face of the apparition was a featureless grey now, but more expressive of its evil than when it had appeared behind Top in demonic form.
Roberta seemed no longer afraid; rather she was profoundly agitated. She sat there grimacing and shaking her head, not at anyone in particular, unless she was thinking of her husband.
Neal lifted her hand, squeezing it. "Edgar has a peculiar fondness for his son. Or, he did, seven years ago, was it?"
"Shut up! It's of no concern of yours."
"Alicia disagrees," he said with that pompous air.
I knew then, and Top helped me to know, that it was not Alicia, the ill-starred young woman, whom Neal was referring to, but that which he had acquired and to some extent controlled: a dark side of the feminine, of sex and of love and of life itself, but quintessentially feminine. Down through history men have always regarded the female as morally inferior, but, perhaps because of it, powerful and deadlier than the male; the mistress of the life force; Life, which must destroy to construct, must kill to survive; life eating life; good and evil as a single orange in the right hand and in the left; life and death mirroring each other; the dark birthing the light; the feminine giving rise to the male and loving him to death.
Joe's hand was such that I turned my head to look at him. He was drenched in sweat. "Let me have her," he said to Neal in a hoarse voice. What he meant was, 'Let me BE her.' It was obvious what he was thinking. The ghostly face of his father was drifting down toward him like the benediction of a rogue priest. The sense of presence was so strong that we were leaning back in our seats, watching not the disembodied spirit-head of Edgar, but Joe's anguished face.
Roberta, maddened, broke into tears. "I did everything I could for you, Joe," she sobbed, "but you wouldn't listen to me. You clung to me but wouldn't hear a word I said." Then turning in her chair she gave Moira a look of deep loathing. "You're as bad as his father! Rotten! You did whatever Edgar told you to do, you vile, vile, disgusting bitch!"
Top and Neal leaned in close to each other, whispering like two naughty schoolboys enjoying a joke on the teacher. I caught this in the briefest glance and thought no more of it.
I was staring straight into the hard cold blue marbled eyes of Moira.
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