The Gorgon Field Read Free Page B

of the house. I would if it were mine.”
    “It’s just a big, expensive house on an expensive piece of real estate,” he said. “All it takes is enough money.”
    She shook her head. “Oh, no. That’s not it. All the money on earth wouldn’t buy what’s out there.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “Magic. This is a magic place.”
    They dined in Carl Wyandot’s private sitting room. Here, too, were the decorative Indian and Mexican rugs, the wall hangings, the pots with lush plants. And here the windows were nearly floor to ceiling, with drapes that had been opened all the way. He had the entire western side of the second floor, as Constance had guessed he would. When she saw how he handled his silverware, she knew Deborah had been right; they were being honored. His hands were misshapen with arthritis, drawn into awkward angles, the knuckles enlarged and sore-looking. He was a proud man; he would not permit many strangers to gawk.
    The fifth member of the party was Ramón. Thirty, forty, older? Constance could not tell. His eyes were a warm brown, his face smooth, his black hair moderately short and straight. He had a lithe, wiry build, slender hands. And, she thought, if she had to pick one word to use to describe him, it would be stillness . Not rigidity or strain, but a natural stillness. He did not fidget or make small talk or respond to rhetorical questions, and yet he did not give the impression of being bored or withdrawn. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt; in this establishment, it appeared that only the servants dressed up. The two young men who waited on them wore black trousers, white dress shirts, and string ties. They treated Ramón with perhaps a shade more reverence than they showed Wyandot.
    Charlie was telling about the day he had run into one of the arsonists he had put away, who was then out of prison. “He introduced me to his pals, told them who I was, what I had done, all of it, as if he was proud. Then we sat down and had a beer and talked. He wasn’t resentful, but rather pleased to see me again.”
    Carl Wyandot nodded. “Preserving the order of the cosmos is always a pleasing experience. He had his role; you had yours. But you can’t really be retired after being so active, not at your age!”
    He was too shrewd to lie to, Charlie decided, and he shook his head. “I do private investigations now and then. And Constance writes books and does workshops sometimes. We stay busy.”
    Deborah was the only one who seemed shocked by this disclosure.
    “Actually, I’m planning a book now,” Constance said. “It will deal with the various superstitions that continue to survive even in this superrational age, like throwing coins into a fountain. That goes so far back that no one knows for certain when it began. We assume that it was to propitiate the Earth Goddess for the water that the people took from her. It has variations throughout literature.”
    “To what end?” Carl Wyandot asked. “To debunk or explain or what?”
    “I don’t debunk things of that sort,” she said. “They are part of our heritage. I accept the theory that the archetypes are patterns of possible behavior; they determine how we perceive and react to the world, and usually they can’t be explained or described. They come to us as visions, or dream images, and they come to all of us in the same forms over and over. Civilized, educated Westerner; African native who has never seen a book—they have the same dream images, the same impulses in their responses to the archetypes. If we try to bury them, deny them, we are imperiling our own psyches.”
    “Are you not walking the same ground that Carl Jung plowed?” Ramón asked. He spoke with the polite formality of one whose English was a second language, learned in school.
    “It’s his field,” Constance said. “But it’s a very big field and he opened it to all. His intuition led him to America, you know, to study the dreams of the Hopi,