The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,142

If you choose to be our mediator and to give the file on the Mayfair Witches to Rowan for us, then our highest aims will have been served.”

Michael was quiet, trying to absorb all this, his eyes moving anxiously over Lightner but seeing countless other things.

He could not entirely account for his feelings towards “the man” now, the man who had always seemed vaguely beautiful to him, an embodiment of elegance, a wan and soulful figure, almost, who seemed to possess, in his deep garden hideaway, some serenity that Michael himself wanted to possess. Behind the fence last night, the man had tried to frighten him. Or was that so?

If only in that instant, he’d been rid of his gloves, and had been able to touch the man!

He did not doubt Lightner’s words. There was something ghastly in all this, something ominous, something dark as the shadows that enclosed that house. Yet it seemed familiar. He thought of the visions, not in a struggle to remember, but merely to sink once more in the sensations evoked by them, and a conviction of goodness settled on him, as it had before.

“I’m meant to intervene,” he said, “surely I am. And maybe I’m meant to use this power through touching. Rowan said … ”

“Yes?”

“Rowan asked why I thought the power in my hands had nothing to do with it, why I kept insisting it was separate … ” He thought again of touching the man. “Maybe it is part of it, maybe it’s not just a little curse visited on me to drive me crazy and off course.”

“That’s what you thought?”

He nodded. “Seemed like it. Like it was the thing preventing me from coming. I holed up on Liberty Street for two months. I could have found Rowan sooner … ” He looked at the gloves. How he hated them. They made his hands into artificial hands.

He could think no further. He couldn’t grasp all the aspects of this rally. The feeling of familiarity lingered, taking the edges off the shocks of Lightner’s revelations.

“All right,” he said finally. “I’ll go with you. I want to read that file, all of it. But I want to be back here as soon as possible. I’m leaving word for her that I’ll be back in case she should call. She matters to me. She matters to me more than you know. And it’s got nothing to do with the visions. It’s got to do with who she is, and how much I … care about her. She can’t be subordinated to anything else.”

“Not even to the visions themselves?” Lightner asked respectfully.

“No. Twice, maybe three times in a lifetime you feel about someone the way I do about Rowan. That involves its own priorities, its own purposes.”

“I understand,” said Lightner. “I’ll be downstairs to meet you in twenty minutes. And I wish that you would call me Aaron, from now on, if you’d like to. We have a long way to go together. I’m afraid I lapsed into calling you Michael quite some time ago. I want us to be friends.”

“We’re friends,” said Michael. “What the hell else could we possibly be?” He gave a little uneasy laugh, but he had to admit, he liked this guy. In fact, he felt distinctly uneasy letting Lightner, and the briefcase, out of his sight.

Michael showered, shaved, and dressed in less than fifteen minutes. He unpacked, except for a few essentials. And only as he picked up his suitcase did he see the message light still pulsing on the bedside phone. Why in the world hadn’t he responded the first time he’d seen it? It infuriated him suddenly.

At once he called the switchboard.

“Yes. A Dr. Rowan Mayfair called you, Mr. Curry, about five-fifteen A.M.” The woman gave him Rowan’s number. “She insisted that we ring, and that we knock.”

“And you did?”

“We did, Mr. Curry. We didn’t get any answer.”

And my friend Aaron was there all the time, Michael thought angrily.

“We didn’t want to use the passkey to go in.”

“That’s fine. Listen, I want to leave word with you for Dr. Mayfair if she calls again.”

“Yes, Mr. Curry?”

“That I arrived safely, and that I’ll call within twenty-four hours. That I have to go out now, but I’ll be here later on.”

He laid a five-dollar bill for the maid on the coverlet and walked out.

The small narrow lobby was bustling when he came down. The coffee shop was crowded and cheerfully noisy. Lightner, having changed from his dark tweed into an