The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,150

Indian-style, and trying to remember the experience in cold detail. She’d glanced at the clock last night only moments before the thing had appeared. It had been five minutes after three. And hadn’t that awful woman said, “Your mother died at five minutes after five”?

Same time exactly in New Orleans. But what a bewildering possibility, she thought, that the two were linked.

Of course, if her mother had appeared to her it would have been splendid beyond belief. It would have been the kind of sacramental moment people talk about forever. All the lovely clichés—“life-changing, miraculous, beautiful”—could have come into play. In fact, it was almost impossible to contemplate the comfort of such a moment. But it was not a woman who had appeared there, it was a man, a strange and curiously elegant man.

Just thinking about it again, thinking about the beseeching expression of the being, made her feel her alarm of the night before. She turned and glanced anxiously at the glass wall. Nothing there of course but the great empty blue sky over the dark distant bills, and the flashing, sparkling panorama of the bay.

She grew coldly and unexpectedly calm as she puzzled over it, as she reviewed in her mind all the popular myths she’d heard about such apparitions, but then this brief interlude of excitement began to fade.

Whatever it was, it seemed vague, insubstantial, even trivial beside the fact of the death of her mother. That was what had to be dealt with. And she was wasting precious time.

She climbed to her feet and went to the phone. She called Dr. Larkin at home.

“Lark, I have to go on leave,” she explained. “It’s unavoidable. Can we talk about Slattery filling in?”

How cool her voice sounded, how like the old Rowan. But that was a lie. As they spoke, she stared at the glass wall again, at the empty space on the deck where the tall, slender being had stood. She saw his dark eyes again, searching her face. She could scarcely follow what Lark was saying. No way I imagined that damned thing, she thought.

Eleven

THE DRIVE TO the Talamasca retreat house took less than an hour and a half. The limousine took the dull path of the interstate, cutting over the river road only when they were within a few miles of the house.

But it seemed like far less to Michael, who was for the entire time immersed in his conversation with Aaron.

By the time they reached the house, Michael had a fairly good understanding of what the Talamasca was, and he had assured Aaron that he would keep confidential forever what he was about to read in the files. Michael loved the idea of the Talamasca; he loved the genteel civilized way in which Aaron presented things; and he thought to himself more than once, that had he not been hell-bent on this “purpose” of his, he would cheerfully have embraced the Talamasca.

But those were foolish thoughts, because it was the drowning which had led to the sense of purpose and to his psychic ability; and these things had led the Talamasca to him.

There also had sharpened in Michael a sense of his love for Rowan—and it was love, he felt—as something apart from his involvement with the visions, even though he knew now that the visions had involved Rowan.

He tried to explain this to Aaron as they approached the retreat house gates.

“All you’ve told me sounds familiar; there is a sense of recognition, just as I felt when I saw the house last night. And you know of course that the Talamasca couldn’t be familiar to me, it’s not possible that I would have heard of you and forgotten except if they told me while I was drowned. But the point I’m trying to make is that my affection for Rowan doesn’t feel familiar. It doesn’t feel like something meant to be. It’s fresh; it’s tied up in my mind somehow with rebellion. Why, I remember when I was with her out there, you know, talking over breakfast, at her house in Tiburon, I looked out over the water and I said almost defiantly to those beings, that this thing with Rowan mattered to me.”

Aaron listened to all this carefully, as he had listened to Michael, intermittently, all along.

It seemed to Michael that both knew their knowledge of each other had deepened and become seemingly natural to them, that they were now completely at ease.

Michael had drunk only coffee since they’d left New Orleans.

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