The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,152

the eastern side of the house. Floor-length windows opened onto both the front and the side galleries. And though the carpet was as dark and thick as everywhere else, the decor had yielded to the plantation tradition with a couple of marble-top bureaus and one of those overpowering poster beds which seemed made for this kind of house. Several layers of handmade quilts covered its shapeless feather mattress. No carvings ornamented its eight-foot-high posts.

But the room had a surprising array of modern conveniences, including the small refrigerator and television fitted into a carved armoire, and a chair and desk nestled in the inside corner, so that they faced both the front windows and those to the east. The phone was covered with buttons and tiny carefully inscribed numerals for various extensions. A pair of Queen Anne wing chairs stood on tiptoe before the fireplace. A door was open to an adjoining bath.

“I’m moving in,” Michael said. “Where’s the file?”

“But we should have lunch.”

“You should. I can get a sandwich and eat it while I’m reading. Please, you promised. The file.”

Aaron insisted that they go at once to a small screened porch off the back of the second story, and there, overlooking a formal garden with gravel paths and weathered fountains, they sat down to eat. It was an enormous southern breakfast, complete with biscuits, grits, and sausage; and plenty of chicory café au lait to drink.

Michael was ravenous. Again, he had that feeling he’d had with Rowan—good to be off the booze. Good to be clear-headed, looking out on the green garden with the branches of the oaks dipping down to the very grass. Divine to be feeling the warm air again.

“This has all happened so fast,” Aaron said, passing him the basket of steaming biscuits. “I feel I should say something more, yet I don’t know what I can say. We wanted to approach you slowly, we wanted to get to know you and for you to know us.”

Michael couldn’t stop thinking about Rowan suddenly. He resented it powerfully that he couldn’t call Rowan. Yet it seemed useless to try to explain to Aaron how worried about Rowan he was.

“If I had made the contact I hoped to make,” said Aaron, “I would have invited you to our Motherhouse in London, and your introduction to the order might have been slow and graceful there. Even after years of fieldwork, you would not have been asked to undertake a task as dangerous as intervention with regard to the Mayfair Witches. There is no one in the order even qualified to undertake such a task except for me. But you are involved, to use the simple modern expression.”

“In it up to the eyeballs,” Michael said, eating steadily as he listened. “But I hear what you’re saying. It would be like the Catholic church asking me to participate in an exorcism when they knew I wasn’t an ordained priest.”

“Very nearly so,” he said. “I sometimes think that on account of our lack of dogma and ritual, we are all the more stringent. Our definition of right and wrong is more subtle, and we become more angry with those who don’t comply.”

“Aaron, look. I won’t tell a blessed soul in Christendom about that file, except for Rowan. Agreed?”

Aaron was thoughtful for a moment. “Michael,” he said, “when yoy’ve read the material we must talk further about what you should do. Wait before you say no. At least commit yourself to listening to my advice.”

“You’re personally afraid of Rowan, aren’t you?”

Aaron drank a swallow of coffee. He stared at the plate for a moment. He had eaten nothing but half a biscuit. “I’m not sure,” he answered. “My one meeting with Rowan was very peculiar. I could have sworn … ”

“What?”

“That she wanted desperately to talk to me. To talk to someone. And then again, there was a hostility I perceived in her, a rather generalized hostility, as if the woman were superhuman and bristled with something instinctively alien to other human beings. Oh, I know that sounds farfetched. Of course she isn’t superhuman. But if we think of these psychic powers of ours as mutations, then we can begin to think of a creature like Rowan as something different, as one species of bird is different from another. I felt her differentness, so to speak.”

He paused. He seemed to notice for the first time that Michael was wearing his gloves as he ate. “Do you want to try it without those? Perhaps I