The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,209

full of dark persons, slaves perhaps moving in the foliage, and I did see one very shapely light-skinned creature smiling up at me as she passed. In a dream, it seemed, I heard Charlotte speaking to me:

“All right, handsome Petyr, what more would you say to me?”

Strange words I thought, between father and daughter, for surely she knows it, she cannot but know it. Yet again, perhaps she does not. I turned to her and began my warnings. Did she not understand that this spirit was no ordinary spirit? That this thing which could possess the body of the old man and make it do her bidding could turn upon her, that it was, in fact, obtaining its very strength from her, that she must seek to understand what spirits were, but she bid me hush.

And then it did seem to me that I was seeing the most bizarre things through the window of the lighted dining room, for the slave boys in their shining blue satin appeared to me to be dancing as they dusted and swept the room, dancing like imps.

“What a curious illusion,” I said. Only to realize that the young boys, dusting the seats of the chairs and gathering the fallen napkins, were only cavorting, and playing, and did not know that I watched.

Then staring back at Charlotte, I beheld that she had let her hair down free over her shoulders and that she was staring up at me with cold, beautiful eyes. It seemed also that she had pushed down the sleeves of her dress, as a tavern wench might do it, the better to reveal her magnificent white shoulders and the tops of her breasts. That a father should stare at a daughter as I stared at her was plainly wicked.

“Ah, you think you know so much,” she said, obviously referring to the conversation which in my general confusion I had all but forgot. “But you are like a priest, as my mother told me. You know only rules and ideas. Who told you that spirits are evil?”

“You misunderstand. I do not say evil, I say dangerous. I say hostile to man perhaps, and impossible to control. I do not say hellish, I say unknown.”

I could feel my tongue thick in my mouth. Yet still I continued. I explained to her that it was the teaching of the Catholic church that anything “unknown” was demonic, and that was the greatest difference between the Church and the Talamasca. It was upon that great difference that we had been founded long ago.

Again, I saw the boys were dancing. They whirled about the room, leaping, turning, appearing and reappearing at the windows. I blinked to clear my head.

“And what makes you think that I do not know this spirit intimately,” said she, “and that I cannot control it? Do you really think that my mother did not control it? Can you not see that there is a progression here from Suzanne to Deborah to me?”

“I see it, yes, I see it. I saw the old man, did I not?” I said, but I was losing the thought. I could not form my words properly and the remembrance of the old man upset my logic. I wanted the wine, but did not want it, and did not drink any more.

“Yes,” she said, quickening it seemed, and taking the wineglass from me, thank God. “My mother did not know that Lasher could be sent into a person, though any priest might have told her demons possess humans all the time, though of course they do it to no avail.”

“How so, no avail?”

“They must leave eventually; they cannot become that person, no matter how truly they want to become that person. Ah, if Lasher could become the old man … ”

This horrified me, and I could see that she smiled at my horror, and she bid me sit down beside her. “What is it however that you truly mean to convey to me?” she pressed.

“My warning, that you give up this being, that you move away from it, that you not found your life upon its power, for it is a mysterious thing, and that you teach it no more. For it did not know it could go into a human until you taught it so, am I right?”

This gave her pause. She refused to answer.

“Ah, so you are teaching it to be a better demon for your sake!” I said. “Well, if Suzanne could have read the demonology shown