The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,211

look to revelation, to Scripture as it were. When I tell you of the old tales of demons, it is to draw attention to a distilled knowledge! I do not say take the Demonologie on its face, for it is poison. I say read what is worthwhile and discard the rest.”

She gave no reply.

“You say you are educated, my daughter, well then consider my father, a surgeon at the University of Leiden, a man who went to Padua to study, and then to England to hear the lectures of William Harvey, who learned French that he might read the writings of Paré. Great doctors cast aside the ‘scripture’ of Aristotle and Galen. They learn from the dissection of dead bodies, and from the dissection of live animals! They learn from what they observe! That is our method. I am saying look at this thing, look at what it has done! I say that it brought down Deborah with its tricks. It brought down Suzanne.”

Silence.

“Ah, but you give me the means to study it better. You tell me to approach it as a doctor might approach it. And be done with incantations and the like.”

“Ah, for this I came here,” I sighed.

“You have come here for better things than this,” she said, and gave me a most devilish and charming smile. “Come now, let us be friends. Drink with me.”

“I would go to bed now.”

She gave a sweet laugh. “So would I,” she said. “By and by.”

Again she pushed the glass at me, and so to be polite I took it and drank, and there came the drunkenness again as if it had been hovering like an imp in the bottle. “No more,” I said.

“Oh, yes, my finest claret, you must drink it.” And once again she pushed it at me.

“All right, all right,” I said to her and drank.

Did I know, then, Stefan, what was to happen? Was I even then peering over the edge of the glass at her succulent little mouth and juicy little arms?

“Oh, sweet beautiful Charlotte,” I said to her. “Do you know how I love you? We have spoken of love, but I have not told you … ”

“I know,” she whispered lovingly to me. “Don’t upset yourself, Petyr. I know.” She rose and took me by the arm.

“Look,” I said to her, for it seemed the lights below were dancing in the trees, dancing as if they were fireflies, and the trees themselves seemed quite alive and to be watching us, and the night sky to rise higher and higher, its moonlit clouds rising beyond the stars.

“Come, dearest,” she said, now pulling me down the stairs, for I tell you, Stefan, my limbs were weakened by the wine. I was stumbling.

A low music had meantime commenced, if one could call it that, for it was made up entirely of African drums, and some eerie and mournful horn playing which I found I liked and then did not like at all.

“Let me go, Charlotte,” I said to her, for she was pulling me towards the cliffs. “I would go to bed now.”

“Yes, and you shall.”

“Then why do we go to the cliffs, my dear? You mean to throw me over the edge?”

She laughed. “You are so handsome in spite of all your propriety and your Dutch manners!” She danced in front of me, with her hair blowing in the breeze, a lithesome figure against the dark glittering sea.

Ah, such beauty. More beautiful even than my Deborah. I looked down and saw the glass was in my left hand, most strange, and she was filling it once more, and I was so thirsty for it that I drank it down as if it were ale.

Taking my arm once more, she pointed the way down a steep path, which led perilously close to the edge, but I could see a roof beyond and light and what seemed a whitewashed wall.

“Do you think I am ungrateful for what you’ve told me?” she said in my ear. “I am grateful. We must talk more of your father, the physician, and of the ways of those men.”

“I can tell you many things, but not so that you use them to do evil.” I looked about me, stumbling still, and trying to see the slaves who played the drums and the horn, for surely they were very near. The music seemed to echo off the rocks and off the trunks of the trees.

“Ah, and so you do believe in evil!” She