The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,212

laughed. “You are a man of angels and devils, and you would be an angel, like the angel Michael who drove the devils into hell.” She placed her arm about me so that I did not fall, her breasts crushed up against me, and her soft cheek touching my shoulder.

“I do not like that music,” I said. “Why must they play it?”

“Oh, it makes them happy. The planters hereabouts do not think sufficiently about what makes them happy. If they did they would get more from them, but now we are back to observations, are we not? But come now, such pleasures await you,” she told me.

“Pleasures? Oh, but I do not care for pleasures,” I said, and my tongue was thick again and my head swimming and I could not get accustomed to the music.

“What on earth are you saying, you do not care for pleasures!” she scoffed. “How can one not care for pleasures?”

We had come to the small building, and I saw in the bright light of the moon that it was a house of sorts with the usual pitched roof, but that it was built to the very edge of the cliff. Indeed the light I had seen came from the front of it, which perhaps was open, but we could gain entrance only through a heavy door, which she did unbar from the outside.

She was still laughing at me, for what I had said, when I stopped her.

“What is this, a prison!”

“You are in prison, within your body,” she said, and pushed me through the door.

I drew myself up and meant to go back out, but the door was shut and being bolted by others. I heard the bolt slide into place. I looked about me, in anger and confusion.

A spacious apartment I saw, with a great four-poster bed, fit for the king of England, though it was fitted out in muslin rather than velvet, and in the netting they use here to fend off the mosquitoes, and on either side of it burned candles. Rugs covered the tiled floor, and indeed the front of the little house was entirely open, its shutters back, but I soon saw why, for to walk even ten steps out was to come to a balustrade, and beyond that, I soon saw upon clumsy investigation, as she held my arm to steady me, was nothing but a great plunge to the beach below and the lapping sea.

“I do not care to spend the night here,” I said to her, “and if you will not provide me with a coach, I shall walk to Port-au-Prince.”

“Explain this to me, that you do not like pleasure,” she said gently, tugging at my coat. “Surely you are hot in these miserable garments. Do all Dutchmen wear such clothes?”

“Stop those drums, will you?” I said. “I cannot bear the sound.” For the music seemed to come through the walls. There was a melody to it now, however, and that was a slight bit reassuring, though the melody kept putting its hooks into me and dragging me with it mentally so that I was dancing in my head against my will.

And somehow or other I was now on the side of the bed, with Charlotte removing my shirt. On the table but a few feet away sat a silver tray with bottles of wine and fine glasses, and to this she went now, and poured a glass full of claret and brought this to me and put it in my hand. I went to dash it to the floor, but she held it, and looked into my eyes, and said:

“Petyr, drink a little only that you may sleep. When you wish to leave you may leave.”

“You are lying to me,” I said. Whereupon I felt other hands upon me, and other skirts brushing my legs. Two stately mulatto women had somehow managed to enter this chamber, both of them exquisitely pretty, and voluptuous in their freshly pressed skirts and ruffled blouses, moving with ease no doubt through the general fog which now shrouded all my perceptions, to pound the pillows, and straighten the netting of the bed, and take my boots from me and my trousers.

Hindu princesses they might have been with their dark eyes and dark eyelashes and dusky arms and innocent smiles.

“Charlotte, I will not have this,” I said, yet I was drinking the wine, as she held it to my mouth, and again there came the swoon. “Oh, Charlotte, why, what is