The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,215

me, but a man bound to me by blood.”

So it was all planned.

“But there is more to it,” she said. “Do you know what it is to me to feel a true man with his arms about me?” she asked. “To feel a true man on top of me? And why should it not be my father, if my father is the most pleasing of all the men I have ever seen?”

I thought of you, Stefan. I thought of your warnings to me. I thought of Alexander. Was he at this moment mourning for me still in the Motherhouse?

Surely I shed tears, for I remember her comforting me, and how touching was her distress. Then she did cling to me, like a child herself curled beside me, and said that we two knew things that no one else had ever known save Deborah and Deborah was dead. She cried then. She cried for Deborah.

“When he came to me and told me that she was dead, I wept and wept. I could not stop weeping. And they beat on the doors and said, ‘Charlotte, come out.’ I had not seen him or known him until that moment. My mother had said: ‘Put on the emerald necklace, and by its light he will find you.’ But he did not need that thing. I know it now. I was lying in the darkness alone when he came to me. I will tell you a terrible secret. Until that moment I did not believe in him! I did not. I had held the little doll she gave me, the doll of her mother … ”

“It was described to me in Montcleve.”

“Now that is made of the bone and the hair of Suzanne, or so my mother claimed it was, for Lasher, she said, had brought the hair to her after they cut it from Suzanne in prison, and the bone after she was burnt. And from this she had made the doll as Suzanne had told her to do, and she would hold it and call upon Suzanne.

“Now, I had this, and I had done as she had instructed me. But Suzanne didn’t come to me! I heard nothing and felt nothing, and I wondered about all the things which my mother had believed.

“Then he came, as I told you. I felt him come in the darkness, I felt his caress.”

“How so, caress?”

“Touching me as you have touched me. I lay in the darkness, and there were lips upon my breasts. Lips upon my lips. Between my legs he stroked me. I rose up, thinking, Ah well, this is a dream, a dream of when Antoine was still a man. But he was there! ‘You have no need of Antoine,’ he said to me. ‘My beautiful Charlotte.’ And then, you see, I put on the emerald. I put it on as she had told me to do.”

“He told you that she was dead?”

“Aye, that she had fallen from the cathedral battlements, and that you had thrown the evil priest to his death. Ah, but he speaks most strangely. You cannot imagine how strange his words are. As if he had picked them up from all over the world the way he picks up bits and pieces of jewels and gold.”

“Tell me,” I said to her.

She thought. “I cannot,” she said with a sigh. Then she tried it, and now I shall do my best to recount it. “ ‘I am here, Charlotte, I am Lasher, and I am here. The spirit of Deborah went up out of her body; it did not see me; it left the earth. Her enemies ran to the left and to the right and to the left in fear. See me, Charlotte, and hear me, for I exist to serve you, and only in serving you, do I exist.’ ” She gave another sigh. “But it is even stranger than that when he tells me a long tale. For I questioned him as to what happened to my mother and he said, ‘I came and I drew together, and I lifted the tiles of the roofs and made them fly through the air. And I lifted the dirt from the ground and made it fly through the air.’ ”

“And what else does this spirit say as to his own nature?”

“Only that he always was. Before there were men and women, he was.”

“Ah, and you believe this?”

“Why should I not believe it?”

I did not answer her, but in my soul