The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,352

It was only an eight-hour trip, and I was able to write in my diary the entire way.

At length I considered what had happened. The girl had renounced her history and her psychic powers. Her aunt had reared her to reject the spirit, Lasher. But for years she’d been losing the battle, quite obviously. But what if we gave her our assistance? Might the hereditary chain be broken? Might the spirit depart the family like a spirit fleeing a burning house which it has haunted for years?

Even as I wrote out these thoughts, I was dogged by my remembrance of the apparition. The thing was so powerful! It was more seemingly incarnate and powerful than any such phantom I had ever beheld. Yet it had been a fragmentary image.

In my experience only the ghosts of people who have very recently died appear with such seeming substance. For example, the ghost of a pilot killed in action may appear on the very day of his death in his sister’s parlor, and she will say after, “Why, he was so real. I could see the mud on his shoes!”

Ghosts of the long departed almost never had such density or vividness.

And discarnate entities? They could possess bodies of the living and of the dead, yes, but appear on their own with such solidity and such intensity?

This thing liked to appear, didn’t it? Of course it did. That was why so many people saw it. It liked to have a body if only for a split second. So it didn’t just speak with a soundless voice to the witch, or make an image which existed entirely in her mind. No, it made itself somehow material so that others saw it and even heard it. And with great effort—perhaps very great effort, it could make itself appear to cry or smile.

So what was the agenda of this being? To gain strength so that it might make appearances of greater and greater duration and perfection? And above all what was the meaning of the curse, which in Petyr’s letter had read: “I shall drink the wine and eat the meat and know the warmth of the woman when you are no longer even bones”?

Lastly, why was it not tormenting me or enticing me now? Had it used the energy of Deirdre to make this appearance, or my energy? (I had seen very few spirits in my life. I was not a strong medium. In fact, at that point, I had never seen an apparition which could not have been explained as some sort of illusion created by light and shadow, or an overactive mind.)

Perhaps foolishly I had the feeling that as long as I was away from Deirdre it couldn’t do me harm. What had happened with Petyr van Abel had to do with his powers of mediumship and how the thing manipulated them. I had very little of that sort of power.

But it would be a very bad mistake to underestimate the being. I needed to be on guard from here on out.

I arrived in New Orleans at eight in the evening, and strange unpleasant little things began to happen at once. I was nearly run down by a taxi outside Union Station. Then the taxi which took me to my hotel nearly collided with another car as we pulled up to the curb.

In the small lobby of the Royal Court, a drunken tourist bumped into me and then tried to start a brawl. Fortunately, his wife diverted him, apologizing repeatedly, as the bellhops assisted her in getting the man upstairs. But my shoulder was bruised from this small incident. I was shaken from the close calls in the cab.

Imagination, I thought. Yet as I climbed the stairs to my first-floor room, a weak portion of the old wooden railing came loose in my hands. I almost lost my balance. The bellhop was immediately apologetic. An hour later, as I was noting all these things in my diary, a fire broke out on the third floor of the hotel.

I stood in the cramped French Quarter street with other uncomfortable guests for the better part of an hour before it was determined that the small blaze had been put out without smoke or water damage to any other rooms. “What was the cause?” I asked. An embarrassed employee murmured something about rubbish in a storage closet, and assured me that everything was all right.

For a long time, I considered the situation. Really, all this might have