The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,371

to me.” said the Englishman softly in her ear, in that clipped yet melodious accent. “Michael would be here if he could. I’m here in Michael’s place. Michael will come tonight. Just as soon as he can.”

She looked at him. shocked, the relief almost making her shudder. Michael was coming. Michael was somewhere close. But how could this be?

“Yes, very close, and unavoidably detained,” he said, as sincerely as if he’d invented the words “and truly put out that he cannot be here … ”

She saw the dim dark featureless First Street house again, the house Michael had been talking about all that time. And when she’d first seen him in the water, he had looked like a tiny speck of clothes floating on the surface, that can’t be a drowned man, not out here, miles and miles from the land …

“What can I do for you now?” said the Englishman, his voice low and secretive and utterly solicitous. “Do you want to step up to the coffin?”

Yes, please, take me up. Please help me! Make my legs move. But they were moving. He had slipped his arm around her and he was guiding her, so easily, and the conversation had started up again, thank God, though it was a low respectful hum, from which she could extract various threads at will. “ … she just didn’t want to come to the funeral parlor, that’s the truth of it. She’s furious that we’re all here.” “Keep quiet, she’s ninety if she’s a day and it’s a hundred degrees outside.” “I know, I know. Well, everyone can come to my place afterwards, I told you … ”

She kept her eyes down, on the silver handles, on the flowers, on the velvet kneeler right in front of her now. Sick again. Sick from the heat and this motionless cool air with the scent of the flowers hanging around her like an invisible mist. But you have to do this. You have to do it calmly and quietly. You cannot lose it. Promise me you’ll never go back there, you’ll never try to find out.

The Englishman was holding her, Michael will come, his right hand comfortingly against her arm, his left hand steadying her left wrist as she touched the velvet-covered side of the casket.

Slowly, she forced herself to look up from the floor, to raise her eyes until she saw the face of the dead woman lying right there on the satin pillow. And slowly her mouth began to open, to pull open, the rigidity shifting into a spasm. She struggled with all her strength to keep from opening her mouth. She clenched her teeth. And the shudder that passed through her was so violent that the Englishman tightened his grip. He too was looking down. He had known her!

Look at her. Nothing else matters now. It is not important to hurry, or to think of anything else, or to worry. Just look at her, look at her face with all its secrets locked away now forever.

And Stella’s face was so beautiful in the coffin. She had such beautiful black hair …

“She is going to faint, help her! Pierce, help her.”

“No, we have her, she’s all right,” said Jerry Lonigan.

So perfectly, hideously dead she looked, and so lovely. Groomed she was for eternity—with the pink lipstick gleaming on her shapely mouth and the rouge on the flawless girlish cheeks, and her black hair brushed out on the satin, like girl’s hair, free and beautiful, and the rosary beads, yes, rosary beads, threaded through her fingers, which are like dough as they lie on her breast, not human hands at all, but something made crudely by a sculptor.

In all these years, Rowan had never seen such a thing. She had seen them drowned, and stabbed, and after they had died on the wards in their sleep. She had seen them colorless and pumped with chemicals, slit open after weeks and months and even years, for the anatomy lesson. She had seen them at the autopsy with the bloodred organs being lifted out in the doctor’s gloved hands.

But never this. Never this dead and pretty thing in blue silk and lace, smelling of face powder, with her hands clasped over the rosary beads. Ageless she looked, almost like a giant little girl with her innocent hair, her face devoid of lines, even the shiny lipstick the color of rose petals.

Oh, if it were only possible to open her eyes! I wish I could see