The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,393

I must attempt everything!

“Almost nine o’clock. Still Aaron isn’t here. And it’s dark and creepy and quiet out here. I don’t want to sound like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, but the crickets make me nervous in the country too. And I’m jumpy in this room, even with its nice brass lamps. I don’t want to look at the pictures on the wall, or in the mirrors for fear something’s going to scare me.

“I hate being scared.

“And I can’t stand waiting here. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect Aaron to arrive the minute I finish reading. But Deirdre’s funeral is over, and here I sit waiting for Aaron, with Mayfairs on the brain and pressing on my heart, but I wait! I wait because I promised I would, and Aaron hasn’t called, and I have to see Rowan.

“Aaron is going to have to trust me on this, he really is. We’ll talk tonight, tomorrow, and the next day, but tonight I am going to be with Rowan!

“One final note: if I sit here and close my eyes, and I think back on the visions. If I evoke the feeling, that is, for all the facts are gone, I still find myself believing that the people I saw were good. I was sent back for a higher purpose. And it was my choice—free will—to accept that mission.

“Now I cannot attach any negative or positive feeling to the idea of the doorway or the number thirteen. And that is distressing, deeply distressing. But I continue to feel that my people up there were good.

“I don’t believe Lasher is good. Not at all. The evidence seems incontrovertible that he has destroyed some of these women. Maybe he has destroyed everyone who ever resisted him. And Aaron’s question, What is the agenda of this being? is the pertinent one. This creature does things on his own. But why am I calling him a creature? Who created him? The same person who created me? And who is that, I wonder. Go for entity.

“This entity is evil.

“So why did he smile at me in the church when I was six? Surely he can’t want me to touch him and discover his agenda? Or can he?

“Again the words ‘meant’ and ‘planned’ are driving me mad. Everything in me revolts against such an idea. I can believe in a mission, in a destiny, in a great purpose. All those words have to do with courage and heroism, with free will. But ‘meant’ and ‘planned’ fill me with this despair.

“Whatever the case, I don’t feel despair right now. I feel crazed, unable to stay in this room much longer, desperate to reach Rowan. And desperate to put all these pieces together, to fulfill the mission I was given out there, because I believe that the best part of me accepted that mission.

“Why do I hear that guy in San Francisco, Gander or whatever his name was, saying, ‘Conjecture!’

“I wish Aaron were here. For the record, I like him. I like them. I understand what they did here. I understand. None of us likes to believe that we are being watched, written about, spied upon, that sort of thing. But I understand. Rowan will understand. She has to.

“The resulting document is just too nearly unique, too important. And when I think about how deeply implicated in all this I am, how involved I’ve been from the moment that entity looked out at me through the iron fence—well, thank God, they’re here, that they ‘watch,’ as they say. That they know what they know.

“Because otherwise … And Rowan will understand that. Rowan will understand perhaps better than I understand, because she will see things I don’t see. And maybe that’s what’s planned, but there I go again.

“Aaron! Come back!”

Twenty-eight

SHE STOOD BEFORE the iron gate as the cab crawled away, the rustling silence closing in around her. Impossible to imagine a house that was any more desolate or forbidding. The merciless light of the street lamp poured down like the full moon through the branches of the trees—on the cracked flags and the marble steps banked with dead leaves, and on the high thick fluted columns with their peeling white paint and black patches of rot, on the crumbling boards of the porch which ran back unevenly to the open door and the dull pale light from within wobbling ever so faintly.

Slowly she let her eyes roam the shuttered windows, the dense overgrown garden. A thin rain had begun to fall even