The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,403

wretched pieces of filth and call upon the spirits of the dead so that all the devils in hell could play dolls with you?”

“I don’t believe in it,” Rowan said. “I don’t believe that you do.”

“I believe what I have seen. I believe what I feel when I touch them. They are endowed with evil, as relics are endowed with sanctity. But the voices who speak through them are all his voice, the voice of the devil. Don’t you believe what you saw when he came to you?”

“I saw a man with dark hair. He wasn’t a human being. He was some sort of hallucination.”

“He was Satan. He will tell you that is not so. He will give you a beautiful name. He will talk poetry to you. But he is the devil in hell for one simple reason. He lies and he destroys, and he will destroy you and your progeny if he can, for his ends, for his ends are what matter.”

“And what are they?”

“To be alive, as we are alive. To come through and to see and feel what we see and feel.” The woman turned her back, and moving her cane before her, walked to the left wall, by the fireplace, stopping at the lumpy roll of rug, and then looking up at the books that lined the shelves on either side of the paneled chimney above the mantel.

“Histories,” she said, “histories of all those who came before, written by Julien. This was Julien’s room, Julien’s retreat. In here he wrote his confessions. How with his sister Katherine he lay to make my mother, Mary Beth, and then with her he lay to make my sister Stella. And when he would have lain with me, I spit into his face. I clawed at his eyes. I threatened to kill him.” She turned to look fixedly at Rowan.

“Black magic, evil spells, records of his petty triumphs as he punished his enemies and seduced his lovers. Not all the seraphim in heaven could have satisfied his lust, not Julien’s.”

“This is all recorded there?”

“All this and more. But I have never read his books, and I never shall. It was enough to read his mind as he sat day by day in the library below, dipping his pen and laughing to himself, and giving vent to his fantasies. That was decades and decades ago. I have waited so long for this moment.”

“And why are the books still here? Why didn’t you burn them?”

“Because I knew that if you ever came, you would have to see for yourself. No book has the power of a burned book! No .… You must read for yourself what he was, for what he says in his own words can’t do anything else but convict and condemn him.” She paused. “Read and choose,” she whispered. “Antha couldn’t make the choice. Deirdre couldn’t make the choice. But you can make it. You are strong and clever and wise already in your years, wise. I can see this in you.”

She rested both hands on the crook of her cane and looked away, out of the corner of her eyes, pondering. Once again, her cap of white hair seemed heavy around her small face.

“I chose,” she said softly, almost sadly. “I went to church after Julien touched me, after he sang me his songs and told me his lies. I honestly think he believed his charms would win me over. I went to the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came through to me. Didn’t matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image—it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural.” She looked up at Rowan. “I said, ‘God, stand by me. Holy Mother, stand by me. Let me use my power to fight them, to beat them, to win against them.’ ”

Again her eyes moved off, gazing back into the past perhaps. For a long moment they lingered on the rug at her feet, bulging in its circles of rusted chain. “I knew what lay ahead, even then. Years after I learned what I needed. I learned the same spells and secrets they used.