The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,405

the Englishman who held your arm. Let him tell you the names of the women whose dolls lie in that trunk. He knows. He’ll sell you his brand of the black arts, his genealogy.”

“I want to get out of this room,” Rowan whispered. She turned around, throwing the beam of the light on the landing.

“You know that it’s true,” said the old woman behind her. “You’ve always known deep inside that an evil lived in you.”

“You choose your words badly. You speak of the potential for evil.”

“Well, know that you can put it to a finish! That can be the significance of your greater strength, that you can do as I have done and turn it against him. Turn it against all of them!”

She pushed past Rowan, the hem of her dress scraping Rowan’s ankle, her cane thudding lightly as before, as she walked out onto the landing, gesturing for Rowan to follow.

Into the only remaining door on the third floor they went, a noxious overpowering smell flooding out over them. Rowan drew back, scarcely able to breathe. Then she did what she knew she had to do. She breathed in the stench, and swallowed it, because there was no other way to tolerate it.

Lifting the lamp high, she saw this was a narrow storage chamber. It was filled with jars and bottles on makeshift shelves and the jars and bottles were filled with blackish, murky fluid. Specimens in these containers. Rotting, putrid things. Stench of alcohol and other chemicals, and most of all of putrefying flesh. Unbearable to think of these glass containers broken open and the horrid smell of their exposed contents.

“They were Marguerite’s,” said the old woman, “and Marguerite was Julien’s mother and the mother of Katherine, who was my grandmother. I don’t expect you to remember these names. You can find them in the ledger books in the other room. You can find them in the old records in the downstairs library. But mark what I say. Marguerite filled these jars with horrors. You’ll see when you pour out the contents. And mind me, do it yourself if you don’t want trouble. Horrible things in those jars .… and she, the healer!” She almost spat the word with contempt. “With the same powerful gift that you have now, to lay hands on the ill, and bring together the cells to patch the rupture, or the cancer. And that’s what she did with her gift. Bring your lamp closer.”

“I don’t want to see this now.”

“Oh? You’re a doctor, are you not? Haven’t you dissected the dead of all ages? You cut them open now, do you not?”

“I’m a surgeon. I operate to preserve and lengthen life. I don’t want to see these things now … ”

Yet even as she spoke she was peering at the jars, looking at the largest of them in which the liquid was still clear enough to see the soft, vaguely round thing floating there, half shrouded in shadow. But that was impossible what she saw there. That looked just like a human head. She drew back as if she’d been burnt.

“Tell me what you saw.”

“Why do you do this to me?” she said in a low voice, staring at the jar, at the dark rotted eyes swimming in the fluid and the seaweed hair. She turned her back on it and looked at the old woman. “I saw my mother buried today. What do you want of me?”

“I told you.”

“No, you punish me for coming back, you punish me for merely wanting to know, you punish me because I violated your schemes.”

Was that a grin on the old woman’s face?

“Don’t you understand that I am alone out there now? I want to know my people. You can’t make me bend to your will.”

Silence. It was sweltering here. She did not know how long she could stand it. “Is that what you did to my mother?” she said, her voice burning out in her anger. “You made her do your will?”

She stepped backwards, as if her anger was forcing her away from the old woman, her hand tightening uncomfortably on the glass lamp which was now hot from the burning wick, so hot she could scarcely hold it any longer.

“I’m getting sick in this room.”

“Poor dear,” said the woman. “What you saw in that jar was a man’s head. Well, look closely at him when the time comes. And at the others you find there.”

“They’re rotted, deteriorated; they’re so old they’re no good