The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,408

shone on the high back of the white wooden rocking chair.

Friendless and terrible the night seemed to Rowan. Awful and dismal this house, a terrible engulfing place. Oh, to live and die here, to have spent one’s life in these awful sad rooms, to have died in that filth upstairs. It was unspeakable. And the horror rose like something black and thick inside her, threatening to stop her breath. She had no words for what she felt. She had no words for the loathing inside her for the old woman.

“I killed Antha,” the old woman said. Her back was turned to Rowan, her words low and indistinct. “I killed her as surely as if I did push her. I wanted her to die. She was rocking Deirdre in the cradle and he was there, by her side, he was staring down at the baby and making the baby laugh! And she was letting him do it, she was talking to him in her simpering, weak little voice, telling him he was her only friend, now that her husband was dead, her only friend in this whole world. She said, ‘This is my house. I can put you out if I want to.’ She said that to me.

“I said, ‘I’ll scratch your eyes out of your head if you don’t give him up. You can’t see him if you don’t have eyes. You won’t let the baby see him.’ ”

The old woman paused. Sickened and miserable, Rowan waited in the muffled silence of the night sounds, of things moving and singing in the dark.

“Have you ever seen a human eye plucked out of its socket, hanging on a woman’s cheek by the bloody threads? I did that to her. She screamed and sobbed like a child, but I did that. I did it and chased her up the stairs as she ran from me, trying to hold her precious eye in her hands. And do you think he tried to stop me?”

“I would have tried,” Rowan said thickly, bitterly. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you wanted to know! And to know what happened to one, you must know what happened to the one before her. And you must know, above all, that this is what I did to break the chain.”

The woman turned and stared at Rowan, the cold white light shining in her glasses and making them blind mirrors suddenly. “This I did for you, and for me, and for God, if there is a God I drove her through that window. ‘Let’s see if you can see him if you’re blind,’ I cried. ‘Then can you make him come!’ And your mother, your mother screaming in the cradle in that very room there I should have taken her life. I should have snuffed it out then and there while Antha lay dead outside on the flagstones. Would to God I had had the courage.”

Again the old woman paused, raising her chin slightly, the thin lips once again spreading in a smile. “I feel your anger I feel your judgment.”

“Can I help it?” Rowan whispered.

The old woman bowed her head. The light of the street lamp settled on her white hair, her face in shadow. “I couldn’t kill such a small thing,” she said wearily. “I couldn’t bring myself to take the pillow and put it over Deirdre’s face I thought of the stones from the old days of the witches who had sacrificed babies, who’d stirred the baby fat in the cauldron at the Sabbats. We are witches, we Mayfairs. And was I to sacrifice this tiny thing as they had done? There I stood ready to take the life of a small baby, a crying baby, and I could not bring myself to do what they had done.”

Silence once again.

“And of course he knew I couldn’t do it! He would have ripped the house apart to stop me had I tried.”

Rowan waited, until she could wait no longer, until the hate and anger in her were silently choking her. In a thick voice, she asked:

“And what did you do to her later on—my mother—to break the chain, as you’ve said?”

Silence.

“Tell me.”

The old woman sighed. She turned her head slightly, gazing through the rusted screen.

“From the time she was a small child,” she said, “playing in that garden there, I begged her to fight him. I told her not to look at him. I schooled her in turning him away! And I had won my fight, won over