The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,421

on the immaculate counter.

The cold water tasted wonderful. Then she remembered the old woman. Her house, really, her glass, perhaps. A glass from which she’d drunk. She was overcome with revulsion, and she set the glass in the small steel sink before her.

Yes, like a restaurant, she thought, detaching herself slowly, rebelliously. The place was that well equipped long long ago when someone had ripped out the Victorian fixtures they so love these days in San Francisco. And put in all this shining steel.

“What are we going to do, Michael?” she said.

He stared down at the glass in his hand. Then he looked at her, and at once the tenderness and the protectiveness in his eyes went to her heart.

“Love each other, Rowan. Love each other. You know, as sure as I am about the visions. I’m sure that it isn’t part of anyone’s plan that we really love each other.”

She stepped up to him and slipped her arms around his chest. She felt his hands come up her back and close warmly and tenderly on her neck and her hair. He held her deliciously tight, and buried his face in her neck, and then kissed her again on the lips gently.

“Love me, Rowan. Trust me and love me,” he said, his voice heartbreakingly sincere. He drew back, and seemed to retreat into himself a little, and then he took her hand, and led her slowly towards the French door. He stood looking out into the darkness.

Then he opened the door. No lock on it. Maybe there was no lock on any of them. “Can we go outside?” he asked.

“Of course, we can. Why do you ask me?”

He looked at her as if he wanted to kiss her but he didn’t do it. And then she kissed him. But at the mere delicious taste of him, all the rest of it returned. She snuggled against him for a long moment. And then she led the way out.

They found that they had come onto a screened porch, much smaller than the one on which the old woman had died, and they went out another door, like many an old-fashioned screened door, even to the spring that caused it to shut behind them. They went down the wooden steps to the flagstones.

“All this is OK,” he said, “it’s not in bad repair really.”

“But what about the house itself? Can it be saved, or is it too far gone?”

“This house?” He smiled, shaking his head, his blue eyes shining beautifully as he glanced at her and then up at the narrow open porch high overhead. “Honey, this house is fine, just fine. This house will be here when you and I are gone. I’ve never been in such a house. Not in all my years in San Francisco. Tomorrow, we’ll come back and I’ll show you this house in the sunlight. I’ll show you how thick these walls are. I’ll show you the rafters underneath if you want.” He stopped, ashamed it seemed of relishing it so much, and caught again in the unhappiness and the mourning for the old woman, just as she had been.

And then there was Deirdre, and so many questions yet unanswered about Deirdre. So many things in this history he described, and yet it seemed the darkest journey … Much rather look at him and see the excitement in him as he looks up at the walls, as he studies the door frames and the sills and the steps.

“You love it, don’t you?”

“I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid,” he said. “I loved it when I saw it two nights ago. I love it now even though I know all kinds of things that happened in it, even what happened to that guy in the attic. I love it because it’s your house. And because … because it’s beautiful no matter what anybody has done in it, or to it. It was beautiful when it was built. It will be beautiful a hundred years from now.”

He put his arm around her again, and she clung to him, nestling against him, and feeling him kiss her hair again. His gloved fingers touched her cheek. She wanted to rip off the gloves. But she didn’t say so.

“You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said. “In all my years in California, I worked on many a house. And I loved them all. But none of them ever made me feel my mortality. They never made me feel small. This