The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,423

unfolding. Even the secrets of the old woman were the mere beginning.

And it draws its strength, this big secret, from the same root from which I draw my strength, both the good and the bad, because in the end, they cannot be separated.

“Rowan, let me get you away from here,” he said. “We should have left before. This is my fault.”

“No, it doesn’t matter, leaving here,” she whispered. “I like it here. It doesn’t matter where I go, so why not stay here where it’s dark and quiet and beautiful?”

The soft heavy smell of that flower came again, the one the old woman had called the night jasmine.

“Ah, do you smell it, Michael?” She looked at the white water lilies glowing in the dark.

“That’s the smell of summer nights in New Orleans,” he answered. “Of walking alone, and whistling, and beating the iron pickets with a twig.” She loved the deep vibration of his voice coming from his chest. “That’s the smell of walking all through these streets.”

He looked down at her, struggling to make out her face, it seemed. “Rowan, whatever happens, don’t let this house go. Even if you have to go away from it and never see it again, even if you come to hate it. Don’t let it go. Don’t let it ever fall into the hands of anyone who wouldn’t love it. It’s too beautiful. It has to survive all this, just as we do.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t confess this dark fear that they weren’t going to survive, that somehow everything that had ever given her consolation would be lost. And then she remembered the old woman’s face, upstairs in the death room where the man had died years and years ago, and the old woman saying to her, “You can choose. You can break the chain!” The old woman, trying to break through her own crust of malice and viciousness and coldness. Trying to offer Rowan something which she herself perceived to be shining and pure. And in the same room with that man who had died, bound helplessly in that rug, while life went on in the rooms below.

“Let’s go, darling dear,” he said. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I insist. And let’s just get into one of those big soft hotel beds and snuggle together.”

“Can we walk, Michael? Can we walk slowly through the dark?”

“Yes, honey, if you want to.”

They had no keys to lock up. They left the lights shining behind soiled or draped windows. They went down the path and out the rusted gate.

Michael unlocked the car and took out a briefcase and showed it to her. It was the whole story, he said, but she couldn’t read it before he explained a few things. There were things in there that were going to shock her, maybe even upset her. Tomorrow, they’d talk about it over breakfast. He had promised Aaron that he wouldn’t put it into her hands without explanations, and it was for her that he was doing this. Aaron wanted her to understand.

She nodded. She had no distrust of Aaron Lightner. It wasn’t possible for people to fool her, and Lightner had no need to fool anyone. And when she thought of him now, remembering his hand on her arm at the funeral, she had the uneasy feeling that he too was an innocent, an innocent like Michael. And what made them innocent was that they really didn’t understand the malice in people.

She was so tired now. No matter what you see or feel or come to know, you get tired. You cannot grieve on and on hour after hour day after day. Yet glancing back at the house she thought of the old woman, cold and small, and dead in the rocker, her death never to be understood or avenged.

If I had not killed her, I could have hated her with such freedom! But now I have this guilt on account of her, as well as all the other doubts and misery she brought to the fore.

Michael stood stranded, staring at the front door. She gave a little tug to his sleeve as she drew close to him.

“Looks like a great keyhole, doesn’t it?” she asked.

He nodded, but he seemed far away, lost in his thoughts. “That’s what they called that style—the keyhole doorway,” he murmured. “Part of the Egyptian Greek Italianate mishmash they loved so much when they built this house.”

“Well, they did a good job of it,” she said wearily. She wanted