The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,430

visions. He believed in them and their goodness as surely as people believed in God or saints, or the God-given lightness of a certain path, as truly as they believed in a vocation.

And this seemed as foolish as the other beliefs. “But I saw, but I felt, but I remember, but I know … ” So much stammering. After all he still couldn’t remember. Nothing in the entire Mayfair history had really brought him back to those precious moments, except the image of Deborah, and for all his certainty that she had been the one who had come to him, he had no real details, no truly remembered moments or words.

On impulse, his eyes still fixed on the altar, he made the sign of the cross.

How many years had it been since he’d done that every day, three times a day? Curiously, thoughtfully, he did it again. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” his eyes still fixed on the Virgin.

“What do they want of me?” he whispered. And trying to reinvoke what little he could of the visions, he realized in despair that the image of the dark-haired woman he had seen was now replaced by the descriptive image of Deborah in the history. One had blotted out the other! He had lost through his reading, not gained.

After a little while more, of standing there in silence, his gloved hands shoved in his pockets, he went slowly back down the aisle, until he had come to the altar rail, and then he walked up the marble steps, crossed the sanctuary, and found his way out through the priest house.

The sun was beating down on Constance Street the way it always had. Merciless and ugly. No trees here. And the garden of the priest house hidden behind its high brick wall, and the lawn beside St. Mary’s burned and tired and dusty.

The holy store on the far corner, with all its pretty little statues and holy pictures, was no more. Boards on the windows. A real estate sign on the painted wooden wall.

The little bald man with the sweaty red face sat on the rectory steps, his arms folded on his knees, eyes following a gust of gray-winged pigeons as they flew up the dreary peeling façade of St. Alphonsus.

“They oughtta poison them birds,” he said. “They dirty up everything.”

Michael lighted a cigarette, offered one to the man. The man took it with a nod. Michael gave him the near empty matchbook.

“Son, why don’t you take off that gold watch and slip it inside your pocket?” the man said. “Don’t walk around here with that thing on your wrist, ya hear?”

“They want my watch,” Michael said, “they’re gonna take my wrist with it, and the fist that’s attached to it.”

The old man just shrugged and shook his head.

Up on the corner of Magazine and Jackson Michael went in a dark, evil-looking bar, in the sorriest old sagging wooden clapboard building. In all his years in San Francisco, he had never seen such a run-down place. A white man hung like a shadow at the far end, staring at him with glittering eyes out of a cracked and caved-in face. The bartender too was white.

“Give me a beer,” Michael said.

“What kind?”

“I don’t give a damn.”

He timed it perfectly. At three minutes before three he was crossing Camp Street, walking slowly, so the heat would not kill him, and soothed once more by the sweet shade and random beauty of the Garden District. Yes, all this was as it had always been. And at once he felt good; at once he felt he was where he wanted to be, and maybe even where he ought to be, if one could chart a course of one’s own.

At three P.M. exactly he stood at the open gate. This was the first time he had seen the house in the sunlight, and his pulse quickened. Here, yes. Even in its neglect it was dignified, grand, merely slumbering beneath the overhanging vines, its long shutters caked with flaking green paint yet still hanging straight on their iron hinges. Waiting …

A giddiness overtook him as he looked at it, a swift delight that for whatever reasons, he had come back. Doing what I am supposed to be doing …

He went up the marble steps, and pushed at the door, and when it opened he walked into the long broad hallway. Never in San Francisco had he been in such