The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,434

making it truly blond.

“My dislikes run very deep. They always have. They don’t change with time. I feel an inveterate dislike for this thing. Oh, I remember what you said last night, about wanting to talk to it, reason with it, learn what it wants. But the dislike is what’s strongest right now.”

Michael watched her for a long silent moment. He felt a curious, near inexplicable, quickening of his love for her.

“You know, you’re right in what you said before,” he said. “I don’t really understand you, or what kind of person you are. I love you, but I don’t understand you.”

“You think with your heart,” she said, touching his chest gently with her left fist. “That’s what makes you so good. And so naive. But I don’t do that. There’s an evil in me equal to the evil in people around me. They seldom surprise me. Even when they make me angry.”

He didn’t want to argue with her. But he was not naive!

“I’ve been thinking for hours about all this,” she said. “About this power to rupture blood vessels and aortas and bring about death as if with a whispered curse. If this power I have is good for anything, maybe it’s good for destroying this entity. Maybe it can act on the energy controlled by him as surely as it acts upon flesh and blood cells.”

“That never even crossed my mind before.”

“That’s why we have to think for ourselves,” she said. “I’m a doctor, first and foremost. Only a woman and a person, second. And as a doctor, it’s perfectly easy for me to see that this entity is existing in some continuous relationship with our physical world. It’s knowable, what this being is. Knowable the way the secret of electricity was knowable in the year 700 though no one knew it.”

He nodded. “Its parameters. You used that word last night. I keep wondering about its parameters. If it’s solid enough when it materializes for me to touch it.”

“Right. Exactly. What is it when it materializes? I have to learn its parameters. And my power also works according to the rules of our physical world. And I have to learn the parameters of my power, too.”

The pain came back into her face, again like a flash of light, somehow distorting her expression, and then broadening until her smooth face threatened to rumple like that of a doll in a flame. Only gradually did she go blank again, calm and pretty and silent. Her voice was a whisper when she resumed.

“That’s my cross, the power. Just as your cross is the power in your hands. We’ll learn to control these things, so that we decide when and where to use them.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what we have to do.”

“I want to tell you something about that old woman, Carlotta, and about the power … ”

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”

“She knew I was going to do it to her. She foresaw it, and then she calculatedly provoked me. I could swear she did.”

“Why?”

“Part of her scheme. I go back and forth thinking about it. Maybe she meant to break me, break my confidence. She always used guilt to hurt Deirdre, and she used it probably with Antha. But I’m not going to get drawn into the lengthy pondering of her scheme. This is the wrong thing for us to do now, talk about them and what they want—Lasher, the visions, that old woman—they’ve drawn a bunch of circles for us and I don’t want to walk in circles.”

“Yeah, do I ever know what you mean.”

He let go of her eyes slowly, and rummaged in his pocket for his cigarettes. Three left. He offered her one, but she shook her head. She was watching him.

“Some day, we can sit at the table,” she said, “drink white wine together, beer, whatever, and talk about them. Talk about Petyr van Abel, and about Charlotte, and about Julien and all that. But not now. Now I want to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the substantial from the mystical. And I wish you would do the same thing.”

“I follow you,” he said. He searched for his matches. Ah, no matches. Gave them to that old man.

She slipped her hand in her pants pocket, drew out a slender gold lighter, and lighted his cigarette.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Whenever we do focus on them,” she said, “the effect is always the same. We become passive and confused.”

“You’re right,” he said. He was thinking about all