The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,436

said. He smiled.

How mysterious she was, such a baffling mixture of sharpness and softness. Maybe his mistake was that he had always confused strength and coldness in women. Maybe most men did.

“They’ll come to us again,” she said. “They have to. And when they do, then we’ll think and we’ll decide what to do.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. And what if I took off the gloves? Would they come to me now?

“But we’re not holding our breath until then.”

“No.” He gave a little laugh.

He grew quiet, filled with excitement, and yet filled with worry though every word she spoke gladdened him and made him feel that this anxiety would lift any second.

He found himself looking off to the mirror at the far end of the room, and seeing their tiny reflection there, and the repeated chandeliers, caught in the two mirrors, marching on, countless, in a blur of silver light, to eternity.

“Do you like loving me?” she asked.

“What?”

“Do you like it?” Her voice had a decided tremor in it for the first time.

“Yeah, I love loving you. But it’s scary, because you aren’t like anyone else I’ve ever known. You’re so strong.”

“Yes, I am,” she said thickly. “Because I could kill you right now if I wanted to. All your manly strength wouldn’t do you any good.”

“No, that isn’t what I meant,” he said. He turned and looked at her, and for one moment in the shadows her face looked unspeakably cold and cunning, with her eyelids at half mast, and her eyes gleaming. She looked malicious the way she had for one instant in the house in Tiburon in the cold light coming through the glass into a darkened room.

She sat up slowly, with a soft rustle of cloth, and he found himself shrinking from her, instinctively, every hair standing on end. It was the hard wariness you feel when you see a snake in the grass two inches from your shoe, or you realize the man on the next bar stool has just turned towards you and opened a switchblade knife.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he whispered.

But then he saw. He saw she was shaking and her cheeks were blotched with pink yet deathly white, and her hands reached out for him and then shrank back and she looked at them and then clasped them together, as if trying to contain something unspeakable. “God, I didn’t even hate Karen Garfield,” she whispered. “I didn’t! So help me God, I … ”

“No, it was all a mistake,” he said, “a terrible mistake, and you won’t ever make that mistake again.”

“No, never,” she said. “Even with that old woman, I swear, I didn’t really believe it.”

Desperately he wanted to help her but he didn’t know what to do. She was quivering like a flame in the shadows, her teeth stabbing her lower lip, her right hand clenching her own left hand cruelly.

“Stop, honey, stop—you’re hurting yourself,” he said. But she felt like something made of steel, unbending, when he touched her.

“I swear, I didn’t believe it. It’s like an impulse, you know and you don’t really believe you can possibly … I was so angry with Karen Garfield. It was outrageous, her coming there, her walking into Ellie’s house, so stupidly outrageous!”

“I know, I understand.”

“What do I do to neutralize it? Does it come back inside me and burn me from within?”

“No.”

She turned away from him, drawing up her knees and peering out into the room dully, a little calmer now, though her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her fingers were still working anxiously.

“I’m surprised you haven’t hit upon the obvious answer,” she said, “the one that is so clear and so neat.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe your purpose is simple. It’s to kill me.”

“God, how could you think of such a thing?” He drew closer to her, brushing her hair back out of her face, and gathering her near to him.

She looked at him as if from a long long distance away.

“Honey, listen to me,” he said. “Anybody can take a human life. It’s easy. Very easy. There are a million ways. You know ways I don’t know because you’re a doctor. That woman, Carlotta, small as she was, she killed a man strong enough to strangle her with one hand. When I sleep next to any woman, she can kill me if she wants to. You know that. A scalpel, a hat pin, a bit of lethal poison. It’s easy. And we don’t do those things, nothing on