The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,438

her face imploring and almost sad. A split second of dread shocked him, and left him empty. The love he felt for her was so precious to him, and yet he was afraid, actually afraid.

“What are we going to do, Michael?” she said. And suddenly she smiled, a very beautiful and warm smile.

He laughed softly. “I don’t know, honey.” He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You know what I want from you right now?”

“No. But whatever it is, you can have it.”

She reached out for his hand. “Tell me about this house,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “Tell me everything you know about a house like this, and tell me if it really can be saved.”

“Honey, it’s just waiting for that, just waiting. It’s solid as any castle in Montcleve or Donnelaith.”

“Could you do it? I don’t mean with your own hands … ”

“—I’d love to do it with my own hands.” He looked at them suddenly, these wretched gloved hands. How long since he’d held a hammer and nails, or the handle of a saw, or laid a plane to wood. And then he looked up at the painted arch above them, at the long sweep of the ceiling with its fractured and peeling paint. “Oh, how I’d love to,” he said.

“What if you had carte blanche, what if you could hire anybody and everybody you wanted—plasterers, painters, roofers, people to bring it all back, to restore every nook and cranny … ”

Her words went on, slow yet exuberant. But he knew everything she was saying, he understood. And he wondered if she could possibly understand all that it really meant to him. To work on a house like this had always been his greatest dream, but it wasn’t merely a house like this, it was this house. And back and back he traveled in memory, until he was a boy again, outside at the gate, a boy who went off to the library to pull down off the shelves the old picture books which had this house inside them, this very room and that hallway, because he never dreamed he would see these rooms except in books.

And in the vision the woman had said, converging upon this very moment in time, in this house, in this crucial moment when …

“Michael? You want to do it?”

Through a veil, he saw her face had lighted up like the face of a child. But she seemed so far away, so brilliant and happy and far away.

Is that you, Deborah?

“Michael, take off the gloves,” Rowan said, her sudden sharpness startling him. “Go back to work! Go back to being you. For fifty years nobody’s been happy in this house, nobody’s loved in this house, nobody’s won! It’s time for us to love here and to win here, it’s time for us to win the house back itself. I knew that when I finished the File on the Mayfair Witches. Michael, this is our house.”

But you can alter … Never think for a moment that you do not have the power, for the power derives from …

“Michael, answer me.”

Alter what? Don’t leave me like this. Tell me!

But they were gone, just as if they’d never come near, and here he stood, with Rowan, in the sunshine and on the warm amber-colored floor, and she was waiting for him to answer.

And the house waited, the beautiful house, beneath its layers of rust and soil, beneath its shadows and its tangled ragged vines, and in its heat and its dampness, it waited.

“Oh, yes, honey, yes,” he said as if waking from a dream, his senses flooded suddenly with the fragrance of the honeysuckle on the screens, and the singing of the birds outside, and the warmth of the sun itself coming in on them.

He turned around in the middle of the long room. “The light, Rowan, we have to let in the light. Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s see if these old shutters still open.”

Thirty-one

QUIETLY, REVERENTLY, THEY began to explore the house. At first it was as if they had crept away from the guards in a museum, and dared not abuse their accidental freedom.

They were too respectful to touch the personal belongings of those who had once lived here. A coffee cup lying on a glass table in the sun room. A magazine folded on a chair.

Rather they traveled the rooms and the hallways, opening the drapes and shutters, merely peeking now and then into closets and