The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,445

to evaluate it the way they had evaluated everything else.

Tentatively he pointed out to her that only in this room was there the ornamentation that was common to the lower floor. He drew her attention to the scrollwork crowning the windows. A crystal chandelier, covered with dust, hanging from an ornate plaster medallion. The bed itself was huge and vaguely ugly.

“It’s not like the others, the four-posters,” she said.

“It’s newer, machine made,” he explained, “It’s American. That was the kind they bought by the millions near the end of the last century. Probably Mary Beth bought it and it was very much the thing.”

“She stopped time, didn’t she?”

“Mary Beth?”

“No, that hateful Carlotta. She stopped time here. She made everything grind to a halt. Think of young girls growing up in a house like this. There isn’t a scrap of evidence that they ever had anything beautiful or special or contemporary of their own.”

“Teddy bears,” Michael whispered. Hadn’t Deirdre said something about teddy bears in the garden in Texas?

Rowan had not heard him. “Well, her reign is over,” she said, but it was without triumph or resolution.

She suddenly moved forward and picked up the plaster Virgin with the exposed red heart, and pitched it across the room. It landed on the marble floor of the open bathroom, the body breaking into three uneven pieces. She stared at it as if shocked by what she’d done.

He was astonished. Something purely irrational and completely superstitious shook him. The Virgin Mary broken on the bathroom floor. He wanted to say something, some magic words or prayers to undo it; like tossing salt over your shoulder or knocking on wood. Then his eye caught something glittering in the shadows. A heap of tiny glittering things on the table at the far side of the bed.

“Look, Rowan,” he said softly, slipping his fingers around the back of her neck. “Look, on the other table, over there.”

It was the jewel box, and it stood open. It was the velvet purse. Gold coins heaped everywhere, and ropes of pearls, and gems, hundreds of small glittering gems.

“Good God,” she whispered. She moved around the bed, and stared down at it as if it were alive.

“Didn’t you believe it?” he asked her. But he wasn’t sure now whether he had believed it himself. “They look fake, don’t they? Like a motion-picture treasure. Couldn’t possibly be real.”

She looked at him across the barren empty bed. “Michael,” she said softly, “would you touch them? Would you … lay your hands on them?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to, Rowan,” he said.

She stood silent, drawing into herself, it seemed, her eyes becoming vague and unfocused. She hugged her arms again, the way she always did it seemed when she was upset, as if her interior misery made her cold.

“Michael,” she said again softly, “would you touch something of Deirdre’s? Her nightgown. Maybe the bed.”

“I don’t want to, Rowan. We said we wouldn’t … ”

She looked down, her hair tumbling over her eyes so that he couldn’t see them.

“Rowan, I can’t interpret it. It will just be confusion. I’ll see the nurse that helped her dress, or maybe the doctor, or maybe a car that passed when she was sitting out there, watching. I don’t know how to use it. Aaron’s taught me a little. But I’m still not very good. I’ll see something ugly and I’ll hate it. And it scares me, Rowan, because she’s dead. I touched all kinds of things for people in the beginning. But I can’t now. Believe me, I … I mean when Aaron teaches me … ”

“What if you saw happiness? What if you saw something beautiful like that woman in London saw, who touched her robe for Aaron?”

“Did you believe in that, Rowan? They aren’t infallible, these people in the Talamasca. They’re just people.”

“No, they aren’t just people,” she said. “They’re people like you and me. They have preternatural powers like you and I have preternatural powers.”

Her voice was mild, unchallenging. But he understood what she felt. He stared again at the blessed candles, and then at the broken statue, which he could just see in the shadows behind her on the bathroom floor. Flash of the May procession and the giant statue of the Virgin tilting as it was carried through the streets. Thousands of flowers. And he thought again of Deirdre, Deirdre in the botanical garden, talking in the dark to Aaron. “I want normal life.”

He moved around the bed and went to