The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,449

it? Someone was definitely crying, a baby crying in a cradle, and a dull low voice cursing in English, kill you, kill you, kill you.

“It’s enough, stop, don’t … ”

“No, it isn’t. The jars are there. It is not enough. Let me do it, once and for all, with all of it.”

He pushed her aside, amazed again at the strength with which she tried to stop him, and shoved open the door to the room of the jars. If only they would shut up, if only that baby would stop crying, and the old woman cursing, and that voice in French … “I can’t … ”

The jars.

A gust of air came up the stairway and moved the sluggish stench for an instant. He was standing with his hands over his ears looking at the jars. He took a deep breath, but the stench went into his lungs. Rowan was watching him. Is this what you want me to touch? And they wanted to come back, like a great sloppy veil again closing around him, but he wouldn’t let them. He sharpened his focus. The jars only. He took another breath.

The smell was enough to kill you, but it can’t. It can’t really hurt you. Look. And now in the swimming ugly light, he put his hand on the dingy glass, and through his splayed fingers saw an eye looking at him. “Christ,” it’s a human head, but what was he getting from the jar itself, through his tortured fingers, nothing, nothing but images so faint they were like the thing inside, a cloud surrounding him, in which the visual and the audial were blended and ever dissolving, and trying to be solid and breaking apart again. The jar was there, shining.

These were his fingers scratching at the wax seal.

And the beautiful flesh and blood woman in the door was Rowan.

He broke the seal open, and plunged his hand into the liquid, while the fumes from it went up his nose like poison gas. He gagged, but that didn’t stop him. He grabbed the head inside by the hair though it fell away in his fingers, slipped like seaweed.

The head was slimy and falling to pieces. Chunks of it rose against the glass, pushing against his wrist. But he had a hold of it, his thumb sinking into the putrid cheek. He drew it up out of the jar, knocking the jar on the floor so that the stinking liquid splattered on him. He held the head—dim flash of the head speaking, the head laughing, the features mobile though the head was dead, and the hair was brown hair, the eyes bloodshot but brown, and blood seeping from the dead mouth that talked.

Aye, Michael, flesh and blood when you are nothing but bones.

The whole man sat on the bed, naked, and dead, yet alive with Lasher in him, the arms thrashing and the mouth opening. And beside him Marguerite, with her hag hair and her hands on his shoulders, her big wide taffeta skirts out like a circle of red light around her, holding the dead thing, just as Rowan was trying to hold him now.

The head slipped out of his hands. It slid in the muck on the floor. He went down on his knees. God! He was sick. He was going to vomit. He felt the convulsion, and the pain in a circle around his ribs. Vomit. I can’t help it. He turned towards the corner, tried to crawl away … It poured out of him.

Rowan held him by the shoulder. When you’re this sick you don’t give a damn who’s, touching you, but again, he saw the dead thing on the bed. He tried to tell her. His mouth was sour and full of vomit. God. Look at his hands. The mess was all over the floor, on his clothes.

But he got to his feet, his fingers slipping off the doorknob. Pushing Julien out of the way, and Mary Beth, and then Rowan, and groping for the fallen head, squashed fruit on the floor, breaking apart like a melon.

“Lasher,” he said to her, wiping at his mouth. “Lasher, in that head, in the body of that head.”

And the others? Look at them, filled with heads. Look at them! He snatched at another, smashed it against the wood of the shelf, so that the greenish remains slid down soft and rotten, like a giant greenish egg yoke onto the floor, oozing off the skull that emerged dark and shrunken