The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,450

as he caught it and held it, the face just dripping away.

Aye, Michael, when you are nothing but bones, like the bones you hold in your hands.

“Is this flesh?” he cried. “Is this flesh!” He kicked the rotten head on the floor. He threw down the skull and kicked the skull. Like rubber. “You aren’t going to get her, not for this, not for anything.”

“Michael!”

He was sick again, but he wasn’t going to let it come. His hand caught the edges of the shelf. Flash of Eugenia.

“Sure hate the smell of this attic, Miss Carl.” “You leave it, Eugenia.”

He turned around and wiping both his hands on his coat, wiping them furiously, he said to Rowan, “He came into the dead bodies. He possessed them. He looked through their eyes and he spoke through their vocal cords, and used them, but he couldn’t make them come alive again, he couldn’t make the cells begin to multiply again. And she saved the heads. He came into the heads, long after the bodies were gone, and he looked through the eyes.”

Turning, he snatched up one jar after another. She stood beside him. They were peering through the glass, the shimmer of the images almost blinding him to what he meant to see, but he was determined to see. Heads with brown hair, and look, a blond head with streaks of brown in it, and look, the face of a black man, with blotches of white skin on it, and streaks of lighter hair, and here another, with the white hair streaked with brown.

“Dear God, don’t you see? He not only went into them, he changed the tissues, he caused the cells to react, he changed them but he couldn’t keep them alive.”

Heads, heads, heads. He wanted to smash all the jars.

“You see that? He caused a mutation, a new cell growth! But it was nothing, nothing compared to being alive! They rotted. He couldn’t stop them! And they won’t tell me what they want me to do!”

His slippery fingers closed in a fist. He smashed at one of the jars and saw it fall. She didn’t try to stop him. But she had her arms around him. And she was begging him to come out of the room with her, dragging him. If she didn’t watch it, they were both going to go down in this muck, for sure, this filthy muck.

“But look! You see that!” Far back on the shelf, behind the jar he’d just broken. The finest of them, the liquid clear, the thick seal tarlike and intact. Through the flicker of meaningless indistinguishable images and sounds he heard her:

“Open it, break it,” she said.

He did. The glass fell away soundlessly into the ashy layer of whispering voices, and he held this head, no longer even caring about the stench, or the spongy, moldering texture of the thing he held.

Again the bedroom, Marguerite at the dressing table, tinywaisted, big skirts, turning to smile at him, toothless, eyes dark and quick, hair like a great ugly cascade of Spanish moss, and Julien reed thin and white-haired and young with his arms folded, you devil. Let me see you, Lasher. And then the body on the bed, beckoning for her to come, and then her lying down beside him and the dead rotting fingers tearing open her bodice, and touching her living breast. The dead cock erect between his legs. “Look at me, change me, look at me, change me.”

Had Julien turned his back? No such luck. He stood at the foot of the bed, his hands on the pillars of the bed, his face beating with the faint light of the candle blowing in the wind from the open windows. Fascinated, fearless.

Yes, and look at this thing in your hands, now, this was his face, wasn’t it? His face! The face you saw in the garden, in the church, in the auditorium, the face that you saw all those many times. And the brown hair, oh yes, the brown hair.

He let it slide to the floor with the others. He backed away from it, but the eye pits were staring up at him, and the lips were moving. Did Rowan see it?

“Do you hear it talking?”

Voices all around him, but there was only one voice, one clear searing soundless voice:

You cannot stop me. You cannot stop her. You do my bidding. My patience is like the patience of the Almighty. I see to the finish. I see the thirteen. I shall