The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,452

him at his request. The pain in his muscles was awful, and even his eyes were tired, as if he’d been reading for hours by a poor light.

“I’m not going to get drunk,” he told both of them.

Rowan explained that his heart had been racing, that whatever had happened it had been an extreme physical exertion, that a pulse reading like that was something you expected after a man had run a four-minute mile. It was important that he rest, and that he not remove the gloves again.

OK by him. He would have loved nothing better than to encase his hands in concrete!

They went back to the hotel together, ordered supper, and sat quietly in the living room of the suite. For two hours, he told them everything he had seen:

He told them about the little snatches of the visions that were coming back to him even before he’d taken off the gloves. He told them about the first vision when he held Deirdre’s nightgown, and how it was Julien he’d seen in the hellish place, and how he’d seen him upstairs.

He told and he told. He described and described. He wished Aaron would speak, but he understood why Aaron did not.

He told them about Lasher’s ugly prophecy, and the weird feeling of intimacy he had with the thing now though he had not really touched it but merely that rotted stinking head.

He told them finally about Belle, and then exhausted from the telling, he sat there, wanting another beer, but afraid they’d think he was a drunk if he drank another, then giving in and getting up and getting it out of the refrigerator no matter what they thought.

“I don’t know why I’m involved, any more than I did before,” he said. “But I know they’re there, in that house. You remember Cortland said he wasn’t one of them. And Belle said to me she wasn’t one of them … if I didn’t imagine it … well, the others who are part of it are there! And that thing altered matter, just a little but it did it, it possessed the dead bodies and worked on the cells.

“It wants Rowan, I know it does. It wants Rowan to use her power to alter matter! Rowan has more of that power than any of the others before her. Hell, she knows what the cells are, how they operate, how they’re structured!”

Rowan seemed struck by those words. Aaron explained that after Michael had gone to sleep, and Rowan was sure his pulse was normal, that she had called Aaron and asked him to come to the house. He’d brought crates of ice in which to pack the specimens in the attic, and together they had opened each jar, photographed the contents, and then packed it away.

The specimens were at Oak Haven now. They were frozen. They’d be shipped to Amsterdam in the morning, which was what Rowan wanted. Aaron had also removed Julien’s books, and the trunk of dolls, and they too would go to the Motherhouse. But Aaron wanted to photograph the dolls first and he wanted to examine the books, and of course Rowan had agreed to all this, or it wouldn’t have happened.

So far, the books appeared to be no more than ledgers, with various cryptic entries in French. If there was an autobiography such as Richard Llewellyn had indicated, it had not been in that attic room.

It gave Michael an irrational relief to know those things were no longer in the house. He was on his fourth beer now, as they sat together on the velvet couches. He didn’t care what they thought about it. Just one night’s peace, for Chrissakes, he thought. And he had to slow down his brain so he could think it through. Besides, he wasn’t getting drunk. He didn’t want to be drunk.

But what was one more beer now, and besides they were here where they were safe.

At last, they fell quiet. Rowan was staring at Michael, and suddenly for the whole disaster Michael felt mortally ashamed.

“And how are you, my dear?” asked Michael. “After all this madness. I’m not being very much help to you, am I? I must have scared you to death. Do you wish you’d followed your adoptive mother’s advice and stayed in California?”

“You didn’t scare me,” she said affectionately, “and I liked taking care of you. I told you that once before. But I’m thinking. All the wheels in my head are turning. It’s the strangest mixture