The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,489

and radiant smile.

Rowan was merely smiling at them both in a vague, bemused fashion. And now it was time for Beatrice to take her downtown to Ryan’s office. Interminable legal matters. How horrible. Off they went.

He realized the black leather glove had fallen to the grass. He picked it up, and put it on.

Not one of them …

But who had been speaking? Who had been digesting and relaying that information? Maybe he was simply getting better at it, learning to ask the questions, as Aaron had tried to teach him to do.

Truth was, he hadn’t paid much attention to that aspect of the lessons. He mainly wanted to shut the power off. Whatever the case, there had, for the first time since the debacle of the jars, been a clear and distinct message. In fact, it was infinitely more concise and authoritative than the majority of the awful signals he’d received that day. It had been as clear as Lasher’s prophecy in its own way.

He looked up slowly. Surely there was someone on the side porch, in the deep shade, watching him. But he saw nothing. Only the painters at work on the cast iron. The porch looked splendid now that the old screen had been stripped away and the makeshift wooden railings removed. It was a bridge between the long double parlor and the beautiful lawn.

And here we will be married, he thought dreamily. And as if to answer the great crepe myrtles caught the breeze, dancing, their light pink blossoms moving gracefully against the blue sky.

When he got back to the hotel that afternoon, there was an envelope waiting for him from Aaron. He tore it open even before he reached the suite. Once the door was soundly shut on the world, he pulled out the thick glossy color photograph and held it to the light.

A lovely dark-haired woman gazed out at him from the divine gloom spun by Rembrandt—alive, smiling the very same smile he had only just seen on Rowan’s lips. The Mayfair emerald gleamed in this masterly twilight. So painfully real the illusion, that he had the feeling the cardboard on which it was printed might melt and leave the face floating, gossamer as a ghost, in the air.

But was this his Deborah, the woman he had seen in the visions? He didn’t know. No shock of recognition came to him no matter how long he studied it.

Taking off the gloves and handling it yielded nothing, only the maddeningly meaningless images of intermediaries and incidental persons he had come by now to expect. And as he sat on the couch holding the photograph, he knew it would have been the same had he touched the old oil painting itself.

“What do you want of me?” he whispered.

Out of innocence and out of time, the dark-haired girl smiled back at him. A stranger. Caught forever in her brief and desperate girlhood. Fledgling witch and nothing more.

But somebody had told him something this afternoon when Beatrice’s hand had touched his! Somebody had used the power for some purpose. Or was it simply his own inner voice?

He put aside his gloves, as he was accustomed to do now when alone here, and picked up his pen and his notebook, and began to write.

“Yes, it was a small constructive use of the power, I think. Because the images were subordinate to the message. I’m not sure that ever happened before, not even the day I touched the jars. The messages were mingled with the images, and Lasher was speaking to me directly, but it was mixed together. This was quite something else.”

And what if he were to touch Ryan’s hand tonight at dinner, when they all gathered around the candlelighted table in the Caribbean Room downstairs? What would the inner voice tell him? For the first time, he found himself eager to use the power. Perhaps because this little experiment with Beatrice had turned out so well.

He had liked Beatrice. He had seen perhaps what he wanted to see. An ordinary human being, a part of the great wave of the real which meant so much to him and to Rowan.

“Married by November 1. God, I have to call Aunt Viv. She’ll be so disappointed if I don’t call.”

He put the photograph on Rowan’s bedside table for her to see.

There was a lovely flower there, a white flower that looked like a familiar lily, yet somehow different. He picked it up, examining it, trying to figure why it looked so