The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,531

you have spoken those last few words sarcastically? Is that how they were meant to sound?”

“I can sound any way that I like, Rowan. You hear what I feel. I do feel in my thoughts, in what I am, pain and love. Emotions.”

“You’re speeding up your words a little.”

“I am in pain.”

“Why?”

“To end your misunderstandings.”

“You want me to make you human?”

“I want to have flesh.”

“And I can give you flesh?”

“You have the power. And once such a thing is achieved, other such things may be achieved. You are the thirteenth, you are the door.”

“What do you mean, ‘other such things’?”

“Rowan, we are talking of fusion; of chemical change; the structural reinvention of cells, of matter and energy in a new relationship.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Then you know, as with fission, if it is achieved once, it can be achieved again.”

“Why couldn’t anyone else do it before me? Julien was powerful.”

“Knowledge, Rowan. Julien was born too soon. Allow me once more to use the word fusion and in a slightly different fashion. We have spoken so far of fusion within cells. Let me now talk of a fusion between your knowledge of life, Rowan, and your innate power. That is the key; that is what enables you to be the doorway.

“The knowledge of your era was unimaginable even to Julien, who saw in his time inventions that seemed purely magical. Could Julien have foreseen a heart opened on an operating table? A child conceived in a test tube? No. And there will come after you those whose knowledge is great enough even to define what I am.”

“Can you define yourself to me?”

“No, but I am certainly definable, and when I am defined by mortals, then I shall be able to define myself. I learn all things from you which have to do with such understanding.”

“Ah, but you know something of yourself which you can tell me now in precise language.”

“—that I am immense; that I must concentrate to feel my strength; that I can exert force; that I can feel pain in the thinking part of me.”

“Ah, yes, and what is that thinking part? And whence comes the force you exert? Those are the pertinent questions.”

“I do not know. When Suzanne called to me I came together. I drew myself up small as if to pass through a tunnel. I felt my shape, and spread out like the five-pointed star of the pentagram which she drew, and each one of these points I elongated. I made the trees shiver and the leaves fall, and Suzanne called me her Lasher.”

“And you liked what you did.”

“Yes, that Suzanne saw it. And that Suzanne liked it. Or else I would never have done it again and not even remembered it.”

“What is there in you that is physical, apart from energy?”

“I do not know!” The voice was soft yet full of despair. “Tell me, Rowan. Know me. End my loneliness.”

The fire was dying in the grate, but the warmth had spread all through the room, and it surrounded her and held her like a blanket. She felt drowsy but sharply alert.

“Let’s return to Julien. Julien had as much power as I have.”

“Almost, my beloved. But not quite. And there was in Julien a playful and blasphemous soul that danced back and forth in the world, and liked to destroy as much as to build. You are more logical, Rowan.”

“That is a virtue?”

“You have an indomitable will, Rowan.”

“I see. Not broken with humor as Julien’s will could be broken.”

“Pree—cisely, Rowan!”

She laughed again under her breath. Then she fell quiet, staring at the shimmering air.

“Is there a God, Lasher?”

“I do not know, Rowan. In time I have formed an opinion and it is yes, but it fills me with rage.”

“Why?”

“Because I am in pain and if there is a God, he made this pain.”

“Yes, that I understand perfectly, Lasher. But he made love, too, if he exists.”

“Yes. Love. Love is the source of my pain,” he said. “It is the source of all my moving into time and ambition and plans. All my desires spring from love. You might say that what I was—when I was only what I am—that I was poisoned by love, that in the call of Suzanne I was awakened to love, and to the nightmare of want. But I saw. And I loved. And I came.”

“You make me sad,” she said suddenly.

“Love mutated me, Rowan. It created my first dissatisfaction.”

“Yes.”

“And now I seek to mutate into flesh, and that shall be the