The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,538

her, where it vanished among the fronds and the dark leaves.

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“We can do it together, Rowan. You can see and feel many things.”

“Talk to me first,” she said.

“As you wish. But you hunger for me, Rowan.”

“Can you see Michael? Do you know where he is?”

“Yes, Rowan, I see him. He is in his house, sorting through his many possessions. He is swimming in memories and in anticipation. He is consumed with the desire to return to you. He thinks only of you. And you think of betraying me, Rowan. You think of telling your friend Aaron that you have seen me. You dream of treachery.”

“And what’s to stop me if I want to speak to Aaron? What can you do?”

“I love you, Rowan.”

“You couldn’t stay away from me now, and you know it. You’ll come if I call you.”

“I want to be your slave, Rowan, not your enemy.”

She stood up, staring up into the soft foliage of the sweet olive tree, at the bits and pieces of pale sky. The pool was a great rectangle of steaming blue light. The oak beyond swayed in the breeze, and once again she felt the air changing.

“Stay back,” she said.

There came the inevitable sigh, so eloquent of pain. She closed her eyes. Somewhere very far away a baby was crying. She could hear it. Had to be coming from one of these big silent houses, which always seemed so deserted in the middle of the day.

She went inside, letting her heels sound loudly on the floor. She took her raincoat from the front hall closet, all the protection she needed against the cold, and she went out the front door.

For an hour she walked through the quiet empty streets. Now and then a passerby nodded to her. Or a dog behind a fence would approach to be petted. Or a car would roar past.

She tried merely to see things—to focus upon the moss that grew on the walls, or the color of the jasmine twined still around a fence. She tried not to think or to panic. She tried not to want to go back into the house. But at last her steps took her back that way, and she was standing at her own gate.

Her hand was trembling as she put the key in the lock. At the far end of the hall, in the door to the dining room, he stood watching her.

“No! Not until I say!” she said, and the force of her hate went before her like a beam of light. The image vanished; and a sudden acrid smell rose to her nostrils. She put her hand over her mouth. All through the air she saw the faint wave-like movement. And then nothing, and the house was still.

That sound came again, the baby crying.

“You’re doing it,” she whispered. But the sound was gone. She went up the stairs to her room. The bed was neatly made now, her night things put away. The draperies drawn.

She locked the door. She kicked off her shoes, and lay down on the counterpane beneath the white canopy, and closed her eyes. She couldn’t fight it any longer. The thought of last night’s pleasure brought a deep charring heat to her, an ache, and she pressed her face into the pillow, trying to remember and not to remember, her muscles flexing and then letting go.

“Come then,” she whispered. At once, the soft eerie substance enclosed her. She tried to see what she was feeling, tried to understand. Something gossamer and immense, loosely constructed or organized to use its own word, and now it was gathering itself, making itself dense, the way steam gathers itself when it turns to water, and the way water gathers itself when it turns to ice.

“Shall I take a shape for you? Shall I make illusions?”

“No, not yet,” she whispered. “Be as you are, and as you were before with all your power.” She could already feel the stroking on her insteps, and on the undersides of her knees. Delicate fingers sliding down into the tender spaces between her toes, and then the nylon of her hose snapping, and torn loose, pulled off her and the skin breathing and tingling all over on her naked legs.

She felt her dress opening, she felt the buttons slipped out of the holes.

“Yes, make it rape again,” she said. “Make it rough and hard, and slow.”

Suddenly she was flung over on her back, her head was forced to one