The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,561

you hear me?”

She stood on the porch talking aloud to no one. And all around her the snow came down. Snow in paradise, pelting the frozen banana leaves, drifting past the high thick stems of bamboo. But what would paradise have been without the beauty of snow?

“You understand me, don’t you? You cannot hurt him. You absolutely cannot hurt him. Promise me. Make the pact with me. No harm comes to Michael.”

As you wish, my darling. I do love him. But he cannot come between us on the night of all nights. The stars are moving into the perfect configuration. They are my eternal witnesses, old as I am, and I would have them shine down upon me at the perfect moment. The moment of my choosing. If you would save your mortal lover from my wrath, see that he is gone from my sight.

Fifty

IT WAS TWO in the morning before they all left. He had never seen so many happy people completely oblivious to what was really going on.

But what was really going on? It was a great warm house, full of laughter and singing, with its many fires burning, and outside the snow floating down, covering the trees and the shrubbery and the paths with luminous whiteness. And why shouldn’t they all be having a wonderful time?

How they’d laughed as they slipped on the snow-covered flagstones, and crunched through the ice in the gutters. There had been enough snow even for the children to make, snowballs. In their caps and mittens they had skittered along the frozen crust that covered the lawn.

Even Aunt Viv had loved the snow. She had drunk too much sherry, and in those moments reminded him frighteningly of his mother, though Bea and Lily, who had become her dearest friends, did not seem to care.

Rowan had been perfect all evening, singing carols with them at the piano, posing for the pictures before the tree.

And this was his dream, wasn’t it, full of radiant faces and ringing voices, people who knew how to appreciate this moment—glasses clinked together in toasts, lips pressed to cheeks, and the melancholy sound of the old songs.

“So sweet of you to do this so soon after the wedding … ”

“ … All gathered like in the old days.”

“Christmas the way it ought to be.”

And they had so admired his precious ornaments, and though they had been cautioned not to, they piled their little presents beneath the tree.

There were moments when he couldn’t stand it. He’d gone upstairs to the third floor and climbed out on the roof of the north bedroom and stood near the parapet wall, looking towards downtown and the city lights. Snow on the rooftop, snow etching windowsills and gables and chimneys, and snow falling thin and beautiful, as far as he could see.

It was everything he’d ever wanted, as full and rich as the wedding, and he had never been more unhappy. It was as if that thing had its hand around his throat. He could have put his fist through a wall in his anxiety. It was bitter, bitter as grief is bitter.

And it seemed in the pockets of quiet through which he wandered, upstairs away from them, that he could feel that thing. That when he laid his naked fingers on the door frames and the doorknobs, he caught great raging glimpses of it in the shadows.

“You’re here, Lasher. I know you’re here.”

Something stepped back for him in the shadows, playing with him, sliding up the dark walls away from him, and then dispersing so that he found himself in the upper hallway, in the dim light, alone.

Anyone spying on him would have thought he was a madman. He laughed. Is that how Daniel McIntyre had seemed in his drunken, wandering old age? What about all the other eunuch husbands who sensed the secret? They went off to mistresses—and certain death, it seemed—or drifted into irrelevance. What the hell was going to happen to him?

But this wasn’t the finish. This was only the beginning, and she had to be playing for time. He had to believe that behind her silent pleas her love waited to reveal itself in truth again.

At last they’d gone.

The very last invitations to Christmas dinner had been tactfully refused, and promises had been made for future get-togethers. Aunt Viv would dine with Bea on Christmas Eve and they weren’t to worry about her. They could have this Christmas to themselves.

Polaroid pictures had been exchanged and sleeping children gathered up from