The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,574

he roared, “my child’s flesh, my flesh!” Wringing his right hand and unable to free it, he closed his left fingers around the thing’s smooth throat, jabbing his thumb into its windpipe while his knee rammed into its scrotum. “Oh, she made you really complete, didn’t she, right down to the outdoor plumbing!”

In a flash he saw Rowan again, but it was the thing that knocked her down this time as it let go of Michael at last. She fell against the balustrade.

The thing was shrieking in pain, the blue eyes rolling in its head. Before Rowan could get to her feet, it shot backwards, shoulders rising like wings, and then lowering its head, it cried, “You are teaching me, Father. Oh yes, you’re teaching me well!” A growl overrode the words, and it ran at Michael, butting him in the chest with its head, striking him one fine blow that hurled him off his feet and out over the swimming pool.

Rowan gave a deafening cry, far louder and more shrill than the siren of the alarm.

But Michael had crashed into the icy water. He sank down, down, into the deep end, the blue surface glittering high above him. The freezing temperature shocked the breath out of him. He was motionless, scalded by the cold, unable even to move his arms, until he felt his body scrape along the bottom.

Then in a desperate convulsion he started for the top, his clothes like fingers grabbing him and holding him down. And as his head passed through the surface into the blinding light, he felt another thudding blow and sank again, rising, only to be held under, his hands up in the air, free in the air, clawing futilely at the thing that held him, his mouth swallowing gulp after gulp of cold water.

Happening again, drowning again, this cold cold water. No, not like this, not again. He tried to close his mouth, but the exploding pain in his chest was too great and the water poured into his lungs. His hands could feel nothing above; and he could no longer see either color or light, or even sense up from down. And in a flash he saw the Pacific again, endless and gray, and the lights of the Cliff-House dimming and vanishing as the waves rose around him.

Suddenly his body relaxed; he wasn’t struggling desperately to breathe or to rise, not clawing at anything. In fact, he wasn’t in his body at all. He knew this feeling, this weightlessness, this sublime freedom.

Only he wasn’t traveling upward, not rising buoyant and free the way he had that long-ago day, right up into the leaden gray sky and the clouds, from which he could see all the earth down there below with its millions upon millions of tiny beings.

He was in a tunnel this time, and he was being sucked down, and it was dark and close and there seemed no end to the journey. In a great rush of silence, he plummeted, completely without will, and full of vague wonder.

At last a great splashing red light surrounded him. He had fallen into a familiar place. Yes, the drums, he heard the drums, the old familiar Mardi Gras cadence of marching drums, the sound of the Comus parade moving swiftly through the winter dark on the tired dreary edge of Mardi Gras night, and the flicker of the flames was the flicker of the flambeaux beneath the twisted elbows of the oaks, and his fear was the all-knowing little boy’s fear of long ago, and it was all here, everything he’d feared, happening at last, not a mere glimpse on the edge of dream, or with Deirdre’s nightgown in his hands, but here, around him.

His feet had struck the steaming ground, and as he tried to stand up, he saw the branches of the oaks had gone right up through the plaster roof of the parlor, catching the chandelier in a tangle of leaves, and brushing past the high mirrors. And this was really the house. Countless bodies writhed in the dark. He was stepping on them! Gray, naked shapes fornicating and twisting in the flames and in the shadows, the smoke billowing up to obscure the faces of all those surrounding him and looking at him. But he knew who they were. Taffeta skirts, cloth brushing him. He stumbled and tried to get his balance but his hand just passed right through the burning rock, his feet went down into the steaming