The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,575

muck.

In a circle the nuns were coming, tall black-robed figures with stiff white wimples, nuns whose names and faces he knew from childhood, rosaries rattling, their feet pounding on the heart pine floor as they came, and they closed the circle around him. Stella stepped through the circle, eyes flashing, her marcelled hair shining with pomade, and suddenly reached for him and tugged him towards her.

“Let him alone, he can climb up on his own,” said Julien. And there he was, the man himself with his curling white hair and his small glittering black eyes, his clothes immaculate and fine, and his hand rising as he smiled and beckoned:

“Come on, Michael, get up,” he said, with the sharp French accent. “You’re with us now, it’s quite finished, and stop fighting at once.”

“Yes, get up, Michael,” said Mary Beth, her dark taffeta skirt brushing his face, a tall stately woman, hair shot through and through with gray.

“You’re with us now, Michael.” It was Charlotte with her radiant blond hair, bosom bulging over her taffeta décolletage, lifting him, though he struggled to get away. His hand went right through her breast.

“Stop it, get away from me!” he cried. “Get away.”

Stella was naked except for the little chemise falling off her shoulder, the whole side of her head dripping with blood from the bullet.

“Come on, Michael darling, you’re here now, to stay, don’t you see, it’s finished, darling. Job well done.”

The drums were thudding closer and closer, battering at the keening song of a Dixieland band, and the coffin lay open at the end of the room, with the candles around it. The candles were going to catch the drapes and burn the place down!

“Illusion, lies,” he cried. “It’s a trick.” He tried to stand up straight, to find some direction in which to run, but everywhere he looked he saw the nine-paned windows, the keyhole doors, the oak branches piercing the ceiling and the walls and the whole house like a great monstrous trap re-forming around the struggling gnarled trees, flames reflected in the high narrow mirrors, couches and chairs overgrown with ivy and blossoming camellias. The bougainvillea swept over the ceiling, curling down by the marble mantels, tiny purple petals fluttering into the smoking flames.

The nun’s hand suddenly came down like a board against the side of his face, the pain shocking him and maddening him. “What do you say, boy! Of course you’re here, stand up!” That bellowing coarse voice. “Answer me, boy!”

“Get away from me!” He shoved at her in panic, but his hand passed through her.

Julien was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. And behind Julien stood handsome Cortland, with his father’s same expression and his father’s same mocking smile.

“Michael, it should be perfectly obvious to you that you have performed superbly,” said Cortland, “that you bedded her, brought her back, and got her with child, which is exactly what we wanted you to do.”

“We don’t want to fight,” said Marguerite, her haglike hair veiling her face as she reached out for him. “We’re all on the same side, mon cher. Stand up, please, come to us.”

“Come now, Michael, you’re making all this confusion yourself,” said Suzanne, her big simpleton eyes flashing and snapping as she helped him to his feet, her breasts poking through the filthy rags.

“Yes, you did it, my son,” said Julien. “Eh bien, you have been marvelous, both of you, you and Rowan, you have done precisely what you were born to do.”

“And now you can go back through with us,” said Deborah. She raised her hands for the others to step aside, the flames rising behind her, the smoke curling over her head. The emerald glimmered and winked against her dark blue velvet gown. The girl of Rembrandt’s painting, so beautiful with her ruddy cheeks and her blue eyes, as beautiful as the emerald. “Don’t you see? That was the pact. Now that he’s gone through, we’re all going to go back through! Rowan knows how to bring us back through, the same way that she brought him through. No, Michael, don’t struggle. You want to be with us, earthbound here, to wait your turn, otherwise you’ll simply be dead forever.”

“We’re all saved now, Michael,” said fragile Antha, standing like a little girl in her simple flowered dress, blood pouring down her face on both sides from the bashed-in wound on the back of her head. “And you can’t imagine how long we’ve been waiting. One loses