The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,581

to sound to himself like the voice of Julien he’d heard on the street in San Francisco. Even his expression had changed somewhat. He felt he had a touch of Julien’s resignation.

Of course this was his Julien, the Julien he had seen on the bus, and whom Richard Llewellyn had once seen in a dream. Not the playful smiling Julien of his portraits, or the menacing laughing Julien of the dark hellish place full of smoke and fire. That place hadn’t really existed.

He went downstairs, slowly, the way the doctor recommended, and went into the library. There had never been anything in the desk since it was cleaned out after Carlotta’s death, and so he had made it his, and he kept his notebook there. His diary.

It was the same diary he’d started to keep on his first visit to Oak Haven. And he continued to write in it—making entries almost every day, because it was the only place that he could express what he really felt about what had happened.

Of course he had told Aaron everything. And Aaron was the only person he would ever tell.

But he needed this quiet, contemplative relationship with the blank page in which to voice his soul completely. It was beautiful to sit here, only now and then looking up through the lace curtains at the passersby who were headed up to St. Charles Avenue to see the Venus parade. Only two more days until Mardi Gras.

But the one thing he didn’t like was that he could sometimes hear the drums in the quiet. That had happened yesterday, and he hated it.

When he was tired of writing, he took his copy of Great Expectations off the shelf, sat down at the end of the leather couch nearest the fireplace, and started reading. In a little while, Eugenia or Henri would come, he figured, and bring him something to eat. And maybe he’d eat it and maybe he wouldn’t.

Fifty-four

“TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, Mardi Gras Night.

“I will never believe that what I saw the second time was a true vision. I maintain now and always will that it was Lasher’s doing. Those weren’t the Mayfair Witches, because they are not here, earthbound and waiting to pass through the door, though that might have been a lie he told them during their individual lives, and part of the pact which he used to gain their cooperation.

“I believe that as each one of them died, he or she either ceased to exist or attained a greater wisdom. And there was no intent to cooperate with any plan on this earth. If anything, attempts were made to thwart it.

“Such an attempt was made when Deborah and Julien came to me the first time. They told me about the plan and that I had to intervene, to subvert Rowan so that Rowan could not be seduced by Lasher and his deceptions. And in San Francisco, when they told me to go home, they were trying to get me to intervene again.

“I believe this because there is no other sensible explanation. I would never have agreed to do anything so evil as father the child by which that greedy monster could come through. And if I had even been privy to such a horror, I would have awakened not with a sense of zeal and purpose, but in an utter panic, and with a deep revulsion against those who tried to use me.

“No. It was all Lasher’s doing, that last hallucinatory vision of hellish earthbound souls and their ugly, ignorant morality. And the tip-off, of course, and I don’t know why Aaron can’t see it, was the appearance of the nuns in the vision. For the nuns most certainly didn’t belong there. And the drums of Comus—they didn’t belong there either. They were from my childhood fears.

“The whole hellish spectacle was drawn from my childhood fears and dreads; and Lasher tumbled them all up with the Mayfair Witches, to create a hell for me that would keep me dead and drowned and in despair.

“If his plan had worked, I would have really died, of course, and his vision of hell would have vanished, and maybe, just maybe, in some life after I would have found the true explanation.

“It’s difficult to think about that last part, however. Because I didn’t die. And what I have now, for what it’s worth, is a second chance to stop Lasher, simply by being alive, and being here.

“After all, Rowan knows I’m here, and I can’t believe