The Witching Hour

by Anne Rice

  Very loudly again spoke the old deaf woman, the insectile one, saying to everyone and no one, "I have not seen him move his hands like that in years."

  "Well, he sounds to me like the very devil!" said the handsome female.

  "Damn him, he'll never die," whispered Andre and then fell to sleep, face down in his plate, his overturned glass rolling off the table.

  Charlotte, watching all of this and more, with equal calm, gave a soft laugh, and said, "Oh, he is very far from dead."

  Then a horrid sound startled the entire company, for at the top of the stairs, or somewhere very close to the head of it, the old man gave forth another loud terrible laugh.

  Charlotte's face grew hard. Patting her husband's hand gently, she took her leave with great speed, but not so much speed that she did not look at me as she left the room.

  Finally the old doctor, who was at this point almost too besotted to rise from the table, which he started to do once and then thought the better of, declared with a sigh that he must go home. At which moment two other visitors arrived, well-dressed Frenchmen, to whom the handsome older female cousin went immediately, as the three other women rose and made their way out, the crone glaring back in condemnation at the drunken brother, who had fallen into the plate, and muttering at him. The other son meantime had risen to assist the drunken doctor, and these two staggered out on the gallery.

  Alone with Antoine and a host of slaves cleaning the table, I asked the man if he would enjoy with me a cigar, as I had bought two very good ones in Port-au-Prince.

  "Ah, but you must have my own, from the tobacco I grow here," he declared. A young slave boy brought the cigars to us and lighted them, and this young man stood there to take the thing from the master's mouth and replace it as he should.

  "You must excuse my father," said Antoine to me softly, as if he did not like the slave to hear it. "He is most keen of mind. This illness is a very horror."

  "I can well imagine," I said. Much laughter and conversation came from the parlor across the hall where the females had settled, it seemed, with the visitors, and possibly with the drunken brother and the doctor.

  Two black slave boys meantime attempted to pick up the other brother, who suddenly shot to his feet, indignant and belligerent, and struck one of the boys so that he began to cry.

  "Don't be a fool, Andre," said Antoine wearily. "Come here, my poor little one."

  The slave obeyed, as the drunken brother rampaged out.

  "Take the coin from my pocket," said the master. The slave, familiar with the ritual, obeyed, his eyes shining as he held up his reward.

  At last, Reginald and the lady of the house appeared and this time with the rosy-cheeked infant son, a blessed lambkin, two mulatto maids hovering behind them as though the child were made of porcelain and might any moment be hurled to the floor.

  The lambkin laughed and kicked its little limbs with joy at the sight of his father. And what a sad spectacle it was that its father could not even lift his miserable hands.

  But he did smile at the lambkin, and the lambkin was placed upon his lap for an instant, and he did bend and kiss its blond head.

  The child gave no sign of infirmity, but neither had Antoine at such a tender age, I wager. And surely the child had beauty both from its mother and father, for it had more than any such child I have ever beheld.

  At last, the mulatto maids, both very pretty, were allowed to descend upon it, and rescue it from the world at large, and carry it away.

  The husband then took his leave of me, bidding me remain at Maye Faire for as long as I should please. I took another drink of the wine, though I was resolved it should be my last, for I was dizzy.

  Immediately, I found myself led out onto the darkened gallery by the fair Charlotte, so as to look out over the front garden with its melancholy lanterns, the two of us quite alone as we took our places on a wooden bench.

  My head was most surely swimming from the wine, though I could not quite determine how I had managed to drink so much of it, and when I pleaded to have no more, Charlotte would not hear of it, and insisted that I take another glass. "It is my finest, brought from home."

  To be polite I drank it, feeling then a wave of intoxication; and remembering in a blur the image of the drunken brothers and wishing to get clearheaded, I rose and gripped the wooden railing and looked down into the yard. It seemed the night was full of dark persons, slaves perhaps moving in the foliage, and I did see one very shapely light-skinned creature smiling up at me as she passed. In a dream, it seemed, I heard Charlotte speaking to me:

  "All right, handsome Petyr, what more would you say to me?"

  Strange words I thought, between father and daughter, for surely she knows it, she cannot but know it. Yet again, perhaps she does not. I turned to her and began my warnings. Did she not understand that this spirit was no ordinary spirit? That this thing which could possess the body of the old man and make it do her bidding could turn upon her, that it was, in fact, obtaining its very strength from her, that she must seek to understand what spirits were, but she bid me hush.

  And then it did seem to me that I was seeing the most bizarre things through the window of the lighted dining room, for the slave boys in their shining blue satin appeared to me to be dancing as they dusted and swept the room, dancing like imps.

  "What a curious illusion," I said. Only to realize that the young boys, dusting the seats of the chairs and gathering the fallen napkins, were only cavorting, and playing, and did not know that I watched.

  Then staring back at Charlotte, I beheld that she had let her hair down free over her shoulders and that she was staring up at me with cold, beautiful eyes. It seemed also that she had pushed down the sleeves of her dress, as a tavern wench might do it, the better to reveal her magnificent white shoulders and the tops of her breasts. That a father should stare at a daughter as I stared at her was plainly wicked.

  "Ah, you think you know so much," she said, obviously referring to the conversation which in my general confusion I had all but forgot. "But you are like a priest, as my mother told me. You know only rules and ideas. Who told you that spirits are evil?"

  "You misunderstand. I do not say evil, I say dangerous. I say hostile to man perhaps, and impossible to control. I do not say hellish, I say unknown."

  I could feel my tongue thick in my mouth. Yet still I continued. I explained to her that it was the teaching of the Catholic church that anything "unknown" was demonic, and that was the greatest difference between the Church and the Talamasca. It was upon that great difference that we had been founded long ago.

  Again, I saw the boys were dancing. They whirled about the room, leaping, turning, appearing and reappearing at the windows. I blinked to clear my head.

  "And what makes you think that I do not know this spirit intimately," said she, "and that I cannot control it? Do you really think that my mother did not control it? Can you not see that there is a progression here from Suzanne to Deborah to me?"

  "I see it, yes, I see it. I saw the old man, did I not?" I said, but I was losing the thought. I could not form my words properly and the remembrance of the old man upset my logic. I wanted the wine, but did not want it, and did not drink any more.

  "Yes," she said, quickening it seemed, and taking the wineglass from me, thank God. "My mother did not know that Lasher could be sent into a person, though any priest might have told her demons possess humans all the time, though of course they do it to no avail."

  "How so, no avail?"

  "They must leave eventually; they cannot become that person, no matter how truly they want to become that person. Ah, if Lasher could become the old man ... "

  This horrified me, and I could see that she smiled at my horror, and she bid me sit down beside her. "What is it however that you truly mean to convey to me?" she pressed.

  "My warning, that you give up this being, that you move away from it, that you not found your life upon its power, for it is a mysterious thing, and that you
teach it no more. For it did not know it could go into a human until you taught it so, am I right?"

  This gave her pause. She refused to answer.

  "Ah, so you are teaching it to be a better demon for your sake!" I said. "Well, if Suzanne could have read the demonology shown her by the witch judge, she would have known you can send a demon into people. Deborah would have known had she read enough too. But ah, it must be left to you to teach it this thing so that the witch judge is upheld in the third generation! How much more will you teach it, this thing which can go into humans, create storms, and make a handsome phantom of itself in an open field?"

  "How so? What do you mean phantom?" she asked.

  I told her what I had seen at Donnelaith--the gauzy figure of the being among the ancient stones, and that I had known it was not real. At once I saw that nothing I had said so far caught her interest as this caught it.

  "You saw it?" she asked me incredulously.

  "Yes, indeed I did see it, and I saw her see it, your mother."

  She whispered, "Ah, but he has never appeared thus to me." And then, "But do you see the error, for Suzanne, the simpleton, thought he was the dark man, the Devil as they call him, and so he was for her."

  "But there was nothing monstrous in his appearance, rather he made himself a handsome man."

  At this she gave a mischievous laugh, and her eyes flashed with sudden vitality. "So she imagined the Devil to be handsome and for her Lasher made himself handsome. For you see, all that he is proceeds from us."

  "Perhaps, lady, perhaps." I looked at the empty glass. I was thirsty. But I would not be drunk again. "But perhaps not."

  "Aye, and that is what makes it so interesting to me," she said. "That on its own it cannot think, do you not see? It cannot gather its thoughts together; it was the call of Suzanne which gathered it; it was the call of Deborah which concentrated it further, and gave it the purpose to raise the storm; and I have called it into the old man, and it delights in these tricks, and peers through his eyes at us as if it were human, and is much amused. Do you not see, I love this being for its changing, for its development, as it were."

  "Dangerous!" I whispered. "The thing is a liar."

  "No, that is impossible. I thank you for your warnings, but they are so useless as to be laughable." Here she reached for the bottle and filled my glass again.

  But I did not take it.

  "Charlotte, I implore you ... "

  "Petyr," she said, "let me be plainspoken with you, for you deserve as much. We strive for many things in life; we struggle against many obstacles. The obstacle of Suzanne was her simple mind and her ignorance; of Deborah that she had been brought up a peasant girl in rags. Even in her castle, she was that frightened country lass always, counting Lasher as the sole cause of her fortune, and nothing else.

  "Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, and educated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in my twenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruled before my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study this thing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength.

  "Now surely you understand this, Petyr van Abel, for we are alike, you and I, and with reason. You are strong as I am strong. Understand as well that I have come to love this spirit, love, do you hear me? For this spirit has become my will!"

  "It killed your mother, beautiful daughter," I said. Whereupon I reminded her of all that was known of the trickery of the supernatural in tales and fables, and what the moral was: this thing cannot be fully understood by reason, and cannot by reason be ruled.

  "My mother knew you for what you were," she said sadly, shaking her head, and offering me the wine which I did not take. "You of the Talamasca are as bad as the Catholics and the Calvinists, when all is said and done."

  "No," I said to her. "Of a different ilk entirely. We draw our knowledge from observation and experience! We are of this age, and like unto its surgeons and physicians and philosophers, not the men of the cloth!"

  "Which means what?" she sneered.

  "The men of the cloth look to revelation, to Scripture as it were. When I tell you of the old tales of demons, it is to draw attention to a distilled knowledge! I do not say take the Demonologie on its face, for it is poison. I say read what is worthwhile and discard the rest."

  She gave no reply.

  "You say you are educated, my daughter, well then consider my father, a surgeon at the University of Leiden, a man who went to Padua to study, and then to England to hear the lectures of William Harvey, who learned French that he might read the writings of Pare. Great doctors cast aside the 'scripture' of Aristotle and Galen. They learn from the dissection of dead bodies, and from the dissection of live animals! They learn from what they observe! That is our method. I am saying look at this thing, look at what it has done! I say that it brought down Deborah with its tricks. It brought down Suzanne."

  Silence.

  "Ah, but you give me the means to study it better. You tell me to approach it as a doctor might approach it. And be done with incantations and the like."

  "Ah, for this I came here," I sighed.

  "You have come here for better things than this," she said, and gave me a most devilish and charming smile. "Come now, let us be friends. Drink with me."

  "I would go to bed now."

  She gave a sweet laugh. "So would I," she said. "By and by."

  Again she pushed the glass at me, and so to be polite I took it and drank, and there came the drunkenness again as if it had been hovering like an imp in the bottle. "No more," I said.

  "Oh, yes, my finest claret, you must drink it." And once again she pushed it at me.

  "All right, all right," I said to her and drank.

  Did I know, then, Stefan, what was to happen? Was I even then peering over the edge of the glass at her succulent little mouth and juicy little arms?

  "Oh, sweet beautiful Charlotte," I said to her. "Do you know how I love you? We have spoken of love, but I have not told you ... "

  "I know," she whispered lovingly to me. "Don't upset yourself, Petyr. I know." She rose and took me by the arm.

  "Look," I said to her, for it seemed the lights below were dancing in the trees, dancing as if they were fireflies, and the trees themselves seemed quite alive and to be watching us, and the night sky to rise higher and higher, its moonlit clouds rising beyond the stars.

  "Come, dearest," she said, now pulling me down the stairs, for I tell you, Stefan, my limbs were weakened by the wine. I was stumbling.

  A low music had meantime commenced, if one could call it that, for it was made up entirely of African drums, and some eerie and mournful horn playing which I found I liked and then did not like at all.

  "Let me go, Charlotte," I said to her, for she was pulling me towards the cliffs. "I would go to bed now."

  "Yes, and you shall."

  "Then why do we go to the cliffs, my dear? You mean to throw me over the edge?"

  She laughed. "You are so handsome in spite of all your propriety and your Dutch manners!" She danced in front of me, with her hair blowing in the breeze, a lithesome figure against the dark glittering sea.

  Ah, such beauty. More beautiful even than my Deborah. I looked down and saw the glass was in my left hand, most strange, and she was filling it once more, and I was so thirsty for it that I drank it down as if it were ale.

  Taking my arm once more, she pointed the way down a steep path, which led perilously close to the edge, but I could see a roof beyond and light and what seemed a whitewashed wall.

  "Do you think I am ungrateful for what you've told me?" she said in my ear. "I am grateful. We must talk more of your father, the physician, and of the ways of those men."

  "I can tell you many things, but not so that you use them to do evil." I looked about me, stumbling still, and trying to see t
he slaves who played the drums and the horn, for surely they were very near. The music seemed to echo off the rocks and off the trunks of the trees.

  "Ah, and so you do believe in evil!" She laughed. "You are a man of angels and devils, and you would be an angel, like the angel Michael who drove the devils into hell." She placed her arm about me so that I did not fall, her breasts crushed up against me, and her soft cheek touching my shoulder.

  "I do not like that music," I said. "Why must they play it?"

  "Oh, it makes them happy. The planters hereabouts do not think sufficiently about what makes them happy. If they did they would get more from them, but now we are back to observations, are we not? But come now, such pleasures await you," she told me.

  "Pleasures? Oh, but I do not care for pleasures," I said, and my tongue was thick again and my head swimming and I could not get accustomed to the music.

  "What on earth are you saying, you do not care for pleasures!" she scoffed. "How can one not care for pleasures?"

  We had come to the small building, and I saw in the bright light of the moon that it was a house of sorts with the usual pitched roof, but that it was built to the very edge of the cliff. Indeed the light I had seen came from the front of it, which perhaps was open, but we could gain entrance only through a heavy door, which she did unbar from the outside.

  She was still laughing at me, for what I had said, when I stopped her.

  "What is this, a prison!"

  "You are in prison, within your body," she said, and pushed me through the door.

  I drew myself up and meant to go back out, but the door was shut and being bolted by others. I heard the bolt slide into place. I looked about me, in anger and confusion.

  A spacious apartment I saw, with a great four-poster bed, fit for the king of England, though it was fitted out in muslin rather than velvet, and in the netting they use here to fend off the mosquitoes, and on either side of it burned candles. Rugs covered the tiled floor, and indeed the front of the little house was entirely open, its shutters back, but I soon saw why, for to walk even ten steps out was to come to a balustrade, and beyond that, I soon saw upon clumsy investigation, as she held my arm to steady me, was nothing but a great plunge to the beach below and the lapping sea.