The Witching Hour

by Anne Rice

  "She isn't brilliant. That's what people think, but there's more to it. She's some sort of mutant. No, seriously. She can study the research animals and tell you what's going to happen. She would lay her hands on them and say, 'This drug isn't going to do it.' I'll tell you something else she did too. She could cure those little creatures. She could. One of the older doctors told me once that if she didn't watch it, she could upset the experiments by using her powers to cure. I believe it. I went out with her one time, and she didn't cure me of anything, but boy, was she ever hot. I mean literally hot. It was like making love to somebody with a fever. And that's what they say about faith healers, you know, the ones who've been studied. You can feel a heat coming from their hands. I believe it. I don't think she should have gone into surgery. She should have gone into oncology. She could have really cured people. Surgery? Anybody can cut them up."

  (Let us add that this doctor himself is an oncologist, and non-surgeons frequently make extremely pejorative statements about surgeons, calling them plumbers and the like; and surgeons make similar pejorative remarks about non-surgeons, saying things such as "All they do is get the patients ready for us.")

  ROWAN'S POWER TO HEAL

  As soon as Rowan entered the hospital as an intern (her third year of medical school), stories of her healing powers and diagnostic powers became so common that our investigators could pick and choose what they wanted to write down.

  In sum, Rowan is the first Mayfair witch to be described as a healer since Marguerite Mayfair at Riverbend before 1835.

  Just about every nurse ever questioned about Rowan has some "fantastic" story to tell. Rowan could diagnose anything; Rowan knew just what to do. Rowan patched up people who looked like they were ready for the morgue.

  "She can stop bleeding. I've seen her do it. She grabbed a hold of this boy's head and looked at his nose. 'Stop,' she whispered. I heard her. And he just didn't bleed any more after that."

  Her more skeptical colleagues--including some male and female doctors--attribute her achievements to the "power of suggestion." "Why, she practically uses voodoo, you know, saying to a patient, Now we're going to make this pain stop! Of course it stops, she's got them hypnotized."

  Older black nurses in the hospital know Rowan has "the power," and sometimes ask her outright to "lay those hands" on them when they are suffering severe arthritis or other such aches and pains. They swear by Rowan.

  "She looks into your eyes. 'Tell me about it, where it hurts,' she says. And she rubs with those hands, and it don't hurt! That's a fact."

  By all accounts, Rowan seems to have loved working in the hospital, and to have experienced an immediate conflict between her devotion to the laboratory and her newfound exhilaration on the wards.

  "You could see the research scientist being seduced!" said one of her teachers sadly. "I knew we were losing her. And once she stepped into the Operating Room it was all over. Whatever they say about women being too emotional to be brain surgeons, no one would ever say such a thing about Rowan. She's got the coolest hands in the field."

  (Note the coincidental use of cool and hot in reference to the hands.)

  There are indications that Rowan's decision to abandon research for surgery was a difficult, if not traumatic one. During the fall of 1983, she apparently spent considerable time with a Dr. Karl Lemle, of the Keplinger Institute in San Francisco, who was working on cures for Parkinson's disease.

  Rumors at the hospital indicated that Lemle was trying to lure Rowan away from University, with an extremely high salary and ideal working conditions, but that Rowan did not feel she was ready to leave the Emergency Room or the Operating Room or the wards.

  During Christmas of 1983, Rowan seems to have had a violent falling out with Lemle, and thereafter would not take his calls. Or so he told everyone at University over the next few months.

  We have never been able to learn what happened between Rowan and Lemle. Apparently Rowan did agree to see him for lunch in the spring of 1984. Witnesses saw them in the hospital cafeteria where they had quite an argument. A week later Lemle entered the Keplinger private hospital having suffered a small stroke. Another stroke followed and then another, and he was dead within the month.

  Some of Rowan's colleagues criticized her severely for her failure to visit Lemle. Lemle's assistant, who later took his place at the Institute, said to one of our investigators that Rowan was highly competitive and jealous of his boss. This seems unlikely.

  No one to our knowledge has ever connected the death of Lemle with Rowan. However, we have made the connection.

  Whatever happened between Rowan and her mentor--she frequently described him as such before their falling out--Rowan committed herself to neurosurgery shortly after 1983, and began operating exclusively on the brain after she completed her regular residency in 1985. She is at the time of this writing completing her residency in neurosurgery, and will undoubtedly be Board-certified, and probably hired as the Staff Attending at University within the year.

  Rowan's record as a neurosurgeon so far--though she is still a resident and technically operating under the eye of the Attending--is as exemplary as one might expect.

  Stories abound of her saving lives on the operating table, of her uncanny ability to know in the Emergency Room whether surgery will save a patient, of her patching up ax wounds, bullet wounds, and skull fractures resulting from falls and car collisions, of her operating for ten hours straight without fainting, of her quiet and expert handling of frightened interns and cranky nurses, and of disapproving colleagues and administrators who have advised her from time to time that she takes too many risks.

  Rowan, the miracle worker, has become a common epithet.

  In spite of her success as a surgical resident, Rowan remains extremely well liked at the hospital. She is a doctor upon whom others can rely. Also she elicits exceptional devotion from the nurses with whom she works. In fact, her relationship with these women (there are a few male nurses but the profession is still predominately female) is so exceptional as to beg for an explanation.

  And the explanation seems to be that Rowan goes out of her way to establish personal contact with nurses, and that indeed, she displays the same extraordinary empathy regarding their personal problems that she displayed with her teachers years ago. Though none of these nurses report telepathic incidents, they say repeatedly that Rowan seems to know when they are feeling bad, to be sympathetic with their family difficulties, and that Rowan finds some way to express her gratitude to them for special services, and this from an uncompromising doctor who expects the highest standards of those on the staff.

  Rowan's conquest of the Operating Room nurses, including those famous for being uncooperative with women surgeons, is something of a legend in the hospital. Whereas other female surgeons are criticized as "having a chip on their shoulder," or being "too superior" or "just plain bitchy"--remarks which seem to reflect considerable prejudice, all things considered--the same nurses speak of Rowan as if she were a saint.

  "She never screams or throws a tantrum like the men do, she's too good for that."

  "She's as straight as a man."

  "I'd rather be in there with her than some of these men doctors, I tell you."

  "She's beautiful to work with. She's the best. I love just to watch her work. She's like an artist."

  "She's the only doctor who's ever going to open my head, I can tell you that."

  To put this more clearly into perspective, we are still living in a world in which Operating Room nurses sometimes refuse to hand instruments to women surgeons, and patients in Emergency Rooms refuse to be treated by women doctors and insist that young male interns treat them while older, wiser, and more competent women doctors are forced to stand back and watch.

  Rowan appears to have transcended this sort of prejudice entirely. If there is any complaint against her among members of her profession it is that she is too quiet. She doesn't talk enough about what she's doing to the young doctors w
ho must learn from her. It's hard for her. But she does the best she can.

  As of 1984, she seemed to have escaped completely the curse of the Mayfairs, the ghastly experiences that plagued her mother and her grandmother, and to be on the way to a brilliant career.

  An exhaustive investigation of her life had turned up no evidence of Lasher's presence, or indeed any connection between Rowan and ghosts or spirits or apparitions.

  And her strong telepathic powers and healing powers seemed to have been put to extraordinarily productive use in her career as a surgeon.

  Though everyone around her admired her for her exceptional accomplishments, no one thought of her as "weird" or "strange" or in any way connected with the supernatural.

  As one doctor put it when asked to explain Rowan's reputation, "She's a genius. What else can I say?"

  LATER DISCOVERIES

  However, there is more to the story of Rowan which has surfaced only in the last few years. One part of that story is entirely personal and no concern of the Talamasca. The other part of it has us alarmed beyond our wildest expectations as to what may happen to Rowan in the years that lie ahead.

  Allow us to deal with the insignificant part first.

  In 1985, the complete lack of any social life on the part of Rowan aroused our curiosity. We asked our investigators to engage in closer surveillance.

  Within weeks, they discovered that Rowan, far from having no social life, has a very special kind of social life including very virile working-class men whom she picks up from time to time in any one of four different San Francisco bars.

  These men are predominately fire fighters or uniformed policemen. They are invariably single; they are always extremely good-looking and extremely well built. Rowan sees them only on the Sweet Christine, in which they sometimes go out to sea and other times remain in the harbor, and she rarely sees any one of them more than three times.

  Though Rowan is very discreet and unobtrusive, she has become the subject of some gossip in the bars she frequents. At least two men have been embittered by their inevitable rejection by her and they talked freely to our investigators, but it became apparent that they knew almost nothing about Rowan. They thought she was "a rich girl from Tiburon" who had snubbed them, or used them. They had no idea she was a doctor. One of them repeatedly described the Sweet Christine as "Daddy's fancy boat."

  Other men who have known Rowan are more objective. "She's a loner, that's all. I liked it, actually. She didn't want any string attached and neither did I. I would have liked it once or twice more maybe, but it's got to be mutual. I understand her. She's an educated girl who likes old-fashioned men."

  A superficial investigation of twelve different men seen leaving Rowan's house between 1986 and 1987 indicated that all were highly regarded fire fighters or policemen, some with sterling records and decorations, and all considered by their peers and later girlfriends to be "nice guys."

  Further digging also confirmed that Rowan's parents knew about her preference for this sort of man as early as her undergraduate years. Graham told his secretary that Rowan wouldn't even speak to a guy with a college degree. That she only went out with "hairy-chested galoots," and one of these days she was going to discover that these non-compos-mentis apes were dangerous.

  Ellie also expressed her concern to her friends. "She says they're all cops and firemen and that those kind of men only save lives. I don't think she knows what she's doing. But as long as she doesn't marry one of those men I suppose it's all right. You should see the one she brought home last night. I got a glimpse of him on the side deck. Beautiful red hair and freckles. Just the cutest Irish cop you ever saw."

  As things stand now, I have put a halt to this investigation. I feel we had no grounds to pursue this aspect of Rowan's life further. And indeed, the bars in which Rowan picks up her cops and firemen are so few that asking questions about Rowan truly violates her privacy by drawing attention to her; and in some instances our questions have encouraged rather degrading talk on the part of crude men, who actually knew nothing about Rowan, but claimed to have heard this or that vulgar detail from someone else.

  I do not think that this aspect of Rowan's life is any concern of ours, except to note that her taste seemed similar to that of Mary Beth Mayfair, and that such a pattern of random and limited contacts reinforces the idea that Rowan is a loner, and a mystery to everyone who knows her. That she does not talk about herself to these bed partners is obvious. Perhaps she cannot talk about herself to anyone, and this may be one key to understanding her compulsions and her ambitions.

  ROWAN'S TELEKINETIC POWER

  The other aspect of Rowan's life, only lately discovered, is far more significant, and represents one of the most disturbing chapters in the entire history of the Mayfair family. We have only begun to document this second secret aspect of Rowan, and we feel compelled to continue our investigations, and to consider the possibility of contact with Rowan in the very near future, though we are deeply troubled about disturbing her ignorance regarding her family background, and we cannot in conscience make contact without disturbing her ignorance. The responsibilities involved are immense.

  In 1988, when Graham Franklin died of a cerebral hemorrhage, our investigator in the area wrote us a brief description of the event, adding only a few details, namely that the man had died in Rowan's arms.

  As we knew of the deep division between Graham Franklin and his dying wife, Ellie, we read this report with some care. Could Rowan have somehow caused Graham's death? We were curious to know.

  As our investigators sought more information about Graham's plan to divorce his wife, they came in contact with Graham's mistress, Karen Garfield, and reported in due time that Karen had suffered several severe heart attacks. Then they reported her death, two months following that of Graham.

  Attaching no significance to it whatsoever, they had also reported a meeting between Rowan and Karen the day that Karen was rushed to the hospital with her first major attack. Karen had spoken to our investigator--"You're a cute guy, I like you"--only hours after seeing Rowan. She was, in fact, talking to the man when she broke off because she wasn't feeling well.

  The investigations did not make the connection, but we did. Karen Garfield was only twenty-seven. Her autopsy records, which we obtained fairly easily, indicated that she had had an apparent congenital weakness of the heart muscle, and a congenital weakness of the artery wall. She sustained a hemorrhage in the artery and then major heart failure, and after the initial damage to the heart muscle, she simply could not recover. The subsequent bouts of heart failure weakened her progressively until she finally died.

  Only a heart transplant could have saved her, and as she had a very rare blood type, that was out of the question. And besides, there wasn't time.

  The case struck us as very unusual, especially since Karen's condition had never given her any trouble before. When we studied Graham's autopsy we discovered that he too had died of an aneurysm, or weakness of the artery wall. A massive hemorrhage had killed him almost instantly.

  We ordered our investigators to go back through Rowan's life as best they could, and look for any sudden deaths through heart failure, cerebrovascular accident, or any such internal traumatic cause. In sum, this meant making casual and unobtrusive inquiries of teachers who might remember Rowan and her classmates, and inquiries of students who might remember such things at U.C. Berkeley, or University Hospital. Not such an easy thing to accomplish, but easier than one unfamiliar with our methods might suppose.

  In truth, I expected the investigation to turn up nothing.

  People with this kind of telekinetic power--the power to inflict severe internal damage--are almost unheard of, even in the annals of the Talamasca. And certainly we had never seen anyone in the Mayfair family who could bring death with that kind of force.

  Many Mayfairs moved objects, slammed doors, caused windows to rattle. But in almost every incidence it could have been pure witchcraft--to wit, the ma
nipulation of Lasher or other lowly spirits, rather than telekinesis. And if it was telekinesis it was the garden variety and nothing more.

  Indeed, the history of the Mayfairs was the history of witchcraft, with only mild touches of telepathy or healing power or other psychic abilities mixed in.

  In the meantime, I studied all the information we had on Rowan. I could not help but believe that Deirdre Mayfair would be happy if she could read such a history, if she could know that her daughter was so deeply admired and so uniformly successful, and I vowed to myself that I would never do anything to disturb the happiness or the peace of mind of Rowan Mayfair--that if the Mayfair history, as we knew it and understood it, was coming to an end in the liberated figure of Rowan, then we could only be glad for Rowan, and could do nothing to affect that history in any way.

  After all, only a tiny bit of information about the past might change the course of Rowan's life. We could not risk such intervention. In fact, I felt we had to be prepared to close the file on Rowan, and on the Mayfair Witches, as soon as Deirdre was released in death. On the other hand we had to be prepared to do something if, when Ellie died, Rowan went back to New Orleans to find out about her past.

  Within two weeks of Ellie's funeral, we knew that Rowan was not going back. She had just commenced her final year as senior resident in neurosurgery and could not possibly take the time. Also our investigators had discovered that Rowan had been asked by Ellie to sign a paper swearing officially that she would never go to New Orleans or seek to know who her real parents were. Rowan had signed this paper. There was no indication that she did not mean to honor it.

  Perhaps she would never set eyes on the First Street house. Perhaps somehow "the curse" would be broken. And Carlotta Mayfair would be victorious in the end.

  On the other hand, it was too soon to know. And what was to stop Lasher from revealing himself to this highly psychic young woman who could read people's minds more strongly perhaps than her mother or grandmother, and whose enormous ambition and strength echoed that of ancestors like Marie Claudette, or Julien, or Mary Beth, about whom she knew nothing, but about whom she might soon find out a lot.