Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  Then came the blast of heat, the hot wind blowing her hair back and the whirlwind scorching her.

  And in the clean silence of the morning, in the light of the sun pouring through the glass, it was happening all over again.

  At noon, she sat outside by the pool. Steam was rising from the water into the cold sunlight. Time to turn off the heater. Winter was truly here.

  But she was warm in her wool dress. She was brushing her hair.

  She felt him near her; and she narrowed her eyes. Yes, she could see the disturbance in the air again, very clearly actually, as he surrounded her like a veil being slowly wound around her shoulders and arms.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she whispered. The invisible substance clung to her. She sat upright, and hissed the words at it this time. ‘Away, I told you!’

  It was the shimmer from a fire in sunlight, what she saw. And then the chill afterwards as the air regained its normal density, as the subtle fragrances of the garden returned.

  ‘I’ll tell you when you may come,’ she said. ‘I will not be at the mercy of your whims or your will.’

  ‘As you wish, Rowan.’ It was that interior voice she’d heard once before in Destin, the voice that sounded like it was inside her head.

  ‘You see and hear everything, don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Even your thoughts.’

  She smiled, but it was a brittle, fierce smile. She pulled the long loose hairs out of the hairbrush. ‘And what am I thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘That you want me to touch you again, that you want me to surround you with illusions. That you would like to know what it is to be a man, and for me to take you as I would a man.’

  The blood rose to her cheeks. She matted up the little bit of blond hair from the brush and dropped it into the ferny garden beside her, where it vanished among the fronds and the dark leaves.

  ‘Can you do that?’ she asked.

  ‘We can do it together, Rowan. You can see and feel many things.’

  ‘Talk to me first,’ she said.

  ‘As you wish. But you hunger for me, Rowan.’

  ‘Can you see Michael? Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Yes, Rowan, I see him. He is in his house, sorting through his many possessions. He is swimming in memories and in anticipation. He is consumed with the desire to return to you. He thinks only of you. And you think of betraying me, Rowan. You think of telling your friend Aaron that you have seen me. Your dream of treachery.’

  ‘And what’s to stop me if I want to speak to Aaron? What can you do?’

  ‘I love you, Rowan.’

  ‘You couldn’t stay away from me now, and you know it. You’ll come if I call you.’

  ‘I want to be your slave, Rowan, not your enemy.’

  She stood up, staring up into the soft foliage of the sweet olive tree, at the bits and pieces of pale sky. The pool was a great rectangle of steaming blue light. The oak beyond swayed in the breeze, and once again she felt the air changing.

  ‘Stay back,’ she said.

  There came the inevitable sigh, so eloquent of pain. She closed her eyes. Somewhere very far away a baby was crying. She could hear it. Had to be coming from one of these big silent houses, which always seemed so deserted in the middle of the day.

  She went inside, letting her heels sound loudly on the floor. She took her raincoat from the front hall closet, all the protection she needed against the cold, and she went out the front door.

  For an hour she walked through the quiet empty streets. Now and then a passerby nodded to her. Or a dog behind a fence would approach to be petted. Or a car would roar past.

  She tried merely to see things — to focus upon the moss that grew on the walls, or the color of the jasmine twined still around a fence. She tried not to think or to panic. She tried not to want to go back into the house. But at last her steps took her back that way, and she was standing at her own gate.

  Her hand was trembling as she put the key in the lock. At the far end of the hall, in the door to the dining room, he stood watching her.

  ‘No! Not until I say!’ she said, and the force of her hate went before her like a beam of light. The image vanished; and a sudden acrid smell rose to her nostrils. She put her hand over her mouth. All through the air she saw the faint wave-like movement. And then nothing, and the house was still.

  That sound came again, the baby crying.

  ‘You’re doing it,’ she whispered. But the sound was gone. She went up the stairs to her room. The bed was neatly made now, her night things put away. The draperies drawn.

  She locked the door. She kicked off her shoes, and lay down on the counterpane beneath the white canopy, and closed her eyes. She couldn’t fight it any longer. The thought of last night’s pleasure brought a deep charring heat to her, an ache, and she pressed her face into the pillow, trying to remember and not to remember, her muscles flexing and then letting go.

  ‘Come then,’ she whispered. At once the soft eerie substance enclosed her. She tried to see what she was feeling, tried to understand. Something gossamer and immense, loosely constructed or organized to use its own word, and now it was gathering itself, making itself dense, the way steam gathers itself when it turns to water, and the way water gathers itself when it turns to ice.

  ‘Shall I take a shape for you? Shall I make illusions?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ she whispered. ‘Be as you are, and as you were before with all your power.’ She could already feel the stroking on her insteps, and on the undersides of her knees. Delicate fingers sliding down into the tender spaces between her toes, and then the nylon of her hose snapping, and torn loose, pulled off her and the skin breathing and tingling all over on her naked legs.

  She felt her dress opening, she felt the buttons slipped out of the holes.

  ‘Yes, make it rape again,’ she said. ‘Make it rough and hard, and slow.’

  Suddenly she was flung over on her back, her head was forced to one side against the pillow; the dress was ripping and the invisible hands were moving down her belly. Something like teeth grazed her naked sex, fingernails scraping her calves.

  ‘Yes,’ she cried, her teeth clenched. ‘Make it cruel.’

  FORTY-THREE

  How MANY days and nights had passed? She honestly did not know. Unopened mail stacked on the hall table. The phone, now and then ringing - to no avail.

  ‘Yes, but who are you? Underneath it all. Who is there?’

  ‘I told you, such questions mean nothing to me. I can be what you want me to be.’

  ‘Not good enough.’

  ‘What was I? A phantom. Infinitely satisfied. I don’t know whence came the capacity to love Suzanne. She taught me what death was when she was burnt. She was sobbing when they dragged her to the stake; she couldn’t believe they could do it to her. This was a child, my Suzanne, a woman with no understanding of human evil. And my Deborah was forced to watch it. And had I made the storm, they would have burnt them both.

  ‘Even in her agony, Suzanne stayed my hand, for Deborah’s sake. She went mad, her head banging against the stake. Even the villagers were terrified. Crude, stupid mortals come there to drink wine and laugh as she was burned. Even they could not bear the sound of her screaming. And then I saw the beautiful flesh and blood form which nature had given her ravaged by fire, like a corn husk in a burning field. I saw her blood pouring down on the roaring logs. My Suzanne. In the perfection of her youth, and in her strength, burnt like a wax candle for a stupid pack of villagers who gathered in the heat of the afternoon.

  ‘Who am I? I am the one who wept for Suzanne when no one wept. I am the one who felt an agony without end, when even Deborah stood numb, staring at the body of her mother twisting in the fire.

  ‘I am the one who saw the spirit of Suzanne leave the pain-racked body. I saw it rise upwards, freed, and without care. Do I have a soul that it could know such joy — that Suzanne would suffer no more? I reached out for her spirit, shaped still in the form of her body, for
she did no know yet that such a form was not required of her, and I tried to penetrate and to gather, to take unto myself what was now like unto me.

  ‘But the spirit of Suzanne went past me It took no more notice of me than of the burning husk in the fire. Upwards it went away from me and beyond me, and there was no more Suzanne.

  ‘Who am I? I am Lasher, who stretched himself out over the whole world, threaded through and through with the pain of the loss of Suzanne. I am Lasher, who drew himself together, made tentacles of his power, and lashed at the village till the terrified villagers ran for cover, once my beloved Deborah was taken away. I laid waste the village of Donnelaith. I chased the witch judge through the fields, pounding him with stones. There was no one left to tell the tale when I finished. And my Deborah gone with Petyr van Abel, to silks and satins, and emeralds, and men who would paint her picture.

  ‘I am Lasher, who mourned for the simpleton, and carried her ashes to the four winds.

  ‘This was my awakening to existence, to self-consciousness, to life and death, to paying attention.

  ‘I learned more in that interval of twenty days than in all the gracious aeons of watching mortals grow upon the face of the earth, like a breed of insect, mind springing from matter but snared in it, meaningless as a moth with its wing nailed to a wall.

  ‘Who am I? I am Lasher, who came down to sit at the feet of Deborah and learn how to have purpose, to obtain ends, to do the will of Deborah in perfection so that Deborah would never suffer; Lasher, who tried and failed.

  ‘Turn your back on me. Do it. Time is nothing. I shall wait for another to come who is as strong as you are. Humans are changing. Their dreams are filled with the forecast of these changes. Listen to the words of Michael. Michael knows. Mortals dream ceaselessly of immortality, as their lives grow longer. They dream of unimpeded flight. There will come another who will break down the barriers between the carnate and discarnate. I shall pass through. I want this too much, you see, for it to fail, and I am too patient, too cunning in my learning, and too strong.

  ‘The knowledge is here now. The full explanation for the origin of material life is at hand. Replication is possible. Look back with me if you will to Marguerite’s bedroom on the night that I took her in the body of a dead man, and willed my hair to grow the color that I would have for myself. Look back on that experiment. It is closer in time to the painted savages who lived in caves and hunted with spears than it is to you in your hospital, and in your laboratory.

  ‘It is your knowledge which sharpens your power. You understand the nucleus, and the protoplasm. You know what are chromosomes, what are genes, what is DNA.

  ‘Julien was strong. Charlotte was strong. Petyr van Abel was a giant among men. And there is another kind of strength in you. A daring, and a hunger, and aloneness. And that hunger and aloneness I know, and I kiss with the lips I do not have; I hold with the arms I do not have; I press to the heart in me that isn’t there to beat with warmth.

  ‘Stand off from me. Fear me. I wait. I will not hurt your precious Michael. But he cannot love you as I can, because he cannot know you as I know you.

  ‘I know the insides of your body and your brain, Rowan. I would be made flesh, Rowan, fused with the flesh and superhuman in the flesh. And once this is done, what metamorphosis may be yours, Rowan? Think on what I say.

  ‘I see this, Rowan. As I have always seen it — that the thirteenth would be the strength to open the door. What I cannot see is how to exist without your love.

  ‘For I have loved you always, I have loved the part of you that existed in those before you. I have loved you in Petyr van Abel, who of all was most like you. I have loved you even in my sweet crippled Deirdre, powerless, dreaming of you.’

  Silence.

  For an hour there had been no sound, no vibrations in the air. Only the house again, with the winter cold outside it, crisp and windless and clean.

  Eugenia was gone. The phone rang again in the emptiness.

  She sat in the dining room, arms resting on the polished table, watching the bony crepe myrtle, scraping, leafless and shining, at the blue sky.

  At last she stood up. She put on her red wool coat, and locked the door behind her, and went out the open gate and up the street.

  The cold air felt good and cleansing. The leaves of the oaks had darkened with the deepening of winter, and shrunken, but they were still green.

  She turned on St Charles and walked to the Pontchartrain Hotel.

  In the little bar, Aaron was already waiting at the table, a glass of wine before him, his leather notebook open, his pen in his hand.

  She stood in front of him, conscious of the surprise in his face when he looked at her. Was her hair mussed? Did she look tired?

  ‘He knows everything I think, what I feel, what I have to say.’

  ‘No, that’s not possible,’ said Aaron. ‘Sit down. Tell me.’

  ‘I cannot control him. I can’t drive him away. I think… I think I love him,’ she whispered. ‘He’s threatened to go if I speak to you or to Michael. But he won’t go. He needs me. He needs me to see him and be near him; he’s clever, but not that clever. He needs me to give him purpose and bring him closer to life.’

  She was staring at the long bar, and the one small bald-headed man at the end of it, fleshly being with a slit of a mouth, and at the pale anemic bartender polishing something as bartenders always do. Rows of bottles full of poison. Quiet in here. Dim lights.

  She sat down and turned and looked at Aaron.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were sent here to stop him?’

  ‘I have not been sent here to stop him. I’ve never lied.’

  ‘You know that he can come through. You know it’s his purpose, and you are committed to stopping it. You have always been.’

  ‘I know what I read in the history, the same as you know it. I gave you everything.’

  ‘Ah, but you know it’s happened before. You know there are things in the world like him that have found a doorway.’

  No answer.

  ‘Don’t help him,’ Aaron said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Would you have believed me if I had? I didn’t come to tell you fables. I didn’t come to induct you into the Talamasca. I gave you the information I had about your life, your family, what was real to you.’

  She didn’t answer. He was telling a form of truth as he knew it, but he was concealing things. Everyone concealed things. The flowers on the table concealed things. That all life was ruthless process. Lasher was process.

  ‘This thing is a giant colony of microscopic cells. They feed off the air the way a sponge feeds from the sea, devouring such minuscule particles that the process is continuous and goes utterly unnoticed by the organism or organelle itself or anything in its environment. But all the basic ingredients of life are there - cellular structure most certainly, amino acids and DN A, and an organizing force that binds the whole regardless of its size and which responds now perfectly to the conscious’ ness of the being which can reshape the entire entity at will.’

  She stopped, searching his face to divine whether or not he understood her. But did it matter? She understood now, that was the point.

  ‘It is not invisible; it is simply impossible to see. It isn’t supernatural. It is merely capable of passing through denser matter because its cells are far smaller. But they are eukaryote cells. The same cells that make up your body or mine. How did it acquire intelligence? How does it think? I can’t tell you any more than I can tell you how the cells of an embryo know to form eyes and fingers and liver and heart and brain. There isn’t a scientist on earth who knows why a fertilized egg makes a chicken, or why a sponge, crushed to powder, reassembles itself perfectly — each cell doing exactly what it should — over a period of mere days.

  ‘When we know that, we will know why Lasher has intellect, because his is a similar organizing force without a discernible brain. It i
s sufficient to say now that he is Precambrian and self-sufficient, and if not immortal, his life span could be billions of years. It is conceivable that he absorbed consciousness from mankind, that if consciousness gives off a palpable energy, he has fed upon this energy and a mutation has created his mind. He continues to feed upon the consciousness of the Mayfair Witches and their associates, and from this springs his learning, and his personality, and his will.

  ‘It is conceivable as well that he has begun a rudimentary process of symbiosis with higher forms of matter, able to attract more complex molecular structures to him when he materializes, which he then effectively dissolves before his own cells are hopelessly bonded with these heavier particles. And this dissolution is accomplished in a state bordering on panic. For he fears an imperfect union, from which he can’t be freed.

  ‘But his love of the flesh is so strong he is willing now to risk anything to be warm-blooded and anthropomorphic.’

  Again, she stopped. ‘Maybe all of life has a mind,’ she said, her eyes roving over the small room, over the empty tables. ‘Maybe the flowers watch us. Maybe the trees think and hate us that we can walk. Or maybe, just maybe they don’t care. The horror of Lasher is that he began to care!’

  ‘Stop him,’ said Aaron. ‘You know what he is now. Stop him. Don’t let him assume human form.’

  She said nothing. She looked down at the red wool of her coat, startled suddenly by the color. She did not even remember taking it out of the closet. She had the key in her hand but no purse. Only their conversation was real to her and she was aware of her own exhaustion, of the thin layer of sweat on her hands and on her face.

  ‘What you’ve said is brilliant,’ said Aaron. ‘You’ve touched it and understood it. Now use the same knowledge to keep it out.’

  ‘He’s going to kill you,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘I know he is. He wants to. I can hold him off, but what do I bargain with? He knows I’m here.’ She gave a little laugh, eyes moving over the ceiling. ‘He’s with us. He knows every trick at my command. He’s everywhere. Like God. Only he’s not God!’