Anne Rice - The witching hour

Suddenly his body relaxed; he wasn’t struggling desperately to breathe or to rise, not clawing at anything. In fact, he wasn’t in his body at all. He knew this feeling, this weightlessness, this sublime freedom.

Only he wasn’t traveling upward, not rising buoyant and free the way he had that long-ago day, right up into the leaden gray sky and the clouds, from which he could see all the earth down there below with its millions upon millions of tiny beings.

He was in a tunnel this time, and he was being sucked down, and it was dark and close and there seemed no end to the journey. In a great rush of silence, he plummeted, completely without will, and full of vague wonder.

At last a great splashing red light surrounded him. He had fallen into a familiar place. Yes, the drums, he heard the drums, the old familiar Mardi Gras cadence of marching drums, the sound of the Comus parade moving swiftly through the winter dark on the tired dreary edge of Mardi Gras night, and the flicker of the flames was the flicker of the flambeaux beneath the twisted elbows of the oaks, and his fear was the all-knowing little boy’s fear of long ago, and it was all here, everything he’d feared, happening at last, not a mere glimpse on the edge of dream, or with Deirdre’s nightgown in his hands, but here, around him.

His feet had struck the steaming ground, and as he tried to stand up, he saw the branches of the oaks had gone right up through the plaster roof of the parlor, catching the chandelier in a tangle of leaves, and brushing past the high mirrors. And this was really the house. Countless bodies writhed in the dark. He was stepping on them! Gray, naked shapes fornicating and twisting in the flames and in the shadows, the smoke billowing up to obscure the faces of all those surrounding him and looking at him. But he knew who they were. Taffeta skirts, cloth brushing him. He stumbled and tried to get his balance but his hand just passed right through the burning rock, his feet went down into the steaming 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 track of time here … ”

“Yes, saved,” said Marie Claudette. She was sitting in a big four-poster bed, with Marguerite beside her, the flames twining around the posts, eating at the canopy. Lestan and Maurice stood behind the bed, looking on with vaguely bored expressions, the light glimmering on their brass buttons, flames licking at the edges of their flared coats.

“They burned us out in Saint-Dominigue,” said Charlotte, holding the folds of her lovely skirt daintily. “And the river took our old plantation.”

“But this house will stand forever,” said Maurice gravely, eyes sweeping the ceiling, the medallions, the listing chandeliers, “thanks to your fine efforts at restoration, and we have this safe and marvelous place in which to wait our turn to become flesh again.”

“We’re so glad to have you, darling,” said Stella, with the same bored air, shifting her weight suddenly so that her left hip poked out the silk chemise. “Surely you don’t want to pass up an opportunity like this.”

“I don’t believe you! You’re lies, figments!” Michael spun round, head crashing through the peach-colored plaster wall. The potted fern went over on the floor. Couples writhing before him snarled as his foot went through them-through the back of the man and the belly of the woman.