Anne Rice - The witching hour

Stella giggled and sprinted across the floor, pitching herself back into the satin-lined coffin and reaching out for her glass of champagne. The drums were growing louder and louder. Why doesn’t everything catch fire, why doesn’t it all burn?

“Because this is hell, son,” said the nun, who raised her hand to slap him again. “And it just burns and burns.”

“Stop it, let me go!”

He crashed into Julien, falling forward the flames flashing upward in a heated blast into his face.

But the nun had him by his collar. She had the St. Michael medal in her hand. “You dropped this, didn’t you? And I told you to take care of it, didn’t I? And where did I find it? I found it lying on the ground, that’s where I found it!” And wham, the slap struck him again, fierce and hurtful, and he seethed with rage. She shook him as he slipped onto his knees, hands struggling to shove her away.

“All you can do now is be with us, and go back through!” said Deborah. “Don’t you understand? The doorway is open; it’s just a matter of time. Lasher and Rowan will bring us through, Suzanne first, then I shall go and then-”

“No, wait a minute now, I never agreed to any such order,” said Charlotte.

“Neither did I,” said Julien.

“Who said anything about order!” roared Marie Claudette, kicking the quilt off her legs as she sat forward in the bed.

“Why are you being so foolish!” said Mary Beth, with a bored, matter-of-fact air. “My God, everything has been fulfilled. And there is no limit to how many times the transmutation can be effected, and you can imagine, can’t you, the superior quality of the mutated flesh and the mutated genes. This is actually a scientific advance of stunning brilliance.”

“All natural, Michael, and to understand that is to understand the essence of the world, that things are-hmmmm, more or less predetermined,” said Cortland. “Don’t you know you were in our hands from the very beginning?”

“That is the crucial point for you to understand,” said Mary Beth reasonably.

“The fire that killed your father,” said Cortland, “that was no accident … ”

“Don’t say these things to me!” roared Michael. “You didn’t do that. I don’t believe it. I don’t accept it!”

“ … to position you exactly, and see to it that you had the desired combination of sophistication and charm, so as to command her attention and cause her to let down her guard … ”

“Don’t bother talking to him,” the tall nun snapped, her rosary beads jangling together as they hung from her thick leather belt. “He’s incorrigible. You just leave him to me. I’ll slap the fire out of him.”

“It isn’t true,” he said, trying to shield his eyes from the glare of the flames, the drums pounding through his temples. “This is not the explanation,” he cried. “This is not the final meaning.” He outshouted the drums.

“Michael, I warned you,” came the piteous little voice of Sister Bridget Marie, who peeped around the side of the mean nun. “I told you there were witches in those dark streets.”

“Come here at once, and have some champagne,” said Stella. “And stop creating all these hellish images. Don’t you see, when you’re earthbound you create your surroundings.”

“Yes, you are making it so ugly here!” said Antha.

“There are no flames here,” said Stella. “That’s in your head. Come, let’s dance to the drums, oh, I have grown so to love this music. I do like your drums, your crazy Mardi Gras drums!”

He thrashed with both his arms, his lungs burning, his chest about to burst. “I won’t believe it. You’re all his little joke, his trick, his connivance-”

“No, mon cher, ” said Julien, “we are the final answer and the meaning.”

Mary Beth shook her head sadly, looking at him. “We always were.”

“The hell you are!”

He was on his feet at last. He twisted loose from the nun, ducking her next slap, and gliding through her, and now he sped through Julien’s thickening form, blind for a moment, but emerging free, ignoring the laughter, and the drums.

The nuns closed ranks but he went through. Nothing was going to stop him. He could see the way out, he could see the light pouring through the keyhole door. “I will not, I will not believe … ”

“Darling, think back to the first drowning,” said Deborah, suddenly beside him, trying to capture his hand. “It was what we explained to you before when you were dead, that we needed you, and you did agree, but of course we knew you were just bargaining for your life, lying to us, you see, and we knew that if we didn’t make you forget, you would never never fulfill-”

“Lies! Lasher’s lies!” He pulled free of her.

Only a few more feet to the door, and he could make it. He pitched forward, stumbling again over the bodies that littered the floor, stepping on backs and shoulders and heads, smoke stinging his eyes. But he was getting closer to the light.

And there was a figure in the doorway, and he knew that helmet, that long mantle, he knew that garb. Yes, knew it, very familiar to him.

“I’m coming,” he cried out.

But his lips had barely moved.

He was lying on his back.

His body was shot through and through with pain, and the frozen silence closed around him. And the sky high above was that dizzying blue.

He heard the voice of the man over him saying, “That’s right, son, breathe!”

Yes, knew that helmet and that mantle, because it was a fire fighter’s garb, and he was lying by the pool, sprawled on the icy cold flagstones, his chest burning, his arms and legs aching, and it was a fireman bending over him, clapping the plastic oxygen mask to his face and squeezing the bag beside him, a fireman with a face just like his dad’s face, and the man said again: “That’s it, son, breathe!”

The other firemen stood over him, great shadowy shapes against the moving clouds, all familiar by virtue of their helmets and their coats, as they cheered him on with voices so like his father’s voice.

Each breath he took was a raw throb of pain, but he drew the air down into his lungs, and as they lifted him, he closed his eyes.

“I’m here, Michael,” Aaron said. “I’m at your side.”

The pain in his chest was enormous and pressing against his lungs, and his arms were numb. But the darkness was clean and quiet and the stretcher felt as if it were flying as they wheeled him along.

Argument, talk, the crackle of those walkie-talkie things. But none of it mattered. He opened his eyes and saw the sky flashing overhead. Ice dripping from the frozen withered bougainvillea, as they went past, all its blossoms dead. Out the gate, wheels bouncing on the uneven flagstones.

Somebody pressed the little mask hard over his face as they lifted him into the ambulance. “Cardiac emergency, coming in now, requesting … ” Blankets all around him.

Aaron’s voice again, and then another:

“He’s fibrillating again! Damn it! Go!”

The doors of the ambulance slammed, his body rocking to the side slightly as they pulled away from the curb.

The fist came down on his chest, once, twice, again. Oxygen pumping into him through the plastic mask, like a cold tongue.

The alarm was still going, or was it their siren singing like that, a faraway cry, like the cries of those desperate birds in the early morning, crows cawing in the big oaks, as if scratching at the rosy sky, at the dark deep moss-covered silence.

SOME TIME BEFORE nightfall, he understood he was in the critical care unit, that his heart had stopped in the pool, and again on the way in, and a third time in the Emergency Room. They were regulating his pulse now with a powerful drug called lidocaine, which was why he was in a mental fog, unable to hang on to any complete thought.