The witching hour lotmw-1

by Anne Rice

  She should have destroyed the jars then. She should have never urged Michael to take off the gloves, and she never would again, of that she was certain. Michael couldn’t endure this power in his hands. He couldn’t really endure his memory of the visions. It made him suffer, and it filled her with dread to see him afraid.

  It was the fact of the drowning that had brought them together, not these mysterious dark forces that lurked in the house. Voices speaking from rotted heads in jars. Ghosts in taffeta. His strength and her strength, that had been the origin of their love, and the future was the house, the family, the legacy which could bring the miracles of medicine to thousands, even millions.

  What were all the dark ghosts and legends on earth compared to those hard and glittering realities? In her sleep, she saw the buildings rise. She saw the immensity. And the words of the history ran through her dreams. No, never meant to kill the old woman, the one awful flaw. To have killed. To have done something so wrong.…

  *

  At six o’clock, when her breakfast arrived, the newspaper came with it.

  SKELETON FOUND IN FAMOUS GARDEN DISTRICT HOUSE

  Well, that was inevitable, wasn’t it? Seems Ryan had warned her that they couldn’t quash it. Numbly, she scanned the several paragraphs, amused in spite of herself, at the gothic tale unfolding in a quaint old-fashioned journalistic style.

  Who could argue with the statement that the Mayfair mansion had always been associated with tragedy? Or that the one person who might have shed light upon the demise of Texan Stuart Townsend was Carlotta Mayfair, who had died the very night that the remains were discovered, after a long and distinguished legal career?

  The rest was an elegy to Carlotta, which filled Rowan with coldness and guilt.

  Surely someone from the Talamasca was clipping this story. Perhaps Aaron was reading it in his rooms above. What would he write in the file about it? It comforted her to think of the file.

  In fact, she was a lot more comfortable now than a sane person ought to be. For no matter what was happening, she was a Mayfair, among all the other Mayfairs; and her secret sorrows were tangled with older, more intricate sorrows.

  Even yesterday when Michael had been smashing the jars and wrestling with the power, it had not been the worst for her, not by any means. She had him, she had Aaron, she had all the cousins. She wasn’t alone. Even with the murder of the old woman, she wasn’t alone.

  She sat still for a long time after reading the story, her hands clasped on top of the folded newspaper, as rain came down hard outside, and the food on the breakfast table grew cold.

  No matter what else she felt, she ought to grieve in silence for the old woman. She ought to let the misery coagulate in her soul. And the woman was going to be dead forever now. Wasn’t she?

  The truth was, so much was happening to her, and so rapidly, that she could no longer catalog her responses; or even manifest any response at all. She passed in and out of emotion. Yesterday when Michael was lying on the bed, his pulse racing and his face flushed, she had been frantic. She had thought, If I lose this man, I’ll die with him. I swear it. And an hour after, she had broken one jar after another, spilling the contents into the white dishpan, and poking at it with an ice pick as she examined it, before handing it over to Aaron to be packed in the ice. Clinical as any doctor. No difference at all.

  In between these moments of crisis, she was drifting, watching, remembering, because it was all too different, too purely unusual, and finally too much.

  This morning, waking at four A.M., she had not known where she was. Then it all came back to her, the mingled flood of curses and blessings, her dream of the hospitals, and Michael beside her, and the desire for him like a drug.

  Not his fault really that his every gesture, word, movement, or facial expression was electrically erotic to her, no matter what else might be going on. He was a sex object and delightfully oblivious to it, because in his innocence he didn’t really understand the greed of her desire.

  Sitting up in bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, she had wondered if this wasn’t somehow worse for a woman than a man, because a woman could find the smallest things about a man violently erotic, such as the way his curly hair was mashed down now on his forehead, or the way it curled on the back of his neck.

  Weren’t men a little more direct about things? Did they go mad over a woman’s ankle? Seems Dostoyevski said they did. But she had doubted it. It was excruciating for her to look at the dark fleece on the back of Michael’s wrist, to see his gold watch-band cutting into it, to imagine his arm later, with the white cuff rolled up, which for some reason made it even more sexy than when the arm was naked, and the flash of his fingers as he lighted his cigarettes. All directly genitally erotic. Everything done with a sharp edge, a punch. Or his low growly voice, full of tenderness, when he talked on the phone to his Aunt Viv.

  When he’d been on his knees in that foul, ugly room, he’d been battling, striking out. And on the dusty bed after, he had been irresistible to her in his exhaustion, his large, strong hands curled and lying empty on the counterpane. Loosening his thick leather belt and the zipper of his jeans, all erotic, that tins powerful thing was suddenly dependent upon her. But then the terror had gripped her when she felt his pulse.

  She’d sat with him for a long tense time, until the pulse returned to normal; until his skin had cooled. Until he was breathing in regular sleep. So coarsely and perfectly beautiful he’d been, the white undershirt stretched tight over his chest, just a real man and so exquisitely mysterious to her, with that dark hair on his chest and on the backs of his arms, and the hands so much bigger than hers.

  Only his fear cooled her passion, and his fear never lasted very long.

  This morning, she had wanted to wake him up by clamping her mouth on his cock. But he needed his sleep now after all that had happened. He needed it badly. She only prayed he had peace in his dreams. And besides she was going to marry him as soon as it seemed polite to ask him. And they had all their lives in the First Street house, didn’t they, to do things like that?

  And it seemed wrong to do what she’d done several mornings with Chase, her old palomino cop from Marin County, which was roll over next to him, press her hips against his flank and her face against his suntanned upper arm, and squeeze her legs tightly together, until the orgasm ran through her like a wash of blinding light.

  It wasn’t much fun to do that, either-nothing, in fact, compared to being tacked to the mattress by an adorable brute, with a little gold crucifix dangling from a chain around his neck.

  He hadn’t even stirred when the thunder rolled overhead, when the crack came so loud and sudden that it was like guns tearing loose the roof.

  And now, two hours later, as the rain fell, and the breakfast grew cold, she sat dreaming, her mind running over all the past and all the possibilities, and this crucial meeting, soon to begin.

  The phone startled her. Ryan and Pierce were in the lobby, ready to take her downtown.

  Quickly she wrote a note for Michael, saying she was off on Mayfair legal business, and would be back for dinner, no later than six. “Please keep Aaron with you and don’t go over to the house alone.” She signed it with love.

  “I want to marry you,” she said aloud as she placed the note on the bedside table. Softly he snored into the pillow. “The archangel and the witch,” she said, even more loudly. He slept on. She chanced one kiss on his naked shoulder, felt gently of the muscle in his upper arm, enough to drag her right into the bed if she lingered on it, and went out and shut the door.

  Skipping the fancy paneled elevator, she walked down the carpeted stairs, staring for a moment at smooth-faced Ryan and his handsome son as if they were aliens from another universe in their tropical wool suits, with their mellow southern voices, there to guide her to a spaceship disguised as a limousine.

  The small quaint brick buildings of Carondelet Street glided past in a curious silence, the sky like polished stone beyond
the delicate downpour, the lightning opening a vein in the stone, the thunder crackling menacingly and then dying away.

  At last they came into a region of burnished skyscrapers, a shining America for two blocks, followed by an underground garage that might have been anywhere in the world.

  No surprises in the spacious thirtieth-floor offices of Mayfair and Mayfair, with its traditional furnishings and thick carpet, not even that two of the assembled Mayfair lawyers were women, and one was a very old man, or that the view through the high glass windows was of the river, gray as the sky, dotted with interesting tugs and barges, beneath the rain’s silver veil.

  Then coffee and conversation of the most vague and frustrating sort with the white-haired Ryan, his light blue eyes as opaque as marbles, speaking interminably it seemed of “considerable investments,” and “long term holdings,” and “tracts of land which have been held for over a century,” and hard-core conservative investments “larger than you might expect.”

  She waited; they had to give her more than this; they had to. And then like a computer she analyzed the precious names and details when he at last began to let them slip.

  Here it was, finally, and she could see the hospitals and the clinics shimmering against the dream horizon, though she sat there motionless, expressionless, letting Ryan talk on.

  Blocks of real estate in downtown Manhattan and Los Angeles? The major financing for the Markham Harris Resorts worldwide hotel chain? Shopping malls in Beverly Hills, Coconut Grove, Boca Raton, and Palm Beach? Condominiums in Miami and Honolulu? And then once more references to the “very large” hard-core investments in treasury bills, Swiss francs, and gold.

  Her mind drifted but never very far. So Aaron’s descriptions in the file had been completely accurate. He had given her the backdrop and the proscenium arch for this little drama to be fully appreciated. Indeed he had given her knowledge of which these clean-faced lawyers in their shining pastel office garments could not possibly dream.

  And once again, it struck her as positively strange that Aaron and Michael had ever feared her displeasure for placing a tool of that power in her hands. They didn’t understand power, that was their problem. They’d never sliced into a cerebellum.

  And this legacy was a cerebellum, wasn’t it?

  She drank her coffee in silence. Her eyes ran over the other Mayfairs, who also sat there in silence, as Ryan continued drawing his vague pictures of municipal bonds, oil leases, some cautious financing in the entertainment industry and of late in computer technology. Now and then she nodded, and made a small note with her silver pen.

  Yes, of course, she understood that the firm had managed things for over a century. That deserved a nod and a heartfelt murmur. Julien had founded the firm for such management. And of course she could well envision how the legacy was entangled with the finances of the family at large-“all to the benefit of the legacy, of course. For the legacy is first and foremost, but there has never been a conflict, in fact, to speak of a conflict is to misunderstand the scope … ”

  “I understand.”

  “Ours has always been a conservative approach, but to appreciate fully what I’m saying, one must understand what such an approach means when one is speaking of a fortune of this size. You might, realistically, think in terms of a small oil-producing nation and I do not exaggerate-and of policies aimed at conserving and protecting rather than expanding and developing, because when capital in this amount is properly conserved against inflation or any other erosion or encroachment, the expansion is virtually unstoppable, and the development in countless directions is inevitable, and you are faced with the day-to-day issue of investing revenues so large that … ”

  “You’re talking billions,” she said in a quiet voice.

  Silent ripples passed through the assemblage. A Yankee blunder? She caught no vibration of dishonesty, only confusion, and fear of her and what she might eventually do. After all, they were Mayfairs, weren’t they? They were scrutinizing her as she was scrutinizing them.

  Pierce glanced at his father, Pierce who was of all of them the most purely idealistic and the least tarnished. Ryan glanced at the others, Ryan who understood the scope of what was at stake in a way perhaps that the others could not.

  But no answer was forthcoming.

  “Billions.” She spoke again. “In real estate alone.”

  “Well, actually, yes, I have to say that is correct, yes, billions in real estate alone.”

  How embarrassed and uncomfortable they all seemed, as if a strategic secret had been revealed.

  She could smell the fear suddenly, the revulsion of Lauren Mayfair, the older blond-haired woman lawyer, in her seventies perhaps, with the soft powdery wrinkled skin, who eyed her from the end of the table and imagined her shallow, spoilt, and programmed to be totally ungrateful for what the firm had done. And then there was Anne Marie Mayfair to the right, dark-haired, pretty, forty years or more, skillfully rouged, and smoothly dressed in her gray suit and blouse of saffron silk, and more frankly curious, peering at Rowan steadily through horn-rimmed glasses, but convinced that disaster of one sort or another must lie ahead.

  And Randall Mayfair, grandson of Garland, slender, with a hoary thatch of gray hair, and a soft wattle of a neck spilling over his collar, who merely sat there, eyes sleepy under his heavy brows and faintly purpled lids, not fearful, but watchful and by nature, resigned.

  And when their eyes met, Randall answered her silently. Of course you don’t understand. How could you? How many people can understand? And so you’ll want control, and for that you are a fool.

  She cleared her throat, ignoring the revealing manner in which Ryan made his hands into a church steeple just beneath his chin and stared at her hard with his marble blue eyes.

  “You’re underestimating me,” she said in a monotone, her eyes sweeping the group. “I’m not underestimating you. I only want to know what’s involved here. I cannot remain passive. It would be irresponsible to remain passive.”

  Moments of silence. Pierce lifted his coffee cup and drank without a sound.

  “But what we’re really talking about,” said Ryan calmly and courteously, the steeple having fallen, “to be completely practical here, you understand, is that one can live in queenly luxury on a fraction of the interest earned by the reinvestment of a fraction of the interest earned by the reinvestment of … et cetera, if you follow me, without the capital ever being touched in any incidence or for any reason … ”

  “Again, I cannot be passive, nor complacent, nor negligently ignorant. I do not believe that I should be any of those things.”

  Silence, and once again Ryan to break it. Conciliatory and gentlemanly. “What specifically would you like to know?”

  “Everything, the nuts and bolts of it. Or perhaps I should say the anatomy. I want to see the entire body as if it were stretched on a table. I want to study the organism as a whole.”

  A quick exchange of glances between Randall and Ryan. And then Ryan again. “Well, that’s perfectly reasonable but it may not be as simple as you imagine … ”

  “Yet there must be a beginning to it somewhere, and at some point, an end.”

  “Well, undoubtedly, but I think you’re envisioning this, if I may say so, in the wrong way.”

  “One thing specifically,” she said. “How much of this money goes into medicine? Are there any medical institutions involved?”

  How startled they were. A declaration of war, it seemed, or so said the face of Anne Marie Mayfair, glancing at Lauren and then at Randall, in the first undisguised bit of hostility which Rowan had witnessed since she’d come to this town. The older Lauren, a finger hooked beneath her lower lip, eyes narrow, was too polished for such a display and merely looked fixedly at Rowan, her gaze now and then shifting very slowly to Ryan, who again began to speak.

  “Our philanthropic endeavors have not in the past involved medicine, per se. Rather the Mayfair Foundation is more heavily involved with the arts and wit
h education, with educational television in particular, and with scholarship funds at several universities, and of course we donate enormous sums through several established charities, quite independent of the Foundation, but all of this, you see, is carefully structured, and does not involve the release of the control of the money involved, so much as the release of the earnings … ”

  “I know how that works,” Rowan said quietly. “But we are talking about billions, and hospitals, clinics, and laboratories are profit-making institutions. I wasn’t thinking of the philanthropic question, really. I was thinking of an entire area of involvement; which could have considerable beneficial impact upon human lives.”

  How curiously cold and exciting this moment was. How private too. Rather like the first time she had ever approached the operating table and held the microinstruments in her own hands.

  “We have not tended to go in the direction of medicine,” said Ryan with an air of finality. “The field would require intense study, it would require an entire restructuring … and Rowan, you do realize that this network of investments, if I may call it that, has evolved over a century’s time. This isn’t a fortune which can be lost if the silver market crashes, or if Saudi Arabia floods the world with free oil. We are talking about a diversification here which is very nearly unique in financial annals, and carefully planned maneuvers which have proven profitable through two world wars and numberless smaller upheavals.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I really do. But I want information. I want to know everything. I can start with the paper you filed with the IRS, and move on from there. Perhaps what I want is an apprenticeship, a series of meetings in which we discuss various areas of involvement. Above all I want statistics, because statistics are the reality finally … ”

  Again, the silence, the inner confusion, the glances ricocheting off each other. How small and crowded the room had become.

  “You want my advice?” asked Randall, his voice deeper and rougher than that of Ryan, but equally patient in its mellow southern cadences. “You’re paying for it, actually, so you might as well have it.”