Anne Rice - The Mayfair Witches 1 - The Witching Hour

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The Mayfair Witches Trilogy
Volume 1
The WITCHING HOUR
Anne Rice
With Love:
FOR
Stan Rice and Christopher Rice
FOR John Preston
FOR
Alice O‘Brien Borchardt, Tamara O‘Brien Tinker, Karen O‘Brien, and Micki O‘Brien Collins
AND FOR
Dorothy Van Sever O‘Brien, who bought me my first typewriter in 1959, taking the time and trouble to
see that it was a good one.
And the rain is brain-colored
And the thunder sounds like something remembering something.
STAN RICE
PART ONE
Come Together
CHAPTER ONE
The doctor woke up afraid. He had been dreaming of the old house in New Orleans again. He had seen
the woman in the rocker. He’d seen the man with the brown eyes.
And even now in this quiet hotel room above New York City he felt the old alarming disorientation.
He’d been talking again with the brown-eyed man. Yes, help her. No, this is just a dream. I want to get
out of it.
The doctor sat up in bed. No sound but the faint roar of the air conditioner. Why was he thinking about
it tonight in a hotel room in the Parker Meridien? For a moment he couldn’t shake the feeling of the old
house. He saw the woman again -her bent head, her vacant stare. He could almost hear the hum of the
insects against the screens of the old porch. And the brown-eyed man was speaking without moving his
lips. A waxen dummy infused with life
No. Stop it.
He got out of bed and padded silently across the carpeted floor until he stood in front of the sheer white
curtains, peering out at black sooty rooftops and dim neon signs flickering against brick walls. The early
morning light showed behind the clouds above the dull concrete facade opposite. No debilitating heat
here. No drowsing scent of roses, of gardenias.
Gradually his head cleared.
He thought of the Englishman at the bar in the lobby again. That’s what had brought it all back — the
Englishman remarking to the bartender that he’d just come from New Orleans, and that certainly was a
haunted city. The Englishman, an affable man, a true Old World gentleman it seemed, in a narrow
seersucker suit with a gold watch chain fixed to his vest pocket. Where did one see that kind of man these
days? – a man with the sharp melodious inflection of a British stage actor, and brilliant, ageless blue eyes.
The doctor had turned to him and said: ‘Yes, you’re right about New Orleans, you certainly are. I saw a
ghost myself in New Orleans, and not very long ago -’ Then he had stopped, embarrassed. He had stared
at the melted bourbon before him, the sharp refraction of light in the base of the crystal glass.
Hum of flies in summer; smell of medicine. That much Thorazine? Could there be some mistake?
But the Englishman had been respectfully curious. He’d invited the doctor to join him for dinner, said
he collected such tales. For a moment, the doctor had been tempted. There was a lull in the convention,
and he liked this man, felt an immediate trust in him. And the lobby of the Parker Meridien was a nice
cheerful place, full of light, movement, people. So far away from that gloomy New Orleans corner, from
the sad old city festering with secrets in its perpetual Caribbean heat.
But the doctor could not tell that story.
‘If ever you change your mind, do call me,’ the Englishman had said. ‘My name is Aaron Lightner.’
He’d given the doctor a card with the name of an organization inscribed on it: ‘You might say we collect
ghost stories - true ones, that is.’
THE TALAMASCA
We watch
And we are always here.
It was a curious motto.
Yes, that was what had brought it all back. The Englishman and the peculiar calling card with the
European phone numbers, the Englishman who was leaving for the coast tomorrow to see a California
man who had lately drowned and been brought back to life. The doctor had read of that case in the New
York papers — one of those characters who suffers clinical death and returns from having seen ‘the
light.’
They had talked about the drowned man together, he and the Englishman. ‘He claims now to have
psychic powers, you see,’ said the Englishman, ’and that interests us, of course. Seems he sees images
when he touches things with his bare hands. We call it psychometry.’
The doctor had been intrigued. He had heard of a few such patients himself, cardiac victims if he rightly
recalled, who had come back, one claiming to have seen the future. ‘Near Death Experience.’ One saw
more and more articles about the phenomenon in the journals.
‘Yes,’ Lightner had said, the best research on the subject has been done by doctors - by cardiologists.’
‘Wasn’t there a film a few years back,’ the doctor had asked, ’about a woman who returned with the
power to heal? Strangely affecting.’
‘You’re open-minded on the subject,’ the Englishman had said with a delighted smile. ‘Are you sure
you won’t tell me about your ghost? I’d so love to hear it. I’m not flying out till tomorrow, some time
before noon. What I wouldn’t give to hear your story!’
No, not that story. Not ever.
Alone now in the shadowy hotel room, the doctor felt fear again. The clock ticked in the long dusty
hallway in New Orleans. He heard the shuffle of his patient’s feet as the nurse ’walked’ her. He smelled
that smell again of a New Orleans house in summer, heat and old wood. The man was talking to him…
The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans. And the old
house really did have white fluted columns on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek
Revival style they called it - a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District,
its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were made in a rose pattern
and much festooned with vines — purple wisteria, the yellow Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a
dark, incandescent pink.
He liked to pause on the marble steps and look up at the Doric capitals, wreathed as they were by those
drowsy fragrant blossoms. The sun came in thin dusty shafts through the twisting branches. Bees sang in
the tangle of brilliant green leaves beneath the peeling cornices. Never mind that it was so sombre here,
so damp.
Even the approach through the deserted streets seduced him. He walked slowly over cracked and
uneven sidewalks of herringbone brick or gray flagstone, under an unbroken archway of oak branches, the
light eternally dappled, the sky perpetually veiled in green. Always he paused at the largest tree that had
lifted the iron fence with its bulbous roots. He could not have gotten his arms around the trunk of it. It
reached all the way from the pavement to the house itself, twisted limbs clawing at the shuttered windows
beyond the banisters, leaves enmeshed with the flowering vines.
But the decay here troubled him nevertheless. Spiders wove their tiny intricate webs over the iron lace
roses. In places the iron had so rusted that it fell away to powder at the touch. And here and there near the
railings, the wood of the porches was rotted right through.
Then there was the old swimming pool far beyond the garden — a great long octagon bounded by the
flagstones, which had become a swamp unto itself with its black water and wild irises. The smell alone
was frightful. Frogs lived there, frogs you could hear at dusk, singing their grinding, ugly song. Sad to see
the little fountain jets up one side and down the other still sending their little arching streams into the
muck. He longed to drain it, clean it, scrub the sides with his own hands if he had to. Longed to patch the
broken balustrade, and rip the weeds from the overgrown urns.
Even the elderly aunts of his patient - Miss Carl, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy - had an air of staleness
and decay. It wasn’t a matter of gray hair or wire-rimmed glasses. It was their manner, and the fragrance
of camphor that clung to their clothes.
Once he had wandered into the library and taken a book down from the shelf. Tiny black beetles
scurried out of the crevice. Alarmed he had put the book back.
If there had been air-conditioning in the place it might have been different. But the old house was too
big for that - or so they had said back then. The ceilings soared fourteen feet overhead. And the sluggish
breeze carried with it the scent of mold.
His patient was well cared for, however. That he had to admit. A sweet old black nurse named Viola
brought his patient out on the screened porch in the morning and took her in at evening.
‘She’s no trouble at all, Doctor. Now, you come on, Miss Deirdre, walk for the doctor.’ Viola would lift
her out of the chair and push her patiently step by step.
‘I’ve been with her seven years now, Doctor, she’s my sweet girl.’
Seven years like that. No wonder the woman’s feet had started to turn in at the ankles, and her arms to
draw close to her chest if the nurse didn’t force them down into her lap again.
Viola would walk her round and round the long double parlor, past the harp and the Bősendorfer grand
layered with dust. Into the long broad dining room with its faded murals of moss-hung oaks and tilled
fields.
Slippered feet shuffling on the worn Aubusson carpet. The woman was forty-one years old, yet she
looked both ancient and young — a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion.
Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?
On the library bookshelves were leather-bound ledgers with old dates marked on the spines in faded
purple ink: 1756, 1757,1758… Each bore the family name of Mayfair in gold lettering.
Ah, these old southern families, how he envied them their heritage. It did not have to lead to this decay.
And to think, he did not know the full names of his own great-grandparents or where they had been born.
Mayfair - a vintage colonial clan. There were old paintings on the walls of men and women in
eighteenth-century dress, as well as daguerreotypes and tintypes and faded photographs. A yellowed map
of Saint-Domingue - did they call it that still? -in a dirty frame in the hallway. And a darkening painting
of a great plantation house.
And look at the jewels his patient wore. Heirlooms surely, with those antique settings. What did it mean
that they put that kind of jewelry on a woman who hadn’t spoken a word or moved of her own volition in
over seven years?
The nurse said she never took off the chain with the emerald pendant, not even when she bathed Miss
Deirdre.
‘Let me tell you a little secret, Doctor, don’t you ever touch that!’
‘And why not?’ he wanted to ask. But he had said nothing. He watched uneasily as the nurse put on the
patient’s ruby earrings, her diamond ring.
Like dressing a corpse, he thought. And out there the dark oaks wind their limbs towards the dusty
window screens. And the garden shimmers in the dull heat.
‘And look at her hair,’ said the nurse lovingly. ‘Have you ever seen such beautiful hair?’
It was black all right, and thick and curly and long. The nurse loved to brush it, watching the curls roll
up as the brush released them. And the patient’s eyes, for all their listless stare, were a clear blue. Yet
now and then a thin silver line of saliva fell down from the side of her mouth, making a dark circle on the
bosom of her white nightgown.
‘It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t tried to steal those things,’ he said half to himself. ‘She’s so helpless.’
The nurse had given him a superior, knowing smile.
‘No one who’s ever worked in this house would try that.’
‘But she sits all alone on that side porch by the hour. You can see her from the street.’
Laughter.
‘Don’t worry about that, Doctor. No one around here is fool enough to come in that gate. Old Ronnie
mows the lawn, but that’s because he always did, done it for thirty years now, but then old Ronnie isn’t
exactly right in the head.’
‘Nevertheless…" But he had stopped himself. What was he doing, talking like this right in front of the
silent woman, whose eyes only now and then moved just a little, whose hands lay just where the nurse
had placed them, whose feet rested limply on the bare floor. How easy it was to forget oneself, forget to
respect this tragic creature. Nobody knew what the woman understood.
‘Might get her out in the sun sometime,’ the doctor said. ‘Her skin is so white.’
But he knew the garden was impossible, even far away from the reek of the pool. The thorny
bougainvillea burst in clumps from beneath the wild cherry laurel. Fat little cherubs, streaked with slime,
peered out of overgrown lantana like ghosts.
Yet once children had played there.
Some boy or girl had carved the word Lasher into the thick trunk of the giant crepe myrtle that grew
against the far fence. The deep gashes had weathered so that they gleamed white against the waxy bark.
Strange word that. And a wooden swing was still hanging from the branch of the distant oak.
He’d walked back to that lonely tree, and sat down on the swing for a moment, felt the rusted chains
creak, then move as he pushed his foot into the crushed grass.
The southern flank of the house looked mammoth and overwhelmingly beautiful to him from this
perspective, the flowering vines climbing together all the way up past the green shuttered windows to the
twin chimneys above the third floor. The dark bamboo rattled in the breeze against the plastered masonry.
The glossy banana trees grew so high and dense they made a jungle clear back to the brick wall.
It was like his patient, this old place — beautiful yet forgotten by time, by urgency.
Her face might be pretty still if it were not so utterly lifeless. Did she see the delicate purple clusters of
wisteria, shivering against the screens, the writhing tangle of other blooms? Could she see all the way
through the trees to the white columned house across the street?
Once he had ridden upstairs with her and her nurse in the quaint yet powerful little elevator with its
brass gate and worn carpet. No change in Deirdre’s expression as the little car began to rise. It made him
anxious to hear the churning machinery. He could not imagine the motor except as something blackened
and sticky and ancient, coated with dust.
Of course he had questioned the old doctor at the sanitarium.
‘I remember when I was your age,’ said the old doctor. ‘I was going to cure all of them. I was going to
reason with the paranoiacs, and bring the schizophrenics back to reality, and make the catatonics wake up.
You give her that shot every day, son. There’s nothing there anymore. We just do our best to keep her
from getting worked up now and then, you know, the agitation.’
Agitation? That was the reason for these powerful drugs? Even if the shots were stopped tomorrow it
would be a month before the effects had fully worn off. And the levels used were so high they might have
killed another patient. You had to build up to a dosage like that.
How could anyone know the true state of the woman when the medication had gone on for so long? If
only he could run an electroencephalogram…
He’d been on the case about a month when he sent for the records. It was a routine request. No one
noticed. He sat at his desk at the sanitarium all afternoon struggling with the scrawl of dozens of other
physicians, the vague and contradictory diagnoses — mania, paranoia, complete exhaustion, delusions,
psychotic break, depression, attempted suicide. It went all the way back to the girl’s teens apparently. No,
even before. Someone had seen her for ‘dementia’ when she was ten years old.
What were the specifics behind these abstractions? Somewhere in the mountain of scribble he found
that she had borne a girl child at eighteen, given it up, suffered severe paranoia.’
Is that why they had given her shock treatments in one place and insulin shock in another? What had
she done to the nurses who over and over again quit on account of ’physical attacks’?
She had ’run away’ at one point, been ‘forcibly committed’ again. Then pages were missing, whole
years uncharted. ‘Irreversible brain damage’ was noted in 1976. ‘Patient sent home. Thorazine prescribed
to prevent palsy, mania.’
It was an ugly document, telling no story, revealing no truth. And it discouraged him, finally. Had a
legion of other doctors talked to her the way he did now when he sat beside her on the side porch?
‘It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Deirdre?’ Ah, the breeze here, so fragrant. The scent of the gardenias was
suddenly overpowering, yet he loved it. Just for a moment, he closed his eyes.
Did she loathe him, laugh at him, even know he was there? There were a few streaks of gray in her hair,
he saw that now. Her hand was cold, unpleasant to touch.
The nurse came out with a blue envelope in her hand, a snapshot.
‘It’s from your daughter, Deirdre. See? She’s twenty-four years old now, Deirdre.’ She held the
snapshot out for the doctor to see too. A blond girl on the deck of a big white yacht, hair blowing in the
wind. Pretty, very pretty. ‘On San Francisco Bay, 1983.’
Nothing changed in the woman’s face. The nurse brushed the black hair back from her forehead. She
thrust the picture at the doctor. ‘See that girl? That girl’s a doctor, too!’ She gave him a great superior
nod. ‘She’s an intern, going to be a medical doctor just like you some day, that’s the truth.’
Was it possible? Had the young woman never come home to see to her own mother? He disliked her
suddenly. Going to be a medical doctor, indeed.
How long had it been since his patient had worn a dress or a real pair of shoes? He longed to play a
radio for her. Maybe she would like music. The nurse had her television soap operas on all afternoon in
the back kitchen.
He came to distrust the nurses as he distrusted the aunts.
The tall one who wrote the checks for him — ‘Miss Carl’ — was a lawyer still though she must have
been in her seventies. She came and went from her offices on Carondelet Street in a taxicab because she
could no longer climb up on the high wooden step of the St Charles car. For fifty years, she had told him
once when he had met her at the gate, she had ridden the St Charles car.
‘Oh, yes,’ the nurse said one afternoon as she was brushing Deirdre’s hair very slowly, very gently.
‘Miss Carl’s the smart one. Works for Judge Fleming. One of the first women ever to graduate from the
Loyola School of Law. She was seventeen years old when she went to Loyola. Her father was old Judge
McIntyre, and she was ever so proud of him.’
Miss Carl never spoke to the patient, not that the doctor had ever seen. It was the portly one, ‘Miss
Nancy,’ who was mean to her, or so the doctor thought.
‘They say Miss Nancy never had much chance for an education,’ the nurse gossiped. ‘Always home
taking care of the others. There used to be old Miss Belle here too.’
There was something sullen and almost common about Miss Nancy. Dumpy, neglected, always wearing
her apron yet speaking to the nurse in that patronizing artificial voice. Miss Nancy had a faint sneer on
her lips when she looked at Deirdre.
And then there was ‘Miss Millie,’ the eldest of them all, who was actually some sort of cousin - a
classic in old lady black silk and string shoes. She came and went, never without her worn gloves and her
small black straw hat with its veil. She had a cheery smile for the doctor, and a kiss for Deirdre. ‘That’s
my poor dear sweetheart,’ she would say in a tremulous voice.
One afternoon, he had come upon Miss Millie standing on the broken flags by the pool.
‘Nowhere to begin anymore, Doctor,’ she had said sadly.
It was not his place to challenge her, yet something quickened in him to hear this tragedy
acknowledged.
‘And how Stella loved to swim here,’ the old woman said. ‘It was Stella who built it, Stella who had so
many plans and dreams. Stella put in the elevator, you know. That’s just the sort of thing that Stella
would do. Stella gave such parties. Why, I remember hundreds in the house, tables over the whole lawn,
and the bands that would play. You’re too young, Doctor, to remember that lively music. Stella had those
draperies made in the double parlor, and now they’re too old to be cleaned anymore. That’s what they
said. They’d fall apart if we tried to clean them now. And it was Stella who had paths of flagstones laid
here, all along the pool. You see, like the old flags in the front and along the side…’ She broke off,
pointing down the long side of the house at the distant patio so crowded by weeds. It was as if she
couldn’t speak anymore. Slowly she looked up at the high attic window.
He had wanted to ask, But who is Stella?
‘Poor darling Stella.’
He had envisioned paper lanterns strung through the trees.
Maybe they were simply too old, these women. And that young one, the intern or whatever she was,
two thousand miles away…
Miss Nancy bullied the silent Deirdre. She’d watch the nurse walking the patient, then shout in the
patient’s ear.
Tick up your feet. You know damn good and well you could walk on your own if you wanted to.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Miss Deirdre’s hearing,’ the nurse would interrupt her. ‘Doctor says she
can hear and see just fine.’
Once he tried to question Miss Nancy as she swept the upstairs hallway, thinking, well, maybe out of
anger she’ll shed a little light.
‘Is there ever the slightest change in her? Does she ever speak… even a single word?’
The woman squinted at him for a long moment, the sweat gleaming on her round face, her nose
painfully red at the bridge from the weight of her glasses.
‘I’ll tell you what I want to know!’ she said. ‘Who’s going to take care of her when we’re no longer
here! You think that spoilt daughter out in California is going to take care of her? That girl doesn’t even
know her mother’s name. It’s Ellie Mayfair who sends those pictures.’ She snorted. ‘Ellie Mayfair hasn’t
set foot in this house since the day that baby was born and she came to take that baby out of here. All she
wanted was that baby because she couldn’t have a baby of her own, and she was scared to death her
husband would leave her. He’s some big lawyer out there. You know what Carl paid Ellie to take that
baby? To see to it that girl never came home? Oh, just get her out of here, that was the idea. Made Ellie
sign a paper.’ She gave a bitter smile, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Send her to California with Ellie and Graham to live in a fancy house on San Francisco Bay with a big
boat and all, that’s what happened to Deirdre’s daughter.’
Ah, so the young woman did not know, he thought, but he said nothing.
‘Let Carl and Nancy stay here and take care of things!’ The woman went on. ‘That’s the song in this
family. Let Carl write the checks and let Nancy cook and scrub. And what the hell has Millie ever done?
Millie just goes to church, and prays for all of us. Isn’t that grand? Aunt Millie’s more useless than Aunt
Belle ever was. I’ll tell you what Aunt Millie can do best. Cut flowers. Aunt Millie cuts those roses now
and then, those roses growing wild out there.’
She gave a deep ugly laugh, and went past him into the patient’s bedroom, gripping the broom by its
greasy handle.
‘You know you can’t ask a nurse to sweep a floor! Oh, no, they wouldn’t stoop to that, now, would
they? "Would you care to tell me why a nurse cannot sweep a floor?’
The bedroom was clean all right, the master bedroom of the house it appeared to be, a large airy
northern room. Ashes in the marble fireplace. And what a bed his patient slept in, one of those massive
things made at the end of the last century, with the towering half tester of walnut and tufted silk.
He was glad of the smell of floor wax and fresh linen. But the room was full of dreadful religious
artifacts. On the marble dresser stood a statue of the Virgin with the naked red heart on her breast, lurid,
and disgusting to look at. A crucifix lay beside it, with a twisting, writhing body of Christ in natural
colors even to the dark blood flowing from the nails in his hands. Candles burned in red glasses, beside a
bit of withered palm.
‘Does she notice these religious things?’ the doctor asked.
‘Hell, no,’ Miss Nancy said. Whiffs of camphor rose from the dresser drawers as she straightened their
contents. ‘Lot of good they do under this roof!’
There were rosaries hung about the carved brass lamps, even through their faded satin shades. And it
seemed nothing had been changed here for decades. The yellow lace curtains were stiff and rotted in
places. Catching the sun they seemed to hold it, casting their own burnt and sombre light.
There was the jewel box on the marble-top bedside table. Open. As if the contents weren’t priceless,
which of course they were. Even the doctor, with his scant knowledge of such things, knew those jewels
were real.
Beside the jewel box stood the snapshot of the pretty blond-haired daughter. And beneath it a much
older and faded picture of the same girl, small but even then quite pretty. Scribble at the bottom. He could
only make out: ‘Pacific Heights School, 1966.’
When he touched the velvet cover of the jewel box, Miss Nancy had turned and all but screamed at him.
‘Don’t you touch that, Doctor!’
‘Good Lord, woman, you don’t think I’m a thief.’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about this house and this patient. Why do you think the shutters are all
broken, Doctor? Almost fallen off their hinges? Why do you think the plaster’s peeling off the brick?’
She shook her head, the soft flesh of her cheeks wobbling, her colorless mouth set. ‘Just let somebody try
to fix those shutters. Just let someone climb a ladder and try to paint this house.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said the doctor.
‘Don’t ever touch her jewels, Doctor, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t touch a thing around here you don’t
have to. That swimming pool out there, for instance. All choked with leaves and filth like it is, but those
old fountains run into it still, you ever think about that? Just try to turn off those faucets, Doctor!’
‘But who -?’
‘Leave her jewels alone, Doctor. That’s my advice to you.’
‘Would changing things make her speak?’ he asked boldly, impatient with all this, and not afraid of this
aunt the way he was of Miss Carl.
The woman laughed. ‘No, it wouldn’t make her do anything,’ Nancy answered with a sneer. She
slammed the drawer into the bureau. Glass rosary beads tinkled against a small statue of Jesus. ‘Now, if
you’ll excuse me, I have to clean out the bathroom, too.’
He looked at the bearded Jesus, the finger pointing to the crown of thorns around his heart.
Maybe they were all crazy. Maybe he would go crazy himself if he didn’t get out of this house.
Once, when he was alone in the dining room, he’d seen that word again - Lasher - written in the thick
dust on the table. It was done as if by fingertip. Great fancy capital L. Now, what could it possibly mean?
It was dusted away when he came the following afternoon, the only time in fact that he had ever seen the
dust disturbed there, where the silver tea service on the sideboard was tarnished black. Faded the murals
on these walls, yet he could see a plantation scene if he studied them, yes, that same house that was in the
painting in the hall. Only after he had studied the chandelier for a long time did he realize it had never
been wired for electricity. There was wax still on the candle holders. Ah, such a sadness, the whole place.
At night at home in his modern apartment overlooking the lake, he couldn’t stop brooding on his
patient. He wondered if her eyes were open as she lay in bed.
‘Maybe I have an obligation —’ But then what obligation? Her doctor was a reputable psychiatrist.
Wouldn’t do to question his judgment. Wouldn’t do to try anything foolish -like taking her out for a ride
in the country, or bringing a radio to the porch. Or stopping the sedatives to see what would happen!
Or picking up a phone and contacting that daughter, the intern. Made Ellie sign a paper. Twenty-four
years old was plenty old enough to be told a few things about one’s own mother.
And surely common sense dictated a break in Deirdre’s medication once in a while. And what about a
complete reevaluation? He had to at least suggest it.
‘You just give her the shots,’ said the old doctor. ‘Visit with her an hour a day. That’s what you’re
asked to do.’ Slight coldness this time around. Old fool!
No wonder he was so glad the afternoon he had first seen the man visiting her.
It was early September, and still warm. And as he turned in the gate, he saw the man on the screen
porch beside her, obviously talking to her, his arm resting on the back of her chair.
A tall, brown-haired man, rather slender.
The doctor felt a curious possessive feeling. A man he didn’t know with his patient. But he was eager to
meet him actually. Maybe the man would explain things that the women would not. And surely he was a
good friend. There was something intimate in the way he stood so close, the way he inclined towards the
silent Deirdre.
But when the Doctor came out on the porch there was no visitor. And he could find no one in the front
rooms.
‘You know, I saw a man here a while ago,’ he said to the nurse when she came in. ‘He was talking to
Miss Deirdre.’
‘I didn’t see him,’ the nurse had said offhandedly.
Miss Nancy, shelling peas in the kitchen when he found her, stared at him for a long moment, then
shook her head, her chin jutting. ‘I didn’t hear anybody come in.’
Well, isn’t that the damnedest thing! But he had to confess, it had only been for an instant — a glimpse
through the screens. No, but he saw the man there.
‘If only you could speak to me,’ he said to Deirdre when they were alone. He was preparing the
injection. ‘If only you could tell me if you want to have visitors, if it matters…" Her arm was so thin.
When he glanced at her, the needle ready, she was staring at him!
‘Deirdre?’
His heart pounded.
The eyes rolled to the left, and she stared forward, mute and listless as before. And the heat, which the
doctor had come to like, seemed suddenly oppressive. The doctor felt light-headed in fact, as though he
was about to faint. Beyond the blackened dusty screen, the lawn seemed to move.
Now, he’d never fainted in his life, and as he thought that over, as he tried to think it over, he realized
he’d been talking with the man, yes, the man was here, no, not here now, but just had been. They had
been in the middle of a conversation, and now he’d lost the thread, or no, that wasn’t it, it was that he
suddenly couldn’t remember how long they’d been talking, and it was so strange to have been talking all
this time together, and not recall how it started!
He was suddenly trying to clear his head, and have a better look at the guy, but what had the man just
said? It was all very confusing because there was no one there to talk to, no one but her, but yes, he’d just
said to the brown-haired man, ‘Of course, stop the injections…’ and the absolute rectitude of his position
was beyond doubt, the old doctor — ‘A fool, yes!’ said the brown-haired man — would just have to
listen!
This was monstrous all this, and the daughter in California…
He shook himself. He stood up on the porch. What had happened? He had fallen asleep in the wicker
chair. He had been dreaming. The murmur of the bees grew disconcertingly loud in his ears and the
fragrance of the gardenias seemed to drug him suddenly. He looked down over the railing at the patio to
his left. Had something moved there?
Only the limbs of the trees beyond as the breeze traveled through them. He’d seen it a thousand times in
New Orleans, that graceful dance, as if one tree releases the breeze to another. Such lovely embracing
heat. Stop the injections! She will wake.
Slowly, awkwardly, a monarch butterfly climbed the screen in front of him. Gorgeous wings. But
gradually he focused upon the body of the thing, small and glossy and black. It ceased to be a butterfly
and became an insect - loathsome!
‘I have to go home,’ he said aloud to no one. ‘I don’t feel right exactly, I think I should lie down.’
The man’s name. What was it? He’d known it just a moment ago, such a remarkable name — ah, so
that’s what the word means, you are — Actually, quite beautiful — But wait. It was happening again. He
would not let it!
‘Miss Nancy!’ He stood up out of the chair.
His patient stared forward, unchanged, the heavy emerald pendant gleaming against her gown. All the
world was filled with green light, with shivering leaves, the faint blur of the bougainvillea.
‘Yes, the heat,’ he whispered. ‘Have 1 given her the shot?’ Good Lord. He had actually dropped the
syringe, and it had broken.
‘You called for me, Doctor?’ said Miss Nancy. There she stood in the parlor door, staring at him,
wiping her hands on her apron. The colored woman was there too, and the nurse behind her.
‘Nothing, just the heat,’ he murmured. ‘I dropped it, the needle. But I have another, of course.’
How they looked at him, studied him. You think I’m going crazy, too?
It was on the following Friday afternoon that he saw the man again.
The doctor was late, he’d had an emergency at the sanitarium. He was sprinting up First Street in the
early fall dusk. He didn’t want to disturb the family dinner. He was running by the time he reached the
gate.
The man was standing in the shadows of the open front porch. He watched the doctor, his arms folded,
his shoulder against the porch column, his eyes dark and rather wide, as though he were lost in
contemplation. Tall, slender, clothes beautifully fitted.
‘Ah, so there you are,’ the doctor murmured aloud. Flush of relief. He had his hand out as he came up
the steps. ‘Dr Petrie is my name, how do you do?’
And - how to describe it? There was simply no man there.
‘Now, I know this happened!’ he said to Miss Carl in the kitchen. ‘I saw him on that porch and he
vanished into thin air.’
‘Well, what business is it of ours what you saw, Doctor?’ said the woman. Strange choice of words.
And she was so hard, this lady. Nothing feeble about her in her old age. She stood very straight in her
dark blue gabardine suit, glaring at him through her wire-rimmed glasses, her mouth withered to a thin
line.
‘Miss Carl, I’ve seen this man with my patient. Now the patient, as we all know, is a helpless woman. If
an unidentified person is coming and going on these premises -’
But the words were unimportant. Either the woman didn’t believe him or the woman didn’t care. And
Miss Nancy, at the kitchen table, never even looked up from her plate as she scraped up the food noisily
onto her fork. But the look on Miss Millie’s face, ah, now that was something - old Miss Millie so clearly
disturbed, her eyes darting from him to Carl and back again.
What a household.
He was irritated as he stepped into the dusty little elevator and pressed the black button in the brass
plate.
The velvet drapes were closed and the bedroom was almost dark, the little candles spluttering in their
red glasses. The shadow of the Virgin leapt on the wall. He couldn’t find the light switch immediately.
And when he did, only a single tiny bulb went on in the lamp beside the bed. The open jewel box was
right next to it. What a spectacular thing.
When he saw the woman lying there with her eyes open, he felt a catch in his throat. Her black hair was
brushed out over the stained pillowcase. There was a flush of unfamiliar color in her cheeks.
Did her lips move?
‘Lasher…’
A whisper. What had she said? Why, she’d said Lasher, hadn’t she? The name he’d seen on the tree
trunk and in the dust of the dining table. And he had heard that name spoken somewhere else… That’s
why he knew it was a name. It sent the chills up his back and neck, this catatonic patient actually
speaking. But no, he must have been imagining it. It was just the thing he wanted so to happen - the
miracle change in her. She lay as ever in her trance. Enough Thorazine to kill some’ body else…
He set down the bag on the side of the bed. He filled the syringe carefully, thinking as he had several
times before, what if you just didn’t, just cut it down to half, or a fourth, or none and sat by her and
watched and what if - He saw himself suddenly picking her up and taking her out of the house. He saw
himself driving her out into the country. They walked hand in hand on a path through the grass until
they’d come to the levee above the river. And there she smiled, her hair blowing in the wind
What nonsense. Here it was six thirty, and the shot was long overdue. And the syringe was ready.
Suddenly something pushed him. He was sure of it, though where he had been pushed he couldn’t say.
He went down, his legs buckling, and the syringe went flying.
When he caught himself he was on his knees in the semidark, staring at motes of dust gathered on the
bare floor beneath the bed.
‘What the hell -’ he’d said aloud before he could catch himself. He couldn’t find the hypodermic
needle. Then he saw it, yards away, beyond the armoire. It was broken, smashed, as if someone had
stepped on it. All the Thorazine had oozed out of the crushed plastic vial onto the bare boards.
‘Now, wait a minute!’ he whispered. He picked it up and stood holding the ruined thing in his hands. Of
course he had other syringes, but this was the second time this sort of thing
… And he found himself at the bedside again, staring down at the motionless patient, thinking, now
how exactly did this — I mean, what in God’s name is going on?
摘要：

TheMayfairWitchesTrilogyVolume1TheWITCHINGHOURAnneRiceWithLove:FORStanRiceandChristopherRiceFORJohnPrestonFORAliceO‘BrienBorchardt,TamaraO‘BrienTinker,KarenO‘Brien,andMickiO‘BrienCollinsANDFORDorothyVanSeverO‘Brien,whoboughtmemyfirsttypewriterin1959,takingthetimeandtroubletoseethatitwasagoodone.Andt...

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