The Witching Hour (158 page)

“And suppose I told you it was finished now, Lasher, that I would never recognize you again. That I would not be the doorway. That I am the doorway for the Mayfairs into the future centuries, the doorway for my unborn child, and for things of which I dream with my ambition.”

“Small things, Rowan. Nothing compared to the mysteries
and possibilities which I offer you. Imagine, Rowan, when the mutation is complete and I have a body, infused with my timeless spirit, what you can learn from this.”

“And if it’s done, Lasher, if the doorway is opened, and the fusion is effected, and you stand before me, flesh and blood, how will you treat me then?”

“I would love you beyond all human reason, Rowan, for you would be my mother and my creator, and my teacher. How could I not love you? And how tragic my need of you will be. I will cleave to you to learn how to move with my new limbs, how to see, how to speak and laugh. I will be as a helpless infant in your hands. Can’t you see? I would worship you, my beloved Rowan. I would be your instrument in anything that you wished, and twenty times as strong as I am now. Why do you cry? Why are there tears in your eyes?”

“It’s a trick, it’s a trick of sound and light, the spell you induce.”

“No. I am what I am, Rowan. It’s your reason which weakens you. You see far. You always have. Twelve crypts and one doorway, Rowan.”

“I don’t understand. You play with me. You confuse me. I can’t follow anymore.”

Silence and that sound again, as if the whole air were sighing. Sadness, sadness enveloping her like a cloud, and the undulating layers of smoky shadow moving the length of the room, weaving through and around the chandeliers, filling the mirrors with darkness.

“You’re all around me, aren’t you?”

“I love you,” he said, and his voice was low again as a whisper and close to her. She thought she felt lips touch her cheek. She stiffened, but she had become so drowsy.

“Move away from me,” she said. “I want to be left alone now. I have no obligation to love you.”

“Rowan, what can I give you, what gift can I bring?”

Again, something brushed her face, something touched her, bringing the chills up over her body. Her nipples were hard beneath the silk of the nightgown, and a low throbbing had started inside her, a hunger she could feel all through her throat and her chest.

She tried to clear her vision. It was dark in here now. The fire had burnt down. But only moments ago it had been a blaze.

“You’re playing tricks on me.” The air seemed to be touching her all over. “You’ve played tricks on Michael.”

“No.” It was a soft kiss against her ear.

“When he was drowned, the visions. You made them!”

“No, Rowan. He was not here. I could not follow him to where he went. I am of the living only.”

“Did you make the ghosts he saw when he was alone here that night, when he went alone into the pool?”

“No.”

She shivered all over, her hands up to brush away the sensations as if she’d been caught in cobwebs.

“Did you see the ghosts Michael saw?”

“Yes, but through Michael’s eyes, I saw them.”

“What were they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“They were images of the dead, Rowan. I am of this earth. I do not know the dead. Do not talk to me of the dead. I do not know of God or of anything which is not of the earth.”

“God! But what is this earth?” Something touching the back of her neck, gently lifting the tendrils of her hair.

“Here, Rowan, the realm in which you exist and the realm in which I exist, parallel and intermingled yet separate, in the physical world. I am physical, Rowan—natural as anything else which is of the earth. I burn for you, Rowan, in a purity in which fire has no end, in this our world.”

“The ghosts Michael saw on our wedding night,” she said, “in this very room. You made him see them.”

“No.”

“Did you see them?” Like a feather stroking her cheek.

“Through Michael’s eyes. I do not have all the answers you demand of me.”

Something touching her breasts, something stroking her breasts and her thighs. She curled her legs back under her. The hearth was cold now.

“Get away from me!” she whispered. “You
are
evil.”

“No.”

“Do you come from hell?”

“You play with me. I am in hell, desiring to give you pleasure.”

“Stop. I want to get up now. I’m sleepy. I don’t want to stay here.”

She turned and looked at the blackened fireplace. There were no embers anymore. Her eyes were heavy and so were her limbs. She struggled to her feet, clinging to the mantel. But she knew she could not possibly reach the steps. She turned, and sank down again on her knees and stretched out on the soft Chinese rug. Like silk beneath her, and the hardness and the cool air felt so good to her. She felt she was dreaming when she looked up
into the chandelier. The white plaster medallion appeared to be moving, its acanthus leaves curling and writhing.

All the words she’d heard were suddenly swimming in her brain. Something touching her face. Her nipples throbbed and her sex throbbed. She thought of Michael miles and miles away from her, and she felt anguish. She had been so wrong to underestimate this being.

“I love you, Rowan.”

“You’re above me, aren’t you?” She stared up into the shadows, thankful for the coolness, because she was burning as if she’d absorbed all the heat of the fire. She could feel the moisture pumping between her legs, and her body was opening like a flower. Stroking the inside of her thighs where the skin was always softest and had no down, and her legs were turning outward like petals opening.

“I’m telling you to stop, that I’ll hate it.”

“Love you, my darling.” Kissing her ears, and her lips, and then her breasts. The sucking came hard, rhythmic, teeth grazing her nipples.

“I can’t stand it,” she whispered, but she meant the very opposite, that she would cry out in agony if it stopped.

Her arms were flung out, and the nightgown was being lifted off her. She heard the silk tearing and then the cloth was loose and she was sweetly, deliciously naked lying there, the hands stroking her sex, only they weren’t hands. It was Lasher, Lasher sucking her and stroking her, lips on her ears, on her eyelids, all of his immense presence wrapped around her, even under her, stroking the small of her back, and parting her backside and stroking the nether mouth.

Yes, opening, like the dark purple iris in the garden. Like the roses exploding on the ends of their coarsened and darkened stems and the leaves with so many points and tiny veins to them. She tossed and twisted on the carpet.

And when she writhed like a cat in heat
 … Go away, old woman, you are not here! This is my time now.

“Yes, your time, our time.”

Tongues licked her nipples, lips closing on them, pulling them, teeth scratching her nipples.

“Harder, rougher. Rape me, do it! Use your power.”

He lifted her so that her head fell backwards, her hair tumbling down beneath her, her eyes closed, hands parting her sex, parting her thighs.

“Come in to me, hard, make yourself a man for me, a hard man!”

The mouths drew harder on her nipples, the tongues lapping
at her breasts, her belly, the fingers pulling at her backside and scratching at her thighs. “The cock,” she whispered, and then she felt it, enormous and hard, driving into her. “Yes, do it, tear me, do it! Override me, do it!” Her senses were flooded with the smell of clean, hard flesh and clean hair, as the weight bore down on her and the cock slammed into her, yes, harder, make it rape. Glimpse of a face, dark green eyes, lips. And then a blur as the lips opened her lips.

Her body was pinned to the carpet, and the cock burned her as it drove inside her, scraping her clitoris, plunging deeper into her vagina. I can’t stand it, I can’t bear it. Split me apart, yes. Laid waste. The orgasm flooded through her, her mind blank except for the raging flow of colors like waves as the rollicking sensation washed up through her belly, and her breast and her face, and down through her thighs, stiffening her calves, and through the muscles of her feet. She heard her own cries, but they were far away, unimportant, flowing out of her mouth in a divine release, her body pumping and helpless and stripped of will and mind.

Again and again, it exploded in her, scalding her. Over and over, until all time, all guilt, all thought was burnt away.

Morning. Was there a baby crying? No. Only the phone ringing. Unimportant.

She lay in the bed, beneath the covers, naked. The sun was streaming in the windows on the front of the house. The memory of it came back to her, and a hurtful throbbing started in her. The phone, or was it a baby crying? A baby somewhere far off in the house. Half in dream she saw its little limbs working, bent knees, chubby little feet.

“My darling,” he whispered.

“Lasher,” she answered.

The sound of the crying had died away. Her eyes closed on the vision of the shining windowpanes and the tangle of the oak limbs over the sky.

When she opened them again, she stared up into his green eyes, into his dark face, exquisitely formed. She touched the silk of his lip with her finger, all his hard weight pressed down on her, his cock between her legs.

“God, yes, God, you are so strong.”

“With you, my beauty.” The lips revealed the barest glint of white teeth as the words were formed. “With you, my divine one.”

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 her 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. You 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.