The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches, #1)

by Anne Rice

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some boy or girl had carved the word Lasher into the thick

trunk of the giant crepe myrtle that grew against the far fence.

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.

had borne a girl child at eighteen, given it up, suffered “severe paranoia.”

She had “run away” at one point, been “forcibly committed” again.

“Patient sent home, Thorazine prescribed to prevent palsy, mania.”

One of the first women ever to graduate from the Loyola School of Law.

“And how Stella loved to swim here,” the old woman said. “It

Stella would do. Stella gave such parties.

“Poor darling Stella.”

It’s Ellie Mayfair who sends those pictures.”

you can’t argue with them. And you don’t want to tangle with Carlotta Mayfair.

The specter was protecting her!

And he was thinking about the south again, about summer evenings in New Orleans when the jasmine was blooming.

Summer breeze makes me feel fine blowing thru the jasmine in my mind …

He dreamed of being Maxim de Winter.

Michael was ashamed of this hate. He was ashamed as Pip had been ashamed of such a hate of his own in Great Expectations. But the more he learned and the more he saw, the more the disdain grew in him.

To think that all these years he had not smelled that sweet, heavy scent, and had not seen the sky behind the oaks catch fire, so each tiny leaf was suddenly distinct. The flagstones buckled over the roots of the oaks.

He saw the long iron lace railings of that First Street house, the side porch with its sagging screens. And the man in the garden. So strange that the man never changed. And that last May, on the very last walk that Michael had ever taken through those streets, he had nodded to the man, and the man had lifted his hand and waved.

him. The barrier is falling away between the living and dead. Come through. But the woman with the black hair said, “Remember, you have a choice.”

He was sleeping again. The wind was blowing. The drums of the Mystic Krewe of Comus filled him with fear. Was it a warning? Why don’t you jump, said the mean housekeeper to the poor frightened woman at the window in the movie Rebecca. Had he changed the tape? He could not remember that. But we are at Manderley now, aren’t we? He could have sworn it was Miss Havisham. And then he heard her whisper in Estella’s ear, “You can break his heart.” Pip heard it too, but still he fell in love with her.

He sank back into the bed, back into the dreams. Walking through Miss Havisham’s house. The man in the garden nodded again.

Don’t try to put it all together. Talk of devils from a small child still echoing in your ears after all this time! Once you’ve seen the man, you’re done for.

“A witch is a person who can attract and manipulate unseen forces,”

The slaves regarded Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angélique, and Marie Claudette as powerful sorceresses.

There are books still in existence that were written by this doctor, Jan van Abel. “I know who he is,” she said. “He was an anatomist.”

“All the Mayfairs since are Charlotte’s descendants. And in each generation of those descendants down to the present time at least one woman has inherited the powers of Suzanne and Deborah, which included, among other things, the ability to see this brown-haired man, this spirit. And they are what the Talamasca calls the Mayfair Witches.”

Suzanne, Deborah, and Charlotte; Jeanne Louise, Angélique, and Marie Claudette; followed in Louisiana by Marguerite, Katherine, and Mary Beth. Then come Stella, Antha, Deirdre. And finally you, Rowan! The thirteenth is simply the strongest, Rowan, the one who can be the doorway for this thing to come through. You are the doorway, Rowan.

“How sweet of them to think of it,” Rowan said. “And so it’s our wedding night, Rowan,” Michael said. “And the clock’s just stopped chiming. It’s the witching hour, darlin’, and we have it all to ourselves.”