The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

At first I thought he did not remember me or the incident in question, so vague did he seem. Then he appeared to recognize me. He became excited.

"Come in the back with me," he said, and as he struggled to rise from the desk I lent him a hand. He was unsteady on his feet. We passed through a dusty curtained doorway into a small storage room, and there he stopped just as if he were staring at something, but I could see nothing.

He gave a strange little laugh and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. Then he took out a box, and with trembling hands, he removed a packet of photographs. These were all of Julien. He gave them to me. It seemed he wanted to say something but he couldn't find the words.

"I cannot tell you what this means to me," I said.

"I know," he answered. "That is why I want you to have them. You are the only person who has ever understood about Julien."

I felt sad then, dreadfully sad. Had I understood? I suppose I had. He had caused the figure of Julien Mayfair to come to life for me, and I had found it a seductive figure.

"My life might have been different," he said, "had I not met Julien. No one ever after seemed to measure up, you see. And then the store, well, I fell back on the store, and didn't really accomplish very much in the long run."

Then he appeared to shrug it all off, and he smiled.

I put several questions to him but he only shrugged them off too. Finally one caught his attention.

"Did Julien suffer when he died?" I asked.

He became absorbed, then he shook his head. "No, not really. He didn't much care for being paralyzed, of course. Who would? But he loved books. I read to him all the time. He died in the early morning. I know because I was with him till two o'clock, and then I blew out the lamp and went downstairs.

"Well, around six o'clock a storm waked me. It was raining so hard it was coming in at the windowsills. And the limbs of the maple tree outside were making quite a racket. I ran up at once to see to Julien. His bed was right by the window.

"And what do you think? He had somehow managed to sit up, and open the window; and there he was, dead, across the windowsill, his eyes closed, looking quite peaceful, as if he'd wanted a breath of fresh air, and when he had had it he gave up, just like that, falling dead as if he were falling asleep, with his head to one side. Would have been a very peaceful scene if it hadn't been for the storm, for the rain pouring in on him and even the leaves blowing into the room.

"They said later it was a massive stroke. They couldn't figure how he had ever managed to open the window. I never said anything, but you know it occurred to me ... "

"Yes?" I prodded him.

He gave a little shrug and then went on, his speech extremely slurred. "Mary Beth went mad when I called her. She pulled him off the windowsill and back onto the pillow. She even slapped him. 'Wake up, Julien,' she said. 'Julien, don't leave me yet!' I had a hell of a time closing that window. Then one of the panes blew out. It was dreadful.

"And that horrible Carlotta came up. All the others were coming to kiss him, you know, and to pay their respects, and Millie Dear, Remy's daughter, you know, was helping us with the bedcovers. But that dreadful Carlotta wouldn't go near him, wouldn't even help us. She stood there on the landing, with her hands clasped, like a little nun, just staring at the door.

"And Belle, precious Belle. Belle, the angel. She came in with her doll, and she started crying. Then Stella climbed in the bed and lay beside him, with her hand over his chest.

"Belle said, 'Wake up, Oncle Julien.' I guess she had heard her mama say it. And Julien, poor sweet Julien. He was such a peaceful picture, finally, with his head on the pillow, and his eyes closed."

Llewellyn smiled and shook his head, then he began to laugh softly under his breath as though remembering something that aroused tenderness in him. He said something but it wasn't clear. Then he cleared his throat with difficulty. "That Stella," he said. "Everybody loved Stella. Except Carlotta. Carlotta never did ... " His voice trailed off.

I pressed him further, once more asking the sort o

f leading questions I made it a rule to avoid. I broached the subject of a ghost. So many people said the house was haunted.

"I should think if it was, you would have known," I said.

I could not tell if he understood me. He made his way back to his desk and sat down, and just when I was quite certain he'd forgotten me altogether, he said that there was something in the house, but he didn't know how to explain it.

"There were things," he said, and that look of revulsion came over him again. "And I could have sworn they all knew about it. Sometimes it was just a sense ... a sense of somebody always watching."

"Was there more to it than that?" I pressed, being young and ruthless and full of curiosity, and not knowing yet what it means to be old.

"I told Julien about it," he said, "I said it was there in the room with us, you know, that we weren't alone, and that it was ... watching us. But he would just laugh it off, the way he laughed at everything. He would tell me not to be so self-conscious. But I could swear it was there! It came when, you know, Julien and I were ... together."

"Was it something you saw?"

"Only at the end," he said. He said something else but I couldn't understand it. When I pressed, he shook his head, and pressed his lips together for emphasis as he did it. Then he dropped his voice to a whisper. "Must have imagined it. But I could swear in those last days when Julien was so sick, that the thing was there, definitely there. It was in Julien's room, it was in the bed with him."

He looked up at me to gauge my reaction. His mouth turned down at the ends and he was scowling, his eyes glaring up at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

"Awful, awful thing," he whispered, shaking his head. He shivered. "Did you see it?"

He looked away. I asked him several more questions, but I knew I had lost him. When he answered again, I caught something about the others knowing about that thing, knowing and pretending they didn't.

Then he looked up at me again and he said, "They didn't want me to know that they knew. They all knew. I told Julien, 'There's somebody else in this house, and you know it, and you know what it likes, and what it wants, and you won't tell me you know,' and he said, 'Come now, Richard,' and he'd use all his ... persuasion, so to speak, to you know, make me forget about it. And then that last week, that awful last week, it was there, in that bed. I know it was. I woke up in the chair and I saw it. I did. I saw it. It was the ghost of a man, and it was making love to Julien. Oh, God, what a sight. Because you see, I knew it wasn't real. Wasn't real at all. Couldn't be. And yet I could see it."