The Witching Hour by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

completely remember!
    He had sat up, brushing one of the needles out of his arms and asked for a pen and paper.
    “You have to lie still.”
    “Not now. I have to write it down.” But there was nothing to write! He remembered standing on the rock, thinking of that long-ago summer in Florida, of the warm waters … Then the wet soaked cold aching thing that he was, on the stretcher.
    All of it gone.
    He had shut his eyes, trying to ignore the strange warmth in his hands, and the nurse pushing him back against the pillows. Somebody was asking Jimmy to go out of the room. Jimmy didn’t want to go. Why was he seeing all these strange irrelevant things—flashes of orderlies again, and the nurse’s husband, and these names, why did he know all these names?
    “Don’t touch me like that,” he said. It was the experience out there, over the ocean, that’s what mattered!
    Suddenly he reached for the pen. “If you’ll be very quiet … ”
    Yes, an image when he touched the pen, of the nurse getting it out of the drawer at the hallway station. And the paper, image of a man putting the tablet in a metal locker. And the bedsidetable? Image of the woman who’d last wiped it clean, with a rag full of germs from another room. And some flash of a man with a radio. Somebody doing something with a radio.
    And the bed? The last patient in it, Mrs. Ona Patrick, died at eleven A.M. yesterday, before he’d even decided to go to Ocean Beach.
No. Turn it off!
Flash of her body in the hospital morgue. “I can’t stand this!”
    “What’s wrong, Michael?” said Dr. Morris. “Talk to me.” Jimmy was arguing in the hall. He could hear Stacy’s voice, Stacy and Jimmy were his best friends.
    He was trembling. “Yeah, sure,” he whispered to the doctor. “I’ll talk to you. Just so long as you don’t touch me.”
    In desperation he had put his hands to his own head, run his fingers through his own hair, and mercifully he felt nothing. He was drifting into sleep again, thinking, well, it will come as it did before, she’ll be there and I’ll understand. But even as he nodded off, he realized he didn’t know who this
she
was.
    But he had to go home, yes, home after all these years, these long years in which home had become some sort of fantasy … 
    “Back to where I was born,” he whispered. So hard now to talk. So sleepy. “If you give me any more drugs, I swear I’ll kill you.”
    It was his friend, Jimmy, who brought the leather gloves the next day. Michael hadn’t thought it would work. But it was worth a try. He was in a state of agitation bordering on madness. And he had been talking too much, to everybody.
    When reporters rang the room direct, he told them in a great rush “what was going on.” When they pushed their way into the room, he talked on and on, recounting it again and again, repeating “I can’t remember!” They gave him things to touch; he told them what he saw. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
    The cameras went off with their myriad shuffling electronic sounds. The hospital staff threw the reporters out. Michael was scared to touch even a fork or a knife. He wouldn’t eat. Staff members came from all over the hospital to place objects in his hands.
    In the shower, he touched the wall. He saw that woman, that dead woman again. She’d been in this room three weeks. “I don’t want to take a shower,” she’d said. “I’m sick, don’t you understand?” Her daughter-in-law had made her stand there. He had to get out of the stall. He fell down exhausted in the bed, shoving his hands under the pillow.
    There had been a few flashes as he first smoothed the tight leather gloves over his fingers. Then he rubbed his hands togetherslowly, so that everything was a blur, image piling upon image until nothing was distinct, and all the various names tumbling through his mind made a noise—then quiet.
    Slowly he reached for the knife on the supper tray. He was seeing something but it was pale,