The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

explained quickly. He went over everything that happened. He was heading for the coat closet near the butler’s pantry as he spoke, Felix tagging after him. He put on his heavy coat, and picked up the flashlight.
    “But what are you doing?” Felix asked.
    “I have to go outside. I have to look for her.”
    The rain was light, little more than a drizzle. He hurried down the front steps and walked around the side of the house till he was standing beneath the large library window. He had never been on this exact spot before. He’d seldom even driven his car along the gravel drive here to the back of the property. The whole foundation was elevated of course, and there was no ledge on which Marchent, a living breathing Marchent, could have been standing.
    The window was bright with the lamplight above him, and the oak forest stretching out to his right beyond the gravel drive was impenetrably dark, and filled with the sounds of the dripping rain, the rain forever working its way through leaves and branches.
    He saw the tall slim figure of Felix looking out through the window, but Felix did not appear to see him down there looking up. Felix appeared to be looking off into the blackness.
    Reuben stood very still, letting the light drizzle dampen his hair and his face, and then he turned and, bracing himself, he looked off into the oak forest. He could see almost nothing.
    A terrible pessimism came over him, an anxiety bordering on panic. Could he feel her presence? No, he couldn’t. And that she might, in some spiritual form, some personal form, be lost in that darkness terrified him.
    Slowly he made his way back to the front door, looking off into the night all around him. How vast and foreboding it seemed, and how distant and hideously impersonal the roar of the ocean he couldn’t see.
    Only the house was visible, the house with its grand designs, and lighted windows, the house like a bulwark against chaos.
    Felix was waiting in the open door, and helped him with his coat.
    He sank down in the chair by the library fire, in the big wing chair that Felix usually claimed early every evening.
    “But I did see her,” Reuben said. “She was there, vivid, in her negligee, the one she wore the night she was killed. There was blood on it, all over it.” It tormented him suddenly to relive it. He felt for a second time the same alarm he’d experienced when he first looked up at her face. “She was … unhappy. She was … asking me for something, wanting something.”
    Felix stood there quietly with his arms folded. But he made no effort to disguise the pain he was feeling.
    “The rain,” said Reuben, “it had no effect on her, on the apparition, whatever it was. She was shining, no, glistening. Felix, she was looking in, wanting something. She was like Peter Quint in
The Turn of the Screw
. She was looking for someone or something.”
    Silence.
    “What did you feel when you saw her?” Felix asked.
    “Terror,” said Reuben. “And I think she knew it. I think she might have been disappointed.”
    Again, Felix was silent. Then after a moment, he spoke up again, his voice very polite, and calm.
    “Why did you feel terror,” he asked.
    “Because it was … Marchent,” Reuben said, trying not to stammer. “And it had to mean that Marchent is existing somewhere. It had to mean that Marchent is conscious somewhere, and not in some lovely hereafter, but here. Doesn’t it have to mean that?”
    Shame. The old shame. He’d met her, loved her, and failed utterly to stop her murder. Yet from her he had inherited this house
.
    “I don’t know what it means,” said Felix. “I have never been a seer of spirits. Spirits come to those who can see them.”
    “You do believe me.”
    “Of course I do,” he said. “It wasn’t some shadowy shape as you’re describing it—.”
    “Utterly clear.” Again his words came in a rush. “I saw the pearlson her negligee. The lace. I saw this old heavy lace, kind of dagged