Free The Witching Hour by Anne Rice Page A

public library.
    The visit of Aunt Vivian was brief. His mother’s sister came to town on a train. They met her at Union Station. She stayedat the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles, and the evening after her arrival she invited Michael and his mother and father to join her for dinner at the Caribbean Room. This was the fancy dining room in the Pontchartrain Hotel. Michael’s father said no. He wasn’t going into a place like that. Besides, his suit was at the cleaners.
    Michael went, the little man, all dressed up, walking through the Garden District with his mother.
    The Caribbean Room quite astonished him. It was a near silent, eerie world of candlelight, white tablecloths, and waiters who looked like ghosts, or better yet, they looked like the vampires in the horror movies, with their black jackets and stiff white shirts.
    But the true revelation was that Michael’s mother and her sister were entirely at home in this place, laughing softly as they talked, asking the waiter this and that about the turtle soup, the sherry, the white wine they’d have with dinner.
    This gave Michael an enhanced respect for his mother. She wasn’t a lady who just put on airs. She really was used to that life. And he understood now why she sometimes cried and said she’d like to go home to San Francisco.
    After her sister left, she was sick for days. She lay in bed, refusing everything but wine, which she called her medicine. Michael sat by her, reading to her now and then, getting scared when she didn’t speak for an hour. She got well. She got up, and then life went on.
    But Michael often thought of that dinner, of the easy and natural way the two ladies had been together. Often he walked by the Pontchartrain Hotel. He looked with quiet envy at the well-dressed people who stood outside, under the awning, waiting for their taxis or limousines. Was he just greedy to want to live in their world? Wasn’t all that beauty spiritual? He puzzled over so many things. He was bursting with desires to learn, to understand, to possess. Yet he wound up next door in Smith’s Drugstore reading the horror comics.
    Then came the accidental discovery at the public library. Michael had only recently learned about the library itself, and the accidental discovery came in stages.
    Michael was in the children’s reading room, roaming about, looking for something easy and fun to read when he suddenly saw, open for display on top of a bookcase, a new stiff-backed book on the game of chess—a book that told one how to play it.
    Now, chess had always struck Michael as highly romantic. But how he knew of it he couldn’t have told anyone. He’d neverseen a chess set in real life. He checked out the book, took it home, and began to read it. His father saw it and laughed. He knew how to play chess, played it all the time, he said, at the firehouse. You couldn’t learn it from a book. That was stupid.
    Michael said that he could learn it from the book, he was learning it.
    “OK, you learn it,” his father said, “and I’ll play it with you.”
    This was a great thing. Another person who knew chess. Maybe they would even buy a chessboard. Michael finished the book in less than a week. He knew chess. For an hour he answered every question his father put to him.
    “Well, I don’t believe this,” his father said. “But you know how to play chess. All you need is a chess set.” Michael’s father went downtown. When he returned home, he had a chess set that surpassed all Michael’s visions. It was made up not of symbols—a horse’s head, a castle, a bishop’s cap—but of fully delineated figures. The knight sat upon his horse with its front feet raised; the bishop held his hands in prayer. The queen had long hair beneath her crown. The rook was a castle riding upon the back of an elephant.
    Of course it was made of plastic, this thing. It had come from D. H. Holmes department store. But it was so much finer than anything pictured in the book on chess