Free The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice

then the entire scene went dark. He was standing in the silent empty hallway, trembling, sweating, and the door to Marchent’s room was closed.
    In a fury, he opened the door and walked into the darkened room. Groping for the wall button he found it and snapped on a collection of scattered small lamps.
    The sweat broke out all over his chest and arms. His fingers were slippery with it. The wolf change had stopped. The wolf hair was gone now. But he still felt the pringling and the tremors in his hands and feet. And he forced himself to take several slow breaths.
    No sound of a radio, no sight of a radio even, and all the room as he remembered it from the last time he’d inspected it before Felix and Margon and the others had ever come.
    The windows were done in elaborate white-lace-ruffled curtains, and so was the canopy of the heavy brass four-poster bed. An old-fashioned dressing table in the far-north corner had been fitted with a skirt in the same starched white-lace ruffles. The bedspread was pink chintz and the overstuffed love seat by the fire was covered in the same fabric. There was a desk, ultra-feminine like all the rest, with Queen Anne legs, and white bookshelves half filled with a few hardcover books.
    The closet door was ajar. Nothing inside but a half-dozen padded clothes hangers. Pretty. Some were covered in toile, others in pastel silk. Perfumed. Just there on the closet bar, empty hangers—a symbol for him suddenly of loss, of the horrid reality of Marchent having vanished into death.
    Dust on the shelves above. Dust on the hardwood floor. Nothing to be found, nothing to which a vagrant spirit might have sadly attached itself—if that’s what vagrant spirits did.
    “Marchent,” he whispered. He put his hand to his forehead, then took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from it. “Marchent,please,” he whispered again. He couldn’t remember from the lore he’d heard all his life whether a ghost could read your mind. “Marchent, help me,” he offered, but his whisper sounded huge in the empty room, and as unnerving to him suddenly as everything else.
    The bathroom was empty and immaculate, with empty cabinets. No radio to be seen. Smell of bleach.
    How pretty the wallpaper was, an old toile pattern with pastoral figures, in blue and white. This was like the pattern on the padded hangers.
    He imagined her bathing in the long oval claw-foot tub, and a wave of her intimate presence caught him off guard, fragments of their moments in each other’s arms on that ghastly night, fragments of her warm face against his, and her soft soothing voice.
    He turned and inspected the scene before him, and then slowly he made his way to the bed. It wasn’t a high bed at all, and he sat down on the side of it, facing the windows, and he closed his eyes.
    “Marchent, help me,” he said under his breath. “Help me. What is it, Marchent?” If he’d ever known sorrow like this before, he couldn’t remember it. His soul was shaken. And suddenly he began to cry. The whole world seemed empty to him, devoid of any hope, of any possibility of dreams. “I’m so sorry about what happened,” he said thickly. “Marchent, I came as soon as I heard you scream. I swear to God, I did, but they were too much for me, the two of them, and besides, I was just too late.”
    He bowed his head. “Tell me what it is you want of me, please,” he said. He was crying just like a child now. He thought of Felix downstairs in the library last night, asking himself why he had never come home during all those years, feeling such awful regret. He thought of Felix in the hallway last night saying so dejectedly, “Why should she want me to have anything … after the way I abandoned her?”
    He took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose and mouth.
    “I can’t answer for Felix,” he said. “I don’t know why he did what he did. Or if I do, I can’t say. But I can tell you that I love you. I would have given my life to stop