The Witching Hour Read Online Free Page A

and glossy and black. It ceased to be a butterfly and became an insect—loathsome!
    “I have to go home,” he said aloud to no one. “I don’t feel right exactly, I think I should lie down.”
    The man’s name. What was it? He’d known it just a moment ago, such a remarkable name—ah, so that’s what the word means, you are—Actually, quite beautiful—But wait. It was happening again. He would not let it!
    “Miss Nancy!” He stood up out of the chair.
    His patient stared forward, unchanged, the heavy emerald pendant gleaming against her gown. All the world was filled with green light, with shivering leaves, the faint blur of the bougainvillea.
    “Yes, the heat,” he whispered. “Have I given her the shot?” Good Lord. He had actually dropped the syringe, and it had broken.
    “You called for me, Doctor?” said Miss Nancy. There she stood in the parlor door, staring at him, wiping her hands on her apron. The colored woman was there too, and the nurse behind her.
    “Nothing, just the heat,” he murmured. “I dropped it, the needle. But I have another, of course.”
    How they looked at him, studied him.
You think I’m going crazy, too?
    It was on the following Friday afternoon that he saw the man again.
    The doctor was late, he’d had an emergency at the sanitarium. He was sprinting up First Street in the early fall dusk. He didn’t want to disturb the family dinner. He was running by the time he reached the gate.
    The man was standing in the shadows of the open front porch. He watched the doctor, his arms folded, his shoulder against the porch column, his eyes dark and rather wide, as though he were lost in contemplation. Tall, slender, clothes beautifully fitted.
    “Ah, so there you are,” the doctor murmured aloud. Flush of relief. He had his hand out as he came up the steps. “Dr. Petrie is my name, how do you do?”
    And—how to describe it? There was simply no man there.
    “Now, I know this happened!” he said to Miss Carl in the kitchen. “I saw him on that porch and he vanished into thin air.”
    “Well, what business is it of ours what you saw, Doctor?” said the woman. Strange choice of words. And she was so hard,this lady. Nothing feeble about her in her old age. She stood very straight in her dark blue gabardine suit, glaring at him through her wire-rimmed glasses, her mouth withered to a thin line.
    “Miss Carl, I’ve seen this man with my patient. Now the patient, as we all know, is a helpless woman. If an unidentified person is coming and going on these premises—”
    But the words were unimportant. Either the woman didn’t believe him or the woman didn’t care. And Miss Nancy, at the kitchen table, never even looked up from her plate as she scraped up the food noisily onto her fork. But the look on Miss Millie’s face, ah, now that was something—old Miss Millie so clearly disturbed, her eyes darting from him to Carl and back again.
    What a household.
    He was irritated as he stepped into the dusty little elevator and pressed the black button in the brass plate.
    The velvet drapes were closed and the bedroom was almost dark, the little candles sputtering in their red glasses. The shadow of the Virgin leapt on the wall. He couldn’t find the light switch immediately. And when he did, only a single tiny bulb went on in the lamp beside the bed. The open jewel box was right next to it. What a spectacular thing.
    When he saw the woman lying there with her eyes open, he felt a catch in his throat. Her black hair was brushed out over the stained pillowcase. There was a flush of unfamiliar color in her cheeks.
    Did her lips move?
    “Lasher … ”
    A whisper. What had she said? Why, she’d said Lasher, hadn’t she? The name he’d seen on the tree trunk and in the dust of the dining table. And he had heard that name spoken somewhere else … That’s why he knew it was a name. It sent the chills up his back and neck, this catatonic patient actually speaking. But no, he must