{"product_id":"the-witching-hour-isbn-9780345367891","title":"The Witching Hour","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the first installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series!\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Extraordinary . . . Anne Rice offers more than just a story; she creates myth.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eRowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of \u003ci\u003eher\u003c\/i\u003e past and \u003ci\u003ehis\u003c\/i\u003e unwelcome gift, an intricate tale of evil unfolds.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eMoving through time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the Louis XIV’s France, and from the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, \u003ci\u003eThe Witching Hour\u003c\/i\u003e is a luminous, deeply enchanting novel.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe magic of the Mayfairs continues:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS\u003cb\u003eAnne Rice\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of thirty-seven books, including the Vampire Chronicles, the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, and the Wolf Gift book series. Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941 and grew up there and in Texas. She lived in San Francisco with her husband, the poet and painter, Stan Rice until 1988, when they returned to New Orleans to live with their son, Christopher. In 2006, Rice moved to Rancho Mirage, California. She died in 2021.The doctor woke up afraid. He had been dreaming of the old house in New Orleans again.  He had seen the woman in the rocker. He'd seen the man with the brown eyes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And  even now in this quiet hotel room above New York City he felt the old alarming disorientation.  He'd been talking again with the brown-eyed man. Yes, help her. \u003ci\u003eNo, this is just  a dream. I want to get out of it.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The doctor sat up in bed. No sound but the faint  roar of the air conditioner. Why was he thinking about it tonight in a hotel room  at the Parker Meridien? For a moment he couldn't shake the feeling of the old house.  He saw the woman again—her bent head, her vacant stare. He could almost hear the  hum of the insects against the screen in the old porch. And the brown-eyed man was  speaking without moving his lips. A waxen dummy infused with life—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eNo, stop it.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He got out of bed and padded silently across the carpeted floor until he stood in  front of the sheer white curtains, peering out at black sooty rooftops and dim neon  signs flickering against brick walls. The early morning light showed behind the clouds  above the dull concrete façade opposite. No debilitating heat here. No drowsing scent  of roses, of gardenias.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Gradually his head cleared.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He thought of the Englishman  at the bar in the lobby again. That's what had brought it all back—the Englishman  remarking to the bartender than he'd just come from New Orleans, and that certainly  was a haunted city. The Englishman, an affable man, a true Old World gentleman it  seemed, in a narrow seersucker suit with a gold watch chain fixed to his vest pocket.  Where did one see that kind of man these days?—a man with the sharp melodious inflection  of a British stage actor, and brilliant, ageless blue eyes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The doctor had turned  to him and said: \"Yes, you're right about New Orleans, you certainly are. I saw a  ghost myself in New Orleans, and not very long ago—\" Then he had stopped, embarrassed.  He had stared at the melted bourbon before him, the sharp refraction of light in  the base of the crystal glass.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Hum of flies in summer; smell of medicine. \u003ci\u003eThat much  Thorazine? Could there be some mistake?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But the Englishman had been respectfully  curious. He'd invited the doctor to join him for dinner, said he collected such tales.  For a moment, the doctor had been tempted. There was a lull in the convention, and  he liked this man, felt an immediate trust in him. And the lobby of the Parker Meridien  was a nice cheerful place, full of light, movement, people. So far away from that  gloomy New Orleans corner, from the sad old city festering with secrets in its perpetual  Caribbean heat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But the doctor could not tell his story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"If you ever change your  mind, do call me,\" the Englishman had said. \"My name is Aaron Lightner.\" He'd given  the doctor a card with the name of an organization inscribed on it: \"You might say  we collect ghost stories—true ones, that is.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e                 \u003ci\u003eThe Talamasca\u003cbr\u003e                 We  watch\u003cbr\u003e                 And we are always here.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was a curious motto.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Yes, that  was what had brought it all back. The Englishman and that peculiar calling card with  the European phone numbers, the Englishman who was leaving for the Coast tomorrow  to see a California man who had lately drowned and been brought back to life. The  doctor had read of that case in the New York papers—one of those characters who  suffers clinical death and returns after having seen \"the light.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They had talked  about the drowned man together, he and the Englishman. \"He claims now to have psychic  powers, you see,\" said the Englishman, \"and that interests us, of course. Seems he  sees images when he touched things with his bare hands. We call it psychometry.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The doctor had been intrigued. He had heard of a few such patients himself, cardiac  victims if he rightly recalled, who had come back, claiming to have seen the future.  \"Near Death Experience.\" One saw more and more articles about the phenomenon in the  journals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Yes,\" Lightner had said, \"the best research on the subject has been done  by doctors—by cardiologists.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Wasn't there a film a few years back,\" the doctor  had asked, \"about a woman who returned with the power to heal? Strangely affecting.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"You're open-minded on the subject,\" the Englishman had said with a delighted smile.  Are you sure you won't tell me about your ghost? I'd so love to hear it. I'm not  flying out till tomorrow, sometime before noon. What I wouldn't give to hear your  story!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e No, not that story. Not ever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Alone now in the shadowy hotel room, the  doctor felt fear again. The clock ticked in the long dusty hallway in New Orleans.  He heard the shuffle of his patient's feet as the nurse \"walked\" her. He smelled  that smell again of a New Orleans house in the summer, heat and old wood. The man  was talking to him—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until  that spring in New Orleans. And the old house rally did have white fluted columns  on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek Revival style they called  it—a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District,  its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were  made in a rose pattern and much festooned with vines—purple wisteria, the yellow  Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He liked to pause  on the marble steps and look up at the Doric capitals, wreathed as they were by those  drowsy fragrant blossoms. The sun came in thin dusty shafts through the twisting  branches. Bees sang in the tangle of brilliant green leaves beneath the peeling cornices.  Never mind that it was so somber here, so damp.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Even the approach through the deserted  streets seduced him. He walked slowly over cracked and uneven sidewalks of herringbone  brick or gray flagstone, under an unbroken archway of oak branches, the light eternally  dappled, the sky perpetually veiled in green. Always he paused at the largest tree  that had lifted the iron fence with its bulbous roots. He could not have gotten his  arms around the trunk of it. It reached all the way from the pavement to the house  itself, twisted limbs clawing at the shuttered windows beyond the banisters, leaves  enmeshed with the flowering vines. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But the decay here troubled him nevertheless.  Spiders wove their tiny intricate webs over the iron lace roses. In places the iron  had so rusted that it fell away to powder at the touch. And here and there near the  railings, the wood of the porches was rotted right through.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Then there was the old  swimming pool far beyond the garden—a great long octagon bounded by the flagstones,  which had become a swamp unto itself with its black water and wild irises. The smell  alone was frightful. Frogs lived there, frogs you could hear at dusk, singing their  grinding, ugly song. Sad to see the little fountain jets up one side and down the  other still sending their little arching streams into the muck. He longed to drain  it, clean it, scrub the sides with his own hands if he had to. Longed to patch the  broken balustrade, and rip the weeds from the overgrown urns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Even the elderly aunts  of his patient—Miss Carl, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy—had an air of staleness and  decay. It wasn't a matter of gray hair or wire-rimmed glasses. It was their manner,  and the fragrance of camphor that clung to their clothes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Once he had wandered into  the library and taken a book down from the shelf. Tiny black beetles scurried out  of the crevice. Alarmed he had put the book back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If there had been air-conditioning  in the place it might have been different. But the old house was too big for that—or  so they had said back then. The ceilings soared fourteen feet overhead. And the sluggish  breeze carried with it the scent of mold.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e His patient was well cared for, however.  That he had to admit. A sweet old black nurse named Viola brought his patient out  on the screened porch in the morning and took her in at evening.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"She's no trouble  at all, Doctor. Now, you come on, Miss Deirdre, walk for the doctor.\" Viola would  lift her out of the chair and push her patiently step by step.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"I've been with her  seven years now, Doctor, she's my sweet girl.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eSeven years like that.\u003c\/i\u003e No wonder  the old woman's feet had started to turn in at the ankles, and her arms to draw close  to her chest if the nurse didn't force them down into her lap again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Viola would  walk her round and round the long double parlor, past the harp and the Bosendorfer  grand layered with dust. Into the long broad dining room with its faded murals of  moss-hung oaks and tilled fields.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Slippered feet shuffling on the worn Aubusson  carpet. The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young—a  stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. \u003ci\u003eDeirdre, did you ever  have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299803746533,"sku":"NP9780345367891","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345367891.jpg?v=1767742265","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-witching-hour-isbn-9780345367891","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}