Lasher

  "You know, this Talamasca man or whatever he is, he's going to find out about that other one, that the body's in the attic. When you're a Mayfair you can kill anyone you want, and nobody does anything about it. Nobody can think what to do." She'd shrugged, and a month later her brother Lionel killed her. No more Stella.

  No more anyone who knew about the Victrola or Julien with Evelyn in Julien's bedroom. Evelyn's only living witness gone to the grave.

  It had not been a simple thing, during Julien's last illness, to get the Victrola out of the house. He'd waited for a time when Mary Beth and Carlotta were not at home, and then sent the boys down to fetch another "music box," as he stubbornly called it, from the dining room.

  And only when he had a record ready to play full blast on the big one, did he tell her to take the little Victrola and run away. He'd told her to sing as she walked with it, sing as if it were playing, just sing and sing aloud until she reached her house uptown.

  "People will think I am crazy," she had said softly. She had looked at her hands, her left hand with the extra finger--witches' marks.

  "Do you care what they think?" His smile had always been so beautiful. Only in sleep did he look his age. He had cranked the big music box. "You take these records of my opera--I have others--take them under your arm, you can do it. Take it uptown, my darling. If I could be a gentleman and carry the whole load for you up to your attic, you can be sure I would. Now, here, when you get to the Avenue, flag a taxi. Give him this. Let him carry the thing inside."

  And there she was singing that song, singing along with the big music box, while carrying the little one out of the house.

  Out she had walked, like an altar boy in a procession, carrying the precious thing.

  She'd carried it until her arms ached so much she couldn't go any further. Had to set down the burden on the corner of Prytania and Fourth Street, and sit there on the curb with her elbows on her knees and rest for a while. Traffic whizzing by. Finally she had stopped a taxi, though she had never done such a thing before, and when she got home, the man had brought the Victrola all the way up to the attic for the five dollars Julien had given her. "Thank you, ma'am!"

  The darkest of days had been right after his death, when Mary Beth had come to ask if she had "anything of Julien's," if she had taken anything from his room. She had shaken her head, refusing as always to answer. Mary Beth had known she was lying. "What did Julien give you?" she asked.

  Evelyn had sat on the floor of her attic room, her back to the armoire, which was locked, with the Victrola inside, refusing to answer. Julien is dead, that was all she could think, Julien is dead.

  She hadn't even known then about the child inside her, about Laura Lee, poor doomed Laura Lee. At night, she walked the streets in silence, burning for Julien, and dared not play the Victrola while any light burned in the big Amelia Street house at all.

  Years later, when Stella died, it was as if the old wound opened, and they became one--the loss of her two brilliant loves, the loss of the only warm light which had ever penetrated her life's mysteries, the loss of the music, the loss of all fire.

  "Don't try to make her talk," her great-grandfather had said to Mary Beth. "You go out of here. You go back up to your house. You leave us alone. We don't want you here. If there is anything of that abominable man in this house, I'll destroy it."

  Oh, such a cruel cruel man. He would have killed Laura Lee if he could have. "Witches!" Once he'd taken a kitchen knife and threatened to cut the little extra finger off Evelyn's hand. How she'd screamed. The others had to stop him--Pearl, and Aurora, and all the old ones from Fontevrault who'd still been there.

  But Tobias had been the worst of them, as well as the eldest. How he hated Julien, and all over the gunshot in 1843, when Julien had shot his father, Augustin, at Riverbend, Julien no more than a boy, Augustin a young man, and Tobias, the terrified witness, only a baby still in dresses. That's the way they dressed boys then, in dresses. "I saw my father fall over dead at my feet!"

  "I never meant to kill him," Julien had told Evelyn as they lay in bed. "I never meant for one whole branch of the family to veer off in bitterness and rage, and everyone else has been trying to get them back ever since, but somehow there are two camps. There is here, and there is Amelia Street. I feel so sorry when I think of all that. I was just a boy, and the fool didn't know how to run the plantation. I have no compunction about shooting people, you understand, only that time I didn't plan it, honestly I did not. I did not mean to kill your great-great-grandfather. It was all just the most blundering mistake."

  She had not cared. She hated Tobias. She hated all of them. Old men.

  Yet it was with an old man that love had first touched her, in Julien's attic.

  And then there were those nights when she had walked downtown in the dark to that house, climbed the wall, and gone up, hand over hand on the trellis. So easy to climb so high, to swing out and stare down at the flags.

  The flags on which poor Antha died. But that had been yet to come, all that, those horrible deaths--Stella, Antha.

  It would always be pleasant to remember the thick green vine and the softness of it under her slipper as she climbed.

  "Ah, Cherie," he said. "My delight, my wild thing," and he raised the window to receive her, to bring her inside. "Mon Dieu, child, you could have fallen."

  "Never," she whispered. Safe in his arms.

  Even Richard Llewellyn, that boy he kept, didn't come between them. Richard knew to knock on Julien's door, and one was never sure what Richard Llewellyn knew, really. Years ago Richard Llewellyn had talked to that last Talamasca man, though Evelyn had warned him not to. Richard had come up to see her the next day.

  "Well, you didn't tell him about me, did you?" Ancient Evelyn had demanded. Richard was so old. He didn't have very long.

  "No, I didn't tell him that story. I didn't want him to think--"

  "What? That Julien would bed a girl my age?" She had laughed. "You shouldn't have talked to that man at all." Richard hadn't lasted out the year, and when he died, they gave her his old records. He must have known about the Victrola, why else would he have left those old records to her?

  Evelyn should have given Mona the little Victrola a long time ago, and not with such ceremony in front of the other two, her idiot granddaughters, Alicia and Gifford. Leave it to Gifford to confiscate everything--the music box itself and the beautiful necklace.

  "You dare!"

  Leave it to Gifford to have made the very wrong choice, leave it to Gifford to misunderstand. To gasp in horror when Ancient Evelyn had said the poem. "Why would he want you to have this? What did he think it could do? He was a witch and you know it. A witch as surely as the others."

  And then the terrible confession from Gifford, that she had gone and taken those things and hidden them back up at First Street, in that house whence they'd come.

  "You little fool, how could you do such a thing?" Ancient Evelyn had asked. "Mona should have had it! Mona is his great-granddaughter! Gifford, not back to that house where Carlotta will find it, where it will be destroyed."

  She remembered suddenly. Gifford had died this morning!

  She was walking on St. Charles Avenue, going up to First Street, and her aggravating, annoying, grating, nerve-wracking grandchild was dead!

  "Why didn't I know it? Julien, why didn't you come to tell me!"

  Well over half a century ago, she'd heard Julien's voice an hour before his death. She'd heard him calling from beneath her window. She'd sprung up and opened it wide to the rain, and there was Julien down there, only at once she knew it wasn't really Julien. She'd been terrified he was already dead. He had waved at her, so cheerful and gay, with a big dark mare beside him. "Au revoir, ma Cherie," he had called out.

  And then she had gone to him, running all the way those ten blocks downtown, and climbed the trellis, and for those precious moments seen his eyes--the life still in them--fixed on her. Oh, Julien, I heard you calling me. I saw you
. I saw the embodiment of your love. She had raised the window. She had lifted him.

  "Eve," he had whispered. "Evie, I want to sit up. Evie, help me, I'm dying, Evie! It's happening, it's come!"

  They had never known she was there.

  She'd crouched outside on the porch roof in the fury of the storm, listening to them. They'd never thought to even look outside as they closed the window and laid him out, and sent for everyone. And there she'd been huddled against the chimney, watching the lightning and thinking, Why don't you strike me? Why don't I die? Julien is dead.

  "What did he give you?" Mary Beth had asked her every time she saw her. Year after year she came.

  Mary Beth had stared at little Laura Lee, such a weak, thin baby, never a baby that people wanted to hold. Mary Beth had always known that Julien had been Laura Lee's father.

  And how the others had hated her. "Julien's spawn, look at her, with the witch's mark on her hand, look, like you!"

  It wasn't so bad, just a tiny extra finger. Why, most people had never noticed it, though Laura Lee had been so self-conscious, and no one at Sacred Heart knew what it meant.

  "The mark of the witch," Tobias used to say. "There are many. Red hair is the worst, and a sixth finger the second, and a monster's height, the third. And you with the sixth finger. Go live up at First Street, live with the damned who gave you your talents. Get out of my house."

  Of course she had never gone, not with Carlotta there! Better to ignore the old men as she and her little daughter went about their business. Laura Lee had been too sickly ever to finish high school. Poor Laura Lee, who spent her life taking in stray cats, and talking to them, and going round the block to find them and feed them, until the neighbors complained. She'd been too old by the time she married; and to be left with those two girls!

  Were we the powerful witches, those of us who bore the mark of the sixth finger? What about Mona with her red hair?

  As the years passed the great Mayfair legacy had gone to Stella and then to Antha and then to Deirdre...

  All of them lost, who had lived in the times of shadows. Even the bright blaze of Stella pinched out, like that!

  "But there will come another time. A time of battle and catastrophe." That Julien had promised her the last night she had really spoken with him. "That's the meaning of your poem, Evelyn. I shall try to be here."

  The music whined and thumped. He was always playing it.

  "You see, Cherie, I have a secret about him and music. He cannot hear us so well when we play music. It's an old secret, my grandmere Marie Claudette told me herself.

  "The evil daemon is actually drawn to the music. Music can distract him. He can hear music when he can hear nothing else. Rhythm and rhyme can also entrap him. All ghosts find such things irresistible, as they do visible patterns. In their gloom, they pine for order, for symmetry. I use the music to draw him and confuse him. Mary Beth knows this too. Why do you think there are music boxes in every room? Why do you think she loves her many Victrolas? They give her privacy from this being, which she would have now and then, just as anyone would.

  "And when I am gone, child, play the Victrola. Play it and think of me. Perhaps I can hear it, perhaps I can come to you, perhaps the waltz will penetrate the darkness, and bring me back to myself and to you."

  "Julien, why do you call him evil? They always said at home that the spirit in this house was yours to command. Tobias said it to Walker. They said it to me when they told me Cortland was my father. Lasher was the magic slave of Julien and Mary Beth, they said, which will grant their every wish."

  He'd shaken his head, talking under cover of a Neapolitan song. "He's evil, mark my word, and the worst kind of evil, but he does not know it himself. Recite the poem again. Tell it to me."

  Ancient Evelyn had hated to say the poem. The poem came from her as if she were the Victrola and someone had touched her with an invisible needle, and out came the words, and she did not know what they meant. Words that frightened Julien, and had frightened his niece Carlotta beforehand, words that Julien said over and over again as the months passed.

  How vigorous he had looked, his white curly hair still very thick, his eyes very clever and focused upon her. He'd never suffered the blindness and deafness of old age, had he? Was it his many loves that kept him young? Perhaps so. He'd laid his soft dry hand over hers, and kissed her cheek.

  "Soon I shall die like everyone else, and there's nothing I can do about it."

  Oh, that precious year, those precious few months.

  And to think of him coming to her, young in that vision. That she'd heard his voice all the way up at her window. And there he'd stood in the rain, all chipper and handsome and beaming at her as he held the bridle of his horse. "Au revoir, ma Cherie."

  Afterwards little visions of him came so fast they were like the pop of flashbulbs. Julien on the streetcar passing by. Julien in a car. Julien in the cemetery at Antha's funeral. All make-believe perhaps. Why, she could have sworn she glimpsed him for one precious second at Stella's funeral.

  Is that why she'd spoken so to Carlotta, accusing her outright, as they stood together amongst the graves?

  "It was the music, wasn't it?" Evelyn had said, trembling as she made her verbal assault, fired with hatred and grief. "You had to have the music. When the band was playing loud and wild, Lionel could come up on Stella and shoot her with the gun. And 'the man' didn't even know, did he? You used the music to distract 'the man.' You knew the trick. Julien told me the trick. You tricked 'the man' with music. You killed your sister, you were the one."

  "Witch, get away from me," Carlotta had said, seething with anger. "You and all your kind."

  "Ah, but I know, and your brother's in the straitjacket, yes, but you're the killer! You put him up to it. You used the music, you knew the trick."

  It had taken all her strength to say those words, but her love for Stella had demanded it. Stella. Evelyn had lain alone in the bed in the little French Quarter apartment, holding Stella's dress in her hands, crying against it. And the pearls, they would never find Stella's pearls. She had turned inward after Stella, she had never dared to want again.

  "I'd give them to you, ducky," Stella had said of the pearls, "you know, I really would, but Carlotta will raise hell! She's read me the riot act, ducky, I cannot give away the heirlooms and things! If she ever knew about that Victrola--that Julien let you take it--she'd get it away from you. She's an inventory taker that one. That's what she ought to do in hell, make sure nobody's gotten out to purgatory by mistake, or is not suffering his fair share of fire and brimstone. She's a beast. You may not see me again so soon, ducky dear, I may run away with that Talamasca person from England."

  "No good can come of that!" she said. "I feel afraid."

  "Dance tonight. Have fun. Come on. You cannot wear my pearls if you won't dance."

  And never again had they even spoken together, she and Stella. Oh, to see the blood oozing on the waxed floor.

  Well, yes, Evelyn had answered Carlotta later, she did have the pearls but she'd left them there at the house that night, and after that she would never answer another question about them.

  Over the decades, others asked. Even Lauren came in time and asked. "They were priceless pearls. You don't remember what happened to them?"

  And young Ryan, Gifford's beloved, and her beloved, even he had been forced to bring up the unpleasant subject.

  "Ancient Evelyn, Aunt Carlotta will not drop the question of these pearls." At least Gifford had kept her counsel then, thank heaven, and Gifford had looked so miserable. Never should have showed the pearls to Gifford. But Gifford had said not a word.

  Well, if it hadn't been for Gifford, the priceless pearls would have stayed in the wall forever. Gifford, Gifford, Gifford, Miss Goody-two-shoes, Miss Meddler! But then they were in the wall again, weren't they? That was the lovely part. They were in the wall right now.

  All the more reason to walk straight, to walk slow, to walk sure. The pearls to
o are up there, and surely they must be given to Mona, for Rowan Mayfair was gone and might never return.

  My, so many houses on this long avenue had vanished. It was too sad, really. Whatever made up for a magnificent house, full of ornament and gay shutters and rounded windows? Not these, these mock buildings of stucco and glue, these dreary little tenements all got up for the middle class as if people were fools after all.

  You had to hand it to Mona, she knew. She said quite flatly that modern architecture had been a failure. You had only to look around to see, and that was why people loved the old houses now. "You know, I figure, Ancient Evelyn, that probably more houses were built and torn down between 1860 and 1960 than ever before in human history. Think about the cities of Europe. The houses of Amsterdam go back to the 1600s. And then think about New York. Almost every structure on Fifth Avenue is new; there is hardly a house left standing on the whole street from the turn of the century. I believe there is the Frick mansion, and I can't think of another one. Of course I've never been to New York, except with Gifford, and it wasn't Gifford's thing to go examining old buildings. I think she thought we went there to go shopping, and shop we did."

  Evelyn had agreed, though she hadn't said so. On all accounts, Evelyn always agreed with Mona. Though Aunt Evelyn never said.

  But that was the great thing about Mona; before her computer had drawn off all her love, Mona had used Ancient Evelyn as her sounding board, and it had never been necessary to say anything to Mona. Mona could make a long conversation all on her own, proceeding with manic fire from one topic to another. Mona was her treasure, and now that Gifford was gone, why, she would talk to Mona and they could sit alone, and they could play the Victrola. And the pearls. Yes, she would wrap them around Mona's neck.

  Again came that wicked and terrible relief. No more Gifford of the haggard face, and frightened eyes, speaking of conscience and right in a hushed voice, no more Gifford to witness Alicia's decay and death with horror in her face, no more Gifford standing watch over all of them.

  Was the Avenue still the Avenue? Surely she would come to the corner of Washington soon, but there were so many of these new buildings that she had lost her bearings.