Lasher

by Anne Rice

  She walked on, past the drab shabby portable bathrooms they brought out now for Mardi Gras Day, catching the wretched smell of all that filth, and on and on to Louisiana Avenue. Litter everywhere she looked, and from the high branches of the trees hung Mardi Gras necklaces of plastic beads, the kind they threw now, glittering in the sunlight. There was nothing so sorry in the world ever, she thought, as St. Charles Avenue after Mardi Gras Day.

  She waited for the stoplight to change. An old colored woman, very properly dressed, waited there also. "Good morning, Patricia," she said to the woman, and the woman gave a start beneath her black straw hat.

  "Why, Miss Ancient Evelyn. What are you doing all the way down here?"

  "I'm walking down to the Garden District. I will be fine, Patricia. I have my cane. I wish I had my gloves and my hat, but I do not."

  "That's a shame, Miss Ancient Evelyn," said the old woman, very proper, her voice soft and mellow. She was a sweet old thing, Patricia, came by all the time with her little grandchild, who could have passed for white, but didn't, obviously, or maybe had yet to figure it all out.

  Something terribly exciting had happened.

  "Oh, I'll be all right," Ancient Evelyn said. "My niece is up there, in the Garden District. I have to give her the Victrola." And then she realized that Patricia knew nothing about these things! That Patricia had stopped many a time at the gate to speak, but she did not know the whole story. How could she? Ancient Evelyn had thought for a moment she was speaking to someone who knew.

  Patricia was still talking, but Ancient Evelyn didn't hear the words. The light was green. She had to cross.

  And off she went as rapidly as she could, skirting the raised strip of concrete that divided the street, because stepping up and stepping down would be needlessly hard for her.

  She was too slow for the light of course, that had been true twenty years ago, when she still made this walk all the time to pass the First Street house and look at poor Deirdre.

  All the young ones of that generation doomed, she thought--sacrificed, as it were, to the viciousness and stupidity of Carlotta Mayfair. Carlotta Mayfair drugged and killed her niece Deirdre. But why think of it now?

  It seemed Ancient Evelyn was plagued with a thousand confusing thoughts.

  Cortland, Julien's beloved son, dead from a fall down the steps--that was all Carlotta's fault, too, wasn't it? They'd brought him into Touro only two blocks away. Ancient Evelyn had been sitting on the porch. She could see the top of the brick walls of the hospital from her very chair, and what a shock it had been to learn that Cortland had died there, only two blocks away, talking to strangers in the emergency room.

  And to think that Cortland had been Ancient Evelyn's father. Ah, well, that had never mattered, not really. Julien had mattered, yes, and Stella, but fathers and mothers, no.

  Barbara Ann had died giving birth to Ancient Evelyn. That was no mother, really. Only a cameo, a silhouette, a portrait in oils. "See? That's your mother." A trunk full of old clothes, and a rosary and some unfinished embroidery that might have been for a sachet.

  How Ancient Evelyn's mind wandered. But she had been counting murders, hadn't she? The murders committed by Carlotta Mayfair who was now dead, thank God, and gone.

  The murder of Stella, that had been the worst of them all. That Carlotta had most definitely done. Surely that had to be laid on Carlotta's conscience. And in the rosy days of 1914, Evelyn and Julien had known such terrible things were coming, but there had been nothing either of them could do.

  For one brief instant, Ancient Evelyn saw the words of the poem again, same way she had seen them on that long-ago day when she had recited them aloud to Julien in his attic bedroom. "I see it. I do not know what it means."

  Pain and suffering as they stumble

  Blood and fear before they learn.

  Woe betide this Springtime Eden

  Now the vale of those who mourn.

  Ah, what a day this was. So much was coming back to her, and yet the present itself was so fresh and sweet. The breeze so good to her.

  On and on, Ancient Evelyn walked.

  Here was the vacant lot at Toledano. Would they never build anything else there, and look at these apartment buildings, so plain, so ugly, where once glorious mansions had stood, houses grander than her own. Oh, to think of all those people gone since the days when she took Gifford and Alicia downtown, or the other way to the park, walking between them. But the Avenue did keep its beauty. The streetcar rattled into view even as she spoke, and then roared round the bend--the Avenue was one endless curve, just as it had been all of Ancient Evelyn's life from the time she rode it to go up to First Street. Of course she could not step up on the streetcar now. That was out of the question.

  She could not now remember when she stopped riding the car, except that it was decades ago. She'd nearly fallen one night when she was coming home, and dropped her sacks from Marks Isaacs and Maison Blanche and the conductor himself had had to come and help her up. Very embarrassing and upsetting to her it had been. Silent as usual, she had given the conductor her special nod, and touched his hand.

  Then the car had rushed away, in a sweep of wind, and she'd been left alone on the neutral ground, and the oncoming traffic had seemed endless and impossible to defeat--the big house in another world on the other side of the street.

  "And would you have believed it then if they'd told you you'd live to see another twenty years, to see Deirdre buried and dead, to see poor Gifford dead?"

  She had thought sure she'd die the year that Stella died. And then when Laura Lee died it was the same way. Her only daughter. She thought if she stopped talking, death could come and take her.

  But it hadn't happened. Alicia and Gifford had needed her. Then Alicia had married. And Mona needed her. Mona's birth had given Ancient Evelyn a new voice.

  Oh, she didn't want to be considering things in such a perspective. Not on such a lovely morning. She did try to speak to people. It was simply so unnatural a thing for her to do.

  She'd hear the others speaking to her, or more truly she saw their lips move and she knew they wanted her attention. But she could stay in her dreams, walking through the streets of Rome with her arm around Stella's waist, or lying with her in the little room at the hotel, and kissing so gently and endlessly in the shadows, just woman and woman, her breasts pressed softly against Stella's.

  Oh, that had been the richest time. Thank God she had not known how pale it would all be...after. She would only know the wide world once, really, and with Stella, and when Stella died, the world did too.

  Which had been the greatest love of her prime? Julien in the locked room or Stella of the great adventures? She could not make up her mind.

  One thing was true. It was Julien who haunted her, Julien she saw in her waking dreams, Julien's voice she heard. There was a time when she was sure Julien was going to come right up the front steps the way he had when she was thirteen, pushing her great-grandfather out of the way. "Let that girl out, you bloody fool!" And she in the attic had shivered in fear. Julien come to take me away. It would make sense, wouldn't it? Julien hovering about her still. "Crank the Victrola, Evelyn. Say my name."

  Stella was more abruptly and totally gone with her tragic death, vanished into a sweet and agonizing grief, as though she had with her last breath truly ascended into heaven. Surely Stella went to heaven. How could anyone who made so many people happy go to hell? Poor Stella. She had never been a real witch, only a child. Maybe gentle souls like Stella did not want to haunt you; maybe they found the light quickly and far better things to do. Stella was memories, yes, but never a ghost.

  In the hotel room in Rome, Stella had put her hand between Evelyn's legs, and said, "No, don't be frightened. Let me touch you. Yes, let me see you." Parting Evelyn's legs. "Don't be ashamed. Don't be afraid, with a woman there is never any cause to be afraid. You should know that. Besides, wasn't Oncle Julien gentle?"

  "If only we could shut the blinds," E
velyn had pleaded. "It's the light, it's the noise from the piazza. I don't know." But in fact, her body had been stirring and she wanted Stella. It had only just struck her that she could touch Stella all over with her own hands, that she could suckle Stella's breasts and let Stella's weight fall down on her. How she loved Stella. She could have drowned in Stella.

  And in a true and deep way Ancient Evelyn's life had ended on that night when Stella was shot in 1929.

  She had seen Stella fall on the living room floor and that man from the Talamasca, that Arthur Langtry, run to take the gun from Lionel Mayfair's hand. That man from the Talamasca had died at sea only a little while after. Poor fool, she thought. And Stella had hoped to escape with him, to run off to Europe and leave Lasher with her child. Oh, Stella, to think that such a thing could be done, how foolish and terrible. Ancient Evelyn had tried to warn Stella about those men from Europe who kept their secret books and charts; she'd tried to explain that Stella must not talk to them. Carlotta knew, Evelyn had to give her that, though for all the wrong reasons.

  And now there was one of those men about again, and nobody suspected anything. Aaron Lightner was his name; they talked about him as though he were a saint because he had the records of the clan all the way back to Donnelaith. What did any of them know about Donnelaith? Julien had hinted of terrible things in a hushed voice as they lay together, with the music playing in the background. Julien had gone to that place in Scotland. The others had not.

  Ancient Evelyn might have died even with his passing, if it hadn't been for little Laura Lee. She wasn't going to leave her daughter. Some baby was always catching hold of her, and drawing her back in. Laura Lee. Now Mona. And would she live to see Mona's child?

  Stella had come with a dress for Laura Lee, and to take her to school. Suddenly she'd said, "My darling, forget about all this rubbish, sending her to school. Poor little creature. I always hated school. You two come with us to Europe. Come with me and Lionel. You can't spend your life on one single corner of the world."

  Evelyn would have never seen Rome or Paris or London or any of those marvelous places to which Stella took her, Stella her beloved, Stella who was not faithful but devoted, teaching her that the latter was the thing.

  Evelyn had worn a gray silk dress the night of Stella's death, with ropes of pearls, Stella's pearls, and she had gone out onto the grass and sunk down weeping as they took Lionel away. The dress had been utterly ruined. Glass broken all around the house. And Stella a little heap on the waxed floor, with flashbulbs exploding all around her. Stella lying where they had all danced, and that Talamasca man so horrified, rushing away. Horrified...

  Julien, did you foresee this? Has the poem been fulfilled? Evelyn had cried and cried, and later when no one was about, when they had taken Stella's body away, when all was quiet, and the First Street house was plunged into darkness and the random glitter of the broken glass, Evelyn had crept to the library and pulled out the books and opened Stella's secret hiding place in the library wall.

  Here Stella had hidden all their pictures, their letters, all the things she meant to keep from Carlotta. "We don't want her knowing about us, ducky, but I'll be damned if I'll burn our pictures."

  Evelyn had taken off the long ropes of pearls that were Stella's and put them there in the dark cavity, with the little keepsakes of their soft and shining romance.

  "Why can't we love each other always, Stella?" She had cried on the boat home.

  "Oh, my darling, the real world will never accept," Stella had said. She'd been already having an affair with a man on board. "But we shall meet. I shall arrange a little place downtown for us together."

  Stella had been true to her word, and what an enchanting little courtyard apartment it had been, and only for them.

  Laura Lee had been back in school all day, no trouble. Laura Lee had never suspected a thing.

  It had rather amused Evelyn--she and Stella making love in that little cluttered place, with its bare brick walls, and the noise of the restaurant beyond, and none of the Mayfair clan knowing a thing about it. Love you, my darling.

  It was only to Stella that Evelyn had ever shown Julien's Victrola. Only Stella knew that Evelyn had taken it from the First Street house at Julien's command. Julien the ghost who was ever close to her, whenever she imagined him, the feel of his hair, the touch of his skin.

  For years after his death, Evelyn had crept up to her room, and wound the Victrola. She'd put on the records and played the waltz; she'd closed her eyes and imagined she danced with Julien--so sprightly and graceful in his old age, so ready to laugh at the ironies of it all, so patient with the weaknesses and deceptions of others. She'd played the waltz for little Laura Lee.

  "Your father gave me this record," she had told her daughter. The child's face was so sad, it could make her cry just to look at Laura Lee's face. Had Laura Lee ever known happiness? She'd known peace and perhaps that was just as good.

  Could Julien hear the Victrola? Was he really bound to the earth by his own will? "There are dark times ahead, Evie. But I will not give up. I will not go quietly into hell and let him triumph. I will overreach death if I can, same as he has done. I will thrive in the shadows. Play the song for me so that I might hear it, so that it might call me back."

  Stella had been so puzzled to hear about it, years after, when they ate spaghetti and drank wine, and listened to the Dixieland in the little place in the Quarter--Evelyn's old tales of Julien.

  "So you were the one who took that little Victrola! Ah, yes, I remember, but Evie, I think you're all mixed up about the rest. He was always so gay around us, Evelyn, are you sure he was so frightened?

  "Of course I do remember the day Mother burnt his books. He was so angry! So angry. And then we went to get you. Do you remember. I think I told him you were in the attic up there at Amelia, a prisoner, just so he would get angry enough not to die on the couch that very afternoon. All those books. I wonder what was in them. But he was happy after that, Evie, especially after you started coming. Happy till the end."

  "Yes, happy," Evelyn had declared. "He was right in his head till the day he died."

  In her mind's eye, she was in that time once more. She grabbed the tangled, thorny vines, climbing higher and higher up the stucco wall. Oh, to be that strong again, even for a moment, to step up to one bar of the trellis after another, fingers tugging on the vines, pushing through the wet flowers, until she had reached the roof of the second floor porch, all the way above those flagstones, and saw Julien, through the window, in his brass bed.

  "Evalynn!" he'd said peering through the glass to welcome her, reaching out for her. She'd never told Stella about all that.

  Evelyn had been thirteen when Julien first brought her to that room.

  In a way, that day had been the first of her true life. To Julien she could talk the way she couldn't to other people. How powerless she had been in her silence, only now and then breaking it when her grandfather beat her, or the others begged her and then mostly to speak in rhymes. Why, she wasn't speaking them at all really, she was reading the words from the air.

  Julien had asked to hear her strange poetry, her prophecy. Julien had been afraid. He had known of the dark times to come.

  But oh, they had been so carefree in their own way, the old man and the mute child. In the afternoon, he'd made love to her very slowly, a little heavier and clumsier than Stella later on, yes, but then, he'd been an old man, hadn't he? He'd apologized that it had taken him so long to finish, but what delights he'd given her with his nether kisses and embraces, with his skilled fingers, and the secret little erotic words he spoke into her ear as he touched her. That was the thing about them both, they knew how to touch you and kiss you.

  They made of love a soft and luxurious thing. And when the violence came you were ready. You wanted it.

  "Dark times," he said. "I can't tell you all, my pretty girl. I don't dare to explain it. She's burnt my books, you know, right out there on the grass. She burnt wh
at was mine. She burnt my life when she did that. But I want you to do this for me, believe in this for me. Take the Victrola out of this house. You must keep it, in memory of me. It's mine, this thing, I have loved it, touched it, imbued it with my spirit as surely as any stumbling mortal can imbue an object with spirit. Keep it safe, Eve, play the waltz for me.

  "Pass it on to those who would cherish it after Mary Beth is gone. Mary Beth can't live forever any more than I can. Never let Carlotta get it. A time will come..."

  And then he'd sunk into sadness again. Better to make love.

  "I cannot help it," he had said. "I see but I can do nothing. I do not know any more than any man what is really possible. What if hell is utterly solitary? What if there is no one there to hate? What if it's like the dark night over Donnelaith, Scotland? Then Lasher comes from hell."

  "Did he really say all that, now?" asked Stella, years later, and only a month after that very conversation, Stella herself had been shot and killed. Stella whose eyes closed forever in the year 1929.

  So much life since the death of Stella. So many generations. So much world.

  Sometimes it was a downright consolation to hear her beloved redhaired Mona Mayfair railing against modernism.

  "We've had nearly an entire century, you realize, and the most coherent and successful styles were developed in those first twenty years. Stella saw it. If she saw art deco, if she heard jazz, if she saw a Kandinsky, she saw the twentieth century. What have we had since? Look at these ads for this hotel in Miami. Might as well have been done in 1923 when you were running around with Stella."

  Yes, Mona was a consolation in more ways than one.

  "Well, ducky, you know, I might run off to England with this man from the Talamasca," Stella had said in those last weeks of her life. She'd stopped eating her spaghetti as if this were something to be decided then and there, with fork in hand. To run from First Street, run from Lasher, seek help from these strange scholars.

  "But Julien warned against those men. Stella, he said they were the alchemists in my poem. He said they would only hurt us in the long run. Stella, he used that word, he said not to speak with them ever at all!"