by Anne Rice
She caught the fragrance as soon as she reached the doors to Seventh Floor West. That was it. The exact same smell.
She stopped, took a deep breath and realized that for the first time in her life she felt really afraid of something. It made her disgusted. She stood, head cocked to the side, thinking it over. There was an exit to the stairs. There were the doors ahead. There was an exit on the other side of the ward. There were people right inside at the desk.
If only she had Michael here, she’d push open that exit door, see if someone was standing in the stairwell, someone who gave off this odor.
But the smell was already weak. It was going away. And as she stood there, considering this, getting quietly furious that she didn’t have the guts to just open that damned door, someone else opened it, and let it swing shut as he went down the corridor. A young doctor with a stethoscope over his shoulder. The landing had been empty.
But that didn’t mean somebody wasn’t hiding above or below. Either the smell was going away, however, or Mona was simply getting used to it. She took a deep slow breath; it was so rich, so sensuous, so delicious. But what was it?
She pushed through the double doors into the ward. The smell grew stronger. But there were the three nurses, sitting, writing away, in an island of light surrounded by high wooden counters, one of them whispering on a phone as she wrote, the others seemingly in deep concentration.
No one noticed as Mona walked past the station and passed into the narrow corridor. The smell was very strong here.
“Jesus Christ, don’t tell me this,” Mona whispered. She glanced at the doors to her left and her right But the smell told her before she even saw the chart that said “Alicia (CeeCee) Mayfair.”
The door was ajar, and the room was dark; its one window opened upon an airwell. Blank wall stared in through the glass at the still woman, lying with her head to the wall, beneath the white covers. A small digital machine recorded the progress of the IV-a plastic sack of glucose, clear as glass, feeding down through a tiny tube into the woman’s right hand, beneath a mass of tape, the hand itself flat on the white blanket.
Mona stood very still, then pushed open the door. She pushed it all the way back, so that she could see into the open bathroom to the right Porcelain toilet Empty shower stall. Quickly, she examined the rest of the room, and then turned back to the bed, confident that she and her mother were alone.
Her mother’s profile bore a remarkable resemblance to that of her sister, Gifford, in the coffin. All points and angles, the emaciated face sunk into the large, softly yielding pillow.
The covers made a mound over the body. All white except for a small irregular blotch of red in the very center of the covers, very near to where the hand lay with its tape and its tubing and needle.
Mona drew closer, clamped her left hand on the chrome bar of the bed, and touched the red spot. Very wet Even as she stared at it the blotch grew bigger. Something seeping up through the covers from below. Roughly Mona pulled the blanket down from under Alicia’s limp arm. Her mother didn’t stir. Her mother was dead. The blood was everywhere. The bed was soaked with it
There was a sound behind Mona; and then a female voice spoke in a rasping, unfriendly whisper.
“Don’t wake her up, dear. We had a hell of a time with her this morning.”
“Check her vital signs lately?” Mona asked, turning to the nurse. But the nurse had already seen the blood. “I don’t think there’s much chance of waking her up. Why don’t you call my cousin Anne Marie? She’s down in the lobby. Tell her to come up here immediately.”
The nurse was an old woman; she picked up the dead woman’s hand. At once she set it down, and then she backed away from the bed, and out of the room.
“Wait a minute,” said Mona. “Did you see anybody come in here?”
But in an instant she knew the question was pointless. This woman was too afraid of being blamed for this to even respond. Mona followed her, and watched her rush down to the station, walking about as fast as a person can walk without running. Then Mona went back to the bed.
She felt the hand. Not ice-cold. She gave a long sigh; she could hear footsteps in the corridor, the muffled sound of rubber-soled shoes. She leaned over the bed, and brushed her mother’s hair back from her face, and kissed her. The cheek held only a tiny bit of fading warmth. Her forehead was already cold.
She thought sure her mother would turn her head and look up at her and shout out: “Be careful what you wish for. Didn’t I tell you? It might come true.”
Within minutes the room was filled with staff. Anne Marie was in the hallway, wiping her eyes with a paper handkerchief. Mona backed off.
For a long time she stood at the nurses’ station just listening to everything. An intern had to be called to say that Alicia was legally dead. They had to wait for him, and that would take twenty minutes. It was past eight o’clock. Meantime the family doctor had been summoned. And Ryan, of course. Poor Ryan. Oh, God help Ryan. The phone was ringing now continuously. And Lauren? What shape was she in?
Mona walked off down the hall. When the elevator door opened, it was the young intern who came out-a kid who didn’t look old enough to know if somebody was dead. He passed her without even looking at her.
In a daze Mona rode down to the lobby and walked out the doors. The hospital was on Prytania Street, only one block from Amelia and St. Charles, where Mona lived. She walked slowly along the pavement, under the lunar light of the street lamps, thinking quietly to herself.
“I don’t mink I want to wear dresses like this anymore.” She said it out loud when she stood on the corner. “Nope, it’s time to dump this dress and this ribbon.” Across the street, her home was brightly lighted for once. There were people climbing out of cars. All the crisp excitement already begun.
Several Mayfairs had seen her; one was pointing to her. Someone was walking to the corner to reach out towards her as if that might mean she might not be run down as she crossed the street.
“Well, I don’t think I like these clothes anymore,” she said under her breath as she walked fast before the distant oncoming traffic. “Nope, sick of it Won’t do it anymore.”
“Mona, darling!” said her cousin Gerald.
“Yeah, well, it was just a matter of time,” said Mona. “But I sure didn’t count on both of them dying. No, didn’t see that coming at all.” She walked past Gerald, and past the Mayfairs assembled around the gate and the path to the steps.
“Yeah, OK,” she said to those who tried to speak to her. “I’ve got to get out of these ridiculous clothes.”
Fourteen
JULIEN’S STORY
IT IS NOT the story of my life which you require, but let me explain how I came upon my various secrets. As you know I was born in the year 1828, but I wonder if you realize what this means. Those were the very last days of an ancient way of life-the last decades in which the rich landowners of the world lived pretty much as they had for centuries.
We not only knew nothing of railroads, telephones, Victrolas, or horseless carriages. We didn’t even dream of such things!
And Riverbend-with its vast main house crammed with fine furniture and books, and all its many outbuildings sheltering uncles and aunts and cousins, and its fields stretching as far as the eye could see from the riverbank, south, and east and west-truly was Paradise.
Into this world I slipped almost without notice. I was a boy child, and this was a family that wanted female witches. I was a mere Prince of the Blood, and the court was a loving and friendly place, but no one observed that a little boy had been born who possessed probably greater witches’ gifts than any man or woman ever in the family.
In fact, my grandmother Marie Claudette was so disappointed that I was not a girl child that she stopped speaking to my mother, Marguerite. Marguerite had already given birth to one male, my older brother, Rémy, and now, having had the audacity to bring another into the world, she crashed down completely from favor.
Of c
ourse Marguerite rectified this mistake as soon as possible, giving birth in 1830 to Katherine, who was to become her heiress and designee of the legacy-my darling little sister. But a coldness by then existed between mother and daughter, and was never healed in Marie Claudette’s lifetime.
Also I personally suspect that Marie Claudette took one look at Katherine and thought, “What an idiot,” for that is just what Katherine turned out to be. But a female witch was needed, and Marie Claudette would lay eyes upon a granddaughter before she died, so on to this little witless baby who was bawling in the cradle Marie Claudette passed the great emerald.
Now as you know, by the time Katherine was a young woman I had come into my own as a family influence, was much valued as a carrier of witches’ gifts, and it was I who fathered, by Katherine, Mary Beth Mayfair, who was the last in fact of the great Mayfair Witches.
I fathered Mary Beth’s daughter Stella, as I am sure you also know, and fathered by Stella her daughter, Antha.
But let me return to the perilous times of my early childhood, when men and women both warned me in hushed voices to be well-behaved, ask no questions, defer to the family customs in every regard, and pay no attention to anything strange that I might see pertaining to the realm of ghosts and spirits.
It was made known to me in no uncertain terms that strong Mayfair males did not do well; early death, madness, exile-those were the fates of the troublemakers.
When I look back on it, I think it is absolutely impossible that I could have become one of the great Passive Well-Behaved, along with my Oncle Maurice and Lestan and countless other goody-two-shoes cousins.
First of all, I saw ghosts all the time; heard spirits; could see life leaving a body when the body died; could read people’s minds, and sometimes even move or hurt matter without even really getting angry or meaning to do it. I was a natural Utile witch or warlock or whatever the word might be.
And I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t see Lasher. He was standing by my mother’s chair many a morning when I went in to greet her. I saw him by Katherine’s cradle. But he never cast his eyes on me, and I’d been warned very early on that I must never speak to him, nor seek to know who or what he was, or say his name, or make him look at me.
My uncles, all very happy men, said, “Remember this, a Mayfair male can have everything he desires-wine, women, and wealth beyond imagining. But he cannot seek to know the family secrets. Leave it in the hands of the great witch, for she sees all and directs all, and upon that principle our vast power has been founded.”
Well, I wanted to know what this was about. I had no intention of merely accepting the situation. And my grandmother, never someone not to catch the eye, became for me an extreme magnet of curiosity.
Meantime, my mother, Marguerite, grew rather distant. She snatched me up and kissed me whenever we chanced to meet but that wasn’t often. She was always going into the city to shop, to see the opera, to dance, to drink, to do God knows what, or locking herself in her study screaming if anyone dared to disturb her.
I found her most fascinating of course. But my grandmother Marie Claudette was more a constant figure. And she became for me in my idle moments-which were few-a great irresistible attraction.
First let me explain about my other learning. The books. They were everywhere. That wasn’t so common in the Old South, believe me. It has never been common among the very rich to read; it is more a middle-class obsession. But we had all been lovers of books; and I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t read French, English and Latin.
German? Yes, I had to teach myself that, as well as Spanish and Italian.
But I cannot recall a point in childhood where I had not read some of every book we possessed, and in this case that meant a library of such glory you cannot envision it. Most of those volumes have over the years simply rotted away; some have been stolen; some I entrusted many decades later to those who would cherish them. But then I had all I wanted of Aristotle, Plato, Plautus and Terence, Virgil and Horace. And I read the night away with Chapman’s Homer, and Golding’s Metamorphoses, a mammoth and charming translation of Ovid. Then there was Shakespeare, whom I adored, naturally enough, and lots of very funny English novels. Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe.
I read it all. I read it when I didn’t know what it meant until I did. I dragged my books with me about the house, pulling on skirts and jackets and asking, “What does this mean?” and even asking uncles, aunts, cousins or slaves to read various puzzling passages aloud to me.
When I wasn’t reading I was adventuring about with the older boys, both white and black, jumping onto horses bareback, or trekking into the swamps to find snakes, or climbing the swamp cypress and the oaks to watch out for pirates invading from the south. At two and a half, I was lost in the swamps during a storm. I almost died, I suppose. But I shall never forget it. And after I was found, I never again suffered any fear of lightning. I think I had my little wits nearly blown out of my head by thunder and lightning that night. I screamed and screamed and nothing happened. The thunder and lightning went on; I didn’t die; and in the morning I was sitting at the table with my tearful mother, having breakfast.
Ah, the point is this: I learned from everything, and there was plenty to learn from.
My principal tutor in those first three years of life was in fact my mother’s coachman, Octavius, a free man of color and a Mayfair by five different lines of descent from the early ones through their various black mistresses. Octavius was then only eighteen or so, and more fun man anyone else on the plantation. My witch powers did not so much frighten him, and when he wasn’t telling me to hide them from everybody else, he was telling me how to use them.
I learnt from him for example how to reach people’s thoughts even when they meant to keep them inside, and how to give them suggestions without words, which they invariably obeyed! And how even to force my will with subtle words and gestures on another. I learnt also from him how to cast spells, making the entire world around appear to change for myself and for others who were with me. I also learnt many erotic tricks, for as many children are, I was erotically mad at age three and then four, and would attempt things then which made me blush by the time I was twelve-at least for a year or two.
But to return to the witches and how I came to be known to them.
My grandmother Marie Claudette was always there amongst us. She sat out in the garden, with a small orchestra of black musicians to play for her. There were two fine fiddlers, both slaves, and several who played the pipes, as we called them, but which were wooden flutes known as recorders. There was one who played a big bass riddle of a homemade sort, and another who played two drums, caressing them with his soft fingers. Marie Claudette had taught these musicians their songs, and soon told me that many such songs came from Scotland.
More and more I gravitated to her. The noise I did not like, but I found that if I could get her to take me in her arms she was sweet and loving and had things to say as interesting as the things I read in the library.
She was stately, blue-eyed, white-haired, and picturesque as she lay on a couch of wicker and fancy pillows, beneath a canopy that blew just a little in the breeze, sometimes singing to herself in Gaelic. Or letting loose long strings of curses on Lasher.
For what had happened you see was that Lasher had tired of her! He had gone on to serve Marguerite and to hover about Katherine, the new baby. And for Marie Claudette he had only an occasional kiss or word or two of poetry.
Perhaps every few days or so, he came to beg Marie Claudette’s forgiveness for giving all his attentions to Marguerite, and to say in a very pure and beautiful voice, which I could hear, that Marguerite would not have it otherwise. Sometimes when he came to kiss and court Marie Claudette, he was dressed as a man in frock coat and pants, which were then a novelty you understand, we are only a few decades past tricorne and breeches, and sometimes he had a more rustic look to him, in rawhide garments of a very rough cut; but always h
is hair was brown and his eyes brown, and he was most beautiful.
And guess who came along, all ringlets and smiles, and hopped up into her lap, and said, “Grandmère, tell me why you are so sad? Tell me everything.”
“Can you see that man who comes to me?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, “but everybody says I should lie to you about it, though why I don’t know because he seems to like to be seen, and will even frighten the slaves by appearing to them, for no good reason, it seems to me, except vanity.”
She fell in love with me at that moment. She smiled approvingly at my observations. She also said she’d never encountered a two-year-old child who was so bright. I was two and a half but I didn’t bother to point this out. Within a day or two of our first real conversation about “the man,” she began to tell me everything.
She told me all about her old home in Saint-Domingue and how she missed it, about voodoo charms and devil worship in the islands and how she’d mastered every slave trick for her own purposes.
“I am a great witch,” she said, “far greater than your mother will ever be, for your mother is slightly mad and laughs at everything. As for the baby Katherine, who knows. Something tells me you had best look out for her. I myself laugh at very little.”
Every day I jumped in her lap and started asking her questions. The hideous little orchestra played on and on-she would never tell them to stop-but very soon she began to expect me to come, and if I did not she sent Octavius to find me, wash me and deliver me. I was happy. Only the music sometimes sounded to me like cats howling. I asked her once if she wouldn’t like to listen instead to the song of the birds, but she only shook her head and said that it helped her think to have this background.
Meantime, over the din, her tales became more and more involved and filled with colorful pictures and violence.
