by Daniel Hecht
And that was without trying to figure in the imponderable: the wolf, the snake, the living table claws! Most of all, the predatory upstairs ghost with his hateful affect and the double anomalies of his boar's head and his complete lack of a perimortem dimension.
After a while, the teeming streets of the Quarter seemed to call to her. She left the riverbank, crossed the streetcar tracks, and came to the terraced park just below Jackson Square. On the other side, she descended to the street through a crowd gathered around a trio playing something that sounded like bayou bluegrass.
Decatur Street, she discovered, was a more family-oriented version of Bourbon Street, a broader avenue that separated the narrow streets of the Quarter from the river. New high-rise apartment buildings and hotels dominated the south side, but on the north side it was lined with fine historic buildings that housed shops and restaurants, in better repair than elsewhere in the Quarter. Unlike Bourbon Street, there were no strip clubs or body-piercing parlors, and only a couple of the low-budget, black-painted voodoo shops. Most stores maintained cheerful windows and catered to the impulses of middle-class consumers, offering strings of beads, packages of Cajun and Creole spices, postcards, dried and varnished alligator heads and other bayou kitsch, bogus gris-gris bags, crawfish- and jazz-themed artwork, illustrated T-shirts and billed caps. The sidewalks were crowded, the restaurants and bars wide open to the evening, the cars bumper to bumper.
Better, Cree thought. Flux. All the appetites of the living. It did help.
Drifting, she window-shopped. She lingered for a few moments in front of a store that specialized in hot sauces. Its window featured hundreds of bottles with luridly illustrated labels and hyperbolic names: Ass in Hell, Thermonuclear Holocaust, Liquid Lucifer, Mother-in-Law's Revenge, Pain amp; Suffering, Bayou Butt Burner.
She drifted to the next window and was admiring its contents when abruptly she felt as though she'd stepped through a hole and fallen and hit hard.
The store was crammed with Mardi Gras supplies: overflowing racks of beads of every description in sizzling colors, racks of gaudy gowns and capes and boas. Armies of manikins strutting in full-body costumes. Wigs and hats of every kind on Styrofoam heads.
And masks. Hundreds of them: faces grimacing, leering, snarling, laughing, conniving, drunken, murderous, seductive, imperious, pathetic, dead. Dainty eye masks, feathered face masks, and whole-head, pullover rubber masks of Nixons, werewolves, aliens, clowns, corpses, witches, Satans, queens and kings, kindly grannies, chubby babies, drag queens, vampires.
Bird heads, frog heads, dog heads, alligator heads.
No boar heads, true. And the idea didn't solve the mystery of the wolf, the snake, the table and other changelings. But here at last was a possible explanation for at least one of the anomalous aspects of Lila's experience. Of course that's how he would clothe himself in his thoughts. Of course that's how she would see him — half memory, half spectral being. She was appalled that the possibility hadn't occurred to her sooner, in this of all places. City of masks.
With the realization came another, meshing with the first like pieces of a puzzle fitting seamlessly. She'd spent hours pouring over the Beauforte family archives, and they had revealed almost nothing of value. But now she realized that what the material had to tell her lay not in what it contained but in what it omitted.
There were no photos or clippings relating to the family's Mardi Gras activities.
The Beaufortes had been involved in all kinds of civic activities, and from everything she'd read or heard from Paul, Mardi Gras was the ultimate civic function in New Orleans. It had been a family tradition for both Lamberts and Beaufortes: Lila had spoken of her father's involve ment in one of the krewes, what was it? Epicurus. The Krewe of Epicurus. Uncle Brad had been a member. Ro-Ro was a member. Even Paul Fitzpatrick was a member, as his father had been. Yet Cree had looked at all the family records, and they showed no indication that the Beaufortes participated in Mardi Gras in any way.
No, she hadn't looked at all of them. She'd looked at the ones Lila had. But Lila had said her mother had kept some at the old house, that they'd stayed over there when Charmian had moved on to Lakeside Manor and they'd rented to the Chases. No doubt in the locked storage room she'd sat in briefly, pondering her own cracked image in the mirror: those two oak file cabinets against the far wall of the room.
She checked her watch as she hurried through the teeming crowds back toward the hotel to get the car. It had been more than three hours since Joyce had gone to the house to meet Ronald. She wondered if they were still there. She hoped not. Ro-Ro would not approve of what she was going to do. If Charmian heard about it, she'd have apoplexy.
She was relieved to find the house dark when she pulled up in front: Joyce and Ro-Ro must have finished the architectural comparison.
Inside, she locked the door behind her, reset the security system, and headed immediately through the black central hall to the back of the house. The hush wrapped around her, filling her ears with a ringing silence that seemed composed of a chorus of faint whispers and mutters.
Hoping the boar-headed man was indeed confined to the upstairs, she turned from the kitchen to the back hall, found the storage room door largely by feel, and used her penlight to sort among the keys on the ring Lila had given her. When she went inside, she flipped the light switch: This was a night for nonnal-world processes.
The central chandelier gave the room a depressing yellow cast but shed enough light to see the humped dust cloths, the mirror with its face to the wall, the big file cabinets against the far wall. The leaves reaching between the window bars seemed to press against the glass like desperate hands.
Cree crossed the room and yanked on one of the drawer pulls. Locked, of course. She tried a drawer in the second cabinet with the same result. She fished in her jacket pocket and tried several keys from the key ring. None worked.
Who would have the keys? Definitely not Lila; that had been the whole point of separating these files and keeping them here. Ron, maybe; Charmian, definitely. But Cree couldn't ask her for them, couldn't reveal where her thoughts were leading her. Not until she knew more. Charmian would figure out some new level of obstruction, some new complication.
Her father's voice spoke to her from memory, another one of his humorous philosophical axioms: Hey, it's nothin' that brute force and ignorance won't fix. A comment on the human penchant for crude, stupid solutions, as well as an admission that you could outsubtle yourself and were sometimes better off keeping things straightforward.
Cree took a turn through the room, looking for a tool, something like a crowbar. The best she could do was the rack of fireplace tools beside the old coal grate. The poker was by far the strongest, but its head was too thick to insert between drawer and case, so she started with the ash shovel, wedging the blade into the gap and prying until it opened enough to receive the point of the poker. It was a murderous implement, with a thumb-thick steel shaft and heavy, elephant-goad head — for all she knew, the very weapon that had been used to beat Lionel to death. The long shaft gave her excellent leverage, and though her first two heaves just broke away the edge of the drawer, the third made something snap loudly inside the cabinet. All three drawers had been freed.
She slid open the first drawer, aware that she had truly started down a one-way street. The drawer she'd levered was gashed and broken, bristling with splinters of oak. Sooner or later, Ronald or Charmian would come in here and see that the cabinet had been broken into. There was no going back now, no way to hide the fact that she knew enough to go this far. She had better find what she needed here.
She used both hands to sort through the files crammed into the top drawer. The first few were not what she had expected: folder after folder about Charmian's tennis activities, photos and clippings from a fairly successful amateur career. Bradford, too. One newspaper clipping featured photos of both of them in their whites, winning some minor event: "Teen Tennis Twins Terrorize Tournament Foes,"
the headline ran. There were more Lambert family materials toward the back of the drawer, featuring Charmian's mother and father and particularly her brother Bradford. Brad had indeed been a handsome devil, Cree admitted. He grinned from the backs of thoroughbred horses, frowned studiously as he worked on a tennis stroke. Here was Brad at some high school ball or prom, teeth as white as his starched collar, with some dark-haired teen lovely wearing the wretched Mamie Eisenhower hairstyle of the 1950s. Brad with fishing gear, sometimes with Richard, showing off the fish they'd caught. Brad with Lila and Ronald at some Christmas gone by.
She came to the end of the drawer without finding any Mardi Gras materials.
But the second drawer was different, and it drew a drumbeat from Cree's pulse. "Epicurus 1954," one file tab read. These were miscellaneous materials indeed: photos of parties, of floats being prepared, of parades. Notes of minutes of krewe meetings, financial statements. Invitation lists for Carnival balls. Glossy eight-by-tens and photos clipped from newspapers, showing costumed partyers, some with masks and some without. A newspaper photo of Brad atop a streetlight post in the Quarter, shirtless, strings of beads around his neck, arms raised exultantly to the sky. Another showed Charmian as Marie Antoinette raising a glass high to toast her masked Louis, presumably Richard.
Greek themes were prominent in Epicurus costuming, no doubt in observance of its namesake, the philosopher. Aside from the identification of his name with the pursuit of pleasure and the refinement of taste, Cree didn't know anything about Epicurus, and she suspected that most krewe members didn't either. But it gave license for lots of togas, beards, and dusty wigs. Here was a photo of Bradford wearing a toga and a crown of laurel, looking more Roman than Greek as he tipped his head to drink lustily from a flagon.
She moved on to the next file, "Epicurus 1955." This held more of the same and even included a small, sequined face mask pressed flat among the papers. Her fingers skipped through, piece by piece, impatient for the revelation that had to be here.
For the parades, all participants wore costumes appropriate to whatever theme had been chosen for the year, but for the private parties and balls leading up to Fat Tuesday, individuals wore widely diverse costumes. In the early sixties, the styles of Epicurus seemed to evolve: 1962 showed a preference for decadent movement figures like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Later still, maybe as sixties trends caught up with the krewe, the costumes became more widely varied. There were a few hedonistic-looking psychedelic rock stars. Brad settled into a few years as a pirate, maybe Jean Laffite. Ron entered the scene as a ghastly child Nero, with toga and fiddle. Richard spent two years in the early sixties as some fat chef: a face mask with ballooning red cheeks, a towering mushroom hat, white clothes stuffed with pillows — presumably some icon of the pleasure principle.
From the materials here, she could see it was just as Paul had explained: A krewe was little more than a party club. You got together every year at Carnival to have parties and balls and parades, culminating in the extravagances of Fat Tuesday. Each year the krewe's activities were presided over by a king, chosen by the membership; from the records, Cree could see that Richard had been king of Epicurus several times. To be chosen krewe king was a mixed blessing, apparently, because along with the honor came the obligation to pay for everything: The files for years when Richard had been king included ledgers for the money he spent on lavish feasts, the best booze, exotic entertainments, and ostentatious decorations. One newspaper article suggested that though Rex and Comus were still the most prestigious krewes, Epicurus was the most expensive to belong to — due, apparently to the obligations of providing a truly epicurean standard of feasting and entertainment.
Cree came to the end of the second drawer and went on to the third. She leafed through 1967 and 1968, and then came up short. The back of the drawer was empty. The files from 1969 onward were missing.
Of course! she realized. Charmian would have taken them away before Lila moved back into the house. Cree knuckled her head, furious at her own stupidity. This had all been a waste of time. Of course Charmian would have been several steps ahead.
On the off chance there was something more to discover here, she retrieved the fireplace tools and went to work on the second cabinet. The locking mechanism of this one was more stubborn, and eventually she just broke away half of the top drawer. She ripped away the oak slab and shined her flashlight inside. It was empty. Knowing it was pointless, she reached inside anyway and managed to release the lower drawers. They were empty, too.
That the crucial years were missing half proved her guess, but half wasn't good enough.
In frustration, she almost pitched the poker across the room. Clearly she wasn't going to find records for the year she was really interested in. It would have been 1971, maybe 1972, she figured, when Lila had been raped by someone wearing a boar-head mask.
30
It was close to midnight by the time she turned off the lights and locked the storage room door. She headed down the hall, trying to loosen joints that had grown stiff with immobility and tension. The adrenaline high she'd maintained since her epiphany on Decatur Street had kept her tense enough to scream for more than three hours.
She'd made it all the way to the kitchen before she realized there was a sound in the house.
A voice, whimpering. Not weeping, but beyond weeping: the convulsive, involuntary utterances of an injured person. A woman's voice.
Lila! Cree ran down the dark central hall, following the sound, and stopped to listen again from the entry hail. It was clearer there, the sound of devastation. From upstairs.
Cree took the steps two at a time, turned at the landing, and came into the central room.
"Lila?" she called. She groped until she found the light switch and flipped it. The big room filled with the dull yellow of the chandelier, the doorways dark rectangles all around. "Lila, it's Cree. You shouldn't have come here. This isn't safe. We've got to get you out of here."
There was no answer, just the continuing squelched exclamations of misery. It was a wet sound of breathy exhalations and throaty vocalizations, ragged grunts and sobs, arrhythmic, constricted, forced. Hard to tell where it was coming from. Cree stopped to listen, and suddenly the awful quality of the whimpering suddenly made sense. Not an injured person. A person being injured, right now.
A woman being raped.
"Lila, where are you?" Cree shouted. She moved to the head of the hallway and thought the sound was louder here. Lila had to be in one of the rooms down the hall, the master bedroom or maybe the room she'd occupied as a child.
She ran down to the master bedroom, turned into it, slapped the light switch. No one. Now the whimpering seemed to come from behind: the other bedroom! She raced across the hall, flung open the door, and looked in. Nothing. No one.
The noise stopped.
Cree stood still again just outside the room, looking up and down the hall, confused. "Lila?"
The ceiling light in the central room went out, leaving it a cavern at the end of the hall.
"Lila?" she called toward the dark rectangle.
(‹ Lila?" an echo came back.
The voice sickened her. It was a parody of her voice, a man's voice straining to reach a woman's range. It was mocking her fear and concern, ridiculing her, taunting her.
At the end of the hall, thirty feet away, just where the lighted corridor met the shadow of the big room, down on the floor: two brown shoe tips.
Suddenly Cree felt him, all around, the gnarled malevolent affect lit with manic glee and lust. His mental weather closed around her suddenly and completely, suffocatingly close. It was a trap, she knew instantly, a reprise of a long-ago game of predation and terror. Without knowing it, she'd fallen into Lila's role.
And the anguished, injured whimpering — that had been a ghastly parody, too, the monster mimicking and belittling the sounds of his victim's suffering.
(‹ Lila?" the parody voice jeered again. u Lila?" Taunting her, savori
ng her terror.
Still frozen with horror, Cree could see now that there was something above the shoe tips: yes, the edge of coarse fabric, rising and falling with his breathing. And above that, at head height, something else. Glistening skin beneath coarse bristles. The side of his face.
The awful cheek moved. ^(‹ Lila?" The voice had changed subtly, not so much a sadistic parody any more. "Lila?" Now he seemed to be just calling the name of his victim, twisting the nuance so the implicit threat was clear.
Cree heard the name as if it were her own, and maybe it was, maybe she had become Lila to a sufficient degree that she could draw him as Lila did.
The bristles moved as he turned his head. And there was the snout, just visible around the corner, and then the snout inched forward until the mouth and then the eyes came around. The mouth was wet and red, and the eyes were bright and small and gleeful as they fixed her. The nostrils hissed with his excited breathing.
Fear seared her. She broke and ran down the hallway toward the back stairs. Her body fled instinctively, by simple animal reflex, but her thoughts persisted, trying to find reasons, explanations, precedent, anything that would give her the slightest control. But she'd never experienced anything like this: the intentionality, the malevolent interactivity. His physical solidity. His one-dimensionality: no conscience, no dying man's regrets to appeal to. She heard heavy footsteps charging behind her as she plunged into the smaller back stairwell and flung herself down into the pitch dark. But before she reached the landing, he was there, in front of her, boiling up out of the stairwell. His shape congealed out of darkness: two legs, two arms, a man's torso with a boar's humped, muscular shoulders, an impossibly thick neck, bristled jowls, and pointed ears.
