by Daniel Hecht
"There's someone coming," Paul whispered urgently.
"Shhh."
"No, there's someone… this is no joke, Cree, these crack heads — "
"Paul, shut up!"
The shadow of Paul looked down one side of the crypt, saw nothing, then stepped to the other side. Then he mounted the apron and put one hand against the marble crypt cover. He snatched it away as if it had burned him. No doubt he felt the faint vibration in the marble. Afterward he stood motionless again, indecisive. Cree couldn't see his face, but she could hear his breath, a short, sharp panting.
Lila hadn't moved. Cree let herself fall into sync with the burgeoning manifestation in the crypt and felt Lila coming with her.
And they found him there.
He had just awakened in utter darkness, confused. At first it seemed that he couldn't open his eyes, but then he realized they were open, he had either gone blind or there was simply no light for them to register. A waterfall of pain originated in his head and poured down his neck and back. Something was wrong with him, he realized. He'd been hurt. It took a while to make sense of things, but he became aware he was lying on his back on a hard, smooth, slightly rounded surface. With an effort, he lifted one hand only to discover a coarse masonry ceiling just inches above him. The discovery shocked him and his whole body jerked reflexively. The movement caused him to slide to the right, down the slight incline of the curved surface. Abruptly he felt a gap beneath him, and he rolled partly into it.
He was wedged there in the dark, his forehead against rough stone, the back of his head against the thing he'd been lying on. One arm hung beneath him, his fingers trailing in some kind of rubble — dust and crumbly chunks and sharp pieces. An incomprehensible place.
The movement had caused savage arcs of pain to streak through his whole body, and with it the memory came suddenly to him: Richard had been beating him! He had fled the purpling face of his brother-in-law, cringing from and yet welcoming every explosion of pain as the poker struck. Now was some time after that, and he was somewhere dark and small and musty smelling.
The arm beneath his body could hardly move, but the other was free, and with his fingers he traced the surface behind him. Beneath a film of grit it felt smooth and metallic. Something was digging painfully into his back, and when his fingers found it he discovered it was carved in low-relief designs. A flange or fixture like a decorative fist gripping a pole or rail that felt like, it was, a handle!
It was the carrying rail on a coffin.
At the realization, Bradford's ghost ignited in sheer terror. The hand wedged beneath him scrabbled in the remains of his Lambert ancestors. His free hand clawed the wall and bloodied itself. He got it above him, past the end of the coffin, and found only more of the same: bricks with bulges of mortar between them.
Bradford screamed. He was in a crypt. Richard must have done this. Richard and that black witch Josephine had buried him alive.
A groan squeezed out of Lila, and Cree knew she was experiencing the ghost's terror. The silhouette of Paul had put its hands over its ears.
Bradford tried to pound on the wall. Somebody would hear the thumping. They'd let him out. But he found he was too weak to pound long. Two useless blows and his arm fell back against his side, muscles exhausted. The darkness swam in whorls of sick yellow light. He tried to inch himself forward or backward beneath the low ceiling but found he couldn't. He was wedged in the narrow gap between the coffin and the rough wall and he had no strength and he was damaged, badly damaged.
"Help me!" he mouthed. He intended the words but had not enough breath to make them sound. "Help me!"
He pounded the wall for another few seconds and nearly blacked out from the exertion. Confusion took him, and he lost track of where he was or why. It had to do with Lila, he thought. Lila was an idea that was all pain. He had to do something for Lila, she was hurt. Somebody bad had hurt her. He had to get free to do something for Lila. Why? Then he remembered chasing her, and the giddy craziness of it, the way his anger and envy had risen and converged with his lust and that strange sadistic abandon, and how he'd let them go, let it go on. Breaking the boundaries was a thrill that fueled itself. In the boar mask he was a rutting animal, powerful and brutal and free, given power in all the ways his daily life deprived him of power. How good her fear of him felt, how supple her flesh when he forced himself on her, how exciting her struggles beneath him. Even in his pain and remorse, the memory was sharp and clear and spun out of him like a creature with its own separate life, savage and exultant.
Then it got distant and he forgot it again. A sharp tooth of mortar seemed to screw itself into the flesh of his forehead, and he couldn't pull away even a fraction of an inch.
"Charm? Charm!" he called, and this time his heard his voice work. Charm would always help, she had always helped. For a moment the thought of her gave him reassurance, but then he lost his place in time again. He kicked with his free leg and hit something hard. The crypt door. He kicked again, and that was all the strength he had.
The sound of Bradford's spectral shoe against the inch-thick marble door was clearly audible outside the crypt. Paul retreated several steps from the crypt, stumbling as he came off the apron, hands still over his ears, and despite her anger Cree felt a pang for him: His world, too, would come undone tonight.
Bradford's ghost scratched at the bricks with his free hand until he felt his nails come away and he became too weak to move any more. He lay there in the dark, mostly unconscious for a while.
When he awoke again, it was with a start. Something had changed.
The bricks he was wedged against had gotten warmer. The air he struggled to breathe was getting warm, too.
Cree fought to keep calm, knowing the agonies that would follow. The sun must have risen at that point, beginning its daily slow incineration of the occupants of the aboveground crypts of New Orleans. Inside, Bradford's ghost would relive the dying man's panic. His body would arch minutely as he began to be cooked alive. It would go on for some hours yet. It had been happening for almost thirty years.
Even in his wrath, Cree didn't think Richard would have intentionally condemned Bradford to this — surely he hadn't known Brad was still alive when he'd stuffed him in here.
She hoped Lila would intervene soon.
Cree could help, but Lila would need to find strength enough to offer him the window of escape. She had to enter his world dream and offer some promise of release.
Now the dying man was distilling down to his rudiments. There was regret — somewhere far away was a movie of memory that wouldn't stop, a wereboar taking its angry pleasure upon a girl. And Bradford hated the wereboar impulse. It lived in him like a huge tapeworm, fastened into his mind and feeding on him. It punished him. He wanted to be free of it.
You're dead, Bradford, he heard. The voice intruded on his solitary nightmare and startled him: Lila's voice! Go away now, it said. Just go away.
Cree looked at the dark shape of Lila. She was holding herself very still, but around her a dirty purple aura jittered.
Lila? the ghost thought. Its world became confused, and the presence of his victim, the source of his guilt, terrified him. The world of the crypt began to break up, unsustainable.
Cree held her breath, hoping Lila would find in herself what was needed.
"Go away, Bradford! Let yourself go away now!" Lila was saying it out loud. There was no forgiveness in her thought or her voice, but there was pity and there was acceptance. "You're dead. You're a long time ago. You're over with. The whole thing is over now."
The best thing she could manage to give him was to get over him. And it was just right, Cree realized.
It was all the window the tortured ghost needed. He fled from his nightmare in the crypt toward her hard pity and resignation. In the mind of the ghost, past and present clashed, irreconcilable. Lost, the ghost spun away. The boar-headed memory broke apart and became an echo of a memory of a dream and then just dust in a whorl of da
rkness, and even the walls of the crypt, oven hot now, weren't real. Nothing was.
45
By the time Paul swung wide the iron gate at Beauforte House, Lila felt as if she were floating. The night air of the Garden District seemed to buoy her just above the ground — not a light, good feeling, but detached, emptied. The familiar streets struck her as alien. Meeting Bradford's ghost, sharing his dying moments, trying to find her own reconciliation with what had happened, she felt as if she'd been scraped raw inside, hollowed out.
Poor Paul had vomited wrenchingly after the encounter. Of the three of them, only Cree had been able to talk during the short drive from Lafayette Cemetery. Cree had said that the coming encounter was the crucial one. Meeting her father would be the way she'd become free and strong.
Thank you, Cree, Lila thought, I knew that. They were all being so kind.
"One other thing," Cree whispered. She put her hand on Lila's arm and the three of them stopped, halfway up the walk. "I can't be absolutely sure the boar-headed ghost is gone. Bradford's perimortem ghost is gone from the crypt, but his perseveration of the rape was highly independent. If we sense anything at all of him, we have to leave the house immediately. If you don't feel you can take the risk, we shouldn't go in at all."
Lila thought about that for a moment, weighing what was to be gained and what could be lost. "I want to go in," she said finally. "Come with me into the hall. But I want to go into the library by myself."
Even in the half-light, Lila could see the doubt in Paul's face. Cree looked wary but pleased. Of course Cree would know it was the only thing to be done.
They opened the door. Cree had insisted they leave the lights off, and for a moment the yawning darkness of the rooms frightened Lila. Maybe she couldn't do this. But though they waited at the bottom of the stairs, neither she nor Cree could feel the boar-headed specter, no echo or whisper. In fact, his absence was palpable. The house felt different: That coiled-spring feeling, that about-to-snap feeling, was gone. The boar-headed ghost was dead.
She drew one breath and realized it was the first clear, unconstricted inhalation she'd taken in many, many years.
Paul waited near the open front door as Cree walked her back through the dark hallway and through the kitchen. They turned into the long south wing hallway. Cree squeezed her hands at the library door and left without a word.
Lila went in. She could see almost nothing, but her body remembered the room's contours so well it almost didn't matter. She took small steps, feeling as she had when she'd performed on the cello as a little girl, going out onto the stage in front of a vast auditorium to perform some intimidating work she knew she hadn't mastered.
"Daddy?" she whispered.
The library smell reminded her of him, but she saw and heard nothing. Of course, Cree had said it might take a long time.
Her thigh found the piano bench and she sat backward on it, facing the room.
There were many varieties of fear, Lila decided. She was scared shaky now, but it was not the same as the fear she'd felt upstairs and in all her solitary moments in the last four months. That had been torn out of her like a tumor at the Lambert crypt. No, this was more like the fear you feel from some mountaintop you've climbed, where the fear of height chills you even as the long views make you joyful. There was a state where fear and hope met, she realized, where they were indistinguishable. The impulses sprang from the same well inside you.
It helped that everyone was so kind. Cree was so good-hearted. Paul had been dubious about this, but clearly he cared, he really wanted her to recover, as a human being as well as a psychiatrist. She hadn't seen Ron since all the revelations, but she knew he had done so much to protect her from what had happened. Even Momma, in her inimitable way confessing to killing Daddy and Temp Chase, taking all the blame. She'd played the tyrannical dowager to the hilt, even refusing to see Lila when she'd tried to visit her at the jail earlier. She'd done it so that Lila couldn't sympathize too strongly. So that Lila could stay angry at her.
And so that she wouldn't see the lie for what it was.
It was so touching. They'd been protecting her for so long, she couldn't bear to let them down.
Cree and Paul had explained what had happened to her: the boar mask, Brad and Daddy switching costumes that night, the rape. Daddy beating Brad and, thinking he was dead, hiding his unconscious body in the Lambert crypt, where he died of his wounds the next day. Charmian's rage at Daddy for killing Brad, last scion of the illustrious Lamberts, and her vengeance by poison.
She could almost believe it. Certainly she would put nothing past Momma, and a tiny, awful part of her gloated at Charmian's having to pay the piper at last, for these and other sins. But as she'd thought about it afterward, it didn't quite make sense, and during that last long night awake in the hospital room, her memory had unsealed itself. It was like discovering a hidden door in the house, one that opened into a long, dark hallway. That secret corridor of memory had always been there, she'd always sensed it, running parallel to the traveled ways of her life, her daily acts and thoughts. She had knocked on the walls and heard the hollow echoes, but she had never been able to find the way inside.
But as she thought about what Cree and Paul told her, she suddenly found the door, swinging open unexpectedly. It made sense out of Ron's inexplicable comments in the kitchen that afternoon. If you knew there was something I did — something that put me in danger. Something I could barely live with… something I could never even do again. Wouldn't you try to protect me?
He hadn't been talking about himself. He was talking about her.
She began to remember: believing Daddy had done it to her. Secretly making the poison from the wild cherry seeds and blossoms as Josephine had told them years ago, and putting it in his amaretto. Coming down later to find Momma with him on the floor, and all the feelings she'd felt. Though she'd been kind of crazy since that night with the boar-headed man, it was that moment in the library that she'd gone truly insane. That searing instant had cauterized her mind, closing the wound and sealing off her memory.
Knowing what she'd done, she wanted again to kill herself. After Cree and Paul had left the hospital room, she'd raged at herself, and at them for trying to deceive her yet again.
But the girl who had done it was so long gone; Lila could not fully blame her. The emotion was weary, it had worn itself out. And all around her now was the kindness of those who sought to protect her. Didn't she owe them the consummation of their kindness? That was what won out, what gave her strength. That much kindness was something of a redemption, wasn't it? People were at least sometimes capable of fine deeds and noble hopes, weren't they?
She made up her mind to pretend she didn't know. Cree had helped her at every step of the way, but this step she decided she'd take on her own. She'd see if she could find Daddy tonight. She'd ask for his forgiveness. She'd try to let him free. Then she'd keep the secret for the rest of her life.
Time passed. She wondered now how long she'd been in here; it seemed like hours, but in the dark it was hard to tell. Cree had said it might take a while, and that Daddy's ghost was a subtler sort of manifestation; she might not experience him as strongly as Brad's ghost, at least not visually. It might be only her heart that perceived him, so she'd have to observe her feelings closely. Be gentle with yourself, Cree had said. Be patient with yourself
She did her best. She tried to relax, and she stared open-eyed around her in the dark. The room wasn't totally black — a little light crept around the edges of the curtains. She could see the vaguest of forms: the dark flat of bookshelves, the lighter walls on either side of the fireplace, the looming lumps of darkness that would be the wingback chairs. Invisible at the far end of the room was the table that had scared her so badly and that throughout the many ordeals with the boar-headed man had lingered in her thoughts and figured in her nightmares. She'd worried that it would persist as the boar-headed man did, it would arise to torment her in some unforseen way. Th
at other things in the house would start changing, too.
But Cree had explained that, too, along with the snake and the wolf. When Cree had asked Josephine about it, down in Port Sulphur, Josephine had shown her a book she'd kept since back then. Again, Lila remembered it the moment Cree told her about it. She and Ro-Ro would go to Josephine's room and huddle up in their pajamas on the quilted bed cover as Josephine read to them. Sometimes it was Bible stories, sometimes fairy tales, but their favorite was an old volume of supernatural stories, illustrated with lurid full-color plates, called Terrors of Devil's Bayou. Daddy called that kind of thing "pulp." The book had heavy, flaking cardboard covers, and just the smell of it when they opened its crumbly pages gave them a delicious thrill of terror. Josephine said it was from back in the 1920s. They'd make her read it, and though she'd always resist she always gave in. It would scare them terribly and they'd come trembling back into the main house to lie wide eyed and quaking in bed, imagining all its lovely horrors.
There was the gigantic water moccasin that dwelt deep in the cypress swamps. It came at night to the scattered houses of Cajun trappers to eat their children, right in their beds. Nothing could stop it: It was able to seep like smoke through cracks in walls, down chimneys, around doors. The old people knew that the black mist that sometimes gathered and glided along the bayous at sundown was the snake, beginning to take form, and that its appearance meant someone would die that night.
The wolf was a loup-garou that terrorized the swamps. He could lope through the night over land or water or swamp and turn into a man or a wolf at will. The scariest picture was when he was halfway between. When he came to the house of his victim, he became as stealthy as a shadow and took great pleasure in stalking his unknowing victim. Before he struck, he'd whisper the name of his intended prey at door cracks and keyholes.
The living table was pictured in the book, Cree said, claw feet and all. Lila remembered the story: An evil rich man in some small town oppressed the men who worked in his sawmill and was cruel to their wives and children. He lived alone in a huge house, and while his neighbors suffered in poverty he indulged himself by buying jewels and baubles, importing fine furniture from France, drinking only the most expensive wines. Eventually the townspeople asked a local witch to put a curse on him. The house and the rich things in it came alive, attacking him, driving him mad, and devouring his soul.
