Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [87]
“ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. I knew right where they were. We always kept oil lamps at Blackwood Manor because, being out in the country like we were, we never knew when the electricity was going to go out, and so I found the oil lamp in the sideboard and I lifted it up and put it on the dining table. I raised the glass shade and lighted the wick with the cigarette lighter I always carried just for such things.
“ ‘Put it on the window, darling,’ she said, ‘yes, right there, on the sill, and let’s go into the parlor and light the lamp there too.’
“I did what she told me, putting the lamp onto the windowsill. ‘But that looks dangerous,’ I said, ‘with it under the lace panels and so near to the draperies.’
“ ‘Don’t you worry, darling,’ she said. She led me briskly across the hallway and into the parlor. I took the lamp out of the high Chinese chest between the two hall doorways. After it was lighted, I put it on the windowsill in the same manner as I had done across the hall. Now, that harp, that harp was the same, the big gold harp, I thought, but everything else was changed.
“This was the strangest dizziness. I didn’t dare to think of having her, of her finding out that I didn’t know how.
“ ‘You’re my darling,’ she said. ‘Don’t stare at the pretty furniture, it doesn’t matter.’ But I couldn’t help it because only a moment ago—when I’d taken the lamp from the chest—it had been familiar and now it was different again, all those violet satin black-framed chairs, and there came a sudden chorus of voices, of people saying the Rosary!
“Candlelight flickered on the ceiling. Something was wrong, and terribly terribly sad.
“I was off balance. I was about to fall. I turned around. The sound of the voices was an inundation. And the room was full of people—people in black, seated on chairs and couches and in little gold folding chairs—and a man was sobbing.
“Others were crying. Who was the little girl who stared at me?
“There was a coffin lying before the front windows, an open coffin, and the air was heavy with flowers, drenched with flowers, the waxy smell of lilies, and then up out of this coffin there rose a blond-haired woman in a blue dress. In one swift gesture, as if she rode an invisible tide, she had come up out of the coffin and stepped down on the polished floor.
“ ‘Lynelle,’ I cried out. But it wasn’t. It was Virginia Lee. How could I not know the lovely little face of Virginia Lee! Our blessed Virginia Lee. The little girl let out a baleful cry, ‘Mamma!’ How could a woman rise from a coffin?
“ ‘You leave this house alone!’ she cried, and she reached out in a perfect fury at the woman who stood with me, her white hands almost touching her, but the woman at my side drove her back with a great hissing sound, a flash and sputtering, and the figure of Virginia Lee, our blessed sweet Virginia Lee, our household saint, the figure of Virginia Lee, and the coffin, and the bawling child, the mourners—all of it blinkered and went out.
“The chorus of voices died away, as if it were a wave on the beach being sucked back into the ocean. Hail Mary Full of Grace and then nothing. Breeze and the flicker of the oil lamp in the shadows, and that smell of burning oil.
“I was too dizzy to stand. She clung to me.
“The silence crashed around us, and I wanted to say something, I wanted to ask something; I tried to form the thought, Virginia Lee had been here, but I was holding the woman again and kissing her—and I was so hard it was painful, I couldn’t keep it back much longer, it was worse than waking from a wet dream—and saying, ‘No, I won’t let it go on, I can’t do that. That’s a mortal sin.’ But she said,
“ ‘Quinn, my darling Quinn. Quinn, you are my destiny.’ It was so inexpressibly tender. ‘Take me to my room.’
“Smoke was rising behind the thick lace. A woman was crying softly, brokenheartedly. The child’s sobs came like coughs. But