Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [76]
“We went down there. It was the most godforsaken slum I’d ever seen. The very slabs of the sidewalks had floated away in the mud, buildings had collapsed into heaps of lumber, and the weeds were like fields of wheat. And there stood this classic raised cottage with its fresh white paint and planted garden. It had a high picket fence and gate, and a bell at the gate and we rang, and up on the porch, a tall woman opened the door and stood there in her bare feet with the light of the hall behind her. It was Merrick Mayfair.
“She knew who we were. It was astonishing. She complimented me on the Medical Center, and she thanked Lauren for coming to Great Nananne’s wake years and years ago. She was very pleasant to us, but she didn’t ask us in. She was quite fine, she said. She hadn’t really disappeared at all, just become a hermit. I remember using every grain of second sight that I might possess when I looked at her, and a deep spell overtook me. It was the timbre of her voice, and the way that she walked, which set her apart. The center of gravity was not in her hips as it should have been in a human female. And her voice, it had a rich musical dimension to it. As for the rest of her, she was a shadow up there.
“Of course, Lauren had satisfied her abysmal legal mind that all was well. The superficial idiot. And her next attack was upon the Talamasca, which she proposed ‘to run out of Louisiana,’ but when she came up against their endless list of London and New York law firms, and the fact that an entire contingent of the family went up in arms against her, myself and Michael included, she settled very quickly for a schism in the firm, and for telling me how ‘insane’ I was, and that she was going to ‘put Tante Oscar in a home.’ I grabbed her and shook her. I didn’t mean to do it. I’ve never done that to any person before. It was a terrible thing to do. But when she said that about Tante Oscar, I lost my temper. I just did it. I told her if she dared to attempt such a thing with any Mayfair, colored or white, anywhere, at any time, I would kill her. I went sort of out of my mind. How could she think she had the power to do such a thing? I backed away from her. I was afraid that—. I was afraid I would do something even more dreadful to her. And the whole matter was dropped. And she doesn’t come near me anymore.
“And I had so much to do with the Medical Center that I really didn’t want to talk the night away with Dolly Jean about Blood Children and what they did or didn’t do. Though I couldn’t resist going up to Tante Oscar’s apartment one more time with Dolly Jean, but when they started talking about the ‘Walking Babies’ born out in the swamps, and I knew they meant actual Taltos babies, and the way the terrified swamp Mayfairs hacked them to death, I thought I was going into trance mode, and I left.
“And now we come forward almost to the present, and suddenly Miss McQueen is dead, Quinn’s beloved aunt, whom everyone adored, and it’s her funeral we’re gathered for, and Mona’s much too sick to even be told, and the funeral’s in grand New Orleans style, and there in the pew in St. Mary’s Church before me I see you—Quinn, Lestat—and this tall woman, with the scarf around her head, and I see Stirling come up to her and he calls her Merrick, and I knew, I knew she was the same woman I’d seen before, and this time I was certain she wasn’t human. Only I couldn’t concentrate on it.
“At one point she turned and lifted her sunglasses and looked directly into my eyes, and I thought, What does it have to do with me? She smiled. And after that I felt sleepy and unable to concentrate on any thought in particular, except that Aunt Queen was dead and everyone was the lesser for it.
“I wouldn’t look at Quinn. I wouldn’t think about the change in Quinn’s voice on the phone—how over a year ago, his voice and his entire audial demeanor had changed. That might be a mistaken notion after all. What did it matter to know such things? And what if the blond-haired tan-skinned guy next to Quinn in the pew looked like an angel?