Merrick - Anne Rice [33]
“But you must explain this to me,” I said.
“It was in a back street, rather dangerous,” he said. “I thought she wanted to die. She was walking alone in utter darkness, and when she heard my deliberate footfall behind her, she didn’t even bother to glance over her shoulder or speed her pace. It was very reckless behavior and unusual for any woman of any sort at all. I thought she was weary of life.”
“I understand you.”
“But then, when I drew close to her,” he said, “her eyes flashed on me violently, and she sent out a warning that I heard as distinctly as a spoken voice: ‘Touch me and I’ll shatter you.’ That’s about the best translation of it from the French that I can make. She uttered other curses, names, I’m not sure what they meant. I didn’t withdraw from her in fear. I simply didn’t challenge her. I had been drawn to her in my thirst because I thought she wanted death.”
“I see,” I said. “It checks with what she told me. Other times, I believe she’s seen you from afar.”
He pondered this for a moment. “There was an old woman, a very powerful old woman.”
“Then you knew of her.”
“David, when I came to you to ask you to speak with Merrick, I knew something of her, yes. But that was a while ago that the old woman was alive, and the old woman did sometimes see me, most definitely, and the old woman knew what I was.” He paused for a moment, then resumed. “Way back before the turn of the last century, there were Voodooiennes about who always knew us. But we were quite safe because no one believed what they said.”
“Of course,” I responded.
“But you see, I never much believed in those women. When I encountered Merrick, well, I sensed something immensely powerful and alien to my understanding. Now, please, do go on. Tell me what happened tonight.”
I recounted how I’d taken Merrick back to the Windsor Court Hotel, and how the spell had then descended upon me with numerous apparitions, the most unwholesome and frightening of which was most definitely that of the dead grandmother, Great Nananne.
“If you could have seen the two figures speaking to one another in the carriageway, if you could have seen their absorbed and somewhat secretive manner, and the casual fearless way in which they regarded me, it would have given you chills.”
“No doubt of it,” he said. “And you do mean you actually saw them, as though they were truly there. It wasn’t simply an idea.”
“No, my dear fellow, I saw them. They looked real. Of course they didn’t look entirely like other people, you must understand. But they were there!”
I went on to explain my return to the hotel, the altar, Papa Legba, and then my coming home, and, once again, I described the music of the harpsichord and the singing of the caged birds.
Louis grew visibly sad at this, but again, he did not interrupt.
“As I told you before,” I said, “I recognized the music. It was Mozart’s first sonata. And the playing was unrealistic and full of—.”
“Tell me.”
“But you must have heard it. It was haunting. I mean a long, long time ago you must have heard such music, when it was first played here, for hauntings only repeat what occurred once upon a time.”
“It was full of anger,” he said softly, as though the very word “anger” made him hush his tone.
“Yes, that was it, anger. It was Claudia playing, was it not?”
He didn’t respond. He seemed stricken by his memories and considerations. Then finally he spoke.
“But you don’t know that Claudia made you hear these sounds,” he said. “It might have been Merrick and her spell.”
“You’re right on that score, but you see, we don’t know that Merrick caused all the other things, either. The altar, the candle, even my blood upon the handkerchief—these things don’t prove that Merrick sent the spirits after me. We have to think about the ghost of Great Nananne.”
“You mean this ghost might have interfered with us, entirely on