"As for Pops and Sweetheart, I think they caught on that Lynelle believed in Goblin, which we'd withheld from them before, and they issued a couple of warnings that this 'side of my personality' oughtn't to be encouraged, and surely a high-quality teacher like Lynelle ought to agree. Pops got tough about it and Sweetheart started to cry.
"I took time alone with Sweetheart in the kitchen, helping her dry her tears on her apron and assuring her that I was not insane.
"The moment is deeply inscribed in my memory because Sweetheart, who was always pure kindness, said softly to me that 'things went terribly wrong with Patsy' and she didn't want for things to go badly for me.
" 'My daughter could have had a Sweet Sixteen Party in New Orleans,' Sweetheart said. 'She could have made her debut. She could have been a maid in the Mardi Gras krewes. She could have had all that -- Ruthie and I could have managed everything -- and instead she chose to be what she is.’
" 'Nothing's going wrong with me, Sweetheart,' I said. 'Don't misjudge Lynelle or me either.' I kissed her and kissed her. I lapped her tears and kissed her.
"I might have pointed out to her that she herself had abandoned all the refinements of New Orleans for the spell of Blackwood Manor, that she had spent her whole life in the kitchen, only leaving it for paid guests. But that would have been mean of me. And so I left it with assurances to her that Lynelle was teaching me more than anybody ever had.
"Lynelle and I gave up on the question of insight or commiseration with others as to Goblin -- except for Aunt Queen -- and Lynelle believed me when I complained of how difficult it was sometimes to stop Goblin's assaults.
"For instance, if I wanted to read for any length of time, I had to read aloud to Goblin. And that, I think, is why I am a slow reader to this day. I never learned how to speed through a text. I pronounce every word aloud or in my head. And in those times I shied away from what I couldn't pronounce.
"I got through Shakespeare thanks to Lynelle bringing the films of the plays for me to see -- I particularly loved the films with the actor and director Kenneth Branagh -- and she took me through a little Chaucer in the original Middle English, but I found it extremely hard all around and insisted we give it up.
"There are gaps in my education which no one could ever get me to fill. But they don't matter to me. I don't need to know science or algebra or geometry. Literature and music, painting and history -- these are my passions. These are the things that still, somehow, in hours of quiet and lonesomeness, keep me alive.
"But let me close out the history of my love of Lynelle.
"A great high point came right before the end.
"Aunt Queen called from New York on one of her rare visits to the States and asked if Lynelle could bring me there, and both of us -- along with Goblin -- were delirious with joy. Sweetheart and Pops were glad for us and had no desire themselves to be away from the farm. They understood Aunt Queen's wishes not to come home just now, but they wanted her to know that they were having her room entirely redone, as she had requested, in Lynelle's favorite color blue.
"I explained to Goblin that we were going away, much farther away than New Orleans, and he had to cleave to me more closely than ever before. Of course I hoped that he'd stay at Blackwood Manor but I knew that wouldn't happen. How I knew I can't say. Perhaps because he was always with us in New Orleans. I don't know for sure.
"No matter what my hopes, I insisted that Goblin have his own seat beside me on my left on the plane. We flew first class -- the three of us, with the stewardesses serving Goblin graciously -- to join Aunt Queen at the Plaza on Central Park, and for a great ten days saw all that we could of wondrous sights, museums and the like. Though we had suites as big as Aunt Queen's, eternally filled with fresh flowers and boxes of Aunt Queen's beloved chocolate-covered cherries, Goblin and I bunked in with Aunt Queen as we had in the past.
"I was sixteen by this time, but it doesn't much matter to people like my people whether or not a teenager or even a grown man bunks in with his great-aunt or his granny; those are our ways. In fact, to be utterly frank, I was still sleeping with Jasmine's mother, Little Ida, at home, though she was now very old and feeble and sometimes dribbled a bit of urine in the bed.
"But where was I? Yes, in New York with my great-aunt, at the Plaza Hotel, cuddled in her arms as I slept.
"Goblin was with us for the entire trip, but something peculiar happened to Goblin. He became more and more transparent as the trip progressed. He seemed unable to be anything else. He lacked strength to move my hand, too. I learned this when I asked him to write for me how he liked New York. He could not. And this meant that there could be no pinching and no hair pulling either, though I had pretty much punished him -- by silence and scorn -- for those acts in the past.
"I pondered this, this uncommon transparency in a spirit who has always appeared to me to be three-dimensional and flesh and blood, but in truth I didn't want much to worry about Goblin. I wanted to see New York.
"The high point of our trip for me was the Metropolitan Museum, and I will never forget no matter how long I live Lynelle taking Goblin and me from painting to painting and explaining the relevant history, the relevant biography, and commenting on the wonders we beheld.
"After three days in the museum, Lynelle sat me down on a bench in a room full of the Impressionist paintings and asked me what I thought I'd learned from all I'd seen. I thought for a long time and then I told her that I thought color had died out in modern painting due to World War I and II. I told her that maybe now, and only now, since we had not had a Third World War, could color come back to painting. Lynelle was very surprised and thought this over and said perhaps it was true.
"There are many other things I remember from that trip -- our visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral, in which I cried, our long walk through Central Park, our roaming Greenwich Village and SoHo, our little trek to obtain my passport just in case I might soon be drawn off to Europe -- but they don't press in on this narrative, except in one respect. And that is that Goblin was utterly manageable all the time, and in spite of his transparency seemed to be as wildly stimulated as I was, appearing wide-eyed and happy, and of course New York is so crowded that when I talked to Goblin in midtown restaurants or on the street, no one even noticed.
"I half expected to have him show up beside me in my passport photo but he did not.
"When we returned, Goblin appeared solid again, and could make mischief, and danced himself into exhaustion and invisibility out of sheer joy.
"I felt an overwhelming relief. I had thought the trip to New York mortally wounded him -- that my inattention to him had been the specific cause of his fading severely and perhaps approaching death. And now I had him back with me. And there were moments when I wanted to be with no one else.
"Just after I passed my seventeenth birthday, my days with Lynelle came to a close.
"She had been hired to work in research at Mayfair Medical in New Orleans. And it would henceforth be impossible to keep up with her work, and with tutoring me.
"I was in tears, but I knew what Mayfair Medical meant to Lynelle. It was a brand-new facility, endowed by the powerful Mayfair family of New Orleans -- of which you know at least one member -- and its laboratories and equipment were already the stuff of legend.
"Lynelle had dreamed of studying human growth hormone directly under the famous Dr. Rowan Mayfair and being accepted by the revolutionary Mayfair Medical was a triumph for her. But she couldn't be my teacher and boon companion anymore, it was simply impossible. I'd been lucky to have her as long as I did.
"The last time I saw Lynelle I told her I loved her. And I meant it with all my heart. I hope and pray that she understood how grateful I was for everything.
"She was on her way to Florida that day with two fellow female scientists, headed to Key West for a week of childless and husbandless relaxation.
"Lynelle died on the road.
"She, the speed demon, was not even at the wheel of the car. It
was one of the others who was driving, and they were in a blinding rainstorm on Highway 10 when the car hydroplaned into an eighteen-wheeler truck. The driver was decapitated. Lynelle was pronounced dead at the scene, only to be revived and linger on life support for two weeks without ever regaining consciousness. Most of Lynelle's face had been crushed.
"I only learned of the accident when Lynelle's family called to tell us about the Memorial Mass that would be said for her in New Orleans. Lynelle had already been buried in Baton Rouge, where her parents lived.
"I walked up and down for hours, saying 'Lynelle' over and over. I was out of my mind. Goblin stared at me, obviously bewildered. I had no words. Just her name: 'Lynelle.’
"Pops and Sweetheart took me to the Mass -- it was in a modern church in Metairie -- and Goblin became very solid for the event, and I made space for him in the pew beside me, but he agitated me considerably, demanding to know what was going on. I could hear his voice in my head and he kept gesturing. He shrugged, turned his palms up, shook his head and kept mouthing the words 'Where is Lynelle?’
"The Mass was said by a very elderly priest and had a certain elegance to it, but for me it was a nightmare. When people went to the microphone to speak about Lynelle, I knew that I should step up, I should say all that she'd meant to me, but I couldn't overcome my fear that I would stumble or cry. All my mortal life I have regretted that I didn't speak at that Mass!
"I went to Communion, and as I always did after receiving Communion, I told Goblin flatly and furiously to shut up.
"Then came a frightening moment. As you might not expect, I believe strongly in the Catholic Church and in the miracle of the Transubstantiation -- that the Priest in the Mass turns the wafers and the wine into the true Body and Blood of Christ.
"Well, as I knelt in the pew after having received Communion, and after telling Goblin to shut up, I turned and saw him kneeling right beside me, his shoulder not an inch from my shoulder, his face as vivid and ruddy as my face and his eyes sharply glaring at me; and for the first time in all my life, he frightened me.
"He appeared quickened and cunning, and he gave me the creeps.
"I turned away from him, trying not to feel the obvious press of his shoulder against mine and his right hand slinking over my left. I prayed. I wandered in my mind, and then, when I opened my eyes, I saw him again -- dazzlingly solid -- and I felt the coldest escalating fear.
"The fear did not pass. On the contrary, I became vividly aware of all the other people in the church, seeing those in the pews in front of me with extraordinary peculiarity, and even glancing to the sides at others and then turning boldly to look over my shoulder at all those behind. I had a sense of their normality. And then again I looked at this solid specter beside me; I looked into his brilliant eyes and at his sly smile, and a desperate panic seized me.
"I wanted to banish him. I wanted him dead. I wished that the journey to New York had killed him. And who could I tell this to? Who would understand? I felt murderous and abnormal. And Lynelle was dead.
"I sat in the pew. My heart went quiet. He continued his efforts to get my attention. He was just Goblin, and when he cleaved to me, when he gave up the solid image and wrapped his invisible self around me I felt myself relax in his embrace.
"Aunt Queen flew home for the Memorial, but, as she was coming from St. Petersburg, Russia, and there was a delay out of Newark, New Jersey, she did not make it in time. When she saw her room decorated in Lynelle's favorite blue, she cried. She threw herself on the blue satin comforter, turned over and stared up at the canopy, and looked like nothing so much as one of her own many slender flopping boudoir dolls, with her high heels and her cloche hat and her wet vacant weeping stare.
"I was so devastated by Lynelle's death that I fell into a state of silence, and though I knew that as the days passed those around me were concerned about me, I couldn't speak a single syllable to anyone. I sat in my room, in my reading chair by the fireplace, and I did nothing but think of Lynelle.
"Goblin went sort of mad on account of my state. He began to pinch me incessantly, and trying to lift my left hand, and rushing towards the computer and making gestures that he wanted to write.
"I remember staring at him as he stood over there at the desk, beckoning to me, and realizing for what it's worth that his pinches weren't any worse than they had ever been, and that he couldn't make the lights blink more than very little, and that when he pulled my hair I hardly felt it, and that I could ignore him without consequence if I chose.
"But I loved him. I didn't want to kill him. No, I didn't. And the moment had come to tell him what had happened. I dragged myself out of the chair and I went to the computer and I tapped out:
" 'Lynelle is dead.’
"For a long moment he read this message and then I said it out loud to him, but I received no response.
" 'Come on, Goblin, think. She's dead.' I said. 'You're a spirit and now she's a spirit.’
"But there was no response.
"Suddenly I felt the old pressure on my left hand, with the tight sensation of fingers curling around it, and then he tapped out:
" 'Lynelle. Lynelle is gone?’
"I nodded. I was crying and I wanted now to be left alone. I told him aloud that she was dead. But Goblin took my left hand again and I watched it claw the keyboard:
" 'What is dead?’"
"In a fit of annoyance and heightened grief, I hammered out:
" 'No longer here. Gone. Dead. Body has no Life. No Spirit in her body. Body left over. Body buried in the ground. Her Spirit is gone.’
"But he simply couldn't understand. He grabbed my hand again and tapped out, 'Where is Lynelle dead?' and 'Where is Lynelle gone?' and then finally, 'Why are you crying for Lynelle?’
"A cold apprehension came over me, a cold form of concentration.
"I typed in 'Sad. No more Lynelle. Sad. Crying. Yes.' But other thoughts were brewing in my mind.
"He snatched for my hand again, but he was weaker on account of his earlier efforts, and all he could type was her name.
"At that moment, as I stared at the black monitor and the green letters, I saw what looked like the reflection of a pinpoint of light in the monitor, and, wondering what it could be, I moved my head from side to side to block the light or get a clearer look at it. For one second it became distinctly the light of a candle. I saw the wick as well as the flame.
"At once I turned around and looked behind me. I saw nothing in my room that could have produced this reflection. Absolutely nothing. Needless to say, I had no candles. The only candles were on a hallway altar downstairs.
"I turned back to the monitor. There was no pinpoint of light. There was no candle flame. Again I moved my head from side to side and turned my eyes at every possible angle. No light. No reflected candle flame.
"I was astonished. I sat quiet for a long time, distrusting my senses, and then, unable to deny what I saw, I tapped out to Goblin the question, 'Did you see the candle flame?' Again there came his monotonous and panicky answers: 'Where Lynelle?' 'Lynelle gone.' 'What is gone?’
"I went back to my chair. Goblin appeared for a moment, in a vague flash, and there came the pinches and the hair pulling, but I lay indifferent to him thinking only, praying only in a bizarre way of praying backwards, that Lynelle had never really known how badly she was injured, that she hadn't suffered in her coma, that she hadn't known pain. What if she had seen the car careening into the truck? What if she had heard some insensitive person at her bedside saying that her face, her beautiful face, had been crushed?
"She never suffered. That was the story.
"She never suffered. Or so they said.
"I knew I had seen the light of that candle! I had seen it plainly in the monitor.
"I murmured to Goblin, 'You tell me where she is, Goblin. Tell me if her spirit went into the light.' There came no answer. He couldn't grasp it. He didn't know.
"I hammered at him. 'You're a spirit. You ought to know.
We are made of bodies and souls. I am body and soul. Lynelle was body and soul. Soul is spirit. Where did Lynelle's spirit go?’
"He gave nothing back but his infantile answers. It was all he could do.
"Finally, I went to the computer. I wrote it out: 'I am body and soul. The body is what you pinch. The soul is what speaks to you, what thinks, what looks at you through my eyes.’
"Silence. Then came the vague formation of the apparition again, translucent, face without detail; then it dissolved.
"I went on typing on the computer keyboard: 'The soul -- that part of me which speaks to you and loves you and knows you -- that part is sometimes called spirit. And when my body dies my spirit or my soul will leave my body. Do you understand?’
"I felt his hand clamp onto my left hand.
" 'Don't leave your body,' he wrote. 'Don't die. I will cry.’
"For a long moment I pondered. He had made the connection. Yes. But I wanted more from him, and a terrifying urgency gripped me, a feeling very near panic.
" 'You are a spirit,' I wrote. 'You have no body. You are pure spirit. Don't you know where Lynelle's spirit has gone? You must know. You should know. There must be a place where spirits live. A place where spirits are. You do know.’
"There was a long silence, but I knew he was right beside me.
"I felt him grip my hand. 'Don't leave your body,' he wrote again. 'I will cry and cry.’
" 'But where is the home of the spirits?' I wrote. 'Where is the place where spirits live, like I live in this house?’
"It was useless. I typed it out in two dozen different ways. He couldn't grasp it. And it was not long before he began to ask, 'Why did Lynelle's spirit leave her body?’
"I wrote out the description of the accident. Silence. And finally, his store of energy being exhausted and there being no rainfall to help him, he was absent.
"And alone, cold and frightened, I curled up in my chair and went to sleep.
"A great gulf had opened between me and Goblin.
"It had been widening for all the years that I knew Lynelle, and it was now immeasurable. My doppelgänger loved me and was as ever fastened to me but no longer knew my soul. And what was all the more ghastly to me was that he didn't know what he was himself. He couldn't speak of himself as a spirit. He would have done so if he could. He could not.
Rice, Anne - Vampire Chronicles 11 - Blackwood Farm (v3.0) Page 16