by Rice, Anne
I broke off there. “No finer language can be used to describe Aunt Queen,” I said. “And that she lived among us to be eighty-five years of age was a gift to all of us, a precious gift, and that death took her so abruptly must be seen as a mercy if we are to remain sane, and to think of her and what decrepitude might have meant to her. She is gone. She, the childless one who was a mother to all of us. The rest is silence.”
Then, scarcely believing that I had stepped up to the sanctuary of the church to deliver these words before a human crowd at a Requiem Mass, I was about to return when suddenly Tommy rose and anxiously gestured for me to wait.
He came to speak, shaking violently, and he put his arm around me to steady himself, and I put my hand on his shoulder, and he said into the microphone:
“She gave me the world. I traveled it with her. And everywhere we went, from Calcutta to Aswan to Rio to Rome to London, she gave me those places—in her words, in her enthusiasm, in her passion, and in … in … showing me and telling me what I could make of my life. I’ll never forget her. And though I hope to love other people as she taught me to love people, I’ll never love anyone the way I loved her.”
Looking up at me to indicate he was finished, he clung to me as we made our way out of the sanctuary and back to the pew.
I was very proud of him and he took my mind off my own sins completely, and, as I sat down right beside Lestat I held Tommy’s hand with my left hand and Lestat took my right.
When it came time to receive Communion, a great many people were moving out of the pews to get in line, and of course Tommy and Jasmine were going to do it. And on impulse I rose and went before them to get in line.
And to my utter shock, so did Merrick, and so did Lestat, following my example perhaps, or doing what they would have done in any case.
The three of us received the sacrament.
I took it in my hand as was my custom, then put it in my mouth. I don’t know how they took it—whether in their hands or directly into their mouths. But they took it. I felt it dissolve on my tongue as always—such a tiny morsel of food not being repulsed by my body—and I prayed to the God who had come into me to forgive me everything I was. I prayed to Christ to redeem me from what I was. I prayed to know what I must do—if there was any way, honorable or decent or moral—for me to live.
Was Christ inside me? Of course. Why should one miracle cease just because another one had taken hold of me? Was I guilty of sacrilege? Yes. But what is a murderer to do? I wanted God to be inside me. And my Act of Contrition, my renunciation of all sin, was for the moment pure. I knelt with my eyes closed and I thought the strangest thoughts.
I thought of the omniscient God becoming Man and it seemed such a remarkable gesture! It was as if I’d never heard the story before! And it seemed that the omniscient God had to do it to fully understand His Creation because He had created something that could offend Him so deeply as humankind had done. How tangled it was. How bizarre. Angels hadn’t offended Him so deeply. No. But human beings had. My head was so full of ideas, and my heart for the moment was full of Christ, and my soul wept its own bloodless tears, and I felt innocent just for this little while.
Fast-forward: the cemetery:
Lonigan and Sons had provided us all with small candles, each with its round paper shield so the wax wouldn’t burn our hands. Fr. Kevin Mayfair finished the graveside ceremony with dash and charm. He wept for Aunt Queen. Many people were crying. Terry Sue was still crying. Flowers were heaped all around the coffin on its bier. We were invited to file past and touch the wood for the last time. The gates to the tall granite tomb stood open. The coffin would be interred on one of the shelves after we left.
Patsy broke into hysterical sobbing.
“How could you bring us out here at night!” she shouted at me, her eyes wet and streaming. “You, always you, Tarquin. I hate this place, and you have to bring us at night. You, always you, Tarquin.”
I felt sorry for her that she was so unhappy and that everyone was staring at her, and not knowing how sick she was, and how insane she was in general.
Big Ramona tried to quiet her. Merrick Mayfair stood at my elbow watching her intently. I could feel Lestat watching her as well. I felt humiliated for her, but what did it matter to them, her strange theatrics? And why had she come?
She had not come to the gravesides of her own parents. But she had loved Aunt Queen. Everybody had.
And then Big Ramona guided her towards the car. Our lawyer, Grady Breen, tried to pet her and quiet her.
“Damn you, Quinn!” she shouted as they forced her into the limousine. “Damn you to Hell!” I wondered if she had some divining power to call out such perfect curses.
“We should meet tonight,” said Merrick in a low voice. “Your spirit friend is dangerous. I can sense his presence. He isn’t eager to be seen by me or by Lestat. But he’s here. There’s no time to lose.”
“We’ll meet at the house?” I asked.
“Yes, you go with your family,” said Lestat. “We’ll be waiting for you when you arrive.”
“Your mother, she’s headed there also,” said Merrick. “She wants to leave, however. Try to keep her. We have to talk to her. Tell her that we have to talk to her. Use any means you can to keep her there.”
“But why?” I asked.
“When we get together,” said Merrick, “you’ll understand.”
The limousine was waiting for me. And so were Tommy, Patsy, Big Ramona, Nash, Jasmine and Clem.
I glanced back once at the coffin and the mortuary personnel and the cemetery workers as they prepared the crypt—just what they had not wanted us to see—and then I went back to take two red roses from the bank of flowers, and, glancing up, I saw Goblin.
He stood at the very door of the mausoleum. He was dressed as I was, in a black suit, and his hair was like mine, full but trimmed, and he stared at me with wild, sparkling eyes, and all through him, solid though he was, I could see an intricate web of blood, as it infected all that made up the illusion. The image remained for one second, perhaps two, and then winked out as though it had been a flame.
I shuddered. I felt the breeze. The emptiness.
Taking the two roses with me, I got into the car and we headed for Blackwood Manor.
Patsy cried all the way. “I haven’t been right up to that damn tomb in all these years,” she kept saying. “And we have to come in the middle of the night on account of Quinn, little Quinn, how fitting, little Quinn!”
“You didn’t have to come,” said Big Ramona. “Now shush, you’re making yourself sick.”
“Oh, damn you, damn you all, what do you know about sick?”
And so on it went for the long ride home.
By the time we reached the house my anxious hands had involuntarily crushed both roses into wanton petals.
47
Patsy was in the front bedroom across from mine, and as soon as we reached home, Cindy, our beloved nurse, went up to attend to her, to make certain she had taken her medicines and to give her some sort of mild tranquilizer. She was soon in an official Blackwood Manor flannel nightgown with no intentions of going anywhere, though when she saw me pass the door to my room she screamed at me that I had made her nauseated by dragging us all to the cemetery “at midnight.”
It was not yet midnight.
As for Goblin, everyone knew the danger. I did not have to tell Jasmine and Clem to look after Jerome, or tell Nash to keep his eye close on Tommy. Everyone knew what Goblin had done to Aunt Queen. Even Patsy believed it and Big Ramona was now her companion and guardian.
No one was to climb the staircase alone. No one was to react with panic to the breaking of glass. Everybody was to remain within the house, in pairs or threes, including me, who had my “two friends” visiting in my private parlor.
And they were waiting for me just as they had promised. We clustered around the center table, Merrick, Lestat and I, and Merrick, a tall, very lean woman with almond-colored skin and full
dark hair, who had taken off her white scarf and her big glasses, immediately began to talk.
“This creature, this ghost that’s haunting you, he’s related to you by blood, and the connection is more than important.”
“But how can that be?” I said. “I’ve always believed him to be a spirit. I’ve been haunted by ghosts. They declare who they are. They have histories; they have patterns.”
“He has a history and a pattern too, believe me.”
“But what is it?” I asked.
“You have no idea?” she probed, looking me in the eye as if I was concealing something from myself perhaps.
“None whatsoever,” I replied. I found it easy to talk to her. I felt she would understand. “He was always with me,” I said, “from the beginning. I thought that I created him almost. That I drew him to myself, out of the void, and developed him in my own image. Oh, I know he’s made of something. Ether. Astral particles—some form of matter. Something, yes, something that obeys natural laws. Mona Mayfair explained to me once that such spirits have a nucleus, a kind of heart, and a circulatory system, and I understand that my blood feeds that system now, and that he’s becoming stronger and stronger as he draws blood from me after I feed. But I’ve never had an inkling that he was the ghost of somebody.”
“I saw him in the cemetery,” she responded. “Just as you did.”
“You saw him before our crypt? When I went to take the roses?”
“I saw him before that,” she said. “He was very strong there. Tarquin, he’s your twin.”
“Yes, I know, my absolute doppelgänger.”
“No, Tarquin, I mean he’s the ghost of your twin brother, your identical twin brother.”
“That’s impossible, Merrick,” I said. “Believe me, I appreciate your wanting to attack this problem head-on, but there’s a very simple reason why that can’t be so. There are two reasons, actually.”
“Which are?” she asked.
“Well, first off, if I’d had a twin, I’d know. Somebody would have told me. But far more important, Goblin writes with his right hand. And I’ve always been left-handed.”
“Tarquin,” she said, “he’s a mirror twin. Haven’t you ever heard of them? They mirror each other exactly. And there’s an old legend that argues that every left-handed person is the survivor of mirror twins, one of whom perished in the womb, but your twin didn’t perish that way. Tarquin, I think we need to talk to Patsy. I think Patsy wants you to know. She’s weary of the silence.”
I was too shocked to speak.
I made a little gesture for patience and then I stood up and beckoned for them to come with me.
We crossed the hall. Patsy’s door was open. Her room didn’t have a parlor like mine, but it was spacious and beautiful, with a regal bed done up in blue-and-white ruffles, and a blue silk couch and chairs before it. She was sitting on the couch with Cindy, our nurse, watching the television while Big Ramona sat with her embroidering ring in one of the chairs. The volume of the television was so low it seemed unimportant. Big Ramona rose to go as we entered. So did Cindy.
“What kind of invasion is this?” Patsy asked. “Hey, Cindy, don’t you go without giving me another shot. I’m sick. And you, Tarquin Blackwood, half the time you don’t know I’m alive. When I die, are you going to drag everybody to Metairie Cemetery at the stroke of twelve?”
“I don’t know, Patsy,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just strangle you and dump you in the swamp. I dream about that sometimes, murdering you and dumping you in the swamp. I dream I did it. You tasted like cotton candy and candy apples, and you sank deep down in the green water.”
She laughed and shook her head as she looked at me and at my two friends. In her long white flannel nightgown she looked particularly thin, which worried me for her. And her blond hair, so often teased, was brushed out and hung down in waves, making her look young. Her eyes were big and hard.
“You’re so crazy, Tarquin Blackwood,” she sneered. “You should have been drowned when you were born. You don’t know how much I hate you.”
“Now, Patsy, you don’t mean that,” said Cindy, the nurse. “I’ll be up to give you another shot in an hour.”
“I’m sick right now,” said Patsy.
“You’re loaded right now is what you are,” said Big Ramona.
“Can we talk to you for a little while?” asked Lestat. He gestured gently and she motioned for him to sit beside her. He settled there and actually put his arm along the back of the couch behind her.
“Sure, I’m glad to talk to friends of Quinn’s,” Patsy said. “You sit down, all of you. It’s never happened before. Nash is so stuck-up, he calls me Miss Blackwood most of the time. Jasmine can’t stand the sight of me. She thinks I don’t know that black bastard of hers is your child. Like Hell I don’t know. Everyone in the parish knows. And she runs around saying, ‘He is my son’ like he came from a virgin birth, can you imagine? I tell you if that child’s father had been anybody but you, Quinn, it would have been out with the trash, but it was little Quinn who got into Jasmine’s panties and so it’s just fine, according to Aunt Queen, just fine, let the little bastard have the run of the house, it’s just—”
“Come on, Patsy, stop it,” I said. “If anybody hurt that child’s feelings, you’d be the first to stick up for him.”
“I’m not trying to hurt him, Quinn, I’m trying to hurt you, ‘cause I hate you.”
“Well, I’ll give you some real good opportunities to hurt me. You just need to talk to me and my friends.”
“Well, that will be a pleasure.”
Merrick had taken the chair in which Big Ramona had been sitting, and all this while she had been studying Patsy, and now in a low voice she introduced herself by her first name and she introduced Lestat also.
I sat down beside Merrick.
Patsy nodded to these introductions and said with a searingly vicious smile, “I’m Tarquin’s mother.”
“Patsy, did he have a twin?” Merrick asked. “A twin that was born at the same time he was or moments after?”
Utter silence fell over Patsy. I had never seen such an expression on her face. It went blank, yes, with a combination of stupefaction and dread, and then she screamed for Cindy. “Cindy, I need you, Cindy, I’m panicky! Cindy!”
She turned this way and that, until Lestat placed his hand firmly on her shoulder. He spoke her name in a whisper. She appeared to look into his eyes and to lose her hysteria as if it were being drained out of her.
Cindy appeared in the door with the syringe poised.
“Now, Patsy, you just hang on,” she said, and then she came forward and, sitting on Patsy’s left, she very modestly lifted the gown and gave Patsy a shot of the sedative in her left hip, and then stood there waiting.
Patsy was still looking into Lestat’s eyes.
“You understand,” Patsy said. “It was the most pitifulest, terriblest thing—.” She shuddered. “You can’t imagine.”
Without taking his eyes off Patsy, Lestat told Cindy that Patsy was fine now.
Patsy turned her eyes to the Oriental rug and she appeared to be tracing its patterns. Then she looked up at me.
“I hated you so much,” she said. “I hate you now. I always hated you. You killed it.”
“Killed it! How—?” I was stunned.
“Yes,” she said. “You did it.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “How did I do that?” I wanted to probe her mind, but I’d never used that power with her and some profound inveterate distaste kept me from doing it.
“You were so big,” she said. “You were so healthy, so normal. Ten pounds, eleven ounces. Even your bones were big. And then that other little one, my little Garwain, only three pounds, and they said he had given you all his blood in my womb, all his blood. You were like a vampire baby drinking up all his blood! It was so awful, and he was so small. Just three pounds. Oh, he was the most terriblest, pitifulest creature you ever saw in your life.”
&nbs
p; I was too amazed to speak.
The tears were rolling down her cheeks. Cindy took out a clean Kleenex and wiped them away.
“I wanted so badly to hold him, but they wouldn’t let me,” Patsy went on. “They said he was the donor twin, that’s what they called him. The donor twin. He gave everything. And there he was, too tiny hardly to live. They put him in an incubator. They wouldn’t even let me touch him. I sat there in that hospital day and night, day and night. And Aunt Queen kept calling me and telling me, ‘This baby at home needs you!’ What a thing to say to me! Like this tiny little baby in the hospital didn’t need me! Like this little pitiful creature in the hospital didn’t need me! She wanted me to come home and give my milk to a ten-pound monster of a baby. I couldn’t even look at you! I didn’t want to be in the same house with you! That’s why I moved out back.”
She wiped angrily at her tears. Her voice was so soft. I don’t think human beings could have heard her. I’m not sure Cindy who sat right beside her could hear her.
“I sat there in that hospital day and night,” she said. “I begged them to let me touch that tiny little baby, and don’t you know he died in that machine with all those tubes and wires, and monitors and numbers clicking. He died! That little baby, that poor little Garwain, my Little Knight, that’s what I called him, Garwain, my Little Knight, and then they let me hold him, when he was dead, that poor tiny infant, I held him in my arms.”
I had never seen her like this, never seen her cry such tears, never seen her in such abject sadness. On she went:
“And we had a tiny coffin for him, a white coffin, with him in a white christening gown, all nestled in it, poor little thing, and we went to the Metairie Cemetery, all of us, and Aunt Queen, for the love of God, why on earth did she bring you out there, and you were screaming and hollering and carrying on, and I hated her for bringing you, and she kept saying that you knew that your twin had died, you felt it, that I should hold you, can you imagine, that I should hold you, and there was my little Garwain in the teensy white coffin, and they put him in the grave and I had it carved on the stone, ‘Garwain, My Little Knight,’ and he’s in there now, in his own little place.”