Free Lasher by Anne Rice

towel in a little careless heap and went to the head of the stairs. At that very instant, light softly leapt out of the doorways of the double parlor, and grew soundlessly brighter as she went down the steps. The wool carpet felt slightly rough to her bare feet, and when she incidentally saw her toes they looked very babyfied beneath the flannel, which she had to lift now, just like a picture-book kid.
    She stopped. As she looked down, she saw that the carpet was no longer the red wool carpet. It was an oriental runner, very worn, very thin. She felt the change of texture. Or rather she became aware of standing on something more threadbare, and she followed the cascade of Persian blue and pink roses down the stairs. The walls had changed around her. The wallpaper was a deep dusty gold, and far below an unfamiliar chandelier hung from the oval cluster of plaster leaves on the hallway ceiling—something frothy and Venetian that she could never recall having seen before. And it had real lighted candles in it, this little chandelier.
    She could smell the wax. The song of the soprano went onwith its reliable and swinging rhythm, making her want to sing with it again. Her heart was brimming.
    “Oncle Julien!” she whispered, almost bursting into tears. Oh, this was the grandest vision she had ever beheld!
    She looked down into the hallway. More lovely patterns that she’d never seen before. And through the first of the high parlor doorways, the very doorway through which a long-ago cousin had been shot from this very stairway, she saw that the room was no longer the room of the present, and that tiny flames danced in the graceful crystal gasoliers.
    Ah, but the rug was the same rug! And there were Julien’s gold damask chairs.
    She hurried down, glancing to right and left as the details caught her—the old gas sconces with their fluted crystal saucers of light, and the leaded glass around the huge front door, which had not been there before.
    The music was as loud perhaps as a Victrola could get. And ah, behold the whatnot shelf all crowded with tiny ceramic figures, and the brass clock on the front mantel, and the Greek statues on the rear mantel, and the draperies of a mellow old velvet, burnished and fringed, and puddling on the polished floor.
    The doorframes were painted to look like marble! So were the baseboards. It was that old kind of graining, so popular at the end of the century, and the gaslight flickered steadily against the darkly papered ceiling as if the little jets were dancing to the rhythm of the waltz.
    What flaw could there be in this fabric? The rug was the very same rug she’d seen earlier, but that made perfect sense, didn’t it, it had been Julien’s, and there were his lovely fauteuils grouped together for conversation in the very center of the rooms.
    She lifted her arms, and found herself dancing on the balls of her feet, in a circle, round and round, till the narrow nightgown flared around her, making a perfect narrow bell. She sang with the soprano, understanding the Italian effortlessly, though that was the most recent of all the languages she’d learned, and enchanted with the simple rhythm, and then swaying wildly back and forth, bending from the waist and letting her hair whip out and all over her face and tossing it again, so it tumbled down her back. Her eyes swept the veined and yellowed paper of the ceiling, and then in a blur, she saw the big sofa, Michael’s new sofa, only it didn’t have the beige damaskon it now, but rather a worn gold velvet like the draperies which hung from the windows, gorgeous and warm in the flickering light.
    Michael was sitting motionless on the couch looking at her. She stopped in mid-step, her arms curved downward like those of a ballerina, and felt her hair shift and tumble again off her shoulders. He was afraid. He sat in the middle of the couch in his cotton pajamas staring at her, as if she were something utterly terrifying or grotesque. The music