Free Merrick by Anne Rice Page B

mouth working as if she were whispering to herself or to someone unseen, her head tilted just a little to one side.
    I sucked in my breath and stared at her. She showed no signs of weakening, this wee apparition, this tiny old woman who regarded me rather directly in spite of moving lips. She was clothed in a faintly flowered nightgown of flannel that was stained all over with coffee, perhaps, or long-faded blood. Indeed, I became intensely conscious that her image was becoming all the more solid and detailed.
    Her feet were bare and her toenails the color of yellowed bone. Her gray hair was now quite visible and distinct, as if a light were being brightened upon her, and I saw the veins moving up the sides of her head, and the veins on the back of the one hand which dangled at her side. Only very old people looked as she looked. And of course this woman looked exactly as she had when I’d seen her ghost in the carriageway earlier this evening, and exactly as she had on the day of her death. Indeed, I remembered the nightgown. I remembered the stains upon it. I remembered that on her dying body it had been stained but fresh and clean.
    I broke into a true sweat as I stared at her, and I could not move a muscle, except to speak.
    “You think I’ll harm her?” I whispered.
    The figure did not change. The little mouth continued to work, but I could hear only a faint dry rustling noise, as from an old woman telling her rosary in church.
    “You think I mean to do something wrong?” I said.
    The figure was gone. It was gone past tense. I was talking to no one.
    I turned on my heel and glared at the statue of the saint. It seemed to be material and nothing more. I seriously considered smashing it, but my mind was full of confusion as to my intentions and their implications, when quite suddenly there came a deafening knock on the hallway door.
    Well, it seemed to be deafening. I suspect it was ordinary. I was violently startled. Regardless I opened the door and said crossly:
    “What in hell do you want?”
    To my astonishment and his astonishment also, I was addressing one of the ordinary and innocent attendants who worked in the hotel.
    “Nothing, Sir, excuse me,” he said in his slow southern manner, “just this for the lady.” He lifted a small plain white envelope and I took it out of his hand.
    “Oh, wait, please,” I said, as I fumbled to retrieve a ten-dollar bill from my pocket. I had put several in my suit just for this purpose and gave one over to him, with which he seemed pleased.
    I shut the door. The envelope contained the two-piece leather hair barrette which I had taken off Merrick so carelessly in the cab. There was an oval of leather, and then a long pin covered with leather with which she gathered and fixed her hair in place.
    I was trembling all over. This was too dreadful.
    How in the hell had this come to be here? It seemed quite impossible that the cabby had retrieved it. But then how was I to know? At the time, I’d been aware that I ought to pick it up and pocket it, but I’d fancied myself to be under duress.
    I went to the altar, laid the barrette in front of Papa Legba, avoiding his eyes as I did so, and I went straight out of the suite, down the stairs and out of the lobby, and out of the hotel.
    This time, I vowed to observe nothing, to look for nothing, and I went directly to our home.
    If there were spirits along the way, I did not see them, keeping my eyes on the ground, moving as swiftly as I could safely move without causing a stir among mortals, and going directly through the carriageway, back to the courtyard, and then up the iron steps into the flat.

4
    T HE FLAT WAS DARK , which I hadn’t expected, and I did not find Louis in either the front parlor or the back, or in his room. As for Lestat, the door of his room was closed, and the harpsichord music, very rapid and very beautiful, seemed to emanate from the very walls, as is so often the case with modern compact disc