Free Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice

Her body felt cold to him, and there was about her a stale odor so unnecessary and in such contradiction to her waxen beauty. Her hair had been brushed. It made him think of a great black cat clinging to her.
    “You know that aria,” she murmured, “the one from
Griselda
, will you sing that for me now?”
    “You can sing it with me….”
    “No, not now,” she said. He knew she was right. The wine made her voice completely unmanageable.
    He knew the song by heart and he started, but singing only in half voice, as if for her ears alone, and he felt her weight collapsing against him. She gave a little moan, the way she did in her sleep.
    “Mamma,” he said suddenly. He stopped playing. And turning, he gathered her up and looked at her dim profile. For an instant he was distracted by the tangle of triple-layered shadows they made on the floor beyond her. “Mamma, I must ask you to listen to a little story, and tell me what you know about it.”
    “If there are fairies in it, and ghosts, and witches,” she said, “I might like it.”
    “Maybe there are. Mamma,” he said.
    And while she was still looking away, he described to herexactly Marcello Lisani and all he had said, and his search for the picture.
    He described to her the portrait in the dining room, and the ghastly pentimento.
    And very slowly, while he was talking, she turned to face him. He did not notice anything strange about her at once, only that she was really listening to him.
    But gradually her face began to alter. It seemed her expression changed indefinably, and that the heavy mantle of lassitude and ebbing drunkenness lifted from her.
    There was almost a distorted quality to it, her sharpening as she listened, her pointed fascination.
    And gradually he grew frightened.
    He stopped talking. And staring at her as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, he felt she was changing into another person.
    It was subtle, it had been slow, but it was complete, and for a long moment it silenced him.
    He saw her all of a piece: her lace dressing gown, her bare feet, and her angular face with its slanted Byzantine eyes and her mouth, small, colorless, and quivering as was all the rest of her.
    “Mamma?” he whispered.
    Her hand burned his wrist as she touched him.
    “There are pictures of him in this house?” she asked. There was a blankness to her face. It made her look young and utterly absorbed and curiously innocent. “Where are they?”
    And she rose immediately as he did. She pulled on her yellow silk wrapper and waited right beside him as he took a candle from the sconce and then she followed him.
    There was a mindless quality to her. And he was halfway to the supper room when he realized she was still barefoot and did not seem to know it.
    “Where?” she asked. He opened the doors and pointed to the great family portrait.
    She stared at it and then looked at him in confusion.
    “I’ll show you,” he said quickly, reassuring her. “It’s the clearest image of him when you look very close. Come.” And he guided her to it.
    There was no need for the candle. The late afternoon sunlight was flowing through the mullioned windows and the backs of the chairs were warm as he touched them.
    He brought her up close and said, “Look,
through
the blackness.”
    And then he lifted her, surprised at how light she was, and how her body shook with an invisible tremor. Suspended in the air, she laid her hand flat on the picture, the fingers closing in on the shape that was hidden, and then at once she saw it. He could feel her shock, a slow absorbing of every detail as though the figure, rising as it had for so many years, were actually striving forward.
    It seemed a moan came out of her, starting low, and then rising to be suddenly strangled. She had her mouth tight shut, and all at once she moved so violently, he let her drop quickly to the floor and she staggered backwards.
    She moaned again, her eyes growing wider.
    “Mamma?” He was suddenly afraid of