Blackwood Farm (62 page)

“Aunt Queen gave me fifty thousand dollars,” she said. “It wasn't what I wanted, but she gave me that to get started, and to hold you, and so I did. Just one time. And she got Pops and Sweetheart and everybody on her side. You were the one they cared about. Don't ever tell Quinn he had a little brother who died. Like I didn't have a son? Don't ever tell Quinn about little Garwain. Don't ever let him know that he drained all the blood from that helpless little baby. Don't ever tell Quinn that awful story, like it was your story. And so now you come in here and you ask me, did you have a twin. You want to know, and Aunt Queen's dead, and thanks to Grady tipping me off about the bonus and what was in her will, I know it's got nothing to do with telling you anything. So there you have it. And I guess you know now. You know why I've hated you all these years. I guess you can figure it out finally.”

I rose to my feet. As far as I was concerned we had discovered what we wanted to know. And I was too shocked and exhausted to say a word to Patsy. I hated her as much as she hated me. I hated her so much I couldn't look at her.

I think I uttered my thanks, and with my two friends I started to leave the room.

“Don't you have something to say to me?” Patsy asked as I reached the door.

Cindy looked so miserable.

“What?” I inquired.

“Can you imagine what I went through?” Pasty asked. “I was sixteen years old when that happened.”

“Ah,” I replied, “but you're not sixteen years old now, that's what matters.”

“And I'm dying,” Patsy said. “And no one in all my life has ever loved me the way that people love you.”

“You know, that's really true,” I responded, “but I'm afraid I hate you the way that you hate me.”

“Oh, no, Quinn, no,” said Cindy.

“Get away from me,” Patsy said.

“That's what I was doing when you stopped me,” I answered.

48

BEFORE I COULD
so much as think about what I'd heard I had to hear it from Big Ramona and from Jasmine as well, and so I went down the stairs and found them in the kitchen with Jerome and Tommy and Nash. They were around the oak table having a late supper of red beans and rice, and of course invited me to join them.

“I have to know something,” I said, not accepting the chair that was offered. “Patsy just told me I had a twin brother who was buried in the Metairie Cemetery. Is this true?”

Immediately I received my answer. I could see it in their faces and read it from their minds. Then Big Ramona said,

“Patsy's got no call to be telling you that now. She's got no call at all.” She started to get up.

I gestured for her to sit down.

“And Goblin,” I said. “Did you never think Goblin could have been the ghost of that little twin brother, Garwain?” I asked.

“Well, yes, we thought it,” said Big Ramona, “but what would have been the good of saying that to a little child, and then to a growing boy, and then to a young man who was off in Europe having a fine time, with Goblin disappeared and not making any more trouble, and then to a fine man come home to a peaceful household?”

I nodded. “I understand,” I said. “And it was a smaller twin? A little tiny one?”

“She's got no call for worrying you with all of that,” said Jasmine sharply. “Everything's an excuse with that girl. An excuse or a lie. Only reason she carried on about that tiny twin is she wanted everybody to feel sorry for her.”

Nash rose to take Tommy out, but I gestured for them to go on with their supper. I could see that Tommy was curious but I didn't see the harm in it. Why keep the secret a moment longer? Nash looked concerned, as he so often did.

“And nobody did feel sorry for Patsy?” I asked.

There was silence all around. Then Big Ramona said,

“That Patsy, she's a liar. Sure, she cried over that little twin. She knew it was going to die. It's easy to feel sorry for something that doesn't have a chance, something that's not going to live a week. It's a lot harder to be a real mother. And Aunt Queen did feel sorry for her and gave her money to start her band. And then she didn't stick around to—.”

“I understand,” I said. “I just wanted to know.”

“Aunt Queen never wanted you to know,” said Big Ramona gently. “Like I said, there was no call for anybody to tell you. Pops and Sweetheart didn't want you to know either. Pops always said it was best forgotten. That it was morbid, and he used another word too. What was that other word?”

“Grotesque,” said Jasmine. “He said it was morbid and grotesque and he wasn't telling you about it.”

“He just never found a good time to tell you,” said Big Ramona.

“Sure we thought Goblin was that twin's ghost,” said Jasmine, “some of the time, at least, and some of the time we didn't. And I guess, most of the time, we didn't think it mattered.”

Big Ramona got up to stir the pot of beans on the stove. She heaped some onto Tommy's plate. My son, Jerome, had peach cobbler all over his face and his plate.

“Now, if when you'd come home from Europe,” Big Ramona said, “Goblin had been a big nuisance again, maybe we would have told you about that little twin—you know, to have some sort of exorcism. But you never mentioned Goblin again.”

“And then out of nowhere he came,” said Jasmine with a catch in her throat, “and he made Aunt Queen fall.” She started crying.

“Now don't you start with that,” said Big Ramona.

“It's my fault what happened,” I responded. “I'm the one who brought him up and made him strong. Whether he was a ghost or spirit doesn't have a whole lot to do with it.”

“Then it's not your fault either,” said Big Ramona. “And now we have to get rid of him.”

I felt a faint breeze in the air. The blades of the overhead fan started to whirl though the fan had been turned off. Jasmine and Big Ramona both felt it.

“Stick together,” I said, “and don't look at him, or at any of his tricks. Now I have to go and talk to my friends. I have to talk to them about getting rid of him.”

A plate came off the pantry shelf and was smashed on the floor. Jasmine moved shakily to get the broom. Big Ramona made the Sign of the Cross. So did I.

Nash put his arm around Tommy. Tommy seemed thrilled. Little Jerome ate his peach cobbler as if nothing was happening.

I turned and left the room.

He was making his doleful music in the chandeliers.

Big Ramona rushed past me up the steps murmuring that she had to be with Patsy and Cindy. I could hear Patsy's hysterical crying.

I stood outside her closed door listening to her for a long time, unable to make out the syllables, wondering what drug Cindy had injected into her hip that she was still so miserable, and I realized I felt chilled all over. Of course I had always known that she hated me, but she had never said it quite so clearly, quite so convincingly; and now I had my self-hatred to add to the mix, and for the moment it was almost too much for me.

I went into my room and shut the door.

Lestat and Merrick sat at the table, two elegant and high-toned creatures facing one another. I took the chair with my back to the door. The computer was immediately switched on. The windows were rattling. A convulsion moved through the heavy velvet draperies. The trimming of the baldachin over the bed undulated in the breeze.

Merrick rose from the table, looking about, her mahogany hair a thick mass down her back. Lestat watched her keenly.

“Show yourself, spirit,” she said in a low breath. “Come, show yourself to those who can see you.” Her green eyes probed the room. She turned around, gazing at the gasolier, at the ceiling. “I know you're here, Goblin,” she said, “and I know your name, your true name, the name your mother gave you.”

At once, the windowpanes closest to us were shattered. The glass flew against the lace curtains but could not pierce them and fell, tangled and splintering and loudly clattering to the floor. The hot breeze of the night gusted into the room.

“Cowardly, foolish trick,” said Merrick under her breath, as if she were whispering in his ear. “I could do that myself. Don't you want me to say your true name? Are you afraid to hear it?”

The keys of the computer fired like crazy. I saw nonsense marching across the screen. I drew near to it.

MAKEMERRICKANDLESTATLEAVENOWORIWILLCUTUPALLOFBLACKWOODMANORWITHGLASSIHATEYOUQUINN

Suddenly a huge amorphous cloud spread itself out beneath the ceiling, the billowing hideous shape of a human form made only of filaments of blood, with a huge and silently screaming face, the entire shape abruptly contracting and thrashing as it surrounded Merrick and whipped her with its tentacles as she fell over backwards onto the carpet.

She threw up her arms. She cried out to us. “Let it be!” And then to Goblin, “Yes, come into my arms, let me know you, come into me, be with me, yes, drink my blood, know me, yes, I know you, yes. . . .” Her eyes appeared to roll up in her head, and then she lay as one unconscious.

At last, when I was just at the point where I could endure it no longer, he rose, a wind full of blood rising, thrashing wildly once more before the ceiling and then gusting through the broken window, more tiny bits of glass flying into the lace curtains, which he left stained with bits of blood and gore, as he left her bare arms and hands and face and legs covered with it.

Lestat helped her to her feet. He kissed her on the mouth and stroked her long brown hair. He helped her into the chair.

“I wanted to burn him!” he said. “God, I was seething to do it.”

“So was I,” I said. I straightened her white skirt. I took out my handkerchief and began to blot the bloody scratches he had left all over her.

“No, it was too soon for the Fire,” she said, “and our meeting had to come. I had to be sure of everything.”

“And he is the ghost of my twin? It's true?” I asked.

“Yes, it's true,” she said quietly. She motioned for me to stop with my handkerchief, taking my hand gently and kissing it. “He's the ghost of the baby buried in Metairie Cemetery, and that's why he's always been strongest here,” she explained. “It's why you couldn't take him with you to Europe, as Lestat told me. It's why he was transparent and weak when you went as far as New York. It's why he was even stronger when you went into New Orleans. It's why he appeared so very strongly by the mausoleum tonight. His remains are inside of it.”

“But he doesn't really understand, does he?” I asked. “He doesn't know where he comes from or what his real name is?”

“No, he doesn't know,” said Merrick.

I could see the little wounds vanishing, leaving her again the alluring woman she had been before. Her long wavy brown hair was gorgeously mussed, and her green eyes were bloodshot still, and she appeared over-all to still be shaken.

“But he can be made to know,” she continued, “and this is our most powerful weapon. Because a ghost, unlike a pure spirit, is connected to his remains, and this ghost is most connected. He is connected to you by blood, and that is why, don't you see, he feels he has always had a right to what you have.”

“Of course,” I said, “oh, of course!” Only now was it hitting me. “He thinks it's his right. We were in the womb together.” I felt a deep rivet of pain in my heart.

“Yes, and try to imagine for a moment what death was like for this spirit. First off, he was a twin, and we know of twins that they feel the loss of the other terribly. Patsy speaks of your crying at his funeral. Of Aunt Queen begging her to console you. Aunt Queen knew that you were feeling Garwain's death. Well, Garwain had felt this separation from you in the incubator as well, and at death, undoubtedly his spirit was confused and had not gone on into the Light as it should have gone.”

“I see,” I responded. “And now for the first time in all these months I feel pity for him again. I feel . . . mercy.”

“Feel mercy for yourself,” said Merrick kindly. Her entire manner was gracious. In fact, she reminded me very much of Stirling Oliver. “But when you were brought to that funeral for him,” she went on, “when you were carried there on the day of his interment, his poor miserable little spirit, cast adrift, found its living twin in you, Tarquin, and became your doppelgänger. Indeed, he became something far stronger than a mere doppelgänger. He became a companion and a lover, a true twin who felt he had a right to your patrimony.”

“Yes, and we began our long journey together,” I said, “two genuine twins, two genuine brothers.” I tried my damndest to remember that I had once loved him. I wondered if she could see into my soul and sense the animosity I now felt for him, the enslavement which had been so vicious for me all during this long year since Petronia had so rudely made me. And the loss of Aunt Queen—the unspeakable loss of Aunt Queen.

“And now that you've been given the Dark Blood,” said Lestat in a cross voice, “he wants what he sees as his share of it.”

“But that's not all that's happening,” said Merrick, continuing in her subdued fashion. She looked intently at me. “I want you to describe for me, if you will, what goes on when he attacks you.”

I considered for a moment, then I spoke, my eyes moving from Merrick to Lestat and back again.

“It's like a fusion, a fusion I never felt when I was alive. Oh, he was inside me at times. Mona Mayfair told me that he was. She said when we made love that he was in me and she knew he was there. She could feel this. Mona considers herself a witch on account of the way she feels spirits.”

“You love Mona Mayfair?” Merrick asked gently.

“Very much,” I managed to reply. “But I'll never see her again. She'd know me for what I am the minute she looked at me. I avoided Rowan Mayfair desperately at the wake and the Mass. Her husband, Michael, too. They're both what the Talamasca calls witches. And then there was the ghost of Julien Mayfair at the wake. Aunt Queen was his child. I'm his descendant.”

“You have Mayfair blood?” Merrick asked. “And you saw Julien?”

“My precious darling, I had hot cocoa with Oncle Julien in the days when I could drink it,” I said. “He served me animal crackers with it on a china plate, all of which later vanished just as he did.”

Very hastily I told her the whole tale, including the affair of the mask and the cape, and saw her lips spread in a generous and beautiful smile.

“Oh, our Oncle Julien,” she said with a winsome sigh. “The beds he left unmade and warm, what a man he was. It's a wonder there's anyone in the city of New Orleans who doesn't share some genetic inheritance from him!” She beamed at me. “He came to my Great Nananne in a dream when I was eleven years old and told her to send me to the Talamasca. They were my salvation.”

“Oh, God in Heaven,” I declared. “You don't know what I almost did to Stirling Oliver.”

“Forget that!” said Lestat. “I mean it! That's over and done.” He raised his hand and made the Sign of the Cross. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I absolve you from all sin. Stirling Oliver is alive! Now that matter's closed as long as I'm Coven Master here.”

Merrick broke into a soft, sweet laugh. Her dark skin made her green eyes all the more brilliant.

“And you are the Coven Master, aren't you?” she said, with a flirtatious flashing glance at Lestat. “You become that automatically wherever you go.”

Lestat shrugged. “But of course,” he said, exactly as if he meant it.

“We could argue about that, my magnificently feathered friend,” she replied, “but we need this time while Goblin is exhausted. And must get back to the matter at hand. So Goblin is your twin, Tarquin, and you were going to tell me what it's like when the two of you are together now. Describe the fusion.”