When he awoke again, it was with a start. Something had changed.
The bricks he was wedged against had gotten warmer. The air he struggled to breathe was getting warm, too.
Cree fought to keep calm, knowing the agonies that would follow. The sun must have risen at that point, beginning its daily slow incineration of the occupants of the aboveground crypts of New Orleans. Inside, Bradford's ghost would relive the dying man's panic. His body would arch minutely as he began to be cooked alive. It would go on for some hours yet. It had been happening for almost thirty years.
Even in his wrath, Cree didn't think Richard would have intentionally condemned Bradford to this – surely he hadn't known Brad was still alive when he'd stuffed him in here.
She hoped Lila would intervene soon.
Cree could help, but Lila would need to find strength enough to offer him the window of escape. She had to enter his world dream and offer some promise of release.
Now the dying man was distilling down to his rudiments. There was regret – somewhere far away was a movie of memory that wouldn't stop, a wereboar taking its angry pleasure upon a girl. And Bradford hated the wereboar impulse. It lived in him like a huge tapeworm, fastened into his mind and feeding on him. It punished him. He wanted to be free of it.
You're dead, Bradford, he heard. The voice intruded on his solitary nightmare and startled him: Lila's voice! Go away now, it said. Just go away.
Cree looked at the dark shape of Lila. She was holding herself very still, but around her a dirty purple aura jittered.
Lila? the ghost thought. Its world became confused, and the presence of his victim, the source of his guilt, terrified him. The world of the crypt began to break up, unsustainable.
Cree held her breath, hoping Lila would find in herself what was needed.
"Go away, Bradford! Let yourself go away now!" Lila was saying it out loud. There was no forgiveness in her thought or her voice, but there was pity and there was acceptance. "You're dead. You're a long time ago. You're over with. The whole thing is over now."
The best thing she could manage to give him was to get over him. And it was just right, Cree realized.
It was all the window the tortured ghost needed. He fled from his nightmare in the crypt toward her hard pity and resignation. In the mind of the ghost, past and present clashed, irreconcilable. Lost, the ghost spun away. The boar-headed memory broke apart and became an echo of a memory of a dream and then just dust in a whorl of darkness, and even the walls of the crypt, oven hot now, weren't real. Nothing was.
45
By the time Paul swung wide the iron gate at Beauforte House, Lila felt as if she were floating. The night air of the Garden District seemed to buoy her just above the ground – not a light, good feeling, but detached, emptied. The familiar streets struck her as alien. Meeting Bradford's ghost, sharing his dying moments, trying to find her own reconciliation with what had happened, she felt as if she'd been scraped raw inside, hollowed out.
Poor Paul had vomited wrenchingly after the encounter. Of the three of them, only Cree had been able to talk during the short drive from Lafayette Cemetery. Cree had said that the coming encounter was the crucial one. Meeting her father would be the way she'd become free and strong.
Thank you, Cree, Lila thought, I knew that. They were all being so kind.
"One other thing," Cree whispered. She put her hand on Lila's arm and the three of them stopped, halfway up the walk. "I can't be absolutely sure the boar-headed ghost is gone. Bradford's perimortem ghost is gone from the crypt, but his perseveration of the rape was highly independent. If we sense anything at all of him, we have to leave the house immediately. If you don't feel you can take the risk, we shouldn't go in at all."
Lila thought about that for a moment, weighing what was to be gained and what could be lost. "I want to go in," she said finally. "Come with me into the hall. But I want to go into the library by myself."
Even in the half-light, Lila could see the doubt in Paul's face. Cree looked wary but pleased. Of course Cree would know it was the only thing to be done.
They opened the door. Cree had insisted they leave the lights off, and for a moment the yawning darkness of the rooms frightened Lila. Maybe she couldn't do this. But though they waited at the bottom of the stairs, neither she nor Cree could feel the boar-headed specter, no echo or whisper. In fact, his absence was palpable. The house felt different: That coiled-spring feeling, that about-to-snap feeling, was gone. The boar-headed ghost was dead.
She drew one breath and realized it was the first clear, unconstricted inhalation she'd taken in many, many years.
Paul waited near the open front door as Cree walked her back through the dark hallway and through the kitchen. They turned into the long south wing hallway. Cree squeezed her hands at the library door and left without a word.
Lila went in. She could see almost nothing, but her body remembered the room's contours so well it almost didn't matter. She took small steps, feeling as she had when she'd performed on the cello as a little girl, going out onto the stage in front of a vast auditorium to perform some intimidating work she knew she hadn't mastered.
"Daddy?" she whispered.
The library smell reminded her of him, but she saw and heard nothing. Of course, Cree had said it might take a long time.
Her thigh found the piano bench and she sat backward on it, facing the room.
There were many varieties of fear, Lila decided. She was scared shaky now, but it was not the same as the fear she'd felt upstairs and in all her solitary moments in the last four months. That had been torn out of her like a tumor at the Lambert crypt. No, this was more like the fear you feel from some mountaintop you've climbed, where the fear of height chills you even as the long views make you joyful. There was a state where fear and hope met, she realized, where they were indistinguishable. The impulses sprang from the same well inside you.
It helped that everyone was so kind. Cree was so good-hearted. Paul had been dubious about this, but clearly he cared, he really wanted her to recover, as a human being as well as a psychiatrist. She hadn't seen Ron since all the revelations, but she knew he had done so much to protect her from what had happened. Even Momma, in her inimitable way confessing to killing Daddy and Temp Chase, taking all the blame. She'd played the tyrannical dowager to the hilt, even refusing to see Lila when she'd tried to visit her at the jail earlier. She'd done it so that Lila couldn't sympathize too strongly. So that Lila could stay angry at her.
And so that she wouldn't see the lie for what it was.
It was so touching. They'd been protecting her for so long, she couldn't bear to let them down.
Cree and Paul had explained what had happened to her: the boar mask, Brad and Daddy switching costumes that night, the rape. Daddy beating Brad and, thinking he was dead, hiding his unconscious body in the Lambert crypt, where he died of his wounds the next day. Charmian's rage at Daddy for killing Brad, last scion of the illustrious Lamberts, and her vengeance by poison.
She could almost believe it. Certainly she would put nothing past Momma, and a tiny, awful part of her gloated at Charmian's having to pay the piper at last, for these and other sins. But as she'd thought about it afterward, it didn't quite make sense, and during that last long night awake in the hospital room, her memory had unsealed itself. It was like discovering a hidden door in the house, one that opened into a long, dark hallway. That secret corridor of memory had always been there, she'd always sensed it, running parallel to the traveled ways of her life, her daily acts and thoughts. She had knocked on the walls and heard the hollow echoes, but she had never been able to find the way inside.