Walter was in terrible trouble. He loved Floss. No question. But why did she leave him alone so much? Why did Walter trust Ronnie? No one else did! But I also wanted to see you, my darling Louis, and to be with you. I’d realized how you were trying to help. You were being so kind. And you had always been on my list after all. Gorgeous old muffin.
I’m so sorry, Louis, that this story is going to unfold as I know it will. I decided to use you, to take advantage of you. I do regret that now. But I simply had to try to steal Walter from Floss. I couldn’t help myself. They call women like me “home-wreckers.” But Floss and Walter didn’t have a real home. Not like this one, the one you sit in these days to write. I made this home for you. This is the real thing. It’s turned out pretty well. Hasn’t it, sweetheart? Do you forgive me? Can you?
Yes, I seduced Walter. I don’t know why he believed me about Floss and Ronnie. It was almost as though he’d known all along that something had been going on between them. I knew a secret that could create terrible trouble for almost everyone in my circle if I spoke about it. Including you if I wished. I felt so powerful at that moment. It was intoxicating. I’m not proud of it looking back, but for me things were only going to get a lot worse before they got better.
And Walter had been hearing all that weird music. It was just the beginning for him. It was going to get so much more overwhelming as his chakras opened up.
And you might ask if it’s hard to understand why Walter believed me when I told him I could see Floss and Ronnie making love, in the haze of my super-sight and psychic intuition.
Chapter 21
My name is Louis Doxtader. It seems I have been duped. I’m not sure I can afford to give a damn. Old Nik’s funeral came a week after the revelations at the hospital, where Floss met Maud, and Maud understood that Old Nik had only ever loved her, but that he died also loving and reaching out for the woman who was in fact, unbeknownst to him, his only child. I attended the funeral of my most successful artist with few regrets. I was sitting on a number of Nikolai Andréevich’s finest pictures and I knew his death was more than doubling their value. If I released them slowly over the ensuing years they would eventually increase in value tenfold. It was Maud for whom I mourned most on this occasion. I had seen what had happened in the critical care ward and the terrible ordeal she had had to endure in Nik’s final hours. Floss had only been in the bed opposite Nik’s for a week, and in that time Maud had almost lost her mind.
We stood huddled around the coffin, the grave freshly dug and dressed with red velvet curtain material. A few fans of Nik’s years with Hero Ground Zero had come, kept at a distance by a pop industry security man so that Maud and the guests could mourn with some dignity.
I kept my eyes on her. She had never looked so beautiful, I thought. I have never tried to hide my passion for her in this story, after all.
Floss, still using a cane, walked slowly over to stand by Maud’s side; it was at that precise second that my world started to unravel. The funeral began to feel rather dreamlike, and reminded me of a dream I’d had the night before, and I couldn’t help but try to recall it. Eventually it came flooding back to me, but as it did a second dream came to mind with equal strength. I tried to bring myself back into the present. Selena has told me that I raped Floss. I can hardly believe it. I can’t imagine doing such a thing, but I know if that Floss, that exceedingly pretty woman, had ever held her arms out to me and pursed her lips, I could never have resisted.
Louis, it’s Selena. My darling, I am taking over again. Before you go too far. There is still so much you don’t know. I remember running to your side then and drawing you away from everyone there, into the shelter of a huge tree in the cemetery so that we were alone.
“I can see them,” I said to you in a whisper.
“Who? What can you see? Who can you see?” You were struggling to stay connected to the present.
“I can see several entities using you,” I explained, waving my hands around your shoulders. I could see they were trying to take over your mind, vying with each other for supremacy.
“I can remember a number of dreams,” you said. I knew that of course. That’s why I had come to you. Your voice was shaking.
“They feel very real, and they are invading my reality.”
“These entities are actually using your mind.” That’s what I told you. I was so happy to be able to explain what I knew was happening to you. I knew you needed my attention, and that you appreciated it. I was looking particularly good that day: black suits me.
I tried to explain to you: “They are dreaming their own dreams, remembering their own past lives; this has nothing to do with you.”
You started to feel you might see Nik’s hosts of angels next, visions from his paintings, and then I had to bring you down to earth with a bump.
“You deserve this, Louis,” I told you. “I’m sorry, but this is your mind’s way of dealing with what you’ve done.”
“What have I done?” Your head was clearing quickly.
And this, my darling Louis, was when you rose from number four to number one on my list. This was the moment I knew I could hold you. “You know I saw you. At my sister’s wedding.”
It was true, I had seen you; my voice sounded low and conspiratorial even in my own ears. “With Floss…”
“Yes.”
“She was completely out of it with drink and drugs. You took her.”
You looked over at Maud and Floss together. They both smiled. Floss was beautiful of course, but Maud was beautiful too; like Floss grown older.
My name is Louis Doxtader, I am still trying to come to grips with what she has told me, and finishing this book has become so much more important. Was I guilty of giving three teenagers some overly hard drugs and trying to take advantage of one of them? I know Selena will say anything in order to get what she wants. I know that she comes to believe what she thinks she can see.
After her accusing me of what she had seen me do, we returned to the grave and moved around it as the priest read the sanctification. I was trying to get away from Selena and found myself nearer to Maud. I felt as if I had strayed into a life that wasn’t mine, and I wanted to get back to where I belonged, a place where I was respected and loved.
Maud smiled at Floss and took her free hand, and—as Nik’s coffin was lowered into the grave—mother and daughter embraced.
The wake was held at my flat, where we were surrounded by Nik’s best pictures. I felt compelled to be the host, because I was Maud’s protector, but also of course I was Andréevich’s agent.
Conversation inevitably turned to the circumstances of Floss’s birth and Maud explained to us all that Nik had never known she had borne a daughter. She had been too young and afraid; it was before they were married. By then Nik had already started to become difficult, having fits and anxiety attacks. Hero Ground Zero had become huge and he was always traveling. There was plenty of money, but the pressure on Nik was extreme and Maud did not want to have a child with him, at least not then, not so early in their relationship. So before she married him, while he was on tour for the last six months of her pregnancy, she arranged for the baby she was carrying to be born and adopted immediately in the clinic in Bern. She had never even seen the child’s face, nor held her to her bosom.
Floss’s adoptive parents, Albert and Katharine, had been waiting for her there, and brought her up as though she were their own. They never hid from Floss that she was adopted at birth, and even told her the name of the clinic in Bern where she had been born, but they had known nothing about Floss’s biological mother, only that she did not want to keep her child. The three of them had seen each other briefly in the clinic, however, passing in a corridor as Maud walked wretchedly away from her baby and they walked joyfully toward her. Their eyes met.