tranquilizers-given to her in astonishing combinations, or so the records, as we continue to gain access to them, reveal.
How does one justify such treatment? Deirdre Mayfair ceased to speak coherently as early as 1962. When not tranquilized, she screamed or cried incessantly. Now and then she broke things. Sometimes she simply lay back, with her eyes rolling up in her head, and howled.
As the years have passed, we have continued to collect information about Deirdre Mayfair. Every month or so we manage to “interview” some doctor or nurse, or other person who has been in the First Street house. But our record of what really happened remains fragmentary. Hospital files are, naturally, confidential and extremely difficult to obtain. But in at least two of the sanitariums where Deirdre was treated, we now know that no record of her treatment exists.
One of her doctors has clearly and by his own admission to an inquiring stranger destroyed his records of Deirdre’s case. Another physician retired shortly after he had treated Deirdre, leaving only a few cryptic notes in his brief file. “Incurable. Tragic. Aunt demands continued medication yet Aunt’s descriptions of behavior not credible.”
We continue, for obvious reasons, to rely upon anecdotal evidence, for our assessment of Deirdre’s history.
Though Deirdre has slumbered in a twilight induced by drugs all of her adult life, there have been countless sightings by those around her of “a mysterious brown-haired man.” Nurses in St. Ann’s Asylum claimed to have seen him-“some man going into her room! Now I know I saw that.” At a Texas hospital where she was incarcerated briefly, a doctor claimed to have seen “a mysterious visitor” who always “seemed somehow to just disappear when I wanted to question him or ask him who he was.”
At least one nurse in a northern Louisiana sanitarium insisted to her superiors that she had seen a ghost. Black orderlies in the various hospitals saw “that man all the time.” One woman told us, “He not human. I know him when I see him. I see spirits. I call them up. I know him and he know me and he don’t come near me at all.”
Most workmen cannot work on the First Street house any more today than they could in the days when Deirdre was a girl. There are the same old stories. There is even some talk of “a man around there” who doesn’t want things done.
Nevertheless some repairs are completed; air-conditioning units have been installed in some rooms, and some upgrading of the electricity has been carried out-these tasks almost invariably being done under Carlotta Mayfair’s on-site supervision.
The old gardener still comes, and he occasionally paints the rusted fence.
Otherwise First Street slumbers beneath the oak branches. The frogs sing in the night around Stella’s pool with its lily pads and wild irises. Deirdre’s wooden swing has long ago fallen from the oak at the far end of the property. The wooden seat-a mere slat of wood-lies bleached and warping in the high grass.
Many a person stopping to look at Deirdre in her rocking chair on the side porch has glimpsed “a handsome cousin” visiting her. Nurses have sometimes quit because of “that man who comes and goes like some kinda spook,” or because they kept seeing things out of the corner of their eye, or thought they were being watched.
“There’s some kind of ghost hovering near her,” said one young practical nurse who told the agency she would never, never go back to that house. “I saw him once, in the bright sunlight. Scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
When I asked this nurse about it over lunch, she had few details to add to the story. “Just a man. A man with brown hair and brown eyes in a nice-looking coat and white shirt. But dear God, if I have ever seen anything more terrifying than that! He was just standing there in the sunlight beside her looking at me. I dropped the tray and just screamed and screamed.”
Numerous other medical persons left the service of the family abruptly. One doctor was fired off the case in 1976. We continue to track down these people, to take their testimony and record it. We try to tell them as little as we can of why we want to know what they saw and when.
What emerges from this data is a frightening possibility-that Deirdre’s mind has been destroyed to the point where she cannot control her evocation of Lasher. That is, she subconsciously gives him the power to appear near her in very convincing form. Yet she is not conscious enough to control him further, or indeed to drive him away, if on some level she does not want him there.
In sum, she is a mindless medium; a witch rendered inoperative, and at the mercy perhaps of her familiar, who is ever at hand.
There is another very distinct possibility. That Lasher is there to comfort her, to look out for her, and to keep her happy in ways perhaps that we do not understand.
In 1980, over eight years ago, I managed to obtain an article of Deirdre’s clothing, a cotton duster, or loose- fitting garment, which had been put in the dustbin in back of the house. I took this garment back with me to England, and placed it in the hands of Lauren Grant, the most powerful psychometric in the order today.
Lauren knew nothing per se about the Mayfair Witches, but one cannot rule out telepathy in such situations. I tried to keep out of it with my own thoughts as much as I could.
“I see happiness,” she said. “This is the garment of someone who is blissfully happy. She lives in dreams. Dreams of green gardens and twilight skies, and exquisite sunsets. There are low-hanging branches there. There is a swing hanging from a beautiful tree. Is this a child? No, this is a woman. There is a warm breeze.” Lauren massaged the garment ever more tightly, pressing its fabric to her cheek. “Oh, and she has the most beautiful lover. Oh, such a lover. He looks like a picture. Steerforth out of
Is that the subconscious life of Deirdre Mayfair? Deirdre herself will never tell.
In closing allow me to add a few details. Since 1976, Deirdre Mayfair, whether clothed in a white flannel nightgown or a cotton duster, has always worn the Mayfair emerald around her neck.
I have seen Deirdre myself several times from a distance since 1976. By that time, I had made three visits to New Orleans to gather information. I have returned numerous times since.
I invariably spend some time walking in the Garden District on these return visits; I have attended the funerals over the years of Miss Belle, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy, as well as Pierce, the last of Cortland’s sons, who died of a heart attack in 1984.
At each funeral, I have seen Carlotta Mayfair. Our eyes have met. I have three times during this decade placed my card in her hand as I passed her. She has never contacted me. She has never made any more legal threats.
She is very old now, white-haired, painfully thin. Yet she still goes to work every day. She can no longer climb up on the step of the St. Charles car, so she is taken by a regular taxi. Only one black servant works in the house regularly, with the exception of Deirdre’s devoted nurse.
With each visit, I encounter some new “witness” who can tell me more about “the brown-haired man” and the mysteries surrounding First Street. The stories are all much the same. But we have indeed come to the end of Deirdre’s history, though she herself is not yet dead.
It is time to examine in detail her only child and heir, Rowan Mayfair, who has never set foot in her native city since the day she was taken away from it, six hours after her birth, on a cross-continental jet flight.
And though it is much too soon to attempt to put the information on Rowan into a coherent narrative, we have made some critically important notes from our random material, and there is considerable indication that Rowan Mayfair-who knows nothing of her family, her history, or her inheritance-may be the strongest witch the Mayfair family has ever produced.
Twenty-four
THE AIR-CONDITIONING FELT good after the hot streets. But as she stood quietly for a moment in the foyer of Lonigan and Sons, unobserved and therefore anonymous, she realized the heat had already made her faintly sick. The icy stream of air was now shocking her. She felt the kind of chill you have when you have fever. The enormous crowd milling only a few feet away took on a curious dreamlike quality.
