she’d taken it, just when she thought her fingers couldn’t take the heat anymore, and for a moment she held her right hand to her lips, trying to soothe the burn. Then slowly she lifted the candle and plunged it down the glass chimney of the lamp, because she knew the glass of the chimney was too hot to touch now. The wick caught, wax dripping on the wick, and then she blew out the lamp, and stood still for a moment, her eyes falling on that rolled rug and the pair of leather shoes tossed against it.
No, not tossed, she thought. No. Slowly she moved towards the shoes. Slowly, she extended her own left foot until the toe of her shoe touched one of those shoes, and then she kicked the shoe and realized that it was caught on something even as it fell loose and she saw the gleaming white bone of the leg extending from the trouser within the rolled carpet.
Paralyzed, she stared at the bone. At the rolled rug itself. And then walking along it, she saw at the other end what she could not see before, the dark gleam of brown hair. Someone wrapped in the rug. Someone dead, dead a long time, and look, the stain on the floor, the blackish stain on the side of the rug, near the bottom where the fluids long ago flowed out and dried up, and see, even the mashed and tiny insects fatally caught in the sticky fluid so long ago.
From somewhere far below, she heard the old woman’s voice, so faint it was no more than a thought. “Come down, Rowan Mayfair.”
Rowan Mayfair, Rowan Mayfair, Rowan Mayfair …
Refusing to hurry, she made her way out, glancing back once more at the dead man concealed in the rug, at the slender spoke of white bone protruding from it. And then she shut the door and walked sluggishly down the stairs.
The old woman stood at the open elevator door, merely watching, the ugly gold light from the elevator bulb shining full on her.
“You know what I found,” Rowan said. She steadied herself as she reached the newel post. The little candle danced for a moment, throwing pale translucent shadows on the ceiling.
“You found the dead man, wrapped in the rug.”
“What in God’s name has gone on in this house!” Rowan gasped. “Are you all mad?”
How cold and controlled the old woman seemed, how utterly detached. She pointed to the open elevator. “Come with me,” she said. “There is nothing more to see and only a little more to say … ”
“Oh, but there’s a lot more to say,” Rowan said. “Tell me-did you tell my mother these things? Did you show her those horrible jars and dolls?”
“I didn’t drive her mad if that’s your meaning.”
“I think anyone who grew up in this house might go mad.”
“So do I. That’s why I sent you away from it. Now come.”
“Tell me what happened with my mother.”
She stepped after the woman into the small dusty chamber again, closing the door and the gate angrily. As they moved down, she turned and stared at the woman’s profile. Old, old, yes, she was. Her skin as yellow all over as parchment, and her neck so thin and frail, the veins standing out under her fragile skin. Yes, so fragile.
“Tell me what happened to her,” Rowan said, staring at the floor, not daring to look closely at the woman again. “Don’t tell me how he touched her in her sleep, but tell me what happened, really happened!”
The elevator stopped with a jerk. The woman opened the gate, and pushed back the door, and walked out into the hallway.
As Rowan closed the door, the light died out as if the elevator and its bare bulb had never existed. The darkness swept in close and faintly cool, and smelling of the rain from beyond the open front door. The night gleamed outside, noisy with comforting sounds.
“Tell me what happened,” Rowan said again, softly, bitterly.
Through the long front parlor they walked, the old woman leading the way, listing slightly to the left as she followed her cane, Rowan coming patiently behind her.
The pale light of the candle slowly crept throughout the whole room, lighting it thinly to the ceiling. Even in decay, it was a beautiful room, its marble fireplaces and high mantel mirrors shining in the dreary shadows. All its windows were floor-length windows. Mirrors at the far ends gazed across the length of the room into each other. Dimly Rowan saw the chandeliers reflected again and again and into infinity. Her own small figure was there, repeated over and over and vanishing finally in darkness.
“Yes,” said the old woman. “It is an interesting illusion. Darcy Monahan bought these mirrors for Katherine. Darcy Monahan tried to take Katherine away from all the evil around her. But he died in this house of yellow fever. Katherine wept for the rest of her life. But the mirrors stand today, there and there, and over the fireplaces, just as Darcy fixed them.”
She sighed, once more resting her two hands on the crook of her cane.
“We have all … from time to time … been reflected in these mirrors. And you see yourself in them now, caught in the same frame.”
Rowan didn’t respond. Sadly, distantly, she longed to see the room in the light, to see the carvings in the marble fireplaces, to see the long silk draperies for what they really were, to see the plaster medallions fixed to the high ceilings.
The old woman proceeded to the nearest of the two side floor-length windows. “Raise it for me,” she said. “It slides up. You are strong enough.” She took the candle from Rowan and set it on a small lamp table by the fireplace.
Rowan reached up to unsnap the simple lock, and then she raised the heavy nine-paned window, easily pushing it until it was almost above her head.
Here was the screened porch, and the night outside, and the air fresh as it was warm, and full of the breath of the rain again. She felt a rush of gratitude, and stood silently letting the air kiss her face and her hands. She moved to the side as the old woman passed her.
The candle, left behind, struggled in an errant draft. Then went out. Rowan stepped out into the darkness. Again that strong perfume came on the breeze, drenchingly sweet.
“The night jasmine,” said the old woman.
All around the railings of this porch vines grew, tendrils dancing in the breeze, fine tiny leaves moving like so many little insect wings beating against the screen. Flowers glimmered in the dark, white and delicate and beautiful.
“This is where your mother sat day after day,” said the old woman. “And there, out there on the flagstones is where her mother died. Where she died when she fell from that room above which had been Julien’s. I myself drove her out of that window. I think I would have pushed her with my own hands if she hadn’t jumped. With my own hands I’d scratched at her eyes, the way I’d scratched at Julien’s.”
She paused. She was looking out through the rusted screen into the night, perhaps at the high faint shapes of the trees against the paler sky. The cold light of the street lamp reached long and bright over the front of the garden. It fell upon the high unkempt grass. It even shone on the high back of the white wooden rocking chair.
Friendless and terrible the night seemed to Rowan. Awful and dismal this house, a terrible engulfing place. Oh, to live and die here, to have spent one’s life in these awful sad rooms, to have died in that filth upstairs. It was unspeakable. And the horror rose like something black and thick inside her, threatening to stop her breath. She had no words for what she felt. She had no words for the loathing inside her for the old woman.
“I killed Antha,” the old woman said. Her back was turned to Rowan, her words low and indistinct. “I killed her as surely as if I did push her. I wanted her to die. She was rocking Deirdre in the cradle and he was there, by her side, he was staring down at the baby and making the baby laugh! And she was letting him do it, she was talking to him in her simpering, weak little voice, telling him he was her only friend, now that her husband was dead, her only friend in this whole world. She said, ‘This is my house. I can put you out if I want to.’ She said that to me.
“I said, ‘I’ll scratch your eyes out of your head if you don’t give him up. You can’t see him if you don’t have eyes. You won’t let the baby see him.’ ”
The old woman paused. Sickened and miserable, Rowan waited in the muffled silence of the night sounds, of things moving and singing in the dark.
“Have you ever seen a human eye plucked out of its socket, hanging on a woman’s cheek by the bloody
