'Cree! Cree! Are you there? Open the door!' A muffled voice accompanied the clacking. That heavy brass door knocker, that's what it was. And Joyce.
'Cree' referred to her. She wasn't Lila. Some relief in that.
Carefully, Cree rotated her body until her feet were lower than her head, disturbing a couple of broken balustrade rails that slid noisily down. When she sat up, her arms and legs and spine felt as if their component bones didn't fit any more, as if she'd been wrenched apart and put together incorrectly. Her hips hurt and her head was bruised, but the worst pain came from her left index finger, which must have gotten bent wrong when she landed. It had taken only a split second: flipping over the balustrade, knees smashing the rails hard enough to break several loose. Flailing into space. Her hands and head had hit the wall an instant before the rest of her had landed half on the landing and half on the steps just below it. It was a drop of only about six feet. She'd been lucky she hadn't fallen farther toward the front of the stairwell, or impaled herself on one of the broken rails that fell with her.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack! Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!
Not ready to stand, she moved her butt down one step and then another and then another. When her feet hit the floorboards, she lurched upright and staggered to the front door. It was hard to unlock in the dark with her uncooperative index finger, but after a moment of fumbling she got the door open and Joyce burst in with a shaft of blue light from the street.
'Cree! Are you all right?'
'There is a doorbell, Joyce. Jesus!' That didn't seem appropriate. Joyce had asked her something, and after a hesitation, Cree remembered what. 'I'm shitty. But I'm okay,' she muttered. Her jaw felt joined wrong, too. She turned to the security panel and reset it, feeling a little proud of herself for being so lucid. No point in bringing the gendarmes or whatever they'd be called here.
Joyce brushed past her, groping on the walls until she found the light switch. The chandelier came on and there was Joyce, face fierce, eyes wide, can of pepper spray at the ready. The stairway was littered with broken rails, and Cree saw one of her shoes there, too. She hadn't realized she'd lost it until that moment. She had only one shoe on, which helped account for some of the difficulty of standing. That was nice, she thought, because it meant you could put on your other shoe and then maybe your legs would work right.
'Sit down!' Joyce ordered. 'Tell me exactly what happened. I need to check you out.'
That's right, Cree thought appreciatively, Joyce had been an EMT in one of her previous careers. Amazing Joyce.
Loving her enormously, Cree said, 'I'm so very glad to see you.' It struck her as sounding formal and funny.
She told the story of being pursued by the boar-headed ghost as Joyce felt her limbs and tested her joints, inspected her abrasions, palpated her abdomen, found Cree's flashlight and checked the pupils of her eyes. At last Joyce made her get up, walk a bit, and balance on one foot.
'The finger's badly sprained, but otherwise I think you're all right,' Joyce said incredulously. She looked up at the long flight of stairs, shaking her head. 'You could have been killed! You're in shock, Cree. We've got to get you to a hospital.'
'Nah. I'm great.'
'Bullshit!' Joyce probably would have gone on more of a tirade, but another realization struck her: 'Cree… you've never run away from a ghost before!' She sounded frightened.
'Not so good, huh? Not a good trend, no.'
'Listen to yourself] Your being flippant just proves you're in shock.'
Cree kept pacing, trying to flex out kinks, trying to get her thoughts together. At the rear of the entry hall, she caught sight of herself in the big, gilt-framed mirror there. Her hair was snarled, her jaw marred with a red swelling, her lips and teeth rimmed with blood. Both armpits of her jacket had sprung, and one pocket had become an upside-down flap of fabric. Her blouse was untucked and had lost buttons at top and bottom, and her knees had burst through the denim of her jeans. She'd been feeling almost giddy, opiated by shock and her unexpected rescue from the boar-headed man, but the image in the mirror threw cold water on that fast.
She looked like Lila.
Things were getting out of hand, she realized. There was work to be done, and there was a lot to tell Joyce. She whirled to face her just as a jarring buzz echoed from the dark hallway near the kitchen. Cree startled and retreated several steps before she realized it was the doorbell.
Joyce didn't seem as surprised. She opened the door to let Paul Fitzpatrick in.
The three of them sat on a bench in the emergency ward admitting room, waiting for someone to treat Cree's finger. In the nightly triage of New Orleans, Paul warned them, it might be a longish wait: the Big Easy had the highest violent crime rate in the country, and sprained fingers and contusions didn't rate against bullet and knife wounds. The finger throbbed and swelled to an obscene size despite the ice pack an orderly had given her.
Cree hated emergency wards. They were jagged, scary psychic spaces where a lot of pain and anxiety had been concentrated and where many deaths had taken place. The unending energy and determination of generations of medical staff were also here, a strong, bright river that cleansed and renewed, but nothing could wash away all the sorrows.
Cree concentrated on the welcome distraction of physical pain.
And on the growing excitement she felt. She knew it was partly the irrational euphoria of shock, but part of it was real, too: the thrill of the chase and the close encounter. Every new insight was costing her a lot, but she had grabbed a thread. It was more than the mask idea and the missing Mardi Gras files; she had learned something crucial from the ghost. This mystery was starting to unravel.
Back at the house, Cree's first thought upon seeing Paul was that she was not looking her best at the moment. But he came to her and warily held her shoulders, searching her face with concern. He looked good, Cree thought, in a frowsy, unshaven, hastily dressed sort of way.
But for all that, he struck her as diffident, too. Holding back. As they'd driven to the hospital in Paul's car, she'd told them the story of her realizations: the boar head as mask, the absence of Mardi Gras materials among Lila's family archives, the years missing from the Epicurus files at the house. Throughout, Paul had said next to nothing. When she'd asked him what he thought, he said only, 'Right now, I'm just concerned about your health and your safety. We can worry about all that tomorrow.' She got the sense he was stalling, giving himself time to appraise the situation from a psychiatrist's perspective.
Probably, she realized, he saw this as a psychological breakdown of grave consequence. Hysteria. Incipient schizophrenia.
That got her mad. Sitting here in the bright fluorescents of the waiting room, in that inimitable one A.M. emergency ward ambience, she knew she was emotionally labile from shock and exhaustion, and the best course would be to stay calm. But she couldn't let his skepticism be. Not after what she'd been through. The world owed her some credence.
'You're sitting there thinking I've flipped my friggin' gourd,' she told him, 'and that really pisses me off.'
He shot a glance at Joyce, who just blinked expressionlessly. 'I admit I'm trying to retain some objectivity here, Cree, but – '
' 'Objectivity'? How often has that been used as a euphemism for an unwillingness to face the obvious? How long did 'objectivity' keep multiple personality disorder, or Tourette's syndrome, from being properly diagnosed and adequately researched?'
'Only as long as it took for credible clinical evidence to accumulate,' he said quietly.
His levelheadedness infuriated her further. 'You want to see some friggin' 'credible evidence'? Lemme show you something!' And she lifted her shirt to show the four painful red stripes across her stomach, just above the waistband of her jeans. 'That thing grabbed me, and I ripped myself out his grip, and he left some evidence right here!'
There were a dozen other people in the lounge, other triaged patients biding their time or tired family members waiting for news, and heads turned. Paul gently took her hands and made her lower her blouse. Cree felt suddenly ashamed of herself.
Joyce looked at the two of them, blinked again, then stood up and brushed her skirt smooth. 'Well,' she said briskly, 'I think I'll go powder my nose.' She gathered her purse and walked away.
Her absence changed everything as if someone had flipped a switch.
