the deal, she'd also confessed to murdering Temp Chase when he attempted to blackmail her; she was right, it was an effective way to keep Guidry from any suspicion of Ron. The story would cause a fabulous scandal when Deelie's scoop hit the newsstands, the kind that cropped up in New Orleans only once every few years and helped preserve its exotic reputation: great names fallen low, the sordid underbelly of the aristocracy exposed, ancient secrets come to life.
Still, Lila looked determined. Knowing what had happened back then, who the boar-headed man was, had strengthened her. She admitted she was terrified by what they were about to do, yet she took Cree's word that within the cemetery gates lay the promise of closure and the beginning of healing.
If everything went as Cree hoped, anyway.
Paul appeared to waver between confusion about Cree, and, she hoped, shame for being a lying, deceiving son of a bitch. Also worry for his patient and distrust of tonight's enterprise – he had come along only because Lila had insisted.
And Cree – how did Cree feel? she wondered. For starters, she wished Edgar had made it here, as much for moral support as for gathering physical evidence on the boar-headed man. But when Joyce had spoken to him on Saturday, he'd told her he just couldn't make it, after all. Things were really heating up with the Gloucester ghost, he needed to extend his stay a few days. Ordinarily, Cree would have waited on the final phase until Ed had a shot at these ghosts, but remediation couldn't wait.
But more than anything else, she was scared for Lila. Hopeful for her, too. A little sick with apprehension at the prospect of what they were about to do.
For Cree, the most difficult decision of the last two days was whether Lila should begin with Bradford's ghost or Richard's. On one hand, she felt that if Lila came to Richard's ghost first, she'd emerge strengthened, cleansed of subconscious guilt – j u s t maybe strong enough to face down her uncle's monstrous revenant. But she worried that bringing Lila back to the house when the creature still roamed there would undo her before she got anywhere near the library. Anyway, before she went to the library, Lila needed to know, absolutely and at the deepest level, the truth of who her rapist had been. She had to purge any lingering subconscious accusation of her father if she were to meet him and accept the love he offered.
So maybe she should face Bradford first, conquer him, release him, to prove to herself that her father was not the guilty one. But Cree had no confidence she was strong enough to face the dark halls of Beauforte House, the spectral wereboar that hunted her there.
For most of the night, she had gone back and forth, agonizing. It had to unfold just right. If anything went wrong, Lila could emerge from the encounters crazy, permanently unbalanced, lost.
The biggest problem was that Cree really had no idea how to alleviate the boar-headed phantom. How could they reach him? He was too intentional, physical, awful. And he was too simple – a powerful revenant existing in a very narrow band, with an almost one-dimensional affective complex. For the thousandth time, she puzzled over the absence of the perimortem experience in his manifestation. She knew his predations were a memory recalled intensely at the moment of death, but she'd never sensed the 'umbilicus': He was almost completely devoid of any connection to the man's actual experience of dying. And it was under the duress of dying that each individual most fervently sought to settle his accounts, sought emotional refuge – and therefore was most vulnerable That's when he was most likely to allow a living being to intrude upon his perseverating universe. But Cree had never sensed the library beating in the boar-headed man. And if he felt any remorse, it was only a tiny, dark thing, a grain of ash.
But late last night, thinking through every step of the scenario yet again, an epiphany had come to her. A curtain had fallen away, her vision clearing so abruptly that at two A.M. she'd leapt out of the hotel bed. She had dressed and slipped away from the hotel and come here to Lafayette Cemetery. She'd slid between the iron rails of the gate and gone deep into the center of the city of the dead. It had taken a long time to find the right crypt, but her guess had proved correct.
Paul looked at Cree, a question and an accusation. She had not told him the specifics of what was to happen, only that this visit was necessary and that he damned well owed her this much faith after all she'd accomplished so far. Not to mention the little matter of his secret collusion with Charmian. She had refused to listen to his excuses, and she'd made no effort to hide her contempt: He was as deceitful as anyone else in this city of masks.
'What do you think, Lila?' Paul asked. 'Are you really up for this?'
'I think so,' Lila said. 'I can try.'
'You'll do fine,' Cree assured her. She took her arm and went with her across the street, Paul following reluctantly.
The attendant swung the gate open to let them in, then closed it after them. ' 'Bout how long?' he asked. 'I got to stay on to close up after.'
'It might be two or three hours,' Cree told him. 'I'm sorry to keep you late. We're very grateful.'
He cheered up when Paul tipped him with a twenty. He nodded, checked his watch in a shaft of streetlight, and went to sit on a block of masonry to one side of the gate. Cree looked back to see him light up a cigarette, its tiny orange pulse the last beacon of the ordinary world beyond the cemetery walls.
Near the gate, the cemetery was arranged in major lanes lined with the little temples. Farther in, the lanes branched and wandered, narrowing, and the crypts stood closer together. In the dim light, the faux-marble surfaces took on a misty quality, rectangles and triangles pale against the night. Here and there, statues stood guard at crypt doors, patient and sorrowful.
There were a thousand faint ghosts of grieving here, the lingering feelings of the living who had come here to bid farewell to loved ones. But otherwise, it was a tranquil place, Cree felt. The densely clustered crypts blocked the noise of the city, broke its sounds on a million facets of masonry so that the wandering avenues were bathed in a soft white whisper. It smelled of old brick, old cement, and the faint, musty breath of vault interiors. The air was cool now, but when she passed close to crypts Cree could feel the glow of the heat they'd stored during the day.
They walked slowly on. Lila was gripping her arm hard. Paul still followed behind, saying nothing. Cree had instructed him to be quiet, not to voice his skepticism, to bring a flashlight but not to use it unless she told him to. It was crucial that they let Lila find her own way through this.
Near the center, they hesitated at an intersection of narrow paths. At first Cree wasn't sure she remembered the way, but finally she decided they needed to go left, and only a few steps farther brought them to the crypt. As befitted an old and prestigious family, it was larger than most, a Greek temple about the size of a prefab backyard storage shed. In front, two fluted pillars held up the roof of a shallow vestibule that cast the vault's cover into shadow. The back was wedged only a hand's width from neighboring crypts, the gaps between completely lightless.
'What do we do?' Lila whispered so quietly Cree could hear the pulse in her throat.
'We wait. Might as well sit.' Cree gestured toward a squat urn to the left of the door. 'You'll find him.'
Lila sat, just a shadow within the shadow of the overhang. Barely more visible, Paul hung several paces back, shifting uneasily. When Cree had proposed this visit, he had warned her that New Orleans cemeteries were dangerous places at night, and not for supernatural reasons. The enclosed, labyrinthine little cities made good temporary lodging for homeless people and had become favored places for crack deals to be made, for junkies to cook heroin over candle flames and shoot up. Night in the cemeteries was too often a time of predation.
'If you're too scared,' she had told him acidly, 'then don't come.' The look on his face had given her a pang, but he damned well deserved it.
The air turned gradually cooler. Cree stood until her legs tired and then sat cross-legged on the floor of the vestibule. Paul's shadow shifted uneasily from foot to foot. Lila was a mound of darkness that rocked ever so slightly from side to side.
Sometime later, Cree felt it coming: the impulse growing toward its eerie nascence. It began with a faint sense of movement and feeling that coalesced only inches away, on the other side of the vault cover.
Paul sensed it, too. His shadow froze, as if he were listening.
'I'm scared, Cree,' Lila whispered.
Something moved audibly inside the crypt. It started as a faint scraping noise, like a rat gnawing, but it soon changed. Something larger shifted, making a rustle of cloth and then a faint, dull thump. Even knowing it was coming, Cree felt a feather drift up her spine.
'There's someone coming,' Paul whispered urgently.
