'Shhh.'
'No, there's someone… this is no joke, Cree, these crack heads – '
'Paul, shut up!'
The shadow of Paul looked down one side of the crypt, saw nothing, then stepped to the other side. Then he mounted the apron and put one hand against the marble crypt cover. He snatched it away as if it had burned him. No doubt he felt the faint vibration in the marble. Afterward he stood motionless again, indecisive. Cree couldn't see his face, but she could hear his breath, a short, sharp panting.
Lila hadn't moved. Cree let herself fall into sync with the burgeoning manifestation in the crypt and felt Lila coming with her.
And they found him there.
He had just awakened in utter darkness, confused. At first it seemed that he couldn't open his eyes, but then he realized they were open, he had either gone blind or there was simply no light for them to register. A waterfall of pain originated in his head and poured down his neck and back. Something was wrong with him, he realized. He'd been hurt. It took a while to make sense of things, but he became aware he was lying on his back on a hard, smooth, slightly rounded surface. With an effort, he lifted one hand only to discover a coarse masonry ceiling just inches above him. The discovery shocked him and his whole body jerked reflexively. The movement caused him to slide to the right, down the slight incline of the curved surface. Abruptly he felt a gap beneath him, and he rolled partly into it.
He was wedged there in the dark, his forehead against rough stone, the back of his head against the thing he'd been lying on. One arm hung beneath him, his fingers trailing in some kind of rubble – dust and crumbly chunks and sharp pieces. An incomprehensible place.
The movement had caused savage arcs of pain to streak through his whole body, and with it the memory came suddenly to him: Richard had been beating him! He had fled the purpling face of his brother-in-law, cringing from and yet welcoming every explosion of pain as the poker struck. Now was some time after that, and he was somewhere dark and small and musty smelling.
The arm beneath his body could hardly move, but the other was free, and with his fingers he traced the surface behind him. Beneath a film of grit it felt smooth and metallic. Something was digging painfully into his back, and when his fingers found it he discovered it was carved in low-relief designs. A flange or fixture like a decorative fist gripping a pole or rail that felt like, it was, a handle!
It was the carrying rail on a coffin.
At the realization, Bradford's ghost ignited in sheer terror. The hand wedged beneath him scrabbled in the remains of his Lambert ancestors. His free hand clawed the wall and bloodied itself. He got it above him, past the end of the coffin, and found only more of the same: bricks with bulges of mortar between them.
Bradford screamed. He was in a crypt. Richard must have done this. Richard and that black witch Josephine had buried him alive.
A groan squeezed out of Lila, and Cree knew she was experiencing the ghost's terror. The silhouette of Paul had put its hands over its ears.
Bradford tried to pound on the wall. Somebody would hear the thumping. They'd let him out. But he found he was too weak to pound long. Two useless blows and his arm fell back against his side, muscles exhausted. The darkness swam in whorls of sick yellow light. He tried to inch himself forward or backward beneath the low ceiling but found he couldn't. He was wedged in the narrow gap between the coffin and the rough wall and he had no strength and he was damaged, badly damaged.
'Help me!' he mouthed. He intended the words but had not enough breath to make them sound. 'Help me!'
He pounded the wall for another few seconds and nearly blacked out from the exertion. Confusion took him, and he lost track of where he was or why. It had to do with Lila, he thought. Lila was an idea that was all pain. He had to do something for Lila, she was hurt. Somebody bad had hurt her. He had to get free to do something for Lila. Why? Then he remembered chasing her, and the giddy craziness of it, the way his anger and envy had risen and converged with his lust and that strange sadistic abandon, and how he'd let them go, let it go on. Breaking the boundaries was a thrill that fueled itself. In the boar mask he was a rutting animal, powerful and brutal and free, given power in all the ways his daily life deprived him of power. How good her fear of him felt, how supple her flesh when he forced himself on her, how exciting her struggles beneath him. Even in his pain and remorse, the memory was sharp and clear and spun out of him like a creature with its own separate life, savage and exultant.
Then it got distant and he forgot it again. A sharp tooth of mortar seemed to screw itself into the flesh of his forehead, and he couldn't pull away even a fraction of an inch.
'Charm? Charm!' he called, and this time his heard his voice work. Charm would always help, she had always helped. For a moment the thought of her gave him reassurance, but then he lost his place in time again. He kicked with his free leg and hit something hard. The crypt door. He kicked again, and that was all the strength he had.
The sound of Bradford's spectral shoe against the inch-thick marble door was clearly audible outside the crypt. Paul retreated several steps from the crypt, stumbling as he came off the apron, hands still over his ears, and despite her anger Cree felt a pang for him: His world, too, would come undone tonight.
Bradford's ghost scratched at the bricks with his free hand until he felt his nails come away and he became too weak to move any more. He lay there in the dark, mostly unconscious for a while.
When he awoke again, it was with a start. Something had changed.
The bricks he was wedged against had gotten warmer. The air he struggled to breathe was getting warm, too.
Cree fought to keep calm, knowing the agonies that would follow. The sun must have risen at that point, beginning its daily slow incineration of the occupants of the aboveground crypts of New Orleans. Inside, Bradford's ghost would relive the dying man's panic. His body would arch minutely as he began to be cooked alive. It would go on for some hours yet. It had been happening for almost thirty years.
Even in his wrath, Cree didn't think Richard would have intentionally condemned Bradford to this – surely he hadn't known Brad was still alive when he'd stuffed him in here.
She hoped Lila would intervene soon.
Cree could help, but Lila would need to find strength enough to offer him the window of escape. She had to enter his world dream and offer some promise of release.
Now the dying man was distilling down to his rudiments. There was regret – somewhere far away was a movie of memory that wouldn't stop, a wereboar taking its angry pleasure upon a girl. And Bradford hated the wereboar impulse. It lived in him like a huge tapeworm, fastened into his mind and feeding on him. It punished him. He wanted to be free of it.
You're dead, Bradford, he heard. The voice intruded on his solitary nightmare and startled him: Lila's voice! Go away now, it said. Just go away.
Cree looked at the dark shape of Lila. She was holding herself very still, but around her a dirty purple aura jittered.
Lila? the ghost thought. Its world became confused, and the presence of his victim, the source of his guilt, terrified him. The world of the crypt began to break up, unsustainable.
Cree held her breath, hoping Lila would find in herself what was needed.
'Go away, Bradford! Let yourself go away now!' Lila was saying it out loud. There was no forgiveness in her thought or her voice, but there was pity and there was acceptance. 'You're dead. You're a long time ago. You're over with. The whole thing is over now.'
The best thing she could manage to give him was to get over him. And it was just right, Cree realized.
It was all the window the tortured ghost needed. He fled from his nightmare in the crypt toward her hard pity and resignation. In the mind of the ghost, past and present clashed, irreconcilable. Lost, the ghost spun away. The boar-headed memory broke apart and became an echo of a memory of a dream and then just dust in a whorl of darkness, and even the walls of the crypt, oven hot now, weren't real. Nothing was.
45
