American Gothic (5 page)

7

The Garden District

P
EREGRINE THREW MONEY at the driver, angry even though he knew there was no reason to blame the man for losing the other carriage in the traffic of St. Charles Avenue.

The woman who had killed Evangeline, and who had come close to killing Peregrine—assuming it wasn’t all the creation of a bizarre fantasy—had gotten away from him again. Peregrine felt like a hapless wanderer, pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp through the night. Each time he got tantalizingly close to the deadly fairy, she would pull away and vanish. The chase was leading him deeper and deeper into a perilous swamp, even though the dangers might have been confined within his mind, which had suffered a series of terrible shocks since he’d marched off to war.

Peregrine wandered down St. Charles on foot.

“Matches, sir?”

He practically ran into the old black woman standing in the middle of the boardwalk. He hadn’t even seen her.

“Buy my matches, sir.”

He absently pushed back his coat to put his hand in his pocket. The wide-eyed stare made him realize his mistake, but by then it was too late.

“God bless Mr. Lincoln,” the old woman said.

Peregrine nodded and shoved a handful of money at the woman. He stepped around her, ignoring the box of matches in her hand.

“God bless you, sir,” she cried after him. “And God bless the Union Army.”

Peregrine cringed inwardly and drew the cloak around him as he walked away as fast as he could.

The Garden District was the quarter of New Orleans where wealth was most concentrated. The war had been hard on the South, but the Garden District showed few outward signs of hardship. The war had destroyed most small and midsized planters, but Peregrine suspected the people who lived in these pillared mansions set back from moss-draped oaks had been shrewd enough to put aside money against the eventuality that the Confederacy lost the war. The rich had a way of enduring. There was old money in places like New Orleans and Savannah that had outlasted the French, the Spanish, and the British. The old-money people would survive the present troubles as well, their gold hidden safely away in the bank vaults of Europe.

Walking quickly but with an almost desperate aimlessness, Peregrine left St. Charles and turned up Philip Street, hoping to find some clue or talisman that the woman who had become his quest had come this way. The houses on Philip Street were well lighted and decorated for the season. Holiday parties were being thrown here and there, like the one Peregrine had attended earlier in the evening, almost as if the city were still in control of the rebels and not under the martial law of an occupying army.

In the middle of the block, a carriage stood outside a Palladian mansion tucked behind a jungle of tropical foliage. It could have been the carriage that had carried the woman away from the Quadroon Ballroom, though Peregrine couldn’t be certain. He crossed the street toward it. There was no driver in sight. A lead from the team’s reins was wrapped around an iron hitching post cast in the shape of a horse’s head set into the ground next to the curb.

The sound of a child singing came from the house. The breath caught in Peregrine’s throat. The memories, the memories—how long could he endure, haunted by his terrible memories?

The horse whinnied when Peregrine put his hand on its back. The creature had been tied up long enough to cool off, so it couldn’t have been the carriage he was seeking.

From inside the house, the singing continued. It made Peregrine’s heart ache to hear the high-pitched voice sweetly mispronounce words. At least the child was not in jeopardy from
her
.

Peregrine continued up one street, turned, and continued again until his intuition took him down another street, wandering until his feet were tired and he stopped to rest. He realized without any special sense of concern that he was no longer certain of the way back to St. Charles Avenue.

An open buggy was coming toward him up the street, pulled by a horse driven by a black man with a wreath of gray hair. Hooves clapped against the cobblestones with a rhythm that gave Peregrine an odd feeling in the hollow of his stomach, a strange sensation of weightlessness. The driver tugged at the reins, stopping beside Peregrine. He continued to stare straight ahead. The buggy was empty.

“Excuse me,” Peregrine said.

The driver kept his eyes forward as if in a trance.

A voice from within silently commanded Peregrine to get into the buggy. He resisted, thinking that there was no rational reason for such an impulse.

“Did she send you for me?” he said at last.

Still the driver did not respond. Perhaps he was deaf. The horse stamped and shook its head.

Peregrine put his hand on the door. He expected some reaction as he opened it, but the ancient driver gave no sign he was aware of Peregrine’s existence. Peregrine climbed in and sat back against the leather seat.

“I am ready,” he said. “Take me to her.”

The driver showed no sign that he had heard, yet he snapped the reins, and the buggy began to move, taking Peregrine further into the mystery.

The hour was approaching midnight and few were still about.

They drove up and down streets threading through the Garden District. If there was a destination, Peregrine could not divine it. Their course seemed to be entirely random, sometimes backtracking over the same streets they’d traveled earlier. Peregrine settled back into the comfortable leather and fell into a dreamy reverie, content to watch the passing scene and wait for whatever the night would bring him.

The Lafayette Cemetery passed by on the left, the graveyard surrounded by a brick wall. Inside were the aboveground crypts, a walled neighborhood within a neighborhood where the residents were all dead.

After a long while—Peregrine could not be sure how much time had elapsed—the carriage turned onto Chestnut Street and stopped in front of a house where a spirited party was going on despite the increasing lateness of the hour. Golden light filtered through the well-tended plants and trees partly screening the house from the street. Peregrine made out a square Italianate villa, with four columns upholding the gallery that divided the structure’s two stories, three crowning dormers barely visible from the street. Intricate ironwork prevented people from falling from the gallery, the same pattern repeated in the fence atop the low stone wall surrounding the property. Tall windows ran from floor to ceiling, each framed with black shutters that could be closed against the hurricanes that blew off the Gulf. Piano music spilled from the house, something by Beethoven, Peregrine thought as the music concluded to the sound of enthusiastic applause and a few cheers and cries of “bravo.”

The elderly driver climbed down from his seat without bending his spine, his back stiff with age. He opened the carriage door for Peregrine.

“Thank you,” Peregrine said.

Not the faintest flicker of acknowledgment passed across the old man’s yellow eyes. The driver turned and climbed back into his seat, maintaining what might have been a religious vow of perpetual silence. As the carriage began to move away from Peregrine, a trill of female laughter came from within the house. There was something odd about the high-pitched laughter—a tone that was brittle and uncontrolled, hilarity bordering on the hysterical, mirth mingled with an equal measure of madness.

Peregrine knew it then: he had found her.

The iron gate closed behind him with a metallic rattle. Peregrine went up the stairs toward where a woman reclined in a wicker chaise longue on the porch near the entrance. She was young, curls of red hair framing a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were shut. She could have been asleep or dead. Peregrine thought about pushing back her hair to see her neck, but if he did and found wounds over her jugular vein, what would it really prove?

A servant in livery opened the door.

“Good evening,” Peregrine said. The man looked past him. “Is your mistress at home?”

The other man made no answer. His eyes remained fixed, as if staring at something over Peregrine’s shoulder in the middle distance. He appeared to be mesmerized, like the carriage driver.

A maid in a black dress and spotless apron so heavily starched that it crackled helped Peregrine out of his cloak. She, too, was unresponsive when he thanked her as she disappeared with his coat.

The front parlor was filled with people talking gaily and drinking champagne. The men were in formal evening clothes, and the women wore elegant gowns with pearls around their necks and jeweled bracelets on their arms. Peregrine was the only one wearing a uniform.

The uniform!

Peregrine’s heart began to pound. He stood perfectly still, waiting for the inevitable reaction while he wondered how he could have been so stupid. He was just too far inside the room to turn away and retreat without attracting notice. Moving only his eyes, he scanned the party from left to right. Either they were blind or the Union uniform was of no concern to them, though both possibilities seemed equally implausible. Still, it was impossible to imagine that he could walk into a Garden District party wearing the uniform of a federal general without drawing, at the very least, looks of cold disapproval, if not outrage, insults, and challenges to fight duels.

A woman directly in Peregrine’s line of vision smiled at him, and the man she was talking to nodded. Peregrine tipped his head slightly in return.

Who were these people?

What kind of party was this?

With what he hoped looked to the others like a perfectly casual gesture, he brought his hand to the pocket where he carried the derringer, only to remember losing it on the filthy hallway floor in the Quadroon Ballroom.

A servant came through the room with a silver tray of glasses filled with champagne. Peregrine took a glass and drank, wishing it were whiskey.

Music resumed in the next parlor, the piano playing the overture to an opera Peregrine could not identify. The other people began to filter toward the sound. Peregrine followed, putting the empty glass on a drum table next to a couch where two women leaned against each other, their eyes closed. Peregrine saw at once that they were different from the other women at the party. Their dresses were cut from cheap fabric, the tailoring inferior and showing evidence of wear. The toes of their boots needed polish, while rouge, powder, and lipstick were far too liberally applied to their faces. They did not belong in the house on Chestnut Street any more than Peregrine did.

The women were dead, Peregrine realized with a lack of surprise that was in itself surprising.

No one paid him the least attention as he bent slightly forward from the waist for a closer look. A set of neat, almost fastidious bite marks disfigured each woman’s neck. The skin around the bites had a purplish discoloration, a sign that mouths had suckled greedily from these mortal fountains. The tissue around each individual wound was raised and swollen, a ring encircling a red center glistening with blood that was still wet and, Peregrine guessed, as warm as it had been in life only a few minutes earlier.

8

Memento Mori

P
EREGRINE PICKED UP a second glass of champagne as the others moved past him into the music room, and stood turned away from them, pretending to admire an English landscape painting on the wall.

The wounds in the dead girls’ necks had already faded from what they had been barely a minute earlier. The torn skin was pulling itself together, the purplish discoloration fading. Some unknown mechanism—Peregrine refused to consider the possibility that supernatural powers were involved—was causing the corpses to heal themselves of the only outward evidence of the attacks that had killed them.

Peregrine felt himself almost physically lifted on a wave of relief as he realized that there was an explanation for it all that didn’t involve madness—the bite marks he had seen in Evangeline’s neck at the opium den, and then, later, the absence of those same fatal wounds when he examined her body as it lay in its casket. Through the work of some mysterious agency, the damage repaired itself even after life had ended, eliminating all visible proof of the cause of death.

“Clever,” Peregrine said beneath his breath, “very clever indeed.”

The pianist in the other room played a flourish, stopped, and said something that made the people in the other room laugh. It occurred to Peregrine that he should flee; strange, but he felt no compelling reason to make his escape. He did not feel threatened, though it was not because there was no menace present. The two dead women on the couch beneath the Constable oil painting were proof enough of
that.
He thought it likely some, perhaps even most, of the guests at the macabre soirée belonged to the same secret race as the girl-woman who had been playing hide-and-seek with him, luring Peregrine away from the Quarter, away from the safety of crowds and the recourse to summon Union soldiers to assist him in his quest to find out what he had become mixed up in. Still, no one at the party had so much as looked at Peregrine sideways. Perhaps the others sensed, as had Peregrine, that he had been invited to the party—as the carriage sent to bring him clearly indicated—to meet with the porcelain-skinned lady and learn whatever dark meaning there was within the heart of this bloody mystery.

By choosing to enter the house on Chestnut Street—no one had made him do it—Peregrine had willingly crossed the invisible threshold separating the ordinary world from one where none of the usual laws applied. Here, he was in the midst of an intimate circle buried as far as one could hope to go in the ever-narrowing circles of New Orleans society, each more exclusive, more hidden, more jealous of its secrets than the previous. It went without saying that he already knew far more than it was safe for him to know about
them.
Even his casual association had taught him that these creatures, whatever they were, existed side by side with ordinary society, unknown and unsuspected by other people or the authorities. But appearances were deceptive. They might have looked like ordinary human beings, but they were different, beginning with a complete disregard for the value of human life, and including the most disturbing distinction of all: their desire, or perhaps their need, to drink the blood of the living. Ultimately, Peregrine thought, the two races had no more in common than do wolves and sheep.

Beginning to feel conspicuous, Peregrine joined the others in the music room, where the crowd had formed a semicircle around the piano. He stood in the back of the room as the music began again, the first part of the selection instrumental. The singer stood near the pianist, the only one in the room who was turned away from him in order to face the audience. She was German or Polish, Peregrine guessed, judging by her blond hair and strong, handsome features.

On a settee in the corner, a man and woman were embracing with an intimacy that was scandalous outside of a Crescent City brothel. Peregrine was looking away in embarrassment when he noticed the woman was the seemingly ubiquitous Mrs. Foster! She must have left the Quadroon Ballroom after him and come straight to Chestnut Street, the guest of one of the monsters, brought here to service their pleasure. But then something else occurred to Peregrine, an idea that made him frown. Perhaps the slatternly madam was one of
them.
The bouncer at the ballroom had said his employer was a woman. Maybe Mrs. Foster was the mistress of both houses of ill repute, though she seemed too low to exercise that much authority, even of the most perverse variety.

The singer opened her mouth and joined a crystalline soprano to the music pouring from the piano, making it impossible for Peregrine to keep his attention focused on Mrs. Foster. The lyrics were Italian, an aria from another opera Peregrine did not recognize.

A sharp gesture brought Peregrine’s glance back to Mrs. Foster.

She had become suddenly, even dramatically rigid, as if she were in the grip of a grand mal seizure. Her fingers clutched empty air, and her legs were stuck out straight in the air. One slipper came off and fell to the carpeted floor, the sound hidden beneath the soaring music. All the while Mrs. Foster was held tight in the embrace of the long-haired man whose face was buried in her neck. Her eyes were open wide, her mouth contorted with animal passion.

It was an expression he had seen before, on Evangeline’s face.

Peregrine could not stand silently by and watch as Mrs. Foster was slaughtered. He started to move toward them, but a small hand on his arm stopped him before he’d taken his first step.

“Don’t.”

Peregrine found himself looking down on a slim, olive-skinned woman with jet black hair and eyes as dark and shiny as black pearls. She was a gypsy, Peregrine thought, though his only evidence of that was the riding boots she wore beneath her long, sheathlike dress.

“You cannot stop it,” she whispered in a low voice colored with an indeterminate accent that might have been Russian. “Do not try or you will only cause your own death.”

She stepped around him and put her hand against the wall. The wooden panel started to move away from her the moment she touched it, and she was halfway gone before Peregrine realized she wanted him to follow her through the hidden door.

But Mrs. Foster—his honor would not let him turn his back on a woman in need.

The gypsy was still in the passage, her eyes intent upon him, waiting, when Peregrine decided to follow.

It was already too late for anyone to help Mrs. Foster.

The door closed with a dull click, merged into the wall of bookcases. Peregrine doubted he would be able to find it, assuming he had the opportunity to try.

The hidden library was windowless, the walls covered with bookshelves that extended from the floor to the ceiling fourteen feet above. A fire burned in the fireplace carved from marble, a baroque fantasia of cupids and filigree that probably was once part of a Florentine villa. The furniture was French—brocade chairs, parquet tables, an ornate chest. In the corner, sitting at an angle, was a big marble-topped table, each leg a carved lion’s claw grasping a globe. A heavily carved wooden chair, imposing enough to have served as a throne in a bishop’s palace, was pulled up to the table. Open on the blotter—as if the reader had been called away in the midst of study—was a large, leather-bound book. The printing on the page was in a language Peregrine did not recognize. Not Latin, Greek, or even Cyrillic, he thought. The alien script in the illuminated manuscript resembled Celtic or Norse runes. He stared down at the book. Perhaps this was the language of these creatures.

The woman standing by the fireplace watched him with an expression that seemed to indicate she knew his thoughts. She was an exotic creature. He had not noticed it before, but her eyes were like a cat’s: large, wise, sensual, and predatory, in a quiet feline way.

“I should have stopped that,” Peregrine said.

“There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

“I could have tried.”

“Safian would have torn your throat out with his fingers without looking up from his fun. He does not like being interrupted by underlings.”

What sort of name was Safian? It sounded foreign and menacing, matching his appearance.

“I am no man’s underling,” Peregrine said.

“Safian is not a man.”

“He looks like a man.”

“In outward appearance, yes, but he has been something else for a long time.”

“How long?” Peregrine said, pretending to scan the titles on the shelf nearest him. Some were in English, others in the weird language of these creatures.

Her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “You’re curious,” she said.

“Yes, I am. That is why I am here. How long has Safian not been a man?”

“For centuries.”

“How can that be possible?”

“You cannot begin to guess all the things that are possible,” she said, and started slowly toward him.

Peregrine held himself still and upright as she walked slowly around him, looking at him the way one might appraise a horse at auction. She did not seem big or strong enough to be a threat to Peregrine, who had killed men in battle with his bare hands. Still, he knew she was a killer; he could feel it in his bones. But he wasn’t afraid. Fear was an emotion he could no longer experience, perhaps because his reasons for living had themselves been dead this past year.

“If he’s not a man, what is this Safian, besides old enough to be my grandfather’s grandfather?”

“One of us, my child,” she said from behind him.

“Us?”

“Yes,” she said, turning the word into a purr.

She came around in front of him and looked up into his face as if interested in him in an unexpected way. “You are not afraid.”

He did not deny it.

“You should be afraid.”

“Perhaps.”

“Most people who want to die are weak.” She leaned close and put her cheek against him. He could feel her warmth through his tunic and shirt. She drew in a breath through her nose. “You do not have the stink of cowardice. Do you want to die?”

“I don’t know how to answer your question. I no longer have any interest in life, but it might be more accurate to say I’m indifferent on the subject. The one thing I do want is to understand what this is all about—you, the others, the woman who introduced me to all of this.”

She spun away from him, giving Peregrine the impression that she did not want him to see whatever was in her eyes.

“She is of no concern.”

“She brought me here tonight, although I can’t explain how she did it.”

“She brings many here,” the gypsy said, her new smile so bright that Peregrine thought it had to be false. “That is what she does, you know; she brings people here. She is like a flower drawing insects here to the nectar.”

“Or is it just the reverse—she draws the nectar here to the insects?”

“You have a quick wit.”

“Take me to meet her,” Peregrine said.

The smile flickered but only just. “That would not be wise. You know what happens when the moth flies too near the flame.”

She put her hand on his breast before he could speak. Desire came flooding into Peregrine then, catching him unawares, possessing him, setting him on fire from inside. How could she do this to him, with a touch of the hand?

Peregrine saw his yearning mirrored in the gypsy’s gamine eyes, and though he knew it was only her hunger for his blood, he could not make himself resist. An inexplicable paralysis robbed him of control over his body, so that all he could do was stare down at that hand, smooth and white as the marble fireplace, the long fingers tapering to nails the color of blood. She wore a ring of an antique design, the gold setting holding a square-cut ruby. The jewel glowed with the same sensual fire burning within him.

“A lover gave it to me,” her voice said, sounding very far away, as in a dream. “He is dead now. I keep it as a memento mori.”

Her hand began to move across his chest, the caress making his heart race. She slipped her fingers inside the edge of his tunic and drew him to her, pulling them both backward until she was against the table. She released him long enough to raise herself up onto the marble surface. Peregrine found himself standing between her legs, looking down to see that she had raised her dress up to her hips.

Peregrine put one hand on her arm, the other around her back. He did not know what he was doing or why he was doing it, only that he had no control. They were face-to-face, eye to eye, Peregrine leaning forward until there was no more than a breath separating their lips.

A glitter of light at the edge of the gypsy’s mouth became the serpent’s teeth, appearing from beneath her upper lip.

Peregrine had not discovered what he’d come to the house on Chestnut Street to learn, but it no longer mattered to him. The bliss enveloped him, erasing all memories, cares, and intentions. He had long since ceased participating in life except insofar as it allowed him to pursue vengeance against the people who murdered his family. This final act severing him from the world would be but a formality, the formal ending to something that in actuality had been over a long time ago.

“What will you give me as a memento mori to remember you when you are dead?” she said in his ear.

Their lips touched briefly before she lowered her face into his shoulder. The ecstasy crashing into him seemed without limit. No wonder Evangeline and Mrs. Foster had gone to their deaths moaning with delight. Who could resist pleasure a million times more powerful than anything that came out of an opium pipe?

Her nimble fingers had opened his tunic and were drawing down the collar of his shirt, her lips parted against the skin of his throat. Peregrine closed his eyes, waiting for it, wanting it, anxious for her to possess him completely, and for the peaceful nothingness that would follow.

The ugly hiss destroyed the moment, breaking the spell as completely as a rock thrown through a windowpane. Peregrine felt himself thrown roughly back. Disoriented and staggering, he saw the gypsy push herself up from the table, her upturned face contorted with rage at an apparition on the ceiling she alone could see.

Peregrine’s hands came up defensively, but she flew past him and was gone, leaving one bookcase turned out into the room at an angle. Through the opening, Peregrine saw the revelers still circled around the piano. Behind them, sprawled across the settee like a discarded doll missing a shoe, was Mrs. Foster’s dead body.