The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,260

had looked into her palm and told her so. A long life, she would have.

“And think of it, shot dead like that by Lionel when she wasn’t even thirty years old. Good God! But you know it was Carlotta all along, don’t you?”

Llewellyn was by this time almost incoherent. I pressed on the matter of Carlotta and the shooting, but he would say no more about it. The whole subject began to frighten him. He returned to the subject of Julien’s “autobiography” and how much he wanted it. And what he wouldn’t give to get into that house some day and lay hands on those pages if they were still in that upstairs room. But then so long as Carlotta was there, he didn’t have a chance of it.

“You know there were storage rooms up there, right along the front of the house under the roof. You can’t see the roof slope from the street, but they’re there. Julien had trunks in there. I’ll bet that’s where she put the autobiography. She didn’t bother to burn it. Not Mary Beth. She just didn’t want it to fall into my hands. But then that beast Carlotta, who knows what she’s done with all those things?”

Not wanting to miss an opportunity, I pressed as to whether there was ever anything strange in the house, anything supernatural. (That is, other than Julien’s power to cause apparitions.) This was of course the kind of leading question that I try not to ask, but I had been with him for hours and he had volunteered nothing on this score other than his strange experiences with Julien. I was searching for something more.

His reaction to my question about a ghost was very strong. “Oh, that,” he said. “That was awful, just awful. I can’t tell anyone about that. Besides, it must have been my imagination.” He all but passed out.

I helped him back to his flat above the bookstore on Chartres Street. Over and over, he mentioned that Julien had left him the money for the building, and for the opening of a shop. Julien knew Llewellyn loved poetry and music and really despised his work as a clerk. Julien sought to set him free, and he had done it. But the one book he wished he had was Julien’s life story.

I was never able to obtain another interview of similar depth and length.

When I tried to talk to Llewellyn again a few days later, he was very polite but cautious. He apologized for having gotten so drunk and talked so much, though he said he had enjoyed it. And I could never persuade him to lunch with me again or to speak again at any length about Julien Mayfair.

Several times after that, I stopped in his shop. I asked him many questions about the family and its various members. But I could never regain his trust. Once I asked again if that house on First Street was haunted as people said. There were so many stories.

The very same expression came over him that I had seen the first night I spoke with him. He looked away, his eyes wide, and he shuddered. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might have been what you call a ghost. I don’t like to think about those things. I always thought it was my … guilt, you know, that I was imagining it.”

When I found myself pressing, perhaps a little too much, he said to me that the Mayfair family was a hard and strange family. “You don’t want to run afoul of those people. That Carlotta Mayfair, she’s a monster. A real monster.” He looked very uncomfortable.

I asked if she had ever given him trouble, to which he replied dismissively that she gave everyone trouble. He seemed distracted, troubled. Then he said a most curious thing, which I wrote down as soon as I returned to my hotel room. He said that he had never believed in life after death, but when he thought of Julien, he was convinced that Julien was still in existence somewhere.

“I know you think I’m out of mind to say something like that,” he said, “but I could swear it’s true. The night after we first met, I could swear I dreamed of Julien and Julien told me a lot of things. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember the dream clearly, but I felt that Julien didn’t want us to talk again. I don’t even like talking about it now except that