The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,320

to certain types of people. Did you know that the very night of her murder, two different young men of my acquaintance fell in love with her! Can you imagine? Neither of them had ever met her before and there they were quarreling over her, one demanding that the other let him have his chance with her, and the other saying that he had spoken to her first. My dear man, the party only started at seven. And by eight-thirty, she was dead!”

The night after Stella’s funeral, Lionel woke up screaming in the asylum, “He’s there, he won’t leave me alone.”

He was in a straitjacket by the end of the week, and finally on the fourth of November, he was placed in a padded cell. As the doctors debated whether to try electric shock, or merely to keep him sedated, Lionel sat crouched in the corner, unable to free his arms from the straitjacket, whimpering and trying to turn his head away from his invisible tormentor.

The nurses told Irwin Dandrich that he screamed for Stella to help him. “He’s driving me mad. Oh, why in the name of God doesn’t he kill me? Stella, help me. Stella, tell him to kill me.”

The corridors rang with his screams. “I didn’t want to give him any more injections,” one of the nurses told Dandrich. “He never really went to sleep. He’d wrestle with his demons, mumbling and cursing. It was worse for him that way, I think.”

“He is judged to be completely and incurably insane,” wrote one of our private detectives. “Of course, if he were cured he might have to stand trial for the murder. God knows what Carlotta has told the authorities. Possibly she hasn’t told them anything. Possibly no one has asked.”

On the morning of the sixth of November, alone and unattended, Lionel apparently went into a convulsion and died of suffocation, having swallowed his tongue. No wake was held in the funeral parlor on Magazine Street. Cousins were turned away the morning of the funeral, and told to go directly to the Mass at St. Alphonsus Church. There they were told by hired funeral directors not to continue on to the cemetery, that Miss Carlotta wanted things quiet.

Nevertheless they gathered at the Prytania Street gates of Lafayette No. 1, watching from a distance as Lionel’s coffin was placed beside Stella’s.

Family legend:

“It was all over, everyone knew it. Poor Pierce eventually managed to get over it. He studied at Columbia for a while, then entered Harvard the following year. But to the day he died no one ever mentioned Stella in his presence. And how he hated Carlotta. The only time I ever heard him speak of it, he said she was responsible. She ought to have pulled the trigger herself.”

Not only did Pierce recover, he became a highly capable lawyer, and played a major role in guiding and expanding the Mayfair fortune over the decades. He died in 1986. His son, Ryan Mayfair, born in 1936, is the backbone of Mayfair and Mayfair today. Young Pierce, Ryan’s son, is at present the most promising young man in the firm.

But those cousins who said “It was all over” were right.

With the death of Stella, the power of the Mayfair Witches was effectively broken. Stella was the first of Deborah’s gifted descendants to die young. She was the first one to die by violence. And never after would a Mayfair Witch “rule” at First Street, or assume direct management of the legacy. Indeed, the present designee is a mute catatonic and her daughter—Rowan Mayfair—is a young neurosurgeon living over two thousand miles from First Street who knows nothing of her mother, her heritage, her inheritance, or her home.

How did it all come to this? And can any one person be blamed? These are questions over which one could agonize eternally. But before we consider them in greater detail, let us draw back and consider the position of the Talamasca after Arthur Langtry’s death.

THE STATUS OF THE INVESTIGATION IN 1929

No autopsy was ever performed on Arthur Langtry. His remains were buried in England in the Talamasca cemetery, as he had long ago arranged for them to be. There is no evidence that he died by violence; indeed, his last letter, describing Stella’s murder, indicates that he was already suffering from heart trouble. But one can say with some justification that the stress of what he saw in New Orleans took its toll. Arthur might have lived longer had he never gone