The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,388

glancing anxiously at the old woman. Rowan understood he was young Pierce’s father.

And into the immense nave they all moved, the entire assemblage following the coffin on its rolling bier. Footfalls echoed softly and loudly under the graceful Gothic arches, light striking brilliantly the magnificent stained-glass windows and the exquisitely painted statues of the saints.

Seldom even in Europe had she seen such elegance and grandeur. Faintly Michael’s words came back to her about the old parish of his childhood, about the jam-packed churches which had been as big as cathedrals. Could this have been the very place?

There must have been a thousand people gathered here now, children crying shrilly before their mothers shushed them, and the words of the priest ringing out in the vast emptiness as if they were a song.

The straight-backed old woman beside her said nothing to her. In her wasted, fragile-looking hands, she held with marvelous capability a heavy book, full of bright and lurid pictures of the saints. Her white hair, drawn back into a bun, lay thick and heavy against her small head, beneath her brimless black felt hat. Aaron Lighter remained back in the shadows, by the front doors, though Rowan would have had him stay beside her. Beatrice Mayfair wept softly in the second pew. Pierce sat on the other side of Rowan, arms folded, staring dreamily at the statues of the altar, at the painted angels high above. His father seemed to have lapsed into the same trance, though once he turned and his sharp blue eyes fixed deliberately and unselfconsciously on Rowan.

By the hundreds they rose to take Holy Communion, the old, the young, the little children. Carlotta refused assistance as she made her way to the front and then back again, her rubber-tipped cane thumping dully, then sank down into the pew, with her head bowed, as she said her prayers. So thin was she that her dark gabardine suit seemed empty, like a garment on a hanger, with no contour of a body at all within it, her legs like sticks plunging to her thick string shoes.

The smell of incense rose from the silver censer as the priest circled the coffin. At last the procession moved out to the waiting fleet in the treeless street. Dozens of small black children—some barefoot, some shirtless—watched from the cracked pavements before a shabby, neglected gymnasium. Black women stood with bare arms folded, scowling in the sun.

Can this really be America?

And then through the dense shade of the Garden District the caravan plunged, bumper to bumper, with scores of people walking on either side of it, children skipping ahead, all advancing through the deep green light.

The walled cemetery was a veritable city of peaked-roof graves, some with their own tiny gardens, paths running hither and thither past this tumbling down crypt or this great monument to fire fighters of another era, or the orphans of this or that asylum, or to the rich who had had the time and money to etch these stones with poetry, words now filled with dust and wearing slowly away.

The Mayfair crypt itself was enormous, and surrounded by flowers. A small iron fence encircled the little building, marble urns at the four corners of its gently sloping peristyle roof. Its three bays contained twelve coffin-sized vaults, and from one of these the smooth marble stone had been removed, so that it gaped, dark and empty, for the coffin of Deirdre Mayfair to be placed inside like a long pan of bread.

Urged politely to the front ranks, Rowan stood beside the old woman. The sun flashed in the old woman’s small round silver-rimmed glasses, as grimly she stared at the word “Mayfair” carved in giant letters within the low triangle of the peristyle.

And Rowan too looked at it, her eyes once again dazzled by the flowers and the faces surrounding her, as in a hushed and respectful voice young Pierce explained to her that though there were only twelve slots, numerous Mayfairs had been buried in these graves, as the stones on the front revealed. The old coffins were broken up in time to make way for new burials, and the pieces, along with the bones, were slipped into a vault beneath the grave.

Rowan gasped faintly. “So they’re all down there,” she whispered, half in wonder. “Higgledy-piggledy, underneath.”

“No, they are in hell or heaven,” said Carlotta Mayfair, her voice crisp and ageless as her eyes. She had not even turned her head.

Pierce backed away, as if he were