“Yeah, that’s it, honey, we don’t go but fifty feet, you just stand still, real still. This is a big, steady pirogue. Nothing’s going to make it tip. You can kneel down if you want, or even sit down, but at this point I would not recommend the bother.”
“The house, Mary Jane, the house, it’s tilted to one side.”
“Darlin’, it’s been like that for fifty years.”
“I knew you’d say that. But what if it sinks, Mary Jane! God, I can’t stand the sight of it! It’s horrible, something that big tilting like that, it’s like …”
Another flash of pain, small and mean and deep, for all its quickness.
“Well, stop looking at it!” Mary Jane said. “You will not believe this, but I myself, with a compass and a piece of glass, have actually measured the angle of the tilt, and it is less than five degrees. It’s just all the columns make those vertical lines and look like they’re about to fall over.”
She lifted the pole, and the flat-bottomed boat slipped forward fast on its own momentum. The dreamy night closed all around them, leafy and soft, vines trailing down from the boughs of a listing tree that looked as if it might fall too.
Mary Jane dug the pole in again and shoved hard, sending the boat flying towards the immense shadow looming over them.
“Oh my God, is that the front door?”
“Well, it’s off the hinges now, if that’s what you mean, but that’s where we’re headed. Honey, I’m going to take you right up to the staircase inside. We’re going to tie this boat right there like always.”
They had reached the porch. Mona put her hands over her mouth, wanting to cover her eyes, but knowing she’d fall if she did. She stared straight up at the wild vines tangled above them. Everywhere she looked she saw thorns. Must have been roses once, and maybe would be again. And there, look, blossoms glowing in the dark, that was wisteria. She loved wisteria.
Why don’t the big columns just fall, and had she ever seen columns so wide? God, she’d never, when looking at all those sketches, ever dreamed the house was on this scale, yes, it was, absolutely Greek Revival grandeur. But then she’d never actually known anyone who really lived here, at least not a person who could remember.
The beading of the porch ceiling was rotted out, and a hideous dark hole gaped above that could just harbor a giant python, or what about a whole nest of roaches? Maybe the frogs ate the roaches. The frogs were singing and singing, a lovely sound, very strong and loud compared to the more gentle sound of garden cicadas.
“Mary Jane, there are no roaches here, are there?”
“Roaches! Darlin’, there are moccasins out here, and cottonmouth snakes, and alligators now, lots of them. My cats eat the roaches.”
They slid through the front door, and suddenly the hallway opened up, enormous, filled with the fragrance of the wet soaked plaster and the glue from the peeling wallpaper, and the wood itself, perhaps, oh, there were too many smells of rot and the swamp, and living things, and the rippling water which cast its eerie light all over the walls and the ceiling, ripples upon ripples of light, you could get drugged by it.
Suddenly she pictured Ophelia floating away on her stream, with the flowers in her hair.
But look. You could see through the big doors into a ruined parlor and, where the light danced on the wall there, the sodden remnant of a drapery, so dark now from the water it had drunk up that the color was no longer visible. Paper hung down in loose garlands from the ceiling.
The little boat struck the stairs with a bump. Mona reached out and grabbed the railing, sure it would wobble and fall, but it didn’t. And a good thing, too, because another pain came round her middle and bit deep into her back. She had to hold her breath.
“Mary Jane, we’ve got to hurry.”
“You’re telling me. Mona Mayfair, I’m so scared right now.”
“Don’t be. Be brave. Morrigan needs you.”
“Morrigan!”
The light of the lantern shivered and moved up to the high second-floor ceiling. The wallpaper was covered with little bouquets, faded now so that only the white sketch of the bouquet remained, glowing in the dark. Great holes gaped in the plaster, but she could not see anything through them.
“The walls are brick, don’t you worry about a thing, every single