Buddenbaum caught hold of Hany's sleeve. "Is she
?" crazy
"No. Her husband's ghost is here."
"I should have seen, I suppose," he said, his voice a monotone. "Final acts... they're a bitch...
"Better get used to it," Harry said.
"I never liked the sentimental shit," Buddenbaum replied.
"I think it's more than that," Harry said, looking up at the motes and filaments that had touched Maeve's skin. they were not extinguishing themselves in the night sky as those that had gone before had done, but were roving purposefully, like bees in a field of flowers, mazing the air as they went about their purpose. Where they traveled they left trails of light, which, once loosed, proceeded to elaborate themselves, describing a multitude of forms in the warm night air.
It was Raul who spoke what he saw first. "The house-2' he said in amazement. "You see it, Harry?"
"I see it."
"Enough," said Buddenbaum, waving the sight away as if nauseated. "I'm done with the past. Done with it!"
Covering his head with his hands he stumbled off as Maeve's memory raised her whorehouse out of light and air: walls and windows, staircase and ceilings. Off to Harry's left a passageway led to the front door, and the step beyond. to his right, through another door there was a parlor, and through another, a kitchen, and through a third a yard where the trees were blossoming. And everywhere, even as the floors were laid, the rooms were being filled with furniture and rugs and plants and vases, the sheer proliferation of detail suggesting that once the process had been initiated these objects were coming back into being of their own accord. Their solid selves had gone to dust decades since, but these, their imagined forms, remained encoded at the spot where they'd existed. Now they came again, remembering themselves in all their perfection.
None was so solid, however, as to keep Hany's eyes from wandering in any direction he wished. He could see the picket fence that bounded the backyard and the fine Spanish tile on the front step. He could see up the graceful staircase to the second and third floors, each of which boasted two bathrooms and half a dozen well-appointed bedrooms.
And now, even before the roof had appeared on the house, the souls who had occupied it began to appear, gracing its rooms.
"Ah... " Raul cooed appreciatively, "the ladies." they appeared everywhere. On the landings and in the bedrooms, in the parlors and in the kitchen, their voices and their laughter like whispering music.
"There's Bedelia," Maeve said, "and Hildegard and Jennie, oh my dear Jennie, look at her... "
It was not such a bad place to be, Harry thought, come the end of the world, surrounded by such memories. Though only one or two of the women would have been judged pretty by current standards, there was an air of ease and pleasure here, of a house as much dedicated to laughter as to erotic excess.
As for the clients who'd patronized the establishment, they were like the ghosts of ghosts, gossamer forms passing up and down the stairs and in and out of the bedrooms and bathrooms, their dress and flesh gray.
Once in a while Harry would catch a glimpse of a face, but it was always fleeting, as though the house had conjured the furtiveness of these men, rather than the men themselves; caught them turning from scrutiny, ashamed of their desire.
There was little evidence of shame among the women. they went bare-breasted on the stairs, and naked on the landing. they chatted to one another as they shit or passed water. they helped each other bathe and douche and shave their legs and what lay between. "There, said Maeve, pointing to a prodigiously ample woman sitting in the kitchen, taking fingerfuls of pudding from a porcelain bowl, "that's Mary Elizabeth. You got a lot for your bucks with her. She always had a waiting list. And up there"-she pointed towards a slim, pale girl feeding a parrot from between her teeth-"that's Dolores. And the parrot, what was the parrot's name?" She glanced round at Raul. "Ask Coker," she said.
The answer came in an instant. "Elijah."
Maeve smiled. "Elijah. Of course, Elijah. She swore it spoke prophecies."
"Were you happy here?" Harry asked her.
"It wasn't what I'd expected my life to be," she said. "But yes, I was happy. Probably too happy. That made people envious."
"Is that why they burned the place down?" Harry said, wandering to the stairs to watch Mary Elizabeth ascend. "Because they were envious?"
"That was some of it," she said. "And some of it was eer self-righteousness: they didn't want me and my busiss corrupting the citizens. Can you imagine? Without me, without this house and these women, there wouldn't have been any citizens because there wouldn't have been any city. And they knew that. That's why they waited until they had an excuse-"
"And what was that?"
"Our son, our crazy son, who was too little like his father and too much like me. Coker was always gentle, you see. But there was a streak of the lunatic in the O'Connells, and it came out in Clayton. Not just that, but we made the error of teaching him he was special, telling him he'd have power in his hands one day, because he was a child of two worlds. We should never have done that. It made him think he was above the common decencies; that he had the right to be barbarous if he chose, because he was better than everybody else." She grew pensive. "I saw him once, when he was maybe ten or so, looking up at Harmon's Heights, and I said to him: What are you thinking? And do you know what he said to me? One day, he said, I'll have that hill, and I'll look down on a world of fishes. I've thought so many times, that was the sign. I should have put him out of his misery right there and then. But it had taken Coker and me so much pain and effort to get a child... "
While part of Harry's mind listened to the story of Clayton O'Connell's begetting-how Coker's charms and suits had kept Maeve preternaturally young, but slowed her ovulations to a trickle; how she was almost seventy when she gave birth to the boy-another part turned over what she'd said previously. The child's notion of looking down from Hannon's Heights on a world of fishes rang some vague bell.
"What happened to Clayton?" he asked her, while he puzzled over the problem.
"He was hanged."
"You saw him dead?"
"No. His body was taken by wolves or bears...
And now, thinking of wild beasts up on the mountain, he remembered where he'd heard the words before. "Raul?" he said. "Stay here with Maeve, will you?"
"I'm not leaving." Raul smiled, his face flushed with voyeuristic pleasure.
"Don't you go," Maeve said, as Harry left the bottom of the stairs.
"I'll be back," he replied, "you just keep remembering," and heading off down the hallway he slipped through the unopened front door onto the street.
"Lives are leaves on the story tree," the man who walked on Quiddity had told Tesla. to which she'd replied that she'd never told a story she'd given a damn about.
"Oh, but you did," he'd said. "Yourown... yourown...
It was true, of course. She'd told that story with every blink of her eye, every beat of her heart, with every deed and word, cruel and kind alike.
But here was a mystery; that now, though her heart was no longer beating and her eyes could no longer blink, though she would never again say or do anything in the living world, cruel or kind, the story refused to finish.
She was dead; that much was sure. But the pen moved on, and kept moving. There was more to tell it seemed...
The brightness into which she had fallen was still around her, though she knew it wasn't her eyes that were seeing it, because she could see her own body some distance 1from her, suspended in the light. It lay face-up, arms and legs spread, fingers splayed, in a posture she knew all too well. She'd assembled this image in front of Buddenbaum, half an hour ago: It was the pose of the figure at the center of the medallion. Now it was her dead flesh that took that pose, while her mind drifted around it with a kind of detached curiosity, mildly puzzled as to what all this meant, but suspecting the answer was beyond her comprehension.