City of Masks

6

That night, back at her hotel, Cree opened her laptop and took notes on the interview. She'd booked a week at the Clarion, on Canal Street, the backbone avenue of New Orleans and a good central location from which to conduct research. She had chosen it sight unseen from Seattle for its reasonable rate and had been pleasantly surprised to find the building clean and well appointed, her room big and agreeably modern. It had watercolors of French Quarter scenes on the walls, a queen-sized bed with a reasonably firm mattress, a well-stocked minibar, and cable Internet hookup. Best of all was the absence of too much psychic ambience, meaning it would serve as a place of respite from the rigors of her job. From her seventh-floor window, she had a good view of the traffic on Canal: six o'clock and though it was well past Mardi Gras, flocks of tourists were drifting toward the river and the French Quarter, wide-eyed couples holding hands and looking around with a mix of excitement and uncertainty. Cree had every intention of joining them once she'd gotten her notes done.

Do you think I'm crazy? The word crazy didn't quite mean anything to Cree. The world could be chaotic and so could minds. You could be absolutely rational in one part of your mind and utterly nutso in another, and the universal coexistence of the two was what made the human race so marvelously interesting – and so dangerous.

But the phenomena Lila reported didn't fit with any of Cree's expectations or experience. Lila's psychiatrist was absolutely right to insist on brain scans and blood work – a tumor or an unnoticed stroke could induce hallucinations not unlike schizophrenia and would need immediate treatment. The scariest part was that Lila had barely started to recount her ordeal. If what Cree had heard was just the tale of Lila's first forty-eight hours at Beauforte House, she shuddered to think what the rest of the month had been like.

Jack had been cordial, full of a Realtor's bogus bonhomie, but he'dalso been assessing Cree with a critical eye. When she'd left, he'd made a point of coming out to the driveway with her.

"Uh, Ms. Black, I don't know just how to say this," he'd told her.

"But as you can see, my wife is not in the best condition at this time. We are all very concerned."

' 'Understandably.

"Now, she's seeing a highly regarded headshrinker, and it's important to us that she follow through with her therapy. This ghost business – it's all just a bit much for me. I don't mind telling you I'm skeptical. Of people coming back from the dead and all that. And therefore, I'm skeptical of someone like yourself who claims to get rid of them. I don't believe any of it." His accent was much stronger than Lila's: Ayund theahfoah, Ah'm skeptical…

Cree paused at the door of her car and thought about that. A breeze bustled in off the lake, balmy and soothing, tossing the live oaks and the towering date palm in the Warrens' yard.

"What do you believe, if I may ask?"

An indignant expression froze Jack Warren's habitually jovial face.

"Why, I was raised to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ!"

"Me too." Cree nodded. "I especially take strength and solace in his return from death, don't you? His resurrection and everlasting life?" She gave him a steady, sincere smile, and in the end he had no choice but to swallow his protests and nod in agreement.

"Point is," he went on, "we can't have anything getting in the way of my wife's recovery. That's my only concern. Me and the kids, we want our Lila back. You're here because we're willing to do anything, even call in a witch doctor if we have to. Anything to set her mind at ease. But- "

"You're worried that by taking her claims seriously, I'm jeopardizing her other treatment. Which depends on her accepting her experiences as delusional."

"The thought occurred to me."

"I couldn't agree with you more. I'll certainly encourage her to continue with her therapist." Cree opened her car door, tossed her purse onto the passenger seat, but didn't get in. "I hear your concern. You want your wife to be happy and stable. You're worried that my dredging up her experience again, acting like I believe her, will make her worse. And you're warning me that if you see that happening, I'm out of here. Is that a fair summary of what you're trying to say?"

Jack tucked his chin. "It's not my habit to be so, uh, blunt, but yes. That about says it."

Cree got in and shut the door. "I have absolutely no desire to encourage any self-destructive or delusive behavior. We're on the same side here, Mr. Warren."

Cree had driven away trying to sort through the several levels of that short conversation. Jack Warren wasn't as sophisticated or cosmopolitan or assured as Ron, or even, despite her disarray, Lila. His accent was deeper, his suit didn't fit as well, he was clearly trying harder – as Lila said, a man feeling perpetually on the outside of New Orleans's wealthier society, looking in. His concerns for his wife's well-being were no doubt sincere, but they were complicated by his desire to live at Beauforte House. And though he certainly wanted his wife "back," she suspected he wanted her returned to him in the form he was used to: timid, compliant, self-effacing, supportive. Which Cree could not promise. Lila would come through this a stronger person, or not at all.

Wanting to make a credible first impression, Cree had dressed in a businesslike outfit of skirt, white blouse, silk jacket, nylons, and moderate heels, but after fifteen minutes at her computer she suddenly realized that if she didn't get out of them she'd go crazy herself, run screaming down the hotel halls, flinging clothing left and right. She stood up and peeled off the layers, then took a quick shower. Still naked, she went to the minibar, found a Heineken, opened it, drew a satisfying swallow, and stood for a moment in the middle of the room, rolling the tension out of her shoulders. Through the gauze curtains, the busy street seemed very alluring. New Orleans!

Jeans and a T-shirt, she decided at last, walking shoes. Feeling much better, she dressed and carried the beer back to the laptop.

Lila's experiences, from what Cree had heard so far, were anomalous, particularly the table's claw feet clenching their globes. The shoes were possibly a spectral manifestation and the most scary kind, too – the furtive and secretive kind, the kind with some weird agenda. Just the thought made Cree shiver. But that type was very rare; put it together with the table coming alive, and you had to consider other alternatives.

One was that Lila Warren did have a brain disorder, or was facing some normal-world psychological crisis. She was certainly a woman arriving at certain physical and situational passages: last kid just off to college, the empty-nest syndrome. Maybe the beginnings of menopause? Moving to a too-big, too-empty house, redolent with memories of her distant childhood. The clash of past, present, and that long, looming future as Jack Warren's little wife. The strong possibility of a medical dimension here upped the stakes and greatly increased the level of Cree's responsibility: Her actions now would have direct bearing on the mental health, the survival, of another person.

Another possibility was that the experiences were epiphenomenal: that is, Lila's perceptions were psychological in origin, not delusory per se but rather "side effects" of being in the proximity of a real extracorporeal presence. Cree's sometime mentor, Mason Ambrose, had lectured her from time to time on the diversity of epiphenomenal effects. They could include anything, as the witness's hyperstimulated mind, triggered by subconscious perceptions of inexplicable phenomena, churned out images, sounds, feelings, sensations. Dr. Ambrose's several papers on epiphenomenal manifestations stressed that though the perceived images were not "real," as symbol-rich products of the witness's subconscious they could be very helpful in determining the nature of the actual haunting entity and the witness's link to it.

There were other possibilities, progressively less likely. One was that the things Lila experienced were indeed the manifestations of some awful revenant, part of a once-human being locked into its own scary imaginings. In effect, the ghost of a crazy person. That would be a hard one – hard to study, hard to communicate with, hard to shake out of Lila. And very dangerous for the empath who tried to make contact. Madness could be contagious.

And – something no parapsychologist should ever forget – there was always the chance that there was some truth to all the tales of powerful malevolent beings, shape changers capable of, say, masquerading as tables. True, for all the terrors she'd witnessed, Cree had never experienced anything of the sort, and she was intellectually, emotionally, and philosophically resistant to the idea. But though she and Ed tried hard to be systematic, to map the invisible world and to establish a taxonomy for the range of entities and occurrences, to match experience with accepted scientific theory, it was an uphill struggle. If she'd learned anything from the last nine years, it was that paranormal events were enormously diverse. And given that devils and goblins and nightmare spirits and unnamed creatures of the dark had inhabited every culture's legends and folktales throughout history

Okay, Cree told herself pointedly, enough of that, thank you. She slapped her computer shut and stood up quickly. A little shaky, but that was just low blood sugar – time to look for something to eat. Further speculation would have to wait until after her next interview with Lila.

Now it was time to hit the streets of New Orleans, see what all the fuss was about.

A breeze played in Canal Street, flipping Cree's hair around with gusts that were one moment balmy and the next chilly and river scented. She was tired, but it felt good to be on her feet, in casual clothes, off-duty, with an unfamiliar city to explore. Starting with a restaurant, her stomach insisted. She surrendered to the street, to the flow of people moving toward their Friday night meals, entertainments, adventures.

From studying maps during the flight, Cree had a rough idea of the layout of New Orleans. It was nicknamed "the Crescent City" because the original French colony had built outward in an arc around the sharp northern bulge in the Mississippi River. Now the city occupied all the land between the river and the southern belly of Lake Ponchartrain. At its center was Canal Street, a broad boulevard with a wide median up the center, running straight to the river and dividing the historic French Quarter from the Downtown district. Down the streets to Cree's left, the buildings were mostly three stories tall, fronted with the Quarter's famous ironwork balconies, while to her right loomed the glassy modern facades of skyscrapers, skyline cut crisp against the lingering sunset. Somewhere beyond downtown was the Garden District, newer by a hundred years than the French Quarter but still old enough to be the site of many of New Orleans's finest historic buildings, including Beauforte House.

Tomorrow, Cree reminded herself.

She looked covertly at the street map she'd folded into her purse. No question, she didn't want to get anywhere near the infamous LaLaurie House. Fortunately, she found, it was on the eastern end of Royal Street, which would allow her to enjoy most of Bourbon Street without getting too close.

Bourbon Street: Crowds of pedestrians filling streets and sidewalks. Bright lights, the pulsing beat of music. The buildings on either side had a pleasantly dilapidated look to them, their flaking, flat facades coming right down to the narrow sidewalk with no intervening lawn at all. On the upper stories, balconies were hung with ferns and bougainvillea, and many of the second- and third-floor windows were warm with light, revealing high ceilings and moving figures. Strings of colorful beads were caught on railings, gutters, streetlights, no doubt flung by Mardi Gras revelers. At street level, the wide-open doors and windows of restaurants gave glimpses of tables stretching away into dim interiors echoing with the gabble of conversation. Bars, trinket shops, strip joints. Cajun food, seafood, Creole food, Italian food, po'boys. The smell of meat broiling, piss, beer, garbage. The sharp, sweet scent of fruity mixed drinks and stale cigarette smoke rolling out of doorways on air-conditioned gusts.

Jazz, crawfish, and booze, Cree thought, the themes of Bourbon Street.

And sex, she added. Another block farther up and every other doorway advertised sex shows – topless, bottomless, men, women, old-fashioned burlesque, female impersonators: You Have to See It to Believe It! Live Love Acts. Randy music from curtained doorways guarded by handsome barkers in top hats and tails. Windows full of photos of lush-bodied nudes. Sex toy and video and leather shops. Every ten steps, another pounding bass rhythm made war with the last: music for the bump and grind, Zydeco, hard rock, Dixieland jazz, rhythm and blues, Top 40, Zydeco again.

Flux, Cree thought. So many experiences crammed into the same psychic locale. The flux was nice, a buzzing place where it seemed she could find balance. This was one of the things Mom found at the gym. Tugged in every direction, she could stay steady where she was. Yes, she could still hear the whisper of endlessly layered history here, the quiet stories breathed by dark attic windows and deep courtyards, telling of the thousand thousand lives passed and deaths met in these rooms for two hundred and fifty years. But it was drowned out by the tumultuous noise and chaos of the street, the air of libidinous license, the endless rushing waterfall of immediate emotions and experiences. Sex, food, drink, music, money, dancing, talk. All the hungers.

Three-for-ones! signs advertised. Hurricanes! Drinks to Go! No Cover!

Everything Live! one sex emporium sign bragged, and Cree smiled and thought, Well, hey, that's some relief. Considering the alternative.

When she couldn't ignore her stomach any longer, she picked a restaurant at random. She was led upstairs to an outside balcony, where from her table she had a terrific view down Bourbon Street, a corridor of sagging balconies and thronged pavement, alive with activity and light, that stretched as far as she could see. She ordered a beer and a mixed seafood plate, and watched the trade coming and going at the female impersonator club across the way.

About half the people passing – the more uptight tourists, especially families with kids – tended to walk in the middle of the street, clumped close together with eyes fixed on the pavement, uncomfortable, embarrassed, disapproving. But the other half seemed to catch the sexualized charge of the place. Young teenage girls thrust out their chests and found excuses for lots of movement, as if announcing to their scrawny boyfriends or gawking brothers, I've got those, too, you know! Middle-aged pairs, to-go drinks in hand, paused for deep kisses and daringly intimate caresses. It wasn't Mardi Gras by any means, but she got some idea of the licentious mood Deirdre had mentioned. Even old couples sashayed to the music and bumped hips flirtatiously as they walked.

Cree decided that maybe human beings were okay after all.

She drank beer out of a plastic cup, ate deep-fried oysters and shrimp, a slice of blackened fish, and a cup ofjambalaya. Finishing up with another beer, she felt fatigue come-on as the night air picked up a chill. Still the street grew more crowded, the music louder, the barkers more aggressive.

Cree watched a woman her age beckon to her man as if she wanted to say something over the din of the crowd, and when he bent to hear her Cree clearly saw her tongue slip into his ear. The man leaned into the sensation for a few seconds before they pulled apart, laughing. He swatted her rear, and they continued up the street, hip to hip, arms firm around each other's waists, with obvious plans for later. Walking right next to them, an alarmed-looking husband and wife shepherded their two children quickly along, holding the kids' blond heads against their sides with eyes mostly covered.

Which kind is Cree Black? she wondered. At first, a little of the reserved type, she decided, defenses up; but after not too long, definitely more of the other. Not that she had anyone to share that mood with.

And with that thought she suddenly found herself sliding. Cree Black was sitting up on a balcony, alone, watching the passing parade from above. No plans for later but that solitary hotel bed, probably drifting off to sleep doing some reading on the habits of the dead.

Nine years. And counting. When was she going to get around to turning her full attention to the living? Mom was right. Everybody was right.

It had all turned around on her, the gaiety gone sour. Bourbon Street now struck her as frantic, squalid, false. A city of masks, as Don had said. Desperation masquerading as pleasure. She quickly pushed back her chair and stood up, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of there. She left a tip, went to the register to pay. The cashier was a handsome guy in his early thirties, dark hair and brown eyes, earring in one ear, T-shirt showing good biceps. He smiled at her and seemed to take his time making change. "Here on business?" he inquired mildly. "Or just for pleasure? Seeing the sights?" An easy glance at Cree's face to let her know he was fishing, in a low-key way.

"Business," Cree told him curtly. "A business trip."