Tempter (19 page)

Jazrel and Eugenie exchanged one last, long embrace. After all, it had been nearly a hundred and fifty years since they had last held one another. As Jazrel held the kiss, Eugenie relinquished control over her borrowed flesh, and a heartbeat later Charlie opened her eyes. She cried out in surprise and confusion, and then pushed the other woman away from her. As she turned around, Charlie saw the towering sheets of flame that surrounded her on all sides and promptly swooned. Jazrel caught her reincarnated lover in her strong, supple arms before she could strike the floor and carried her from the burning house, the flames parting before her like obedient servants.

Jerry was seated in the passenger seat of his car, watching Seraphine burn to the ground. The heat generated by the mansion’s destruction was so terrific it made his skin tighten, even from a safe distance. Aggie stood next to the car, muttering a litany of prayers under her breath, her wrinkled face oddly serene in the glare from the inferno.

Just then Jerry saw Aggie’s grandchild emerged from the smoke and soot, holding Charlie cradled in her arms. He struggled to stand up, but the pain in his leg made him change his mind. The woman in the white dress, its skirt now smudged with soot, carefully lowered Charlie’s naked body to the ground.

“Your friend merely sleeps,” she reassured him, her voice sounding as if she was speaking from inside an empty drum. “She has gone through much and understands little.”

Aggie threw her arms about Jazrel, hugging her tightly. “Mama...it’s so good to hear your voice again! It’s been so long!”

Jazrel gently ran her hand over her daughter’s grizzled mane. “I know, child. Please forgive me for keeping us apart for so long. But we shall be together soon enough.”

Jerry looked away from the unlikely mother-child reunion. Other people’s family matters always made him uncomfortable. He looked skyward, and for the briefest of moments it looked as if the stars were tied together with silken threads the color of midnight and blood.

Jerry spent the ride back to New Orleans utterly convinced they were going to be pulled over at any minute by some bullnecked trooper wanting to know exactly why the hell an one-eyed centenarian was driving his ’97 hatchback thirty-five miles an hour while he rode shotgun with a broken leg and an unconscious naked woman in the backseat. To his surprise, they managed to make it back to New Orleans without attracting any undue attention, arriving at an imposing mansion in the heart of the city’s Garden District just before daybreak.

As Aggie parked the sputtering hatchback in a carriage house that was nicer than his apartment, Jerry glimpsed her familiar red wagon parked in a corner of the garage. A stiff-lipped white butler built like a walking refrigerator and dressed in a suit nice enough for a banker ferried first Charlie, then Jerry, into the house through a special passageway that insured curious neighbors couldn’t keep track of his mistress’s comings and goings.

The butler, who Aggie called Fortescue, placed Jerry in a small, nicely appointed room with a big feather bed that smelled of lilacs and left a bottle of brandy on the nightstand. A couple of minutes later Aggie shuffled into the room, armed with a first aid kit and a roll of bandages.

“Here. Clamp down on this,” she said, handing him a leather strap with loops at either end. “It’ll keep you from bitin’ your tongue off.”

“Why don’t you just take me to the hospital?”

“And have them ask you all kinds of questions while you’re out of your head on painkillers? No, you don’t need to go blabbin’ things while you’re under the knife. Don’t worry; I’ve set more legs than Carter’s got lit’l liver pills.”

Before he could ask who the fuck Carter was, Aggie removed the splint and Jerry found his mouth full of strap. When he regained his senses, he awoke to find Aggie washing her hands in an antique washbasin a decade her junior. She smiled at him as she dried her hands on her apron.

“That weren’t too bad, was it?” she asked, nodding to the plaster cast now drying on his leg. “I did a damn fine job, if I do say so myself. You might have some misery come the rainy season, but that can’t be helped.”

“What about Charlie?”

“Boy, you got it bad, ain’t ya?” Aggie chuckled as she repacked her instruments. “She’s just fine. Don’t worry your head about her. Fortescue tells me she’s showin’ signs of revivin’. She’ll be confused for a while, probably have bad dreams on and off for the rest of her life, but I doubt she’ll have any real damage.”

The door opened and Aggie’s grandchild entered the room. Her white muslin dress was stained with sweat and smeared with, soot, mud and axle grease. The keys to Aggie’s Mercedes dangled from one hand. There was no sign of her ancestress in her weary eyes.

“Mercy, child! You look like you pulled the car out of the ditch by hand!”

“Maybe I did. I don’t really remember,” she said wearily. “I feel like I’ve been movin’ heavy furniture all night long.”

“Do you recall anything of what happened last night?”

“Most of it is blurry. The last thing I remember doin’ was killin’ Alex.” There was a hitch in her voice and she put her hands to her eyes, as if to shield herself from the memory.

“Don’t feel bad about that, darlin’,” Aggie said soothingly as she patted her on the shoulder. “You did him a kindness. You put him out of his misery, same as you would a rabid dog.”

“I know,” she whispered hoarsely.

“Now you go get cleaned up and have yourself a lie-down,” Aggie said, kissing her on the cheek. “I’ll be around shortly to see how you’re doin’.”

Jerry watched silently as the young woman who had saved his life left the room. He glanced at Aggie, who had a sad smile on her face. “Is she going to be all right?”

Aggie sighed and reached for the brandy on the bedside table. “What she had to do was hard. But that little gal is strong, like my mama was strong.” She fixed Jerry with her good eye. “She’s carryin’ his young’un, y’know.”

Jerry wasn’t sure how to react to that piece of news, so he changed the subject. “What about Legendre, I mean Tempter, or whatever he was? Is he dead for good this time?”

“Depends on what you consider ‘dead’,” Aggie replied with a shrug. “If you mean ‘is his body destroyed?’ Yes, it is. It’ll be a lot harder for him to come back to this world next time ‘round--assumin’ there
is
a next time. That’s not my worry anymore.”

“You mean we went through all this and there’s
still
a chance that bastard might come back?”

“You’re not dealin’ with some pretend monster, like in those movin’ pictures,” the old woman chided. “As long as there is evil, and the desire to do harm, Tempter will be there, on the other side, lookin’ for a way to make himself flesh in this world.” She poured a dollop of brandy into a water glass and handed it to Jerry. “But you needn’t worry yourself about such things. It will be a long time, probably longer than you can live, before my father can marshal the energy to get up to such mischief again.”

The brandy burned all the way down. It felt wonderful. It was as if his body was sinking into the pillows and mattress. A question bubbled up inside him, one he knew he should not ask, but he was too tired to control his tongue. “What about me and Charlie? What will happen to us?”

The old woman turned to look at him, her hand on the doorknob. “Are you askin’ if you will get the girl?”

He nodded; relieved he did not have to explain himself to her.

“My foresight is imperfect, but I
have
been known to see things in the future,” she admitted grudgingly.

“Can you do that for me?”

“Are you
sure
you want to know?”

“Just this one time, about this one thing—then I won’t ask you for anything else.”

Aggie sighed and placed her hand over her good eye. The glass eyes rolled as if tracking movement on the horizon. “You and she will marry.”

Jerry’s smile was goofy, but he didn’t care. He yawned and asked: “Will we live happily ever after?”

The fatigue and medicinal herbs in the brandy claimed him before he could hear her answer.

Chapter Twenty-Five

From
“Bad To The Bone: Rock’n Roll’s Most Notorious Black Sheep”
, by Darryl Dalrymple,
Rolling Stone
, October, 2007:

‘When discussing the black sheep of Rock’n Roll’s far-from-pristine flock, they don’t get any darker than Alex Rossiter, who first won acclaim as the boy genius lead singer/songwriter for the grunge band Crash.

‘At the time, many critics refused to believe that a seventeen year old could produce such sophisticated songs as those found on the band’s debut album,
Crash And Burn
(SubPop, 1994)
.

However, following the success of their first album, nothing seemed to go right for the talented singer/songwriter. Throughout the rest of the 1990s and well into the new millennium, Alex Rossiter suffered a series of personal and career setbacks that would pave the way for his later infamy.

‘In early 1994, Crash’s original keyboardist, Jim Shakespeare, died unexpectedly of an overdose, plunging Rossiter into a deep depression that many believe was the ‘trigger event’ that lead to his later troubles. Yet from this dark crucible came Crash’s one and only album, the platinum-selling
Crash And Burn,
after which
Rossiter allowed the band to dissolve in order to strike out on his own.

‘When his solo album,
Blood Moon Rising
(Interscope, 1996) failed to chart, Rossiter began a self-destructive downward spiral typical of rock’n roll flameouts. Dismissed as an aged wunderkind, he found it impossible to land another recording contract with a major label. He only managed to release one other album during the 1990s,
Darker Yet
(Scrub Records 1998), which failed to chart. In 2002, during a comeback attempt at CBGB’s, Rossiter’s chances at reclaiming the limelight were destroyed when he attacked and badly wounded a heckler in the audience, which not only left him bankrupt, but blacklisted by booking agents throughout the US and Europe.

‘In late 2004 Rossiter relocated to New Orleans, where it is alleged that he took up the practice of voodoo. It was there he began what appeared to be a genuine attempt to start fresh, creating the band Pigfoot with local drummer, and fellow voodoo devotee, Arsine Copeland.

‘Then on July 28
^th
, 2005, the mutilated body of a middle-aged woman was found in a dumpster in the suburb of New Orleans East. Her head was nowhere to be found. Two days later, fire fighters responded to a five-alarm blaze in nearby Redeemer Parish. The investigators found a car at the scene, registered to one Charlotte Calder, a thirty year old investment banker from New Orleans.

‘The subsequent investigation of the burned building—an abandoned antebellum mansion with a long local history as a ‘haunted house’—turned up a pair of mutilated bodies, both male. As forensics worked to identify the badly charred corpses, the police questioned Ms. Calder, who informed them that she had loaned the vehicle to her boyfriend, Alex Rossiter, but was unaware of where he had gone, or why.

‘Upon arriving at Rossiter’s apartment, the police found the badly decomposed corpse of Arsine Copeland in the bathtub. The drummer’s head was missing. However, a quick search of Rossiter’s kitchen revealed its location, as well as that of the decapitated woman found in the New Orleans East dumpster, one Naomi Bordelon. Both victims were missing their brains.

‘Police also found a crude map drawn on one of the walls in Rossiter’s apartment depicting the location of the mansion in Redeemer Parish. A cache of hard drugs, including meth and heroin, was also found on the premises. Forensics was later able to confirm that one of the charred corpses the fire as being that of Alex Rossiter. The other body, which was extensively mutilated, was never properly identified.

‘The official police explanation is that Rossiter killed the unknown man as part of a satanic ritual, and then committed suicide after setting fire to the building. However, the gun Rossiter supposedly used to kill himself with has never been found.

‘Following the forgotten rock star’s gruesome murder spree, demand for his albums went through the roof. Within months of Rossiter’s death, a cult formed around him. As soon as the flood waters from Katrina finally receded from the area, these devoted groupies, known as Crashers, began finding their way to the charred ruins of the old plantation house where the singer met his end. Psychiatrists claim these alienated teenagers have turned a psychotic killer into a tormented, Byronic hero.

‘Perhaps the most concise summary of the phenomena was made by a fourteen-year-old Crasher named Marjorie who, when asked about her attraction to the doomed singer, said; “Like, you know, he’s really handsome, he’s, you know, really cool, and he’s, you know, dead.” ’

Charlie got out of bed, making sure not to wake Jerry as she did so. Moonlight poured through the skylight of their home, washing the bedroom in black and silver. The only other sign of life was their cat, a good-natured tabby called Neptune, asleep in the bentwood rocker by the door.

Charlie pulled on a robe and stood looking out the window at the moonlit Bayou Saint John waterway. She and Jerry had been married nearly two years, but every morning she still woke up expecting to find herself back in her old house in Carrollton, with Pluto curled up at the foot of the bed and Alex snoring beside her.

But Alex was dead--notoriously so. She had been forced to move from her wonderful old house in order to get away from the weird teenage girls, the ones called Crashers, who stood on the sidewalk all hours of the day and night and stole handfuls of her lawn. Most of the Crashers were ridiculously young, dressed in black, and wore makeup that made them look as dead as their idol.

She rubbed her arms, trying to lay the goose bumps to rest. She still had a hard time accepting what Alex had done. If she had not seen him kill Pluto with her own eyes, she would never have believed what the papers said about him being a serial killer and cannibalistic devil worshipper.

She had trouble remembering what happened that night, after Alex killed Pluto, and she wasn’t certain she really wanted to. She must have fainted and hit her head on the edge of the night table, or at least that’s Jerry said. He’d found her unconscious upstairs, and broke his leg trying to carry her downstairs.

The days following the discovery of Alex’s crimes were a horrid blur. Charlie did not know what she would have done without Jerry being there to fend off the paparazzi that first terrible week. It was during that chaotic, emotional time that their relationship finally moved from the platonic to the romantic, and everything between them changed forever.

Not long after the business with Alex, an incredibly rich old Garden District matron Jerry had once done a portrait for died and mentioned him in her will. He quit his job teaching art and used the money she’d left him to open his own gallery in the Quarter, and had enjoyed a good deal of success since then.

Sometimes the old lady’s granddaughter, a tall, regal-looking black woman, paid Jerry a visit during gallery hours. While Charlie didn’t particularly care for the woman—she made her uncomfortable, for some reason—she thought her little boy, Jubal, was absolutely precious.

In the end, her life with Jerry, for the most part, was a happy and stable one. But sometimes, on nights like this one, when she couldn’t sleep, she felt a strange urge to get in the car and drive beyond the city limits, where she could see the stars and smell the pine trees and swamp grass. Maybe even go see, for herself, the ruins of the house where Alex died…What was it called again? Oh, yes. Seraphine. She never did do it, though.

Although she was tempted…