She Walks in Shadows(27)
Ownership works both ways, you see. Which is why, even in its heyday, Riverside was never anything more than just another ship, carrying our ancestors to an unwanted afterlife chained cheek-by-jowl with their oppressors, with no way to escape, even in death. No way for any of us to escape our own actions, or from each other.
But when I returned, Kaayakire showed me just how deep those dead slaves had sunk their roots in Riverside’s heart: deep enough to strangle, to infiltrate, to poison, all this while lying dormant under a fallow crust. To sow death-seeds in every part of what the De Russys called home, however surface-comfortable, waiting patient for a second chance to flower.
Inside, under a sagging double weight of floor-turned-roof, fifty years’ worth of mold spikes up the nose straight into the brain while shadows scatter from your twinned lights, same as silt in dark water. You hear the rain like someone else’s pulse, drumming hard, sodden. Tully glances ‘round, frowning. “Don’t like it,” he says. “Been more damage since my last time here: there, and there. Structural collapse.”
“The columns will keep it up, though, no? They seem — ”
“Saggy like an elephant’s butt, that’s what they seem ... but hell, your money. Got some idea where best to look?” You shake your head, drawing a sigh. “Well, perfect. Guess we better start with what’s eye-level; go from there.”
As the two of you search, he asks about that old business, the gory details. For certainly, people gossip, here as everywhere else, yet the matter of the De Russys is something most locals flinch from, as though they know it to be somehow — not sacred, perhaps, but significant, in its own grotesque way. Tainted and tainting, by turns.
“Denis de Russy brought Marceline home and six months later, Frank Marsh came to visit,” you explain. “He had known them both as friends, introduced them, watched them form un ménage. Denis considered him an artistic genius but eccentric. To his father, he wrote that Marsh had ‘a knowledge of anatomy which borders on the uncanny.’ Antoine de Russy heard odd stories about Marsh, his family in Massachusetts, la ville d’Innsmouth ... but he trusted his son, trusted that Denis trusted. So, he opened his doors.”
“But Denis goes travelling and Marsh starts in to painting Missus de Russy with no clothes on, maybe more. That part right, or not?”
“That was the rumor, yes. It’s not unlikely Marceline and Marsh were intimates, from before; he’d painted her twice already, taken those photos. A simple transaction. But this was ... different, or so Antoine de Russy claimed.”
“How so?”
You shrug. “Marsh said there was something inside her he wanted to make other people see.”
“Like what, her soul?”
“Peut-etre. Or something real, maybe — hidden. Comme un, eh, hmmm ....” You pause, thinking. “When you swallow eggs or something swims up inside, in Africa, South America: It eats your food, makes you thin, lives inside you. And when doctors suspect, they have to tempt it out — say ‘aah,’ you know, tease it to show itself, like a ... snake from a hole ....”
Tully stops, mouth twitching. “A tapeworm? Boy must’ve been trippin’, ma’am. Too much absinthe, for sure.”
Another shrug. “Antoine de Russy wrote to Denis, told him to come home before things progressed further, but heard nothing. Days later, he found Marsh and Marceline in Marsh’s rooms, hacked with knives, Marceline without her wig, or her, eh — hair — ”
“Been scalped? Whoo.” Tully shakes his head. “Then Denis kills himself and the old man goes crazy; that’s how they tell it ‘round here. When they talk about it at all, which ain’t much.”
“In the testimony I read, de Russy said he hid Marsh and Marceline, buried them in lime. He told Denis to run, but Denis hanged himself instead, in one of the old huts — or something strangled him, a big black snake. And then the house burnt down.”
“Aunt Sophy’s snake, they call it.”
“A snake or a braid, oui, c’est ca. Le cheveaux de Marceline.” But here you stop, examining something at your feet. “But wait, what is — ? Over here, please. I need your light.”
Tully steps over, slips, curses; down on one knee in the mud, cap cracking worryingly, his torch rapping on the item in question. “Shit! Look like a ... box, or something. Here.” As he hands it up to you, however, it’s now his own turn to squint, scrubbing mud from his eyes — something’s caught his notice, there, half-wedged behind a caryatid, extruding from what used to be the wall. He gives it a tug and watches it come slithering out.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, la?”
“Um ... think this might be what you lookin’ for, ma’am. Some of, anyhow.”
The wet rag in his hand has seen better days, definitely. Yet, for one who’s studied poor Frank Marsh’s work — how ridiculous such a thing sounds, even to me! — it must be unmistakable, nevertheless: a warped canvas, neglect-scabrous, all morbid content and perverted geometry done in impossible, liminal colors. The body I barely recognize, splayed out on its altar-throne, one bloated hand offering a cup of strange liquor; looks more the way it might now were there anything still unscattered, not sifted through dirt and water or filtered by a thousand roots, drawn off to feed Riverside’s trees and weeds with hateful power. The face is long-gone, bullet-perforated, just as that skittish Northerner claimed. But the rest, that coiling darkness, it lies (I lie) on —