The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

On November 7, 1959, Deirdre gave birth at five o'clock in the morning to Rowan Mayfair, nine pounds, eight ounces, a healthy, fair-haired baby girl. Hours afterwards, emerging from the general anesthesia, Deirdre found her bed surrounded by Ellie Mayfair, Father Lafferty, and Carlotta Mayfair, and two of the Sisters of Mercy who later described the scene in detail to Sister Bridget Marie.

Father Lafferty held the baby in his arms. He explained that he had just baptized it in the Mercy Hospital chapel, naming it Rowan Mayfair. He showed her the signed baptismal certificate.

"Now kiss your baby, Deirdre," said Father Lafferty, "and give her to Ellie. Ellie is ready to go."

Parish gossip says that Deirdre did as she was told. She had insisted that the child have the name Mayfair and once that condition was met, she let her baby go. Crying so as she could scarce see, she kissed the baby and let Ellie Mayfair take it from her arms. Then she turned her head, sobbing, into the pillow. Father Lafferty said, "Best leave her alone."

Over a decade later, Sister Bridget Marie explained the meaning of Rowan's name.

"Carlotta stood godmother to the child. I believe they got some doctor off the ward to be its godfather, so determined were they to have the baptism done. And Carlotta said to Father Lafferty, the child's to be named Rowan, and he said to her, 'Now, you know, Carlotta Mayfair, that that is not a saint's name. It sounds like a pagan name to me.'

"And she to him in her manner, you know the way she was, she says, 'Father, don't you know what the rowan tree was and that it was used to ward off witches and all manner of evil? There's not a hut in Ireland where the woman of the house did not put up the rowan branch over the door to protect her family from witches and witchcraft, and that has been true throughout Christian times. Rowan is to be the name of this child!' And Ellie Mayfair, the little mealymouth that she always was, just nodded her head."

"Was it true?" I asked. "Did they put the rowan over the door in Ireland?"

Gravely Sister Bridget Marie nodded. "Lot of good that it did!"

Who is the father of Rowan Mayfair?

Routine blood typing done at the hospital indicates that the baby's blood type matched that of Cortland Mayfair, who had died less than a month before. Allow us to repeat here that Cortland may also have been the father of Stella Mayfair, and that recent information obtained from Bellevue Hospital has at last confirmed that Antha Mayfair may have been his daughter as well.

Deirdre "went mad" before she ever left Mercy Hospital after Rowan's birth. The nuns said she cried by the hour, men screamed in an empty room, "You killed him!" Then wandering into the hospital chapel during Mass, she shouted once more, "You killed him. You left me alone among my enemies. You betrayed me!" She had to be taken out by force, and was quickly committed to St. Ann's Asylum, where she became catatonic by the end of the month.

"It was the invisible lover," Sister Bridget Mane believes to this day. "She was shouting and cursing at him, don't you know it, for he'd killed her college professor. He'd done it, because the devil wanted her for himself. The demon lover, that's what he was, right here in the city of New Orleans. Walking the streets of the Garden District by night."

That is a very lovely and eloquent statement, but since it is more than highly likely that the college professor never existed, what other meaning can we attach to Deirdre's words? Was it Lasher who pushed Cortland down the staircase, or startled him so badly that he fell? And if so, why?

This is the end of the life of Deirdre Mayfair really. For seventeen years she was incarcerated in various mental institutions, given massive doses of drugs and ruthless courses of electric shock treatment, with only brief respites when she returned home, a ghost of the girl she had once been.

At last in 1976, she was brought back to First Street forever, a wide-eyed and mute invalid, in a perpetual state of alertness, yet with no connective memory at ail.

The side porch downstairs was screened in for her. For years she has been led out every day, rain or shine, to sit motionless in a rocking chair, her face turned ever so slightly towards the distant street.

"She cannot even remember from moment to moment," said one physician. "She lives entirely in the present, in a way we simply cannot imagine. You might say there is no mind there at all." It is a condition described in some very old people who reach the same state in advanced senility, and sit staring in geriatric hospitals throughout the world. Regardless, she is drugged heavily, to prevent bouts of "agitation," or so her various doctors and nurses have been told.

How did Deirdre Mayfair become this "mindless idiot," as the Irish Channel gossips call her, "this nice bunch of carrots" sitting in her chair? Shock treatments certainly contributed to it, course after course of them, given by every hospital in which she had ever stayed since 1959. Then there were the drugs--massive doses of near paralytic tranquilizers--given to her in astonishing combinations, or so the records, as we continue to gain access to them, reveal.

How does one justify such treatment? Deirdre Mayfair ceased to speak coherently as early as 1962. When not tranquilized, she screamed or cried incessantly. Now and then she broke things. Sometimes she simply lay back, with her eyes rolling up in her head, and howled.

As the years have passed, we have continued to collect information about Deirdre Mayfair. Every month or so we manage to "interview" some doctor or nurse, or other person who has been in the First Street house. But our record of what really happened remains fragmentary. Hospital files are, naturally, confidential and extremely difficult to obtain. But in at least two of the sanitariums where Deirdre was treated, we now know that no record of her treatment exists.

One of her doctors has clearly and by his own admission to an inquiring stranger destroyed his records of Deirdre's case. Another physician retired shortly after he had treated Deirdre, leaving only a few cryptic notes in his brief file. "Incurable. Tragic. Aunt demands continued medication yet Aunt's descriptions of behavior not credible."

We continue, for obvious reasons, to rely upon anecdotal evidence, for our assessment of Deirdre's history.

Though Deirdre has slumbered in a twilight induced by drugs all of her adult life, there have been countless sightings by those around her of "a mysterious brown-haired man." Nurses in St. Ann's Asylum claimed to have seen him--"some man going into her room! Now I know I saw that." At a Texas hospital where she was incarcerated briefly, a doctor claimed to have seen "a mysterious visitor" who always "seemed somehow to just disappear when I wanted to question him or ask him who he was."

At least one nurse in a northern Louisiana sanitarium insisted to her superiors that she had seen a ghost. Black orderlies in the various hospitals saw "that man all the time." One woman told us, "He not human. I know him when I see him. I see spirits. I call them up. I know him and he know me and he don't come near me at all."

Most workmen cannot work on the First Street house any more today than they could in the days when Deirdre was a girl. There are the same old stories. There is even some talk of "a man around there" who doesn't want thi

ngs done.

Nevertheless some repairs are completed; air-conditioning units have been installed in some rooms, and some upgrading of the electricity has been carried out--these tasks almost invariably being done under Carlotta Mayfair's on-site supervision.

The old gardener still comes, and he occasionally paints the rusted fence.

Otherwise First Street slumbers beneath the oak branches. The frogs sing in the night around Stella's pool with its lily pads and wild irises. Deirdre's wooden swing has long ago fallen from the oak at the far end of the property. The wooden seat--a mere slat of wood--lies bleached and warping in the high grass.

Many a person stopping to look at Deirdre in her rocking chair on the side porch has glimpsed "a handsome cousin" visiting her. Nurses have sometimes quit because of "that man who comes and goes like some kinda spook," or because they kept seeing things out of the corner of their eye, or thought they were being watched.

"There's some kind of ghost hovering near her," said one young practical nurse who told the agency she would never, never go back to that house. "I saw him once, in the bright sunlight. Scariest thing I've ever seen."

When I asked this nurse about it over lunch, she had few details to add to the story. "Just a man. A man with brown hair and brown eyes in a nice-looking coat and white shirt. But dear God, if I have ever seen anything more terrifying than that! He was just standing there in the sunlight beside her looking at me. I dropped the tray and just screamed and screamed."

Numerous other medical persons left the service of the family abruptly. One doctor was fired off the case in 1976. We continue to track down these people, to take their testimony and record it. We try to tell them as little as we can of why we want to know what they saw and when.

What emerges from this data is a frightening possibility--that Deirdre's mind has been destroyed to the point where she cannot control her evocation of Lasher. That is, she subconsciously gives him the power to appear near her in very convincing form. Yet she is not conscious enough to control him further, or indeed to drive him away, if on some level she does not want him there.