Page 46 of One Last Regret

I finish showering and dress in clean clothes. That makes me feel somewhat better, but losing the fear only makes the grief worse. I don’t know how Amelia and Gabriel will do without me. I only know that they’ll be worse with me, and that hurts.

I open my closet to retrieve my suitcase, but I stop when I see a book on top of it. It’s an unnamed leatherbound book with a clasp on the front. How on Earth did it get there? Was someone in my room? Did I have another dissociative episode and steal this somehow?

Leave it, Mary. That’s enough. Just take your things and leave.

I am so disturbed by tonight’s episode that I nearly do. But my curiosity gets the better of me. It killed the cat, and it will almost certainly kill me eventually.

I pick the book up and head to the small table. When I undo the clasp and open the book, the spine creaks softly, showing the book’s age.

The notebook's age. It's not a novel or a treatise, I find, but a journal. The first entry confirms that this is the personal journal of Marcel Lacroix.

I wrestle for a moment longer, but the answers to all of the mysteries surrounding this family may have just fallen into my lap, and I can’t resist.

Once more, the parallel between this family in New Orleans and the painter I work for in Monterey is stunning. In Monterey, I also come across a journal, and that journal lays bare the angst and brilliance of its author but also the fragility of his mind. The painter’s journal also talks of a fairy, who I later confirm to be Annie.

This journal references no fairy, but it demonstrates an almost identical mind in every other case. Marcel was a brilliant but tortured composer. This journal begins about seven years before his death. It starts fairly tame, but as I skim through the entries, the decline of his emotional state becomes clear.

He starts by expressing melancholy at achieving the peak of his musical journey at such a young age.Where am I to go when I’ve already reached the summit?

As the entries progress, he offers increasingly fantastic suggestions to himself. Composing freeform music influenced by his emotional state at any given moment. Creating pieces to mimic the cries of children, the moans of women in ecstasy (I roll my eyes at that one), the calls of animals and the sounds of storms and tides. Studying the effects of music on human behavior and creating pieces to influence certain behaviors. Studying the effects of music on the inanimate world and creating pieces to influence that.

As the suggestions become more fantastic, the rest of the writing follows suit, gradually growing disjointed and less coherent. Even the handwriting loses its clarity, becoming little more than a scrawl near the end of the journal.

I feel guilty for reading this, and at the same time, I feel terrible for Marcel. I’m observing his descent into madness.

That madness takes a dark turn when Marcel decides that his ultimate accomplishment will be to create a piece that will open the gate between the world of the living and the world of the dead. He raves about how he will write a piece that will close the gap between the spiritual and the physical and allow—in his words—“life and afterlife to understand each other as intimately as two lovers understand each other in the throes of passion.”

The final entry is on the day of his death. The handwriting is back to its original clarity here, and the message is no longer disjointed or incoherent.

It is still every bit as sobering.

June 27

I fear that I’ve gone too far. I allowed my frustration with the process to lead me to seek shortcuts. Rather than allow the music to guide me and put to paper the energy the Universe wished to send through me as its conduit, I have tried to force the music to adapt to my own incomplete understanding.

It began last week when I finally despaired of the original piece I’ve been slaving over for five years. In a rage at my inability to capture the essence of the soul’s travels when it leaves this world, I returned to my own feeble initial attempt, the piece I wrote to lay to rest once and for all the question of my superiority compared to M. Poitier.

I took this vanity piece and layered over its framework all of my passion, all of my anger, all of my frustration and all of my vindictive rage at being denied the secret I felt I deserved.

And I succeeded. I will never forget the moment when the last notes escaped my fingers, and I stared in awe at the sheet, knowing that I had finally discovered the true door to the afterlife. Great was my joy in that moment, but greater still was my terror. Like a child who reaches for a hot stove only to understand how frail the human form is compared to the heat of a fire, I understood how utterly unprepared we are to know what lies beyond.

But my arrogance overcame that fear. I presumed myself great enough to handle the terror that comes with this knowledge.

I was wrong. I was so wrong. The Universe has indeed made me a conduit, but not of joy, not of life. I am become an unwilling angel of death. I have tried thrice to burn this composition, but each time I only stand in front of the fire, sweating and trembling, my fingers clutching the papers as though their life depended on it. Perhaps it does. Perhaps the price I will pay when this is over will be my own death. I don’t know.

But even as I write this, I do know. I can feel death coming for me. I can see her empty, hollow eyes, her seductive and yet terrible form, her mocking, sinister smile. Perhaps for some her smile is tender and her embrace sweet, but for me, it won’t be, that I know. I have committed a great sin. My eternity will not be spent in Paradise.

I will play this piece tonight. I will pour every ounce of my soul into it as I always have. And when death comes to take me, I will see her coming, and I will do nothing to stop her. Icando nothing.

I am doomed.

I close the journal and set it on the table, staring ahead at the wall. The storm has passed, and sunlight streams through thewindow. Dawn has arrived. I’ve spent yet another night without sleep.

I don’t believe in superstitions. I can’t accept that Marcel could have written a song with the terrible power he ascribes to it.

Yet tragedy continues to strike despite my disbelief. Perhaps, I, like he, am fated to act as a conduit until death finally takes me to whatever punishment awaits for me beyond.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

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