Lasher

Fourteen

IT IS NOT the story of my life which you require, but let me explain how I came upon my various secrets. As you know I was born in the year 1828, but I wonder if you realize what this means. Those were the very last days of an ancient way of life-the last decades in which the rich landowners of the world lived pretty much as they had for centuries.

We not only knew nothing of railroads, telephones, Victrolas, or horseless carriages. We didn’t even dream of such things!

And Riverbend-with its vast main house crammed with fine furniture and books, and all its many outbuildings sheltering uncles and aunts and cousins, and its fields stretching as far as the eye could see from the riverbank, south, and east and west-truly was Paradise.

Into this world I slipped almost without notice. I was a boy child, and this was a family that wanted female witches. I was a mere Prince of the Blood, and the court was a loving and friendly place, but no one observed that a little boy had been born who possessed probably greater witches’ gifts than any man or woman ever in the family.

In fact, my grandmother Marie Claudette was so disappointed that I was not a girl child that she stopped speaking to my mother, Marguerite. Marguerite had already given birth to one male, my older brother, Rémy, and now, having had the audacity to bring another into the world, she crashed down completely from favor.

Of course Marguerite rectified this mistake as soon as possible, giving birth in 1830 to Katherine, who was to become her heiress and designee of the legacy-my darling little sister. But a coldness by then existed between mother and daughter, and was never healed in Marie Claudette’s lifetime.

Also I personally suspect that Marie Claudette took one look at Katherine and thought, “What an idiot,” for that is just what Katherine turned out to be. But a female witch was needed, and Marie Claudette would lay eyes upon a granddaughter before she died, so on to this little witless baby who was bawling in the cradle Marie Claudette passed the great emerald.

Now as you know, by the time Katherine was a young woman I had come into my own as a family influence, was much valued as a carrier of witches’ gifts, and it was I who fathered, by Katherine, Mary Beth Mayfair, who was the last in fact of the great Mayfair Witches.

I fathered Mary Beth’s daughter Stella, as I am sure you also know, and fathered by Stella her daughter, Antha.

But let me return to the perilous times of my early childhood, when men and women both warned me in hushed voices to be well-behaved, ask no questions, defer to the family customs in every regard, and pay no attention to anything strange that I might see pertaining to the realm of ghosts and spirits.

It was made known to me in no uncertain terms that strong Mayfair males did not do well; early death, madness, exile-those were the fates of the troublemakers.

When I look back on it, I think it is absolutely impossible that I could have become one of the great Passive Well-Behaved, along with my Oncle Maurice and Lestan and countless other goody-two-shoes cousins.

First of all, I saw ghosts all the time; heard spirits; could see life leaving a body when the body died; could read people’s minds, and sometimes even move or hurt matter without even really getting angry or meaning to do it. I was a natural Utile witch or warlock or whatever the word might be.

And I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t see Lasher. He was standing by my mother’s chair many a morning when I went in to greet her. I saw him by Katherine’s cradle. But he never cast his eyes on me, and I’d been warned very early on that I must never speak to him, nor seek to know who or what he was, or say his name, or make him look at me.

My uncles, all very happy men, said, “Remember this, a Mayfair male can have everything he desires-wine, women, and wealth beyond imagining. But he cannot seek to know the family secrets. Leave it in the hands of the great witch, for she sees all and directs all, and upon that principle our vast power has been founded.”

Well, I wanted to know what this was about. I had no intention of merely accepting the situation. And my grandmother, never someone not to catch the eye, became for me an extreme magnet of curiosity.

Meantime, my mother, Marguerite, grew rather distant. She snatched me up and kissed me whenever we chanced to meet but that wasn’t often. She was always going into the city to shop, to see the opera, to dance, to drink, to do God knows what, or locking herself in her study screaming if anyone dared to disturb her.

I found her most fascinating of course. But my grandmother Marie Claudette was more a constant figure. And she became for me in my idle moments-which were few-a great irresistible attraction.

First let me explain about my other learning. The books. They were everywhere. That wasn’t so common in the Old South, believe me. It has never been common among the very rich to read; it is more a middle-class obsession. But we had all been lovers of books; and I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t read French, English and Latin.

German? Yes, I had to teach myself that, as well as Spanish and Italian.

But I cannot recall a point in childhood where I had not read some of every book we possessed, and in this case that meant a library of such glory you cannot envision it. Most of those volumes have over the years simply rotted away; some have been stolen; some I entrusted many decades later to those who would cherish them. But then I had all I wanted of Aristotle, Plato, Plautus and Terence, Virgil and Horace. And I read the night away with Chapman’s Homer, and Golding’s Metamorphoses, a mammoth and charming translation of Ovid. Then there was Shakespeare, whom I adored, naturally enough, and lots of very funny English novels. Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe.

I read it all. I read it when I didn’t know what it meant until I did. I dragged my books with me about the house, pulling on skirts and jackets and asking, “What does this mean?” and even asking uncles, aunts, cousins or slaves to read various puzzling passages aloud to me.

When I wasn’t reading I was adventuring about with the older boys, both white and black, jumping onto horses bareback, or trekking into the swamps to find snakes, or climbing the swamp cypress and the oaks to watch out for pirates invading from the south. At two and a half, I was lost in the swamps during a storm. I almost died, I suppose. But I shall never forget it. And after I was found, I never again suffered any fear of lightning. I think I had my little wits nearly blown out of my head by thunder and lightning that night. I screamed and screamed and nothing happened. The thunder and lightning went on; I didn’t die; and in the morning I was sitting at the table with my tearful mother, having breakfast.

Ah, the point is this: I learned from everything, and there was plenty to learn from.

My principal tutor in those first three years of life was in fact my mother’s coachman, Octavius, a free man of color and a Mayfair by five different lines of descent from the early ones through their various black mistresses. Octavius was then only eighteen or so, and more fun man anyone else on the plantation. My witch powers did not so much frighten him, and when he wasn’t telling me to hide them from everybody else, he was telling me how to use them.

I learnt from him for example how to reach people’s thoughts even when they meant to keep them inside, and how to give them suggestions without words, which they invariably obeyed! And how even to force my will with subtle words and gestures on another. I learnt also from him how to cast spells, making the entire world around appear to change for myself and for others who were with me. I also learnt many erotic tricks, for as many children are, I was erotically mad at age three and then four, and would attempt things then which made me blush by the time I was twelve-at least for a year or two.

But to return to the witches and how I came to be known to them.

My grandmother Marie Claudette was always there amongst us. She sat out in the garden, with a small orchestra of black musicians to play for her. There were two fine fiddlers, both slaves, and several who played the pipes, as we called them, but which were wooden flutes known as recorders. There was one who played a big bass riddle of a homemade sort, and another who played two drums, caressing them with his soft fingers. Marie Claudette had taught these musicians their songs, and soon told me that many such songs came from Scotland.

More and more I gravitated to her. The noise I did not like, but I found that if I could get her to take me in her arms she was sweet and loving and had things to say as interesting as the things I read in the library.

She was stately, blue-eyed, white-haired, and picturesque as she lay on a couch of wicker and fancy pillows, beneath a canopy that blew just a little in the breeze, sometimes singing to herself in Gaelic. Or letting loose long strings of curses on Lasher.

For what had happened you see was that Lasher had tired of her! He had gone on to serve Marguerite and to hover about Katherine, the new baby. And for Marie Claudette he had only an occasional kiss or word or two of poetry.

Perhaps every few days or so, he came to beg Marie Claudette’s forgiveness for giving all his attentions to Marguerite, and to say in a very pure and beautiful voice, which I could hear, that Marguerite would not have it otherwise. Sometimes when he came to kiss and court Marie Claudette, he was dressed as a man in frock coat and pants, which were then a novelty you understand, we are only a few decades past tricorne and breeches, and sometimes he had a more rustic look to him, in rawhide garments of a very rough cut; but always his hair was brown and his eyes brown, and he was most beautiful.

And guess who came along, all ringlets and smiles, and hopped up into her lap, and said, “Grandmère, tell me why you are so sad? Tell me everything.”

“Can you see that man who comes to me?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, “but everybody says I should lie to you about it, though why I don’t know because he seems to like to be seen, and will even frighten the slaves by appearing to them, for no good reason, it seems to me, except vanity.”

She fell in love with me at that moment. She smiled approvingly at my observations. She also said she’d never encountered a two-year-old child who was so bright. I was two and a half but I didn’t bother to point this out. Within a day or two of our first real conversation about “the man,” she began to tell me everything.

She told me all about her old home in Saint-Domingue and how she missed it, about voodoo charms and devil worship in the islands and how she’d mastered every slave trick for her own purposes.

“I am a great witch,” she said, “far greater than your mother will ever be, for your mother is slightly mad and laughs at everything. As for the baby Katherine, who knows. Something tells me you had best look out for her. I myself laugh at very little.”

Every day I jumped in her lap and started asking her questions. The hideous little orchestra played on and on-she would never tell them to stop-but very soon she began to expect me to come, and if I did not she sent Octavius to find me, wash me and deliver me. I was happy. Only the music sometimes sounded to me like cats howling. I asked her once if she wouldn’t like to listen instead to the song of the birds, but she only shook her head and said that it helped her think to have this background.

Meantime, over the din, her tales became more and more involved and filled with colorful pictures and violence.

Until the end of her life, she talked to me. In the last days, she brought the orchestra into the bedroom, and while they played, she and I whispered together on the pillow.

Basically, she told me how Suzanne, the cunning woman, had called up the spirit Lasher, “in error,” in Donnelaith, and then been burnt; how her daughter, Deborah, was taken away by sorcerers from Amsterdam; how the beautiful Deborah was followed by Lasher, and courted by him, and made powerful and rich, only to suffer a horrible death in a French town on the day they tried to burn her as they had burnt her mother. Then came Charlotte into the picture, daughter of Deborah by one of the sorcerers from Amsterdam, and the strongest of the first three, who used the spirit Lasher as never before to acquire great wealth and influence and unlimited power.

And Charlotte-by her own father, Petyr van Abel, one of these daring and mysterious Amsterdam wizards, who had for her own good followed her to the New World to warn her of the evil of intercourse with spirits-then conceived Jeanne Louise and her twin brother, Peter, and from Jeanne Louise and her brother was born Angélique, who had been Marie Claudette’s mother.

Gold, jewels, coin of every realm, and every luxury, this family had acquired. Not even the revolution on Saint-Domingue had destroyed its immense wealth, very little of which rode upon the success of the crops, but was piled up now in a string of safe places.

“Your mother does not even know what she possesses,” said Marie Claudette, “and the more I think of it, the more important it is that I tell you.”

I naturally agreed. All this power and wealth, said Grandmère, had come to us through the machinations of this spirit, Lasher, who could kill those whom the witch marked for death, torment those whom she marked for madness, reveal to her secrets which other mortals strove to keep, and even acquire jewels and gold by transporting these things magically, though for this the spirit required great energy.

A loving thing was this spirit, she said, but it took some craft to manage. Look how it had abandoned her of late, and spent all its time hovering about Katherine’s crib.

“That’s because Katherine can’t see it,” I said. “It’s trying very hard. It won’t give up, but it’s useless.”

“Ah, is that so? I don’t believe it, a granddaughter of mine can’t see that thing?”

“Go see for yourself. The child’s eyes don’t move. It cannot see the creature even when it comes in its strongest form, which anyone might touch and feel as solid.”

“Ah, so you know it does that.”

“I hear its footsteps on the stairs,” I said. “I know its tricks. It can go from vapor to a solid being, and then in a gust of warm wind vanish.”

“Oh, you’re very observant,” she said. “I love you.”

I was very thrilled to the heart by this and I told her I loved her too, which I did. She was precious to me. Also, I had come to realize, while sitting on her knee, that I found old people more beautiful in the main than young ones.

This was to prove true of me all my life. I love young people too, of course, especially when they are very careless and brave, as my Stella was, or my Mary Beth. But people in the very middle of life? I can hardly tolerate them.

Allow me to say, Michael, you are an exception. No, don’t speak. Don’t break the trance. I won’t tell you you are a child at heart, but you do have some childlike faith and goodness in you, and this has been both intriguing to me and somewhat maddening. You have challenged me. Like many a man with Irish blood, you know all sorts of supernatural things are possible. Yet you don’t care. You go about talking to wooden joists and beams and plaster!

Enough. Everything depends on you now. Let me return to Marie Claudette and the particular things she told me about our family ghost.

“It has two kinds of voices,” she declared, “a voice one can hear only in one’s head, and the voice you heard, which can be heard by anyone with the right ears to hear it. And sometimes even a voice so loud and clear that it can be heard by everyone. But that isn’t often, you see, for that wears it out, and where does it get its strength? From us-from me, from your mother, and possibly even from you, for I have seen it near me when you were here, and I have seen you look at it.

“As for the inner voice, it can devil you with it anytime, as it has done many an enemy, unless of course you are defended against it.”

“And how do you defend yourself?” I asked.

“Can’t you guess?” she said. “Let me see how smart you are. You see it with me, which means it appears, no? It summons its strength, it comes together, it becomes as a man for a few cherished moments. Then it is gone and exhausted. Why do you think it gives so much of itself to me, instead of merely whispering inside my head, ‘Poor old soul, I shall never forget you’?”

“To be seen,” I said with a shrug. “It’s vain.”

She laughed with delight. “Ah, yes, and no. It has to take form to come to me for a simple reason. I surround myself night and day with music. It cannot get through unless it gathers all its strength, and concentrates most fiercely in the manifestation of a human form and a human voice. It must drown out the rhythm which at every moment enchants it and distracts it.

“Understand it likes music of course, but music is a thing with a sway over it, as music sometimes is with wild beasts or mythical persons in stories. And as long as I command my band to play, it cannot plague my mind alone, but must come and tap me on the shoulder.”

I remember that it was my turn to laugh with delight. The spirit was no worse than me in a way. I had had to learn to concentrate on my grandmother’s stories when the music seemed to make it all but impossible. But for Lasher, to concentrate was to exist. When spirits dream, they don’t know themselves.

I could digress on that. But I have too much to tell, and I’m too…tired now.

Let me go on. Where was I? Ah, yes, she told me about the power of music over the thing, and how she kept the music near her so that it would be forced to come and pay court, for otherwise it wouldn’t have bothered.

“Does it know this?” I asked.

“Yes, and no,” she said. “It begs me to shut out the din, but I cry and say I cannot, and it then comes to me and kisses my hand, and I look at it. You are right that it is vain. It would be seen again and again, just to be reassured that I have not drifted out of its realm, but it no longer loves or needs me. It has a place in its heart for me. That’s all, and that is nothing.”

“You mean it has a heart?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, it loves us all, and we great witches above all things, for we have brought it into knowing itself, and have greatly aided it to increase its power.”

“I see,” I said. “But what if you didn’t want it around anymore? If you…”

“Shhhh…never say such a thing!” she said, “not even with trumpets or bells pealing all about you.”

“All right,” I said, feeling strongly already that I must never be given the same advice more than once, and I said no more about that. “But can you tell me what it is?” I asked.

“A devil,” she said, “a great devil.”

I told her, “I don’t think so.”

She was amazed. “Why do you say that? Who else but the Devil would serve a witch?”

I told her all I knew of the Devil, from prayers and hymns and Mass and the quick-witted slaves all around me. “The Devil is just plain bad,” I said. “And he treats badly all who trust him. This thing is too damned good to us.”

She agreed, but it was like the Devil, she said, in that it would not submit to God’s laws, but would come through as flesh and be a man.

“Why?” I said. “Isn’t it a hell of a lot stronger the way it is? Why would it want to catch yellow fever or lockjaw?”

She laughed and laughed. “It would be flesh to feel all that flesh can feel, to see what men can see, and hear what they can hear, and not have forever to be collecting itself out of a dream and fear the losing of itself. It would be flesh to be real; to be in the world and of the world, and to defy God, who gave it no body.”

“Hmmm, sounds like it has overrated the whole experience,” I said. Or in words that a three-year-old might choose for pretty much the same thing, for by that age, like many a country child of the times, I’d seen plenty of death and suffering.

Once again, she laughed, and she said that it would have what it would have, and lavished everything upon us because we served its purpose.

“It wants strength; every hour and every day in our presence, we give it strength; and it pushes for one thing: that is the birth of a witch so strong that she can make it once and for all material.”

“Well, that isn’t going to be my baby sister, Katherine,” I said.

She smiled and nodded her head. “I fear you’re right, but the strength comes and goes. You have it. Your brother has none.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “He’s more easily frightened. He’s seen it and it has made an ugly face at him to keep him from Katherine’s cradle. I don’t require ugly faces, nor do I flee from them. And I have too much sense to overturn Katherine’s cradle. But tell me, how is a witch going to make it flesh forever? Even with Mother, I see it solid for no more than two, three minutes at most. What does it mean to do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Truly I don’t know the secret. But let me tell you this while the music plays on, and listen to me carefully. I’ve never even expressed this in thought to myself but I confide it to you. When it has what it wants, it shall destroy the entire family.”

“Why?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said again very gravely. “It’s just what I fear. For I think and I feel in my bones, that though it loves us and needs us-it also hates us.”

I thought about this in quiet.

“Of course it doesn’t know this, perhaps,” she said, “or does not wish for me to know. The more I think on it the more I wonder if you weren’t sent here to pass on what I have to say to that baby in the cradle. God knows Marguerite will not listen now. She thinks she rules the world. And I fear hell in my old age and crave the company of a cherubic three-year-old.”

“Flesh, the thing wants to be flesh,” I pressed, for I remember I was almost carried off course by being called cherubic, which I liked very much, and wanted her to digress on my charms. But I went back to the evil thing. “How can it be flesh? Human flesh? What? Would it be born into the world again, or take a body that is dead, or one that is…”

“No,” she said. “It says it knows its destiny. It says it carries the sketch within itself of what it would be again, and that someday a witch and a man shall make the magical egg from which its form will be made, and into which it will come again, knowing its own form, and the infant soul shall not knock it loose, and all the world will come to understand it.”

“All the world, hmmm.” I thought. “And you said, ‘again.’ By that you mean the thing has been flesh before?”

“It was something before which it is not now, but what it was, I can’t rightly tell you. I think it was a creature fallen, damned to suffer intelligence and loneliness in a vaporish form! And it would end the sentence. Through us it wants a strong witch, who can be as the Virgin Mary was to Christ, the vessel of an Incarnation.”

I pondered all this. “It’s no devil,” I said.

“And why do you say that?” she asked again, as if we hadn’t discussed this before.

“Because,” I said, “the Devil has more important things to do if he exists at all, and on the point of his existence at all I am not certain.”

“Where did you get an idea there was no Devil?”

“Rousseau,” I said. “His philosophy argues that the worst evil is in man.”

“Well,” she said, “read some more before you make up your mind.”

And that was the end of that part of it.

But before she died, which was not so long after that at all, she told me many things about this spirit. It killed through fright mostly. In the form of a man, it startled coachmen and riders at night, causing them to veer off the road and into the swamps; and sometimes it even frighted the horses as well as the men, which was proof that it was indeed material.

It could be sent to stalk a mortal man or woman, and tell in its own childish way what that person had done all the livelong day, but one had to interpret its peculiar expressions carefully.

It could steal, of course, small things mostly, though sometimes whole banknotes for considerable amounts. And it could come into mortals for a bit of time, to see through their eyes and feel through their hands, but this was never long-lasting. Indeed the battle left it fatigued and often more tormented than it had been before, and it oftentimes killed whom it had possessed out of sheer rage and envy. This meant one had to be very careful in helping it with such tricks, for the innocent body used for such purposes might very well be destroyed after.

Such had happened to one of Marie Claudette’s nephews, she told me-one of my very own cousins-before she had learnt to control the thing and make it obey or starve it with silence and covering her eyes and pretending not to hear it. “It is not so hard to torture at times,” she said. “It feels, and it forgets, and it weeps. I don’t envy it.”

“Me neither,” I said aloud and she said:

“Never scorn it. It will hate you for that. Look away always when you see it.”

Like hell, I thought, but I didn’t confess it.

It wasn’t more than a month after that that she died.

I was out in the swamps with Octavius. We had run away to live in the wild like Robinson Crusoe. We had docked our little flat-bottomed boat and had made a camp, and while he gathered wood I tried to make fire with what we already had, and was having no success at it.

When suddenly, the kindling in my hand leapt into flames, and I looked up and what should I see but Marie Claudette, my beloved grandmother, only looking more splendid and vigorous than she ever had in old age, with full, rosy cheeks and a beautiful soft mouth. She picked me up off the ground, kissed me and then set me down, and she was gone. Like that. And the little fire was blazing.

I knew what it meant. Farewell. She was dead. I insisted we go back to Riverbend immediately. And as we drew closer and closer to the house, we came into a heavy storm, and had, at last, to run through the water, against a fierce wind filled with leaves and debris and even sharp stones, until we came to the gates, and the slaves ran to shelter us with blankets.

Marie Claudette was indeed dead, and when I sobbed and told my mother how I knew, I think for the very first time in her life, she actually saw me. I had been a cuddly thing, of course, but in that moment, she spoke to me not as one does to a dog or a child, but as to a human being.

“You saw her and she gave you her kiss,” she said.

And then right there in the sickroom, with everyone sobbing and the shutters banging in the wind, and the priest in a state of terror, the damned fiend appeared over my mother’s shoulder, and our eyes met, and his were soft with a plea, and filled with tears for me to see, and then of course, like that, he vanished.

That’s the way my own tale will end, don’t you think? You will tell the final words. “Then Julien vanished.” And where will I be? Where will I go? Was I in heaven before you called me here, or in hell? I am so weary I don’t care anymore and that is perhaps a blessing.

But to return to that long-ago noisy moment when the rain was blowing in, and my grandmother lay neat and small on the bed beneath layers of pretty lace and my mother, gaunt and dark-haired, stared at me, and the fiend behind took the form of a handsome man, and little Katherine cried in the cradle-it was the beginning of my true life as my mother’s cohort.

First, after the funeral and the burial in the parish cemetery-we Catholics never had cemeteries on our own land, but only in consecrated ground-my mother went mad. And I was the only witness.

Halfway up the stairs, coming home from the graveyard, she began to scream, and I rushed behind her into her room before she bolted the doors to the gallery. Then she gave one aching cry after another. All this was grief for her mother, and what she had not done, and had not said, but then it passed from grief into great wild anger.

Why could this spirit not prevent death? “Lasher, Lasher, Lasher.” She caught up the feather pillows from the bed and ripped the cloth and strewed the feathers everywhere. If you’ve never seen such a spectacle, you might rip up such a pillow and give it a try. There isn’t anything quite like it, and she tore up three pillows in her rage, and soon the entire air was full of feathers and in the midst of them she screamed, and looked more miserable and forlorn than any being I have ever beheld in all my little life, and soon I began to weep helplessly.

She held tight to me; she begged my forgiveness that she’d shown me such a sight. We lay down together and finally she cried herself to sleep, and the night descended upon the plantation, which, in those days of precious few oil lamps and candles, brought everything to an early halt, and finally only silence.

It must have been past midnight when I awoke. I don’t recall the face of the clock; only the feeling of deep night, and that it was spring and that I wanted to push through the netting which surrounded our bed and walk outside and talk to the moon and stars for a while.

Well, I managed to sit up and there before me was the thing itself, sitting on the side of the bed, and it reached out its white hand for me. I did not scream. There was no time. For all at once I felt the stroke of its fingers on my cheek and it felt good to me. Then it seemed the air around me made a caress, and the thing, having dissolved, was kissing me with invisible lips and touching me and filling my body with whatever pleasure it could feel at so young an age, which, as you probably remember, was something!

After it was finished with me, and I lay there, a little puddle of baby juice beside my mother’s sleeping body, I saw it materialize again, this being, standing by the window. I climbed out of bed, weak and confused by the pleasure I’d felt, and went towards it. I reached out to take its hand, which dangled at its side like a man’s hand, and then it looked down at me and gave me its most tearful gaze and together we pushed the window netting aside and went out on the gallery.

It seemed to me that it trembled in the light, that it vanished some three or four times only to reappear, and then it died away, leaving the air very warm behind it. I stood in the warmth and I heard its voice for the first time in my head, its private confiding voice:

“I have broken my vow to Deborah.”

“Which was what?” I asked.

“You do not even know who Deborah was, you miserable child of flesh and blood,” it said, and went on with some hysterically funny pronouncement upon me that seemed made up of all the worst doggerel in the library. Mind you, I was nearly four by this time, and I couldn’t claim to know poetry as anything more than song, but I knew when the words were downright preposterous. And the cunning laughter of the slaves had taught me this too. I knew pomposity.

“I know who Deborah was,” I said, and I told it then the story of Deborah as told to me by Marie Claudette of how she had risen high, and then been accused of witchcraft.

“Betrayed by her husband and sons, she was, and before that, by her father. Aye, her father. And I took my vengeance upon him,” it said. “I took my vengeance on him for what he and his ilk had done to her and to me!”

The voice broke off. I had the distinct feeling in my little three-year-old mind that it had been about to launch on another long song of rotten poetry but had changed its mind at the last minute.

“You understand what I say?” it asked. “I vowed to Deborah that I would never smile upon a male child, nor favor a male over a female.”

“Yes, I know what you are saying,” I said, “and also my Grandmamma told me. Deborah was born in the Highlands, a merry-begot, bastard child of the May revels, and her father was most likely the lord of the land himself, and did not raise a finger when her mother, Suzanne, was burnt at the stake, a poor persecuted witch who knew almost nothing.”

“Aye,” he said. “So it was. So it was! My poor Suzanne, who called me from the depths like a child who pulls a snake from a deep pond without knowing. Stringing syllables in the air, she called my name, and I heard her.

“And it was indeed the lord of the land, the chief of the Clan of Donnelaith, who got her with child and then shivered in fear when they burnt her! Donnelaith. Can you see that word? Can you make it in letters? Go there and see the ruins of the castle I laid waste. See the graves of the last of that clan, stricken from the earth, until such time as…”

“Until such time as what?”

And then it said nothing more, but went back again to caressing me.

I was musing. “And you?” I asked. “Are you male or female, or simply a neuter thing?”

“Don’t you know?” it asked.

“I wouldn’t ask if I did,” I answered.

“Male!” it said. “Male, male, male, male!”

I stifled my own giggles at its pride and ranting.

But I must confess that from then on, it was in my mind both an “it” and a “he” as you can hear from my story. At some times it seemed so devoid of common sense that I could only perceive it as a monstrous thing, and at other times, it took on a distinct character. So bear with my vascillation if you will. When calling it by name, I often thought of it as “he.” And in my angry moments, stripped it of its sex, and cursed it as too childish to be anything but neuter.

You will see from this tale that the witches saw it variously as “he” and “it.” And there were reasons.

But let me return to the moment. The porch, the being caressing me.

When I grew tired of its embrace, and I turned around, there was my mother in the doorway, watching all of this, and she reached out and clutched me to herself, and said to it: “You shall never hurt him. He is a harmless boy!”

And I think then it answered her in her head because she grew quiet. It was gone. That was all I knew for certain.

The next morning I went at once to the nursery where I still slept with Rémy and Katherine and some other sweet cousins best forgotten. I could not write very well. And understand now on this point, many people in those years could read, but couldn’t write.

In fact, to read but not to write was common. I could read anything, as I’ve said, and words like transubstantiation rolled off my tongue both in English and in Latin. But I had only just begun to form written letters with agility and speed, and I had a hell of a time recording what the fiend had said, but finally, asking, “How do you spell-?” of everybody who chanced to pass through the room, I got it down, exactly. And if you want to know, those words are still scratched deep in the little desk, a thing handmade of cypress which is in the far back attic now and which you, Michael, have touched with your own hands once as you repaired the rafters there.

“Until such time as…” Those were the words the fiend had spoken. Which struck me as powerfully significant.

I determined then and there to learn to write, and did so within six months, though my handwriting did not assume its truly polished form till I was near twelve. My early writing was fast and clumsy.

I told my mother all the fiend had told me. She was filled with fear. “It knows our thoughts,” she said at once in a whisper.

“Well, these are not secrets,” I said, “but even if they were, let us play music if we want to talk of them.”

“What do you mean?” asked she.

“Didn’t your own mother tell you?”

No, she confessed, her mother had not. So I did. And she began to laugh as wildly as she had cried the night before, clapping her hands and even sinking down upon the floor and drawing up her knees. At once she sent for the very musicians who had played for her mother.

And under cover of the wild band, which sounded like drunken gypsies fighting musical war with Cajuns of the Bayou over matters of life and death, I told her everything Marie Claudette had told me.

Meantime the spirit appeared in the room, behind the band, where his manly form could not be seen by them but only by us, and began to dance madly. Finally the shaky apparition fell to rocking back and forth, and then vanished. But we could still feel its presence in the room, and that it had fallen into the band’s repetitive and distinctly African rhythm.

We spoke under this cover.

Marguerite had not cared for “ancient history.” She had never heard the word Donnelaith. She did not remember much about Suzanne. She was glad I had taken note of this. And there were history books which she would give to me.

Magic was her passion, she explained, and told me in detail how her mother had never appreciated her talents. Early on she, Marguerite, had befriended the powerful voodooiennes of New Orleans. She’d learned from them, and she would now heal, spellbind, and cast curses with good effect, and in all this Lasher was her slave and devotee and lover.

There began a conversation between my mother and me which was to last all her life, in which she gave me everything she knew without compromise and I gave to her all that I knew, as well, and I was close to her at last, and in her arms, and she was my mother.

But it was soon clear to me that my mother was mad; or shall we say she was maniacally focused upon her magical experiments. It seemed a certainty in her mind that Lasher was the Devil; and that anything else he might have said was lies; indeed, the only truth I’d given her was the trick of shutting him out by music. Her real passions lay in hunting the swamps for magical plants, talking to the old black women of bizarre cures, and attempting to transform things through the use of chemicals and telekinetic power.

Of course we did not use that word then. We didn’t know it. She was certain of Lasher’s love. She had had the girl child, and would try to have another, stronger girl, if that was what he wanted. But with every passing year, she became less interested in men, more addicted to the fiend’s embraces, and altogether less coherent.

Meantime, I was growing fast, and just as I had been a miracle of a three-year-old, I became a miracle at every age, continuing my reading, and my adventures, and my intercourse with the daemon.

The slaves knew now that I had it in my power. They came to me for aid; they begged a cure from me when they were ill, and very soon I had supplanted my mother as the object of mystery.

Now, here, Michael, I face a clear choice. I can tell you all that Marguerite and I learnt and how; or I can go on ahead with those things which are most important. Let me choose a compromise and make a swift summary of our experiments.

But before I do, let me say that my sister, Katherine, was coming along, utterly lacking in guile, but beautiful as she was innocent, a flower I adored and wished to protect, and knowing it pleased the fiend when I shepherded her about, I did it all the more willingly. But I conceived a great love for her in my own right, and I came to realize that she did in fact see “the man” but that he frightened her. She seemed shy of all that was unwholesome or otherworldly. Of our mother she was terrified, and with reason.

Marguerite’s experiments were becoming ever more reckless. If a baby was born dead on our land, she wanted it. The slaves tried to hide from her their lost children, lest these poor beings end up in jars in Marguerite’s study. And one of my keenest memories of those times is of Marguerite dashing into the house with a bundle in her hands, and then flashing at me her eager smile, and throwing back the cloth to reveal a tiny dead black baby form, and then covering it up again in jubilation as she went to lock herself in her study.

Meantime the spirit was ever attentive. It put gold coins in my pockets every day. It warned me when amongst my cousins I had some petty enemy. It stood guard over my room, and once struck down a thieving runaway who sought to steal the few jewels I possessed.

And when I was alone, it often came to me and caressed me and gave me a pleasure more keen than any I could achieve with others.

And this it did too with Marguerite faithfully. And all the while it tried its blandishments on Katherine but seemed to get nowhere with her.

She had it in her head that such evil pleasures as were offered to her in the dark of night were mortal sin. I think she was perhaps the first of the witches to actually believe this, and how the Catholic conception took root in her so strong and so soon-before the fiend could carry her off into erotic dreams-I can’t honestly say. If you believe in God, you might say God was with her. I don’t think so.

Whatever, my mother and I, tiring of my grandmother’s awful band, soon hired a piano player and a fiddler to play for us. The spirit seemed at first to delight in this as it had in the cacophonous band. In dazzling male form, it would appear in the room, spellbound and happy to reveal it.

But it came to realize we whispered to each other under the notes of the song, and it couldn’t hear or know what we thought or planned, it became fiercely angry. We needed louder music to shut it out and brought back the others to create their din, and then we saw that what was most effective was melody and rhythm. Noise alone was not sufficient to do it.

Meantime, as we prospered, as the plantation was flush, and our money seemed to breed upon itself in foreign banks, and our cousins married far and wide, the name Mayfair became greater and greater along the River Coast, and we reigned supreme on our own land. No one could bother us or touch us.

I was nine years old when I demanded of the fiend:

“What is it you really want of us, of my mother and me?”

“What I want of you all,” he said. “That you make me flesh!” and, imitating the band, it began to sing these words over and over, and shake the objects in the room to the rhythm as it were of a drum, until I put my hands over my ears and begged for mercy.

“Laughter,” he said. “Laughter.”

“Which means what?” I asked.

“I am laughing at you because I too can make music to make you rock.”

I laughed. “You’re right,” I said. “And you say this word, because you cannot actually laugh.”

“Just so,” he said, petulantly. “When I am flesh I shall laugh again.”

“Again?” said I.

He said nothing.

Ah, this moment is so clear in my memory. I stood out on the upper gallery of the house, shielded somewhat by the banana leaves that stroked the wooden banisters. And out on the river, ships made their way north to the port through the channels. All the fields lay in warm spring sunlight, and below on the grass my cousins played, some forty or fifty of them, all below the age of twelve, and around them in rocking chairs sat the uncles and aunts, fanning themselves and chatting.

And here I stood with this thing, my hands on the rail, my face very grave most likely for the age of nine, trying to get to the heart of it.

“All this I have given you,” he said, as if he had read my emotions more clearly than I had myself. “Your family is my family; I will bring blessing upon blessing. You do not know what wealth can give. You are too young. You will come to see that you are a prince in a great kingdom. No crowned head in Europe enjoys such power as you have.”

“I love you,” I said mechanically to it, and sought to believe this for an instant, as if I were seducing a mortal adult.

“I shall continue,” he said. “Protect Katherine until she can bear a girl child. Carry on the line; Katherine is weak, strong ones will come, it must happen.”

I pondered.

“This is all I can do?” I asked.

“For now,” he said. “But you are very strong, Julien. Things will come into your mind, and when you see what is to be done I shall see it.”

Again I pondered. I studied the happy throng on the lawn. My brother was calling for me to come down and play; they would be taking a boat out soon to the Bayou. Did I want to come with them?

I saw, then, two founts of enterprise at work now in this family-one was the witches’ fount, to use the spirit to acquire wealth and advantage; and the other was the natural or normal fount, already bubbling with a great strong flow that might not be stopped were the spirit destroyed.

Once again, it answered me.

“War on me and I destroy all this! You are living now because Katherine needs you.”

I didn’t answer. I went inside, took my diary, went down to the parlor, and urged the musicians to play loud and strong, and then I wrote my thoughts in my diary.

Meantime, my gifts and those of my mother were growing stronger. We healed, as I have said, we cast spells, we sent Lasher to spy upon those about whom we would know the truth, and sometimes to gauge the financial changes of the future.

This was no easy thing, and the older I became, the more I realized my mother was slowly becoming too mad to do much of anything practical. Indeed, our cousin Augustin, manager of the plantation, was pretty much doing what he wanted with its profits.

By the time I was fifteen, I knew seven languages, and could write very well in any one, and was now the unofficial overseer and manager of the entire plantation. My cousin Augustin grew jealous of me, and so in a fit of rage I shot him.

This was an awful moment.

I had not meant to kill him. Indeed, he was the one who had produced the gun and threatened me; and I in my rage had snatched it from his hand and fired the ball into his forehead. My plan had been “short-range,” that is, to knock him about, and voilà! he was totally and finally dead forever! No one could have been more surprised than I was. Not even him, wherever he went, for I did see his soul rise, befuddled and staring through a vague human form as it disintegrated.

The whole family went into chaos. The cousins fled to their cottages, the city cousins to their town houses in New Orleans; indeed the plantation shut down in mourning for Augustin, and the priest came, and the funeral preparations commenced.

I sat in my room weeping. I imagined that I would be punished for my crime, but very soon, I realized that nothing of the sort was going to happen!

No one was going to touch me. Everyone was frightened. Even Augustin’s wife and children were frightened. They had come to tell me they knew it was “an accident” and did not want to risk my disfavor.

My mother watched this with astonished eyes, barely interested at all, and said, “Now you can run things as you like.”

And the spirit came, nudging me playfully, delighted it could knock the quill pen out of my hand, and give me a start with a smile in the mirror.

“Julien,” it said, “I could have done this thing stealthily for you! Put away your gun. You do not need it.”

“Can you so easily kill?”

“Laughter.”

I told it then of two enemies I had made, one a tutor who had insulted my beloved Katherine, and another a merchant who had crassly cheated us. “Kill them,” I said.

The fiend did. Within the week both had met a bad end-one beneath the wheels of a carriage, the other thrown from his horse.

“It was simple,” said the fiend.

“So I see,” said I. I think I was fairly drunk with my power. And remember I was only fifteen, and this was the time before the war when we were still isolated from all the world beyond us.

As it turned out, Augustin’s descendants left our land. They went deep into the Bayou country and built the beautiful plantation of Fontevrault. But that is another story. Someday you must journey up the river road and over the Sunshine Bridge and into that land, and see the ruins of Fontevrault, for many many things happened there.

But let me only say now, that with Tobias, the eldest son of Augustin, I was never reconciled. He had been a toddler on the night of the killing, and in later years his hate for me remained great, though his line was prosperous and they kept to the name Mayfair and their progeny married with our progeny. This was one of many branches of the family tree. But it was one of the strongest. And as you know Mona comes from this line, and from my later entanglement with it.

Now, to return to our day-to-day life, as Katherine became more and more beautiful, Marguerite began to fade, as if some vital energy were drawn from her by her daughter. But nothing of the sort really happened.

Marguerite was only mad with her experiments, of trying to bring the dead infants back to life, of inviting Lasher to plunge into their flesh, and make the limbs move, but he could never restore the soul itself. The idea was preposterous.

Nevertheless, she delved deep and drew me with her into magic. We sent for books from all over the world. The slaves came to us for medicines for every illness. And we grew stronger and stronger so that soon we could cure many common aches with the simple laying on of hands. And Lasher was always our ally in this, and if the daemon knew some secret that would cure the sick one-that he had been accidentally poisoned perhaps-it would make these secrets known to us.

When I was not at my experiments, I was with Katherine, taking her into New Orleans to see the opera, the ballet, whatever dramas we could, showing her the fine restaurants, and taking her for walks so that she might see the world itself, which a woman could not really do without an escort. She was as always innocent and full of love, slight of build, dark, and perhaps a little feebleminded.

It began to penetrate to me that in our inbreeding we had encouraged certain weaknesses. In fact, now amongst my cousins I began to study these things, and feeblemindedness of a certain charming sort was definitely part of it. There were also among us many with witches’ gifts, and some even with witches’ marks-a black mole or birth pattern of peculiar shape; a sixth finger. Indeed the sixth finger was a common thing, and could take various forms. It might be a tiny digit projecting from the outside edge of the hand, an adjunct to the little finger. Or it could be near the thumb, and sometimes a second thumb. But wherever it appeared, you can be sure someone was ashamed of it.

Meantime I had read the history of Scotland, under the fiend’s nose, most likely without his being aware of it. For if I had a fiddler standing by, playing a dreary melody as I read, the fiend hardly noticed anything. Indeed, he often tired of being invaded by the music as it were and went off to court my mother.

Well and good. Donnelaith was not a town of importance. But there were some old stories that told it once had been, and that a great cathedral had stood there. Indeed there had been a school and a great saint in those parts, and Catholics had journeyed for miles and miles to worship at his shrine.

I kept this information for future use. I would go there. I would find the history of these people of Donnelaith.

Meanwhile my mother laughed at all this. And under the cover of music, said, “Ask him questions. You will soon discover he is no one or anything and comes from hell. It’s that simple.”

I took up the theme with it.

And sure enough, what she had said was true. I would say, “Who made the world?” and on it would go about mist and land and spirits always being there, and then I would say, “And Jesus Christ, did you witness His birth?” and it would say that there was no time where it lived and it saw only witches.

I spoke of Scotland, and it wept for Suzanne, and told me that she had died in fear and pain, and Deborah had watched with solemn eyes before the evil wizards of Amsterdam came to fetch her.

“And who were these wizards?” I asked, and the fiend said: “You will know soon enough. They watch you. Beware of them, for they know all and can bring harm to you.”

“Why don’t you kill them?” I said.

“Because I would know what they know,” he said, “and there is no real reason. Beware of them. They are alchemists and liars.”

“How old are you?”

“Ageless!”

“Why were you in Donnelaith?”

Silence.

“How did you come to be there?”

“Suzanne called me, I told you.”

“But you were there before Suzanne.”

“There is no there before Suzanne.”

And so on it went, intriguing but never really advancing the story very far or revealing a practical secret.

“It is time for you to come and help your mother. Your strength is necessary.”

This meant, of course, help Marguerite with her experiments. All right, I thought, though if she keeps burning those stinking candles and mumbling Latin words of which she doesn’t know the meaning, I am leaving!

I followed Lasher into her rooms. She had just come in with an infant, feeble but alive, which had been left at the church door by its slave mother. The infant cried, a tiny brown creature with curling brown hair, and a little pink mouth that could break your heart. It seemed too small to survive very long. She was delighted with it. She put me in mind at once of a little boy playing with a bug in a jar, so savage was her interest, and so disconnected was she from the fact that this fragile wailing thing was human.

She shut the doors, lighted the candles, and then knelt beside the child and invited Lasher to go inside it.

With a great chant she egged the daemon on: “Into its limbs; see through its eyes; speak through its mouth; live in its breath and in its heartbeat.”

The room seemed to swell and to contract, though of course it did not, and all that could rattle was moved, and the noise became a subtle murmuring-bottles jiggling, bells tinkling, shutters fluttering in the wind-and then this tiny baby before my eyes began to change. It coordinated its tiny limbs and the expression of its little face became malevolent or merely adultlike.

It was no longer an infant at all but a hideous mannequin of sorts, for though it had not changed physically, a grown man was inside it and manipulating it, and spoke now, in a gurgling voice. “I am Lasher. See me here.”

“Grow, grow strong!” declared Marguerite, holding up both her fists. “Julien, command it to grow. Stare at its arms and legs. Command them to grow.”

I did, and against all I believed I saw that its little legs and arms were lengthening. Indeed, the eyes of the infant, pale blue at birth, were now suddenly dark brown, and its hair slowly darkened as well as though absorbing a dark liquid.

Its skin on the other hand began to pale; color pulsed in its cheeks. Its legs for one instant were stretched like tentacles. And then the little thing died. Just died. Let out a cry, and died.

And Marguerite grabbed it off the bed, and threw it at the dresser mirror. The little one splashed with blood and gore on the glass but didn’t break it and down it tumbled, one nameless dead child among her perfumes, potions and hair combs.

The room was trembling again. He was near, and then gone, and the cold was all around us. It was as if Lasher had taken the balmy heat with him.

She sat down and wept. “It’s always so. We get that far, and the vessel is too weak to contain him. He destroys what he changes. How will he ever be flesh? And now he is so tired from what he has done that he cannot come to us. We must wait and let him drift and re-collect, there is nothing to be done for it.”

I was spellbound by what I’d seen. I wanted to go out and write it down. She stopped me.

“What can we do to make him flesh?” she said.

“Well, don’t try with an infant, for one thing. Try with the body of a man. Find someone disabled in mind and body too, perhaps, who is already near to death, someone who cannot resist any more than an infant could. And see if Lasher can go into it.”

“Ah, but he said that from a little child he must grow. A little child like the infant in the manger.”

“Lasher said this? When?” I asked, and took note of this along with all its other little slips.

“From a little child, he will be born, from the most powerful witch, but the baby shall start out small as the Christ Child, but ah, if only we could bring him into the flesh now, think what we would have done, and then, and then, we could bring back the dead in the very same fashion.”

“You think so?”

“Come here,” she said. She took me by the hand, and dropped to her knees and pulled a small trunk from beneath the bed, and in it lay dolls, dolls of bone and hair and carefully stitched clothes. And mark, Michael, they weren’t rotted as they were when you saw them. They were swaddled in lace and surrounded in some cases with beautiful jewels, and strands of pearls, and they peered at us with their tiny specks for eyes.

“These are the dead,” she said. “See? This is Marie Claudette.” She lifted a tiny doll with gray hair, clothed in red taffeta, and made from a stocking it seemed and filled with things that felt like pebbles. “Parings of her nails, one bone from her hand, taken by me from her grave, and her hair, lots of her hair, that is what makes up this doll, and within the hour of her death, I had taken the spittle from her mouth and soaked its face, and the blood she had vomited, and smeared that as well on the doll beneath its clothing. Now hold it and you will see that she is here.”

She put the doll in my hands, and in a flash I saw the living Marie Claudette! I was knocked backwards by the shock. I stared down at this thing of cloth. I squeezed it again and there she stood, motionless for an instant, staring at me. I called out to her. I did this over and over again, summoning her, seeing her, calling to her, and then losing her.

“This is nothing,” I said. “She is not there.”

“No, no, but she is and she speaks to me.”

“I don’t believe it.”

I squeezed the doll once more and said, “Grandmère, tell me the truth,” and then I heard a tiny voice in my head which said, “I love you, Julien.” Of course I knew it was not Marie Claudette speaking to me. It was Lasher, but how was I to prove this?

I did a daring thing. So that my mother could hear, I said, “Marie Claudette, Marie Claudette, beloved Grandmère, do you remember the day that as the band played, we buried my little wooden toy horse in the garden? Do you remember how I cried and the poem which you told to me?”

“Yes, yes, my child,” said the secret voice and the image, which both my mother and I could see, held fast for the longest time yet, a graceful vision of Marie Claudette as she had been the last time I ever glimpsed her.

“The poem,” I said, “help me to recall it.”

“Think back, my child, you will remember,” said the ghost.

And then I said, “Ah, yes, ‘Toy horse, toy horse, ride on into the fields of heaven!’ ”

Ah yes, she said, and repeated this line with me.

I threw down the doll! “This is nonsense,” I declared. “I never owned a toy wooden horse. I never had an interest in such things. I never buried it in the yard, and I never wrote any stupid poem to it.”

The fiend went into a frenzy. My mother threw her hands over me to protect me. Everything was flying about…furniture, bottles, jars, books. It was worse than all those feathers had been, and things were raining down upon us.

“Stop!” my mother declared. “Who will protect Katherine?”

The room grew quiet.

“Do not become my enemy, Julien,” said the thing.

I was at this point scared to death. I’d proved my point. This thing was a liar. This thing was not the repository of any sanctified wisdom. And this thing could kill me all right, as surely as it had my enemies, and I had made it very angry.

I was wily. “All right, you would be flesh?”

“I would be flesh, I would be flesh, I would be flesh!”

“Then we shall proceed with our experiments in earnest.”

Michael, you yourself have seen the fruits of those years. When you came to this house, you saw the human heads rotted in their jars of fluid. You saw the infants swimming there in darkness. You saw the sum total of our accomplishments.

So let me be brief about these dark disasters and what we did, and I did, out of fear of the thing, and seeing myself sinking into deeper and deeper evil.

It was the year 1847 by this time. Katherine was a lithe thing of seventeen, courted by cousins and strangers alike, but showed no desire to marry. The poor girl’s most wicked pleasure in fact was to let me dress her as a boy and take her with me to the quadroon balls and to the riverfront drinking places where no true white woman could ever enter. All this was fun and sport for her, and I loved it too, seeing this seamy rotten world through her pretty eyes…

But! As all that went on, as the city grew rich and yearly full of more diversions, I carried out with Marguerite in the privacy of the study our worst sacrifices to the daemon.

Our first victim of any note was a voodoo doctor, a mulatto with yellow hair, very old, but still strong, whom we stole from his front steps, and took to Riverbend, plying him with fancy words and wine and heaps of gold, and assuring him we would know what he knew of God and the Devil.

He had been possessed by many a spirit, he averred. Fine, we have a nice one for you. We talked voodoo and we talked trash and lies. We had him ripe to welcome this powerful god, Lasher.

In Marguerite’s rooms with the doors bolted once more, we called Lasher down into this man, who of his own free will surrendered to the possession.

At first, the creature lay still, a small-boned old man, skin very pale, hair very yellow, and then as he opened his eyes, we saw another life was inside him! The eyes fixed upon us, and the mouth moved, and a voice deeper than that of the man himself, yet from the same throat, said:

“Ah, my beloveds, I see you.” The voice was flat and horrid. Indeed it roared from the mouth, and the eyes of the creature were wild and without intelligent expression.

“Sit up!” declared Marguerite. “Be strong! Take possession!” And she urged me to say these words with her, and we repeated them again, our eyes fixed on the thing.

The man rose up, arms outstretched, and then these were let to flop at his sides, and he almost toppled over. He struggled to his feet, and then he did fall, but we rushed to catch him. His fingers wriggled in the air, and then he managed to close one hand on my neck, which I didn’t particularly like, but I knew he was too weak to do me any harm, and it said again in that awful voice:

“My beloved Julien.”

“Take possession of the being forever,” cried Marguerite. “Take this body as if it were your right.”

And then the whole body began to tremble; and before my eyes once more, as had happened with the infant, the hair of the creature began somewhat to darken. And it seemed the face was wildly contorted.

And then the poor old body fell dead, in our arms, and if the old man was there again even for an instant, we never knew it.

But as we laid him down upon the bed, Marguerite made a careful study. She showed me patches of his skin which had been rendered white, and the parts of the hair which were distinctly dark as if some energy had erupted from within and changed these things. I noted it was only the new and short hair which had changed, and the skin was already fading back to its yellowish hue.

“What do we do with all this, Mother? We must keep it secret from the family.”

“Well, of course,” she said. “But first we take off the head here to save it.”

I collapsed in exhaustion, sitting against the wall, crossing my ankles and watching in silence as she slowly severed the man’s head, using a hatchet for the purpose. And then I saw this thing immersed in the chemicals she had so lately bought for the purpose and the jar sealed, and the man’s eyes staring out at me.

By then Lasher had gathered his wits, if that’s what they were. And he was there, a human-looking male, strong, beside her. And I remember that moment as perfectly as any other-the fiend standing there in the form of an innocent man, wide-eyed and almost sweet, and Marguerite, clamping the top on that jar and holding it up to the light and talking baby talk to the head inside. “You’ve done well, little head, you’ve done well.”

Then back she went to scribbling about future experiments.

Michael, when you came to this house and saw the jars, you saw all that ever resulted from this magic. There was nothing more. But how were we to know that?

With each new victim we grew more cunning and bold; and more hopeful; we learnt that the body must be strong, not old, and that a youngster with no family or home was our best prospect.

I lived in dread Katherine would find out. Katherine was my joy. I sat sometimes looking at Katherine and thinking, If only you knew, yet I could not draw myself away from my mother or from the thing, from any of it. Katherine was my innocent self, perhaps, the child I had never been, the good one I had never cared to be. I loved her.

As for my machinations with the fiend, I enjoyed them. I took a secret pleasure even in catching the victims and bringing them home, leading them up the steps, and inducing them to make themselves proper vessels. Each experiment brought me to a powerful level of excitement. The flickering candles, the victim on the bed, the possession itself-it was all hypnotic.

Lasher too began to express his preferences. Bring those of light complexion and hair so that he could change them more easily to what he wanted; and for longer periods of time, he walked and talked in their bodies.

Some superficial mutation was always accomplished. But that’s all it ever was! It was skin and it was hair and no more.

And the victim inevitably died as the result.

But the spirit loved it; the spirit soon lived for it.

“I would see the moon tonight with human eyes,” Lasher said, “bring a child to me. I would dance to the music tonight with human feet. Have the fiddlers outside the door and bring me legs that know dancing.”

And to reward us, the thing brought us gold and jewels beyond imagining. I was always finding money in my pockets. And ever more prosperous we grew, the thing warning us when to take our investments out of this or that place, and never failing in this.

Something else happened as well. The thing began to imitate me. I saw it.

This stemmed from a few careless remarks of mine. “Why must you look like that when you appear? So prim, so dusty?”

“Suzanne thought this was a handsome man. What would you have me look like?”

And in a few carefully chosen words I designed its clothes for it. Thereafter it appeared exactly like me to frighten me and amuse me. And we soon discovered that it could fool others on this score completely. I could leave it at my desk pretending to be me and run away, and people thought I had never left the house at all.

It was marvelous. Of course it could be nothing solid for very long. But it was getting stronger and stronger.

And something else had come clear to me. The thing, though it gave me pleasure whenever I desired it, had no jealousy of others where I was concerned. Indeed the thing liked to watch such goings-on-with lovers, whores, mistresses. The thing often hovered about my armoires, causing my coats to stir in the wind as he touched them. The thing was taking me as some sort of interesting model.

Whereas Marguerite now kept to her mad laboratory night and day, I went forth into the city. And with me the fiend went, observing everything. And I felt great power to have it at my side, my secret confidant, my supernatural eye, my guardian.

And now when Marguerite and I did hide from it beneath music, it appeared and danced, as it had once appeared to Marie Claudette. That is, our shutting it out made it show its strength, and in dandified clothes, it put on a show, distracting us as we distracted it, flinging itself into the melody.

If there was anyone at Riverbend who had not seen this fiend in material form for at least thirty seconds, that person was either blind or crazy.

Michael, I could tell you so much! But it is not the story of my life that matters. Suffice it to say I lived as few men ever have, learning what I wanted, and doing what I wanted, and enjoying all manner of pleasure. And the fiend was my best lover, of course, always. No man or woman kept me from it for long.

“Laughter, Julien. Am I not better?”

“You are, I must confess,” I said, flinging myself back on the bed, and letting it go to work pulling at my clothes and caressing me.

“Why do you love so to do it?” I asked.

“You become warm; you become close; I am close; we are nearly together. You are beautiful, Julien. We are men, you and I.”

Makes sense, I thought, and, drunk on erotic pleasure, I gave myself to it for days on end, emerging finally to go to the city again and amuse myself in some other way, lest I go as mad as my mother.

Of course I now knew the experiments would never get us anywhere. Lasher’s addiction to possession was all that kept us going.

Marguerite meantime was now officially mad. But no one cared. Why should they? We were a family of hundreds! My brother, Rémy, had married and had numerous children, both by his wife, and by his quadroon mistress. There were Mayfairs to the left and Mayfairs to the right, and many of our ilk went into town and built fine houses throughout the city.

If the head witch kept to her rooms during the lavish picnics we gave, or the balls we held, who cared? No one missed her. I was there, dancing with Katherine of course, who broke the hearts of all the young men who chased after her-Katherine now past twenty-five years of age, an old maid in the South of those times, but so beautiful no one dared even think such a thing, and so wealthy, of course, that she need never marry.

In fact, it soon came clear to me that she was afraid to marry. Of course my mother and I had told her what we could. And she had been horrified. She didn’t want to have a child, for fear the evil seed would be carried on. “I shall die a virgin,” she said, “and that will be the end. There will be no more witches.”

“Any comments?” I asked Lasher.

“Laughter” was his solitary reply. “She is human. Humans crave each other’s company; humans crave little ones. There are many cousins to choose from. Look at those who have the marks. Look at those who see.”

I did. I pushed every Mayfair with a witch’s gift into Katherine’s face for all the good it did. She was a dreamy sweet sort. She never argued.

But then the unthinkable occurred.

It began innocently enough. She wanted a house in the city. I should hire the Irish architect Darcy Monahan to build it for her, in the Faubourg uptown where all the Americans had settled.

“You must be mad,” I said. My father had been Irish, true, but I had never known him. I was a Creole, and spoke only French. “Why would we want to live up there with those splashy Americans? With merchants and trash such as that?”

I bought from Darcy a town house in the Rue Dumaine which he had already completed for a man who’d gone bankrupt and blown his brains out. I could see the ghost of this man from time to time, but it didn’t bother me. It was like that ghost of Marie Claudette, something lifeless and unable to communicate.

I moved into this flat, and made lavish rooms for Katherine. Not good enough. And so I said, “All right, we shall buy the square of land at Chestnut Street and First, and we will build some grand horror of a Greek temple to suit your tastes, go ahead. Go wild. What do I care?”

Darcy commenced at once to design and build the house in which I am now standing. I was disdainful, but Lasher came to me, leaning over my shoulder, duplicating me, and then fading back into that brown-haired man he preferred to be, and said:

“Make it full of pattern; make it full of ornament and design: make it beautiful.”

“Tell Katherine these things,” I urged, and the daemon obeyed, putting these thoughts in her head and guiding the plans, and she as guileless as ever.

“This shall be a great house,” the fiend said to me when we rode uptown together, the thing materializing to step out of the very carriage and stand at the gate. “In this house miracles will happen.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“I see now. I see the way. You are my beloved Julien.”

What does that mean, I wondered, but I was in too thick to think about it much, that was certain. I threw myself into my business dealings, the acquiring of land, my investments abroad, and in general tried to keep my mind off Katherine’s plan for this American house, this Greek Revival house, this uptown house, and to lure her back to the Quarter to sup with me whenever possible.

As you know, she fell in love with Darcy! Indeed it was Lasher who revealed the plot to me. I was headed uptown, for Katherine had not come home, and I did not like it that she stayed late after the builders had gone, roaming around the half-built house alone with that wicked Irishman.

Lasher sought to divert me. First he would talk. Then he would have a victim to possess.

“Not now,” says I. “I must find Katherine.”

And finally, in manly form, he did his worst trick, affrighting my coachman and driving us off the Nyades Road, where we broke a wheel, and I was soon sitting on the curb as the repairs went on, perfectly furious. But I could see now that the daemon did not want me to go uptown.

So the next night, I sought to deflect it. I sent it upon a mission to find for me some rare coins which I would have, and then off I went alone on my mare, singing the entire time, lest it come near enough to read my thoughts and intentions.

It was twilight when I reached this house. Like a great castle it stood, its brick plastered over to imitate stone, its columns in place, its windows ready for the glass to be installed. And it was dark and deserted.

I came inside, and on the floor of the parlor found my blessed sister and her man. I almost killed him. Indeed, I had him by the neck and was pounding him with my fist, when Katherine, to my horror, cried out:

“Come now, my Lasher. Be my avenger. Stop him from destroying the one I love.”

Shrieking and sobbing, she fell to the floor in a faint. But Lasher was there. I felt him surrounding me in the darkness, as if he were a great creature of the sea and I a helpless victim. Darkness wrapped itself around me in the shell of the double parlor below, and then I felt the thing stretch out and stroke the walls, and come together again.

“Hold back, Julien,” Lasher said. “The witch loves this mortal man. Be careful. She has used ancient and sanctified words to call me.”

Darcy Monahan rose to his feet and came to assault me. Lasher stayed his hand. He was superstitious as anyone with Irish blood, and he looked around sensing the presence in the dark, and then he saw his lovely Katherine in a heap, moaning, and he went to revive her.

I stalked out in a rage. I went back to my flat in the Rue Dumaine and brought several quadroon ladies of the night to my house, and there coupled with them one after another, in an abandon of grief. Katherine and that Irish beast; uptown in the land of the Americans.

I see when I look back upon the story that I had kept too much knowledge from her. She thought the man was a ghost or a simple thing. She had no knowledge of what Lasher could do when she called upon him.

“Well,” I told her, “if you want to kill me, just call on him again like that, and he will try to do your bidding.”

I wasn’t sure this was true, but I didn’t want her flinging curses at me. First she had betrayed me with Darcy and then with Lasher himself, and she was the witch, and all my life I had shielded her. “You don’t know what you command,” I said, “I’ve saved you from it.”

She was horrified and tearful and sad, but she was also resolved to marry Darcy Monahan. “You don’t need to save me anymore,” she said. “I shall marry with the emerald around my neck as our family laws require, but I marry in God’s house before His altar, and my children shall be baptized at His font, and they shall turn their back on evil.”

I shrugged. We had always married at a Catholic altar, had we not? We were all baptized. What was this? But I said nothing to her.

My mother and I set out to turn her away from Darcy. But there was no doing it. Indeed, she was ready to renounce the legacy for this Irish fool, or so she told everyone. The cousins came to me en masse. What will happen? What is the law? Will we lose our good fortune? And then it was clear how much they knew of the dark secret furnace of evil which fueled the entire enterprise and how willing they were to go along with it.

But it was Lasher who gave the bride away.

“Let her marry the Celt,” he said. “Your father had the Irish blood, and in it rode the witches’ gifts which have ridden in such blood for centuries. The Irish, the Scots, they are gifted with second sight. Your father’s blood made you strong. Let us see what this Irishman can do with your sister.”

But you know the story. Katherine lost two babies, both boys; then had by Darcy two sons. Then despite her prayers, her Masses, her rosaries and her priests, she lost one baby after another.

As the Civil War raged, as the city fell, as fortunes were destroyed overnight, as Yankee troops went through our streets, she reared her boys in the First Street house, among American friends and traitors. Katherine thought she had left the family curse behind. Indeed, she had given back the emerald on her wedding day.

The family was frantic. The witch was gone. For the first time I heard many of them whispering the word. “But she is the witch!” they would say. “How can she desert us?”

And the emerald. It lay on Mother’s dresser among all her voodoo trash, like a hideous trinket. I picked it up, finally, and hung it round the neck of the nearby plaster Virgin.

This for me was a dark time, a time of great freedom and also great learning. Katherine was gone, and nothing else much mattered to me. If I had ever doubted it, I knew it now-my family was my world. I could have gone to Europe then; I could have gone to China. I could have gone beyond war and pestilence and poverty. I could have lived as a potentate. But this small part of the earth was my home, and without my loved ones around me, nothing had any flavor.

Pathetic, I thought. But it was true. And I learned what only a powerful and rich man can ever know-what it was I truly wanted.

Meantime, the fiend was ever urging me to new lovers; and watching what went on as eagerly as ever. He imitated me more and more. Even when he visited Mother now, he came in a guise so like me that others thought it was I. He seemed to have lost any sense of himself, if he had ever had any.

“What do you really look like?” I asked.

“Laughter. Why ask me such a question?”

“When you are flesh what will you be?”

“Like you, Julien.”

“And why not like you were at first-brown-haired and brown-eyed?”

“That was only for Suzanne, that was what Suzanne would see, and so I took that shape and grew in that shape, a Scotsman of her village. I would be you. You are beautiful.”

I pondered much. I gambled, drank, danced until dawn, fought and argued with Confederate patriots and Yankee enemies, made and lost fortunes in various realms, fell in love a couple of times, and in general came to realize I grieved night and day for my Katherine. Perhaps I needed a purpose to my life, something beyond the making of money and the lavishing of it upon cousins far and wide, something besides the building of new bungalows on our lands, and the acquisition of more and more property. Katherine had been a purpose of sorts. I had never had any other.

Except for the fiend, of course. To play with him, to mutate flesh, to court and use him. Ah, I began to see through everything!

Then came the year 1871. Summer, and yellow fever, as it always struck, running rampant among the newest of the immigrants.

Darcy and Katherine and their boys had lately been abroad. In fact, for six months, they had been in Europe, and no sooner had the handsome Irishman set foot on shore than he came down with the fever.

He’d lost his immunity to it in foreign lands, I suppose, or whatever, I don’t honestly know, except that the Irish were always dying of this disease, and we were never affected by it. Katherine went mad. She sent letters to me in the Rue Dumaine; please come and cure him.

I said to Lasher, “Will he die?”

Lasher appeared at the foot of my bed, collected, arms folded, dressed as I had been dressed the day before, all illusion of course.

“I think he will die,” he said. “And perhaps it’s time. Don’t fret. There is nothing even a witch can do against this fever.”

I wasn’t so sure. But when I called upon Marguerite she began to cackle and dance: “Let the bastard die and all his spawn with him.”

This disgusted me. What had little Clay and Vincent done, those innocent children, except be born boys as I had been with my brother, Rémy?

I went back to the city, pondering what to do, consulting doctors and nurses, and of course the fever raged as it always did in hot weather, and the bodies piled high at the cemeteries. The city stank of death. Great fires were burned to drive away the evil effluvia.

The rich cotton factors and merchandising giants who had come south to make a buck after the war went down to the Grim Reaper as easily as the Irish peasants off the ships.

Then Darcy died. He died. And there was Katherine’s coachman at my door.

“He’s dead, Monsieur. Your sister begs you to come!”

What could I do? I had never set foot in that First Street house since it had been completed. I did not even know poor little Clay or Vincent by sight! I had not seen my sister in a year, except to argue with her once in a public street. Suddenly all my riches and my pleasures seemed nothing to me. My sister was begging me to come.

I had to go and I had to forgive her.

“Lasher, what do I do?”

“You will see,” he said.

“But there is no female to carry on the line! She will wither as a widow behind closed doors. You know it. I know it.”

“You will see,” he said again. “Go to her.”

The whole family held its breath. What will happen?

I went to the First Street house. It was a rainy night, very hot and simmering, and in the Irish slums only blocks away, the bodies of fever victims were stacked in the gutters.

A stench wafted on the breeze from the river. But there stood this house as it always has, majestic among its oaks and magnolia trees, a narrow and high-flung castle complete with battlements and walls that appear indestructible. A deep secretive house, full of graceful designs yet somehow ominous.

I saw the window of the master bedroom to the north. I saw a sight which many have seen since, and which you have seen, the flicker of candles against the shutters.

I came into the house, forcing the door, with Lasher’s help or my own strength I do not know, only that it yielded to me, and the lock broke and was thereafter useless.

I took off my rain-drenched coat and went up the stairs. The door to the master bedroom lay open.

Of course I expected to see the dead Irish architect lying there putrefying on summer schedule. But I soon realized he had been taken away on account of the contagion. The superstitious Irish maids came to tell me this, that Darcy, poor soul, was already buried, and with the bells of St. Alphonsus tolling night and day, there had been no time for a Requiem.

Within the room, all had been scrubbed down and cleaned, and it was Katherine who lay on the bed, a giant four-poster with black carved lions’ heads in its posts, crying softly into the embroidered pillow.

She looked so small and so frail; she looked like my little sister. Indeed, I called her that. I sat by her and comforted her. She sobbed on my shoulder. Her long black hair was still thick and soft, and her face held its beauty. All those babies lost had not taken away her charms or her innocence, or the radiant faith in her eyes when she looked at me.

“Julien, take me home to Riverbend,” she said. “Take me home. Make Mother forgive me. I cannot live here alone. Everywhere I look I see Darcy, only Darcy.”

“I will try, Katherine,” I said. But there was no doubt in my mind, I could not make a reconciliation with Mother. Mother was so crazy now, she might not even know who Katherine was, or where she’d been. Things were that out of hand there. Last I saw Mother, she and Lasher had been making flowers spring early from their seeds. And Lasher had told Mother secrets of plants which could make a brew to make her see visions. That was Mother’s life of late. I might tell her Katherine had died and come back to earth and we had to be good to her. And who knows? She might have bought it.

“Don’t worry, my beautiful girl,” I said. “I’ll take you home if you want to go, and your little babies with you. All the family is there as always.”

She nodded her head, and gestured in a helpless graceful way as if to say it was in my hands.

I kissed her and held her in my arms, and then laid her down to rest, assuring her that I would sit with her until morning.

The door was closed. The nurse was gone. The little boys were quiet, wherever they were. I went out of the room to have a smoke.

I saw Lasher.

He stood at the foot of the staircase looking up at me. He said in his silent voice, Study this house. Study its doors, its rooms, its patterns. Riverbend will perish as did the citadel we built in far-off Saint-Domingue, but this house will last to serve its purpose.

A dreamy feeling came over me. I went down the stairs, and began to do what you have done, Michael, a thousand times. Walk about this house slowly, in and around, laying my hands upon its doorframes and its brass knobs and musing at the paintings in the dining room and the lovely plaster ornament that everywhere decorated its ceilings.

Yes, a beautiful house, I thought. Poor Darcy. No wonder his designs had been so much the fashion. But he had had no witch’s blood I supposed. I suspected my nephews Clay and Vincent were as innocent as my brother, Rémy. I went out into the gardens. I perceived what had been done, a great octagon of a lawn, with an octagon carved in the stone posts that ended the limestone balustrades. And everywhere flagstones at angles, so that one was beset in the moonlight with lines and designs and patterns.

“Behold the roses in the iron,” said Lasher to me. By this he meant the cast-iron railings. And I saw what he pointed out, lines at angles, echoing the angles of the flags, as well as the roses.

He walked with his arm around me now, and I felt a thrill in this, this closeness with him. I had half a mind to invite him into the trees, and give myself over to him. I was addicted as I said. But I had to remember my beloved sister. She might wake and cry and think that I had left her.

“Remember all these things,” he said again. “For this house will last.”

As I came into the hallway, I saw him in the high dining room door with his hands on the frame. How it soared above him with its tapered keyhole shape, more narrow above, and thereby looking higher.

I turned to note that the front door, through which I’d just come, which I had left wide open, was of the same design, and there he stood, as if he had never been in the other place at all, a man like me with his hands on the frame, peering back at me.

“Would you live after death, Julien? Of all my witches you ask me so little about that final darkness.”

“You don’t know anything about it, Lasher,” I commented. “You said so yourself.”

“Don’t be cruel with me, Julien. Not tonight of all nights. I am glad to be here. Would you live after death? Would you hover and stay, that is what I am asking you?”

“I don’t know. If the Devil was trying to take me into hell I might hover and stay, if that’s what you mean, a purgatorial soul wandering about, appearing to voodoo queens and spiritualists. I suppose I could do it.” I crushed out my cigar in the ashtray on the marble table, which is there now, this very day, in the lower hallway.

“Is that what you’ve done, Lasher? Are you some vile human being become a ghost, hovering forever, and seeking to wrap yourself in an undeserved mystery?”

I saw something in the face of the fiend change. One moment he was my twin and then he had smiled. Indeed, he was imitating my very smile and to perfection. I had not seen him do this trick before very often. And as he slumped against the door frame, he folded his arms as I might, and he made a little sound of cloth brushing the wood, to let me know how strong he was.

“Julien,” he said, actually shaping his mouth with the words, he was so strong, “maybe all mysteries are nothing at the core. Maybe the world is made from waste.”

“And you were there when it happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said, imitating my own sarcastic tone exactly. He raised his eyebrows as I raise mine. I had never seen him so strong.

“Shut the door, Lasher,” I said, “if you are so very mighty.”

And to my astonishment, he reached for the knob and stepped aside, and made the door close exactly as if he were a man doing it. That was the limit for him, for it had been an astonishing feat. He was gone. The air held the heat as it always did.

“Admirable,” I whispered.

“Remember this place if you would linger or come back; remember its patterns. In the dim world beyond they will shine in your eyes, they will guide you home. This is a house for centuries to come. This is a house worthy of the spirits of the dead; this is a house in which you may safely remain. War or revolution or fire, or the river’s current, will not trouble you. I was held once…by two patterns. Two simple patterns. A circle, and stones in the form of a cross…two patterns.”

I memorized this. More proof that he was not the great Devil himself.

I went up the stairs. I had gotten just a little more out of him than I usually did, but nothing much really. And then there was Katherine.

This time I found her awake, and standing by the window.

“Where did you go?” she asked me breathlessly. And then she threw her arms around me again and leant against me. It seemed I felt Lasher stirring near us. I told him through the mind, Do not come here now, you’ll scare her. I lifted her chin as men do to women, though how the little things stand it, I don’t know, and I kissed her.

At that very second, something caught me by surprise. It was the pressure of her breasts against me. She wore nothing but a soft white dressing gown, and I felt her nipples, her heat, and then a stream of heat it seemed from her lips. But when I drew back and looked at her I saw only innocence.

I also saw a woman. A beautiful woman. A woman whom I had loved, who had risen up against me and cast me aside for another, a body loved by me as a brother should love his sister, with nothing about it unfamiliar to me from all our childhood romps and swims, and yet it was a woman’s body, and it was in my arms, and in a moment of daring, I kissed her again, and then again, and then even once more, and I felt her begin to burn against me.

I was repelled. This was my baby sister, Katherine. I took her to the bed and laid her down; she seemed confused, looking at me. Dare I say spellbound? Did she think it was Darcy come back?

“No,” she whispered. “I know it is you. I have always loved you. I’m sorry. You must forgive my little sins, but when I was a little girl I used to dream we would marry. We would walk down the aisle. It was only when Darcy came that I gave up that silly incestuous dream. God forgive me.”

She made the Sign of the Cross, and drew up her knees, and reached for the covers.

I don’t know what came over me. Fury? I looked down at this little feminine thing, this creature with her outstretched hand and ragged veil of black hair, and pale shivering face, and I saw her make the Sign of the Cross, and I became enraged.

“How dare you play with me in this way!” I said, and I threw her back on the bed. Her dressing gown opened and there were her breasts, a luscious enticement.

Within seconds, I was ripping open my own clothes. She had begun to scream. She was terrified.

“No, no Julien, don’t!” she cried.

But I was on top of her, and spreading her legs, and ripping what cloth was left out of my way.

“Oh Julien, please, please, don’t,” she cried in the most heartbreaking voice. “It’s me, it’s Katherine.”

But it was done. I had raped her and I took my time in finishing it and then climbed off the bed and went to the window. I thought my heart would burst. And I could not believe what I had done.

Meantime, she had gone from a little curl of a sobbing woman in the bed, to rushing to me, and suddenly flinging her arms around me and crying again my name, “Julien, Julien!”

What did this mean? That she wanted me to protect her from myself?

“Oh, darling child,” I said. And I broke down utterly, kissing her.

And then we did it again, and again, and again.

And Mary Beth was born to us nine months after.

By then we had been at Riverbend all that time, and I could scarcely stand the sight of Katherine.

I had not dared to trouble her under our own roof, and I doubt she would have received me anyway. She had blotted the truth from her mind. She thought the thing in her belly was Darcy’s baby. She said her rosary all the time, for Darcy’s unborn child.

And everyone, everyone knew what I had done to her. Julien the evil one. Julien had got his sister with child. The cousins stared at me as if I were anathema. Out of Fontevrault, Augustin’s son Tobias came especially to curse me and tell me I was the Devil. Far and wide people knew who did not dare to show their displeasure.

And then there were all my gambling, whoring friends, who thought it strange and unmanly, but when I did not falter a step in my usual dance, they merely gave a shrug and accepted it. That’s one thing I found out, you can carry off most any sin, if you just do nothing.

Ah, but the baby was coming. Once again, the whole family held its breath.

And Lasher? When I saw him at all, he was as impassive as he had ever been. He hovered near Katherine all the time, unseen by her.

“It was his doing,” my mother said. “He pushed you into her arms. Stop fretting. She has to have more babies, everyone knows, she has to have a daughter. Why not you for the father, a powerful witch? I think it’s a fine idea.”

I didn’t bother to talk about it again with her.

And I didn’t know if it had been his doing. I don’t know now. All I knew was it was the most expensive pleasure I’d ever bought, this rape, and that I, Julien, who could kill men at any time without a qualm, felt filthy and acquainted with cruelty and with evil.

Katherine really lost her mind before Mary Beth was born. But nobody knew it.

From the time of the rape, really, she was never anything any more than a mumbling woman saying her beads, and talking about angels and saints, good for playing with little children.

But then came the night of Mary Beth’s birth; Katherine was huge with the child, and screaming in agony. I was in the room, with the black midwives and the white doctor, and with Marguerite and all those who were to attend and help. You never saw such a committee assembled.

And finally with her last and most wrenching scream, Katherine pushed Mary Beth forth into the world, and here it came, this beautiful and perfect child, resembling more a small female than an infant. By that I mean that though its head was a baby’s head, it had rich black curls already, and one shining tooth flashed beneath the baby’s upper lip, and its arms and legs were exquisite. It writhed with life and gave forth the most soft and beautiful and lustful cries.

They put it into my arms.

“Eh bien, Monsieur, this is your niece,” said the old doctor with great ceremony.

And I looked down at this daughter of mine, and then in the corner of my eye saw the devil come in vapor form, my Lasher, not in the solid way so that others in this room might see, but merely an apparition, soft as silk brushing my shoulder. And the child’s eyes had seen it too! The child was making its tiny precocious mouth into a smile for it.

Her cries grew quiet; her tiny hands opened and closed. I planted my kiss on her forehead. A witch, a witch through and through; the scent of power rose from her like perfume.

And then came the most ominous words I had ever heard, confidential from the fiend to me:

“Well done, Julien. You have served your purpose!”

I was thunderstruck. Every silent and deafening syllable sank in slowly.

I let my right hand slip up and around the baby’s throat, beneath its covers of white linen and lace, and closed my thumb and my forefinger tightly against the pale flesh, though no one in the room took notice.

“Julien, no!” came his whisper in my head.

“Oh, come now,” I asked in my secret voice, “you need me to protect it for a little while longer, don’t you? Look around you, spirit. Look with a human’s cunning, for once, and not the addled brains of an angel. What do you see? An old hag and a mumbling madwoman, and a baby girl. Who will teach it what it needs to know? Who will be there to protect it when it begins to show its gifts?”

“Julien, I never meant that I would harm you.”

I laughed and everyone thought I was laughing at the wriggling child, which did certainly seem to have its little eyes focused tight upon something which no one else could now see, just over my shoulder, and now I gave it over to the nurses, and they bathed it again to make it ready for its mother.

I withdrew from the room. I was steaming with rage. You have served your purpose! Indeed, had that been it from the very first? More than likely. And all the rest was games and I knew it.

But I knew this too. Around me in all directions, there thrived an immense and prosperous family, a family of people I loved, who had once loved me before this abominable act, and stood to love me still if I could earn their forgiveness. And in that room behind me was a darling child who touched my heart as all children always have-and this child was mine, my firstborn!

All the good things, I thought, the good things which are life itself! And damn this daemon to hell that I cannot get rid of it!

But what right had I to complain? What right had I to regret? What right had I to be ashamed? I’d let the thing enslave me from my earliest years, when I knew it was treacherous and fanciful and pompous and selfish. I’d known. I’d played into its hands as all the witches had, as the whole family had.

And now, if it was to let me live, I had to be of some clear use to it. I had to think of something. Teaching Mary Beth wouldn’t be enough. No, not nearly enough. After all the thing itself was a damned good teacher. No, I had to think of something quick, and it was going to take all my witches’ gifts to do it.

Even as I brooded, the family gathered. Cousins came running, shouting and waving and clapping their hands.

“It’s a girl, it’s a girl! At last, Katherine has given birth to a girl!”

And suddenly I was surrounded by loving hands, and loving kisses. It was perfectly fine that I’d raped my sister; or I’d done penance enough; whatever, I didn’t know. But Riverbend was filled with cheering voices. Champagne corks popped; musicians played. The baby was held aloft from the gallery. Ships on the river began to blow their whistles to honor our visible and obvious festivity.

Oh God in heaven! What will you do now, I thought, you evil evil man? What will you do merely to keep yourself alive and to save that tiny baby from utter destruction?