Lasher

Twenty

LET ME PASS quickly to the point. I did not lay eyes upon the bleak dreamy landscape of Donnelaith until the year 1888. My “memories” continued much in the same vein, though there was increasingly confusing material mixed up with them.

By that time, Mary Beth had grown into a powerful witch, more quick-witted, cunning and philosophically interesting than Katherine, Marguerite and even Marie Claudette insofar as I could judge such things. But then Mary Beth was of a new age-postwar, post-crinoline, as they said.

She worked by my side in my three endeavors: care of family; pursuit of pleasure; making money. She became my confidante, and my only friend.

I had many lovers during these years-men and women. I was married. My darling wife, Suzette, whom I loved very much in my own selfish way, gave me four children. I wish I could tell you the story of all this, because in a way, everything a man does is part of the moral fabric of who he is, and what he is. And this was never more true than with me.

But there isn’t time. So let me only explain that no matter how close I was to wife, lovers, and children, it was Mary Beth who was my friend, who shared the secret of the knowledge of Lasher and all its burdens and dangers.

New Orleans was, throughout that period, vice-ridden, and a great place for whoring, gambling, and merely watching the spectacle of life in all its seediness and violence. I adored it, felt fearless in its midst and pursued my passions. And Mary Beth, disguised as a boy, went with me everywhere. While I protected my sons somewhat, sending them off to Eastern schools and preparing them for the world at large, I nurtured Mary Beth with much stronger ingredients.

Mary Beth was the single most intelligent human being I have ever known. There was nothing in business or politics or any realm which she could not grasp. She was cool, relentless, logical, but above all imaginatively brilliant. She saw the larger scheme of things.

And she perceived early on that the daemon did not.

Let me give an example. There came to New Orleans in the early 1880s a musician called Blind Henry. Blind Henry was an idiot savant. There was nothing he could not play on the piano. He played Mozart, Beethoven, Gottschalk, but Blind Henry was otherwise just what the title implies, an utter idiot.

When Mary Beth and I attended this concert, she wrote on her program a note to me, right under the nose of the daemon, so to speak, who was totally taken by the music. “Blind Henry and Lasher-same form of intellect.”

This was exactly right. It is a far more mysterious question than we can examine here. And today you know more in the modern world about idiot savants, autistic children and the like. But in her simple way, she was trying to communicate to me: Lasher cannot put either learning or perception into any real context. We, the living, have a context for what we know and feel. This dead thing does not.

And having understood this from an early age, Mary Beth did not mythologize the spirit. When I suggested it was a vengeful ghost, she shrugged and considered the possibility.

But-and this is key-she didn’t despise Lasher as I did, either.

On the contrary, she bore him love; and he forged with her a close emotional link, drawing from her a sympathy which I did not feel for the being.

And as I saw this happening, as I saw her nodding to my ironic statements, and carefully veiled warnings, as I saw her understanding me perfectly, yet nevertheless loving him, I understood better why he had always preferred women to men, for I think he played to a part of women which is more dormant in men. They were more likely to fall in love with, to feel pity for, to be enamored of, that which gives them erotic pleasure.

Of course this is a bias on my part. A bias. I presented it to her, and she sneered. “It’s like the old argument from the witch judges,” she said, “that women are more susceptible to the Devil’s blandishments because they are more stupid. Shame on you, Julien. Maybe the simple fact is I am more capable of love than you are.”

We argued about this all of our lives. All of our lives.

I once suggested in rapid debate that most women were morally flawed and could be led to anything. She quietly pointed out to me that she felt a deep honor-bound responsibility to Lasher, which I, the pragmatist and diplomat, did not feel. I was the one morally flawed, she said. And perhaps she was right.

Whatever the case, I always felt an abhorrence for the thing. And she didn’t feel it.

“When you are gone someday,” she said, “there will be only I and that thing. It will be my love, my solace, my witness. I do not really care what it is or whence it comes. I do not care what I am or whence I come. The idea that I can think of myself in those terms is an illusion.”

She was then fifteen, tall, black-haired, very sturdy of build and very pretty in a dark strong way which some men would not have found appealing. Her manner was quiet, and highly persuasive. All admired her, and anyone not afraid of her unflinching gaze and mannish poise usually was smitten by her.

I was impressed, of course. All the more because after saying such a thing, she could smile and do this trick which never failed to delight me: to take the thick braid of her black hair and untangle it so that the whole veil spilled over her shoulders in sharp little waves, and then shake it out and laugh, as if transforming herself at once in that gesture from my intellectual companion to a budding woman.

But understand, I was the only male ever to have power with Lasher. And I still maintain that I had a male’s immunity to the thing’s blandishments. And mark, I’ve been frank with you about my male amours. I am not prejudiced against that love that dares not say its name, and so forth. Love to me…is love. In my heart of hearts I loathed the creature! I loathed its reckless mistakes! I loathed its sense of humor.

Alors. Sharing my ambition in every regard, Mary Beth became familiar with our business dealings from early childhood. By the time she was twelve she had participated with me in decisions which so diversified and extended our fortune that an unstoppable money-making machine had been created from the Mayfair capital.

We were as active in Boston and New York and London as in the South. Money was in place where it could only make more money, and that money automatically made more money, and so forth and so on, and so it has been really since those days.

Mary Beth was a genius at it. And she learnt to use the spirit very skillfully, as her spy, her informant, her observer, her idiot savant adviser. It was quite startling to watch her at work with the being.

Meantime we had made the First Street house ours. My brother, Rémy, was quiet, retiring, his children sweet and good-natured. My boys were off at school. My poor daughter Jeannette, feebleminded as Katherine had been, died young. That is another tale-all that. My sweet Jeannette, my beloved wife, Suzette. I cannot tell it.

After the death of those two, which came much later on, and the death of my mother, Marguerite, Mary Beth and I were quite isolated from all the world in our shared knowledge and passion, and our relentless pursuit of pleasure. But this isolation had already begun.

We were also mad for the modern world. We journeyed to New York frequently merely to be in the thriving capital. We adored the railroads; we kept abreast of new inventions; indeed we invested in progress, per se. We had a passion for change, while many in our family and in our home had nothing of the sort. Rather they clung to a sleepy, glamorous Old World past, receding behind closed shutters. Not so with us.

We had…as they say in your time…we had our hands into everything.

And let me note that until we went to Europe in the year 1887, Mary Beth had maintained her status as a Virgin Warrior, so to speak, never allowing any man in any sort of way to really touch her. That is, she had fun in a thousand ways, but she ran no risk of mothering a witch until such a time as she could pick the father. That is why she preferred the boy disguise when we went cavorting on the town. And beautiful dark-eyed boy that she was, she never let anyone too close to her.

Finally the time came when we could break away for a long European trip, a Grand Tour, an exercise of our wealth on a large scale, a marvelous and long-overdue education. Overdue for me, that is, and perhaps even for her. If I have one regret it is that I did not travel more in life; and that I did not encourage others in my family to travel. But that is of small import now.

The spirit was very loath for us to go; over and over he warned against the dangers of wandering; he told us we possessed Paradise where we were. But we would not be deterred; Mary Beth was desperate to see the world, and the spirit would keep her happy; and within an hour of our departure it was clear that he was journeying with us.

Throughout our tour, he could be summoned with a silent wish, and frequently when I saw Mary Beth at a distance I saw him beside her.

In the city of Rome, he went into me for many hours, but the effort exhausted him. Indeed it seemed to madden him. He begged to go home, that we cross the sea, that we return to the house he so loved. He said that he detested this place; indeed he could not endure it. I told him we had to take this trip, that it was folly to think the Mayfairs would never journey afar, and to be quiet, there was nothing to be done for it.

When we journeyed north of Rome towards Florence, he became disconsolate, and turbulent, and actually left us. Mary Beth was afraid. She could not summon him, no matter what she did.

“So we are on our own in the mortal world,” I said with a shrug. “What can happen to us?”

She was leery and sad, and wandered the streets of Siena and Assisi by herself, scarce speaking to me. She missed the daemon. She said that we had caused it pain.

I was indifferent.

But oh, to my regret! When we reached Venice, and lodged in a gorgeous palazzo on the Grand Canal, the monster came to me. It was one of his most vicious and contrived and strong gestures.

I had left at home in New Orleans my beloved secretary and young quadroon lover Victor Gregoire, who was running my office for me in my absence as no one else could have ever done, I supposed.

When I reached Venice, I expected the usual communications from Victor to be waiting for me-some letters, contracts to be notarized, signed, that sort of thing. But mainly I anticipated his written assurance that all was well in New Orleans.

What greeted me was this: as I sat at my desk, above the canal, in a great vast drearily painted room in the Italian style, hung with velvet and very damp, with a cold marble floor, in walked Victor. Or so it seemed. For I knew in an instant this was not my Victor but someone who made himself look identical to him. He stood before me, smiling almost coyly-the young man I knew with pale golden skin, blue eyes, black hair, and a tall powerful body dressed to perfection. And then vanished.

Of course it had been the monster pretending to be Victor; making this vision to torment me. But why? I knew. I laid my head down on the desk and wept. Within an hour Mary Beth came in with the news from America. Victor had been killed two weeks ago in an accident. He had stepped off the curb at Prytania and Philip and been run down, right outside the apothecary. Two days later he had died, calling for me.

“We had better go home,” she said.

“I will not!” I declared. “Lasher has done this.”

“He would not.”

“Oh, hell yes he would and he did.” I was in a rage. I locked myself in my bedroom on the third floor of the palazzo. I had only a view of the narrow calle below. I paced in a fury.

“Come to me,” I said. “Come!”

And finally he did, once again tricked out as a brittle, shiny smiling cutout of my Victor.

“Laughter, Julien. I would go home now.”

I turned my back on the vision. He made the draperies blow, the floors rattle. It seemed he made the deep stone walls rumble.

At last I opened my eyes.

“I would not be here!” he declared. “I would be home.”

“Ah, and to walk the streets of Venice means nothing to you?”

“I loathe this place, I do not want to hear hymns. I hate you. I hate Italy.”

“Ah, but what of Donnelaith, what of that? Were we to go north to Scotland?” For that had been one of my most important goals on this trip, to see the town for myself where Suzanne had called up the thing.

He passed into a tantrum. Papers flew from my table, the bedcovers were snatched up and twirled into a great shape, which knocked me flat on my back before I realized what was happening. Never had I seen the thing so strong. All my life, its strength had been increasing. And now it had struck me.

I shot up from the floor, snatched the fabric and cast it down and cursed the thing. “Be gone from me, Devil! Feast no more on my soul, Devil. My family shall cast you out, Devil!” And I tried with all my might and main to see it, spirit that it was-and I did, a great dark collecting force in the room, and with my entire will and a great roar I drove it out of the windows, out over the calle, and above the rooftops, where it seemed to unfurl like a monstrous fabric without end.

Mary Beth came rushing to me. Back it came to the window. Again I shot it my most heated and venomous curses!

“I shall return to Eden,” it roared. “I shall slay all who bear the name Mayfair.”

“Ah,” said Mary Beth, opening her arms. “And then you will never be flesh, and we will never return, and ail our dreams shall be laid waste and those who love you and know you best will be gone. You will be alone again.”

I got out of the way. I saw what was coming. She reached out to it again, and in the softest voice wooed it. “You have built this family. You have made the Eden in which it lives. Grant us this little time. All the good that has come to us has been through you. Will you begrudge us this little journey, you who have always given us our way, and what would make us happy?”

The spirit was weeping. I could bear that peculiar soundless sound. It was a wonder it didn’t plunk down the syllables: Weeping! the way it plunked down the syllables: Laughter. But it did not. It took the more eloquent and heartrending path.

Mary Beth stood at the window. Like many an Italian girl, she had matured young in our own southern heat; she was a luscious flower in her red dress, the small-waisted, big-skirted fashion of the times making her full breasts and hips all the more gorgeous. I saw her bow her head and rest her lips on her hands, and then give this kiss in offering to the being.

It wrapped itself slowly around her, lifting and caressing her hair, and twisting it, and letting it fall again. She let her head turn on her shoulders. She gave herself to it.

I turned my back. I brooded and waited in silence.

At last it came to me. “I love you, Julien.”

“Would you be flesh? Would you continue to shower all blessings upon us-your children, your helpers, your witches?”

“Yes, Julien.”

“Let us go to Donnelaith,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Let me see the glen where our family was born. Let me lay a wreath of flowers on the glen floor where our Suzanne was burnt alive. Let me do this.”

This was the most shameful lying! I no more wanted to do that than to go play the bagpipes and wear the tartan! But I was determined to see Donnelaith, to know it, to penetrate to the core of this mystery!

“Very well,” Lasher said, buying the lie, for after all, who could lie to him better than I could, by this time?

“Take my hand when we are there,” I said. “Tell me what I should know.”

“I will,” he said in a resigned voice. “Only leave this accursed popish country. Leave these Italians and their crumbling church. Get away from here. Go north, yes, and I go with you, your servant, your lover-Lasher.”

“Very well, spirit,” I said. And then trying to mean it with all my heart, and finding some meaning in it, I said, “I love you, spirit, as well as you love me!” And then the tears sprang to my eyes.

“We will know each other in the darkness someday, Julien,” he said. “We will know each other as ghosts when we roam the halls of First Street. I must be flesh. The witches must prosper.”

I found this thought so terrifying that I said nothing. But be assured, Michael, it hasn’t been so. I am in no realm that is shared by any other soul.

These things cannot be explained; even now my understanding is too dim for words. I know only that you and I are here, that I see you, and you see me. Maybe that is all creatures are ever meant to know in any realm.

But I didn’t know that then. Any more than any other living being, I couldn’t grasp the immense loneliness of earthbound spirits. I was in the flesh as you are now. I knew nothing else, nothing unbounded and purgatorial as what I have since suffered. Mine was the naïveté of the living; now it is the confusion and longing of the dead.

Pray when I am finished this tale, I will go on to something greater. Punishment even would have its shape, its purpose, some conviction of meaning. I cannot imagine eternal flames. But I can imagine eternal meaning.

We left Italy immediately as the daemon had asked us to do. We journeyed north, stopping again in Paris for only two days before we made the crossing, and drove north to Edinburgh.

The daemon seemed quiet. When I tried to engage it in conversation, it would say only, “I remember Suzanne,” and there was something utterly without hope in its manner.

Now in Edinburgh a remarkable thing happened. Mary Beth, in my presence, begged that the daemon come with her and protect her. She, who had gone out with me disguised, would now wander on her own, with only her familiar to protect her. In sum, she lured Lasher away, whistling to herself as she went out, walking in a man’s tweed coat and breeches, her hair swept up beneath a small shapeless cap, her steps big and easy as any boy’s steps might be.

And I, alone, went at once to the University of Edinburgh, on the trail of the finest professor of history in those parts, and soon cornered the man, and, plying him with drink and money, was soon closeted away with him in his study.

His was a charming house in the Old Town, which many of the rich had long deserted but which he still preferred, for he knew the whole history of the building. The rooms were filled with books, even to the narrow hallways, and the stairway landing.

He was an ingratiating, volatile little creature-with a shiny bald head, silver spectacles and rather showy flaring white whiskers, which were then the style-who spoke with a thick Scots accent to his English, and he was passionately in love with the folklore of his country. His rooms were crammed with dreary pictures of Robert Burns, and Mary Queen of Scots, and Robert the Bruce, and even Bonnie Prince Charlie.

I thought it all rather amusing, but I was too excited to keep still when he admitted that indeed he was, as his students had told me, an expert on the ancient folklore of the Highlands.

“Donnelaith,” says I. “I may have the spelling wrong. Here. But this is the word.”

“No, you’ve got it right,” he said. “But wherever did you hear of it? The only folks who go up there now are the students interested in the old stones, and the fishermen and the hunters. That glen is a haunted place, very beautiful of course, and well worth the trek, but only if you have some purpose. There are terrible legends in those parts, as terrible as the legends of Loch Ness, or Glamis Castle.”

“I have a purpose. Tell me about it, everything that you know,” said I, frightened that any moment I would feel the spirit’s presence. I wondered if Mary Beth had gone into some dangerous pub where women are in the main not allowed, just to keep Lasher on his toes.

“Well, it all goes back to the Romans,” said the professor. “Pagan worship in those parts, but the name Donnelaith refers to an ancient clan stronghold. The Clan Donnelaith were Irish and Scots, descendants of the missionaries who went up there from Ireland to spread the word of God in the time of St. Brendan. And of course the Picts were up there, before the Romans. Rumor was they built their castle in Donnelaith because it was a place blessed by the pagan spirits. We are talking now of the Picts when we speak of pagans. That was their part of Scotland up there, and the Donnelaith clan probably descended from them as well. You know how it went, pagans and Catholics.”

“Catholics built upon pagan shrines to appease and include the local superstitions.”

“Exactly,” said he. “And even the Roman documents mention terrible things about that glen and the things that lurked in it. They mention a sinister childlike breed, which could overrun the world if ever allowed to stray from the valley. And a particularly vicious species of the ‘little people.’ Of course you are familiar with the little people. Don’t laugh at them, I warn you.” Yet he smiled as he said this. “But you can’t find the original material on any of that anymore. Whatever, even before the Venerable Bede those tribes up there had become the Clan of Donnelaith, and Bede even mentions a cult center, a Christian church there.”

“What was its name?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” says he. “The Venerable Bede never said, at least not that I remember, but it had to do with a great saint who was, as you can probably guess, a converted pagan. You know, one of those legendary kings of great potency who suddenly fell upon his knees and allowed himself to be baptized, and then worked a score of miracles. Just the sort of things the Celts and the Picts of those times required of their God if they were going to go over to him.

“The Romans never really tamed the Highlands, you know. And neither really did the Irish missionaries. The Romans actually forbade their soldiers from going into the glen, or to the nearby islands. Something to do with the licentiousness of the women. The Highlanders were Catholic later on, yes, fiercely so, ready to fight to the death, but they were Catholic in their own strange way. And that was their downfall.”

“Explain,” said I, pouring him another glass of port, and peering over the parchment map which he spread out before us. This was a facsimile, he explained, that he’d made himself from the real thing under glass in the British Museum.

“The town reached its height in the fourteen hundreds. There is some evidence it was a market town. The loch was a true port in those times. Rumor was, the Cathedral was magnificent. Not the church Bede mentions, you understand, but a Cathedral which had taken centuries to build, and all the time under the wing of the Clan of Donnelaith, who were devoted to this saint, and regarded him as the guardian of all Scots, and the one someday to save the nation.

“You have to go to travel accounts for descriptions of the shrine, and there isn’t very much there, and nobody has ever bothered to compile it.”

“I’ll compile it,” I said.

“If you have a century to stay here, you might,” said he, “but you ought to go up to the glen and see how little remains of all that. A castle, a pagan circle of stones, the foundations of the town, now totally overgrown, and then those terrible ruins of the Cathedral.”

“But what did happen to it? What did you mean its Catholicism was its ruin?”

“Those Highland Catholics would yield to no one,” he said. “Not to Henry the Eighth when he tried to convert them to his new church in the name of Anne Boleyn, and not to the great reformer John Knox, either. But it was John Knox-or his followers-who destroyed them.”

I closed my eyes; I was seeing the Cathedral. I was seeing the flames, and the stained glass exploding in ail directions. I opened my eyes with a shudder.

“You’re a strange man,” he said. “You’ve got the Irish blood, don’t you?”

I nodded. Told him my father’s name. He was flabbergasted. Of course he remembered Tyrone McNamara, the great singer. But he didn’t think anyone else did. “And you are his son?”

“Aye,” I said. “But go on. How did the followers of Knox destroy Donnelaith? Oh, and the stained glass. There was stained glass, wasn’t there, where would that have come from?”

“Made right there,” said he, “all through the twelve hundreds and thirteen hundreds by the Franciscan monks from Italy.”

“Franciscans from Italy. You mean the Order of St. Francis of Assisi was there.”

“Most definitely so. The Order of St. Francis was popular right up to the time of Anne Boleyn,” he said. “The Observant Friars were the refuge of Queen Catherine, when Henry divorced her, of course. But I don’t think Observant Friars built or maintained the Cathedral at Donnelaith; it was far too elaborate, too rich, too full of ritual for simple Franciscans. No, it was probably the Conventuals; they were the Franciscans who kept the property, I believe. Whatever the case, when King Henry broke with the pope, and went to looting the monasteries all around, the Clan of Donnelaith drove out his soldiers without a moment’s hesitation. Terrible, terrible bloody battles in the glen. And even the bravest British soldiers were loath to go up there.”

“The name of the saint.”

“I don’t know. I told you. Probably some meaningless Gaelic collection of syllables and when we break it down we’ll find it’s descriptive like Veronica or Christopher.”

I sighed. “And John Knox.”

“Well, Henry died, as you know, and his Catholic daughter, Mary, took the throne, and another bloodbath ensued and this time it was Protestants who were burnt or hanged or whatever. But next, we had Elizabeth the First! The Great Queen, and once again Great Britain was Protestant.

“The Highlands were prepared to ignore the whole thing, but then came John Knox, the great reformer, and preached his famous sermon against the idolatry of the papists, at Perth in 1559, and it was war in the glen as the Presbyterians descended upon the Cathedral. Burnt it, smashed the glass to pieces, laid ruin the Cathedral school, burnt the books, all of it gone. Horrible horrible story. Of course they claimed the people were witches in the glen, that they worshiped a devil who looked like a man; that they had it all mixed up with the saints; but it was Protestant against Catholic finally.

“The town never recovered. It hung on till the late sixteen hundreds, when the last of the clan was killed in a fire in the castle. Then there was no more Donnelaith. Just nothing.”

“And no more saint.”

“Oh, the saint was gone in 1559, whoever he was, God bless him. His cult disappeared with the Cathedral. You have only a little Presbyterian town after that, with the ‘abominable’ pagan circle of stones outside it.”

“What do we know about the pagan legends in particular?” I asked.

“Only that there are those who still believe them. Now and then, someone will come from as far away as Italy. They will ask about the stones. They seek the road to Donnelaith. They even ask about the Cathedral. Yes, I’m telling you the truth; they’ll come asking for the Glen of Donnelaith and they’ll journey up there to look about in search of something. And then you are here, asking the very same questions, really, in your own way. The last person was a scholar from Amsterdam.”

“Amsterdam.”

“Yes, there is an order of scholars there. Indeed, they have a Motherhouse in London also. They are organized like religious but they have no beliefs. Over my lifetime they have come some six times to explore the glen. They have a very strange name. Luckier than the saint, I suppose. Their name is unforgettable.”

“What is it?” asked I.

“Talamasca,” he said. “They are really very well-educated men, with a great respect for books. Here, see this little Book of the Hours? It’s a gem! They gave it to me. They always bring me something. See this? This is one of the first King James Bibles ever printed. They brought that last time they visited. They go camp in that glen, really, they do. They stay for weeks and then they go away, invariably disappointed.”

I was overcome with excitement. All I could think of for a moment was Marie Claudette’s strange tale to me when I was only three of how a scholar from Amsterdam had come to Scotland and rescued poor Deborah, daughter of Suzanne. For a moment all manner of images came back to me, from the daemon’s memories, and I almost lost consciousness. But time was too precious to indulge in any trances now. I had this kindly little doctor of history and had to get everything I could from him.

“Witchcraft,” I said. “Witchcraft up there. The burnings in the seventeenth century. What do you know of them?”

“Oh, ghastly tale. Suzanne, the Milkmaid of Donnelaith. On that I happen to have an invaluable piece of material, one of the original pamphlets circulated in those days by the witch judges.”

He went to his press and took out of it a small, crumbling quarto of pages. I could see a coarse engraving of a woman surrounded by flames that resembled more huge leaves or tongues of fire. And in thick English letters was written:

“I will buy this from you,” I said.

“Not on your life,” says he. “But I’ll have it copied in detail for you.”

“Good enough.” I took out my wallet and laid down a wad of American dollars.

“That will do, that will do. Don’t get carried away! What a passionate fellow you are. Must be the Irish blood. The French are by nature so much more reticent. It’s my granddaughter who does the copying and it won’t take her that long. She’ll give you a lovely transcript in facsimile form on parchment.”

“Good, now tell me what it says.”

“Oh, same old foolishness. These pamphlets were circulated all over Europe. This one was printed in Edinburgh in 1670. Tells how Suzanne, the cunning woman, came under the sway of Satan, and gave him her soul, and how she was tried and burnt, but her daughter the merry-begot was spared, for the child had been conceived on the first of May, and was sacred to God, and no one dared touch her.

“The daughter was at last entrusted to the care of a Calvinist minister who took her to Switzerland, I believe, for the salvation of her soul. Name Petyr van Abel.”

“Petyr van Abel, you are certain of that name? It says it there?” I could scarcely contain myself. This was the only written word I had ever beheld to confirm the tale which Marie Claudette had told me. I did not dare say this was my ancestor as well. Having Tyrone McNamara seemed gauche enough. I merely fell silent, overwhelmed, and even contemplated stealing the pamphlet.

“Yes, indeed, Petyr van Abel, right here,” said he. “All written by a minister here in Edinburgh and printed here too and sold for quite a profit. These things were popular, you know, just like the magazines of today. Imagine people sitting around the fire and looking at this horrid picture of the poor girl burning.

“You know they were burning witches, right here in Edinburgh-at the Witches’ Well, on the Esplanade, right up till the seventeen hundreds.”

I made some murmur of total sympathy. But I was too stunned by this little confirmation to think clearly. Again I might have yielded to a load of Lasher’s memories if I had allowed myself to do so. Hurriedly, I put my questions:

“But by the time of the witch, the Cathedral was long burnt,” said I, trying to get my bearings.

“Yes, everything was pretty much gone. Only sheepherders up there. But do understand, some historians do believe that the witchcraft persecutions were a last bit of Protestant-Catholic feuding. There may be some truth to it. What they say specifically is this-life became very dull under John Knox, what with stained glass and statues gone, and all the old Latin hymns banned; and colorful Highland customs abandoned; and the people went back to some of their pagan ceremonies just to put some fancy in their lives, you know, some color.”

“Do you think that was the case in Donnelaith?”

“No. It was a typical trial. The Earl of Donnelaith was a poor man, living in a dreary castle. We hear nothing of him in that century, except that he later died in the fire that killed his son and grandson. The witch was a poor cunning woman from the village, called to account for bewitching some other humble person. We hear of no Sabbats. But God knows, they were held in other places up there. And this woman had been known to go to the pagan circle of stones, and that was used against her.”

“The stones themselves. What do you know of them?”

“Big controversy. Some say they are as old as Stonehenge, maybe older. I think they have something to do with the Picts, that at one time there were carvings on them. They’re very rough, those stones, and all of different sizes. They are remnants of what was once there, and I think at one time, they were deliberately defaced-all the inscriptions chipped off or worn off, and then the rest of the work was done by the weather.”

He opened a small book of drawings. “This is the art of the Picts,” he said.

I felt a terrible moment of disorientation. I don’t know what it meant. I shall never forget it. I looked at these warriors, rows and rows of crude little profile figures with shields and swords. I didn’t know what to make of it.

“I think the stones were their worshiping place. To hell with Stonehenge. But who will ever know? Perhaps the stones belonged to one of these strange tribes, or even the little people.”

“Who owns this valley?” said I.

The man wasn’t sure. All the land had been cleared up there by the government, the last starving settlers driven out for their own good. Pitiful. Just pitiful. Many had gone to America. Did I know of the Highland clearances?

“I’ve told you all I know,” he said. “I wish I knew more,”

“You will,” I said. “I will leave you the means to make a study.”

Then I begged him to join me on my trek to Donnelaith, but he swore he wasn’t up to it. “I love that glen,” he said. “I did go there many years ago with a man from the Amsterdam order. Alexander Cunningham was his name, a brilliant fellow. He paid for everything, and what a picnic we took with us. We stayed in the glen for a full week. I tell you I was glad to get back to civilization. But he said the strangest thing when he left me here, after our final dinner.

“ ‘You didn’t really find what you wanted up there, did you?’ I asked him.

“ ‘No, indeed, I didn’t, and thank God for that, if there is one.’ He went out of the house and then he came back. ‘Let me tell you something, old friend. Never make light of the legends of those glens,’ he said. ‘And never laugh at the story of Castle Glamis. The little people are still to be found, and they’d bring the witches to the Sabbat if they could for the old purpose.’

“Naturally I said to the man, ‘What purpose?’ But he wouldn’t answer on that, and seemed to be sincere in his silence.”

“But what is the Glamis Castle story?” asked I.

“Oh, that there is some curse in that family, you see, and when they tell the new heir he never smiles again. Many have written of that. I’ve been to Glamis Castle. Who knows? But this man from the Talamasca, he was a studious and passionate sort. We had a splendid time up there, in the glen, looking at the moon.”

“But you didn’t see the little people.”

He fell silent, then: “I did see something. But it wasn’t fairies, I don’t think. It was just a smallish man and woman, rather misshapen, same unfortunates you see begging in the streets. I did see those two once very early in the morning, and when I told my Talamasca friend he was in a perfect fury that he himself had not seen them. They didn’t come again.”

“With your own eyes, you saw them. Were they frightening?”

“Oh, they gave me the shivers!” He shook his head. “I don’t like to tell that tale,” he said. “Remember, to us, my friend, fairies aren’t merely humorous little beings. They are demons of the wild; they are powerful and dangerous and can be vengeful. I’ll tell you this, there are fairy lights in that glen. Fairy lights, those flames that rise up in the night on the distant horizon without explanation. I wish you luck in going there. I really wish I could go. We’ll begin collecting these research materials for you immediately.”

I went home to our fine lodgings in New Town.

Mary Beth had still not come back. I sat alone in our suite, a comfortable pair of bedrooms and a sitting room in between, and I drank my sherry and wrote down all that I could remember of what the man had told me. It was cold in these rooms. It would be cold in the glen. But I had to go there. The saint, the fairies, it’s all mixed up, I thought.

Then, in the silence, a feeling stole over me. Lasher was near. Lasher was in the room, and he knew my thoughts, and was close to me.

“Are you there, beloved?” I asked casually as I jotted down the last few words.

“So they gave you his name,” he said in his secret voice.

“Petyr van Abel, yes, but not the name of the saint.”

“Aye, Petyr,” he said softly. “I remember Petyr van Abel. Petyr van Abel saw Lasher.” His entire demeanor seemed tame and thoughtful. His secret voice was at its most resonant and beautiful.

“Tell me,” I coaxed.

“In the great circle,” he said. “We will go there. I have always been there. I mean that you will go there.”

“Can you be there and with us at the same time?”

“Yes,” he said with a sigh. But there seemed some doubt in his mind. It was, again, the limits of his thinking.

“Be clever, spirit, who are you?” I asked.

“Lasher, called by Suzanne, in the glen,” said he. “You know me. I have done so well for you, Julien.”

“Tell me where my daughter Mary Beth is, then, spirit. I hope you did not leave her somewhere in this dark city to her own devices.”

“Her devices are very good, Julien, allow me to remind you. But I left her to her own vices rather than devices.”

“Which means what?”

“She found a Scot who would be the father of her witch.”

I shot out of the chair in a protective rage! “Where is Mary Beth?”

But even then I heard her singing as she came down the corridor. She opened the door. She was very red-cheeked and beautiful from the cold, indeed, sort of glistening, and her hair was loose. “Well, I have done it at last,” she said. She danced into the room, and then put a kiss on my cheek. “Don’t look so stricken.”

“But who is the man?”

“Don’t give it another of your precious thoughts, Julien,” she said. “I shall never again lay eyes on him. Lord Mayfair is a good name, don’t you think?”

And so that was the lie that was written home, just as soon as we knew she had conceived. Lord Mayfair of Donnelaith had fathered her child. Indeed her “marriage” had been held in that “town”-though of course there was no town at all.

But I jump ahead of my story. I had the keen feeling at that moment that she had mated with success, and as she described this man to me, pure Scots, and black-haired and wicked and charming and very rich, I thought, Well, perhaps this is as good a way to choose a father for one’s child as any.

Any pain I felt, jealousy, shame, fear, whatever, I buried it inside me. We were committed libertines, she and I. I would not have her laughing at me. Besides, I was too eager to go to Donnelaith.

As I told her what I knew, our beloved spirit did nothing to come between us. Indeed, he was quiet that night. We were ail quiet. Though down the street there was quite a bit of talk. Seems one of the local lords had been murdered.

I didn’t learn till later who it was. And even then the name didn’t mean anything. But I think I know now that it was the father of Mary Beth’s baby.

Let’s go on to Donnelaith now. And let me tell you what I discovered there.

We set out the very next day, with two big carriages, one for ourselves and our luggage, the other for several servants needed to assist us. We went north to Darkirk, to the inn there, and from Darkirk on together on horseback, with two pack animals, and two of the local Scotsmen also on horseback to guide us.

We were both great lovers of horses, you understand, and riding in this treacherous hilly terrain was rather a treat for us. We had fine horses for the trip and provisions to stay the night, though not long after we set out, I became aware of my age, and aware of many aches and pains that I had been able to ignore before this time. Our guides were young. Mary Beth was young. I was pretty much on my own, bringing up the rear, but the beauty of the surrounding hills, of the rich forests, and the sky itself drugged me and made me very happy.

There was a chilly haunted glory to all this, however. Scotland! But I had to go all the way to the glen. When I felt the urge to turn round, I kept my counsel and went on. We had a hasty lunch, then rode until almost sunset.

It was just then that we came to the glen, or rather a slope descending upon it. And from a high promontory, just out of the deep forest of Scots pine and alder and oak, we saw the distant castle across the gulf, a hollow overgrown monstrous thing above the beautiful glowing waters. And in the valley itself the high straggled arches of the Cathedral, and the circle of stones, remote, and austere but plainly visible.

Darkness or no darkness, we decided to press on. We lighted our lanterns and went down through the scattered groves of trees, and into the grassy glen, and did not pitch camp till we had reached the remnants of the town, or more visibly, the village which had lingered on after it.

Mary Beth was for pitching camp in the pagan stones. But the two Scotsmen refused. Indeed, they seemed outraged. “That’s a fairy circle, madam,” said one of them. “You wouldn’t dare to do such a thing as camp there. The little people would take it very ill, believe me.”

“These Scots are as crazy as the Irish,” said Mary Beth. “Why didn’t we go on to Dublin if we wanted to hear about leprechauns?”

Her words gave me a little thrill of fear. We were now deep in the broad glen. The village did not include one single stone left standing. Our tents, our lanterns must have been visible for miles around. And suddenly, I felt strangely naked and undefended.

We should have gone up to the ruins of the castle, I thought. And then I realized it. We had not heard from our spirit all day. We had not felt his touch, his nudge, his breath.

The thrill of fear deepened. “Lasher, come to me,” I whispered. I feared suddenly that he had gone off to do some terrible thing to those we loved, that he was angry.

But he was quick to respond. As I walked out alone with my unlighted lantern in the tall grass, each step an ordeal since I was so sore from the ride, he came with a great cooling breeze, and made the grass bow to me in a huge circle.

“I am not angry with you, Julien,” he said. But his voice was thick with suffering. “We are in our land, the land of Donnelaith. I see what you see, and I weep for what I see, for I remember what there was once in this valley.”

“Tell me, spirit,” I said.

“Ah, the great church which you know, and processions of the penitent and the ill come for miles through the hills and down to worship at the shrine. And the thriving town full of shops and tradesmen, selling images…images…”

“Images of what?” asked I.

“What is it to me? I would be born again, and never waste my flesh this next time as I did in those years. I am not the slave of history but rather the slave of ambition. Do you understand the difference, Julien?”

“Enlighten me,” I said. “There are few times when you make me genuinely curious.”

“You are too frank, Julien,” it said. “What I mean to say is this. There is no past. Absolutely none. There is only the future. And the more we learn the more we know-reverence for the past is simply superstition. You do what you must do to make the clan strong. So do I. I dream of the witch who will see me and make me flesh. You dream of wealth and power for your children.”

“I do,” said I.

“There is nothing else. And you have brought me back to this place, which I have never left, that I might know it.”

I was standing there idle under the darkling sky, the valley huge, the ruins of the Cathedral just ahead of me. These words sank into my soul. I memorized them.

“Who taught you these things?” I asked.

“You did,” Lasher said. “It was you and your kind who taught me to want, to aim, to reach, rather than to lament. And now I remind you, for the past calls to you under false pretenses.”

“You think so,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “These stones, what are they? They are nothing.”

“May I see the church, spirit?”

“Oh yes,” said he. “Light your lantern if you will. But you will never see it as I saw it.”

“You’re wrong, spirit. When you come into me, you leave something of yourself behind. I have seen it. I have seen it with the faithful crowded to the doors, and the candles and the Christmas green-”

“Silence!” he declared and I felt him like the wind wrapping me so roughly suddenly he might knock me over. I went down on my knees. The wind ceased. “Thank you, spirit,” said I. I struck a match, shielding it carefully, and lighted the wick of the lantern. “Won’t you tell me of those times?”

“I’d tell you what I see from here. I see my children.”

“Do you speak of us now?”

But that was all he would say, though he followed me as I made a path through the high grass, over rocky and uneven ground, and came at last to the ruins themselves and stood in the giant nave looking at the broken arches.

Dear God, what a grand cathedral it must have been. I had seen its like all over Europe. It was not in the Roman style, with rounded arches and paintings galore; no doubt it was cold stone, and lofty and graceful as the Cathedral of Chartres or Canterbury.

“But the glass, does anything remain of the glorious glass?” I whispered.

And in mournful answer the wind swept broadly and serenely across the entire darkening glen and passed through the nave, once again, making the wild grass bend to and fro, and ruffling around me as if to embrace me. The moon had risen a bit, and the stars were shining through.

And suddenly beyond the very end of the nave, where the rose window had once been, where the arch stood at its height, I saw the spirit himself, immense, and huge and dark and translucent, spread across the sky like a great storm rolling in, only silent, and collecting and re-collecting and then in one sudden burst dispersing into nothingness.

Clear sky, the moon, the distant mountain, the wood. All that was plain and still and the air felt cold and empty. My lantern burnt on bright. I stood alone. The Cathedral seemed to grow taller around me, and I to be dwarfed and vain and petty and desperate. I sank down to the ground. I drew up my knee, and rested my hand and my chin upon it. I peered through the dark. I wished for Lasher’s memories to come to me.

But nothing came but my loneliness, and my sense of the absolute wonder of my life, and how much I loved my family, and how they flourished beneath the wing of this terrible evil.

Maybe it was so with all families, I thought. At the heart a curse, a devil’s bargain. A terrible sin. For how else can one attain such riches and freedom? But I didn’t really believe this. I believed, on the contrary, in virtue.

I saw my definition of virtue. To be good, to love, to father, to mother, to nurture, to heal. I saw it in its shining simplicity. “What can you do, you fool?” I asked of myself. “Except keep your family safe, give them the means to live on their own, strong and healthy and good. Give them conscience and protect them from evil.”

Then a solemn thought came to me. I was sitting there still, with the warm light of the lantern about me, and the high church on both sides, and the grass flattened like a bed before me. I looked up again, and saw that the moon had moved right into the great circle of the rose window. The glass of course was all gone. I knew it had been a rose window because I knew what they were. And I knew the meaning as well, the great hierarchy of all things which had prevailed in the Catholic Church and how the rose was the highest of flowers and therefore the symbol of the highest of women, the Virgin Mary.

I thought on that, and on nothing. And I prayed. Not to the Virgin. No, just to the air of this place, just to time, perhaps to the earth. I said: God, as if all this had that name, can we make this bargain? I will go to hell if you will save my family. Mary Beth will go to hell, perhaps, and each witch after her. But save my family. Keep them strong, keep them happy, keep them blessed.

No answer came to my prayers. I sat there a long time. The moon was veiled by clouds, then free again and brilliant and beautiful. Of course I did not expect to hear any answer to my prayers. But my bargain gave me hope. We, the witches, shall suffer the evil; and the others shall prosper. That was my vow.

I climbed to my feet, I lifted the lantern and I started to walk back.

Mary Beth had already gone to sleep in her tent. The two guides were smoking their pipes, and invited me to join them. I told them I was weary. I’d sleep and wake early.

“You weren’t praying up there, were you, sir?” asked one of the men. “ ‘Tis a dangerous thing to pray in the ruins of that church.”

“Oh, and why is that?” asked I.

“ ‘Tis St. Ashlar’s church, and St. Ashlar is likely to answer your prayer and who knows what will happen!”

Both men roared with laughter, slapping their thighs and nodding to one another.

“St. Ashlar!” I said. “You said Ashlar!”

“Yes, sir,” said the other, who had not spoken till now. “Was his shrine in olden times, the most powerful saint of Scotland, and the Presbyterians made it a sin to speak his name. A sin! But the witches always knew it!”

Time and space were naught. In the quiet haunted night of the glen, I was remembering: a boy of three, the old witch, the plantation, her tales to me in French. “Called up by accident in the glen…” I whispered to myself, “Come now my Lasher. Come now my Ashlar. Come now, my Lasher! Come now, my Ashlar!”

I began to murmur it, and then to say it aloud, the two men not understanding at all of course, and then out of the heart of the glen came the roaring wind, so fierce and huge it wailed against the mountains.

The tents flapped and whipped in the wind. The men ran to steady them. The lanterns went out. The wind became a gale, and as Mary Beth crept to my side, and held tight to my arm, a storm came down on Donnelaith, a storm of rain and thunder so fierce that we were all cowering before it.

All save I. I righted myself soon enough, realizing it was pointless to cower, and I stared back into it. I stared up into the heavens as the rain pelted and stung my face.

“Damn you, St. Ashlar, that’s who you are! Go to hell with you!” I cried. “A saint, a deposed saint, a saint knocked from his throne! Go back to hell with you. You are no saint. You are a daemon!”

One tent was torn loose and carried away. The guides ran to stop the other. Mary Beth tried to quiet me. The wind and the rain gave their full breath, strong perhaps as a hurricane.

To a peak of anger it came, so we saw a ghastly funnel of black cloud rising suddenly from the grass and spinning and spinning and darkening the whole sky, and suddenly-as swiftly as it had come-it vanished.

I stood stock-still. I was dripping wet. My shirt was half torn from my shoulder. Mary Beth uncovered her hair and walked round in the damp, staring upwards, bravely and curiously.

One of the guides came back to me.

“Goddamnit, man,” said he. “I told you not to pray to him. Whatever in hell did you pray for!”

I laughed softly to myself. “Oh, God, help me,” I sighed. “Is that the proof, Almighty God, that you are not there, that your saints could be such petty demons?”

The air was warming slightly. The men had the lanterns lighted. The water had vanished from the earth as if it had never come at all. We were still battered and wet but the moon was clear again, and flooding the glen with light. We went to right the tents, to dry the bedding.

I lay awake the whole night. As the sun came up, I went to the guides. “I have to know the story of this saint,” said I.

“Well, don’t say his name for god’s sakes,” said the other. “I wish I hadn’t said it last night, I’ll tell you. And I don’t know his story and you won’t hear it from anyone else I know either. It’s an old legend, man, perhaps a joke,” he said, “though we’ll be talking about that storm last night for many a night to come, I can tell you.”

“Tell me all,” I said.

“I don’t know. My grandmother said his name when she wished for an impossible thing, and said always to take care, and never wish for something from him unless you really wanted it. I’ve heard his name once or twice up there in the hills. There’s an old song they sing. But that’s all I know of it. I’m no Catholic. I don’t know saints. No one hereabouts knows saints.”

The other man nodded. “I myself did not know that much. I’ve heard my daughter call on him, though, to make the young men turn their heads to notice her.”

I pounded them with questions. They gave me nothing more. It was time for us to survey the ruins proper, the circle, the castle. The spirit lay back. I neither heard his voice nor saw any evidence of him.

Only once did fear come on me when searching the castle.

It was treacherous there. But he played no tricks.

We took our time. It was sunset before we made camp again. I had seen all that I had the strength to see. Many feet of dirt covered the original Cathedral floor, and who knew what lay below it? What tombs? What caches of books or documents? Or perhaps nothing.

And where had my precious Suzanne died, I wondered. No trace was left of roads or marketplaces. I could not tell. I did not dare to challenge Lasher or say any words to make him angry. I remembered everything.

In Darkirk, a small, clean Presbyterian town of white buildings, I could find no one who knew a thing of Catholic saints. They would talk of the circle, the witches, the old days, Sabbats in the glen, and the evil little people who sometimes stole babies. But it was all remote to them. They were more interested in taking the train to Edinburgh or Glasgow. They had no love of the woods or the glen. They wanted an iron smelting factory to come. Cut down the trees. It was all bread and butter.

I was a week in Edinburgh, with the bankers, buying the land. But at last I had title to all of it. And I had set up a trust for its study with my little professor of history, who welcomed me back from my journey with a fine dinner of roast duck and claret.

Mary Beth went off on her own, another escapade, and took with her the daemon. He and I had not exchanged one silent or audible word since that terrible night, but he had hovered close to her, and spoken with her. And I had told her nothing of what I had done or learnt or said, and she had asked me nothing.

I was afraid to utter the name Ashlar. That was the truth. I was afraid. I kept seeing that storm around me. And those frightened men, and Mary Beth peering so curiously into the rainy darkness. I was frightened, though why I wasn’t sure. I had won, had I not? I had the thing’s name. Was I ready to wager my life in a battle with it?

At last I sat down with my little bald-headed bespectacled teacher in Edinburgh and said, “I’ve been through all the lives of the saints in the library, all the histories of Scotland, and I can find no mention of St. Ashlar.”

He gave me a cheerful laugh as he poured the wine. He was in great form tonight, as I had just laid upon him thousands and thousands of American dollars to do nothing but study Donnelaith, and his security was assured and that of his children.

“ ‘By St. Ashlar,’ ” said he. “That’s an expression the schoolchildren use. Saint of the impossible, I believe, rather like Jude in other parts. But there is no tale to it, none I know, but remember, this is a Presbyterian land now. The Catholics are very few, and the past is wrapped in mystery.”

Nevertheless he promised we would search through his books when the meal was over. And in the meantime, we discussed the trust for the excavation and preservation of Donnelaith. The ruins would be fully explored, mapped, described, and then made an object of ongoing study.

Finally, we retired to the library together, and he sought, among his books, some old Catholic texts dating back to the days before King Henry, one in particular, A Secret Historie of the Highland Clans, which carried no author’s name on it. It was a very old book, of black leather, and rather large, and many of the leaves had come unbound, so it was more like a folio of damaged pages. When he laid it down in the light, I saw they were covered with writing.

There was a family tree of sorts described, and he followed it down with his finger.

“Ah, here, can you read this? Well, of course you can’t. It’s Gaelic. But it’s Ashlar, son of Olaf and husband of Janet, founders of the clan of Drummard and Donnelaith, yes, there it is. The word Donnelaith, and to think all these years I had never spotted it here. Though Ashlar I have seen in countless places. Yes, St. Ashlar.”

He paged through the sloppy fragile text until he came to another page. “Ashlar,” he said, reading the crabbed hand. “Yes, King of Drummard-Ashlar.”

He carefully read the text, translating it for me, and jotting notes on a pad with his pencil.

“King Ashlar of the pagans, beloved by his people, husband of Queen Janet, rulers of High Dearmach far north of the Great Glen in the Highland forests. Converted in the year 566 by St. Columba of Ireland. Yes, here it is, the legend of St. Ashlar. Died at Drummard, where a great cathedral was raised in his name. Drummard later became Donnelaith, you see. Relics…cures…ah, but his wife, Janet, refused to give up the pagan faith and was burnt at the stake for her stubborn pride. ‘And when the great saint mourned her loss, a spring gushed forth from the burnt ground in which thousands were baptized.’ ”

The image virtually paralyzed me. Janet burnt at the stake. The saint, the magic spring. I was too overcome to speak.

The scholar was tantalized. He quickly promised me that all this would be copied out and sent to me.

And now to his other books he went, finding in the history of the Picts the same Ashlar and Janet, and the dreadful story of how Janet refused to accept the faith of Christ, and indeed offered to die by fire, cursing her kinsmen and husband, and preferring to be delivered by fire to the gods than live with cowardly Christians.

“Now this is all legend, you understand. Nobody really knows about the Picts, you see. And it’s confusing. Doesn’t even really say for sure that they were Picts. Here, see these words in Gaelic, this means ‘tall men and women of the glen.’ And this here, it can be roughly translated to mean ‘the big children.’

“Ah, here, King Ashlar, defeated the Danes in the year 567, waving the fiery cross before their fleeing armies. Janet, daughter of Ranald, burnt at the stake by Ashlar’s clan in 567, though the saint himself was innocent, and begged his newly converted followers to show mercy.”

He took down yet another book.

“Ah, here we are. St. Ashlar, still venerated in some parts of Scotland as late as the sixteen hundreds, principally by young girls who would have their most secret wishes granted. Not a true canonical saint.”

He closed the book. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. Not a true canonical saint. All of this is too early for us to call it history. That means he was never canonized by Rome, you understand. We’re dealing with another St. Christopher.”

“I know,” said I, but I was mainly quiet, swept up again in the memories. I saw the Cathedral so distinctly. For the first time I truly saw its windows-narrow, high, with bits of colored glass, not pictures, but mostly glass mosaics of gold, red and blue-and the rose window, ah, the rose window! Suddenly I saw the flames. I saw the glass shattering. I heard the cries of the mob. I felt myself so much in the midst of it that I knew for an instant my height as I faced the oncoming crowd, I saw my own hands outstretched against them!

I shook it off. The old professor was peering curiously at me.

“You do have a great passion for these things, don’t you?”

“Almost an unholy passion,” I said. “A cathedral of the twelve hundreds. That’s not too early to be called history.”

“No, indeed not,” he said, and now he went to another shelf, to a whole series of books on the churches and ruins of Scotland. “So much has been lost, you see, so much. Why, if it weren’t for the present scholarly interest in all these things, every trace of those Catholic edifices would have been…here, ‘Highland Cathedrals.

“Donnelaith Cathedral, under the patronage of the Clan of Donnelaith, greatly expanded and enhanced from 1205 to 1266, by their chieftains. A special Christmas Devotion fostered by the Franciscan friars drew thousands from the surrounding area. No records remain today, but the principal patrons were always members of the Donnelaith clan. Some records believed to be…in Italy.”

I gave a long sigh. I didn’t want to be dislodged from the present by the memories again. What had the memories taught me?

He turned several pages. “Ah, see here, a crude family tree of the Donnelaith clan. King Ashlar, then look here, the great-grandson, Ashlar the Venerable, and here another descendant, Ashlar the Blessed, married to the Norman queen Mora. My, but there are any number of Ashlars.”

“I see.”

“And here an Ashlar, and an Ashlar, but you can trace the progress of the name, that is, if you believe all these chieftains existed! You know these clans reveled so in all this, and their mossback descendants write up these fanciful accounts. I don’t know.”

“It’s quite enough to satisfy my lust for the moment,” I said.

“Ah, lust, yes, that’s the word, isn’t it?” He shut the book. “There must be more. I’ll find it for you. But to tell you the truth, it’s going to be pretty much like this, in these old privately published texts, and the best you can say of it is it’s folklore.”

“But the fifteen hundreds, the time of John Knox, surely there were records of that time; there must have been.”

“Up in smoke,” said the old man. “We’re talking about an ecclesiastical revolution. You cannot imagine the number of monasteries destroyed by Henry the Eighth. Statues and paintings were sold off, burnt. Sacred books lost forever. And when they finally broke the defenses of Donnelaith, everything was reduced to cinders.”

He sat down and began to pile these books in a semblance of order. “I’ll find everything for you,” he said. “If there is any indication anywhere of records from Donnelaith being taken somewhere else I’ll find it. But I can tell you my guess. It’s lost. A land of monasteries and cathedrals lost its treasures then. And Henry, the scoundrel, it was all for money. All for money and that he would marry Anne Boleyn! Ah, despair, that one man should so turn the tide. Ah, here, look, ‘St. Ashlar, the special saint of young girls who would have their secret wishes granted.’ I know I’ll find a dozen more mentions such as this.”

At last I left the man in peace.

I had what I wanted. I knew now the thing had once lived; it was full of vengeance! It was a ghost.

And I felt I had the proof of it in all this, and all that I had ever known, and as I walked home alone up the hill from the old man’s house, I kept repeating these details to myself, and thinking, What does it mean that this devil has attached himself to us! That he would be flesh. What does it mean? But above all how can I use this name to destroy him?

When I came into my rooms, Mary Beth was already home and asleep on the couch there, and Lasher was standing beside her. He was in his very old garb of rawhide clothing, hair longish, which I had not seen in years, and he was smiling at me.

For one moment, I was so struck by his vivid quality and his beauty that I did nothing but stare at him. And this he loved; it was as if I were giving him water to drink, you see. And he grew brighter and more distinct.

“You think you know, but you know nothing,” he said, moving his lips. “And I remind you again that the future is everything.”

“You are no great spirit,” I said. “You are no great mystery. That is what I must teach my family.”

“Then you teach them a lie. Their future is in my hands. And my future is theirs. That is your strongest suit. Be quick-witted for once, with all your learning.”

I didn’t answer. I was amazed that the thing would hold a visible form so long.

“A saint turned against God?” I asked.

“Don’t mock me with that foolish folklore, that nonsense. Do you think I was ever one of you? You are mad to suppose it. When I come again, I…” and he broke off, clearly on the verge of threats. Then he said with childish quickness, “Julien, I need you. The child in Mary Beth’s womb, it is no witch, but a feebleminded girl, suffering the same defect as Katherine, your sister, and even Marguerite, your mother. You must make the witch with your daughter.”

“So I have that to bargain with,” I said with a sigh, “and you want me to couple with my own daughter.”

But he had exhausted himself. He was fading. Mary Beth lay sleeping, lush and quiet on the couch, covered in blankets, her dark hair sleek and glowing in the light of the little fire.

“Will she give birth to this child?”

“Yes, bide your time, and wait. You shall make a great witch with her.”

“And she herself?”

“The greatest of all,” he said with an audible voice and sigh. “Unless one counts Julien.”

Michael, that was my greatest triumph. I learnt what I have told you now, its name, its history, that it was of our blood, but more than that I never discovered!

Ashlar, it was all connected with that name. But was the daemon Ashlar, and if so which of the Ashlars in the pages of the old man’s books? The first or one who came after?

The following morning, I left Edinburgh, leaving only a note for Mary Beth, and I traveled north to Donnelaith, going from Darkirk again on horseback. I was too old to make this journey on my own, but I was crazed with my discoveries.

Once again I searched the Cathedral, under the cool Highlands sun coming down in beautiful rays through the clouds, and then I walked out to the circle of stones, and stood there.

I called upon it. I cursed it. I said, “I want you to go back to hell, St. Ashlar! That is your name, that is who you are, a two-legged man, who would have been worshiped, and in pride you have survived, an evil daemon to torment us.”

My voice rang out in the glen. But I was alone. It had not even deigned to answer me. But then as I stood in the circle, I suddenly felt that awful woozy feeling, as if I’d been dealt a blow, which meant the thing was coming into me.

“No, back into hell!” I screamed, but I was falling to the grass. The world had become the wind itself, roaring in my ears, and carrying all distinct shapes and points of reference away with it.

It was night when I awoke. I was bruised. My clothes were torn. The thing had run rampant in me, and here of all places.

I was for a moment in fear for my life, sitting there in the dark, not knowing what had become of my horse, or which way to walk to leave this awful haunted glen. Finally I staggered to my feet, and realized a man held me by the shoulders.

It was he, strong again, material again, guiding me, his face very near to mine, in the dark. We were walking towards the castle. He was so real I could smell the leather of his jerkin, and I could smell the grass clinging to him, and the fragrance of the woods hanging about him. He vanished and I staggered on alone, only to have him reappear again and help me.

At last we entered a broken doorway to the floor of the great hall, and there I fell down to sleep, too exhausted to go further. He was sitting there in the dark, a vapor, and now and then solid, and sometimes merely there, wrapped around me.

In my sheer exhaustion and despair, I said, “Lasher, what do I do? What is it you will do finally?”

“To live, Julien, that is all I want. To live, to come back out into the light. I am not what you think. I am not what you imagine. Look at your memories. The saint is in the glass, is he not? How could I be the saint if I could see him in the window? I never knew the saint; the saint was my downfall!”

I had never seen the saint in the window. I had seen only the colors, but now as I lay on the ground I remembered the church again, I was there, in a former time, and I was intimately recalling how I had, in that time, gone into the transept and entered the chapel of the saint, and yes, there he was emblazoned in the gorgeous glass, with the sun pouring through his image, the warrior priest, long-haired, bearded. St. Ashlar, crushing the monsters beneath his foot: St. Ashlar.

I found myself saying, in this former time, desperately from my soul: St. Ashlar, how can I be this thing? Help me. God help me. They were taking me away. What choice had I been given?

Such longing, such pain!

I blacked out. All consciousness left me. I was never to know the fiend again so vividly as I had in that moment, when I stood in its flesh in the Cathedral. St. Ashlar! I even heard his voice, my voice, echoing beneath the lofty stone roof. How can I be this thing, St. Ashlar! And the brittle shining glass gave no reply. It did what pictures always do-remain constant, remain dominant.

Blackness.

When I awoke that morning, in the ruins of the castle, guides from Darkirk had come to find me. They brought food and drink and blankets and a fresh horse. They had feared for me. My mount had gone all the way home without me.

In the splendor of the morning, the valley looked innocent, lovely. I wanted to lie down and sleep, but alas, I could not until

I was in the inn at Darkirk, and there I slept on and off for two days, suffering a bit of fever, but in general merely resting.

When I returned to Edinburgh Mary Beth was in a panic. She had thought me gone forever. She had accused Lasher of doing me harm. He had wept.

I told her to come and sit by the fire, and I told her everything. I told her the history and what it meant. I told her again the memories.

“You must be stronger than this thing to the last of your days,” I said. “You must never let it get the better of you. It can kill; it can dominate! It can destroy; it wants to be alive, yes, and it is a bitter thing, a thing not of transcendent wisdom but under God, you see, something of blackness and utter despair, something that has been defeated!”

“Aye, suffered,” she said, “that’s the word. But Julien, you are past all patience. You cannot go on with this opposition to it. You must from now on leave this thing entirely to me.”

She rose to her feet and began to declaim in her calm voice, with few gestures, as was her manner.

“I shall use this thing to make our family richer than your wildest imaginings. I shall build a clan so great that no revolution, no war, no uprising could ever destroy it. I shall unite our cousins when I can, encourage marriage within the clan, and see to it that the family name is borne by all who would be part of us. I shall triumph in the family, Julien, and this it understands. This it knows. This is what it wants. There is no battle between us.”

“Is that so?” I asked. “Has it told you what I would do for it next? That I should father a witch by you?” I was trembling with apprehension and rage.

She smiled at me in a soft appeasing and calm way, and then, stroking my face, said: “Now, really, when the time comes, will that be so very hard, my darling?”

That night I dreamed of witches in the glen. I dreamed of orgies. I dreamed of all manner of things I would forget but never did. From Edinburgh we went to London. There we remained until Mary Beth gave birth to Belle in 1888, and from the beginning we knew the radiant child was not normal only because Lasher had told us.

In London, I procured a large book with a leather cover and fine-quality parchment paper, and I wrote down everything I knew of Lasher in it. I wrote down everything I knew of our family. I had much such writing at home, other books started, stopped, forgotten. But now, from memory I collected everything.

I recorded any and all details about Riverbend, Donnelaith, the legends, the saint. All of it. I wrote fast and in a fury. For I didn’t know but that, at any moment, the monster might stop me.

But the monster did nothing.

Letters came to me daily from the old scholar, but mostly they were stories of St. Ashlar, that St. Ashlar would grant a miracle to a young girl, for he was their special protector. And the rest was repetitive of what we had discovered. Some excavations were begun at Donnelaith but that work would take a century. And what would we find that I did not now know?

Yet I wrote enthusiastically to my professor and his friends, increased the endowments and gave in to their wishes in any project to further the study of Donnelaith and its complex of ruins.

Each letter I copied out into my book.

Then I took up another book and began to write my own life story in it. This book too was chosen for its strong binding and good paper. I never dreamt that both books would perish before I did.

Lasher meantime did not trouble me while I did this, but spent his time with Mary Beth, who almost up to the hour of giving birth went traipsing all about London and down to Canterbury and off to Stonehenge. She was ever in the company of young men. I believe there were two of them with her, Oxford scholars both, deeply in love, when she gave birth to baby Belle in the hospital.

I have never felt so separate from her as during this time. She was in love with the city and all the ancient sites and the newfangled things, rushing to see factories and theaters and all sorts of new inventions. She went to the Tower of London, of course, and the wax museum, which was all the rage. Her pregnancy was nothing to her. She was so tall, so strong, so hearty; the impersonation of a man was more than natural to her. And yet she was a woman, through and through, beautiful and eager for the child, though she had been told by now that it would not be the witch.

“It is mine,” she would say. “It is mine. Its name is Mayfair, as is my name. That is what matters.”

I was locked up in my rooms with the past, desperate to make a record which might invite a later interpretation. And the more I was left alone to it, and the more I realized I had written everything I knew, the more helpless and hopeless I felt.

Finally Lasher appeared.

He was as he had been that day we walked to the castle. A friend to me, a comfort. I let him stroke my brow; I let him soothe me with kisses. But secretly I lamented. I had found the thing I needed to know, and it would not help me. I could do no more. Mary Beth loved him, and did not see his power any more than any other witch who had ever dabbled with him, or commanded him or been kissed by him.

Finally, I asked him politely and kindly to go away, to go back to the witch and see to her. He consented.

Mary Beth, who had only the day before given birth, was still with the blessed baby girl in the hospital, resting comfortably, surrounded by nurses.

I went walking by myself through London.

I came to an old church, perhaps from those times, I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was, only I went into it, and sat in a rear pew, and bowed my head and gave myself over to almost praying.

“God help me,” I said. “I have never in my life really prayed to you, except when I felt I was in the memory of that creature in the old Cathedral, standing in his flesh before the window of St. Ashlar. I have learnt how to pray from that one single moment of possession, when I was in him, and he prayed. Now I am trying. I am praying now. What do I do? If I destroy this thing, do I destroy my family?”

I was deep in this prayer when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up to see a young man standing there, dressed neatly in black, with a black silk tie, and looking a little too well-dressed and well-bred to be ordinary. He had beautifully groomed dark hair, and startling eyes, small but very gray and bright.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Why, are you the answer to my prayer?”

“No, but I would know what you know. I am from the Talamasca. Do you know who we are?”

Of course I knew these were the Amsterdam scholars. These were the men the old professor had described to me. My ancestor Petyr van Abel had more than likely been one of these.

“Ah, that is true, Julien, you know more than I thought,” said the man. “Now come, I would talk with you.”

“I’m not so certain,” said I. “Why should I?”

At once I felt the air around me stir, grow warm, and suddenly a gust of wind swept through the church, banging the doors, and startling this man so that he looked about him frightened.

“I thought you wanted to know what I know,” said I. “You seem afraid now.”

“Julien Mayfair, you don’t know what you do,” he said.

“But you know, I am to suppose?”

The wind grew stronger and banged the doors open, letting in a flood of ugly daylight among the dusty statues and carved wood, the sanctified shadows of the place.

The man backed away. He stared at the faraway altar. I felt the air collecting itself, I felt the wind growing strong, and rolling towards this man. I knew it would strike him one fine blow and then it did. He went sprawling on the marble floor, scrambling quickly to his feet and backing away from me. Blood ran from his nose, down his lips and his chin, and with a fancy handkerchief, he went to blot it.

But the wind wasn’t finished. The church was now giving off a low rumble as if the earth beneath it were moving.

The man rushed from the church. He was gone. The wind died down. The air was still, as if nothing had ever happened here. The shadows closed upon the nave. The dusty sun came only through the windows.

I sat down again, and peered once more at the altar.

“Well, spirit?” I said.

Lasher’s secret voice spoke to me out of the emptiness and the silence.

“I would not have those scholars near you. I would not have them near my witches.”

“But they know you, do they not? They have been to the glen. They know you. My ancestor Petyr van Abel…”

“Yes, yes and yes. I have told you the past is nothing.”

“There is no power in knowing it? Then why did you drive the scholar away? Spirit, I must tell you, all this is most suspicious to me.”

“For the future, Julien. For the future.”

“Ah, and this means that what I have learnt may stop what you see in the future.”

“You are old, Julien, you have served me well. You will serve me again. I love you. But I would not have you speak to the men of the Talamasca ever, at any time, nor would I have them trouble Mary Beth or any of my witches.”

“But what do they want? What is their interest? The old professor in Edinburgh told me they were antiquarians.”

“They are liars. They tell you they are scholars and scholars only. But they harbor a horrid secret, and I know what it is. I would not have them come close to you.”

“You know them then as they know you?”

“Yes. They feel an irresistible attraction to mysteries. But they lie. They would use their knowledge for their own ends. Tell them nothing. Remember what I say. They lie. Protect the clan from them.”

I nodded. I went out. I went up to my rooms and opened my big book, the book of the clan and of Lasher.

“Spirit, I know not whether you can read these words, whether you are here or not, or whether you have gone to protect your witch. I know none of these things. But this I wonder. If you really feared those scholars, as you say, if you would really shut them out, why in the name of God did you make such a show of power for them?

“Why did you show your undeniable presence and force to that man, as you have seldom ever shown it to others? And he, a scholar who has gone to the Glen of Donnelaith, who knows something of you? Oh, vain childish spirit, I would be rid of you.”

I closed the book.

Later in the week, as Mary Beth came back to our rooms in triumphant motherhood, and commenced to buy out every baby shop in London for its lace and trinkets and trash, I went to make my own historical study of this mysterious order.

The Talamasca.

Indeed, this was no easy task. Mentions were fewer than of St. Ashlar, and inquiries among the professors at Cambridge gave me only vague suggestions: antiquarians, collectors, historians.

I knew this could not be the entire picture. I remembered too vividly that gray-eyed young man, and his manner. I remembered too vividly his fear when the wind knocked him down.

At last I discovered the Motherhouse of the place, but it was impossible for me to draw close to it. I came to the entrance to the park. I saw the high windows and chimneys. But the daemon stood between me and it, and said: “Julien, go back, these men are evil. These men will destroy your family. Julien, go back. Julien, you must make a witch with Mary Beth. You have your purpose. I see far and I see ever more clearly.”

The battle was simply too much for me. I realized Lasher had let me acquire what little knowledge of the Talamasca I had acquired because it was meaningless. Anything further he would prevent.

All this I wrote in my book. But I was highly suspicious now of this order.

And now let me conclude my tale, let me tell you briefly of those last years, and of one last small bit of knowledge I acquired with which you must be armed now. It is nothing much, only what I think you have come to suspect, that you must trust in no one, no one but your own self, to destroy this being, and destroy Lasher you must. Now it is in the flesh. It can be killed; it can be driven out; and where it shall then go, and whence return, who knows but God? But you can put an end to its tyranny here; an end to its horror.

After I returned home, I urged Mary Beth into marriage with Daniel McIntyre, one of my own lovers and a man of great charm, of whom she was fond, yet Lasher egged me on to couple with her. Her first child by Daniel became a willful and grim young girl, Carlotta by name, who was of a strict Catholic mind from the beginning. It was as if the angels claimed Carlotta at birth. I wish they’d taken her straight to heaven. Lasher was ever at me to father a new daughter.

But we were in a new age. The modern age. You cannot imagine the impact of the changes around us. And Mary Beth had been so powerful in her resolve, and so successful, that the great concrete reality of the family seemed everything.

The knowledge of Lasher she kept to herself, and ordered me not to show my books to anyone. Lasher she would make a ghost and legend, and thereby insignificant even among our own, who were shut out now, far and wide, from all secrets.

At last-when she had given birth by Daniel to two children, neither of whom could serve her purposes, for the second, Lionel, was a boy and more unsuitable even than Carlotta-I did what she wanted me to do and what Lasher wanted me to do, and from that union-of an old man and his daughter-was born my beautiful Stella.

Stella was the witch; she saw Lasher. Her gifts were great, yes, but from early girlhood she had a love of fun which outstripped any other passion. She was carefree, wanton, gay, loving to sing and dance. And there were times in my old age when I wondered how in the world she would ever bear the burden of the secrets at all, and whether or not she had been created merely to give me happiness.

Stella, my beautiful Stella. She wore the secrets as if they were light veils she could tear off at will. But she showed no signs of madness, and that was enough for Mary Beth. This was her heiress, this was Lasher’s link to the witch who would someday bring him into the world again.

I was so old by the turn of the century!

I still rode my horse up the neutral ground of St. Charles Avenue. At Audubon Park, I would dismount and I would walk with my horse along the lagoon there, and I would look back at the great facades of the universities. All changed, all changed. The whole world changed. No more the pastoral paradise of Riverbend, no more those who would work sorcery with evil spells and candles and chants, no more.

Only a great and rich family, a family that could be challenged by none, in which the history had been relegated to fireside tales to tantalize the children.

Of course I enjoyed these years. I did. No one in this long line of Mayfairs has ever prospered any more than I did. I never worked as hard as Mary Beth, I never personally cared for so many.

I did found the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair with my sons, Cortland, Barclay and Garland. Mary Beth and I worked together on this, as the legacy took even greater and greater legal form. But I reveled in pleasure.

When not chatting happily with my sons and their wives, or playing with my grandchildren, or laughing at Stella, I was off to Storyville, the remarkable red-light district of those times, to sleep with the best of women. And though Mary Beth, now the dutiful mother of three, would not go with me on my romps anymore, I took my young lovers with me, and had the double pleasure of the women and my young men with them.

Ah, Storyville, that is another wondrous tale, an experiment gone awry so to speak, a part of our great history. But we must pass over that too.

I lied to my sons in those years. I lied to them about my sins, my debauchery, my powers, about Mary Beth, and about her Stella. I tried to turn their eyes to the world, to the practical, to truths in nature and in books, which I had learnt when I was so little. I did not dare to pass my secrets to them, and also, as they grew to manhood, I knew that none of them was a proper recipient of this knowledge. They were all so solid, my boys, so good. So keen on the making of money and the fostering of the family. I had made three engines of my good self in them. I dared not trust them with the bad self.

And every time I tried to tell Stella anything, she either fell asleep or started laughing. “You needn’t scare me with all that,” she said once. “Mother’s told me your fantasies and dreams. Lasher is my dearest spirit and will do as I say. That’s all that matters. You know, Julien, it’s quite a thing to have one’s own family ghost.”

I was stupefied. This was a girl of modern times. She didn’t know what she was saying! Ah, to have lived so long to see the truth come down to this-Carlotta, the elder, a vicious clerical-minded monster; and this sparkling child, who thought the whole thing quaint though she could see the spirit with her own eyes! I am going mad, I thought.

Even as I lived on in comfort and luxury, even as I spent my days tasting the pleasures of the new age, driving my automobile and listening to my Victrola, even as I read, I dreaded the future.

I knew the daemon was evil. I knew it lied. I knew it was a lethal mystery. And I feared those scholars in Amsterdam. I feared that man who had spoken to me so briefly in the church.

And when my professor wrote to me from Edinburgh, saying that the Talamasca had pestered him to see his letters to me, I at once admonished him that he was to reveal nothing. I doubled his income on that account. He gave me his assurances. And I never doubted him.

It did not make sense, you see, the conduct of those scholars. Or the conduct of the spirit in front of them. Why had the man been so sinister with me? And why had the spirit deliberately made such a show of itself? I sensed something politic in all this. And wondered if the spirit did not enjoy teasing those men, but was it just childishness?

Finally in my last years, I retired to the attic room, and took with me one of the most splendid of all the new inventions, the portable windup Victrola. I can’t tell you what a delight these things were to us, to be able to listen to music from those old records. To go out onto the lawn with the thing, and play a song from an opera.

I adored it. And of course when the music played, Lasher could not come into my head, though he did this less and less anyhow.

He had both Mary Beth and little Stella to content him. And both of them he adored in different ways, drawing strength from each and passing back and forth between the two of them. Indeed, his happiest moments were when he had mother and daughter together.

I had no need of Lasher by this time. No need at all. I wrote in my books, storing them under my bed; I had my lover Richard Llewellyn, a charming young man who worshiped the ground I walked on and was ever congenial company to me, and in whom I never dared to confide, for his own safety’s sake.

My life was rich in other ways. My nephew Clay lived with us then, Rémy’s daughter Millie, and my sons were growing hale and fine, and steps were being taken to strengthen the law firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, or the beginnings of it in any event-which would control our family enterprises.

At last, when Carlotta was twelve, I sought to confide in her. I tried to tell her the whole story. I showed her the books. I tried to warn her. I told her that Stella would inherit the emerald, and she would be the darling of the daemon, and how tricky the daemon was, and that it was a ghost, it had lived before, and that to live again was its only objective.

I shall never forget her reaction, the names she heaped upon me, the curses. “Devil, witch, sorcerer. Always I have known this evil lived in the shadows here. Now you give it a name and history.”

She would turn to the Catholic Church to destroy the thing, she said, “to the power of Christ, and His Holy Mother, and the saints.”

We fought a terrible battle of words. I cried out: “Don’t you see that that is nothing but another form of witchcraft?”

“And what do you teach me, you evil old man, that I must have intercourse with devils? To defeat it, I must know it? I shall stamp it out. I shall stamp out the line itself!” she cried. “You wait and you shall see. I shall leave the legacy without an heir. I shall see an end to it.”

I was in despair. I begged her to listen, to refine her concepts, to accept counsel and not to believe such a thing was possible. We were now an immense family! But she had taken all these mysteries, put them under her Catholic foot, and relied upon her rosary and her Masses to save her.

Later Mary Beth told me to put no store in her words whatsoever. “She is a sad child,” she said. “I do not love her. I tried to love her, but I do not. I love Stella. And Carlotta knows this, and knows she will not inherit the emerald. She has always known, and she is shaped in hate and jealousy.”

“But she is the cunning one, don’t you see? Not Stella. I love Stella too but Carlotta’s the one with the head.”

“It’s all done, it was done many a year ago,” said Mary Beth. “Carlotta’s soul is closed to me. It’s closed to him and he will not abide her here except as something to serve the family case, in the shadows.”

“Ah, but you see how he controls things now. How can Carlotta serve the family case? How do those scholars in Amsterdam serve it? There is something I have to unravel. This thing can kill those it would not suffer to live.”

“You are simply thinking too much for an old man,” she said. “You don’t sleep enough. Scholars in Amsterdam, what is all that? Who cares about people who tell tales of us, and that we are witches? We are, that is our strength. You try to put it all in some kind of order. There is no order.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “You are miscalculating.”

Every time I looked into Stella’s innocent eyes, I realized I could not tell her the full burden of what I knew. And to see her play with the emerald necklace made me shudder.

I showed her where I had hidden my books, beneath my bed; I told her someday she must read all of it. I told her the mystery of the Talamasca, the scholars of Amsterdam who knew of the thing, but these men could be very dangerous to us. They were nothing to play with, these men. I told her how to distract the fiend. I described its vanity. I told her what I could. But not the whole story.

That was the horror. Mary Beth alone knew the whole story. And Mary Beth had changed with the times. Mary Beth was a woman of the twentieth century. Yet Mary Beth taught Stella what Mary Beth felt she should know. Mary Beth gave her the dolls of the witches to play with! Mary Beth gave her a doll made from my mother’s skin and nails and bone; and another of Katherine.

One day, I came down the stairs, and I saw Stella perched on the side of her bed, pink legs crossed, holding these two dolls and making a conversation between them.

“That’s rot and stupidity!” I declared, but Mary Beth took me away.

“Come on, Julien, she must know what she is. It’s an old custom.”

“It means nothing.”

But I was talking to the air. Mary Beth was in her prime. I was dying.

Ah, that night I lay in bed, unable to shake the vision of the little girl with those worthless dolls, thinking how to separate the real from the unreal and give Stella some warning of how it might go wrong with this devil. What worked against me as well was the dour nature of Carlotta. Carlotta warned and so did I. And Stella listened to neither of us!

Finally I slept, deep and sound, and during the night dreamed again of Donnelaith and the Cathedral.

When I awoke, it was to a dreadful discovery. But I did not make it immediately.

I sat up in bed, drank my chocolate, read for a while, some Shakespeare, I think, for one of my boys had pointed out to me not long before that I had never read one of the plays, ah yes, The Tempest. In any account, I read some of it and loved it and found it deep as the tragedies were deep, only with a different rhythm and rules to it. Then came time to write.

I climbed from bed, dropped down to my knees, and reached for my books. They were gone. The space there was empty.

In a hideous instant I knew they were gone from me forever. No one in this house troubled my things. Only one person would have dared in the night to come into my rooms and take those books. Mary Beth. And if Mary Beth had taken them, they were no more.

I rushed down the stairs, nearly falling. Indeed, I was so out of breath by the time I came to the garden windows of the house that I was sick with a pain in my side and in my head, and had to call for the servants to help me.

Then Lasher himself came to wrap himself round me and steady me. “Be calm, Julien,” he said in his soft voice. “I have always been good to you.”

But I had already seen through the side windows a raging fire in the far corner of the yard, away from the street, and the figure of Mary Beth hurling one object into it after another.

“Stop her,” I whispered. I could scarce breathe at all. The thing was invisible, yet all around me, sustaining me.

“Julien, I beg you. Do not push this further.”

I stood there, trying not to pass out from weakness, and I saw the stacks of books on the grass, the old pictures, paintings from Saint-Domingue, old portraits of ancestors back to the beginning. I saw the account books and ledgers and sheaves of papers from my mother’s old study, the foolishness she’d written. And the letters from Edinburgh, all tied and in bundles! And my books, aye, one was left, and this one she threw into the fire as I called out to her!

I reached out with all my power to stop it. She swung round as if caught by a hook, the book still in her fingers, and as she stared at me, dazzled and confused by the power that had stayed her hand, the wind rose and caught the book and sent it flip-flopping and whirling into the flames!

I gasped for breath. My curses had no syllables. The worst kind of curses. All went black.

When I awoke I was in my room.

I was in bed, and Richard, my dear young friend, was with me. And Stella too, holding my hand.

“Mamma had to burn all those old things,” she said.

I said nothing. The fact was, I had suffered a very tiny stroke, and could not for a while speak, though I myself did not know it. I thought my dreamy silence a choice. It was not until the following day when Mary Beth came to me that I realized my words were slurred and I could not find the very ones I chose to use to tell her of my anger.

It was late evening, and when she saw how it was with me she was greatly distressed and called at once for Richard to come, as if it were all his fault. He did come, and together they helped me down the stairs, as if to say, if I could get out of bed and walk, then I could not die that night.

I sat on the living room sofa.

Ah, how I loved that long double parlor. Loved it as you love it, Michael. It was a comfort to me to be there, facing the windows that looked out on the lawn, with all remnants of that brutal fire gone now.

For long hours, Mary Beth spoke. Stella came and went. The gist was that my time and my ways were gone now.

“We are coming into an age,” Mary Beth said, “when science itself may know the name of this spirit, when science will tell us what it is.” On and on she spoke of spiritualists and mediums and séances and guides, and the scientific study of the occult, and such things as ectoplasm.

I was revolted. Ectoplasm, the thing from which mediums make their spirits material? I didn’t even answer. I was sunk into despair. Stella cuddled beside me and held my hand, and said finally:

“Mamma, do shut up. He isn’t listening to a word you say and you are boring him.”

I gave no argument one way or the other.

“I see far,” said Mary Beth. “I see a future in which our thoughts and words do not matter. I see in our clan our immortality. It will not be in our lifetime-any of us-that Lasher will have his final victory. But it will come and no one will prosper from it as greatly as we will. We shall be the mothers of this prosperity.”

“All hope and optimism,” I sighed. “What of the glen, what of the vengeful spirit? What of the wounds dealt in the olden times, from which its conscience has never healed! This thing was good. I felt its good. But now it is evil!”

And then I was ill again, very ill. They brought my pillows and covers to me there. I could not climb the stairs again until the next day, and I had not quite decided to do it, when something turned my head one last time, with hope, and that was to a final and helpless confidante.

It came about this way.

As I lay on the couch in the heat of the day, feeling the river breeze through the side windows and trying not to smell any taint of that fire in which so much had been burnt, I heard Carlotta arguing-her low sour voice growing ever more fierce as she denounced her mother.

At last she came into the room and glared down at me. She was a thin tall girl of fifteen then, I think. Though her actual birthday escapes me. I remember that she was not so terribly unattractive then, having rather soft hair and what one calls intelligent eyes.

I said nothing, as it was not my policy to be unkind to children, no matter how unkind those children were to me. I took no notice of her.

“And you fuss over that fire,” said she in a cold righteous way, “and you let them do what they have done to that child, and you know it is in fear of Mother. Of you and of Mother.”

“What are you talking about? What child?” said I.

But she was gone, angry and despairing, and stalking away. But soon Stella appeared, and I told her all these words.

“Stella, what does all this mean? What is she talking about?”

“She dared to say that to you? She knew you were ill. She knew you and Mother had quarreled.” Tears sprang to Stella’s eyes. “It’s nothing to us, it’s just those Fontevrault Mayfairs and all their own madness. You know, the Amelia Street gang. Those zombies.”

Of course I knew whom she meant-the Fontevrault Mayfairs being the descendants of my cousin Augustin, whose life I’d taken when I was only fifteen with a pistol shot. His wife and children had founded that line at Fontevrault, as I told you-their own palatial plantation in the Bayou country miles from us, and only now and then at the largest of family get-togethers deigned to pay us a call. We visited their sick. We helped them bury their dead. They did the same with us, but over the years there had been little softening.

Some of them-old Tobias and his son Walker, I believe-had built a fine house on St. Charles Avenue, at Amelia Street, only about fifteen blocks away, and I had watched it being built with interest. A whole pack of them lodged there-old women and old men, all of whom personally despised me. Tobias Mayfair was a feeble old fool who had lived too long just as I had, and as vicious a man as I have ever known, who blamed me his whole life for everything.

The others were not so bad. They were of course rich, sharing in the family enterprises with us, though they had no need of us directly. And Mary Beth with her large family fetes had been inviting them into the fold, especially the younger ones. There had always been a few star-crossed cousins marrying cousins across the dividing line, or whatever it was. Tobias in his hatred called the nuptials wedding dances on Augustin’s grave, and now it was known that Mary Beth wished all cousins to return to the fold, and Tobias was supposedly uttering curses.

I could tell you many amusing stories about him and all his various attempts to kill me. But it’s no matter now. I wanted to know what Stella was talking about, what Carlotta meant. What was all this venom?

“So what have Augustin’s children done now?” I asked, for that was all I ever called them, the whole crazy lot of them.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” said Stella. “That is what it is all about. Let down your long hair, or waste away in the attic forever.”

She positively sang out these words in her merry fashion.

“It’s Cousin Evelyn, I mean, my darling dear, and everybody’s saying she’s Cortland’s daughter.”

“I beg your pardon. You are referring to my son Cortland? You are saying he has got one of their women with child? Those Mayfairs?”

“Thirteen years ago, Cortland snuck off to Fontevrault drunk and got Barbara Ann with child, to be exact. You know, Walker’s daughter. The child was Evelyn, you know, you remember. Barbara Ann died when Evelyn was born. Well, guess what, darling dear? Evelyn is a witch, as powerful a witch as ever there was, and she can see into the future.”

“Says who?”

“Everyone. She has the sixth finger! She’s marked, my darling dear, and positively strange beyond imagining. And Tobias has locked her up for fear that Mother will kill her! Imagine. That you and Mother would harm her. Why, you are the girl’s grandfather! Cortland admitted it to me, though he made me swear never to tell you. ‘You know how Father hates the Fontevrault crowd,’ he said. ‘And what good can I do that girl, when everyone in the household loathes me?’ ”

“Wait a minute, child. Slow down. Do you mean to tell me Cortland took advantage of that addle-brained Barbara Ann, who died giving birth, and he deserted that baby?”

“He never took advantage of her at all,” said Stella. “She was an attic case too. Doubt she’d ever seen another human being before Cortland went up to meet the poor prisoner for himself. And I don’t know what happened. I was barely born then, you know. But don’t go getting angry at Cortland. Cortland, of all your boys, adores you. And he’ll be angry at me, and round it will go. Forget about it.”

“Forget about it! I have a granddaughter locked in an attic fifteen blocks from here? The hell I will forget about it! Her name is Evelyn? She’s the daughter of that poor idiot Barbara Ann! This is what you’re telling me? And that monster Tobias has her locked away? No wonder Carlotta is beside herself. She’s right. It’s atrocious, the whole story!”

Stella leapt up from the chair, clapping her hands. “Mother, Mother,” she cried. “Oncle Julien’s all recovered. He has no more stroke. He is himself again! We’re going to Amelia Street.”

Of course Mary Beth came rushing in. “Did Carlotta tell you about that girl?” she said. “Don’t mix in it.”

“Don’t mix in it!” I was rabid.

“Oh, Mother, really, you are worse than Queen Elizabeth,” cried Stella, “fearing the power of her poor cousin Mary Queen of Scots. That girl cannot harm us! She is no Mary Queen of Scots.”

“I didn’t say that she was, Stella,” said Mary Beth, unruffled and very calm as always. “I have no fear of the child, no matter how powerful she is. I have only pity for her.” She was towering over me. I sat on the couch, resolved to move but still curious to know more before I did so.

“Carlotta started it all, visiting up there. The girl hides in the attic.”

“Does not. Is locked in!”

“Stella, hush up. Be a witch, not a bitch, for the love of heaven.”

“Mother, she’s never been out of the house in her whole life, same story as Barbara Ann! Same reason. There are plenty of witches’ gifts in that family, Oncle Julien. Barbara Ann was sort of crazy, they say, but this girl has Cortland’s blood too, and she sees the future.”

“No one really sees the future,” Mary Beth declared, “and no one should want to see it. Julien, the girl is peculiar. She is shy. She hears voices. Sees ghosts. It’s nothing new. She is more warped and isolated than most, having been brought up by old people.”

“Cortland, how dare he not tell me this!” I said.

“He didn’t dare,” said Mary Beth. “He wouldn’t hurt you.”

“He doesn’t care,” said I. “Damn him, to leave a baby daughter with those cousins! And it was Carlotta who went there, to that house, to be under Tobias’s roof, Tobias who has always called me a murderer.”

“Oncle Julien, you are a murderer,” said Stella.

“Hush up once and for all,” said Mary Beth.

Stella sulked, which meant at least a temporary victory.

“Carlotta went there to ask the girl what she saw, to ask her to predict, the most dangerous of games. I forbade it, but she went. She’d heard tell of how this girl had more power than anyone ever in our family.”

“That’s such an easy claim to make,” I said with a sigh. “More power than anyone else. There was a time when I made it myself, in a long-ago world of horses and carriages, and slaves and peaceful country. More power.”

“Ah, but you see there’s a wrinkle here. This girl has many many Mayfair ancestors. When you mixed Cortland into it, the number became fantastic!”

“Ah, I see,” I said. “Barbara Ann was the daughter of Walker and Sarah, both Mayfairs. Yes, and Sarah was from Aaron and Melissa Mayfair.”

“Yes, and so on it goes back and back. It’s hard to find any ancestor for this child who was not a Mayfair.”

“Now, that is a thought,” said I. And then I wanted my books, I wanted to write this down, to note it and ponder it, and when I remembered with a dull ache that my books were burnt, I felt such bitterness. I grew quiet, and listened to them chatter over me.

“The girl doesn’t see the future any more than anyone else,” declared Mary Beth. She sat down beside me. “Carlotta went there wishing to be upheld, that we were cursed, we were all doomed. It is her song and dance.”

“She sees probabilities as we all do,” said Stella with a melodramatic sigh. “She has strong presentiments.”

“And what happened?”

“Carlotta went up into the attic, to visit Evelyn. She went more than once. She played to the girl, drew her out, and then the girl, who almost never speaks, or does not for years on end, declared some terrible prediction.”

“Which was what?”

“That we should all perish from the earth,” said Stella, “afflicted by him who had raised us and upheld us.” I lifted my head. I looked at Mary Beth. “Julien, there is nothing in it.”

“Is this why you burned my books? Is that why you destroyed all the knowledge I had gathered?”

“Julien, Julien,” she said. “You are old and you dream. The girl said what would get her a gift, perhaps, or make Carlotta leave, for all we know. The girl’s a mute almost. The girl sits in the window all day and watches the traffic on St. Charles Avenue. The girl sings sometimes, or speaks in rhymes. She cannot lace her own shoes or brush her hair.”

“And that wicked Tobias doesn’t let her out,” said Stella.

“Damn it all, I’ve heard enough. Have my car brought round to the front.”

“You can’t go driving,” said Mary Beth, “you’re too ill. Do you want to die on the front steps of Amelia Street? Have the courtesy to die in your bed with us.”

“I’m not ready for dying yet, my darling daughter,” I declared, “and you tell the boys to bring the car around now, or I’ll walk up there. Richard, where is Richard! Richard, get me fresh clothes, everything. I will change in the library. I cannot walk upstairs. Hurry.”

“Oh, you are really going to scare them out of their wits,” cried Stella. “They’ll think you’ve come to kill her.”

“Why would I do that!” I demanded.

“Because she’s stronger than us, don’t you see? Oncle Julien, look to the legacy, as you are always instructing me. Isn’t there a case for her claiming everything?”

“Certainly not,” said I. “Not so long as Mary Beth has a daughter, and Stella, the daughter of Mary Beth, has a daughter of her own. Not much of a case.”

“Well, they say there are provisions-having to do with power and such, and the witches’ gifts, and all. And they hide that girl so we won’t kill her.”

Richard had come with my clothes. I hastily dressed, and to the teeth, for this ceremonial visit. I sent him for my riding coat-my Stutz Bearcat was open and the roads were muddy then-for my goggles, and for my gloves, and told him once more to hurry.

“You can’t go up there,” Mary Beth said. “You’ll scare him to death and her to death too.”

“If she’s my granddaughter I’m going to get her.”

I stormed to the front porch. I was feeling entirely myself, though I alone noticed one tiny deficit. I could not quite control the movement of my left foot. It would not arch and lift properly as I walked, so I had a little to drag it. But they didn’t see it, damn them, they didn’t know. Death had given a pinch. Death was coming. But I told myself I could live another score of years with this tiny infirmity.

As I went down the front steps, and had the boys help me up into the car, Stella clambered into my lap, nearly castrating and killing me simultaneously. And then out of the shadows beneath the oaks came Carlotta.

“Will you help her?”

“Of course I will,” said I. “I will take her out of there. Horrible, horrible thing. Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“I don’t know,” Carlotta said, and her face was stricken and her head was bowed. “The things she said she saw were terrible.”

“You don’t listen to the right people. Now, Richard, drive!”

And off we went, with Richard steering wildly up St. Charles Avenue, splattering mud and gravel, and finally running right up on the curb in his careless, amateurish way, on the corner of St. Charles and Amelia.

“This I have to see for myself, this child in the attic,” I mumbled. I was in a rage. “And I will throttle Cortland when next he dares to come into my presence.”

Stella helped me down from the car and then started jumping up and down with excitement. This was one of her more endearing or irritating habits, all depending on how one felt at the moment.

“Look, Julien, darling,” she cried. “Up there in the attic window.”

Now you have no doubt seen this house. It stands today as solid as First Street.

And of course I had seen it too, as I have said, but I never set foot in it. I was not even sure how many Mayfairs lived there. It was, for my money, a pompous Italianate house, very proud yet very beautiful. It was all wood, yet designed to look as if it were stone, like our house. It had columns on the front, Doric down and Corinthian up, and a great alcoved door, and further back octagonal wings jutting out on both sides, and throughout rounded Italian-style windows. It was massive and bulky yet graceful. Not such a bad house, though not pure and old as ours was.

And immediately I spied, as Stella pointed, the attic window.

It was a double dormer, in the very center over the porch, and I swear I could feel the pulse of the girl who peered through the glass at me. A wan bit of face up there, a streak of hair. And then nothing but the sun flashing in the glass.

“Oh, there she is, poor, darling Rapunzel,” Stella cried and waved vigorously though the girl had disappeared. “Oh Evie, we have come to save you.”

Then out upon the porch came storming Tobias and his son Oliver, the younger brother of Walker, and a blithering fool if ever there was one. It was almost impossible to tell on sight which was which, and which was more feeble.

“Why have you locked that child in the attic?” said I. “And is this Cortland’s girl, or is that some baseless lie you dreamed up to rattle and disconcert my family?”

“You miserable scoundrel,” Tobias declared, stepping forward and nearly losing his balance at the top of the steps. “Don’t you come near my door. Get off my property. You spawn of Satan. Yes, it was Cortland who ruined my Barbara Ann. She died in my arms. And it was Cortland, Cortland who did it. That child is a witch such as you’ll never see, and as long as I have breath in my body, she’ll make no more witches out of herself and out of you and out of all that went before you.”

That was twice as much as I needed to hear. I went straight up the steps, and both old fools rushed at me. I stopped and raised my voice:

“Come now, my Lasher,” I cried. “Make the way for me.”

Both men fell back in terror. Stella gave a gasp of amazement. But the wind did come, as it always had, when I needed it most, when my wounded old soul and pride needed it most, and when I was most unsure of it. It came gusting over the garden and up the porch, forcing back the door with a powerful clatter.

“Thank you, spirit,” I whispered. “That you have saved face for me.”

I love you, Julien. But it is my wish you leave this house and all those in it.

“That I cannot do,” I said. I entered the house, a long cool dark hallway, lying between rows of doors, with Stella scampering on the boards beside me. The old men came behind, screaming to rouse the women, and out of the long row of doors came numerous Mayfairs-a regular Parliament of Fowls-screeching and screaming. Behind me the wind lashed the oaks. A great scattering of leaves gusted down the hallway before me.

Some of these faces I had seen; all I knew in one fashion or another. As the others peeped out, Tobias sought again to stop me.

“Get out of my way,” I said and planted myself at the foot of the dark oak stairs and then began to climb them.

It was a huge staircase, to one side of the hall, and turning midway, with a broad landing and grim stained glass which made me pause for a moment. For as the light came through the glass, as it passed through the yellow and red panes, I thought of the Cathedral and “remembered” it as I had not in years, not since I’d left Scotland.

I could feel the spirit collected around me. I pushed on, out of breath till I reached the upper hall. “Where is the attic stairs?”

“There, there,” cried Stella, leading me through the double doors to the rear hall, and there was the lesser staircase in a narrow well, and the door at the top of it.

“Evelyn, come down, my child!” I cried. “Evelyn, come down. I cannot come up this long climb. Come down, my girl, I’m your grandfather come to get you.”

There was silence in the house. All the others crowded in the hallway door, staring, so many white oval faces, mouths agape, eyes large and hollow.

“She will not listen to you,” cried one of the women. “She has never listened to anyone.”

“She cannot hear,” cried another.

“Or speak!”

“Look, Julien, the door is locked from this side,” cried Stella, “and the key is in it.”

“Oh, you evil old fools!” I shouted. And I closed my eyes and collected all my strength and was about to command this door to open. I did not know if I could do such a thing, for something like that is never certain. And I could feel Lasher hovering near, and feel his distress and confusion. He did not like this house, these Mayfairs.

Aye, they are not mine, these.

But before I could answer Lasher or persuade him, or make the door move, it opened! The key fell from the lock by some power other than mine, and the door sprang back, letting the sunlight fall into the dusty stairwell.

I knew it was not my power, and so did Lasher! For he collected around me close as if he too were actually fearful.

Calm yourself now, spirit, you are most dangerous when you are afraid. Behave. It is all well and good. The girl herself opened the door. Be silent.

But then he gave me to know the truth. It was the girl who frightened him! Of course. I assured him she was no menace to the likes of us, and please do my bidding.

The sunlight brightened the swirling dust. And then there came a tall thin shadow-a girl of great beauty, with full glossy hair, and still eyes staring down at me. She seemed frightfully tall and thin, even starved perhaps.

“Come down to me, my child,” said I. “You see yourself you need not be a prisoner of anyone.”

She understood my words and as she came down, silently, step by step with her soft leather shoes, I saw her eyes move above me and to the left and to the right of me, and over Stella, and again as she beheld the invisible thing clustered about us. She saw “the man,” as they say, she saw him invisible and made no secret.

When she reached the foot of the stairs, she turned, beheld the others, and shrank trembling! I have never seen fear so expressed by one without a sound. I snatched up her hand.

“Come with me, darling. You and you alone shall decide whether you wish to live in an attic.”

I pulled her to me; she gave no resistance, and no cooperation either. How strange she seemed, how pale, how accustomed to the darkness. Her neck was long and thin, and she had small ears with no lobes to them, and then I saw on her hand the mark of the witch! She had on her left hand the sixth finger! Just as they had told me. I was amazed.

But they had seen me see it. A great squabble broke out. The girl’s uncles had come, Ragnar and Felix Mayfair, young men famous about the town, and known to be suspicious of us. They started to block my way.

But in an instant the wind had gathered. All could feel it stealing along the floor, icy and strong. It whipped those who blocked the way, until they stepped back, and then I took the girl by the hand and led her back into the front hall and down the main staircase. Stella crept at my side.

“Oh, Oncle Julien,” Stella said as breathlessly as some village girl to a great prince. “I adore you.”

And with us walked this pale swan of a girl, with her shimmering hair and her sticks for arms and sticks for legs, and pitiful dress made from a flowered feed sack. I don’t know if you have ever seen such clothing, poorest of the poor. Women used this cloth to line their everyday quilts and she had it for a frock, this cheap flowered cotton. And her shoes, they were scarcely shoes at all, rather leather socks of some sort, laced, like booties of a baby!

I took her through the hall, the wind rattling and swinging the doors, and going before us, stirring the oaks outside, and brushing the many cars and carriages and carts that passed on the Avenue.

No one moved to stop me as I handed her up to Richard to be placed in the car. And then, sitting close beside her, with Stella again on my knee, I gave the order for Richard to go, and the girl turned round and stared at the house, and at the high window, and at the collection of people on the porch in astonishment.

We had not gone five feet when they all began to scream. “Murderer, murderer! He’s taken Evelyn!” and to cry to one another to do something about it. Young Ragnar ran out and cried that he would proceed against me in a court of law.

“By all means do,” I cried back over the rumbling car, “ruin yourself in the process. I am father to the finest law firm in the city! Sue! I cannot wait.”

The car made its way awkwardly and noisily up St. Charles, yet faster than any horse-drawn carriage. And the girl sat still between Richard and me, under Stella’s curious eye, staring at everything as if she had never been out of doors before.

Mary Beth waited on the step.

“And what do you mean to do with her?”

“Richard,” I said, “I can’t walk any farther.”

“I’ll fetch the boys, Julien,” he cried, and off he ran, calling and clapping. Stella and the girl climbed down and Stella lifted both her hands to me.

“I’ve got you, darling. I won’t let you fall, my hero.”

The girl stood with her hands at her sides, staring at me, and then at Mary Beth, and then at the house, and at the servant boys who came running.

“What do you mean to do with her?” Mary Beth demanded again.

“Child, will you come into our house?” I said, looking at this lithe and lovely girl with pale shell-pink tender little mouth protruding beautifully on account of her hollow cheeks, and eyes the color of the gray sky in a rainstorm.

“Will you come into our house,” I said again, “and there safe beneath our roof decide if you want to spend your life a prisoner or not? Stella, if I die on the way upstairs, I charge you to save this girl, you hear me?”

“You won’t die,” said Richard, my lover, “come, I’ll help you.” But I could see the apprehension in his face. He was more worried about me than anyone.

Stella led the way. The girl followed, and then Richard came, all but carrying me in his exuberantly manly way, with his arm around me, hoisting me step by step so that I might keep what dignity I had.

At last we entered my room on the third floor of the house.

“Get the girl some food,” I said. “She looks as if she has never had a square meal.” I sent Stella off with Richard. I collapsed on the side of my bed, too exhausted to think for a moment.

Then I looked up and my soul was filled with despair. This beautiful fresh creature on the brink of life, and I so old, very soon to end it. I was so tired I might have said yes to death now, if this girl, if her case had not demanded my presence here.

“Can you understand me?” I asked. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, Julien,” she said in plain English effortlessly enough. “I know all about you. This is your attic, is it not?” she said in her little treble voice, and as she looked around at the beams, at the books, at the fireplace and the chair, at all my precious things, my Victrola and my piles of songs, she gave a soft trusting smile to me.

“Dear God,” I whispered. “What shall I do with you?”

Twenty-one

THE PEOPLE WHO lived in this bright little house were brown people. They had black hair and black eyes; their skin gleamed in the light above the table. They were small with highly visible bones, and they wore clothes in very bright red and blue and white, clothes that were tight around their plump arms. The woman, when she saw Emaleth, got up and came to the transparent door.

“Good heavens, child! Come inside here,” she said, looking up into Emaleth’s eyes. “Jerome, look at this. This child’s stark naked. Look at this girl. Oh, my Lord in heaven.”

“I’ve washed in the water,” said Emaleth. “Mother is sick under the tree. Mother can’t talk anymore.” Emaleth held out her hands. They were wet. Her hair hung wet on her breasts. She was slightly cold, but the air of the room was warm and still.

“Well, come in here,” said the woman, tugging her hand. She reached for a piece of cloth on a hook and began to wipe Emaleth’s long dripping hair. The water made a pool on the shiny floor. How clean things were here. How unnatural. How unlike the fragrant beating night outside, full of wings and racing shadows. This was a shelter against the night, against the insects that stung, and the things that had cut Emaleth’s naked feet, and scratched her naked arms.

The man stood still, staring up at Emaleth.

“Get her a towel, Jerome, don’t stand there. Get this girl a towel. Get her some clothes. Child, what happened to your clothes? Where are your clothes? Did something bad happen to you?”

Emaleth had never heard voices quite like these, of the brown people. They had a musical note in them that the other people’s voices didn’t have. They rose and fell in a distinctly different pattern. The whites of their eyes were not purely white, these people. They had a faint yellowish cast to them that went better with their beautiful brown skin. Even Father did not have this kind of soft ringing quality to his words. Father had said, “You will be born knowing all you need to know. Do not let anything frighten you.”

“Be kind to me,” said Emaleth.

“Jerome, get the clothes!” The woman had taken a big wad of paper off a roll and was blotting Emaleth’s shoulders and arms with them. Emaleth took the wad of paper and wiped her face. Hmmmm. This paper felt rough, but it wasn’t hurtfully rough, and it smelled good. Paper towels. Everything in the little kitchen smelled good. Bread, milk, cheese. Emaleth smelt the milk and cheese. That was the cheese, wasn’t it? Bright orange cheese in a block lying on the table. Emaleth wanted this. But she had not been offered it.

“We are by nature a gentle and polite people,” Father had said. “This is why they have been so hateful to us in times past.”

“What clothes?” said the man named Jerome, who was taking off his shirt. “There’s nothing in this house that’s going to fit her.” He held out the shirt. Emaleth wanted to take it but she also wanted to look at it. It was blue-and-white-colored. In little squares like the red and white squares on the table.

“Bubby’s pants will do it,” said the woman. “Get a pair of Bubby’s pants and give me that shirt.”

The little house was shining. The red and white squares on the table were shining. If she grabbed the edge of the red and white squares she could have pulled them off. It was one sheet, that thing. Shiny white refrigerator with an engine on the back of it. She knew the handle would bend just so, just by looking at it. And inside would be cold milk.

Emaleth was hungry. She had drunk all of Mother’s milk as Mother lay staring under the tree. She had cried and cried, and then she had gone to bathe in the water. The water was greenish and not fresh-smelling. But there had been a fountain on the edge of the grass, a fountain with a handle. Emaleth had washed better in that.

The man came rushing back into the room with long pants such as Father wore and he wore. Emaleth put these on, pulling them up over her long thin legs, almost losing her balance. The zipper felt cold against her belly. The button felt cold. But they were all right. Newborn, she was still a little too soft all over.

Father said, “You will walk but it will be hard.” These pants made a warm heavy covering. “But remember, you can do everything that you need to do.”

She slipped her arms into the shirt as the woman held it for her. Now, this cloth was nicer. More like the towel with which the woman kept patting her hair. Emaleth’s hair was golden yellow. It looked so bright on the woman’s fingers, and the inside of the woman’s hand was pink, not brown.

Emaleth looked down at the shirt buttons. The woman reached out with nimble fingers and buttoned one button. Very quick. Like that. Emaleth knew this. She buttoned the other buttons very fast. She laughed.

Father said, “You will be born knowing, as birds know how to build their nests, as giraffes know how to walk, as turtles know to crawl from the land and swim in the open sea, though no one has ever shown them. Remember human beings are not born with this instinctive knowledge. Human beings are born half-formed and helpless, but you will be able to run and talk. You will recognize everything.”

Well, not everything, Emaleth thought, but she did know that was a clock on the wall, and that was a radio on the windowsill. If you turned it on, voices came out of it. Or music.

“Where’s your mother, child?” asked the woman. “Where did you say she was sick?”

“How old is this girl?” asked the man of his wife. He stood rigid, hands forming into fists. He had put on his cap, and he glowered at her. “Where is this woman?”

“How should I know how old she is? She looks like a big tall little girl. Honey, how old are you? Where is your mother?”

“I’m newborn,” said Emaleth. “That’s why my mother is so sick. It wasn’t her fault. She doesn’t have any more milk. She is sick unto death and she smells like death. But there was enough milk. I am not one of the little people. That is something I no longer need to fear.” She turned and pointed. “Walk a long way, cross the bridge and under the tree, she’s there where the branches touch the ground, but I don’t think she’ll ever talk anymore. She will dream until she dies.”

Out the door he went, letting it bang loudly after him. With a very determined air he walked across the grass and then he started to run.

The woman was staring at her.

Emaleth put her hands to her ears, but it was too late, the transparent door had banged so loud it made a ringing inside her ears and nothing now would stop it. The ringing had to wear away. Transparent door. Not glass. She knew about glass. The bottle on the table was glass. She remembered glass windows, and glass beads, lots of things of glass. Plastic. The transparent door was screen and plastic.

“It’s all encoded inside,” said Father.

She looked at the woman. She wanted to ask the woman for food, but it was more important now to leave here-to find Father or Donnelaith or Michael in New Orleans, whichever proved to be the easier thing to do. She had looked at the stars but they hadn’t told her. Father had said you will know from the stars. Now, of that part she wasn’t so sure.

She turned and opened the door and stepped outside, careful not to let it bang, holding it for the woman. All the tree frogs sang. All the crickets sang. Things sang of which no one knew the name, not even Father. They rustled and rattled in the dark. All the night was alive. Look at the tiny insects swimming beneath the light bulb! She waved her hand at them. How they scattered, only to come back in a tight little cloud.

She looked at the stars. She would always remember this pattern of the stars, surely enough, the way the stars dipped down to the far trees, and how black the sky seemed at one point and how deep blue at another. Yes, and the moon. Behold the moon. The beautiful radiant moon. Father, at last I see it. Yes, but to get to Donnelaith, she had to know how the stars would look when she reached her destination.

The woman took Emaleth’s hand. Then the woman looked at her hand and let her go.

“You’re so soft!” she said. “You’re as soft and pink as a little baby.”

“Don’t tell them you are newborn,” Father had told her. “Don’t tell them that they will soon die. Feel sorry for them. It is their final hour.”

“Thank you,” said Emaleth. “I’m going now. I’m going to Scotland or New Orleans. Do you know the way?”

“Well, New Orleans is no big problem,” said the woman. “I don’t know about Scotland. But you can’t just walk off like this in your bare feet. Let me get Bubby’s shoes for you. Lord, yes, Bubby’s shoes are the only ones that are going to fit.”

Emaleth looked out over the dark grass to the forest. She saw the darkness close in over the water, beyond the bridge. She wasn’t sure she should wait for the shoes.

“They are born hardwired with almost nothing,” Father had said. “And what is hardwired in them is soon forgotten. They no longer catch scents or see patterns. They no longer know by instinct what to eat. They can be poisoned. They no longer hear sounds the way you do, or hear the full beat of songs. They are not like us. They are fragments. Out of these fragments we will build but it will be their doom. Be merciful.”

Where was Father? If Father had observed the stars over Donnelaith, then she, Emaleth, ought to know them and what they looked like. She caught not the faintest trace of his scent anywhere at all. None had clung anymore to Mother.

The woman had come back. She laid down the shoes. It was hard for Emaleth to get her soft long feet inside them, toes wriggling, the canvas scratching her skin, but she knew that this was best, to have shoes. She ought to wear shoes. Father wore shoes. And so had Mother. Emaleth had cut her foot already on a sharp stone in the grass. This was better. It felt good when the woman tied the laces tight. Little bows, how pretty. She laughed when she saw these bows. But prettier still were the woman’s fingers when she tied them.

How big Emaleth’s feet looked compared to those small feet of the little woman.

“Good-bye, lady. And thank you,” said Emaleth. “You’ve been very kind to me. I’m sorry for everything that is going to happen.”

“And what’s that, child?” the woman asked. “Just exactly what is going to happen? Child, what is that smell? What is on your body? First I thought you were just all wet from the Bayou. But there is another smell.”

“A smell?”

“Yes, it’s kind of good, kind of like a good something cooking.”

Ah, so Emaleth had the scent too. Was that why she couldn’t smell Father? She was now wrapped in the scent, perhaps. She lifted her fingers to her nose. There it was. The scent came right out of her pores. The smell of Father.

“I don’t know,” said Emaleth. “I think I should know these things. My children will. I have to go now. I should go to New Orleans. That is what Mother said. Mother pleaded and pleaded with me. Go to New Orleans, and Mother said it was on the way to Scotland, that I didn’t have to disobey Father. So I’m on my way.”

“Wait a minute, child. Sit down, wait for Jerome to come back. Jerome is looking for your mother.” The woman called out in the dark for Jerome. But Jerome was gone.

“No, lady. I’m going,” said Emaleth, and she bent down and touched her hands lightly to the woman’s shoulders and kissed her on the smooth brown forehead. She felt her black hair. She smelled it and smoothed her hand on the lady’s cheek. Nice woman.

She could see the woman liked the smell of her.

“Wait, honey.”

This was the first time Emaleth had kissed anyone but Mother and it made the tears come again, and she looked down at the brown woman with the black hair and the big eyes, and she felt sorrow, that they would all die. Kindly people. Kindly people. But the Earth simply wasn’t big enough for them, and they had prepared the way for the more gentle, and the more childlike.

“Which way is New Orleans?” she said. Mother hadn’t known. Father had never told.

“Well, that way, I reckon,” said the woman. “I don’t know, tell the truth, I think that’s east. You can’t just…”

“Thank you, darling dear,” she said, using Father’s favorite phrase. And she started walking.

It felt better with every step. She walked faster and faster on the sodden grass, and then out on the road, and beneath the white electric light, and then on and on, her hair blowing out, her long arms swinging.

She was all dry now underneath the clothes, except for a little water on her back, which she did not like but which would dry soon. And her hair. Her hair was drying quickly, getting lighter and lighter. She saw her shadow on the road and laughed. How tall and thin she was compared to the brown people. How large her head was. And even compared to Mother. Poor little Mother, lying beneath the tree and staring off into the darkness and the greenness. Mother had not even heard Emaleth anymore. Mother could hear nothing. Oh, if only they had not run away from Father.

But she would find him. She had to. They were the only ones in the world. And Michael. Michael was Mother’s friend. Michael would help her. Mother had said, “Go to Michael. Do that first of all.” Those had almost been the last words from Mother. Go to Michael, first of all.

One way or the other, she was obedient to Father, or obedient to Mother.

“And I will be looking for you,” he’d said.

It shouldn’t be all that hard, and walking was fun.