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I could digress on that. But I have too much to tell, and I'm too...tired now.
Let me go on. Where was I? Ah, yes, she told me about the power of music over the thing, and how she kept the music near her so that it would be forced to come and pay court, for otherwise it wouldn't have bothered.
"Does it know this?" I asked.
"Yes, and no," she said. "It begs me to shut out the din, but I cry and say I cannot, and it then comes to me and kisses my hand, and I look at it. You are right that it is vain. It would be seen again and again, just to be reassured that I have not drifted out of its realm, but it no longer loves or needs me. It has a place in its heart for me. That's all, and that is nothing."
"You mean it has a heart?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, it loves us all, and we great witches above all things, for we have brought it into knowing itself, and have greatly aided it to increase its power."
"I see," I said. "But what if you didn't want it around anymore? If you..."
"Shhhh...never say such a thing!" she said, "not even with trumpets or bells pealing all about you."
"All right," I said, feeling strongly already that I must never be given the same advice more than once, and I said no more about that. "But can you tell me what it is?" I asked.
"A devil," she said, "a great devil."
I told her, "I don't think so."
She was amazed. "Why do you say that? Who else but the Devil would serve a witch?"
I told her all I knew of the Devil, from prayers and hymns and Mass and the quick-witted slaves all around me. "The Devil is just plain bad," I said. "And he treats badly all who trust him. This thing is too damned good to us."
She agreed, but it was like the Devil, she said, in that it would not submit to God's laws, but would come through as flesh and be a man.
"Why?" I said. "Isn't it a hell of a lot stronger the way it is? Why would it want to catch yellow fever or lockjaw?"
She laughed and laughed. "It would be flesh to feel all that flesh can feel, to see what men can see, and hear what they can hear, and not have forever to be collecting itself out of a dream and fear the losing of itself. It would be flesh to be real; to be in the world and of the world, and to defy God, who gave it no body."
"Hmmm, sounds like it has overrated the whole experience," I said. Or in words that a three-year-old might choose for pretty much the same thing, for by that age, like many a country child of the times, I'd seen plenty of death and suffering.
Once again, she laughed, and she said that it would have what it would have, and lavished everything upon us because we served its purpose.
"It wants strength; every hour and every day in our presence, we give it strength; and it pushes for one thing: that is the birth of a witch so strong that she can make it once and for all material."
"Well, that isn't going to be my baby sister, Katherine," I said.
She smiled and nodded her head. "I fear you're right, but the strength comes and goes. You have it. Your brother has none."
"Don't be so sure," I said. "He's more easily frightened. He's seen it and it has made an ugly face at him to keep him from Katherine's cradle. I don't require ugly faces, nor do I flee from them. And I have too much sense to overturn Katherine's cradle. But tell me, how is a witch going to make it flesh forever? Even with Mother, I see it solid for no more than two, three minutes at most. What does it mean to do?"
"I don't know," she said. "Truly I don't know the secret. But let me tell you this while the music plays on, and listen to me carefully. I've never even expressed this in thought to myself but I confide it to you. When it has what it wants, it shall destroy the entire family."
"Why?" I said.
"I don't know," she said again very gravely. "It's just what I fear. For I think and I feel in my bones, that though it loves us and needs us--it also hates us."
I thought about this in quiet.
"Of course it doesn't know this, perhaps," she said, "or does not wish for me to know. The more I think on it the more I wonder if you weren't sent here to pass on what I have to say to that baby in the cradle. God knows Marguerite will not listen now. She thinks she rules the world. And I fear hell in my old age and crave the company of a cherubic three-year-old."
"Flesh, the thing wants to be flesh," I pressed, for I remember I was almost carried off course by being called cherubic, which I liked very much, and wanted her to digress on my charms. But I went back to the evil thing. "How can it be flesh? Human flesh? What? Would it be born into the world again, or take a body that is dead, or one that is..."
"No," she said. "It says it knows its destiny. It says it carries the sketch within itself of what it would be again, and that someday a witch and a man shall make the magical egg from which its form will be made, and into which it will come again, knowing its own form, and the infant soul shall not knock it loose, and all the world will come to understand it."
"All the world, hmmm." I thought. "And you said, 'again.' By that you mean the thing has been flesh before?"
"It was something before which it is not now, but what it was,
I can't rightly tell you. I think it was a creature fallen, damned to suffer intelligence and loneliness in a vaporish form! And it would end the sentence. Through us it wants a strong witch, who can be as the Virgin Mary was to Christ, the vessel of an Incarnation."
I pondered all this. "It's no devil," I said.
"And why do you say that?" she asked again, as if we hadn't discussed this before.
"Because," I said, "the Devil has more important things to do if he exists at all, and on the point of his existence at all I am not certain."
"Where did you get an idea there was no Devil?"
"Rousseau," I said. "His philosophy argues that the worst evil is in man."
"Well," she said, "read some more before you make up your mind."
And that was the end of that part of it.
But before she died, which was not so long after that at all, she told me many things about this spirit. It killed through fright mostly. In the form of a man, it startled coachmen and riders at night, causing them to veer off the road and into the swamps; and sometimes it even frighted the horses as well as the men, which was proof that it was indeed material.
It could be sent to stalk a mortal man or woman, and tell in its own childish way what that person had done all the livelong day, but one had to interpret its peculiar expressions carefully.
It could steal, of course, small things mostly, though sometimes whole banknotes for considerable amounts. And it could come into mortals for a bit of time, to see through their eyes and feel through their hands, but this was never long-lasting. Indeed the battle left it fatigued and often more tormented than it had been before, and it oftentimes killed whom it had possessed out of sheer rage and envy. This meant one had to be very careful in helping it with such tricks, for the innocent body used for such purposes might very well be destroyed after.
Such had happened to one of Marie Claudette's nephews, she told me--one of my very own cousins--before she had learnt to control the thing and make it obey or starve it with silence and covering her eyes and pretending not to hear it. "It is not so hard to torture at times," she said. "It feels, and it forgets, and it weeps. I don't envy it."
