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"I might ask you the same thing I" I said. "Did you enjoy your romp?"
"Yes, Julien. I want to do it again, Julien. Now. But I am too weak."
"Small wonder. Go off and make like smoke. I'm exhausted too. We'll do it..."
"...as soon as we can."
"All right, all right, you devil."
I shoved the pages into the desk. I lay in a dead sleep, and when I woke it was sunlight and I knew I'd been again in the Cathedral. I remembered the rose window. I remembered the carving of the saint on top of its tomb. And the people singing...
What could this mean, I thought? This demon is in fact a saint? No, no. A bad angel fallen into hell. What? I don't know. Or did he serve some saint, venerate him, and then...what?
But the point is there could be no doubt these were mortal memories. The thing remembered being flesh; it had those memories in itself, and they had been left with me, who was perhaps the only one who could examine them. No doubt the fiend knew the memory of its fleshly self was there, but the fiend couldn't really think! The fiend used us to think! The fiend would only know what it had been if I told it.
The idea was born in my mind. Each time, remember more. Be the fiend, and know the fiend, and ultimately you will possess the truth about it. If the truth can't help, what can? "You tawdry, evil ghost!" I thought, "you are only someone who wants to be reborn. You have no right, you greedy greedy fiend. You have been alive. You are no wise or eternal thing. Go to hell and be gone."
I slept again, the livelong day, I was so tired.
That night I rode to Riverbend. I called up the band, told them to play "Dixie," for the love of God, and then I sat with Mother. I told her. She would have none of it.
"First of all, he is all-powerful and from time immemorial."
"The hell."
"And next, he will know it if you pit your soul against his. He'll kill you."
"Likely."
I never confided in her again. I don't believe I ever really spoke to her again. I don't think she much noticed.
I went into the nursery. The fiend was hanging about the cradle. I saw him in a flash, dressed as me, all full of mud, the way he'd been before. Idiot thing. I smiled.
"You want to come into me now?"
"Time to be with her, my baby," he said. "See how beautiful she is. Your witches' gifts are in her, yours and those from her mother's mother, and her mother's mother. And to think I might have wasted you."
"You never know, do you? What do you learn when you are in me?"
He didn't answer for a long while. Then he appeared in an even more brilliant flash, my spitting image as they say, and he glared at me, and smiled, and then he tried to laugh, but nothing came from his mouth, and he vanished. But what I'd caught was his improved mimicry; his greater love for my form.
I walked out. I now saw what I had to do. Study the problem when the thing was occupied with the baby. And keep it coming into me when it would, for as long as I could endure it.
The months passed. Mary Beth's first-birthday party was a great fete. The city was booming again; the shadows of the war were gone; money was to be had everywhere. Mansions were rising uptown.
The fiend took possession of me on the average once a week.
That is all either of us could take of it. It lasted some four or five hours, then whoom! I was back. I might be anywhere when it left me. Sometimes in bed, and even with a man. So it had tastes as broad as my own, when we came right down to it.
But this was the twist. It wasn't Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, no, by no means. The fiend, inside me, was unfailingly charming to people. Almost angelic. "My darling, last night you were so sweet," said my mistress, "to give me those pearls!"
"What!"
That sort of thing. It was also clear that people thought me staggering drunk when he was inside. My reputation became even more lurid and controversial. I wasn't much of a drunk on the natch. I hated to be befuddled. But it couldn't do any better than that in me. And so I lived with the recriminations and the smiles and the teasing. "Boy, were you in your cups last night."
"No kidding? I don't remember."
Meantime, night and day the vision of the Cathedral haunted me. I saw the grassy hills, sometimes I saw a castle as if I were looking through a clear piece of a stained-glass window. I saw the glen, and the mist. And some vast and unsupportable horror would overtake the memory. It would blot out all sense. And I could get no further with it. Pain. I knew pain when I tried. I knew pain unthinkable.
I did not attempt to discuss this with the villain. And as for what he learnt while he was I...this seemed a matter of pure sensuality. He guzzled, he danced, he laid waste, he fought. But there were times when he despaired afterwards. I must be flesh myself, he would lament.
There is also some evidence that when he walked in my shoes, he accumulated information. But as always, he did not seem to be able to do anything with this information. But this information would come out of him in great enthusiastic volleys.
We spoke of the changing times, for instance, of the railroads and how they had eroded the river trade; we spoke of changing fashions. We spoke of photography, with which the villain had a strong fascination. He went often to have himself photographed when he was in my body, though drunk and clumsy as he was, he had difficulty holding still for the camera. He often left these pictures in my pockets.
But this whole endeavor proved a great task for him. He would have flesh of his own, not lumber about in mine. And his adoration for Mary Beth knew no bounds.
Indeed, sometimes weeks went by when he did not have the fortitude to come into me. Just as well, as it took me two days to recover. And as Mary Beth grew, Lasher used Mary Beth very often as his excuse. Fine with me, I thought. My reputation's bad enough, and I'm growing older.
Also as Mary Beth gained in beauty with every passing day, my soul became more and more troubled. I detested the charade that she was my niece and not my daughter. I wanted my own children, indeed, I wanted sons. My values came down to such a pitiful and powerful few that I was appalled by the simplicity of it.
But my life ran on an even keel. I remained sane, in spite of the demon's assaults. I never even approached true madness. I made money in all the new postwar enterprises--building, merchandising, cotton factoring, whatever opportunity there was, and I perceived also that to keep my family rich, I had to extend its interests far beyond New Orleans. New Orleans went through waves of boom and bust; but as a port we were losing our preeminence.
I made my first trips to New York in the postwar years. With the fiend happily occupied at home, I lived as a free man in Manhattan.
I began in earnest the real building of an enduring fortune. My brother, Remy, went to live in the First Street house. I visited often.
And in time, convincing myself that there was no reason I could not have everything a good man should have, I fell in love with my young cousin Suzette, who reminded me of Katherine in her innocence. I prepared to occupy the First Street house as master, with my brother and his family living there agree
ably as part of the household.
Now, something else was coming across to me, in bright flashes, about the villain and his memories. As I continued to "recall" the Cathedral and the glen, the town of Donnelaith, images became more vivid to me. I did not move back and forth in time very much, but I saw more detail. And I came to realize that the euphoria I felt in my dream of the Cathedral was the love of God.
I learnt this for sure one weekday morning. I was outside the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and I heard a lovely singing. I went inside. Little quadroon girls, very beautiful all, "colored children" as we would have called them then, were making their First Communion. They were dressed in gorgeous white, and the ceremony was breathtaking, like so many child brides of Christ filing up the aisle, each with her rosary and white prayer book.
The love of God. That is what I felt in the St. Louis Cathedral right in my own little city. And I knew it was what I knew in the glen in the ancient Cathedral. I was stricken. I wandered about all day, evoking the feeling and then doing my best to dispel it.
In flashes I saw Donnelaith. I saw its stone houses. I saw its little square. I saw the Cathedral itself in the distance--oh, great great Gothic church. Olden times!
I sank down finally in a cafe, as always, drank a cold glass of beer and rolled my head on the wall behind me.
The demon was there, invisible.
"What are you thinking?"
Cautiously and deliberately I told him.
He was silent and confused.
Then in a timid voice, he said: "I will be flesh."
"Yes, I'm sure you will," I said, "and Mary Beth and I have vowed to help you."
"Good, for I can show you then how to remain, and come back yourself, it can be done, and others have done it."
"Why has it taken so long for you?"
"There is no time where I am," he said. "It is an idea. It will be realized. Only when I am in your body is there a sort of time, measured by noise and movement. But I am out of time. I wait. I see far. I see myself come again, and then everyone will suffer."
"Everyone."
"Everyone but our clan, yours and mine. The Clan of Donnelaith, for you are of that clan and so am I."
"Is that so? Are you telling me then that all our cousins, all our ilk, all our descendants..."
