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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 naivete 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. Pun
