Lasher Read online

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

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

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

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

  Then back she went to scribbling about future experiments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And the victim inevitably died as the result.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Laughter, Julien. Am I not better?"

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

  "Why do you love so to do it?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Any comments?" I asked Lasher.

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

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

  But then the unthinkable occurred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "How do you know?" I said.

  "I see now. I see the way. You are my beloved Julien."

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

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

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

  "Not now," says I. "I must find Katherine."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But it was Lasher who gave the bride away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "What do you really look like?" I asked.

  "Laughter. Why ask me such a question?"

  "When you are flesh what will you be?"

  "Like you, Julien."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I said to Lasher, "Will he die?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "He's dead, Monsieur. Your sister begs you to come!"

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