Lasher Read online

  Enough. You get the picture. My life hung by a thread, and I knew I didn't want to lose it.

  What could I do?

  The answer came within days. I saw the fiend perpetually hovering by Mary Beth's cradle. Everyone else saw it too. "The man" gave his blessings to Mary Beth; Mary Beth's little baby eyes could make him solid and strong; he guarded the child; he fawned upon her already. And the thing appeared as me! He wore my styles, he affected my manners, he exuded, if you will, my charm!

  Calling the band together to play, a din I had begun to resent as much as an aching tooth that would never be pulled, I tried to speak with Marguerite about Lasher, and what he was, and what everyone had ever known of him.

  She made little sense, speaking only of her power to make plants grow, wounds to heal, and to make potions that might give her longevity. "The fiend will someday be flesh, and if it can come through, so can we. The dead can come back through the same doorway."

  "That's a perfectly dreadful idea," I said.

  "You think so because you're not dead. Just wait!"

  "Mother, do you want the earth peopled with the dead? Where are we going to put them?"

  In a fit of rage, she said, "Why do you ask all these questions! You put yourself in danger. You think Lasher can't do away with you? Of course he can. Be quiet and do what you were born to do. You have life all around you. What more do you want?"

  I went into the city, to my flat in the Rue Dumaine. It was again raining as it had been on the night I went to the First Street house, and the rain has always soothed my nerves and made me happy. I opened the doors to the porch. I let the rain splash in, noisy and beautiful, drenching the iron railings and splattering on the silk curtains. What did I care? I could have hung the windows with gold, if I'd wanted.

  I lay on the bed, hands cradled beneath my head, one boot against the footboard, and I listed my various sins in my head...not sins of passion, for I counted them not at all...but sins of viciousness and cruelty.

  Well, I thought, you have given this damned fiend your soul. What more can you give him? You can promise to protect and strengthen the babe, but again, the babe sees him already. He can teach the babe, he must know that.

  Then as the rain died away, and the moon came out, flooding down into the Rue Dumaine, I saw the answer.

  I would give him my human form. He already had my soul. Why not give him the form he was always imitating? I would offer him my body for possession.

  Of course he might try to mutate me and kill me. But it seemed that in all past ventures, he had required the help of me and my mother to mutate flesh. Even to mutate plants or make them spring open. If he had been good at that by himself, he would never have needed any of us.

  So, it was a safe enough risk, as I would let him live in me and walk about and dance and see, but not mutate me.

  Now, not knowing whether he would or could hear me over the miles, I called to him.

  Within seconds I saw him materialize near the oval mirror which stood in the corner. And I saw his reflection in the mirror! That I had never spied before. How strange that I had not even thought of it. He vanished soon enough. But he had smiled and showed me he was dressed in fine clothes such as I wore.

  "You want to be in the flesh?" I asked. "You want to see with my eyes? Why don't you come into me? Why don't I welcome you and lie quiet while you are inside, and let you make of me what you will for as long as you have the power to do it?"

  "You would do this?"

  "Well, surely my ancestors gave you this invitation. Surely Deborah invited you in or Charlotte."

  "Do not mock me, Julien," he said in a cold secret soundless voice. "You know I would not go into the body of a woman."

  "A body is a body," I said.

  "I am no woman."

  "Well, now you have a male witch to command. I make the offer. Perhaps it was my destiny. Come into me, I invite you. I lay myself open to you. You have certainly been close enough to me."

  "Don't mock me," he said again. "When I make love to you it is men with men as always."

  I smiled. I didn't say anything. But I was powerfully amused by this show of male pride, and it fitted with my entire picture of the childish nature of the thing. I thought to myself how I hated it, and how I had to bury that thought in my soul. So I dreamed of it soothing me with kisses and caresses. "You can reward me after as you always have," I said.

  "This will be hard for you to bear."

  "For you, I'll do it. You've done much for me."

  "Aye, and now you fear me."

  "Yes, somewhat. I want to live. I want to educate Mary Beth. She is my child."

  Silence. "Come into you..." it said.

  "Yes, do it."

  "And you will not roust me with all your power."

  "I'll do my best to behave like a perfect gentleman."

  "Oh, you are so different from a woman."

  "Really, how so?" asked I.

  "You never really love me as they do."

  "Hmmm, I could digress on all this," I said, "but be assured that you and I can further each other's aims. If women are too squeamish to say such things, then let us trust they have other ways of gaining their ends."

  "Laughter."

  "You can laugh when you're in me. You know you can."

  The room grew perfectly still. The curtains seemed to die on their rods. The rain was gone. The gallery shone in the light of the moon. It seemed I felt an emptiness. The hair tingled all over my body. I sat up, struggling to prepare myself, though for what I couldn't imagine, and then whoom, the thing had descended upon me, surrounding me and enclosing me, and I felt a great drunken swoon, and all sounds outside were melted in one single roar.

  I was standing, I was walking, but I was falling. It was shadowy and vague and nightmarish, the stairs appearing before me, the shining street, and people even waving their hands, and through a great rolling ocean of water, voices echoing. "Eh bien, Julien!"

  I knew I was walking because I had to be. But I could feel no ground beneath my feet, no balance, no up, no down, and I began to sicken with terror. I held back. I did not fight, I tried with all my might to relax into this thing, to fall into it, even as it seemed I was losing consciousness.

  What followed was an eternity of such confusion.

  It was two of the clock when next I had a coherent thought. I was sitting in the Rue Dumaine, still, but in a cafe, at a small marble-top table. I was smoking a cigarette, and my body was exhausted and full of aches, and I realized I was staring at the bartender, who stooped over me to ask again, perhaps for the sixth time:

  "Monsieur, another before we close?"

  "Absinthe." My own voice came in a hoarse whisper out of my throat. There was no part of me that didn't hurt.

  "You damned son of a bitch," I said in my secret voice, "what the hell have you been doing with me?"

  But there came no answer. It was too damned exhausted to answer. It had possessed me for hours and run about in my form. Good God, there was mud on my clothes; look at my shoes. And my pants had been taken off and put back on and badly fastened. Oh, so we'd had some woman or man, had we? And what else did we catch, I'd like to know?

  I took the fresh glass of absinthe and drank it down, and stood up and nearly fell over. My ankle was sore. I had blood on my knuckles. "We've been fighting?"

  I managed to make it to my rooms in the Rue Dumaine. My servant, Christian, was there, a man of color, a Mayfair by blood, very well-paid, very smart, and often very sarcastic. I asked if my bed was ready, and he said in his usual way, "What do you think?"

  I fell into it. I let him pull off my clothes and take them away. I asked for a bottle of wine.

  "You've had enough."

  "Get me the wine," I said, "or I will climb up off this bed and strangle you till you die."

  He got the wine. "Get out," I said. He did. I lay in the dark drinking and trying to remember what I had done...the street, the drunken whoozy feeling, voices coming at
me through water. And then clear memories began to emerge, oh yes, of course, with only the familiarity that one's own memories can have, that I had gone down into the glen and drawn all the people together, and then the entire procession had come into the Cathedral. The Cathedral was more beautiful than I had ever beheld it in my life, hung with bows for the season, greenery everywhere, and I held the Christ Child. The singing was euphoric, and the tears were sliding down my face. I am home, I am here. I looked up at the great stained window of the saint. Yes. In the hands of God and the saint, I thought.

  I woke with a start. What memory was this? I knew that the place was Scotland. I knew it was Donnelaith. And I knew that it had to be centuries ago. And yet the memory had been mine, fresh and clear, and immediate as only memory can be.

  I rushed to my desk and scribbled it all down. Up came the fiend, weak and vague and without a form, his voice only a suggestion. "What are you doing, Julien?"

  "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..."