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?"