Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

I told my mother all the fiend had told me. She was filled with fear. "It knows our thoughts," she said at once in a whisper.

"Well, these are not secrets," I said, "but even if they were, let us play music if we want to talk of them."

"What do you mean?" asked she.

"Didn't your own mother tell you?"

No, she confessed, her mother had not. So I did. And she began to laugh as wildly as she had cried the night before, clapping her hands and even sinking down upon the floor and drawing up her knees. At once she sent for the very musicians who had played for her mother.

And under cover of the wild band, which sounded like drunken gypsies fighting musical war with Cajuns of the Bayou over matters of life and death, I told her everything Marie Claudette had told me.

Meantime the spirit appeared in the room, behind the band, where his manly form could not be seen by them but only by us, and began to dance madly. Finally the shaky apparition fell to rocking back and forth, and then vanished. But we could still feel its presence in the room, and that it had fallen into the band's repetitive and distinctly African rhythm.

We spoke under this cover.

Marguerite had not cared for "ancient history." She had never heard the word Donnelaith. She did not remember much about Suzanne. She was glad I had taken note of this. And there were history books which she would give to me.

Magic was her passion, she explained, and told me in detail how her mother had never appreciated her talents. Early on she, Marguerite, had befriended the powerful voodooiennes of New Orleans. She'd learned from them, and she would now heal, spellbind, and cast curses with good effect, and in all this Lasher was her slave and devotee and lover.

There began a conversation between my mother and me which was to last all her life, in which she gave me everything she knew without compromise and I gave to her all that I knew, as well, and I was close to her at last, and in her arms, and she was my mother.

But it was soon clear to me that my mother was mad; or shall we say she was maniacally focused upon her magical experiments. It seemed a certainty in her mind that Lasher was the Devil; and that anything else he might have said was lies; indeed, the only truth I'd given her was the trick of shutting him out by music. Her real passions lay in hunting the swamps for magical plants, talking to the old black women of bizarre cures, and attempting to transform things through the use of chemicals and telekinetic power.

Of course we did not use that word then. We didn't know it. She was certain of Lasher's love. She had had the girl child, and would try to have another, stronger girl, if that was what he wanted. But with every passing year, she became less interested in men, more addicted to the fiend's embraces, and altogether less coherent.

Meantime, I was growing fast, and just as I had been a miracle of a three-year-old, I became a miracle at every age, continuing my reading, and my adventures, and my intercourse with the daemon.

The slaves knew now that I had it in my power. They came to me for aid; they begged a cure from me when they were ill, and very soon I had supplanted my mother as the object of mystery.

Now, here, Michael, I face a clear choice. I can tell you all that Marguerite and I learnt and how; or I can go on ahead with those things which are most important. Let me choose a compromise and make a swift summary of our experiments.

But before I do, let me say that my sister, Katherine, was coming along, utterly lacking in guile, but beautiful as she was innocent, a flower I adored and wished to protect, and knowing it pleased the fiend when I shepherded her about, I did it all the more willingly. But I conceived a great love for her in my own right, and I came to realize that she did in fact see "the man" but that he frightened her. She seemed shy of all that was unwholesome or otherworldly. Of our mother she was terrified, and with reason.

Marguerite's experiments were becoming ever more reckless. If a baby was born dead on our land, she wanted it. The slaves tried to hide from her their lost children, lest these poor beings end up in jars in Marguerite's study. And one of my keenest memories of those times is of Marguerite dashing into the house with a bundle in her hands, and then flashing at me her eager smile, and throwing back the cloth to reveal a tiny dead black baby form, and then covering it up again in jubilation as she went to lock herself in her study.

Meantime the spirit was ever attentive. It put gold coins in my pockets every day. It warned me when amongst my cousins I had some petty enemy. It stood guard over my room, and once struck down a thieving runaway who sought to steal the few jewels I possessed.

And when I was alone, it often came to me and caressed me and gave me a pleasure more keen than any I could achieve with others.

And this it did too with Marguerite faithfully. And all the while it tried its blandishments on Katherine but seemed to get nowhere with her.

She had it in her head that such evil pleasures as were offered to her in the dark of night were mortal sin. I think she was perhaps the first of the witches to actually believe this, and how the Catholic conception took root in her so strong and so soon--before the fiend could carry her off into erotic dreams--I can't honestly say. If you believe in God, you might say God was with her. I don't think so.

Whatever, my mother and I, tiring of my grandmother's awful band, soon hired a piano player and a fiddler to play for us. The spirit seemed at first to delight in this as it had in the cacophonous band. In dazzling male form, it would appear in the room, spellbound and happy to reveal it.

But it came to realize we whispered to each other under the notes of the song, and it couldn't hear or know what we thought or planned, it became fiercely angry. We needed louder music to shut it out and brought back the others to create their din, and then we saw that what was most effective was melody and rhythm. Noise alone was not sufficient to do it.

Meantime, as we prospered, as the plantation was flush, and our money seemed to breed upon itself in foreign banks, and our cousins married far and wide, the name Mayfair became greater and greater along the River Coast, and we reigned supreme on our own land. No one could bother us or touch us.

I was nine years old when I demanded of the fiend:

"

What is it you really want of us, of my mother and me?"

"What I want of you all," he said. "That you make me flesh!" and, imitating the band, it began to sing these words over and over, and shake the objects in the room to the rhythm as it were of a drum, until I put my hands over my ears and begged for mercy.

"Laughter," he said. "Laughter."

"Which means what?" I asked.

"I am laughing at you because I too can make music to make you rock."

I laughed. "You're right," I said. "And you say this word, because you cannot actually laugh."

"Just so," he said, petulantly. "When I am flesh I shall laugh again."

"Again?" said I.

He said nothing.

Ah, this moment is so clear in my memory. I stood out on the upper gallery of the house, shielded somewhat by the banana leaves that stroked the wooden banisters. And out on the river, ships made their way north to the port through the channels. All the fields lay in warm spring sunlight, and below on the grass my cousins played, some forty or fifty of them, all below the age of twelve, and around them in rocking chairs sat the uncles and aunts, fanning themselves and chatting.

And here I stood with this thing, my hands on the rail, my face very grave most likely for the age of nine, trying to get to the heart of it.

"All this I have given you," he said, as if he had read my emotions more clearly than I had myself. "Your family is my family; I will bring blessing upon blessing. You do not know what wealth can give. You are too young. You will come to see that you are a prince in a great kingdom. No crowned head in Europe enjoys such power as you have."

"I love you," I said mechanically to it, and sought to believe this for an instant, as if I were seducing a mortal adult.

"I shall continue," he said. "Protect Katherine until she can bear a girl child. Carry on the line; Katherine is weak, strong ones will come, it must happen."

I pondered.

"This is all I can do?" I asked.

"For now," he said. "But you are very strong, Julien. Things will come into your mind, and when you see what is to be done I shall see it."

Again I pondered. I studied the happy throng on the lawn. My brother was calling for me to come down and play; they would be taking a boat out soon to the Bayou. Did I want to come with them?