“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 naïveté 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. Punishment even would have its shape, its purpose, some conviction of meaning. I cannot imagine eternal flames. But I can imagine eternal meaning.
We left Italy immediately as the daemon had asked us to do. We journeyed north, stopping again in Paris for only two days before we made the crossing, and drove north to Edinburgh.
The daemon seemed quiet. When I tried to engage it in conversation, it would say only, “I remember Suzanne,” and there was something utterly without hope in its manner.
Now in Edinburgh a remarkable thing happened. Mary Beth, in my presence, begged that the daemon come with her and protect her. She, who had gone out with me disguised, would now wander on her own, with only her familiar to protect her. In sum, she lured Lasher away, whistling to herself as she went out, walking in a man’s tweed coat and breeches, her hair swept up beneath a small shapeless cap, her steps big and easy as any boy’s steps might be.
And I, alone, went at once to the University of Edinburgh, on the trail of the finest professor of history in those parts, and soon cornered the man, and, plying him with drink and money, was soon closeted away with him in his study.
His was a charming house in the Old Town, which many of the rich had long deserted but which he still preferred, for he knew the whole history of the building. The rooms were filled with books, even to the narrow hallways, and the stairway landing.
He was an ingratiating, volatile little creature-with a shiny bald head, silver spectacles and rather showy flaring white whiskers, which were then the style-who spoke with a thick Scots accent to his English, and he was passionately in love with the folklore of his country. His rooms were crammed with dreary pictures of Robert Burns, and Mary Queen of Scots, and Robert the Bruce, and even Bonnie Prince Charlie.
I thought it all rather amusing, but I was too excited to keep still when he admitted that indeed he was, as his students had told me, an expert on the ancient folklore of the Highlands.