“Come to me, Gifford,” he answered with a smooth astonishing simplicity. “Come into my arms.”
“I didn’t quite hear you,” she answered, the forced and uneasy smile flashing before she could stop it, the words falling from her lips as she drew closer and felt the heat of the fire. The fragrance was so delicious, made her want to do nothing suddenly but breathe. “Who are you?” She tried to make it sound polite. Casual. Normal. “Do we know each other, you and I?”
“Yes, Gifford. You know me. You know who I am,” he said. His voice was lyrical as if he were reciting something that rhymed, but it didn’t rhyme. He seemed to cherish the simple syllables he spoke. “You saw me when you were a little girl,” he said, making the last word very beautiful. “I know you did. I can’t really remember the moment now. You can remember for both of us. Gifford, think back, think back to the dusty porch, the overgrown garden.” He looked sad, thoughtful.
“I don’t know you,” she said, but her voice had no conviction.
He came closer to her. The bones of his face were gracefully sculptured but the skin, how fine and flawless was the skin. He was better than the dime-store Christ, certainly. Oh, more truly like the famous self-portrait of Dürer. “Salvator Mundi,” she whispered. Wasn’t that the painting’s name?
“I’ve lost those recent centuries,” he said, “if ever I possessed them, struggling as I did then to see the simplest of solid things. But I claim older truths and memories now, before the time of my Mayfair beauties and their fragile nurture. And must rely as men do upon my chronicles-those words I wrote in haste, as the veil thickened, as the flesh tightened, robbing me of a ghost’s perspective which might have seen me triumph all the quicker and all the easier than I shall do.
“Gifford. I myself recorded the name Gifford. Gifford Mayfair-Gifford, the granddaughter of Julien. Gifford came to First Street. Gifford is one who saw Lasher, don’t I speak the truth?”
At the sound of the name, she stiffened. And the rest of his words, going on and on like a song, were barely intelligible to her.
“Yes, I paid the price of every mewling babe, but only to recover a more precious destiny, and for you a more precious and tragic love.”
He looked Christlike as he spoke, as Dürer had in the painting, deliberately perhaps, nodding just a little for emphasis, fingers pressed together in a steeple for a fleeting moment and then released to appeal to the open air. The Christ who doesn’t know how to make change and has to ask one of the Twelve Apostles, but knows he is going to die on the cross.
Her mind was utterly blank, unable to proceed, to frame a response or a plan. Lasher. Her body told her suddenly how frightened of this strange man she was. She had lifted her own hands and was almost wringing them, a characteristic gesture with her, and she saw her own fingers like blurred wings in the corner of her vision.
In a rush of rampant pulse and heat, she could not see anything distinct about him suddenly, only the beauty itself, like a reflection marring the view through a window. Her fear surged, paralyzing her, while at the same instant forcing from her another gesture. She raised her hand to her forehead; and in a dark obliterating flash, his hand came out and locked itself around her wrist. Hot, hurtful.
Her eyes closed. She was so very frightened that she was not really there for a moment. She was not really alive. She was disconnected and out of time and out of any place; then the fear subsided and rose again, whipping her once again into terror. She felt the tightness and the pressure of his fingers; she smelled the deep warm inviting fragrance. She said willfully, in terror and in rage:
“Let me go.”
“What did you mean to do, Gifford?” The voice was almost timid; mellow; lilting as before.
He stood now very close to her. He was nearly monstrously tall, a man of six and half feet perhaps. She couldn’t calculate; just the right side of monstrous perhaps, a being of slender parts, the bones of the forehead very prominent beneath the smooth skin.
“What did you mean to do?” he asked her. Childlike, not petulant, simply very innocent and young.
“Make the Sign of the Cross!” she said in a hoarse whisper. And she did it, convulsively, tearing loose from him, and beginning again, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The words were spoken inside her. Then she steadied herself, and looked him full in the face. “You’re not Lasher,” she said, the word almost dying on her lips. “You’re just a man. You’re a man standing here.”
“I am Lasher,” he said gently as if trying to protect her from the coarseness of his words. “I am Lasher and I am in the flesh, and have come again, my beautiful one, my Mayfair Witch.” Lovely enunciation, careful yet so rapid. “Flesh and blood now, yes, a man, yes, again, and needing you, my beauty, my Gifford Mayfair. Cut me and I bleed. Kiss me and you quicken my passion. Learn for yourself.”
Again there was that disconnection. The terror couldn’t become old, or tedious, or even manageable. Surely a person this frightened ought to mercifully lose consciousness, and for one second she thought indeed she might do that. But she knew that if she did, she was lost. This man was standing there before her; the aroma that flooded her was coming from him. He was only a foot or two away from her now as he looked down at her, eyes radiant and fixed and imploring, face smooth as a baby’s and lips almost rosy as a child’s lips.
He seemed unaware of his beauty, or rather not to be consciously using it to dazzle her, or distract her, to comfort or quiet her. He seemed to see not himself in her eyes, but only her. “Gifford,” he whispered. “Granddaughter of Julien.”
It was as terrible suddenly, as dismal and as endless as any fear in childhood, any moment of disconsolate gloom when she had hugged her knees and cried and cried, afraid to even open her eyes, afraid of the creaking house, afraid of the sound of her mother’s moans, afraid of darkness itself, and the endless vistas of horror that lay in it.
She forced herself to look down, to feel the moment, to feel the tile beneath her feet, and the fire’s annoying and persistent flickering, to see his hands, so very white and heavily veined like those of an elderly person, and then to look up at the smooth, serene Christlike forehead with its flowing dark hair. Sculpted ridges for his sleek black eyebrows, fine bones framing his eyes, making them all the more vivid as they peered out at her. A man’s jaw, giving force and shape to the lustrous close-cropped beard.
“I want you to leave now,” she said. It sounded so nonsensical, so helpless. She pictured the gun in the closet. She had always secretly longed for a reason to use it, she knew it now. She smelled the cordite in her memory, and the dirt of the cement-walled shooting gallery in Gretna. Heard Mona cheering her on. She could feel that big heavy thing dance upwards as she pulled the trigger. Oh, how she wanted it now.
“I want you to come back in the morning,” she said, nodding emphatically as she said it. “You must leave my house now.” She even thought of the medal. Oh, God, why hadn’t she put the medal on! She had wanted to. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
“Go away from here.”
“I can’t do that, my precious one, my Gifford,” he said as if singing to a slow-paced melody.
“You’re saying crazy things to me. I don’t know you. I’m asking you again to leave.” But when she went to step back, she did not dare. Some bit of charm or compassion had left his face abruptly. He was staring at her warily, maybe even bitterly. This was like the face of a child, all right, mobile and seductive, and endearing in its quick and abandoned flashes of feeling. How smooth and perfect the forehead; such proportion. Had Dürer been born so perfect?