This was to prove true of me all my life. I love young people too, of course, especially when they are very careless and brave, as my Stella was, or my Mary Beth. But people in the very middle of life? I can hardly tolerate them.
Allow me to say, Michael, you are an exception. No, don’t speak. Don’t break the trance. I won’t tell you you are a child at heart, but you do have some childlike faith and goodness in you, and this has been both intriguing to me and somewhat maddening. You have challenged me. Like many a man with Irish blood, you know all sorts of supernatural things are possible. Yet you don’t care. You go about talking to wooden joists and beams and plaster!
Enough. Everything depends on you now. Let me return to Marie Claudette and the particular things she told me about our family ghost.
“It has two kinds of voices,” she declared, “a voice one can hear only in one’s head, and the voice you heard, which can be heard by anyone with the right ears to hear it. And sometimes even a voice so loud and clear that it can be heard by everyone. But that isn’t often, you see, for that wears it out, and where does it get its strength? From us-from me, from your mother, and possibly even from you, for I have seen it near me when you were here, and I have seen you look at it.
“As for the inner voice, it can devil you with it anytime, as it has done many an enemy, unless of course you are defended against it.”
“And how do you defend yourself?” I asked.
“Can’t you guess?” she said. “Let me see how smart you are. You see it with me, which means it appears, no? It summons its strength, it comes together, it becomes as a man for a few cherished moments. Then it is gone and exhausted. Why do you think it gives so much of itself to me, instead of merely whispering inside my head, ‘Poor old soul, I shall never forget you’?”
“To be seen,” I said with a shrug. “It’s vain.”
She laughed with delight. “Ah, yes, and no. It has to take form to come to me for a simple reason. I surround myself night and day with music. It cannot get through unless it gathers all its strength, and concentrates most fiercely in the manifestation of a human form and a human voice. It must drown out the rhythm which at every moment enchants it and distracts it.
“Understand it likes music of course, but music is a thing with a sway over it, as music sometimes is with wild beasts or mythical persons in stories. And as long as I command my band to play, it cannot plague my mind alone, but must come and tap me on the shoulder.”
I remember that it was my turn to laugh with delight. The spirit was no worse than me in a way. I had had to learn to concentrate on my grandmother’s stories when the music seemed to make it all but impossible. But for Lasher, to concentrate was to exist. When spirits dream, they don’t know themselves.
I could digress on that. But I have too much to tell, and I’m too…tired now.
Let me go on. Where was I? Ah, yes, she told me about the power of music over the thing, and how she kept the music near her so that it would be forced to come and pay court, for otherwise it wouldn’t have bothered.
“Does it know this?” I asked.
“Yes, and no,” she said. “It begs me to shut out the din, but I cry and say I cannot, and it then comes to me and kisses my hand, and I look at it. You are right that it is vain. It would be seen again and again, just to be reassured that I have not drifted out of its realm, but it no longer loves or needs me. It has a place in its heart for me. That’s all, and that is nothing.”
“You mean it has a heart?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, it loves us all, and we great witches above all things, for we have brought it into knowing itself, and have greatly aided it to increase its power.”
“I see,” I said. “But what if you didn’t want it around anymore? If you…”
“Shhhh…never say such a thing!” she said, “not even with trumpets or bells pealing all about you.”
“All right,” I said, feeling strongly already that I must never be given the same advice more than once, and I said no more about that. “But can you tell me what it is?” I asked.
“A devil,” she said, “a great devil.”
I told her, “I don’t think so.”
She was amazed. “Why do you say that? Who else but the Devil would serve a witch?”
I told her all I knew of the Devil, from prayers and hymns and Mass and the quick-witted slaves all around me. “The Devil is just plain bad,” I said. “And he treats badly all who trust him. This thing is too damned good to us.”
She agreed, but it was like the Devil, she said, in that it would not submit to God’s laws, but would come through as flesh and be a man.
“Why?” I said. “Isn’t it a hell of a lot stronger the way it is? Why would it want to catch yellow fever or lockjaw?”
She laughed and laughed. “It would be flesh to feel all that flesh can feel, to see what men can see, and hear what they can hear, and not have forever to be collecting itself out of a dream and fear the losing of itself. It would be flesh to be real; to be in the world and of the world, and to defy God, who gave it no body.”
“Hmmm, sounds like it has overrated the whole experience,” I said. Or in words that a three-year-old might choose for pretty much the same thing, for by that age, like many a country child of the times, I’d seen plenty of death and suffering.
Once again, she laughed, and she said that it would have what it would have, and lavished everything upon us because we served its purpose.
“It wants strength; every hour and every day in our presence, we give it strength; and it pushes for one thing: that is the birth of a witch so strong that she can make it once and for all material.”
“Well, that isn’t going to be my baby sister, Katherine,” I said.
She smiled and nodded her head. “I fear you’re right, but the strength comes and goes. You have it. Your brother has none.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “He’s more easily frightened. He’s seen it and it has made an ugly face at him to keep him from Katherine’s cradle. I don’t require ugly faces, nor do I flee from them. And I have too much sense to overturn Katherine’s cradle. But tell me, how is a witch going to make it flesh forever? Even with Mother, I see it solid for no more than two, three minutes at most. What does it mean to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Truly I don’t know the secret. But let me tell you this while the music plays on, and listen to me carefully. I’ve never even expressed this in thought to myself but I confide it to you. When it has what it wants, it shall destroy the entire family.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said again very gravely. “It’s just what I fear. For I think and I feel in my bones, that though it loves us and needs us-it also hates us.”
I thought about this in quiet.
“Of course it doesn’t know this, perhaps,” she said, “or does not wish for me to know. The more I think on it the more I wonder if you weren’t sent here to pass on what I have to say to that baby in the cradle. God knows Marguerite will not listen now. She thinks she rules the world. And I fear hell in my old age and crave the company of a cherubic three-year-old.”
“Flesh, the thing wants to be flesh,” I pressed, for I remember I was almost carried off course by being called cherubic, which I liked very much, and wanted her to digress on my charms. But I went back to the evil thing. “How can it be flesh? Human flesh? What? Would it be born into the world again, or take a body that is dead, or one that is…”
“No,” she said. “It says it knows its destiny. It says it carries the sketch within itself of what it would be again, and that someday a witch and a man shall make the magical egg from which its form will be made, and into which it will come again, knowing its own form, and the infant soul shall not knock it loose, and all the world will come to understand it.”