“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 café, 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?”
“I might ask you the same thing I” I said. “Did you enjoy your romp?”
“Yes, Julien. I want to do it again, Julien. Now. But I am too weak.”
“Small wonder. Go off and make like smoke. I’m exhausted too. We’ll do it…”
“…as soon as we can.”
“All right, all right, you devil.”
I shoved the pages into the desk. I lay in a dead sleep, and when I woke it was sunlight and I knew I’d been again in the Cathedral. I remembered the rose window. I remembered the carving of the saint on top of its tomb. And the people singing…
What could this mean, I thought? This demon is in fact a saint? No, no. A bad angel fallen into hell. What? I don’t know. Or did he serve some saint, venerate him, and then…what?
But the point is there could be no doubt these were mortal memories. The thing remembered being flesh; it had those memories in itself, and they had been left with me, who was perhaps the only one who could examine them. No doubt the fiend knew the memory of its fleshly self was there, but the fiend couldn’t really think! The fiend used us to think! The fiend would only know what it had been if I told it.
The idea was born in my mind. Each time, remember more. Be the fiend, and know the fiend, and ultimately you will possess the truth about it. If the truth can’t help, what can? “You tawdry, evil ghost!” I thought, “you are only someone who wants to be reborn. You have no right, you greedy greedy fiend. You have been alive. You are no wise or eternal thing. Go to hell and be gone.”
I slept again, the livelong day, I was so tired.
That night I rode to Riverbend. I called up the band, told them to play “Dixie,” for the love of God, and then I sat with Mother. I told her. She would have none of it.
“First of all, he is all-powerful and from time immemorial.”
“The hell.”
“And next, he will know it if you pit your soul against his. He’ll kill you.”
“Likely.”
I never confided in her again. I don’t believe I ever really spoke to her again. I don’t think she much noticed.
I went into the nursery. The fiend was hanging about the cradle. I saw him in a flash, dressed as me, all full of mud, the way he’d been before. Idiot thing. I smiled.
“You want to come into me now?”
“Time to be with her, my baby,” he said. “See how beautiful she is. Your witches’ gifts are in her, yours and those from her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother. And to think I might have wasted you.”
“You never know, do you? What do you learn when you are in me?”
He didn’t answer for a long while. Then he appeared in an even more brilliant flash, my spitting image as they say, and he glared at me, and smiled, and then he tried to laugh, but nothing came from his mouth, and he vanished. But what I’d caught was his improved mimicry; his greater love for my form.
I walked out. I now saw what I had to do. Study the problem when the thing was occupied with the baby. And keep it coming into me when it would, for as long as I could endure it.
The months passed. Mary Beth’s first-birthday party was a great fete. The city was booming again; the shadows of the war were gone; money was to be had everywhere. Mansions were rising uptown.