Lasher (44 page)

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.”

“All the world, hmmm.” I thought. “And you said, ‘again.’ By that you mean the thing has been flesh before?”

“It was something before which it is not now, but what it was, I can’t rightly tell you. I think it was a creature fallen, damned to suffer intelligence and loneliness in a vaporish form! And it would end the sentence. Through us it wants a strong witch, who can be as the Virgin Mary was to Christ, the vessel of an Incarnation.”

I pondered all this. “It’s no devil,” I said.

“And why do you say that?” she asked again, as if we hadn’t discussed this before.

“Because,” I said, “the Devil has more important things to do if he exists at all, and on the point of his existence at all I am not certain.”

“Where did you get an idea there was no Devil?”

“Rousseau,” I said. “His philosophy argues that the worst evil is in man.”

“Well,” she said, “read some more before you make up your mind.”

And that was the end of that part of it.

But before she died, which was not so long after that at all, she told me many things about this spirit. It killed through fright mostly. In the form of a man, it startled coachmen and riders at night, causing them to veer off the road and into the swamps; and sometimes it even frighted the horses as well as the men, which was proof that it was indeed material.

It could be sent to stalk a mortal man or woman, and tell in its own childish way what that person had done all the livelong day, but one had to interpret its peculiar expressions carefully.

It could steal, of course, small things mostly, though sometimes whole banknotes for considerable amounts. And it could come into mortals for a bit of time, to see through their eyes and feel through their hands, but this was never long-lasting. Indeed the battle left it fatigued and often more tormented than it had been before, and it oftentimes killed whom it had possessed out of sheer rage and envy. This meant one had to be very careful in helping it with such tricks, for the innocent body used for such purposes might very well be destroyed after.

Such had happened to one of Marie Claudette’s nephews, she told me—one of my very own cousins—before she had learnt to control the thing and make it obey or starve it with silence and covering her eyes and pretending not to hear it. “It
is not so hard to torture at times,” she said. “It feels, and it forgets, and it weeps. I don’t envy it.”

“Me neither,” I said aloud and she said:

“Never scorn it. It will hate you for that. Look away always when you see it.”

Like hell, I thought, but I didn’t confess it.

It wasn’t more than a month after that that she died.

I was out in the swamps with Octavius. We had run away to live in the wild like Robinson Crusoe. We had docked our little flat-bottomed boat and had made a camp, and while he gathered wood I tried to make fire with what we already had, and was having no success at it.

When suddenly, the kindling in my hand leapt into flames, and I looked up and what should I see but Marie Claudette, my beloved grandmother, only looking more splendid and vigorous than she ever had in old age, with full, rosy cheeks and a beautiful soft mouth. She picked me up off the ground, kissed me and then set me down, and she was gone. Like that. And the little fire was blazing.

I knew what it meant. Farewell. She was dead. I insisted we go back to Riverbend immediately. And as we drew closer and closer to the house, we came into a heavy storm, and had, at last, to run through the water, against a fierce wind filled with leaves and debris and even sharp stones, until we came to the gates, and the slaves ran to shelter us with blankets.

Marie Claudette was indeed dead, and when I sobbed and told my mother how I knew, I think for the very first time in her life, she actually
saw
me. I had been a cuddly thing, of course, but in that moment, she spoke to me not as one does to a dog or a child, but as to a human being.

“You saw her and she gave you her kiss,” she said.

And then right there in the sickroom, with everyone sobbing and the shutters banging in the wind, and the priest in a state of terror, the damned fiend appeared over my mother’s shoulder, and our eyes met, and his were soft with a plea, and filled with tears for me to see, and then of course, like that, he vanished.

That’s the way my own tale will end, don’t you think? You will tell the final words. “Then Julien vanished.” And where will I be? Where will I go? Was I in heaven before you called me here, or in hell? I am so weary I don’t care anymore and that is perhaps a blessing.

But to return to that long-ago noisy moment when the rain
was blowing in, and my grandmother lay neat and small on the bed beneath layers of pretty lace and my mother, gaunt and dark-haired, stared at me, and the fiend behind took the form of a handsome man, and little Katherine cried in the cradle—it was the beginning of my true life as my mother’s cohort.

First, after the funeral and the burial in the parish cemetery—we Catholics never had cemeteries on our own land, but only in consecrated ground—my mother went mad. And I was the only witness.

Halfway up the stairs, coming home from the graveyard, she began to scream, and I rushed behind her into her room before she bolted the doors to the gallery. Then she gave one aching cry after another. All this was grief for her mother, and what she had not done, and had not said, but then it passed from grief into great wild anger.

Why could this spirit not prevent death? “Lasher, Lasher, Lasher.” She caught up the feather pillows from the bed and ripped the cloth and strewed the feathers everywhere. If you’ve never seen such a spectacle, you might rip up such a pillow and give it a try. There isn’t anything quite like it, and she tore up three pillows in her rage, and soon the entire air was full of feathers and in the midst of them she screamed, and looked more miserable and forlorn than any being I have ever beheld in all my little life, and soon I began to weep helplessly.

She held tight to me; she begged my forgiveness that she’d shown me such a sight. We lay down together and finally she cried herself to sleep, and the night descended upon the plantation, which, in those days of precious few oil lamps and candles, brought everything to an early halt, and finally only silence.

It must have been past midnight when I awoke. I don’t recall the face of the clock; only the feeling of deep night, and that it was spring and that I wanted to push through the netting which surrounded our bed and walk outside and talk to the moon and stars for a while.

Well, I managed to sit up and there before me was the thing itself, sitting on the side of the bed, and it reached out its white hand for me. I did not scream. There was no time. For all at once I felt the stroke of its fingers on my cheek and it felt good to me. Then it seemed the air around me made a caress, and the thing, having dissolved, was kissing me with invisible lips and touching me and filling my body with whatever pleasure
it could feel at so young an age, which, as you probably remember, was something!

After it was finished with me, and I lay there, a little puddle of baby juice beside my mother’s sleeping body, I saw it materialize again, this being, standing by the window. I climbed out of bed, weak and confused by the pleasure I’d felt, and went towards it. I reached out to take its hand, which dangled at its side like a man’s hand, and then it looked down at me and gave me its most tearful gaze and together we pushed the window netting aside and went out on the gallery.

It seemed to me that it trembled in the light, that it vanished some three or four times only to reappear, and then it died away, leaving the air very warm behind it. I stood in the warmth and I heard its voice for the first time in my head, its private confiding voice:

“I have broken my vow to Deborah.”

“Which was what?” I asked.

“You do not even know who Deborah was, you miserable child of flesh and blood,” it said, and went on with some hysterically funny pronouncement upon me that seemed made up of all the worst doggerel in the library. Mind you, I was nearly four by this time, and I couldn’t claim to know poetry as anything more than song, but I knew when the words were downright preposterous. And the cunning laughter of the slaves had taught me this too. I knew pomposity.

“I know who Deborah was,” I said, and I told it then the story of Deborah as told to me by Marie Claudette of how she had risen high, and then been accused of witchcraft.

“Betrayed by her husband and sons, she was, and before that, by her father. Aye, her father. And I took my vengeance upon him,” it said. “I took my vengeance on him for what he and his ilk had done to her
and to me!”

The voice broke off. I had the distinct feeling in my little three-year-old mind that it had been about to launch on another long song of rotten poetry but had changed its mind at the last minute.

“You understand what I say?” it asked. “I vowed to Deborah that I would never smile upon a male child, nor favor a male over a female.”

“Yes, I know what you are saying,” I said, “and also my Grandmamma told me. Deborah was born in the Highlands, a merry-begot, bastard child of the May revels, and her father was most likely the lord of the land himself, and did not raise
a finger when her mother, Suzanne, was burnt at the stake, a poor persecuted witch who knew almost nothing.”

“Aye,” he said. “So it was. So it was! My poor Suzanne, who called me from the depths like a child who pulls a snake from a deep pond without knowing. Stringing syllables in the air, she called my name, and I heard her.

“And it was indeed the lord of the land, the chief of the Clan of Donnelaith, who got her with child and then shivered in fear when they burnt her! Donnelaith. Can you see that word? Can you make it in letters? Go there and see the ruins of the castle I laid waste. See the graves of the last of that clan, stricken from the earth, until such time as…”

“Until such time as what?”

And then it said nothing more, but went back again to caressing me.

I was musing. “And you?” I asked. “Are you male or female, or simply a neuter thing?”

“Don’t you know?” it asked.

“I wouldn’t ask if I did,” I answered.

“Male!” it said. “Male, male, male, male!”

I stifled my own giggles at its pride and ranting.

But I must confess that from then on, it was in my mind both an “it” and a “he” as you can hear from my story. At some times it seemed so devoid of common sense that I could only perceive it as a monstrous thing, and at other times, it took on a distinct character. So bear with my vascillation if you will. When calling it by name, I often thought of it as “he.” And in my angry moments, stripped it of its sex, and cursed it as too childish to be anything but neuter.

You will see from this tale that the witches saw it variously as “he” and “it.” And there were reasons.

But let me return to the moment. The porch, the being caressing me.

When I grew tired of its embrace, and I turned around, there was my mother in the doorway, watching all of this, and she reached out and clutched me to herself, and said to it: “You shall never hurt him. He is a harmless boy!”