Lasher (55 page)

I had left at home in New Orleans my beloved secretary and young quadroon lover Victor Gregoire, who was running my office for me in my absence as no one else could have ever done, I supposed.

When I reached Venice, I expected the usual communications from Victor to be waiting for me—some letters, contracts to be notarized, signed, that sort of thing. But mainly I anticipated his written assurance that all was well in New Orleans.

What greeted me was this: as I sat at my desk, above the canal, in a great vast drearily painted room in the Italian style, hung with velvet and very damp, with a cold marble floor, in walked Victor. Or so it seemed. For I knew in an instant this was not my Victor but someone who made himself look identical
to him. He stood before me, smiling almost coyly—the young man I knew with pale golden skin, blue eyes, black hair, and a tall powerful body dressed to perfection. And then vanished.

Of course it had been the monster pretending to be Victor; making this vision to torment me. But why? I knew. I laid my head down on the desk and wept. Within an hour Mary Beth came in with the news from America. Victor had been killed two weeks ago in an accident. He had stepped off the curb at Prytania and Philip and been run down, right outside the apothecary. Two days later he had died, calling for me.

“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.

“Donnelaith,” says I. “I may have the spelling wrong. Here. But this is the word.”

“No, you’ve got it right,” he said. “But wherever did you hear of it? The only folks who go up there now are the students interested in the old stones, and the fishermen and the hunters. That glen is a haunted place, very beautiful of course, and well worth the trek, but only if you have some purpose. There are terrible legends in those parts, as terrible as the legends of Loch Ness, or Glamis Castle.”

“I have a purpose. Tell me about it, everything that you know,” said I, frightened that any moment I would feel the spirit’s presence. I wondered if Mary Beth had gone into some dangerous pub where women are in the main not allowed, just to keep Lasher on his toes.

“Well, it all goes back to the Romans,” said the professor. “Pagan worship in those parts, but the name Donnelaith refers to an ancient clan stronghold. The Clan Donnelaith were Irish
and Scots, descendants of the missionaries who went up there from Ireland to spread the word of God in the time of St. Brendan. And of course the Picts were up there, before the Romans. Rumor was they built their castle in Donnelaith because it was a place blessed by the pagan spirits. We are talking now of the Picts when we speak of pagans. That was their part of Scotland up there, and the Donnelaith clan probably descended from them as well. You know how it went, pagans and Catholics.”

“Catholics built upon pagan shrines to appease and include the local superstitions.”

“Exactly,” said he. “And even the Roman documents mention terrible things about that glen and the things that lurked in it. They mention a sinister childlike breed, which could overrun the world if ever allowed to stray from the valley. And a particularly vicious species of the ‘little people.’ Of course you are familiar with the little people. Don’t laugh at them, I warn you.” Yet he smiled as he said this. “But you can’t find the original material on any of that anymore. Whatever, even before the Venerable Bede those tribes up there had become the Clan of Donnelaith, and Bede even mentions a cult center, a Christian church there.”

“What was its name?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” says he. “The Venerable Bede never said, at least not that I remember, but it had to do with a great saint who was, as you can probably guess, a converted pagan. You know, one of those legendary kings of great potency who suddenly fell upon his knees and allowed himself to be baptized, and then worked a score of miracles. Just the sort of things the Celts and the Picts of those times required of their God if they were going to go over to him.

“The Romans never really tamed the Highlands, you know. And neither really did the Irish missionaries. The Romans actually forbade their soldiers from going into the glen, or to the nearby islands. Something to do with the licentiousness of the women. The Highlanders were Catholic later on, yes, fiercely so, ready to fight to the death, but they were Catholic in their own strange way. And that was their downfall.”

“Explain,” said I, pouring him another glass of port, and peering over the parchment map which he spread out before us. This was a facsimile, he explained, that he’d made himself from the real thing under glass in the British Museum.

“The town reached its height in the fourteen hundreds.
There is some evidence it was a market town. The loch was a true port in those times. Rumor was, the Cathedral was magnificent. Not the church Bede mentions, you understand, but a Cathedral which had taken centuries to build, and all the time under the wing of the Clan of Donnelaith, who were devoted to this saint, and regarded him as the guardian of all Scots, and the one someday to save the nation.

“You have to go to travel accounts for descriptions of the shrine, and there isn’t very much there, and nobody has ever bothered to compile it.”

“I’ll compile it,” I said.

“If you have a century to stay here, you might,” said he, “but you ought to go up to the glen and see how little remains of all that. A castle, a pagan circle of stones, the foundations of the town, now totally overgrown, and then those terrible ruins of the Cathedral.”

“But what did happen to it? What did you mean its Catholicism was its ruin?”

“Those Highland Catholics would yield to no one,” he said. “Not to Henry the Eighth when he tried to convert them to his new church in the name of Anne Boleyn, and not to the great reformer John Knox, either. But it was John Knox—or his followers—who destroyed them.”

I closed my eyes; I was seeing the Cathedral. I was seeing the flames, and the stained glass exploding in ail directions. I opened my eyes with a shudder.

“You’re a strange man,” he said. “You’ve got the Irish blood, don’t you?”

I nodded. Told him my father’s name. He was flabbergasted. Of course he remembered Tyrone McNamara, the great singer. But he didn’t think anyone else did. “And you are his son?”

“Aye,” I said. “But go on. How did the followers of Knox destroy Donnelaith? Oh, and the stained glass. There was stained glass, wasn’t there, where would that have come from?”

“Made right there,” said he, “all through the twelve hundreds and thirteen hundreds by the Franciscan monks from Italy.”