Seventeen
JULIEN’S STORY CONTINUES
THE DAYS AFTER Mary Beth’s birth were the darkest of my life. If I ever possessed a moral vision it was in those moments. The cause of it precisely I am not certain, and as it isn’t the subject of the narrative I shall try to pass over it quickly.
Let me just say that as a precocious child I had become accustomed to murder, to witchcraft, to evil in general before I had time to evaluate it. The war, the loss of my sister, her subsequent rape-all these had further illuminated for me what I’d already come to suspect, that I required something deep and of value to make me happy. Wealth wasn’t enough; the flesh wasn’t enough. If my family could not prosper I could not draw breath! And I wanted to draw breath. I was no more ready to let go of life-of health, of pleasure, of prosperity-than a newborn baby screaming as loudly as Mary Beth had screamed.
Also I wanted to know and love my daughter. Above all else I wanted this, and I knew for the first time why so many legends and so many fairy tales have at their core the simple treasure-a child, an heir, a little infant in one’s arm, made up of oneself and another.
Enough. You get the picture. My life hung by a thread, and I knew I didn’t want to lose it.
What could I do?
The answer came within days. I saw the fiend perpetually hovering by Mary Beth’s cradle. Everyone else saw it too. “The man” gave his blessings to Mary Beth; Mary Beth’s little baby eyes could make him solid and strong; he guarded the child; he fawned upon her already. And the thing appeared as me! He wore my styles, he affected my manners, he exuded, if you will, my charm!
Calling the band together to play, a din I had begun to resent as much as an aching tooth that would never be pulled, I tried to speak with Marguerite about Lasher, and what he was, and what everyone had ever known of him.
She made little sense, speaking only of her power to make plants grow, wounds to heal, and to make potions that might give her longevity. “The fiend will someday be flesh, and if it can come through, so can we. The dead can come back through the same doorway.”
“That’s a perfectly dreadful idea,” I said.
“You think so because you’re not dead. Just wait!”
“Mother, do you want the earth peopled with the dead? Where are we going to put them?”
In a fit of rage, she said, “Why do you ask all these questions! You put yourself in danger. You think Lasher can’t do away with you? Of course he can. Be quiet and do what you were born to do. You have life all around you. What more do you want?”
I went into the city, to my flat in the Rue Dumaine. It was again raining as it had been on the night I went to the First Street house, and the rain has always soothed my nerves and made me happy. I opened the doors to the porch. I let the rain splash in, noisy and beautiful, drenching the iron railings and splattering on the silk curtains. What did I care? I could have hung the windows with gold, if I’d wanted.
I lay on the bed, hands cradled beneath my head, one boot against the footboard, and I listed my various sins in my head…not sins of passion, for I counted them not at all…but sins of viciousness and cruelty.
Well, I thought, you have given this damned fiend your soul. What more can you give him? You can promise to protect and strengthen the babe, but again, the babe sees him already. He can teach the babe, he must know that.
Then as the rain died away, and the moon came out, flooding down into the Rue Dumaine, I saw the answer.
I would give him my human form. He already had my soul. Why not give him the form he was always imitating? I would offer him my body for possession.
Of course he might try to mutate me and kill me. But it seemed that in all past ventures, he had required the help of me and my mother to mutate flesh. Even to mutate plants or make them spring open. If he had been good at that by himself, he would never have needed any of us.
So, it was a safe enough risk, as I would let him live in me and walk about and dance and see, but not mutate me.
Now, not knowing whether he would or could hear me over the miles, I called to him.
Within seconds I saw him materialize near the oval mirror which stood in the corner. And I saw his reflection in the mirror! That I had never spied before. How strange that I had not even thought of it. He vanished soon enough. But he had smiled and showed me he was dressed in fine clothes such as I wore.
“You want to be in the flesh?” I asked. “You want to see with my eyes? Why don’t you come into me? Why don’t I welcome you and lie quiet while you are inside, and let you make of me what you will for as long as you have the power to do it?”
“You would do this?”
“Well, surely my ancestors gave you this invitation. Surely Deborah invited you in or Charlotte.”
“Do not mock me, Julien,” he said in a cold secret soundless voice. “You know I would not go into the body of a woman.”
“A body is a body,” I said.
“I am no woman.”
“Well, now you have a male witch to command. I make the offer. Perhaps it was my destiny. Come into me, I invite you. I lay myself open to you. You have certainly been close enough to me.”
“Don’t mock me,” he said again. “When I make love to you it is men with men as always.”
I smiled. I didn’t say anything. But I was powerfully amused by this show of male pride, and it fitted with my entire picture of the childish nature of the thing. I thought to myself how I hated it, and how I had to bury that thought in my soul. So I dreamed of it soothing me with kisses and caresses. “You can reward me after as you always have,” I said.
“This will be hard for you to bear.”
“For you, I’ll do it. You’ve done much for me.”
“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
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.
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,
