by Anne Rice
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!”
And I think then it answered her in her head because she grew quiet. It was gone. That was all I knew for certain.
The next morning I went at once to the nursery where I still slept with Rémy and Katherine and some other sweet cousins best forgotten. I could not write very well. And understand now on this point, many people in those years could read, but couldn’t write.
In fact, to read but not to write was common. I could read anything, as I’ve said, and words like transubstantiation rolled off my tongue both in English and in Latin. But I had only just begun to form written letters with agility and speed, and I had a hell of a time recording what the fiend had said, but finally, asking, “How do you spell-?” of everybody who chanced to pass through the room, I got it down, exactly. And if you want to know, those words are still scratched deep in the little desk, a thing handmade of cypress which is in the far back attic now and which you, Michael, have touched with your own hands once as you repaired the rafters there.
“Until such time as…” Those were the words the fiend had spoken. Which struck me as powerfully significant.
I determined then and there to learn to write, and did so within six months, though my handwriting did not assume its truly polished form till I was near twelve. My early writing was fast and clumsy.
I told my mother all the fiend had told me. She was filled with fear. “It knows our thoughts,” she said at once in a whisper.
“Well, these are not secrets,” I said, “but even if they were, let us play music if we want to talk of them.”
“What do you mean?” asked she.
“Didn’t your own mother tell you?”
No, she confessed, her mother had not. So I did. And she began to laugh as wildly as she had cried the night before, clapping her hands and even sinking down upon the floor and drawing up her knees. At once she sent for the very musicians who had played for her mother.
And under cover of the wild band, which sounded like drunken gypsies fighting musical war with Cajuns of the Bayou over matters of life and death, I told her everything Marie Claudette had told me.
Meantime the spirit appeared in the room, behind the band, where his manly form could not be seen by them but only by us, and began to dance madly. Finally the shaky apparition fell to rocking back and forth, and then vanished. But we could still feel its presence in the room, and that it had fallen into the band’s repetitive and distinctly African rhythm.
We spoke under this cover.
Marguerite had not cared for “ancient history.” She had never heard the word Donnelaith. She did not remember much about Suzanne. She was glad I had taken note of this. And there were history books which she would give to me.
Magic was her passion, she explained, and told me in detail how her mother had never appreciated her talents. Early on she, Marguerite, had befriended the powerful voodooiennes of New Orleans. She’d learned from them, and she would now heal, spellbind, and cast curses with good effect, and in all this Lasher was her slave and devotee and lover.
There began a conversation between my mother and me which was to last all her life, in which she gave me everything she knew without compromise and I gave to her all that I knew, as well, and I was close to her at last, and in her arms, and she was my mother.
But it was soon clear to me that my mother was mad; or shall we say she was maniacally focused upon her magical experiments. It seemed a certainty in her mind that Lasher was the Devil; and that anything else he might have said was lies; indeed, the only truth I’d given her was the trick of shutting him out by music. Her real passions lay in hunting the swamps for magical plants, talking to the old black women of bizarre cures, and attempting to transform things through the use of chemicals and telekinetic power.
Of course we did not use that word then. We didn’t know it. She was certain of Lasher’s love. She had had the girl child, and would try to have another, stronger girl, if that was what he wanted. But with every passing year, she became less interested in men, more addicted to the fiend’s embraces, and altogether less coherent.
Meantime, I was growing fast, and just as I had been a miracle of a three-year-old, I became a miracle at every age, continuing my reading, and my adventures, and my intercourse with the daemon.
The slaves knew now t
hat I had it in my power. They came to me for aid; they begged a cure from me when they were ill, and very soon I had supplanted my mother as the object of mystery.
Now, here, Michael, I face a clear choice. I can tell you all that Marguerite and I learnt and how; or I can go on ahead with those things which are most important. Let me choose a compromise and make a swift summary of our experiments.
But before I do, let me say that my sister, Katherine, was coming along, utterly lacking in guile, but beautiful as she was innocent, a flower I adored and wished to protect, and knowing it pleased the fiend when I shepherded her about, I did it all the more willingly. But I conceived a great love for her in my own right, and I came to realize that she did in fact see “the man” but that he frightened her. She seemed shy of all that was unwholesome or otherworldly. Of our mother she was terrified, and with reason.
Marguerite’s experiments were becoming ever more reckless. If a baby was born dead on our land, she wanted it. The slaves tried to hide from her their lost children, lest these poor beings end up in jars in Marguerite’s study. And one of my keenest memories of those times is of Marguerite dashing into the house with a bundle in her hands, and then flashing at me her eager smile, and throwing back the cloth to reveal a tiny dead black baby form, and then covering it up again in jubilation as she went to lock herself in her study.
Meantime the spirit was ever attentive. It put gold coins in my pockets every day. It warned me when amongst my cousins I had some petty enemy. It stood guard over my room, and once struck down a thieving runaway who sought to steal the few jewels I possessed.
And when I was alone, it often came to me and caressed me and gave me a pleasure more keen than any I could achieve with others.
And this it did too with Marguerite faithfully. And all the while it tried its blandishments on Katherine but seemed to get nowhere with her.
She had it in her head that such evil pleasures as were offered to her in the dark of night were mortal sin. I think she was perhaps the first of the witches to actually believe this, and how the Catholic conception took root in her so strong and so soon-before the fiend could carry her off into erotic dreams-I can’t honestly say. If you believe in God, you might say God was with her. I don’t think so.
Whatever, my mother and I, tiring of my grandmother’s awful band, soon hired a piano player and a fiddler to play for us. The spirit seemed at first to delight in this as it had in the cacophonous band. In dazzling male form, it would appear in the room, spellbound and happy to reveal it.
But it came to realize we whispered to each other under the notes of the song, and it couldn’t hear or know what we thought or planned, it became fiercely angry. We needed louder music to shut it out and brought back the others to create their din, and then we saw that what was most effective was melody and rhythm. Noise alone was not sufficient to do it.
Meantime, as we prospered, as the plantation was flush, and our money seemed to breed upon itself in foreign banks, and our cousins married far and wide, the name Mayfair became greater and greater along the River Coast, and we reigned supreme on our own land. No one could bother us or touch us.
I was nine years old when I demanded of the fiend:
“What is it you really want of us, of my mother and me?”
“What I want of you all,” he said. “That you make me flesh!” and, imitating the band, it began to sing these words over and over, and shake the objects in the room to the rhythm as it were of a drum, until I put my hands over my ears and begged for mercy.
“Laughter,” he said. “Laughter.”
“Which means what?” I asked.
“I am laughing at you because I too can make music to make you rock.”
I laughed. “You’re right,” I said. “And you say this word, because you cannot actually laugh.”
“Just so,” he said, petulantly. “When I am flesh I shall laugh again.”
“Again?” said I.
He said nothing.
Ah, this moment is so clear in my memory. I stood out on the upper gallery of the house, shielded somewhat by the banana leaves that stroked the wooden banisters. And out on the river, ships made their way north to the port through the channels. All the fields lay in warm spring sunlight, and below on the grass my cousins played, some forty or fifty of them, all below the age of twelve, and around them in rocking chairs sat the uncles and aunts, fanning themselves and chatting.
And here I stood with this thing, my hands on the rail, my face very grave most likely for the age of nine, trying to get to the heart of it.
“All this I have given you,” he said, as if he had read my emotions more clearly than I had myself. “Your family is my family; I will bring blessing upon blessing. You do not know what wealth can give. You are too young. You will come to see that you are a prince in a great kingdom. No crowned head in Europe enjoys such power as you have.”
“I love you,” I said mechanically to it, and sought to believe this for an instant, as if I were seducing a mortal adult.
“I shall continue,” he said. “Protect Katherine until she can bear a girl child. Carry on the line; Katherine is weak, strong ones will come, it must happen.”
I pondered.
“This is all I can do?” I asked.
“For now,” he said. “But you are very strong, Julien. Things will come into your mind, and when you see what is to be done I shall see it.”
Again I pondered. I studied the happy throng on the lawn. My brother was calling for me to come down and play; they would be taking a boat out soon to the Bayou. Did I want to come with them?
I saw, then, two founts of enterprise at work now in this family-one was the witches’ fount, to use the spirit to acquire wealth and advantage; and the other was the natural or normal fount, already bubbling with a great strong flow that might not be stopped were the spirit destroyed.
Once again, it answered me.
“War on me and I destroy all this! You are living now because Katherine needs you.”
I didn’t answer. I went inside, took my diary, went down to the parlor, and urged the musicians to play loud and strong, and then I wrote my thoughts in my diary.
Meantime, my gifts and those of my mother were growing stronger. We healed, as I have said, we cast spells, we sent Lasher to spy upon those about whom we would know the truth, and sometimes to gauge the financial changes of the future.
This was no easy thing, and the older I became, the more I realized my mother was slowly becoming too mad to do much of anything practical. Indeed, our cousin Augustin, manager of the plantation, was pretty much doing what he wanted with its profits.
By the time I was fifteen, I knew seven languages, and could write very well in any one, and was now the unofficial overseer and manager of the entire plantation. My cousin Augustin grew jealous of me, and so in a fit of rage I shot him.
This was an awful moment.
I had not meant to kill him. Indeed, he was the one who had produced the gun and threatened me; and I in my rage had snatched it from his hand and fired the ball into his forehead. My plan had been “short-range,” that is, to knock him about, and voilà! he was totally and finally dead forever! No one could have been more surprised than I was. Not even him, wherever he went, for I did see his soul rise, befuddled and staring through a vague human form as it disintegrated.
The whole family went into chaos. The cousins fled to their cottages, the city cousins to their town houses in New Orleans; indeed the plantation shut down in mourning for Augustin, and the priest came, and the funeral preparations commenced.
I sat in my room weeping. I imagined that I would be punished for my crime, but very soon, I realized that nothing of the sort was going to happen!
No one was going to touch me. Everyone was frightened. Even Augustin’s wife and children were frightened. They had come to tell me they knew it was “an accident” and did not want to risk my disfavor.
My mother watched this with astonished eyes, b
arely interested at all, and said, “Now you can run things as you like.”
And the spirit came, nudging me playfully, delighted it could knock the quill pen out of my hand, and give me a start with a smile in the mirror.
“Julien,” it said, “I could have done this thing stealthily for you! Put away your gun. You do not need it.”
“Can you so easily kill?”
“Laughter.”
I told it then of two enemies I had made, one a tutor who had insulted my beloved Katherine, and another a merchant who had crassly cheated us. “Kill them,” I said.
The fiend did. Within the week both had met a bad end-one beneath the wheels of a carriage, the other thrown from his horse.
“It was simple,” said the fiend.
“So I see,” said I. I think I was fairly drunk with my power. And remember I was only fifteen, and this was the time before the war when we were still isolated from all the world beyond us.
As it turned out, Augustin’s descendants left our land. They went deep into the Bayou country and built the beautiful plantation of Fontevrault. But that is another story. Someday you must journey up the river road and over the Sunshine Bridge and into that land, and see the ruins of Fontevrault, for many many things happened there.
But let me only say now, that with Tobias, the eldest son of Augustin, I was never reconciled. He had been a toddler on the night of the killing, and in later years his hate for me remained great, though his line was prosperous and they kept to the name Mayfair and their progeny married with our progeny. This was one of many branches of the family tree. But it was one of the strongest. And as you know Mona comes from this line, and from my later entanglement with it.
Now, to return to our day-to-day life, as Katherine became more and more beautiful, Marguerite began to fade, as if some vital energy were drawn from her by her daughter. But nothing of the sort really happened.
Marguerite was only mad with her experiments, of trying to bring the dead infants back to life, of inviting Lasher to plunge into their flesh, and make the limbs move, but he could never restore the soul itself. The idea was preposterous.
