Lasher

by Anne Rice

  Only a great and rich family, a family that could be challenged by none, in which the history had been relegated to fireside tales to tantalize the children.

  Of course I enjoyed these years. I did. No one in this long line of Mayfairs has ever prospered any more than I did. I never worked as hard as Mary Beth, I never personally cared for so many.

  I did found the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair with my sons, Cortland, Barclay and Garland. Mary Beth and I worked together on this, as the legacy took even greater and greater legal form. But I reveled in pleasure.

  When not chatting happily with my sons and their wives, or playing with my grandchildren, or laughing at Stella, I was off to Storyville, the remarkable red-light district of those times, to sleep with the best of women. And though Mary Beth, now the dutiful mother of three, would not go with me on my romps anymore, I took my young lovers with me, and had the double pleasure of the women and my young men with them.

  Ah, Storyville, that is another wondrous tale, an experiment gone awry so to speak, a part of our great history. But we must pass over that too.

  I lied to my sons in those years. I lied to them about my sins, my debauchery, my powers, about Mary Beth, and about her Stella. I tried to turn their eyes to the world, to the practical, to truths in nature and in books, which I had learnt when I was so little. I did not dare to pass my secrets to them, and also, as they grew to manhood, I knew that none of them was a proper recipient of this knowledge. They were all so solid, my boys, so good. So keen on the making of money and the fostering of the family. I had made three engines of my good self in them. I dared not trust them with the bad self.

  And every time I tried to tell Stella anything, she either fell asleep or started laughing. "You needn't scare me with all that," she said once. "Mother's told me your fantasies and dreams. Lasher is my dearest spirit and will do as I say. That's all that matters. You know, Julien, it's quite a thing to have one's own family ghost."

  I was stupefied. This was a girl of modern times. She didn't know what she was saying! Ah, to have lived so long to see the truth come down to this--Carlotta, the elder, a vicious clerical-minded monster; and this sparkling child, who thought the whole thing quaint though she could see the spirit with her own eyes! I am going mad, I thought.

  Even as I lived on in comfort and luxury, even as I spent my days tasting the pleasures of the new age, driving my automobile and listening to my Victrola, even as I read, I dreaded the future.

  I knew the daemon was evil. I knew it lied. I knew it was a lethal mystery. And I feared those scholars in Amsterdam. I feared that man who had spoken to me so briefly in the church.

  And when my professor wrote to me from Edinburgh, saying that the Talamasca had pestered him to see his letters to me, I at once admonished him that he was to reveal nothing. I doubled his income on that account. He gave me his assurances. And I never doubted him.

  It did not make sense, you see, the conduct of those scholars. Or the conduct of the spirit in front of them. Why had the man been so sinister with me? And why had the spirit deliberately made such a show of itself? I sensed something politic in all this. And wondered if the spirit did not enjoy teasing those men, but was it just childishness?

  Finally in my last years, I retired to the attic room, and took with me one of the most splendid of all the new inventions, the portable windup Victrola. I can't tell you what a delight these things were to us, to be able to listen to music from those old records. To go out onto the lawn with the thing, and play a song from an opera.

  I adored it. And of course when the music played, Lasher could not come into my head, though he did this less and less anyhow.

  He had both Mary Beth and little Stella to content him. And both of them he adored in different ways, drawing strength from each and passing back and forth between the two of them. Indeed, his happiest moments were when he had mother and daughter together.

  I had no need of Lasher by this time. No need at all. I wrote in my books, storing them under my bed; I had my lover Richard Llewellyn, a charming young man who worshiped the ground I walked on and was ever congenial company to me, and in whom I never dared to confide, for his own safety's sake.

  My life was rich in other ways. My nephew Clay lived with us then, Remy's daughter Millie, and my sons were growing hale and fine, and steps were being taken to strengthen the law firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, or the beginnings of it in any event--which would control our family enterprises.

  At last, when Carlotta was twelve, I sought to confide in her. I tried to tell her the whole story. I showed her the books. I tried to warn her. I told her that Stella would inherit the emerald, and she would be the darling of the daemon, and how tricky the daemon was, and that it was a ghost, it had lived before, and that to live again was its only objective.

  I shall never forget her reaction, the names she heaped upon me, the curses. "Devil, witch, sorcerer. Always I have known this evil lived in the shadows here. Now you give it a name and history."

  She would turn to the Catholic Church to destroy the thing, she said, "to the power of Christ, and His Holy Mother, and the saints."

  We fought a terrible battle of words. I cried out: "Don't you see that that is nothing but another form of witchcraft?"

  "And what do you teach me, you evil old man, that I must have intercourse with devils? To defeat it, I must know it? I shall stamp it out. I shall stamp out the line itself!" she cried. "You wait and you shall see. I shall leave the legacy without an heir. I shall see an end to it."

  I was in despair. I begged her to listen, to refine her concepts, to accept counsel and not to believe such a thing was possible. We were now an immense family! But she had taken all these mysteries, put them under her Catholic foot, and relied upon her rosary and her Masses to save her.

  Later Mary Beth told me to put no store in her words whatsoever. "She is a sad child," she said. "I do not love her. I tried to love her, but I do not. I love Stella. And Carlotta knows this, and knows she will not inherit the emerald. She has always known, and she is shaped in hate and jealousy."

  "But she is the cunning one, don't you see? Not Stella. I love Stella too but Carlotta's the one with the head."

  "It's all done, it was done many a year ago," said Mary Beth. "Carlotta's soul is closed to me. It's closed to him and he will not abide her here except as something to serve the family case, in the shadows."

  "Ah, but you see how he controls things now. How can Carlotta serve the family case? How do those scholars in Amsterdam serve it? There is something I have to unravel. This thing can kill those it would not suffer to live."

  "You are simply thinking too much for an old man," she said. "You don't sleep enough. Scholars in Amsterdam, what is all that? Who cares about people who tell tales of us, and that we are witches? We are, that is our strength. You try to put it all in some kind of order. There is no order."

  "You're wrong," I said. "You are miscalculating."

  Every time I looked into Stella's innocent eyes, I realized I could not tell her the full burden of what I knew. And to see her play with the emerald necklace made me shudder.

  I showed her where I had hidden my books, beneath my bed; I told her someday she must read all of it. I told her the mystery of the Talamasca, the scholars of Amsterdam who knew of the thing, but these men could be very dangerous to us. They were nothing to play with, these men. I told her how to distract the fiend. I described its vanity. I told her what I could. But not the whole story.

  That was the horror. Mary Beth alone knew the whole story. And Mary Beth had changed with the times. Mary Beth was a woman of the twentieth century. Yet Mary Beth taught Stella what Mary Beth felt she should know. Mary Beth gave her the dolls of the witches to play with! Mary Beth gave her a doll made from my mother's skin and nails and bone; and another of Katherine.

  One day, I came down the stairs, and I saw Stella perched on the side of her bed, pink legs crossed, holding these two dolls and making a conversation be
tween them.

  "That's rot and stupidity!" I declared, but Mary Beth took me away.

  "Come on, Julien, she must know what she is. It's an old custom."

  "It means nothing."

  But I was talking to the air. Mary Beth was in her prime. I was dying.

  Ah, that night I lay in bed, unable to shake the vision of the little girl with those worthless dolls, thinking how to separate the real from the unreal and give Stella some warning of how it might go wrong with this devil. What worked against me as well was the dour nature of Carlotta. Carlotta warned and so did I. And Stella listened to neither of us!

  Finally I slept, deep and sound, and during the night dreamed again of Donnelaith and the Cathedral.

  When I awoke, it was to a dreadful discovery. But I did not make it immediately.

  I sat up in bed, drank my chocolate, read for a while, some Shakespeare, I think, for one of my boys had pointed out to me not long before that I had never read one of the plays, ah yes, The Tempest. In any account, I read some of it and loved it and found it deep as the tragedies were deep, only with a different rhythm and rules to it. Then came time to write.

  I climbed from bed, dropped down to my knees, and reached for my books. They were gone. The space there was empty.

  In a hideous instant I knew they were gone from me forever. No one in this house troubled my things. Only one person would have dared in the night to come into my rooms and take those books. Mary Beth. And if Mary Beth had taken them, they were no more.

  I rushed down the stairs, nearly falling. Indeed, I was so out of breath by the time I came to the garden windows of the house that I was sick with a pain in my side and in my head, and had to call for the servants to help me.

  Then Lasher himself came to wrap himself round me and steady me. "Be calm, Julien," he said in his soft voice. "I have always been good to you."

  But I had already seen through the side windows a raging fire in the far corner of the yard, away from the street, and the figure of Mary Beth hurling one object into it after another.

  "Stop her," I whispered. I could scarce breathe at all. The thing was invisible, yet all around me, sustaining me.

  "Julien, I beg you. Do not push this further."

  I stood there, trying not to pass out from weakness, and I saw the stacks of books on the grass, the old pictures, paintings from Saint-Domingue, old portraits of ancestors back to the beginning. I saw the account books and ledgers and sheaves of papers from my mother's old study, the foolishness she'd written. And the letters from Edinburgh, all tied and in bundles! And my books, aye, one was left, and this one she threw into the fire as I called out to her!

  I reached out with all my power to stop it. She swung round as if caught by a hook, the book still in her fingers, and as she stared at me, dazzled and confused by the power that had stayed her hand, the wind rose and caught the book and sent it flip-flopping and whirling into the flames!

  I gasped for breath. My curses had no syllables. The worst kind of curses. All went black.

  When I awoke I was in my room.

  I was in bed, and Richard, my dear young friend, was with me. And Stella too, holding my hand.

  "Mamma had to burn all those old things," she said.

  I said nothing. The fact was, I had suffered a very tiny stroke, and could not for a while speak, though I myself did not know it. I thought my dreamy silence a choice. It was not until the following day when Mary Beth came to me that I realized my words were slurred and I could not find the very ones I chose to use to tell her of my anger.

  It was late evening, and when she saw how it was with me she was greatly distressed and called at once for Richard to come, as if it were all his fault. He did come, and together they helped me down the stairs, as if to say, if I could get out of bed and walk, then I could not die that night.

  I sat on the living room sofa.

  Ah, how I loved that long double parlor. Loved it as you love it, Michael. It was a comfort to me to be there, facing the windows that looked out on the lawn, with all remnants of that brutal fire gone now.

  For long hours, Mary Beth spoke. Stella came and went. The gist was that my time and my ways were gone now.

  "We are coming into an age," Mary Beth said, "when science itself may know the name of this spirit, when science will tell us what it is." On and on she spoke of spiritualists and mediums and seances and guides, and the scientific study of the occult, and such things as ectoplasm.

  I was revolted. Ectoplasm, the thing from which mediums make their spirits material? I didn't even answer. I was sunk into despair. Stella cuddled beside me and held my hand, and said finally:

  "Mamma, do shut up. He isn't listening to a word you say and you are boring him."

  I gave no argument one way or the other.

  "I see far," said Mary Beth. "I see a future in which our thoughts and words do not matter. I see in our clan our immortality. It will not be in our lifetime--any of us--that Lasher will have his final victory. But it will come and no one will prosper from it as greatly as we will. We shall be the mothers of this prosperity."

  "All hope and optimism," I sighed. "What of the glen, what of the vengeful spirit? What of the wounds dealt in the olden times, from which its conscience has never healed! This thing was good. I felt its good. But now it is evil!"

  And then I was ill again, very ill. They brought my pillows and covers to me there. I could not climb the stairs again until the next day, and I had not quite decided to do it, when something turned my head one last time, with hope, and that was to a final and helpless confidante.

  It came about this way.

  As I lay on the couch in the heat of the day, feeling the river breeze through the side windows and trying not to smell any taint of that fire in which so much had been burnt, I heard Carlotta arguing--her low sour voice growing ever more fierce as she denounced her mother.

  At last she came into the room and glared down at me. She was a thin tall girl of fifteen then, I think. Though her actual birthday escapes me. I remember that she was not so terribly unattractive then, having rather soft hair and what one calls intelligent eyes.

  I said nothing, as it was not my policy to be unkind to children, no matter how unkind those children were to me. I took no notice of her.

  "And you fuss over that fire," said she in a cold righteous way, "and you let them do what they have done to that child, and you know it is in fear of Mother. Of you and of Mother."

  "What are you talking about? What child?" said I.

  But she was gone, angry and despairing, and stalking away. But soon Stella appeared, and I told her all these words.

  "Stella, what does all this mean? What is she talking about?"

  "She dared to say that to you? She knew you were ill. She knew you and Mother had quarreled." Tears sprang to Stella's eyes. "It's nothing to us, it's just those Fontevrault Mayfairs and all their own madness. You know, the Amelia Street gang. Those zombies."

  Of course I knew whom she meant--the Fontevrault Mayfairs being the descendants of my cousin Augustin, whose life I'd taken when I was only fifteen with a pistol shot. His wife and children had founded that line at Fontevrault, as I told you--their own palatial plantation in the Bayou country miles from us, and only now and then at the largest of family get-togethers deigned to pay us a call. We visited their sick. We helped them bury their dead. They did the same with us, but over the years there had been little softening.

  Some of them--old Tobias and his son Walker, I believe--had built a fine house on St. Charles Avenue, at Amelia Street, only about fifteen blocks away, and I had watched it being built with interest. A whole pack of them lodged there--old women and old men, all of whom personally despised me. Tobias Mayfair was a feeble old fool who had lived too long just as I had, and as vicious a man as I have ever known, who blamed me his whole life for everything.

  The others were not so bad. They were of course rich, sharing in the family enterprises with us, though they had
no need of us directly. And Mary Beth with her large family fetes had been inviting them into the fold, especially the younger ones. There had always been a few star-crossed cousins marrying cousins across the dividing line, or whatever it was. Tobias in his hatred called the nuptials wedding dances on Augustin's grave, and now it was known that Mary Beth wished all cousins to return to the fold, and Tobias was supposedly uttering curses.

  I could tell you many amusing stories about him and all his various attempts to kill me. But it's no matter now. I wanted to know what Stella was talking about, what Carlotta meant. What was all this venom?

  "So what have Augustin's children done now?" I asked, for that was all I ever called them, the whole crazy lot of them.

  "Rapunzel, Rapunzel," said Stella. "That is what it is all about. Let down your long hair, or waste away in the attic forever."

  She positively sang out these words in her merry fashion.

  "It's Cousin Evelyn, I mean, my darling dear, and everybody's saying she's Cortland's daughter."

  "I beg your pardon. You are referring to my son Cortland? You are saying he has got one of their women with child? Those Mayfairs?"

  "Thirteen years ago, Cortland snuck off to Fontevrault drunk and got Barbara Ann with child, to be exact. You know, Walker's daughter. The child was Evelyn, you know, you remember. Barbara Ann died when Evelyn was born. Well, guess what, darling dear? Evelyn is a witch, as powerful a witch as ever there was, and she can see into the future."

  "Says who?"

  "Everyone. She has the sixth finger! She's marked, my darling dear, and positively strange beyond imagining. And Tobias has locked her up for fear that Mother will kill her! Imagine. That you and Mother would harm her. Why, you are the girl's grandfather! Cortland admitted it to me, though he made me swear never to tell you. 'You know how Father hates the Fontevrault crowd,' he said. 'And what good can I do that girl, when everyone in the household loathes me?' "

  "Wait a minute, child. Slow down. Do you mean to tell me Cortland took advantage of that addle-brained Barbara Ann, who died giving birth, and he deserted that baby?"