playing with a bug in a jar, so savage was her interest, and so disconnected was she from the fact that this fragile wailing thing was human.
She shut the doors, lighted the candles, and then knelt beside the child and invited Lasher to go inside it.
With a great chant she egged the daemon on: “Into its limbs; see through its eyes; speak through its mouth; live in its breath and in its heartbeat.”
The room seemed to swell and to contract, though of course it did not, and all that could rattle was moved, and the noise became a subtle murmuring—bottles jiggling, bells tinkling, shutters fluttering in the wind—and then this tiny baby before my eyes began to change. It coordinated its tiny limbs and the expression of its little face became malevolent or merely adultlike.
It was no longer an infant at all but a hideous mannequin of sorts, for though it had not changed physically, a grown man was inside it and manipulating it, and spoke now, in a gurgling voice. “I am Lasher. See me here.”
“Grow, grow strong!” declared Marguerite, holding up both her fists. “Julien, command it to grow. Stare at its arms and legs. Command them to grow.”
I did, and against all I believed I saw that its little legs and arms were lengthening. Indeed, the eyes of the infant, pale blue at birth, were now suddenly dark brown, and its hair slowly darkened as well as though absorbing a dark liquid.
Its skin on the other hand began to pale; color pulsed in its cheeks. Its legs for one instant were stretched like tentacles. And then the little thing died. Just died. Let out a cry, and died.
And Marguerite grabbed it off the bed, and threw it at the dresser mirror. The little one splashed with blood and gore on the glass but didn’t break it and down it tumbled, one nameless dead child among her perfumes, potions and hair combs.
The room was trembling again. He was near, and then gone, and the cold was all around us. It was as if Lasher had taken the balmy heat with him.
She sat down and wept. “It’s always so. We get that far, and the vessel is too weak to contain him. He destroys what he changes. How will he ever be flesh? And now he is so tired from what he has done that he cannot come to us. We must wait and let him drift and re-collect, there is nothing to be done for it.”
I was spellbound by what I’d seen. I wanted to go out and write it down. She stopped me.
“What can we do to make him flesh?” she said.
“Well, don’t try with an infant, for one thing. Try with the body of a man. Find someone disabled in mind and body too, perhaps, who is already near to death, someone who cannot resist any more than an infant could. And see if Lasher can go into it.”
“Ah, but he said that from a little child he must grow. A little child like the infant in the manger.”
“Lasher said this? When?” I asked, and took note of this along with all its other little slips.
“From a little child, he will be born, from the most powerful witch, but the baby shall start out small as the Christ Child, but ah, if only we could bring him into the flesh now, think what we would have done, and then, and then, we could bring back the dead in the very same fashion.”
“You think so?”
“Come here,” she said. She took me by the hand, and dropped to her knees and pulled a small trunk from beneath the bed, and in it lay dolls, dolls of bone and hair and carefully stitched clothes. And mark, Michael, they weren’t rotted as they were when you saw them. They were swaddled in lace and surrounded in some cases with beautiful jewels, and strands of pearls, and they peered at us with their tiny specks for eyes.
“These are the dead,” she said. “See? This is Marie Claudette.” She lifted a tiny doll with gray hair, clothed in red taffeta, and made from a stocking it seemed and filled with things that felt like pebbles. “Parings of her nails, one bone from her hand, taken by me from her grave, and her hair, lots of her hair, that is what makes up this doll, and within the hour of her death, I had taken the spittle from her mouth and soaked its