face, and the blood she had vomited, and smeared that as well on the doll beneath its clothing. Now hold it and you will see that she is here.”
She put the doll in my hands, and in a flash I saw the living Marie Claudette! I was knocked backwards by the shock. I stared down at this thing of cloth. I squeezed it again and there she stood, motionless for an instant, staring at me. I called out to her. I did this over and over again, summoning her, seeing her, calling to her, and then losing her.
“This is nothing,” I said. “She is not there.”
“No, no, but she is and she speaks to me.”
“I don’t believe it.”
I squeezed the doll once more and said, “Grandmère, tell me the truth,” and then I heard a tiny voice in my head which said, “I love you, Julien.” Of course I knew it was not Marie Claudette speaking to me. It was Lasher, but how was I to prove this?
I did a daring thing. So that my mother could hear, I said, “Marie Claudette, Marie Claudette, beloved Grandmère, do you remember the day that as the band played, we buried my little wooden toy horse in the garden? Do you remember how I cried and the poem which you told to me?”
“Yes, yes, my child,” said the secret voice and the image, which both my mother and I could see, held fast for the longest time yet, a graceful vision of Marie Claudette as she had been the last time I ever glimpsed her.
“The poem,” I said, “help me to recall it.”
“Think back, my child, you will remember,” said the ghost.
And then I said, “Ah, yes, ‘Toy horse, toy horse, ride on into the fields of heaven!’ ”
Ah yes, she said, and repeated this line with me.
I threw down the doll! “This is nonsense,” I declared. “I never owned a toy wooden horse. I never had an interest in such things. I never buried it in the yard, and I never wrote any stupid poem to it.”
The fiend went into a frenzy. My mother threw her hands over me to protect me. Everything was flying about…furniture, bottles, jars, books. It was worse than all those feathers had been, and things were raining down upon us.
“Stop!” my mother declared. “Who will protect Katherine?”
The room grew quiet.
“Do not become my enemy, Julien,” said the thing.
I was at this point scared to death. I’d proved my point. This thing was a liar. This thing was not the repository of any sanctified wisdom. And this thing could kill me all right, as surely as it had my enemies, and I had made it very angry.
I was wily. “All right, you would be flesh?”
“I would be flesh, I would be flesh, I would be flesh!”
“Then we shall proceed with our experiments in earnest.”
Michael, you yourself have seen the fruits of those years. When you came to this house, you saw the human heads rotted in their jars of fluid. You saw the infants swimming there in darkness. You saw the sum total of our accomplishments.
So let me be brief about these dark disasters and what we did, and I did, out of fear of the thing, and seeing myself sinking into deeper and deeper evil.
It was the year 1847 by this time. Katherine was a lithe thing of seventeen, courted by cousins and strangers alike, but showed no desire to marry. The poor girl’s most wicked pleasure in fact was to let me dress her as a boy and take her with me to the quadroon balls and to the riverfront drinking places where no true white woman could ever enter. All this was fun and sport for her, and I loved it too, seeing this seamy rotten world through her pretty eyes…
But! As all that went on, as the city grew rich and yearly full of more diversions, I carried out with Marguerite in the privacy of the study our worst sacrifices to the daemon.
Our first victim of any note was a voodoo doctor, a mulatto with yellow hair, very old, but still strong, whom we stole from his front steps, and took to Riverbend, plying him with fancy words and wine and heaps of gold, and assuring him we would know what he knew of God and the Devil.
He had been possessed by many a spirit, he averred. Fine, we have a nice one for you. We talked voodoo and we talked trash and lies. We