Yes, a beautiful house, I thought. Poor Darcy. No wonder his designs had been so much the fashion. But he had had no witch’s blood I supposed. I suspected my nephews Clay and Vincent were as innocent as my brother, Rémy. I went out into the gardens. I perceived what had been done, a great octagon of a lawn, with an octagon carved in the stone posts that ended the limestone balustrades. And everywhere flagstones at angles, so that one was beset in the moonlight with lines and designs and patterns.
“Behold the roses in the iron,” said Lasher to me. By this he meant the cast-iron railings. And I saw what he pointed out, lines at angles, echoing the angles of the flags, as well as the roses.
He walked with his arm around me now, and I felt a thrill in this, this closeness with him. I had half a mind to invite him into the trees, and give myself over to him. I was addicted as I said. But I had to remember my beloved sister. She might wake and cry and think that I had left her.
“Remember all these things,” he said again. “For this house will last.”
As I came into the hallway, I saw him in the high dining room door with his hands on the frame. How it soared above him with its tapered keyhole shape, more narrow above, and thereby looking higher.
I turned to note that the front door, through which I’d just come, which I had left wide open, was of the same design, and there he stood, as if he had never been in the other place at all, a man like me with his hands on the frame, peering back at me.
“Would you live after death, Julien? Of all my witches you ask me so little about that final darkness.”
“You don’t know anything about it, Lasher,” I commented. “You said so yourself.”
“Don’t be cruel with me, Julien. Not tonight of all nights. I am glad to be here. Would you live after death? Would you hover and stay, that is what I am asking you?”
“I don’t know. If the Devil was trying to take me into hell I might hover and stay, if that’s what you mean, a purgatorial soul wandering about, appearing to voodoo queens and spiritualists. I suppose I could do it.” I crushed out my cigar in the ashtray on the marble table, which is there now, this very day, in the lower hallway.
“Is that what you’ve done, Lasher? Are you some vile human being become a ghost, hovering forever, and seeking to wrap yourself in an undeserved mystery?”
I saw something in the face of the fiend change. One moment he was my twin and then he had smiled. Indeed, he was imitating my very smile and to perfection. I had not seen him do this trick before very often. And as he slumped against the door frame, he folded his arms as I might, and he made a little sound of cloth brushing the wood, to let me know how strong he was.
“Julien,” he said, actually shaping his mouth with the words, he was so strong, “maybe all mysteries are nothing at the core. Maybe the world is made from waste.”
“And you were there when it happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said, imitating my own sarcastic tone exactly. He raised his eyebrows as I raise mine. I had never seen him so strong.
“Shut the door, Lasher,” I said, “if you are so very mighty.”
And to my astonishment, he reached for the knob and stepped aside, and made the door close exactly as if he were a man doing it. That was the limit for him, for it had been an astonishing feat. He was gone. The air held the heat as it always did.
“Admirable,” I whispered.
“Remember this place if you would linger or come back; remember its patterns. In the dim world beyond they will shine in your eyes, they will guide you home. This is a house for centuries to come. This is a house worthy of the spirits of the dead; this is a house in which you may safely remain. War or revolution or fire, or the river’s current, will not trouble you. I was held once…by two patterns. Two simple patterns. A circle, and stones in the form of a cross…two patterns.”
I memorized this. More proof that he was not the great Devil himself.