“I will,” he said in a resigned voice. “Only leave this accursed popish country. Leave these Italians and their crumbling church. Get away from here. Go north, yes, and I go with you, your servant, your lover—Lasher.”
“Very well, spirit,” I said. And then trying to mean it with all my heart, and finding some meaning in it, I said, “I love you, spirit, as well as you love me!” And then the tears sprang to my eyes.
“We will know each other in the darkness someday, Julien,” he said. “We will know each other as ghosts when we roam the halls of First Street. I must be flesh. The witches must prosper.”
I found this thought so terrifying that I said nothing. But be assured, Michael, it hasn’t been so. I am in no realm that is shared by any other soul.
These things cannot be explained; even now my understanding is too dim for words. I know only that you and I are here, that I see you, and you see me. Maybe that is all creatures are ever meant to know in any realm.
But I didn’t know that then. Any more than any other living being, I couldn’t grasp the immense loneliness of earthbound spirits. I was in the flesh as you are now. I knew nothing else, nothing unbounded and purgatorial as what I have since suffered. Mine was the naïveté of the living; now it is the confusion and longing of the dead.
Pray when I am finished this tale, I will go on to something greater. Punishment even would have its shape, its purpose, some conviction of meaning. I cannot imagine eternal flames. But I can imagine eternal meaning.
We left Italy immediately as the daemon had asked us to do. We journeyed north, stopping again in Paris for only two days before we made the crossing, and drove north to Edinburgh.
The daemon seemed quiet. When I tried to engage it in conversation, it would say only, “I remember Suzanne,” and there was something utterly without hope in its manner.
Now in Edinburgh a remarkable thing happened. Mary Beth, in my presence, begged that the daemon come with her and protect her. She, who had gone out with me disguised, would now wander on her own, with only her familiar to protect her. In sum, she lured Lasher away, whistling to herself as she went out, walking in a man’s tweed coat and breeches, her hair swept up beneath a small shapeless cap, her steps big and easy as any boy’s steps might be.
And I, alone, went at once to the University of Edinburgh, on the trail of the finest professor of history in those parts, and soon cornered the man, and, plying him with drink and money, was soon closeted away with him in his study.
His was a charming house in the Old Town, which many of the rich had long deserted but which he still preferred, for he knew the whole history of the building. The rooms were filled with books, even to the narrow hallways, and the stairway landing.
He was an ingratiating, volatile little creature—with a shiny bald head, silver spectacles and rather showy flaring white whiskers, which were then the style—who spoke with a thick Scots accent to his English, and he was passionately in love with the folklore of his country. His rooms were crammed with dreary pictures of Robert Burns, and Mary Queen of Scots, and Robert the Bruce, and even Bonnie Prince Charlie.
I thought it all rather amusing, but I was too excited to keep still when he admitted that indeed he was, as his students had told me, an expert on the ancient folklore of the Highlands.
“Donnelaith,” says I. “I may have the spelling wrong. Here. But this is the word.”
“No, you’ve got it right,” he said. “But wherever did you hear of it? The only folks who go up there now are the students interested in the old stones, and the fishermen and the hunters. That glen is a haunted place, very beautiful of course, and well worth the trek, but only if you have some purpose. There are terrible legends in those parts, as terrible as the legends of Loch Ness, or Glamis Castle.”
“I have a purpose. Tell me about it, everything that you know,” said I, frightened that any moment I would feel the spirit’s presence. I wondered if Mary Beth had gone into some dangerous pub where women are in