all, if it is Ashlar, one of the many Ashlars, a saint, a king, the vengeful ghost, a mere human—! The dark made noises back to me. The bed trembled. I thought of that verse again…the flesh that isn’t human.
“Have you come to trouble me or content me?” I asked.
“Die in peace, Julien,” he said. “I would have given you my secrets the first day I came with you to this house. I told you then that such a place could draw you out of eternity, that it was as the castles of old. Remember its patterns, Julien, its graceful battlements. And through the mist you will see them, distinct. But you would not have my lessons then. Will you have them now? I know you. You are alive. You didn’t want to hear about death.”
“I don’t think you know about death,” I said. “I think you know about wanting, and haunting, and living! But not death.”
I got out of bed. I cranked up the Victrola just to drive the thing away from me. “Yes, I want to come back,” I whispered. “I want to come back. I want to remain earthbound, to stay, to be part of this house. But God, I swear it, in my soul of souls, it is not greed to live again, it is that the tale is unfinished, the daemon continues, and I die! I would help, I would be an angel of the Lord somehow. Oh, God, I do not believe in you. I do not believe in anything but Lasher and myself.”
I started pacing. I paced and paced and played the waltz of Violetta, a song that seemed utterly oblivious to every kind of sorrow, something so frivolous yet so organized that I found it irresistible.
Then a moment came, so unusual as perhaps to have been unique. In all my long life, I had never been so caught off guard as I was at this moment, and it was by the face of a small girl at my window, a waif of a child crouched upon the high porch roof.
At once I opened the stubborn sash.
“Eve a Lynn,” I said. And perfumed, and soft, and wet from the spring rain, she came into my arms.
“How did you come to me, darling?” I asked her.
“Up the trellis, Oncle Julien, hand over hand. You have shown me an attic is not a prison. I will come to you as long as I can.”
We made love; we talked together. I lay there with her as the sun came up. She told me they were being kind to her now, letting her go places, that she walked in the evening all the way up the Avenue, and down to Canal Street, that she had ridden in a car again, that she had real shoes. Richard had bought her pretty dresses. Cortland had bought her a coat with fur on the collar. Mary Beth even had given her a silver-backed mirror and a silver-handled comb.
At dawn I sat up and cranked the Victrola. We danced to the waltz. It was a crazy morning, the kind of crazy morning that follows carousing and drunkenness and wandering from dance halls to taverns, yet it had all taken place in this room. She wore only her petticoat then, trimmed in pink lace, and a ribbon in her hair. We danced and danced about the room, giggling, laughing, until finally someone…ah yes, Mary Beth, opened the door.
I only smiled. I knew my angelic child would visit me again.
In the dark of the night, I talked to the Victrola.
I told it to hold the spell. Of course I did not believe in these things. I had steadfastly refused to believe in them. Yet now I pared my nails and slipped them in between the bottom wood and the side wood. I clipped my hair, and slipped that beneath the turntable. I bit my fingers and drew blood and smeared it into the dark stain. I made the thing like a doll of myself, like the witches’ dolls, and I sang the waltz.
I played the waltz and said, “Come back, come back. Be at hand if they need you. Be at hand if they call you. Come back, come back.”
I was possessed of a terrible vision, that I was dead and rising and the light was coming, and that I turned my back on it, and plummeted with my arms out, digging deep into an air which became thicker and thicker, as dense