The battle was simply too much for me. I realized Lasher had let me acquire what little knowledge of the Talamasca I had acquired because it was meaningless. Anything further he would prevent.
All this I wrote in my book. But I was highly suspicious now of this order.
And now let me conclude my tale, let me tell you briefly of those last years, and of one last small bit of knowledge I acquired with which you must be armed now. It is nothing much, only what I think you have come to suspect, that you must trust in no one, no one but your own self, to destroy this being, and destroy Lasher you must. Now it is in the flesh. It can be killed; it can be driven out; and where it shall then go, and whence return, who knows but God? But you can put an end to its tyranny here; an end to its horror.
After I returned home, I urged Mary Beth into marriage with Daniel McIntyre, one of my own lovers and a man of great charm, of whom she was fond, yet Lasher egged me on to couple with her. Her first child by Daniel became a willful and grim young girl, Carlotta by name, who was of a strict Catholic mind from the beginning. It was as if the angels claimed Carlotta at birth. I wish they’d taken her straight to heaven. Lasher was ever at me to father a new daughter.
But we were in a new age. The modern age. You cannot imagine the impact of the changes around us. And Mary Beth had been so powerful in her resolve, and so successful, that the great concrete reality of the family seemed everything.
The knowledge of Lasher she kept to herself, and ordered me not to show my books to anyone. Lasher she would make a ghost and legend, and thereby insignificant even among our own, who were shut out now, far and wide, from all secrets.
At last-when she had given birth by Daniel to two children, neither of whom could serve her purposes, for the second, Lionel, was a boy and more unsuitable even than Carlotta-I did what she wanted me to do and what Lasher wanted me to do, and from that union-of an old man and his daughter-was born my beautiful Stella.
Stella was the witch; she saw Lasher. Her gifts were great, yes, but from early girlhood she had a love of fun which outstripped any other passion. She was carefree, wanton, gay, loving to sing and dance. And there were times in my old age when I wondered how in the world she would ever bear the burden of the secrets at all, and whether or not she had been created merely to give me happiness.
Stella, my beautiful Stella. She wore the secrets as if they were light veils she could tear off at will. But she showed no signs of madness, and that was enough for Mary Beth. This was her heiress, this was Lasher’s link to the witch who would someday bring him into the world again.
I was so old by the turn of the century!
I still rode my horse up the neutral ground of St. Charles Avenue. At Audubon Park, I would dismount and I would walk with my horse along the lagoon there, and I would look back at the great facades of the universities. All changed, all changed. The whole world changed. No more the pastoral paradise of Riverbend, no more those who would work sorcery with evil spells and candles and chants, no more.
Only a great and rich family, a family that could be challenged by none, in which the history had been relegated to fireside tales to tantalize the children.
Of course I enjoyed these years. I did. No one in this long line of Mayfairs has ever prospered any more than I did. I never worked as hard as Mary Beth, I never personally cared for so many.
I did found the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair with my sons, Cortland, Barclay and Garland. Mary Beth and I worked together on this, as the legacy took even greater and greater legal form. But I reveled in pleasure.
When not chatting happily with my sons and their wives, or playing with my grandchildren, or laughing at Stella, I was off to Storyville, the remarkable red-light district of those times, to sleep with the best of women. And though Mary Beth, now the dutiful mother of three, would not go with me on my romps anymore, I took my young lovers with me, and had the double pleasure of the women and my young men with them.
Ah, Storyville, that is another wondrous tale, an experiment gone awry so to speak, a part of our great history. But we must pass over that too.
I lied to my sons in those years. I lied to them about my sins, my debauchery, my powers, about Mary Beth, and about her Stella. I tried to turn their eyes to the world, to the practical, to truths in nature and in books, which I had learnt when I was so little. I did not dare to pass my secrets to them, and also, as they grew to manhood, I knew that none of them was a proper recipient of this knowledge. They were all so solid, my boys, so good. So keen on the making of money and the fostering of the family. I had made three engines of my good self in them. I dared not trust them with the bad self.
And every time I tried to tell Stella anything, she either fell asleep or started laughing. “You needn’t scare me with all that,” she said once. “Mother’s told me your fantasies and dreams. Lasher is my dearest spirit and will do as I say. That’s all that matters. You know, Julien, it’s quite a thing to have one’s own family ghost.”
I was stupefied. This was a girl of modern times. She didn’t know what she was saying! Ah, to have lived so long to see the truth come down to this-Carlotta, the elder, a vicious clerical-minded monster; and this sparkling child, who thought the whole thing quaint though she could see the spirit with her own eyes! I am going mad, I thought.
Even as I lived on in comfort and luxury, even as I spent my days tasting the pleasures of the new age, driving my automobile and listening to my Victrola, even as I read, I dreaded the future.
I knew the daemon was evil. I knew it lied. I knew it was a lethal mystery. And I feared those scholars in Amsterdam. I feared that man who had spoken to me so briefly in the church.
And when my professor wrote to me from Edinburgh, saying that the Talamasca had pestered him to see his letters to me, I at once admonished him that he was to reveal nothing. I doubled his income on that account. He gave me his assurances. And I never doubted him.
It did not make sense, you see, the conduct of those scholars. Or the conduct of the spirit in front of them. Why had the man been so sinister with me? And why had the spirit deliberately made such a show of itself? I sensed something politic in all this. And wondered if the spirit did not enjoy teasing those men, but was it just childishness?
Finally in my last years, I retired to the attic room, and took with me one of the most splendid of all the new inventions, the portable windup Victrola. I can’t tell you what a delight these things were to us, to be able to listen to music from those old records. To go out onto the lawn with the thing, and play a song from an opera.
I adored it. And of course when the music played, Lasher could not come into my head, though he did this less and less anyhow.
He had both Mary Beth and little Stella to content him. And both of them he adored in different ways, drawing strength from each and passing back and forth between the two of them. Indeed, his happiest moments were when he had mother and daughter together.
I had no need of Lasher by this time. No need at all. I wrote in my books, storing them under my bed; I had my lover Richard Llewellyn, a charming young man who worshiped the ground I walked on and was ever congenial company to me, and in whom I never dared to confide, for his own safety’s sake.
My life was rich in other ways. My nephew Clay lived with us then, Rémy’s daughter Millie, and my sons were growing hale and fine, and steps were being taken to strengthen the law firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, or the beginnings of it in any event-which would control our family enterprises.
At last, when Carlotta was twelve, I sought to confide in her. I tried to tell her the whole story. I showed her the books. I tried to warn her. I told her that Stella would inherit the emerald, and she would be the darling of the daemon, and how tricky the daemon was, and that it was a ghost, it had lived before, and that to live again was its only objective.