“Now we
who favor evil,” said the Patriarch, “profess ourselves
to be natural creatures and strive only to express our natures. We
feed when we must, we give vent to rage and lust, to the full range
of our emotions, and we do so without self-recrimination, without the
unnatural reining in of our basic urges. We deny ourselves nothing,
and we accept the truth of who and what we are. And what comes of
this? Some die at our hands, a few are granted immortality. Some
unpleasant physical and mental conditions arise, but are these any
worse than the cancers and senility and derangement that afflict
mortals? On occasion we overindulge, but never on such a grand and
fulminant scale as the overindulgences of the Christians. We do not
make war on them. We feed upon them, yes. But that is a natural
thing, this cutting back of the herd now and again. It is they who
seek war with us, they who attempt genocide. That is their way. They
have no understanding of moderation.”
He glanced over
his shoulder at Beheim. “Both philosophies have at their core
the same yearning for peace, the same vision of a perfect serenity.
On the one hand, this is seen as a stainless white radiance; on the
other, as an infinite darkness. But there are few salient differences
between these two apparent poles. In fact, their sole distinction
lies in the method of attaining peace. Our method, what is called
evil, the exercise of license and power on an individual basis, a
stable kind of anarchy with only the loosest form of restraint, that
is the most humane way, the way that causes the least pain. It has
been argued that this is so only because there are not so many of us
as there are devotees of the good. My answer to that has always been,
there will under no circumstances ever be as many of us as there are
now of the good, for we will keep our own numbers down, we will
harvest the weak and legislate against the abusers of power. So which
is truly the good? I ask you. And which the evil? The gaudy,
blackhearted, self-indulgent way of least pain? Or the pious,
psalm-singing, selfless way of war and desolation?” He came
back toward Beheim. “The secret of our virtue is this, child:
not to care. None of us care. Not you, not Alexandra, not Agenor, not
any member of the Family. Oh, it can happen that a kind of caring may
spring into existence when two or several of us become fascinated
with the other, and admittedly this is sweet, this is a delight. But
it is not caring as defined by the Christians. It is a playful
delusion, a costume in which we dress our lust, our selfish needs.
And this essential lack of concern for others, our almost total
self-absorption, that is what makes us less dangerous and ultimately
more compassionate than our foes. They have been poisoned, driven mad
by the pursuit of those hypocritical eidolons: generosity and love
for their fellowman. By contrast to their penchant for mass violence
in the name of salvation, our own madness is a balmy distraction.”
Once again the
entire courtyard appeared to flicker into unreality, becoming for a
moment a vague sketch of itself, almost lost in grayness. The
Patriarch seized hold of Beheim’s shirtfront and pulled him
erect so that they stood face-to-face.
“Evil,”
he said, evoking the essence of the word by his menacing
pronunciation of it. “It is no satanic pageant play, it has no
infernal city as its capital. Evil is simply what you are, Michel,
the stuff of your life. It is the taste of blood, it is the slack
feel of a drained supper limp in your arms, and as you lift your
head, the sight of the pitted moon like a dead god sailing the dark
between the forked limbs of a gallows tree. You can deny what you are
for a little while, but in the end your own nature will overwhelm
you. As it has begun to do this night. And if you continue to deny,
to resist”—he pushed his face nose to nose with Beheim’s,
lowered his voice to a savage whisper—“then you will
displease me! That, my child, is by far the worst of the fates that
can enfold you. That is something I should avoid were I you.”
He held Beheim aloft at arm’s length. “Now go! Finish the
task I have set you. And when you have finished, think on all I have
said this night.”
He shoved Beheim
away, and Beheim, having no desire to anger him further, walked
briskly toward the stairs that led away into the depths of the
castle. From behind him came the sound of laughter, laughter so
liquid and resonant he did not believe it could have issued from a
human throat, and thus when the stairs—as he mounted them—and
the stone walls began to fade into flat, unrelieved gray, he did not
hesitate, but continued on, less fearing the insubstantiality of the
place than what he might see if he were to turn back. The ground
remained solid beneath his feet, and the air, though colder than it
had been in the Patriarch’s chamber, was sweet to breathe. As
the final traces of form faded, enclosing him in featureless gray, he
felt a twinge of claustrophobic panic, but he maintained his resolve
and took heart in the fact that the laughter had faded along with all
else; after walking for several minutes, however, and finding no end
to the gray, he wondered if panic would not be more appropriate than
self-control. Evil, he thought, could not find a more fitting
expression than this limbo. Perhaps it was another conceit of the
Patriarch’s, an object lesson of sorts. But that was something
of a leap. More likely the Patriarch had been distracted and had
forgotten what he had done with Beheim, forgotten all about him. Left
him to wander, to become the ghost of this supreme emptiness. It was
quite possible, he decided, for the image he had gathered of the
Patriarch was one of erratic, brilliant decay. But then he realized
that in conjuring up the Patriarch’s essence, he was only
considering that last, more genteel guise and was failing to add in
the ghoulish demon the man had seemed at first, the all-powerful
dweller in Mystery.
That
creature would forget nothing. He
might pretend to have forgotten in order to increase one’s
anxiety; but he would so delight in every potential for torment that
nothing would elude his mental grasp, though he kept a thousand souls
dangling at once over the fires of his majestic disdain.
Beheim cleared
his head of these morbid considerations and plodded on, gradually
becoming as gray and indefinite in his mind as his surround. If there
was a thought in his brain, it consisted of a dismal, primitive
chant, a wordless beat of failure and futility that kept marching
time with his footsteps. He was heavy in his flesh, his heart,
permeated with fatigue both physical and spiritual, and when at last
he saw the gray begin to clear and glimpsed the dark shapes of pine
trees and a hill, other hills, and realized that he had passed
through the imponderable, magical stuff of the walls of Castle Banat,
actually walked through them, a ghost in effect if not in reality,
and reached the place to which his duty bound him, he felt not a whit
of relief, only the weary recognition that yet another phase of his
ordeal was about to begin.
Chapter
Twenty
T
he Patriarch’s servants, following Beheim’s instruction,
dug several pits in the woods close to the castle, each one four
meters deep. These they lined with heavy canvas to slow drainage and
filled three-quarters full with water, not enough in itself to entrap
a member of the Family, but enough to render him helpless for a few
moments so that sheets of iron—shutters removed from castle
windows—could be drawn over the top of the pits, thus sealing
in the murderer. Given the water level and the mucky condition of the
soil, Beheim thought it doubtful that she—or he—would be
able to achieve sufficient leverage so as to climb up and push the
iron sheet away. Once this was done, he had the sheets and pits
camouflaged with branches and dirt, and then sent the servants back
to the castle. Shortly before dawn he took up a position behind a
small hillock some sixty feet from the depression where lay the body
of the Golden’s companion, whose decaying scent was borne to
him on the night wind.
Soon a blade of
carnelian light slipped between the horizon and the sky. Beheim,
benumbed, too distanced by the evening’s events to give more
than passing attention to the consideration of his peril, watched it
spread, illuminating the humped blue-dark geography of the hills, the
crimped valleys with their star-struck tinsel rivers, and the towns
with a few early lights burning like a scatter of embers. He could
smell the wet grass, the heady spice of pine needles, bitter smoke
from some far-off burning, and from these odors, these sights, it
seemed to him that the faces and forms of his past were being
extruded, some still-vital essence of each being released into the
air and growing more vital yet on being kissed by the rich nitrogens
and stinging ozones of the moment, rearing up before him like the
fabulous visions that come to a dying man who can longer feel the
terrible insult done his body by wound or disease, but rather is
drifting in a blissful nowhere between Mystery and the end of time.
The things that
came to him then were not the things that he would have assumed he
would remember, the memorial moments, the birthdays, the promotions,
the successes, but were lesser, brighter, and more convivial bits of
living. Eating fish stew from a can on a Marseilles dock and trading
insults with the fishermen. Spending a night in a cave in the
sun-browned, god-thronged hills above Corinth. Drunk in the company
of other students, diving into the Seine off the morning bridges to
impress a girl. Another girl with whom he had lived for a summer, a
dancer in one of the tiny family circuses that passed back and forth
across Europe like gaudy platoons; the kid from Reims who sold him a
gold watch without any works inside; the lady who invited him in when
he had been hiking near Strasbourg, cooked him a meal, prayed over
him for an hour, and then—as if this had effected a sufficient
purification—took his virginity; the old soldier serving now as
a cook in a country inn near Avignon who had prepared fresh trout
with mushrooms and told bloodcurdling stories of the Napoleonic wars.
Meeting a woman who had just been released from an asylum in Quercy
and claimed she was on her way to keep a rendezvous with her dead
husband in a bistro near Les Halles; meeting a group of albino
children whose parents were educating them to be psychics; meeting a
priest who hated God, a Gypsy who refused to read his cards, a
drunken dog trainer whose trick-performing pets had been stolen.
Wrestling a giant at a carnival in Irun and getting his arm broken.
Going to the cockfights in Salamanca, a night under olive trees lit
by torches, and winning a thousand pesetas on a black cock whose guts
at the end had hung from his belly like fringe off a general’s
epaulets. The great cathedral in Köln where he first heard
The
Messiah
; a cantina near San Sebastián where cryptic
designs were painted on the doors to ward off evil, as if evil were
an incompetent lout who might be sent fleeing by the sight of a few
daubs of color and some misspelled Latin words; a riverboat owned by
a young widow whose windows were all of stained glass and whose walls
were illuminated by crude murals of the saints; a waterfront bar in
Calais where one night, while having his first after-dinner calvados,
he watched a ten-year-old girl pierce her cheek with steel needles in
return for whatever change the patrons tossed her way.
It was all
running out of him, he realized, like violet water down a drain, all
that brilliant particularity of life and history emptying, as if it
no longer found him a suitable vessel. And it was being replaced
by . . . by what? He could put no simple name to it,
but it seemed a new pilot stood at the helm of his soul. Someone
informed by a dark, cool competency, yet in whom there burned a lust
so feral it was almost indistinguishable from rage, so potent that it
outshone even his fear of the day now dawning. It was this entity who
now looked out from his eyes onto the brightening world, who
contemplated the patch of weeds around him, yarrow and vetch, mint
and sorrel, with stony displeasure, annoyed by the rich, moldering
scents of the autumn woods, and who watched unmoved as the sun
smeared scarlet and orange and purple along the horizon beneath
galleons of cloud, bringing the forested crests of the surrounding
hills into sharp relief. Yet he did not quite conform to the
Patriarch’s definition of an indulgent and self-absorbed
mentality, for there remained in him more than a sliver of
conscience, of moral regard, of all his old compulsions, and he did
not believe these things to be mere residues. He had changed, yes,
but he was still himself in some wise, still Beheim the man, and
while understanding this did not please him as once it would have, he
was nevertheless satisfied to know that the change had not utterly
overwhelmed him. The Patriarch’s wisdom apparently had its
limits, and recognizing that was also an occasion for satisfaction.
Soon the world
came to be filled with the great vibration of the sun. Beheim lay
flat, refusing to look up, feeling waves of killing heat on his neck
and shoulders, his eyes on the castle, which blotted out nearly half
the sky, as still and silent as the corpse of some immense
stone-colored animal. The pale blue sky distressed him, as did the
winded greenery and rippling grass and the incessant play of light
and shadow; yet he experienced no panic and furious disorientation as
before. He did not think he could ever come to love the light, but if
tolerate it he must, then tolerate it he would. A black beetle
sporting pincers nearly twice as long as its body began climbing a
stalk of sorrel in front of him, blindly proceeding into midair. He
felt an odd kinship with the thing, but when it reached the top of
the stalk and swayed there, turning its antennae this way and that,
he became annoyed with it and also with the analogy he had drawn
between its progress and his own, and flicked it away with a
forefinger.