The Old

A Manner of Devil

Part Two

“There is more to tell,” Chris said, “but I don’t know how.”

“Maybe it’s best if you tell him… you know?” Laurie said. “Thatway.”

“That way?” Lewis said.

Laurie did not respond to him. He said, “You and Lewis have shared blood. And if he is, I mean, we know he is what he is, then… I think you can.”

“I wish you would tell me what you were talking about,” Lewis said.

“Instead of talking, I could share my memories with you,” Chris said.

“That’s possible?”

“I did it with Veronica,” Laurie said. And then, when Lewis raised an eyebrow, Laurie explained.

“She was my wife. A long time ago I was married.”

“Oh,” Lewis was tactful enough not to ask any more.

“She died,” Lawrence told him anyway. “She was not what we are.”

Since Laurie had said it, Lewis asked, “Was this before… you were changed?”

“No,” Lawrence said. “I was already a vampire.”

“And she knew?”

“Yes,” Laurie said. “She knew everything about me. But she wanted to remain as she was.”

None of them spoke, and Lawrence said, “There are times when I still cannot forgive her for that, that she did not want to go on with me, that she stayed in time, leaving me to go through forever.”

The whole time Laurie spoke, Chris tried not to look at Lewis, and now Laurie said, “I realize what I’ve just said. You don’t need to listen to me. We were very happy together. She said I would forget her. I have not.”

“We never do,” Chris said.

“I need to stop talking because we’ve moved from the first thing I was talking about to something else.”

“We’ve moved to an elephant in the room.” Lewis said.

“We have never discussed it,” Chris said. “Our relationship is still new.”

“I used to always worry, once I knew I loved her,” Laurie said. “Every moment I did not Make her, I was terrified she could die and leave me all alone. I was so fearful that often I thought of changing her while she slept. But… there are rules. And that was madness.”

“Do you feel the same way about me?” Lewis asked Chris, not looking at him.

“You are a witch,” Chris said. “It’s different.”

“I’m still mortal.’

“It’s a witch’s lot to be mortal,” Chris said. “It is different for you all. For ordinary humans they just… die. For witches it is different.”

“Chris, you have to tell him.” Laurie said. “You need to tell him. We need to tell him everything.”

“You need to tell me about your sister.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Chris said. “Laurie is a vampire because of her.”

“What?”

Laurie nodded. “It’s true. Mostly.”

“Did she turn you?”

“No,” Laurie said. “But she nearly killed me. It was because of her I needed to be turned.”

“By you?” Lewis turned to Chris.

Chris shook his head.

“By our master,” Chris said. “As your clan has a master, so does our house. Our Master saved Laurie and exiled Evangeline.”

“Evangeline came with you to America?”

` “No,” Chris shook his head. “When I met her again it was here, and we had been parted for over one hundred fifty years. I assumed my entire family was dead. But she had heard of me, she came looking for me. Doubtless the fact that you are in my life again—in my life—is why she is here.”

“Again?” Lewis said.

“What?” Chris said.

“You said in your life again.”

Chris said nothing.

Laurie prompted, “Chris, you need to say it.”

“Please do,” Lewis said.

“Witches are not like others,” Chris told Lewis. “And you are not the first witch I have loved. Or, rather, you are the only witch I ever loved.”

“Witches die,” Laurie said, because Chris was saying so little. “But so do we. I died. I had to die to become a blood drinker. So did Chris. And the death is real. I’ve seen the change. When I died… I really died. And when I kill, part of that death is still in it. But, as far as I know, we die only once. For you all it is a passage. Some of you, it is rumored, prolong life.”

“Owen,” Lewis said.

“Yes, your amazingly young looking uncle. And some of you put your lives in different realms,” Laurie went on. “That you would know more than me. Chris told me long ago he loved someone, and when he met you he swore you were that one.”

“Malachy,” Chris said. “Who said you would come back to me. I begged you not to leave me, but you said it was the way of your kind and that, in time, when you were able, you would return to me. And that first morning we were together, “ Chris said, “when you knew what I was, I knew who you were. You are my Malachy, and you have returned to me at last.”

When Laurie was gone and it was only him and Lewis. While he yawned, Chris said, casually, “My father sold me.”

It was well past noon and time for bed, far too late to be up.

“I do not think I ever told anyone that, not even Laurie. And it was not that I loved the man. I did not. But still, he was my father, and he sold me to a slaver. He told my mother that I was going to sail to Ireland to work the land there, for it was a colony of the English, and they used the native population just like slaves. Maybe that’s what the slaver told him. I don’t know. But we sailed from Inningham, and we landed in the Bahamas, as far from Ireland as you can get. There were plenty of Irish there, though. That’s the one thing you can say about slavery at that time. It was colorblind. And it was slavery. The work in the fields was backbreaking. Being a slave was like being in prisoner for having committed no higher crime than living. And we were on the islands, but not in sight of the sea, and it was unbearably hot. Lots of people, self included, were fevered, nearly died, vomited up their lives. Bodies were pitched over the ship long before we made it to the colonies. If I do not speak of it much it is because it is something I do not really wish to remember, but I must get through this part so you will understand everything else.

I stopped thinking of home. Home was gone. I would never see my mother again or any of my family, and I had put them out of my mind. I thought I had put goodness out of my mind too. Many of us did. But we had to be good to each other there, in the colonies. We had to look out for each other because no one else would.

“The preachers began to care for our souls. The Africans were heathens, the Irish were Catholics and who knew what the rest of us were? Unchurched, in need of the good news, and the good news was so much cheaper than freeing us. But at night, many of us, and I wasn’t the only white one, would be drawn to the drums in the forest, and to the dancing around the fires. The long limbed men and the women, and I felt like I shouldn’t watch, but I could not help it. Their dancing, their singing, their crying out, awoke something in me. I had stopped believing in anything. I no longer believed in God. He was something made up by the churches to let rich men keep doing what they were doing and make poor people bow down to rich men’s whims. But now, here these were crying out to their Gods, who were outside of everything I knew, and I began to fall in love with what I did not understand.

“The next day my friend, Ikixi, told me he had seen me. I tried to make out he was wrong, to say he had been mistaken.

“‘How could a six foot narrow white man with a shock of blond hair not be seen?” he demanded, and it was then that he told me I was not the only one.

“‘We belong to the old thing,’ he told me. ‘And you belong to an old thing too. But now it is time to create the new thing, because the old thing is not enough. It will need all of us.’”

And so I began to come down to the rituals, and one night, in the midst of one, a woman who I thought was white came out. She was pale, but I began to see her skin was different, as if she had African or some other blood that was not white. And her hair was paler than mine, thought it was in the largest style of an Egyptian wig I had ever seen, like a great mushroom cap. And she wore a dull bronze circlet on her head, and carried a bowl of gold. That night she conducted rituals different from what had been done before, and with her was a mage, clothed in black.

“‘We have come,’ she said.

“‘You have come,’ we said.

“‘Because you called,’ she said.

“And we said, ‘We called! We called! We called!’

“And then she said, ‘We came across the miles of ocean, and with only one of the implements, and yet it must be enough.’

“‘It is enough. It is enough.’

“‘We heard of your travail,’ and we echoed her.

“And as she spoke, I was not entirely sure she spoke in English, why would she? But I could understand everything being said, and now she raised the bowl and cried, ‘Let the revenge be summoned!’”

“‘Let it be summoned!’

“‘Let the offering be made right!’

“‘It shall be made right!’”

“‘Let the old alliances be restored!’

“‘Restore them! Restore them!’

And as she spoke, the other figure rose up in a black gown open at his magnificent brown chest. He was not tall, only as tall as she, and hooded, and now he threw back the hood, and he held out a dove in his hand, and the dove cooed. But, quickly, he snapped the neck, and to my surprise severed the head from the body with his hands, and the blood showered out on him, on the woman’s white face, red into the golden bowl. She spilled the blood as he burned the incense, and now the man called, ‘They shall come!’

“‘They shall come!’

“‘Oh, they shall come!’

“‘They shall come.’

“‘The vengeance shall come!”

Somewhere along the line, Chris stopped speaking, and Lewis stopped hearing. Chris began sharing, and Lewis began feeling. Somewhere in the telling, the midday light through blinds gave way to the blackness and fire, the humidity of Caribbean night.

There was feasting that night, and in the midst of the feasting. Ikixi brought me to the pale woman and the red brown bald man.

“This is Christophah,” he said. “He is filled with the fiery spirit.”

“Are you?” the man asked, chewing on his meat.

“Am I what, sir?”

“Filled with this… fiery spirit?”

“I do not know that I am,” I said.

“You are thin,” the man said. “Undernourished. Pale and green, but still here. Others like you would have died on the crossing. No, you are filled with spirit, else you would have died in the coming. Do you know what you have witnessed tonight?”

“The preachers would say the worship of the devil.”

“The preachers worship their own devil and call him Christ,” the man said. “And looking all around, you can see the fruits of his work. This plantation is well guarded. It was hard for us to get onto it.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“From far away,” he said, and the woman nodded.

“We came because we were needed. We came to bring you freedom, or the opportunity for it. We came because blood is crying out.”

This last lost me. It all lost me, and I said, “Sir, who are you?”

“This is the Maid,” he said, gesturing to the woman, and she pressed her hands together and nodded.

He said, “And I am the Master.”