CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Marabeth sure is learning more about Nathan then she ever wanted to know! Her family has had a screwed up history. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
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The Blood: A Denoument
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT THE REVELATIONS OF NATHAN STRAUSS COME TO A HEAD
I fuck her all the time now and write about it in here. No one’s going to see it but me and the truth is, for the first time I enjoy being me, enjoy being this bad man, and Delia’s a bad woman. She always was. She lives in the carriage house with Byron, and Byron is asleep by eight. When I fuck her in their bed, I half strangle her and make her promise she isn’t fucking anyone else. When it’s, done sometimes there are bruises and bites on her, but I slap her, the way she likes if she tries to bruise or bite me After all, Becca can’t know, but I don’t want to talk about her, because with her I’m someone different. I’m the man I should be. I go to work, protect my family, With Delia I’m a monster, and we both like it.
One night Delia says, “I’m not even fucking my own husband. I can’t remember the last time I had Byron, and I certainly can’t remember the last time he satisfied me….”
Becca tells me I’m going to be a Dad all over again. I take her and Marabeth for ice cream and feel like a good husband, like someone who isn’t cheating on his beautiful wife with the girl who’s supposed to be her best friend. It feels good to feel like a good man, and Mara looks at me with so much love in her eyes. They all do, my whole family. I’m finally the man I was supposed to be. I think I go to Delia to break it off. I tell her Becca’s pregnant with my son so it’s over.
Delia laughs and slaps me real hard back to reality.
“We’ll never be over, Nate. She’s not the only one pregnant with your son.”
I stare at her.
“Yeah,” she laughs. “That’s right.”
Cigarette in hand, Marabeth isn’t nearly as surprised as she thought she would be. It all makes since, and she’s been waiting for this since Delia first came into the story. Since the strange letter about Jim being her Golden Brother, really. On some level, knowing how… challenged... her Uncle Byron was, she’d always suspected he couldn’t be Jim’s father. Maybe, on some level, it was the reason for the strife between Kris and Jim.
“I have to tell him about this,” Marabeth said. He has to know, Marabeth is thinking as she pulls on the housecoat. He has to know before anybody else.
When she knocked on the door, Seth was sitting on the other side of the bed and he said, “I can go.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Seth said.
Marabeth nodded, “There’s really no need for it.”
And then she began to explain everything, to review how Pamela had lain with Friederich and begotten Steiger, then how she had lain with her own son to beget Delia and while Jim shook his head, Marabeth said:
“There is more.”
“More?”
“You can read if you want. I’m reading through it now. But… you are not Byron Strauss’s son,.”
“What?” Jim looked stricken. He had never known Byron, but Byron was the link into the family. Except…. He supposed Pamela was the link into the family. But…
“What did Mom do? Did she climb into the grave with Friederich, or… What? Seriously, what the fuck?”
“Your mother,” Marabeth said, seriously, looking at Jim, “was my father’s lover. Always. Jim, you are the son of Nathan Strauss. You are my brother.”
MORE IN A FEW DAYS
I fuck her all the time now and write about it in here. No one’s going to see it but me and the truth is, for the first time I enjoy being me, enjoy being this bad man, and Delia’s a bad woman. She always was. She lives in the carriage house with Byron, and Byron is asleep by eight. When I fuck her in their bed, I half strangle her and make her promise she isn’t fucking anyone else. When it’s, done sometimes there are bruises and bites on her, but I slap her, the way she likes if she tries to bruise or bite me After all, Becca can’t know, but I don’t want to talk about her, because with her I’m someone different. I’m the man I should be. I go to work, protect my family, With Delia I’m a monster, and we both like it.
One night Delia says, “I’m not even fucking my own husband. I can’t remember the last time I had Byron, and I certainly can’t remember the last time he satisfied me….”
Becca tells me I’m going to be a Dad all over again. I take her and Marabeth for ice cream and feel like a good husband, like someone who isn’t cheating on his beautiful wife with the girl who’s supposed to be her best friend. It feels good to feel like a good man, and Mara looks at me with so much love in her eyes. They all do, my whole family. I’m finally the man I was supposed to be. I think I go to Delia to break it off. I tell her Becca’s pregnant with my son so it’s over.
Delia laughs and slaps me real hard back to reality.
“We’ll never be over, Nate. She’s not the only one pregnant with your son.”
I stare at her.
“Yeah,” she laughs. “That’s right.”
Cigarette in hand, Marabeth isn’t nearly as surprised as she thought she would be. It all makes since, and she’s been waiting for this since Delia first came into the story. Since the strange letter about Jim being her Golden Brother, really. On some level, knowing how… challenged... her Uncle Byron was, she’d always suspected he couldn’t be Jim’s father. Maybe, on some level, it was the reason for the strife between Kris and Jim.
“I have to tell him about this,” Marabeth said. He has to know, Marabeth is thinking as she pulls on the housecoat. He has to know before anybody else.
When she knocked on the door, Seth was sitting on the other side of the bed and he said, “I can go.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Seth said.
Marabeth nodded, “There’s really no need for it.”
And then she began to explain everything, to review how Pamela had lain with Friederich and begotten Steiger, then how she had lain with her own son to beget Delia and while Jim shook his head, Marabeth said:
“There is more.”
“More?”
“You can read if you want. I’m reading through it now. But… you are not Byron Strauss’s son,.”
“What?” Jim looked stricken. He had never known Byron, but Byron was the link into the family. Except…. He supposed Pamela was the link into the family. But…
“What did Mom do? Did she climb into the grave with Friederich, or… What? Seriously, what the fuck?”
“Your mother,” Marabeth said, seriously, looking at Jim, “was my father’s lover. Always. Jim, you are the son of Nathan Strauss. You are my brother.”
MORE IN A FEW DAYS
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Wow so Jim is Marabeth and Kris’s half brother? That’s cool and fucked up at the same time. It will be interesting to read how the characters deal with it. Excellent writing and I look forward to more in a few days!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
The secret is finally out. Oh my!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
MARABETH CONTINUES HER FATHER'S JOURNAL AND LEARNS OF DELIA'S TRAGIC FATE FROM THE MOUTH OF NATHAN
Ten pounds, ten fingers ten toes, the happiest baby I’ve ever seen, and out of the womb with a head of dark hair! We’ll have to do something about that mess. My son, Kristian Strauss. Rebecca said he should be named after my sister. I’ll put that out of my head. He’s going to be a different type of kid. In her way, Mara is fascinated by him.
The baby went missing for a moment. Becca was out of her mind. Found Mara and Amy and Maris playing with Chris in the stroller. He was gnawing on Becca’s bra. When she exploded and asked Mara what she was doing, she just said, “Breastfeeding him.”
Seven pounds all limbs and digits accounted for, my second son! James for my Dad, his granddad. James Friederich Strauss. The others were pale and dark haired, he’s golden and blond, and his eyes are going to stay blue. I can tell that already. Jim, you’re such a happy baby. You’re nothing like me and your mom or the man you think is your dad or your grandparents, except maybe Steiger. Pamela won’t stop hovering over you. She’ll hardly let me hold you she wants to hold you so much. Here comes Byron.
My brother Byron is dead. I don’t want to write about him, though. I want to write to you, my son. Jim, I’ve always tried to do the best by you. And I always will. I wish I could tell you that you weren’t without a dad. I have told you, but I don’t know if you understand. I don’t know, my little golden boy, if you can understand how much I love you, how much we all do. There are so many things I wish I could say, but for the peace of our family I can’t, and that’s my fault. I look at my two little blue eyed boys, sort of like something our a fairy tale, my serious black haired son and the other one sunny and gold, and sometimes you all are like best friends, but sometimes you all just don’t get on, and I guess that’s what family’s like. Still, I always want you all to watch out for each other. Kris is your big brother and he loves you even if he acts like he doesn’t. And I hope one day you can watch out for him. He’ll watch out for you. I just want all my children to love each other, and I want all of you to know just how much I love you. But especially you, James. I will always love you. I will always be your Dad.
STRAUSS
Pamela
Passed away peacefully on April 29th, 1992
aged 92 years.
Beloved Daughter of Friederich Strauss
Cherished Sister to Maris, Claire and James,
Beloved Aunt and Great-Aunt of Many
By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide
them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light,
so that they could travel by day or night.
Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar
of fire by night
left its place in front of the people.
Exodus 13:21–22
Relatives and friends are respectfully invited to attend Pamela’s
homegoing to be held at Saint Agatha’s Catholic Church
.
With Requiem Mass
commencing at 11 am
on May 5th, 1992
My aunt is dead. Who could have believed it? She passed on as she would have wished, grave and austere and having said everything she wished. She died in bed surrounded by us and was even more terrifying as a corpse. I wonder how many lies we put on the death notice. A homegoing! I wonder where her true home is. I can’t imagine it being a heavenly one or her wishing for it. What a needle she stuck in the eye of Saint Ursula’s, though, insisting on being buried from Saint Agatha, the church she always loved even if she barely went.
Beloved aunt. For beloved we should have written terrifying, and of course, none of us really know how old she was, but she ran this family. Everyone else only pretended to. How much truth can a funeral notice bear? What will we do now?
It never stopped, me and Delia. We’re doing the same thing we’ve always done. Why make it glamourous? But we always go to the third floor, where no one else is.
Today, why does she come up there? Why does Becca come up here? I’m fucking Delia against the window, and she’s calling me names and I’m calling her names and then Becca starts screaming, and when she sees that it’s Delia, she begins to tear at her face. You bitch. How could you do this to me? You were supposed to be my best friend. You were my sister. Delia is crying. I’ve never known her to cry about anything. She’s saying Rebecca, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry! I’ve never known Delia to be sorry about anything. I pull Rebecca away. I take her downstairs. On the second floor she’s screaming at me and we’re in Mara’s room. Mara’s at school and Rebecca is screaming at me, smacking me across my face when she shrieks and I turn to look out the window,
“Oh my God!” Rebecca cries, but I just hear the thud.
We run downstairs and Rebecca runs out the door. Mom is already following us.
The police leave as the kids are coming home from school. Rebecca hugs Jim and takes him upstairs. The sidewalk is still being cleaned. Later that night, as Jim is sobbing, I try to say something, but Rebecca says, “You go sleep upstairs. You like the third floor so much.”
“Del—”
“Never speak her name again,” my wife says.
I never do.
STRAUSS
Delia
Nee Frye
Life was cut short passed on June 21st , 1999
aged 45 years.
Beloved Widow of Byron Strauss
Devoted Mother of James
Cherished Daughter of Steiger Frye
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
Revelation 21.4
Relatives and friends are respectfully invited to attend Delia’s
funeral to be held at Waverly Cemetery in the chapel.
.
on November 11, 1999
This whole time is desolate. The last few years were. A funeral in a cemetery with no Mass. For a woman who took her own life. I failed her. I could hardly get out of my own despair. I failed her, and I failed my Jim. Jim, you’re not alone. You got us. I hope you understood she loved you. I hope you can forgive us.
Forgive me.
MORE TOMORROW
Ten pounds, ten fingers ten toes, the happiest baby I’ve ever seen, and out of the womb with a head of dark hair! We’ll have to do something about that mess. My son, Kristian Strauss. Rebecca said he should be named after my sister. I’ll put that out of my head. He’s going to be a different type of kid. In her way, Mara is fascinated by him.
The baby went missing for a moment. Becca was out of her mind. Found Mara and Amy and Maris playing with Chris in the stroller. He was gnawing on Becca’s bra. When she exploded and asked Mara what she was doing, she just said, “Breastfeeding him.”
Seven pounds all limbs and digits accounted for, my second son! James for my Dad, his granddad. James Friederich Strauss. The others were pale and dark haired, he’s golden and blond, and his eyes are going to stay blue. I can tell that already. Jim, you’re such a happy baby. You’re nothing like me and your mom or the man you think is your dad or your grandparents, except maybe Steiger. Pamela won’t stop hovering over you. She’ll hardly let me hold you she wants to hold you so much. Here comes Byron.
My brother Byron is dead. I don’t want to write about him, though. I want to write to you, my son. Jim, I’ve always tried to do the best by you. And I always will. I wish I could tell you that you weren’t without a dad. I have told you, but I don’t know if you understand. I don’t know, my little golden boy, if you can understand how much I love you, how much we all do. There are so many things I wish I could say, but for the peace of our family I can’t, and that’s my fault. I look at my two little blue eyed boys, sort of like something our a fairy tale, my serious black haired son and the other one sunny and gold, and sometimes you all are like best friends, but sometimes you all just don’t get on, and I guess that’s what family’s like. Still, I always want you all to watch out for each other. Kris is your big brother and he loves you even if he acts like he doesn’t. And I hope one day you can watch out for him. He’ll watch out for you. I just want all my children to love each other, and I want all of you to know just how much I love you. But especially you, James. I will always love you. I will always be your Dad.
STRAUSS
Pamela
Passed away peacefully on April 29th, 1992
aged 92 years.
Beloved Daughter of Friederich Strauss
Cherished Sister to Maris, Claire and James,
Beloved Aunt and Great-Aunt of Many
By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide
them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light,
so that they could travel by day or night.
Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar
of fire by night
left its place in front of the people.
Exodus 13:21–22
Relatives and friends are respectfully invited to attend Pamela’s
homegoing to be held at Saint Agatha’s Catholic Church
.
With Requiem Mass
commencing at 11 am
on May 5th, 1992
My aunt is dead. Who could have believed it? She passed on as she would have wished, grave and austere and having said everything she wished. She died in bed surrounded by us and was even more terrifying as a corpse. I wonder how many lies we put on the death notice. A homegoing! I wonder where her true home is. I can’t imagine it being a heavenly one or her wishing for it. What a needle she stuck in the eye of Saint Ursula’s, though, insisting on being buried from Saint Agatha, the church she always loved even if she barely went.
Beloved aunt. For beloved we should have written terrifying, and of course, none of us really know how old she was, but she ran this family. Everyone else only pretended to. How much truth can a funeral notice bear? What will we do now?
It never stopped, me and Delia. We’re doing the same thing we’ve always done. Why make it glamourous? But we always go to the third floor, where no one else is.
Today, why does she come up there? Why does Becca come up here? I’m fucking Delia against the window, and she’s calling me names and I’m calling her names and then Becca starts screaming, and when she sees that it’s Delia, she begins to tear at her face. You bitch. How could you do this to me? You were supposed to be my best friend. You were my sister. Delia is crying. I’ve never known her to cry about anything. She’s saying Rebecca, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry! I’ve never known Delia to be sorry about anything. I pull Rebecca away. I take her downstairs. On the second floor she’s screaming at me and we’re in Mara’s room. Mara’s at school and Rebecca is screaming at me, smacking me across my face when she shrieks and I turn to look out the window,
“Oh my God!” Rebecca cries, but I just hear the thud.
We run downstairs and Rebecca runs out the door. Mom is already following us.
The police leave as the kids are coming home from school. Rebecca hugs Jim and takes him upstairs. The sidewalk is still being cleaned. Later that night, as Jim is sobbing, I try to say something, but Rebecca says, “You go sleep upstairs. You like the third floor so much.”
“Del—”
“Never speak her name again,” my wife says.
I never do.
STRAUSS
Delia
Nee Frye
Life was cut short passed on June 21st , 1999
aged 45 years.
Beloved Widow of Byron Strauss
Devoted Mother of James
Cherished Daughter of Steiger Frye
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
Revelation 21.4
Relatives and friends are respectfully invited to attend Delia’s
funeral to be held at Waverly Cemetery in the chapel.
.
on November 11, 1999
This whole time is desolate. The last few years were. A funeral in a cemetery with no Mass. For a woman who took her own life. I failed her. I could hardly get out of my own despair. I failed her, and I failed my Jim. Jim, you’re not alone. You got us. I hope you understood she loved you. I hope you can forgive us.
Forgive me.
MORE TOMORROW
Last edited:
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Wow that was an eventful part of Nathan Strauss and co’s history. I hope that after hearing all of this Jim can forgive his real Dad and go on with the knowledge that Marabeth and Kris are his siblings. That was a shocking way for Delia’s life to end. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
It was something else, wasn't it. We knew she was dead, and I think we knew she commited suicide, but to die that way! Nathan was always a father to Jim, but to find out he was his real father! It's all so much. It was really sad and a whole lot of mess to process. How the Strauss kids manage, we will soon see.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
A SPECIAL FRIDAY POSTING
CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER SIX
That night Marabeth was glad when Loreal came to visit. She was sitting alone in her room, fairly talking to herself. She had been reading the last of the journal, reading the lines she would return to eventually. She was more fascinated by what Jim and Chris had found in the records, and she suspected that it was important. But she had learned, at the end of the day, the most important thing, a thing she had almost suspected.
There were the other lines.
I’m sad Delia’s gone, and I wasn’t right to her, but now it means me and Becca can be what we are supposed to be…
Sometimes, I feel like Kris hates Jim so much he must know the truth. I wonder if I told them the truth could they really start to be friends?
Me and Grange decided to do the Change. This month he will do it and I will bind him. Next month he will do the same to me…
For the first time in years I did the Change. I wasn’t bound, but I was locked in the room. Grange and I spent the money on cows. One to be brought each night. When I woke up I was covered in blood and that room smelled of the dead cow across from me. I feel so alive….
Kris Changed for the first time. We always hope it won’t happen this time, and sometimes it doesn’t. Some of Aunt Maris’s grandkids never have….
Waiting on Jim’s Change. But it still hasn’t come. We’re all watching him, waiting for something to happen. Is it because he’s blond? Could that be it? After all, Pamela and Grandfather didn’t change unless they wanted to….
Peter said he wants to be bound. Grange is dead set against it. Peter lost his shit, and Peter never does that. He said if he’s going to bear the pressure of the family he’s going to have this too.He says he made a major sacrifice and lost his girlfriend for this family. He’s just a boy. He’s not my son. He’s not even my nephew, but I feel like he is, and it actually breaks my heart to put a seventeen year old boy in a harness and watch this happen to him…
Vanessa called me and Dillard to the house. Seems Grange had gotten lose. She was afraid we’d blame her for shooting him, and Dill did, but his wife and Becca circled around Vanessa. Cynthia, Dill’s wife has a detective in the family, she says they can make it look like an accident. Her boy Myron starts to come in and ask us what’s going on. We just send him away…
It went on and on, and the thing that came to Marabeth over and over again, as she told Loreal, was leaving Kris and Jim together to sift through their father’s journal.
“I don’t hate you,” Kris said, wiping tears from his face. “I don’t. And I’m sorry if I ever made you think that. I just wish I had known, I wish I had known. That I had a little brother.”
Jim tried not to cry and sniffed.
“It’s only six months difference.”
“I wish I’d known.”
“Well, we know now.”
“You always do that,” Kris said, red eyed. “See the best in things.”
“It’s not that,” said Jim, “It’s just I’m not going to let myself get bogged down in what’s too fucking late to be changed. And anyway, we’ve got the rest of our lives.”
“So,” Loreal said, “Jim is your brother ,and your father’s son, which means he still is Jimmy’s grandson, and he’s still Steiger’s grandson, but he’s also Steiger’s nephew because Delia was Steiger’s sister as well as his…”
“It doesn’t do to think too much about it,” Marabeth said, “and Steiger’s so old there will be no telling him. Maybe not even telling Grandma. Can you imagine telling that dear old man that Pamela was his mother, that she slept with him, that she was Delia’s mother too… It explains everything about Jim. I suppose, in a way, without trying to, they were making the ubermench when they were making Jim.”
“The uberwulf.” Loreal said.
Against her will, Marabeth snorted.
“How German,” Loreal noted, and Marabeth felt light for a moment. “How very, very German.”
But it still didn’t answer an important question. If Jim was this uberwolf, then shouldn’t Delia have been the Queen of the Pack? Far from being a friend of the family, she was the most Strauss of the Strausses, the granddaughter and great granddaughter of Friederich, her father’s sister, her grandmother’s daughter, far more pure Strauss than Maris or Claire or Marabeth’s own grandfather.
“Because she was not made on purpose,” Loreal said. “Because she did not have the blood of Frau Inga, and frankly, because she was not you, Marabeth. Personal strength and intelligence cannot be bred. They are given. You are the real thing. The Queen. Too much breeding just makes redheads who have sex with their cousins and jump out of windows leaving their kids as orphans.”
“This is too much,” Marabeth shook her head.
“It is too much,” Loreal agreed. “You should call Joyce. And she should tell Peter.”
“There’re are things about his dad…” Marabeth shook her head in disbelief. “No, you’re right. I will call them.”
Joyce was her old best friend and Marabeth had never really had another. It was at that moment, sitting beside Loreal Dunmore, she realized she did.
MORE ON SATURDAY NIGHT/SUNDAY AFTERNOON
CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER SIX
That night Marabeth was glad when Loreal came to visit. She was sitting alone in her room, fairly talking to herself. She had been reading the last of the journal, reading the lines she would return to eventually. She was more fascinated by what Jim and Chris had found in the records, and she suspected that it was important. But she had learned, at the end of the day, the most important thing, a thing she had almost suspected.
There were the other lines.
I’m sad Delia’s gone, and I wasn’t right to her, but now it means me and Becca can be what we are supposed to be…
Sometimes, I feel like Kris hates Jim so much he must know the truth. I wonder if I told them the truth could they really start to be friends?
Me and Grange decided to do the Change. This month he will do it and I will bind him. Next month he will do the same to me…
For the first time in years I did the Change. I wasn’t bound, but I was locked in the room. Grange and I spent the money on cows. One to be brought each night. When I woke up I was covered in blood and that room smelled of the dead cow across from me. I feel so alive….
Kris Changed for the first time. We always hope it won’t happen this time, and sometimes it doesn’t. Some of Aunt Maris’s grandkids never have….
Waiting on Jim’s Change. But it still hasn’t come. We’re all watching him, waiting for something to happen. Is it because he’s blond? Could that be it? After all, Pamela and Grandfather didn’t change unless they wanted to….
Peter said he wants to be bound. Grange is dead set against it. Peter lost his shit, and Peter never does that. He said if he’s going to bear the pressure of the family he’s going to have this too.He says he made a major sacrifice and lost his girlfriend for this family. He’s just a boy. He’s not my son. He’s not even my nephew, but I feel like he is, and it actually breaks my heart to put a seventeen year old boy in a harness and watch this happen to him…
Vanessa called me and Dillard to the house. Seems Grange had gotten lose. She was afraid we’d blame her for shooting him, and Dill did, but his wife and Becca circled around Vanessa. Cynthia, Dill’s wife has a detective in the family, she says they can make it look like an accident. Her boy Myron starts to come in and ask us what’s going on. We just send him away…
It went on and on, and the thing that came to Marabeth over and over again, as she told Loreal, was leaving Kris and Jim together to sift through their father’s journal.
“I don’t hate you,” Kris said, wiping tears from his face. “I don’t. And I’m sorry if I ever made you think that. I just wish I had known, I wish I had known. That I had a little brother.”
Jim tried not to cry and sniffed.
“It’s only six months difference.”
“I wish I’d known.”
“Well, we know now.”
“You always do that,” Kris said, red eyed. “See the best in things.”
“It’s not that,” said Jim, “It’s just I’m not going to let myself get bogged down in what’s too fucking late to be changed. And anyway, we’ve got the rest of our lives.”
“So,” Loreal said, “Jim is your brother ,and your father’s son, which means he still is Jimmy’s grandson, and he’s still Steiger’s grandson, but he’s also Steiger’s nephew because Delia was Steiger’s sister as well as his…”
“It doesn’t do to think too much about it,” Marabeth said, “and Steiger’s so old there will be no telling him. Maybe not even telling Grandma. Can you imagine telling that dear old man that Pamela was his mother, that she slept with him, that she was Delia’s mother too… It explains everything about Jim. I suppose, in a way, without trying to, they were making the ubermench when they were making Jim.”
“The uberwulf.” Loreal said.
Against her will, Marabeth snorted.
“How German,” Loreal noted, and Marabeth felt light for a moment. “How very, very German.”
But it still didn’t answer an important question. If Jim was this uberwolf, then shouldn’t Delia have been the Queen of the Pack? Far from being a friend of the family, she was the most Strauss of the Strausses, the granddaughter and great granddaughter of Friederich, her father’s sister, her grandmother’s daughter, far more pure Strauss than Maris or Claire or Marabeth’s own grandfather.
“Because she was not made on purpose,” Loreal said. “Because she did not have the blood of Frau Inga, and frankly, because she was not you, Marabeth. Personal strength and intelligence cannot be bred. They are given. You are the real thing. The Queen. Too much breeding just makes redheads who have sex with their cousins and jump out of windows leaving their kids as orphans.”
“This is too much,” Marabeth shook her head.
“It is too much,” Loreal agreed. “You should call Joyce. And she should tell Peter.”
“There’re are things about his dad…” Marabeth shook her head in disbelief. “No, you’re right. I will call them.”
Joyce was her old best friend and Marabeth had never really had another. It was at that moment, sitting beside Loreal Dunmore, she realized she did.
MORE ON SATURDAY NIGHT/SUNDAY AFTERNOON
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great portion. I am glad Kris said what he said to Jim. That was beautiful. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
S E V E N
B E C O M I N G
A feast every day in your hearts in the joy of my rapture!
-The Book of the Law
There was a knock at Jenean Morrison’s door and this surprised her because no one ever visited her. She didn’t dare to think Kris was actually back yet, and she came to the keyhole saying, “Who is it?”
“Jenean,” the voice with the trace of a French accent said, “It is your aunt.”
Later on Jenean might analyze if this was a pit in her stomach or excitement, but she opened the door for Clotilde.
Clotilde, what an old fashioned name for a good looking middle aged woman with a lion’s mane of dark hair.
“Aunt Clotilde.”
“We need to talk, my dear,” Clotilde said, coming in. “There is no time for trivias.”
“Trivialities?”
“Is what I said. I could take you to lunch. Would you like lunch?”
She was on her off day from the I-Hop and had intended to spend it sleeping. Now, her head was spinning because Clotilde, who had come to this country some thirty years ago, did not live in Lassador and must have, with no warning and zero invitation, been traveling here since last night.
“Tante, I love you, but what is all this about?”
“It’s about your boyfriend.”
“How do you know about…?”
“Please, I know everything. Did you know he was bisclavret?”
“I…” Jenean was almost glad her aunt had used one of the French words.
“I thought. I suspected.”
“There is more to tell,” Clotilde said. And then she said, as Jenean stood before her, too stupefied to do anything useful.
“When you see him again, you should tell him that we are too.”
Lewis Dunharrow sat gloomily looking at the Cards before he stacked them back up and handed them to Levy.
Now it’s my turn,” the boy said, not wanting to look too eager.
“Don’t get excited,” Lewis said. “The information you get from a Tarot Card is limited at best. But yes, it’s your turn.”
These days Chris Ashby used the sunlit hours almost strictly for sleeping, and rose in the night to go out, which they both used as euphemism for hunting. Chris Ashby looked healthier than ever, and Lewis stopped in their bedroom to see him sleeping nude as always, face down, mouth open on the pillow. The sunlight through the curtains made everything the color of ivory, including Chris, and Lewis thought, “Only a day or two longer, then we will be back to our life.”
He walked through the great house and to the front porch where he found Augustus looking a little bit older today, though Lewis couldn’t settle on the age. He sat in the chair nearest his uncle, and as they looked on the great lawn with the drive coming up, and the ring of green trees encircling Long Lees,” Lewis said, “I am sorry for my abruptness. It was not right for to say Long Lees was mine.”
“It is,” Augustus said. “It is yours as much as it is mine. You are Octavian’s heir and this was his. He took it with me. And with Susanna. And if you are who you say you are…” Augustus eyed him, “and it appears you are… well then…”
Augustus nodded.
“You all fought so hard to take Long Lees, and after all the solitude I apologize again,” Lewis said. “I am bringing more white peple yo your door than you ever planned to see.”
Augustus almost laughed.
“Truthfully, I do not desire people of any color at my door. Did you see something in your cards?”
“You know how little Cards can do. I did not see. I sensed.”
“All of Pamela’s kin are welcome. At first I thought the boy James was an idiot, but it is not so, and I see his grandmother in him.”
“And Marabeth?”
“She is what Pamela hoped for, what she worked for all her life. Especially now that she has won the Gift.
When Levy came to the porch, Augustus said, “Your hair is mess.”
“Do you have a barber?” Levy eyed the old witch.
Augustus raised an eyebrow.
“You may be a Dunharrow after all.”
“Marabeth cuts hair,” Lewis said.
“Does she now?” Augustus murmured.
Levy looked dubious.
“When are people coming?” Augustus asked without looking at Lewis or Levy.
Lewis said, “Tonight.”
Marabeth sat on the porch between Augustus and Lewis, and the sound of electric trimmers clicked off as she wiped hair from Levy’s shoulders.
“You are the first white person I ever let cut my hair,” he said.
Lewis gave him the hand mirror without even looking, and Levy turned back and forth, wiped his hair onto the porch. Augustus cleared his throat.
“I know,” Levy said, a little irritated. “I wasn’t going to leave my hair all over the porch. Marabeth it looks good!”
“In a former life I was a hairdresser,” she said, wrapping the cord around the clippers. “Or an almost one.”
“You are a woman of many hidden talents,” Lewis noted as Levy began to gather the clumbs of his hair that had not fallen on the newspaper around him.
Up to the porch, out of the woods, the saw Jim Strauss coming, tanned and bright eyed, sweat down the front of his tee shirt, and Seth walked beside him.
“You didn’t go out to day,” Lewis said to Marabeth.
Marabeth was barefoot in jeans and a tee shirt, and her hair was tied back.
“I go out once a day, to learn, and to get used to the Change, and then I become myself again.”
Augustus only nodded, but when Jim and Seth sat down at the bottom of the steps, he said:
“Long ago witches changed. Some still do. This was in a time when all things were one. Nowadays the most a witch usually does is cast herself or himself into the eyes of another animal and even then we must be careful.
“But long ago, when there were many of us, we changed all of the time. We loved the Change, the wildness, and we changed into anything. Wolves, yes, but bears, badgers, birds. It is even said that Fafnir, the dragon of creation was once a man.
“But the more some grew to love the Change, the harder it was to come back from it, and, in time, some of us never came back. It is said that there are many bears and many lions, many wolves as well, who were once men, but forgot themselves.”
Jim looked up at Augustus to see the face of the man who looked both old and young, both like Lewis Dunharrow and unlike him.
“This is why, for the most part, the witches forgot the Change, and those who change, who warg, were so careful of it, many even lost the ability to do it properly or do at all. This is, in fact, though you may no longer remember it, why some chose to change only on the three days of the full moon, for that is the origin of that old curse. Take care, Seth, that you do not love traveling through the minds of animals too much. Take care, James Strauss, that you do not love your wolf form so much you can no longer return from it.”
MORE.... AND MORE SURPRISES ON TUESDAY!
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
A great start to the chapter. It is surprising to learn more about the characters gifts and I look forward to learning even more in a few days. Excellent writing!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I'm glad you enjoyed. Meanwhile, I went to bed like a normal person.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT A WHOLE LOT OF WHITE PEOPLE CONVERGE ON AUGUSTUS DUNHARROW'S HOUSE
Augustus Dunharrow, who loved nearly no one, who had used his grandchildren to work his will and then banished them with curses when they had endangered him by falling in line with vampires, was enchanted by Marabeth. In her strange way the girl—well, woman now, reminded him of Susanna in her youth. But the reminder was surface one only. Since the days of her first change, Marabeth instictively knew the Change would be something she must continue to do. She was disciplined, and had done it once a day. Now she came barefoot down the stairs in a black dress, and she had put a crown of flowers in her dark hair, Her lips were red as blood, and there was a wildness that had not been in her. She had seen the car coming up the drive and as she ran down she took Augustus’ hand and kissed it.
“It is good of you to allow my friend to come into your house.”
“Yes,” Augustus thought, this girl was a witch, a true enchantress. She was a wild witch. Even her shoes meant nothing to her. She had received the Gift, and her mind had passed through animals. She would never be entirely of the human world again.
She threw her arms around Jason McCord before he reached the steps, and he swung her about and then, when she threw her legs around him and he was holding her, he realized as she planted a fierce kiss on his mouth, that he had never known she was so light.
“I don’t know what the fuck has happened to you,” he said to Marabeth, but I like it.”
“Oh, Jason,” she said, “So much has happened to me.”
Jim and Kris had met Jason, but only as the detective who had brought them news of their father. But before they could meet him again, he introduced himself to Augustus with great courtliness, and then to Lewis with equal courtesy and lastly to Loreal.
“For a moment,” she said, “I thought you were going to kiss my hand.”
“I could.”
“There’s no time for that, sir,” Loreal told him. “You’ve got work to do.”
“Can I smoke in this house?” Jason whispered.
“Of course you can,” Augustus’s voice came from the next room.
“Anything else would be uncivilized.”
Later that day, as evening drew on, Peter Keller arrived at Long Lees with Joyce MacNamara.
He was confused because he knew Lewis, but did not know who the young man sitting beside him was.
“This is my great-grand uncle, Augustus Dunharrow,” Lewis said.
While the youing man smiled courteously beside him, Lewis added, “Loreal’s grandfather.”
For a brief moment, Peter’s face revealed the shock that Joyce did not even bother to hide, and then Peter said, “Mr Dunharrow, I hope I am not intruding on your home.”
“I always wanted to see the rest of the family that Pamela came from,” Augustus said. “Of course, none of you are the ones that she ever spoke of. Pray tell me, Mr. Keller, what relation were you to my old friend?”
Whatever Peter was thinking, and Lewis could see his blue eyes trying to not fall out while looking on the young man, he said, “Pamela had two younger sisters. My grandmother, Maris, was the younger.”
Augustus nodded in satisfaction, and then said, “You are most welcome here.”
“Indeed,” Lewis said, “if he had not wanted you, you would never have found this house. It is ringed about with magics and few ever come here.”
“Then I am doubly honored,” said Peter.
Loreal had spent the day with the Strausses, putting together what they had learned from the journals and the lists of names. Marabeth was relieved to see that Loreal and her old friend got along easily. Often while they spoke of one thing or another that seemed not to matter, Peter tapped his foot impatiently and tried to interrupt. It was Loreal who said, “You’re making us all nervous. Relax.”
“Thank you for that,” Joyce said. “I’ve tried to…”
“Tried to what?” Peter said.
Loreal shrugged and told Joyce, “Sometimes you just need another woman to come in and say something. If more women said something, less men would feel the need to say just anything.”
But later that evening, Peter went into the library and read everything he hadn’t gone through before. He was the first after Marabeth to read Nathan’s journal, and at some places he stopped with a gasp, and at some points he put it down and then came out to smoke a cigarette with Joyce. He and Joyce went back to the library when it was near one in the morning, and a little later, as he reached the end of Nathan’s journals, he let out something like a shriek and when Marabeth and Loreal ran to the library, they found the door half open and Kris and Jim standing uncertainly at it. Marabeth looked in and saw Peter, shaking with sobs, held by Joyce as he wept. She wasn’t entirely sure what to say, but suddenly Loreal reached up and smacked Jim and Kris in the backs of their heads.
“He’s your family. He’s always been there for you. Be there for him, you assholes.”
At that the newly found brothers went to the library and closed the door behind them. A moment, later Joyce came out, shaken.
“What the hell is in that book?” she wondered
“Lots of things,” Marabeth said, “but I imagine now Peter just found out that Uncle Grange didn’t die in a car crash.”
“Oh, God,” Joyce said. “Do I want to know?”
“No,” Marabeth said, “but you will.”
On the other side of the door, they could still hear Peter Keller weeping.
“I wonder,” Loreal began, crossing her arms over her chest, “if we all had a Pamela and a Nathan to write down our history, how many of us would not be in tears?”
It was about two in the morning, certainly late enough for Chris Ashby to be up beside Lewis, and in the large kitchen they all sat drinking coffee. Peter looked red eyed and rumpled and unshaven, and Marabeth thought, somehow better than he ever had before, and he said, “If it’s true, if you all have had dreams, and if Kris has this gift, this torque, then we should use it. We should use it to find out as much as we can. If all have this witch blood, and if we are accompanied by such great witches as the Dunharrows, then the reason we are at Long Lees is to learn what has haunted us for so long.”
Peter sounded noble, but his voice was hoarse, and his face was tear stained.
“This has hurt our family so much. Hurt us, screwed us up. If we can end it, we end it, but—” he said, looking at Chris Ashby levelly, because he had heard what the blood drinker had said to his cousin. “It is not my goal to end it. I… love the Wolf. The same way my father did. The same way Nathan did too. But I cannot let it destroy me. Not anymore than it has.”
“We will construct the Circle,” Lewis said. “We will do it together, even with Augustus. I’m sure he will consent to join.”
“I wish Owen and Uri were here,” Seth murmured.
“I definitely wish Uriah was here,” Kris agreed.
“We have literally become the Magic Negro,” Loreal said.
“What?” Kris barked out a nervous laugh.
“The Magic Negro,” Lewis said. “The trope that a beneficent and strangely powered Black person or persons shows up to help white people in trouble, and yes, Loreal, I can’t help thinking there is some truth to what you’ve said.”
“Well, I hate to make you a trope,” Peter said, “but we need you all to help us very badly.”
“And we will, Lewis said. “Only, while television shows and bad books rely on tropes, nature and the Craft rarely do, which means that you must be here for us as well. There is something you know that we must know. Some help we need, something we have lost, that only you can bring us. What that is, I cannot say.”
“Well,” Jason Mc.Cord said, “let’s hope there’s a little bit of magic in a white man too.”
Lewis looked at him.
“I’ve been having dreams,” he said.
“Yes,” Lewis said. “Mara told me something about that.”
Jason nodded, wondering how much Marabeth had told this man who seemed to keep his own council and be incapable of surprise.
“Well, tonight I will try and speak with him again,” Jason said. “I could not do it away from Marabeth, but now that I am here…”
The tall detective of sloping shoulders with the marmalade colored hair shrugged.ou too?”
“Yes,” Lewis said, and appreciated Jason’s humility while hoping he would, in fact, be able to contact the man who was a ghost and not quite a ghost. Somehow, some way, this had to do with him. He was not simply helping white people out and forwarding their plot. There was no plot. Was there ever? Only connections and as yet, he could not tell fully what those connections were.
Loreal, who was still thinking of her maps of the four castles and the four treasures, who wished to know of the Grail or the Cup or the Chalice, whatever it was called, had not given up her quest, werewolves and vampires not withstanding, did.
MORE TOMORROW
Augustus Dunharrow, who loved nearly no one, who had used his grandchildren to work his will and then banished them with curses when they had endangered him by falling in line with vampires, was enchanted by Marabeth. In her strange way the girl—well, woman now, reminded him of Susanna in her youth. But the reminder was surface one only. Since the days of her first change, Marabeth instictively knew the Change would be something she must continue to do. She was disciplined, and had done it once a day. Now she came barefoot down the stairs in a black dress, and she had put a crown of flowers in her dark hair, Her lips were red as blood, and there was a wildness that had not been in her. She had seen the car coming up the drive and as she ran down she took Augustus’ hand and kissed it.
“It is good of you to allow my friend to come into your house.”
“Yes,” Augustus thought, this girl was a witch, a true enchantress. She was a wild witch. Even her shoes meant nothing to her. She had received the Gift, and her mind had passed through animals. She would never be entirely of the human world again.
She threw her arms around Jason McCord before he reached the steps, and he swung her about and then, when she threw her legs around him and he was holding her, he realized as she planted a fierce kiss on his mouth, that he had never known she was so light.
“I don’t know what the fuck has happened to you,” he said to Marabeth, but I like it.”
“Oh, Jason,” she said, “So much has happened to me.”
Jim and Kris had met Jason, but only as the detective who had brought them news of their father. But before they could meet him again, he introduced himself to Augustus with great courtliness, and then to Lewis with equal courtesy and lastly to Loreal.
“For a moment,” she said, “I thought you were going to kiss my hand.”
“I could.”
“There’s no time for that, sir,” Loreal told him. “You’ve got work to do.”
“Can I smoke in this house?” Jason whispered.
“Of course you can,” Augustus’s voice came from the next room.
“Anything else would be uncivilized.”
Later that day, as evening drew on, Peter Keller arrived at Long Lees with Joyce MacNamara.
He was confused because he knew Lewis, but did not know who the young man sitting beside him was.
“This is my great-grand uncle, Augustus Dunharrow,” Lewis said.
While the youing man smiled courteously beside him, Lewis added, “Loreal’s grandfather.”
For a brief moment, Peter’s face revealed the shock that Joyce did not even bother to hide, and then Peter said, “Mr Dunharrow, I hope I am not intruding on your home.”
“I always wanted to see the rest of the family that Pamela came from,” Augustus said. “Of course, none of you are the ones that she ever spoke of. Pray tell me, Mr. Keller, what relation were you to my old friend?”
Whatever Peter was thinking, and Lewis could see his blue eyes trying to not fall out while looking on the young man, he said, “Pamela had two younger sisters. My grandmother, Maris, was the younger.”
Augustus nodded in satisfaction, and then said, “You are most welcome here.”
“Indeed,” Lewis said, “if he had not wanted you, you would never have found this house. It is ringed about with magics and few ever come here.”
“Then I am doubly honored,” said Peter.
Loreal had spent the day with the Strausses, putting together what they had learned from the journals and the lists of names. Marabeth was relieved to see that Loreal and her old friend got along easily. Often while they spoke of one thing or another that seemed not to matter, Peter tapped his foot impatiently and tried to interrupt. It was Loreal who said, “You’re making us all nervous. Relax.”
“Thank you for that,” Joyce said. “I’ve tried to…”
“Tried to what?” Peter said.
Loreal shrugged and told Joyce, “Sometimes you just need another woman to come in and say something. If more women said something, less men would feel the need to say just anything.”
But later that evening, Peter went into the library and read everything he hadn’t gone through before. He was the first after Marabeth to read Nathan’s journal, and at some places he stopped with a gasp, and at some points he put it down and then came out to smoke a cigarette with Joyce. He and Joyce went back to the library when it was near one in the morning, and a little later, as he reached the end of Nathan’s journals, he let out something like a shriek and when Marabeth and Loreal ran to the library, they found the door half open and Kris and Jim standing uncertainly at it. Marabeth looked in and saw Peter, shaking with sobs, held by Joyce as he wept. She wasn’t entirely sure what to say, but suddenly Loreal reached up and smacked Jim and Kris in the backs of their heads.
“He’s your family. He’s always been there for you. Be there for him, you assholes.”
At that the newly found brothers went to the library and closed the door behind them. A moment, later Joyce came out, shaken.
“What the hell is in that book?” she wondered
“Lots of things,” Marabeth said, “but I imagine now Peter just found out that Uncle Grange didn’t die in a car crash.”
“Oh, God,” Joyce said. “Do I want to know?”
“No,” Marabeth said, “but you will.”
On the other side of the door, they could still hear Peter Keller weeping.
“I wonder,” Loreal began, crossing her arms over her chest, “if we all had a Pamela and a Nathan to write down our history, how many of us would not be in tears?”
It was about two in the morning, certainly late enough for Chris Ashby to be up beside Lewis, and in the large kitchen they all sat drinking coffee. Peter looked red eyed and rumpled and unshaven, and Marabeth thought, somehow better than he ever had before, and he said, “If it’s true, if you all have had dreams, and if Kris has this gift, this torque, then we should use it. We should use it to find out as much as we can. If all have this witch blood, and if we are accompanied by such great witches as the Dunharrows, then the reason we are at Long Lees is to learn what has haunted us for so long.”
Peter sounded noble, but his voice was hoarse, and his face was tear stained.
“This has hurt our family so much. Hurt us, screwed us up. If we can end it, we end it, but—” he said, looking at Chris Ashby levelly, because he had heard what the blood drinker had said to his cousin. “It is not my goal to end it. I… love the Wolf. The same way my father did. The same way Nathan did too. But I cannot let it destroy me. Not anymore than it has.”
“We will construct the Circle,” Lewis said. “We will do it together, even with Augustus. I’m sure he will consent to join.”
“I wish Owen and Uri were here,” Seth murmured.
“I definitely wish Uriah was here,” Kris agreed.
“We have literally become the Magic Negro,” Loreal said.
“What?” Kris barked out a nervous laugh.
“The Magic Negro,” Lewis said. “The trope that a beneficent and strangely powered Black person or persons shows up to help white people in trouble, and yes, Loreal, I can’t help thinking there is some truth to what you’ve said.”
“Well, I hate to make you a trope,” Peter said, “but we need you all to help us very badly.”
“And we will, Lewis said. “Only, while television shows and bad books rely on tropes, nature and the Craft rarely do, which means that you must be here for us as well. There is something you know that we must know. Some help we need, something we have lost, that only you can bring us. What that is, I cannot say.”
“Well,” Jason Mc.Cord said, “let’s hope there’s a little bit of magic in a white man too.”
Lewis looked at him.
“I’ve been having dreams,” he said.
“Yes,” Lewis said. “Mara told me something about that.”
Jason nodded, wondering how much Marabeth had told this man who seemed to keep his own council and be incapable of surprise.
“Well, tonight I will try and speak with him again,” Jason said. “I could not do it away from Marabeth, but now that I am here…”
The tall detective of sloping shoulders with the marmalade colored hair shrugged.ou too?”
“Yes,” Lewis said, and appreciated Jason’s humility while hoping he would, in fact, be able to contact the man who was a ghost and not quite a ghost. Somehow, some way, this had to do with him. He was not simply helping white people out and forwarding their plot. There was no plot. Was there ever? Only connections and as yet, he could not tell fully what those connections were.
Loreal, who was still thinking of her maps of the four castles and the four treasures, who wished to know of the Grail or the Cup or the Chalice, whatever it was called, had not given up her quest, werewolves and vampires not withstanding, did.
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Excellent to get back to this story with so much going on. It’s nice to see family and others getting together and getting along. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Yup. It's all coming together. No more time for strife. Just healing and discoveries.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
MARABETH AND JASON JOURNEY TO LEARN LONG FORGOTTEN SECRETS OF THE STRAUSS ANCESTORS AND AUGUSTUS BEGINS TO TELL THE STORY OF LONG LEES AND THE FOUNDING OF THE DUNHARROWS
Help me to understand.
Give yourself to me, and you will.
Jason closed his eyes and still he felt that part of him was fighting to stay awake or stay himself. When he had not known he was being taken over it hardly mattered, and when he was in the midst of lust it was easy to slip into Hagano. But now, at the spirit’s invitation, the trip was harder.
Ease yourself. He heard.
He did not reapond that he was trying, that this was like willing himself to drown. But in the end, much as in drowning, one could not hold off forver. In drowning, one was compelled to open his mouth, to open his nostrils and breathe and now this was something ismliar. He sank down and down and down and….
The world was green. In old movies the world wasblakc and white, in Technicolor ,the world was much too colored, saturared tiwth a strne artificiality, but here, this world was the fullness of color, as f he had not seen blue sky or ellow sun or green hills stretching dare yond and he rode on the horse, his body matching the horse’s gait, and then he was moving away from the horse. He was Hagano at the same time he was watching the tall handsome man, part Roman, part barbarian, sandy hair cut in a military style, his straight nose and chiseled cheeks reddenbed by the sun, the cloak, a fur cloak, wolf headed and no Roman one, thrown over his shoulder. An old gladius hung at his hip and he rode toward a richly dressed woman, a Roman woman? No. But yes. A different type of Roman. She was robed in burgundy and a sword swung from her side. She wore a great furlined cloak and there was a metal tiara on her head, over her twisted, elaborate dark braids.
“I have come, Mechtild,” Hagano said.
The woman nodded her beautiful head gravely, her deep red lips making only the hint of a smile.
“You have.”
They feasted at a table that was Roman but not Roman full of men who were aristocrats and barbarians, a great fire blazed beyond in the night outside of f the porch of the villa. But this was not like in the old tales of the barbarians who had taken over an old Roman villa. The tessellated image of Dionysus on the floor was new. This house was not ancient. These Germans were…. Romans.
In the distance, singing, not in holiness, but a little drunkenly, a man chanted:
Quam te amo, Domine!
Tu es protector meus.
II Dominus protector meus;
qui accingit me fortitudine.
Tutela mei, Deus meus,
et ego salvum illum.
Suscepit me clypeus
salvum me et tuetur me, et custodit.
III voco ad Dominum,
et salvet se de inimicis meis iracundis.
Laudate Dominum!
Jason, whose Latin was rudimentary, understood what was being sung”
How I love you, Lord!
You are my defender.
2 The Lord is my protector;
he is my strong fortress.
My God is my protection,
and with him I am safe.
He protects me like a shield;
he defends me and keeps me safe.
3 I call to the Lord,
and he saves me from my enemies.
Praise the Lord!
He wondered, even as Hagano said it:
“Are the Burgunds Christians now?”
Mechtild tilted her hand.
“Christian enough. Sometimes. You know how it is.”
“In a few years the whole world will be Christian,” Hagano said. And then he assed, smiling, “Christian enough.”
“Exactly,” the lady nodded.
“How did you gain the wolf gift?” she asked.
“From a southern sorcerer. Or rather he helped me to gain it.”
“They say your sister Sygny—“”
“She gained it from her treacherous husband. But she would not have been able to possess it if it were not in our past.”
“Then it can be restored.”
“Yes.”
“I wish,” Mechtild said, gazing around the room, “it could be given to everyone here, a whole tribe of wolves. You are Burgun, like me. You did it to defend your tribe against the Franks, and what did that do?”
“Nothing,” Hagano was honest. “I was too late.”
“When I have the gift, I so close to the royal line, it will do something. Already, my cousin, that stupid bitch, had married Clovis. Her father thought being partnered to the Frank we would be free. He never saw his greed.”
“My lady,” Hagano said, “if you would take on this gift, do it for yourself, not for your people. One wolf or even a hundred will not stop the change that is about to come. You look for the wold world of god and berserkers, but this is the new world of one God and his priests…. Look around you,” Hagano’s eyes swept the great room. “The Christ came to this land fifty years ago and took over.”
“Because Christ is stronger?”
“Because he is easier,” Hagano said, “and the people prefer the world they can easily see to all the worlds and spirits and gods they cannot. And Mechtild, you cannot return to the old world.”
She nodded. She said, “I have heard that if one is bitten by the wolf he will receive the gift. I have also heard if one puts on the pelt.”
“One is too simple,” Hagano said, running his finger over the rim of a bronze goblet as the firelight shown on it. “The other is too dangerous.”
“They are both dangerous, Friend Hagano, if you ask me.”
“Wolf calls to wolf,” Hagano said. “Perhaps if a wolf were to be in his right mind when he bit a man then one could survive, but usually it is wolf to wolf, one who has already had the gift in the blood.”
“I had heard…” Mechtild’s voice became lower, “that one need not be in the form of the wolf to give the bite and to place the cloak over another.”
“This is so.”
Beyond them the singing went on, and Jason could not tell if his penis was becoming stiff or if it was Hagano’s.
In periculo mortis fuit mecum in circuitu:
et advolvit super me fluctus exitium.
V In periculo mortis fuit circum me,
et sepulcrum eius profecti captionem mihi.
VI dicitur Clamavi de tribulatione mea ad Dominum,
Vocavi Deo meo auxilium.
In his templo suo vocem meam;
audiebat meo et clamoribus.
“It was my belief….” Mechtild continued, “that the gift could be given… in love?”
“It is the—“ but as Mechtild’s unslippered foot, under the table, rubbed itself between his thighs, Hagano’s throat cleared. He began again.
“It is the best way.”
That night, as they made love hungrily in the bed, and the heat and sweat joined their bodies, he could not tell if he was Jason McCord or Hagano, if the beautiful dark haired woman in his arms, whom he took to himself, whose eyes he bore into while he filled her, was Mechtild the Burgund, or her very distant descendant Marabeth Strauss. In the night, their bodies came together, curled, uncurled and shifted into sigils of desire and the more she came the more he came. When he thought they were done and exhausted, they continued it again, and it was only in the morning, as the sun rose, and the air conditioning soughed gently, bringing coolness to the hot room, that Jason blinked into consciousness, feeling wholly himself again. Knowing he was at the house called Long Lees, his limbs splayed with those of Marabeth Strauss.
Still, in this modern morning, he could hear the words of long ago, a day in winter nearly a year after Hagano had come to the great house of the lady Mechtild.
“A daughter? They will call her bastard.”
Again, as Marabeth ran a hand over his shoulder, down the small of his back, that drunken psalm from the night before…
4 The danger of death was all around me;
the waves of destruction rolled over me.
5 The danger of death was around me,
and the grave set its trap for me.
6 In my trouble I called to the Lord;
I called to my God for help.
In his temple he heard my voice;
he listened to my cry for help.
“It is a new world and a Christian world, but it is not that new and it is not that Christian. You need not fear, and you need not remain as my husband. I see the look in your eyes. You are wolf as I am wolf now. One day I will send her to you, though.”
“What will you call her?”
“Leinghelde.”
Jim enjoyed watching him, and in these last few days, Jim had gone from enjoying watching Seth, to needing to watch him. He’d known him as a man and as a beast and he knew him in spirit, so as he lay on his side, watching the other young man with the fringer of dark beard all along his jaw twitch, he wondered, “What are you thinking, Seth Moore. Seth More, come back to me.”
It was almost as if wishing woke him. Maybe it did. Seth’s eyes fluttered and his body lifted up a little.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m tired of dreaming,” Seth said.
And then he said, “No, no that isn’t true. And I would share dreams with you gladly. But it isn’t that, not those dreams. It is the other dreams. It is the waking dreams.”
“It’s the ghost,” Jim said, matter of factly.
“Yes.”
“Funny,” Jim noted. “That would have never come out of my mouth a few days ago, and yet, it’s not that the world is stranger now. The world was always strange and trying to explain it away made me feel sick and strange. Looking at what it is—”
“The sickness disappears.”
“Yes,” Jim said.
He sat up and pulled on his linen trousers without putting on underwear. Shirtless, he began brushing the curling waves of his golden hair. In the middle of it, he handed Seth his own trousers.
“We have to talk to Augustus,” Jim said. “Whatever you are feeling, he must know all about.”
Despite his fearful dreams, Seth gulped. The only thing he dreaded more than ghosts was the uncle of his uncle.
They were all in the great parlor, Augustus included, when Jim and Seth came down. Seth could never tell how old Augustus looked. Today, in his winged back chair, he looked of an age with Lewis, almost identical to him, but there was a mocking smile on his face that Lewis never had, and he cocked his head.
“Yes?” said, trying to place in his voice a nonchalance he did not feel.
“It is only,” Augustus began, “and you will thinking I am mocking you because mocking seems to always be in me, but this is true, the two of you are handsome together. Appropriate.”
Augustus dropped his eyes and returned to his book adding, “It’s so rare that one sees two evenly matched lovers these days.”
When Seth and Jim continued to stand instead of sitting, Augustus said, “Is there something you need? Kris is here, Mara is here, the other Chris is here. You’re still standing so I assume it’s something you need?”
“The ghosts,” Seth said, because he saw the words forming on Jim’s lips and needed to do the speaking for himself.
“I need to know why I am seeing the ghost. What happened here?”
“The ghosts,” Augustus murmured, but not as if he did not know them. It was more, Jim thought, as if someone had referenced the mice or cockroach problem you thought had been taken care of.
“Well, that’s a story.”
“And one that probably ought to be told,” Lewis, who had been looking over a large old tome said, shutting it firmly.
“You would say that,” Augustus looked annoyed.
“I did say it.”
“Well,” Augustus murmured. He looked around the room. Marabeth and Loreal had ceased their conversation. Kris Strauss had stopped pretending to read. Chris Ashby sat looking in that alarmingly still way his kind did, and Seth and Jim were still standing.
“Someone,” Augustus said, “should write this down once and for all, for the family histories, for I will never tell it again. You could even send it to Owen. There is no conviction for crimes three hundred years past, and no belief that anyone who performed them is alive to be punished. Have a seat, James Strauss. Sit down, my nephew.”
It was Lewis who took out pen and paper, but whose face bore no expression.
“Hear now the story of Long Lees and the Dunharrow family,” Augustus said, looking at Seth.
“Though I doubt it will ease your mind.”
MORE TOMORROW
Help me to understand.
Give yourself to me, and you will.
Jason closed his eyes and still he felt that part of him was fighting to stay awake or stay himself. When he had not known he was being taken over it hardly mattered, and when he was in the midst of lust it was easy to slip into Hagano. But now, at the spirit’s invitation, the trip was harder.
Ease yourself. He heard.
He did not reapond that he was trying, that this was like willing himself to drown. But in the end, much as in drowning, one could not hold off forver. In drowning, one was compelled to open his mouth, to open his nostrils and breathe and now this was something ismliar. He sank down and down and down and….
The world was green. In old movies the world wasblakc and white, in Technicolor ,the world was much too colored, saturared tiwth a strne artificiality, but here, this world was the fullness of color, as f he had not seen blue sky or ellow sun or green hills stretching dare yond and he rode on the horse, his body matching the horse’s gait, and then he was moving away from the horse. He was Hagano at the same time he was watching the tall handsome man, part Roman, part barbarian, sandy hair cut in a military style, his straight nose and chiseled cheeks reddenbed by the sun, the cloak, a fur cloak, wolf headed and no Roman one, thrown over his shoulder. An old gladius hung at his hip and he rode toward a richly dressed woman, a Roman woman? No. But yes. A different type of Roman. She was robed in burgundy and a sword swung from her side. She wore a great furlined cloak and there was a metal tiara on her head, over her twisted, elaborate dark braids.
“I have come, Mechtild,” Hagano said.
The woman nodded her beautiful head gravely, her deep red lips making only the hint of a smile.
“You have.”
They feasted at a table that was Roman but not Roman full of men who were aristocrats and barbarians, a great fire blazed beyond in the night outside of f the porch of the villa. But this was not like in the old tales of the barbarians who had taken over an old Roman villa. The tessellated image of Dionysus on the floor was new. This house was not ancient. These Germans were…. Romans.
In the distance, singing, not in holiness, but a little drunkenly, a man chanted:
Quam te amo, Domine!
Tu es protector meus.
II Dominus protector meus;
qui accingit me fortitudine.
Tutela mei, Deus meus,
et ego salvum illum.
Suscepit me clypeus
salvum me et tuetur me, et custodit.
III voco ad Dominum,
et salvet se de inimicis meis iracundis.
Laudate Dominum!
Jason, whose Latin was rudimentary, understood what was being sung”
How I love you, Lord!
You are my defender.
2 The Lord is my protector;
he is my strong fortress.
My God is my protection,
and with him I am safe.
He protects me like a shield;
he defends me and keeps me safe.
3 I call to the Lord,
and he saves me from my enemies.
Praise the Lord!
He wondered, even as Hagano said it:
“Are the Burgunds Christians now?”
Mechtild tilted her hand.
“Christian enough. Sometimes. You know how it is.”
“In a few years the whole world will be Christian,” Hagano said. And then he assed, smiling, “Christian enough.”
“Exactly,” the lady nodded.
“How did you gain the wolf gift?” she asked.
“From a southern sorcerer. Or rather he helped me to gain it.”
“They say your sister Sygny—“”
“She gained it from her treacherous husband. But she would not have been able to possess it if it were not in our past.”
“Then it can be restored.”
“Yes.”
“I wish,” Mechtild said, gazing around the room, “it could be given to everyone here, a whole tribe of wolves. You are Burgun, like me. You did it to defend your tribe against the Franks, and what did that do?”
“Nothing,” Hagano was honest. “I was too late.”
“When I have the gift, I so close to the royal line, it will do something. Already, my cousin, that stupid bitch, had married Clovis. Her father thought being partnered to the Frank we would be free. He never saw his greed.”
“My lady,” Hagano said, “if you would take on this gift, do it for yourself, not for your people. One wolf or even a hundred will not stop the change that is about to come. You look for the wold world of god and berserkers, but this is the new world of one God and his priests…. Look around you,” Hagano’s eyes swept the great room. “The Christ came to this land fifty years ago and took over.”
“Because Christ is stronger?”
“Because he is easier,” Hagano said, “and the people prefer the world they can easily see to all the worlds and spirits and gods they cannot. And Mechtild, you cannot return to the old world.”
She nodded. She said, “I have heard that if one is bitten by the wolf he will receive the gift. I have also heard if one puts on the pelt.”
“One is too simple,” Hagano said, running his finger over the rim of a bronze goblet as the firelight shown on it. “The other is too dangerous.”
“They are both dangerous, Friend Hagano, if you ask me.”
“Wolf calls to wolf,” Hagano said. “Perhaps if a wolf were to be in his right mind when he bit a man then one could survive, but usually it is wolf to wolf, one who has already had the gift in the blood.”
“I had heard…” Mechtild’s voice became lower, “that one need not be in the form of the wolf to give the bite and to place the cloak over another.”
“This is so.”
Beyond them the singing went on, and Jason could not tell if his penis was becoming stiff or if it was Hagano’s.
In periculo mortis fuit mecum in circuitu:
et advolvit super me fluctus exitium.
V In periculo mortis fuit circum me,
et sepulcrum eius profecti captionem mihi.
VI dicitur Clamavi de tribulatione mea ad Dominum,
Vocavi Deo meo auxilium.
In his templo suo vocem meam;
audiebat meo et clamoribus.
“It was my belief….” Mechtild continued, “that the gift could be given… in love?”
“It is the—“ but as Mechtild’s unslippered foot, under the table, rubbed itself between his thighs, Hagano’s throat cleared. He began again.
“It is the best way.”
That night, as they made love hungrily in the bed, and the heat and sweat joined their bodies, he could not tell if he was Jason McCord or Hagano, if the beautiful dark haired woman in his arms, whom he took to himself, whose eyes he bore into while he filled her, was Mechtild the Burgund, or her very distant descendant Marabeth Strauss. In the night, their bodies came together, curled, uncurled and shifted into sigils of desire and the more she came the more he came. When he thought they were done and exhausted, they continued it again, and it was only in the morning, as the sun rose, and the air conditioning soughed gently, bringing coolness to the hot room, that Jason blinked into consciousness, feeling wholly himself again. Knowing he was at the house called Long Lees, his limbs splayed with those of Marabeth Strauss.
Still, in this modern morning, he could hear the words of long ago, a day in winter nearly a year after Hagano had come to the great house of the lady Mechtild.
“A daughter? They will call her bastard.”
Again, as Marabeth ran a hand over his shoulder, down the small of his back, that drunken psalm from the night before…
4 The danger of death was all around me;
the waves of destruction rolled over me.
5 The danger of death was around me,
and the grave set its trap for me.
6 In my trouble I called to the Lord;
I called to my God for help.
In his temple he heard my voice;
he listened to my cry for help.
“It is a new world and a Christian world, but it is not that new and it is not that Christian. You need not fear, and you need not remain as my husband. I see the look in your eyes. You are wolf as I am wolf now. One day I will send her to you, though.”
“What will you call her?”
“Leinghelde.”
Jim enjoyed watching him, and in these last few days, Jim had gone from enjoying watching Seth, to needing to watch him. He’d known him as a man and as a beast and he knew him in spirit, so as he lay on his side, watching the other young man with the fringer of dark beard all along his jaw twitch, he wondered, “What are you thinking, Seth Moore. Seth More, come back to me.”
It was almost as if wishing woke him. Maybe it did. Seth’s eyes fluttered and his body lifted up a little.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m tired of dreaming,” Seth said.
And then he said, “No, no that isn’t true. And I would share dreams with you gladly. But it isn’t that, not those dreams. It is the other dreams. It is the waking dreams.”
“It’s the ghost,” Jim said, matter of factly.
“Yes.”
“Funny,” Jim noted. “That would have never come out of my mouth a few days ago, and yet, it’s not that the world is stranger now. The world was always strange and trying to explain it away made me feel sick and strange. Looking at what it is—”
“The sickness disappears.”
“Yes,” Jim said.
He sat up and pulled on his linen trousers without putting on underwear. Shirtless, he began brushing the curling waves of his golden hair. In the middle of it, he handed Seth his own trousers.
“We have to talk to Augustus,” Jim said. “Whatever you are feeling, he must know all about.”
Despite his fearful dreams, Seth gulped. The only thing he dreaded more than ghosts was the uncle of his uncle.
They were all in the great parlor, Augustus included, when Jim and Seth came down. Seth could never tell how old Augustus looked. Today, in his winged back chair, he looked of an age with Lewis, almost identical to him, but there was a mocking smile on his face that Lewis never had, and he cocked his head.
“Yes?” said, trying to place in his voice a nonchalance he did not feel.
“It is only,” Augustus began, “and you will thinking I am mocking you because mocking seems to always be in me, but this is true, the two of you are handsome together. Appropriate.”
Augustus dropped his eyes and returned to his book adding, “It’s so rare that one sees two evenly matched lovers these days.”
When Seth and Jim continued to stand instead of sitting, Augustus said, “Is there something you need? Kris is here, Mara is here, the other Chris is here. You’re still standing so I assume it’s something you need?”
“The ghosts,” Seth said, because he saw the words forming on Jim’s lips and needed to do the speaking for himself.
“I need to know why I am seeing the ghost. What happened here?”
“The ghosts,” Augustus murmured, but not as if he did not know them. It was more, Jim thought, as if someone had referenced the mice or cockroach problem you thought had been taken care of.
“Well, that’s a story.”
“And one that probably ought to be told,” Lewis, who had been looking over a large old tome said, shutting it firmly.
“You would say that,” Augustus looked annoyed.
“I did say it.”
“Well,” Augustus murmured. He looked around the room. Marabeth and Loreal had ceased their conversation. Kris Strauss had stopped pretending to read. Chris Ashby sat looking in that alarmingly still way his kind did, and Seth and Jim were still standing.
“Someone,” Augustus said, “should write this down once and for all, for the family histories, for I will never tell it again. You could even send it to Owen. There is no conviction for crimes three hundred years past, and no belief that anyone who performed them is alive to be punished. Have a seat, James Strauss. Sit down, my nephew.”
It was Lewis who took out pen and paper, but whose face bore no expression.
“Hear now the story of Long Lees and the Dunharrow family,” Augustus said, looking at Seth.
“Though I doubt it will ease your mind.”
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great and in some ways a very different portion! I am really enjoying learning new things about the main characters. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Yes, the Marabeth and Jason portions are always different. Here was a nice little trip back to early Medieval France/Germany. And then with Seth and Jim... It seemed like everyone was pretty much dreaming and turning into other people.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT AUGUSTUS TELLS THE STORY OF LONG LEES, AND OF THE DUNHARROWS
They were all in the great parlor, Augustus included, when Jim and Seth came down. Seth could never tell how old Augustus looked. Today, in his winged back chair, he looked of an age with Lewis, almost identical to him, but there was a mocking smile on his face that Lewis never had, and he cocked his head.
“Yes?” said, trying to place in his voice a nonchalance he did not feel.
“It is only,” Augustus began, “and you will thinking I am mocking you because mocking seems to always be in me, but this is true, the two of you are handsome together. Appropriate.”
Augustus dropped his eyes and returned to his book adding, “It’s so rare that one sees two evenly matched lovers these days.”
When Seth and Jim continued to stand instead of sitting, Augustus said, “Is there something you need? Kris is here, Mara is here, the other Chris is here. You’re still standing so I assume it’s something you need?”
“The ghosts,” Seth said, because he saw the words forming on Jim’s lips and needed to do the speaking for himself.
“I need to know why I am seeing the ghost. What happened here?”
“The ghosts,” Augustus murmured, but not as if he did not know them. It was more, Jim thought, as if someone had referenced the mice or cockroach problem you thought had been taken care of.
“Well, that’s a story.”
“And one that probably ought to be told,” Lewis, who had been looking over a large old tome said, shutting it firmly.
“You would say that,” Augustus looked annoyed.
“I did say it.”
“Well,” Augustus murmured. He looked around the room. Marabeth and Loreal had ceased their conversation. Kris Strauss had stopped pretending to read. Chris Ashby sat looking in that alarmingly still way his kind did, and Seth and Jim were still standing.
“Someone,” Augustus said, “should write this down once and for all, for the family histories, for I will never tell it again. You could even send it to Owen. There is no conviction for crimes three hundred years past, and no belief that anyone who performed them is alive to be punished. Have a seat, James Strauss. Sit down, my nephew.”
It was Lewis who took out pen and paper, but whose face bore no expression.
“Hear now the story of Long Lees and the Dunharrow family,” Augustus said, looking at Seth.
“Though I doubt it will ease your mind.”
THE
TESTAMENT
OF
AUGUSTUS DUNHARROW
There were five plantations here once. You needn’t look for them, this was long ago, and these lands are hot and wet, so even had they not been burned down you would see little of them. Long Lees is the remaining one, and it takes much upkeep, magical and otherwise, for it to maintain its pristine condition.
You see about the house portraits, wonder who they are, especially these white men, these white women, in their powdered wigs and fancy gowns. Imagine the road into here as it is now, and imagine behind the house much as it is, but that past what is not the pool was a kitchen house, and beyond that were the cabins of slaves playfully called servants. Imagine earthen palisades raised so they could not escape, and then all those green fields, all those forest around, imagined them leveled for the growing of rice, for the marshlands came closer in those days. There was rice all the way to the joining of the other plantation whose name we will not say.
Of those days all that remains is the name, Long Lees, but in those times, when an avenue of shaggy moss took rich proto Americans to the doors, the family who owned it was called Waverly. In 1759, the Waverly daughters were Catherine, of whom you may not know, and Susanna, whom you have seen with your own eyes.
Yes, my dear Loreal, your very grandmama, Susanna Dunharrow, who you saw as a white haired hag, but never knew was so old.
How fair she was once! But how is she a part of this story, and where do I come in? I will make the connection quick. A ship of Africans led by a great queen full of power, from the old lands east of Dahomey, raised her magic and the ship crashed on the coasts of Cornwall rather than reach the West Indies. Some married each other, but the son of this witch queen married a Cornish girl. She was witch born, the granddaughter of the witch of that village and her power went back to times of old.
That line continued until the great granddaughter of those two witches, the black and the white, came to the Carolinas. In those days lawless men, pirates, men fleeing slavery as well as men fleeing society came to live in the numerous islands and in the marshes. It was along that coast that Margaret Carew lived and there she had two daughters, many say by a quadroon descended of those Africans and those Cornish like she was. One of those daughters caught the eye of Frederick Waverly, the planter and became his wife. Thus, in time, were two daughters born, Susanna and Catherine.
But the story only begins here, for when that ship had left Africa another ship with the remainder of that house of powerful mages, called a house of witchcraft, had headed to the Caribbean. It had not ship wrecked but come to Jamaica, as you, my dear Mr. Ashby, know. It was on this ship that Melek and his people were and it was from this ship that his descendants, through whom he was sometimes reborn, came.You yourself helped Malachy out the Carolinas, but before this he had the raising of his nephews, my brother Octavian and, of course me.
What is more, that Margaret Carew of whom I spoke, had a cousin of the same blood, though darker of skin, Edwine, and it was Edwine who married the brother of Malachy and Edwine who was my mother. So, my brother and I grew up, second cousins to the Waverly girls, and Octavian loved Catherine, but I loved Susanna, for there was witchcraft in her.
What happened?
Things happened?
Oh, yes. Things happened.
They always do.
Catherine was promised in marriage to a wealthy planter from Savannah. From then on she was forbidden to come to the marshes and islands, told to live as a lady. Likely, her father suspected she had Negro blood and did not want it known to the man she was going to marry. More likely, he’d made mulatto children on his own slaves. Not merely likely, but certainly.
Octavian could not abide that he be separated from Catherine and, like a fool, went in the night to bring her back, and this is how he was captured by Frederick Waverly, and by his clan. This is how we learned he was to be made an example of. He was hung up like an X and whipped will his back was a web of tracks. News of his execution was put about, possibly, to lure us out of the marshes. It did.
We were already planning to take Waverly, but had not thought how, or rather, I had thought how, but no one would agree to it. See, when we had come to the Carolinas, we came with Sword of Melek and the Kernows possessed the Golden Lantern. The Orb had gone missing, and so had the Cup but we were re establishing the great houses. The land we came from had many names, but it is known in the West, to White Men, is the Land of the Saracens, for they assumed only Saracens or Muslims lived East of Dahomey. So, though our ancestors called the land many names, it was known to the west as—
Sarras!
Yes, Kristian Strauss. Sarras, of King Arthur’s fame. And it was even said that the reason one ship blew itself to Cornwall is because they knew this was the land of that ancient king. The fathers of the fathers of the Dunharrows lived in that land and the records of it are kept even if not remembered. Priests and priestly kings they were. They guarded the ancient treasures, and we, for lack of better words guarded its treasures, though the most famous of them was a Cup. I will not insult you by explaining.
The Holy Grail.
Some have called it such. Ah, but what I am about to relate is anything but holy.
Was it holy how I went in the night through the plantations of the land, sewing descent, giving the watch word to rebellion? Or was it holy how I stopped the war drums and the drums of dance from being beaten? Was it holy how I saw that the descendants of the pirates who had married with the descendants of slaves and Cornishmen guarded the roads by which planting families might flee? The nighr before my brother was to die, my soul flew out in the form of a bird and released him, and if release was all I was after, then we would have been done with it. Susanna and Catherine aided me, taking the treasures and a wagon and leaving the house in the night. Their mother was dead and their father had taken to raping the women of the plantation.
The next night we came ouf of the grasses and marshes, out of the trees and from the bayou. The whole country was alit with flame and red with blood. There, Seth, are your ghosts. I did not lead alone. Octavian was with me as well as Susanna and Catherine, but I was at the head of them. It was I who have the command that none should live, that children who tried to escape should be struck down. The roads were lined with the dead. At the MacCrae plantation, I took Delia MacCrae’s newborn sun, slit his throat and handed him to her before another sliced her in two with a machete. She used to wake her slaves in the night and bid them dance for her entertainment, and once, when they did not dance quickly enough, she smashed the girl Chloe in the face with a pewter cup. Her rival, Josephine, pregnant with the child of her husband’s rape, she kicked in the stomach until she miscarried, so I felt no sadness in her end and feel none to this day.
There were those among us who said the children be saved and raised among us. Surprisingly it was our English allies who disagreed. I think it was because they looked at this in the light of war and never having nursed these children or been tender to them, they knew with a cold reason that they would grow up conflicted or run away. So they did not grow up.
In the very gracious parlor that you walk into now we rounded up some of the last planters.
“You are brute goddamn filthy niggers, every one of you,” Mr. Beckworth said, and well he could say it, for he was at his end and his stately house, once mile south, was a bonfire in the night.
“Teach him to be better spoken,” I said to Gensher.
Perhaps I mean Genshur to strike him, but instead Gensher, who was the servant of his young son Geoffrey, neatly, stuck the boy on the head and then bashed his head into the wall and the child fell dead, making a blood mark on the white surface.
Adeline Beckworth screamed to see the death of her children, and you should hear this that you do not think that what happened was one bit kinder than it was. Genshur took the next one, a girl called Mary, but this time, more to be merciful than from any vengeance, I killed the girl neatly with a dagger. I killed the other two, twins, quickly, and then Gensher killed their mother and, because he had scores to settle with Beckworth, who had now dissolved into screaming madness, I let Gensher finish him off.
In gunshots and machete chops, in stabbings and throat slicings, we finished our work. Three hundred and sixteen souls died that night.
You’re a monster.
Yes, Seth. Most likely. Anything that lives beyond the normal span of human years most likely becomes a monster. I cannot be the exception.
Neither can you, My Ashby. But we both know the blood between us. We know it. But you this. What I did, though I alone live to tell of it, I did not do alone. And I do not mean my dear wife Susanna, who surely in her old age repented of the murder of her father. Octavian, my brother was three with his wife Catherine who was the mother of my nephews and nieces—
Nephews and nieces?
Yes, Loreal. The various mothers and fathers of the other lines of our clans. You have met some of them. Onnalee came from them. But the most powerful and closest to me was my oldest nephew, Tiberius. Lewis knows, though I would think Seth, one as simple as you might not, that Tiberius had three children, Drusilla, Claudius and Owen…. Why the sudden change in names? Ran out of Emperors I suppose. Lewis, the keeper of our family’s secrets and knowledge knows Drusilla was his grandmother and Owen is, of course, Owen. But Claudius, a mulatto—
Mixed race.
Please! A mulatto, took his chances and married a white woman whose name eludes me. Claudius’s grandson was Kyle who was about as magical as he was black. But there must have been something your white mother, Seth, or something in Kyle we did not see, for that long haired, vaguely tanned hippie managed to produce you who, if you have proved to be far useless than most of us thought.
But…. But…. This whole place…. Everything here… was made in blood.
Did you think most things came clean? With a let there be light and there was light, a divine wave of the hand? Everything you see was made in blood, Seth. You fool. Ask the werewolves. Ask the blood drinkers you keep company with. Ask the history books though they will lie and say it was justified. Trace the tracks down the Negro slaves back or see the gaping wound where greedy white men cut off his genitals after a hanging. Every family conceived from one who conceived in a rape in a dark nighr or a dark room or a field in the middle of the day while no one came to help. See your grandmother’s grandmother staggering home, holding her reddened thighs together, knowing what will be born before the year is over. See what the cunning woman did to prevent it and her tools all red by the light of a candle or a lamp or an electric light, for this till goes on today.
Look at the battlefields. Or, if you will, the car wreck that took your parents and made it so you came to Owen where you learned what they would never have taught you. See the infant taken from his mother’s insides, squalling and covered in effluvium. Everything is made in blood.
It always was.
MORE NEXT WEEK
They were all in the great parlor, Augustus included, when Jim and Seth came down. Seth could never tell how old Augustus looked. Today, in his winged back chair, he looked of an age with Lewis, almost identical to him, but there was a mocking smile on his face that Lewis never had, and he cocked his head.
“Yes?” said, trying to place in his voice a nonchalance he did not feel.
“It is only,” Augustus began, “and you will thinking I am mocking you because mocking seems to always be in me, but this is true, the two of you are handsome together. Appropriate.”
Augustus dropped his eyes and returned to his book adding, “It’s so rare that one sees two evenly matched lovers these days.”
When Seth and Jim continued to stand instead of sitting, Augustus said, “Is there something you need? Kris is here, Mara is here, the other Chris is here. You’re still standing so I assume it’s something you need?”
“The ghosts,” Seth said, because he saw the words forming on Jim’s lips and needed to do the speaking for himself.
“I need to know why I am seeing the ghost. What happened here?”
“The ghosts,” Augustus murmured, but not as if he did not know them. It was more, Jim thought, as if someone had referenced the mice or cockroach problem you thought had been taken care of.
“Well, that’s a story.”
“And one that probably ought to be told,” Lewis, who had been looking over a large old tome said, shutting it firmly.
“You would say that,” Augustus looked annoyed.
“I did say it.”
“Well,” Augustus murmured. He looked around the room. Marabeth and Loreal had ceased their conversation. Kris Strauss had stopped pretending to read. Chris Ashby sat looking in that alarmingly still way his kind did, and Seth and Jim were still standing.
“Someone,” Augustus said, “should write this down once and for all, for the family histories, for I will never tell it again. You could even send it to Owen. There is no conviction for crimes three hundred years past, and no belief that anyone who performed them is alive to be punished. Have a seat, James Strauss. Sit down, my nephew.”
It was Lewis who took out pen and paper, but whose face bore no expression.
“Hear now the story of Long Lees and the Dunharrow family,” Augustus said, looking at Seth.
“Though I doubt it will ease your mind.”
THE
TESTAMENT
OF
AUGUSTUS DUNHARROW
There were five plantations here once. You needn’t look for them, this was long ago, and these lands are hot and wet, so even had they not been burned down you would see little of them. Long Lees is the remaining one, and it takes much upkeep, magical and otherwise, for it to maintain its pristine condition.
You see about the house portraits, wonder who they are, especially these white men, these white women, in their powdered wigs and fancy gowns. Imagine the road into here as it is now, and imagine behind the house much as it is, but that past what is not the pool was a kitchen house, and beyond that were the cabins of slaves playfully called servants. Imagine earthen palisades raised so they could not escape, and then all those green fields, all those forest around, imagined them leveled for the growing of rice, for the marshlands came closer in those days. There was rice all the way to the joining of the other plantation whose name we will not say.
Of those days all that remains is the name, Long Lees, but in those times, when an avenue of shaggy moss took rich proto Americans to the doors, the family who owned it was called Waverly. In 1759, the Waverly daughters were Catherine, of whom you may not know, and Susanna, whom you have seen with your own eyes.
Yes, my dear Loreal, your very grandmama, Susanna Dunharrow, who you saw as a white haired hag, but never knew was so old.
How fair she was once! But how is she a part of this story, and where do I come in? I will make the connection quick. A ship of Africans led by a great queen full of power, from the old lands east of Dahomey, raised her magic and the ship crashed on the coasts of Cornwall rather than reach the West Indies. Some married each other, but the son of this witch queen married a Cornish girl. She was witch born, the granddaughter of the witch of that village and her power went back to times of old.
That line continued until the great granddaughter of those two witches, the black and the white, came to the Carolinas. In those days lawless men, pirates, men fleeing slavery as well as men fleeing society came to live in the numerous islands and in the marshes. It was along that coast that Margaret Carew lived and there she had two daughters, many say by a quadroon descended of those Africans and those Cornish like she was. One of those daughters caught the eye of Frederick Waverly, the planter and became his wife. Thus, in time, were two daughters born, Susanna and Catherine.
But the story only begins here, for when that ship had left Africa another ship with the remainder of that house of powerful mages, called a house of witchcraft, had headed to the Caribbean. It had not ship wrecked but come to Jamaica, as you, my dear Mr. Ashby, know. It was on this ship that Melek and his people were and it was from this ship that his descendants, through whom he was sometimes reborn, came.You yourself helped Malachy out the Carolinas, but before this he had the raising of his nephews, my brother Octavian and, of course me.
What is more, that Margaret Carew of whom I spoke, had a cousin of the same blood, though darker of skin, Edwine, and it was Edwine who married the brother of Malachy and Edwine who was my mother. So, my brother and I grew up, second cousins to the Waverly girls, and Octavian loved Catherine, but I loved Susanna, for there was witchcraft in her.
What happened?
Things happened?
Oh, yes. Things happened.
They always do.
Catherine was promised in marriage to a wealthy planter from Savannah. From then on she was forbidden to come to the marshes and islands, told to live as a lady. Likely, her father suspected she had Negro blood and did not want it known to the man she was going to marry. More likely, he’d made mulatto children on his own slaves. Not merely likely, but certainly.
Octavian could not abide that he be separated from Catherine and, like a fool, went in the night to bring her back, and this is how he was captured by Frederick Waverly, and by his clan. This is how we learned he was to be made an example of. He was hung up like an X and whipped will his back was a web of tracks. News of his execution was put about, possibly, to lure us out of the marshes. It did.
We were already planning to take Waverly, but had not thought how, or rather, I had thought how, but no one would agree to it. See, when we had come to the Carolinas, we came with Sword of Melek and the Kernows possessed the Golden Lantern. The Orb had gone missing, and so had the Cup but we were re establishing the great houses. The land we came from had many names, but it is known in the West, to White Men, is the Land of the Saracens, for they assumed only Saracens or Muslims lived East of Dahomey. So, though our ancestors called the land many names, it was known to the west as—
Sarras!
Yes, Kristian Strauss. Sarras, of King Arthur’s fame. And it was even said that the reason one ship blew itself to Cornwall is because they knew this was the land of that ancient king. The fathers of the fathers of the Dunharrows lived in that land and the records of it are kept even if not remembered. Priests and priestly kings they were. They guarded the ancient treasures, and we, for lack of better words guarded its treasures, though the most famous of them was a Cup. I will not insult you by explaining.
The Holy Grail.
Some have called it such. Ah, but what I am about to relate is anything but holy.
Was it holy how I went in the night through the plantations of the land, sewing descent, giving the watch word to rebellion? Or was it holy how I stopped the war drums and the drums of dance from being beaten? Was it holy how I saw that the descendants of the pirates who had married with the descendants of slaves and Cornishmen guarded the roads by which planting families might flee? The nighr before my brother was to die, my soul flew out in the form of a bird and released him, and if release was all I was after, then we would have been done with it. Susanna and Catherine aided me, taking the treasures and a wagon and leaving the house in the night. Their mother was dead and their father had taken to raping the women of the plantation.
The next night we came ouf of the grasses and marshes, out of the trees and from the bayou. The whole country was alit with flame and red with blood. There, Seth, are your ghosts. I did not lead alone. Octavian was with me as well as Susanna and Catherine, but I was at the head of them. It was I who have the command that none should live, that children who tried to escape should be struck down. The roads were lined with the dead. At the MacCrae plantation, I took Delia MacCrae’s newborn sun, slit his throat and handed him to her before another sliced her in two with a machete. She used to wake her slaves in the night and bid them dance for her entertainment, and once, when they did not dance quickly enough, she smashed the girl Chloe in the face with a pewter cup. Her rival, Josephine, pregnant with the child of her husband’s rape, she kicked in the stomach until she miscarried, so I felt no sadness in her end and feel none to this day.
There were those among us who said the children be saved and raised among us. Surprisingly it was our English allies who disagreed. I think it was because they looked at this in the light of war and never having nursed these children or been tender to them, they knew with a cold reason that they would grow up conflicted or run away. So they did not grow up.
In the very gracious parlor that you walk into now we rounded up some of the last planters.
“You are brute goddamn filthy niggers, every one of you,” Mr. Beckworth said, and well he could say it, for he was at his end and his stately house, once mile south, was a bonfire in the night.
“Teach him to be better spoken,” I said to Gensher.
Perhaps I mean Genshur to strike him, but instead Gensher, who was the servant of his young son Geoffrey, neatly, stuck the boy on the head and then bashed his head into the wall and the child fell dead, making a blood mark on the white surface.
Adeline Beckworth screamed to see the death of her children, and you should hear this that you do not think that what happened was one bit kinder than it was. Genshur took the next one, a girl called Mary, but this time, more to be merciful than from any vengeance, I killed the girl neatly with a dagger. I killed the other two, twins, quickly, and then Gensher killed their mother and, because he had scores to settle with Beckworth, who had now dissolved into screaming madness, I let Gensher finish him off.
In gunshots and machete chops, in stabbings and throat slicings, we finished our work. Three hundred and sixteen souls died that night.
You’re a monster.
Yes, Seth. Most likely. Anything that lives beyond the normal span of human years most likely becomes a monster. I cannot be the exception.
Neither can you, My Ashby. But we both know the blood between us. We know it. But you this. What I did, though I alone live to tell of it, I did not do alone. And I do not mean my dear wife Susanna, who surely in her old age repented of the murder of her father. Octavian, my brother was three with his wife Catherine who was the mother of my nephews and nieces—
Nephews and nieces?
Yes, Loreal. The various mothers and fathers of the other lines of our clans. You have met some of them. Onnalee came from them. But the most powerful and closest to me was my oldest nephew, Tiberius. Lewis knows, though I would think Seth, one as simple as you might not, that Tiberius had three children, Drusilla, Claudius and Owen…. Why the sudden change in names? Ran out of Emperors I suppose. Lewis, the keeper of our family’s secrets and knowledge knows Drusilla was his grandmother and Owen is, of course, Owen. But Claudius, a mulatto—
Mixed race.
Please! A mulatto, took his chances and married a white woman whose name eludes me. Claudius’s grandson was Kyle who was about as magical as he was black. But there must have been something your white mother, Seth, or something in Kyle we did not see, for that long haired, vaguely tanned hippie managed to produce you who, if you have proved to be far useless than most of us thought.
But…. But…. This whole place…. Everything here… was made in blood.
Did you think most things came clean? With a let there be light and there was light, a divine wave of the hand? Everything you see was made in blood, Seth. You fool. Ask the werewolves. Ask the blood drinkers you keep company with. Ask the history books though they will lie and say it was justified. Trace the tracks down the Negro slaves back or see the gaping wound where greedy white men cut off his genitals after a hanging. Every family conceived from one who conceived in a rape in a dark nighr or a dark room or a field in the middle of the day while no one came to help. See your grandmother’s grandmother staggering home, holding her reddened thighs together, knowing what will be born before the year is over. See what the cunning woman did to prevent it and her tools all red by the light of a candle or a lamp or an electric light, for this till goes on today.
Look at the battlefields. Or, if you will, the car wreck that took your parents and made it so you came to Owen where you learned what they would never have taught you. See the infant taken from his mother’s insides, squalling and covered in effluvium. Everything is made in blood.
It always was.
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CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Augustus certainly had a very interesting story/history to tell! Thanks for sharing that, it was an enjoyable read. Excellent writing and I look forward to more next week!