Michael was deeply alarmed and so was Stirling.
“Dolly Jean, put a lid on it,” Michael said.
“Rowan, can you go on?” I pleaded. “I understand everything you’ve said. You’ve been telling us exactly how and why you can keep our secrets.”
“That’s right,” Quinn said. “Rowan’s telling us how she can abide what we are.”
The deep hurt flashed in Michael’s eyes, private and almost lonely. “That’s very true,” he said under his breath.
“I gave birth to two,” Rowan said. “I let the evil in after twelve generations. That’s what Mona wants to hear. That’s the secret we have to divulge in exchange for yours—.”
“Oh yes!” cried Mona sarcastically, “more of the saga of Rowan! I want to know about my own child! About the man who took her away.”
“How many times must I tell you, I can’t find them!” said Rowan. “I’ve searched and searched.”
I became furious at Mona. I had to take a deep breath. I reached over and snatched her out of Quinn’s protective hold and turned her to face me.
“Now you listen to me,” I said in a small voice. “Stop abusing your power. Stop forgetting that you have it. Stop forgetting the inevitable limitations of your kindred here! If you want to search for your daughter now, you have resources that Rowan and Michael can’t even dream of! Quinn and I are here to find out what the Taltos is because you won’t tell us! (She stared at me wide-eyed and slightly in terror.) Every time we ask you about it you dissolve into tears. In fact, you’ve wept more in the last thirty-six hours than any fledgling I’ve ever encountered in all my years, and it’s becoming an ontological, existential, epistemological, and hermeneutical nuisance!”
“How dare you ridicule me!” she hissed. She took a deep cool breath. “You let me go this instant. You think I’m going to obey you in thought, word and deed! You’re dreaming. I’m not the Wander Slut you make me out to be. I was the Designée of the Legacy of the entire Mayfair family. I know what it means to have self-possession and power. You don’t look like an angel to me, and you sure as Hell don’t have the charm of a bona fide gangster!”
I was stunned. I let her go. “I give up!” I said disgustedly. “You’re a brash little infidel! Go your own way.”
Quinn whipped her around and looked down into her eyes.
“Be still, please,” he said. “Let Rowan talk the way she wants to talk. If you’re ever to be Mona Mayfair again, that must be allowed to happen.”
“Mona, this is very true,” said Stirling. “Remember, this is an exposition of souls, a bartering of extraordinary revelations.”
“Oh, let me get it straight,” said Mona. “I triumph over death, and we gather here to listen to the personal memories of Rowan Mayfair?”
Dolly Jean, who had been dozing with the bottle, suddenly jumped into life, bouncing up and down and leaning forward, crinkled little eyes staring hard at Mona.
“Mona Mayfair, you button your lip,” she said. “You know perfectly well, no matter how sick you’ve been, that Rowan almost never talks at all, and when she does talk she’s got something to say, you and your fancy friends are learning about the Mayfair family, now how’s that supposed to hurt you, I’d like to know, don’t you want your handsome escorts to understand you? Shut up.”
“Oh, you’re just joining in with the chorus!” Mona said sharply to Dolly Jean. “Drink your Amaretto and leave me alone!”
“Mona,” said Quinn as amiably as he could. “There are things we do need to know for your sake. Does it hurt so much to listen to Rowan?”
“Very well,” Mona replied miserably, and she sat back in the chair. She wiped at her face with one of her thousands of handkerchiefs. She glared at me.
I glanced at her, then back to Rowan.
Rowan was watching all this with a remote expression, her face more relaxed than it had been all evening. Dolly Jean took another drink of Amaretto and sat back and closed her eyes. Michael was studying the three of us. Stirling waited, but our cross words had fascinated him.
“Rowan,” I said. “Can you tell us what the Taltos is? We lack that basic knowledge. Can you give it to us?”
“Yes,” she answered in a resigned voice. “I can tell you as much as anyone can.”
18
H
ER EXPRESSION REMAINED PLACID
, though she looked away, her inner focus gathering.
“A mammal,” she said, “evolved totally apart from Homo sapiens, on a volcanic island in the North Sea thousands of years before us. We share perhaps forty-five percent of our genes in common. The creatures look like us except that they tend to be taller and more long of limb. Their bone structure is almost entirely what we would call cartilage. When the pure creatures mate, the female ovulates on demand and the fetus develops within a matter of minutes or hours, it isn’t clear to me—but whatever the case, it puts tremendous stress upon the mother. Birth is accompanied by severe pain, and the infant unfolds as a small adult and begins to grow to maturity immediately.”
Mona’s entire demeanor changed at these words. She moved closer to Quinn, and he put his arm around her once more, kissing her quietly.
“The Taltos craves its mother’s milk in order to grow,” said Rowan. “And without that milk it cannot develop properly. In the hour right after birth it runs the risk of being stunted forever. With that milk, and with its mother’s full telepathic nurture, the baby reaches its full height within that hour. Six and a half feet is the usual. The males can be seven feet. It will go on drinking its mother’s milk as long as it can. Weeks, months, years. But the toll on the mother is heavy.”
Rowan stopped. She put her hand up to support her forehead. A deep sigh came out of her. “The milk . . .” she said. “The milk has curative properties. The milk can work a cure in humans.” Her voice broke apart. “Nobody really knows what that milk could do. . . .”
Deliberate flash of images.
A bedroom with an elaborate half-tester bed and Rowan in the bed, sitting up, taking milk from the breast of a young female.
Shut out.
Gunfire. Several shots. Flash of Rowan digging in this very yard. Michael with her. Rowan wouldn’t let go of the shovel. Body of the young female lying limp in the moist earth.
Heartbreak.
Rowan began again, voice strong, automatic:
“Nobody knows the lifespan of a pure Taltos. It could be thousands of years. Females clearly can become infertile in time. I’ve seen one who was past her prime. She was a simpleton. She was found in rural India. Males? I know of only one in existence—the one who took Morrigan. They may remain potent till they die. Taltos tend in their natural state to be extremely naive and childlike. In ancient times, many died through clumsiness and accidents.” She paused for a moment and then went on:
“The Taltos is telepathic, curious by nature and hardwired with a tremendous amount of basic historical and intellectual knowledge. It is born ‘knowing,’ as they say, all about the species itself, the island continent from which they came, and the places in the British Isles to which they migrated after the island was destroyed by the same volcano that created it. The glen of Donnelaith in Scotland was one of those strongholds. Maybe one of the last.
“That’s what the Taltos was . . . when it was pure, before it knew about humankind or had any mixture with it. The population was culled by accidents, occasional pestilence, the females by overbreeding.”
“What does this mean, hardwired?” I said. “I want to be sure I understand you.”
“We’re not hardwired,” she said. “We don’t come into this world knowing how to build a house or speak a language. But a bird is hardwired to build its nest, to do a mating call, or a mating dance. A cat is hardwired to hunt for food, care for its kittens—even to eat them if they are weak or deformed.”
“Yes, I see,” I said.
“The Taltos is a highly intelligent primate that is hardwired with a tremendous fund of knowledge,” she said. “That and its extraordinary reproductive advantage are what make it so dangerous. Its naivete, its simplicity and lack of aggression are its vulnerabilities. It’s also extremely sensitive to rhythm and music. You can almost paralyze a Taltos when you utter a long rhyme or sing a rhythmic song.”
“I understand,” I replied. “How did they become mixed with humans?” I asked.
She seemed at a loss. “Medically,” she said, “I don’t know the answer. I only know that it happened.”
“Humans inevitably came to the British Isles,” said Michael. “And there is a long history of “the tall people” and their fight with their more aggressive invaders. Interbreeding occurred. For human females it’s almost always fatal. The woman conceives and then miscarries and bleeds to death. You can imagine the hatred and fear this inspired. As for the other way around, a human male would bring about an insignificant hemorrhage in a female Taltos. Nothing important there, except that if it happens repeatedly over years and years, it will use up the female’s eggs.” He paused, caught his breath and went on:
“Some successful breeding occurred and the offspring gave rise both to malformed ‘little people’ and Taltos with human genes, and humans with the genes of the Taltos. And as the centuries passed, all this became a matter of superstition and legend.”
“Not so very neatly,” said Rowan. Her voice was firmer than before, though her eyes still moved feverishly. “There were terrible wars and massacres and unspeakable bloodshed. The Taltos, being far less aggressive than humans by nature, lost out to the new species. The Taltos were scattered. And they went into hiding. They pretended to be humans. They concealed their birthing rites. But as Michael said, couplings with humans did happen. And unbeknownst to the early inhabitants of the British Isles, there developed a kind of human who carried a giant helix of genes, twice the number of a normal human, and capable at any time of giving birth to the Taltos or a malformed elfin child struggling to be one. When two such humans happened to mate, a Taltos birth was even more likely.”
Rowan paused. Michael hesitated, and then, as she put her face into her hands, he continued the story.
“The secret genes were passed on by the Earls of Donnelaith, Scotland, and their kith and kin, this we know for certain, and superstitious legends grew up about any occasional Taltos child born to their household.
“Meantime, a May Day orgy gave way to a misalliance between an Earl and a common woman of the glen, which led in three generations to the foundation of the Mayfair family. The Taltos genes were passed on in this way to what would later become a great colonial clan, first on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue, and then here in Louisiana.
“But even before the Mayfair family had a name, the Talamasca had become intimately involved with its origins—recording the story of a witch by the name of Suzanne, who had called up a spirit quite by accident, a spirit who appeared to be a brown-eyed man who answered to the name Lasher—a spirit who was to haunt the family right down to Rowan’s generation. The ghost originated in the glen of Donnelaith, as did the Mayfairs.”
Rowan broke in:
“You see, we thought it was the ghost of a human being,” she said, “or some astral being without a human story. I believed this even as it courted me, and I tried to control it.”
“And it was a Taltos ghost,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “and it was biding its time, generation by generation, until a witch would come who would bear a Taltos child, a witch with psychic powers enough to aid it to possess that unborn Taltos fetus and be reborn within it.”
Michael interrupted: “And I didn’t know I had Mayfair genes in my blood. I never even dreamed. It was a dalliance between Oncle Julien and a riverfront Irish girl, and the child went to an Irish Catholic orphanage. And that was one of my ancestors.”
“Oh, this Lasher was a clever ghost,” said Rowan, shaking her head with a bitter smile. “Over the generations he brought this family great wealth in any number of ways. Strong witches appeared in various generations who really knew how to use him. And the men he despised and punished if they got in his way. Except for Julien. Julien was the only Mayfair male strong enough to use Lasher to perfection. And Julien regarded Lasher as an evil thing, but even Julien thought that Lasher had once been human.”
“Lasher himself thought so,” said Michael. “The ghost didn’t fully understand who he was or what he wanted, except to be reborn. He guided everything to that purpose: to come through, to be flesh and blood again. I saw the ghost from the time I was a little kid, passing the fence outside. I’d see him standing in the garden. I never dreamed that one day I’d live in this house. I never dreamed that one day—.” He stopped, clearly unable to continue.
“The Legacy was established very early on,” said Mona. “You had to keep the name Mayfair, whether you married out or not, if you were to be part of the family, if you were to be connected to the Legacy.”
“And that way, the clan was kept close,” said Rowan, “and there was much interbreeding.”
“And there is one Heiress in each generation,” said Mona, wiping her nose, “and that Heiress lives in this house and must be able to bear children.”
“It was a matriarchy in legal and moral fact,” said Rowan softly. “And Michael and I . . . we fit the design of Lasher perfectly. Of course my child was not pure Taltos. It was Taltos mixed with human. It was perhaps five months in the womb. And on the night of its birth, there came Lasher with all his force down into the infant manniken making it grow and cry out to me to use all my power. Rowan the Mad Scientist knew the circuitry and the cells! Rowan the Mad Scientist knew how to guide the monstrous offspring.” She closed her eyes. She turned away, as though the remembrance was pressing against her.
Brilliant flash of the Man Baby, tall, slippery, face evincing wonder, gawky, pinkish limbs. Rowan clothing it as the creature laughed delightedly. Flash of it clutching her breast, drinking. Rowan sinking to the floor in unconsciousness. The creature drinking hungrily from the other breast as well.
My Darling, what secrets these are, indeed.
Silence.
A look of pure torment on the face of Michael. How well I understood his pain now, that he had fathered these creatures, and apparently no others.
Stirling appeared fearful as before, yet shamelessly fascinated. Mona, her eyes closed, leaned against Quinn as he watched Rowan. Sounds of the garden—soft, inevitable, indifferent, sweet.
“Walking Babies, horrible things,” said Dolly Jean from her sleep. “If only I’d a known that ghost was a Walking Baby, but the thought never entered my head. . . .”
“Not my girl,” whispered Mona. “My girl wasn’t a horrible thing. Her father was the demon, but not her.”
Michael fighting with the creature called Lasher. Snow and ice. The creature tremendously slippery and crafty and flexible and invulnerable to the blows. The creature laughing and mocking Michael. The creature knocking Michael into the ice-cold swimming pool, Michael sinking down to the bottom. Sirens, trucks, Rowan and the creature running towards the car . . .
“I left with it,” Rowan whispered. “This Man Child thing with no name other than the name of a ghost. I left Michael. I took it away. The Mad Scientist thought first and foremost to save it from those who might have destroyed it, and it had possessed the body of Michael’s child and sent that child’s true soul Heavenward, and I knew that Michael wouldn’t stop until he’d killed it, and so I fled with it. It was a dreadful error.”
Silence.
Rowan remained turned to the side, as though away from all that she’d said, her eyes closed, her hands limp on the table. I wanted to enfold her in my arms. I did nothing.
Michael remained still. Father of this monster. No.
Sent that child’s true soul Heavenward.
Father of the mysterious body only, the vehicle for the mystery.
“The Taltos,” I said to Rowan, “it fathered a daughter in you? You bore two of these creatures?”
Rowan nodded. She opened her eyes and looked at me with a steady gaze. There might as well have been no one else there.
“The male was an atrocity,” she said. “A spiritual monster. It had two goals—to remember what it had been, as Taltos memories inundated it—and to father a female with which to breed. I lost control of it almost immediately. I miscarried again and again as it drank my breasts dry. Only in the very beginning could I lure it into laboratories or hospitals, where, using my authority, I managed to accomplish some tests and secretly forward the material on to a laboratory in San Francisco.
“As the Heiress of the Legacy, I could draw all the money we needed from our foreign accounts, as long as I stayed one jump ahead of the family, which was searching for me. So the creature had the funds to drag me on a world odyssey. In the glen of Donnelaith, a torrent of memories came back to it. But it was soon desperate to get back to the States.
“I chose Houston as a city where we might settle and I could study it. Among hospitals and medical centers, I thought I could order the equipment for a laboratory and not be discovered. Unbeknownst to me this was perfect for the fiend. Having no luck with me, he was soon leaving me tied up, starved and near insane. Only much later did I learn that he was making the short journey to New Orleans to mate with random female Mayfairs. Of course his victims fatally miscarried, and were found dead in their own blood.
“The family was in a panic.
“Mayfair women began dying one after another. And they couldn’t trace Rowan who had abandoned Michael for the fiend. And Rowan was now a prisoner. Soon Mayfair women everywhere were surrounded by armed guards. The creature came to First Street and almost gained access to Mona.
“But Mona, in the time of my desertion, had made love with Michael and was already carrying a Taltos child, though she didn’t know it.
“At last, when I’d almost given up hope of life, I conceived another child of my own. And the child spoke to me. It said the very word ‘Taltos.’ It told me its name: Emaleth. It spoke of times its father couldn’t remember. In the secret telepathic voice, I told it that when it was born it was to go to Michael in New Orleans. I told it about the house on First Street. If I should die, it must reach Michael with word of my death. We talked to each other in silence.
“Lasher was jubilant when he heard the child’s voice! He would soon have his bride. It was then, as he softened to me, that I managed to escape. With the filthy clothes on my back I made for the highway.