Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(150)
Author: Anne Rice

Ash didn’t answer.

“They are surrounded by hundreds of people for whom they must make this part of their lives a lie,” Samuel continued to expostulate. “They will want to forget you exist; they will not want the great realm of their day-to-day life lost in the glare of your presence.”

“I see.”

“I don’t like it when you suffer.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes! I like to open magazines and newspapers and read about your little corporate triumphs, and see your smiling face above flippant little lists of the world’s ten most eccentric billionaires, or New York’s most eligible bachelors. And now I know you will break your heart wondering if these witches are your true friends, if you can call them when your heart aches, if you can depend on them for the knowledge of yourself that every being requires—”

“Stay, please, Samuel.”

This put a silence to the lecture. The little man sighed. He drank some of the fresh drink, about half, and licked his heavy crooked lower lip with an amazingly pink tongue.

“Hell, Ash, I don’t want to.”

“I came when you called me, Samuel.”

“You regret that now?”

“I don’t think in that way. Besides, how could I regret it?”

“Forget it all, Ash. Seriously, forget it. Forget a Taltos came to the glen. Forget you know these witches. Forget you need anyone to love you for what you are. That’s impossible. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what you will do now. The pattern’s all too familiar.”

“What pattern is that?” asked Ash quietly.

“You’ll destroy all this, the company, the corporation, the Toys Without Limit or Dolls for the Millions, whatever it’s called. You’ll sink into apathy. You’ll just let it go. You’ll walk out and far away, and the things you’ve built and the things you’ve made will just slowly fall apart without you. You’ve done it before. And then you’ll be lost, just the way I’m lost, and some cold winter evening, and why you always choose the dead of winter I don’t know, you’ll come to the glen again looking for me.”

“This is more important to me, Samuel,” he said. “It’s important for many reasons.”

“Parks, trees, gardens, children,” sang the little man.

Ash didn’t reply.

“Think about all those who depend on you, Ash,” said Samuel, continuing the same sermon for the same congregation. “Think of all these people who make and sell and buy and love the things you manufacture. That can substitute for sanity, I think, having other warm beings of intellect and feeling dependent upon us. You think I’m right?”

“It doesn’t substitute for sanity, Samuel,” said Ash. “It substitutes for happiness.”

“All right, that’s fine then. But don’t wait for your witches to come to you again, and for God’s sake never seek them on their own turf. You’ll see fear in their eyes if they ever see you standing in their garden.”

“You’re so sure of all this.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Ash, you told them everything. Why did you do that? Perhaps if you had not, they wouldn’t fear you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“And Yuri and the Talamasca, how they will plague you now.”

“They will not.”

“But those witches, they are not your friends.”

“So you keep saying.”

“I know they are not. I know their curiosity and awe will soon change to fear. Ash, it’s an old cliché, they’re only human.”

Ash bowed his head and looked away, out the window at the blowing snow, at shoulders hunkered against the wind.

“Ashlar, I know,” Samuel said, “because I am an outcast. And you are an outcast. And look out there at the multitudes of humans passing on the street, and think how each one condemns so many others as outcast, as ‘other,’ as not human. We are monsters, my friend. That’s what we’ll always be. It’s their day. That we’re alive at all is enough to worry about.” He downed the rest of the drink.

“And so you go home to your friends in the glen.”

“I hate them, and you know it. But the glen we won’t have for long. I go back for sentimental reasons. Oh, it’s not just the Talamasca, and that sixteen genteel scholars will come with tape recorders, begging me to recite all I know over lunch at the Inn. It’s all those archaeologists digging up St. Ashlar’s Cathedral. The modern world has found the place. And why? Because of your damned witches.”

“You can’t lay that on me or on them, and you know it.”

“Eventually we’ll have to find some more remote place, some other curse or legend to protect us. But they’re not my friends, don’t think they are. They don’t.”

Ash only nodded.

Food had come, a large salad for the little man, the pasta for Ash. The wine was being poured in the glasses. It smelled like something gone utterly wrong.

“I’m too drunk to eat,” Samuel said.

“I understand if you go,” Ash said softly. “That is, if you’re bound to go, then perhaps you should do it.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Then the little man lifted his fork and began to devour the salad, shoveling it into his mouth, as bits and pieces fell to the plate despite his most diligent efforts. Loudly he scraped up every last bit of olive, cheese, and lettuce on the plate, and then drank a big gulp of the mineral water.

“Now I can drink some more,” he said.

Ash made a sound that would have been a laugh if he had not been so sad.

Samuel slid off the chair and onto his feet. He picked up the leather portmanteau. He sauntered over to Ash, and crooked his arm around Ash’s neck. Ash kissed his cheek quickly, faintly repelled by the leathery texture of the skin, but determined at all costs to hide it.

“Will you come back soon?” Ash asked.

“No. But we’ll see each other,” said Samuel. “Take care of my dog. His feelings are hurt very easily.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“And pitch yourself into your work!”

“Anything else?”

“I love you.”

And with that Samuel pushed and swaggered his way through the press of those being seated and those rising to go, and all the backs and elbows clumped against him. He went out the front door and along the front window. The snow was already catching in his hair and on his bushy eyebrows, and making dark wet spots on his shoulders.