• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 607 0

dollars, Dupre took the Doctor to the convent yard, where he told the 'casket girls' story; the Hotel Bourbon Orleans, where he recounted seeing the ghost of a cavalier in the lobby (the Doctor didn't ask why a seventeenth-century English cavalier was haunting an eighteenth-century French city); an alley where ghostly duellists appeared; a house where ghostly Civil War soldiers still fought; a corner where once a year at midnight you could still hear the alarm bells that heralded one of the great New Orleans fires; and a bar where women who visited the toilet were groped by invisible hands. He then magnanimously offered to let the Doctor buy him a drink.

They went to a bar in a house that had been built for Napoleon to live in, though the exiled emperor had never actually taken up residence. The interior was the familiar high-ceilinged dimness. Sunlight, thought the Doctor, remembering the punishing Louisiana summers, was something you came inside to get away from. The tall windows, overhung and shaded outside by long balconies, were to let in breezes, dot light.

'I suppose you're wondering why a man of my originality and brilliance conducts these tours,' Dupre said. He was on his third bourbon. The first two had accompanied the story of his life, which the Doctor hadn't found very interesting and had already forgotten. 'I do it in order to remind myself that there are fools who think the occult is just entertainment. "Fun".' He sneered delicately at the word. 'I don't know why I bother - their childish notions are of no consequence. But contact with them keeps me disciplined. It reminds me how great a task I have, and what boldness and integrity I maintain as I achieve it. Very few of us have the intelligence to comprehend - let alone the strength to face - the harsh and unyielding truths of existence. Especially so-called occultists. Wicca, for example, is shit.'

The Doctor, whose mind had wandered, heard the pause rather than the words and quickly asked what was always a safe question. 'Why do you say that?'

'It's too damned nice. All this Blessed-Be, nature-loving crap. Nature, my friend, is red in tooth and claw.' Dupre leaned across the table. 'It's a girls' religion. Can't face reality, wants to pretty it up, hang cutesy little curtains on it. The man who truly knows life's secrets faces their dangers with indifferent calm. He is beyond others' naive "caring", a creature of irony, detachment, wit and, of course, ruthless efficiency.'

Oh dear, the Doctor thought, as the embarrassing realisation sank in that Dupre believed he was describing himself. 'And "reality" is ?'

'Power.'

The Doctor had to admit this was an arguable point of view. It was certainly a widely held one. 'But power is what we don't have,' he said. 'Not ultimately. And surely "reality" must be some ultimate ground of being.'

'We don't have power because we're afraid of it.'

'Afraid of the cost?'

'Afraid of using it. Afraid of being selfish. Afraid of facing the fact that nothing lives without something else dying.' The Doctor shivered. Dupre smiled. 'You see? You understand.'

The Doctor wasn't really clear why he had shivered. But he was afraid that, deep inside, he did understand.

'You have to have the courage to make the hard decisions,' Dupre continued.

'It doesn't take courage,' said the Doctor. 'It takes 'What? he thought.

Desperation. Despair. A sudden, sickening understanding that life's choices have run out, that there's no other way. 'Not courage,' he muttered.

Dupre ran over him. 'And most people don't have courage. They're sentimentalists. They're weak.'

'But all of us are too weak to bend reality to our wishes.'

'Not the adept. Not the true mage.'

'I'm not just talking about will,' insisted the Doctor. 'Even if a person has the will, acquiring the necessary power - energy - to mould reality -'

'It can be done,' Dupre hissed. 'It can!'

'Have you seen it done?'

Dupre hesitated. He belched slightly. 'I believe,' he said, less intensely.'I have faith.'

'Oh, well,' said the Doctor.