It’s dancing at the edges of my vision again; the imp. The two-foot-high blacker-than-black wraith that lives on the periphery of my mind is my damnation, my penance for inheriting my father’s gift of rage. Sibilant giggles escape its fleshless throat as it capers about my home, unraveling my concentration as it would a poorly-woven cloak. It haunts my nights with whispers of “Daddy” that issue from shadowed corners of untenanted rooms. And despite its facial nothingness, I know it does this smiling.

Tonight its footsteps play along the ancient walls and ceilings of my ancestral home. Even after sixteen years of such visitations from my son, Reginald, I still flinch at his whisper. In his infancy he would serenade me with crystalline infant coos and chuckles. I was a hungrier man in those days, a state to which Reginald’s mother would attest, had she not possessed the good sense to flee my vitriolic tongue and fists before they claimed her as they did our son. Back then I’d never have believed I could miss him as much as I do on nights when he’s dancing right beside me.

“Daddy, come play with me,” the imp demands. Reginald’s voice is a frenetic teardrop sizzling upon a hot skillet. Nothing of the crystal giggles remains. No memento of my lupine days lingers, save for the gruesome inkblot that nightly toddles in circles around my bed as I struggle to sleep. Some nights he will claim a corner of my bedroom and cry until I awaken, only to vanish until slumber reclaims me, and then awaken me anew. Some nights his old man joins him for a weep.

He misses his mother, or so says the toothless bruja in the stilted shack at the swamp’s edge. She claims her Tarot readings have whispered that Reginald wants to see his parents reunited. I’ll admit having been inebriated the first time I solicited the bruja’s arts. Reginald’s visitations had just begun, and since I’m not a religious man, I lacked the option of praying my way to inner peace. But if necessity is the mother of invention, then surely naivety is the bastard spawn of desperation and drunkenness, for there I sat sixteen autumns ago, raptly devouring the woman’s every untruth. Even had I desired to rejoin Reginald’s mother, to do so would have spelled my disinheritance in the most final of terms. My father would have died rather than see his son wed a Negro, and a slave at that.
 
“Come find me, Daddy,” I hear. Reginald’s voice is a downpour thrashing through trees. Reginald’s voice is snow falling upon a meadow covered with crumpled paper. These sounds make strange treasures, but I’d not survive a single night spent in their absence. I’ve learned, over the sixteen years since my son’s manifestations began, that even mere echoes of a lost loved one grow desirable when having that person removed altogether from your life marks your only alternative.

If only some such shred of his mother’s essence remained here. I would bend my knees in apology to the woman. I would kiss her brown feet and beg her forgiveness with all the abjection of the whipped mongrel that this life has made of me.

That there could be no colored heirs to my family’s estate, our father’s temper ensured. My only sibling, a sister two years my junior, feared the old man too greatly ever to speak above a whisper in his presence, much less betroth herself to a non-white suitor. Despite the inherent moral deficiencies that have guided much of my past savagery, mine is still a proud and civilized society, and as such, would never suffer any colored fancying himself good enough for a white woman. Nor should any white woman be endured who would willingly bed a savage. Only through ravishing her by force, as I ravished Reginald’s mother that summer amid hay bales in the larger of our family’s two stables, could any Negro claim knowledge of the silken heat that lives between the thighs of a white and Christian woman.

“Come play, Daddy, come play come play come play,” the imp whispers at me from the ceiling where it crouches peering at me.

Being born as brown as his mother was but one aspect of Reginald’s two-fold curse. Having me as his father has proven to be the second. Bearing that in mind, I suppose my current existence is as it should be, if one considers that just as I have been Reginald’s undoing, so is he now mine.

One of my greatest regrets lies in my never having cared enough to learn the name given by my family to the slave woman who bore our son. I certainly took time enough the day after my father’s funeral to acquire that knowledge of her that had always been forbidden to me by society. It was as much an act of defiance of my deceased father’s wrath as it was one of carnality. I was now the patriarch of my family’s estate; a position of grace that did little but feed the sense of entitlement instilled in me from birth. It argued as effectively against limitations as it did against a slave’s humanity, and so I cared nothing for her screaming while I instructed myself on the flavor of brown skin, the feral clutch of African cunt.

Nowadays, the memory of her eyes as it was happening is another kind of ghost. Hers bore the precise look of confusion and panic that Reginald’s did sixteen years ago tonight when I drowned him in his bath basin.

I did it to punish his mother, who’d threatened, in wake of the emancipation of slaves everywhere, to publicly disclose the nature of my relationship to her and her child. No child, no foul, I thought back then. Tonight, Reginald’s ripped burlap coos serve as proof enough of how wrong I was.

“Daddy,” I hear as I extinguish the desktop oil lamp. Shadows awaken, stretching furtively, murdering the last vestiges of firelight, and my parlor is swallowed in their darkness. The imp wails as if I’ve laid fire against its feet. Perhaps one wouldn’t expect Reginald to have retained a toddler’s fear of the dark, but indeed he has; just as he has his capacity for temper tantrums.

Climbing the creaking stairs that lead to my bed, I hear “Daddy daddy daddydaddydaddydaddy daddy…”

I’m startled to hear “Yes, son?” escape my lips. I’ve never spoken to the imp before. Spiteful though that may seem, it isn’t malice that has muted me in Reginald’s presence all these years. Responsibility has rested, I think, in my hope that for as long as I refused to acknowledge my murdered son’s wraith, I could continue comfortably denying its presence to myself; I could cling a bit longer to my desperate wish that it would depart if ignored, that time would expose it as a figment of my guilt-ridden imagination. To my thinking, active recognition of the wraith translated into madness having stolen the last of me, and that silent fear has yoked me for the past sixteen years.

“Play with me,” Reginald hisses. The statement simultaneously beseeches and demands.

“Yes, son.”

At the top of the stairs, I enter the room I privately pretend is Reginald’s nursery. In my youth, this space served as my bedroom, and in later years, as my father’s study. Tonight the square unpainted room stinks of dry rot. The only furnishings that remain within its cracked walls are my grandfather’s rocker and a bookshelf bearing a few volumes from my childhood with which nostalgia has prevented me from parting. Floor timber squeals as I approach the aged rocker occupying the room’s darkest corner and seat myself in it.

Oh, the countless stories my sister and I heard as children seated at our grandfather’s feet whenever he visited. I wondered often back then, savoring the aroma of the cherry Cavendish pipe tobacco that was his favorite, what tales the chair itself might share, had it a voice with which to spin yarns. Tonight, hearing my dead son’s clambering footsteps echo through the darkness, I wonder still.

“Quintus?” I hear, so involved in my current undertaking that my name on my wife Mira’s lips sounds alien to my ear. The telltale creaking of these floorboards has awakened her. Whether her apparent inability to see or hear Reginald at play is advantageous to me or not remains undetermined. Tonight, though, I am glad for it.

“Yes, dearest?”

“Are you coming to bed? It’s late.”

“Daddy find me Daddy play daddydaddydaddy,” Reginald adds.

“I’ll be there in a moment, love”, I answer her, watching the imp take a seat on the floor in front of me as I used to do with my grandfather.

From the bookshelf, I pull a tattered volume of fairy tales and nursery rhymes that was my favorite adolescent read. I open the book to a familiar page and begin to read my murdered baby a bedtime story. If that doesn’t tire him out, perhaps I’ll join him in a game of hide and seek.

“Daddy... daddy look behind, look daddy look,” the imp tells me, growing animated. He jabs a tiny shadow digit toward the wall beyond which the bed I share with Mira is located.

I turn in search of whatever phenomenon has caught Reginald’s eye. Not surprisingly, I find nothing notable beyond him, so I resume my tale of the three little pigs. Moments later, he begins again.

“Oh, what is it?” I snap, eager to finish this chore so I might seek a bit of rest beside Mira. I need to nestle inside her tonight. My need to open her nightdress, gather her blonde, aristocratic splendor in my arms, and hide inside her until daylight dawns, has set my fingertips trembling. Or perhaps it’s the chill in this room and the ghost at my feet that drive my tremors.

“Mommy...” Reginald tells me, “Mommy’s here,” a moment before Mira’s terrified scream has me bolting from the rocker and into the next room.

The slender wraith bent over Mira straightens as I burst upon the scene. It hovers a full head shorter than I, but is clearly representative of an adult’s stature. The shadow possesses neither discernible legs nor arms. Perhaps the dead slave woman appears in such fashion because I never took time enough to know Reginald’s mother as a whole person worthy of respect. To me, that day in the stable, she was a pair of brown breasts to fondle, a clenching canal for my cock, a shuddering receptacle for my seed, but never was she a person in my eyes. Not for an instant. And so in death, she presents to me the only parts of her that ever mattered to me.

Behind the slave’s effigy, the doors to the balcony beyond our bedroom stand gaping. Chill night wind rushes forth, maliciously whipping around drapery and loose papers upon the writing desk against the north wall.

“Leave her!” I shout, “Get away from her! Go back to Hell!” Whether obliging me or not, I cannot tell as the wraith fades from view like a tendril of smoke. Despite its absence of facial features, I sense that it did this smiling.

“Are you all right?” I ask my wife. By the light of the moon, I see tears of blood welled around her eyes, creeping from their corners.

“Don’t touch me,” Mira rasps, “I’ve seen things, Quintus. Seen and felt such loathsome things! You’re a beast! How could you?”

“You’ve had a nightmare, darling” I tell her, praying to mask the lie in my voice, “Rest now. We’ll speak more of it in the morning if you wish.” I press her shoulders gently backward as I speak. Within moments, sleep has claimed her once again.

The imp giggles in jubilation from the shadows beneath the bed. I am certain his mother has not strayed far. I wonder how recently the woman died, praying the cause of her demise was natural.

I fear to imagine what more of my past crimes she will show to Mira in nights to come.

Locking the balcony doors, I join Mira in our bed and pray for daylight as my dead son’s footsteps march clumsy toddler cadences along the ceiling.

The Vices of the Saints was first published in the August 2002 issue of Dark Moon Rising Magazine.