“Pigspittle,” said Avaric. “Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn’t progress . . .”
“I think it’s a presence, not an absence,” said an artist. “Evil’s
an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It’s an other. It’s not us.”
“Not even me?” said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. “A self-confessed murderer?”
“Oh go on with you,” said the artist, “we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That’s just normal vanity.”
“Evil isn’t a thing, it’s not a person, it’s an attribute like beauty . . .”
“It’s a power, like wind . . .”
“It’s an infection . . .”
“It’s metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation—”
“Blame it on the Unnamed God, then.”
“But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?”
“It’s not of air and eternity, evil isn’t; it’s of earth; it’s physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less—”
“I like pain, if I’m wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me—”
“No, you’re all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart—the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience—”
“Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven’t wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.”
“Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I ne
ver repress any appetite.”
“I won’t have this talk in my drawing room,” said the Margreavess, near tears. “You’ve been behaving all night as if an old woman hadn’t been slaughtered in her bedclothes. Didn’t she have a mother too? Didn’t she have a soul?”
Avaric yawned and said, “You’re so tender and naive. When it’s not embarrassing it’s quite appealing.”
The Witch stood up, sat down quickly, and stood up again, aided by her broom.
“Why did you do it?” asked the hostess with spirit.
The Witch shrugged. “For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.”
But as she wobbled toward the door, she said, “You know, you’re all a pack of fools. You ought to have turned me in instead of entertaining me all evening.”
“You entertained us,” said Avaric broadly, gallantly. “This’ll end up being the dinner party of the season. Even if you’ve been lying all evening about killing this old schoolmarm. What a treat.” The dinner guests drolly applauded her.
“The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it—the human side, say—and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”
8
The moon was up again, a little less swollen than the night before. The Witch didn’t trust herself to ride on the broom, so she meandered in a zigzaggy way across the greensward. She would find a place to nap outside of the claustrophobia of a society den.
She came upon the construction that Avaric had talked about. It was an old, early tiktok thing, a sort of portable stupa made of carved wood and figurines, too variegated and numerous for the Witch to comprehend tonight. Perhaps there was a running board where she could rest underneath, a platform elevated just a couple of inches off the dampish ground. She peered, and moved forward.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
A Munchkinlander, no, a dwarf, stood in her way. He had a cudgel in one hand, and was thwacking it into the thick leathery palm of his other hand.
