“But before I do, let me trace the Blackwood lineage, for what it’s worth. Manfred was the patriarch, and William was his son. William begat Gravier. Gravier begat Pops. And Pops, late in life when he and Sweetheart had despaired of having a child, begat Patsy. At age sixteen, Patsy gave birth to me and named me Tarquin Anthony Blackwood. As to my father, let me state now plainly and unequivocally that I don’t have one.

“Patsy has no clear recollection of what was happening to her in the weeks during which I might have been conceived, except that she was singing with a band in New Orleans, with fake identification to get her into the club where the band was playing, and she and a whole mob of musicians and singers were hanging together in a flat on Esplanade Avenue, ‘with plenty of weed and plenty of wine and plenty of company.’

“I’ve often wondered why Patsy didn’t seek an abortion. She certainly could have managed it. And I’m tormented by the suspicion that Patsy thought that if she was a mother she would be an adult, and Pops and Sweetheart would give her freedom and money. She didn’t get either one. And so there she was at sixteen, with a baby brother of a child, and obviously no notion of what to do with me, as she went on with her dreams of becoming a country-western singer and of having her own band.

“I have to remember all this when I think of her. I have to try not to hate her. I wish I could stop feeling pain every time I think of her. I’m ashamed to say it again but I would like to kill her.

“Now on to the story of me and Goblin and how I was educated and how I educated him.”

CHAPTER 8

8

“YOU’VE HEARD ME say that Goblin is my double, and let me emphasize it, because the duplication of me is always perfect, and so I’ve had all my life a mirror held up to me in Goblin in which I could see, if not know, myself.

“As to Goblin’s personality? His wishes? His temper? All this was wholly different in that he could be a perfect devil when it humiliated me and embarrassed me, and I could seldom control him, though I did learn early on that if I ignored him completely, which took an immense act of will, he might fade and disappear.