Lasher

by Anne Rice

  "Good God," Lark whispered.

  The man's voice was so level, so cold.

  "Can you come downtown to my office?" Ryan Mayfair asked. "And ask Lightner to come with you?"

  "Absolutely. We'll be there in--"

  "Ten minutes," Lightner said. He was already on his feet. He took the phone from Lark.

  "Ryan," he said. "Get the word out to the women of the family. You don't want to alarm anyone, but none of the women should be alone just now. If something does happen, there should be someone there to call for medical help. Obviously neither Edith nor Gifford was able to do this. I know what I'm asking...Yes. Yes. All of them. Everyone. That's exactly the way to go. Yes, we'll see you in ten minutes."

  The two men left the suite, choosing the short flight of stairs to the street over the elegant little elevator.

  "What the hell do you think is going on?" Lark asked. "I mean what does this mean, another death exactly like that of Gifford Mayfair?"

  Lightner didn't respond. He looked grim and impatient.

  "And by the way, do you have super-hearing? How did you know what he'd told me on the phone?"

  "Super-hearing," murmured Lightner vaguely.

  They slipped out the front door and right into a waiting cab. The air still had its coolness, but there was a bit of balmy warmth mixed up in it. Everywhere Lark looked he saw greenery, and some random, shabby bit of charm--an old-fashioned lamppost perhaps, or a bit of iron balcony on the upper facade of a house behind its stucco storefront.

  "I think the question is," Lightner said, once again talking to himself as much as to Lark, "what are we going to tell them. You know perfectly well what's happening. You know this has nothing to do with genetic illness, except in the broadest interpretation of those words."

  The cab driver made a U-turn and tore down the Avenue, bouncing them uncomfortably together on the leather seat of the cab.

  "I don't follow you," said Larkin. "I don't know what's going on. This is some kind of syndrome, like toxic shock."

  "Oh, come on, man," said Lightner. "We both know. He's trying to mate with them. You told me yourself, did you not? Rowan said she wanted to know if the creature could mate with humans or with her. She wanted an entire genetic examination of all material."

  Lark was stunned. He had not in all seriousness thought of this, and he realized once more that he had not been sure really that he believed in this new species of being, this male creature who had been born to Rowan Mayfair. He was still assuming in the back of his mind that all this would have some "natural" explanation.

  "It's natural," said Lightner. "Natural is a deceptive word. I wonder if I shall ever before my time is up lay eyes on him. I wonder if he really can reason, if he possesses human self-control, if there is any moral framework to his mind, assuming it is a mind as we know mind..."

  "But are you seriously suggesting that he is preying upon these women?"

  "Of course I am," said Lightner. "It's obvious. Why do you think the Talamasca took Gifford's bloodstained clothes? He impregnated her and she lost the child. Look, Dr. Larkin, you'd better come clean on all this. I understand your scholarly interest and your loyalty to Rowan. But we may have no further contact with Rowan."

  "God."

  "The point is you'd better come clean about what you know. We have to tell this family that this creature is on the prowl. We don't have time for vague talk of genetic illness, and genetic testing. We don't have time to go about gathering data. The family is too vulnerable. You realize that woman died today? She died while the family was burying Gifford!"

  "Did you know her?"

  "No. But I know she was thirty-five, a recluse by nature, and something of a family nut, as they call them, of which there are a great many. Her grandmother Lauren Mayfair didn't approve of her very much. In fact, I'm fairly certain she went to see her this afternoon to condemn her roundly for not attending her cousin's funeral."

  "Well, she sure had a good excuse, didn't she?" said Lark He was instantly sorry. "God, if I had a single clue as to where Rowan was."

  "What an optimist you are," said Lightner bitterly. "We have a lot of clues, don't we, but they do not suggest that you or I will ever see or speak to Rowan Mayfair again."

  Eleven

  THE NOTE WAS waiting for him when he picked up his ticket for New Orleans. Call London at once.

  "Yuri, Anton wants to talk to you." It was not a voice he knew. "He wants you to stay in New York until Erich Stolov gets there. Erich can meet you in New York tomorrow afternoon."

  "Why is that, do you think?" asked Yuri. Who was this person? He had never heard this voice before, and yet this person spoke as if she knew him.

  "He thinks you'll feel better if you talk to Stolov."

  "Better? Better than what?"

  As far as he was concerned, there was nothing he would say to Stolov that he had not said to Anton Marcus. He could not understand this decision at all.

  "We've arranged a room for you, Yuri," said the woman. "We have you booked at the St. Regis. Erich will call you tomorrow afternoon. Shall we send a car for you? Or will you take a cab?"

  Yuri thought about it. In less than twenty minutes the airline would call his plane. He looked at the ticket. He did not know what he was thinking or feeling. His eyes roved the long concourse, the motley drift of passersby. Luggage, children, round-shouldered staff in uniform. Newspapers in a darkened plastic box. Airports of the world. He could not have told from this place whether he was in Washington, D.C., or Rome. No sparrows. That meant it couldn't be Cairo. But it could have been Frankfurt or L.A.

  Hindus, Arabs, Japanese passed him. And the countless unclassifiable individuals who might have been Canadian, American, British, Australian, German, French, how could one know?

  "Are you there, Yuri? Please so to the St. Regis. Erich wants to talk to you, wants to bring you up to date on the investigation himself. Anton is very concerned."

  Ah, that is what it was--the conciliatory tone, the pretense that he had not disobeyed an order, not walked out of the house. The strange intimacy and politeness of one he did not even know.

  "Anton himself is very anxious to speak to you," she said. "He will be distressed when he discovers you called while he was out. Let me tell him you are going to the St. Regis. We can arrange a car. It's no trouble."

  As if he, Yuri, did not know? As if he had not taken a thousand planes and a thousand cars and stayed in a thousand hotel rooms booked by the Order? As if he were not a defector?

  No, this was all wrong. They were never rude, never, but they did not speak this way to Yuri, who knew their ways perfectly. Was it the tone for lunatics who had left the Motherhouse without permission, people who had simply walked out after years of obedience and commitment, and support?

  His eyes settled on one figure--that of a woman, standing against the far wall. Sneakers, jeans, a wool jacket. Nondescript, except for her short dark hair. Swept back, rather pretty. Small eyes. She smoked a cigarette, and she kept her hands in her pockets, so that the cigarette hung on her lip. She was looking at him.

  Right at him. And he understood. It was only a partial understanding but it was plenty. He dropped his eyes, he murmured something about he would think about it, yes, he would probably go to the St. Regis, he would call again from there.

  "Oh, I'm so relieved to hear it," came that warm ingratiating voice. "Anton will be so pleased."

  "I'll bet." He hung up, picked up his bag and walked down the concourse. He did not notice the numbers of the various gates, the names of the snack stands, the bookshops, the gift stores. He walked and he walked. At some point he turned to the left. And then on he went to a great gate that ended this arm of the terminal and then he pivoted and walked very fast back the way he'd come.

  He almost ran into her, she was that close on him. He came face-to-face with her, and she--startled--stepped to the side. She almost tripped. Her face colored. She glanced back at him, and then she took off down a little c
orridor, disappeared through a service door, and was seen no more. He waited. She did not come back. She did not want him to see her again or be close to her. He felt the hairs stand up on the back of his head.

  An instinct told him to turn in the ticket. To go to another airline, and proceed south by another, less obvious route. He would fly to Nashville, then to Atlanta and on to New Orleans. It would take longer, but he would be harder to find.

  He stopped at a phone booth long enough to send a telegram to himself at the St. Regis, to be held for him when he came, which of course he never would.

  This was no fun to him. He had been followed before by policemen in various countries. He had been stalked once by an angry and malevolent young man. He had even been attacked a few times in barroom arguments, when his world had carried him down into the dregs of some slum or port. Once he'd been arrested by the police in Paris, but it had all been straightened out.

  Those things he could handle.

  What was this happening to him now?

  There was a terrible feeling inside him, a mixture of distrust and anger, a feeling of betrayal and loss. He had to talk to Aaron. But there was no time to call him. Besides, how could he burden Aaron with this now? He wanted to go to Aaron, be of assistance, not confuse him with some mad story of being followed in an airport, of a voice on the phone from London which he did not know.

  For one second he was tempted to blow the lid, to call back, demand to speak to Anton, ask what was happening, and who was this woman who was tailing him at the airport?

  But then he felt no spirit for it, no trust that it would work.

  That was the awful part. No trust at all that it would do any good. Something had happened. Something had changed.

  The flight was leaving. He looked around, and he did not see her. But that didn't mean anything. Then he went to board the plane.

  In Nashville, he found a desk with a fax machine, and he wrote out a long letter to the Elders directly, to the Amsterdam number, telling them all that had taken place. "I will contact you again. I am loyal. I am trustworthy. I do not understand what has happened. You must give me some explanation, personally, of why you told me not to talk to Aaron Lightner, of who this woman in London was, of why I am being followed. I do not mean to throw my life out a window. I am worried about Aaron. We are human beings. What do you expect me to do?"

  He read it over. Very like him, very melodramatic, the manner that often prompted from them a little humor or a pat on the head. He felt sick suddenly.

  He gave the letter to the clerk with a twenty. He said, "Send it three hours from now, not before." The man promised. By that time Yuri would have already left Atlanta.

  He saw the woman again, the very same woman in the wool coat, with the cigarette on her lip, standing by the desk, and staring at him coldly as he boarded the Atlanta plane.

  Twelve

  HAVE I DONE this to myself? Is this how it ends for me, because of my own selfishness, my own vanity? She closed her eyes again on the vast empty cube of a room. Sterile, white, it flashed against her eyelids. She thought, Michael. She said his name in the darkness, "Michael," and tried to picture him, to bring him up like an image on the computer of her mind. Michael, the archangel.

  She lay still, trying not to fight, to struggle, to tense, to scream. Just lie as if it were her choice to be on the filthy bed, her hands chained with loops of plastic tape to the ends of the headboard. She had given up all deliberate efforts to break the tape, either with her own physical strength or with the power of her mind--a power she knew could work fatal results upon the soft tissue inside the human frame.

  But late last night, she had managed to free her left ankle. She wasn't sure why. She'd managed to slip it loose from the encircling tape, which had become a thick ill-fitted cuff. And with that foot free she had, over the long hours of the night, managed to shift her position several times, and to slowly drag loose the top sheet of the bed, stiff with urine and vomit, and force it down and away.

  Of course the sheets beneath were filthy too. Had she lain here three days or four? She didn't know and this was maddening her. If she even thought about the taste of water she would go mad.

  This very well might have been the fourth day.

  She was trying to remember how long a human being could survive without food and water. She ought to know that. Every neurosurgeon ought to know something as simple as that. But since most of us do not tie people to beds and leave them captive for days on end, we don't have need of that specific information.

  She was casting back through her memory--of the heroic stories she'd read, wondrous tales of those who had not starved when others had starved around them, those who had walked miles through heavy snow when others would have died. She had will. That was true. But something else was very wrong with her. She'd been sick when he'd tied her here. She had been sick off and on since they'd left New Orleans together. Nausea, dizziness--even lying flat she sometimes felt she was falling--and an ache in her bones.

  She turned, twisting, and then moved her arms the little bit that she could, up and down, up and down, and worked her free leg, and twisted the other one in the strap of tape. Would she be able to stand up when he returned?

  And then the obvious thought came. What if he does not return? What if he chooses not to return; or what if something prevents him? He was blundering out there like a mad creature, intoxicated with everything he saw, and no doubt making his characteristic ludicrous errors in judgment. Well, there really wasn't much to think about if he didn't come back. She'd die.

  Nobody would ever find her here.

  This was a perfectly isolated place. A high empty office tower, crowded among hundreds of others--an unrented and undeveloped "medical building" which she had chosen herself for their hiding place, deep in the middle of this sprawling ugly southern metropolis--a city chock-full of hospitals and clinics and medical libraries, where they'd be hidden as they did their experiments, like two leaves on a tree.

  She'd arranged the utilities for the entire building herself, and all of its fifty floors were probably still lighted as she had left them. This room was dark. He'd snapped off the lights. And that had proved a mercy as the days passed.

  When darkness fell, she could see the dense, charmless sky-scrapers through the broad windows. Sometimes the dying sun made the silvery glass buildings glow as if they were burning, and beyond against the ruby-red sky rose the high dense ever-rolling white clouds.

  The light, that was the thing you could always watch, the light. But at full dark when the lights came on, silently, all around her, she felt a little better. People were near, whether they knew she was there or not. Someone might come. Someone...Someone might stand at an office window with a pair of binoculars, but why?

  She began to dream again, thank God, to feel the bottom of the cycle again--"I don't care"--and imagine that she and Michael were together and walking through the field at Donnelaith and she was explaining everything to him, her favorite fancy, the one into which she could sink when she wanted to suffer, to measure, to deny all at the same time.

  "It was one wrong judgment call after another. I had only certain choices. But the mistake was pride, to think I could do this thing, to think I could handle it. It's always been pride. The History of the Mayfair Witches was pride. But this came to me wrapped in the mysteries of science. We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless. And I knew this, I knew but I forgot. That was my mistake."

  She pictured the grass; conjured the ruins; saw the tall fragile gray arches of the Cathedral rising from the glen, and it seemed she was really there and free.

  A sound jolted her.

  It was the key in the lock.

  She grew still and quiet. Yes, the key turning. The outer door was closed loudly and fearlessly, and then she heard his tread on the tile floor.
She heard him whistling, humming.

  Oh, God, thank you, God.

  Another key. Another lock, and that fragrance, the soft good fragrance of him as he drew close to the bed.

  She tried to feel hate, to grow rigid with it, to resist the compassionate expression on his face, his large glistening eyes, so very beautiful as only eyes can be, and filled with sorrow as he looked at her. His beard and mustache were now very black and thick and like those of saints in pictures. His forehead was exquisitely shaped where the hair grew back from it, parted in the center with the smallest widow's peak.

  Yes, a beautiful being, undeniably beautiful. Maybe he wasn't there. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe it was all imagined that he had finally come back.

  "No, my darling dear, I love you," he whispered. Or did he?

  As he drew closer, she realized she was looking at his mouth. There had been a subtle change to his mouth. It was more a man's mouth, perhaps, pink and decisively molded. A mouth had to be that way to hold its own beneath the dark glossy mustache, above the curling close-cut locks of the beard.

  She turned away as he bent down. His warm fingers wound around her upper arms, and his lips grazed her cheek. He touched her breasts with his large hand, rubbing the nipples, and the unwelcome sensation ran through her. No dream. His hands. She could have lost consciousness to shut it out. But she was there, helpless, and she couldn't stop it or get away.

  It was as degrading as anything else to feel this sudden utter joy that he was here, to kindle beneath his fingers as if he were a lover, not a jailer, to rise out of her isolation towards any kindness or gentleness proffered by the captor in a swoon.

  "My darling, my darling." He rested his head on her belly, nuzzled his face into the skin, oblivious to the filth of the bed, humming, whispering, and then he gave off a loud cry, and drawing up began to dance, round and round, a jig with one leg lifted, singing and clapping his hands. He seemed to be in ecstasy! Oh, how many times had she seen him do it, but never with such gusto. And what a curious spectacle it was. So delicate were his long arms, his straight shoulders; his wrists seemed double the length of those of a normal man.