Lasher

by Anne Rice

  She shut her eyes, and against her darkened lids the figure continued to jig and to twirl, and she could hear his feet thudding on the carpet, and his peals of delighted laughter.

  "God, why doesn't he kill me?" she whispered.

  He went silent and bent over her again.

  "I'm sorry, my darling dear. I'm sorry." Oh, the pretty voice. The deep voice. The voice that could read Scripture over a radio in a car in the night as you drove endless miles all alone with it. "I didn't mean to be gone so long," he said. "I was off on a bitter and heartbreaking adventure." His words became more rapid. "In sorrow, in discovery, witnessing death, and beset with miseries and frustrations..." Then he lapsed as always into the whispering and humming, rocking on his feet, humming and murmuring, or was it a whistling, a tiny whistling through his dry lips?

  He knelt as if he had collapsed. He laid his head on her waist again, his warm hand dangling between her legs, on her sex, ignoring the filth of the bed once more, and he kissed the skin of her belly. "My darling, my dear."

  She couldn't prevent herself from crying out.

  "Let me loose, let me up. I'm lying here in filth. Look what you've done to me." And then her anger clamped down on her voice, and she went motionless and soundless, paralyzed with rage. If she stung him, he might sulk for hours. He might stand at the window and cry. Be silent. Be clever. He stood watching her.

  Then he drew out his knife, small, flashing, like his teeth, a flash like that in the sterile twilight of this empty room.

  He cut through the tape so quickly! Nothing to it, this spindly giant reaching over her, slice, slice, slice.

  Her arms were free--numb and useless--and free. With all her might and main she tried to lift them. She couldn't lift her right leg.

  She felt his arms sliding under her. He lifted her, and rose to his feet with her, tumbling her against his chest.

  She cried. She sobbed. Free from the bed, free, if only she had the strength to put her hands around his neck and--

  "I'll bathe you, my darling dear, my poor darling love," he said. "My poor beloved Rowan." Were they dancing in circles? Or was it only that she was so dizzy? She smelled the bathroom--soap, shampoo, clean things.

  He laid her down in the cold porcelain tub, and then she felt the first jet of warm water. "Not too hot," she whispered. The glaring white tile was moving, marching up the walls all around her. Flashing. Stop.

  "No, not too hot," he said. His eyes were bigger, brighter, the lids better defined when she had last looked at them, the eyelashes smaller yet still luxuriant and jet-black. She noted this as if jotting it down on a laptop computer. Finished? Who could guess? To whom would she ever give her findings? Dear God, if that package had not reached Larkin...

  "Don't fret, my darling dear," he said. "We are going to be good to each other, we are going to love each other. You will trust me. You will love me again. There's no reason for you to die, Rowan, no reason at all for you to leave me. Rowan, love me.

  She lay like a cadaver, unable to work her parts. The water swirled round her. He unbuttoned her white shirt, pulled loose the pants. The water rushed and hissed and was so warm. And the dirt smell was being broken. He hurled the soiled clothes away.

  She managed to lift her right hand, to tug at the panties, and rip at them, but she hadn't the strength to pull them off. He had gone into the other room. She could hear the sound of sheets being ripped from the bed; it was amazing all the sounds our minds registered; sheets being thrown in a heap. Who would have thought that such things even made a sound? And yet she knew it perfectly well, and remembered foolishly an afternoon at home in California when her mother had been changing the beds--that very sound.

  A plastic package torn open; a fresh sheet let to fall open and then shaken out to loose its wrinkles and land on the bed.

  She was slipping and the water was rising to her shoulders. Once again she tried to use her arms; she pushed and pushed against the tile and managed to sit forward.

  He stood over her. He had taken off his heavy coat. He was dressed in a simple turtleneck sweater, and as always he looked alarmingly thin. But he was strong and stalwart in his thinness, with none of the twisted neurotic apology of the very lanky and the underfed and the overgrown. His hair was so long now it covered his shoulders. It was as black as Michael's hair, and the longer it became the looser its curl, so that it was now almost wavy. In the steam from the tub, the hair at his temples curled somewhat, and she could see a glistening sheen on his seemingly poreless skin as he bent down again to caress her.

  He steadied her against the back of the tub. He lifted his little knife--Oh dare she try to get hold of it!--and he cut loose her soiled panties, and pulled them up out of the bubbling water and threw them aside. He knelt by the tub.

  He was singing again, looking at her, singing or humming, or whatever it was--this strange sound that almost reminded her of the cicadas at evening in New Orleans. He cocked his head to the side.

  His face was narrower than it had been days ago, more manly perhaps, that was the secret, the last of the roundness had left his cheeks. His nose had become slightly narrower, too, more rounded at the tip, more fine. But his head was just about the same size, she figured, and his height was very nearly the same too, and as he took the washrag and squeezed it out, she tried to figure whether his fingers had grown any longer. It did not seem so.

  His head. Was the soft spot still there in the top? How long would it take for the skull to close? She suspected the growth had slowed but not stopped.

  "Where did you go?" she asked. "Why did you leave me?"

  "You made me leave," he said with a sigh. "You made me leave with hate. And I had to go back out in the world and learn things. I had to see the world. I had to wander. I had to build my dreams. I can't dream when you hate me. When you scream at me and torment me."

  "Why don't you kill me?"

  A look of sadness came over him. He wiped her face with the warm, folded rag, and wiped her lips.

  "I love you," he said. "I need you. Why can't you give yourself to me? Why have you not given yourself? What do you want that I can give? The world will soon be ours, my darling dear, and you my queen, my beauteous queen. If only you would help me."

  "Help you do what?" she asked.

  She looked at him, and drew deep on her hatred, and her rage, and with all her might tried to send some invisible and lethal power against him. Shatter the cells; shatter the veins; shatter the heart. She tried and she tried, and then exhausted, lay back against the tub.

  In her life she had accidentally with such hate killed several human beings, but she could not kill him. He was too strong; the membranes of the cells were too strong; the osteoblasts swarming at their accelerated rate, just as everything within him worked at that rate, defensively and aggressively. Oh, if only she had had more of a chance to analyze these cells! If only, if only...

  "Is that all I am to you?" he said, his lip quivering. "Oh, God, what am I? A mere experiment?"

  "And what am I to you that you hold me prisoner here, and leave me for days on end like this? Don't ask love of me. You're a fool if you do. Oh, if only I had learned from the others, learned how to be a real witch! I could have done what they wanted of me."

  He was convulsed with silent hurt. The tears stood in his eyes, and his pliant glistening skin flamed with blood for an instant. He made his long hands into fists as if he would hit her again, as he had in the past, though he'd vowed he never would again.

  She did not care. That was the horror. Her own limbs were failing her; tingling, aching; pains in her joints. Could she have escaped from here herself if she had managed to kill him? Perhaps not.

  "What did you expect me to do?" he asked. He leant down and kissed her again. She turned away. Her hair was wet now. She wanted to slide down into the water, but she feared she might not be able to bring herself back up. He crushed the rag in his hands, and began again to bathe her. He bathed her all over. He squeezed the water
into her hair, washing it back from her forehead.

  She was so used to his scent that now she didn't really smell it; she felt only a warm sense of his nearness and a deep enervating desire for him. Of course, desire for him.

  "Let me trust you again, tell me you love me again," he implored, "and I'm your slave, not your captor. I swear it, my love, my brilliant one, my Rowan. Mother of us all."

  No answer came from her. He'd risen to his feet.

  "I'm going to clean everything for you," he said proudly like a child. "I'm going to clean it ail and make it fresh and beautiful. I've brought things for you. New clothes. I've brought flowers. I'll make a bower of our secret place. Everything is waiting by the elevators. You will be so surprised."

  "You think so?"

  "Oh yes, you will be pleased, you'll see. You're only tired and hungry. Yes, hungry. Oh, you must have food."

  "And when you leave me again, you'll tie me up with white satin ribbon?" How harsh her voice was, how filled with utter contempt. She shut her eyes. Without thinking, she raised her right hand and touched her face. Yes, muscles and joints were beginning to work again.

  He went out, and she struggled to sit up and she caught the floating cloth and began to wash herself. The bath was polluted. Too much filth. Flakes of human excrement, her excrement, floated on the surface of the water. She felt nausea again, and lay back until it was gone. Then she bent forward, her back aching, and she pulled up the stopper, fingers still numb and weak and clumsy, and she turned on the flood again to wash away the tiny crusted curls of dirt.

  She lay back, feeling the force of the water flowing all around her, bubbling at her feet, and she breathed deep, calling upon the right hand and then the left to flex, and then on the right foot and then the left; and then began these exercises over again. The water grew hotter, comfortably so. The rushing noise blotted out all sounds from the other room. She listed in moments of pure and thoughtless comfort, the last moments of comfort she might ever know.

  It had gone like this:

  Christmas Day and the sun coming in on the parlor floor, and she lying on the Chinese rug in a pool of her own blood, and he sitting there beside her--newborn, amazed, unfinished.

  But then human infants are actually born unfinished, far more unfinished than he had been. That was the way to view it. He was simply more fully completed than a human baby. Not a monster, no.

  She helped him walk, stand, marveling at his eruptions of speech, and ringing laughter. He was not so much weak as lacking in coordination. He seemed to recognize everything he saw, to be able to name it correctly, as soon as the initial shock had been experienced. The color red had baffled and almost horrified him.

  She had dressed him in plain drab clothes, because he did not want the bright colors to touch him. He smelled like a newborn baby. He felt like a newborn baby, except that the musculature was there, all of it, and he was growing stronger with every passing minute.

  Then Michael had come. The terrible battle.

  During the battle with Michael she had watched him learn on his feet, so to speak, go from frantic dancing and seemingly drunken staggering to coordinated efforts to strike Michael, and finally to pitch Michael off balance, which he had done with remarkable ease, once he had decided, or realized, how it could be done.

  She was sure that if she had not dragged him from the site, he would have killed Michael. She had half lured him, half bullied him into the car, the alarm screaming for help, taking advantage of his growing fear of the sound, and his general confusion. How he hated loud sounds.

  He had talked all the way to the airport about how it all looked, the sharp contours, the absolutely paralyzing sense of being the same size as other human beings, of looking out the car window and seeing another human at eye level. In the other realm, he had seen from above, or even inside, but almost never from the human perspective. Only when he possessed beings did he know this and then it had always been torture. Except with Julien. Yes, Julien, but that was a long tale.

  His voice was eloquent, very like her own or Michael's, accentless, and giving words a more lyrical dimension, perhaps, she wasn't certain. He jumped at sounds; he rubbed his hands on her jacket to feel its texture; he laughed continuously.

  In the airport, she had to stop him from sniffing her hair and her skin and from trying to kiss her. But he walked perfectly by then. He ran, for the sheer fun of it, down the concourse. He leapt into the air. Under the spell of a passing radio, he had rocked to and fro--a trance she would see again and again.

  She took the plane to New York because it was leaving. She would have gone anywhere to get out of there. She felt a wild panic, a need to protect him from everyone in the world until she could get him quiet and see what he really was; she felt possessive and madly excited, and fearful, and wildly ambitious.

  She had given birth to this thing; she had created it. They weren't going to get their hands on it, take it away, lock it up away from her. But even so, she knew she wasn't thinking straight. She was sick, weakened from the birth. Several times in the airport she had almost passed out. He was holding her when they got on the plane, and whispering rapidly in her ear, a sort of running commentary on all they passed and saw, filled with random explanations about things in the past.

  "I recognize everything. I remember, don't you see, when Julien said this was the age of wonders, predicting that the very machines they then found so essential to life were going to be obsolete within the decade. Look at the steamboats, he would declare, and how fast they gave way to the railroad, and now people drive in these automobiles. He knew all of it, he would have loved this plane, you see. I understand how the engine works...The highly combustible fuel is altered from a gelatinous liquid to a vapor and..."

  ...On and on it had gone as she tried from time to time to quiet him, and finally she had encouraged him to try to write, because she was so exhausted, she could no longer make sense of what he was saying. He couldn't write. He couldn't control the pen. But he could read, and thereafter went through every piece of reading material he could acquire.

  In New York, he demanded a tape recorder, and she fell asleep in a suite at the Helmsley Palace, as he walked back and forth, now and then bending his knees, or stretching his arm, talking into the recorder.

  "Now there is in fact a real sense of time, of a ticking, as if there existed in the world even before the invention of clocks a pure ticking, a natural measurement, perhaps connected to the rhythm of our hearts, and our breath; and the smallest changes in temperature affect me. I do not like the cold. I do not know if I am hungry or not. But Rowan must eat, Rowan is weak, and sick-smelling..."

  She'd awakened to the most erotic sensations, a mouth on her breast pulling so hard on the nipple it almost hurt. She'd screamed, opened her eyes, and felt his head there, and felt his fingers lying on her belly as he sucked and sucked. Her breast itself was hard and full; the left breast, free in her own hand, felt like marble.

  She'd panicked for a moment. She had wanted to cry for help. She'd pushed him aside, assuring him she would order food for them both, and after she'd made the call, she'd started to make another.

  "For what?" he'd demanded. His baby face had already elongated slightly, and his blue eyes seemed not so round anymore, as though the lids were lowering just a bit and becoming more natural.

  He snatched the phone out of her hand. "Don't call anyone else."

  "I want to know if Michael is all right."

  "It doesn't matter whether he is or not. Where shall we go? What do we do?"

  She was so tired she could scarce keep her eyes open. He lifted her effortlessly and carried her into the bath and told her he had to wash the smell off her--of sickness and birth and of Michael. Especially the smell of Michael, his "unwilling" father. Michael, the Irishman.

  At one point, as they sat in the tub together, facing each other, a moment of consummate horror overtook her. It seemed he was the word made flesh in the absolute sense, staring a
t her, his face very round and pale in a healthy pinkish way like the face of an infant, eyes gazing at her with wonder, lips curling in an angelic smile. She almost began to scream again.

  There was no hair on his chest. The food had come. He wanted her milk again. He held her in the bath sucking her, hurting her, until she cried out.

  The waiters in the other room would hear her, she said, stop. He waited until the clatter of silver domes was over. Then he sucked hard at the other breast; it seemed a perfect balance between pain and pleasure, this zinging, thrilling sensation, radiating out from her nipples, and the hurt of the nipples themselves. She begged him to be gentle.

  He rose up on all fours in the water over her, and his cock was thick and slightly curved. He covered her mouth and slipped his cock between her legs. She was sore from the birth, but she locked her arms around his neck, and it seemed the pleasure would kill her.

  Dressed in terry-cloth robes, they lay on the floor together, doing it again and again. Then he rolled over on his back and he spoke about the endless darkness, the sense of being lost, the warm blaze of Mary Beth. The great fire of Marie Claudette. The radiance of Angelique; the dazzling glow of Stella; his witches, his witches! He talked about how he would collect around Suzanne's body and feel her shiver, and know what she felt, but now he felt a distinct and separate sensation himself, which was infinitely more powerful, sweeter, richer. He said the flesh was worth the price of death.

  "You think you'll die like anyone else?" she asked.

  "Yes," he said and fell silent but only for a moment. He began to sing, or hum, or make some strange combination of both, imitating bits of melody which seemed familiar to her. He ate everything on the table that was soft and liquid. "Baby food," he said with laughter. He ate the mashed potato, and the butter, and drank the mineral water, but he did not want the meat.

  She examined his teeth. They were perfect, the same number as that of a mature human. No sign of wear or decay, obviously, and then his tongue was soft, but he couldn't bear this examination for long. He needed air! He told her she didn't know how much air he needed, and he threw open the windows.