Lasher

by Anne Rice

  "Tell me about the others," she said.

  The tape recorder was on; he had loaded whole shelves of cassette tape onto the counter at the airport store. He was prepared. He knew. He understood the inner workings and the outer workings. Very few creatures knew both.

  "Talk about Suzanne and Donnelaith."

  "Donnelaith," he said, and he began to weep, saying he could not remember what had come before, only it was pain, it was something, it was a crowd of faceless beings in an antechamber, and when Suzanne had called his name, it was just a word tossed out on the night: Lasher! Lasher! Perhaps a confluence of syllables never intended to be that word, but it had rung some recognition in him, in a core of himself that he had forgotten he possessed, and he had "come together" for her and drawn close and sent the winds lashing down around her.

  "I wanted her to go to the ruins of the Cathedral. I wanted her to see the stained glass. But I could not tell her. And there was no more stained glass."

  "Explain all this to me slowly."

  But he couldn't disentangle it. "She said to make the woman sick. I made her sick. I found I could toss things into the air, strike the roof. It was like reaching for the light down a long long dark tunnel, and now, it's so sharp, I feel the sound, I smell it...say rhymes to me, tell me rhymes. I want to see something red again; how many shades of red are there in this room?"

  He began to crawl about on all fours looking at the colors in the carpet, and then moving along the walls. He had long hard sturdy white thighs, and forearms of uncommon length. But when he was dressed it wasn't so noticeable.

  Around three in the morning, she managed to escape to the bathroom alone; it seemed the greatest of dreams to have that moment of privacy. That was to be the pattern of the future. At times in Paris, she had dreamed only of finding a private bathroom, where he was not right outside the door, listening to every sound, calling out to her to make her confess she was still there and not trying to escape, whether or not there was a window through which she might have climbed.

  He got the passport himself the next day. He said that he would find a man who resembled him. "And what if he doesn't have a passport?" she asked.

  "Well, we shall go to a place of traveling men, won't we? Where people go to get passports, and then we shall wait for a likely suspect, as they say, and take the passport from him. You are not so very bright as you think you are, hmmm? That is simple enough for a baby."

  They went to the bureau itself; they waited outside; they followed a tall man who had just received his passport; at last he stepped in the man's path. She watched, afraid, and then he struck the man and took the passport from him. No one seemed to notice, if anyone even saw. The streets were crowded and the noise of the traffic hurt her head. It was cold, very cold. He pulled the man by his coat into a doorway. It was that simple. She watched all this. He was not needlessly brutal. He disabled the man, as he said, and the passport was now his.

  Frederick Lamarr, aged twenty-five, resident of Manhattan. The picture was close enough, and by the time he trimmed off some of his hair, no casual eye would know the difference.

  "But the man, he could be dead," she said.

  "I have no special feeling for human beings," he said. And then he was surprised. "Am I not a human being?" He clutched at his head, walking ahead of her on the pavement, pivoting every few seconds to make certain she was there, though he said he had her scent and he'd know if the crowds separated them. He said he was trying to remember about the Cathedral. That Suzanne would not go. She was scared of the ruins of the church, an ignorant girl, ignorant and sad. The glen had been empty! Charlotte could write. Charlotte had been so much stronger than Suzanne or Deborah.

  "All my witches," he said. "I put gold in their hands. Once I knew how to get it, I gave them all that I could. Oh, God, but to be alive, to feel the ground beneath me, to reach up, and feel the earth pulling down upon my arms!"

  Back in the hotel, they continued the more organized chronology. He recorded descriptions of each witch from Suzanne down through Rowan, and to her surprise he included Julien. That made fourteen. She did not point this out, because the number thirteen was something highly significant to him and mentioned by him over and over, thirteen witches to make one strong enough to have his child, he said, as if Michael had had nothing to do with it, as if he were his own father. He tossed in strange words--maleficium, ergot, belladonna. Once he even rattled along in Latin.

  "What do you mean?" she asked. "Why was I able to give birth to you?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  By dark something was becoming obvious. There was not a sense of proportion to his tale-telling. He might describe for forty-five minutes all the colors which Charlotte had worn, and how vague they had looked and how he could imagine them now, those fragile, dyed silks, and then in two sentences describe the flight of the family from Saint-Domingue to America.

  He wept when she asked about Deborah's death; he could not describe this.

  "All my witches, I brought them ruin, one way or another, except for the very strongest ones, and they hurt me, and whipped me and made me obey," he declared.

  "Who?" she asked.

  "Marguerite, Mary Beth, Julien! Damn him, Julien." And he began to laugh in an uncontrollable way and then sprang to his feet to do a complete imitation of Julien--proper gentleman tying a four-in-hand silk tie, putting on his hat, then going out, cutting off the end of a cigar, then putting it to his lip.

  It was spectacular, this little performance, in which he became another being, even to drawling a few words in languid French.

  "What is a four and hand?" she said.

  "I don't know," he confessed, "but I knew a moment ago. I walked in his body with him. He liked me to do this. Not so the others. Jealously guarding their bodies from me, they sent me to possess those they feared or would punish, or those they would use."

  He sank down and tried to write again, on the hotel pad and paper. Then he sucked on her breasts, nursed, shifting slowly from one to the other and back again. And she slept, and they slept together. When she awoke, he was taking her, and the orgasms were those long, dreamlike orgasms that she always felt when she was almost too exhausted to have them.

  At midnight they took off for Frankfurt.

  It was the first plane they could get across the Atlantic.

  She was terrified that the stolen passport had been reported. He told her to rest easy, that human beings weren't all that smart, that the machinery of international travel moved sluggishly. It wasn't like the world of the spirits, where things moved at the speed of light or stood still. He hesitated a long time before putting on the earphones. "I am scared of music!" he said. Then he put them on and surrendered, sliding down in the seat, and staring forward as if he'd been knocked unconscious. He tapped his fingers with the songs. In fact, the music so entranced him that he didn't want anything else until they landed.

  He wouldn't speak to her or answer her, and when she tried to get up to use the rest room, he held her hand in a tight clamp, refusing to cooperate. She won once, and he was watching her as she emerged, standing there in the aisle, earphones locked to his head, arms folded, tapping his foot to some beat she couldn't hear and smiling at her only in passing before they both sat down again, and she slept beneath the blanket.

  From Frankfurt they flew to Zurich. He went with her to the bank. She was now weak and dizzy and her breasts were full of milk and ached continuously.

  At the bank she was quick and efficient. She hadn't even thought of escape. Protection, subterfuge, those were her only concerns, oh, fool that she had been.

  She arranged for enormous transfers of funds, and different accounts in Paris and in London that would give them money, but could not likely be traced.

  "Let's go now to Paris," she said, "because when they receive these wires they'll be looking for us."

  In Paris, she saw for the first time that a faint bit of hair had grown on his belly, around his navel, curling,
and a tiny bit around each of his nipples. The milk was flowing more freely now. It would build up with incredible pleasure. She felt listless and dull-minded as she lay there, letting him suck from her, letting his silky hair tickle her belly, her thighs.

  He continued to eat soft food, but the milk from her breasts was all that he really wanted. He ate the food because she thought he should. She believed his body must require the nutrients. And she wondered what the nursing was taking out of her, if it was the reason she felt so weak, so listless. Ordinary mothers felt that, a great slothful ease, or so they had told her. The small aches and the pains had begun.

  She asked him to talk of a time before the Mayfair Witches, of the most remote and alien things he could recall. He spoke of chaos, darkness, wandering, having no limit. He spoke of having no organized memory. He spoke of his consciousness beginning to organize itself with...with...

  "Suzanne," she said.

  He looked at her blankly. Then he said yes, and he spun off the whole line of the Mayfair Witches in a melody: "Suzanne, Deborah, Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angelique, Marie Claudette, Marguerite, Katherine, Julien, Mary Beth, Stella, Antha, Deirdre, Rowan!"

  He accompanied her to the local branch of the Swiss Bank and she arranged for more funds, setting up routes so the money would go through Rome and even in one case through Brazil before it came to her. She found the bank officials very helpful. At a law firm recommended by the bank, he watched and listened patiently as she wrote out instructions, entitling Michael to the First Street house for the rest of his life, and to whatever amount of the legacy he wanted.

  "But we will return there, won't we?" he demanded. "We will live there, someday, you and I. In that house! He will not have it forever."

  "That's impossible now."

  Oh, the folly.

  An awe fell over the members of the law firm as they fired up their computers and put the information out on the wire, and soon confirmed for her, yes, Michael Curry in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, was ill and in intensive care at Mercy Hospital, but definitely living!

  He saw as she hung her head and began to cry. One hour after they left the lawyer's office, he told her to sit on the bench in the Tuileries and be still and that he would never be out of sight.

  He returned with two new passports. Now they could change hotels and be different people. She felt numb and full of aches. When they reached the second hotel, the glorious George V, she collapsed on the couch in the suite and slept for hours.

  How was she to study him? Money wasn't the point; she needed equipment she herself could not operate. She needed a medical staff, electronic programs, brain scan machines, all manner of things.

  He went out with her to buy notebooks. He was changing before her very eyes, but it was subtle. A few wrinkles had appeared on his knuckles, and his fingernails now seemed stronger though they were still exactly the color of flesh. His eyelids had the first subtle fold, which really gave his face a little maturity. His mustache and beard were coming in. He let them grow though they were prickly.

  In the notebooks, she wrote until she was so tired that she couldn't see, cloaking all her observations in the most dense scientific language. She wrote of his need for air, that he threw open windows everywhere they went, and sometimes gasped, and that his head sweated when he slept and the soft spot was no smaller now than when he'd been born, that he was insatiable for her milk and that she was sick with exhaustion.

  The fourth day in Paris, she insisted they go to a large central-city hospital. He did not want to do this. She more or less enticed him, making bets with him as to just how stupid human beings were, and describing the fun of sneaking around and pretending to be regular inmates of the place.

  He enjoyed it. "I get the hang of it," he said triumphantly, as if that phrase had a special meaning for him. He said lots of such phrases with delight. "Lo, dear, the coast is clear! Ah, Rowan, bubble bubble, toil and trouble." And sometimes he just sang rhymes that he had heard that were sort of jokes.

  "Mother, may I go out to swim,"

  "Yes, my darling daughter.

  Hang your clothes on a hickory limb,

  But don't go near the water!"

  He went into great peals of laughter at such things. Mary Beth had said this one, and Marguerite had said that. And Stella said: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers!" He said it faster and faster until it was a whistling whisper and no more.

  She began to try to amuse him, testing him with various little verbal tidbits and such. When she hit him with bizarre English constructions, like "Throw Mamma from the window a kiss," he became damned near hysterical. Even alliteration would make him laugh, like the song: "Bye, Baby Bunting! Mamma's gone a hunting, to get a little rabbit skin, to put her baby bunting in!"

  It was as if the shape of her lips amused him. He became obsessed with the rhyme, told to him by her, "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well!" Sometimes he danced as he sang these songs.

  In the realm of the spirits, music had delighted him. He could hear it at times when he could hear no other emanation from humans. Suzanne sang as she worked. A few old phrases came out of him, sounded Gaelic, but he really didn't know what they were! Then he forgot them. Then once he broke into plaintive Latin and sang many verses, but he could not repeat them when he tried.

  He woke in the night talking about the Cathedral. About something that had happened. He was all in a sweat. He said they had to go to Scotland.

  "That Julien, that clever devil," he said. "He wanted to find out all those things. He spoke riddles to me, which I denied." He lay back and said softly, "I am Lasher. I am the word made flesh. I am the mystery. I have entered the world and now I must suffer all the consequences of the flesh, and I do not know what they will be. What am I?"

  He was by this time conspicuous but not monstrous. His hair was now loose and shoulder length. He wore a black hat, pulled down over his head, and even the most narrow black jackets and pants fitted him loosely as if he were made of sticks, and he actually looked like one of the crazed bohemian young people. An acolyte of the rock music star David Bowie. People everywhere seemed to respond to him, to his mirth, to his innocent questions, to his spontaneous and often exuberant greetings. He struck up conversations with people in shops; he asked questions about everything. His enunciation had taken on a sharpness with a touch of French to it, but could change while he spoke to her, back into her pronunciation.

  When she tried to use the phone in the middle of the night, he woke up and tore her hand off the receiver. When she rose and tried to go out the door, he was suddenly standing beside her. The hotel suites, from now on, had bathrooms without windows or he found them unacceptable. He tore out the phones in the baths. He would not let her out of his sight, except during that time when she would lock the bathroom door before he reached it.

  She at last tried to argue with him. "I must call and find out what happened to Michael." He struck her. The blow was astonishing to her. He knocked her back on the bed, and the entire side of her face was bruised. He was crying. He lay with her, suckling her, and then entering her, and doing both at the same time, the pleasure washing through her. He kissed the bruise on her face and she felt an orgasm moving up through her even though his cock was no longer inside her. Paralyzed with pleasure, she lay with her fingers curling up, her feet to the side, like one who is dead.

  At night he talked about being dead, about being lost.

  "Tell me the earliest thing you remember."

  That there was no time, he said.

  "And what did you feel, was it love for Suzanne?"

  He hesitated and said that he thought it was a great burning hatred.

  "Hatred? Why was that?"

  He honestly didn't know. He looked out the window and said that in general he had no patience with humans. They were clumsy and stupid and could not process data in their brains as he could. He had pla
yed the fool for humans. He would not do it again.

  "What was the weather on the morning that Suzanne died?" she asked.

  "Rainy, cold. It rained so heavily they thought for a while they would have to delay the burning. By noon it had settled. The sky was clear. The village was ready." He looked baffled.

  "Who was King of England then?" she asked. He shook his head. He had no idea. What was the double helix, she wanted to know. Rapidly he described the two twin strands of chromosomes which contain the DNA in the double helix, our genes, he said. She realized he was using the very words she had once memorized from a textbook for an examination in childhood. He spoke them with cadence, as if it was the cadence of them that had impressed them through her into his mind, whatever his mind was...if you could call it that.

  "Who made the world?" she asked.

  "I have no idea! What about you? You know who made it?"

  "Is there a God?"

  "Probably not. Ask the other people. It's too big a secret. When a secret is that big there's nothing to it. No God, no, absolutely not."

  In various clinics, talking authoritatively, and wearing the de rigueur white coat, she drew vials and vials of his blood while he complained, and those around her never realized that she did not belong in the large laboratory, was not working on some special assignment. In one place she managed to analyze the blood specimens for hours beneath the microscope, and record her findings. But she did not have the chemicals and equipment she needed.

  All this was crude, simplistic. She was frustrated. She wanted to scream. If only she was at the Keplinger Institute! If such a thing were possible, to go back with him to San Francisco, to gain access to that genetic laboratory! Oh, but how could they do it?

  One night, she got up thoughtlessly to go down to the lobby and buy a pack of cigarettes. He caught her at the top of the stairs.

  "Don't hit me," she said. She felt rage, a rage as deep and terrible as she had ever known, the kind of rage which in the past had killed others.

  "Won't work with me, Mother!"

  Nerves frayed, she lost all control and slapped him. It hurt him and he cried. He cried and cried, rocking back and forth in a chair. To comfort him, she sang more songs.