Lasher

by Anne Rice

  She lay in bed, his fingers tight around her wrist, thinking Houston, Texas, only one hour by air from home. "Only one hour."

  "Yes, they'll never guess," he said. "You might as well have taken us to the South Pole, you couldn't have thought of a more clever hiding place."

  Her heart sank. She slept. She was sick. When she woke she was bleeding. Miscarriage again, this time the viscid core was perhaps two inches long, maybe even longer, before it had begun to disintegrate.

  In the morning after she had rested, she took a stand. She was going to the institute, to test this thing, and to run what tests she could on him. She screamed and screamed. And finally in terror, and misery, he consented.

  "You're frightened to be without me, aren't you?" she asked.

  "What if you were the last man on earth?" he asked. "And I were the last woman?"

  She didn't know what that meant. But he seemed to know. He took her to the institute. All the normal motions of life were now nothing to him--hailing cabs, tipping, reading, walking, running, going up in an elevator. He had bought himself a cheap little wooden flute in a store, and he played it on the street, very dissatisfied with it, and with his own ability to make melodies with it. He didn't dare buy a radio. It would get its hands around his throat.

  Again, at the institute, she managed a white coat, a chart, a pencil, the things she needed, forms from a raft of desktop pockets, yellow, pink, blue slips for various tests, and began to fill out the bogus orders.

  She was at one minute his doctor, at another the technician, and whenever questioned, he rattled away like a celebrity in hiding.

  In the midst of it all, she managed to fill out a long note on one of the triplicate forms, addressed to the concierge at the hotel, instructing him to arrange for a medical shipment. The address Samuel Larkin, M.D., University Hospital, San Francisco, California. She would make available the material as soon as she could. The concierge was to charge her account for overnight delivery, heat-sensitive medical material.

  When they returned to the hotel room, she picked up a lamp and struck him. He reeled and then fell down, blood spattering from his face, into his eyes, but he came back, that wonderfully plastic skin and bones, like an infant surviving a fall from a ridiculously high window. He grabbed her and beat her again, until she lost consciousness.

  In the night she woke. Her face was swollen, but the bones were not broken. One of her eyes was almost shut. That would mean days in this room. Days. She did not know if she could endure it.

  The next morning he tied her to the bed for the first time. He used bits and pieces of sheet and made powerful knots, and had it half done when she awoke and discovered the gag in her mouth. He was gone for hours. No one came to the room. Surely some warning or instructions had been issued. She kicked, screamed, to no avail. She could not make a sound that was loud enough.

  When he returned, he took the phone out of hiding and ordered a feast for her and once again begged her forgiveness. He played his small flute.

  As she ate, he watched her every move. His eyes were thoughtful, speculating.

  The next day she did not fight when he tied her up, and this time it was with the masking tape he'd brought back the day before, and quite impossible to break. He was going to tape her mouth when she advised him calmly that she might smother. He settled on a less painful and efficient gag. She went mad struggling after he left. It did no good. Nothing did any good. The milk leaked from her breasts. She was sick, and the room spun.

  The following afternoon, after they had made love, he lay on top of her, heavy, sweet, his soft black hair between her breasts, his left hand on her right hand, dreaming, humming. She was not tied. He had cut the tape cuffs and let them dangle. He would make new ones when he wanted them.

  She looked at the top of his head, at the shining black mane, she breathed in the scent of him, and pressed her body against his weight, and then lapsed back half into sleep for an hour.

  Still he had not waked up. He was breathing deeply.

  She reached over with her left hand and picked up the phone. Nothing else in her stirred. She managed to hold the earpiece and punch the button for the desk, and she spoke so low they could barely hear her.

  It was night in California. Lark listened to what she had to say. Lark had been her boss. Lark was her friend. Lark was the only person who might believe her, the only person who would vow to take these specimens to Keplinger. Whatever happened to her, these specimens had to be taken to Keplinger. Mitch Flanagan was the man there she trusted, though he might not remember her.

  Somebody had to know.

  Lark tried to ask her all sorts of questions. He could not hear her, he said, speak up. She told him she was in danger. And might be interrupted at any moment. She wanted to blurt out the name of the hotel, but she was divided. If he came to look for her while she was still helpless, possibly she could not get the specimens out of here. Her mind was overwrought. She couldn't reason. She was babbling something to Lark about the miscarriages. Then Lasher looked up, snatched the phone from her hand, ripped the entire apparatus out of the wall and started to hit her.

  He stopped because she reminded him that the marks would show. They had to go to America. They should leave tomorrow. And when he tied her up she wanted him to make everything looser. If he kept tying her up so tight she would lose the use of her limbs. There was an art to keeping a prisoner.

  He wept in a dry quiet way. "I love you," he said. "If only I could trust you. If only you could be my helpmate, if you give me your love and trust. But I made you what you are, a calculating witch. You look at me and you try to kill me."

  "You're right," she said. "But we should go to America now, unless you want them to find us."

  She thought if she did not get out of this room she would go completely mad and be useless. She tried to make a plan. Cross the sea, get closer to home. Get closer. Houston is closer.

  A dull hopelessness covered everything. She knew now what she had to do. She had to die before she conceived by this being again. She could not give birth to another, could not. But he was breeding with her; he had impregnated her twice already. Her mind went blank with fear. For the first time in her life, she understood why some human beings cannot act when they are frightened, why some freeze and stare in a meek fashion.

  What had become of her notes?

  In the morning, they packed the suitcases together. Everything medical was in one bag, and in this she placed the copies of all the various tags and slips she had used to order various information at the clinics. She placed on top the written instructions for the concierge which included Lark's address. He did not seem to notice.

  She had taken considerable amounts of packing from the lab, but now she shoved towels in around the material. She shoved in her old bloodstained clothes.

  "Why don't you throw that away?" he demanded, "that horrid smell."

  "I don't smell anything," she said coldly. "And I need the packing, I told you. But I can't find my notebooks. I had all these notebooks."

  "Yes, I read them," he said quietly. "I threw them away."

  She stared at him.

  No record now but these specimens. No communication to anyone that this thing lived and breathed and wanted to breed.

  At the doors of the hotel, as he arranged for the car to take them to the airport, she gave the bag of medical specimens to the doorman, with a bundle of Swiss francs, and said in German hurriedly that the bag must go at once to Dr. Samuel Larkin. Turning her back on the man immediately, she walked towards the waiting car as Lasher turned and smiled at her and put out his hand.

  "My wife, how tired she looks," he said softly with a little smile. "How sick she has been."

  "Yes, very," she said, wondering what the bellhop saw when he looked at her, her bruised and thin face.

  "Let me hold you, darling dear." He put his arms around her in the backseat. He kissed her as they drove away. She did not bother to look to see if the doorman had gon
e inside with the medical bag. She did not dare. The concierge would find the address inside. He had to.

  When they reached New York, he realized the medical bag and all the test results were gone. He threatened to kill her.

  She lay on the bed, refusing to speak. He tied her up gently, carefully, giving her room to move her limbs but not to get free, the twined tape making the strongest rope in the world. He covered her carefully so she wouldn't be cold. He turned on the fan vent in the bathroom and then the television at a high but not unreasonable volume, and went out.

  It was a full twenty-four hours before he returned. She had been unable to hold the urine. She hated him. She wished for his death. She wished she knew charms with which to kill him.

  He sat by her as she made all the arrangements in Houston--yes, two floors in a fifty-story building where they would have complete privacy. It was small in Houston terms, such a complex as this, and right downtown, and Houston had quite a few empty ones. This had been the headquarters of a cancer research program until it had gone broke. There were presently no other tenants.

  All kinds of equipment was still on these three floors. It had all been repossessed by the owners of the property. But they could warrant nothing about it. Fine with her. She leased the entire space, complete with living quarters, offices, reception rooms, examining rooms, and laboratories. She arranged for utilities, rental cars, everything they would need to begin their serious study.

  His eyes were very cold as he watched her. He watched her fingers when she pressed the buttons. He listened to every syllable that passed her lips.

  "This city is very near to New Orleans," she said, "you realize that." She did not want him to discover it later and rail at her. Her wrists ached from his dragging her about. She was hungry.

  "Oh yes, the Mayfairs," he said, gesturing to the printed history, which lay in its folder. Not a day passed that he did not study this or his notes or his tapes. "But they would never think to look for you only one hour away by air, would they?"

  "No," she said. "If you hurt Michael Curry, I will take my own life. I will not be of further use to you."

  "I'm not sure you're of use to me now," he said. "The world is filled with more amiable and agreeable people than you, people who sing better."

  "So why don't you kill me?" she said. As he reflected, she did her level best with every invisible power at her command to kill him. It was useless.

  She wanted now to die, or to sleep forever. Possibly they were the same thing.

  "I thought you were something immense, something innocent," she said. "Something wholly unknown and new."

  "I know you did!" he answered sharply, infuriated, and dangerous, blue eyes flashing.

  "I don't think you are now."

  "Your job is to find out what I am."

  "I'm trying," she said.

  "You know you find me beautiful."

  "So what?" she said. "I hate you."

  "Yes, it was plain in your notebooks, 'this new species,' 'this creature,' 'this being'--how clinically you spoke of me, and you know? You are wrong. I am not new, my darling dear, I am old, older by far than you can imagine. But my time is coming again. I could not have chosen a better moment for my childlike loving progeny. Don't you want to know what I am?"

  "You're monstrous, you're unnatural, you're cruel and impulsive. You cannot think straight or concentrate. You're mad."

  He was so angry that he couldn't answer her for a moment. He wanted to hit her. She could see his hand opening and closing.

  "Imagine," he said, "if all mankind died out, my darling dear, and all the genes for mankind rode in the blood of one miserable apelike creature, and he passed it down and down, and finally, to the apes was born again a man!" She said nothing.

  "Do you think that man would be very merciful to the lower apes? Especially if he secured a mate? An ape woman who could breed with him to form a new dynasty of superior beings--"

  "You're not superior to us," she said coldly.

  "The hell I'm not!" he said wrathfully.

  "I don't know for sure how it happened, but I know it will never happen again."

  He shook his head, smiling at her. "What a fool you are. What an egotist. You make me think of all the scientists whose words I read now and listen to on the television. It's happened before, and before and before...and this time is the right time, this time is the moment, this time there shall be no sacrifice, this time we will strive as never in the past!"

  "I'll die before I help you."

  He shook his head wanly. He looked away. He seemed to be dreaming. "Do you think we will be merciful when we rule? Has any superior being ever been merciful to the weaker? Were the Spaniards when they came to the New World merciful to the savages they found there? No, it's never happened in history, has it, that the higher species, the species with the advantages, has been kind to those who were lower. On the contrary, the higher species wipes out the lower. Isn't that so? It's your world, tell me about it! As if I didn't know."

  The tears rose in his eyes. He laid his head on his arm and wept, and when he finished, he dried his eyes with a towel from the bath. "Oh, what might have been between us!"

  "What's that?" she asked.

  He started to kiss her again, to stroke her, and to open his clothes.

  "Stop this. I've miscarried twice. I'm sick. Look at me. Look at my face and my hands. Look at my arms. A third miscarriage will kill me, don't you realize it? I'm dying now. You're killing me. Where will you turn when I'm gone? Who will help you? Who knows about you?"

  He mused. Then, suddenly, he slapped her. He hesitated, but it seemed to have satisfied him. She was staring at him.

  He laid her on the bed, and he began stroking her hair. There was very little milk now. He drank it. He massaged her shoulders and her arms, and her feet. He kissed her all over. She lost consciousness. When she came round, it was late at night, and her thighs were sore and wet from him, and from her own desire.

  When they reached Houston, she realized she had arranged for a prison. The building was deserted. And she had leased two floors very high up. He indulged her for two days, as they acquired various things for their comfort in this high fairy-tale tower amid the neon and sparkling lights. She watched, she waited, she struggled to seize the slightest opportunity, but he was too wakeful, too fast.

  And then he tied her up. There was to be no study, no project. "I know what I need to know."

  The first time he left it was for a day. The second time for an entire night and most of the morning. The third time had been this time--four days perhaps.

  And now look what he had done to this cold modern bedroom of white walls and glass windows, and laminated furniture.

  Her legs hurt so much. She limped out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. He had cleaned up the bed; it was draped in rose-colored sheets, and he had surrounded it with flowers. This brought a strange image to her mind, of a woman who had committed suicide in California. She had ordered lots of flowers for herself first, then put them all around the bed, and taken poison. Or was she simply remembering Deirdre's funeral, with all those flowers and the woman in the coffin like a big doll?

  This looked like a place to die. Flowers in big bouquets, and in vases everywhere she looked. And if she died, perhaps he'd blunder. He was so foolish. She had to be calm. She had to think, to live and be clever.

  "Such lilies. Such roses. Did you bring them up yourself?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "They were all delivered and outside the door before I ever put the key in the lock."

  "You thought you'd find me dead in here, didn't you?"

  "I'm not that sentimental, except when it comes to music," he said with a bright smile. "The food is in the other room. I'll bring it to you. What can I do to make you love me? Is there something I can tell you? Is there any news that will bring you to your senses?"

  "I hate you totally and completely," she said. She sat down on the bed, because there were no chairs
in the room, and she could not stand any longer. Her ankles ached. Her arms ached. She was starving. "Why do you keep me alive?"

  He went out and came back with a large tray full of delicatessen salads, packs of cold meat, portable processed garbage.

  She ate it ravenously. Then she shoved the tray away. There was a quart of orange juice there and she drank all of it. She rose and staggered into the bathroom, nearly falling. She remained in that small room for a long time, crouched on the toilet, her head against the wall. She feared she would vomit. Slowly she made an inventory of the room. There was nothing with which to kill herself.

  She wasn't going to try it yet anyway. She had fight in her, plenty of it. If necessary, the two of them would go up in flames. That she could arrange surely. But how?

  Wearily, she opened the door. He was there, with arms folded. He picked her up and carried her to the bed. He had littered it with white daisies from one of the bouquets and when she sank down on the stiff stems and fragrant blossoms, she laughed. It felt so good she let herself go, laughing and laughing, until it rippled out of her just like a song.

  He bent to kiss her.

  "Don't do it again. If I miscarry again, I'll die. There are easier, quicker ways to kill me. You can't have a child by me, don't you understand? What makes you think you can have a child by anyone?"

  "Ah, but you won't miscarry this time," he said. He lay beside her. He placed his hand on her belly. He smiled. He uttered a string of rapid syllables in a hum, his mouth grotesque for one moment as he did it--it was a language!

  "Yes, my darling, my love, the child's alive and the child can hear me. The child is female. The child is there."

  She screamed.

  She turned her fury on the unborn thing, kill it, kill it, kill it, and then--as she lay back, drenched in sweat, stinking again, the taste of vomit in her mouth--she heard a sound that was like someone crying.

  He made that strange humming song.

  Then came the crying.

  She shut her eyes, trying to break it down into something coherent.

  She could not. But she could hear a new voice now and the new voice was inside her and it was speaking to her in a tongue she could understand, without words. It sought her love, her consolation.