Lasher lotmw-2

by Anne Rice

  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.

  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.