by Anne Rice
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 at 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 Angélique; 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.
“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.
