Lasher lotmw-2

by Anne Rice

  “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, Angélique, 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 S
uzanne?”

  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 played 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.

  In Hamlen town, long long ago

  Nobody was happy, no, no, no

  Their pretty little town was full of rats!

  In everything they ate big holes

  And drank their soup from the big soup bowls

  And even made their nests in people’s hats!

  For a long time she sat beside him on the floor, watching him as he lay there with his eyes open. What a pure marvel he seemed, his hair black and flowing, facial hair thickening and the hands still like baby hands except they were bigger than her own hands, and his thumbs though well-developed were slightly longer than normal thumbs. She felt dizzy. She was confused. She had to eat.

  He ordered food for her, and watched her eat. He told her she must eat regularly from now on and then he knelt down before her chair, between her legs, and tore open the silk of her blouse and squeezed her breast so the milk came as out of a fountain into his mouth.

  At other medical establishments, she managed to breach the X-ray department, and twice to run a complete brain scan on him, ordering everyone else out of the laboratory. But there were machines she couldn’t use and those she didn’t know how to. Then she became bolder. She gave orders to people, and they helped her. She was masquerading as herself: “Dr. Rowan Mayfair, neurosurgeon.” Among strangers she took over as though she were a visiting specialist and her needs took priority.

  She picked up charts and pencils and phones when she needed them. She was single-minded. Record, test, discover. She studied the X rays of his skull, his hands.

  She measured his head, and felt that soft skin again in the very middle of his skull-the fontanel-bigger than that of an infant. Lord God, she could put her fist through that skin, couldn’t she?

  Sometime in those first few days, he began to have some consistent success with his writing. Especially if he used a fine-pointed pen that nevertheless glided easily. He made a family tree of all the Mayfairs. He scribbled and scribbled. He included in it all sorts of Mayfairs whom she did not know, tracing lines from Jeanne Louise and Pierre of which she’d been unaware, and over and over again, he asked her to tell him what she had read in the Talamasca files. At eight in the morning, his handwriting had been round and childish and slow. By night, it was long, slanted, and at such a speed that she could not actually follow the formation of a letter with her eyes. He also began the strange singing-the humming, the insectile sound.

  He wanted her to sing again and again. She sang lots of songs to him, until she was too sleepy to think.

  Along came a fellow slim and tall,

  And said to the man at city hall,

  My dear, I think I have a cure.

  I’ll rid your town of every rat

  But you have to pay me well for that,

  And the mayor jumped up and down and cried,

  Why sure.

  But more and more, he seemed baffled. He did not remember the rhymes she’d sung to him only days ago. No, no, say it again:

  The man in the wilderness asked of me,

  How many strawberries grew in the sea?

  I answered him, as I thought good,

  As many as red herrings grew in the wood.

  She herself was becoming increasingly exhausted. She’d lost weight. The mere sight of herself in a lobby mirror alarmed her.

  “I have to find a quiet place, a laboratory, a place where we can work,” she said. “God help me. I’m tired, I’m seeing things.” In moments of pure fatigue, a dread gripped her. Where was she? What was going to happen to her? He dominated her waking thoughts, and then she sank back into herself and thought, I am lost, I am like a person on a drug trip, an obsession. But she had to study him, see what he was, and in the midst of her worst doubts she realized she was passionately possessive of him, protective, and drawn to him.

  What would they do to him if they got hold of him? He had already committed crimes. He had stolen, perhaps he had killed for the passports. She didn’t know. She couldn’t think straight. Just a quiet place, a laboratory, what if they could go secretly back to San Francisco. If she could get in touch with Mitch Flanagan. But you couldn’t simply call the Keplinger Institute.

  Their lovemaking had tapered off somewhat. He still drank the milk from her breasts, though less and less often. He discovered the churches of Paris. He became perplexed, hostile, deeply agitated in these churches. He walked up to the stained-glass windows and reached up for them. He stared with hatred and loathing at the statues of the saints, at the tabernacle.

  He said it was not the right cathedral.

  “Well, if you mean the cathedral in Donnelaith, of course not. We’re in Paris.”

  He turned on her and in a sharp whisper told her, “They burnt it.” He wanted to hear a Catholic Mass. He dragged her out of bed before dawn and down to the Church of the Madeleine so that he would witness this ceremony.

  It was cold in Paris. She could not complete a thought without his interrupting her. It seemed at times she lost all track of day and night; he’d wake her up, suckling or making love, roughly, yet thrillingly, and then she’d doze again, and he’d wake her to give her food, talking on and on about something he’d seen on the television, on the news, or some other item or thing that he had noticed. It was random and more and more fragmented.

  He picked up the hotel menu off the table and sang all the names of the dishes. Then he went back to writing furiously.

 
; “And then Julien brought Evelyn to his house and there conceived Laura Lee, who gave birth to Alicia and Gifford. And from Julien also the illegitimate child, Michael O’Brien, born to the girl in St. Margaret’s orphanage, who gave it up and went into the convent to become Sister Bridget Marie, and then from that girl, three boys and one girl, and that girl married Alaister Curry, who gave birth to Tim Curry, who…”

  “Wait a minute, what are you writing?”

  “Leave me alone.” Suddenly he stared at it. He tore the paper in little pieces. “Where are your notebooks, what have you written in them?” he demanded.

  They were never too far from the room. She was too weak, too tired. And her breasts no sooner filled with milk than it began to spill under her blouse and he came to drink it. He cradled her in his arms. The swooning pleasure of his nursing from her was so great that nothing else mattered when it happened. All fear left her.

  That was his trump card, she figured, the comfort, the pleasure, the high-pitched glamour and joy of just being with him, listening to his rapid, often incoherent speech, watching him react to things.

  But what was he? She had lived with the illusion from the very first hour that somehow she had created him, that through her powerful telekinesis she had mutated her own child into him. Now she was beginning to see impossible contradictions. First off, she could remember no distinct scheme of elements being in her mind during that time when he was struggling on the floor to remain alive, the birth fluid all over both of them. She had given some sort of powerful psychic nourishment. She had even given colostrum, she remembered that now, the first spill from her breasts, and there had been a great deal of it.

  But this thing, this creature, was highly organized-no Frankenstein’s monster, made of parts, no grotesque culmination of witchcraft. He knew his own properties too-that he could run very fast, that he caught scents she did not, that he gave off a scent which others caught without knowing it. That was true. Only now and then did the scent intrude on her, and when it did, she had the eerie feeling it had been engulfing her all along and even controlling her, rather like a pheromone.