Lasher lotmw-2

by Anne Rice

  More and more she kept her journal in narrative form, so that if something happened to her, if someone found it, that person could understand it.

  “We’ve stayed long enough in Paris,” she said. “They might come to find us.” Two bank wires had come in. They had a fortune at their disposal and it took her all afternoon, with him at her side, to assign the money to various accounts so they could hide it. She wanted to leave, perhaps only to be warmer.

  “Come now, darling dear, we have only been in ten different hotels. Stop worrying, stop checking the locks, you know what it is, it’s the serotonin in your brain, it’s a fear-flight mechanism gone wrong. You’re obsessive-compulsive, you always have been.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I told you…I…” and then he stopped. He was beginning to be a little less confident, maybe “…I knew all that because once you knew. When I was spirit I knew what my witches knew. It was I…?”

  “What’s the matter with you, what are you thinking?”

  In the night he stood at the window and looked out at the light of Paris. He made love to her over and over, whether she was asleep or awake. His mustache had come in thick and finally soft, and his beard was now covering his entire chin.

  But the soft spot in his skull was still there.

  Indeed, his entire schedule of growth rates seemed programmed and different. She began to make comparisons to other species, listing his various characteristics. For example he possessed the strength of a lower primate in his arms, yet an enhanced ability with his fingers and thumbs. She would like to see what happened if he got access to a piano. His need for air was his great vulnerability. It was conceivable that he could be smothered. But he was so strong. So very strong. What would happen to him in water?

  They left Paris for Berlin. He did not like the sound of the German language; it was not ugly to him, but “pointed,” he said, he couldn’t shut out the sharp intrusive sounds. He wanted to get out of Germany.

  That week she miscarried. Cramps like seizures, and blood all over the bathroom before she’d realized what was happening. He stared at the blood in utter puzzlement.

  “I have to rest,” she said again. If only she could rest, some quiet place, where there was no singing and no poems and nothing, just peace. But she scraped up the tiny gelatinous mass at the core of her hemorrhage. An embryo at that stage of pregnancy would have been microscopic. There was something here, and it had limbs! It repulsed her and fascinated her. She insisted that they go to a laboratory where she could study it further.

  She managed three hours there before people began to question them. She had made copious notes.

  “There are two kinds of mutation,” she told him, “those which can be passed on and those which cannot. This is not a singular occurrence, your birth, it’s conceivable that you are…a species. But how could this be? How could this happen? How could one combination of telekinesis…” She broke off, resorting again to scientific terms. From the clinic she had stolen blood equipment and now she drew some of her own and properly sealed the vials.

  He smiled at her in a grim way. “You don’t really love me,” he said coldly.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Can you love the truth more than mystery?”

  “What is the truth?” She approached him, put her hands on his face and looked into his eyes. “What do you remember way back, from the very beginning, from the time before humans came on the earth? You remember you talked of such things, of the world of the spirits and how the spirits had learned from humans. You spoke…”

  “I don’t remember anything,” he said blankly.

  He sat at the table reading over what he had written. He stretched out his long legs, crossed his ankles, cradled his head on his wrists against the back of the chair and listened to his own tape recordings. His hair now reached his shoulders. He asked her questions as if testing her, “Who was Mary Beth? Who was her mother?”

  Over and over she recounted the family history as she knew it. She repeated the stories from the Talamasca files and random things she had heard from the others. She described-at his request-all the living Mayfairs she knew. He had begun to be quiet, listening to her, forcing her to speak, for hours.

  This was agony.

  “I am by nature quiet,” she said. “I cannot…I cannot…”

  “Who were Julien’s brothers, name them and their children.”

  At last, so exhausted she couldn’t move, the cramps coming again as if she had been impregnated again and was in fact already aborting, she said, “I can do this no longer.”

  “Donnelaith,” he said. “I want to go there.”

  He’d been standing by the window, crying. “You do love me, don’t you? You aren’t afraid of me?”

  She thought a long time before she said, “Yes, I do love you. You are all alone…and I love you. I do. But I’m frightened. This is frenzy. This is not organization and work. This is mania. I am afraid…of you.”

  When he bent over her, she clasped his head in her hands and guided it to her nipple; then came the trance as he sucked up the milk. Would he never tire of it? Would he nurse forever? The thought made her laugh and laugh. He would be an infant forever-an infant who walks and talks and makes love.

  “Yes, and sings, don’t forget that!” he said when she told him.

  He finally began to watch television in long unbroken periods. She could use the bathroom without his hovering about. She could bathe slowly. She did not bleed anymore. Oh, for the Keplinger Institute, she thought. Think of the things the Mayfair money could do, if only she dared. Surely they were looking for her, looking for them both.

  She had gone about this all wrong! She should have hidden him in New Orleans and pretended that he had never been there! Blundering, mad, but she hadn’t been able to think on that day, that awful Christmas morning! God, an eternity had come and gone since then!

  He was glaring at her. He looked vicious and afraid.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

  “Tell their names,” she said.

  “No, you tell me…”

  He picked up one of the pages he’d so carefully written out, in narrow cluttered scrawl, and then he laid it down. “How long have we been here?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He wept for a while. She slept, and when she awoke, he was composed and dressed. The bags were packed. He told her they were going to England.

  They drove north from London to Donnelaith. She drove most of the time, but then he learned, and was able on the lonely stretches of country road to manage the vehicle acceptably. They had all their possessions in the car. She felt safer here than in Paris.

  “But why? Won’t they look for us here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that they expect us to go to Scotland. I don’t know that they expect you to remember things…”

  He laughed bitterly. “Well, sometimes I don’t.”

  “What do you remember now?”

  He looked hateful and solemn. His beard and the mustache were ominous on his face. Signs of obvious sexual maturity. The miscarriage. The fontanel. This was the mature animal, or was it merely adolescent?

  Donnelaith.

  It wasn’t a town at all. It was no more than the inn, and the nearby headquarters of the archaeological project, where a small contingent of archaeological students slept and ate. Tours were offered of the ruined castle above the loch, and of the ruined town down in the glen, with its Cathedral-which could not be seen from the inn-and farther out the ancient primal circle of stones, which was quite a walk but worth it. But you could go only in the designated areas. If you roamed alone, you must obey all signs. The tours would be tomorrow in the morning.

  It chilled her to look down from the window of the inn and actually see it in the dim distorting distance, the place where it had all begun, where Suzanne, the cunning woman of the village, had called up a spirit named Lasher and that spirit had attac
hed itself forever to Suzanne’s female descendants. It chilled her. And the great awesome glen was gray and melancholy and softly beautiful, beautiful as damp and green and northern places can be, like the remote high counties of Northern California. The twilight was coming, thick and shining in the damp gloom, and the entire world below appeared mysterious, something of fairy tales.

  It was possible to see any car approaching the town, from any direction. There was only one road, and you could see for miles north and south. And the majority of the tourists came from nearby cities and in busloads.

  Only a few die-hards stayed at the inn, a girl from America writing a paper on the lost cathedrals of Scotland. An old gentleman, researching his clan in these remote parts, convinced that it led back to Robert the Bruce. A young couple in love who cared about no one.

  And Lasher and Rowan. At supper he tried some of the hard food. He hated it. He wanted to nurse. He stared at her hungrily.

  They had the best and most spacious room, very prim and proper with a ruffled bed beneath the low white-painted beams, a thick carpet and a little fire to take away the chill, and a sweeping view of the glen below them. He told the innkeeper they must not have a phone in the room, they must have privacy, and what meals he wanted prepared for them and when, and then he took her wrist in his terrible, painful grip and said, “We are going out into the valley.”

  He pulled her down the stairs into the front room of the inn. The couple sat glowering at them from a small distant table.

  “It’s dark,” she said. She was tired from the drive and faintly sick again. “Why don’t we wait until morning?”

  “No,” he said. “Put on your walking shoes.” He turned and bent down and started to pull off her shoes. People were staring at him. It occurred to her that it wasn’t at all unusual for him to behave like this. It was typical. He had a madman’s judgment; a madman’s naïveté.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. They went back upstairs. He watched as she dressed for the cold outdoors. She came out fit for a long night of exploration, walking shoes laced over wool socks.

  It seemed they walked an endless time down the slope and then along the banks of the loch.

  The half-moon illuminated the jagged and broken walls of the castle.

  The cliffs were perilous, but there were well-worn paths. He climbed the path, pulling her along with him. The archaeologists had set up barriers, signs, warnings, but there was no one around. They went where they chose to go. New wooden staircases had been built in the high half-ruined towers, and down into dungeons. He crept ahead of her, very surefooted, and almost frenzied.

  It occurred to her that this might be the best time for escape. That if she only had the nerve she could push him off the top of one of these fragile staircases, and down he would go and splat, he’d have to suffer like any human! His bones weren’t brittle, they were mostly cartilage still, but he would die, surely he would. Even as she considered it, she began to cry. She felt she could not do it. She could not dispatch him like that. Kill him? She couldn’t do it.

  It was a cowardly and rash thing to imagine, far more rash than leaving with him had been. But that had been rash also. She realized it now. She was mad to think she could manage or control or study him on her own; what a fool, what a fool, what a fool. To leave that house alone with this wild and domineering demon, to be so obsessed in pride and hubris with her own creation!

  But would he have let it happen any other way? When she looked back on it, had he not rushed her, had he not pushed her, had he not said Hurry to her countless times? What did he fear? Michael, yes, Michael had been something to fear.

  But it was my error. I could have contained the whole situation! I could have had this thing under control.

  And in the pool of moonlight falling on the grassy floor of the castle’s gutted main hall, she found it easier to blame herself, to castigate herself, to hate herself, than to hurt him.

  It was doubtful she could have done it anyway. The one time she accelerated her step behind him on the stairs, he turned and grabbed hold of her and put her up in front of him. He was ever vigilant. He could lift her effortlessly with one of his long gibbonlike arms, and deposit her on her feet wherever he wished. He had no fear of falling.

  But something in the castle made him afraid.

  He was trembling and crying as they left the castle. He said he wanted to see the Cathedral. The moon had drifted behind the clouds, but the glen was still washed in an even pale light, and he knew the way, ignoring the preordained path and cutting down through the slopes from the base of the castle.

  At last they came to the town itself, to the excavated foundations of its walls, its battlements, its gates, its little main street, all roped off and marked, and there, there loomed the immense ruin of the Cathedral, dwarfing every other structure, with its four standing walls and their broken arches reaching like arms to enclose the lowering heavens.

  He went down on his knees in the grass, staring into the long roofless nave. One could see half the circle of what had once been the lofty rose window. But no glass survived among these stones, many of which had been newly put in place and plastered to re-create walls that apparently had tumbled down. Great quarries of stones lay to the left and to the right, obviously brought from other places to reassemble the building.

  He rose, grabbed her and dragged her with him, past the barrier and the signs, until they stood in the church itself, gazing up and up past the arches on either side, at the cloudy sky and the moon giving just a teasing light through the clouds that had no shape to it. The Cathedral had been Gothic, vast, overreaching perhaps for such a place, unless in those times there had been hordes of the faithful.

  He was trembling all over. He had his hands to his lips, and then he began to give off that humming, that singing, and rock on his feet.

  He walked doggedly, against his own mood, along the wall and then pointed up at one high narrow empty window. “There, there!” he cried. And it seemed he spoke other words, or tried to and was then weary and agitated again. He sank down, drawing up his knees, and hugged her close to him, his head on her shoulder, and then nuzzling down onto her breasts. Rudely he pushed up the sweater and began to suckle. She lay back, all will leaving her. Staring up at the clouds. Begging for stars but there were no stars, only the dissolving light of the moon, and the lovely illusion that it was not the clouds which moved but the high walls and the empty arched windows.

  In the morning, when she awoke, he was not in the room! But neither was there a phone anymore, and when she opened the window, she saw it was a straight drop some twenty feet or more to the grass below. And what would she do if she did manage to get down there? He had the keys to the car. He always carried them. Would she run to others for help, explain she was being kept prisoner? Then what would he do?

  She could think it through, all the possibilities. They went round like horses on a carousel in her mind until she gave up.

  She washed, dressed, and wrote in her diary. Once again, she listed all the little things she had observed: that his skin was maturing, that his jaw was now firm, but not the top of his head, but mostly she recounted what had happened since they had come to Donnelaith, his curious reactions to the ruins.

  In the great room of the inn downstairs, she found him at the table with the old innkeeper in fast conversation. The man stood for her, respectfully, and pulled out her chair.

  “Sit down,” Lasher said to her. Her breakfast was being prepared now, he had heard her tread above when she stepped out of bed.

  “I’m sure,” she said grimly.

  “Go on,” he said to the old man.

  The old man was champing at the bit and picked up apparently where he’d left off, that the archaeological project had been funded for ninety years, through both wars, by American money. Some family in the States interested in the Clan of Donnelaith.

  But only in recent years had real progress been made. When they’d realized the Cathedral dated back t
o 1228, they’d asked the family in the States for more money. To their amazement the old trust was beefed up, and a whole gang from Edinburgh was now here, had been for twenty years, gathering stones that had been scattered and finding the entire foundations of not only the church itself but a monastery and an older village, possibly from the 700s. The time of the Venerable Bede, he explained, some sort of cult place. He didn’t know the details.

  “We always knew there was Donnelaith, you see,” said the old man. “But the Earls had died out in the great fire of 1689, and after that there wasn’t much of a town at all, and by the turn of the century nothing. When the archaeological project began, my father came to build this inn. Nice gentleman from the United States leased him this property.”

  “Who was this?” he asked in utter bafflement.

  “Julien Mayfair, it’s the Julien Mayfair Trust,” said the old man. “But you really ought to talk to the young chaps from the project. They are a well-behaved and serious lot, these students, they stop the tourists from picking up stones and what-not and wandering off with them.

  “And speaking of stones, there is the old circle, you know, and for a long time that was the place where they did most of their work. They say it’s as old as Stonehenge, but the Cathedral is the real discovery. Talk to the chaps.”

  “Julien Mayfair,” he repeated, staring at the old man. He looked helpless, bewildered, on guard. And as if the words meant nothing. “Julien…”

  By afternoon, they had wined and dined several of the students, and the entire picture emerged, as well as packets of old pamphlets printed from time to time to sell to the public to raise money.

  The present Mayfair Trust was handled out of New York, and the founding family was most generous.

  The eldest on the project, a blond Englishwoman, with bobbed hair and a cheerful face, rather chunky in her tweed coat and leather boots, didn’t mind at all answering their questions. She’d been working here since 1970. She’d applied twice for more funds and found the family entirely cooperative.