Lasher (41 page)

“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 gone 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.

I won’t hurt you anymore
, she thought. Without words, in gratitude and with love, it answered her.

Good God, it was alive, he was right. It was alive and it could hear her. It was in pain.

“It won’t take very long,” he said. “I’ll care for you with all my heart. You are my Eve, yet you are sinless. And once it’s born, then if you wish, you can die.”

She didn’t answer him. Why should she? For the first time in two months, there was someone else there to talk to. She turned her head away.

A
NNE
M
ARIE
M
AYFAIR
sat stiffly on the smooth beige plastic couch in the hospital lobby. Mona saw her as soon as she came in. Anne Marie wore her funeral suit, still, of navy blue, and her usual prim blouse with its score of ruffles. She was reading a magazine, her legs crossed, her black glasses down on her nose, and there was something cute about her as always, with her black hair drawn back in a twist, and her small nose and mouth, and the big glasses made her look both stupid and intelligent.

She looked up as Mona approached. Mona pecked her on the cheek and then flopped down beside her.

“Did Ryan call you?” asked Anne Marie, her voice hushed and private though there were very few other people moving in the brightly lighted lobby. Elevator doors opened and closed in an alcove far away. The reception desk with its high impersonal counter was empty.

“You mean about Mother?” Mona said. She hated this place. It occurred to her that when she was very rich and a huge Mayfair Mogul with mutual funds in every sector of the economy, she would spend some time on interior design, trying to liven up places as sterile and cold as this. Then she thought of Mayfair Medical! Of course that plan had to go forward! She had to help Ryan. They couldn’t shut her out. She’d talk to Pierce about it tomorrow. She’d speak to Michael, soon as he felt a little better.

She looked at Anne Marie. “Ryan said Mother was in here.”

“Yes, well, she is, and according to the nurses she thinks we’re trying to permanently commit her. That’s what she told them this morning when they brought her in. She’s been asleep ever since they stuck a needle in her arm. The nurse is supposed to call me if she wakes up. What I meant was—did Ryan call you about Edith?”

“No, what happened to Edith?” Mona barely knew Edith.
Edith was Lauren’s granddaughter, a timid belligerent recluse who lived on Esplanade Avenue and spent all her time with her cats, a predictable and boring woman, never went anywhere ever, not even to funerals apparently. Edith. What did she look like? Mona wasn’t sure.

Anne Marie sat up, slapped the magazine on the table, and pushed her glasses up against her pretty eyes. “Edith died this afternoon. Hemorrhage same as Gifford. Ryan says for none of the women in the family to be alone. It might be something genetic. We’re to be around people all the time. That way if something happens, we can call for help. Edith had been all alone, like Gifford.”

“You’re kidding me. You mean Edith Mayfair is dead? This really actually happened?”

“Yeah, I know. Believe me. Think how Lauren feels. Lauren went over there to scold her for not showing up at Gifford’s funeral. And there was Edith lying on the bathroom floor. Bled to death. And her cats were all around her licking up the blood.”