Lasher

by Anne Rice

  "You didn't see anything at all?" he said.

  He followed her out and down the hall.

  "I caught that scent," she said. "I think it was the scent that woke me up, and then I heard the noise of the window."

  How calm she was. He was in a blaze of protective fury.

  He opened the front door, and went out first, to the edge of the porch. Anyone could have hidden anywhere out there, behind the oaks, across the street behind a wall, even low down among the big elephant ears and palms that crowded his own garden. My own garden.

  "I'm going, Michael, I'll call you later," she said.

  "You must be nuts, you think I'm going to let you walk off home like this in the dark? Are you crazy?"

  She stopped on the steps. She had been about to protest, but then she too cast a wary eye on the shadows that surrounded them. She looked thoughtfully up into the branches and at the dark shadows of Chestnut Street. "I've got an idea. You follow me. Then when he springs out, whoever he is, you kill him with your hammer. You have your hammer?"

  "That's ridiculous. I'll drive you home," he said. He pulled her in and shut the door.

  Henri was in the kitchen, just as he ought to have been, in white shirt and suspenders and drinking his whiskey from a white china cup so no one would know it. He put down the newspaper, and stood up. He would take the child home, of course. Or to the hospital? Certainly. Whatever Miss Mona wanted. He reached for his coat, which was ever ready on the chair behind him.

  Michael walked out with them to the drive, distrustful of the darkness, and saw them safely to the car. Mona waved, a smear of red hair at the window. He felt an ache for her as they drove away, that he had let her go without a parting embrace, and then he was ashamed of it.

  He went back inside, locking the kitchen door behind him.

  He went back to the hall closet. His old tool chest was here, on the first floor under the stairs. This house was so big you had to have a tool chest for every floor of it. But these were his old tools, his favorites, and this was the claw hammer with the chewed-up old wooden handle, the one he had owned all his years in San Francisco.

  A strange awareness came over him and he clutched it tight, and went to peer through the library window again. This had been his dad's hammer. He'd taken it out to San Francisco when he was a boy, with all his dad's tools. Nice to have something of his dad's amid all the great carefully inventoried Mayfair wealth, just one simple tool or two. He lifted the hammer. Love to bash it through the burglar's skull, he thought. As if we don't have enough trouble in this house, and some bastard tries to break in the library window!

  Unless...

  He switched on the light nearest the corner and examined the little gramophone. Covered with dust. No one had touched it. He didn't know whether or not he could touch it. He knelt down, put his fingers on the soft felt turntable. The records of La Traviata were in their thick old faded album. The crank lay beside the thing. It looked impossibly old. Who had made the waltz play twice now in this house, when this thing itself lay inert and dust-covered?

  There was a sound in the house, a creaking as if someone was walking. Perhaps Eugenia. Or perhaps not.

  "Goddamnit," he said. "Son of a bitch is in this place?"

  He set out at once to make a search. He covered the whole first floor room by room, listening, watching, studying the tiny lights in the control boxes of the alarm which told him if anything was moving in rooms beyond him. Then he went upstairs, and covered the second floor as well, poking into closets and bathrooms that he had not entered in all this time, and even into the front bedroom, where the bed was all made and a vase of yellow roses stood on the mantel.

  Everything seemed all right. Eugenia was not here. But from the servants' porch he could see the distant guest house in back, ail aglow as if there were a party going on. That was Eugenia. She always turned on all the lights. She and Henri swapped shifts now, and so this was her turn to be alone back there, with the radio playing in the kitchen and the television tuned to "Murder, She Wrote."

  The dark trees shifted in the wind. He could see the still lawn, the swimming pool, the flags. Nothing stirred but the trees themselves, making the lights of the distant guest house twinkle deceptively.

  On to the third floor. He had to check every crevice and crack.

  He found it still and dark. The little landing at the top of the stairs was empty. The street lamp shone through the window. The storage room lay with its door open, all empty shelves clean and white and waiting for something. He turned and opened the door of Julien's old room, his own workroom.

  The first thing he saw was the two windows opposite, the window on the right, beneath which Julien had died in his narrow bed, and the window on the left, through which Antha had fled only to fall to her death from the edge of the porch roof. Like two eyes, these windows.

  The shades were up; the soft light of early evening flooded in on the bare boards and on his drafting table.

  Only those were not bare boards. On the contrary, a threadbare rug lay there, and where his drafting table should have been was the narrow brass bed, which had long ago been moved out of here.

  He groped for the light.

  "Please don't turn it on." The voice was frayed and soft, French.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  "It's Julien," came the whispered response. "For the love of heaven. I am not the one who came to the library door! Come in now while there is still time, and let me talk to you."

  He shut the door behind him. His face was teeming with heat. He was sweating and his grip had tightened on the hammer. But he knew it was Julien's voice, because he had heard it before, high high above the sea, in another realm, the very same voice, speaking to him softly and rapidly, putting the case to him, so to speak, and telling him he could refuse.

  It seemed the veil would lift; he would see the shining Pacific again, his own drowned body on the heaving waves, and he would remember everything. But no such thing occurred. What occurred was infinitely more frightening and exciting! He saw a dark figure by the fireplace, arm on the mantel, long thin legs. He saw the soft hair, white in the light from the windows.

  "Eh bien, Michael, I am so tired. It is so hard for me."

  "Julien! Did they burn the book? Your life story."

  "Oui, mon fils," he said. "My beloved Mary Beth burnt every page of those books. All my writing..." His voice was soft with sad wonder, eyebrows rising slightly. "Come in, come closer. Take the chair there. Please. You must listen to me.

  Michael obeyed, taking the leather chair, the one which he knew to be real, lost now among so many alien dusty objects. He touched the bed. Solid. He heard the creak of the springs! He touched the silken quilt. Real. He was dazed, and marveling.

  On the mantelpiece stood a pair of silver candlesticks, and the figure had turned and, with the sharp sudden scratch of a match, was putting a light to the wicks. His shoulders were narrow but very straight; he seemed ageless, tall, graceful.

  When he faced Michael again, the warm yellow light spread out behind him. Perfectly realized, he stood, his blue eyes rather cheerful and open, his face almost rapt.

  "Yes, my boy," he said. "Look at me! Hear me. You must act now. But let me speak my piece. Ah, do you hear it? My voice is getting stronger."

  It was a beautiful voice, and not a syllable was lost on Michael, who all his life had loved beautiful voices. It was an old-fashioned voice, like the cultured voices of those long-ago film stars he so cherished, the actors who made an art of simple speech, and it occurred to him in his strange daze that perhaps this was all more of his own fancy.

  "I don't know how long I have," the ghost said. "I don't know where I've been as I've waited for this moment. I am the earthbound dead."

  "I'm here, I'm listening to you. Don't go. Whatever you do, don't go!"

  "If only you knew how hard it has been to come through, how I have tried, and your own soul has shut me out."

  "I'm afraid of ghosts,
" Michael said. "It's an Irish trait. But you know that now."

  Julien smiled and stood back against the mantel, folding his arms, and the tiny candle flames danced, as if he really were solid flesh and he had stirred the air. And solid enough he seemed in his black wool coat and silk shirt. He wore long trousers and old-fashioned button shoes, polished to a perfect luster. As he smiled, his gently lined face with its curling white hair and blue eyes seemed to grow ever more vivid.

  "I'm going to tell my tale," he said, as a gentle teacher might. "Condemn me not. Take what I have to give."

  Michael was flooded by an inexplicable combination of trust and excitement. The thing he had feared all this time, the thing which had haunted him, was now here, and it was his friend, and he was with it. Only Julien had never really been the thing to fear.

  "You are the angel, Michael," said Julien. "You are the one who still has a chance."

  "Then the battle isn't over."

  "No, mon fils, not at all."

  He seemed distracted suddenly, woefully sad, and searching, and for one second Michael was terrified the vision would fail. But it only grew stronger, more richly colored, as Julien gestured to the far corner, and smiled.

  There the small wooden box of the gramophone stood on a table at the very foot of the brass bed!

  "What is real in this room?" Michael demanded softly. "And what is a phantom?"

  "Mon Dieu, if I only knew. I never knew." Julien's smile broadened, and once again he relaxed against the mantel shelf, eyes catching the light of the candles, as he looked from left to right, almost dreamily over the walls. "Oh for a cigarette, for a glass of red wine!" he whispered. "Michael, when you can't see me anymore, when we leave each other--Michael, play the waltz for me. I played it for you." His eyes moved imploringly across the ceiling. "Play it every day for fear that I am still here."

  "I'll do it, Julien."

  "Now listen well..."

  Ten

  NEW ORLEANS WAS very simply a fabulous place. Lark didn't care if he never left here. The Pontchartrain Hotel was small, but utterly comfortable. He had a spacious suite over the Avenue, with agreeable, traditional furnishings, and the food from the Caribbean Room kitchen was the best he'd ever tasted. They could keep San Francisco for a while. He'd slept till noon today, then eaten a fabulous southern breakfast. When he got home, he was going to learn how to make grits. And this coffee with chicory was a funny thing--tasted awful the first time, and then you couldn't do without it.

  But these Mayfairs were driving him crazy. It was late afternoon of his second day in this town and he'd accomplished nothing. He sat on the long gold velvet couch, a very comfortable L-shaped affair, ankle on knee, scribbling away in his notebook, while Lightner made some call in the other room. Lightner had been really tired when he came back to the hotel. Lark figured he'd prefer to be upstairs asleep in his own room now. And a man that age ought to nap; he couldn't simply drive himself night and day as Lightner did.

  Lark could hear Lightner's voice rising. Somebody on the other end of the line in London, or wherever it was, was exasperating him.

  Of course it wasn't the family's fault that Gifford Mayfair had died unexpectedly in Destin, Florida, that the last two days had been entirely devoted to a wake and a funeral and a sustained pitch of grief which Lark had seldom witnessed in his lifetime. Lightner had been drawn away over and over again by the women of the family, sent on errands, called for consolation and advice. Lark had scarcely had two words with him.

  Lark had gone to the wake last night out of prurient curiosity. He could not imagine Rowan Mayfair living with these strange garrulous southerners, who spoke of the living and the dead with equal enthusiasm. And what a handsome well-oiled crowd they were. Seems everybody drove a Beamer or Jag or Porsche. The jewels looked real. The genetic mix included good looks, whatever else came with it.

  Then there was the husband; everybody was protecting this Michael Curry. The man looked ordinary enough; in fact, he looked as good as all the others. Well fed, well groomed. Certainly not like a man who'd just suffered a heart attack.

  But Mitch Flanagan on the coast was breaking down Curry's DNA now and he'd said it was extremely strange, that he had as unusual a blueprint as Rowan. Flanagan had "managed," as the Keplinger Institute always did, to get the records on Michael Curry without the man's knowledge or permission. But now Lark couldn't get Flanagan!

  Flanagan hadn't answered last night or this morning. Some sort of machine kept giving Lark some minimal song and dance with the customary invitation to leave a number.

  Lark didn't like this at all. Why was Flanagan stalling him? Lark wanted to see Curry. He wanted to talk to him, ask him certain questions.

  It was fun to party and all--he'd gotten much too drunk last night after the wake--and he was headed to Antoine's tonight for dinner with two doctor friends from Tulane, both of them roaring sots, but he had business to do here, and now that Mrs. Ryan Mayfair was buried perhaps they could get on with it.

  He stopped his scribbling as Lightner came back into the room.

  "Bad news?" he asked.

  Lightner took his usual seat in the morris chair, and pondered, finger curled beneath his lip, before he answered. He was a pale man with rather attractive white hair, and a very disarming personal manner. He was also really fatigued. Lark thought this was the one with the heart to worry about.

  "Well," said Lightner, "I'm in an awkward position. It seems Erich Stolov was the one who signed for Gifford's clothes in Florida. He was here. He picked up her old clothes at the funeral parlor. And now he's gone, and he and I have not consulted on all this with each other."

  "But he's a member of your gang."

  "Yes," Aaron answered with a slight sarcastic grimace. "A member of my gang. And the advice from the Elders according to the new Superior General is that I am not to question 'that part' of the investigation."

  "So what does all this mean?"

  Lightner grew quiet before answering. Then he looked up.

  "You said something earlier to me about genetic testing of this entire family. You want to try to broach that subject with Ryan? I think tomorrow morning would not be too early to do it."

  "Oh, I'm for it. But you do realize what they'd be getting into. I mean they are the ones taking the risk, essentially. If we turn up congenital diseases, if we turn up predispositions to certain conditions--well, this information might affect everything from insurance eligibility to qualifying for the military. Yes, I want to do it, but I'd much rather concentrate on Curry right now. And this woman Gifford. No way we can get records on Gifford? I mean, let's take our time with this. This Ryan Mayfair is a pretty smart lawyer, as I see it. He won't go for wholesale genetic testing of his entire family. He'd be a fool if he consented or encouraged it."

  "And I am not in his good graces just now. If it weren't for my friendship with Beatrice Mayfair, he'd be far more suspicious than he is, and with reason."

  Lark had seen the woman in question. She'd come to the hotel yesterday with the news of the tragic death in Destin--a comely small-waisted woman, with upswept gray hair, and one of the most successful face-lifts he'd seen in recent years, though he figured it was probably not her first one. Eyes bright, cheeks perfectly sculpted, only a little telltale indentation beneath the chin and neck smooth as a young woman's neck. So--it was she and Lightner. He should have figured from the wake; she had clung to Lightner desperately, and several times Lark had seen Lightner kiss her. Lark hoped he'd have that kind of luck when he reached eighty, assuming he would. If he didn't stop hitting the booze, he might not make it.

  "Look," he said now, "if Gifford Mayfair has medical records in this city, I think I can access them through Keplinger, confidentially, without disturbing or alerting anyone."

  Lightner frowned and shook his head as if he thought this most distasteful. "Not again without consent," he said.

  "Ryan Mayfair will never know. You leave that to us, the Medical Secret Service
or whatever you want to call it. But I want to see Curry."

  "I understand. We can arrange that tomorrow as well. Maybe even later this evening. I have to think."

  "About what?"

  "All of this. Why the Elders would permit Stolov to come here and to interfere this way, to risk the displeasure of the family." The man seemed to be thinking aloud, not really directing his comments to Lark for an answer. "You know, I've spent all my life in psychic investigation. I've never become so involved with a family before. I feel increasing loyalty to them, and increasing concern. I'm rather ashamed I didn't interfere before Rowan left, but the Elders had given me a very specific directive."

  "Well, obviously they too think there is something genetically strange about this family," said Lark. "They too are looking for hereditary traits. Good Lord, at least six people at the wake last night told me Gifford was psychic. They said she'd seen 'the man,' some sort of family ghost. They said she was more powerful than she ever let on. I think your friends in the Talamasca are simply on the same track."

  Lightner wasn't quick to respond. Then he said, "But that's just it. We should be on the same track, and I'm not sure we are. It's all rather...puzzling."

  The phone interrupted, a low pulsing ring from the handset beside the couch, which looked rather crudely modern among all the mahogany and velvet furniture.

  Lark picked it up. "Dr. Larkin," he said, as he always had wherever he answered a phone, even one time a ringing pay phone in an airport, which had jerked him suddenly from his reverie.

  "This is Ryan Mayfair," said the man on the other end. "You're the doctor from California?"

  "Yes, glad to talk to you, Mr. Mayfair, didn't want to bother you on this of all days. I can hang in here until tomorrow."

  "Is Aaron Lightner with you, Doctor?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact he is. Do you want to speak to him?"

  "No. Please listen. Edith Mayfair died early today from a uterine hemorrhage. Edith Mayfair was Lauren Mayfair's granddaughter by Jacques Mayfair, my cousin and Gifford's cousin. And Rowan's cousin. Same exact thing which had happened to my wife. Edith apparently bled to death alone in her apartment on Esplanade Avenue. Her grandmother found her this afternoon after the funeral. I think we should talk about this question of genetic testing. There may be problems...coming to the surface in this family."