Lasher

by Anne Rice

  "Very obvious. Aaron knows about this creature. He knows what it is. In the first days after Christmas, before the Mayfairs understood what had happened, careless things were done. Forensic evidence was gathered from the site of the creature's birth. It was sent to an impersonal agency. Then Rowan herself contacted a doctor in San Francisco, sending him tissue samples of this creature and of herself. This was a terrible error. The doctor who analyzed these materials in a private institute in San Francisco is now dead. The doctor who delivered the material, who came here to discuss it with the family, has completely disappeared. Last night he left his hotel here without explanation. He has not been seen since. In New York, the genetic tests done in connection with this creature have vanished. Same in a genetic institute in Europe to which the New York institution sent samples of his work. All traces of the being are now gone from official sources.

  "But we...we the Talamasca know all about this being. We know everything about him. More even than the poor unfortunates who studied his cells beneath the microscope. More even than the family now struggling to protect itself from him. The being will seek to eradicate our knowledge. This was inevitable. Perhaps...an error in judgment was made."

  "What do you mean?"

  The waitress set down the small cup of black espresso. Yuri tested the porcelain with his fingers. Too hot.

  " 'We watch and we are always here,' " said Stolov. "This is our motto. But sometimes these powerful things we watch, these brooding and unclassifiable forms of energy or evil or whatever they are--these things seek to destroy all witnesses, and we must suffer the consequences of our long vigilance, of our understanding, so to speak. Perhaps if we had been better prepared for the birth of this being. But then...I am not sure anyone knew that such a thing was really possible. And now...it is too late.

  "This thing will surely try to kill Aaron. It will try to kill you. It will try to kill me once it knows that I am involved in this investigation. That is why something has changed with the Talamasca. That is why something, as you said, is not right. The Elders have bolted the doors; the Elders would assist the family, yes, insofar as they can. But the Elders will not allow our members to be placed in jeopardy. They will not stand by idle as this thing seeks to invade our archives, and destroy our priceless records. As I said...these things have happened before. We have a mode for such assaults."

  "Yet it isn't an emergency."

  "No, it is merely another way of operating. A tightening of security; a protective concealment of evidence; a demand for blind obedience on the part of those in danger. That you, and that Aaron go back to the Motherhouse at once."

  "Aaron refuses to do this?"

  "Adamantly. He will not leave the family. He regrets his obedience on Christmas Day."

  "So what is the official goal of the Order? Merely to protect itself?"

  "To do the extreme protective thing."

  "I don't get you."

  "Yes, you do. The extreme protective measure is to destroy the threat. But that is what you must leave to us. To me and to my investigators. For we know how to do this, how to track this being, how to locate it, how to close in upon it, and how to stop it from achieving its goals."

  "And you want me to believe that our Order, our beloved Talamasca, has done this sort of thing in the past."

  "Absolutely. We cannot be passive when our own survival is at stake. We have another mode of operation. In that mode, you and Aaron can play no part."

  "There are pieces missing from this picture."

  "How so? I thought it was very complete."

  "You speak of a threat to the family. You speak of a threat to the Order. What about the threat to others? What is the moral disposition of this entity? If it does mate successfully, what will be the consequences?"

  "Ah, but that will not happen. It is unthinkable that that should happen. You do not know what you ask."

  "Oh, I think I do," said Yuri. "I spoke, after all, with those who've seen it. Once this creature has secured the proper females, it could propagate at remarkable speed--the sort of speed one sees in the insect world or the world of reptiles, a speed so much greater than that of other mammals that it would soon overrun them, overpower them, conceivably wipe them out."

  "You are very clever. You know too much about this thing. It's unfortunate that you read the file, that you went to Donnelaith. But don't fear, this creature will not succeed. And who knows its life span? Who knows but that its hour, with or without propagation, would not be short?"

  Stolov lifted his knife and fork, cut a small wedge-shaped piece from the sweet roll on the plate before him and ate it silently, while Yuri watched. Then he set down the knife and fork and looked at Yuri.

  "Persuade Aaron to go back with you. Persuade him to leave the Mayfair family and their problems in our hands."

  "You know, it just doesn't sound right," said Yuri. "There is so much involved here. And you don't speak of the big picture. And this is not the style of the Talamasca which I know. This thing, it is so dangerous...No. This does not fit with what I know of my Order, my brethren, not at all."

  "What in the world can you possibly mean?"

  "You're very patient with me. I appreciate it. But our Order is too smooth for all this. The Elders know how to take care of everything without creating suspicion and alarm. There's something crude about the way it all happened. It would have been a simple thing for the Elders to keep me contented in London. To keep Aaron contented. But this is all clumsy, hasty. Impolite. I don't know. This is not the Talamasca to me."

  "Yuri, the Order expected your complete obedience. It had a right to expect it." For the first time, the man displayed a tiny bit of anger. He laid his napkin down on the table, rudely, beside his fork. Dirty napkin on the table. Napkin smeared with sugar and stained with droplets of coffee. Yuri stared at it.

  "Yuri," said Stolov. "Women have died in the last forty-eight hours. This doctor, Samuel Larkin, is probably dead too. Rowan Mayfair will die sometime during the next few weeks. The Elders did not expect that you would cause them trouble at this hour. They did not anticipate that you would add to their burdens, any more than they anticipated Aaron's disloyalty."

  "Disloyalty?"

  "I told you. He won't leave the family. But he is an old man. There is nothing he can do against Lasher. There never was!" Anger again.

  Yuri sat back. He thought for a long moment. He stared at the napkin. The man picked it up, wiped his mouth with it again and laid it back down. Yuri stared at it.

  "I want to communicate with the Elders," said Yuri. "I want to know these things from them."

  "Of course. Take Aaron with you today. Take him to New York. You're tired. Rest first if you will, but only in a location known to us. Then go. And when you reach New York, you can contact the Elders. You will have time. You can discuss this between you, you and Aaron, and then you must go on back to London. You must go home."

  Yuri stood up. He laid the napkin on the chair. "Are you coming with me to see Aaron?"

  "Yes, maybe it is for the best that you are here. Maybe it is for the best, for on my own I don't know that I could ever have convinced him to leave here. We'll go now. It's time I talked to him myself."

  "You mean you have not done that?"

  "Yuri, I have my hands full, as they say. And Aaron is not cooperative now."

  There was a car waiting for them, an egregious American Lincoln limousine. It was lined in gray velvet. Its glass was so dim that the outside world fell under an edict of utter night. Impossible to really see a city through such windows, Yuri thought. He sat very still. He was thinking of something that had happened to him years ago.

  He was remembering the long train ride with his mother into Serbia. She had given him something. An ice pick, though he did not know what it was at the time. It was a long rounded and pointed instrument, made of metal, with a wooden handle which had once been painted, and from which the paint had been chipped away.

  "Here, you keep thi
s," she'd said. "You use it if you have to. You stick it straight in...between the ribs."

  How fierce she'd looked in those moments. And he had been so startled. "But who's going to hurt us?" he had asked. He did not know at this moment whatever became of the ice pick. Perhaps it had been left on the train.

  He had failed her, hadn't he? Failed her and himself. And now he realized--as this smooth car went up on the freeway, and gained speed--he had no weapon, no ice pick, no knife. Even the Swiss Army knife he carried he had left at home because he was taking a plane. They don't want such things on a plane.

  "You'll feel better once you've communicated with the Elders, once you've reported in and been officially invited to return home."

  Yuri looked at Stolov, who sat there all in priestly black, with only a bit of white collar showing, and his large pale hands opening and closing as they rested on his knees.

  Yuri smiled very deliberately. "You're right," he said. "A fax sent to a number in Amsterdam. It is so well calculated to inspire trust."

  "Yuri, please, we need you," said the man with visible and heartfelt distress.

  "I'm sure you do. How far are we from Aaron?"

  "Only a few minutes. Everything here is small. Only a few minutes, and we will be there."

  Yuri took the black mouthpiece from the velvet-paneled wall. "Driver," he said.

  "Yes, sir."

  "I want you to stop at a place that sells weapons, guns. You know such a place? Not far out of the way for us?"

  "Yes, sir, South Rampart Street."

  "That will be fine."

  "Why are you doing this?" asked Stolov, pale bushy eyebrows knitted, face almost sad.

  "It's the gypsy in me," said Yuri. "Don't worry."

  The man on South Rampart Street had an arsenal beneath the glass and on the wall behind him. "You need a Louisiana driver's license," he said.

  Stolov was watching. This infuriated Yuri, that Stolov stood there, watching, as if he were entitled.

  "This is an emergency," said Yuri. "I need a gun with a long barrel, there, that's fine. Three fifty-seven Magnum. A box of cartridges. Here." He took the money out of his pocket, hundred-dollar bills, ten of them, then twenty, slowly counted out. "Do not worry," he said. "I am not a crook. But I need the gun. You understand?"

  He loaded it there, in the shadowy little store with Stolov watching. He put the rest of the bullets into his pockets, divided up in little handfuls, heavy, loose.

  As they stepped into the sunlight, Stolov said: "You think it's a simple matter of shooting this thing?"

  "No. You are going to stop it, remember? We are going home, Aaron and I. But we are in danger. You said so. Terrible danger. And now I have my gun." He gestured to the car. "After you."

  "You must not do anything stupid or foolish," said the other man. It wasn't anger this time, just apprehension. He laid his hand on Yuri's hand. Yuri looked down. He thought how pale was the skin of this Norwegian, and how dark was his own.

  "Like what?"

  "Like try to shoot it, that's what." The man was exasperated. "The Order has a right," he said, "to finer devotion than this."

  "Hmmm. I understand. Don't worry about it. As we say all over the world where English is spoken, no problem! OK?"

  He flashed a smile at Stolov and opened the door of the car for him and waited for him to get in. Now it was Stolov who was suspicious, uneasy, even a little frightened.

  And I barely know how to pull the trigger, Yuri thought.

  Twenty-six

  MONA HAD NEVER thought her first days at Mayfair and Mayfair would be like this. She was at the big desk in Pierce's spacious dark-paneled office, typing furiously on a 386 SX IBM-compatible computer, just a tad slower than the monster she had at home.

  Rowan Mayfair was still alive now eighteen hours after surgery, and twelve hours after they'd taken her off the machines. Any minute she might stop breathing. Or she might live for weeks. Nobody really knew.

  The investigation was forging ahead. Nothing to do right now but stay with the others, and think, and wait, and write.

  She banged away on the white keyboard, faintly annoyed by the noisy click. "Confidential to File from Mona Mayfair" was her title. It was protected. No one could access this material except Mona herself. When she got home, she'd transfer via modem. But for now, she couldn't leave here. This is where she belonged. She had been here since last night. She was writing down everything she had seen, heard, felt, thought.

  Meantime every room in the vast complex of offices was occupied, busy soft voices speaking steadily and in conflict with each other, into different phones, behind partially open doors. Couriers came and went.

  It was quiet, without panic. Ryan was behind his desk in the large office, as they called it, with Randall, and Anne Marie. Lauren was down the hall. Sam Mayfair and two of the Grady Mayfairs from New York were in the conference rooms using all three phones. Somewhere, Liz Mayfair and Cecilia Mayfair made their calls. The family secretaries, Connie, Josephine and Louise Mayfair, were working in another conference room. Faxes kept rolling in on every machine in the place.

  Pierce was here with Mona, letting her have the big machine, on his mammoth mahogany desk, and looking rather defenseless at his secretary's smaller, more humble computer, in his tie and shirtsleeves, his coat on the back of the chair. He was not doing much of anything, however. He was simply too sleepy, and too grief-stricken, as Mona herself ought to have been, but was not.

  The investigation was entirely private, and it could not have been handled any better by anyone else.

  They had begun last night in earnest an hour after Rowan had been found. Several times Pierce and Mona had returned to the hospital. They had been there again at sunrise. And then gone back to work. Ryan, Pierce, Mona and Lauren were the nucleus of the investigation. Randall and several of the others came and went. It was now some eighteen hours since they had commenced their phone calls, their faxes, their communications. It was getting on dusk, and Mona was lightheaded and hungry, but much too excited to think about either thing.

  Someone would bring some supper in a little while, wouldn't they? Or maybe they would go uptown. Mona didn't want to leave the office. She figured the next piece of information would be from a Houston emergency room, where the mysterious man, six and a half feet tall, had had to seek some sort of medical help.

  The Houston truck driver had been the most important link.

  This was the man who had picked up Rowan yesterday afternoon. He had stopped in St. Martinville last night to tell the local police about the thin, crazed woman who had struck off on her own into the swamps. On account of him, they had found Rowan. He had been called, questioned further. He had described the place in Houston where she'd run up to his truck. He told all the things she said, how she was desperate to get to New Orleans. He confirmed that as of yesterday evening when he last saw her, Rowan had been right in the head. Crazed perhaps, but talking, walking, thinking. Then she had gone off alone into the swamps.

  "That woman was in pain," he'd told Mona on the phone this morning, recapitulating the entire tale. "She was hugging herself, you know, like a woman having cramps."

  Gerald Mayfair, still stunned and sick over the fact that Dr. Samuel Larkin had slipped away from his care and vanished, had gone with Shelby, Pierce's big sister, and Patrick, Mona's father, off to the swamp near St. Martinville to search the spot where Rowan had been found.

  Rowan had been hemorrhaging, just like the others, though she was not dead. At twelve last night they had performed an emergency hysterectomy on the unconscious woman, with only Michael there--in tears--to consent. It was either that or she'd never make it till morning. Incomplete miscarriage. Other complications. "Look, we're lucky she's still breathing."

  And breathing she was.

  Who knew what they might discover up there in the grass in that St. Martinville swamp park? It was Mona who had suggested this and was all for going herself. Patrick, her dad, was all sober
ed up now and determined to be of help. Ryan had wanted Mona to remain here with him. Mona couldn't quite figure that one. Was Ryan worried about her?

  But then when Ryan started to buzz her over the intercom every few minutes to ask her some minor question, or make some minor suggestion, she knew that he simply wanted her support. OK by her. She was there to give it. In between calls, she typed, she wrote, she recorded, she described.

  The Houston office building had been discovered before noon.

  It was only walking distance from where Rowan had appeared on the highway. Unoccupied except for the fifteenth floor, which had been leased to a man and a woman. The fifteenth floor was a grim scene. Rowan had been a prisoner. For long periods Rowan had been tied to a bed. The mattress was filthy with urine and feces, yet it had been laid with fresh sheets, and surrounded by flowers, some of which were still fresh. There was fresh food.

  It was ghastly, all of it. There had been plenty of blood--not Rowan's--in the bathroom. The man had been hurt there, obviously, maybe even knocked unconscious. Photographs of the bathroom had already come in. But the bloody footprints leading to the elevator, and out the front doors of the building, clearly indicated he had left on his own.

  "Looks to me from this like he fell again in the elevator. See that. That's blood all over the carpet. He's weak, he's hurt."

  Well, he had been then, but was he still hurt now?

  They were canvassing every emergency room in the entire city. Every hospital, clinic, doctor's office. They would check the suburbs, and then move in concentric circles, checking, until they found where the bleeding man had gone. Within the direct vicinity of the building they were checking door to door. They were checking alleyways, and rooftops, restaurants, buildings that were boarded up. If the man was anywhere nearby, wounded, they would find him.

  As it was, the bloody foot tracks had vanished under the wheels of the passing traffic. Whether the man had climbed into a vehicle or simply crossed to the other side could never be known.

  The entire investigation was private, the best that money could buy.

  One agency after another had been enlisted. Tasks were constantly being assigned, information collated. Private doctors had gathered the blood samples in the Houston bathroom and taken them to private laboratories, the names of which were known only to Lauren and Ryan. The grim prison rooms had been fingerprinted. Every article of clothing, and there had been many, had been packed, labeled and shipped to Mayfair and Mayfair. Things had already started to arrive.