Lasher

Twelve

HAVE I DONE this to myself? Is this how it ends for me, because of my own selfishness, my own vanity? She closed her eyes again on the vast empty cube of a room. Sterile, white, it flashed against her eyelids. She thought, Michael. She said his name in the darkness, “Michael,” and tried to picture him, to bring him up like an image on the computer of her mind. Michael, the archangel.

She lay still, trying not to fight, to struggle, to tense, to scream. Just lie as if it were her choice to be on the filthy bed, her hands chained with loops of plastic tape to the ends of the headboard. She had given up all deliberate efforts to break the tape, either with her own physical strength or with the power of her mind-a power she knew could work fatal results upon the soft tissue inside the human frame.

But late last night, she had managed to free her left ankle. She wasn’t sure why. She’d managed to slip it loose from the encircling tape, which had become a thick ill-fitted cuff. And with that foot free she had, over the long hours of the night, managed to shift her position several times, and to slowly drag loose the top sheet of the bed, stiff with urine and vomit, and force it down and away.

Of course the sheets beneath were filthy too. Had she lain here three days or four? She didn’t know and this was maddening her. If she even thought about the taste of water she would go mad.

This very well might have been the fourth day.

She was trying to remember how long a human being could survive without food and water. She ought to know that. Every neurosurgeon ought to know something as simple as that. But since most of us do not tie people to beds and leave them captive for days on end, we don’t have need of that specific information.

She was casting back through her memory-of the heroic stories she’d read, wondrous tales of those who had not starved when others had starved around them, those who had walked miles through heavy snow when others would have died. She had will. That was true. But something else was very wrong with her. She’d been sick when he’d tied her here. She had been sick off and on since they’d left New Orleans together. Nausea, dizziness-even lying flat she sometimes felt she was falling-and an ache in her bones.

She turned, twisting, and then moved her arms the little bit that she could, up and down, up and down, and worked her free leg, and twisted the other one in the strap of tape. Would she be able to stand up when he returned?

And then the obvious thought came. What if he does not return? What if he chooses not to return; or what if something prevents him? He was blundering out there like a mad creature, intoxicated with everything he saw, and no doubt making his characteristic ludicrous errors in judgment. Well, there really wasn’t much to think about if he didn’t come back. She’d die.

Nobody would ever find her here.

This was a perfectly isolated place. A high empty office tower, crowded among hundreds of others-an unrented and undeveloped “medical building” which she had chosen herself for their hiding place, deep in the middle of this sprawling ugly southern metropolis-a city chock-full of hospitals and clinics and medical libraries, where they’d be hidden as they did their experiments, like two leaves on a tree.

She’d arranged the utilities for the entire building herself, and all of its fifty floors were probably still lighted as she had left them. This room was dark. He’d snapped off the lights. And that had proved a mercy as the days passed.

When darkness fell, she could see the dense, charmless sky-scrapers through the broad windows. Sometimes the dying sun made the silvery glass buildings glow as if they were burning, and beyond against the ruby-red sky rose the high dense ever-rolling white clouds.

The light, that was the thing you could always watch, the light. But at full dark when the lights came on, silently, all around her, she felt a little better. People were near, whether they knew she was there or not. Someone might come. Someone…Someone might stand at an office window with a pair of binoculars, but why?

She began to dream again, thank God, to feel the bottom of the cycle again-“I don’t care”-and imagine that she and Michael were together and walking through the field at Donnelaith and she was explaining everything to him, her favorite fancy, the one into which she could sink when she wanted to suffer, to measure, to deny all at the same time.

“It was one wrong judgment call after another. I had only certain choices. But the mistake was pride, to think I could do this thing, to think I could handle it. It’s always been pride. The History of the Mayfair Witches was pride. But this came to me wrapped in the mysteries of science. We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless. And I knew this, I knew but I forgot. That was my mistake.”

She pictured the grass; conjured the ruins; saw the tall fragile gray arches of the Cathedral rising from the glen, and it seemed she was really there and free.

A sound jolted her.

It was the key in the lock.

She grew still and quiet. Yes, the key turning. The outer door was closed loudly and fearlessly, and then she heard his tread on the tile floor. She heard him whistling, humming.

Oh, God, thank you, God.

Another key. Another lock, and that fragrance, the soft good fragrance of him as he drew close to the bed.

She tried to feel hate, to grow rigid with it, to resist the compassionate expression on his face, his large glistening eyes, so very beautiful as only eyes can be, and filled with sorrow as he looked at her. His beard and mustache were now very black and thick and like those of saints in pictures. His forehead was exquisitely shaped where the hair grew back from it, parted in the center with the smallest widow’s peak.

Yes, a beautiful being, undeniably beautiful. Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe it was all imagined that he had finally come back.

“No, my darling dear, I love you,” he whispered. Or did he?

As he drew closer, she realized she was looking at his mouth. There had been a subtle change to his mouth. It was more a man’s mouth, perhaps, pink and decisively molded. A mouth had to be that way to hold its own beneath the dark glossy mustache, above the curling close-cut locks of the beard.

She turned away as he bent down. His warm fingers wound around her upper arms, and his lips grazed her cheek. He touched her breasts with his large hand, rubbing the nipples, and the unwelcome sensation ran through her. No dream. His hands. She could have lost consciousness to shut it out. But she was there, helpless, and she couldn’t stop it or get away.

It was as degrading as anything else to feel this sudden utter joy that he was here, to kindle beneath his fingers as if he were a lover, not a jailer, to rise out of her isolation towards any kindness or gentleness proffered by the captor in a swoon.

“My darling, my darling.” He rested his head on her belly, nuzzled his face into the skin, oblivious to the filth of the bed, humming, whispering, and then he gave off a loud cry, and drawing up began to dance, round and round, a jig with one leg lifted, singing and clapping his hands. He seemed to be in ecstasy! Oh, how many times had she seen him do it, but never with such gusto. And what a curious spectacle it was. So delicate were his long arms, his straight shoulders; his wrists seemed double the length of those of a normal man.

She shut her eyes, and against her darkened lids the figure continued to jig and to twirl, and she could hear his feet thudding on the carpet, and his peals of delighted laughter.

“God, why doesn’t he kill me?” she whispered.

He went silent and bent over her again.

“I’m sorry, my darling dear. I’m sorry.” Oh, the pretty voice. The deep voice. The voice that could read Scripture over a radio in a car in the night as you drove endless miles all alone with it. “I didn’t mean to be gone so long,” he said. “I was off on a bitter and heartbreaking adventure.” His words became more rapid. “In sorrow, in discovery, witnessing death, and beset with miseries and frustrations…” Then he lapsed as always into the whispering and humming, rocking on his feet, humming and murmuring, or was it a whistling, a tiny whistling through his dry lips?

He knelt as if he had collapsed. He laid his head on her waist again, his warm hand dangling between her legs, on her sex, ignoring the filth of the bed once more, and he kissed the skin of her belly. “My darling, my dear.”

She couldn’t prevent herself from crying out.

“Let me loose, let me up. I’m lying here in filth. Look what you’ve done to me.” And then her anger clamped down on her voice, and she went motionless and soundless, paralyzed with rage. If she stung him, he might sulk for hours. He might stand at the window and cry. Be silent. Be clever. He stood watching her.

Then he drew out his knife, small, flashing, like his teeth, a flash like that in the sterile twilight of this empty room.

He cut through the tape so quickly! Nothing to it, this spindly giant reaching over her, slice, slice, slice.

Her arms were free-numb and useless-and free. With all her might and main she tried to lift them. She couldn’t lift her right leg.

She felt his arms sliding under her. He lifted her, and rose to his feet with her, tumbling her against his chest.

She cried. She sobbed. Free from the bed, free, if only she had the strength to put her hands around his neck and-

“I’ll bathe you, my darling dear, my poor darling love,” he said. “My poor beloved Rowan.” Were they dancing in circles? Or was it only that she was so dizzy? She smelled the bathroom-soap, shampoo, clean things.

He laid her down in the cold porcelain tub, and then she felt the first jet of warm water. “Not too hot,” she whispered. The glaring white tile was moving, marching up the walls all around her. Flashing. Stop.

“No, not too hot,” he said. His eyes were bigger, brighter, the lids better defined when she had last looked at them, the eyelashes smaller yet still luxuriant and jet-black. She noted this as if jotting it down on a laptop computer. Finished? Who could guess? To whom would she ever give her findings? Dear God, if that package had not reached Larkin…

“Don’t fret, my darling dear,” he said. “We are going to be good to each other, we are going to love each other. You will trust me. You will love me again. There’s no reason for you to die, Rowan, no reason at all for you to leave me. Rowan, love me.

She lay like a cadaver, unable to work her parts. The water swirled round her. He unbuttoned her white shirt, pulled loose the pants. The water rushed and hissed and was so warm. And the dirt smell was being broken. He hurled the soiled clothes away.

She managed to lift her right hand, to tug at the panties, and rip at them, but she hadn’t the strength to pull them off. He had gone into the other room. She could hear the sound of sheets being ripped from the bed; it was amazing all the sounds our minds registered; sheets being thrown in a heap. Who would have thought that such things even made a sound? And yet she knew it perfectly well, and remembered foolishly an afternoon at home in California when her mother had been changing the beds-that very sound.

A plastic package torn open; a fresh sheet let to fall open and then shaken out to loose its wrinkles and land on the bed.

She was slipping and the water was rising to her shoulders. Once again she tried to use her arms; she pushed and pushed against the tile and managed to sit forward.

He stood over her. He had taken off his heavy coat. He was dressed in a simple turtleneck sweater, and as always he looked alarmingly thin. But he was strong and stalwart in his thinness, with none of the twisted neurotic apology of the very lanky and the underfed and the overgrown. His hair was so long now it covered his shoulders. It was as black as Michael’s hair, and the longer it became the looser its curl, so that it was now almost wavy. In the steam from the tub, the hair at his temples curled somewhat, and she could see a glistening sheen on his seemingly poreless skin as he bent down again to caress her.

He steadied her against the back of the tub. He lifted his little knife-Oh dare she try to get hold of it! — and he cut loose her soiled panties, and pulled them up out of the bubbling water and threw them aside. He knelt by the tub.

He was singing again, looking at her, singing or humming, or whatever it was-this strange sound that almost reminded her of the cicadas at evening in New Orleans. He cocked his head to the side.

His face was narrower than it had been days ago, more manly perhaps, that was the secret, the last of the roundness had left his cheeks. His nose had become slightly narrower, too, more rounded at the tip, more fine. But his head was just about the same size, she figured, and his height was very nearly the same too, and as he took the washrag and squeezed it out, she tried to figure whether his fingers had grown any longer. It did not seem so.

His head. Was the soft spot still there in the top? How long would it take for the skull to close? She suspected the growth had slowed but not stopped.

“Where did you go?” she asked. “Why did you leave me?”

“You made me leave,” he said with a sigh. “You made me leave with hate. And I had to go back out in the world and learn things. I had to see the world. I had to wander. I had to build my dreams. I can’t dream when you hate me. When you scream at me and torment me.”

“Why don’t you kill me?”

A look of sadness came over him. He wiped her face with the warm, folded rag, and wiped her lips.

“I love you,” he said. “I need you. Why can’t you give yourself to me? Why have you not given yourself? What do you want that I can give? The world will soon be ours, my darling dear, and you my queen, my beauteous queen. If only you would help me.”

“Help you do what?” she asked.

She looked at him, and drew deep on her hatred, and her rage, and with all her might tried to send some invisible and lethal power against him. Shatter the cells; shatter the veins; shatter the heart. She tried and she tried, and then exhausted, lay back against the tub.

In her life she had accidentally with such hate killed several human beings, but she could not kill him. He was too strong; the membranes of the cells were too strong; the osteoblasts swarming at their accelerated rate, just as everything within him worked at that rate, defensively and aggressively. Oh, if only she had had more of a chance to analyze these cells! If only, if only…

“Is that all I am to you?” he said, his lip quivering. “Oh, God, what am I? A mere experiment?”

“And what am I to you that you hold me prisoner here, and leave me for days on end like this? Don’t ask love of me. You’re a fool if you do. Oh, if only I had learned from the others, learned how to be a real witch! I could have done what they wanted of me.”

He was convulsed with silent hurt. The tears stood in his eyes, and his pliant glistening skin flamed with blood for an instant. He made his long hands into fists as if he would hit her again, as he had in the past, though he’d vowed he never would again.

She did not care. That was the horror. Her own limbs were failing her; tingling, aching; pains in her joints. Could she have escaped from here herself if she had managed to kill him? Perhaps not.

“What did you expect me to do?” he asked. He leant down and kissed her again. She turned away. Her hair was wet now. She wanted to slide down into the water, but she feared she might not be able to bring herself back up. He crushed the rag in his hands, and began again to bathe her. He bathed her all over. He squeezed the water into her hair, washing it back from her forehead.

She was so used to his scent that now she didn’t really smell it; she felt only a warm sense of his nearness and a deep enervating desire for him. Of course, desire for him.

“Let me trust you again, tell me you love me again,” he implored, “and I’m your slave, not your captor. I swear it, my love, my brilliant one, my Rowan. Mother of us all.”

No answer came from her. He’d risen to his feet.

“I’m going to clean everything for you,” he said proudly like a child. “I’m going to clean it ail and make it fresh and beautiful. I’ve brought things for you. New clothes. I’ve brought flowers. I’ll make a bower of our secret place. Everything is waiting by the elevators. You will be so surprised.”

“You think so?”

“Oh yes, you will be pleased, you’ll see. You’re only tired and hungry. Yes, hungry. Oh, you must have food.”

“And when you leave me again, you’ll tie me up with white satin ribbon?” How harsh her voice was, how filled with utter contempt. She shut her eyes. Without thinking, she raised her right hand and touched her face. Yes, muscles and joints were beginning to work again.

He went out, and she struggled to sit up and she caught the floating cloth and began to wash herself. The bath was polluted. Too much filth. Flakes of human excrement, her excrement, floated on the surface of the water. She felt nausea again, and lay back until it was gone. Then she bent forward, her back aching, and she pulled up the stopper, fingers still numb and weak and clumsy, and she turned on the flood again to wash away the tiny crusted curls of dirt.

She lay back, feeling the force of the water flowing all around her, bubbling at her feet, and she breathed deep, calling upon the right hand and then the left to flex, and then on the right foot and then the left; and then began these exercises over again. The water grew hotter, comfortably so. The rushing noise blotted out all sounds from the other room. She listed in moments of pure and thoughtless comfort, the last moments of comfort she might ever know.

It had gone like this:

Christmas Day and the sun coming in on the parlor floor, and she lying on the Chinese rug in a pool of her own blood, and he sitting there beside her-newborn, amazed, unfinished.

But then human infants are actually born unfinished, far more unfinished than he had been. That was the way to view it. He was simply more fully completed than a human baby. Not a monster, no.

She helped him walk, stand, marveling at his eruptions of speech, and ringing laughter. He was not so much weak as lacking in coordination. He seemed to recognize everything he saw, to be able to name it correctly, as soon as the initial shock had been experienced. The color red had baffled and almost horrified him.

She had dressed him in plain drab clothes, because he did not want the bright colors to touch him. He smelled like a newborn baby. He felt like a newborn baby, except that the musculature was there, all of it, and he was growing stronger with every passing minute.

Then Michael had come. The terrible battle.

During the battle with Michael she had watched him learn on his feet, so to speak, go from frantic dancing and seemingly drunken staggering to coordinated efforts to strike Michael, and finally to pitch Michael off balance, which he had done with remarkable ease, once he had decided, or realized, how it could be done.

She was sure that if she had not dragged him from the site, he would have killed Michael. She had half lured him, half bullied him into the car, the alarm screaming for help, taking advantage of his growing fear of the sound, and his general confusion. How he hated loud sounds.

He had talked all the way to the airport about how it all looked, the sharp contours, the absolutely paralyzing sense of being the same size as other human beings, of looking out the car window and seeing another human at eye level. In the other realm, he had seen from above, or even inside, but almost never from the human perspective. Only when he possessed beings did he know this and then it had always been torture. Except with Julien. Yes, Julien, but that was a long tale.

His voice was eloquent, very like her own or Michael’s, accentless, and giving words a more lyrical dimension, perhaps, she wasn’t certain. He jumped at sounds; he rubbed his hands on her jacket to feel its texture; he laughed continuously.

In the airport, she had to stop him from sniffing her hair and her skin and from trying to kiss her. But he walked perfectly by then. He ran, for the sheer fun of it, down the concourse. He leapt into the air. Under the spell of a passing radio, he had rocked to and fro-a trance she would see again and again.

She took the plane to New York because it was leaving. She would have gone anywhere to get out of there. She felt a wild panic, a need to protect him from everyone in the world until she could get him quiet and see what he really was; she felt possessive and madly excited, and fearful, and wildly ambitious.

She had given birth to this thing; she had created it. They weren’t going to get their hands on it, take it away, lock it up away from her. But even so, she knew she wasn’t thinking straight. She was sick, weakened from the birth. Several times in the airport she had almost passed out. He was holding her when they got on the plane, and whispering rapidly in her ear, a sort of running commentary on all they passed and saw, filled with random explanations about things in the past.

“I recognize everything. I remember, don’t you see, when Julien said this was the age of wonders, predicting that the very machines they then found so essential to life were going to be obsolete within the decade. Look at the steamboats, he would declare, and how fast they gave way to the railroad, and now people drive in these automobiles. He knew all of it, he would have loved this plane, you see. I understand how the engine works…The highly combustible fuel is altered from a gelatinous liquid to a vapor and…”

…On and on it had gone as she tried from time to time to quiet him, and finally she had encouraged him to try to write, because she was so exhausted, she could no longer make sense of what he was saying. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t control the pen. But he could read, and thereafter went through every piece of reading material he could acquire.

In New York, he demanded a tape recorder, and she fell asleep in a suite at the Helmsley Palace, as he walked back and forth, now and then bending his knees, or stretching his arm, talking into the recorder.

“Now there is in fact a real sense of time, of a ticking, as if there existed in the world even before the invention of clocks a pure ticking, a natural measurement, perhaps connected to the rhythm of our hearts, and our breath; and the smallest changes in temperature affect me. I do not like the cold. I do not know if I am hungry or not. But Rowan must eat, Rowan is weak, and sick-smelling…”

She’d awakened to the most erotic sensations, a mouth on her breast pulling so hard on the nipple it almost hurt. She’d screamed, opened her eyes, and felt his head there, and felt his fingers lying on her belly as he sucked and sucked. Her breast itself was hard and full; the left breast, free in her own hand, felt like marble.

She’d panicked for a moment. She had wanted to cry for help. She’d pushed him aside, assuring him she would order food for them both, and after she’d made the call, she’d started to make another.

“For what?” he’d demanded. His baby face had already elongated slightly, and his blue eyes seemed not so round anymore, as though the lids were lowering just a bit and becoming more natural.

He snatched the phone out of her hand. “Don’t call anyone else.”

“I want to know if Michael is all right.”

“It doesn’t matter whether he is or not. Where shall we go? What do we do?”

She was so tired she could scarce keep her eyes open. He lifted her effortlessly and carried her into the bath and told her he had to wash the smell off her-of sickness and birth and of Michael. Especially the smell of Michael, his “unwilling” father. Michael, the Irishman.

At one point, as they sat in the tub together, facing each other, a moment of consummate horror overtook her. It seemed he was the word made flesh in the absolute sense, staring at her, his face very round and pale in a healthy pinkish way like the face of an infant, eyes gazing at her with wonder, lips curling in an angelic smile. She almost began to scream again.

There was no hair on his chest. The food had come. He wanted her milk again. He held her in the bath sucking her, hurting her, until she cried out.

The waiters in the other room would hear her, she said, stop. He waited until the clatter of silver domes was over. Then he sucked hard at the other breast; it seemed a perfect balance between pain and pleasure, this zinging, thrilling sensation, radiating out from her nipples, and the hurt of the nipples themselves. She begged him to be gentle.

He rose up on all fours in the water over her, and his cock was thick and slightly curved. He covered her mouth and slipped his cock between her legs. She was sore from the birth, but she locked her arms around his neck, and it seemed the pleasure would kill her.

Dressed in terry-cloth robes, they lay on the floor together, doing it again and again. Then he rolled over on his back and he spoke about the endless darkness, the sense of being lost, the warm blaze of Mary Beth. The great fire of Marie Claudette. The radiance of Angélique; the dazzling glow of Stella; his witches, his witches! He talked about how he would collect around Suzanne’s body and feel her shiver, and know what she felt, but now he felt a distinct and separate sensation himself, which was infinitely more powerful, sweeter, richer. He said the flesh was worth the price of death.

“You think you’ll die like anyone else?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said and fell silent but only for a moment. He began to sing, or hum, or make some strange combination of both, imitating bits of melody which seemed familiar to her. He ate everything on the table that was soft and liquid. “Baby food,” he said with laughter. He ate the mashed potato, and the butter, and drank the mineral water, but he did not want the meat.

She examined his teeth. They were perfect, the same number as that of a mature human. No sign of wear or decay, obviously, and then his tongue was soft, but he couldn’t bear this examination for long. He needed air! He told her she didn’t know how much air he needed, and he threw open the windows.

“Tell me about the others,” she said.

The tape recorder was on; he had loaded whole shelves of cassette tape onto the counter at the airport store. He was prepared. He knew. He understood the inner workings and the outer workings. Very few creatures knew both.

“Talk about Suzanne and Donnelaith.”

“Donnelaith,” he said, and he began to weep, saying he could not remember what had come before, only it was pain, it was something, it was a crowd of faceless beings in an antechamber, and when Suzanne had called his name, it was just a word tossed out on the night: Lasher! Lasher! Perhaps a confluence of syllables never intended to be that word, but it had rung some recognition in him, in a core of himself that he had forgotten he possessed, and he had “come together” for her and drawn close and sent the winds lashing down around her.

“I wanted her to go to the ruins of the Cathedral. I wanted her to see the stained glass. But I could not tell her. And there was no more stained glass.”

“Explain all this to me slowly.”

But he couldn’t disentangle it. “She said to make the woman sick. I made her sick. I found I could toss things into the air, strike the roof. It was like reaching for the light down a long long dark tunnel, and now, it’s so sharp, I feel the sound, I smell it…say rhymes to me, tell me rhymes. I want to see something red again; how many shades of red are there in this room?”

He began to crawl about on all fours looking at the colors in the carpet, and then moving along the walls. He had long hard sturdy white thighs, and forearms of uncommon length. But when he was dressed it wasn’t so noticeable.

Around three in the morning, she managed to escape to the bathroom alone; it seemed the greatest of dreams to have that moment of privacy. That was to be the pattern of the future. At times in Paris, she had dreamed only of finding a private bathroom, where he was not right outside the door, listening to every sound, calling out to her to make her confess she was still there and not trying to escape, whether or not there was a window through which she might have climbed.

He got the passport himself the next day. He said that he would find a man who resembled him. “And what if he doesn’t have a passport?” she asked.

“Well, we shall go to a place of traveling men, won’t we? Where people go to get passports, and then we shall wait for a likely suspect, as they say, and take the passport from him. You are not so very bright as you think you are, hmmm? That is simple enough for a baby.”

They went to the bureau itself; they waited outside; they followed a tall man who had just received his passport; at last he stepped in the man’s path. She watched, afraid, and then he struck the man and took the passport from him. No one seemed to notice, if anyone even saw. The streets were crowded and the noise of the traffic hurt her head. It was cold, very cold. He pulled the man by his coat into a doorway. It was that simple. She watched all this. He was not needlessly brutal. He disabled the man, as he said, and the passport was now his.

Frederick Lamarr, aged twenty-five, resident of Manhattan. The picture was close enough, and by the time he trimmed off some of his hair, no casual eye would know the difference.

“But the man, he could be dead,” she said.

“I have no special feeling for human beings,” he said. And then he was surprised. “Am I not a human being?” He clutched at his head, walking ahead of her on the pavement, pivoting every few seconds to make certain she was there, though he said he had her scent and he’d know if the crowds separated them. He said he was trying to remember about the Cathedral. That Suzanne would not go. She was scared of the ruins of the church, an ignorant girl, ignorant and sad. The glen had been empty! Charlotte could write. Charlotte had been so much stronger than Suzanne or Deborah.

“All my witches,” he said. “I put gold in their hands. Once I knew how to get it, I gave them all that I could. Oh, God, but to be alive, to feel the ground beneath me, to reach up, and feel the earth pulling down upon my arms!”

Back in the hotel, they continued the more organized chronology. He recorded descriptions of each witch from Suzanne down through Rowan, and to her surprise he included Julien. That made fourteen. She did not point this out, because the number thirteen was something highly significant to him and mentioned by him over and over, thirteen witches to make one strong enough to have his child, he said, as if Michael had had nothing to do with it, as if he were his own father. He tossed in strange words-maleficium, ergot, belladonna. Once he even rattled along in Latin.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Why was I able to give birth to you?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

By dark something was becoming obvious. There was not a sense of proportion to his tale-telling. He might describe for forty-five minutes all the colors which Charlotte had worn, and how vague they had looked and how he could imagine them now, those fragile, dyed silks, and then in two sentences describe the flight of the family from Saint-Domingue to America.

He wept when she asked about Deborah’s death; he could not describe this.

“All my witches, I brought them ruin, one way or another, except for the very strongest ones, and they hurt me, and whipped me and made me obey,” he declared.

“Who?” she asked.

“Marguerite, Mary Beth, Julien! Damn him, Julien.” And he began to laugh in an uncontrollable way and then sprang to his feet to do a complete imitation of Julien-proper gentleman tying a four-in-hand silk tie, putting on his hat, then going out, cutting off the end of a cigar, then putting it to his lip.

It was spectacular, this little performance, in which he became another being, even to drawling a few words in languid French.

“What is a four and hand?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he confessed, “but I knew a moment ago. I walked in his body with him. He liked me to do this. Not so the others. Jealously guarding their bodies from me, they sent me to possess those they feared or would punish, or those they would use.”

He sank down and tried to write again, on the hotel pad and paper. Then he sucked on her breasts, nursed, shifting slowly from one to the other and back again. And she slept, and they slept together. When she awoke, he was taking her, and the orgasms were those long, dreamlike orgasms that she always felt when she was almost too exhausted to have them.

At midnight they took off for Frankfurt.

It was the first plane they could get across the Atlantic.

She was terrified that the stolen passport had been reported. He told her to rest easy, that human beings weren’t all that smart, that the machinery of international travel moved sluggishly. It wasn’t like the world of the spirits, where things moved at the speed of light or stood still. He hesitated a long time before putting on the earphones. “I am scared of music!” he said. Then he put them on and surrendered, sliding down in the seat, and staring forward as if he’d been knocked unconscious. He tapped his fingers with the songs. In fact, the music so entranced him that he didn’t want anything else until they landed.

He wouldn’t speak to her or answer her, and when she tried to get up to use the rest room, he held her hand in a tight clamp, refusing to cooperate. She won once, and he was watching her as she emerged, standing there in the aisle, earphones locked to his head, arms folded, tapping his foot to some beat she couldn’t hear and smiling at her only in passing before they both sat down again, and she slept beneath the blanket.

From Frankfurt they flew to Zurich. He went with her to the bank. She was now weak and dizzy and her breasts were full of milk and ached continuously.

At the bank she was quick and efficient. She hadn’t even thought of escape. Protection, subterfuge, those were her only concerns, oh, fool that she had been.

She arranged for enormous transfers of funds, and different accounts in Paris and in London that would give them money, but could not likely be traced.

“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 Suzanne?”

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.

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 attached 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 to 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.

Yes, one of the family had come to visit once. A Lauren Mayfair, rather stiff. “You would have never known she was American.” The old woman thought that was hilarious. “But she didn’t care for it here, you know. She took some pictures from the family and was off at once to London. I remember her saying she was going on to Rome. She loved Italy. I don’t suppose most people love both climes-the damp Highlands and sunny Italy.”

“Italy,” he whispered. “Sunny Italy.” His eyes were filling with tears. Hastily he wiped them on his napkin. The woman had never noticed. She was talking on and on.

“But what do you know about the Cathedral?” he asked. For the first time in all his brief life, as Rowan had known it, he looked tired to her. He looked almost frail. He’d wiped his eyes several times more with a handkerchief, saying it was an “allergy” and not tears, but she could see he was cracking.

“That’s just it, we’ve been wrong about it before, we don’t put forth many theories. Definitely the grand Gothic structure was built around 1228, same time as Elgin, but it incorporated an earlier church, one possibly which contained stained-glass windows. And the monastery was Cistercian, at least for a while. Then it became Franciscan.”

He was staring at her.

“There seems to have been a cathedral school, perhaps even a library. Oh, God only knows what we are going to find. Yesterday we found a new graveyard. You have to realize people have been carrying off stones from this place for centuries. We’ve only just unearthed the ruins of the thirteenth-century south transept and a chapel we didn’t know was there, containing a burial chamber. This definitely involves a saint, but we cannot identify him. His effigy is carved on top of the tomb. We’re debating. Dare we open it? Dare we seek to find something in there?”

He said nothing. The stillness around them was suddenly unnerving; Rowan was afraid he would cry out, do something utterly wild, draw attention to them. She tried to remind herself that it would be perfectly fine if this happened. She felt sleepy, heavy with milk. The old woman talked on and on about the castle, about the warring of the clans in these parts, the endless battles and slaughter.

“What destroyed the Cathedral?” Rowan asked. The lack of chronology was disturbing to her. She wanted a chart in her mind.

He glared at her angrily, as if she’d no right to speak.

“I’m not sure,” said the old woman. “But I have a hunch. There was some sort of clan war.”

“Wrong,” he said softly. “Look deeper. It was the Protestants, the iconoclasts.”

She clapped her hands almost with glee. “Oh, you must tell me what makes you think so.” She went on a tirade about the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, the burning of witches that had gone on for a century or more right to the very end of the history of Donnelaith, cruel cruel burnings.

He sat dazed.

“I’ll bet you’re absolutely right. It was John Knox and his reformers! Donnelaith had remained, right up to the bloody fire, a powerful Catholic stronghold. Not even wicked Henry the Eighth could suppress Donnelaith.”

The woman was now repeating herself, and going on at length about how she hated the political and religious forces which destroyed art and buildings. “All of that magnificent stained glass, imagine!”

“Yes, beautiful glass.”

But he had received all she had to give.

As evening fell they went out again. He had been silent, not hungry, not disposed for love, and not letting her out of his sight. He walked ahead of her, all the way across the grassy plain until they came again to the Cathedral. Much of the excavations of the south transept was sheltered by a great makeshift wooden roof, and locked doors. He broke the glass on a window, and unlocked a door and went inside. They were standing in the ruins of a chapel. The students had been rebuilding the wall. Much earth had been dug away from one central tomb, with the figure of a man carved on the top of it-almost ghostly now that it was so worn away. He stood staring down at it, and then up at what they had restored of the windows. In a rage he began to beat on the wooden walls.

“Stop, they’ll come,” she cried. But then she lapsed back, thinking, Let them come. Let them put him in jail for a madman. He saw the cunning in her eyes, the hate which for a moment she could not disguise.

When they got back to the inn, he started listening to his own tapes, then turning them off, rummaging through his pages. “Julien, Julien, Julien Mayfair,” he said.

“You don’t remember him, do you?”

“What?”

“You don’t remember any of it-who Julien was or Mary Beth or Deborah, or Suzanne. You’ve been forgetting all along. Do you remember Suzanne?”

He stared at her, blanched and in a silent fury.

“You don’t remember,” she taunted again. “You started to forget in Paris. Now you don’t know who they were.”

He approached her, and sank down on his knees in front of her. He seemed wildly excited, the rage going into some rampant and acceptable enthusiasm.

“I don’t know who they were,” he said. “I’m not too sure who you are! But I know now who I am!”

Past midnight, he’d wakened her in the act of rape, and when it was done, he wanted to go, to get away before anyone came to look for them. “These Mayfairs, they must be very clever people.”

She laughed bitterly.

“And what sort of monster are you?” she asked. “You’re nothing I made. I know that now. I’m not Mary Shelley!”

He stopped the car and dragged her out into the high grass and struck her again and again. He struck her so hard he almost broke the bones of her jaw. She shouted a warning to him, that the damage would be irreparable. He stopped his blows and stood over her with his fists clenched.

“I love you,” he said, crying, “and I hate you.”

“I know just what you mean,” she answered dully. There was so much pain in her face she thought perhaps he had broken her nose and her jaw. But it wasn’t so. Finally she sat up.

He had flopped down beside her, all knees and elbows, and with his large warm hands began to caress her. In pure confusion, she sobbed against his chest.

“Oh, my God, my God, what shall we do?” she asked. He was stroking her, covering her with kisses, suckling her again, all of his old tricks, his evil tricks, the Devil slipping into the cell of the nun, get away from me! But she didn’t have the courage to do anything. Or was it the physical strength she lacked? It had been so long since she had felt normal, healthy, vital.

The next time he became angry, it was when they’d stopped for gas and she’d wandered near the phone booth. He caught her, and she began to say very fast an old rhyme that her mother had taught her:

Alas! Alas! for Miss Mackay!

Her knives and forks have run away;

And when the cups and spoons are going,

She’s sure there is no way of knowing!

Just as she hoped, it made him weak with laughter. He actually fell to his knees. Such big feet he had. She stood there over him chanting:

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,

Stole a pig and away he run,

The pig was eat, and Tom was beat

And Tom went crying down the street.

He begged her to stop, half laughing, half crying. “I have one for you,” he cried, and he leapt up and sang as he danced, slamming his feet on the ground, and slapping his thighs:

The sow came in with the saddle.

The little pig rocked the cradle.

The dish jumped over the table

To see the pot swallow the ladle.

The spit that stood behind the door

Threw the pudding-stick on the floor.

“Odsplut!” said the gridiron,

“Can’t you agree?

I’m the head constable,

Bring them to me!”

And then he grabbed her roughly, teeth clenched, and dragged her back to the car.

When they reached London, her face was entirely swollen. Anyone who caught a glimpse of her was alarmed. He put them up in a fine hotel, though where it was she had no idea, and he fed her hot tea and sweets and sang to her.

He said that he was sorry for all he’d done, that he had been reborn, did she not realize this, what it meant? That in him resided a miracle. Then came the predictable kissing and suckling and a coarse rough-and-tumble sex that was as good as any. This time, out of sheer desperation, she pushed him to do it again. Maybe she did this because it was the only way she could exert her will. She discovered that after the fourth time even he was spent, and he lay sleeping. She didn’t dare move. When she sighed, he opened his eyes.

He was now truly beautiful. The mustache and beard were of biblical length and shape and each morning he clipped them appropriately. His hair was very long. His shoulders were too big but it didn’t matter. His entire appearance was regal, majestic. Are those words for the same thing? He bowed to people when he spoke, he tipped his soft shapeless gray hat. People loved to look at him.

They went to Westminster Abbey and he walked through the entire place studying every detail of it. He watched the faithful moving about. He said at last: “I have only one simple mission. Old as the earth itself.”

“What is that?” she asked.

He did not answer her.

When they reached the hotel he said:

“I want your study to begin in earnest. We shall get a secure place…not here in Europe…in the States, so close to them that they won’t suspect. We need everything. Cost must be no obstacle. We will not go to Zurich! They’ll be looking for you there. Can you arrange for large amounts of money?”

“I already have,” she reminded him. It was clear from this and other remarks that he did not remember simple things well in sequence. “The bank trail is well laid. We can go back to the States if you wish.”

In fact, her heart silently leapt at the thought of it.

“There is a neurological institute in Geneva,” she said. “That’s where we should go. It’s famous worldwide. It’s vast. We can do some work there. And complete all the arrange-States. They are going to be looking for you. And for me. We must return. I am thinking of the place.”

She fell asleep, dreaming only of the lab, the slides, the tests, the microscope, of knowledge as though it were exorcism. She knew of course she could not do it on her own. The best she could do was get computer equipment and record her findings. She needed a city full of laboratories, a city where hospitals grew as if on trees, where she could go to one large center and then another…

He sat at the table reading the Mayfair History over and over. His lips moved so fast, it was the humming again. He laughed at things in the history as if they were entirely new to him. He knelt by her and looked into her face.

He said, “The milk’s drying up, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. There is so much aching.”

He began to kiss her. He took some milk between his fingers and put it on her lips; she sighed. She said it tasted like water.

In Geneva, everything was planned, down to the last detail.

The most obvious choice for their final destination was the city of Houston, Texas. Reason? There were, very simply, hospitals and medical centers everywhere. Every form of medical research went on in Houston. She would find a building perhaps for them, some medical space now vacant due to the oil depression. Houston was overbuilt. It had three downtowns, they said. No one could find them there.

Money was no obstacle. Her large transfers were safe in the giant Swiss Bank. She had only to set up some sort of dummy accounts in California and in Houston.

She lay in bed, his fingers tight around her wrist, thinking Houston, Texas, only one hour by air from home. “Only one hour.”

“Yes, they’ll never guess,” he said. “You might as well have taken us to the South Pole, you couldn’t have thought of a more clever hiding place.”

Her heart sank. She slept. She was sick. When she woke she was bleeding. Miscarriage again, this time the viscid core was perhaps two inches long, maybe even longer, before it had begun to disintegrate.

In the morning after she had rested, she took a stand. She was going to the institute, to test this thing, and to run what tests she could on him. She screamed and screamed. And finally in terror, and misery, he consented.

“You’re frightened to be without me, aren’t you?” she asked.

“What if you were the last man on earth?” he asked. “And I were the last woman?”

She didn’t know what that meant. But he seemed to know. He took her to the institute. All the normal motions of life were now nothing to him-hailing cabs, tipping, reading, walking, running, going up in an elevator. He had bought himself a cheap little wooden flute in a store, and he played it on the street, very dissatisfied with it, and with his own ability to make melodies with it. He didn’t dare buy a radio. It would get its hands around his throat.

Again, at the institute, she managed a white coat, a chart, a pencil, the things she needed, forms from a raft of desktop pockets, yellow, pink, blue slips for various tests, and began to fill out the bogus orders.

She was at one minute his doctor, at another the technician, and whenever questioned, he rattled away like a celebrity in hiding.

In the midst of it all, she managed to fill out a long note on one of the triplicate forms, addressed to the concierge at the hotel, instructing him to arrange for a medical shipment. The address Samuel Larkin, M.D., University Hospital, San Francisco, California. She would make available the material as soon as she could. The concierge was to charge her account for overnight delivery, heat-sensitive medical material.

When they returned to the hotel room, she picked up a lamp and struck him. He reeled and then fell down, blood spattering from his face, into his eyes, but he came back, that wonderfully plastic skin and bones, like an infant surviving a fall from a ridiculously high window. He grabbed her and beat her again, until she lost consciousness.

In the night she woke. Her face was swollen, but the bones were not broken. One of her eyes was almost shut. That would mean days in this room. Days. She did not know if she could endure it.

The next morning he tied her to the bed for the first time. He used bits and pieces of sheet and made powerful knots, and had it half done when she awoke and discovered the gag in her mouth. He was gone for hours. No one came to the room. Surely some warning or instructions had been issued. She kicked, screamed, to no avail. She could not make a sound that was loud enough.

When he returned, he took the phone out of hiding and ordered a feast for her and once again begged her forgiveness. He played his small flute.

As she ate, he watched her every move. His eyes were thoughtful, speculating.

The next day she did not fight when he tied her up, and this time it was with the masking tape he’d brought back the day before, and quite impossible to break. He was going to tape her mouth when she advised him calmly that she might smother. He settled on a less painful and efficient gag. She went mad struggling after he left. It did no good. Nothing did any good. The milk leaked from her breasts. She was sick, and the room spun.

The following afternoon, after they had made love, he lay on top of her, heavy, sweet, his soft black hair between her breasts, his left hand on her right hand, dreaming, humming. She was not tied. He had cut the tape cuffs and let them dangle. He would make new ones when he wanted them.

She looked at the top of his head, at the shining black mane, she breathed in the scent of him, and pressed her body against his weight, and then lapsed back half into sleep for an hour.

Still he had not waked up. He was breathing deeply.

She reached over with her left hand and picked up the phone. Nothing else in her stirred. She managed to hold the earpiece and punch the button for the desk, and she spoke so low they could barely hear her.

It was night in California. Lark listened to what she had to say. Lark had been her boss. Lark was her friend. Lark was the only person who might believe her, the only person who would vow to take these specimens to Keplinger. Whatever happened to her, these specimens had to be taken to Keplinger. Mitch Flanagan was the man there she trusted, though he might not remember her.

Somebody had to know.

Lark tried to ask her all sorts of questions. He could not hear her, he said, speak up. She told him she was in danger. And might be interrupted at any moment. She wanted to blurt out the name of the hotel, but she was divided. If he came to look for her while she was still helpless, possibly she could not get the specimens out of here. Her mind was overwrought. She couldn’t reason. She was babbling something to Lark about the miscarriages. Then Lasher looked up, snatched the phone from her hand, ripped the entire apparatus out of the wall and started to hit her.

He stopped because she reminded him that the marks would show. They had to go to America. They should leave tomorrow. And when he tied her up she wanted him to make everything looser. If he kept tying her up so tight she would lose the use of her limbs. There was an art to keeping a prisoner.

He wept in a dry quiet way. “I love you,” he said. “If only I could trust you. If only you could be my helpmate, if you give me your love and trust. But I made you what you are, a calculating witch. You look at me and you try to kill me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “But we should go to America now, unless you want them to find us.”

She thought if she did not get out of this room she would go completely mad and be useless. She tried to make a plan. Cross the sea, get closer to home. Get closer. Houston is closer.

A dull hopelessness covered everything. She knew now what she had to do. She had to die before she conceived by this being again. She could not give birth to another, could not. But he was breeding with her; he had impregnated her twice already. Her mind went blank with fear. For the first time in her life, she understood why some human beings cannot act when they are frightened, why some freeze and stare in a meek fashion.

What had become of her notes?

In the morning, they packed the suitcases together. Everything medical was in one bag, and in this she placed the copies of all the various tags and slips she had used to order various information at the clinics. She placed on top the written instructions for the concierge which included Lark’s address. He did not seem to notice.

She had taken considerable amounts of packing from the lab, but now she shoved towels in around the material. She shoved in her old bloodstained clothes.

“Why don’t you throw that away?” he demanded, “that horrid smell.”

“I don’t smell anything,” she said coldly. “And I need the packing, I told you. But I can’t find my notebooks. I had all these notebooks.”

“Yes, I read them,” he said quietly. “I threw them away.”

She stared at him.

No record now but these specimens. No communication to anyone that this thing lived and breathed and wanted to breed.

At the doors of the hotel, as he arranged for the car to take them to the airport, she gave the bag of medical specimens to the doorman, with a bundle of Swiss francs, and said in German hurriedly that the bag must go at once to Dr. Samuel Larkin. Turning her back on the man immediately, she walked towards the waiting car as Lasher turned and smiled at her and put out his hand.

“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.