AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"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, Angelique, 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."
