Lasher

“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.