The incubus spirit that dominates the Mayfair family, he signifies the transcendence of mundane consciousness through ecstasy and union with the supernatural. “The promise of Lasher at the end of the hallway,” claims a source, “is the promise of a good orgasm.”
Appearing most often as a tall, slender man in his mid-twenties who is dresses in nineteenth century clothing, he has soft lips, fair skin, the shadow of a beard, and brown hair and eyes (which has long had erotic significance in legend and folklore). As he is a shapeshifter, Lasher is able to appear as anything that will please the person with whom he is dealing. His face was “strangely unlined. It was as bland as the face of Christ.”
Lasher signifigantly documented in this century as a man standing near the comatose Deirdre Mayfair. The attending doctor notices him and feels compelled by him to reduce her medication. When Lasher appears to him in a bar, and then in various places around New Orleans, the doctor recognizes he is seeing a ghost.
What the doctor does not know – but that the Talamasca does – is that Lasher has haunted the First Street house since it was built and the Mayfair family itself for three centuries. Initially existing in darkness and chaos, with many “faceless” beings, he gained a sense of identity and self-consciousness when Suzanne Mayfair strung together the syllables that formed the word Lasher and called him forth: “Lasher…for the wind that you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees.” As it later turns out, he responded because the word sounded to him like “Ashlar.”) Suzanne called to him from the ancient circle of stones at Donnelaith in Scotland, where Lasher had been hovering for over a century, having had a previous incarnation there in physical form. From this point on, he craved her attention to give himself substance: “To concentrate was to exist. When spirits dream, they don’t know themselves.”
At first he is weak and confused, but he learns to grow stronger over the centuries through ideas and experimentation. What he really desires is physical form so he can feel what humans feel, but this ambition takes shape only gradually. He develops his early speech from words he has picked up around the world. With Suzanne, he is merely a spirit who can bring forth wind and storms. He hates her, thinking she is stupid and slow, but plays the fool for her. He comes to realize that his own thoughts are possible only in virtue of human thoughts and language. As Charlotte Mayfair later expresses it, “all that he is proceeds from us.” A spirit can perceive itself only through a human being’s perception of it: “If we took notice, we were changed,” says Lasher. ( Thus Lasher knows of himself from what the witches know, and his self-concept changes as their knowledge of him changes.) By learning self-consciousness and desire, he also learns discontent with existing in only a spiritual state. Eventually, as Petyr van Abel suspects, Lasher becomes much more than what the witches perceive him to be.
When the people of Donnelaith burn Suzanne at the stake, Lasher creates a storm – an occurrence that would mark the death of a Mayfair witch for the next three centuries – but then follows her daughter, Deborah, to Amsterdam. He serves only the witch he chooses, vowing never to smile on a male child not to favor a male, and kills anyone who calls his name. Deborah learns to use him to get the things she wants, such as the emerald necklace. Lasher then follows her to Montcleve, France, and his clumsy interpretation of her wishes eventually causes her own death as an accused witch. Knowing that her husband was unfaithful to her, he assumed that she would want vengeance on him and undertook actions that brought about the man’s fatal accident. Subsequently, Deborah was accused of witchcraft. Although Lasher destroys the town, he cannot save Deborah. That same day, he causes a fire at the castle of Donnelaith and kills the last of the Donnelaith clan.
Lasher then chooses to serve Deborah’s daughter, Charlotte, and give her Deborah’s emerald. This necklace eventually came to symbolize Lasher’s favored witch and was passed down from mother to daughter. Along with it went the legacy, a family fortune that Lasher helped the witches to amass. Since Charlotte was married to a man who could have no more children, and their only child was a boy, she slept with her father, Petyr van Abel, to have a daughter, Jeanne Louise, through whom the trait of the medical skill and supernatural powers could be passed to succeeding generations. Lasher needs these traits, which as they are passed down will increase in intensity and strength, to achieve his goals. His ambition is to gain a human body through which he will feel things – laugh, have sex, even experience physical pain – and he claims to be able to see a future time when a Mayfair witch would be so powerful as to be able to give him this desire. He is a creature that is constantly learning, figuring out what he needs and sharpening his purpose as he goes along. When he gets what he wants, he will destroy the family, because he hates them as much as he loves them. Until that time, he plays with the witches, exciting them sexually and helping them to grow wealthy while they assist him with experiments in which he possesses a human form.
Charlotte helps Lasher inhabit the weak, afflicted body of her father-in-law, but he can only sustain this possession for a brief period. With the corpses the witch Marguerite brings to him, he is able to achieve limited motion and even genetic mutation: when he inhabits a baby’s corpse, the limbs grow, the eyes change, and the hair darkens. But he cannot do much with the cells that no longer divide, and so the bodies eventually rot: “He destroys what he changes,” Marguerite claims. Lasher takes on the image of the last body which he tried this experiment, a man with brown hair and eyes, and appears to Julien in this form.
Lasher imitates Julien, the only male witch with whom Lasher has intimate relations, and accompanies him on sexual escapades. He loves the experience of sexual contact that he can sometimes achieve because it is warm, close, and provides a form of union. At times Julien allows Lasher to take over his body so that he can walk around and experience the world. Lasher delights in this, yet it does not make him fully content. He believes he must grow from the form of a baby, like Christ did. After his possession of Julien, Lasher merely inhabits other people by entering them while they sleep, as he does with Aaron Lightner.
Lasher hates anyone who attempts to come between him and his witches. The first person to try this is Petyr van Abel, who warns Charlotte of Lasher’s evil impulses. In retaliation Lasher plagues him with horrific images until he runs into a cemetery – the place he most fears – and dies. However, Petyr first delivers to the Talamasca a description of Lasher’s appearance and activities: “When it [Lasher] would be itself, it is made-up body over which it has scant control.” When Lasher attempts to befuddle hum, Petyr reports that he “snatches these images from my mind…and then expands them.”
After that, the Talamasca hears almost nothing about Lasher until Marguerite is rumored to have a mysterious dark-haired lover nearly a century later. Her son, Julien, later reports that his grandmother, Marie Claudette, knew of Lasher and because of him kept a band perpetually playing music. Lasher possessed two kinds of voices: one a public and the other private, heard only in one’s head. This inner voice is persistent, and Julien learns from his grandmother that the only defense against it is the distraction of music. Music confused Lasher who pined for order, pattern, and symmetry.
Julien also reports other details about Lasher: he can steal and transport small material items; he is forgetful, he can be starved by lack of attention; he leaves warm air in his wake; he can become solid for a short period of time; and he can know and reveal the secrets of others. Also, Lasher kills through fear, and he can go into a person and transform their facial features.
Lasher sometimes appears as Julien’s double. Since Julien’s sister, Katherine, the designated witch, shows no interest in him, for the first time Lasher favors a Mayfair male. He dresses as Julien had dressed in the 1870’s and 1880’s, and the Talamasca fears that Lasher is getting stronger. Stories circulate throughout the Irish Channel that the Mayfairs have a spirit who helps them with their magic. Richard Llewellyn, one of Julien’s lovers, describes Lasher as merely the sense of someone watching him, although he actually saw Lasher making love to Julien just before Julien died.
Mary Beth, the last truly powerful Mayfair witch until Rowan, forces Lasher to do her bidding. She views Lasher’s intellect as being similar to that of an idiot savant, because he also cannot put his learning into a context. She is the last witch to know about the pact; that if she helps Lasher in his purposes, he will ensure the witches’ fortune and when he comes through into the physical world, he will bring them all back from the dead and grant them immortality. Mary Beth tries to tell this to her daughter Stella, but Stella is too flighty to pay attention.
Carlotta Mayfair then works to ensure that the next three witches, Stella, Antha, and Deirdre, are unable to fully experience their powers, although Lasher does appear in a picture with Stella and seems to favor her high spirits. She holds séances to call him forth but once she encounters him, has no idea what to do with him, other than to receive his attentions. Peter Mayfair claims Lasher would materialize at Stella’s parties as “a blazing shimmering presence, and for those few moments, I could have sworn he was as solid as any man of flesh and blood I’ve ever seen.” After Stella’s murder, Lasher shows himself weeping to Talamasca agent Arthur Langtry and throughout the years he continues to place flowers on Stella’s grave. He also prevents First Street house from being maintained to reflect his own mourning.
The Talamasca has documented that Lasher was spotted most frequently during Antha’s childhood, although many people report seeing him during Deirdre’s lifetime. Although she allows him to take sexual liberties with her, Deirdre views Lasher as evil. He hovers about each of the Mayfair children at school, and other children spy him. Aaron Lightner, one of those who can see him, describes him as “a malicious young man, smiling coldly as he stood behind her [Deirdre], clothes prim and dark and without detail as if the entire energy of the being were absorbed in the lustrous eyes and the white teeth and the gleaming skin.” As a child, Michael Curry sees Lasher when he passes First Street and then later in church. The man seems very real to him: beautiful, soulful, and serene – the embodiment of elegance that Michael desires for himself. These frequent and substantial appearances alert the Talamasca to the possibility that Lasher’s strength is increasing.
The Talamasca believes that Lasher achieves his greater power through illusion and trickery. When he attacks, he relies on the victim’s energy and vulnerability. Carlotta Mayfair believes Lasher gets his power from attention, echoing the Catholic doctrine about Satan: “you feed him when you question him. You give him oil as if he were the flame in that lamp.” She believes that he is a liar, and that he enthralls his witches when they question him by taking from their own minds the answers most suited and desirable to each one.
After Deirdre dies, Lasher appears to Rowan Mayfair in California, then vanishes. She is the powerful witch he has worked for three centuries to produce. He ravishes her on the plane to New Orleans, and she feels defenseless against his sexual onslaught. Nevertheless, she tells Michael, her human lover, that she intends to resist Lasher and send him to hell. For a while, then, Lasher makes his presence known to her only in subtle ways: through flowers, vague noises, images in the shadows, and a sense of someone watching and waiting.
Lasher finally approaches Rowan on the night she marries, as if her marriage to Michael foreshadows her relationship to Lasher as the Devil’s bride. She puts him off but eventually surrenders to his erotic attention. “I don’t want it,” Rowan says, “and yet it’s so…so seductive.” He tells her that with her knowledge about physical. She is not sure what he means, but agrees to help, in the interest of studying the new form of being that he claims he will become.
He tells her about himself, that his natural state is infinite and unbounded, and that he must concentrate to feel his strength or to exert force. He is able to command matter by piercing the chemical structure of a cell. Rowan perceives that Lasher is an energy field, and that his body is merely a shell that he has learned to manipulate. He seems to be a giant colony of microscopic cells that feed off air, in which the basic ingredients of life – cellular structure, DNA, and amino acids – are present, along with an organizing force that responds to consciousness and will. He is not truly invisible, just too small to see. “They [Lasher’s cells] are eukarotype cells,” Rowan tells Aaron. “The same cells that make up your body or mine.” As a self-sufficient, Precambrian species, Lasher possesses a lifespan that could encompass billions of years. Possibly, he feeds on human consciousness, so that his personality and learning style will derive from the Mayfairs. “You will know of me what I learn of myself through you,” he tells Rowan. What really attracts her is the possibility that his cells could be replicated and grafted into human bodies, thereby potentially putting an end to death, and she resists Aaron Lightner’s attempts to convince her that she should not give in to what Lasher wants.
At Lasher’s insistence, Rowan ensures that Michael is not in the house on Christmas Eve. Lasher is aware that Rowan thinks she can control him, and so he takes on the form of one of her previous lovers – a man of six feet tall and heavily muscled – so that she will be attracted physically to him. She encourages him to become more vivid and solid, she says, “You think you can lure me into the shell of miniscule lifeless particles so you can have me at your command? So that you can destroy me?” Instead, he fuses with the fetus growing inside her and induces his own birth as a baby. “What other flesh in the world is ready for me, plastic and adaptable and swarming with millions upon millions of tiny cells….” Rowan must help him, he insists, or her own child will die as he goes into it. Consequently, he is born with a man-sized head and a child’s body. He quickly grows into a slender man with dark hair, blue eyes, Rowan’s facial features, and long arms and legs. As Rowan watches him develop, she recalls the work of geneticist Karl Lemle, who had said to her, “the embryo is the key to immortality.”
Lasher takes great delight in his new body. When Michael attacks him, he pushes Michael into the pool, then leaves with Rowan.
They move quickly through Europe as Rowan attempts to do a genetic analysis on him. She entrusts the results to Mitch Flanagan, and it becomes clear to him that Lasher, Rowan, and Michael all possess a peculiar DNA structure: they have an extra set of chromosomes. When Michael and Rowan mated, they triggered the extra chromosomes, which had been dormant, and produced a unique embryo. Lasher’s cellular proteins and enzymes are different from that of a human. Talamasca agent Stolov explains the process: a willful soul entered the embryo of Rowan’s child before its own soul took hold and directed the embryo’s development, utilizing the surplus chromosomes to produce a new design. “It was a meeting, if you will of mystery and science…a sort of physical opportunity for an occult and powerful thing.”
Lasher is not a mutation, but a separate species altogether. He seems to have an intense need for air, an insatiable thirst for milk, and the fontanel on his head stays soft, rather than closing as a human’s would. Rowan notices that he makes humming sounds and has inconsistent memories. By this time he has grown long hair and a beard. He steals passports and uses several names for his identity. Viewing himself as superior to humans, he has a plan to eventually wipe their race out. The geneticists working on his tissue confirm his ability to do this: he is of a unique and powerful species that possesses extreme reproductive advantages. He can procreate quickly and his offspring can grow quickly to maturity. Thus his kind could cover and control the earth in no time.
But to do this, Lasher needs a female mate. So he attempts to impregnate Rowan several times. Her repeated miscarriages weaken her. Finally, she is successfully pregnant, and Lasher names the fetus Emaleth. He sings special songs to his baby from an ancient time while he continues to rape and brutalize Rowan.
He takes Rowan with him to Donnelaith, where he recalls that he had once had a physical form. To procreate and replenish the earth with his kind, he imprisons Rowan and sexually approaches other Mayfairs with the same genetic abnormality as her to bear his children. He causes them to ovulate, but the fertilized embryos grow uncontrollably, killing the women he has seduced. He returns to Rowan in failure, and she manages to knock him unconscious and escape.
Lasher shows up again at First Street, where Rowan, who has given birth to his child, lies in a coma, near death. Two Talamasca agents, whom Lasher has agreed to accompany after he tells Michael his story, arrive. When Michael wants to kill him for what he has done to Rowan, the agents retain him and Lasher begins his tale.
Born as a Taltos, he was Anne Boleyn’s “stillborn son” in the sixteenth century. His father, Douglas of Donnelaith, took him back to the Scottish glen, where the clan proclaimed him Saint Ashlar, a Taltos who appears every few centuries when the clan needs him. To avoid those who brutalize the Taltos, Lasher studied in Italy to be a Franciscan priest. The Talamasca watched him during those years and attempted to bring him to Amsterdam, but he resisted. After he kills several prostitutes by having sex with them, one of the Talamasca agents tries to explain to Lasher what he is and what pagan legends say: that his kind have no souls and therefore, after death, they could hover invisibly in darkness between heaven and earth. Thus they must return to the flesh to have identity.
Lasher returned to Donnelaith to strengthen his people against the Protestants and to drive back pagan rituals that crept into the social and religious customs of the town over the years. His human sister, Emaleth, warned him not to remain in Donnelaith, but he ignored her advice. At the Yule feast the Little People of the glen tricked him into having sex with one of their females, whom he believed to be his own kind. He produced another Taltos, which the people then sacrificed to the flames. Lasher was horrified but had no time to react because the Protestants arrived, sacking the town and massacring the townspeople. Lasher himself was thrown through the stained glass window bearing Ashlar’s likeness, then stoned and burned in the circle of stones. For a century he hovered in Donnelaith as a spirit until Suzanne called him forth.
Michael is unmoved by his story and his insistence that what he merely wanted was to devote himself to love and goodness, like Saint Francis had done. Michael chases Lasher to the third floor and, with the help of Julien’s ghost, strikes Lasher with a hammer in the same room where Julien slept and Antha jumped to her death. Lasher falls from the third floor window and dies on the stones below. Symbolically he is wearing the Mayfair emerald, through which he sealed his pact with one witch after another for thirteen generations. Michael buries him beneath Deirdre’s Oak.
The dwarf Samuel reports Lasher’s presence in Donnelaith to the real Ashlar, an ancient Taltos. He describes Lasher as a blundering infant. Ashlar hears Lasher’s full story from Michael. He suggests that Lasher had lived before and was a migrant, power-hungry soul resistant to death – “a wily and unforgiving ghost of a Taltos.” Thus he had come back into life. But by that time, the Taltos were only the stuff of legends in the Highlands and thus Lasher did not know how to probe his memories to discover what he truly was.
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