“Oui, Monsieur,” another guard says, and gives Wilde a glare that reminds him not everyone has buried his past with the risen dead.
He hurries up to their room—Bosie’s room, really, since he pays for it with money inherited from his father’s estate. In bed, Bosie’s head thrashes right and left, dank blond tresses sweated heavily to his forehead. Death’s skeletal hand has gift-wrapped his throat in thick white gauze over a necrotizing bite wound. The rest of his body does not move and this horrifies Wilde. It is as if the Death has asserted dominion everywhere else and what life there remains has gathered in Bosie’s head for a doomed last stand.
Shots fire from outside the window. Wilde looks in that direction, sweating.
“So cold,” Bosie says.
Wilde whips off his topcoat and presses it like a blanket of fire across the slight body.
“Dear boy,” Wilde says. “Have you been unattended all this time? I left specific instructions—”
“Don’t leave me again,” Bosie whispers.
Wilde swallows. How those four words recall memories both tender and hard! Bosie once had the flu and Wilde nursed him devotedly, never leaving his side as he suffered. Then suddenly Bosie recovered and Oscar was stricken by the same malady. From the open window of his sickroom in their rented lakefront house, he endured the sound of his restored lover frolicking jubilantly with several local youths, Bosie having left him to sweat out his own illness in parched solitude.
Wilde forces his hands to open. He has clenched more fists in the last two weeks than he ever did during his three trials or even in prison itself, when the indignities and outrages he’d experienced built into a bitter torrent he directed entirely at Bosie—through a letter. The prison guards had finally allowed him to write something, and the resulting unsent letter presented an accusation, an entire trial and a sentencing of Bosie for his crimes. He had fallen so far, and for what? Bright blue eyes, a pretty face that launched and sank exactly one ship—Wilde’s own? Writing the letter released a rage he would not know again until his moment on the Champ de Mars. A love letter to my messiah, Wilde thinks to himself in derision. It was longer than any letter composed by the Apostles. Here in bed before him is his love’s Laodicean church.
“I can’t breathe,” Bosie says. His chest heaves in short demonstrative bursts.
Wilde touches the handsome youth’s forehead. “Bosie, as long as you have my love, you will not die. I promise you immortality. Splendid immortality, Bosie.”
“Oh, Oscar,” Bosie says, coughs once, and dies.
Fifteen minutes later, men carry the body outside, Wilde protesting. There is fierce debate about what comes next. A German doctor staying at the d’Alsace wants the corpse left inside for observation. Wilde too wants Bosie left in bed. In truth, he is anxious to return the body upstairs because he intends to disrobe and sleep with it, holding Bosie until he feels the life return again. He has seen this happen with his own eyes. The resurrection starts with a tremendous shiver and shake, like the uncoiling of some terrific spring inside the body cavity. The arms shoot up and the knees bend as an extension of that energy. Meanwhile a hissing noise comes from the mouth as dry, inflexible and now unnecessary lungs try to fill. From Bosie’s lips the hiss will sound soft as poetry.
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death. Wilde cannot remember when he said or wrote that. It does not matter—the Lazari have rendered it false.
Hurry back to me, Bosie.
“Le corps doit être brûlé.”
Wilde stirs from his grief and hope, rethinks what he has just heard and translates. His hands move forward, shaking. “My Bosie is to be burned? I’ll not allow that!”
“It is the government’s orders. All dead must be cremated.”
When I am dead cremate me.
Wilde rubs his temples, fighting unwanted memories of Bosie’s father. Around him an argument ensues between the hotel’s manager and the armed guards. The rapidity of the exchange and Wilde’s inner distractions trouble his ability to understand. The gist is who shall take Bosie’s corpse to the designated place of disposal. The crematorium is apparently not close and transportation has become exceedingly difficult and confused. The government has commandeered all the motor vehicles and there are things happening in the streets that have startled the horses. All serviceable horses are also government requisitioned, and the Lazari are known to prey on them when human meat does not present itself. A coach now out of the question, the one choice seems to be carrying Bosie across the city on a stretcher.
“I will not allow my staff to be exposed to such risks. I hired you specifically—”
“You hired us to guard the door. Well, we’re guarding it.”
“How much more do you want?”
“Couldn’t pay us enough. Defending a fixed position is easy. Being out in the open, a moving target? Find yourself a few Americans. They seem foolish enough.”
“Brave enough,” Wilde says, bringing all attention where it properly belongs, on him. “I have been to that exotic land, gentlemen, and dwelt among their roughnecks. I have met recently a young man from a place called Arkansas—how I should love to flee there one day. Americans themselves do not flee. They are a people blessed by the music of Apollo and the ingenuity of Hephaestus. They—”
One of the gunmen strikes a match and holds it over Bosie’s body. “No need to risk the crematorium. Get kerosene. We’ll burn the body right here.”
“In front of the Alsace? My god, the stench! No, my patrons cannot be exposed to such—”
The gunmen’s leader just smiles. “To such what? Barbarism? Indelicacy? Inhumanity? It will be much worse when they see this thing rise to drink our blood.”
“I believe you are confusing this hideous condition with vampirism. If you read the celebrated novel by my friend and countryman Stoker, you will realize they are not the same,” Wilde says.
“He’s an English aristocrat, isn’t he? He was a vampire in life. What he returns as won’t be so different. Get the kerosene.”
Wilde’s gaze shifts to the manager’s reaction. The little Frenchman’s forehead blisters with beads of sweat, telling Wilde that he has already decided to acquiesce. Before the manager can take a step, Wilde produces the Webley. The unexpected quickness of his hands combined with his great height and bulk stupefy them all. No guard even attempts to raise a weapon as Wilde’s aim alternates fast before each face.
“If Lord Douglas must go, then so shall I.”
“You’d carry him alone through these streets?”
“They seem quite deserted now.”
The manager attempts to plead with him, though Wilde knows this is only for the sake of politeness. Removing the body is his chief concern and Wilde was a considerable headache to him before the crisis. In his view, if Wilde leaves with the body, so much the better.
Wilde holds the Webley out a moment longer and then pockets it. He stoops, gathers Bosie into his arms, and like some self-saddling mule Wilde slings him over his right shoulder. The weight stoops him and antagonizes his back, but Bosie feels most familiar to him as a burden to bear. Wilde realizes he did harder labor in prison and ponders that God laid him low in order to toughen him for the present nightmare. It is a perfectly Protestant fantasy, but Wilde is determined to die a Catholic. He takes one step and then another. It will be a slow journey but the weight is not manageable. Nothing truly is except for checking accounts.
“I shall entertain you, my dear resting Bosie,” Wilde says some ten minutes into the journey. His pace is slowed even more because he stops constantly to turn and check his blind spots. The streets remain empty but the Lazari have a way of suddenly swarming in spaces that were clear only moments ago. They move with no grace at all, but so slow and inexorable that their footfalls are soundless. Those wearing shoes make a telltale scraping noise, but most come barefooted. The long dead come only on bone. They lumber, Wilde thinks. It is an odd word to describe a walking style and he won
ders at its etymology. He assumes it means wooden and stiff, without joints, as how a tree might stalk its prey. But that association is too obvious, especially for English diction. Probably the meaning evolved from a root word long dead and resurrected in fifty other disparate expressions having little to do with one another. The paradox of dead meanings existing parasitical and hidden in living words pleases him.
Wilde smiles, remembering his promise to entertain Bosie. He begins to gallop a bit, as if he bore one of his own small children on his back (but no, he shall not think of them now, their mother is dead and it is too horrifying to imagine them alone in another country and surrounded by Lazari). His voice booms out, turning the street into a stage—
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it.”
Wilde stops, winded, and kneels to gentle Bosie’s body to the ground. He pants for air as he strokes the angelic face and adjusts the white gauze that has slipped to reveal the wound. Looking at the purple and red gouge, Wilde only now realizes own lips were not the last to feel the heat and pulse of Bosie’s throat before he died.
“Alas, poor Yorick,” he whispers to himself. A famous speech from a play with many famous speeches—but why did his mind select that one? He is a living Yorick looking at his dead Hamlet. Suddenly he is certain the world has gone terribly wrong, that Bosie should live many decades more and that, by standing here breathing, Wilde is a resurrected man as unnatural as the Lazari. I was dying and every part of me deserved the death. He feels, even in the face of Bosie’s end, the complete bloom of health and vitality. This flower he’ll keep in his buttonhole at all costs. He looks down at his lover and repeats Hamlet’s speech up to the point he set Bosie down. As Wilde’s fingertips stray into Bosie’s sweat-stiffened hair, he finishes: “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.”
He bends to kiss them now and forces himself not to recoil at their cold, rubbery texture. Bosie’s mouth does not open and Wilde’s tongue encounters a barricade of teeth as perfect as prison bars.
“Come back to me, Bosie. Wake.”
How long will it take? Hours? Days? His pushes back from the body and ponders. Vaguely he hears the wounded gait of four, perhaps five, of the resurrected approaching from the east. Blinking away a few tears, Wilde straightens his back and turns to look over his right shoulder. Nine, he counts in astonishment. Six appear quite fresh—they wear fashionable clothes and are obviously recent victims of the very Lazari they have now become. The other three have spent at least ten decades in the ground, garbed as they are in shreds of Jacobin simplicity that doubtlessly resembled rags even a hundred years ago. Complete decomposition of the genitals at least manages to keep them from being altogether indecent.
As he stands, the Webley trembles in his grip. He has already imagined the prospect of reloading. His fingers rub against each other in the left coat pocket—the pocket is empty. He does not have enough bullets for the situation. How could I have made such an oversight? So many things never occur to him until it is too late; sometimes his life seems nothing more than a string of neglected chances at foresight and planning. He thinks of Ayat, leaping into action without thinking. Who in Hades am I to criticize his judgment?
Wilde closes one eye, raises the gun and prepares to duel. The pistol’s strong recoil sends a bolt of pain through his broad wrist as the closest attacker drops, a third eye newly minted in its forehead. Wilde retreats three steps and then automatically circles closer, like an indecisively suicidal man. The brave imperative to assert himself between the Lazari and Bosie waxes and wanes against his terror.
His second shot isn’t good enough—the shoulder. The impact flings the Lazarus woman onto her back and the entire right arm disconnects and shatters into splinters. Maybe it will be enough. But no—the remaining body rises a moment later, oblivious to its loss. The left arm juts out, fingers opening and closing, a hideous mimic of the creature’s lipless mouth.
“You’re nearly as stubborn as Sarah Bernhardt,” Wilde says, firing his third shot into her head.
He shoots again and again, more careful with his aim. The bullets find and fell their targets. But five more Lazari approach.
And one bullet remains.
For myself, Wilde thinks, and even turns the gun around to stare down the barrel. A head shot will assure he stays down. But does he want that? The question surprises him so much he spares a second to consider it. In that space, he imagines himself rising, finding Bosie waiting on him. Is there love among the Lazari? There is clearly greed and gluttony and endless hunger. Is love so different than these things? Is love, as he’s known it, any less base?
Sweat breaks across his face and pools on cheeks that have become sallow and pitted with age. So hideous, he thinks, staring at the monsters as he backpedals. The notion that he could become one of them willfully, that he would be mindless in his carnal pursuits…my God, he realizes: he already mirrors them. He has lived their existence even before his reputation and his fortune fractured. He had only better skin on a better public face.
The gun goes to his temple, his eyes wincing shut against the planned violence. Then he hears a familiar whistle and looks to see the head of the Lazari farthest from him go flying across the street. The decapitated body drops, revealing Ayat in all his glory, holding a sword so ostentatious that Wilde can only marvel. He brings the sword back to him and leaps into a pose—à la coquille. Wilde cries out, drops the Webley, falls to the ground and kicks away from a lunging Lazarus man. The remaining four step over Bosie and swipe down at Wilde’s clothes.
“Now it is my turn to save you, dear Oscar,” Ayat shouts as he thrusts the blade through the next man’s neck. An elegant twist turns the blade flat and with the slightest flick the steel sweeps away bone and flesh. The head lolls backward and tumbles atop the body that collapses underneath it.
“Oscar, what are you doing? Move!”
Wilde has scrambled back as far as he can go. The Lazari have forgotten him, pivoting to indulge Ayat’s fervor. Move, he thinks. He looks for the Webley. It is there—out of immediate reach. His gaze trains on Bosie.
The great coil has sprung inside him. The body twitches with new energy, a scene such as only Mary Shelley could imagine. For the second time in half an hour, Wilde thinks of a scene out of literature and inverts his role inside it. Aesthete, poet, playwright, doomed martyr—all the identities he has created for himself—and in reality he is Bosie’s construction entirely. He is the Creature watching his Creator come to life.
He bares his neck for Bosie’s teeth.
“Oscar!”
Somehow Ayat has lost his sword. It rattles across the ground with a sound that makes Wilde wince. It is a sound like a perfect gem being dropped on the floor and stepped upon until it powders.
Bosie hisses and sits up.
“Damn it, Wilde, your gun! Shoot something!”
Ayat is breathless again. His French is so hard to understand. Wilde takes a deep inhale, wondering if he’ll miss it—breathing. Not here, perhaps. The air is wonderfully poisonous in Paris. He much prefers England where they show their toxins with more discretion, in the heart.
Bosie’s eyes are pale blue cataracts that fix on Wilde’s slumped body. He crawls, still hissing, his body so lithe and exotic and seductive that Wilde’s erection actually hurts in his pants. Take me, consume me, he thinks. There seems so little remaining to him that Bosie has not already devoured, why shouldn’t the flesh yield too? Wilde begins to undo his shirt.
Ayat meanwhile dodges one clumsy blow and throws himself along the ground, rolling to escape being surrounded. He rolls all the way to his fallen sword and takes it up. Wilde’s attention flickers a moment at him. Beautiful, daring Ayat—so much more worthy than Bosie in nearly everything, a man of hard effort and harder employment, not the bratty, untalented poet son of
a crazed aristocrat, himself possessed of terrible poetic pretensions and sensibilities. When I am dead cremate me.
He looks at Ayat and then back at Bosie and wipes away a tear with the back of his hand. Poor boy, raised by such a tyrant and likely touched by inherited madness. It excuses everything. It must.
Ayat beheads the remaining Lazari. The last one he toys with, dancing just out of reach as leisured swipes sever the right hand and then the left, followed by both arms at their shoulders by making an exaggerated, cleaving swing. He whittles away the Lazarus man, clipping extremities as a tailor might break off an excess of buttons. It is an unexpectedly cruel performance only Bosie could appreciate.
“Do you know what sword this is, Oscar? It is the Austerlitz Blade—the personal sword of Emperor Napoleon, forged by the great Biennais! How I longed to hold it as a boy every time I saw it at the Army Museum. I am a God with this weapon. I am—who is it to you British?”
“I am not British, dear boy.”
“I remember now—yes, I am St. George!”
He delivers the decisive blow and then waxes on, addressing his enthusiasms to the blade at such lengths that it takes a minute to realize Wilde’s silence. He turns—and shouts something Wilde cannot understand. Gibberish is gibberish in any language, though he wonders how it must look, with Bosie nearly on top of him and Wilde shirtless, waiting for the dry teeth, imaging how his own blood will warm his lover’s cold mouth.
“Oscar!”
Ayat rushes toward them. Wilde realizes his intent and something in Bosie realizes it too. His muscles still have strength and quickness to them. He turns in to Ayat’s charge, dodges at the last moment and bites into the Frenchman’s leg. The Austerlitz Blade strikes the building a mere inch from Wilde left ear and again falls abandoned. “No, Bosie,” Wilde cries. His lover smothers over the shrieking fencer, whose arms flail in impotence without a weapon.
“No!”
Wilde Stories 2014 Page 22