Once Bitten

by Willis, Clare

  “Yes,” I answered, “but how do you know all these things?”

  I couldn’t read Eric’s expression. “I meet many people in my work. Our paths must have crossed at some time or another. Are you ready to go?”

  “Where?”

  He leaned close and touched my cheekbone. “I’d like to see where you live,” he whispered in my ear.

  His smell permeated my brain and started an avalanche of endorphins. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he hadn’t answered any of my questions.

  There are a few nights every September or October in San Francisco when the fog doesn’t roll in and put a damp chill on skin and spirits. The air stays warm, the smell of flowers lingers in the air, and people stay out in shirtsleeves until midnight. These are also the nights when tempers flare and guns go off, and police sirens are heard until the sun rises. Hot nights make people crazy. Maybe that was my excuse.

  From the top of the hill in Pacific Heights we could see the lights of the city shining like a well-adorned Christmas tree. The moon was almost full, creating an eerie doppelgänger of daylight that illuminated the mansions around us in all their glory. Eric was reining in his natural gait to keep pace with me. As we walked he removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up his sleeves. Just the sight of his sinewy forearms set a rippling thrill through my body.

  The Angie that I had been all my life—the serious, responsible, cautious Angie—had been rolled up like a rug and tossed into the attic of my consciousness. I could still hear her talking, but she seemed powerless and far away. She was telling me that going off alone with this man was unwise, that I was ignoring all the signs of danger. She said that he could only be two things: run-of-the-mill evil, a crazy man, but a human one; or something else, something bigger, a kind of evil she couldn’t begin to fathom.

  But as I watched Eric lope alongside me like a strolling tiger, head turning to sniff the air and take in the sights, I didn’t care what he was. The things the old Angie was trying to preserve—my job, friends, the security of understanding the way the world worked, even my very life—they all seemed unimportant. Many people risked life and limb for an experience—skydivers, racecar drivers, everyone who’d ever attempted to climb Mount Everest. Experience expands and priorities shift.

  We arrived at my building and Eric held the door for me after I unlocked it. We crossed the lobby and I pushed the elevator button. When Mr. Bennett remodeled our apartment building he kept the old elevator, the kind with a mesh gate instead of a sliding door, because it had Art Deco bronze paneling that could never be replicated. I watched the floor numbers light up in descending order, consciously not looking at Eric because I could feel his gaze burning into my face and I knew if I looked at him I would certainly blush. The gate was heavy and stiff and took both my arms to open, but Eric slid it open with one finger. Then I stared at my feet for eight floors.

  We went into the living room and I sat down on the couch, facing the sweeping beam of the lighthouse on Alcatraz Island. Eric tossed his suit jacket over the back of the sofa and a faint smell of eau de Eric wafted over me. He walked over to the bar in the corner and examined the bottles. He poured us each some Scotch, then went into the kitchen. I heard him getting ice. He put our drinks on the table, and then he took me by the shoulders and turned me so my back was facing him.

  He started to gently comb my hair with his fingers. My neck tingled under his touch.

  “Ah, Angela, you beautiful, innocent girl. So young…” He sounded sad.

  “Why do say that? I’m twenty-eight, hardly a girl. How old are you, anyway?”

  “Much older than I look. Too old for you. But I can’t seem to resist you, Angela. You have a beauty that transcends time.”

  If that was a line it was a good one. His lips brushed my neck and his hands slid lightly up and down my arms. A warm glow spread over my body. I leaned against his chest and put my head on his shoulder. With one hand he stroked my face from forehead to chin. I felt his heart beat, a delicate susurration deep in his chest. His breath on my neck was cool and fragrant. A now familiar feeling began to take hold of me. The laws of gravity were repealed and I was lifted, weightless, my body floating, unattached to anything except the hands that were stroking me, the mouth that was sliding down the long tendon in the side of my neck.

  It took willpower I didn’t know I possessed to pull away from Eric, but I did it, and stood up on unsteady feet. I wanted him on my terms this time. I needed to know if he would still want me if I expressed needs and desires of my own, if I were to take control.

  “Is something wrong, Angela?”

  He was sprawled on the couch, his long body filling it from end to end. His face, and I found this maddening, was completely calm, even a little amused. Not a hair on his head was mussed. The lights of the city were reflected in his eyes, shimmering like refractions from a prism, so they had no depth, no window into his soul. Did these encounters mean anything to him? Was I a mouse being toyed with by a bored cat?

  Frustration drove me to take an antithetical action. I had always felt most vulnerable when I was nude, so I usually hid from the few men I had been with, slipping off my clothes under cover of darkness or under the sheets. Even Andy had only seen me naked a handful of times, usually by accident. But now I peeled off my clothes piece by piece, slowly and unhurriedly, holding Eric’s gaze, not allowing his eyes to stray until I stood naked in front of him, hiding nothing, offering everything.

  Eric’s expression changed. What had seemed to be arrogance turned to gentleness and a sweet yearning. He slid to his knees in front of me and bent his head, as if I was an altar at which he was praying.

  “Angela, you are perfection,” he whispered.

  I closed the distance between us, wrapped my arms around him. He pressed his lips against my stomach, then lifted me as easily as a feather.

  “Where’s your room?” he asked.

  Chapter 14

  Kissing Eric was when his scent was at its most overwhelming. Its effect was like laughing gas, beginning with numbness in the extremities and moving toward disorientation and euphoria. I couldn’t understand it except that maybe I was in love, and this is what the experts mean by the power of pheromones.

  At some point I noticed that Eric hadn’t removed his own clothes but it didn’t seem to matter. The sensation was of six hands stroking my body, three pairs of lips kissing me. Just the feel of his long hair as it swept along my skin sent sparks of electricity down my spine. I wasn’t sure what was happening or to which part of me. My body had become a single organ of pure feeling. I could say I had an orgasm, but that would not begin to describe the feeling. I experienced a climax that encompassed my entire body, from my hair to my toenails. I bit my fist to keep from screaming.

  In the midst of this storm of sensation I felt a pain like lightning and a pleasure that was too intense for words. I felt Eric enter me in a way that joined our very souls together. My bones melted, my blood coursed through my veins like a flood tide, rushing to pour into him and join us together at our very molecules. At the apex of this union Eric entered my mind and his thoughts became mine.

  Eric sits in a room with walls made of rough stone, writing with a quill pen by the light of a flickering candle. A man dressed in priest’s robes comes up behind him, puts his arms around his chest, his lips to Eric’s neck.

  A flash of red, then another vision.

  Eric is sitting with Lucy on her couch. I recognize the abstract painting on the wall behind them. There are two wineglasses on the table. Lucy is laughing, her head thrown back. Eric leans toward her, takes her in an embrace. Her arms wind around his neck.

  Behind my eyelids I saw the red licks of flame again, but this time instead of a vision I felt my connection with Eric break. I was falling, tumbling, out of control, into an ocean of darkness. Then, oblivion.

  I awoke in my bed, facing the window, alone. From the utter stillness of the city I could tell it was predawn, sometime
between three and six. I stretched and rolled over. Eric was sitting in my desk chair, dressed in his white shirt and suit pants. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his hair tangled around his shoulders. In the moonlight I could see streaks of tears on his cheeks.

  “Angela, I don’t know how it came to this. I have tried to live virtuously, I have tried to fight against my nature, and now I see I have failed.”

  I sat up and pulled the sheet around my chest. “You know what’s happening to me, don’t you?”

  Eric nodded, and then dropped his head into his hands.

  I realized it was time to ask for the truth. Whatever the answer was, I knew I wasn’t going to pull away from him now.

  “Eric, are you a vampire?” As soon as the words came out I felt both relieved and completely insane.

  Eric came over to sit next to me on the bed. He took my hand and turned it over, as if he was reading my palm. He traced the blue vein that ran from my thumb up my wrist. Finally he looked into my eyes.

  “If I tell you, you will not believe me, and that is as it should be. This incredulity has a protective property for humans, so they do not learn truths with which they cannot live.”

  “Eric, I love…I would love to know you. I need to know.”

  He turned to look out the window. “This is my favorite time of night, when everything is quiet. Let’s take a walk.”

  Eric waited silently while I put on jeans and a sweater, then we descended the Pacific Heights hill. When we reached the water we turned right and walked along Jefferson Street, through the heart of Fisherman’s Wharf. So bright and cheesy during the day, filled with tourists buying Alcatraz T-shirts and clam chowder, the wharf at 4:30 A.M. was a time portal to the nineteenth century. Fishermen in yellow slickers hauled nets and buoys, getting ready to go out to sea. Fog shrouded the most egregious of the tourist traps, like Hooters and the Wax Museum, but pools of light cast from the old-fashioned street lamps picked out the red brick of the buildings and the glossy gray cobblestones in the streets.

  When we reached the Hyde Street Pier Eric picked up his pace. I could hardly keep up as he rushed down the rough wooden pier, but then he stopped so abruptly I almost ran into him. He was staring at the Balclutha, a three-masted sailing ship from the 1800s that San Francisco had turned into a museum.

  “What is this?” he asked, his voice low.

  “A ship.” I couldn’t understand what he was finding so fascinating, especially when I wanted him to be finding me fascinating.

  “Yes, but why is it here, now?”

  “Read the placard.” I pointed it out. I already knew what the ship was. We’d done a photo shoot there not very long ago, but I was miffed and didn’t feel like telling him.

  He read the placard, and then he walked back over to me. His face was filled with delight, like a kid at Christmas, and I instantly felt guilty about being angry with him. Seeing him happy made me realize how melancholy he normally was, and I wished it had been me that put that smile on his face, and not a creaky old boat.

  “It’s the Balclutha,” he said.

  “You’ve seen it before?”

  “I’ve sailed on that ship. I went around Cape Horn on it, from Scotland to San Francisco. How wonderful to see it again.” He gazed at it again, like he wanted to run up and hug the mast.

  “Eric, that ship’s been mothballed for seventy years.”

  His eyes moved back to my face. The melancholy look had returned, and it was even deeper now. I grabbed his hand and pulled him onto a bench.

  “I’d say now’s as good a time as any to start telling me the truth, don’t you?”

  Eric kept my hand in his, but he looked at the ship, not at me, as he talked. His voice was low and even, as if he was reciting a poem.

  “My human life began in 1591 in the south of France. My given name was Cyprien.”

  “Cyprien,” I repeated, trying to pronounce it the same way Eric did. “That’s a more appropriate name than Eric Taylor, for sure. What was your last name?”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anymore. They are all long gone.”

  “I’m sorry.” So his line had died out. There weren’t even any distant relatives for him to keep an eye on.

  He continued. “I was born the last of four boys. My father was a merchant, and although he was successful, he was not rich enough to set up all of his sons in business. As the youngest, I was chosen to enter the religious life. This was fairly common then when a family had more children than it could support, as it took care of the child while providing spiritual tithe for the family in the afterlife. At the age of sixteen I was sent to join an order of Franciscan friars.

  “I didn’t know how to feel about this. As a young man, with all the feelings and desires of a young man, I felt trapped. But I was also very pious, and began to believe that this was what God had chosen for me. I undertook my duties with zeal and after several years began to feel at peace with my life and work.

  “The monastery was in the country, several hours by horse from our town. It was close to a small village where the townspeople supplied the brothers with the physical necessities of life and we provided them with the spiritual ones. Periodically, a brother would be called to the village to minister to someone who had died suddenly, usually visited in their bed by an unknown plague that took them in the night, leaving them white and contorted in their death throes. Some townspeople whispered of demons, witches, or even of vampires, but this was a time when diseases ran rampant and life was precarious at best, and most people took little notice.”

  Eric stopped talking for a moment, and in the stillness I could hear the sound of the water lapping against the hull of the ship, and the creaking of the masts and rigging.

  “An older friar, Brother Vincent, undertook to help me with my studies. A tall, pale, almost ghostly man, Brother Vincent was said to have a disease of the blood that made him delicate and sensitive to the sun. He kept mostly to his room and was rarely seen before dark. He was also a charismatic figure—handsome, intelligent, and kind. Many of the villagers sought him out especially for confessions or other services. He was compelling to me in a strange way I could not name. I found myself falling in love with him.

  “Brother Vincent began coming to my room late at night when the monastery was silent. He would take me in his arms and embrace me. He never removed his robes or mine, and I never knew what was happening to me except that it induced feelings of euphoria that in my long life have never been equaled.

  “During this time I began to change physically. I became sensitive to light and began to develop headaches. I lost my appetite and slept for hours on end. I also began to hear whispers all around me, the voices of other friars drifting through the walls even when I knew they weren’t speaking out loud. I began to think I was dying of one of the diseases that were cursing the village.”

  “Did you tell Vincent what was happening, ask him for help?”

  “One night I confessed my fears to him. He held me against his chest and talked to me without speaking, entered my mind and filled it with his words. He told me he loved me, that he had looked for years for someone to share his life with, and he had chosen me to be his companion. He was undertaking to change me into a different kind of being, a creature that could live forever.

  “He explained to me that tonight would be the night when I would change over. He told me that he was going to kill me. I would feel pain, but then I would wake up in my new body, to my new life. Then he wrapped me in the embrace that he had given me so many times before.”

  I closed my eyes against a rush of feeling so strong it made me feel physically ill. I wanted not to believe this story, but the parallels with my own experience were too uncanny.

  “Only this time he didn’t stop. At the edge of the pleasure I felt panic. My limbs became numb, a black sky full of silver stars spun in front of my closed eyes. I felt a crushing pain in my chest, like a huge rock had been dropped on my heart. I tried to pus
h it off, tried to push Vincent off, but he clung to me. For the first time I felt intense pain, searing burns where his teeth bit into me. The agony radiated down my arms and legs until my whole body felt on fire. Then there was nothing.”

  Eric looked so stricken that I shook his arm gently, trying to break him out of the trance that he seemed to be in. But he didn’t even look at me, his haunted eyes stayed fixed on the past.

  “Out of the darkness I saw a light, a warm glowing light pulsating with love, and I knew that light was heaven. I started to go toward the light but it retreated, became smaller and smaller and the darkness greater, until it was only a pinprick. Then it disappeared and I was desolate.

  “I floated in the blackness, as if in the depths of the ocean where no sun could ever touch, and I cried out, ‘My Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ In response I heard only silence, and I knew I was alone.

  “Finally I heard a voice, and it was Vincent. I heard him as if over a vast distance, calling my name. I moved toward his voice and finally I woke up, and Vincent was holding me and shaking me, rubbing a wet cloth across my face.

  “Enraged, I tried to throw Vincent off me, but I was too weak. I flailed at him with my fists, crying, ‘You knew, you knew I would be damned! I saw the gates of heaven close in my face! I will never be saved, never! God has forsaken me!’

  “Vincent simply held me and ignored my fists, stroking my hair away from my sweating forehead. He said, ‘You have no need of heaven, Cyprien. Not any more.’ It wasn’t long before I found out the true nature of my new existence. Within days of my conversion I was overcome by feelings of hunger the likes of which I couldn’t have imagined. I found myself picturing cutting people with my fingernails or with my teeth, putting my face in the blood and drinking it.

  “When I told this to Vincent he just nodded. ‘The time has come,’ he said. We went to the village after midnight on an evening with no moon. I found I could see as if it were daylight. Vincent went right to a cottage door and opened it, motioned me to go inside. It was the home of a family who had recently lost a child, and Vincent had been there administering the last rites.