Swiftly Weyland shifted his attack. “Of course, you’re afraid. I understand.” Irv might have said that—but Irv was warm.
Weyland’s understanding must be cold. “You know how frail and unworthy, how merely human you are behind your carefully hardened exterior. Your weakness does not make you unfit in my eyes. I know that even in your childhood something cruel lived in you, not simple childish brutality but a core of ice for the sake of which you held yourself aloof . . .”
Reese licked his lips but did not speak. He must always have been physically unlovely, socially overbearing, avid for power. What childhood tales had lifted his sullen heart?
The child is lost in the woods, is taken in by wolves, becomes the leader of a mythic pack ranging the forest forever.
A stranger emerges from a great star vessel to say, “Come, you are not one of these wretched little mammals, this has all been a mistake. You are one of us, mighty, wise, and immortal.”
Magic reveals that the dirty peasants around one are not family; one’s real father and mother are immaculate king and queen of an enchanted land.
Weyland remembered none of his own dreams, but he had studied those of humankind. To the dream of secret superiority, of the potboy’s princely destiny, he spoke. Not that he used such terms. To this deadly adult who proposed to create a new religion Weyland spoke of an ancient sodality; he touched on secrecy ruthlessly maintained, hidden wealth skillfully administered across the centuries, a hierarchy in which Reese would be a bare initiate for decades, a planned transfer from the outworn human identity that must be left behind, slow chemical changes, and increasing powers.
No melodrama—that was Reese’s own territory, he would not be taken in. Weyland spoke with the caution proper to one recruiting in such a cause. Where the desperate inventiveness of his mind failed, he hinted at secrets not so soon to be revealed.
All along ran the subtext, the fairy tales his lies were shadows of, so that he spoke both to the man and to the boy in the man.
Reese broke in at last, husky-voiced. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you.” His hand moved stiffly on the mechanism of the gun, and Weyland heard a single, ominous click.
Time for one last, audacious gesture: moving slowly and deliberately, Weyland unbuttoned his cuff and began rolling back his shirtsleeve. He forced himself not to rush his words.
“As you observed in New York,” he said, “I don’t create another vampire by feeding even many times on one victim. But a grain of truth lies in the old tale of the vampire opening his own veins to an initiate. I must feed you not once but many times, until your change begins. This is risky for me, and I don’t enjoy it, but there is no other way.” He stood up. “Who was your father?”
“Don’t move!” Reese commanded hoarsely. “Sit down!”
“I said, who was your father?” Weyland’s voice sounded distant in his own ears. He felt dizzy with fear, with rage, with the tantalizing nearness of gratification.
Reese whispered, “My father was a motorman on the New York subway.”
Weyland, startled, thought fleetingly of his old plan to go to earth in a Manhattan subway tunnel. The convulsion of feeling vanished. Now he must say the right words or lose all.
“That was the father of your human life,” he declared in a clear, revelatory voice. “I am the father of your life forever—if you are bold enough to acknowledge me.”
He put his lips to the thin skin of his own inner wrist and thrust with the dart from under his tongue. The taste of blood came into his mouth, shocking, familiar, rich, and salty. His hunger surged, threatening to overwhelm him in a feeding ecstasy such as once before had nearly destroyed him. He made himself raise his face and show that ecstasy to Reese: I invite you to abandon mere mummery and tricks for what is yours to claim—this sweet reality that I offer. He extended his arm, feeling the warm trickle of blood curling down into his palm.
“Come and drink.”
Slowly, dazed, Reese rose and approached. His eyes, in which Weyland saw the shine of tears, were fixed on the bloodied wrist. The room seemed hardly to contain Reese’s hoarse breathing. The gun dangled in his slack grip. He leaned forward.
Weyland put his other hand on the back of Reese’s head, guiding, reassuring, silently caressing with a feather touch. Reese bent nearer. Weyland felt the trembling lips against his skin.
With a roar of passionate triumph he seized his quarry and flung him headlong, face down, onto the couch, hurling himself atop him, entwining the frantically bucking body with iron limbs. The gun skittered across the floor. Weyland’s bloodied hand clamped Reese’s face, palm jamming the screaming mouth shut, fingers crushing the nostrils, stifling the breath. He bound tightly to himself the thunder of the frenzied heart, the surge and strain of the massive back, until all collapsed in an air-starved spasm.
Then he moved one finger, felt Reese’s ribs heave for more air—which Weyland gave, a sip at a time, enough to support life and consciousness as he rasped into Reese’s ear, “Now I am going to drink your life. Take good note, this is how I do it.”
Reese’s blood was pungent with adrenaline. Weyland made not just a meal but a banquet, taking his time, permitting entrance of enough air to keep the lungs pumping. The futile lashing of the head and the lunges of the legs and trunk continued, but in time blood loss quelled all this commotion. He relaxed his hold and fed more slowly, savoring also the laboring of Reese’s starved heart, his sobbing gasps at air now freely allowed but powerless to save.
At last, hunger and hatred both fed to repletion, Weyland knelt by the couch and looked into Reese’s blue and liquid eyes that stared back from beneath drooping lids. The couch cushion was dark with Reese’s saliva.
“Can you see me still?” Weyland murmured, drowsy and satisfied. “As you’ve surely guessed by now, you failed the final test. You’re too human.”
He lay down on the living-room rug and slept.
When he woke, Reese was dead. Weyland made his preparations, and with the body lying in the back he drove the blue hatchback toward the mountains.
* * *
Hands in pockets, the collar of the old windbreaker turned to the breeze’s edge, he walked northward facing the sparse oncoming traffic. Now and then headlights would appear and draw on, and he would step back onto the shoulder of the road until the lights had whipped past in a buffet of wind.
Jacket, faded work pants, chambray shirt, even the heavy old hunting boots he wore, all had been lifted in darkness from the Goodwill store downtown an hour before. His own bloodspotted clothes he had deposited in various garbage bins around the city along with a pair of rubber kitchen gloves and the keys to Reese’s car. Local jackals would soon dispose of the hatchback which he had abandoned, unlocked, with the gun inside on the floor, in a neighborhood of slums and light industry.
Reese’s body lay tumbled in a brush-choked arroyo near a major hiking trail on the mountain. When eventually found he would be assumed to have lost his way and died of hypothermia. Little remained to show who Reese had been or what had been the nature of his errand to Albuquerque. Reese’s identification and the letter from Katje de Groot had been burned and the ashes thrown to the wind.
Thrown to the wind like the ashes of Weyland’s documents. Walking the verge of the highway, he altered his gait to the amble appropriate to the wanderer he meant to become. Wait, he had neglected the perfecting touch—a sober man of mature years does not go bareheaded. He pulled from his jacket pocket the rolled-up, time-worn Panama hat and put it on.
Inwardly he was exultant. Though the taste of blood was the sweetest in the world, much was to be enjoyed in the savor of victory. Out of blood and victory together he had fashioned a perfect climax and vindication of his Weyland life.
Now he could walk away from that life without regret.
Shreds of newspaper fluttered palely on the wires of the fence on his left. He imagined the headlines: DOUBLE MYSTERY ON CAMPUS—SUICIDE AND DISAPPEARANCE. Poor Alison,
both her father substitutes lost within a few days. That didn’t bother him, but something else disturbed his elated mood.
Word would get back to Cayslin, thence to Floria Landauer.
I care about this, he thought, alarmed. He stopped and turned off the road and stood staring west, watching the night depart. I care. What will happen to her?
He saw himself standing at some gas-station phone along the road, hunched away from the traffic noise and shouting into the mouthpiece—shouting a warning.
What if Reese had been telling the truth about having her watched? What might the watcher do, bereft of direction from Reese? Mark knew his danger and had flown, but Floria knew nothing. The thought of her innocent and unaware in the power of Reese’s creatures was intolerable. She must be told so she could have the chance to save herself. She must be told so Weyland’s mind would be freed of anxiety for her. Without a doubt, if the one in danger were himself and Floria knew, she would take her courage in her hands and find a way to warn him. Irv, similarly placed, would postpone suicide to do so.
Why, then, was it so clear to Weyland that he might imagine the phone call but not make it? Because by speaking to Floria he might compromise his own disappearance, and that he could not permit. Survival for people was at most a matter of decades, while for him centuries perhaps were at stake. The scale of time divided him from humanity irrevocably. Irv’s passionate involvement, Floria’s valor, were not for him.
The rough, dry wood of the fencepost he leaned on creaked in the grip of his hand, reminding him of the chair he had broken in a moment of alarm in Floria’s office. This was not alarm. This was pain.
He spread his fingers, studying his hands with keen night vision: not the hands of a man, but the talons of a raptor. A raptor does not care. I used not to care.
What was it someone had asked once at a lecture he had given—a question about Satanic pride? He had seen Mrs. de Groot in the audience that night and thought nothing of it except that his efforts to lure her to him were succeeding. He ought not to have answered that question with sarcasm, for pride he had surely harbored, as well as the blindness that pride brings.
He had grown proud in the process of his long, successful struggle to forge the identity of Weyland: the years of working in all sorts of capacities at places where records were kept; the drudgery in libraries, small printing plants, a series of offices with computer links to certain information systems; the careful steps of an academic career begun in a mediocre Southern school and crowned at last with his prized position at Cayslin College. There, running the dream-mapping project, he had settled down to perfect the regularity of his feeding and immerse himself in the absorbing routines of scholarship. His feeling of security had mellowed over several years into something like contempt. He had begun to take his prey for granted.
Until Katje de Groot with one utterly unlooked-for, devastating stroke had rent him open, body and mind, and left him vulnerable to these others.
Memory served him the pain and dread of Reese’s butcher-hands first wrenching at him, Mark’s blood offering, his own effort to refrain from crushing the boy’s thin frame in the violence of his hunger. He remembered Floria’s dazzled, growing awareness as she worked at revelation with her client, first in words, then in flesh. He remembered Irv’s dark, warm gaze, his voice low and concerned, and Dorothea blazing with the anguish of having failed to save her friend.
Not cattle, these; they deserved more from him than disdain. And they had more. He had cared enough to preserve when it was no longer secure his Weyland identity and all its ties and memories. Tonight, in deadly jeopardy because of that recklessness, he had not owed his fury only to past pain or the promise of future suffering at Reese’s hands. He had burned also at the thought of Floria Landauer caught unknowing in Reese’s net; of young Mark flying into a fugitive’s perils from the net flung after him; of Reese obscenely alive and Irv dead.
He burned still.
His breath came shallow and strained and his thoughts in dark, dizzying waves. He tipped back his head and drew air deep into his lungs. Why do I stand here? he demanded furiously of himself. I should be moving, soliciting a ride, jettisoning all futile reflection. He stared fiercely northward, the direction he had chosen to take.
There was no point. He could not leave that which he carried with him—these people, bright as flames. For how long would they dance in his memory even after they died in the world? Time was said to fade such visions. Suppose this was untrue for him—suppose other visions were added? Crippling damage had been dealt him, and all his plans were irrelevant. He could not hunt successfully among prey for whom he might come to care. His life had been broken into; anyone might enter.
Now he knew with bitter clarity why in each long sleep he forgot the life preceding that sleep. He forgot because he could not survive the details of an enormous past heavy with those he cared for. No wonder art, or dreams, or history brought too vividly to life in human speech, were dangerous. They could tap the reservoirs of feeling buried in him under intervening sleeps. He was not fit to endure grief, let alone grief piled on grief through centuries of loss. Short-lived human beings could themselves tolerate only so much pain—look at Irv.
The remedy lay where he had passed over it only a moment before in his own thoughts. Afflicted by attachment, he had recourse to a way out that had not been open to Irv. At some risk and a cost he had no way to measure, he could choose the oblivion of long sleep.
I am not the monster who falls in love and is destroyed by his human feelings. I am the monster who stays true.
The first weak light of dawn touched his face with a ghost of warmth as he turned eastward. Slowly, unwillingly, he raised his eyes toward the mountain; there was his retreat.
* * *
Perhaps hours had passed, perhaps days, since he had lain down in the cave. He had not even hunger to guide him, for the chill black air had begun to dim his body’s systems.
This place in rock was the realm of his elder self, the animal core. From that center had welled up the clear, simple knowledge of how to proceed toward sleep: within reach of water seeping over stone, make a pallet, undress, lie this way, be still, and wait.
No further action was required of him, and slowly anguish faded, calculation stilled. The past was immutable. For the future, it was enough to know that upon waking, if he did wake, he would rise restored, eyes once more as bright and unreflective as a hawk’s and heart as ruthless as a leopard’s.
The novelty of being free of all present necessity came to absorb him. He seemed to float some distance from himself in the darkness, although now and then he noticed the softness of worn cotton under his cheek where his folded clothing served as a pillow or the mixed fragrances of the brush, grasses, and pine boughs of which he made his bed.
Then for a time came an unexpected gift. The voices of the people returned vividly to him, their faces, gestures, laughter, the swirling brightness of the opera crowd, the jingle of coins in Irv’s pocket, Mark’s warm, bony shoulder under his hand as they walked toward the river, the scent of Floria’s skin. Intense pleasure filled him as he yielded himself to the mingled ache and joy of memory, as he gathered in his Weyland life.
At length, when possession of that life was achieved, all was effortlessly let go like a release of breath.
In the still vault of his mind darkness began to thicken and drift. Tranquilly he recognized the onset of sleep. He did not resist.
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