From her purse she removed a small plastic container of blue and white capsules and handed them to Chloe, who read the label.
“Gerlinde, how’s your Spanish?”
“Mejor que mi Aleman,” the girl said.
“Can you talk like an American trying to speak the language?”
“See, Seen your hah.”
“Will you call this doctor? Tell him you’re Carol’s sister. She’s with you in France and you just want some details. Find out what he knows.”
Gerlinde stood, ruffling Carol’s hair. “Chin up.”
As she passed André she punched him macho style on the arm. “You devil!”
He scowled at her.
Chloe reached out her hands and hesitantly Carol took them. Then Chloe looked into her eyes. Those blue orbs were so relaxing. Carol felt tension leaving her body. She sighed. She was tired. So tired. She had a sense of Chloe being a mother, comforting her, inviting her back into the womb so that she could just relax and forget everything that was bothering her. I can rest, she thought. I need rest. I can be at peace.
Gerlinde’s voice dragged her back to reality. “He said she’s preggers, maybe a month. A little low on iron, but otherwise strong. He did an ultrasound. Looks like a fetus, alright. No problems he can see.”
“Fine,” Chloe said.
Carol sat back against the couch. Visually things were unusually bright.
Chloe turned to André and spoke in French.
“What did you say?” Carol asked.
“I said that you are definitely with child. Besides what the doctor told Gerlinde, I can feel it, and see it in your eyes. Who the father is, that’s another question.”
Suddenly Carol felt like crying again. She wanted to get up bravely and tell them, thank you very much, but she was going to leave now. None of them believed her, and she could understand that, and she shouldn’t have come back for their help. She would make her way, go back to Philadelphia and have the abortion. She was sorry to have put them out.
But she couldn’t move. Physically and mentally she felt depleted. Emotionally exhaustion and depression crushed her.
“André said you want an abortion. Why?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t want to have the child.”
“Why not? You’re young. Strong. Probably healthy. Do you dislike children?”
“I... I don’t know. I’ve never thought much about it.”
“So how come?” Gerlinde asked.
Carol hesitated. “He thinks he’s a vampire—not human. He’s sick. I don’t know what that means. I don’t want to give birth to anything with defective genes. And there could be complications. I might die.”
“With an attitude like that, you might die anyway.” André spoke for the first time.
Carol suddenly realized that she had offended them. She didn’t care about André so much, but the women had been kind to her. “I’m sorry,” she said to Chloe then turned to Gerlinde.
“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I’m just afraid.”
“And a liar!” André crossed the room quickly. He grabbed her by the hair, pulling her to her feet. “It’s written all over your face. What’s the real reason you don’t want to have the kid?”
Carol started to shake.
“Answer me!”
“I... I may have something.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Something I can pass on.”
“Which is?”
She was embarrassed to even say it, the implications were so dreadful. “HIV. I’ve tested negative twice but I’m probably a carrier—my ex-husband has AIDS. The baby would likely come down with it.”
They were all silent. Carol looked from one to the other.
Chloe seemed concerned and Gerlinde shocked. André’s face had turned livid—and furious.
“You little bitch!” he said in a tight low voice. “So that’s why you were so eager to let me fuck you. You thought you’d infect me, kill me with the virus.”
Carol felt stunned. “No, that’s not what—”
“What a set up! Even if I had decided to take your blood you thought you’d get me.”
“I wasn’t trying to infect you. I wouldn’t do that to anyone! I tried to tell you, several times—”
“You’re lying!” He raised his hand, about to smack her, but Gerlinde stepped between them.
“Cool it, kiddo! You have just leaped to a gigantic conclusion.”
He shoved Gerlinde out of the way. But immediately Chloe said, “André! Stop!”
“Stay out of this,” he warned them. “She’s mine. It’s my right to do what I want to her. Neither of you can interfere.”
Chloe began talking to him in French. She was explaining something in a calm voice. The more she said the more he argued.
But at some point what she was saying affected him and he became silent. Both he and Gerlinde were staring at Chloe with startled looks on their faces, listening with rapt attention.
Carol had no idea what was going on but she was grateful to Chloe. She knew André had meant to seriously hurt her. But this whole place, all of them... It was like suddenly waking up to find herself imprisoned in an institution for the insane. She was beginning to feel reality slipping from her grasp.
When Chloe finished, Gerlinde flopped into a chair. “I don’t believe this!”
Chloe said something else to André in French and immediately he grabbed Carol’s arm and pulled her across the room.
As they were going out the door, she heard Chloe tell Gerlinde, “I’ll have to let Jeanette know she was correct about The Empress.”
He almost dragged her up the steps, taking her to the same room she’d stayed in before. Without a word he shoved her inside, closed the door then locked it from the outside.
Carol was alone the rest of that night. Just before sunrise the maid brought a tray of food. Next to a plate of liver and spinach sat a bottle that read: Vitamines et Minéraux Multiples Comprimes.
Chapter Ten
As soon as the sun had set the following evening, the maid arrived again with more food. Carol, for all the chaotic events of the night before, had slept well, late into the afternoon. She felt refreshed and hungry and was still eating when André came in.
He sat across from her, watching her. Tonight she felt stronger, not so vulnerable. She took her time eating. He could just wait for her. When she finished, she put down the knife and fork, dabbed at her mouth and sat back.
Minutes passed. Neither of them spoke. She poured a cup of chamomile tea into a turquoise and white china cup with a gold rim and drank some. More minutes went by. She felt as if he had her under a microscope, examining her closely, no doubt searching for imperfections.
“I’ve decided you’ll stay here until the child’s born. Once the birth takes place you’ll leave. The baby remains.”
Carol put down her cup and saucer. “I don’t want to have the baby. I told you, I want an abortion.”
“What you want is irrelevant.”
“Another ultimatum? Your way or death, right?”
“Just my way.”
“Don’t you get tired of controlling the universe? It must be tedious acting out the role of Satan all the time.” She was feeling brave. She didn’t want to put up with any of his patriarchal crap.
“This is the deal. You stay, have the kid, then go. That’s it.”
“What do I get out of this ‘deal’?”
“Your life.”
“Maybe that’s not enough anymore.”
“I don’t recall offering you a choice.”
“I’ll escape. Or abort.”
“Try either one and I’ll chain you to that bed for the next eight months.”
Carol was quiet. He had her over the proverbial barrel and they both knew it. “Why do you want the baby? You don’t even believe it’s yours. Do you want to drink it’s blood?”
“You’re such a stupid bitch. I’m surprised you haven’t prov
oked someone enough to murder you by now.”
“Always threatening. Why? You’re so powerful, physically and in other ways. But you act like a kid with a toy hammer; you’ve got to smash everything you see.”
He stood and walked across the room to the window. His back was to her as he pulled the heavy drapes aside and looked out. “You can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s all the same to me.” He turned around. “But you’ll do it, that I can guarantee.”
Carol chewed on her lower lip, wondering what he was getting at.
As if reading her thoughts he said, “The easy way is this:
You stay here, behave yourself, take care of yourself, make yourself available to me, the way it was before, and eight months from now you deliver a baby. The next day you’re gone.”
“And the hard way?”
“Same as the above, except I use force. And you won’t like it.”
He walked to the door and held it open. “Think about it. Do yourself a favor.” He left.
A few minutes later Carol tried the door. It was locked.
Around midnight André returned and took her downstairs.
Gerlinde, Karl and Chloe waited in the living room on the couch nearest the fireplace. André took a chair opposite the others.
“Sit down next to me, Carol,” Chloe said, patting the smooth fabric.
Carol sat. She looked around. The four were watching her closely.
“We want to talk with you, about what’s going on. I know you must be confused.”
Carol exhaled and her shoulders fell forward a bit. She felt tired again. And depressed. But it was good that Chloe was so kind, otherwise she knew she might have tried something foolish. She felt almost suicidal.
“What’s happened to you, your pregnancy, is very, very unusual. Extraordinary, really.”
“Mondo weirdo,” Gerlinde said.
“Legend has it that only once in a great while can one of our kind reproduce through birth,” Chloe continued. “A male impregnates a mortal female. It doesn’t seem to work the other way around.”
My God, Carol thought. Mortal female? They think they’re gods. They’re all seriously disturbed.
“It happens so rarely,” Chloe continued, “only every few hundred years, that when it does we have a hard time believing it. None of us in this room existed the last time a birth occurred. And I’m the only one here who’s heard the legends.”
“A divine child,” Karl said.
A demon child, Carol thought. “Why does it happen?” she managed to ask, wondering why she was humoring these crazies.
“No one knows,” Chloe said. “All we can guess is that the conditions must be right, the male and female, the time, the chemical balance, the circumstances, maybe even the moon. We just don’t know. But what we do know is that such a child is very special to us.”
“Will it be, you know, a blood drinker, or whatever you people are?” She couldn’t believe she was saying this. But the whole conversation seemed so unreal.
“The baby will be half mortal and half immortal. Whatever is the major influence in his or her life will decide.”
“In other words,” Karl added, “if the child is raised by mortals it will probably live out a mortal existence and then die a natural death. If brought up by our kind, it will likely be immortal. In either case, just before the age of puberty it must choose. If it decides on immortality, it’s lifetime will halt at the age it wishes to remain.”
“You can see, Carol,” Chloe was saying, “that because of the rarity of such a birth, we want the child to stay among us, where he or she naturally belongs. And since you don’t want the baby anyway, here’s what we propose.”
Carol sat back listening. They sounded as reasonable as lawyers and she had to keep reminding herself that this was madness. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was surrounded by vultures, ready to pick her bones clean, eat the fetus right out of her body.
“Stay with us until you reach term. We’ll take good care of you, help you in any way we can. After the baby is born you can leave freely, with no regrets, no concerns. The child will be given more love than he or she will know what to do with. Your job will be finished and you can begin your life fresh.”
“What about the virus? The baby will probably have it.”
“Our cells have mutated,” Karl told her. “The child may or may not develop antibodies, we don’t know. That’s another reason why it should stay with us. It will consume only blood, initially through us, reinforcing the cells like ours, cells immune to mortal diseases.”
“And what kind of danger’s involved for me?”
“No one here will harm you.”
Carol looked at André. He crossed his arms over his chest defensively, looking smug. “I mean, in terms of the birth,” she continued. “If this isn’t an ordinary child, it can’t be an ordinary birth.”
Chloe shifted slightly but Carol did not miss the movement.
“This will be difficult, won’t it? I may die giving birth.”
“No one knows what’s involved,” Chloe said. “As I told you, this is the first time for the four of us. We’ve sent out word to our community. If any of the others know more, they’ll be in touch.”
“Great! You want to keep me here, a prisoner—”
“Not a prisoner, kiddo,” Gerlinde said. “We can all be one big happy family.”
“Sure,” Carol glared at her. “Except I’m the only one who can’t leave.”
“Just for eight months,” Chloe reminded her.
“At the end of which I might die bringing another nut, probably a genetically-programmed killer, into the world. Thanks but no thanks!” She stood. “I’m not going to do it. And you can’t make me. You can torture me or chain me to the wall, but I won’t do it. I’ll starve myself, if I have to, and if you force feed me I’ll throw up. Or I’ll kill it with hate. I’m through being intimidated.”
Her entire body quaked. She felt turbulent, violent, despondently impulsive. Her eyes darted wildly to the large picture window. She envisioned hurtling herself through it.
They were on ground level, so she wouldn’t die from the fall.
But she could easily see herself crashing through that shatter-proof glass…
She heard it shatter. She thudded against the ground. She grabbed up handfuls of shards. Instantly she sliced open the veins in both her wrists, severed the ones behind her knees and slashed at her throat where she hit an artery. In seconds I’ll be dead and they can’t save me!
“Hold on, kiddo!” Gerlinde gripped Carol’s shoulders firmly and looked her in the eye, forcing her away from this ghoulish fantasy and back into the reality of the room. “It ain’t the end of the world. You’re falling off the deep end.”
Somehow Carol knew that Gerlinde understood what was going on inside her. Suddenly she felt exhausted again, frightened and sad, completely overwhelmed. Before she knew it, she was bawling like a baby in Gerlinde’s arms, crying over and over, “I can’t! I can’t do it. Don’t ask me to. I can’t!”
The two women sat with her. Karl fixed her a cup of herbal tea. They waited it out with her, all but André, who stayed aloof. The three of them talked to her, letting her know she wasn’t alone, they would do everything they could to help her.
She knew they were creating the illusion that they were on her side. The real truth was she had no choice.
After a while she told them, “I don’t want to do this, but I guess I have to. But I’ve got some conditions. If you meet them then I promise not to try to hurt myself or the baby.”
“What are your conditions?” Chloe asked.
Carol looked at her. “I want freedom. I want to be able to go outside. I’m not going to be locked up in here for eight months.”
“I’m sure we can work something out,” Chloe assured her.
“I want a doctor to check me out regularly, just to make sure nothing’s going wrong.”
They looked at one another.
“It will be difficult but we can arrange that.”
“And I’ll need some things: clothes, books, movies, I don’t know what yet.”
“No problem,” Gerlinde said.
Carol looked at André. His eyes met hers. “And he has to promise to leave me alone.”
There was silence. Chloe spoke in a soothing voice. “Carol, dear, I told you before, in our world, you belong to André. He has final say over these terms. And one of the things we do know about such births is that the male must have input.”
“What are you getting at?”
“You gotta screw him,” Gerlinde told her.
“No! I refuse!”
André laughed.
“Carol, let me put it this way,” Chloe said. “The child you carry will automatically feel your influence. I have a book you might want to read—The Secret Life of the Unborn Child.
It documents cases of how a fetus is affected by its mother before birth, intrautero. There is also strong evidence that when the father is present he has an equally powerful effect. In the case of this child, because it is so split between our world and yours, and because we want to guide it into our world as much as we can, André must have even greater access to the fetus, so that his effect will be strong and clear. He and the child must bond.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Carol said, afraid that she did.
It was André who answered her. “She means that I’ll have to spend as much time as I can stand being with you until the baby arrives. Among other things, my son’s going to feel my power surrounding and protecting him. He needs to know I’m here.”
“Think of it as a love affair,” Gerlinde said, hugging Carol.
“A loveless love affair,” Carol mumbled. And thought, with a demon lover.
Chapter Eleven
On Carol’s second night back at the château, André came for her just after sunset, when the remaining pink in the sky still reflected along the surface of the calm Atlantic. She was just finishing another meal of liver, spinach and turnips.
“Hurry up!” He looked deathly thin and pale, like a wax figure. His cheeks were hollows, his grey eyes flat. He seemed preoccupied. Carol suspected he was thinking about blood.
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