Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  “You’re Dawn Moskelute.”

  Dawn Moskelute retrieved her flashlight and shone it into Bad’s face. She wanted to know how he knew her name.

  Bad told her she looked like Eve in Groucho’s Hat.

  She frowned at him.

  “Or whatever,” he said. Then, “You pulled me up that pitch. I think I’ve always known that, only it wasn’t possible.” He thought some more. He ran his hands down her slight, firm arms. He lifted her a little to weigh her—found that she weighed like a size 10 of medium height.

  Dawn Moskelute let him heft and manipulate her body. She relaxed, and her hair flopped and swung. He moved her and they smeared each other’s skin and clothes, but all the time she watched him, her expression serious. After a time she said, “I can’t wait to get a look at you in good light.”

  Bad took her flashlight and, to conserve its battery, turned it off. His headlamp, facing the wall, cast its light up in an arc that visibly dissipated at the ceiling. The shadows crowded in. The cave set its black paw down upon them.

  “That’s better,” Bad said.

  Did he feel it at all? Dawn asked. The blood loss? He scarcely seemed to. “You’re perfect,” she said, and dropped her head to rub her face against his throat.

  “You’re as full as a tick, aren’t you?” he said, tender. Then, “What will happen to me?”

  “Nothing.”

  Bad fished in the inside pocket of his jacket and found Eve Moskelute’s letter to her caretaker. He gave the letter to Eve’s sister. Dawn planted her elbow on his chest and tilted the page to the light. She laughed. “She didn’t mention anything to me,” she said. “Tell me—you saw Ares’s portraits of Eve, then went looking for her because she looks like me?”

  “It’s more involved than that. Involved with you.” Bad told Dawn about the body recovery, the detective, his Google hits on “Martine plus Dardo.” Bad said that he was in Italy on a vacation paid for by an insurance claim. He’d been injured in a bomb blast. He was a bomb tech with the New South Wales Emergency Ordnance Disposal Unit. “There was a concert for a singer from Sarawak. The bomb was in the concert hall garage. On the garage’s pillars were posters advertising an exhibition at the State Gallery, an exhibition of European Modern Masters. The image on the poster was Jean Ares’s Eve in a Gaucho Hat. When the bomb went off Ares’s Eve flew toward me, burning. Months later, the picture was still in my head—though if I’d only seen it pasted up on a fence I wouldn’t have taken it in. Years later you were still in my head, too—you, and Le Lien Vert. The day I recovered Martine Dardo’s body I happened to connect the two memories. I saw her hair, thought about you, then realized that the woman in the poster had your face. The day after that I met the detective again and he told me that a woman called Eve Moskelute had identified Dardo’s body. He told me that Eve was the artist Ares’s widow.”

  “What did you make of that?”

  “I thought I’d finally found your family, because I’d been able to make all these connections. It felt like a gift. As if the universe was finally making up to me for the thing it did to friends I had—for the disaster at Dart Ridge. So I went to see your sister. I thought that she might like to know about your last hours. I wanted her to help me understand why you were in the cave and dressed for a night on the town. But your sister only told me tales, and then bribed me with a free stay at Ares’s house in Nice. That’s when I knew for sure that there was something funny going on.”

  “Going on without you, too,” Dawn said. She made a sad face, her chin wholly dimpled as she thrust her lower jaw forward to form a pout.

  Bad frowned, but not at her. He was following his own story—running it through his hands and checking its knots. He went on. “I met Father Octave yesterday, on the train. I aired my suspicions, and he fobbed me off.”

  “Obviously in on it,” Dawn said.

  Bad and Father Octave hadn’t parted ways at the train. They had walked up to the village together and stood for a time on the Avenue 19 Septembre 1947. Bad was in an alcove by a fountain, Daniel Octave on the street, his feet by a clump of dandelions and poppies, which were prostrate and sodden with rain. The priest had seemed reluctant to leave Bad, perhaps regretting his Parable of the Albinos. He’d lingered in the drizzle and his black wool suit was silvered. Father Octave told Bad he was sorry he hadn’t believed him. And Bad said, “I thought you imagined I’d made a mistaken interpretation—not that I was telling unbelievable stories.”

  The priest stared at Bad, and his eyes in his dark face were a cold green, like the water of the Riwaka Resurgence, a pool with an embossed surface and deceptive transparent depths, the place where the Riwaka River emerged from the base of Takaka’s marble mountain, icy, after its weeks underground.

  Father Octave said to Bad that he hoped Bad would join the pilgrimage. “Then you can tell me how you feel about the saint’s story. Because I think you’ve received her story with your head, not your heart. And it’s heart’s sense you need to make of your experience in the caves during the flood of’92.”

  Bad told Dawn that Father Octave’s “heart’s sense” seemed like an indulgence—an easy option for the laity, the ordinary folk. “Your sister bribed me. The priest offered me a parable, and an indulgence. But I’m not going to be bought off—and I don’t want to be one of the ordinary folk.”

  “Is this an application?” Dawn said.

  Bad’s breath caught. The light was shining through the amber of Dawn’s damaged—and magically repaired—right eye. Its eyelashes were the color of corn silk and as thick as fur. The lower half of her face was masked in smeared blood, her mouth open. Bad could actually hear the spines stirring there. When she was stirred they rose and touched her tongue, checked its movement, making her lisp as she spoke.

  “Yes,” Bad answered her. “Yes, please.”

  “Come with me,” Dawn said. She said she shouldn’t have stopped. She’d stolen something. She climbed off Bad and retrieved the object she’d dropped. She gave it to Bad. It was very heavy. Bad sat up, reached for his helmet, and turned its light to look at what he had in his hand. It was a container, solid silver, its seams sealed with strips of gold, its front a crystal panel. It was lined inside with red velvet and contained a match, which stood, its sandy pitch and sulphur bulb upward, in a slot in the velvet. Dawn put out her hand and Bad returned the reliquary. He got up. He felt light-headed and leaned on the wall. Dawn tucked herself under his armpit and wrapped his arm across her shoulders. She asked him if he could walk. Should she give him a minute? She could give him a minute but not much support. The cave was narrow from here on, and they must go single file.

  Bad drooped and dropped his face into her hair. Then he let the helmet fall again, turned in to her, took hold of the tops of her thighs, and lifted her up, up onto him, onto what came up the instant she offered her minute. He wasn’t a weakling. He’d show her he wasn’t. She was laughing; then she grunted. Bad put her back against the wall and her shirt rasped on the rock. He grazed his knuckles. He held her with one arm and opened her shirt to look on her, her body a lithe bow, her small breasts, flat stomach, creamy skin mottled white, in places its pigment utterly gone. These weren’t scars; they were like the grain of polished stone, as smooth as the skin surrounding them. Not scars but skin, sweating and telegraphing her muscles’ happy spasms.

  They left the caves at dusk. The exit was under the escarpment whose overhang had sheltered Bad the night before. The grass beneath the fruit trees was flattened and littered here and there by aluminium foil, food wrappers, paper cups. Apparently some of the pilgrims had had a picnic when they’d emerged into the late-afternoon sun. Dawn took Bad by the hand and led him along a shallowly sloping track beside the escarpment. The goats who had kept Bad company the night before were sheltering already, lying on the gritty ground beneath the overhang, their legs folded under them. They eyed Dawn and Bad but didn’t startle.

  Bad found himself on the mule track he’d gone down that
morning. Dawn led him through an apple orchard, past a haystack under a pup tent, past a springhouse built in a cleft in the escarpment and enclosing the constant resonating gurgle of working water. Dawn led him onto the steeper stepped track. Before them was the village, on its spur. Bad could feel his eye measuring the air between the mountains. The valley was like a room roofed with high cloud, a church with numerous side chapels. To Bad his eyes’ measuring felt physical, as though he had a rod and line and was casting, stroking the surface of a pool. His focus moved, went out from tree to tree and slope to slope.

  The track came to the cultivated terraces. Bad brushed by artichoke flowers, purple onion flowers, and stands of robust twitch weed.

  That morning he’d gone down past the old cypress whose roots broke the path. He hadn’t any trouble seeing then, for the sun was up over the slopes to the east and shone into the place, to show haphazard paving buried in a fall of brown jointed needles and round cypress seeds. Now, at dusk, it was very dark under the cypress—and Bad saw that someone was waiting there. Dawn drew her hand from Bad’s and went forward. Her fresh paleness was eclipsed by hands and hair so white that Bad—light-headed—imagined that he was looking at one of Daniel Octave’s albinos. The man raised one of Dawn’s hands to his lips and kept it there. The man was biting the base of Dawn’s thumb. There was space between Dawn and him—it was an intimacy, but unlike the intimacy Bad had just enjoyed. The two seemed frozen in a pose of courtliness, their faces showing no strong feeling, only absorbed placidity. Then the man’s eyes closed, and she put her free hand on the back of his head. Bad could still see the air between their bodies. They didn’t incline at the hips; the man touched her only with his mouth. It wasn’t like anything Bad had seen before, this prolonged chaste contact.

  Bad finally said it to himself, aloud but in a whisper. He spoke, and felt that he was telling someone—perhaps trying to convey a marvel to Pops, his mother’s father, whose interest in Bad was loving and unfaltering. Or perhaps he was saying, “So there!” to Father Octave and his “sense of a statistically unusual but normal sort.” Bad said to himself, These are vampires, and she is feeding him from her hand.

  Chapter 10

  DAWN

  Bad was taken to a house on Dardo’s Rue Oscura. Dawn and her friend went into the house ahead of him and didn’t switch on the lights. Bad stood for a moment on the threshold and brushed his palm down the wall within the door. His fingers found a switch and flipped it. Nothing happened.

  Dawn said, from the darkness, “That light is controlled from here.” She didn’t turn it on. Bad heard her kick off her shoes, the soft thud of each solid hoof of sole against something hollow. Beyond the street door the lamp in its web-encrusted cage was a hindrance; it shone into the house and showed Bad only a sharply illuminated patch of flagstones and nothing further. He crossed the threshold and pushed the door closed, shutting out the last thread of light. He set his back against the door and waited. A room away, around a corner, a light appeared, low and yellow. After a moment the refrigerator began to hum. Dawn’s shadow moved in the light from its interior. “Eve’s still here,” she said. “There’s milk, cheese, and salami”—her shadow grew taller and turned—“and orange wafers here on the table. I expect you’d like some salami?”

  Bad asked if Eve could hear them.

  “She’ll be in bed. The doors in this house are solid, and kept closed,” Dawn said.

  Another voice echoed her. “Closed,” it said—a reminder, a limitation, the law being laid down. The voice, however, was slight, a dry gauze of sound.

  Bad saw the light from the refrigerator pinch and hurried toward the kitchen before Dawn closed it. He came to a stop in the dark and gasped when he saw a shape moving against the parallel scratches of moonlight through slatted shutters.

  “It’s early for you,” Dawn said—not to Bad.

  “I’ve no reason to stay awake,” said the voice.

  Bad heard a drawer being pulled out. The squeak of bad joinery. Dawn was rummaging among kitchen implements. Then she stopped, stepped away, and turned on a light. “I can’t see to slice,” she said to the other vampire, who, without another word and without looking at them, raised his arms, caught hold of the edge on a kind of shelf formed by the carved ceiling that covered only part of the main room. The wood creaked as it took the vampire’s weight, as he closed the hinge of his elbows, lifted his legs over his head, doubled up, and flipped smoothly backward into the slot of blackness above the ceiling. He withdrew from sight, his disappearing face a smudge of pallid smoke. Bad heard him cross the ceiling, the sound seeming to progress into the wall above a padlocked door.

  Dawn had found a knife and was slicing salami. She spread it out on a plate and poured a glass of milk. “Come on,” she said to Bad.

  Once he was up at the table she dragged her chair over to his so that they sat hip-to-hip. She watched him eat up close, touching his chin when he was chewing and his throat as he swallowed.

  Dawn’s bed was a nest, a big box in a room without windows. When Bad woke he checked his watch in the light shining through the lattice of the box bed’s sliding doors, radiance from a bead-fringed bedside lamp. It was mid-morning. Dawn was difficult to rouse, hot, sleepy, and pliant. Bad opened one door on the bed and pushed down the quilt to examine Dawn’s scars—ordinary skin, extraordinarily white, follicles of normal appearance but sprouting tiny glassy hairs. Dawn stirred and opened her eyes. She saw what Bad was studying and told him that they weren’t really scars. Scars were signs of mending, like mortar in a crack in a wall. “My patches have no edges,” she said, and flexed her full length, so that every white stripe or dusting of freckles-in-negative showed, blood shining through the uneven color of her smooth body. “I am expertly patched,” she said; then she pushed herself, curled up, against Bad’s thighs. She flung her arms around his waist and set her open mouth against the skin over one of his hips. Bad felt her mouth’s spiny interior—but she didn’t bite him. Dawn ran her tongue around inside the tent her lips had made, then broke contact. She pulled him down, so that they lay chest-to-chest and face-to-face. She began to tell Bad her story.

  In 1969 Dawn was living in a commune near St. Agnes, a perched village eight hundred meters above the sea. Each week she’d catch the bus down the road’s many hairpin bends—past terraced farms and shady gorges full of fig trees and stands of green bamboo—to Menton. She would get off at the Gare Routière, shop at the market under the railway, and then climb the steep street at the end of which stood the crumbling, cream-plastered, Eastern-domed Palais Lutetia, where she and Eve had a first-floor apartment.

  Eve was away in early July, and Dawn made the trip more often to collect her sister’s mail. Eve was in England promoting her books—her biography of Guy de Chambord and her English translation of Chambord’s romance, Daylight. The books had come out two years before in France and had made a bit of a splash.

  “You mustn’t imagine this is only incidental to my story,” Dawn told Bad. “Nothing is, not even the weather.”

  On that July day Dawn climbed up the steep street from the market, creeping from one patch of shade to the next. She stopped to make conversation with a neighbor, one of those old people who pause at every encounter on the slope to shake hands and save face, to catch their breath without having to do it standing alone. Dawn helped the man with his shopping. They paused together to make kissing noises at a canary in a cage hung out for some fresh air in a street-level window.

  As soon as she was in the apartment she took off her dress and shoes. She spent the afternoon in her petticoat, with the windows open and shutters closed, their slats sifting some of the heat out of the wind.

  At four the sun had gone from the front face of the building and she could open the shutters. Dawn spent the remainder of that afternoon painting a wardrobe. She ate dinner at the kitchen sink, standing by one of the barred windows at the back of the building, where a fig tree’s leaves were making polite applause in the
breeze. She ate—then tapped the barometer, hoping for change.

  It was thirty-eight degrees, though the sun had gone behind the mountains. She decided to treat herself, to go to one of the cafés on the promenade, where locals usually don’t go, knowing better.

  The air was cooler by the water. Dawn sat at a table on the sea side of the promenade and under a fringed cabana, one of a whole hissing strip. The breeze had increased, and the raffia on the umbrellas made a noise like small surf on the sandy beaches farther east—Cannes, Antibes—the sound of foam sinking through sand’s fine filter. Dawn sipped wine and water and watched waiters dash back and forth across the road through the July traffic of Vespas and convertibles. There was a haze over the sea, of its surface evaporation. The sea was all one color, lavender, from shore to horizon. It had no perspective, looked vertical, not horizontal, and full to the brim. As night came on, the lavender grew slowly gray, then the sea vanished altogether and the stones on the beach began to glow under the street lamps, white and set in a resin of black shadow. Dawn was a little drunk. She wanted to swim but didn’t have her bathing suit. St. Tropez was topless then—but Menton was a quiet town, full of retired people.

  Dawn had a friend with a boat. She decided to walk along to the boat harbor and borrow it, to row out a little way, then swim beyond the reach of the lights.

  The boat was a clinker-built squid boat, with seats for two oarsmen and a high prow from which hung an oil lamp. Dawn’s friend lit the lamp and helped Dawn cast off. She rowed out beyond the first quay and the sheltered swimming beach, out of sight of the fortress on the mole. Then she pulled in the oars and let the boat drift.

  There were no waves. Dawn stripped and jumped into the sea, surfacing to lie in the water and watch the swinging lamp gradually settle again. The boat drifted gently, and Dawn followed it. She cooled down; the sea soaked into her. The water was salty, and she was buoyant, able to lift her chest and knees up into the lamplight to scrape with her thumbnails at her freckles of white paint. She cleaned herself, then climbed back into the boat and got dressed. She blew out the lamp and rowed in closer to the shore, back past the arched doors of shops on the Plage de Sablettes, and into the mouth of the boat harbor between Quays Napoléon and Eugénie. Then she slowed, shipped her oars, caught her breath, and watched the town, the people on the promenades, the girls in sleeveless dresses eating ice cream, the boys with their shirts open, sitting along the seawall or clustered together, on scooters, holding themselves in place with their braced legs, front wheels at a right angle to backs and headlamps downcast. There had been a wedding, Dawn saw, for a cavalcade was making its way, speeding in spurts, along the Bas Corniche. Horns sounded, and the bride and bridesmaids sat in the open car windows hanging onto their roofs.