by Todd Grimson
The victim—a Hispanic, nicely dressed, whom she picked up in a crowded bar—might be dead, or dying; Justine dips the knife into the throat to make a comprehensible wound.
“You hate me, don’t you? You loathe me.”
“No,” he says, but that one syllable’s all he can say. They push the body out of the car just around the back of a pizza place, where it’s sure to be discovered fairly soon. Who cares? For some reason, Keith worries about the guy.
A woman croons in Arabic over a sensual, hypermodern synth beat. He turns it up, flowing with the traffic, speeding when it’s natural, when it fits in. The woman’s wailing voice expresses something, just for a moment or two it reaches right into Keith’s soul and sets him free.
Then he is back, in a speeding car, feeling surely, drably, like another one of the wanton damned.
EIGHTY-FIVE
It was a nice bar. Mostly Anglo, but sort of in the process of being de-yuppified. Popcorn shrimp, import beer, the music too loud for introspective conversation. A table of Vietnamese students celebrating a dragon-boat victory or loss.
Raul Gutierrez really didn’t have any clear conception of having sex with anyone, a pick-up, a one-night stand—no, what he really wanted was a girlfriend, someone to listen to him, someone who would be watching him, who would be aware of him as he led his life. If he had this kind of love, someone who admired him, who saw his finer qualities, then he believed he would be moved to do better, he would be inspired, he’d be a different person, love would transform him in what amounted to a spiritual way.
When he asked this one if he could buy her a drink, if she minded if he sat down, he was already slightly drunk, he was with Cisco and Nick and they always pushed him to drink too much, even in the middle of the week. Alcohol made you outgoing, impulsive, and it was just an impulse, an adventurous impulse, because this girl was not his type at all. It was exciting, but he’d never get anywhere with a girl like that. Her name was Justine.
So when she let him sit down he was glad to, it was a success in front of his friends, they’d be impressed. He’d been on his way back from the can, but at the same time as he reveled in how pretty she was, he was suspicious, frightened even, and this made him more talkative, he felt like there was nothing to do but to get the contradictions out in the open, give them a chance to disagree. Then he would laugh, and ask her for her phone number, he’d be protected when he went back to his friends.
“You grew up here?”
She shook her head, sunglasses in her hand.
“In the Valley,” she said.
“Yeah, I have some friends in the Valley.”
“I said, do you want to come with me, go for a drive?”
He didn’t understand what she meant, but there was only one answer for his honor.
“Sure.”
Raul floated on pleasure as he went over with her to say goodbye to his friends. Maybe he was meant for more exotic things than anyone had thought. Guiding her back through the crowd, he touched the nape of her neck, her hair brushed his hand. He was so aware of her ass in that short little black dress. Her legs.
She turned to him outside, he felt like they were already lovers, she turned to him and said, “Look at me, Raul. Do you feel like you know me? What do you see in my eyes?” with this teasing, flirty smile.
EIGHTY-SIX
It’s sort of a walk-through of The Prince of Darkness Tempts Saint Theresa with the Aid of a Waiter from Budapest. David is the Prince of Darkness, Sabrina Saint Theresa, and Jason is the waiter, carrying a tray of chilled glasses, setting them down, opening a bottle of champagne. The cork flies explosively across the stage.
Saint Theresa throws her bouquet of flowers to the ground.
“Loneliness,” David says. “Loneliness in ancient Egypt was very different from loneliness in ancient Greece.”
“At this very moment, in a single second,” Saint Theresa says, “I’ve developed a new outlook on life.” She tosses off her saintly garb, revealing a glittery, glamorous short gold dress, very low-cut. She drinks a glass of champagne.
The Prince of Darkness joins her. The waiter bows and refills their glasses.
Sabrina throws her glass away, smashing it. Music comes on, romantic music from the twenties. The Prince of Darkness, in tuxedo and tails, begins to dance with her.
She says, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life. You’re a negative particle, highly charged. Your existence means that the universe makes sense.”
They dance cheek to cheek.
Minh watches them, just offstage. She closes the curtains at the appropriate time.
Michelle sits in the front row, with Rudolph and Tiff. In a few moments, David comes out between the curtains, sits down in front of them on the edge of the stage.
“What did you think?”
“I want more action,” complains Michelle, biting her thumb.
Rudolph and Tiff stay there, as David and Michelle wander outside. Into the garden.
“Why can’t you just keep some, like cattle? Keep them happy and well fed?” asks Michelle.
“The spell loses its charm,” David replies. “After a while, you’d have to keep them in chains, and they’d scream every time you came near. It wouldn’t be very stylish, or if you decided you liked that sort of thing, you’d still be running a lot more risk of something going wrong while you’re asleep.”
“You mentioned, the other night, someone you called ‘The Old One.’ Is he still around?”
“I don’t know. I lost touch with him.”
“How old was he, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. He had white hair. He talked like he’d been around forever, but he might have been imagining things. I don’t know if he knew the truth himself.”
Michelle breaks off a rose, letting the thorn pierce her finger. She brings it up to her nose to smell. It looks violet-blue in the night.
“So what do you have against Justine?”
“Nothing. Actually, she did me a great favor.”
Michelle is silent, then offers, “Did you know that I fucked Keith?”
“No, I didn’t realize. How big is his cock?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I’m thinking of cutting it off. I’d like to see the look on her face, see if she cares.”
“It would mean, like, total war.”
“Then we’d have to kill her, wouldn’t we? Killing another one of us is something special, it’s a lot more interesting than killing any of them.”
“We should do it.”
“Of course,” David goes on, “Justine might not care. I’ve never thought of her as being very sentimental. Maybe I was wrong.”
”Well then,” Michelle says, after a moment, twitching her rose, “we could see.”
EIGHTY-SEVEN
When Keith returns, carrying a half-eaten deluxe hamburger in a grease-spotted white paper bag, he comes into this house where all the windows and mirrors are broken, the wind blows into it, and the rain, and Justine looks up at him. In her eyes, her luminous face, there’s such an expression, all the pain, and shame, and moral fatigue, and self-consciousness, and hope—she’s in his room, with a blanket wrapped around her, the TV on without sound. Halfway through his hamburger, having met Alonzo, talking about music, the escapism of just thinking about tones, tone-colors, and technology, Keith suddenly was lonesome for her, he thought of her, he wanted to see her, and now he’s back.
Justine is cold. It’s raining out.
They’re under the blanket together. It’s around their shoulders, as he warms her up.
His love for her is as dense and manifest as a spirit reaching with an arm out of his mouth, a spirit arm reaching to touch her, to find her and help her, caress her, an arm with a hand on it, fingers, fingerprints. And then there is another hand, another arm. One leg, two legs, lips, mouth, eyes, and all the rest.
“We’ve forgotten what we did,” he says, setting the scene, “but it must have been a
terrible crime. We wait in the abandoned hotel, wait for them to come and arrest us, lock us away. At the seaside resort, in the off-season.”
“We’re murderers,” Justine says.
“Yes. We’re murderers.”
A long time passes.
“If you went away, and came back …” she says, tentatively, irresolutely.
”I don’t know.” Keith shrugs.
“Look at those girls,” she says, at all these girls in bikinis on the TV.
Then she stands up, letting the blanket fall, and starts outside—into the rain.
Keith finds her, in a few minutes, hair soaking wet, face.
“Was it… ?” not saying David’s name.
“I think so. He’s found me, and he doesn’t mean to let me alone.”
Keith pulls her to him, both of them dripping, and they go back into the house. They take off their clothes, rubbing each other’s body with towels. Justine laughs, her hair is such a mess.
They try to avoid stepping in broken glass.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
It’s easy to get Tamara Rothschild. At 3:00 A.M., Friday morning, they ring the front door buzzer at her apartment, and Rudolph says, over the phone, when she sleepily answers, that Keith and Justine are in trouble, and have asked for her. “We’ll give you a ride to them, but hurry, it’s an emergency. Justine is suffering some very strange symptoms.” He hangs up before she can ask him any questions. David and the others wait for her. Either she will come down or she will not. She can try to telephone the house, if she likes, but the wires have been cut. The line will be dead. If Tamara does not come down by 3:30 or so, they will leave, and try something else another time.
Tamara doesn’t like it, but she cannot resist. She puts on some clothes. She comes down to see what’s going on. The special knowledge revealed about Justine, the mere fact that there is knowledge of Justine’s existence—this is the lure.
She comes outside. David says, “You’re a loyal friend,” and looks into her eyes. Tamara doesn’t try to shield herself from or avoid the penetrating gaze. She has a moment of remorse, of exquisite regret, almost relief, and she gets into the van, like a captured deer. She walks and she is not aware of walking. She is bitten, a small amount of blood is taken; she does not feel it. Intensely, she is remembering something from her childhood, a scene in a hallway in Virginia, how the light splashed in, dazzling the shaded area, illuminating the heavy furniture, how at ten she did not want to practice the violin. Her report card is torn, how did this happen, how will she show her parents her grades? She wears a white blouse and navy blue jumper, like everyone else. Her feet are so quick, she has so much nervous energy. She opens these wonderful books that have not been read for many years, heavy big tomes with pictures of strange people living in strange parts of the world, people she’s never heard anything about ever since. Tribes who have cameras and automobiles, yet ornamentally tattoo their faces, the women bare their breasts, they’re beautiful, the men lengthen their penises with weights and stand there in the brown shade, smoking cigarettes, the smoke swirling lazily in the dusty air currents. The men discuss shipments of densely packed spices and rare dried fruits, fruits no one has ever heard of or tasted over here.
Seeing herself at one remove, as if in a film, she watches as a bee stings her on the neck. It doesn’t hurt hardly at all. Honey wells up and oozes out of the hole, as the bee crawls inside. Another one lands there, and her throat buzzes, it suddenly frightens her, there are six or ten bees there in the cavity … no, they are her friends. She licks some honey off her index finger. It’s wonderful. It numbs her tongue and makes her dream. She goes past fields of brightly colored, swaying flowers, to a little stream, golden reflections shining as the water trickles over the rocks. Somebody whispers something important to her, but she cannot hear. She understands, anyway, as music plays, harpsichords and harmonious flutes. The water runs over her feet. A honeybee with a human face flies past her eyes. It lands on her book, pointing with its stinger. It’s like a big dictionary, but she can’t read it, it’s in a foreign language she has never seen. The words are familiar, but as soon as she sounds them out she forgets what they mean.
It’s dark outside on the street. There’s a light rain. She must have been up all night. She’s with her friends, but she doesn’t know who they are. “Why don’t you lie down and rest?” someone says, and she agrees. She’ll be late for work. No, it doesn’t matter. She’s too tired. These are her friends. This is where she lives. The bee-sting aches. She is in Germany, with some other students. Some of them, she doesn’t like. They leave her alone. She sleeps in her clothes.
EIGHTY-NINE
Since the phone seems to be out of order, Patrick finds no alternative to going over there. He has been very glum over having had to accept that there seem to be vampires in the world, and this glumness has been magnified and inflamed into a kind of incommunicable panic that Justine and Keith might have done something to Tamara, since she did not show up at the hospital today.
Most other conceivable situations of danger, you could talk about it with someone, there would be channels to follow, some kind of a procedure to abandon yourself to, but the only precedent imaginable here comes from trashy old movies. Holding up a cross, or driving a stake through the heart of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. It’s both horrible and absurd to imagine such an outcome, it makes him feel like he’s in a nightmare, like he went crazy at some point and didn’t know it, and now without Tamara, thinking that Tamara has been taken, and he has to do something… it’s as if he is a child again, playing a made-up childish game, pretending to be an undercover policeman or cartoon superhero. It just does not seem real to him.
Patrick has had an inspiration, based on something Tamara told him. He has put together a custom flashlight featuring an ultraviolet bulb. The idea is that if the vampire cannot stand the light of the sun, it should not be able to stand this flashlight, shone into the face and eyes. It is his secret weapon. The other, more conventional weapon he carries is a handgun, a Glock. He feels nervous in this role, but also very sober, serious, and alert. He has the responsibility to rescue Tamara.
It might not be as bad a situation as all that. There is the possibility that Tamara went over to see Keith and Justine, stayed late, and overslept. Some kind of misadventure. Unlike Tamara, as he has known her, but certainly within the realm of possibility.
The time is 5:45. Patrick did not know Tamara was absent until he tried to phone her, at 3:00. He went to her apartment, used his key to let himself in, discovered nothing in particular—except that her car was still in the garage down below. This is worse than if she drove away on her own, obviously.
Well, if she’s not over here, he’ll call the police and let them handle it. That some stranger … it’s not something he wants to think about.
Keith greets him with what seems genuine friendliness, though in a moment this is replaced by puzzlement at Patrick’s unconcealable anxiety and fear.
“Where is Tamara?”
NINETY
On the dining room table, there is the invitation, which arrived by messenger this afternoon.
“The Lost Shepherdess, at 1:00 A.M. Accomplish the deliverance of a friend. No tricks” Unsigned, with an address and a simple map.
“What does this mean?” Patrick wants to know.
”I think it means that this guy named David has Tamara. He talked to us about putting on plays, or shows … he used to be an actor, in early silent films. Justine bit him, and he’s been looking for her ever since. Lately, he’s sort of been spying on us, and he must have seen Tamara come and go. How long has she been missing?”
“I talked to her last night, until about 10:00.”
“When Justine wakes up, we’ll figure out what to do,” Keith says. He’s thinking, and Patrick is dissatisfied with this seemingly blase response.
“Fine. I can’t just hang out here, waiting. I’ve got to do something.”
“No.” Keith g
rasps him by the arm, hard. “We have to wait.” The physical contact seems to communicate more than the words. “David has an entourage. You’ll never get anywhere near Tamara unless you go with us.”
Patrick stops, but he can’t resist saying, “How can you have lived like this?” accusing Keith, by the scorn in his voice, of any number of fucked-up crimes.
It’s true. What can he say?
Maybe David … no, Keith has looked into David’s eyes. He can’t deceive himself. David is the worst. Whether he will in this case do the worst, or can be persuaded not to, that is the question confronting them now. Will Tamara be sacrificed for their sins?
No, he tells himself firmly. No. We—he and Justine—cannot allow this to go wrong.
NINETY-ONE
Tamara is alone with David. She stands before him, nude. She does not know how she got this way, but she is not ashamed. The spell is on her, but not so heavy as before. She can think, to a degree. If she floats upon it, and does not fight it, she feels all right.
David is sitting in a chair, looking at her. By the slightest of motions, or maybe telepathically, he beckons her to come closer. He touches the skin on the inside of her right thigh, up between her legs, and she shudders a bit, not because she’s repulsed, because she’s not.
“You’re much prettier than I noticed,” David says, in a quiet voice. “Some women, until they’re naked, you can’t see how lovely they are. Your skin is so soft. Isn’t there a commercial… ? ‘Rose-petal soft.’ You’re beautiful. I like you very much.”
“Good. Why don’t you let me go free?”
“It’s not out of the question,” David says, contemplatively, as though half out loud to himself. “Talk to me for a while,” meanwhile burrowing a finger half-shyly, taking his time, into her vagina. Tamara finds in herself no power to resist. It’s like an interrogation by a bad angel. David seems more inhuman by far than Justine ever did. The hypnotic druglike state she’s in waxes and wanes, according perhaps to subtle shifts in the attention David is paying to her.