by Todd Grimson
“What is going on between Justine and … what’s-his-name? Keith.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, what do they do? Tell me about them. Give me your diagnosis.”
“I suppose they love each other.”
“You sound very naive, saying that.”
“Maybe I am. That’s what Patrick thinks.”
“Patrick? Who’s that?”
“My fiancé.”
“Tell me, Tamara, up until now, would you say you’ve led an orderly life?”
“I’m sure from your perspective I have.”
“My perspective. Yes, there’s that. Can you feel this? They used to say, witches that is, they used to say the Devil’s cock was cold as ice. There, now I’ll make it hot. You like that, don’t you?”
”I don’t know,” she says, shifting her feet delicately, his index and middle finger buried in her sex, playing with her. Making her lubricating juices manifest themselves somehow.
“Can Patrick do this?”
“No. You know he can’t.”
“Yes. I know he can’t. Would he die for you?”
“I don’t know,” Tamara answers, her brows gathering as she attempts to think about it. “He might. I think he actually would, yes. Yes, he would I think.”
“That’s very sweet. Have you ever fucked Keith?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Have you ever thought about it?”
“Not really.”
“Not really. That’s fairly ambiguous. Do you wish you had?”
“No. He was a patient of mine. And a heroin addict. So I didn’t think of him that way.”
“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘fate worse than death’?”
NINETY-TWO
“There are limits to David’s powers,” Justine says. “He cannot control more than three or four people at once. I once tried … a family of five. It was too difficult, it hurt my head.”
She looks so young tonight, vulnerable and young. It’s strange.
“What if he … puts a spell on me?” Patrick asks.
“Yes. I can protect you from that. If you will let me.”
“What?”
She shuts her eyes, and then opens them again, shows Patrick her fangs.
“I won’t take more than a spoonful of your blood, but I will give you some of my substance. He cannot hypnotize you when we are linked.”
“So … you’re going to hypnotize me?”
”No. Just… keep us in touch. I will be able to feel, if you’re out of my sight, in a different room, if you’re frightened, or …” She looks at Keith.
Visibly, Patrick is dubious, but he holds out his wrist. It is an inoculation.
She bites Keith also, and he thinks of how they came together. She had barely lived, or never lived, or could not remember living. She had instead survived this prolonged inhuman existence, and yet she was not completely jaded, completely dead. She felt the need to show him how she existed, in a sense to try to justify herself, and illustrating herself made her open, enough so that they found a miraculous consonance in each other, a kind of nakedness. Justine opened herself to him, and he recognized her. Both of them shared an asking-for-nothing, an acceptance, and on this some love was allowed to grow.
“Is it true that bullets are no good?” Patrick says, almost a little drunkenly, from the venom, and he shows them his gun, laying it on the table, in the light.
Justine stares at it, for a moment, her face unreadable, more sphinx-like or vamp-like than it’s been for a long time. She slowly shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “If you blow apart the brain … the vampire will die like anyone else.”
“I also have this.” He shows them a flashlight. No one can decide whether it will work or not. It’s not worth the risk to Justine to see. She gives Keith a nervous little smile, looking down at it and back up to his eyes. No, she’s not like the other young women out there.
“I’ll try to be friends with him,” she says. “Maybe he still loves me, and that’s all he wants.”
“So he loved you,” Keith interjects.
“I played a role for him,” she says. “A type I thought he would like. I don’t remember any of it very well.”
Patrick, having put his flashlight back in his jacket pocket, says, ”You said, didn’t you, that he was in silent films? Anything anyone might have heard of? I took a course on film history once, at USC.”
“Blind Love, that was one.” Justine’s face lights up. “And I remember—Rapture of the Night! Is that right? Have you heard of that one?”
In the car, of his own accord, Patrick tells them that the blood tests came to naught, if they care. He’s nervous, he wants to say everything he knows. The blood turned to soft dark gray dust. A total mystery. It wasn’t even sticky. You could shake it up in the tube.
“I hope she’s okay,” he repeats, forlorn.
NINETY-THREE
At the door, Rudolph and Jason search Keith and Patrick, taking away Patrick’s gun. Rudolph says, “What did you expect, to go crawling around in caves, looking for bats?” and gives the flashlight back.
David and Michelle come forward, and David greets Justine, bending over and kissing her hand.
“You’re lovely tonight,” he says, with a superior smile, as though he sees through all her wiles. She’s wearing an emerald green tube top, tightly outlining her round, small breasts, the nipples of which have come erect in the relative cold. She has on a little gold chain, with a gold cross right there on her neck, contradicting all vampire myth. A black skirt, black stockings and shoes. She thought dressing as a femme fatale might possibly disarm David a tad, or make him hesitate, but it doesn’t look that way.
Rudolph, in black shirt, gray suspenders, and gray pants tucked into black boots, his brown hair slicked down, points a shotgun at Keith’s head. Clicks the hammers back.
“Come,” David says to Justine, grabbing her by the bare upper arm, pulling her as she makes a face, as if he is hurting her, “this is just a precaution, so you won’t be tempted to interfere. In,” he says, and guides her out onto the stage and, so that she has to bend over to get in, into a cage, to which Minh then closes the door.
The shotgun is taken away from Keith’s face. Rudolph relaxes, and smirks at him. The cage is about three feet high, with a solid floor, bars all around and over its roof.
Chains connect it up to a pulley, and David now pulls, on his end, a rope, so that the cage rises up into the air. Justine holds onto the bars, staring down, the cage swaying whenever she moves. On her knees, a mournful look catching Keith’s eye.
“Stand back, everyone,” David orders, and the curtains are opened. There are some people out there, an audience, not many, but enough.
“The Lost Shepherdess” he announces, and some music comes on, the lights come up a bit, and Jason is trying to videotape things, walking around.
There is a pastoral backdrop. Green, stylized hills. A yellow sun, outlined in black, with a faint white halo blending into the pale blue of the cloudless sky. Out on the stage are two dark green plastic bushes with many leaves, and a prop oak tree, thick-trunked and tall. A stuffed, or simply fake, blackface merino sheep, with thick, ivory-colored fleece.
Looking zoned-out, or as though she is concentrating on a math problem far away, Tamara slowly emerges from stage right, a bandaid on her neck.
She wears a lavender-blue print dress that doesn’t belong to her, and she’s barefoot. When she reaches the sheep, she says, “Tolstoy,” and pets it, before continuing on her way.
“Go meet her,” hisses Michelle, backstage left, and Patrick obeys, coming out, saying, “Tamara! Are you all right?”
Does she know him? She appears interested, at any rate. He embraces her, and she smiles. He leads her offstage. Curtain. They are instructed to go down and join the audience.
”You’ll be okay,” Michelle says, and Patrick glances at Keith, who still has the shotgun menaci
ngly near him, but he has Tamara, that’s what’s most important.
She says, “Patrick?” They sit in the front row.
NINETY-FOUR
Minh helps Jason array two of the life-size painted wooden figures. An elderly black man, shirtless, with white hair and beard, smoking a corncob pipe. A Confederate soldier, a common infantryman, with bayonet fixed on the end of his rifle.
And then, a fake little grassy hillock, upon which the naked body of Tiff is laid out, her throat cut ear to ear. She’s been dead for several hours. Minh arranges the massy gold ringlets of her hair.
She looks across the stage at Keith, handsome in his white shirt and black pants, and then up at the beautiful Justine, swaying slowly in the cage.
Jason is next to her. They wait for David to re-emerge. At his signal, the curtain will be opened once more.
NINETY-FIVE
“Put this on.”
“No,” Keith says, and just lets the dark blue Union officer’s jacket, with gold braid, fall to the floor. They’re not going to kill him over this, and he’s not going to cooperate unduly with this spectacle.
“Your funeral,” the young man says, and shrugs.
Michelle had said to Keith, “You can leave, you can go with your friends. But leave right now, without Justine.”
He wouldn’t go.
Michelle was glad. She let him see that she was glad.
Meanwhile Justine, above, is praying, moving her lips, not even knowing what she’s saying, her eyes locked on Rudolph, she even knows that is his name. There is no sign that he is connected by blood to David. He is here voluntarily. He likes this. He worships him.
Justine sees, it comes out of him, that earlier this afternoon he was talking to Sabrina, he was suggesting that they could be helpful to one another.
“I’m nothing,” he said. “But I can pretend to be something. Obviously, I’m someone. David knows who I am.”
“You worthless piece of shit. You scumbag.”
“I was standing there, minding my own business, when he came along. All around me,” sipped his Coke, “degeneration and decay. I was ready to believe in anything.”
Rudolph looks up, now, at Justine. Almost as if he knows, but not quite. He is perspiring, just a little. He smiles at her, as a bed of iron spikes is moved underneath her cage, spikes that would easily pierce the black-painted wood floor if the cage was to suddenly fall.
There are strangers in the audience. People—nobody knows who they are.
NINETY-SIX
The curtain opens.
“Pick it up,” David says, resplendent in a Confederate officer’s uniform, holding a sword.
Keith decides the bloody knife is better than nothing. You never know. He steps close to the dead blond girl, who is naked but for red high heels matching her painted lips. She stares, all-knowing it seems to Keith, up toward the theoretical sky. Where the sky ought to be, if there is a sky. She doesn’t look ridiculous or stupid to him. Rather, she seems composed, you can almost see her leaving her body behind. What is this flesh I was so fond of? How vulnerable it is, how soft.
So Keith has a knife, no match against David’s long sword. “You raped my sister,” David says, a kind of cruel light in his eyes at this, his joke, seeing it register on Keith. He might not be guilty of this, but he’s not innocent, as David well knows. David flicks out the sabre, slashes Keith’s left cheek. The laceration feels hot, blood flows inevitably down to stain the white shirt.
“Please don’t do this,” Justine says, rocking her cage, above.
Keith had forgotten about her, in the moment. He doesn’t dare look up now, unreasonably fearing that he might lose one of his eyes.
David, assuming a fencing pose, thrusts forward and stabs him in the ribs.
Justine shrieks; her shriek corresponds exactly to the pain and shock of the stab wound. Keith feels her in him, and is, fighting through the physicalness of his fear, conscious of a strength, a vast inner repose. A lack of surprise.
“You raped her, and then you killed her. You … fiend—” David waves the sword around. As Keith raises his arms to protect his face he’s cut on the right upper arm.
Then David stabs him in the thigh.
“No!” Justine screams, and Keith is sorry for her, he wants to comfort her somehow.
He stumbles against the sheep, and feels himself pierced again. This one is in the back, in the shoulder blade, it hurts the worst, and he wonders if this is it, if he’s going to die. A sudden swoon of real weakness has him down on one knee, bleeding onto the floor. The pain varies. It suddenly gets worse, say in his side, then he forgets about that one. It is diffuse, a floating negative ball, all of this pain.
When he closes his eyes for a second he catches a vivid glimpse, as fast as that, of an unmoving huge lake, a lake of pellucid beautiful water, green with reflections purple and golden and rose. The water is so deep.
He opens his eyes and turns, feeling suddenly that something is going to change very soon. He looks up to Justine, as Rudolph walks near him, and he notices a big wooden X, with shackles on it, that Rudolph has rolled out. It looks like something you’d find in a torture chamber, and Keith understands.
“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” David intones, but there is a disturbance, they all look as, amazingly, Patrick runs up the three steps onto the stage.
NINETY-SEVEN
Several things happen at once.
Rudolph, unaccountably, hands his shotgun to Keith, a solemn, beatific expression on his face. They trade. Keith gives him the knife.
Patrick, with his glasses on, determined, throwing his life away, comes pointing his flashlight, distracting David, drawing also the attention of Michelle.
“I was going to let you go,” David says, and Rudolph begins to stab himself in the lower left abdomen, sharply, just as Patrick switches the flashlight on and its light explodes in David’s face. The face itself is on fire, blackening horribly, as Michelle knocks Patrick aside, her own left arm bursting into flames so that she rolls away, screaming, rolling on it until the flames go out. The flashlight explodes out of his hand.
Minh goes to the rope and begins violently untying it, to cause Justine to fall down on the spikes.
David has backed into the wooden figure’s bayonet, the Confederate soldier, the inanimate witness now involved.
Up on his feet, Keith raises the shotgun. He knows how to use one. David, blind but sensing him, throws the sword, but it clatters harmlessly downstage.
Keith shoots David directly in the face, blowing away the best part of his head.
The huge boom! startles them all, no one is immune, the sound just makes you jump, it scares you, you can’t help but respond. The smell of the powder is, Keith thinks, very sweet, and he smiles at the gory stump of the monster’s neck.
Then, with a low wail, Minh succeeds in untying the last of the thick knot, it slips, and the cage falls abruptly, just like that, down onto the spikes.
Lithe as a panther, with such athletically swift responses, Justine jumps as the cage comes apart, one spike catches her leg as she twists free but she manages to land mostly unharmed.
She and Keith embrace, shotgun smoke still hovering, and he loses his strength, dropping the weapon, bleeding all over them both. She is holding him as he begins to ever so slowly collapse from his five wounds.
Rudolph lies on his back, smiling, still breathing, alive. He wants someone to lean over him, to look into his face, but no one will. He has disemboweled himself.
Michelle, one side of her face burned blackish, blistering, one arm worse, has retrieved David’s Confederate sword.
“Keith!” Tamara screams, standing at the edge of the stage, but it’s too late.
Swiftly, savagely, Michelle stabs Keith in the back, through him and into Justine with inhuman force.
As she pulls the sword back, blood all over, Justine comes up so quickly, Michelle can’t help but look into her eyes. Weakened as she is, she’s lik
e a child. Justine takes the sword from her. Michelle slips to one knee, whimpering, trembling … Justine grasps the sword with both hands, raising it high above her head, and then brings it down, cleanly and heavily, separating head from body. Michelle’s head rolls until it’s right under the gaze of the big sheep.
Justine tosses the sword, with great force, sideways, so that it sticks into a wall. If Minh, fleeing, doesn’t see it, she is aware of it, running out of the house.
Justine holds Keith, kissing him, saying little things to him, as he gazes into her eyes. Tamara comes near, looks at him, but there’s nothing any doctor can do.
Cars are driving off, the strangers leaving the scene. Sabrina comes to see David’s corpse. Michelle’s. The severed head is dignified, at rest. Other survivors, like Jason and Fred, wander about, stunned. They’re quite confused.
Justine is kissing Keith when he begins his last breath and then stops.
When he has been dead for several minutes, she looks up to Patrick and Tamara, and asks them if they will help carry him outside. They nod, yes, as the tears slowly run down her cheeks. She looks at them with the history of a species in her eyes, the history of one life.
NINETY-EIGHT
Red hibiscus, white jasmine, yellow penstemon, purple fuchsias. It’s a beautiful garden. Justine holds Keith in her arms, there on the grass, wet with morning dew.
She speaks to him. He could be asleep. Dreaming. She asked Tamara and Patrick to leave. The birds are all awake. It’s dawn. Nervously, she pushes her hair out of her face, a gesture from when she was a young girl. She prays, but it’s hard to remember the right words. She had forgotten how to speak French; now it is all that she knows.
She’s so frightened. Every nerve tells her to run. She could flee, and then cherish her love forever, for centuries, build a shrine. Worship him as a murdered god.