by Neil Gaiman
“How old are you?” I asked, wondering at the odd way in which she spoke.
“I am young,” she said, smiling as if there was a joke hidden among her words. “Come home with me for the night.”
“I don’t chase after white girls, Julia,” I said, because that was the name she’d given me.
“Come home with me,” she said again.
“I’ll walk you to your door,” I said, reluctantly, “but after that I have to get back to Central House.”
“What is Central House?”
“The officers and senior members of the BSUs around the city have rented a brownstone in Harlem. We live together and prepare for whatever’s coming.”
She smiled at my words and stood.
“JULIA,” A MAN SAID when we were halfway down the block from the café. “Wait up.”
He was tall and brawny, white and blond. He might have been a football player at some university, maybe the one I was attending.
“Martin,” she said by way of a tepid greeting.
“Where you going?” He had a thick gauze wad taped to his left forearm.
When she didn’t answer he gave me an evil look.
“This is my, my girlfriend, dude,” he said.
I didn’t reply. Instead I was preparing for a fight I didn’t think I could win. He was very big and I am, at best, a middleweight.
“Just walk away and you won’t get hurt,” the footballer added.
His tone had a pleading quality to it. This made him seem all the more dangerous.
“Hey, man,” I said. “I just met the lady, but you aren’t gonna make me go anywhere.”
He reached for me and I got ready to throw the hardest punch I could. I wasn’t about to let that white boy make me turn tail and run.
“Martin, stop,” Julia said. Each syllable was the sound of a hammer driving a nail.
Martin’s fingers splayed out like a fan and he drew the hand back as if it had been burned.
“Go away,” she said, “and don’t bother me again.”
Martin was well over six feet tall and weighed maybe two-forty, most of which was muscle. He shook like a man resisting a strong wind. The muscles of his neck bunched up and corded and he grimaced, exposing his teeth in a skull-like grin. After a minute or so of this strain, Martin turned his back to us and staggered from the sidewalk into the street and away. Cowering as he stumbled off, he gave the impression of a man reeling from a beating.
“You were ready to fight him,” Julia said.
I didn’t answer.
“He would have hurt you,” she stated.
With that she took my arm and walked me across downtown Manhattan to the pedestrian entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t question our walk. There was a buildup of energy in my blood and muscles from the fight I’d almost had, from fear of the pounding I would have surely received.
On the way she told me about her life in Rumania, her escape from the Communists to Munich where she lived with Gypsies for a time. It was a cool October evening and I listened, feeling no need to respond. For her part, she held on to my arm happily prattling about a life that seemed like a story out of a book.
When we got to the other side, she walked me to where there were many warehouses and few residences. We came to a stairwell leading down to a doorway below the surface of the street. She pushed the door open without using a key.
We went down a long hallway until coming to stairs that took us down at least three more levels. There we came to another hall and then to a door that she produced a key for.
IT WAS A SMALL, dimly lit room with a maple table in one corner and a single mattress on the floor. There were no windows, of course, and the room smelled dry and stale, like a tomb that had been sealed for centuries.
The door closed behind me and I turned to look Julia in the eye. The moons there were luminescent and her smile took my breath away. She shucked the blue T-shirt, stepped out of the loose pants, and she was naked. I realized as I lunged for her that this uncontrolled sexuality had been coming on ever since Martin had threatened me. I pulled down my pants and Julia started laughing. I dragged her to the small bed and we were together. My pants were around my ankles. My shoes were still on my feet but I couldn’t take the time to remove them. I had to be in her. I had to fuck her and to keep on fucking. Nothing could stop me. Even my orgasm only slowed down the gyrating urgency for a moment or two.
All the while Julia was laughing and talking to me in some foreign tongue. Now and again she’d pull my hair back and examine my eyes with those eerie lights in hers.
I writhed on top of her while she entwined me with her cold legs and arms. I could not stop. I could not pull away. For the first time in my life, I felt, I knew what freedom was. I understood that this passion was the only thing that touched the core of my being.
I AWOKE NOT REMEMBERING having lost consciousness, yet I must have passed out, because I was now in another room in a bed with a frame. My wrists and ankles were chained to the four corners of the bed and I was naked.
This room was also windowless and stale. It felt as if I was far underground, but I yelled anyway. I screamed and hollered until my throat was raw, but no one came. No one heard me.
As hours went past I thrashed and called out, but the chains were strong and the walls thick. There was a columnlike yellow candle burning for the little light Julia had left me, and I wondered if I was meant to die in that underground tomb.
At times I worried that this was some white supremacist plot against the BSU of New York. Had they captured me to make a statement? Were they going to lynch me or burn me? Would I be a martyr for the cause?
It was many hours later when the door came open and Julia walked in. I yelled for all I was worth before she could close the door, but she wasn’t bothered. She smiled and came to sit next to me on the bed.
She was wearing a red velvet robe that flowed all the way down to her bare feet. There was a hood, but it hung down behind her head.
“This is a room within a room that is itself within a larger room,” she said. “We are far underground and no one can hear you.”
“Why you got me chained down like this?” I asked, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.
In answer, she stood up, letting the sumptuous robe fall to the floor. She was as naked as I. The breath left my lungs, but I don’t know if it was her nakedness or those eyes that left me stunned.
She smiled again and knelt down at my side. She moved her head quickly and bit into my left forearm.
I have spent many days over the next few paragraphs of description.
How can I explain a feeling completely foreign, a feeling that pushed every emotion I could possibly experience past the threshold of my ability to bear it? The pain was a song that I cried out to in cracked harmony. The flow of blood was not only my life but the lives of all who came before me. Her quivering joy was a wild animal in my chest clawing and ripping to escape my silly so-called civilized existence.
My back arched upward and I cried out for release-and for the pain to continue. I wanted to bleed into Julia more than I had craved sex. I was an infant again-so excited by the new sensations of life that I needed the chains to contain my ecstasy.
When I slumped back to the mattress, I no longer existed. I was the husk of the cocoon of a moth that had transformed itself from worm to flight. I was filled with nothing, surrounded by nothing. I was not dead because I had never truly lived. The flailing larvae and the fluttering bug had used my inert being merely for the transition, leaving me nothing but emptiness, like the transient aftermath of a weak smile.
“Juvenal Nyx,” a voice whispered.
“What?” I rasped.
“That is your name.”
I drifted for many hours that seemed like weeks or months. I was not unconscious or asleep but neither was I aware of the world around me. In this limbolike ether I was approached by various entities representing sentients that claimed no race, sex, or speci
es.
“You are in danger of knowledge,” one such being, who seemed to be a yellow nimbus with no origin, said.
“Of being found out?” I asked in some fashion other than speech.
“Of knowing,” the empty halo of light replied.
“I don’t understand.”
“Then there is still hope.”
“JUVENAL,” A HUMAN VOICE SAID.
I opened my eyes and saw Julia, again in jeans and T-shirt, sitting at the foot of the bed. She was staring at me in a way that I can only describe as hungry.
“Julia.”
The smile did not leaven her rapacious eyes.
“You are a sweet man.” Though she whispered these words I heard them as a shout down a long, echoing hallway. “I scented your sweetness before I entered the bookstore. I came there for you.”
“You let Martin go after biting his arm,” I said, “didn’t you?”
“I let them all go after the first bite,” she said. “Hundreds of them…thousands.”
I, the old me, sighed in relief.
“And I want to let you go too,” she said, “but your blood sings to me.”
She touched my inner right thigh halfway between knee and groin. Her cold fingers rubbed that spot. Just the touch caused an echo of dark delight.
She bent over me and hovered an inch away from the place she’d touched, her lunar eyes gazing into mine.
“Bite it,” I said in spite of the panic in my chest.
OVER THE NEXT FOUR days she drank from my other arm and leg, and finally from my abdomen just above the naval. I was in constant ecstasy and dread. I didn’t eat, sleep, or feel the need to relieve myself. My body was in a state of total repose except when she fed on my blood.
“We never drink much,” she told me one evening after having feasted. She was lying back with her head against my thigh, savoring her perversion. “It doesn’t take much to keep us alive. We aren’t like your people who need to kill and squander to keep themselves going. Just a cupful of fresh blood and we can live for many days.”
“Then why do you bite me every day?” I asked. There was no fear in my question. Just after the bite I felt drugged, yielding. I simply wanted to understand what she was saying.
She sat up. Her once-black eyes were now white with that strange light.
“We cannot multiply like you,” she said. “We must create our progeny. Our bite contains a drug that would quickly become a poison to most people. To some, however, those that are sweet, we can pass on the trait that makes us unique. These we call our lovers.”
“You love me?”
“I love your taste.”
“You mean like I love a good steak?”
A wave of disgust passed over her face.
“No, not death, but the life that lives in you and in me simultaneously. The feeling of being that I carry in me that is you. This, this taste is the most exquisite experience that any living creature can know.”
“What about Martin?” I asked when I got the feeling she might leave. I hated it when she left after biting me. It was as if I needed her there with me to keep the darkness away.
“Our bite, like I said, is a drug. It makes those we feed on want us. Usually they forget or remember us as a dream, but sometimes they stalk us. This is one possible consequence of the symbiosis between us. I made the mistake of taking you to the place where Martin had met me. His hunger is strong, but if I were to bite him again he would certainly die.”
“How long ago did you bite him?”
“Two years.”
“And the wound still needed a bandage?”
“Probably not. Sometimes they wear the dressing as a reminder.”
“Do you…,” I began, but she put her cold hand on my forehead and I passed out.
WHEN I AWOKE, THE morning after the last bite, the chains had been removed. On a single straight-backed chair I found my clothes-neatly folded. Lying across the soft pile was a cream-colored envelope with the name Jɬ¤ÊËÌ NÍÎ printed on it. The room was quiet and I knew somehow that Julia was gone for good.
My bites throbbed but didn’t hurt.
I rushed out of the door that led into a hallway that completely encompassed my cell. There was a door from that hall into another corridor that surrounded the first hallway. There was no furniture or even a carpet in the two buffering halls. The only other room I found was a small toilet. Seeing this I realized that my body was coming back to me and I had to go.
Dear Juvenal,
You are mine from now until the far-off day when either you or I cease to exist. That may not be for many years, even centuries. You will discover many things about yourself over the next weeks and months. Do not fear them. Do not despair. You are mine as if you came from my own womb and I am yours, though we cannot see each other for a long time. Trust in your instincts and your urges. Give in to your hungers and passions. One day we will be together again-when it is safe for both of us. These rooms are now yours. Use them as I have.
I love you,
Julia
The letter was written with a fountain pen and each word was wrought for me.
I went back into the cell and looked around. The floors were bare, unfinished pine. The bed was simple. There was only the one chair. That room could have been a poem about Julia’s life and now mine.
I sat down hearing far-off music, like cellos, in the distance. After a while I realized that this music was the singing in my blood.
After a long time of sitting there, wondering what drug she put in her mouth before biting me, I stood up and walked away from her subterranean chamber, never intending to return.
THE DAY WAS BRIGHT, glaring. Everything sounded crisp and loud. I had been in darkness for so long that my eyes hurt and the sun burned against my skin.
But there was also a crystalline quality to the air and vistas. I crossed the bridge feeling light, weightless. The people around me seemed burly and somewhat bumbling. I felt friendly toward them. I was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge before I realized that I hadn’t thought about race once that day. White, black, and brown, they all seemed the same to me.
I chided myself to snap out of it and see the political and racial landscape as I knew it was. I tried to tell myself that my imprisonment had damaged my sense of reality, that Julia had robbed me of my ability to see clearly.
But try as I might I couldn’t find fault with the men and women going on their way. And Julia…her moony eyes and slight accent brought no anger or fear, recrimination or desire for revenge.
I walked on feeling lighter and happier with each step. The world seemed to be singing some joyous hymn to its own life and destiny. The birds and bugs and even the chemical scents in the air made me feel nostalgic for something that had passed away but lived on in sense memory.
I laughed and did a little jig as I went.
I decided to walk all the way up to Harlem and Central House.
I felt like some kind of prince walking up crowded Fifth Avenue. The people were my unwitting subjects and I was beneficent royalty. In amongst them, now and again, I saw bright-colored coronas reminding me of the yellow halo that had warned me about knowledge.
When I got to Central Park, the song in the sky turned strident. It was howling, but I didn’t mind it. The trees whispered of their age and gravity. They had gone one way while I had taken the opposite direction. There was a thrumming in my blood and I was so light-headed that I had to take a seat on a park bench.
I was grinning at the people going past. Some glanced at me with worried looks on their faces. Long ago, last week, I would have said that it was because I was a black man, filled with the purpose of my race, but then I thought that they couldn’t possibly understand the experience that flowed in my veins.
The sun was screaming at me and I decided to stand. It was only then that I realized how weak I was. I fell face forward to the pavement. It didn’t hurt because I was unconscious before I hit the ground.
SOM
EWHERE THE SUN WAS setting. Its final shout over the horizon was followed by a silence so profound that I was yanked out of sleep, as if someone had dumped a hundred pounds of ice on my bare skin. I leaped up from the hospital bed and gazed out of the window into the burgeoning darkness of twilight.
“What’s wrong with you, guy?” a man said.
I turned to see him. He was one of six other men in beds around the room, a white man with a gray beard and a darker, though still somewhat gray, mustache.
“How did I get here?” I asked.
“They just dragged you in. We thought you was dead.”
I was still dressed. The excitement of the day was replaced by the certainty of night. The thrill that filled me was dark and dangerous.
I was in the street before I realized that I had no shoes on my feet. But I wasn’t bothered by the touch of my skin on the concrete and asphalt.
I headed back to the park. Once there I searched out my prey.
SHE WAS A YOUNG brown-skinned woman walking down a quiet lane. There was no fear emanating from her. I headed in her direction and, while passing, I put an arm around her waist, pulled her to me, and bit, with a lower tooth I’d never had before, into her neck. It was a pinprick, a small wound that would heal quickly. She fought me for all of eight seconds and then I felt her hand caress the back of my neck.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you doing to me?”
Her blood flowed slowly into my mouth. It was the richest, most sumptuous meal I’d ever had. It was steak and butter and thick red wine that gods ate on the high holidays of their divinity.
“Please,” she whispered in a wavering voice. “What’s happening to me? I feel it everywhere,” and she rubbed her body against mine.
I drank more and more.
She told me things in that park while people wandered past thinking that we were lovers who couldn’t wait for closed doors.
As I tasted her rich bounty, she whispered the secrets of her life. Her desires and disappointments, loves and mistakes flowed as her blood. I realized somewhere in the back of my mind that I was somehow feeding on her soul as well as the serum of her life.