Elise curls further into herself. This is just too weird. She wants to laugh. She wants to cry. “You refer to human beings like they’re something different. Aren’t you…” Elise’s voice trails off as she wonders how to pose the question. “I mean, weren’t you…”
Maria nods. “Yes. Yes. I suppose I was once a human being. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten. I don’t look at things that way anymore. We’re not human. We’re not superhuman; we’re different. That’s one thing that sets us apart from the human race: perception. We acknowledge there are things going on that might not be part of our immediate perception. We, for example, have moved and merged with masses of people for hundreds of years, and no one ever notices we’re anything out of the ordinary. Because humans believe only what their eyes can see. And sometimes that’s wrong. And sometimes there are things you sense in a different way. The brush of something soft on your neck, the people who appear in dreams you’ve never seen before, things like that are testimony to other worlds that exist all around you.
“So, yes, I was once a human being, like you. But, aside from needing blood to continue to survive, I’ve also honed different ways of seeing. And a lot of what I’ve learned about such sight, I’ve learned from people like you. People who can remove the covers from their eyes, open them and truly see things in a way that’s different from the conventional, from how most people see things. These are the kind of people I feed on in a different way.” Maria sighs. “I’ve been around a long time, so I can sense it when I meet one. Someone like you. Someone like Edward. Believe me, there aren’t many.
“But you want to hear our story.” Maria looks dreamy-eyed. “There’s so much to tell. You just have to come to know us and let the story leak out gradually. We don’t have time to sit here and go through everything. What would interest you? That I grew up as a child in Venice when the city was still new? That Terence knew Oscar Wilde and Dante Rossetti, but that he knew Wilde much better, if you know what I mean?”
Maria shakes her head and summarizes her story—mainly with Terence—a story spanning continents and centuries. She tells of their nocturnal existence, their pursuit of blood, flesh, and art. How, at various times, their desire for each of these things has caused conflict and pain. How, at various times, all three things combined, bring them the most delirious physical, intellectual, and emotional pleasure. Maria tells her how easily they accrued their wealth through the centuries (mostly through black-market buying and selling of paintings and sculptures) and finally, their kin.
“I don’t know if you can immediately understand what we are.” Maria takes Elise’s hand in her own, almost as if to warm it. “That will take time, and it has to be time you’re willing to freely give. If you were like us, you’d discover the luxury of not living as if you’re racing to beat the clock. Immortality, or the enhanced possibility of it, gives us tremendous freedom.”
Elise shivers. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by that.” She swallows, mouth dry, confusion reigning. When will Maria’s face break into laughter? When will she tell her this is all a joke? It must be.
“Oscar Wilde?” Elise giggles, in spite of the fact that dread grows inside her, heavy and warning.
“Ask Terence. The two were quite close.”
Elise shakes her head. “I’ll have to do that. But I don’t want to wake him just now.” She closes her eyes for a second, perhaps hoping when she again opens them, something different will appear. She is disappointed. “So, are there others like you here in Chicago? Nearby?”
“I don’t know. We don’t really mix with others like us, although there is a loosely-knit society the world over, with its own rules and logic, pertaining only to us. I believe we are rare, so perhaps not. There have been times, when we lived in other places, where we saw more of our kind. Anne Rice would have you believe New Orleans is crawling with us; not so.” Maria laughs. “Here, in America, the places I’ve found most populated with others like this are Pittsburgh and Kansas City. Not very romantic, but what can I say?” Maria shakes back her hair. “Terence, Edward, and I are pretty much alone. What need we have for togetherness, we get from one another.”
Elise doesn’t know anymore what she’d call togetherness. She tries to get up on one arm, so she is no longer touching Maria.
“Sometimes, we want someone to join us.”
Elise turns to search Maria’s eyes. Maria cuts off the connection by closing her own eyes. She whispers, “It’s too soon to talk about that.”
Lovingly, Maria strokes the whitening skin of Elise’s face, her long, blood-red nails gently passing over milky warmth.
“Really, there are very few of us. Forget the lore you read in pulp novels. We do not form a new vampire each time we kill. The process is complicated, involving ritual and faith, two concepts you moderns seem to have lost stock in. Those of us who have survived are spread throughout the world, feeding quietly on society’s outcasts, of which there are many. I would guess there are no more than a few hundred of us, and we’ve had hundreds of years to perfect our techniques of hiding, our techniques of hunting.
“I don’t know all the history, or even why we exist. Our biggest influence on the world, the one most noticeable anyway, is in something you might find bizarre, or even silly.” Maria stops and brings out a bowl filled with dried marijuana; leaves, buds, stems and seeds mingle, all redolent of resin, glistening in the dim light. “This is part of our ritual, developed over thousands of years. We used it at first to stun and pacify our victims, while on our systems it had the opposite effect. It awakens our senses, attuning them to your thoughts, your auras, your health, everything about you, before we kill.”
Elise stares down at the marijuana, afraid she will be sick. Who would have thought that fun and games with bongs and power hitters when she was in art school would someday have ties with the living dead? She wants to giggle, but she’s afraid that, once she starts, she will never be able to stop. Never.
“It’s pure, this. Mortals have taken it upon themselves to trade and grow their own, but what they grow is polluted, impure. Hardly the same thing. But I suppose if you’re looking for some stamp of our existence it would be this, and that we introduced it to the world.” With one hand, Maria rolls the marijuana into a slim cigarette, expert; the joint is perfect. “Let’s smoke this now.”
“No!” Elise gets up from the settee and runs from the room, from the house. All of this is too strange. What can she do to forget?
Chapter Twelve
1954
Edward awakened back in his apartment, having no memory of how he arrived there, or when. He looked down at his clothes and saw he was still dressed in the same jeans and shirt he had worn the night before, when he had met Terence and the two of them had taken a trip to the depths (it seemed as if one of them, either Maria or Terence, had referred to their place as “the depths”; the name fit in many ways).
But had last night happened? Had he really spent an evening in a cavernous room in an abandoned and hidden area of the New York City subway system? There was a nauseating sense of the surreal as Edward recalled the night before. How Terence had been waiting for him, not outside his apartment, which would have been normal, if not a little creepy, but several blocks away, as if they had arranged to meet. He remembered the trip with the silent cab driver and the descent into the bizarre underground space: its cold, its dim lighting, the stench of mildew in the air. How could it have seemed so romantic to him? How could he have done what he had done?
But he didn’t want to think about that now. Whether he would have a choice in shutting out his memories was still in question. Concentrate on the present, he told himself, concentrate on getting up, moving. Those things, once so simple, now seemed alien. He felt profoundly weak as he lay upon his mattress, a chill air blowing in from his window. Too weak to even get himself up on his elbows. His entire body felt infused with a lethargy that made him feel as if he had suddenly gained 500 p
ounds. He couldn’t move. He didn’t know how long he had slept, and wondered if it was only for a very short time. He felt so tired, beyond exhaustion. All of his strength had been sapped. If they weren’t automatic, Edward didn’t know if he would have had the strength to keep his heart beating and his lungs drawing in air.
So he stared at the ceiling, tracing a hairline crack from one side of the room to the other. He mustered up enough energy to turn his head and regarded his paintings, arranged along the baseboard of the opposite wall.
Everything was ugly. Childish. Amateur stuff. Crap. What had he been thinking? Slamming his paint-smeared body into canvas, as if that were something original, as if it were communicating something other than the creator’s desperation for getting noticed. It was children’s figure painting, except with a larger “brush.” It was a ploy for getting attention, no more sophisticated than a four-year-old flinging himself on his back in a screaming and kicking tantrum.
When he got enough energy back, he should gather his work up and take it downstairs. There was a place in the back where the janitor burned trash. He could have a bonfire—and then maybe his paintings would actually have some beauty, if only for a fleeting time. He imagined the flames crackling: the orange, the black ash, the way the air shimmered and distorted just above the flames.
Turning his head away from his work, Edward felt nauseated by the smell of turpentine and paint. Those smells once had a resonance. They were exciting, arousing even, like the smell of a man’s armpit, or the aroma of semen. They fired up a desire within his soul, not unlike lust, to create.
But now the thought of painting, and sex, for that matter, offered no appeal. All he wanted was his life back, his energy. If he had believed in God, he would have prayed and offered up all sorts of things, his creativity, his left testicle, for a shot at being normal. Getting out of this apartment and finding a job somewhere, maybe as a teacher, or something more humble. Didn’t garbage men make enough to get by?
He saw the three of them in memory, the music silenced and their bodies intertwined. The sex was nothing new for him, even if it was rare. But the sex had led to something darker, something more soul stealing. They had bit him; their razor sharp teeth piercing his skin and sucking out his blood. The pleasure was delirious, making the most sensational orgasm seemed pedestrian by comparison. He saw their mouths, ringed with blood. He remembered their eyes, bright, almost feral, with desire. He felt, again, their warmth. It was the warmth of his own blood running through their veins.
The thought sickened him. And he knew that the previous night had marked a turning point, had been a true loss of innocence. He wondered if innocence was a quality one could ever regain.
He didn’t know if he could ever return his life to what it once was. There truly were, Edward thought with despair, points of no return.
He turned away from the memory of the previous night, not wanting to confront what he had done, whom he had become in the small hours of the morning, when the city darkened and slowed above him. It was no wonder he suddenly craved a normal, pedestrian life. Craved even turning away from his “inversion,” as Freud called it, and getting married and having two children, a boy and a girl. A place in New Jersey. Hoboken, maybe? And if he couldn’t turn away from his love and desire for his own sex, maybe he could become a more conventional homosexual and find himself a “roommate” or “friend” as they were coyly referred to here in the Village, to hide what could not be hidden, but what discretion and decorum dictated remain concealed. He would spend weekends on Fire Island, attend the opera, and cruise the baths when his roommate traveled on business.
A normal life, he wondered, is that now entirely out of my grasp? Have I reached a point where it’s too late to turn back? Have I jumped off a cliff into an abyss of deep red? Have I embraced something that has damned me?
“Oh shit,” Edward whimpered. “Stop it with the fucking melodrama, you queen.” He forced himself up on his elbows and found it was possible to manage a somewhat vertical position without expiring. His back and neck felt weighted down, as if gravity had increased during the night and was fighting to pull him back down. But as the minutes ticked by on the old Westclox on the wall opposite, his strength was returning, not in waves, but in dribbles, and that had to be good enough.
There was a small, cane-bottomed chair positioned near the window. Edward would sit in this chair from time to time, to catch the breeze, to smoke, and to ponder. Edward made this chair his goal. He needed to get to the chair so he could sit and think, put last night’s events in some sort of order, some sort of perspective.
He wasn’t sure why, but he felt his life depended on it.
And remembering it while sitting near a window seemed to really matter, because it proved he was still human, that he could sit and think like anyone else. Lying on his back was too much like them. He remembered leaving them, remembered their deep slumber and the look of contentment on their faces. It was all coming back.
He rolled over and crawled across the dirty wood plank floor, thinking of nothing else save getting to that chair. The trip across his soiled wooden floor was a long one, one in which the rip in the knees of his jeans grew larger, enough to expose the flesh beneath, enough to rip the skin and cause a trickle of blood to emerge, leaving a crimson smear. Edward paused to regard the swatch of color on the hardwood and thought how his new companions probably would have already lapped it up, leaving the floor as clean as if it were brand new.
Edward pulled himself up on the chair, his face near the window, where a cool breeze, a gusty wind actually, was whistling through. He swore he could almost smell the Hudson, beneath the exhaust fumes.
He stared outside for a long time, not thinking. He smoked three cigarettes down, until his throat felt scorched. But at least he felt something, something human.
After he had tried to eat some of the food they offered, Edward had partaken once more of the powerful weed only they seemed able to procure. The marijuana numbed him and made the actions that followed those of someone else; he was merely an observer.
What he saw was himself, stretched across a red velvet settee, naked limbs white against the plush fabric. The contrast was stunning, almost unreal. The velvet outlined and softened his naked body, which looked better than Edward would have thought, given his diet of coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol. He was slim and sinewy. On his face was a look of rapturous intensity, his eyes bright with desire, his mouth hanging open, lips moist, as if he were panting or already in the throes of some delicious ecstasy.
They were kneeling next to the settee. At first, they didn’t touch; they only observed, building his anticipation. It was as though they knew exactly what they were doing to him by waiting, by not giving in to the delirium of touch. Here was a young man desperate to feel flesh against flesh and withholding it made that desire all the more intense. Yet, there were rules. He didn’t know where they were written down or who had the authority to enforce them, but instinctively he knew the rules of this game. There was to be no talking, no pleading, no wheedling, no seductive tones. He was not allowed to touch them. Supplicant, he had to wait.
They heightened the waiting by at last bringing their hands up, but not touching…not yet. They moved their hands over his body, just above the field of his flesh. He wanted to arch his back to bring his skin into contact with their hands, but knew that would be insubordination, so he remained still while their hands slowly circled, moving in arcs inches from his flesh, flesh becoming more and more fevered with each rotation. He didn’t know if the heat was in response to their almost-touches, as if they could raise heat from his body like magnets with their upraised hands; or if the heat came from within, his lust and need stoking up his internal temperature.
He watched as his body grew slick, and beads of sweat popped up and rolled off his chest, his stomach, his thighs; watched as his pale hair became darkened by perspiration.
And then Terence’s hand landed on his thigh, gentle, the tou
chdown of a butterfly. He whimpered. Maria kissed his neck, barely a whisper.
All of this he observed from a kind of distance, through a tunnel. There was no horror in his second self as Maria and Terence both got up from their knees to more dominant positions and opened their mouths in strange smiles, which revealed teeth changed from normal to rows of tiny, razor-sharp fangs. He thought for a moment, This is the part where I scream; this is the part where I struggle against them and bolt away, but there was no energy for such thoughts, let alone actions.
This time there would be no razors, no slim, almost elegant lines carved into his thighs. Maria bent over him, and as naturally as a doe lowering her head to graze, lit on his neck and nipped him gently, teeth so sharp he barely felt pain. He watched as she moved back to admire her work, the small puncture wounds in his neck, and saw her bring her hand to her mouth in delight as the first blood began to trickle and flow.
“You should have it,” she whispered to Terence. “He’s your acquisition.”
And when Terence knelt once more, Edward swung back into himself to feel, as one, the touch of Terence’s lips against his flesh, sucking, licking. He needed to know what it was to provide the sustenance that Terence needed.
Maria’s hand on his shoulder. “Not too much, now. This one, we’re thinking of keeping.”
And Maria went down to his thigh, where his erect and quivering sex brushed against her hair. Again, she opened his flesh and this time took the blood that issued forth.
Edward squirmed and let them continue to bite and suckle, until his entire body was a mass of small drained wounds.
It was then he became light-headed, drifting in and out of consciousness. These memories came in flashes: he remembered reeling as Maria mounted him (his first woman!), her face smeared with gore, flushed with high color; recalled crawling across the room to Terence, who taunted and laughed at him, calling him a faggot. The ridicule somehow made everything even more intense. He recalled Maria’s touch on his hair, feather-light, as she held his face close to the concrete floor while Terence took him from behind. Terence screeched with glee as something in Edward broke and caused more blood to come forth, to run (but not for long) in trickles down his thigh.
Blood Sacrifice Page 13