Funny how something as trivial as a dress changed my life.
Chapter Eleven
Professor Esel’s estate was located on the outskirts of Zurich. It was an old mansion, inherited from an ancestor who made his fortune with pike men and timepieces. Herr Wallach was eager to make a show of swanning about with me on his arm, and was upset when he realized I intended to wear my sunglasses after dark. We argued about it on the way to the party and he sulked when I refused to take them off. However, parading around with a beautiful girl on his arm quickly restored his good spirits. There were a few raised eyebrows when we made our entrance, but the Swiss are nothing if not polite. Wallach introduced me to Professor Esel, a florid little man who resembled a burgermeister more than a metaphysicist.
“Ah, Herr Professor, I would like you to meet... a friend of mine, Fraulein Blau.”
“Guten tag, Fraulein,” Esel said as he bowed smartly. I received a mental image of myself tied naked to a canopied bed, surrounded by frisky dachshunds. Esel spoke to Wallach, although his eyes never left me. “You’ll never guess who has shown up tonight, Stefan: Pangloss has returned!”
Wallach was genuinely surprised by the news. “Nein! You must be joking. After all this time? It must be ten years since he last attended one of our little gatherings.”
Esel shrugged. “See for yourself. He was in the music room, the last time I looked. The bastard hasn’t aged a day.”
“Come along, Sonja. You simply must meet Pangloss!” Wallach enthused, unmindful of Professor Esel winking me auf Wiedersehen.
Pangloss was, indeed, in the music room, seated on an antique love seat, flanked by a pair of lovely women who laughed at the appropriate times. There was a feverish gleam in their eyes as they followed his every movement. Their movements seemed synchronized, like the clockwork toys the Swiss were famous for creating. They did not look away from Pangloss as Herr Wallach introduced me.
“Herr Doktor Pangloss, I would like you to meet Fraulein Blau.”
Pangloss halted in mid-anecdote and glanced at Wallach. My first impression was of a man in his early fifties, his black hair streaked with gray at the temples. He wore an evening suit and wire-rim glasses tinted dark green. He smiled frostily at Wallach, and then focused his attention on me. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, my dear.”
Wallach cried out as my fingers bit into the soft flesh of his upper arm. I was close to fainting, but I could not look away at the dead thing wearing Pangloss’s clothes. The creature resembled an unwrapped mummy, its flesh the color and texture of parchment, was seated where Pangloss had been only a heartbeat ago. The thing had enough nose left to keep the wire-rims it was wearing in place, and I caught a glimpse of banked embers deep within its eye sockets. A few strands of silvery hair clung to its yellowed, flaking scalp. The creature lifted a skeletal hand—its fingers capped by filthy, splintered talons—and fitted an ebony cigarette holder in its lipless mouth.
“What is the matter with your lovely companion, Wallach?” rasped the dead thing. “She seems to have taken ill.”
Flustered, Wallach hurried me out of the music room and onto the terrace that overlooked the gardens. Pangloss followed us, his lady friends forgotten. The moment he stepped away from them, the twin automatons blinked like mediums emerging from deep trance. Wallach seated me on a bench, babbled something about fresh air and then scampered off in search of a glass of water.
I caught the odor of dust and cobwebs and glanced up to see Pangloss standing over me. He had resumed his previous appearance and no longer looked like an unraveled pharaoh. For a brief moment I wondered if I was going mad.
“Perhaps I can be of some assistance, Fraulein Blau?” he asked politely. “After all, I am a doctor...” He reached out to feel my pulse with a hand that was nothing more than bone and desiccated flesh. I recoiled at the sight.
His features wavered between that of cadaver and living man before returning to their previous mask of normalcy. “I was right. You can see,” he growled. As he moved in closer, the smell of rot threatened to choke me. “Whose get are you?” he asked accusingly. “Who sent you here? Was it Lindworm? Answer me!”
I staggered to my feet, pushing him away. I did not want that dead thing near me.
“You dare touch me?” Pangloss growled.
Red fire flickered behind green glass and something cold stabbed my brain. I remembered Sir Morgan and how he raped Denise’s mind before he raped her body. Not again. Never again. I pushed back, desperate to force the intruder out of my mind, even if it meant my eyes popping out on their stalks. For a brief second I felt Pangloss’s frustration boil into rage, and then I was once more alone in my head. We stood facing each other, both of us shivering. Pangloss was furious, but I now sensed an uncertainty in him that had not been there before.
“How old are you?” he hissed. His image flickered like a failing fluorescent light: one moment he was a well-dressed bon vivant, the next an animated corpse. It was very distracting.
I told him the truth, as I saw no point in lying. “I was born in 1969.”
“Impossible!” he spat. “You could not possibly have accrued such power in such a short period of time!” He grabbed my wrist, forcing me to look him in the face. The flesh sloughed away, revealing a leering death’s head. “Don’t lie to me. I don’t know who you belong to, but you aren’t going to count coup with me! You may have caught me off-guard, but I won’t make the same mistake twice. Oh, you’re strong for your age, that’s true, but you don’t have the slightest clue what to with it, do you?”
“Ah, Herr Doktor! There you are. Herr Wallach mentioned you were looking after Fraulein Blau...”
Pangloss and I turned to stare at the man framed in the terrace doorway. He was a small, slender man in his sixties with a dapper little mustache. Hardly a knight in shining armor, but he’d do for the moment.
Pangloss let go of my wrist as if it were leprous. “I am relieved to hear that you are no longer ill, Fraulein,” he said with a stiff bow. “Now, you must please excuse me.” He quickly hurried past my savior, who regarded him with a wry smile, and disappeared into the house.
“A most unusual man, the Herr Doktor, is he not?” the little man mused aloud. “Ah! But I have not introduced myself. How rude! I am Erich Ghilardi.”
“Do you know Doktor Pangloss?”
Ghilardi shrugged. “Let us say I know of him. I fear Herr Wallach will be returning with your glass of water, so I shall dispense with small talk. May I visit you at your place of employment, Fraulein? Ah, do not look so surprised! Your behavior this evening was most proper. It was no failure on your part, I assure you. It’s just that everyone in our little clique knows how Wallach locates his dinner companions.”
I smiled and handed him my card. Such a polite old gentleman. It was hard to imagine him dangling from the chandelier or groveling on all fours with a rubber ball in his mouth.
He bowed neatly and slipped it into his breast pocket. “Auf Wiedersehen, Fraulein Blau.”
Wallach was frowning as he returned, a glass of water in hand. “What was Ghilardi doing out here?” he asked.
“Simply making sure I was all right. Nothing you need to worry about.”
Wallach continued to fret. “I don’t like him paying attention to you. He’s disturbed, you know.”
“Now how could I possibly know that? Who is he, by the way?”
Wallach clearly didn’t approve of my asking about Ghilardi, but his love of gossip overcame his misgivings. “He’s one of Europe’s leading scholars on the occult. Or, rather, he used to be. Ten years ago he suffered some form of fit while hosting an Akademy meeting. I was there—the man screamed like an animal and befouled himself. Most unfortunate. After that incident, he started claiming werewolves and vampires were real, or some such trash. He even wrote a book about shadow races living in secret coexistence with humanity. Of course, the book was widely ridiculed and he made himself a complete laughing stock. The man’s insane
. He has to be, to believe that vampires walk amongst us.”
It was late when I returned to my room. I stripped down to my skin and sat in the dark, thinking about what had happened at the party. After all these years, I had finally come face-to-face with one of my own. Was that what Morgan really looked like? The thought made me shudder.
I contemplated the cheval glass in the corner of my room. What about me? What did I really look like? I’d dismissed the myth that vampires hated mirrors because they didn’t cast reflections as an old wives’ tale, like the inviolability of sacred ground. Maybe I was the ignorant one. What if vampires loathe mirrors not because of what they don’t see, but because of what they do?
It was dawn before I mustered the courage to stand before the mirror. I was terrified of what might stare back at me, but too curious to remain ignorant. I heaved a sigh of relief upon seeing my I wasn’t that of a withered hag. Then I noticed a faint nimbus of reddish light that seemed to outline my entire body, with the strongest glow about my head and shoulders. I was reminded of the corona glimpsed during an eclipse. Then my reflection smiled at me. I put my hand to my mouth, but my twin in the mirror did not. Instead, a long, pointed tongue, like that of a cat, emerged from my duplicate’s lips.
I cried out in fear and disgust and struck the cheval glass hard enough to make it spin on its pivot like a roulette. I backed away, watching the mirror as it flashed reversed images of the room until it came to a halt with its mirrored face to the wall. I left it that way and never touched it again.
Chapter Twelve
Ghilardi came to visit me within a week of our encounter at Herr Esel’s party. He was received in the parlor and, after sampling the house wine, I escorted him to my room. He had a black valise, like the ones doctors used to carry on house calls. I didn’t think anything about it, since my clients tended to rely a great deal on props, and often brought their favorite ones from home.
Once we were alone, I excused myself and ducked behind a screen to change. I told him to make himself comfortable. He nodded politely, glancing about the room nonchalantly. He looked at the back of the mirror for a long moment before moving to the bed. I tried to engage him in conversation, hoping to divine his kink.
“So, Herr Ghilardi, what is it you like?”
“Like?” He sounded distracted.
“Ja. What is it you wish me to do to you? Or would you rather do things to me? Don’t be shy, mein herr. There is nothing you could suggest that could possibly shock me.”
“I see.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Fraulein Blau ...”
“Please, call me Sonja.”
“Very well—Sonja. I do not want you to do anything.”
“Are you quite sure about that?” I asked as I stepped out from behind the screen. He was standing beside the bed; he was still fully clothed and had the black bag open. As he turned to look at me, his mouth fell open. My work clothes often affected the customers that way.
I was dressed in a black chamois Merry Widow corset that lifted and separated my breasts like jelly molds, and I wore black nylons with seams up the back, held in place by a black lace garter belt. I walked toward him slowly so I wouldn’t overbalance on my spike-heeled patent- leather pumps. I still had my shades on. Most of my clients didn’t mind that I kept my eyes hidden while I serviced them. Those who demanded to see my eyes never returned.
“Lilith!” It was both a gasp of recognition and repudiation. Before I could tell him he could call me whatever he liked, Ghilardi thrust a hand into his valise and withdrew a silver flask.”Verdamt Nosferatu!” he shouted as he splashed its contents in my face. I staggered backward, spitting out a mouthful of lukewarm holy water.
Pressing his advantage, Ghilardi produced a large silver crucifix and slammed it against my forehead, knocking off my shades and throwing me off-balance. I landed hard on my rump. I clapped my hands to my face and screwed my eyes shut. I was vaguely aware of Ghilardi intoning the words to the Lord’s Prayer. I was too dumbstruck to notice if the skin had been flayed from my skull or not.
The only thing that raced through my mind at that moment was that I’d been recognized as a monster and was going to die like one. And I thought of Denise’s parents, for some reason. Suddenly Ghilardi’s hands were on me as he helped me to my feet.
“Ach! Please forgive me, bitte! You must think me a crazy old man, nicht wahr? How can I explain why I did such a cruel, insane thing ...?” He pulled a neatly pressed linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and began to daub at my ruined make up. “I’m sorry if I frightened you, Fraulien! Are you hurt?”
I lowered my hands from my face and, to my surprise as much as Ghilardi’s, I began to cry. It was the first time I’d done so since Joe Lent’s death. “You made no mistake, mein herr. I am, indeed, Nosferatu.”
“Nein,” he replied in a soft, comforting voice. His hand strayed to my damp, unmarred forehead and patted it reassuringly. “You are not one of the Damned, child. Forgive me for thinking such foolishness.”
A flare of anger sparked deep inside me. “What do you know about it, old man?” I tried to pull away from him, and when he would not let me go, I bared my fangs. He sucked in a sharp breath, but did not draw away.
“Let me see your eyes,” he said quietly.
I complied. Even the dim light of my room was painful. Ghilardi raised his eyebrows in surprise, but did not look frightened or disgusted.
“How long have you been like this?”
“Since 1970,” I replied.
“Unmöglich!” he exclaimed, as he wiped away my tears and told me to blow my nose. “You are something very rare, Fraulein Blau. Maybe something that has never happened before.” He handed me my shades, which I gratefully slipped back on. “But you are confused, are you not? And you do not like being Nosferatu, am I correct? Maybe we can work out an agreement between us, ja?” The old man smiled. “How would you like to come live with me, Sonja?”
Herr Ghilardi bought out my contract with Frau Zobel and promptly installed me in his home, changing my life forever, if not for better. Once I moved in with him, he outlined the details of our arrangement: he would provide me with shelter, money and an identity, while I would permit him to observe me, like an anthropologist studying a tribe of apes.
I quickly discovered that he was independently wealthy, and that the Ghilardi fortune had arisen from an arranged marriage between a minor Italian prince and the firstborn daughter of a Swiss moneylender. The family estate was located on a large private harbor on Lake Geneva, with half of the building set on semi-circular arches supported by Meillerie stone pillars anchored in the lake itself.
The manor boasted twenty-two bedrooms, eighteen bathrooms, and a private library devoted to the fantastic. Ghilardi’s filing system, however, was an anal-retentive’s nightmare, with leather-bound first editions sandwiched between garish paperback novels, and secondhand book-club volumes thrust amongst rare Renaissance folios. Everywhere I looked, I found myself surrounded by fictionalized versions of my affliction. Ghilardi allowed me the freedom of his library, allowing me to examine whatever I wanted, but did not steer me in the direction of any one book.
I searched myriad volumes for information, no matter how distorted, that might shed some light on my condition. I had access to Bürger’s Lenore, Goethe’s Bride of Corinth, Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, Byron’s The Giaour, all in their original editions, but met with nothing but frustration. There was no fictional counterpart for the likes of Morgan and Pangloss—much less myself. Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre was a penny-dreadful scarecrow and Stoker’s Dracula nothing more than a Victorian sex fantasy.
I sifted through the works of Poe, Le Fanu, Machen, Lovecraft, and a score of others, and still came away with nothing. Whatever clues I did succeed in plucking from the morass were inevitably contradictory. Only after six weeks of fruitless searching did Ghilardi finally hand me the book.
He was on the terrace, studying a storm building in the mountain tops. Th
e lake had grown dark and choppy. When storms break on Lake Geneva, they are awesome testimony to nature’s potency, which Ghilardi enjoyed watching. “Did you know, my dear, that it was on the shores of this very lake, during a storm, that Mary Shelley first conceived the idea for Frankenstein?” He did not take his eyes off the darkening clouds as he spoke, a brandy snifter cradled in one hand. “I take it that you have not found what you are looking for in my library? Then, perhaps, this might be of some assistance.” He turned and handed me a slender hardbound volume s entitled Die Vorgeben Diejenigen: ‘The Pretending Ones’.
I realized that this was the book Wallach had mentioned at Esel’s party; the one that ruined Ghilardi’s reputation, reducing him to the same level as von Daniken and Berlitz. As I read the book, I understood why he had been treated like a pariah dog by his former peers. If I didn’t know better myself, I would have dismissed the book as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic. But since I did know better, it soon became my Bible: the revelation on which I built my new life.
Humans insist on defining reality by their standards. They are poorly equipped to do so, since they are selectively deaf and blind in one eye. They are beings with an insatiable need to categorize the universe that surrounds them, but demand that the facts reveal a universe suited for human cultivation and exploitation. Things must remain status quo.
The creatures who call themselves Pretenders dwell in the cracks in mankind’s perception. To the untutored eye they are nothing to look at: beggars, cripples, prostitutes, and anonymous strangers. Their faces are unremarkable, their demeanor bland. They normally aren’t the types who like to draw attention to themselves. Although there are numerous subcategories, they all pretend to be human, hiding their demonic otherness behind a mask of carefully constructed banality. Only to those who truly know how to see do they stand revealed, their auras suffused with fearsome energy.
Sunglasses After Dark (Sonja Blue) Page 10