by Lara Parker
“I understand now what you are trying to say.” She took a breath and sighed. “I’m so sorry. But I really have no interest in a relationship with you. I don’t love you. I could never love you. You’re not at all what I’m looking for. You’re a perfectly nice man, but you’re far too intense. I feel somehow that you have some kind of deep dark history that I really don’t want to know about.”
“But—since the séance—you don’t think we share something in common?”
“Yeah, and it makes you mysterious, I guess, but also kind of heavy.” Now she looked again towards the door and Barnabas was forced to admit to himself she was expecting someone. She turned back to him and blushed slightly. “I like—well actually I’m ashamed to say this—but I like guys who are not so into me. Younger guys—you know? I’ve always run after boys who ride bikes, or play music, or, I don’t know, join crazy cults. Our night in the tent was great, but, really, not something to—well, to take too seriously.”
“Maybe you haven’t heard me, Antoinette. I’m asking you to marry me. I’m a wealthy man. I can offer you a house in London, another in the Caribbean—” He was beginning feel as though he were sinking down into a deep well “—every pleasure, every luxury. And my undying devotion to your happiness—”
“But I don’t want to get married. I wasn’t married to Jackie’s father. Listen, Barnabas. I’m really not the girl for you. I’m sorry. But isn’t it better that I tell you now, than for me to lead you on? That would be really cruel.”
It was as if the singer had leaned in too close to the microphone and her plaintive voice wailed its way into his brain.
“I met an old man, who ask-ed o’ me,
‘How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?’
And I answered him, with a tear in my e’e
‘How many ships sail. . . in the forest?’ ”
Barnabas rose, shaking, and knocked over his chair. “Then, my dear, I will say good evening.” And he walked with as much assurance as he could muster out of the bar.
IT WASN’T UNTIL he was safe inside the Bentley that he allowed himself the luxury of despair. He clutched the steering wheel, laid his head upon the cool varnished wood, and trembled. The darkness within the car, the cold and loneliness, was reminiscent of the hours he had known in his casket before falling asleep, cursed to bestiality and isolation. It was not too late. He must return to Collinwood, and to Julia.
As he started the engine and pulled out of his parking place, easing alongside the window of the Blue Whale, he could not resist slowing down to see whether he could catch a glimpse of Antoinette one last time. She was still seated at the same table, but someone was with her now. Her expression was animated, and her face luminous with emotion. Her eyes sparkled and she seemed to be laughing and crying at the same time, completely absorbed in the conversation. More than once she grasped his hands, her cheeks flushed with warmth and excitement. The man leaned in and took her face and kissed her deeply, and Barnabas could see the elegant cut of his coat, his long lean body, his thick dark hair, and graceful hands. It was Quentin Collins who had won her heart.
TWENTY-FOUR
HE WAS DRIVING TOO FAST and was oblivious to the speedometer easing around the dial. Humbled by what was now a bitter irony—he had convinced himself that she loved him, as he loved her—Barnabas focused on the one method of relieving the mortification gnawing at his in-sides like a hungry rat.
He careened recklessly at the bend in the road nearest the cemetery, blasting into a mound of sodden debris before he turned off the ignition. He struggled from the car, and hurried toward the graveyard gate. The bare trees were calm, their stillness eerie, and the full moon was fattening, a cruel round disc hovering on the horizon. This time his sense of direction did not fail him, and he went directly to the mausoleum with its sagging door where he had hidden Quentin’s painting. There it was, tucked behind the iron grate, sleeping with the dead.
His wound throbbed and carrying the canvas was difficult, but Barnabas dragged himself slowly up the path toward Widows’ Hill. When he reached the precipice, he stopped and looked down. Moonlit foam rose and dissolved in never ceasing lines of rolling surf, as it had since time’s beginning. The waves crashed on the rocks and the wind from the sea knocked him off balance. Barnabas drew the painting to the edge. Rancor pulsed through his body and the thrill of revenge produced a rush of euphoria. He would destroy Quentin forever, his true image smashed into bits on the sand. Barnabas imagined the painting cartwheeling, hovering in the air, then dashing, torn and splintered, against the rocks. The werewolf would be released on the rampage, and Quentin would grow venal and repulsive, his soul no longer hidden, his urbane features deformed by a wolf’s snout. Barnabas laughed, his jealousy kindled to rage, and he rejoiced in the vision. She would not love him now.
The saucer moon danced and played a wicked game of hide-and-seek in the low-lying clouds. Barnabas teetered at the edge, his entangled fantasies torn between past and present. Where did his own body hover? Somewhere between the inevitable infirmities of aging, and the loneliness of immortality. Was this why he had felt such a thrill from his new life? Or was it his returning vampire powers? He walked a tightrope over an abyss.
After the séance, Antoinette had clung to him and wept as he consoled her. Holding her had rent him with happiness and awe. She had been willing to sacrifice herself; she would have died for her child. Where does such love come from? Does the heart possess such courage? Once more, he looked down at the rocks in the churning foam. His beloved Josette . . . here she had leapt to her death, driven mad by a vision of the monster he was to become. What agonies must have tormented her final moments? Just as Quentin would transform before Toni’s eyes, grow monstrous, and she would—she would—
Suddenly the image of Antoinette in the embrace of the werewolf flashed across his inner consciousness like a film flickering in a broken projector. Again and again he saw her face: her uncomprehending panic, her eyes wide with fear. She did not deserve cruelty such as that. She deserved happiness, however brief—with Quentin.
After Barnabas had replaced the painting in the basement of the Old House, he stopped to look at his reflection in the window beside the door. His breath misted the pane and his image blurred, a ghost in a shroud, until the damp slowly receded and he saw his face in the night. Dark eyes looked out of a skull. What was he? Human or demon?
WITH HIS FOOT heavy on the accelerator, and his mind fumbling over his own stupidity, Barnabas tortured himself with thoughts of the vampire. The Bentley blasted past mounds of leaves sodden from the rain; and was just topping the hill above Collinwood when he saw beyond the trees a spilling of phosphorescence, an explosion of fractured crystals, and then a fluorescent haze. The full moon bloomed forth and teetered on the tops of the trees. Glancing away from the road, he drank in Diana and her chariot, the goddess he had worshiped for centuries. The tug was still there, as powerful as ever.
He fought back despair. Two miseries joined to torment him—anguish over Antoinette; and his wound, which now pulsed continually and flared like a burning brand in his side as though it were a physical replica of his heartbreak. He thought back on the afternoon when he had first met Jason. A vampire could not bear the sunlight, that was true; but his daytime appearance could be easily explained away by something as simple as his dark sunglasses. There were vampires who were not disturbed by sunlight—unfortunately he was not one of those—just as some Nosferatu were immune to the power of crosses. Jason’s capacity to charm his listeners as he had done around the campfire, his magnetism, and even his seductive manner with Antoinette, had seemed remarkable, and what better masquerade could he have chosen than to pose as a belligerent hippie, luring his trusting flock to their deaths. Barnabas recalled the young man’s supple masculinity; that alone should have betrayed uncanny powers. Vile trickery! He had somehow eluded Barnabas’s instincts, dulled as they were by human naïveté. The perfection of the Old House’s restoration would
have been incomprehensible had it not been wrought by a master carpenter with diabolical assistance. The business card of the Boston rug dealer tucked in the door to his shop had led him to replace an unsuitable carpet, intentionally laid out on the floor of the drawing room to trap him. The same scheme determined the placement of his casket, set there to lure him to his inevitable demise. Of course: a new vampire would demand control over his territory. It all made perfect sense, and he had allowed this whipstart of a diabolis, this newly birthed monster, reckless and unskilled, bereft of judgment and experience, to threaten his domain. The realizadon that this lowlife ruffian was now intent on destroying his family clouded Barnabas’s brain with fury. He thrust down on the accelerator, and the Bentley leapt forwards like some great primordial beast devouring the road.
Shards of moonlight streaked the hood, and for a moment Barnabas thought the moon might come through the windshield. Larger and larger it swelled until it filled the glass, and only then did he realize his vision was dangerously blurred as spasms of brilliance exploded in his brain. The car lifted slightly, then rocked, and Barnabas was forced to steer blind, the road obliterated by bright light; and he clung to the wheel in a glowing vacuum, until he finally remembered to brake. The car jerked horribly, lurched, then bucked across the road, rolled and crashed with a sickening shudder into a ditch.
When he opened his eyes he had no idea how long he had been unconscious. The car was on its side, the engine still running, and he reached for the key. The motor died in a tinny gasp. Numb with pain, Barnabas crawled to the side of the road and staggered to his feet. The lights of Collinwood flickered in the distance and the moonlight drenched the surroundings as though it were a day without color. It was imperative that he reach Julia before it was too late. How could he have thought it would be possible to continue on without her?
Now that he was out in the night, he became conscious of the bite in the air, the cold against his cheek, and the voices of thousands of frogs keening in the ditches where water pooled from the gutters. The buzzing seemed to be inside his brain. Lurching spasmodically, he staggered up the drive and around to the front of the house. The great Tudor mansion loomed up over its wide lawn, its turrets and chimneys silhouetted against the silver sky. The pale blue light behind the tall leaded windows of the drawing room beckoned, and he felt renewed affection for the place, as though it no longer mocked him for his time there. The house seemed instead to belong to him, a gift from the centuries, and although he labored up to the door, his side burning, he felt almost refreshed by thoughts of those he loved. He would sacrifice it all for David, and for Julia, for Elizabeth, Roger, and Carolyn, even for Antoinette, although the thought of her flooded him with melancholy. He had loved her, and loved her still. Because of her, he had tasted life again.
Just as he reached for the door, a flash of movement caught his eye, and he thought something passed over the lawn towards the cliffs. He followed it, then lost sight of what he was pursuing. The sound of the sea rose to his ears and he stopped, leaned forward with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. The pounding convinced him that he must be near the cliffs until he heard the booming behind his eardrums and knew it was his own heart, empty of blood, rushing and sucking like the sea against a barren shore. Rising up within him was the horror of his life, bereft of purpose. He could not fail now.
The moon was higher, and the great oaks surrounding Collinwood stood silent and forbidding, their twisted branches reaching into a sky silver with light. Something reared up just ahead, the running figure of a man, and Barnabas dared to think it was Jason fleeing him. He rushed forward only to lose his quarry once more. He began to think his feverish mind was inventing a mirage, when he stumbled, and almost fell, across the body of a man who had collapsed on his face in the grass. Summoning strength, Barnabas turned the body over only to hear a shriek.
“No! No, Please! Don’t!” A pair of bulging eyes looked up at him. “Barnabas? That you?” Willie’s great relief at seeing his friend and master was palpable even in the dark. “Barnabas—he’s there, a murderer—prowling around—I had to get out of there!”
“Willie, are you hurt?”
“Yeah, but I’m okay, just—Barnabas, you got to stop him, he’s got a knife and crawling around on the roof—”
Barnabas probed under Willie’s coat and pulled his hand away when he felt the moist blood through his shirt. Was this what he needed? He leaned in, his eye drawn to a small patch of skin under Willie’s collar. But Willie sensed something strange and stuttered, “Barnabas, please, what are you doing? Don’t please, not me.” He pushed feebly against Barnabas’s chest but the cape lifted and fell over the two of them, and Barnabas’s breath was hot over the jugular, as with a moan he sank his teeth.
He could not even break the skin.
He tasted Willie’s sweat, smelled both their odors, and knew, finally, that he was not a vampire, but a man, and he was dying. Faintly, he heard Willie whimper, “Please, Barnabas, he’s got a knife and he’s going room to room—trying to kill everyone in the family—”
Barnabas pulled away and looked back toward the house. The main tower thrust into the sky, and a light from the room he knew to be David’s flickered as though candles burned within. The front portal was a rectangle of warm, inviting light. He could make out patches of ivy crawling up the walls and see, in the moonlight, the long porch with its balustrade of carved posts. Willie panted beneath him, quivering, and Barnabas looked down at his servant, who wheezed, “Don’t Barnabas, don’t, please—” Again he raised up, searching for some sign. The moonlight illuminated surfaces of slate, the roof’s deep pitch; and he traced the long horizontal ridge with its nine protruding chimneys, down across the slanted ceiling of the ballroom, then back again to the great tower, up to the widow’s walk, and across to the lightning rod on the ridge. All was familiar and still.
Then he saw something that made him hunch to his feet and break into a run. Above the front entrance, where the half-timbered trim of the three dormers glowed in the moonlight, he could just make out the figure of a man. There on the topmost ridge, where the lightning rod was attached, stood Jason, his body dark against the moon.
He is waiting for me, thought Barnabas, and his only fear was that he could not manage to climb the roof before the killer fled. Breathing heavily, he plunged back across the lawn, and reached the edge of the porch. Was he gone? No, he was still there, glaring down with savage eyes. Jason stood erect, as though soldiering his post, his arms at his sides, and the shank of the knife shining in the moonlight. The drugs had taken their toll and, in his lust for revenge, Jason had gone mad.
Dragging himself through the front portico and up the staircase, Barnabas groped the long hallway, desperate to discover some opening to the roof. Finally he found an unlatched tower window near David’s room, and climbed out. The pitch of the roof was treacherous, and he dug his feet against the shingles, teetering, and walked the narrow peak like a rope dancer, steep sides falling away, his cape billowing like a dark wing. In his old life, this would have been child’s play, but he struggled to stay balanced and forgot his pain and weariness as he pushed forward. Each time he looked to where Jason stood—certain by now he would have disappeared—he was revitalized to see him still there, watching him advance, daring him to proceed, his eyes lit by a flame of insanity. Moonlight silvered the back of his head and his high cheek, and it caught the glint of his knife, stained with blood.
Barnabas fought anxiety. Was he too drained by his months as a human to clash with one so much more powerful? A gust of wind buffeted them both, and Barnabas rocked, then lurched; his cape flew out like a sail, he found his balance and took another step. His heart throbbed in his chest like a drum of doom.
Finally Barnabas gained the cross ridge, and he stood behind Jason, who turned, ready to unleash all his power. He was faintly aware that, against the moonlit sky, they made a macabre pair, two assailants poised on a high roof’s ridge, each primed f
or the kill. Just before Barnabas reached his quarry, the wind gusted, and Jason spun slowly all the way around like a weathervane. Barnabas drew back when Jason’s rigid figure turned, and then returned, as though he were searching for another attacker, until, convinced that there was only one advancing, stopped to face him. Barnabas crouched, ready to leap, and weighed his options, while Jason, with a diabolical grin on his face, challenged him to make the first move. Then Jason pivoted again, but this time too stiffly, too mechanically. Barnabas was baffled until he saw, to his horror, that the man was not moving on his own, but was stuck—skewered on the lightning rod thrust up through his entire body, its point protruding from the top of his head!
What had seemed shadows of menace, from far off, were rivulets of gore seeping onto his cheeks. And on his neck, two gaping holes oozed with blood. Now the wind took him and turned him slowly once more, making him its plaything, and he returned to Barnabas and met him glazed eye to eye, speared by a lightning rod, hanging helplessly with his knife still in his hand.
Barnabas drew back. The dead man stared at him with all the evil in his nature now displayed in a macabre countenance: the diabolical grin, the eyes glazed with hate. Who could have done this? If Jason was not the vampire, then who could it be? Who would have had the strength or the agility to walk this peak with its steep shingles falling away three stories above the ground, lift a man of Jason’s size, and impale him on a pole?
Instantly Barnabas thought of his family, of David, alone in his room, and the others still exposed to unimagined terrors. He crossed the ridge, scaled the curved walls, and found himself within the mansion, pacing the hall, stealthily opening every door. To his relief, Carolyn slept blissfully, her golden hair silkening her pillow, her lips curved in a smile. Elizabeth stirred when he looked in, her sleep troubled, and he glanced around the shadows of her boudoir. Silently he leaned under her canopy to make certain she was alone and checked in her closet. His search only heightened his anxiety. Becoming more afraid every minute, he entered Roger’s room, but drew back at a strange sound. Roger’s snore was as aristocratic as his other pronouncements, a sonorous snuffle. Safe. All were safe. Hearing a noise at the top of the stair, Barnabas wheeled.