Blood Canticle

by Rice, Anne

  "Well, I think you ducked out of the paragraph on that 'fashionable question.' I think you should scrap the thing about fashionable and try to make a more solid finish, perhaps with some very concise statement about the level on which you believe in the Incarnation of Christ. And you can always use 'transcendent' and 'luminous' in another sentence. Also you misused the word 'bequeath.' "

  "Cool!" She dashed out of the room.

  Naturally, she left the door open.

  I went after her.

  She was already pounding the keyboard, the computer humming on one of my many Louis XV desks; her red eyebrows puckered, her green eyes locked to the monitor when I took up my position, arms folded, looking down on her.

  "Yeah, what, Beloved Boss?" she asked without stopping her writing.

  Quinn was stretched out comfortably on the bed, staring at the tester. The whole flat was full of beds with

  testers. Well, six bedrooms, anyway, three on each side.

  "Call Rowan Mayfair and tell her you're all right. What do you think? Can you pull it off? The woman's

  suffering."

  "Bummer!" Clackity-clack.

  "Mona, if you possibly could do it-for their sakes, of course. Michael is suffering."

  She looked sharply up at me and froze. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she lifted the phone to the

  right of her on the desk and she punched in the number so rapidly with her thumb I couldn't follow it. Her generation, with Touch-Tone phones. Big deal! I can write with a quill pen in a flurry of curlicues you wouldn't believe; let's see her do that. And I don't spill a drop of ink on the parchment, either.

  "Yo, Rowan, Mona here." Hysterical crying on the other end. Mona overriding: "I'm just fine, I'm hanging with Quinn, look, don't worry about me, I'm all better, totally." A storm of literal questions. Mona overriding: "Rowan, listen, I'm feeling great. Yeah, a kind of miracle. Like I'll call you later. No, no, no (overriding again), I'm wearing Aunt Queen's clothes, they fit me perfectly, yeah, and her shoes, really cool, like she has tons of these high-heel shoes, yeah, and I never wore shoes like this; yeah, fine, no, no, no, stop it, Rowan, and Quinn wants me to wear them, they're brand new, they're really great. Love you, love to Michael and everybody. Bye." Down with the phone over Rowan shouting.

  "So it's done," I said. "I really appreciate it." I shrugged.

  She sat there white faced, the blood having fled her cheeks, staring into space.

  I felt like a bully. I was a bully. I've always been a bully. Everybody who knows me thinks I am a bully.

  Except perhaps Quinn.

  Quinn sat up on the bed.

  "What's the matter, Ophelia?" he asked.

  "You know I have to go to them," she said, her eyebrows knitted. "I have no choice."

  "What do you mean?" I said. "They just want off the hook. Now, admittedly, it's a very complex hook."

  "No, no, no," she said, "for my sake." Her voice and her face were suddenly pitiless. "For what I have to find out," she continued coldly, shuddering all over as though a wind had blown through the room. "I know she's lied to me. She's lied to me for years. I'm afraid of how much she might have lied to me. I'm going to make her tell me."

  "That was wrong of me, making you talk to her?" I asked.

  "Ophelia," said Quinn, "take your time. It's yours to take."

  "No, had to happen, you were right," she said to me. But she was shaking. Tears standing in her eyes. Preternatural emotions.

  "It's about the Woman Child," I said under my breath. Was I free to reveal it to Quinn? What I'd seen: her monstrous woman offspring? "Doll face," I said, "why should we have secrets now?"

  "You can tell him anything," she said, trying not to cry. "Dear God, I . . . I . . . I'm going to find them! If she knows where they are, if she's kept that from me. . . ."

  Quinn was watching all this, keeping his counsel. But years ago she'd told him she had had a child, that she had had to give up that child. She had spoken of it to him as a mutation. But she had never explained the nature of that mutation.

  And, to recap, in the Blood I'd seen a grown woman, something decidedly not human. Something surely as monstrous as us.

  "You don't want to lay it all out for us?" I asked gently.

  "Not now, not ready, not yet." She sniffled. "I hate it, all of it."

  "I just saw Rowan Mayfair," I said. "I saw her at the Talamasca Retreat House. Something's deeply wrong with her."

  "Of course something's wrong with her," she said with an air of exasperation. "I don't care what happens to her when she sees me. So she sees something that will never make human sense to her. I should care? I don't need to live with them the way Quinn lives with his family. I realize that now. It's impossible. I can't do what Quinn did. I need a legal name. I need some money. . . ."

  "Think about it a little longer," I said. "There's no need to make such a decision right now. I got clear of Rowan and Michael tonight rather than disturb them, rather than create doubts that could harm them. It was hard. I wanted to ask them questions. But I had to give it up."

  "Why do you care so much?" she asked.

  "Because I care about you and Quinn," I said. "You offend me. Don't you know that I love you? I wouldn't have made you if I couldn't love you. Quinn told me so much about you before I ever saw you and then I fell in love with you, of course."

  "I have to know things from them," she said. "Things they're holding back, and then I have to findmy

  daughter on my own. But I can't talk about it just yet."

  "Your daughter?" Quinn asked.

  "You mean the Woman Child, it's living-"

  "Stop! Not now," said Mona. "Leave me to my philosophy, both of you!"

  Huge shift of gears. Her eyes shot to the computer.

  She went back to banging on the keys. "What's a better word than 'bequeathed'?"

  "Bestowed," I responded.

  Quinn came up behind her and fastened a cameo at her neck without interfering with her ferocious

  writing.

  "You're not trying to make her into Aunt Queen, are you?" I asked. She went on hammering.

  "She's Ophelia Immortal," he said. He didn't take offense.

  We left her. We went down the passage and out onto the rear balcony and down into the courtyard and

  found a couple of iron chairs. I realized I'd never used these chairs.

  They were pretty after a fashion, Victorian, ornate. I didn't own anything that wasn't pretty after a fashion,

  or downright beautiful, if I could help it.

  The garden enclosed us with its high banana trees and its night-blooming flowers. The music of the water

  in the fountain mingled with the distant sound of Mona writing, and Mona whispering as she wrote. I could hear the whine of the nightclub bands on the Rue Bourbon. I could hear the whole damned city if I tried. The sky was a faint lilac color now, overcast and reflecting the city glow.

  "Don't think that," said Quinn.

  "What, Little Brother?" I woke from listening to distant sounds.

  "I see her as Aunt Queen's heiress," he said, "don't you see? Everything that Aunt Queen wanted to give of her clothes, her jewelry, all those things, whatever she wanted to give to Jasmine she'd already given, and there's plenty enough in bank boxes for Tommy's wife of the future or whoever little Jerome marries (Jerome was Quinn's son by Jasmine, let me remind you). And so I make Mona an heiress to maybe a tenth of the most extreme silk dresses. Jasmine never wore the extreme silk dresses anyway. And the glitter shoes which nobody really wants. And the shell cameos, which are common.

  "If Aunt Queen somehow knew what had really happened to me, what I'd become, as we always say so delicately; if she knew that Mona was with me, finally, that Heaven and Earth had been moved, and Mona was with me, she'd want me to give those things to Mona. She'd be pleased that Mona was tripping around in those shoes."

  I listened to all this and I understood it. I should have understood it before. But Mona's da
ughter, who and what was Mona's daughter?

  "The clothes and shoes make her very happy," I said. "Most likely she's been sick so long that all her own clothes are gone. Who knows?"

  "What did you see in the Blood when you made her? What was this Woman Child?"

  "That's what I saw," I responded. "A daughter of hers who was a full-grown woman, a monster in her own eyes. It had come from her. And it was torn from her. She loved it. She nursed it. I saw that. And then she lost it, just like she told you. It went away."

  He was aghast. He'd caught nothing like this from her thoughts.

  But in the Blood you go where nobody wants to go. That's the horror of it. That's the beauty of it.

  "Could it really have been so freakish, so abnormal?" he asked. His eyes veered away. "You know, years ago, I told you . . . I went to dinner at the Mayfair house. Rowan showed me the place. There was some secret, some dark hidden story present there the whole time. I could see it in Rowan's silence and in Rowan's drifting. But I couldn't see it in Michael. And even now Mona won't tell us."

  "Quinn, you won't tell her why you killed Patsy, either," I said. "As we move on year by year in this life, we learn that telling doesn't necessarily purge; telling sometimes merely is a reliving, and it's a torment."

  The back door opened with a splat.

  Mona came clattering down the steps, two pages in her hand.

  "Dear God, I just love these shoes!" she said, making a circuit of the courtyard. Then: She stood before us, looking like a waxen doll in the light from the upstairs windows, with one finger pointing, like that of a nun in school:

  " 'I must confess that it has already become undeniably clear to me, though I have existed in this exalted state for only two nights, that the very nature of my powers and means of existence attest to the ontological supremacy of a sensualist philosophy having taken up residence within me, as I proceed from moment to moment and from hour to hour both to apprehend the universe around me and the microcosm of my own self. This requires of me an immediate redefining of the concept of mystical, which I have heretofore mentioned to include a state both elevated and totally carnal, both transcendent and orgasmic, which delivers me when drinking blood or gazing at a lighted candle beyond all human epistemological constraints.

  " 'Whereas the hermeneutics of pain had once completely convinced me of my own personal salvation, indeed, whereas I had once worked out a comprehensive Prayer of Quiet in which I had embraced Christ and his Five Wounds in order to endure the Finality which seemed inescapable for me, I now find myself approaching God on a totally undefined path.

  " 'Can it be that being a vampire, and having a vampire soul as well as a human soul, I am therefore removed from human obligations and all human ontological conditions? I think not.

  " 'I think on the contrary that I am now responsible for the supreme human obligation: to investigate the highest use of my powers, for surely though I am vampire by my own free will and by a Baptism of Blood, I am still by birth, by maturity, by underlying physicality human, and must therefore share in the human condition despite the fact that I shall not in the ordinary scheme of things grow old or die.

  " 'To return to the inescapable question of Salvation, yes, I do remain rooted in a relativistic universe, no matter how spectacularly defined I have become as to form and function, and I find myself within the same dimension in which I existed before my transformation, and therefore I must ask: am I perforce outside the economy of grace established by Our Divine Savior in the very fact of his Incarnation, even before His Crucifixion, both events which I firmly believe to have occurred within human history and chronology, and to be knowable through both, and commanding a response in both?

  " 'Or can the Sacraments of Holy Mother the Church redeem me in my present state? I must conclude on the face of it, from my short experience, from the ecstasy and abandon which have so rampantly replaced all pain and suffering within the organism which I am, that I assume that I stand excommunicated from the Body of Christ by my very nature.

  " 'But it could be that I am never to know the answer to this question, no matter how thoroughly I investigate the world and myself, and does not this very unknowing only bring me all the closer to full existential participation in humankind?

  " 'It seems wise to accept, in deepest humility and with an aim towards a validating spiritual perfection at the onset, that I may never hope at any juncture of my wanderings, be they for untold centuries or for a few short years of near unendurable ecstasy, to know whether I share in the Savior's Redemption, and that that very unknowing may be the price I pay for my extra-human sensibility and inherently blood-thirsty triumph over the pain I once suffered, over the imminent death that once tyrannized me, over the ubiquitous threat of human time.'

  "What do you think?"

  "Very good," I said.

  Quinn piped up: "I like the word 'perforce.' "

  She ran up to him and started beating him about the head and shoulders with the pages, and kicking him with her high-heel shoes. He laughed under his breath and carelessly defended himself with one arm. "Look, it's better than crying!" he said.

  "You hopeless Boy," she declared, erupting in streaks of laughter. "You hopeless, egregious Boy! You are patently unworthy of all the philosophical considerations I have positively lavished upon you! And what, I ask, have you written since your Blood Baptism, why, the very ink has dried up in the circuits of your cruel little preternatural brain."

  "Wait a minute, quiet," I said. "Someone's arguing with the guards at the gate." I was on my feet.

  "My God, it's Rowan," said Mona. "Damn, I should never have called her on her cell."

  "Cell?" I asked. But it was very much too late.

  "Caller ID," Quinn murmured as he rose and took Mona in his arms.

  It was Rowan, most assuredly-breathless and frantic, and, followed by both guards, who were protesting heavily, she came racing back the carriageway and stopped dead, facing Mona across the courtyard.

  THE SHOCK OF SEEING MONA, of apprehending her in the light that fell from the upstairs windows and the inevitable light from the glowing sky, was such that Rowan was stopped as if she'd struck an invisible wall.

  Michael at once caught up with her, and he too experienced a similar immense surprise.

  As they stood baffled, not knowing what to make of the evidence of their senses, I told the guards to back off and leave the matter to me.

  "Come on up into the flat," I said. I gestured towards the iron stairs.

  It was useless to say anything at this juncture. It wasn't a vampire that they'd just seen. They knew and suspected nothing of supernatural origin here. It was Mona's spectacular "recovery" which had them in total disbelief.

  It was in essence a scary moment. Because though a big frank smile of undisguised jubilance had broken out over Michael Curry's face, Rowan's scowling countenance was full of something akin to wrath. All her personal history was coiled behind that wrath, and I was fascinated by it as I'd been by all her emotions before.

  Only reluctantly, and somewhat in the manner of a sleepwalker, Rowan let me take her arm. Her entire body was tense. Nevertheless, I led her to the iron steps, and then I went before her, in order to lead the whole party. And Mona gestured for Rowan to follow me, and Mona, tossing her hair back over her shoulders, looking miserable, followed her.

  The back parlor was best for such gatherings, having no bookshelves and a deep velvet sofa and lots of tolerable Queen Anne chairs. Of course there was ormolu and inlaid wood everywhere, and a blazing new wallpaper of wine and beige stripes, and the garlands of flowers in the carpet seemed to be having convulsions, and the Impressionist paintings on the wall in their thick encrusted frames were like windows into a far far better, sun-filled universe, but it was a good room.

  I shut off the overhead chandelier immediately and switched on two of the smaller corner lamps. It was softly dim now, but not uncomfortably so, and I directed everyone to sit down.

  Mich
ael beamed at Mona and said at once, "Darling, you look absolutely beautiful," as if he was uttering a prayer. "My lovely, lovely girl."

  "Thank you, Uncle Michael, I love you," Mona answered tragically, and wiped at her eyes fiercely as though these people were somehow going to return her to her wretched mortal state.

  Quinn was petrified. And his worst suspicion was rightly directed at Rowan.

  She too appeared paralyzed except for her eyes, breaking away from Mona suddenly and fastening on me.

  This had to be quick.

  "All right, you see for yourself," I said, my eyes moving from Rowan to Michael and back again. "Mona's cured of whatever was wrong with her, and the entire wasting sickness has been reversed. She's utterly self-sufficient and whole. If you think that I am going to explain to you how this was done, or anything about it, you're wrong. You can call me Rasputin or worse names. I don't care."

  Rowan's eyes quivered but her face did not change. The turbulence inside her was unreadable, indeed, unknowable, and if I caught anything definitive it was a high pitch of terror that hearkened back to things which had befallen her in the past. I couldn't fathom it, there wasn't time for such mental mining, and her confusion was putting up too much of a fight.