Then I noticed after waking up one—what? morning or midnight—that she was missing a finger, then soon another finger. I couldn’t be certain that the jailer wasn’t sneaking in and cutting them off. She never moved. There was never any blood at her lips.
“Are you doing it?” I finally asked her when there were none remaining on the left hand and one was gone from the right. “Shani? Are you eating your own fingers?”
There was no response.
“You’re a Moslem, yes?” I asked. “So your people have legends of ghouls, right? Eaters of the dead? You are pretty close to being dead and you consume yourself. Doesn’t that make you a sort-of-ghoul? I myself have always been captivated by our local vampires. Most of those I grew up with see them as dangerous but I see a romance in there. But, then, romance is best with a little danger, don’t you think? Oh, I forget. You do not think.”
This was right, wasn’t it? Or were there any separations between the ghoul and the vampire? I had a nagging bit of dream in the back of my mind, of one who did both—though not necessarily at the same time. And of a wheel going round and round, one spoke spitted with a haunch of raw meat and another spoke merely dripping blood. Were they like the wheel with fire, water, air, earth—separate powers but affecting each other, influencing from their positions of cabal?
I crept as close as my chains would permit me, trying to see if her wounds seemed to have been made from a knife or by chewing. They were crimped as the edges of a badly made pie, bruised, crusted the dark red-black of old blood. I inhaled the scent of it. I tried to see any evidence at all of the red-black on her chin, speckled on those ice-pale lips. A cardinal seam of it pressed between them.
There was nothing.
But she might have licked them clean.
“Do you have vampires in your land? Handsome sultans with harems of gorgeous wives who dance for them only after dark? Omar Khayyam rewritten, a pearl throat, a jug of crimson nectar, and thou?”
I tried to peek where I could see under that veil of hair which covered the other two thirds of her face. Yet I couldn’t get close enough. I pulled, the chain around my wrist rubbing against the bones.
“Shani? I have met Germans and Russians, Greeks and Chinese, even some black skinned natives from Africa. They say they all have vampires in their countries. Does your land have vampires?”
A twitch of the right hand. The slumped, doll body perked up a little. She brought a finger to her mouth and bit down. I heard bone snap, crunch. She worked it between her jaws as I stared, fascinated and repelled. She worried it until the flesh and tendon split free. Then she parted the stringy hair from her face until I saw the empty eye sockets. It was into one of these that she fed the severed finger. Something inside the hollow accepted it, a bit of squirming shadow with legs like eyelashes.
Then she smiled and told me, “We have djinn.”
I have to think hard to recall it but then I get this vision. One remarkable wrist dangles, chewed free from a manacle. Tooth marks tattoo a lace cuff. Freedom is a hazardous preoccupation.
I did make it back to the graveyard, cradling my stump wrapped in fabric torn from a dirty blanket. I wondered if my lips were speckled with blood. I wasn’t as neat as Shani. But I didn’t want to wait until her monster decided it needed fresher meat. I wanted no affiliation with ghouls or djinn. I had a fantasy of my own.
I couldn’t remember the name Atroce but I knew who the locals believed were vampires. I was calling these out, singsong, as my blood made roses in the cloth pressed to my wound.
“Radu Cuza! Vaslui St‚fani! Calga Nadasdy! Are you there?”
(“Don’t worry,” Shani had assured me after I had left it on the floor. “Your hand will be untouched. You are an infidel.” I wished I’d known that before but it was too late now.)
“Theodoru Karolyi! Eva Czabai? If you can hear me, race through the darkness to my heart…”
I was certain that, back in my cell, the fingers from my severed hand were tracing arcane symbols onto the floor. They were caressing the shapes of the doorways which open on falls through darkness. They were trying to scratch their way into the earth beneath the stone, while—as I strode through the cemetery—my astral fingers twitched as if homesick for patterns the real ones made. Insanities or the prose musings of a hopeless romantic, sure I was on the trail of something important to the very core of me. But not quite grasping the specifics. I knew only: fire, water, air, earth. Round and round as lovers dancing across the frigid floor of a tomb. Eternity.
It might have been my calling, voice sharp in the frost. My breath hot with the red scent of my own blood, my lips scarlet, too. Not white, not white and spotless and speaking with the voice of a growling dog strained through broken glass.
Or it might have been as simple as the blood streaming from the wrist. Someone came for me, manifesting out of a chant the clouds whispered together. The wind conjured him, heavy as a storm and with a mouth full of lightning. I began to welcome this thing but then froze, seeing it was not Atroce. There was no promise here. Only a blunt, rather sordid ending. He clawed at my face until it shredded, losing its power. His own grinding down at me was just a mass of bone and gristle. Apparently there was more than a single type of vampire. Some were sisters of heaven, goddesses. Others had no more finesse than plague rats. I died, thinking, Atroce…I’m sorry. I utterly wasted this one…
««—»»
I plummeted into my next existence, dragging an obtuse fragment of darkness from the womb with me. The doctors called it a curious black blood even as my mother died in labor, this substance pumping out of her faster than nurses with towels could sop it up. Quite a revelation, knowing this, now. I couldn’t say whether I’d known it before and forgotten it or if this was a new trophy for me to cherish.
But this time I was in nineteenth century France. (France! So close to where we’d shared our moments…) I was told I was beautiful, except for the black birthmark which engulfed one entire hand until it appeared I’d dipped it in indelible ink, or as if I wore a hangman’s glove. If glimpsed in the dark, I was a white body sans one hand, it seemed to be so invisible.
I drank absinthe and smoked opium. I took trips out to the countryside, looking for something, a place, landmarks I was sure I’d recognize if I saw them. But what they were, well, remained a secret in the back of my mind.
I disdained all the male suitors who flocked about me. I refused to be bound to a woman’s conventional styles, often donning trousers like novelist George Eliot, alias Mary Ann Evans. I smoked cigarettes. I laughed aloud in church until the priests asked me to leave.
In the spring of 1888 I met a fabulous woman, of Mexican descent but the wife of an American diplomat. She was lovely except for the bruises that showed from time to time on her throat and shoulders.
“Your husband is a brute,” I pointed out.
She shrugged one shoulder. As close as she would come to an admission.
I arched my long neck and grinned. “There are places in the world where it is believed a man doesn’t love if his wife if he doesn’t beat her regularly.”
She merely tilted her head, her eyes half closed.
“There are places in the world where violence is only given as a gift to the gods,” she replied at last.
I touched the lace at the back of her neck. “Hearts of love upon the altar?”
She pulled away—slightly. Cool. “Any time a heart is given in love, it may end up a relic upon an altar.”
“The giver of the heart should be the one who owns it. It shouldn’t be a third party,” I countered. I swayed a little on my feet. They were serving decent champagne at this reception and I had helped myself to too much.
She glanced across the room where her husband leaned forward, practically into the fluffy, low-cut gauzed bodice of the party’s hostess. His posture indicated he was drawing on every ounce of dashing expertise. But he was more rake than gentleman. He squeezed the lady’s fingers a bit too tightly. To my
surprise and his pleasure, she giggled with delight.
“Men are mongrels,” I said to the Senora, drunkenly, slurring the word until I’m sure I must have said Men are Mongols.
I slung a hand across her shoulder and asked, “Do you have Spanish blood?”
“Mayan,” she replied, shaking her head.
She said it proudly, too, sneering at the heritage of her people’s enslavers. Of course, she might really have been Aztec, but was loath to admit it since people automatically thought all sorts of things about you if you said that. They would make little cannibal jokes and watch you for signs of bloodthirstiness. But I believed it was to her credit that she spoke only of having native ancestry, instead of claiming to be Spanish as if that made her better because it was European.
And yet she made the comment about hearts and altars. It made my stomach flutter but my blood boil. I had to run my tongue across my lips, seeking some elusive, erotic flavor. Why did I do that?
I grinned, breath ladened with licorice and wormwood. “Well, then, you won’t mind my saying that men are all dirty Spaniards.”
And she laughed! Her bosom heaved until her whalebone stays creaked. Her eyes flashed, round orbs of volcanic obsidian.
She murmured, “Soy del parecer de Ud. I am of your opinion.”
I was certain then that she was Atroce because her sparkling teeth were very sharp. And when she spoke, one could almost hear the sweet, ruby river swirling through the caverns of that organ of the chest. What did the Mexicans call it—the ancient ones, that is… The red cactus fruit?
There was a poem from the late poet, Charles Baudelaire, which was popular among certain ladies. Used as a secret badge for recognition of similar tastes, one would say a verse and if the other also quoted, then they knew they had met their own kind.
It was from “Lesbians”.
I whispered up against her downy ear,
“O demons, monsters, virgins, martyrs, you
Who trample base reality in scorn,
Whether as nuns or satyrs you pursue
The infinite, with cries or tears forlorn…”
Did I actually believe the Senora—from a nation foreign to France—would know any of this? I was drunk. I was hopeful.
I was rather in love.
She bowed her head a moment, dark lashes brushing the tops of her cheeks. I believed I had embarrassed her.
Until she said,
“You, whom my soul has tracked to lairs infernal,
Poor sisterhood, I pity and adore,
For your despairing griefs, your thirst eternal,
And love that floods your hearts for evermore!”
We left together, drove a carriage into the woods. We ingested some buttons she called peyotl and then stripped down. I from my evening suit and tails, and she beyond even her corset and stockings.
“I will show you a method I learned in Matamoros when I was a girl. I was in a convent but a few of us would sneak out every now and then to join the Indians down by the river. It draws out the feral spirit which lurks beneath the surface.”
(A convent, yes… She would have been in a convent.)
First I was very sick to my stomach. She held my hair back as I threw up. I rested the back of my head against her bare thighs until the nausea became as invisible as my black hand in the darkness.
“That’s natural, being ill, especially the first time. You will be all right in a few minutes.”
I felt something wild and exotic in me grow. I stared down at my birthmarked hand and realized it was really a wolf’s paw.
We licked one another like two she-wolves, marking with our musky urine the ground where we struggled. We groped with claws, howled at the moonlight, baying animal endearments in a more feral Baudelaire than the one which had brought us together.
I then growled into her sumptuous hair. “Will you keep your promise now?”
“Qu‚ quiere decir eso, querida?” she asked me.
“You know what I mean.”
She gave me a blank stare, eyes glassy as mirrors.
I was not to be put off by admonitions that she didn’t know what I was talking about. There was too much history here. I sensed it, pressing behind my eyes, squeezing my lungs as if the woods had become a vacuum.
More Baudelaire. I murmured, “And later on an angel will unclose the door and entering joyously relight the tarnished mirrors and the flames blown to the night.”
I crawled back to my suitcoat and took a knife I kept secreted behind the breastpocket. I cut myself, between my full breasts. Not too deeply, not so I would spurt and waste the heart’s juices.
She fought as I pressed her face into this spot. In trying to get her to accept her responsibilities to our bound incarnations, I must have used too much force. I broke her neck. It didn’t snap so much as the vertebra sighed, the stem of it wilting in my hands (my one white hand and one black hand). I took up the knife again and carefully pared the face from its high cheekbones and bird-of-prey nose. But it felt like nothing and so all I did was weep into it.
She was not Atroce. She was but an imposter. I hastily left France for England. I might have killed some other women in the violent slums there in London. Was this the first time I had adopted killing as an art? There were places of progression on the wheel just as there were stations of the cross.
And I made certain they were very afraid. For fear was the shape salvation took, just as the passage from suffering wore the face of the corpse.
But I didn’t steal their faces. One couldn’t see the moon for the fog.
««—»»
And now I was having no better luck. I saw Atroce everywhere. In photographs taken in Serbian death camps. In television footage of crow-like women cursing America from the streets of Iraq. On the covers of pulp horror magazines, and shaking laughing shadows voluptuously on the walls in the background of snuff films. I collected her as one would dreams. But she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere.
Back to that incident in college. My mother was a rich girl who’d been knocked up after some freak raped her when her car broke down one night. The family was Catholic so that was it as far as having an abortion was concerned. Anyway, her attacker had messed her up pretty bad, staving in half her skull with a tire iron. She was in a coma as I grew inside her, and she died giving birth to me.
I grew up with my grandmother who simply couldn’t stand the sight of me. Born from her dead daughter and all that.
“Face the wall,” I was ordered whenever she entered the room.
I could tell what my grandmother thought whenever I didn’t turn away fast enough and our eyes would meet by accident. But there were accidents and there were divine accidents, providential of a church that loved and feared an angry god.
(Satan was your father!)
I eventually spent all my formative years being shunted off to one school after another. I had a trust fund. Finally I decided to study to become a doctor—not that I had any interest in medicine but I was fascinated with nerves and muscles, how things worked and why they sometimes didn’t. Med students had classes where real bodies get dissected. And when I got mine I couldn’t resist skimming off the face, like scooping the cream from the top of the milk. I didn’t even realize everyone else was staring as I next lifted this sticky but human-looking web and then…
I never counted how many students screamed and fainted. Not only when I slipped the face over mine but after I then proceeded to suck it into my mouth as if it was no more than a bubble of chewing gum gone awry. It hadn’t felt right where it was, some integral je ne sais quoi missing until I couldn’t stand the feel of it against my skin. And yet it was my first! (Wasn’t it?) I had become aware they were all watching me, thoroughly sickened, and I’d felt so much power over them at that moment. So I slurped it up and then chewed, smiling.
The doctors made their notations in the institution I ended up in. That was an action they loved, scribbling down observations.
Louise M. has
suffered a break with reality. Mental exhaustion through diligent study.
The patient stands before a mirror all day making horrible faces. Sometimes holds the same expression for days, persisting even through strong medication.
The patient Louise M. talks gibberish. Some of this is readily identifiable as Spanish. Sometimes French. Phrases in a shout resembling some garbled Eastern European language. And one of the orderlies recognized a few words from an obscure Hindi dialect.
Breakthrough today. Louise M. deliberately frightened a group of juvenile patients who laughed at her by threatening them with “I’ll eat you up.” “Stop this instant,” I told her. “Your behavior is atrocious.” She turned and looked at me sharply, saying quietly—and enigmatically—“Atroce.” The French for atrocious. She’s been improving steadily ever since and will likely be released from this facility soon.
It’s so hard to connect the dread of rebirth upon the wheel of incarnation with the desire to reach nirvana through becoming a vampire. Yet the Hindu have vampires in their mythology. I wasn’t Hindu although I perceived this correlation. That I was living too often, enduring the terrors of humanity and poisoned existence. And dying too much. Yes, that, definitely. I had to find my way off this twisted cycle.
I had a nightmare after which I suffered no more lapses of memory. From such visions can come the concretion of our purposes. I was on the incarnation roulette, the noise it made one of those irritating little prayer wheels being constantly turned by a manic lama. It was flinging me into each miserable, lonely life when I slipped! The spokes pierced my body. My blood rained down, wetting the motion until the thing rusted to a stop. I could feel every bone shattered, each organ punctured. I put my hands to my face to search it for injury. And detected the jerk in my features, the contortion which turned it into a mask of shock. A shape dark as damson plums shimmered nearby, murmuring, “Ma monstre disloque, je sens ma bouche aller vers toi.”
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