by Ben Tripp
Lovelorn Paolo was now starting to wonder if the devil was amongst them. In the clanging of Abingdon’s hammer on the forge in the barn, he heard the sound of il diavolo’s cloven hooves ringing on the frozen ground. The sulfurous stink of the smoke was the very reek of hell. The Bible seemed to be coming to life all around him, his fevered imagination finding similarities between his present circumstances and the book that formed the foundation of his life. It was everywhere: even in the unfamiliar words mumbled and moaned by Nilu in her delirium, a tangle of Hindi and Malayalam and English, he heard the Confusion of Tongues that beset Babylon. Yet he bathed her brow and prayed for her.
Now Fra Giu used cotton swabs to dab his mixture on the place he had located on Nilu’s pale greenish-brown neck. He warned Fra Dinckel to get back and bade Paolo come with a towel to receive the discharge in it. Giu saw Emily in the doorway. She had been watching, arms folded across her breasts.
“Do you know,” he said, “every vampire leaves behind a discharge in its victim? It keeps the other vampires away. It says, I am taken. Tastes like the escremento to other fiends. That discharge, it must come out. You do not wish this thing to see.”
He looked at the open doorway behind Emily and tried to shoo her away with his eyebrows.
“You want a little privacy?” she said. Her voice was music to Paolo.
Emily wished them luck and went downstairs. She wasn’t interested in the gruesome side of things.
Paolo tried to occupy his mind with the struggle to save Nilu, but his thoughts would always double back to Emily when he wasn’t paying attention. They would start giggling and pointing and whispering about her again. Certain instructive passages from the Song of Solomon kept invading his mind’s eye: Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Other lines as well.
Paolo dragged his mind back to the present. He held a white bath towel cupped around Fra Giu’s hands against Nilu’s neck. Fra Giu muttered a prayer and Paolo joined in. Dinckel’s voice rose higher and higher, chanting from the Book. Giu had the correct mixture at last, he thought. It stank of onions. He warned Paolo to be ready and with the swab painted the liquid onto the wound, and now at last Paolo saw it begin to open.
It was like a small smiling mouth, bloodless folds of skin parting. Giu kept swabbing, each stroke of the cotton tip dissolving the salivary glue another few microns deeper into the wound. And then he was through, and the pressure of the blood beneath did the rest of the work. A jet of foul, gelatinous liquid the color of liver spurted out with stinging force into the towel and spattered the men. It stank like urine and pumped and foamed, shooting in loops and gobbets until the towel was streaming and Paolo had to fold it around itself and toss it aside and put another one in its place. When Fra Giu thought enough of the stuff had spurted out, he sealed the wound with a clamp resembling an eyelash curler. He left this device in place and began to assemble an intravenous drip, hanging the bag from the finial of the lampshade on the bedside table.
“Saline and holy water,” he said.
Paolo took the rancid towels into the bathroom and ran water over them in the tub, once he figured out how to operate the complicated old-fashioned taps. Then he washed the slime from himself and went downstairs with much trepidation.
There was beautiful Emily, so American in her straightforwardness, but never bold like her uncle. She was so tempting! He tried to concentrate his thoughts upon the gory spectacle he’d witnessed upstairs but it was useless, as if he had been drugged so he would only think of this woman. It put Paolo in mind of Proverbs 5, which said,
My son! to my wisdom give attention, To mine understanding incline thine ear,
To observe thoughtfulness, And knowledge do thy lips keep.
For the lips of a strange woman drop honey, And smoother than oil is her mouth,
And her latter end is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a sword with mouths.
Her feet are going down to death, Sheol do her steps take hold of.
“Sharp as a sword with mouths,” he said out loud. Emily looked up from her book of vampire lore. There was a collection of them at the cottage; she’d previously assumed they’d been left by a morbid houseguest.
“What?” she said. “How is Nilu?”
Paolo wanted her with an ache he felt in his guts. He was out in the world, soaked in it with all these delicious dinners and comfortable beds and women sleeping in the next room with their smooth brown limbs thrown across the pillows, and the influence of such immersion in the world was getting to him, like salt water blistering the skin after a day at the ocean. His defenses were for the first time in his life (or since he was a teenager, at least), being tried—and they were worthless.
“She will live,” Paolo said. He filled a couple of ice cube trays with water and shoved them roughly into the freezer. Then he threw some clean dish towels over his arm, found some shallow bowls in a cabinet, and carried them upstairs.
Emily allowed herself a slight shrug. He was gorgeous, Paolo was. But a little remote. Must be the celibacy, she thought, and returned to her book. He was dotted with bloodstains, she had noticed. She hoped Nilu was going to be okay.
Outside in the barn, Min watched the Englishman laboring at his forge and found herself thinking hazily about taking him for a lover. It would be an act like exercising or sharpening a knife: something pleasurable and straightforward, without further baggage. And he was obviously one of those horse-cocked Europeans they joked about back in her home country. He was just an erection with a man standing behind it. It might be interesting, difficult as it was to find anything that diverted her besides her chosen mission in life.
The old dongseongaeja Saxon-Tang had asked her if she was one of the people who had lost everything, and he had said it in a casual way that was not unsympathetic but that made Min feel like she was ordinary, somehow. Like he knew many such people. Nobody had ever spoken to her like that before, not least because she would break their arms. He was a strange one.
Her thoughts swept back to a time years before when another stranger appeared in the remote Korean countryside where her family was staying for the summer holidays, her parents, both university professors, having an entire month to spend as they wished.
It was a monster, and yet it had appeared to be a man. It had spent some time with them, becoming friends. Vampires often did, savoring their prey.
Then one night it had arrived unexpectedly as Min’s family was getting ready for bed. It had brought with it a false vampire that strained against its collar on the end of a leash. The false vampire was a victim the monster allowed to survive, so infected with the vampire’s alien biology by repeated feedings that it had developed the thirst for human blood itself. At first, the vampire kept its crazed disciple lashed to a post in the main room of the cabin; the vampire had then fallen upon her parents, whose efforts to resist were like the struggles of children in a flood, and it sucked the blood out of them until they were helpless and weak, barely alive.
Following what must have been a program of entertainments in its mind, the vampire next unleashed the screaming madman upon Min’s sister, three years younger than her, and Min herself, both of whom had been cowering in the corner; they struggled to get away but the man bit Min’s sister to death. It took fifteen minutes with blunt human teeth. The vampire watched with fascination. Min had seen its face, the pleasure there. Then, weary of the evening’s amusements, the vampire capriciously broke the spine of the false vampire, pulled out his heart, and forced the trembling organ between Min’s jaws. Then the vampire tore Min’s parents to pieces and left.
Min was suddenly seething with fury. This was what happened. One minute, she was watching Abingdon at his forge, seeing the nicely defined muscles in his sweating back and the big red-skinned arms hammering hot metal bright as sunset into crisp shapes, letting the man charm her. The
next minute she was thousands of miles away and fifteen years younger and witnessing the slaughter of her family once again, every blow, torn screaming mouths vomiting rubies, and the rage rushed up like magma in the marrow of a volcano and mixed with the fear and everything was smoke and heat and cinders. Suddenly Abingdon was just a man making weapons, which was all she required. All else was superfluous. Love was nothing. Pleasure was nothing. Even Min herself was nothing, except that she killed the evil in the world.
Nilu went through five bags of saline. Soon she would be switched to glucose because her body had no fuel in it. Over baguettes filled with meat, cheese, tomato, and butter, Fra Giu explained to Emily the meaning of the procedure they had just performed. The infection was a parasitic organism, after a fashion. The ugly clotted muck that had poured out of Nilu’s wound was the product of the vampire’s biology: it was attacking and colonizing her blood, which is considered a kind of tissue from an anatomical standpoint. It was anchored at the inside of the bite wound. That was how vampires worked: each one had an adhesive saliva that sealed the wound after drinking. No other vampire’s saliva would break the seal; it was a delicate chemistry. And if a different vampire opened a new wound on the same victim, the blood would taste foul because of the infection. However, the parasitic colony in the victim’s blood made it more readily digestible by the vampire from whom the infection came, and was even involved in vampire reproduction. Nilu was two days away from becoming so infected she would be forced, if she had any strength, to begin feeding on blood herself.
Emily was disgusted by all this. She didn’t touch her food.
Abingdon, eating heartily, told them he had a good batch of silver alloy to match the sample from the hammer Simon in his crucible, and had begun shaping a new set of hammers on the forge, beating the metal rather than casting it because he lacked the equipment to make the molds. They discussed names for the new hammers. Fra Giu had some saints in mind, Fra Dinckel his favorite popes. Abingdon wanted to name them after his favorite women, and Min didn’t care. Paolo declared the hammers should not be named. It struck him as too much like idolatry.
Emily thought Paolo had become unreasonable in the last few hours, very prickly, and he kept getting biblical without warning. A far cry from the charming, relaxed man she had met yesterday. Rather than risk his disapproval, Emily did not suggest the names she’d thought of, which were a combination of Santa’s eight reindeer and the Marx Brothers. She liked the abstract idea of plunging a hammer named “Harpo” or “Blitzen” into the heart of a vampire.
“Did you feel the erotic charge in that room?” Fra Giu said, surprising everyone.
“You mean sexual energy?” Fra Dinckel said. “No.”
“I don’t suppose you would,” Fra Giu joked, and laughed at himself, nudging Fra Dinckel in his bony side. “But in truth. One of the side effects, so to say it, of vampire infection is the victim gives off clouds of something like pheromones. It makes them seem very attractive to the opposite sex. Everyone here will be feeling it. I myself had quite an erezione.”
“What?” Paolo gasped. He looked like a man who had just found an electric eel in his bath.
“Yes, it’s true,” Fra Giu said. “They do not much discuss this in our order, of course, because of the confusion it might cause for some of the monks. And you trained in operations, not special medicine. But it is true. In that room above, I was overwhelmed with desire for the sick girl. It was madness. I have not felt such urges since ten years ago in a similar case.”
Here he smiled at Emily, bowed his head, and placed one hand on his heart.
“With apologies to you, mademoiselle, for my frank speech, but I am speaking now of medical matters, not genuine lust. You understand.”
“Yes, of course,” Emily said. There was nothing of course about it, but she didn’t know what else to say. She’d felt it herself.
Fra Giu continued. “That is why I opened the window, although it made the room cold. Our minds would become clouded. That is the nature of the disease. It makes the uninfected person crave to be near the vampire, and when at last the victim can stand it no longer, he or she attacks and feeds on the victims close at hand. Again, something to do with the vampires, an effetto collaterale—side effect. The vampire itself can give off a powerful chemical that makes human beings go mad with desire, a psychotic response similar to the experience of heroin introduced into the bloodstream. The sound of beautiful music, bells, such colors as the real world does not have in it, and at the heart of it all, the vampire. That is why these creatures are successful feeders upon any species and any individuals. The influence of the poison is nearly irresistible.”
“My uncle survived a vampire attack. He told me about it,” Emily said. “He heard bells and saw a golden light, and strange colors. You know what saved him? The vampire was a girl, and he doesn’t—well, you know. He doesn’t go for women in that way. So the spell kind of broke.”
“It was far more than that,” Fra Giu said. “Your uncle is a man of hidden strength—strength beyond reckoning, in a way. It is also his weakness. He refuses to be a victim. That’s why he survived the attack. That’s why he’s here. He won’t tolerate the vampire taking his watchman’s life, or stealing his clock. Paolo told me the whole story,” Fra Giu added, interrupting himself. “He thinks your uncle is a very worthy man. But a man that delights in throwing temptation in people’s ways.”
Here Fra Giu fixed a peculiar look on Paolo, and Paolo blushed and looked down at his half-eaten sandwich. Emily wondered what was going on there.
“But Uncle Sax,” Emily said, “is the opposite of that. Not the temptation part. He’s all about temptation. I mean personality-wise he’s a total victim. When I was a girl, he was always getting robbed by someone he’d—he’d met, you know, I mean he’d wake up with no money and that sort of thing. And he always complains his clients are ripping him off and everything. Really.”
Fra Giu looked very amused by this. “It’s a role, I tell you. He plays the victim part. He never paid for the, ah, for the favors he received from the wayward youths. But he left his purse of money where it could be taken.”
“He’s not like that,” Emily said, realizing he was exactly like that.
16
* * *
France
The maison was warm and comfortable looking after the long drive through cold darkness with the sky shaking its black fists over the landscape, threatening storms. As Rock turned the car into the farmyard, rain spattered down, tossed by the blustering wind. There was going to be a hell of a downpour soon. Emily was standing in the doorway of the maison, for some reason. It took Sax so long to unfold himself from the backseat of the SUV that Rock and Gheorghe had already scattered by the time Sax had his feet on the frozen dirt.
Emily had thrown on a jacket by then, and helped haul Sax up by the wrists. As she guided him toward the house, Sax reminded himself for the thousandth time to get gravel laid down in the courtyard. He never would, of course, because he never had. Gheorghe urinated extravagantly around the corner on the wall of the cottage, decorum not being amongst his talents, while Sax limped inside.
Emily gave Sax a squeeze and he felt for a moment as if he was home.
“I’ve been so worried about you,” she said.
“Don’t stop now,” Sax said, “being worried. Dear niece, please go and round up the crew. I have a report to make.”
Everyone was there. This gathering of souls was so interesting, so rare, Sax hated to break it up. Nine extraordinary people present, not including Nilu, who was of course upstairs quietly surviving in the best bed. Sax had been to gala balls with five thousand guests at which there were not ten people worth talking to; this was a special group.
The kitchen of the maison was humid, the air fragrant with old cooking, the liquid dark outside the windows throwing back reflections of himself and the others like underexposed snaps
hots of the occasion. It was raining with increasing force outside, and the panes rattled with the suck and push of the wind.
Sax looked around the room at his companions. Emily leaned her rump against the island in the middle of the cooking area; Paolo inclined his shoulder against the fridge a few feet behind Emily, his black-furred arms folded. The others—Min, Abingdon, the monks Giu and Dinckel, Rock, and Gheorghe—were arrayed in a manner reminiscent of Jan de Bray’s 1675 painting Governors of the Guild of St. Luke. Direct, expectant stares, with here and there a questing glance between them. Sax finished his inspection of the troupe and thought it was a pity they hadn’t gotten together for some more realistic purpose. He might have enjoyed himself.
“So we’re back from our reccy of Castle Mordstein,” Sax began, and quite poorly. Obviously they were back, or he’d be speaking on the telephone. Get on with it. “And—well, it’s impregnable.”
“That’s what they said about the Queen Mother,” Abingdon remarked.
“What I mean to say,” Sax said, “is the situation stands as follows. Were we to pursue our intended course of action vis-à-vis this vampire, with regard to liberating its property and so forth—and of course avenging its various wrongdoings, obviously—we would all be slaughtered. Here are the obstacles: First, the castle itself can only be assaulted from the air, and even then, it’s unlikely we’d make it inside. Second, it’s not one vampire. It’s two vampires, half a dozen hundings, and God knows how many sort of Igor types running around going ‘yes, master’ and strangling people in their sleep.”