“I don’t know,” Bette answers, shrugging. “I was just thinking that it must be sad to be a vampire. Like being a room that wanted to be a home but was a mausoleum instead.” It wasn’t exactly what she was thinking, but it was close enough.
Artie turns to Gretchen and says something in Polish. She answers, and they speak back and forth in the language to each other for a few seconds while Bette sits and feels more and more out-of-place. Then Gretchen laughs quietly, and looks toward Bette. “Artie says that you should think about happier things,” she explains. It’s obvious that they were saying a lot more than just that, but Bette just nods and tries to keep the smile on her face looking genuine.
“Probably,” she agrees.
“Gretchen says you have band,” Artie says to her.
“Yeah,” Bette answers, feeling uncomfortable at being the center of attention.
“A band, Artie. Not just ‘band’. ‘A band’,” Gretchen corrects.
“What, I should bother to clean up my English when I’m never gonna leave this room? You should be schoolteacher, not singer,” Artie gripes, glaring at Gretchen. Gretchen just rolls her eyes.
“You’re not so sick as you want me to think. You want to talk English, I’m going to make you do it properly,” she counters. Bette giggles at the sparring between the two, the pretend-scowls they’re exchanging. They’re still holding hands, Gretchen’s white smooth one and Artie’s yellow-pale lined one, the fingers laced together.
“So you have A band,” Artie says, speaking to Bette again and putting particular emphasis on the previously missing word. “What kind of music you play?”
Bette shrugs “Just noise, at the moment.” She’d mentioned it to Gretchen on their walk from the bus stop to the hospice. She hadn’t thought Gretchen was paying attention.
“Noisy bands are good.” Artie grins. “The entartete kunst. Best kind of band.”
“That’s degenerate art,” Gretchen translates. “It’s what the Nazi Party called any art they didn’t like. Artie worked at a dance hall—a cabaret, really—during the Weimar years.”
“Most degenerate of all of them!” Artie laughs. “We —”
Bette can see Gretchen squeezing Artie’s hand in her own as he pauses for a moment.
“Me and my… you call it girlfriends, yes? Girlfriend? We just called it lover. Me and my lover, we stayed in Dresden long after it was smart to be going to Poland. Or England. Didn’t want England. English comedy, is all men in dresses making farts.
“Went to Poland later, with my wife. My wife not the same lady as that girlfriend lover from the cabaret. My wife was Lucia Schmidt. Such pretty hair, she had. Went white in the end of course. But it was so pretty when it was brown. Curls, she had such curls.” Artie sighs. “Such curls. But she was not lover in Dresden. That was Gretchen. This one, my little darkling, gets name from her.” Artie gives Gretchen a cheeky-looking smile. She’s looking at him softly, and with obvious love.
Bette raises her eyebrows. “You named your grand-daughter after an old girlfriend? Your wife must have been a pretty cool character.”
It’s Gretchen who nods, and smiles at the memory of the departed Lucia. “Yes. She was. She was a great lady.”
“When the bombings came, the Dresden we knew was dead forever. Kurt Vonnegut—you ever read him? Read him, his books are wise, wise books. Kurt Vonnegut was prisoner in Dresden when bombings come. The Nazis, they kept prisoners in the slaughterhouse meat lockers. Gretchen and me, we hide in old broken tomb in cemetery. Lovers go to kiss there sometimes in the dark. Think that being so close to death is romantic. Kids are stupid. But we survived there. Vonnegut survived in slaughterhouse. Forty thousand people, not soldiers, just lovers and babies and sisters and brothers and the rest. All dead. Too many bodies to bury.”
Artie blinks, shaking his head. His vivid eyes are bright with tears. “Vonnegut, he goes on to write books. Good, brave books. He said music was proof of God. Even after what he saw, he still thought there was beauty in world that was beautiful enough to be proof of a God. You play your noisy music, Bette. Play it loud as it will go. Make joy. Make God. Make music.”
Bette swallows. “I will,” she promises, her voice quiet.
JAY
The townhouse is quiet when Jay awakens, and so he pauses to stretch and get his bearings before climbing out of the bed. He’s getting used to the lightheadedness, the way his feet feel far away from his hips and body and self. If not for the soreness in his wrists and shoulder, he’d say he felt like a loose-jointed toy, a dummy built of wood and wire. As it is, he just feels strange and a little dizzy and a bit sleepy all the time. But he’s getting used to it.
His watch says it’s well into evening, but the house has the feeling of somewhere that’s been empty for a number of hours.
There’s juice in the fridge, one of those expensive cartons with the fruit pulp left in and all kinds of added vitamins. Jay drinks straight from the container without bothering with a glass—it’s not like anyone else is going to want some and object to getting his germs in their drink, after all.
There’s bread but he doesn’t feel like toast, and cereal, but the thought of milk makes him gag. He’s hungry but nothing looks appealing, not even the blood sausage in its clear plastic wrap on the smooth transparent shelf of the smooth white fridge, a gory splash of red in the mostly-empty, cold space. Jay makes a face and closes the fridge, noticing for the first time a note attached to the front with one of the small stainless-steel magnets.
J—Sorry we aren’t here. Pressing business. Boring, boring, I wish you could come along and make it less intolerable. Leave your cell phone on and I will call you when we’re done. Daylight appointments are such a bother, requiring as they do that we linger in other people’s waiting rooms until the dark.—B
Jay smiles a little, pulling the note off and carrying it back with him upstairs as he goes to get dressed. He likes Blake’s handwriting, which is full of loops and flourishes and isn’t all that easy to read, actually, even though it’s not messy so much as it is overwhelmingly ornate. It’s like a written equivalent of Blake’s speaking voice, and so it makes Jay feel the same fond frustration that Blake’s habitual melodrama always does.
Once he’s dressed, Jay spends a little while trying to read. He’s been spending so much time out of the sun lately that his usual light tan is fading to paleness. It won’t be long before he looks like the rest of the inhabitants of the townhouse. He likes that idea. He doesn’t have the attention span for reading today, though, and so decides to explore instead.
The staircase up to the attic, concealed behind one of the nondescript wood doors of the upper level, isn’t styled and decorated like the lower rooms. The carpet’s just a simple dark blue, thick under Jay’s bare feet as he climbs the steps slowly.
He can remember playing in an attic when he was little, with Sofie. He remembers the bare wood floors, once-upon-a-time varnished but not often polished since, and the high un-draped windows. Storage boxes of holiday decorations and unused furniture, the white-sheeted shapes of tables and wardrobes huddled together in corners. He doesn’t remember why they were in an attic. They never stayed anywhere long enough to accumulate that much of a stored life, so it couldn’t have been theirs, and they’d had few friends, so the location of the memory remains a mystery.
Jay remembers old steamer trunks with lids too heavy for their childish arms to lift without help, and how they’d frightened him too much for him or Sofie to ask Liam for assistance. Some dumb ghost story the kids told at school had stuck in Jay’s head, about a bride playing hide-and-seek who becomes trapped inside a trunk, her bones left undisturbed for fifty years.
Even now, too old to believe in stupid scary playground tales, Jay feels a mild shiver of dread at the sight of three steamer trunks, just like those in his memory of that other attic, their leather straps rotted away to crumbling tan remnants. Setting his jaw and straightening his back, he approaches them, determin
ed to ignore the way the skin at his nape crawls as he gets closer.
The hinges creak and threaten to stick halfway on the first trunk, but with a grunt of effort he manages to get it open all the way. It’s fabric, folded clothing, in charcoal shades of black and gray and deep hues of color.
The second trunk is more clothes, with books and papers stacked neatly underneath. The third’s the hardest of the three to open, and is cluttered with the oddly-shaped items that obviously wouldn’t fold neatly into the others—corsets, walking sticks, painted paper parasols gone tea-brown at the creases over their bamboo spokes.
Everything smells a little stale, but nothing’s musty or moth-eaten. The first item Jay lifts out of the trunks is a waistcoat of fine, dark wool. The buttons are dull, but gloss quickly to a shiny black as he rubs at them with the sleeve of his shirt. There are a lot of buttons, all the way up the front, way more than on most waistcoats Jay’s seen on people at functions or in stores. This one looks a little uncomfortable to wear, but very elegant.
There’s a white shirt folded up in paper just underneath where the waistcoat was, and apart from the fragile, vintage feel of the cloth—a bit like paper itself—there’s not much to distinguish it from the shirts which Blake wears now.
There are pants and coats, more waistcoats, a few more shirts with sharp-angled collars and crisp cuffs. Some of the clothes are velvet, and these ones Jay lingers over, skating his fingertips over the soft lines of the fashions. There are a few dresses, beaded bodices and bias-cut skirts, made for girls with corset-curved bodies and shorter statures than most of the girls Jay knows.
In the second trunk he finds an opera cloak, wine red with ivory-colored lining, the drape reaching from his shoulder to his ankle. It has a hood and he pulls this up, nose twitching at the locked-away staleness of the smell. He feels like a character in a fairy tale, and considers for a moment spinning in circles to make the cloak furl out around him like flower petals. The movement would probably make him dizzy, though, so he doesn’t. There’s a matching bag, a little draw-string pouch, with a tangle of bracelets and rings inside. Jay pulls a length of black ribbon free, a choker with a shell-pink cameo set against the smooth inky satin.
Jay re-packs the choker, bag and cloak carefully, then rummages in the third trunk, hefting out the hat boxes which crowd it. He tries a grey top hat first, very like the one Blake wore the first night Jay met him, planting it rakishly at an angle on his head. He could pull the dust cloths off one of the freestanding mirrors if he wanted a proper look at himself, but it’s dark enough now outside that a ghost-reflection of a boy shows up in the glass of the windows anyway.
He tries on a black bowler, and a peacock-green beret, and a black leather cap with a snubbed brim at the front, posing for himself in the fading light. Part of him feels like he’s a kid again, playing dress-ups with Sofie and pretending he’s an adventurer or an enchanter or an imperious prince, while the rest of him feels like he’s someone grown up, dramatic, a cabaret emcee in an old-fashioned club full of smoke and catcalls, or a witty society lord inviting artists and vagrants to tea in his private rooms just to shock the gossips.
One of the umbrellas has a sharp metal point at the tip of it, the end gone colorful with rust. Jay reaches to pull it free, so he can get a closer look, then hesitates with his hand in mid-air. Suddenly, being in a fairy tale doesn’t seem as charming as it did a minute ago. He thinks of Sleeping Beauty’s spindle, and imagines pricking his finger on the umbrella’s point and falling into an enchanted sleep here, among the strewn remnants of another time. It’s not the most inviting place to have a nap, that’s for sure.
Shivering a little, Jay pulls back, slamming the lid of the third trunk. The crack of noise breaks him out of his disquiet, but now he’s conscious of how dark it’s gotten up here while he explored.
There are matches in one of the hat boxes, a little tin of them kept alongside a folded handkerchief and a pair of gloves. Jay strikes a match against one of the window frames, surprised when the head flares up as merrily as if it’d been put away only days, rather than decades, before.
The match pinched between his thumb and forefinger, Jay hunts around quickly for candles to light. There are a few tucked away on top of a tall chest of drawers, made of heavy golden-cream wax. They have the blur-edged, leaning look that tells him they’ve been up here through a lot of warm summers and cold winters, the shape of them softening with the heat and going brittle with the chill over and over again, but they light up just as readily as the match did.
“Jay?” Blake calls. Jay’s certain that Blake already knows he’s here—he’d be able to hear him, and maybe even smell him; he’d sense him in one way or another for sure. It seems likely that the shout was for Jay’s benefit, so that Blake’s silent footsteps wouldn’t startle when he stepped into the room.
“Hey!” Jay calls in reply. Blake’s dressed in slacks and a dark shirt, but his feet are bare and his hair still has faint kinks in it from a hat and, as usual, the realness and solidity which such small details lend him surprises Jay a bit. He likes Blake best like this, imperfect and unfinished. It makes Jay feel like Blake’s someone who might be able to love someone like Jay.
“I haven’t been up here for years,” he says as he joins Jay at the trunks, looking around as if he’s reminding himself of the lay of the room. “And I haven’t had much to do with these trunks in even longer.”
“Would you have preferred I hadn’t looked at them?” Jay asks.
“Yes,” Blake answers after a moment, then smiles. “But now I’m glad you did. You’re proving to be rather a surprise like that.”
In the last trunk, under a packet of yellow-grey envelopes, wrapped together with a now colorless ribbon, is a carefully kept copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Jay eases the front cover open, mindful of the fragile paper. On the title page, three extra lines have been handwritten under Oscar Wilde’s name.
To my dear Prince Charming —
May you live happily ever after,
As only fictions can.
A card falls from between two of the pages, onto Jay’s lap. No, not a card, he realizes as he picks it up. An old silver-plated photograph, of Blake in a dark suit.
“You look younger,” Jay notes, tracing the line of Blake’s jaw in the photograph with the tip of his finger. Blake looks so still, stern and afraid, eyes frozen wide in something like terror. A lot like Jay’s been feeling since the last time he saw Liam and Sofie, really. Like the world fell away. The Blake of the picture hadn’t yet worked out where to find new footing. “I didn’t expect… I mean, this is after you were already a vampire, right?”
He’s not sure how he can tell, but it’s something about how his eyes catch the light and something about the set of his mouth and something about the posture of his shoulders. The boy in the picture, no matter how frightened he may be, is a predator nonetheless.
The Blake sitting opposite Jay on the attic floor gives a small nod in response to the question. Jay keeps talking.
“But you look younger. It’s weird.”
“May I?” Blake takes the photograph from Jay’s hands, looking down at himself. “This was just after I’d become what I am. Only a few weeks after, if memory serves. I was still jumping at every shadow.” He chuckles. “Like a little frightened rabbit. That’s what… it was my pet name for a while. Little rabbit. You can’t tell from this, of course, but my hair was quite green.”
“Green? You had green hair, and you give me grief for my haircut?”
Blake rolls his eyes. “Must every story serve as a parable for what a tyrant I am against you? Your hair looks awful, just as mine did then, and so I scold you from bitter personal experience.
“My hair had turned white when I changed. This is often the case, I’ve been told. Not always, mind you, but often. It was thus with me—within a few hours of reawakening, my hair was white as paper.
“I was scheduled to return to my father’s home in less th
an a month, and there was no way of knowing when—or if—my hair’s previous color would return. For some it takes years, or never happens at all. So I dyed it. It was meant to go black, but it… didn’t.”
“I bet dark green looked wicked cool, though,” Jay teases.
Blake’s tone is dry. “Quite. In the end I simply shaved it off and told my assorted cousins and aunts that I was recovering from fever. I felt terrible for worrying them, but at least it gave me an excuse to keep to my rooms in the daytime and a reason for never displaying much of an appetite.”
Jay looks at Blake, suddenly thoughtful. “So you kept seeing your family after you got turned into a vampire?”
“Yes. For several years. It takes some times to extricate oneself from life. Even being murdered doesn’t always make the process instant.”
“Did any of them ever guess?”
Blake’s gaze drifts over to the dark panes of the high windows. Faint lights of the city beyond ghost against the glass.
“Yes. One of my cousins.”
“What happened to him?”
The lids of Blake’s eyes drop, and he lowers his chin, breathing slowly. His eyelashes are very dark against the thin skin above his cheekbones. Jay wonders if those lashes went white with his hair. It’s difficult to tell in the photograph.
“The same thing that eventually happens to most people,” Alex answers quietly. “She died.”
Jay swallows, letting his own eyes blink closed for a second. Death’s like the bad punch line that ruins every joke, it seems to him.
“Not you, though,” he says in the silence. “You haven’t.”
Blake looks at Jay curiously. “Is that what you think?”
BETTE
After Gretchen and Bette leave the hospice and say good-night to each other, Bette catches a bus to as close to the warehouse as the busses go and then walks the rest of the way. It’s dark, and late, and she’s alone, but she’s pretty sure that there’s not enough irony in the universe for her to get attacked by vampires on the way to the home of a gang of vampire hunters.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 13