Lourdes piped up again. "Do what thou wilt!"
Selene shook her head, amused. "Why is it that all you vampires only remember half of it? 'An it harm no one, do what thou wilt.' But there's one more basic principle to Wicca, and that's from Heraclitus of Ephesus. 'The way Up and the way Down are One and the Same,' he said, about twenty-five hundred years ago."
"Which means?"
"A whole lot of things. In general, it means that when you're born into life, you're dying from death, and when you die from life, you're born into death. But you can apply it in an infinite number of ways. In this case, it's another way of saying that if you want to know how to tear down an edifice, you must look first to see how it was constructed, then reverse the process."
Selene waved the green notebook in the air. "Your little edifice was constructed one brick at a time, and that's exactly how we'll demolish it. One brick at a time."
FOUR
Betty finished working on her sermon a little after midnight, then made the rounds, mostly for the enjoyment of seeing the blinking red and green lights of the new security system, but also to make sure that the building was empty. She didn't want anyone listening when she stepped up to the pulpit to time her sermon. That was the only way she'd ever been able to do it accurately: aloud, at the pulpit.
But when she reached the lectern, she saw that someone had left a present there for her—a fat paperback with a glossy black cover, curling at the corners, embossed with stylized blood drops—vivid, red, raised.
The letters of the title, The City of Blood, were also raised, but in silver, as was the author's name, Nicolas San Georgiou.
The index cards for Betty's sermon fluttered to the floor. With fingers gone suddenly numb—so had the tip of her nose, for some reason—she opened the book to the dog-eared title page. It had been inscribed by the author in a careless hand:
To Jamey and Selene:
Thanks for teaching me about the real thing!
Every Inch Of Mah Love,
Nick.
The numbness passed; she turned the book over in her hand. "You son of a bitch," she said to the picture of the author smiling up at her from the back cover. "You lying son of a bitch." Then she remembered, and both the fear and the anger were supplanted by the same sad sudden understanding that must have washed over that bereaved mother in "The Monkey's Paw," hearing the thing that had once been her child dragging itself with agonizing slowness toward her door.
Only in Betty's case—it had to be true; it was too awful and too ironic and too perfect an answer to her prayer not to be true—the child had just taken root in her belly, and the father appeared to be a vampire.
Then Betty remembered a fragment of another story—a Sufi tale about a little girl who told her mother she was afraid to cross the graveyard on her way home from school, lest she encounter the bogeyman. "If you do see a bogeyman," had been the mother's advice, "run straight at him, because he's just as scared of you as you are of him."
But it was not until after she'd looked up Nick's address in the phone book, coaxed one more start out of her '77 Olds 88 (it took the Marin Street hill in second, with all eight cylinders growling and the tappets clacking like a troupe of demented flamenco dancers), located the house on Grizzly Peak with the red and black lacquer Feng Shui dragons on the mailbox, parked the exhausted Olds at the bottom of the steep driveway, and trudged up the lantern-lit flagstone walk that climbed steeply to the front door, that Betty remembered the punch line to the Sufi story.
"Mommy," the little girl had replied. "What if the bogeyman's mommy told him the same thing?"
Nick hadn't been sleeping—he'd been up in the office working on his Fourth Step—but he was in his pajamas when he answered the bell, with his Deetroit security system (a little Saturday-night special guaranteed not to blow up in your hand three times out of four) behind his back. "Betty, what—?"
When she handed him the beat-up old paperback, it wasn't panic he felt—more like regret, along with the sort of awe that comes when you're white-water rafting, say, and you hear what might be the roar of a waterfall a little ways downstream.
What are the odds? was his first thought. The books were still fairly steady sellers—there'd been several editions—but only the earliest paperback had carried his picture. What are the goddamn odds? Then with one hand (the pistol was still behind his back) he turned to the title page. "Selene," he said aloud. "I should have known."
"Is she another Victim?" Betty asked bitterly.
He shook his head. "Witch."
"Of course. Silly me." She recognized where this new sardonic wisecracking persona was coming from: it was the way she used to act with a few beers in her. Funny, the whole ride over she'd been dying for a drink—once a drunk, always a drunk—and now here she was acting like she'd had a couple.
"Would you like to come in?" Nick tried to imagine what this must be like for her, and then in a flash of inspiration he produced the gun from behind his back, and holding it by the stubby barrel, handed it to her grip first.
"Does it have silver bullets?" She looked down at the cheesy weapon in her hand as if surprised to find it there—which she was, in a way: she'd never held a pistol before in her life.
"That's werewolves. Please, Betty, come in. I promise you, it's not as bad as you think."
"Well. If you promise. After all, it's not as if you've ever lied to me before." But she gestured with the barrel of the gun, feeling like Ida Lupino in a hundred black-and-white movies, and followed him through a small vestibule with straw mats on the floor and a pair of grimacing jade-green Fu dogs guarding the threshold, then down a few steps to a small parlor.
The sparse furniture was Pacific Rim contemporary. Two low wood-framed futons formed an L, the long leg facing a wall of six-inch-square windowpanes looking out over a small, discreetly floodlit rock garden of bonsai and cacti. Beyond the terrace the ground fell away sharply to the wooded hillside, but trees planted below blocked the view.
Nick offered Betty the longer futon, then parked himself cross-legged on the floor with his back to the windows. "At moments like this," he informed her, "I always like to quote Jimmy Dean in Rebel Without a Cause: 'Well… now… then… there.' "
"Don't be charming, Nick," replied Betty. "I'm a lifelong pacifist, but if I knew how to take the safety off this thing, I'd shoot you for that alone."
"That doohickey with the ridges, right there on the side of the barrel? Just click it forward to release the safety. But before you shoot me, let me tell you a couple things to put your mind at ease."
"The only thing that's going to put my mind at ease is if you tell me this child you've knocked me up with—"
"You can't know that yet!"
"Let me give you a hint here, Nick: never tell a woman holding a gun what she can or can't know about her own body."
"You're really getting into that gun thing, aren't you?"
"Just answer my question—is this baby going to be… some kind of monster?"
"If you mean a vampire, I don't know. I can tell you it's no more or less likely to be a vampire than any other child—vampirism is congenital, but there's no clear evidence that it's hereditary. Neither of my parents, for instance, ever showed any indication of being a vampire—not that I ever asked."
"Damn it, Nick, I don't even know what that means. Being a vampire. Should I be holding garlic instead of a gun? Or waving a cross—oh—oh no!" For she had suddenly remembered that first meeting: Do you mind if we take the cross down?
He saw her feeling for the safety. "It's a drug for us, Betty," he said desperately. "Blood is only a drug, and we're only another sorry bunch of addicts, and we need your help." It seemed to be having an effect—her finger relaxed on the trigger. "It wasn't one of us that kidnapped that baby, or sent that hooker to you," he went on hurriedly. "It wasn't a vampire at all. Just the opposite—it was Selene trying to destroy us, to get to us through you. Please don't let her use you so easily."
Betty looked down again at the gun in her hand. It occurred to her that there were depths to this motherhood thing that she'd never dreamed of. She'd only been pregnant for a week, if at all, and yet there wasn't the slightest doubt in her mind that she would blow a hole straight through this man in front of her rather than let harm come to her baby.
Then she remembered that if she were pregnant, the man in front of her was that baby's father. "Convince me, Nick. I don't give a damn about your fellowship, but for the sake of our baby, you'd better convince me."
Betty followed Nick up to the second floor, holding the gun at her side, not at his back. The stairwell was done in that tranquilizing ecru so popular back in the early eighties, and the steps and banister were of a smooth yellow-blond wood. He ushered her into his darkened office and sat her down in front of the old XT. The screen was blank—he reached over her shoulder and tapped a few keys to activate the Quayle program. "Try the 'page down' key," he said.
She pressed it. Four words were now centered on the screen:
MY LIFE ON BLOOD
She looked up over her shoulder at Nick, who nodded. "Go ahead," he said. "It's all there. But don't try to print, copy, or save it—just page down, or if the Screensaver blacks it out, press the space key. Any other keystrokes will wipe out the entire file, not to mention the hard drive."
She nodded that she understood, then tapped the key once more, and began reading about the man who thought he was the King of the Castro.
FIVE
It might have been an hour or two later—Betty couldn't tell, and she'd left her watch back at the church, on the lectern. She rocked her chair back twenty degrees and pressed the heels of her palms against her closed eyes. When she opened them again the Screensaver had turned the screen black; she saw Nick's reflection in the depths of the blackness. "How long have you been there?" she asked him, swiveling the chair around to face him.
"Not long," said Nick. "What do you think?"
It took her a moment to identify his rapt, somewhat stricken expression; then she remembered that he was, after all, an author. "It's very well written," she said—anything rather than discuss the subject matter: she'd just finished reading about Tad, and was still somewhat shaken.
He seemed encouraged. "You really think so?"
"What I really think," she said, rubbing her aching neck, "is that I wish I was reading this at home, in bed, and that I'd got it off the Fiction shelf in the library, and that right under the title it had said 'A Novel' in great big huge letters." Betty looked away, weary again. "I knew Leon, you know."
"No!"
"I met him on an A.A. outreach program. You have him to the life. I tell you, the shock of… coming upon him like that in your story…" Betty used the arms of the chair to push herself up for a moment, put a little air between her jeans and the leather; she groaned as she lowered herself back down. "It's awfully hard, reading on screen like this. Couldn't you print out just one—no, I suppose not." Something occurred to her. "Writing it must have been like a Fourth Step for you."
He was impressed; he nodded solemnly. "And your reading it is a Fifth." Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. "Could I make you some tea or coffee?"
"Coffee, please."
"How do you take it?"
"Half-and-half? Sugar?"
He nodded, turned away, then turned back from the doorway. "I didn't write this to be read—but if somebody had to read it, I'm glad it turned out to be you."
She bobbed her head—a gracious, seated curtsey—and spun her chair around to face the screen again. When she tapped the space key, the first word on the screen caught her eye. "Anomie," she said aloud: she hadn't heard that word since divinity school.
Anomie: n. [Fr., from anomia, lawlessness; a-, without, and namos, law.] Lack of ethical values in a person or in a society.
Is anomie a bad thing? Not if you have it—that'd be like caring about your own apathy. Besides, it got me through the seventies, and halfway through the eighties.
Got most of us through the seventies and halfway through the eighties, as I recall, vampires and bleeders alike. Didn't help Leon, though. One weekend shortly after the Dead debacle, while the rest of us were up at Whistler's Tahoe lodge (which he insisted on calling Whistler Manor), Leon backed a Ryder up to the rear door of the Pistachio Palace, and when we returned there was nothing left but a few deedly-balls on the back staircase, and some LaCoste-shirted twinky behind the bar who couldn't mix a decent Mary if his life depended on it.
And although at the time of his disappearance he had been perhaps my closest friend for a matter of years, I can't honestly say I missed him.
My own life had changed too much since the debacle: I so dreaded waking up sober every sunset that I installed a two-foot-high refrigerator, empty except for a Clamato jar, next to my bed so that my nightly caesura of sobriety might be as brief as possible. It was .either that, or sleep in the kitchen.
Needless to say, I never got around to writing that fourth vampire book—or anything else, except quite a few checks. Fortunately, even after paying back the first third of the advance there was enough money coming in from royalties, and foreign sales, and movie options, and eventually the mini-series, for me to support myself in the style to which I'd grown accustomed. And it was only occasionally, perhaps on hearing a southern drawl in a bar late at night, or seeing some basement-theater Tennessee Williams production, that I'd find myself thinking about Leon, and wondering what had become of him.
As it turned out, he'd been thinking about me, too—about all of us. He'd been out in the desert, you see—the metaphorical desert, that is: The Last Temptation of Leon (he would never have subjected his constitutionally dry skin to the like of Joshua Tree)—and when he did finally return, it was with news that would shake our cozy little vampire world to its very foundations.
My god, that was a dreadful sentence. I've never understood very as a modifier—are very foundations stronger than plain old foundations? And cozy little vampire world doesn't begin to convey the sense we in the Penang (our coinage, so far as any of us knew, from the Malayan word for vampire) had of living, if not in a golden age, then in a soft golden pocket of time, at least.
Nowhere was the pocket cushier than over the Wiccan Yule at Whistler Manor on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe. Credit for this belongs largely to the Coven. For the most part they were a harmless bunch of New Age space cadettes who worshipped various earth spirits and goddesses; but there were a few, like Selene and Carol, who had that signifying look about them, the look that said "Keep that up, buster, and tomorrow morning you'll be looking at a toad in your shaving mirror."
I asked Selene about Wicca and witchcraft once, on what turned out to be my last Yule up at Tahoe. It was the night before the solstice proper, actually. I had just drunk from her, up in her attic room in the Witch's Wing of the lodge, where men were allowed only on invitation. She and I never had sex after blood unless Whistler was around to spur us on, but she dearly loved to cuddle, and when I was high it was an intensely sensual, almost spiritual hit to feel her small body so warm and alive against me, and know its pulse and rhythm, softer than a man's, and higher-pitched. I could hear the sigh of her blood, and her low murmuring voice carried a calm so soothing it was practically a rush.
Wicca had been the dominant religion in pre-history, she explained, earth-worshipping and matriarchal, but it had for so many centuries been persecuted and linked to Satanism by patriarchal sky-worshipping religions attempting to discredit and thus supplant it, that some witches had indeed turned to the dark arts in self-defense.
"Was that an old spell you used on me, that first Halloween?" I asked her.
"A classic," she said, before realizing that she'd never actually admitted to me that she had indeed cast a spell over me. I felt her shrug—a little oops shrug—then she went on. "Remember Odysseus? How he and his men were bewitched by Circe, and turned into swine? Swine with little
curly tails. The way the story was passed to me, by my teacher, the coven on Circe's island needed men desperately—for procreation only, of course—"
"Of course."
"—and when Odysseus' ship was blown onto their island they thought it had been sent by the Goddess. The only trouble was, all the sailors were gay—"
I nodded sagely. "Greeks."
"Sure. Why do you think Penelope had so much time to weave? Anyway, Circe went rooting around in her bag of tricks, and worked out a spell so that every time a man would even look at another man's ass, he'd see this curly tail, and…"
"Oh, I see." I was somewhat offended. "An early attempt at deprogramming."
She smiled slyly. "I think I had more luck with it than Circe, though, even if it did misfire a little."
"Yeah, well, that tail was kind of cute on you."
"Want me to do it again?"
I turned on my side, intrigued. "Could you?"
She kissed the hollow of my shoulder coquettishly. "Sorry, handsome. You have to save your sperm for the kettle."
Sperm for the kettle. Pay-back time for the witches. Three hundred and sixty-three nights a year they sell us their blood (the economics are varied: Whistler supports Selene; Sherman will eventually marry Catherine; Augie has the youngest witch on retainer; I have numbers I can call on nights when the pickings are slim), but when the solstices roll around, our precious bodily fluids are theirs for the taking.
And the taking is always an outrageous bit of fun. A few hours after midnight Selene sends me back to my own bedroom in the Penang Wing—we have all been sent to our rooms—they will come for us one at a time.
A rap at the door; three robed witches surround you, women's hands undress you; a hooded crimson robe with one hole for the mouth and another for the cock, but none for the eyes, is lowered over your head, and you are led through the Manor—you can hear the crackling of the great fire in the main room of the lodge, smell the books as they lead you through the library, and hear the creaking of the classic, not-very-secret revolving bookcase entrance to the Coven Wing.
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