Then a silvery bell rings, candlelight sends the hooded darkness dancing, you are seated on a velvet-cushioned chair, a goblet is brought to your lips, and you are given witch's blood to drink—fresh blood, hot blood.
Then black quiet, stillness, only breathing sounds, and the muffled movements of women in soft robes, circling you, closer and closer as the blood comes on; you feel the fabric brushing your skin, and the fingers—how small women's hands are—caressing you, and their soft scented lips nip at you; erect, you are led to the center of the room and milked by those tiny hands until you come so hard that your jism splashes against the far side of the black iron cauldron.
No man has ever seen the actual receptacle, by the way: that it is a black cauldron from a road-show Macbeth is only a joking supposition encouraged by the Coven. We used to speculate about it after the ritual. That was one of my favorite times during the Wiccan celebrations: after the night of the living sperm the Penang used to gather on the lawn that sloped down to the lake, and watch the pewter surface lighten as the dawn approached.
We would be alone, the Coven having retreated with our offerings to a nearby alder wood, to do whatever the hell they did. We liked to pass as much time as we could lolling on the redwood chaises, safe in the shadow of the mock-Tudor lodge, enjoying treasured glimpses of daylight—the dew on the grass, the ripples made by dawn-feeding fish on the lake, the breathtaking glory of the High Sierra—before the sun rose above the mountains.
Afterwards we would repair to our rooms to sleep the day away. And manufacture more sperm, of course: while our seminal fluid no longer had any ritual application, it was bound to come in handy at the Witch's Orgy scheduled to begin at sunset.
My room on the second floor of the Penang Wing faces west. I awaken at sunset, cop a little hair of the dog, and head for the shower. When I come out about ten minutes later, the floor to ceiling curtains and the casement windows have been opened, and Whistler is sitting in the Nantucket rocker, his yellow hair gilded in the western afterglow.
"Evening's calm and holy hour," he says without turning around, and raises a joint the size of a Tiparillo over his head.
With the towel wrapped around my waist I settle down in the windowseat; as I take the joint our eyes meet, and we smile, and I know we're remembering one of Leon's classic lines. We say it in unison: Oh, but ah do love mah crepusculuh joint!
I hand the joint back. "I wonder what the little guy's doing right about now?"
"Sleeping, drinking blood, or fucking, depending on the time zone." He takes a stiff toke, then exhales indolently. "Selene sent me to ask you if we could reserve the first slot on your dance-card."
"Hey, tell her if she'll do that Circe trick, she'll probably be the first slot."
"Now don't be crude… to a heart that's rude."
"That's Don't be cruel to a heart that's true."
"Oh, you can be as cruel as you like—I think we'd rather enjoy that."
The Penang and the Coven gathered an hour past sunset in the keeping room—the main parlor of the Manor—and a black witch, or rather a "white witch" of African-American descent, Carol, conducted the opening rites of the orgy, which were also the closing rites of the Yule ceremony. We wore black formal wear—the vam-pie penguins, Leon had once dubbed us; the witches were in dark green robes, the folds of which took on the brassy glow of the hearth when they gathered before the great fireplace for the ritual.
I couldn't name the language Carol used, much less understand it, but I had learned over the years to recognize the closing syllables. All the vampires had—we couldn't drink until the ceremony was over, and a vampire who can't drink is an attentive vampire indeed: a sprinter in the starting blocks is less attentive.
The circle before the fireplace broke. Some of the women turned to each other for a first embrace, others fanned out to the waiting vampires; only Selene waited with her back to the fire, arms at her sides, hands down, palms out like pictures of St. Theresa.
Whistler and I approached her with our favorite blades drawn—mine was a slick silver Gerber Mini-Mag and Whistler's a choice turn-of-the-century folding scalpel, surgical steel with a mother-of-pearl handle. I knelt at the right hand, Whistler at the left; at her nod we each opened one of her wrist-veins—not the deep suicide vein, but a delicate blue surface vein—and drank.
Then, as the grandfather clock across the room struck eight, Whistler and I both turned to the assembled vampires and witches and opened our lips just wide enough to let the first flow of her blood spill over for the others to see.
Party trick: hell on the dry-cleaning bill if you don't do it right, but it always gets the orgy off to a swell start.
Once the blood hits, of course, there is no further need for party tricks. Orgies have their own momentum: one minute it's an absurd tangle of bodies; then a moan catches you up just so, and your answering moan is answered by a woman across the tangle being mounted from behind, and at the precise moment that your eyes meet, hers glaze over from a deep stroke, and your own abdominal muscles clench with hers, and your own partner moans, and his moan catches up the man thrusting into the woman whose eyes are locked to yours, and he comes, and she comes, and when you see that in her eyes you come, and the grandfather clock strikes ten, and you think, how nice—Grampa came too.
I enjoyed that last orgy as much as any I'd ever attended. There were even a few firsts: Sandy, a smooth-cheeked vampire with a wide freckled face, gave himself to me: it was his first time with a man, which always gave me a little shudder of enjoyment; the witch Catherine bit her tongue in a transport of joy and let me drink the watery blood; I even had Tacitus quoted to me while making love to a lord.
That last, that lord, was the Viscount, a pale (even for a vampire), enervated Englishman, an old University friend of Whistler's. The Viscount and I were lying together on one of the leather couches in the keeping room, and both happened to turn our heads at the same moment in time to catch Whistler buried somewhere in a daisy chain drinking blood from Carol's thigh, one hand resting on Selene's breast and the other holding a still-smoking joint aloft.
"I do admire the man," whispered the Viscount. "He reminds me of Tacitus' description of Petronius: Unlike most who trod the road to ruin, he was never looked upon as either debauched or a wastrel, but rather as the finished artist in extravagance."
"A regular one-man band, as we say in Detroit," I allowed grudgingly. "Stick a broom up his ass and he could play the drums too."
I'd lost track of how many times Grampa came that night, and since it is as gauche to wear one's wristwatch to an orgy as it is to leave one's socks on, I have only my best guess, and the literary tradition that holds that St. John's true dark night of the soul arrives at three a.m., to suggest that it was probably around two that I wandered in my navy sweats down to the big industrial kitchen to find August Fetterman laying out lines for himself and the Viscount on a Teflon cookie sheet. I joined them, and within twenty minutes was reminded of the old junky adage It ain't the coke that kills you, it's the cut.
In this case the cut was Mannitol, a European baby laxative to which I happen to be particularly sensitive. Fortunately there was a small water-closet off the hallway behind the kitchen that housed an old-fashioned toilet with a walnut-wood seat and a tank up on the wall. I had plenty of time to take in all the charms of the place, seated on that walnut-wood seat whistling the Hershey Squirts with my sweatpants at my ankles and my knees nearly touching the door.
I wasn't suffering, mind you—not after all the blood I'd drunk that night—a little bored, maybe, but mostly just amused by the absurdity of the situation: after all, Bram Stoker never wrote about shit like this. But then, neither did Nicolas San Georgiou, not when he was writing fiction, anyway.
What happened next, though, was more Stevenson than Stoker or San Georgiou: like Jim Hawkins in the apple barrel, I overheard something I had not meant, and was not meant, to overhear—Whistler and the Viscount whispering in the kitchen.
viscount: (A dry pause) Obviously.
whistler: Is one up for a little something special?
viscount: Such as?
whistler: A special little something.
viscount: Delighted. Might one bring a guest?
whistler: (In tones quite as plummy as the Viscount's) Whom did one have in mind?
viscount: That delightful Nick.
(Pause for a modest blush) whistler: No, not Nicky—anybody else but Nicky.
(Another pause—I was already planning my dramatic entrance—I freeze with my hand on the pull-chain)
viscount: (As his chair scrapes back: he is rising) Well, I'm sure you know best. But might I ask why not? You see, I seem to have fallen quite in love with the man. A demned foolish thing for an aging vampire to do, but there you are.
(Another modest blush)
whistler: Why not? Conscience.
viscount: Surely not yours.
whistler: His.
viscount: (Dryly amazed) No!
whistler: Remnants, anyway. Dangerous remnants. Give him another few years.
viscount: And perhaps a copy of Disraeli's famous remark re Gladstone.
whistler: Afraid I must have missed that one.
viscount: "He made his conscience not his guide, but his accomplice."
Well! I was not about to take an insult like that sitting down. I might not know diddly about Gladstone, but like most literate vampires I had read my Nietzsche—the philosopher of choice among those of us who become Übermenschen when we drink blood: "It is more convenient to follow one's conscience than one's intelligence… That is why there are so many conscientious and so few intelligent people." I yanked the chain down and my pants up, and hurried after my faithless friends.
The path paralleled the lake, leading through the woods to the two-story bungalow where the overflow witches were housed. I could see my breath in the air; to my left the tame Tahoe waves slapped the pilings under Whistler's dock, and his boat bumped woodenly against it.
The door to the bungalow—a small gabled building as mockly Tudor as the lodge; serfs quarters once, no doubt—was already open a crack. I slipped in sideways. The entranceway was dark, as was the living room beyond, but at the top of the staircase to my left I could see a faint yellow glow. I crept upstairs as quietly as I could; a crooked trapezoid of yellow light leaked from under one of the two doors on either side of the panelled hallway; with my ear to this door I could hear a woman's voice. European accent. "Almost ready. Another few minutes. He always soon after falls asleep."
I opened the door quietly. A woman was sitting up in a narrow bed wearing a cotton nightgown that buttoned down the front. Or rather, unbuttoned: one plump white breast was exposed; attached to it was a baby of indeterminate age (all babies' ages are indeterminate to me: this one would have been a little over two feet long, if that helps any), eyes closed, tiny fingers clenching and unclenching as he sucked dreamily on a swollen brown nipple. The two vampires were standing with their backs to me, one at either side of the bed, Whistler in black slacks and turtleneck, and the Viscount shirtless, his tuxedo pants held up by narrow black suspenders that, when he turned to face me, made his bony ivory-white chest seem even paler—I thought of Lawrence of Arabia just before that wicked Jose Ferrer had him flogged.
"Hello, Mandy." I announced myself from the doorway.
"Hallo, Nick." Mandy was a bicontinental witch from the Netherlands—I tried to remember whether she'd been visibly pregnant at the previous Midsummer or not.
"Nick," said Whistler, affectless as ever. "You're just in time."
"For what, to hear Disraeli's collected speeches?"
"Oh dear." With the merest upward turn of his palm, the Viscount apologized. "It is good advice, though: if your conscience hasn't stopped you from doing something beforehand, it hasn't any right to nag at you afterwards."
"I'll keep that in mind." I shut the door behind me. "Motherhood seems to agree with you, Mandy."
"I feel goodt." She did look lovely: black hair in an early seventies shag, long cheekbones that gave her narrow black eyes a modest slant.
"How's the kid?"
"I just toldt the two men, soon he falls asleep."
Hmm. "Let me make a wild guess here," I said to Whistler.
"Does it upset you?" He was more curious than concerned.
I turned to Mandy, as if to pass the question on. She looked down at the baby, who had indeed fallen asleep at her breast, then back up at me. "It does him no harm."
"So it's true, what they say about baby-blood?"
"Ah, but you must see for yourself," the Viscount interjected. "Much more scientific, you see. I know how you Americans are about science."
"I prefer the liberal arts, myself," I said. "Very liberal." Trying to keep it light—but I couldn't take my eyes off that baby. "Is there—will there be enough for three of us?"
"For six. Three vampires and three consciences."
The actual taking of the blood was performed judiciously, almost tenderly: Whistler took his works from a drawer in the bedside table, tapped a vein in the baby's foot so smoothly he never even woke up, and drew three small vials of blood, each about the size of a fountain-pen cartridge. The Viscount took the filled ampules, capped them, slipped them into his trouser pocket, and after kissing Mandy goodnight we tiptoed out. I turned at the door to see the mother and child snuggling up close in the iron-steaded bed, a rustic quilt pulled up to their chins.
We dragged three redwood lawn chaises down to the white crescent of Whistler's beach. Rumor was that he had sand shipped in from Maui. It was a moonless night, and even at three in the morning the casino lights brightened the sky to the south. The Viscount had borrowed a set of sweats from Whistler. If we hadn't already been blood-high we'd have been shivering, but as it was, the bite in the air added zest to the evening. The Viscount passed out the ampules; I was about to uncap mine when Whistler put his hand lightly on my arm. This was unusual: he was not a toucher, outside of sex. "You asked if what they said about baby-blood was true?"
"Is it?"
"Depends what they say."
"Different things. Augie says he freaked, his first time."
"Mmmmm. Yes, well… how to put this…" Whistler looked about him, and, not surprisingly, found the lake; he gestured with a long, spectrally pale forefinger towards the sparkling blackness. "Let us posit that nighttime lake out there to be the world as it appears to a normal consciousness. The lake at night is all surface: one trusts there's depth down there, but basically it's impenetrable to the eye, and what one takes one takes on faith.
"But have you ever been out on that lake in the daytime? I never have, personally, but they say it's clear enough that one can see fish swimming fathoms below, even make out the lake-bed, until it drops off to the depths."
I nodded, and he continued; I couldn't see the Viscount in the next chair, but I was pretty sure he was smiling. "You've seen it then. Good. Let's say that's the world on blood. But a hundred years ago this lake was so clear that even in the deepest parts one could see as clearly looking down as looking up: it was transparent as the air: it was glass.
"That's what baby-blood does for one: that's the world on baby-blood: one sees clear to the bottom."
"And Augie didn't like what he saw?"
"It's what he didn't see, more likely."
"And what didn't he see?"
"An illusion. He didn't see a single, stinking illusion anywhere."
I uncapped my vial, and raised it to the dark lake. "Clear to the bottom, eh?" I said.
"Clear to the bottom." Whistler raised his vial, and then the Viscount joined our toast: "To the bottom," he said, and tossed back the contents of the little vial with a practiced gesture, like a man knocking back one of those tidy little bottles of airline booze.
Chapter 8
« ^ »
ONE
Betty pushed back Nick's chair and stretched tent
atively, checking out her body a segment at a time: whatever position she'd been contorted into for the past hour or two, it had not been one for which the human body had been designed by its Maker. She groaned aloud, as much to hear a human sound as anything else, then pushed herself up from the chair and headed down the hall to the guest bathroom that Nick had pointed out, a small toilet-only water closet like the one in his story. The walls were covered with a textured Japanese willow-print wallpaper, white with delicate silver brush-stroke traceries.
When she returned to the office, Nick had freshened her coffee. But the screen was dark, and when she tapped the space key, she seemed to have jumped to a later place in the story. "Nick?"
"Yeah?" He was in the bedroom down the hall. "Thanks for the refill. But it feels like I've missed some pages."
"What?" He hurried in, alarmed. "Where did you leave off?"
"You, Whistler, and the Viscount had just drunk the baby-blood." Nick looked relieved as he glanced over her shoulder at the screen. "Sorry, my fault. I blocked real bad on the next part—I realized I could barely stand thinking about it. And as for writing it down, forget it. I tried it a dozen different ways—couldn't get over it, couldn't get around it. Finally I decided I'd sneak up on it—skip over the hairiest part, and flash back to it."
"I see," said Betty dubiously.
"Trust me, it'll all come clear if you just keep going."
Betty couldn't help herself: "Clear to the bottom?" Nick flinched. "Something like that."
A white glare floods my dream. A heavenly white glare as though the sun had somehow slipped behind the sky. I try to bring my hand up to shield my eyes, but the hand will not move.
A face looms over me: a basset-eared, droop-nosed face, more lined now than when I'd seen it last, but still: "Leon?"
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