It was a particularly useful tip for a furry therapist such as Sherman—he found himself bristling all over like the hedgehog prince in the fairy tale as Catherine described the beach at sunset on Yule's eve, how the twelve other women formed a circle around her, stripping her, Selene administering the fivefold kiss; how they slid the forest green robe over her head.
She remembered it all: the satiny feel of the gown sliding down her body, the steely sky, the sun melting into a cold crimson puddle at the horizon, how she'd started trembling (not from the cold—it was a mild December evening even on the beach; more like the cell-deep shivers that sometimes accompany the second hour of an acid trip) as Selene raised her athame and cut the pentacle gate to the other world.
Catherine stopped there. No sense telling him the incantations, naming the Great Ones—she'd already told Sherman more than she should have. He knew it, too, and it frightened him a little. He couldn't take his eyes off her face—she had a sweet round Irish milkmaid's face, and her eyes were green as moss.
"After the initiation I was sent back to my room to meditate, and throw the runes. Eventually Selene came around with the athame and the bowl. I remember the bowl sitting on the calico comforter, the slow tipping sound of the blood dripping—she only nicked me ever so lightly—the most uncomfortable part was holding my wrist over the bowl for so long. Tip, tip, tip. The blood was darker than red. We talked about the vampires while it fell.
"I hadn't seen any of them yet—I'd only learned about them for sure the night before the initiation. I'd have been more shocked, but I'd pieced together some idea out of bits of overheard conversations, things like that. Anyway, I was sort of nervous—talk about your blind date!
"But Selene said she knew from my runes that I was going to fall in love with one of the vampires, and not only that, she knew exactly which one—but wouldn't tell me. Anybody else, you'd think that was bullshit, but with Selene you never knew.
"After that, naturally, I was dying of curiosity—I couldn't wait until midnight. And then, of course, all I ended up getting to see of them was their dicks.
"It didn't matter, though—the senior witches brought them in one at a time in dark red robes with holes cut out for their mouths and their dicks—" She closed her eyes, as if she could see them still. "—and they drank the blood and their dicks got hard, and along about the fourth or fifth dick—it wasn't the biggest one, but it was thick like a root, and ginger colored, and, I don't know, just… cute somehow, and zing went the strings of my heart.
"And at that exact moment I look up, and there's Selene watching me, her little face just grinning from ear to ear—she looked more like an elf than a witch—you could just picture the pointy ears under that green hood."
Sherman was blushing pink—not the fine red of a blood flush but a rubber-ball pink. She sat up, opened her eyes, and turned to face him. He found himself forgetting to breathe—it was the suspended feeling you get during the earthquake, now that she was talking to him directly again.
"After that it was like in a fairy tale: 'and so it came to pass.' We found each other at the Yule orgy the next night, and it was all my sexual fantasies come true: I loved teddy-bear men, and this was a teddy-bear man with a hard-on that wouldn't quit. There's one particular time from that night I still remember. It wasn't the biggest orgasm, it wasn't a screamer or anything—we'd been in the middle of a pretty intense cluster-fuck, when all of a sudden we looked at each other and without saying a word we knew we wanted to be alone together, and we went up to my room and locked the door and I lay down on my back and opened my legs and you dove into me, do you remember?"
"How could I forget?" He'd been on top of her and in her, but curled up like a pinchbug and slightly turned to the side so he could suckle at her breast while she moved dreamily beside him, underneath him, in a gentle wavelike lapping motion. They had gone on for hours: every so often he would reach for his razor-stropped pocketknife on the bedside table and nick at a vein, and together they would feel him swelling inside her, and then perhaps he'd piston into her for a few minutes—one of them might come, or both—and then they'd subside into their gently rocking, suckling trance.
"Okay. I gave you my blood, and you gave me what I needed, and in between we fell in love. And we went on like that for all those years, and sometimes it got weird, but the sex never let us down, did it? And if that's codependence, then so be it."
She turned away from him and stared at the Christmas tree for a minute; when she closed her eyes again she saw a cone of black dots behind her eyelids. "But then I went away for Candlemas five years ago, and when I came back you didn't want my blood anymore—you'd gone into recovery. So I went into recovery, and that—if you really think about it instead of letting the program think for you—is the biggest codependency of all: giving up your codependency for somebody else."
"How long have you felt this way?"
"In my heart of hearts? Always, I guess. Or at least—well, one of my first codependent exercises was to find myself a still quiet moment once a day—just after you wake up, just before you fall asleep is also cool—and ask myself, 'What do I really want?' Or better, 'What does Cathy really want?'
"But I had to give it up, because every time, what Cathy really wanted was blood-sex, and that simply wasn't an acceptable recovering codependent thing to want."
"So it's the sex? But you always said that our lovemaking had been so much more real since we went into recovery together."
"I'm a co, remember? What did you expect me to say?"
"But something must have triggered this off—you didn't just leave the Coven in the—" He stopped, alerted by something in the way she'd turned away, the way she'd chosen that moment to take a bite of Christmas cookie, then her first sip of tea. "Wait a minute, does this have something to do with the Coven?"
"I'm not supposed to talk about that."
He put his hand on the wrist of the hand that held her teacup, and guided it down to the table, then brought his face near enough to hers that he could smell her sweet vanilla Christmas cookie crumb breath. "It's too late for that now, and the stakes are too high. You've got to tell me what's going on, Cathy. After twenty years you owe me that."
She put her hand on his knee. "Wait here."
He followed her with his eyes as she left the living room; he heard her steps on the stairs; overhead he heard the shriek of the chronically untracked sliding closet door in the bedroom opening, closing. In the silence that followed, he found himself focusing on his reflection in the dark picture window; he imagined his eyes flushing blood red—then Catherine's reflection appeared behind him in the glass, in her diaphanous black Victoria's Secret nightgown with her right hand held behind her back.
She crossed the room and sat next to him, leaned into him with her breast pressed unsubtly against his arm, and produced from behind her back his trusty pocketknife. At the sight of it his eyes welled with tears. "I thought you'd thrown it away."
"You asked me to," she said. "I couldn't. Now listen to me, and if you love me don't ask me any questions. Will you do that for me?" Eyeball to eyeball. He nodded. "Okay then. Vampires Anonymous is going down." He started to protest—she placed her finger across his lips. "Now you promised, right? No questions?"
He nodded again, and she pulled her finger away. "I'm not saying your V.A. was a good thing or a bad thing—I do know you're lucky to have had it for a while. At least you got to talk about your issues sometimes without using euphemisms. But how about me? Can you imagine what it's like to try and talk about blood-sex at an S.L.A. meeting, trying to tell people what it was like and you know even before the words have left your mouth that they'll never have a clue."
She leaned closer as she spoke, until their foreheads were touching. "Or sharing at a CODA meeting—some poor woman is beating herself up cause she bought her husband a lousy six-pack, and I want to tell her, 'You think that's enabling? Practically every night for fifteen years, I opened a vein for my man. And
if he'd only ask me, I'd do it again tonight.' "
She handed him the knife—to his surprise, he took it. "But that's all water under the bridge now. You're just going to have to believe me: the last recovering vampire will be drinking blood by the summer solstice. This will happen, Sherman—your only choice in the matter is whether you'll be that last recovering vampire or not. But let me warn you: if you are, I'll have left you long before that. You won't have me, and you won't have your precious sobriety either."
He looked down at the blade in his hand, but what he was seeing in his mind's eye was a glass snack bowl with about a quarter of an inch of blood in the bottom. Floating in the blood were a few left-over pretzel crumbs, rapidly staining red.
Sherman reached out for his wife's hand, and turned it palm up. "Do you think my knife's still sharp enough?" he asked her. Sherman was not, as he might have put it, entirely in touch with his feelings at this particular moment, elation and terror in equal parts forming an alloy difficult to assay.
Catherine, on the other hand, felt a sense of triumph and satisfaction so absolutely piercing that she could feel her sex growing moist. "If it ain't, lover," she purred, "you can hone it on my nipples, 'cause I guarantee you they're hard enough."
TWO
Whistler awoke at sunset to a faint popcorn sound: Pop. Pop. Pop-pop. Pop-pop-pop. Popopopopopopopop… On his back on the foam pallet, eyes closed, he sniffed the air. Ozone. He allowed himself a smile: he'd forgotten the sound of the rain on the forest canopy.
He listened as the storm passed overhead. When the popping slowed to two or three seconds between pops—the point at which, if it were popcorn, it would be time to take it out of the microwave—he sat up, taking care not to disturb Lourdes, who was snoring beside him. Whistler unzipped his sleeping bag, ducked out from under the mosquito net, stood up, pushed aside the wooden shutters, and reached out to catch in his palm the first clear drops of rain to filter through the canopy.
A rap at the door. "Just a moment." Whistler pulled a pair of jeans out of an open suitcase, slid them on without underwear, and crossed the room barefoot as a beachcomber. The door was massive and mahogany, as were all the doors in the Greathouse; when he turned the brass knob and yanked, it resisted him. Whistler, unaccustomed to doing anything physically strenuous before he'd had a little eye-opener, yanked harder; the door swung open—it was his old nanny.
"Merry Christmas, me son."
"Merry Christmas, Nanny Eames."
"Sleep well?"
He nodded. "The rain awakened me. I'd forgotten what a lovely sound it makes up there."
"You t'irsty now?"
"Do with a little pick-me-up."
"Wackwit'me, den."
He followed her down the winding staircase to the second floor, and along the balcony until they reached her room. She reminded him of a Gorey illustration—the funereal dress, the hovering, gliding walk that never left the floor but never quite seemed to touch it, either.
The room was empty, the couches pushed back against the walls, the cushions stacked in the corner, the massive black-canopied four-poster bed made up tidily—no orgy had raged Christmas Eve, only a circumspect threesome: Whistler, Lourdes, and Nanny Eames, and of course a carefully staggered succession of Drinks.
Nanny pushed aside the mosquito net around the bed, and waved Whistler on ahead of her. "Buoy or gyirl?" she asked, as he helped her up onto the bed.
"A girl, I think."
She reached through the mosquito net, and from the bedside table (which was something of a curiosity—a massive section of the trunk of an elephant-leg tree, hollowed out and overturned) she seized a hand-wrought iron bell and gave it two brisk clanks. A moment later a Luzan girl of about sixteen, dressed in a thin white cotton shift, with her nappy hair twisted into twin red-ribboned pigtails, was standing at the footboard.
It was Josephina; at a wordless signal from Nanny, she slid quietly around to Whistler's side of the bed and stepped through the netting. With a razor-edged utility knife that had been concealed in her left hand, she opened a lengthwise quarter-inch slit in a wormlike vein on the back of her right hand without wincing, presenting it to Whistler with her eyes turned down. He sucked for a minute or two, then relinquished the little brown hand—the skin was dry, the knuckles nearly black—with a lingering kiss that was both gentlemanly and lascivious at the same time. Josephina kept her head respectfully inclined, but the tip of her tongue darted in and out of sight, quick as a fat pink lizard.
Then she curtseyed and backed across the room, her left hand pressed against her right to stanch the wound. Whistler followed her with his eyes. When the door had shut behind her he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. "Ah, that's much better."
Nanny Eames sat propped up against the headboard on several black-slipped pillows. "Tanks for de… how do you call dot t'ing?"
"It's a camera, Nanny."
"I know dot, rubbledehux." She rapped him on the side of the head with her knuckles. "What kyine?"
"Oh, it's a Polaroid."
She had taken one of the snaps from last night out from under her pillow—she examined it, shaking her head, then passed it to Whistler. "Dot's a oooold woman in dot picture, me son."
"Yes, but look how you've got the whole thing in your mouth, Nanny. And your position there? Why, I know women a quarter your age who aren't that supple."
She tilted her ancient head coquettishly. "You t'ink so?"
"Obsolutely," he said in dialect.
She laughed. "Now you be tackin' Luzan, Whistler. But Prescott say you gon' to leave de island nex' week."
Whistler nodded. "Spend Christmas here, New Year's in Tahoe, finish up some business over the winter, then spring in Greece."
"Will you let de chyile be bahn deh?"
Whistler's long jaw fell. "The what?"
"De chyile. She ain' tell you yet?"
Whistler could only shake his head.
Nanny shrugged, and her black dress made that whispering noise again. "Maybe she ain' know herself."
"Please, Nanny. It's too early in the evening for riddles."
"Your Lourdes, me son. She's wit' chyile."
Suddenly Whistler found himself wishing that Josephina had not left the room—lord lord lord, but he could have stood another Drink. "Are you telling me I'm going to be a father?"
Nanny Eames's laughter was as dry and whispery as the rustle of her black bombazine. "Only she can tell you if you be dot." She patted him on the thigh. "But probably so—she love you a bit."
"And I love her a bit as well," he said wonderingly. "But how did you know she was pregnant?"
Nanny smiled—she still had all her teeth. "Me only been tastin' her tun-tun juice since de second night she arrive, me son."
THREE
"Thank you so much for giving up your Christmas to help us out, Lou."
"My pleasure." Cheese Louise picked up the box of cooking utensils, garnishing tools, and sauces and spices she'd brought over with her for the Christmas dinner at the North Berkeley Senior Center, and followed Catherine out of the kitchen. They were both wearing jeans and soiled white chef's jackets. "To tell you the truth, I didn't exactly have a big evening planned."
"Could I get one more favor from you? I have to check that all the rooms are empty before I lock up—would you mind coming with me. It's always a little nervous-making, especially after one of these homeless feeds."
"Sure. Just a sec." She set down the box by the back door, and picked out a fearsome-looking cleaver. "Lead on."
Catherine took them up the back stairs, explaining that the elevator was a little too dangerous at night. "I hate this feeling of being helpless," she confided over her shoulder to Louise. "It's one of the only things I hate about being a woman." When there was no response she tried another cast. "It's also one of the things I used to envy you for, when you were still a vampire."
"I'm still a vampire," replied Louise. "I'm just in recovery."
"When you were
using, then. How nobody could fuck with you."
They had reached the top of the stairs; Louise was breathing heavily. "Girl, do I ever remember!" She followed Catherine down the corridor, cleaver raised. "I was just talking about that at a meeting a few weeks ago—hey, has Sherman been blabbing about our shares in meetings?"
Catherine turned back. "Of course not. I was just remembering that time those guys tried to crash Augie's New Year's Eve party."
"That was fun, wasn't it?"
"The expression on the big one's face when you decked him? Priceless."
The second floor was clear; they checked out the front stairs, then the downstairs rooms, and returned to the back hallway, where Louise shouldered her box of tools again while Catherine punched in the code to arm the security system, then hurried them out the rear exit.
"This is the most dangerous part of the whole trip," Catherine remarked, surveying the unlighted parking lot.
"Cover me," said Louise dryly, handing Catherine the box while she searched her purse for her car keys. But they made it to the Cheese Louise van without incident; Catherine stowed the box in the back, remarking pointedly that the rear doors hadn't been locked.
"Nothing to steal anyway," Louise replied, turning on the engine and pulling onto Bonita. She'd gone about a block when she felt something cold and hard and metallic pressing against the little bump at the back of her shorn skull.
"Don't move, don't talk, don't turn around." It was a man's voice, a hoarse disguised whisper. She couldn't see his ski mask, but she could smell the wool. "And if your eyeballs so much as glance toward that mirror, I'll blow them all over the windshield."
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