Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

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  Chapter Seven

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  I awakened knowing that somehow in my sleep I had grown gigantic, so gigantic that I contained worlds, whole stellar systems, yet I contained nothing, it was I that was contained, supported, cherished. Dara sleeping in my arms contained me as I contained her, both of us grown immeasurably vast there, in the back of the truck, between the clean sheets.

  I must have dozed off again because the next thing I remember was Dara shaking me awake.

  "Get up, David. It's late."

  We dressed and ate some fruit from the cooler, then drove to the rim. I locked the truck. We shouldered our packs and started down the trail, Dara leading. She was wearing a pair of jeans and one of my T-shirts, plus a pair of tennis shoes we'd picked up for her in a supermarket the day before. I was shirtless and barefoot: I'd done a lot of barefoot backpacking in the woods behind Big Sur and my feet were tough.

  There were only a few clouds in the sky and as we worked our way down the morning temperatures climbed rapidly through the nineties. But it felt good to sweat, good to be walking down the trail with a pack on my back, good to be with Dara. I felt in harmony with all creation. The only problem was avoiding the puddles of mule piss and the piles of mule dung, but even shoeless as I was it was not a problem to be taken seriously. Occasionally we had to flatten ourselves against the wall to let a mule train pass us.

  We walked slowly, letting the other hikers pass on. There was an unhurried, dreamlike quality to our descent that the weight of my pack, the tourists and the mules somehow only intensified.

  It was well past noon and immensely hot—I'd heard one of the people passing us say the temperatures had already hit a hundred and thirteen degrees—when the day began to cloud over. We'd worked our way down through the layers of yellow limestone and pale pinkish sandstone into the brick-red hermit shale and below that to the slightly paler red of the Supai formation. Thick clouds were sweeping out of the northwest to cover the sky and the hot canyon air was growing thick and muggy.

  And suddenly I was an ant dangling unsupported over the abyss: I could feel the trail shifting beneath me, feel the rock splintering and cracking, crumbling away from beneath my feet, and I knew that I was going to fall, that nothing could save me from the abyss. Dara was somewhere immeasurably distant from me; I could see her only a few feet away from me but I knew I was alone, unsupported, beginning to fall—

  But Dara turned, reached back and brushed the center of my forehead with her fingertips and the trail was solid beneath my feet again. We continued on, switchbacking deeper and deeper into the canyon.

  It was almost dusk by the time we reached Indian Gardens, which we'd planned as our halfway point. Somehow it didn't seem to matter that we'd never reach the river or Bright Angel Campground by nightfall.

  But there was no question of staying at Indian Gardens. People were everywhere; mules were tied to all the hitching posts and brightly colored sleeping bags littered the ground; there were long lines for the drinking fountain. What we had come for was elsewhere.

  We were a long way past Indian Gardens and it was getting dark before it started to rain. Though the air had begun to cool it must have still been in the eighties and the first raindrops felt good on our sweat-soaked bodies. But as the temperature dropped and the rain increased to a cold torrent we began to shiver. We were soaked through, and since the weather report had been for three days of clear skies I hadn't thought to bring any rain gear—we had no tent, no jackets, not even a ground sheet to put under our sleeping bags, nothing with which to dry or protect ourselves.

  We continued on in the twilight and then in the darkness, using my flashlight. The storm showed no sign of letting up, was if anything getting worse; water ran in little rivulets across and down the trail. We hugged the wall, afraid of losing our balance on the slippery rocks.

  Lightning flashed two, three times. By its light I could make out what looked like a small cave some ways off to the left.

  It might provide us with the shelter we needed for the night. I took the flashlight from Dara and scrambled off across the loose, slippery rocks and up to the entrance.

  At first I thought it was too shallow to be any use to us, but when I shone the light into it I detected an oval hole big enough to crawl through in the back. I knelt down and aimed the light through the hole.

  Inside it was unexpectedly beautiful. Delicate crystalline formations grew from walls, ceiling and floor, like an intricate three-dimensional lattice of glass lace. The formations were totally unlike anything described in the Grand Canyon guidebooks: instead of the crushed and flattened roots of long-buried mountains I'd found fairyland. The air inside was fresh and the floor near the entrance was not only level and free of crystals, but dry. We could sleep there.

  "It's not only perfect, it's beautiful," I told Dara when I returned for the packs. "We can sleep in there, safe from the rain."

  She lit my way back to the cave with the flashlight but stopped just inside the outer entrance, refused to go any further.

  "No," she said. "It might not be safe."

  "Why?" For some reason the fear I could hear in her voice, see on her face, was suddenly contemptible, irritating. "Do you want to stay outside and get wetter?"

  "No, but—David, we can't go in until we're sure. They're stronger in caves."

  "Who are?" She wouldn't answer me. "There's no reason not to sleep in there, nothing to be afraid of."

  "Nothing? David, can't you feel it?"

  There was only the noise of the storm, the tattoo of the rain on the rocks outside, the cold wet wind cutting into my back and neck. And yet—

  I tried to reach in through the opening, felt something like a greasy membrane resist the forward motion of my hand. Before I could pull it back the membrane had given way, stretched without breaking to hold my hand like a tight glove of flabby lung tissue.

  And suddenly I was afraid. Afraid of the dark, afraid of the closed confines of the cave, of the millions of tons of rock overhead. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid even of the Grand Canyon rattlesnakes, the pale pinkish rattlers found nowhere else in the world. This cave would be perfect for them.

  And then Alexandra lay newly dead on the floor of the cave, hundreds of flesh-pink rattlesnakes squirming over her body like maggots or the boneless fingers of dead children.

  I yanked my hand back. The membrane clung to it an instant, reluctant to release me, and then I was free and Alexandra was gone.

  The cave was empty. All my fears seemed absurd. Grand Canyon rattlesnakes? I had far deadlier snakes in my truck. But the membrane, that had been real, that was something to fear—and Alexandra had been killed in a cave.

  "There's something stretched across the hole," I told Dara. "Like a flabby membrane. When I touched it it made me afraid, and I saw my wife lying dead—"

  But she was smiling, shaking her head. "No, it's all right then. I hadn't dared hope they'd still be so weak. I was afraid—" She caught herself, said, "Here!" as she stepped forward and reached past me to thrust her arm, the one with the Naga coiled around it, into the hole. There was a brief flash of light, like a spider web burning, then nothing.

  "Let me go first, just in case. There may still be some traps left inside."

  She climbed in through the hole, sweeping the air in front of her with her Naga-wrapped arm. After a few seconds she smiled and gestured me in after her.

  I put the flashlight down on a rock and handed the packs in to her, then picked it up again and followed them in. It was warm inside the cave, much warmer than it had been outside.

  "Dara—"

  "I still can't answer your questions, David. Not yet."

  "When, then?"

  "Soon. I promise. Very soon."

  We spread the sleeping bags out, undressed and crawled in between them. And then, without warning, the tension that had kept us apart for so long was gone and I was reaching for her, pulling her to me, and she was holding tigh
t to me, kissing me. As I touched, tasted her, felt her hesitant fingers exploring my stiffening cock, I was diving into a sea of light, into the center of some unknown sun, yet at the same time I was being caught up in a gossamer web, encased in sheath after sheath of darkness.

  "Please, David. Make love to me." With Alexandra love-making had been all prowess and technique, all pride and control; with Dara I regained a simplicity I'd never known I'd lost. Her flesh against mine, the taste of her mouth, her skin, the curve of her thigh beneath my hand, all were new to me, new and exciting in a way that Alexandra's expertise had never been.

  When I entered her there was a momentary resistance—she was a virgin, I realized—and then we were moving together, joined in a rhythm at first quiet, almost languid, but swelling, accelerating, beating faster and more powerfully until finally I exploded into total synesthesia, into an orgasm that blasted my eyes with color and my ears with sound, a total experience like nothing I had ever known before, claiming all of me, destroying me and re-creating me out of nothingness.

  And then it was over and we lay together in the still darkness of the cave, our arms around each other, my limp cock still in her, still joining us as we kissed.

  Her face was wet. I put my hand to her cheek. She was crying.

  I kissed her softly beneath her eyes, held her until her breathing changed and I knew she was asleep, watched over her until I too fell asleep.

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  Chapter Eight

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  That morning we passed from sleep into wakefulness and from wakefulness into lovemaking so naturally that there was no sense of transition: we were asleep, and then we were making love. We were tender, gentle, almost shy with each other; there were no pyrotechnics like there'd been the night before, and yet for all our shyness we met and merged and were changed.

  When it was over we lay side by side in the cool darkness. I was at peace, content for the moment to lie on my back and feel the warm sage-scented breeze from the entrance blow across my body, yet I felt alert, awake, full of energy, with none of the torpor or dullness that so often follows sex.

  I slowly became aware that though the only light in the cave was a dim glow filtering through the entrance hole, I could see the ceiling above me, its delicate crystal stalactites glowing with a ghostly silver light, the dark stones from which they hung shimmering faintly, as though coated with moonlit spider webs.

  But what I was doing was not exactly seeing, or not just seeing, for I had become aware of the roof in the same way you feel the heat starting to go out of the air just before the day begins cooling off, and now, looking up at the ceiling, I could feel it in much the same way as, blindfolded, you can feel the pressure of a wall you're groping for against your fingers just before you touch it.

  "David." I rolled over on my side to face Dara. Her skin shone with the palest of silver glows but her eyes were still golden, small suns in this place of the moon.

  "David, you just realized that you can see in the dark now." I nodded. "And you want to know why."

  "Yes."

  "Because making love with me has changed you, just as making love with you has changed me. You are no longer the same person you were yesterday. Nor am I."

  Her voice was very tired, very sad. I didn't understand. I put my arms around her, felt her shoulder muscles knotted tight with tension. I tried to work the tension out of them, felt her relax slightly.

  "I believe you, Dara. But—who are you? Why are you here, with me?"

  "I don't know anymore. I—agreed not to know, and I let them take my memories away from me so I could be here with you now and so we could make love with each other, but—"

  She shook her head, forced herself to go on. "David, all this was planned for us. By someone else, for his own purposes. I was put by that highway to wait for you. Everything was arranged in advance."

  "Everything…"I remembered feeling suddenly hungry, looking for an exit, deciding I had a better chance of finding something without meat in it at the taco stand than at the hamburger stand across the road. Everything.

  "Alexandra?"

  "Yes." A whisper. "I'm sorry, David."

  "Why?"

  "To get you here with me. Because we are—not like other people. You can see in the dark now, and there are other things that you—that both of us—will be able to do later, when we've learned what our abilities are and how to use them.

  "Because of this we are of use to the man who—arranged all this. Who killed your wife. He took me away from my grandparents when I was very young and brought me to live with him in a huge cave underground, but he couldn't prevent them from giving me this—"

  She held up her left arm so I could see the nine-headed cobra twisted around it better. It shone with a subtle, almost imperceptible, blue radiance, paler by far than the silver cave-glow, while its eyes—red by day—shone golden like Dara's own.

  "He brought us here so he could make use of us. But, David, the… what we are together, we really are. The way you feel about me, the way I feel about you—none of that was forced on us. It could not be forced on us. This is vital and you must understand it, you must believe it. Our love, our lovemaking, was planned, yes, but only because he knew it to be inevitable if we were brought together. He did not create it or force it on us; he only makes use of it."

  "But why do you let him—use you?"

  "Because I had no other choice and because he is—I don't remember him, David, not who he is. They took that away from me. All I remember is what I thought about him, what I believed and what I knew was true, but not… why I believed it or how I knew it was true. But he isn't, I remember that he isn't, altogether evil, and he—owns my death. Controls it. Not how I'm going to die, or where, or when, but what will happen to me afterwards."

  "But you don't remember what that is?"

  "No, but—I used to know and it frightens me, David. It terrifies me."

  "Do you remember, not who he is but what he is, if he's even a human being, or—I saw something when Alexandra was killed, like a blue cloud with demons and… things inside it—"

  "No. He's a human being. But those things you saw, those were some of his enemies, and not all of them are human. Though the ones you saw might have been human, and keeping their true forms hidden from you. But they're our enemies now, because he wants to use us to help him defeat them, and they know it."

  "Use us how?"

  "I don't know how, but I know that—once he's safe from them, and he no longer has to worry about them or be afraid that they'll be able to use us against him, then I'll get my memories back and he'll free both of us. But if they defeat him my death will pass from his hands into theirs and they… hate me, David, and they're evil, what they want to do is evil… That's why I let him take my memories away, so that his enemies can't use me against him, because he's the only chance I have. That either of us has. But if he succeeds in defeating them we'll be safe."

  "If what he's told you and what you remember are true."

  "Yes."

  "Dara, do you remember—when you got into the truck for the first time, the way you and the baby cobra stared at each other?"

  "He didn't use me to make the bushmaster kill her, David."

  "Are you sure? He couldn't have made you do it, and then made you forget it?"

  "No. I remember that he… didn't force me to help him."

  "I'm glad, but—he's still set it up so that right now you don't know enough to do anything except what he wants you to do. No matter what that is. And if I believe any of what you've told me, I have to, maybe not believe all of it, but act as if I did, as if the only hope for either of us was to help him get what he wants—"

  "And you believe me."

  "You. Not him. But—Dara? Why me? Is it because of my family?" I was afraid of the answer, didn't want her to say that I'd fallen into the world of vampirism and eternal damnation that all the books I'd sought out, all the historians who spoke of Elizabeth Bathory as pathol
ogically insane, Vlad Tepes as a "cunning Renaissance prince" and a "technician of terror," had enabled me to deny.

  "Because of who we are, and what we are together. That's all I know, David. I'm sorry."

  I put my arms around her and held her, not questioning her, letting her know as best I could that I still believed her, that I still loved and trusted her. Not her hidden master, nor his plans for us, but her, Dara, the girl I was holding.

  "His enemies," I said a while later. "Why did I see them there if he was the one who killed Alexandra?"

  "Your wife had something to do with them, was maybe one of them, and what you saw was them trying to protect her."

  "They failed." I could summon up no bitterness, no sense of loss.

  "Because they're still weaker then he is. But his power is waning, and they're growing stronger. Soon they'll be more powerful than he is, and then they'll try to destroy us or gain control of us. That attack they made on you on the way down, the membrane they put across the entrance to the cave—those were just ways of testing us, finding out how strong we were. But as long as we keep them from separating us or turning us against each other our powers will keep on increasing, and we should be strong enough soon to protect ourselves without his help."

  "Again, if what he told you—what you remember him telling you—was true."

  "Yes."

  "What does he want me to do?"

  "Just continue driving and visiting all the places you'd planned to visit, while our powers grow and we wait for his summons."