by Baker, Scott
At a signal from Uncle Stephen I stepped over the flames and into the circle. The smoke was aloes and musk, amber and incense, violets and vanilla and cinnamon, complex and exciting, so thick it was almost liquid, yet it was cool against my skin and eyes.
But I was blinded by it nonetheless. Dara and I found each other by touch, stood awkwardly afraid an instant before risking our first embrace.
Holding her at last, feeling her warm smooth oil-slicked flesh against mine, I knew that she was all and everything I had ever wanted, that I could ever want, and yet for a moment I held myself back, still suspicious of Uncle Stephen, still afraid of the worm curled inside me. But hope and desire overcame my fear and we sank down onto the grass and began to make love.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-eight
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In Dara's embrace I forgot all else, forgot the worm in my belly, forgot that I was engaged in a sexual rite for magical purposes. The spice-scented smoke coiled itself around us, sheltered and hid us as we rediscovered the smoothnesses and softnesses, the unexpected hollows and angularities, of each other's bodies. And as we touched and tasted and held each other, long before I knelt between her legs and she guided me into her, our fears and needs began to slough from us like the clouded skin an emerald tree boa sheds when the time has come to reveal the glittering beauty of the new skin underneath. We were there, with each other, making love: there was no need of anything else.
The power built in us, was us, united us with the living earth and the forest around us. We shared in the jiggling dance of the smoke molecules in the air above us; we drew water up from the roots of the grass on which we lay to satisfy the thirst of its green blades; we quivered in the wind with the trees surrounding us, drifted gently to earth with a falling leaf. And as our union evolved towards ultimate violence, ultimate still-ness, we wove more and more of ourselves into the forest and the earth, into the smoke and the wind and the sun.
Monteleur—no longer a worm, but a strange configuration of twisting darknesses—wove itself into the pattern we were creating, were becoming, never a part of it yet always remaining in somehow harmonious counterpoint to it.
Below us, far below us, was the jeweled palace of the sun where the Queen sat in glory on her throne of ivory and as we sank our roots ever deeper into the living earth we could feel its warmth coursing through us, melting the frozen diamonds that covered our eyes and blinded us, opening us to the solar wind—
And we were trapped in the congealed wax of my father's corpse, lying dull and heavy and dead in his coffin as his hungers erupted like a sudden cancer in our lovemaking and we died, broke apart into a David and a Dara struggling to keep themselves from fragmenting even further as they fought against their newborn lust for each other's blood, their terrible need to violence, and then we were Gregory Mihnea Bathory and we were falling through the insatiable dark that his hunger had opened within him, through the endless frozen void and the icy wind that scoured the flesh from his body, gouged it particle by frozen particle from him and whirled it away into the hungry darkness. Soon the naked bone would jut from the crystalline tatters of his flesh, soon the bone itself would be gone, eaten by the wind, and all that would remain of him would be an ever-thinner cloud of ice crystals.
Above me, lost in the dark, was the tiny spot of light that meant rebirth. There, if Satan accepted my submission and lifted me from the knife-edged wind, I would find the blood to warm my frozen soul, to reanimate the life-starved flesh lying limp and heavy in my coffin.
There was no transition. I had been him, had shared his hunger and his pain, now I was there with him, falling with him through the dark and cold.
Or rather, we were there with him, for I shared the body I inhabited with Dara. The right side was male, the left, female, with two sets of genitals crowded side by side between the unmatched legs and one full breast on the left side of the chest. A hermaphrodite. Yet though we shared a single body we were no longer a single being: we no longer shared each other's thoughts, knew each other's feelings.
Then, suddenly, we were fighting my father as he tried to use our body as a steppingstone towards the invisible light overhead. Struggling, a tangled mass of arms and legs, we fell together through the wind.
Through the cold that was not the absence of heat and motion which I had learned about when I studied physics, the cold that stops with absolute zero and the cessation of all motion and change, but was a force sufficient to itself, an elemental will, the enemy of heat and warmth and life and not just its lack. But my father was three weeks dead and I was in a body not my own: it could do me no real damage.
A glowing red potbellied imp, like something from a comic book drawn by a man with little imagination but a truly malicious sense of humor, suddenly appeared in front of me.
"Would you like some help?" it asked in Monteleur's voice.
"Of course," Dara said. It was strange to feel what seemed to be my tongue and mouth moving in response to another's will.
"Will you agree to bind yourself to my service in return?"
"No." This time it was I who answered. The imp vanished.
My father was standing on our shoulders, stretching futilely towards the vanished light. I was supposed to vanquish him in a contest of will of some sort, but he seemed to be in the same situation I was in and, if anything, more terrified by it than I was: he was the one making the futile attempt to climb over us to safety.
"Do you understand what's happening?" I asked Dara, shaping the words and then letting my mouth go lax as I waited for her reply.
"Yes. We're trapped on one level of father's mind. This is a stage all the undead go through during their transformation."
"What do we do?"
"I don't know."
"If we're trapped in his mind, perhaps we can escape by willing ourselves back into our bodies. Try to project yourself back."
I summoned up all my own powers of concentration and tried to visualize myself back in the smoke-filled circle.
"Give up?" Monteleur asked. This time it was a great purple parrot with a huge yellow cock covered with warts and spines.
"No," I said. "I thought you were supposed to be helping me."
_ "I don't seem to be much help, do I?"
"Monteleur, I command you to help me."
"No. Not unless you bind yourself to my service."
"Why? Is this darkness your idea, or something Uncle Stephen planned for us?"
"No. It's a trap laid for you by your brother. And unless you find your way out of it before he reawakens he'll be able to keep you trapped here forever."
"Go away," I said. The familiar vanished again.
"Was that true?" I asked Dara.
"I don't know. But from what father told me I thought that the only thing involved in taking dominion was a straight contest of will power."
"You're sure? Nothing more?"
"Nothing that I know about."
We continued to fall.
"Perhaps if we can find a way to make love we can generate enough power to do something," I suggested. But our hermaphroditic body wasn't structured so that we could have sex with ourself and the cold so numbed our flesh that we were totally unresponsive to our attempts at cross-body caresses.
Father shifted his weight on our shoulders again. I reached up and hauled him down by the ankle, held him so that we were facing each other, though there was no way I could see him in the darkness.
"What do you want?" he asked. His voice was toneless, hollow yet somehow still as arrogant as it had been when he'd been alive.
"Tell me why you wanted to be on top."
"So that Satan will know I'm doing everything in my power to reach Him and surrender myself to Him." I was holding him so that his face was no more than a few inches from mine but I couldn't feel his breath on my face when he spoke.
Dara was trying to use our mouth. I surrendered it to her. "You've pledged yourself to Satan?"
"I have of
fered myself to Him but He has not yet accepted me."
"Do you believe him?" I asked Dara.
"I don't know."
"What's in store for you if Satan accepts you?" I asked.
"Blood," my father said. "Satan will send a river of flaming blood streaming down to me when He takes me for His own."
"Why would you want that?" I asked.
"It would bring me back to life."
"You'd still be here, wouldn't you?"
"No. This is death, the space between lives."
"Then Dara and I are dead too?"
"No. You're just here with me. I'm dead."
"What if we drink your blood?" I asked. "Will that get us out of here?"
"Mine?" he asked. "I have no blood."
"And if we drink our own?" Dara asked.
"It wouldn't do any good. You're both already alive. I'm the one who's dead."
"So why are we here?" I asked.
"You came in search of me. You found me dead and now you're trapped here with me."
I waited a moment to see if Dara wanted to use our voice, said, "What you're telling us is that we'll be here until your resurrection."
"Yes."
"And if you were to drink our blood?" Dara asked.
"Then I would be alive and you would both be returned to yourselves."
"He's lying, David."
"Why haven't you tried, then?" I demanded.
He didn't answer. I grabbed his head, forced it back to expose his throat.
"Forgive me if I'm doing you an injustice, father," I said. Then I bit him. It took me a while to rip his throat open, but when I did the blood he'd denied having began to ooze forth in a sluggish stream, thick, cold and bitter.
At first I had to force myself to swallow it. But it was warm inside me, heady and exciting, and as its warmth spread through me the taste changed, became shot through with sweetnesses, like bitter honey.
I drained him, hurled him away from me- to float dead and dry forever in the cold and the wind.
And the forest was dark and chill around me, and I was lost. The wind cut through my thin cloak, and the thick branches overhead hid the moon from me, blocked its light as they had blocked the light of the sun during the days I had stumbled, ever hungrier, ever thirstier, in search of the way I had lost.
Ahead of me a clearing, with something bright shining from it. A fountain. I ran towards it, tripped over a gnarled root and picked myself up.
There was only a mirror, tall and narrow, standing upright in the moonlight. I could see myself in it, a child of perhaps ten, my eyes swollen from crying, my cloak ripped where I'd caught it on a branch the night before. Behind me the shadowed forest, the trees with their leafless branches like claws, reaching down out of the sky to rend and tear me.
But the image in the mirror shimmered, rippled, and the dark forest was gone from it, had become a child's bedroom, damask-walled, lit by the silver candelabra the mirror-me held in one hand as he smiled at me and beckoned me in through the mirror.
I stepped forward, felt myself shimmer and ripple as I stepped through into the warmth, and the mirror-me was no longer me but was my twin, my identical twin, and yet she was a girl, pale and delicate and lovely. She lay sleeping on her bed and I stood over her, gazing down on her, smelling the sweet freshness of her skin and hair.
I bent over her, kissed her gently on the lips so as not to waken her, straightened again. She smiled in her sleep, raised her hand to touch her fingertips to her lips, smiled again. And as her hand fell away the ring she wore on it, bright silver and razor-petaled onyx, brushed against the paleness of her throat and opened a soft rose, a bright wet flower, in her skin. I stared at the welling blood, the thick fat trickle creeping down her neck to stain her pale hair and the silken pillow under her with widening brightness as she opened eyes like pale sapphires and laughed up at me, arching her neck in invitation to drink from the flower she had opened for me and me alone.
And yet I drew back from her, confused, the welling richness of her blood burning in my nostrils, in the cracked dryness of my throat, and yet I took another step back, and another, looked away from her and turned to leave.
"David." My father's voice, grave and resonant, with none of the hollowness it had had in the void. I turned back, saw a woman like my Aunt Judith step from the bed onto the floor, saw her become my father.
"You're strong, David, as strong as ever I was in life, as strong as a son of mine should be. But Michael too was strong, and Stephen, and the family cannot tolerate three reigning dhampires. So there is one more contest you must win to gain dominion over me."
"Stephen?" I asked. "Uncle Stephen?"
"Yes."
"This contest. What is it?"
"We must be joined, you and I, body to body, heart to heart, so that the same blood flows through both our bodies."
"And the contest?"
"Only one of us can control our heart. That one will have gained dominion over the other."
"And neither Michael nor Stephen have passed this test?"
"No. It is an ancient thing, rarely used."
We unbuttoned our shirts and took them off. He took a golden knife with a serrated edge from beneath the blood-soaked pillow and cut through the muscles and ribs protecting his chest, lifted them away to expose his naked heart. It did not beat.
He handed me the knife and I did the same thing to myself, finding to my surprise that there was no pain. When my naked pulsating heart was exposed my father moved closer to me and we pressed our hearts together so that the two organs fused.
"I can feel your blood," he said. "The warm blood of a living man, in my veins."
"And I can feel yours in mine," I found myself saying, "crying out for life."
While we spoke we fought for control of the eight-chambered heart we shared. His dead muscles resisted my efforts to spark them into life; my heart beat on despite his efforts to stop it. His thick, unoxygenated blood dulled my brain but I kept on fighting for control, kept on keeping my heart pumping.
At last he conceded defeat. "You have my heart and my life," he told me. I allowed the eight-chambered heart to fission, making sure I retained control over both halves even after they were separated. We put our ribs and severed muscles back in place and waited the few instants it took for them to knit.
"Is that all?" I asked.
"Yes.".
He was a too-heavy shadow trapping me in the long narrow corridor in which I was free, where I was the master, the rough-cut stone walls of the corridor also doors, hundreds upon hundreds of locked doors to which I was the key, and I was free to range the corridor, to open any and all of the doors, to close them and keep them closed—
"And I'm the head of the family now? I have dominion over you and all my ancestors?"
"Yes. Michael and Stephen can still command me as long as their commands do not conflict with yours, but you have final and complete dominion."
The walls were doors leading to the souls and selves of my ancestors but it was not yet night and they slept there behind the walls. There, in their coffins in the cavern beneath the house.
"What about Uncle Stephen? How can he be a member of your generation and still have the power to command you?"
"Through you, David. Through you," he said and he smiled. "But why not look inside me and learn the answers to all your questions for yourself?"
I looked into him and I saw. And as my memory returned to me and I knew where and how and why Uncle Stephen had lied to me, knew how he'd used me and what he'd done to me I found myself back in the circle, found myself building to an orgasm it was too late to avoid, but even as I climaxed in an explosion of synesthetic ecstasy I could feel Monteleur twisting and squirming in my belly.
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Chapter Twenty-nine
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I tried to wrench us out of noticeability, but the worm was there, pinning us to the world. I said, "Dara—" but the worm was in my voice and there was no way I
could wrap my words with silence and warn her against Uncle Stephen without letting him know what I knew, nothing I could say to her that he wouldn't hear.
I had to find a way to tell her to make herself unnoticeable and escape. A way to warn her against him that he couldn't tap, so she'd have a chance to get away from him before he realized what she was doing. Until then I'd have to stall him, keep him from realizing that I'd remembered that other time in the forest, when he'd first used me to gain control of father. Hope that his sense of drama, the joy he took in cat and mouse games would give me the time I needed.
I reached through and beyond my father to the dark corridor, tried to find the door that would take me to Dara, but Uncle Stephen was there in the corridor with me now, a watchful shadow, inescapable as the worm even now roiling through the secret darknesses of my body, and though the corridor was mine my body was the worm's and the worm was Uncle Stephen. I would have to find another way to warn her.
It was dark there on the grass, beneath the sheltering smoke, though outside the circle I could sense that it was still bright afternoon. I helped Dara to her feet. She sagged against me, trembling and shivering, too weak to stand without help.
Too weak to escape. Unless I could stall him long enough to give her the time to recover.
"The Naga," she said, then had to pause for breath. "Where is it?"
"Hidden. Somewhere safe." And then, speaking as much to Uncle Stephen as to her: "I had to take it off to come after you. But there's some clothing you can put on outside the circle and you need to rest. Come on, we can talk about things later, when you're feeling better. Right now I just want you to get dressed and lie down until you can stop shivering."
I led her through the spice-scented darkness, helped her over the ring of fire and out into the light.