by Rice, Anne
There were too many different documents for me to assess the full value, only that it had been accumulated over time. It seemed Dora might have started a new Crusade to take back Istanbul from the Turks had she wanted to. There were some letters … I could pinpoint the exact date two years ago when Dora had refused all further assistance from the two trusts of which she had knowledge. As for the rest, I wondered if she had any idea of the scope.
Scope is everything when it comes to money. Imagination and scope. You lack either of these two things and you can’t make moral decisions, or so I’ve always thought. It sounds contemptible, but think about it. It’s not contemptible. Money is power to feed the hungry. To clothe the poor. But you have to know that. Dora had trusts and trusts, and trusts to pay taxes on all the trusts.
I thought in a moment’s sorrow of how I had meant to help my beloved Gretchen—Sister Marguerite—and how the mere sight of me had ruined everything, and I’d retreated from her life, with all my gold still in the coffers. Didn’t it always turn out like that? I was no saint. I didn’t feed the hungry.
But Dora! Quite suddenly it dawned on me—she had become my daughter! She had become my saint just as she’d been Roger’s. Now she had another rich father. She had me!
“What is it?” David asked with alarm. He was going through a carton of papers. “You’ve seen the ghost again?”
For one moment, I almost went into one of my major tremours, but I got a grip. I didn’t say anything, but I saw it ever more clearly.
Watch out for Dora! Of course I would watch out for Dora, and somehow I’d convince her to accept everything. Maybe Roger hadn’t known the proper arguments. And Roger was now a martyr for all his treasures. Yes, his last angle had been the right angle. He’d ransomed his treasures. Maybe with Dora, if properly explained.…
I was distracted. There they were, the twelve books. Each in a neat thin film of plastic, lined up on the top shelf of a small desk, right near the file cabinet. I knew what they were. I knew. And then there were Roger’s labels on them, his fancy scribbling on a small white sticker, “W de W.”
“Look,” David said, rising from his knees and wiping the dust from his pants. “These are all simple legal papers on the purchases, everything here is clean, apparently, or has been laundered; there are dozens of receipts, certificates of authentication. I say we take all of this out of here now.”
“Yes, but how, and to where?”
“Think, what’s the safest place? Your rooms in New Orleans are certainly not safe. We can’t trust these things to a warehouse in a city like New York.”
“Exactly. I do have rooms here at a little hotel across from the park but that.…”
“Yes, I remember, that’s where the Body Thief followed you. You mean you didn’t change that address?”
“Doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t hold all this.”
“But you realize that our sizable quarters in the Olympic Tower would hold all this,” he said.
“You serious?” I asked.
“Of course I am. What could be more secure? Now we’ve work to do. We can’t have any mortal connections with this. We’re going to do all this toiling ourselves.”
“Ah!” I gave a disgusted sigh. “You mean wrap all this and move it?”
He laughed. “Yes! Hercules had to do such things, and so have angels. How do you think Michael felt when he had to go from door to door in Egypt slaying the First Born of every house? Come on. You don’t realize how simple it is to cushion all these items with modern plastics. I say we move it ourselves. It will be a venture. Why not go over the roofs.”
“Ah, there is nothing more irritating than the energy of a fledgling vampire,” I said wearily. But I knew he was right. And our strength was incalculably greater than that of any mortal helper. We could have all this cleared out perhaps within the night.
Some night!
I will say in retrospect that labor is an antidote for angst and general misery, and the fear that the Devil is going to grab you by the throat at any moment and bring you down into the fiery pit!
We amassed a huge supply of an insulating material made with bubbles of air trapped in plastic, which could indeed bind the most fragile relic in a harmless embrace. I removed the financial papers and the books of Wynken, carefully examining each to make sure I was right about what I had, and then we proceeded to the heavy labor.
Sack by sack we transported all the smaller objects, going over the rooftops as David had suggested, unnoticed by mortals, two stealthy black figures flying as witches might to the Sabbath.
The larger objects we had to take more lovingly, each of us toting one at a time in our arms. I deliberately avoided the great white marble angel. But David loved it, talking to it all the way until we reached our destination. And all this was slipped into the secure rooms of the Olympic Tower in a rather proper way through the freight stairways, with the obligatory mortal pace.
Our little clocks would wind down as we touched the mortal world, and we would pass into it quickly, gentlemen furnishing their new digs with appropriately and securely wrapped treasures.
Soon the clean, carpeted rooms above St. Patrick’s housed a wilderness of ghostly plastic packages, some looking all too much like mummies, or less carefully embalmed dead bodies. The white marble angel with her seashell holy water basin was perhaps the largest. The books of Wynken, wrapped and bound, lay on the Oriental dining table. I hadn’t really had a chance to look at them, but now was not the moment.
I sank down in a chair in the front room, panting from sheer boredom and fury that I had had to do anything so utterly menial. David was jubilant.
“The security’s perfect here,” David said enthusiastically. His young male body seemed inflamed with his own personal spirit. When I looked at him, sometimes I saw both merged—the elderly David, the young strapping Anglo-Indian male form. But most of the time, he was merely starkly perfect. And surely the strongest fledgling I had ever produced.
That wasn’t due only to the strength of my blood or my own trials and tribulations before I’d brought him over. I’d given him more blood than I’d ever given title others when I made him. I’d risked my own survival. But no matter—
I sat there loving him, loving my own work. I was full of dust.
I realized that everything had been taken care of. We had even brought the rugs last, in rolls. Even the rug soaked with Roger’s blood. Relic of the martyred Roger. Well, I would spare Dora that detail.
“I have to hunt,” David said in a whisper, waking me from my calculations.
I didn’t reply.
“You coming?”
“You want me to?” I asked.
He stood there regarding me with the strangest expression, dark youthful face without any palpable condemnation or even disgust.
“Why don’t you? Don’t you enjoy seeing it, even if you don’t want it?”
I nodded. I’d never dreamed he would let me watch. Louis hated it when I watched. When we’d been together last year, the three of us, David had been far too reticent and suspicious to suggest such a thing.
We went down into the thick snowy darkness of Central Park. Everywhere one could hear the park’s nighttime occupants, snoring, grumbling, tiny whiffs of conversation, smoke. These are strong individuals, individuals who know how to live in the wild in the midst of a city that is itself notoriously fatal to its unlucky ones.
David found what he wanted quickly—a young male with a skullcap, his bare toes showing through his broken shoes, a walker in the night, lone and drugged and insensible to the cold and talking aloud to people of long ago.
I stood back under the trees, wet with snow and uncaring. David reached out for the young man’s shoulder, brought him gently around and embraced him. Classic. As David bent to drink, the young man began to laugh and talk simultaneously. And then went quiet, transfixed, until at last the body was gently laid to rest at the foot of a leafless tree.
The skyscrapers of New Yor
k glowed to the south of us, the warmer, smaller lights of the East and the West Side hemmed us in. David stood very still, thinking what, I wondered?
It seemed he’d lost the ability to move. I went towards him. He was no calm, diligent archivist at the moment. He looked to be suffering.
“What?” I asked.
“You know what,” he whispered. “I won’t survive that long.”
“You serious? With the gifts I gave you—”
“Shhhh, we’re too much in the habit of saying things to each other which we know are unacceptable to each other. We should stop.”
“And speak only the truth? All right. This is the truth. Now, you feel as if you can’t survive. Now. When his blood is hot and swirling through you. Of course. But you won’t feel that way forever. That’s the key. I don’t want to talk anymore about survival. I took a good crack at ending my life; it didn’t work, and besides, I have something else to think about—this thing that’s following me, and how I can help Dora before it closes in on me.”
That shut him up.
We started walking, mortal fashion, through the dark park together, my feet crunching deep into the snow. We wandered in and out of the leafless groves, pushing aside the wet black branches, the looming buildings of midtown never quite out of sight.
I was on edge for the sound of the footsteps. I was on edge and a dreary thought had come to me—that the monstrous thing that had been revealed, the Devil himself or whoever it was, had merely been after Roger.…
But then what of the man, the anonymous and perfectly ordinary man? That is what he had become in my mind, the man I’d glimpsed before dawn.
We drew near to the lights of Central Park South, the buildings rising higher, with an arrogance that Babylon could not have thrown in the face of heaven. But there were the comforting sounds of the well-heeled, and the committed, coming and going, and the never-ending push and shove of taxis adding to the din.
David was brooding, stricken.
Finally I said, “If you’d seen the thing that I saw, you wouldn’t be so eager to jump to the next stage.” I gave a sigh. I wasn’t going to describe the winged thing to either one of us again.
“I’m quite inspired by it,” he confessed. “You can’t imagine.”
“Going to Hell? With a Devil like that?”
“Did you feel it was hellish? Did you sense evil? I asked you that before. Did you feel evil when the thing took Roger? Did Roger give any indication of pain?”
Those questions seemed to me a bit hairsplitting.
“Don’t get overly optimistic about death,” I said. “I’m warning you. My views are changing. The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.”
He smiled, dismissively, as he used to do when he was mortal and visibly wore the laurels of venerable age.
“Have you ever read the stories of Hawthorne?” he asked me softly. We had reached the street, crossed, and were slowly skirting the fountain before the Plaza.
“Yes,” I said. “At some time or other.”
“And you remember Ethan Brand’s search for the unpardonable sin?”
“I think so. He went off to search for it and left his fellow man behind.”
“Recall this paragraph,” he said gently. We made our way down Fifth, a street that is never empty, or dark. He quoted the lines to me:
“ ‘He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.’ ”
I said nothing. I wanted to protest, but it was not an honest thing to do. I wanted to say that I would never, never treat humans like puppets. All I had done was watch Roger, damn it all, and Gretchen in the jungles. I had pulled no strings. Honesty had undone her and me together. But then he wasn’t speaking of me with these words. He was talking about himself, the distance he felt now from the human. He had only begun to be Ethan Brand.
“Let me continue a little farther,” he asked respectfully, then began to quote again. “ ‘Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect—’ ” He broke off.
I didn’t reply.
“That’s our damnation,” he whispered. “Our moral improvement has reached its finish, and our intellect grows by leaps and bounds.”
Still I said nothing. What was I to say? Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick’s coming into view. And then despair would come again.
Meaningless, I almost said, aloud, but what came from my lips was completely different.
“I have Dora to think of,” I said.
Dora.
“Yes, and thanks to you,” he said, “I have Dora too, now don’t I?”
SIX
How and when and what to tell Dora? That was the question. The journey we made to New Orleans early the next night.
There was no sign of Louis at the town house in the Rue Royale, but this was by no means unusual. Louis took to wandering more and more often, and he had been seen once by David in the company of Armand in Paris. The town house was spotless, a dream set out of time, full of my favorite Louis XV furnishings, luscious wallpaper, and the finest carpets to be found.
David, of course, was familiar with the place, though he hadn’t seen it in over a year. One of the many picture-perfect bedrooms, drenched in saffron silks and outrageous Turkish tables and screens, still held the coffin in which he had slept during his brief and first stay here as one of the Undead.
Of course, this coffin was heavily disguised. He had insisted that it be the real thing—as fledglings almost invariably do, unless they are nomads by nature—but it was cleverly enough concealed within a heavy bronze chest, which Louis had chosen for it afterwards—a great hulking rectangular object as defeating as a square piano, with no perceivable opening in it, though of course, if you knew the right places to touch, the lid rose at once.
I had made my resting place as I had promised myself, when restoring this house in which Claudia and Louis and I had once lived. Not in my old bedroom, which now housed only the de rigueur heavy four-poster and dressing table, but in the attic, beneath the eave, I had made a cell of metal and marble.
In sum, we had a comfortable base immediately, and I was frankly relieved that Louis was not there to tell me he didn’t believe me when I described the things that I’d seen. His rooms were in order; new books had been added. There was a vivid and arresting new painting by Matisse. Otherwise, things were the same.
As soon as we had settled in, checked all security, as immortals always do, with a breezy scan and a deep resistance to having to do anything mortals have to do, we decided that I should go uptown and try to catch a glimpse of Dora alone.
I had seen or heard nothing of the Stalker, though not much time had passed, of course, and I had seen nothing of The Ordinary Man.
We agreed that either might appear at any moment.
Nevertheless, I broke from the company of David, leaving him to explore the city as he wished.
Before leaving the Quarter for uptown, I called upon Mojo, my dog. If you are unacquainted with Mojo from The Tale of the Body Thief, let me tell you only what you need to know—that he is a giant German shepherd, is kept for me by a gracious mortal woman in a building of which I retain ownership, and that Mojo loves me, which I find irresistible. He is a dog, no more, or less, except that he is immense in size, with an extremely thick coat, and I cannot stay long away from him.
I spent an h
our or two with him, wrestling, rolling around with him on the ground in the back garden, and talking to him about everything that happened, then debated as to whether I should take him with me uptown. His dark, long face, wolflike and seemingly evil, was full of the usual gentleness and forbearance. God, why didn’t you make us all dogs?
Actually, Mojo created a sense of safety in me. If the Devil came and I had Mojo.… But that was the most absurd idea! I’d fend off Hell on account of a flesh-and-blood dog. Well, humans have believed stranger things, I suppose.
Just before I’d left David, I’d asked, “What do you think is happening, I mean with this Stalker and this Ordinary Man?” And David had answered without hesitation, “You’re imagining both of them, you punish yourself relentlessly; it’s the only way you know how to go on having fun.”
I should have been insulted. But I wasn’t.
Dora was real.
Finally, I decided I had to take leave of Mojo. I was going to spy upon Dora. And had to be fleet of foot. I kissed Mojo and left him. Later we would walk in our favorite wastelands beneath the River Bridge, amid the grass and the garbage, and be together. That I would have for as long as nature let me have it. For the moment it could wait.
Back to Dora.
Of course Dora didn’t know Roger was dead. There was no way that she could know, unless—perhaps—Roger had appeared to her. But I hadn’t gathered from Roger that such was even possible. Appearing to me had apparently consumed all his energy. Indeed, I thought he had been far too protective of Dora to have haunted her in any practical or deliberate way.
But what did I know about ghosts? Except for a few highly mechanical and indifferent apparitions, I’d never spoken to a ghost until I’d spoken to Roger.
And now I would carry with me forever the indelible impression of his love for Dora, and his peculiar mixture of conscience and supreme self-confidence. In retrospect, even his visit seemed to me to exhibit extraordinary self-assurance. That he could haunt, that was not beyond probability since the world is filled with impressive and credible ghost stories. But that he could detain me in conversation—that he could make me his confidant—that had indeed involved an enormous and almost dazzling pride.