by Rice, Anne
Then she found me with her eyes. She looked right at me in the corner.
“Why are you frightened?” she asked. Her voice was soothing.
I realized I was jammed into the corner, legs crossed, knees beneath my chin, arms locked around my legs, looking up at her.
“I … I am sorry.…” I said. “I was afraid … that I had frightened you. I was ashamed that I had caused you distress. I felt that I’d been unforgivably clumsy.”
She stepped towards me, fearlessly. Her scent filled the attic slowly, like the vapor from a pinch of burning incense.
She looked tall and lithesome in the flowered dress, with the lace at her cuffs. Her short black hair covered her head like a little cap with curls against her cheeks. Her eyes were big and dark, and made me think of Roger.
Her gaze was nothing short of spectacular. She could have unnerved a predator with her gaze, the light striking the bones of her cheeks, her mouth quiet and devoid of all emotion.
“I can leave now if you like,” I said tremulously. “I can simply get up very slowly and leave without hurting you. I swear it. You must not be alarmed.”
“Why you?” she asked.
“I don’t understand your question,” I said. Was I crying? Was I just shivering and shaking? “What do you mean, why me?”
She came in closer and looked down at me. I could see her very distinctly.
Perhaps she saw a mop of blond hair and the glint of light in my glasses and that I seemed young.
I saw her curling black eyelashes, her small but firm chin, and the way that her shoulders so abruptly sloped beneath her lace and flowered dress that she seemed hardly to have shoulders at all—a long sketch of a girl, a dream lily woman. Her tiny waist beneath the loose fabric of the waistless dress would be nothing in one’s arms.
There was something almost chilling about her presence. She seemed neither cold nor wicked, but just as frightening as if she were! Was this sanctity? I wondered if I had ever been in the presence of a true saint. I had my definitions for the word, didn’t I?
“Why did you come to tell me?” she asked tenderly.
“Tell you what, dearest?” I asked.
“About Roger. That he’s dead.” She raised her eyebrows very lightly. “That’s why you came, wasn’t it? I knew it when I saw you. I knew that Roger was dead. But why did you come?”
She came down on her knees in front of me.
I let out a long groan. So she’d read it from my mind! My big secret. My big decision. Talk to her? Reason with her? Spy on her? Fool her? Counsel her? And my mind had slapped her abruptly with the good news: Hey, honey, Roger’s dead!
She came very close to me. Far too close. She shouldn’t. In a moment she’d be screaming. She lifted the dead electric torch.
“Don’t turn on your flashlight,” I said.
“Why don’t you want me to? I won’t shine it in your face, I promise. I just want to see you.”
“No.”
“Look, you don’t frighten me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said simply, without drama, her thoughts stirring wildly beneath her words, her mind embracing every detail in front of her.
“And why not?”
“Because God wouldn’t let something like you hurt me. I know that. You’re a devil or an evil spirit. You’re a good spirit. I don’t know. I can’t know. If I make the Sign of the Cross you might vanish. But I don’t think so. What I want to know is, why are you so frightened of me? Surely it’s not virtue, is it?”
“Wait just a second, back up. You mean you know that I’m not human?”
“Yes. I can see it. I can feel it! I’ve seen beings like you before. I’ve seen them in crowds in big cities, just glimpses. I’ve seen many things. I’m not going to say I feel sorry for you, because that’s very stupid, but I’m not afraid of you. You’re earthbound, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “And hoping to stay that way indefinitely. Look, I didn’t mean to shock you with the news. I loved your father.”
“You did?”
“Yes. And … and he loved you very much. There are things he wanted me to tell you. But above all, he wanted me to look out for you.”
“You don’t seem capable of that. You’re like a frightened elf. Look at you.”
“You’re not the one I’m terrified of, Dora!” I said with sudden impatience. “I don’t know what’s happening! I am earth-bound, yes, that’s true. And I … and I killed your father. I took his life. I’m the one who did that to him. And he talked to me afterwards. He said, ‘Look out for Dora.’ He came to me and told me to look out for you. Now there it is. I’m not terrified of you. It’s more the situation, never having been in such circumstances, never having faced such questions!”
“I see!” She was stunned. Her whole white face glistened as if she’d broken into a sweat. Her heart was racing. She bowed her head. Her mind was unreadable. Absolutely unreadable to me. But she was full of sorrow, anyone could see that, and the tears were sliding down her cheeks now. This was unbearable.
“Oh, God, I might as well be in Hell,” I muttered. “I shouldn’t have killed him. I … I did it for the simplest reasons. He was just … he crossed my path. It was a hideous mistake. But he came to me afterwards. Dora, we spent hours talking together, his ghost and me. He told me all about you and the relics and Wynken.”
“Wynken?” She looked at me.
“Yes, Wynken de Wilde, you know, the twelve books. Look, Dora, if I touch your hand just to try to comfort you, perhaps it will work. But I don’t want you to scream.”
“Why did you kill my father?” she asked. It meant more than that. She was asking, Why did someone who talks the way you do, do such a thing?
“I wanted his blood. I feed on the blood of others. That’s how I stay youthful and alive. Believe in angels? Then believe in vampires. Believe in me. There are worse things on earth.”
She was appropriately stunned.
“Nosferatu,” I said gently. “Verdilak. Vampire. Lamia. Earthbound.” I shrugged, shook my head. I felt utterly helpless. “There are other species of things. But Roger, Roger came with his soul as a ghost to talk to me afterwards, about you.”
She started to shake and to cry. But this wasn’t madness. Her eyes went small with tears and her face crumpled with sadness.
“Dora, I won’t hurt you for anything under God, I swear it. I won’t hurt you.…”
“My father’s really dead, isn’t he?” she asked, and suddenly she broke down completely, her face in her hands, her little shoulders trembling with sobs. “My God, God help me!” she whispered. “Roger,” she cried. “Roger!”
And she did make the Sign of the Cross, and she sat there, sobbing and unafraid.
I waited. Her tears and sorrow fed upon themselves. She was becoming more and more miserable. She leant forward and collapsed on the boards. Again, she had no fear of me. It was as if I weren’t there.
Very slowly I slipped out of the corner. It was possible to stand up easily in this attic, once you were out of the corner. I moved around her, and then very gently reached to take her by the shoulders.
She gave no resistance; she was sobbing, and her head rolled as if she were drunk with sorrow; her hands moved but only to rise and grasp for things that weren’t there. “God, God, God,” she cried. “God … Roger!”
I picked her up. She was as light as I had suspected, but nothing like that could matter anyway to one as strong as me. I took her out of the attic. She fell against my chest.
“I knew it, I knew when he kissed me,” she said through her sobbing, “I knew I would never lay eyes on him again. I knew it.…” This was hardly intelligible. She was so crushably small, I had to be most careful, and when her head fell back, her face was blanched and so helpless as to make a devil weep.
I went down to the door of her room. She lay against me, still like a rag doll tossed into my arms, without resistance. There was warmth coming from her room. I pushed open the do
or.
Having once been a classroom perhaps, or even a dormitory, the room was very large, set in the very corner of the building, with lofty windows on two sides and full of the brighter light from the street.
The passing traffic illuminated it.
I saw her bed against the far wall, an old iron bed, rather plain, perhaps once a convent bed, narrow like that, with the high rectangular frame intact for the mosquito netting, though none hung from it now. White paint flaked from the thin iron rods. I saw her bookcases everywhere, stacks of books, books open with markers, propped on makeshift lecterns, and her own relics, hundreds of them perhaps, pictures, and statues, and maybe things Roger had given her before she knew the truth. Words were written in cursive on the wooden frames of doors and windows in black ink.
I took her to the bed and laid her down on it. She sank gratefully, it seemed, into the mattress and the pillow. Things here were clean in the modern way, fresh, and so repeatedly and thoroughly laundered that they looked almost new.
I handed her my silk handkerchief. She took it, then looked at it and said, “But it’s too good.”
“No, use it, please. It’s nothing. I have hundreds.”
She regarded me in silence, then began to wipe her face. Her heart was beating more slowly, but the scent of her had been made even stronger by her emotions.
Her menses. It was being neatly collected by a pad of white cotton between her legs. I let myself think of it now because the menses was heavy and the smell was overpoweringly delicious to me. It began to torture me, the thought of licking this blood. This isn’t pure blood, you understand, but blood is its vehicle and I felt the normal temptation that vampires do in such circumstances, to lick the blood from her nethermouth between her legs, a way of feeding on her that wouldn’t harm her.
Except under the circumstances it was a perfectly outrageous and impossible thought.
There was a long silent interval.
I merely sat there on a wooden straight-backed chair. I knew she was beside me, sitting up, legs crossed, and that she’d found a box of tissue which provided a world of comfort to her, and she was blowing her nose and wiping her eyes. My silk handkerchief was still clutched in her hand.
She was extremely excited by my presence but still unafraid, and far too sunk in sorrow to enjoy this confirmation of thousands of beliefs, a pulsing nonhuman with her, that looked and talked as if it were human. She couldn’t let herself embrace this right now. But she couldn’t quite get over it. Her fearlessness was true courage. She wasn’t stupid. She was someplace so far beyond fear that cowards could never even grasp it.
Fools might have thought her fatalistic. But it wasn’t that. It was the ability to think ahead, and thereby banish panic utterly. Some mortals must know this right before they die. When the game’s up, and everyone has said farewell. She looked at everything from that fatal, tragic, unerring perspective.
I stared at the floor. No, don’t fall in love with her.
The yellow pine boards had been sanded, lacquered, and waxed. The color of amber. Very beautiful. The whole palazzo might have this look one day. Beauty and the Beast. And as Beasts go, I mean, really, I’m quite a stunner.
I hated myself for having such a good time in a miserable moment like this, thinking of dancing with her through the corridors. I thought of Roger, and that brought me back quick enough, and the Ordinary Man, ah, that monster waiting for me!
I looked at her desk, two telephones, the computer, more books in stacks, and somewhere in the corner a little television, merely for study, apparently, the screen no bigger than four or five inches across though it was connected to a long coiling and winding black cable, which I knew connected it to the wide world.
There was lots of other blinking electronic equipment. It was no nun’s cell. The words scrawled on the white framework of the doors and windows were actually in phrases, such as “Mystery opposes Theology.” And “Commotion Strange.” And, of all things, “Darkling, I listen.”
Yes, I thought, mystery does oppose theology, that was something Roger was trying to say, that she had not caught on as she should because the mystical and the theological were mixed in her, and it wasn’t working with the proper fire or magic. He had kept saying she was a theologian. And he thought of his relics as mysterious, of course. And they were.
Again a dim boyhood memory returned to me, of seeing the crucifix in our church at home in the Auvergne and being awestruck by the sight of the painted blood running from the nails. I must have been very small. I was bedding village girls in the back of that church by the time I was fifteen—something of a prodigy for the times, but then the lord’s son was supposed to be a perfect billygoat in our village. Everyone expected it. And my brothers, such a conservative bunch, they had more or less disappointed the local mythology by always behaving themselves. It’s a wonder that the crops hadn’t suffered from their paltry virtue. I smiled. I had certainly made up for it. But when I had looked at the crucifix I must have been six or seven at most. And I had said, What a horrible way to die! I had blurted it out, and my mother had laughed and laughed. My father had been so humiliated!
The traffic on Napoleon Avenue made small, predictable, and slightly comforting noises.
Well, comforting to me.
I heard Dora sigh. And then I felt her hand on my arm, tight and delicate for only an instant, but fingers pressing through the armour of my clothing, wanting the texture beneath.
I felt her fingers graze my face.
For some reason, mortals do that when they want to be sure of us, they fold their fingers inward and they run their knuckles against our faces. Is that a way of touching someone without seeming to be touched oneself? I suppose the palm of the hand, the soft pad of the fingers, is too intimate.
I didn’t move. I let her do it as if she were a blind woman and it was a courtesy. I felt her fingers move to my hair. I knew there was plenty enough light to make it fiery and pretty the way I counted upon it to be, shameless vain preening, selfish, confused, and temporarily disoriented being that I was.
She made the Sign of the Cross again. But she had never been actually afraid. She was just confirming something, I suppose. Though precisely what is really open to question, if you think of it. Silently she prayed.
“I can do that too,” I said. I did it. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” I repeated the entire performance, doing it in Latin.
She regarded me with a still, amazed face, and then she let slip a tiny, gentle laugh.
I smiled. This bed and chair—where we sat so close to each other—were in the corner. There was a window over her shoulder, and one behind me. Windows, windows, it was a palazzo of windows. The dark wood of the ceiling must have been fifteen feet above us. I adored the scale of it. It was European, to say the least, and felt normal. It had not been sacrificed to modern dimensions.
“You know,” I said, “the first time I walked into Notre Dame, after I’d been made into this, a vampire, that is, and it wasn’t my idea, by the way, I was completely human and younger than you are now, the whole thing was forced, completely, I don’t remember specifically if I prayed when it was happening, but I fought, that I vividly remember and have preserved in writing. But … as I was saying, the first time I walked into Notre Dame, I thought, well, why doesn’t God strike me dead?”
“You must have your place in the scheme of things.”
“You think? You really believe that?”
“Yes. I never expected to come upon something like you face to face, but it never seemed impossible or even improbable. I’ve been waiting all these years for a sign, for some confirmation. I would have lived out my life without it, but there was always the feeling … that it was going to come, the sign.”
Her voice was small and typically feminine, that is, the pitch was without mistake feminine, but she spoke with terrific self-confidence now, and so her words seemed to have authority, rather like those of a man.<
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“And now you come, and you bring the news that you’ve killed my father. And you say that he spoke to you. No, I’m not one for simply dismissing such things out of hand. There’s an allure to what you say, there is an ornate quality. Do you know, when I was a young girl, the very first reason I believed in the Holy Bible was because it had an ornate quality! I have perceived other patterns in life. I’ll tell you a secret. One time I wished my mother dead, and do you know on that very day, within the very hour, she disappeared out of my life forever? I could tell you other things. What you must understand is I want to learn from you. You walked into Notre Dame Cathedral and God didn’t strike you dead.”
“I’ll tell you something that I found amusing,” I said. “This was two hundred years ago. Paris before the Revolution. There were vampires living in Paris then, in Les Innocents, the big cemetery, it’s long gone, but they lived there in the catacombs beneath the tombs, and they were afraid to go into Notre Dame. When they saw me do it, they, too, thought God would strike me dead.”
She was looking at me rather placidly.
“I destroyed their faith for them,” I said. “Their belief in God and the Devil. And they were vampires. They were earthbound creatures like me, half demon, half human, stupid, blundering, and they believed that God would strike them dead.”
“And before you, they had really had a faith?”
“Yes, an entire religion, they really did,” I said. “They thought themselves servants of the Devil. They thought it was a distinction. They lived as vampires, but their existence was miserable and deliberately penitential. I was, you might say, a prince. I came swaggering through Paris in a red cloak lined with wolf fur. But that was my human life, the cloak. Does that impress you, that vampires would be believers? I changed it all for them. I don’t think they’ve ever forgiven me, that is, those few who survive. There are not, by the way, very many of us.”