by Rice, Anne
“Clever? You burnt my Master! You destroyed him. You burnt up his children! I am your prisoner here, am I not? What for? And you talk of the Lord Jesus Christ to me? You? You? Answer me, what is this morass of filth and fancy, molded out of clay and blessed candles!”
He laughed. His eyes crinkled at the edges, and his face was cheerful and sweet. His hair, for all its filth and tangles, kept its preternatural luster. How fine he would have been if freed from the dictates of this nightmare.
“Amadeo,” he said. “We are the Children of Darkness,” he explained patiently. “We vampires are made to be the scourge of man, as is pestilence. We are part of the trials and tribulations of this world; we drink blood, and we kill for the glory of God who would test his human creatures.”
“Don’t speak horrors.” I put my hands over my ears. I cringed.
“Oh, but you know it’s true,” he insisted without raising his voice. “You know it as you see me in my robes and you look about my chamber. I am restrained for The Living Lord as were the monks of old before they learned to paint their walls with erotic paintings.”
“You talk madness, and I don’t know why you do it.” I would not remember the Monastery of the Caves!
“I do it because I have found my purpose here and the purpose of God, and there is nothing Higher. Would you be damned and alone, and selfish and without purpose? Would you turn your back on a design so magnificent that not one tiny child is forgotten! Did you think you could live forever without the splendor of that great scheme, struggling to deny the handiwork of God in every beautiful thing which you coveted and made your own?”
I fell silent. Don’t think on the old Russian saints. Wisely, he did not press. On the contrary, very softly, without the devilish lilt, he began to sing the Latin hymn …
Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla
Quantus tremor est futurus …
That day of wrath, that day will turn the earth to ashes.
As both David and Sybelle have foretold
How great a tremor there will be …
“And on that Day, that Final Day, we shall have duties for Him, we His Dark Angels shall take the Evil souls down into the inferno as is His Divine Will.”
I looked up at him again. “And then the final plea of this hymn, that He have mercy on us, was His Passion not for us?”
I sang it softly in Latin:
Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae …
Remember, merciful Jesus,
That I was the cause of your way …
I pressed on, scarcely having the spirit for it, to fully acknowledge the horror. “What monk was there in the Monastery of my childhood who didn’t hope one day to be with God? What do you say to me now, that we, the Children of Darkness, serve Him with no hope of ever being with Him?”
He looked broken suddenly.
“Pray there is some secret that we don’t know,” he whispered. He looked off as if he were in fact praying. “How can He not love Satan when Satan has done so well? How can He not love us? I don’t understand, but I am what I am, which is this, and you are the same.” He looked at me, eyebrows rising gently again to underscore his wonder. “And we must serve Him. Otherwise we are lost.”
He slipped from the stool and came down towards me, settling on the floor opposite me, cross-legged, and putting his long arm out to place his hand on my shoulder.
“Splendid being,” I said, “and to think God made you as he made the boys you destroyed tonight, the perfect bodies you rendered to the fire.”
He was in deep distress. “Amadeo, take another name and come with us, be with us. We need you. And what will you do alone?”
“Tell me why you killed my Master.”
He let go of me and let his hand fall in the lap made by his black robe stretched across his knees.
“It’s forbidden to us to use our talents to dazzle mortals. It is forbidden us to trick them with our skills. It is forbidden us to seek the solace of their company. It is forbidden us to walk in the places of light.”
Nothing in this surprised me.
“We are monks as pure at heart as those of Cluny,” he said. “We make our Monasteries strict and holy, and we hunt and we kill to perfect the Garden of Our Lord as a Vale of Tears.” He paused, and then making his voice all the more soft and wondering, he continued. “We are as the bees that sting, and the rats that steal the grain; we are as the Black Death come to take young or old, beautiful or ugly, that men and women shall tremble at the power of God.”
He looked at me, imploring me for understanding.
“Cathedrals rise from dust,” he said, “to show man wonder. And in the stones men carve the Danse Macabre to show that life is brief. We carry scythes in the army of the robed skeleton who is carved on a thousand doorways, a thousand walls. We are the followers of Death, whose cruel visage is drawn in a million tiny prayer books which the rich and the poor alike hold in their hands.” His eyes were huge and dreamy. He looked about us at the grim domed cell in which we sat. I could see the candles in the black pupils of his eyes. His eyes closed for a moment, and then opened, clearer, more bright.
“Your Master knew these things,” he said regretfully. “He knew. But he was of a pagan time, obdurate and angry, and refusing ever the grace of God. In you, he saw God’s grace, because your soul is pure. You are young and tender and open like the moonflower to take the light of the night. You hate us now, but you will come to see.”
“I don’t know that I will ever see anything again,” I said. “I’m cold and small and have no understanding now of feeling, of longing, even of hate. I don’t hate you, when I should. I’m empty. I want to die.”
“But it’s God’s will when you die, Amadeo,” he said. “Not your own.” He stared hard at me, and I knew I couldn’t hide from him any longer my recollection—the monks of Kiev, starving slowly in their earthen cells, saying they must take sustenance for it was God’s will when they should die.
I tried to hide these things, I drew these tiny pictures to myself and locked them up. I thought of nothing. One word came to my tongue: horror. And then the thought that before this time I had been a fool.
Another came into the room. It was a female vampire. She entered through a wooden door, letting it close carefully behind her as a good nun might do, in order that no unnecessary noise be made. She came up to him and stood behind him.
Her full gray hair was tangled and filthy, as was his, and it too had formed a shapely veil of beauteous weight and density behind her shoulders. Her clothes were antique rags. She wore the low hip belt of women of olden times adorning a shapely dress that revealed her small waist and gently flaring hips, the courtly costume one sees graven on the stone figures of rich sarcophagi. Her eyes, like his, were huge as if to summon every precious particle of light in gloom. Her mouth was strong and full, and the fine bones of her cheeks and jaw shone well for the thin layer of silvery dust that covered her. Her neck and bosom were almost bare.
“Will he be one of us?” she asked. Her voice was so lovely, so comforting, that I felt I’d been touched by it. “I have prayed for him. I have heard him weeping inside though he makes no sound.”
I looked away from her, bound to be disgusted by her, my enemy, who had slain those I loved.
“Yes,” said Santino, the dark-haired one. “He’ll be one of us, and he can be a leader. He has such strength. He slew Alfredo there, you see? Oh, it was wonderful to behold how he did it, with such rage and with such a baby’s scowl on his face.”
She looked beyond me, at the ruin of what that vampire had been, and I didn’t know myself what was left. I didn’t turn to look at it.
A deep bitter sorrow softened her expression. How beautiful she must have been in life; how beautiful still if the dust were taken away from her.
Her eyes shot to me suddenly, accusingly, and then became mild.
“Vain tho
ughts, my child,” she said. “I don’t live for looking glasses, as your Master did. I need no velvet or silks to serve my Lord. Ah, Santino, such a newborn thing he is, look at him.” She spoke of me. “In centuries gone by I might have penned verses in honor of such beauty, that it should come to us to grace God’s sooted fold, a lily in the dark he is, a fairy’s child planted by moonlight in a milkmaid’s cradle to thrall the world with his girlish gaze and manly whisper.”
Her flattery enraged me, but I could not bear in this Hell to lose the sheer beauty of her voice, its deep sweetness. I didn’t care what she said. And as I looked at her white face in which many a vein had become a ridge in stone, I knew she was far too old for my impetuous violence. Yet kill, yes, yank head from body, yes, and stab with candles, yes. I thought of these things with clenched teeth, and him, how I would dispatch him for he was not so old, not nearly by half with his olive skin, but these compulsions died like weeds sprung from my mind stung by a northern wind, the deep frozen wind of my will dying inside of me.
Ah, but they were beautiful.
“You will not renounce all beauty,” she said kindly, having drunk up my thoughts perhaps, despite all my devices for concealing them. “You will see another variant of beauty—a harsh and variegated beauty—when you take life and see that marvelous corporeal design become a blazing web as you do suck it dry, and dying thoughts do fall on you like wailing veils to dim your eyes and make you but the school of those poor souls you hasten to glory or perdition—yes, beauty. You will see beauty in the stars that can forever be your comfort. And in the earth, yes, the earth itself, you will find a thousand shades of darkness. This will be your beauty. You do but forswear the brash colors of mankind and the defiant light of the rich and the vain.”
“I forswear nothing,” I said.
She smiled, her face filling with a warm and irresistible warmth, her huge long mat of white hair curling here and there in the ardent flicker of the candles.
She looked to Santino. “How well he understands the things we say,” she said. “And yet he seems the naughty boy who mocks all things in ignorance.”
“He knows, he knows,” the other answered with surprising bitterness. He fed his rats. He looked at her and me. He seemed to muse and even to hum the old Gregorian chant again.
I heard others in the dark. And far away the drums still beat, but that was unendurable. I looked to the ceiling of this place, the blinded mouthless skulls that looked on all with limitless patience.
I looked at them, the seated figure of Santino brooding or lost in thought, and behind him and above him, her statuesque form in its ragged raiment, her gray hair parted in the middle, her face ornamented by the dust.
“Those Who Must Be Kept, child, who were they?” she asked suddenly.
Santino raised his right hand and made a weary gesture.
“Allesandra, of that he does not know. Be sure of it. Marius was too clever to tell him. And what of it, this old legend we’ve chased for countless years? Those Who Must Be Kept. If They are such that They must be kept, then They are no more, for Marius is no more to keep Them.”
A tremor ran through me, a terror that I would break into uncontrollable weeping, that I should let them see this, no, an abomination. Marius no more …
Santino hastened to go on, as if in fear for me.
“God willed it. God has willed that all edifices should crumble, all texts be stolen or burnt, all eyewitnesses to mystery be destroyed. Think on it, Allesandra. Think. Time has plowed under all those words written in the hand of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Paul. Where is there one parchment scroll left which bears the signature of Aristotle? And Plato, would that we had one scrap he threw into the fire when feverishly working—?”
“What are those things to us, Santino?” she asked reprovingly, but her hand touched his head as she looked down. She smoothed his hair as though she were his Mother.
“I meant to say that it is the way of God,” Santino said, “the way of His creation. Even what is writ in stone is washed away by time, and cities lie beneath the fire and ash of roaring mountains. I meant to say the Earth eats all, and now it’s taken him, this legend, this Marius, this one so much older than any we ever knew by name, and with him go his precious secrets. So be it.”
I locked my hands together to stop their trembling. I said nothing.
“There was a town in which I lived,” he went on, murmuring. He held a fat black rat now in his arms, stroking its fur as if it were the prettiest of cats, and it with its tiny eye seemed unable to move, its tail a great curved scythe turned downward. “A lovely town it was, with high thick walls, and such a Fair each year; words can’t describe where all the merchants showed their wares and all the villages both far and near sent young and old to buy, to sell, to dance, to feast … it seemed a perfect place! And yet the plague took it. The plague came, respecting no gate or wall or tower, invisible to the Lord’s men, and to the Father in the field and the Mother in her kitchen garden. The plague took all, all it seemed except the most wicked. In my house they walled me up, with bloating corpses of my brothers and sisters. It was a vampire found me out, for foraging there he found no other blood to drink but mine. And there had been so many!”
“Do we not give up our mortal history for the love of God?” Allesandra asked but most carefully. Her hand worked on his hair and brushed it back from his forehead.
His eyes were huge with thought and memory, yet as he spoke again he looked at me, perhaps not even seeing me.
“There are no walls there now. It’s gone to trees and blowing grass and piles of rubble. And in castles far away one finds the stones which once made up our lord’s keep, our finest hard-paved street, our proudest houses. It is the very nature of this world that all things are devoured and time is a mouth as bloody as any other.”
A silence fell. I could not stop my shivering. My body quaked. A moan broke from my lips. I looked from right to left and bowed my head, my hands tight to my neck to stop from screaming.
When I looked up again, I spoke.
“I won’t serve you!” I whispered. “I see your game. I know your scriptures, your piety, your love of resignation! You’re spiders with your dark and intricate webs, no more than that, and breed for blood is all you know, all you know round which to weave your tiresome snares, as wretched as the birds that make their nests in filth on marble casements. So spin your lies. I hate you. I will not serve you!”
How lovingly they both looked at me.
“Oh, poor child,” Allesandra said with a sigh. “You have only just begun to suffer. Why must it be for pride’s sake and not for God?”
“I curse you!”
Santino snapped his fingers. It was such a small gesture. But out of the shadows, through doorways like secretive dumb mouths in the mud walls, there came his servants, hooded, robed, as before. They gathered me up, securing my limbs, but I didn’t struggle.
They dragged me to a cell of iron bars and earthen walls. And when I sought to dig my way out of it, my clawing fingers came upon iron-bound stone, and I could dig no more.
I lay down. I wept. I wept for my Master. I didn’t care if anyone heard or mocked. I didn’t care. I knew only loss and in that loss the very size of my love, and in knowing the size of love could somehow feel its splendor. I cried and cried. I turned and groveled in the earth. I clutched at it, and tore at it, and then lay still with only silent tears flowing.
Allesandra stood with her hands on the bars. “Poor child,” she whispered. “I will be with you, always with you. You have only to call my name.”
“And why is that? Why?” I called out, my voice echoing off the stony walls. “Answer me.”
“In the very depths of Hell,” she said, “do not demons love one another?”
An hour passed. The night was old.
I thirsted.
I burned with it. She knew it. I curled up on the floor, my head bowed, sitting back on my heels. I would die before I would drink bl
ood again. But it was all that I could see, all that I could think of, all that I could want. Blood.
After the first night, I thought I would die of this thirst.
After the second, I thought I would perish screaming.
After the third, I only dreamed of it in weeping and in desperation, licking at my own blood tears on my fingertips.
After six nights of this when I could bear the thirst no longer, they brought a struggling victim to me.
Down the long black passage I smelled the blood. I smelled it before I saw their torchlight.
A great stinking muscular youth who was dragged towards my cell, who kicked at them and cursed them, growling and drooling like a madman, screaming at the very sight of the torch with which they bullied him, forcing him towards me.
I climbed to my feet, too weak almost for this effort, and I fell on him, fell on his succulent hot flesh and tore open his throat, laughing and weeping as I did it, as my mouth was choked with blood.
Roaring and stammering, he fell beneath me. The blood bubbled up out of the artery over lips and my thin fingers. How like bones they looked, my fingers. I drank and drank and drank until I could contain no more, and all the pain was gone from me, and all the despair was gone in the pure satisfaction of hunger, the pure greedy hateful selfish devouring of the blessed blood.
To this gluttonous, mindless, mannerless feast they left me.
Then falling aside, I felt my vision clear again in the dark. The walls around me sparkled once more with tiny bits of ore like a starry firmament. I looked and saw that the victim I had taken was Riccardo, my beloved Riccardo, my brilliant and goodhearted Riccardo—naked, wretchedly soiled, a fattened prisoner, kept all this while in some stinking earthen cell just for this.
I screamed.
I beat at the bars and bashed my head against them. My white-faced warders rushed to the bars and then backed away in fear and peered at me across the dark corridor. I fell down on my knees crying.
I grabbed up the corpse. “Riccardo, drink!” I bit into my tongue and spit the blood on his greasy staring face. “Riccardo!” But he was dead and empty, and they had gone, leaving him there to rot in this place with me, to rot beside me.