by Rice, Anne
I drank more slowly.
The thickest worst scars of my body yielded with much defense, itching, throbbing and only slowly melting away. But the thirst, the thirst would not stop. My bowels churned as if devouring themselves. My eyes pulsed with pain.
But the cold wet city, so full of rankling hollow noise, grew ever brighter before me. I could hear voices many blocks away, and small electronic speakers in high buildings. I could see beyond the breaking clouds the true and numberless stars.
I was almost myself again.
So who will come to me now, I thought, in this barren desolate hour before dawn, when the snow is melting in the warmer air, and neon lights have all died out, and the wet newspaper blows like leaves through a stripped and frozen forest?
I took all the precious articles which had belonged to my first vietim, and dropped them here and there into deep hollow public trash cans.
One last killer, yes, please, fate, do give me this, while there’s time, and indeed he came, blasted fool, out of a car as behind him the driver waited, the motor idling.
“What’s taking you so damn long?” said the driver at last.
“Nothing,” I said, dropping his friend. I leaned in to look at him. He was as vicious and stupid as his companion. He threw up his hand, but helplessly and too late. I pushed him over on the leather seat and drank now for rank pleasure, pure sweet crazed pleasure.
I walked slowly through the night, my arms out, my eyes directed Heavenward.
From the scattered black grates of the gleaming street there gushed the pure white steam of heated places below. Trash in shiny plastic sacks made a fantastical modern and glittering display on the curbs of the slate-gray sidewalks.
Tiny tender trees, with little year-round leaves like short pen strokes of bright green in the night, bent their stemlike trunks with the whining wind. Everywhere the high clean glass doors of granite-faced buildings contained the radiant splendor of rich lobbies. Shop windows displayed their sparkling diamonds, lustrous furs and smartly cut coats and gowns on grandly coiffed and faceless pewter mannequins.
The Cathedral was a lightless, soundless place of frost-rimmed turrets and ancient pointed arches, the pavement clean where I had stood on the morning when the sun caught me.
Lingering there, I closed my eyes, trying perhaps to recall the wonder and the zeal, the courage and the glorious expectation.
There came instead, clear and shining through the dark air, the pristine notes of the Appassionata. Roiling, rumbling, racing on, the crashing music came to call me home. I followed it.
The clock in the hotel foyer was striking six. The winter dark would break up in moments like the very ice that had once imprisoned me. The long polished desk was deserted in the muted lights.
In a wall mirror of dim glass framed in rococo gold, I saw myself, paled and waxen, and unblemished. Oh, what fun the sun and ice had had with me in turns, the fury of the one quick-frozen by the merciless grip of the other. Not a scar remained of where the skin had burnt to muscle. A sealed and solid thing with seamless agony within, I was, all of a piece, restored, with sparkling clear white fingernails, and curling lashes round my clear brown eyes, and clothes a wretched heap of stained, misfitted finery on the old familiar rugged cherub.
Never before had I been thankful to see my own too youthful face, too hairless chin, too soft and delicate hands. But I could have thanked the gods of old for wings at this moment.
Above, the music carried on, so grand, so legible of tragedy and lust and dauntless spirit. I loved it so. Who in the whole wide world could ever play that same Sonata as she did, each phrase as fresh as songs sung all their livelong life by birds who know but one such set of patterns.
I looked about. It was a fine, expensive place, of old wainscoting and a few deep chairs, and door keys ranged up a wall in tiny dark-stained wooden boxes.
A great vase of flowers, the infallible trademark of the vintage New York hotel, stood boldly and magnificently in the middle of the space, atop a round black marble table. I skirted the bouquet, snapping off one big pink lily with a deep red throat and petals curling to yellow at the outside, and then I went silently up the fire stairs to find my children.
She did not stop her playing when Benji let me in.
“You’re looking really good, Angel,” he said.
On and on she went, her head moving unaffectedly and perfectly with the rhythm of the Sonata.
He led me through a chain of finely decorated plastered chambers. Mine was too sumptuous by far, I whispered, seeing the tapestry spread and pillows of old gracious threadbare gold. I needed only perfect darkness.
“But this is the least we have,” he said with a little shrug.
He had changed to a fresh white linen robe lined with a fine blue stripe, a kind I’d often seen in Arab lands. He wore white socks with his brown sandals. He puffed his little Turkish cigarette, and squinted up at me through the smoke.
“You brought me back the watch, didn’t you!” He nodded his head, all sarcasm and amusement.
“No,” I said. I reached into my pocket. “But you may have the money. Tell me, since your little mind is such a locket and I have no key, did anyone see you bring that badge-carrying, gun-toting villain up here?”
“I see him all the time,” he said with a little weary wave of his hand. “We left: the bar separately. I killed two birds with one stone. I’m very smart.”
“How so?” I asked. I put the lily in his little hand.
“Sybelle’s brother bought from him. That cop was the only guy ever missed him.” He gave a little laugh. He tucked the lily in the thick curls above his left ear, then pulled it down and twirled its tiny ciborium in his fingers. “Clever, no? Now nobody asks where he is.”
“Oh, indeed, two birds with one stone, you’re quite right,” I said. “Though I’m sure there’s a great deal more to it.”
“But you’ll help us now, won’t you?”
“I will indeed. I’m very rich, I told you. I’ll patch things up. I have an instinct for it. I owned a great playhouse in a faraway city, and after that an island of fancy shops, and other such things. I am a monster in many realms, it seems. You’ll never, ever have to fear again.”
“You’re truly beauty full, you know,” he said raising one eyebrow and then giving me a quick wink. He drew on his tasty-looking little cigarette and then offered it to me. His left hand kept the lily safe.
“Can’t. Only drink blood,” I said. “A regular vampire out of the book in the main. Need deep darkness in the light of day, which is coming very soon. You mustn’t touch this door.”
“Ha!” he laughed with impish delight. “That’s what I told her!” He rolled his eyes and glanced in the direction of the living room. “I said we had to steal a coffin for you right away, but she said, no, you’d think of that.”
“How right she was. The room will do, but I like coffins well enough. I really do.”
“And can you make us vampires too?”
“Oh, never. Absolutely not. You’re pure of heart and too alive, and I don’t have such a power. It’s never done. It can’t be.”
Again, he shrugged. “Then who made you?” he asked.
“I was born out of a black egg,” I said. “We all are.”
He gave a scoffing laugh.
“Well, you’ve seen all the rest,” I said. “Why not believe the best part of it?”
He only smiled and puffed his smoke, and looked at me most knavishly.
The piano sang on in crashing cascades, the rapid notes melting as fast as they were born, so like the last thin snowflakes of the winter, vanishing before they strike the pavements.
“May I kiss her before I go to sleep?” I asked.
He cocked his head, and shrugged. “If she doesn’t like it, she’ll never stop playing long enough to say so.”
I went back into the parlor. How clear it all was, the grand design of sumptuous French landscapes with their golden clouds and cobalt sk
ies, the Chinese vases on their stands, the massed velvet tumbling from the high bronze rods of the narrow old windows. I saw it all of a piece, including the bed where I had lain, now heaped with fresh down-filled coverlets and pillowed with embroidered antique faces.
And she, the center diamond of it all, in long white flannel, flounced at wrists and hem with rich old Irish lace, playing her long lacquered grand with agile unerring fingers, her hair a broad smooth yellow glow about her shoulders.
I kissed her scented locks, and then her tender throat, and caught her girlish smile and gleaming glance as she played on, her head tilting back to brush my coat front.
Down around her neck, I slipped my arms. She leant her gentle weight against me. With crossed arms, I clasped her waist. I felt her shoulders moving against my snug embrace with her darting fingers.
I dared in whisper-soft tones with sealed lips to hum the song, and she hummed with me.
“Appassionata,” I whispered in her ear. I was crying. I didn’t want to touch her with blood. She was too clean, too pretty. I turned my head.
She pitched forward. Her hands pounded into the stormy finish.
A silence fell, abrupt, and crystalline as the music before it.
She turned and threw her arms around me, and held me tight and said the words I’d never heard a mortal speak in all my long immortal life:
“Armand, I love you.”
23
Need I say they are the perfect companions?
Neither of them cared about the murders. I could not for the life of me understand it. They cared about other things, such as world peace, the poor suffering homeless in the waning winter cold of New York, the price of medicines for the sick, and how dreadful it was that Israel and Palestine were forever in battle with each other. But they did not care one whit about the horrors they’d beheld with their own eyes. They did not care that I killed every night for blood, that I lived off it and nothing else, and that I was a creature wed by my very nature to human destruction.
They did not care one whit about the dead brother (his name was Fox, by the way, and the last name of my beautiful child is best left unmentioned).
In fact if this text ever sees the light of the real world, you’re bound to change both her first name and that of Benjamin.
However, that’s not my concern now. I can’t think of the fate of these pages, except that they are very much for her, as I mentioned to you before, and if I’m allowed to title them I think it will be Symphony for Sybelle.
Not, please understand, that I love Benji no less. It’s only that I haven’t the same overwhelming protective feeling for him. I know that Benji will live out a great and adventurous life, no matter what should befall me or Sybelle, or even the times. It’s in his flexible and enduring Bedouin nature. He is a true child of the tents and the blowing sands, though in his case, the house was a dismal cinder block hovel on the outskirts of Jerusalem where he induced tourists to pose for overpriced pictures with him and a filthy snarling camel.
He’d been flat out kidnapped by Fox under the felonious terms of a long-term lease of bondage for which Fox paid Benji’s father five thousand dollars. A fabricated emigration passport was thrown into the bargain. He’d been the genius of the tribe, without doubt, had mixed feelings about going home and had learnt in the New York streets to steal, smoke and curse, in that order. Though he swore up and down he couldn’t read, it turned out that he could, and began to do so obsessively just as soon as I started throwing books at him.
In fact, he could read English, Hebrew and Arabic, having read all three in the newspapers of his homeland since before he could remember.
He loved taking care of Sybelle. He saw to it that she ate, drank milk, bathed and changed her clothes when none of these routine tasks interested her. He prided himself on the fact that he could by his wits obtain for her whatever she needed, no matter what happened to her.
He was the front man for her with the hotel, tipping the maids, making normal talk at the front desk, which included remarkably finespun lies about the whereabouts of the dead Fox, who had become in Benji’s never ending saga a fabulous world traveler and amateur photographer; he handled the piano tuner, who was called as often as once a week because the piano stood by the window, exposed to sun and cold, and also because Sybelle did indeed pound it with the fury that would indeed have impressed the great Beethoven. He spoke on the phone to the bank, all of whose personnel thought he was his older brother, David, pronounced Dahveed, and then made the requisite calls at the teller’s window for cash as little Benjamin.
I was convinced within nights of talking with him that I could give him as fine an education as Marius had ever given me, and that he would end up having his choice of universities, professions or amateur pursuits of mind-engaging substance. I didn’t overplay my hand. But before the week was out I was dreaming of boarding schools for him from which he might emerge a gold-buttoned blue blazer-wearing American East Coast social conquistador.
I love him enough to tear limb from limb anyone who so much as lays a finger on him.
But between me and Sybelle there lies a sympathy which sometimes eludes mortals and immortals for the space of their entire lives. I know Sybelle. I know her. I knew her when I first heard her play, and I know her now, and I wouldn’t be here with you if she were not under the protection of Marius. I will during the space of Sybelle’s life never be parted from her, and there is nothing she can ever ask of me that I shall not give.
I will endure unspeakable anguish when Sybelle inevitably dies. But that has to be borne. I have no choice now in the matter. I am not the creature I was when I laid eyes on Veronica’s Veil, when I stepped into the sun.
I am someone else, and that someone else has fallen deeply and completely in love with Sybelle and Benjamin and I cannot go back on it.
Of course I am keenly conscious that I thrive in this love; being happier than I have ever been in my entire immortal existence, I have gained great strength from having these two as my companions. The situation is too nearly perfect to be anything but utterly accidental.
Sybelle is not insane. She is nowhere near it, and I fancy that I understand her perfectly. Sybelle is obsessed with one thing, and that is playing the piano. From the first time she laid her hands on the keys she has wanted nothing else. And her “career,” as so generously planned for her by her proud parents and by the burningly ambitious Fox, never meant much of anything to her.
Had she been poor and struggling perhaps recognition would have been indispensable to her love affair with the piano, as it would have given her the requisite escape from life’s dreary domestic traps and routines. But she was never poor. And she is truly, in the very root of her soul, indifferent as to whether people hear her play her music or not.
She needs only to hear it herself, and to know that she is not disturbing other people.
In the old hotel, mostly full of rooms rented by the day, with only a handful of tenants rich enough to be lodged there year by year, as was Sybelle’s family, she can play forever without disturbing anyone.
And after her parents’ tragic death, after she lost the only two witnesses who had been intimate to her development, she simply could not cooperate with Fox’s plans for her career any further.
Well, all this I understood, almost from the beginning. I understood it in her incessant repetition of the Sonata No. 23, and I think if you were to hear it, you would understand it too. I want you to hear it.
Understand, it will not at all faze Sybelle if other people do gather to listen to her. It won’t bother her one whit if she’s recorded. If other people enjoy her playing and tell her so, she’s delighted. But it’s a simple thing with her. “Ah, so you too love it,” she thinks. “Isn’t it beautiful?” This is what she said to me with her eyes and her smiles the very first time I ever approached her.
And I suppose before I go any further—and I do have more to put down about my children—I should address this question
: How did I approach her? How did I come to be in her apartment on that fateful morning, when Dora stood in the Cathedral crying to the crowds about the miraculous Veil, and I, the blood in my veins having combusted, was in fact rocketing skyward?
I don’t know. I have rather tiresome supernatural explanations that read like tomes by members of the Society for the Study of Psychic Phenomena, or the scripts for Mulder and Scully on the television show called The X-Files. Or like a secret file on the case in the archives of the order of psychic detectives called the Talamasca.
Bluntly, I see it this way. I have most-powerful abilities to cast spells, to dislocate my vision, and to transmit my image over distances, and to affect matter both at close range and matter which is out of sight. I must somehow, in this morning journey towards the clouds, have used this power. It might have been drawn from me in a moment of harrowing pain when I was for all purposes deranged and completely unaware of what was happening to me. It might have been a last desperate hysterical refusal to accept the possibility of death, or of the horrible predicament, so close to death, in which I found myself.
That is, having fallen on the roof, burnt and in unspeakable torment, I might have sought a desperate mental escape, projecting my image and my strength into Sybelle’s apartment long enough to kill her brother. It certainly is possible for spirits to exert enough pressure on matter to change it. So perhaps that is exactly what I did—project myself in spirit form and lay hands upon the substance that was Fox, and kill him.
But I don’t really believe all this. I’ll tell you why.
First off, though Sybelle and Benjamin are no experts, for all their savvy and seeming detachment, on the subject of death and its subsequent forensic analysis, they both insisted that Fox’s body was bloodless when they got rid of it. The puncture wounds were apparent on his neck. In sum, they believe to this very hour that I was there, in substantial form, and that I did indeed drink Fox’s blood.
Now that a projected image cannot do, at least not insofar as I know it. No, it cannot devour the blood of an entire circulatory system and then dissolve itself, returning to the cicatricula of the mind from which it came. No, that is not possible.