American Gothic

by Michael Romkey

  The woman’s head rose enough for her to look up at him through the long tangle of hair falling around her face. Lavalle was caught completely off guard. It was a white woman. Where had she come from? Lady Fairweather was the only other white woman on the coast, and she was dead.

  Lavalle jerked the reins again when Napoleon began to back away. There was no avoiding the scene, repugnant as it was. Lavalle swung himself out of the saddle, grunting as his boots hit the ground. He looped the reins around the branch of a tree felled in the last storm. He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but something made the ever-charming Parisian doctor wary.

  Lavalle knelt next to the prostrate woman long enough to assure himself of what he already knew. Marie France’s corpse was still warm to the touch. The savage wound in her neck was the cause of death. He was surprised he hadn’t seen the shoe on her right foot and recognized her sooner, for Marie was the only black woman Lavalle knew on the island besides his nurse, Magalie Jeanty, who wore shoes. The left shoe was missing. Perhaps it had come off when her lifeless body was pitched down the stairs. Or maybe she lost it while trying to run away from Peregrine, the coldhearted killer. The American’s interest in sorcery hadn’t prevented him from killing the voodoo priestess. The larger question, though, was would he kill Lavalle?

  The doctor looked up at the white woman, who was watching him with what appeared to be a drugged fascination. Lavalle had her to worry about now, too, not that he would put a stranger’s welfare ahead of his own, even one so lovely. She was young, scarcely past childhood, and far too innocent looking to be anywhere near a creature like Nathaniel Peregrine. Her face had the same refined, idealized preciousness seen in the face of a little girl’s doll. Her skin was the most amazingly perfect shade of white, as if she were made from porcelain. Lavalle guessed she was sixteen, maybe eighteen at the most. Despite his fear, and his determination to look after his own best interests, he could not help but feel a twinge of yearning for the delicious young thing.

  “Hello, my dear,” Lavalle said.

  She did not answer but got to her feet and turned to go into the house. Lavalle went up the stairs after her.

  “Excuse me, young lady, but I am not sure it is a good idea for you to go inside.”

  When she did not stop, Lavalle stepped quickly forward and put his hand gently on her shoulder. She turned, her lips the shimmering red hue of wet cherries. The impulse to take her in his arms and kiss her took command of Dr. Lavalle with such force that he was barely able to keep himself from behaving poorly. There was a dreamy, faraway quality to her eyes. Peregrine must have drugged her, Lavalle thought, perhaps with a draft of opium.

  “It is not I who am on drugs,” she said. She spoke in French, but her accent reminded Lavalle of the Creoles he knew in Port-au-Prince. “I see you have gone back on the cocaine, Dr. Lavalle,” the girl said. “I can smell it in your blood.”

  She pulled a lady’s handkerchief from a sleeve and daintily patted her lips. Some of the red from her mouth transferred to the lace. Her lips were wet with blood, Lavalle realized, his eyes growing wide. She, not Peregine, had killed Marie France. That could only mean she was…

  “A vampire,” she said, and smiled sweetly, finishing his sentence with the same tender expression and tone she would have used to help a beau too shy to ask for the next dance. “But of course I am a vampire, Monsieur le Docteur. Surely you do not think anyone as perfect as I could be mortal?”

  Lavalle turned to run but his body inexplicably froze in midstride. He could not make his legs move by exertion of muscle or will. It was as if he had become completely, instantaneously paralyzed. But unlike in nightmares where Lavalle found himself unable to command his legs to work, now he could not even drag himself away from the thing he feared. He stood there, an awkwardly posed living statue, sweat trickling down his neck and the hollow of his spine. There was nothing to do but wait to see what she was going to do to him—and if Peregrine would intervene on his behalf before it was too late.

  “Won’t you please have a seat in the parlor, Doctor?”

  Lavalle felt an invisible force jerk him back around toward the main salon, his movement a series of jerks and spasms, as if he were a marionette controlled by strings in the puppet master’s hands. There was a fire burning in the fireplace. Lavalle could not turn his neck, but he saw that much from the corner of his eyes. Someone was moving back and forth, throwing things into the growing conflagration. Lavalle’s body was tugged around and abruptly dropped into a chair.

  The other figure was Peregrine. He ignored Lavalle, busy burning his paintings one at a time. The flames mingled the watercolors’ reds and golds with the rich, sometimes lurid colors of the tropical flowers the American had learned to paint from Lady Fairweather.

  Lavalle had no love left for Peregrine, yet it was excruciating to see him destroy the art he had spent so much time creating. The doctor disapproved of the American’s style, but watching Peregrine burn his art was like being forced to witness Saturn devour his children. There was something almost inhumanly hateful about the act. When an artist destroys his own creations, it is akin to infanticide.

  The woman moved into Lavalle’s field of view. She was holding a lamp in both hands like a votive offering, the glass hurricane chimney a few inches from her face. Lavalle did not know what she intended to do with the lamp, but it made him nervous.

  “Sometimes I think you are entirely driven by self-pity, Nathaniel,” she said. “There is nothing easier to get than a new lover.”

  Peregrine did not answer or look up from his grim work. He fed another painting into the flames, squinting against the firelight as it flared brighter.

  “Love is not meant for creatures like us, my darling.”

  The American turned toward the dwindling stack of his paintings, walking in a benumbed shuffle.

  “Did you love your English wench more than your wife?”

  Peregrine stopped and stood up straight, his back still to them both.

  “I didn’t love her more than my wife, but I did love her.”

  The female vampire shrieked with laughter.

  “Helen and my poor wife were more alike than a monster like you could ever imagine, Delphine. They shared the same simple goodness of soul.”

  “Oh, do please stop! You were just like this when I found you in the French Quarter after the Confederate raiders butchered your family. Do you remember what a simpering fool you were? You were killing yourself by degrees with opium, afraid to put a gun against your head and get it over with. It is unfortunate the Change has put you beyond the influence of narcotics. You and the decadent doctor could go on quite a spree together to forget your beloved Helen.”

  Lavalle held his breath as Peregrine stood there, but instead of the great explosion of wrath the doctor expected, the American started again for the stack of artwork he was progressively destroying.

  “If you’re going to burn the pictures you painted with Lady Fairweather, get it over with!” she cried, and threw the lamp. It smashed against the wall above the fireplace, spraying burning oil and fire across the room.

  Peregrine seemed undisturbed that his house was on fire until the paintings propped on the mantel burned through to reveal the oil painting behind them.

  “My Matisse!” he cried, but it was already too late, the oil painting burning brilliantly as the reclining nude disappeared behind a curtain of golden flame.

  The woman’s response at seeing what she’d done was to burst into mad laughter.

  “What fun is it to destroy if you don’t destroy things that are valuable, Nathaniel? You can buy more paintings when you come back with me to Paris. I am tired of New Orleans. And besides, we have worn out our welcome there for another generation or two after our latest visit.”

  With growing panic Lavalle watched the flames climbing the walls, licking toward the center of the ceiling. The draperies behind Peregrine caught fire. Lavalle could feel the heat on his face from across the r
oom.

  “Why did you kill her?”

  Lavalle felt a glimmer of hope. If the American regretted that Marie France had been killed by the other vampire, maybe he would protect Lavalle from the lunatic, and from the flames.

  “He doesn’t care about Marie, you fool,” the woman mocked Lavalle. “He is talking about Lady Fairweather.”

  Lavalle’s eyes grew wide.

  “Oh, yes, you are correct: I killed Lady Fairweather, not that she was anything but as good as dead,” the woman said, returning her attention to Peregrine. “I merely ended her suffering. You should thank me. If I really wanted to be cruel, I could have left her to endure the torment of having you and Dr. Lavalle moon over her in her final weeks.”

  “You are a horror, Delphine,” Peregrine said.

  “Yes,” she said as if receiving a compliment. She nodded toward Lavalle. “Do you want the pleasure of killing this parasite or is he mine?”

  “Let him go. There’s been enough killing.”

  Lavalle would have thrown his arms around the American and hugged him, had he been able to move a muscle.

  “You must be joking, chéri.”

  “It is finished for me here. I have no further need of him.”

  Peregrine turned his hawk’s face toward the doctor. He blinked his eyes with a deliberation that reminded Lavalle of a bird of prey looking down on the world. Lavalle wondered why he had never seen the remote coldness in Peregrine’s eyes before. It was like looking into the eyes of a raptor; the only thing he saw in the American’s dark eyes was a sharp, predatory intelligence devoid of mercy.

  “I am not taking you with me, Doctor.”

  “But what of your dreams of Lavalle finding a so-called cure?” Delphine Allard asked. “As if any of us would ever choose to give up power and immortality to go back to being a weak, pathetic human.”

  “I would have, if I could have shared mortality with Helen. I know, Lavalle, that you think unlocking the secret of what made me what I am is beyond the power of science, at least today. You thought you were using me, but it was just the reverse. My thinking was that if Helen believed you might one day find a cure, she would agree to the Change so that we could be together forever.”

  “She saw through your strategy,” Madame Allard jeered. “She was a better chess player than either of you two men.”

  The fire broke through the ceiling over the fireplace. Pieces of flaming joists crashed down in a shower of sparks, the heat so fierce that Peregrine had to move away.

  “The science…” The sound of Lavalle’s own voice startled him. He could speak again! He tried to stand up, but that was still impossible. “The science,” he began again, “isn’t there yet. But perhaps in twenty years. Maybe fifty. If I were immortal, I could work on the problem until the solution is found for us all.”

  Madame Allard came closer and began to stroke the back of her fingers against the stubble of Lavalle’s unshaven face.

  “What do you think, Nathaniel? Should we make him a changeling so that he can continue your insipid quest to regain your exalted status being human worm food?”

  Peregrine shook his head. “Lavalle is precisely the wrong sort of person to be given a vampire’s power.”

  “Why? Because he is so much like me—vicious, cowardly, and caring only for his own pleasure?”

  The American said nothing.

  “Did you know that he told Lady Fairweather the reason he had to leave France was because he’d killed a man in a duel over a woman?” She put her face directly in front of Lavalle’s, so close he could feel her breath as she spoke. “Why didn’t you tell her the truth? Why didn’t you tell her you went on a monthlong cocaine binge and murdered your pregnant wife and your best friend after becoming so delusional you were convinced they were having an affair and planning to murder you if you didn’t kill them first?”

  “Please don’t speak of that,” Lavalle begged. The tears only added to his humiliation, but he could not bear to think about the horrible thing he’d done in Paris.

  “I think Dr. Lavalle would make a perfect vampire, Nathaniel. Have you told him what it feels like to become drunk on the blood of human cattle?” Her eyes burned with the fire of a madness as intense as the one that was about to consume them along with the great house. “The feeling you get when you inject cocaine into your veins is nothing compared to the delirious bliss a vampire knows drinking blood. Shall I show you? My victims share my pleasure, at least they do until their hearts stop beating.”

  “Let him go, Delphine, and I will go with you to Paris or wherever you wish to go. Enough killing.”

  “You will?” Madame Allard sounded as excited as a child promised a treat.

  Lavalle hardly noticed when his hands began to slip back from their awkward grip on the chair’s arms. An almost electric shock shot through him when he realized he could move again.

  The doctor was on his feet, running, even before his mind could form the intention to flee the fire and the pair of supernatural killers. The archway to the front hall was in flames. He threw his arms over his head to keep his hair from catching on fire, and soon was flinging himself down the front steps.

  Napoleon! He looked frantically around, but there was no sign of his horse. Either someone had stolen him, or the beast had become frightened enough of the conflagration engulfing the house to slip his reins and run away.

  Lavalle began to run down the lane.

  The drumming—why did the drumming continue while Maison de la Falaise went up in flames? Did the people at the voodoo ceremony know Peregrine planned to destroy the great house and leave? Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they were glad the mansion was burning. If not for the infernal drumming, Lavalle would have thought them all dead.

  Unless they were dead. Unless they were zombies.

  Something gave way in Dr. Lavalle’s mind and he began to shriek in animal terror as he ran through the darkness. It was not that he believed in zombies—he could barely believe in vampires, and he knew they were real—but that the science, mathematics, and physics he had used to shore up his life were falling in on themselves, the foundation of his sanity eaten away by the chaos, by the unexplained, and the unexplainable…

  Lavalle ran screaming through the night, knowing that if vampires existed, then perhaps zombies did, too. And even if there were no zombies, he had been proven insufferably narrow-minded and myopic to have circumscribed the world into small, orderly circles whose boundaries were defined by scientific inquiry. There was more to the world than Lavalle had dreamed of in his mind, which lacked only for imagination.

  But worst of all for Dr. Lavalle was knowing that, taking the argument to its logical conclusion (as he felt compelled, as always, to do), the existence of categories of beings beyond the understanding of mortals meant that in all likelihood there really was a God, somewhere out there far, far away, at the end of all things, at the beginning of all things. And since God existed, then it was entirely reasonable to postulate that Dr. Michael Lavalle—murderer, drug addict, lecher, liar, fugitive, racist—was going to die and go straight to hell.

  Lavalle nearly ran into Madame Allard on the road. She had evidently run ahead of him through the jungle with impossible vampire speed, as Peregrine had once done, and was now waiting, not even panting, for him.

  “You didn’t really think I was going to let you get away,” she said. “Nathaniel is such a weakling. He would let you go, but I, however, am quite strict about not leaving loose ends when I finish enjoying myself and move on to new diversions.”

  Lavalle pulled away when she reached for him and ran back toward the house, his legs moving so fast that he kept stumbling and falling forward, though he somehow managed to stay on his feet and keep moving from the horror behind. He could hear her back there, laughing. She could catch him whenever she wanted, but it amused her to toy with him, like a cat playing with a mouse, prolonging the act of killing for sheer perverse enjoyment.

  The flaming great hou
se appeared out of the trees, first as a brilliant light above the leafy canopy, then in its entire horrible blazing glory. The structure was fully wrapped in flames that danced and jumped into the overarching darkness. There was no escape for Lavalle there.

  Peregrine sat on the bottom step of the porch, oblivious to the inferno behind him, head in hands, eyes downcast, ignoring the smoke coming off the back of his smoldering jacket.

  “Help me!” Lavalle shouted, but the American did not even look up.

  She was close behind him now, so the doctor had no choice but to keep running. The fire illuminated the rim of the cliff ahead, beyond it a yawning abyss that concealed the long drop to the rocks and water below. Lavalle had a fleeting, desperate idea to stop at the last possible moment and see the monster hurtle past him, but he was running too fast. Madame Allard’s fevered fingers reached out to lightly brush his neck over his jugular as Lavalle felt himself hurtle over the edge.

  There was the sickening sensation of falling, and the vomit rising, when something smashed into Lavalle from behind.

  He instinctively knew, in that split second, that Delphine had thrown herself after him, unafraid of the fall, knowing that not even the screaming drop to the rocks below could end her demonic existence.

  In his last moment of life, as the rocks loomed boldly into his vision, blotting out everything else—dark, jagged, unforgiving—Dr. Lavalle felt the vampire’s teeth tear savagely into his neck. There was a short, sharp eruption of bliss seemingly as powerful as a star exploding into nova, and after that…

  Nothing.

  PART THREE

  SAN FRANCISCO

  * * *

  The Present

  27

  The Cage Club

  IT WAS A rainy night on a dirty, litter-strewn street of San Francisco. The closed factories and shuttered warehouses had been slated for gentrification a few years earlier, before the Internet bubble burst. The pricey apartment lofts and hip advertising agencies decorated in industrial chic were still only blueprints tucked away in a filing cabinet in the office of a real-estate developer one step ahead of bankruptcy. The buildings on McKennit Street remained empty, the broken windows boarded up, steel accordion gates padlocked across entries to keep out transients. But the homeless and lawless looking for something to steal or smash had learned to stay away from McKennit Street. The neighborhood belonged to the Ravening Brood, and they had a reputation for dealing harshly with trespassers.