There still was no light on across the street when she checked again, but then she noticed the faint golden light flickering on the floor. Someone had lit a fire in the fireplace in the front parlor.
Ophelia pulled on a pair of knee-high boots that zipped up the back, grabbed the Prada backpack containing the crimson file folder, and ran down the stairs.
“I know you’re in there,” Ophelia yelled through the brass letterbox opening.
The door swung open, and there she was, on her knees, looking up at him.
He stood looking down at her for a moment, his face unreadable. He offered her his hand, which felt warm, even feverish, when she accepted it and got back on her feet.
“May I help you, Miss Warring?”
“I would like to…” She paused. “You know my name.”
“I may not be very social, Miss Warring, but I do know my neighbors.”
Ophelia took a deep breath before plunging on. “And I know who you are.”
One of his dark eyebrows shot up.
“Would you like to come inside, Miss Warring? I was just about to make myself a cup of tea.”
He stood aside for her, not waiting for her answer, as if he already knew that she would accept his invitation. And she did.
After looking through the contents, he closed the folder on his lap and sat looking down on it.
“You’re not even going to bother denying you’re Nathaniel Peregrine, are you,” Ophelia said.
He looked up at her, and she could see danger in his dark eyes. But that did not matter to her. One way or the other, she would get something she wanted from him, even if it was death.
“Of course I am Nathaniel Peregrine. But I’m not that Nathaniel.”
“Don’t embarrass yourself. You saw the copy of the Matthew Brady portrait from the Civil War. And the time you came back after World War One—it is obvious that it’s you under that beard. I know who you are, and I know what you are.”
“No, my dear, you do not. You are mistaken.”
“I think I’ve always known that vampires exist, in one form or the other. I’ve always been fascinated with them. They are sensual monsters. They don’t kill their victims so much as seduce them. And, of course, they do not always kill the humans who give them what they need. If they choose to, they can change them, bring them across, make them immortal.”
“I have more than a passing awareness of this group you are associated with, the Ravening,” Peregrine said. He shook his head more with sadness than disapproval, she thought. “It is not healthy to be preoccupied with darkness and death.”
“And why not? We’re all dying from the moment we’re born. Happiness, life, a future—those are all illusions for mortals, comforting lies we tell ourselves to help us pretend we do not see the rot and decay that is our true fate.”
Peregrine looked at Ophelia in a way that made her feel like squirming. It was as if he was looking directly into her soul.
“The day you saw me at the cemetery.”
“I didn’t think you noticed me,” she said.
“I notice everything,” he said, and smiled. “You were visiting your mother’s grave.”
“So?”
“It is hard to suffer the loss of a mother. I know what it is like to lose those closest to you. It can warp you. It can make you hate the world. If you’re not careful, it can destroy you.”
“When?”
Peregrine’s eyes narrowed. “Your flippant attitude tries my patience.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
He glared back at her but said nothing.
“You could kill me,” she said. She knew that touched something, because he had to look away. They were sitting in the parlor in wing-backed chairs facing the fireplace. Even if she tried to run, she knew she couldn’t get more than a few feet from him before he would have her.
“Or you could make me like you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You could turn me into a vampire.”
“I am not a vampire.”
“Nathaniel, you’re nearly one hundred and seventy years old. You are not as invisible to history as you think. I found some of the old newspaper accounts from New Orleans in 1863, where you were in the hospital before supposedly dying at Gettysburg. And that bloody spree in Haiti in 1914.”
The look he gave Ophelia filled her with satisfaction.
“You didn’t even know they wrote about that, did you? It was in the Port-au-Prince newspaper. And yes, I do read French. I read and speak it rather well. My mother went to a great deal of trouble, when she was alive, to ensure that I had a first-rate education.”
“And now it is nearly time for you to go away to school.”
She felt herself sag and tried to hide it by sitting up straight and looking the vampire directly in the eye. “I was going to go to Smith.”
“To study poetry.”
She gave him a curious look. “How do you know such things? Did you read my mind?”
He smiled for the first time, and the expression gave an entirely different dimension to his personality.
“You look like a poet, Miss Warring.” His smile broadened. “And I read your poem about poppies in the Western Review.”
Now it was Ophelia who smiled. “You read the Review?”
“I have to confess that poetry is one of my passions. Poetry and music.”
He handed the folder back to her and stood.
“I would like to offer you another cup of tea, but I’m afraid I have a previous engagement. Perhaps another time.”
She stood and looked up at him.
“Will you help me?”
“Help you how?” he said.
“Will you change me?”
“You are playing a very dangerous game, my dear. Besides, you’re completely mistaken. The Nathaniel Peregrine you take me for has been dead for more than a century. But I would like to talk to you again. We could discuss poetry.”
“That would be nice,” Ophelia said, trying to decide whether or not to believe him. The research, hasty as it was, seemed obvious enough. She was very good with a computer, and the work she’d done on her Hauntings San Francisco Web site had taught her the tricks she needed to know to be a good historical researcher.
“I would only ask that you do one small thing for me,” he said, leaning forward a bit.
They were standing very close to each other. Ophelia could feel the heat coming off Peregrine’s body. The way he was standing over her, he looking down, she up, their faces near, she thought he would kiss her—either that or sink his teeth into her neck. She had the sense that they were sharing the same moment, each wondering what the next move would be, when he spoke in his low, patrician voice.
“Promise me you will not tell others you think a Civil War general has come to live across the street from you.”
Ophelia could almost see herself reflected in his dark eyes. It was as if she were dreaming. She felt light-headed, even high. It was the effect he had on her. She suspected he could get women to say or do anything he wanted.
“I promise. But think about giving me the help I need.”
He looked down on her, nothing changing in his expression, betraying not a hint of what his intentions were about his Gothic visitor.
34
Therapy
DR. GLASS LEANED back in his Aeron chair and shut his eyes. The young woman buried her face in his lap, making pleasure sounds deep in her throat.
“This is the best therapy for you. The only way you will ever learn to coexist with your libido.”
The word Candy had used to describe herself—nymphomaniac—referred to a diagnosis the psychiatric community had judged obsolete. Rather, the DSM-IV had substituted the term hypersexuality to describe individuals exhibiting an abnormally heightened level of sexuality. Dr. Glass had trouble with the new term, for who was to say what degree of sexuality was excessive? There was no ultimately useful scale
to measure so-called normal desire in human beings. Dr. Glass was highly sexed himself, and there was nothing wrong with him.
“You must explore the boundaries of desire and see where your impulses lead if you ever hope to control them.”
“Why don’t you shut up and enjoy it?” Candy said without lifting her head out of his lap.
Dr. Glass was not in the habit of taking advice from patients, but for once he decided to make an exception.
He watched Ophelia get comfortable in her usual position on the couch, wishing he could join her there.
“You are much more relaxed than you were when we started these sessions.”
“I suppose people like to talk about themselves and their problems. Even me, though I wouldn’t have imagined it.”
“You haven’t exactly thrown inhibition to the wind and told me everything.”
“No,” she said, smiling to herself, “but I’ve told you a lot more than I ever expected to.”
“And I have, much to my own surprise, been impressed with your worldview. No doubt you’ve noticed I’ve taken to wearing black.”
Ophelia turned her head toward him and ran her big dark eyes over him in a way that excited him on a level that a slut like Candy never could. Had she noticed his altered taste in clothing? She did not say and Glass couldn’t tell. He could usually read his patients, but Ophelia remained as mysterious and inscrutable as the day they first met.
“Western society has, as you’ve said, developed a pathological aversion to facing death. Aversion is an outward manifestation of fear, and fear indicates subconscious issues that should be addressed. I’m planning a major monograph on the subject for the next APA national convention.
“The sharply focused interest in vampires you share with your friends is noteworthy and has a sociological and psychological significance beyond what most people realize. The force that Jung called the will to power is powerful and openly acknowledged in your darkling coven of a social group. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this runs counter to the despicable milquetoast character shared by the simpering cowards and politically correct weaklings who have taken over society.”
Ophelia laughed quietly. Dr. Glass took it as a sign of approval. She had never before laughed in his presence. There was a delicious velvet quality to the sound, like moths fluttering against silk.
“But most significant of all is your choice to make blood an object of adoration,” Dr. Glass went on. “Blood has always been a taboo substance. In primitive societies, women are considered unclean during menstruation. They are banished to seclusion in huts set apart from the rest of the clan, the blood making them unclean. The Jews have elaborate rituals to avoid the contamination of blood. But your circle has done something entirely new and unprecedented. You have taken blood, the substance of defilement and contamination, and elevated it to serve as your tribal totem.”
“The blood is the life,” Ophelia said.
“Yes!” Dr. Glass exclaimed. “You are precisely right and the rest of the world wrong. Whether we know it or not, we are all controlled by the language of the unconscious. The things we fear and the things we lust after exist beneath the level of our conscious understanding as symbols and images. It is the aim of psychiatry to study and analyze the unconscious, to learn the vocabulary of the dream mind that controls our waking action, not only to keep us from reenacting psychic trauma in disguised ways, but to unlock our secret hidden powers.”
Glass was leaning forward, his eyes bright, his hands alive with gestures.
“I can hear the message in here.” He touched his forehead. “We all can. The messages of the unconscious just keep coming, like a radio signal transmitted over and over again, until finally one day we tune it in and receive the message.
“In olden times, we would go to a priest or a shaman to divine the meaning. Now we turn to psychiatrists, but our job seems to be not so much to free the beast as to drug it into impotent numbness. But I see possibilities in you, Ophelia, possibilities of a knowing I’d scarcely imagined existed.”
Dr. Glass stopped, feeling for a moment a rare hint of uncertainty.
“Why are you smiling?”
“You’re doing all the talking, Dr. Glass. This is supposed to be my therapy session. Did you have espresso at lunch?”
“I suppose it’s because it’s your last session. The insurance companies put a limit on the number of visits they’ll pay for. After that, they expect psychiatrists to do their work with drugs and a few brief, well-spaced maintenance visits.”
“I refuse to take drugs,” the girl said.
“I understand and respect that. I endorse your position. I don’t want to mute what’s inside you. That’s all the more reason for you to continue your therapy. We’re just beginning to make progress. Your insurance wouldn’t cover the cost, but your father can easily afford it.”
“I don’t think I want to continue.”
“Don’t you think you’re benefiting from our sessions?”
“What I think is that I’m mainly indulging myself and entertaining you. I can tell how amused you are at some of my stories. I only agreed to see you because my counselor and the headmistress at my school insisted on it as a condition of graduation.”
“Most schools would have expelled you for keeping an enemies list, Ophelia. School authorities are extremely sensitive to that sort of thing after Columbine, and rightly so.”
“It wasn’t an enemies list. At least not in that way.”
“Keeping a list of people you hate isn’t a good thing to do, given today’s political climate.”
“I know that now. But it seems ridiculous that they overreacted to something like that. It’s not as if I threatened anybody. Those people all made it plain that they hate me. What difference does it make whether I hate them in my mind or write it down in my journal?”
“On top of the whole Goth thing and the way you withdrew from social activities at the school after your mother died, they took it as a warning sign.”
“Let’s not talk about my mom.”
“Now who is avoiding the subject of death?”
“It’s what I deserve for going to an exclusive private school for the children of San Francisco’s ruling elite. At a regular high school, nobody would have given me a second look. They don’t know what real freaks are at my school.”
“So graduating does matter?”
Ophelia’s shoulders rose off the couch in a slight shrug.
“How did you make out with the admissions people at Smith College?”
“Did my counselor tell you everything?”
Dr. Glass nodded.
“Some things ought to be confidential.”
“And they are, when we talk about them in this office. I’m your doctor, Ophelia. There can’t be secrets between us.”
She had nothing to say to that. He hadn’t begun to penetrate the layers of secrets hiding the real Ophelia, immortal black pearl, from being seen by the world.
“So?” he said.
“So what?”
“So did you get in to Smith?”
“Yes.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment.”
Ophelia had no reply to that.
“It’s something to look forward to, something to plan for, going off to an upper-crust Ivy League college in the East.”
“I don’t think I’m going.”
“Why not? Do you intend to stay here and care for your father? I daresay the only thing that can help him is a detox facility.”
“I have everything I need here in San Francisco.”
“Most young people your age would be looking forward to going away to college and making a life for themselves.”
“Life is overrated. I’ve already told you: It’s death that interests me.”
Dr. Glass smiled to himself. He was hoping she would say something like that.
“You know you need more therapy sessions with me. I can help.”
“I’ll
think about it,” she said.
“And if you continue your therapy—indeed, even if you don’t—it would mean very much to me if you would do one small favor for me.”
“Such as?”
“Teach me to drink blood,” Dr. Glass said.
Ophelia turned and gave him an opaque look, her eyes dark and heavily made up with mascara, that filled him with a mad desire almost beyond what he could control.
35
Temptation
“YOU UNDERSTAND THAT he is a real vampire?” Ophelia said.
Scarlet seemed to be having trouble focusing her eyes. “A real vampire,” she said. “Fucking fantastic. Because I want to become a vampire. I’m tired of this fledgling shit, having to kiss everybody’s ass—not to mention other parts of their anatomy.”
“What the hell,” Ophelia said, and rang the doorbell. It was a calculated risk, but maybe it would work. She had to do something to get Nathaniel Peregrine’s attention.
The porch light came on, followed by the sound of the dead bolt being unlocked and the latch turned. The door opened.
“Good evening, Ophelia.”
Peregrine looked as if he’d been expecting her, although that would have been impossible since she had only settled on her plan when she got to the Cage Club and found Scarlet there, stoned out of her mind on Vicodin, making out with Zeke in the Bondage Room.
“And good evening to you,” Peregrine said, looking down at Scarlet.
The Ravening fledgling giggled and began to teeter on her stiletto heels. Ophelia put an arm around her, to keep her from losing her balance and falling.
“I brought you a present,” Ophelia said, indicating the other girl.
Peregrine’s eyes shifted back to Scarlet for a few moments. Ophelia had seen men look at Scarlet—her real name was Laurel—with open lust or revulsion, for she made a special point of being outrageous. Peregrine, however, did not react to her in any particular way. Ophelia had almost decided he would reject her bait when he invited them into his house.
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