American Gothic
Page 25
“I want you to think about it very carefully, Ophelia, and then tell me what it is I can do to help you.” He smiled. “It is not a commonplace occurrence—a vampire putting himself at one’s service. So whatever you choose to ask me for in the way of assistance, think about it carefully and choose wisely.”
38
Two Years Later
WHEN OPHELIA GOT home, the first thing she did was go through the big house on Mulberry Street and open the windows. She had thoroughly cleaned the house before leaving, throwing out the old mail, newspapers, and unread magazines, washing the walls and windows, waxing the floors and woodwork, which hadn’t been touched since her mother died. She hired a retired woman in the neighborhood to come every two weeks to dust, but the house smelled closed and musty after being shut for so long. Ophelia had planned to return sooner, but one thing led to another, and she’d spent the previous summer in Paris, which had been more wonderful than she could ever have imagined.
It was a pleasant day in early summer. The Northern California sky was cornflower blue, a comfortable breeze blowing in off the Pacific.
Ophelia unpacked her suitcases and put away her things. The clothes she’d brought home with her looked a little odd hanging in the closet next to her old Gothic weeds. She tried to remember when she bought her first skirt or blouse that wasn’t black or white. Ophelia hadn’t made a conscious decision to put all that behind her, but somewhere early on, she had walked into Dillard’s or The Gap and bought something that looked not unlike the sort of clothing any other young woman her age and place in society might buy. Ophelia no longer needed to look different; she was different, and she didn’t use the way she dressed to either advertise or disguise the fact.
She went down to the kitchen and opened a new packet of dark-roasted Starbucks coffee, enjoying the rich, smoky aroma filling the air. She still expected to see her father sitting there at the kitchen table, either drinking or passed out. He had hardly budged from that spot all the time she was in high school, like some sort of living art installation, a sculpture depicting depression and dissolution. Ophelia lingered behind the chair where he used to sit. His presence was still in the house, as was her mother’s. She could feel Mother with her as the breeze came in through the windows, lifting the antique lace curtains.
That was the good part of ghosts, she thought, the love they leave behind to comfort and reassure the living, even if we’re not able to identify the source of the good feeling washing warmly over us when we visit a place where people were, if only for a brief time, happy.
The coffeemaker made a slurping noise as the last bit of coffee was forced through the strainer and into the carafe. Ophelia poured herself a cup and sat down with anticipation to read the letter that had been forwarded to her post office box in San Francisco.
The envelope was crinkled and water-stained, as if touched by the rain. The canceled stamps were from the Seychelles, an island group east of Africa, near Tanzania, north of the island of Madagascar. She tapped the envelope on the table and carefully tore it open along the narrow edge opposite the stamps. The writing on a dozen pieces of green-lined notepaper inside were in her father’s distinctive block printing.
Ophelia greatly enjoyed her father’s letters about his adventures in the Galápagos, rounding Cape Horn, visiting the ruined Buddhist temples of Cambodia. Though she had never realized it before this correspondence began, her father had talent as a writer. He had a good eye for detail, and a philosopher’s insight into the things that made the people he met in faraway lands different, and the things that made them all the same. She kept his letters, and not just for sentimental reasons. Ophelia planned to one day excerpt them in a collection of travel stories.
But she would not share with the world, or with anybody, the early letters, which were filled with pain, regret, and sickness. Her father had gone first to Tahiti, the long crossing without alcohol on the boat a chance at least to begin to get drinking out of his system. The first letter made it plain to her just how sick he was. By the time the letter arrived from Fiji, her father wrote that he was coughing up blood. Ophelia knew that the next letter she got from the South Pacific probably wouldn’t be from her father, but a letter of condolence to tell her he had died.
Her father’s letter from New Zealand reported that he’d gotten through the bad spell and felt good enough to do some snorkeling. In the letters she’d gotten after that, one every month, her father never mentioned his health except to say he was well, and detailing trips up mountains, down white-water rivers, and through jungles that only a strong man in robust health could have endured.
One day, the letters would stop. Nobody had told her that. Nobody needed to tell her. Notice would come that the boat had sunk in a typhoon, or something along those lines, claiming the lives of her father and his friend, the captain, Nathaniel Peregrine. That wouldn’t happen for a few years, and until then, there would be the letters, which had become one of the things Ophelia enjoyed most in life, and looked forward to with great anticipation. And even when the time came, she would know they were out there, watching over her from afar. It was hard to imagine that they would not all meet again someday, perhaps when she was old and gray, though her father and Nathaniel Peregrine would look as if they hadn’t aged a day. Yet for the most part, they had gone different ways, and that made her a little sad.
Ophelia had been so certain that she was destined to become like Peregrine, but she knew now she had been wrong. Ahead of her were two more years of undergraduate classes, a master-of-fine-arts degree, and probably a doctorate, all leading to a professorship at Smith or a similar college, and a career divided between writing poetry and teaching other bright young minds to love verse as much as she did. Maybe there would even be a family in her future. She had met a boy the summer before, in Paris, and he was coming to visit her in San Francisco in July.
Ophelia read slowly, savoring every word, wanting it to last.
The note at the end was in Nathaniel’s hand, an old-fashioned script that always made Ophelia think of the writing on the Declaration of Independence. She would never be able to thank Peregrine for everything he had done for her. He had given her back her life and saved her father’s as well. Beyond protecting her from the insane Dr. Glass—who almost certainly would have killed her—the vampire had stood by her throughout the awful week when police were interrogating her and everybody else involved in the Cage Club scene about their investigation into the double murder. The fact that Ophelia had been one of Glass’s patients made them suspicious about her, but the police were never able to prove she was in the building the night Glass and the other girl died. And when it turned out that Zeke and a handful of other Ravening players were also Dr. Glass’s psychiatric patients—all of them from wealthy San Francisco families—the investigators stopped paying so much attention to Ophelia. After an investigative reporter at the newspaper discovered that Glass was supplying Zeke and some of the others with prescriptions for powerful drugs, sharing in the profits when the drugs were resold on the street, the police seemed to lose interest in finding Dr. Glass’s killer. Then a coroner’s jury agreed with the crime-scene investigators’ report that Dr. Glass was the one who had slit Candy Priddle’s throat. In the end, no one was ever charged with killing Dr. Glass. The last detective who talked to Ophelia made it obvious that the police thought Dr. Glass had gotten what he deserved.
Congratulations on completing your sophomore year at Smith, Peregrine wrote in his brief note to Ophelia. Keep posting your new poems on your Web site. The first thing I do when we get somewhere that has Internet access is read your latest work. (Your poem about twilight was sublime!)
Ophelia poured another cup of coffee and went upstairs and turned on her computer. A new poem about homecomings was taking shape in her mind. She would write it directly into an HTML file and post it for her vampire friend and her father to read in an Internet café in Mozambique or Sri Lanka. She’d long since stripped her Web site of the
photos and other information about haunted places; they were no longer an interest of hers. But she still used the same Web domain name, which seemed appropriate enough, given the unusual circumstances surrounding Ophelia’s house, and the house directly across the street, where Nathaniel Peregrine and his family had once lived: www.hauntedsanfrancisco.com.
By Michael Romkey
Published by Ballantine Books:
I, VAMPIRE
THE VAMPIRE PAPERS
THE VAMPIRE PRINCESS
THE VAMPIRE VIRUS
VAMPIRE HUNTER
THE LONDON VAMPIRE PANIC
THE VAMPIRE’S VIOLIN
The girl grinned, her teeth so white they were almost blue…. She had fangs like a viper, the tips red with blood….
“I know everything, my love,” she said. “Everything. I can free you from the pain,” she said, her lips now against his ear.
A feeling of warmth flooded through him, releasing all tension from muscle and sinew, his will completely replaced with desire. Peregrine was not a religious man, but now he was convinced that the Angel of Death existed, an exquisite creature whose embrace no man or woman would want to resist. He closed his eyes and waited for the bliss of death to cleanse him forever of misery and hate….
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Michael Romkey
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eISBN: 978-0-345-45209-2
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