The carriage door stood open; the coachman and the little, twisted groom watched him, grinning, as he put his bare foot on the iron step, stepped up, then stepped up again and into the coach.
It rocked ever so slightly on its leather springs, and the door swung shut and latched itself. Through the open window, he noted the earth Beeetheeeor and Reeezthorreee had scattered, black in the moonlight; the pick, the spade, and the stake that they had cast aside, and a few bones. From the meat, he told himself—but something in him turned it to from the dead woman. He was one of the living now, as she had been.
The coachman’s whip cracked. The coach creaked and jolted into motion. He had never ridden in a coach before and, boylike, delighted in it, exhilarated by the novelty of effortless speed. There was a rug on the backward-facing seat opposite him; he unfolded it and covered himself with it as he sometimes had with stolen altar cloths, tucking it about him and telling himself that he must accustom himself to such comforts now, as befitted the living. He would wash when the ice broke, get a house of his own by whatever means houses were obtained.
As the carriage rattled across the Roman bridge, he grew conscious of something cold pressing against his right side. His fingers found nothing there, but the pressure continued, and even increased. Feeling again, he discovered that his ragged trousers had parted from waistband to knee.
“I am here,” the White Lady said.
“I can’t see you,” he told her. Only silence answered. He tried to push her fingers away, but there were no fingers. “Don’t do that,” he said.
“Don’t do that,” she mocked him.
The rug slid from his lap to the floor.
“Freely,” she said, “freely.” And then, “You will never know another like me.”
“I don’t want to,” he told her; and yet, he did.
“Kiss me.” Hair and chill flesh moulded themselves upon his face. He kissed her, and from somewhere near the dark and swaying ceiling she laughed.
“You’re cold.”
“You are not. Lie down on the seat. I want to show you something.”
Reluctantly he did so, and she loved and bit as though her teeth were within her loins.
“You see? You are a man.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No.” He sat up again, and for a long while sat with his face in his hands. He was naked, though he could not remember how he had come to be, or what had become of his clothes.
After a time he covered his shame with the rug, and after a time still longer, began to enjoy the ride again. It seemed their horses could never tire, but galloped on forever through a night no sun would end. Looking out of the windows, he saw a dark castle upon a darker crag and pretended that he was its owner, a great lord—with a white charger—with medals on his chest—with a sword and a fur cloak. His wife would ride in a carriage like this, and he, swifter than the wind, would gallop before her to see that every lamp and cresset blazed, and that the servants had begun their dinner.
“Have you recovered?” the White Lady inquired. “You are young and should recover quickly.”
When he looked at the window on her side of the coach, he could see her in the corner very faintly, as a traveler among mountains sees, and then does not see, a face in the profile of a cliff, or a silent traveler like himself in a standing stone. When he tried to look at her directly, she vanished, becoming a glimmer of moonlight on the leather seat. “Please don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to. I want to go back to Eeesheeea.”
She laughed—or perhaps it was only the tinkling of a bell on the neck of one of the sheep on the hill below the crag. “You shall. Eventually.”
He would have opened the carriage door and thrown himself out, but the door would not open. He dived through the window instead.
And found himself in a deep, soft bed, with sheets and blankets and a puffy comforter over him. Each bedpost was a black candle, and all four candles were lit, sending up smoky flames as long as his forearm, about which the bats clinging to the arched vault above stirred and chittered in complaint. Something cold lay beside him, and for hours he dared not look.
“You were fatigued. I let you rest. Let us see if you are well rested.”
He felt her fingers and smiled despite himself, trembling.
“Perhaps you would like food? I would.”
“No,” he said; and she kissed him on the lips, covering his eyes with her hand.
“Am I so cold? Do I seem a dead thing?” She warmed him between her thighs.
“No,” he said again.
She laughed with delight, her laughter like church bells far away. “Nor am I. Do you recall what I taught you in the carriage? Here I lie. It is your turn.”
He pressed himself to the face he could scarcely see, and she licked, and tore him with her teeth until her pillow was wet everywhere with his blood. It frightened and sickened him, and yet there was something beyond them both that shone like a gem, turning and beckoning to him—something he seemed about to grasp at each moment.
“These are the pleasures of Hell, you see, man-child. In Hell they are not punished by pain alone, because pain alone can never be punishment enough. Now do as I taught, and show me that you still live, and I as well.” Her hands upon his hips directed his motions, and with each she grew more real, a living woman whose naked body rose from the blood-soaked sheet, bright as morning and white as alabaster. “For the blood is the life,” she said.
He slept, and woke alone.
For days, it seemed, he lay dreaming. That he was in the castle on the crag, he knew. There were windows in every wall of the great domed bedchamber—a tower room, then, high above all the rest. So would he have chosen, he decided, could he choose. Black velvet drapes streaked with cobwebs closed each window; and though at times those drapes were drawn back so that he looked down upon the cottages of their peasants or out upon the sea, or up into that endless night through which the queen’s carriage, somewhere, still thundered past stars white with anger or red with guilt, always he woke at last and found himself still in the great bed, with candles burning silently at its corners and never burning down, and the soft, stirring tester of bats overhead, bats who sometimes left their places to flutter aimlessly about the room or dart behind the drapes, never to be seen again.
By him, at least.
The White Lady returned, carrying a child of three, a girl with terrified eyes whose tears and struggles the long road had exhausted. The White Lady’s countenance was smooth and glowed with health; her red lips smiled as a cat smiles, displaying sharply pointed white teeth. “Do you like me better thus, man-child? Have I not become beautiful for you?”
He nodded, unable to speak or to tear his eyes from her.
“You are not afraid?” She dropped the little girl on a chair, like a parcel.
“Please. Please hurry.” He sat up, not bothering to conceal his nakedness.
“You will die. You have rested less than you imagine.” Her hands were behind her, loosing her dress. “You have one more in you, possibly. Then death.” The dress fell at her feet.
It seemed to the boy that his pounding heart would break his ribs.
“Look upon me, man-child.” For a few seconds that seemed eternity to him, her camisole wrapped her marvelous, living hair like a turban. Raising her arms, she pirouetted before him. “I was old when first you met me, but I am young as you, now. Younger, with your youth.”
Her body was above perfection, filling him with a hunger that consumed him until it could consume her. He sprang from the bed and rushed upon her.
Like mist she vanished. With her, the captured girl, the great bed with its flickering candles, and the vast bedchamber itself. Briefly he knew snow, and daylight beneath a low gray sky.
When he woke again, it was in a hard, narrow bed with one side against a rough plastered wall. He moaned and closed his eyes and sought to dream again, because it had been of her.
“You can’t stay here,” Johann the caretaker sa
id when he was able to sit up and drink broth. “Don’t you remember your own name?”
“I’m called ‘the boy,’” the boy said. It was the name Eeesheeea had given him.
“I call him Jon,” said fat Anna the caretaker’s wife. It had been the name of their first child, born when she and the caretaker had been married less than a year.
“When will I get my bed back?” Robert the caretaker’s son demanded.
“Tonight. He can sleep in front of the fire tonight, and tomorrow he’ll have to go.”
“Where?” the boy asked.
“Anywhere you want, as long as it isn’t here.” Johann the caretaker was silent a moment, rubbing his chin. “Go into the village. You must’ve come from there, and dozens of people are sure to know you.”
The boy said, “I did?” though he wanted to say I did not.
“Certainly. You must’ve walked out here last night, the good God knows why, and fallen among the body snatchers. They hit you on the head and knocked the sense out of it, and stole your clothes.”
Faintly—very faintly in the distance—the boy heard the jingle of harness and the rattle of the coach. “It snowed, didn’t it?” he said. He was scarcely conscious that he spoke aloud. “That’s why I can’t hear the horses’ hooves.”
Anna the caretaker’s wife went to the window. “Johann! It’s the carriage from the schloss.
Her husband went out into the snow with his hat in his hand.
Sitting at the scarred but sturdy old table, propped on his elbows drinking soup, the boy heard a rough, sneering voice from beyond the front door of the cottage, and knew it for the coachman’s, though he had never heard the coachman speak. The carriage, he promised himself, had come with a fur robe for him and a basket of hot food, pheasants and partridges (birds that he had snared for himself when he could) tucked beneath a clean white cloth. The carriage would carry him to the castle, where she would be waiting. They would kiss, tenderly at first.
The coachman’s whip cracked, the harness creaked, and the wheels squeaked as the carriage lumbered away. Johann the caretaker opened the door again, stamped snow from his boots, and stepped inside.
“What is it?” his wife wanted to know.
“They—he…”
“Is it bad news?”
There came the softest of creakings from the loft; and the boy knew that Maria, the sick girl, had come to the ladder-hole to listen.
“I don’t know.” Johann the caretaker sat down, his hat still in his hand. “Perhaps it is. Perhaps not.”
“Tell us!”
“He asked if we had anyone staying with us. I said only— only—”
“Jon.”
“Only a lost boy I found in the snow.”
No more broth could be got from the bowl with the spoon, and the boy did not like spoons anyway; he lifted the bowl to his lips and drank the last drops.
“And he—the coachman. There was no one in the coach.”
“What did he say, Johann?”
“He said we were to keep him. Keep Jon.”
Robert the caretaker’s son asked, “Until summer?”
“Not until anything,” his father told him. “Until he is a man, or until we are told something else to do with him.”
He turned to the boy. “You will call me Master Caretaker, Jon. Is that understood? Otherwise there will be trouble.”
Putting down the empty bowl, the boy nodded. “Yes, Master Caretaker. That is understood. There will be no trouble.”
“And you will call my wife Madame Caretaker. Our son is Robert. Our daughter is Maria.”
So it was settled. The boy called the caretaker’s wife “Madame Caretaker” in the presence of her husband and children, and “Mama” when they were alone. The wounds he had suffered (from wild animals during the night, Mama said when she treated them) healed at last, although each left a black scar.
Spring came, and people talked of flooding on the river; the brook under the Roman bridge rose until it flowed across the roadway. With axe and pole, Johann the caretaker and the boy cleared the brush and uprooted trees that sought to dam it there, finding among them the corpse of a girl for whom they dug a shallow grave in the worst corner of the churchyard that kept filling with water.
Summer followed, decked with apple blossoms and loud with bees. Maria grew so strong that she left the loft to play in the sunlight, smiling at the boy with blue eyes that said, I know. He smiled back, and his eyes said, I know you do. But now and again, when the sun was setting and bats set out from the ruined mausoleum in the middle of the churchyard, the boy heard his own voice saying: “Nine years, I think.”
And the White Lady, Her Highness the Queen of the Night: “Go back to my coach. Get in.”
She’ll come for Maria, he told himself, and I’ll be here waiting for her. Or, she’ll come for Maria, and I’ll run—help with a barge on the river, join the crew of a ship when the river reaches the sea, and go to Amerika.
Once he dreamt that he rose from his pallet by the hearth, and opening the shutter saw Eeesheeea, Beeetheeeor, and others dancing in the churchyard. Eeesheeea saw him at ttep window and waved to him; and though he could not quite make out her face, he knew that she smiled. Waking, he wept. But in time he came to understand that not all that is seen waking is real, nor is all that is seen in sleep false. Although he tried over and over to summon that dream again, it never recurred.
One afternoon at the end of summer, when the apples were ripe and the sheep on the downs were knitting themselves new coats, Johann the caretaker sat sighing on the doorstep, with the boy (who had helped him dig three graves that day, for the fever had waked) beside him.
“Jon,” said Johann, “you’re rich. You think you’re poor, I suppose. It’s very likely. You’d say you’ve got nothing. But you’ve got youth, which is the second greatest treasure in the world. And you’ve innocence. For a few years more you’ll have that, and it’s the greatest of all. A poor man can get rich. A rich man who’s lost his money may get rich again, that happens, too. But when childhood’s past, life’s greatest treasure is gone forever. Nothing can replace it, Jon, or even reconcile you to its loss. There’s no return to innocence, and beyond youth nothing but sorrow.”
“Yes, Master Caretaker,” Jon said. “I know. I know.”
* * *
The Marriage
by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
He had chosen her as his mate because of her ability to renew her emotions again and again, however thoroughly he might deplete her. Even after long periods of hysterical grieving, she would come to him and he would be surprised by her ability to smile, to love, to rage, and to endure serious pain. From the start he had known, of course, that it could not continue forever, for she, like all the others, was mortal, and sooner or later would die. He had thought that most likely he would kill her with his need, all the more ferocious because it would not be satisfied, and then he would be forced to find someone else or to content himself entirely with strangers.
Not that the variously flavored emotions of strangers lacked attraction, not that the surge and substance of their bodies were any less sweet, but even he liked someone familiar to come home to.
She knew, of course, of his predilections, what he did with his days and most of his nights. Sometimes she would request a particular detail, worrying the painful morsel in order to expand her passion in interesting ways.
“We all need our daily tickle and rub,” the guy next door was fond of declaring coarsely. He wouldn’t have been so cheerful about it if he’d known about certain late-night and midafternoon visits to his sad-looking wife and his brittle but equally sad-looking daughters.
Not that he had been the cause of any of this sadness. The neighbor himself, with his anger and his appetites, was sufficient cause for any degree of sadness. He had only found the well and chosen to drink there. Taken a taste of the family’s miseries by way of blood and vaginal secretions. And—when he finally got to the paternal
source—by way of semen.
But the passions of that particular family, the passions of all the mundane sorts he met, sorted through, and tasted each day, paled in comparison with those of his wife. For this part of his life, for the last eighty-four human years, she was by far the most intense person he had met.
Just now, on her deathbed, she was in considerable pain, and her pain was his for the taking. Nearing a hundred in human years, her body was frail, the pain very close to both the surface of the flesh and the marrow of the bone, and he could have sucked it out of her with scarcely any effort, relieving both her and himself in a single easy act.
Instead, he lingered. He teased. He kissed her gently, his lips and teeth closed, all over her aged body, while she moaned and writhed under him in the titillated passion of her suffering. He bared his penis, entered her dry vagina, and probed, curious whether he could increase either her agony or his arousal, seeing that he could. She cried out, begged him. He waited as long as he thought he dared, then drew the pain out of her and into him in one swift current.
She was spent, crumpled against him like a used paper sack. He was, as always, disappointed. He should have waited longer. She could have held more suffering for him. She could have given him more.
So he left her, though she tried feebly to hold him back, and in a bar full of dark music and dim light although it was midafternoon he came, without warning or foreplay, upon a woman who almost at once asked him to tell her he loved her. Readily he took her away from the eyes of that place, out onto hot asphalt and into heady automotive perfumes, where he professed his love for her with perfect, borrowed sincerity. She nodded, licked her lips. “Bite me,” he whispered. “No, there.” He experienced only a distant discomfort, no true pain, as the tiny mouth-shaped ovals of skin disappeared from his arm.
“Now, my turn,” she insisted, too eagerly. She did not care that he had not received pleasure. She did not feel for him.
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