by Jason Dias
Shit. I’m losing track of things. There’s no disease to catch. Just a vampire asleep between dimensions at my place, a being that doesn’t show up on camera.
Again, it seemed like the world lurched to the left. Canted imperceptibly, subliminally. I drove in a daze inspired by the madness of the situation and being ravenously hungry. At home, I set the file on the table, microwaved a cup of coffee, and spread peanut butter on a slice of stale bread. I ate that, and then another, and then put on the kettle to make ramen noodles. Nothing else edible in the house.
While the water heated, I glanced through the file again. Low blood sugar conspired with fatigue to weaken my focus. Some names stood out. I ate noodles and rubbed my temples. Headache coming on.
Worther Janssen. Address in the Northbriar neighborhood. That’s where we were last night. I looked him up on Google. Photo matched his face. Enrique had noted his function: a big HR boss in the organization. He’d supervised Maria. Maria had managed the priest’s transition. He also supervised Mark Burnham and Chelsea Bing. New names. Mark had assisted six retirees into our community, Chelsea seven. They were named, social security numbers provided.
Ysabeau knew about Sidney through another offender; about Maria through Sidney; about Worther through Maria. Presumably, she now knew about Mark and Chelsea through Worther. She had been busy at the end of last night. I might be able to save somebody. I went down the list of people each had moved, checking all the registries I could think of in the states they had come from.
I found a civil suit against a former priest named Charlie Hauer. I nuked more coffee and skimmed the details: wrongful death of a child in his care. Thin. Would it be enough to provoke Ysabeau? And what could I do about it?
My head started to clear as my body digested the food I had consumed.
Maybe I could give Mark a heads-up, maybe via Enrique. Ysabeau had bitten me last night while I slept and would likely bite me again next chance she had. She’d know whatever I knew.
But right now she was vulnerable.
I went into the bedroom and threw open the coffin. It looked like it always looked. Bare oak, old and stained, with tatters of an ancient cloth lining clinging to the corners. She wasn’t in there. She would materialize at dusk, a sick magic trick. An impossibility. She seemed to need the coffin, the dark, and the grave dirt.
I touched the floor of the box. Pushed the dirt into an untidy pile. I could upend the coffin and sweep up the dirt, mix it into the soil out back of the house. Throw it into the neighbors’ compost heap. I could drag the coffin out into the sunshine and hope it would burn her out. But darkness would come soon.
Mad ideas flashed in my head, like driving west, racing the sun, keeping in daylight. Or buying daylight bulbs for the house that radiated on the same frequencies as the sun. All sorts of impractical but rational thoughts.
The only reasonable thing to do: burn it. Burn the coffin and the dirt it contained. I put hands on it.
A headache flashed into my awareness. It hurt like being assaulted with knife to the temple. My knees hit the carpet, putting me eye-level to the box. I didn’t let go: it came with me as I fell, tipping on its side, landing in my lap. The pain intensified. Vision blurred. Consciousness waned. Nausea. An overwhelming urge to puke.
I clambered woozily to my feet and dashed for the toilet. The peanut butter and the ramen came up, splashed into the bowl. From close up, I could see my toilet badly needed cleaning.
Ysabeau watched me from whatever alternate dimension she occupied in daylight hours. She wouldn’t let me harm her.
I tried again but did not make it through the spare bedroom doorway before pain drove me back.
Nothing I could do here. I went back to the kitchen and called Enrique.
“I can’t help you any more, Dominique.”
“I understand. I’m sorry to call you, Ricky.”
“Quit apologizing. It doesn’t sit well on you.”
“Ricky, I’m scared.”
Silence.
I said, “I’m in trouble. Bad trouble. You can’t help, even if you could. You know what I mean. But that file you gave me… I did some legwork. If I’m looking at this right, at least one more person is in danger. It’s a…” I had to look at my notes to recall the name. “Charlie. Charlie Hauer. If he’s still alive and local, you’ve got to send him away. Now. Today. Before dark.”
“Or what, Dom? The Vampire Killer will twist off his head like Sid and Maria and now Worther? He wasn’t a good man, but he didn’t deserve that. Are you involved in this?”
“Just get him clear. Promise me you’ll get him clear. Now. If you have to, drop everything, pick him up, and start driving. Okay?”
A heavy sigh. “You’re going to explain all this to me when it’s over.”
“I promise. Now move your ass. It’s already…” Only one p.m.. “Less than four hours to sundown.”
He clicked off the line. A little trickle of adrenaline, cold on top of my stomach, robbed my confidence. I could just let Ysabeau kill Hauer, and then she would move on to her next site to terrorize, and I could go back to pretending everything was normal. Sometimes bad guys escaped, too bad. You get used to it. Would obstructing her make anything better?
I am sworn to protect.
How far would I go?
I couldn’t come anywhere near the bedroom without the headache filling my reality. But I could go in the garage. An old lawnmower rusted in there, gasoline powered. The sun had murdered my grass years ago, so the mower sat idle to one side, dusty and dirty. But the shelf above the mower held a red gas cannister. I took it down and sloshed it: a quarter gallon in there. It stank. Probably five years old. Did gas degrade over time? Probably no good to start the engine, but good enough to light a fire.
I went back in the kitchen. Pain started slowly just behind my eyes. I flipped the rubber cap off the cannister and spilled gas on the linoleum floor in front of the stove. Turned on the gas. My eyes watered with pain now but it didn’t seem like she could reach me here like she could from the bedroom. In that cluttered junk drawer every house has I found a book of paper matches and lit one. Stood with it between thumb and forefinger, trying to remember if gas would light when you dropped a match in it or just snuff out the flame.
The pain intensified.
I dropped the match and followed it down to the ground, knocking my head on the floor. Consciousness departed.
A dream started some time later. Like waking up but still being asleep, rising into the dream with the knowledge of time having passed.
France. Paris. I inhaled it, tried to define the scent. A dirty, rotten stink: too many bodies in one place; inadequate hygiene both personal and civic. Sewage, trash, decomposing bodies. And at once cold breezes, a thousand floral perfumes, meat and bread cooking.
I descended from a position above a row of tenement houses, through the roof, through rooms stuffed with human lives grinding on through poverty. Children, babies, men and women, older folks gripping onto life with both fists through the squalor. People cooked on improvised stoves alongside their night pots.
Down.
Into a cellar. The floor, dirt, absorbed the light of a dozen candles. They smelled of hot wax and something else, high and clean, a change from the rest of the city. Ysabeau knelt in a circle of them. Pages lay all around her. In the dreams, everyone spoke English, and I knew it was because they were fictions spun by Ysabeau to inform me. But the pages were all in French, and probably old French at that. I guessed they might be torn from a Bible, given her intense interest in all things Catholic.
Also with her on the floor: a wooden mug and a dirty-looking knife suitable for cutting meat.
“The blood is the life,” she said. My mind darted all around. The same old places: books, movies, Diana in the holding cell. “Jesus, I pray my last prayer to you. You commanded that we drink of your blood as wine and eat of your flesh as bread. Whoever drinks of your blood you promise life eternal. But I do not wish to
live any longer in the light of your grace.
“In that light, your messengers took my child to be raised by another, likely to die. Lord, I know what happens to babies sent to wet nurses. You turned away from her. In the light of your grace, my sweet Rousseau was tortured. I met him in the square, trying to work as a one-handed scribe. You turned your face away from him.
“No more will I attend mass. No more will I eat the wafer and drink the wine. The wafer that is your flesh, or the wine that is your blood. I deny you and your light and your grace and your eternal life. The priests… I spoke to a man in confession and he exclaimed that I would consign myself to Satan’s grace if I did this thing. There is no Satan worse than your instruments in the great Church who steal babies and torture men.
“I deny you. I deny your light and your blood. Forever and ever, amen.”
She picked up the knife and slashed her arm. I tried to step in, to knock the knife away, to scream at her – but I did not exist. I wasn’t there. Blood stained her dress – the dress I saw her wearing in the present. It flowed into the dirt until she dropped the knife and picked up the wooden mug. It flowed into the mug in a freshet, slowing as her heart weakened over a few minutes.
Was this the time she became something immortal? I wanted to save her, to bind up the wound. More, I wanted to stop whatever spirit or monster that would come to possess her.
Nothing. The candles burned low. Ysabeau lost the last of her strength and lay among the pools of wax. Her chest moved slowly, so slowly, shallow, then paused. The candles around her guttered and went out with her last breath. Stopped. Her skin, always pale, took on a mottled blue cast as her corpse cooled. The rage and despair that had driven her suicide were done.
But I felt them still. They rose from her dead body. Her unseeing eyes, still open as if awake, glared at the cup of her own blood. She hated. Hated! Her hate for Bishop Cleary survived the last drop of her life into the dirt. Hate too big for her body, too big for him, encompassed the whole of the church. Herself. God.
She hated, and lay there in a pool of her own hate until her body cooled.
A young girl found her in the morning. She went into the cellar to look for rats and found poor, dead Ysabeau. The girl looked into the cup of blood. It had congealed and gone lumpy. The girl had a candle in a lantern to see by, and pointed it at the cup and then away. The smell made the contents obvious. The dirt had eaten the rest.
She ignored the dead woman while she poked around in the corners, around old wooden tools and buckets, rags, a pile of rope. Then, finding no rats, she ran out. I wanted to follow but I stayed put, anchored to Ysabeau and her hate.
Later, men came. A doctor with a kit bag. An undertaker, assistants in tow, to carry her out on a stretcher, covered in a bit of dirty linen. The body sat in a shaft of sunshine on a table in his workroom. Later, a priest came, a young man with a supple smile, to pay for a coffin. The rest of the day, she lay in the box, in the sun, unwarmed.
When evening came, four priests arrived in their cassocks and collars. They carried her, all together, although probably one of them could have done it. They marched across the city, solemn and somber, to a cemetery unlike the memorial grounds I was used to. Just a great gaping pit in the ground, like a landfill except littered with dead bodies. Some naked, some sewn into crude shrouds, a few in boxes of pine or oak or cedar. Even as the priests approached, a family drove by in a cart with their dead mother on the back in her best dress. They drove the cart to the edge of the pit and pushed her off with no ceremony, no tears, a duty done and no emotion wasted on it.
The priests did a little better with Ysabeau. The stink of a thousand corpses could not be dissipated by words, and yet they gave a short, beautiful service, going so far as to sing something in Latin. Then, delicately, they dropped the oak coffin over the edge, consigned to the same fate as all the other bodies below.
She had warned me of this. Of what I would learn.
Sorrow lives in the body, but Ysabeau brought only my mind to Paris in the past. Had I been there to stand at the edge of that pit, to smell the corruption of a thousand bodies, to see her little box resting at the top of a heap of unburied dead, then I should have been disabled by grief. I would have wept for her, for all of them. For the human misery.
Minus my corpus, I could know how I should feel, but no more than that.
And the dream went on grinding through time. Perhaps I had succeeded in burning down my house and now I was consigned to purgatory with Ysabeau, never to wake from her dreams.
More people came in the dark. They tossed their dead into the hole. Some landed on the coffin. By morning, it could not be seen except as a hump beneath the bodies. Through the day and the next night more bodies eroded even that distinction. Workers closed the hole, shoveling dirt over it, starting at the point furthest from her burial. No new bodies arrived; they went to a new hole a hundred yards away. The fill progressed slowly. Another night, another day. The fill came close to her coffin but still she remained unburied except in other corpses.
On the third night, she rose.
She awakened in her coffin, lost in the dark. She felt around in there, me alongside her, sucked down as I had been at the start of the dream, through the dead. She pushed and hammered, shaking the coffin, making the corpses above her wobble. One fell from the top of the stack to roll aside. Another. Soon, the lid ached open enough for her to squirm out.
She became smoke. Mist. She escaped through a tiny crack.
She wafted up through the bodies, some of them leaking now, unspeakable black fluids that joined with the soil below. She reformed atop the pile, standing on the chest of a huge man with obvious head wounds. “C'est tellement sombre!”
Why French now?
She stood under the stars for a time, then began the work of climbing out of the pit. The shortest way led through the filled side, where she left no footprints in the fresh new earth. And from there, she stalked into the city, leaving behind the charnel ground.
Will
My eyes creaked open. The stench of gasoline pervaded my awareness. I felt like I could see the stink of it. Better than the stink of that graveyard, that impossible open pit in Paris. It could not have been true, any of it; no civilized people treated their dead in so barbaric a fashion.
I pushed myself up off the floor. My face hurt and I reeked. But obviously the match had not ignited either the gas or the gasoline.
Once on my feet, it occurred to me that night had fallen hard. Someone had turned off the gas and opened the windows. The only reasonable thing to do was to clean myself up and see what the night held. The thought of finishing the job skittered across the surface of my mind, resulting in immediate punishment: pain lanced behind my eyes, as visible as a flash of lightning.
So, to the bedroom to shower and change.
I peeked in the spare bedroom to check on the coffin. It stood open, moonlight from the window highlighting the darkness of its emptiness. No Ysabeau. In my room, I peeled off clothes and threw them in a hamper. They would need to be soaked and washed. The shower took a minute to warm up and I stood thinking, desultory, gooseflesh amplified by the cold.
She arrived while I washed my hair. Stepped right into the shower with me, tiny and nude. I hadn’t turned on any lights so I could barely make out the edges of her shape. She pressed against my body.
I knew my feelings were distorted. Blame shell-shock: bewildered astonishment by the past few days prevented normal reactions to this monster joining me in my most vulnerable moment. But as she pressed her body against mine, it felt good. Right. Her face nestled against my chest, her breasts under mine, soft and smooth, the chill of her body mitigated by the heat of the shower.
I felt her. A thought rushed through me: if I can feel her flesh, she has fed, and well.
A rush of pleasure supplanted the terror. Her right hand cupped my breast, thumb and forefinger on the nipple, even as her left moved down my belly and between my legs. I tried to obj
ect but there were no words in my mouth, only a moan of surprise/pleasure. I bent down to kiss her. Ysabeau’s mouth met mine, cool like mints, with a sharp taste. My hands did not know what to do so they rested, clumsy, on her little shoulders. She broke the kiss, trailing lips down my neck. I shuddered, fearing and hoping for the sharp pain that would begin my final dissolution into her.
She kept going. Her mouth found my breast. Her hand came up from my crotch so that both hands held my breast steady while she took the nipple into her mouth. Held it between her front teeth. Turned her head so the nipple entered her mouth at the corner.
Now she bit down. Her fangs entered that most sensitive flesh, filling me with sensation. Awful pleasure. I had my first orgasm in ten years, shaking, almost losing my footing on the wet shower floor. Then it ended. Her hands came up again and touched the wound in an unfamiliar way.
Alone again in the dark, hot rain falling on my back.
After a minute, the feelings of pleasure and of numb acceptance started to recede. More normal feelings followed: dread, shame, and the knowledge that I had been violated.
When the water cooled, I knew I had been standing there far too long. The cool felt good on skin burning red with embarrassment. When I emerged, freshly scrubbed and soaped, she met me in the bedroom with a towel, wearing that same gown, the bloody one she’d been buried in.
“What did you do to me?”
“I marked you,” she said, handing the towel over.
“You made me like it.”
“It is easier that way. The cat overpowers her prey. The snake hypnotizes. I make being eaten so much pleasure that you come to me and beg for it.”
“Don’t do that again.”
“You wanted me to. Now you are lying to yourself.”
I stopped rubbing my skin with the towel and stared. A little voice in my head said she could be right. “Bullshit. Every rapist tells their victim they wanted it. Why were you in that bar? Why did you have on that short skirt? Stay out of my head. No part of me hoped for that.”