by Jason Dias
“It’s okay, Ricky. I wish the best for you. I always did. Thanks again.”
I ended the call feeling no easier than I had before.
Twelve p.m.. Fatigue crept up on me. I’d be up all night chasing Ysabeau. It would be best to sleep while I could.
Ay called. I answered on the tablet, tabling sleep.
“How are you? Do you feel sick? We’re worried about you here at the station. Everyone is taking a collection so we can have cake when you come back. When are you coming back?”
“Uh… Fine, no, don’t worry, uh, don’t do that, and soon.”
“What?”
“Lot of questions.”
“Oh. Right.” She giggled. I briefly wondered if she had been drinking. “I wanted to tell you: I just applied for Detective. I sit for the exam next week. Maybe you’d consider sponsoring me? You don’t have to say anything. Just if you want to, talk to the Lieutenant about it this week?”
“Yeah.”
She stayed quiet for a second. A great second. I fell into it, awash in momentary stillness.
Then: “Sorry. I must be interrupting something. Anyway. Is there anything we can do for you? I can do? Do you need food or toilet paper or anything?”
I might have laughed on any other day. The absurdity touched me, though, and I stifled the urge to cry. Psychiatrists had a word for me: “labile.” That meant prone to sudden strong but short-lived emotions. Ysabeau fucking with me, no doubt.
That thought reminded me of what she had done. One hand went to my breast to feel the ring. Pain flared on the site as if I had blocked out the sensation with the memory and both had returned at once.
“Two things,” I said.
“I’m all ears.”
She seemed genuinely eager to help and that broke my heart a little more. “First. No cake. No fuss, no nothing. It’s all a false alarm, nothing to celebrate. OK?” All a lie. A false front. It started to dawn on me that I would never be back. This story led to no happy endings. No way order was restored at the end. Ysabeau raged through my life like a fucking cyclone, destroying everything. The best I could hope was that she wouldn’t eat my soul when this was through.
“Well, I’ll try, but you know how cops are. And number two?”
“It’s personal. You don’t have to tell me. I feel bad even asking.”
“Come on, Sanchez. It’s me.”
“I know. I’ll just throw this out there, and you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want. OK?”
“Just say it.”
That sounded right. Stable and sane, predictable. Business. So I threw it out there. “How would I know if I was gay?”
Silence. I blushed and imagined she could hear me turning red.
“Boss? Uh, that’s a hell of a question. I guess it would be really individual. Me, I didn’t know until later. Like I told you, I thought it was just a phase I would get through. I tried really hard not to be gay. I went through the motions, you know? And it was more complicated, because I really did love my husband, and the sex part was OK. So it was hard to see who I really was until I fell in love, really and hard. With Samantha.
“But her story is totally different. She always knew. From the age of five at least. It’s not that she felt masculine or didn’t want to play with dolls or anything. Oh god, don’t tell her I told you this. She’d be mortified. But at the age when girls sometimes fantasize they are going to marry their daddy, she knew she would grow up to marry her mommy. So she was thirteen, doing her make-up in the girls’ room at the middle school with all the other girls, and they were talking about boys and prom and all that, and she’d nod and smile and all the time she wanted to take them to prom, not boys. She says she never felt bad about it, or weird or strange, until later when she started to notice that the other girls didn’t seem to feel that way. Like she’d ask, and they’d look at her like some kind of freak.”
I said, “None of that sounds at all familiar. It wasn’t like that.”
“What wasn’t? Dom, what happened?”
She must have heard something in my voice, my newly labile, traitorous voice. “A woman came onto me pretty hard. I couldn’t stop her. She didn’t ask. Part of me liked it and most of me was too surprised to stop it. But it was confusing. She… well, she touched me. There. And…”
“Dominque? It sounds to me like she raped you. You’re not gay. Probably not. It sounds like you’re doing what every rape survivor does at first. You’re looking inside for a reason it happened. But it isn’t your fault. It sounds like someone did something to you. No consent. Can I come over? Do you need-”
“No.”
“But-”
“I said no.” Hard, sharp. More softly: “Sorry. On a rollercoaster right now. You want to help. Appreciate that. Just talking to me right now is helpful. Coming here would… confuse things more. I don’t want to feel vulnerable right now. Be vulnerable.” Make you vulnerable.
“It’s OK. Sorry for pushing.”
“All right. Don’t tell anybody. OK?”
She sighed. “Of course not. Not even Samantha. You have the dirt on me and I have the dirt on you. So we’re both safe, right?”
It made sense. I said so. We chatted a little longer, awkwardly. Forced. I don’t even remember what we talked about. At the end, instead of saying goodbye, I said, “You’re going to make a fine detective.”
“Thanks, Sanchez.”
Two-oh-seven p.m.. I should have done more. I could have tried again to dispose of Ysabeau’s coffin. I could have tried to come clean with Burt. My hand shook when I called up the phone app and contemplated dialing her office number. In the end, I succumbed to weakness. Literally, with hunger; figuratively too. Morally weak. I had already surrendered, conceded without a fight that she could just beat me down with pain if I didn’t behave myself.
In college, psychology class, I’d heard about an experiment. A dog kept in a small kennel with a floor wired to the mains. A red light comes on, half the floor electrifies. The dog learns to go to the other half when it sees the light. Version two: both sides of the floor electrify. The dog learns when the light comes on, it will be shocked. There is nothing it can do. It becomes listless. It lays still and absorbs the pain. It has learned to be helpless.
I called up a different app: an online food delivery service.
Freedom
Bishop Clearey stepped into the confessional. He nestled in there in the dark, the only light coming from candles filtered through the screened, latticed window. He moved the slide aside.
A woman’s voice. Her voice. “Forgive me, Father, for I am sin. I gave my last confession at the moment of my death.”
He frowned. Reached for the window slide, then let his hand fall into his lap. He started to speak, halted, began again. “It is a grave matter to intrude here. I come to take the confessions of priests, a sacred charge. You profane this place with your words.”
“Such is my intent, sir.”
“Who are you? Get out. Leave this place and do not return with your profanities. Our Heavenly Father will forgive you if you repent.”
She chuckled. “There is no forgiveness for us.”
The hairs on the backs of his hands stood on end. The remains of the wispy, white hair on his head did the same. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am. You stole my baby and tortured my lover. I have come for you.”
“No. Demon.” He stood, reaching for the large, wooden crucifix hung from a loop of cloth around his neck. His other hand gripped his stole. “Get out. How dare you come to this place – this church, this holy room? Get out. I command you. Our Father commands you.” He pushed open his door, stepped out, flung open the other door.
Empty.
He stood to one side of a chapel. Dark pews made a ladder of shadows reaching back into the depths of the church. From the far side, a priest entered, young and fresh of face, hands clasped around a Bible. “Father?”
“Young Father Bertrand. Come here. Brin
g out your cross. Hold it up, so. Open that book, boy. The Gospel of John. Read it aloud. Now.”
The younger priest complied, concern drawing down his brows and confusion making him clumsy. Clearey dropped to his knees. “Mary, Mother of God, hear my confession. I have been prideful. I have taken it to myself to judge the weak among your Son’s clergy. Now I take it to myself to chase demons out of this most holy of places; necessity does not blind me to the sin of pride. Protect us in our hour of need.” He mumbled something in Latin as Bertrand began to read, also in Latin, from the prescribed verse.
Nothing seemed to change. The confessional remained empty. Candles burned around the place, steady and warm.
Both men finished their benedictions. Bertrand said, “Bishop? What is this about?”
He did not answer. He went to the baptismal font, up at the pulpit. He wet his hands, still muttering in Latin, then returned to the confessional. He sprinkled water from his fingers into the little cell.
Another chuckle rattled through the echoing space of the chapel. It sparkled like the stained glass in the windows.
“Bishop?”
“Keep reading that passage. Repeat it until I tell you to stop.”
“Yes, Bishop.” He began again.
“Demon, show me your face. I command it. The Father commands it. The Son commands it. The Holy Ghost commands it.”
Her voice, coy, wheedling: “The Father has turned away from you. The Son died long ago, and the Romans lost his body. And ghosts… You do not believe in ghosts, do you?”
“The Lord will not be mocked.” He turned in a circle, cross upraised, gripping his stole once more. “Show me your face. I command it. Tell me your name.”
In a dark whisper: “Ysabeau!” She sprang out of the air, becoming real, taking shape. She landed on him, knees astride his chest, face in his throat. He stumbled back under sudden weight, crashing into Bertrand. They both fell against a pew. Bertrand splayed out across the floor, losing his Bible but retaining his crucifix. Clearey fell between the pews. He cried out, voice full of fear and pain.
Bertrand gained his feet and rushed at Ysabeau with cross upraised. “The power of Christ! I compel you with his word, his love, with the authority of the risen savior!”
She turned and looked back at him as if her neck lacked bones. “Speak your command, slave of the blood god.”
“Trickster. Heathen devil. The Master compels you with his voice. It is my voice. I fear no evil. Flee this place, demon.”
Blood coated her chin. Her eyes glowed green and bright in the candlelight. He advanced on her, and she did as he said: she fled the cross he held between them. Her body moved away, and then dissipated: a weak fog and then nothing at all, no sign but a dull sigh.
The young priest stood for a moment, victorious and stern, before kneeling to check on the bishop. That man lay with his throat open, pale as a wisteria bloom in moonlight. “Bishop?”
The old man reached up with one hand, gripping the other’s cassock. “You did well, boy. But the devil has many tricks. He will come back. Be ready… for…” His hand fell to the floor.
Bertrand put his ear to Clearey’s chest. He listened, then ran from the chapel. He came back with two nurses, each adorned with habits and crosses.
My eyes cracked open to a scene of faded daylight illuminating a close-up view of my kitchen table. The grains in the wood stood out, a map to the future. Half a pizza occupied an open box in front of me, grease congealed, reeking and alluring at once. I had eaten like a starving woman then crashed hard. Over-salted and dehydrated. My throat tasted like the floor of an abattoir. My head ached, with no intervention needed from my dead roommate.
“Ugh.”
Water. Two glasses, cold. I glanced at the clock on the stove: four twenty. A little daylight left but nothing to be done with it but wait for dark. For Her.
I went to the guest room, taking a slice of cold pizza with me. Food poisoning hardly concerned me. I sat on the bed next to the coffin, this time with the lid respectfully closed, one hand resting on the old wood. I thought about all the things I knew so far. What she had shown me in the dreams. So much hate. So much reason for it.
People do bad things. Unavoidable fact. We hold them accountable. I arrest them, provide evidence of their guilt, and sit back as they are tried by a jury of their peers. Every guilty person feels justified. Bad circumstances, bad upbringings, plain old desperation. They are guilty or innocent not based on such situational factors but on the decision of a jury of their peers about whether they committed the act and were capable of knowing the acts were wrong.
What to do with Ysabeau? If her story was true, then she died without knowing what she would become. She turned away from the faith of her abusers and rose again as something inhuman. She did not seem to know about wrong except as a distant memory.
The sun slowly set.
I chewed half-heartedly.
Dark settled into the room, first filling up the low spaces between the bed and the wall, around the closet door, then spreading into the rest of the space. The lid of the coffin lifted away. She rose from it.
“Every night for nearly three centuries, I have awakened to find myself in this coffin. It is a millstone tied to my leg. If I am caught in sunlight, I disappear and awaken here. If the box moves, I follow it. Whenever I wake, for a moment, I forget that I died a long time ago. I wonder about my circumstances as someone who has forgotten where they went to sleep.”
“You have a lot to say this evening.”
“Sometimes, when I awaken and feel almost human, I wish I were not alone.”
Ennui? I tried to keep in mind that this was not a person but a snake, an evil mind bent on destroying mine. “Why did you show me your first kill?”
She came all the way out of the box and sat next to me on the bed. Were she made of substance, our hips would have touched. But she had not eaten recently and so she did not exist. I felt nothing.
“I did not kill him, not then. And he was not the first.”
“Oh? Who was the first?”
“My poor, dear Rousseau. I came to him soon after I first awakened. I found him in a square after dark, with some poor candles in his pocket. He had quills and ink and paper and a little jar for coins.”
I thought about the dreams again. “Scribing.”
“All his education and labor come to that: earning a few pennies a day reading and writing for the illiterate.”
“Why did you kill him?” I thought I knew the answer. It would be like the tale of the scorpion who rides across a river on the head of a toad. The snake that bites the man who tends it. Because it is my nature.
“He was surprised to see me. He cried when I saw what had been done to him, the stump of his arm covered by a coat sleeve. He thought no harm had come to me. I looked then just as I look now. These bloody stains are only seen if you look for them quite devotedly. In the dark, they are nothing. He tried to touch me, hold me, but I am made of smoke.
“We went to his room. A squalid space in a rooming house. He had so many questions, as you have. He was upset, beside himself, and the more I told him about what had happened – the suicide, the coffin, the open grave – the more he was broken. And I was starving.
“There was no way for us to be together. He wanted to. I remembered love. I was curious about the feeling I had once had, but felt nothing. Love was a sculpture in rock or clay but I was only a drawing on parchment. I told him of these things and he said he understood. I was empty because I had turned aside from God’s love. I had refused the blood of Christ.
“He offered. If I could not eat the wafer and drink the wine, I should drink of his blood.”
“He offered.”
“Yes.”
I pondered it. “He seems to have known a lot about vampires.”
“There are no vampires.”
I stifled a sigh. “So you bit him.”
“I took too much. You must understand: I had never been what I am.
A vampire, a drinker of blood, a hungry ghost. I did not know what would happen. I bit his throat. I could not touch him except with my teeth. But I found I could touch his mind. I could see what he felt as a snake can sense the heat of a mouse, and I could reach out for the feelings, twist them to my needs. I took away his grief and his desperation. He felt the pain of my bite. And he wanted me to. To drink of him, to take his substance and make it mine. He wanted to give himself for me.
“I became so fascinated with this feeling that I lost track. Before I knew, I was not feeling him love me, I was feeling him die. When I realized, well, I did not stop draining his life. It felt good. I realized then that I was a monster. Evil. Terrible. And I did not care.”
“That’s the most awful story I’ve ever heard. I want to feel something for you. Compassion. All I can manage is dull hatred. What you’ve done to me…”
“Is what the snake does to the mouse. The spider to the fly. What do I care for your feelings? I am hungry and I must eat blood. If you serve me well, you will be rewarded. Poorly and I will consume your soul. Which, I hardly care. Now come. There is work to do tonight.”
“More work? To move your coffin, ship it someplace far away?”
“No, oh no. There is one more person in this city who has to die. One more person complicit in the torture of children.”
“No.”
She looked at me. Eyes black in the dark, just the play of starlight over a bare forehead, the rustle of fabric that didn’t really exist at all. “Come. Drive the car. You want to see this ended as much as I do. No justice for these monsters. The Fathers hide them, move them around the world so they cannot be found guilty, and they continue to rape and kill and rend. Come. See justice for one more. For one who makes it all possible. I had not thought to find such a one here. Kill this one and much of the organization falls apart.”
Nothing I could do. And she was right. I did want justice. I resented the boss saying no, stopping me from running through the chain of priests and administrators who enabled abuse to save the reputation of the church.