by Jason Dias
“You delight me with your dirty mouth,” she said. “But it isn’t sex she is to seduce him with. Fool girl. She is going to go to work on him. To make him one of us. When I do it, it is so easy! Drink a little blood, twist a few thoughts, push on an emotion here or there. For a person, though… She will have to hurt him. For a long time and badly. Until-”
My hand had been snaking up her chest, gently, affectionately. Until I came close to her throat. I grabbed her and slammed her against the car door. The impact shook the BMW on its springs. I could hurt her. I could punch her. I did it again: pulled her towards me, thrust her away. The look on her face: astonishment. On the second blow, my hand went through her. No, through empty space. She was gone.
That little victory provided the antidote I needed for the impotence I felt. And, starting the car for the long drive back south, that bothered me.
Meaning
Six-thirty p.m.. Darkness had congealed over the night. The town, usually manic with rush-hour traffic, showed only the sparsest population. Something in the air.
At the slaughterhouse, lights set the upper-level windows to glowing. Mist smoked around the place, giving it a haunted feel. Nobody came to investigate. In town, people closed their curtains, huddled under blankets, went to bed early. Restaurants shut their doors for lack of business and only the most determined drunks went out to bars. Burt had police-band radio and I heard the whole story, told in police call-outs for bar fights, in inane, bored-cop chatter.
I went in there like a head of cattle in nineteen-sixty. With bovine indifference to fate, awake to the knowledge that I would probably be dead soon and ambivalent: release from torment balanced against the prospect of non-existence.
If Ayame and Enrique were in there, I had to go.
No romance in the act. No heroism or courage. Just a thing that needed doing. Ysabeau had all the power. She pulled all the strings. I could only dance.
I went in the front door. It creaked and clanged as I slid it aside. Big enough for three or four cows at once, it spilled light out my face. Inside, those strings of lights illuminated the same wooden maze. The catwalk, empty, cast a twisted shadow over the whole scene.
“I’m here. I’m where you want me.”
My words filled the space, flattened out, disappeared.
Silence.
I marched across to the slaughter-channels. The wooden barriers were mostly dry-rot. They fell easily to a kick, a push. I battered them down on my way through the open space. Into the chute Burt had indicated last night. Only my footfalls came with me. Through the murder-hole, into the trough.
Enrique hung by his feet from a length of chain. His face, covered in blood, stretched in an expression I could not read. Ayame stood by him, holding the chain that suspended him. Under his head, a ten-gallon bucket, filled to three-quarters with blood.
His blood?
“Dom? Is it you? I can’t see. Blood in my eyes.” He sneezed. Not his blood, then.
“It’s her,” Ayame said. “The blood is the life.”
“You’re drowning him in it.”
“Slowly,” she said. “I just want you to see the score.”
“I see it.” If I shot her, she’d lose her grip on the chain. He’d sag into the blood. It would be unpleasant, but not fatal. I raised the gun.
She pulled on a string I hadn’t seen. Some metal component dropped to the ground between us. “That’s a ratchet up there, not just a pulley.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning when I let go, the wheel ratchets him down, and pulling on this end of the chain won’t bring him back up. The bucket is welded to a rail in the floor. He’ll drown while you try to unchain his legs.”
I kept the gun on her chest, thinking the problem over. I thought I could win, still. Hold him up with one arm, untie with the other.
“I don’t want to kill you, Ayame.”
Enrique said, “You have to. She wants you to. Ysabeau does. You won’t hate her enough until it’s done.”
“Not much left to me but hate already,” I said. “Ay, what did she do to you? You were with me an hour ago. Swearing vengeance.”
“She showed me her dreams. Beautiful dreams. To live forever and feel nothing… That’s what she promised. I could forget my grief. Forget my love. My shame. I could live, and go on, and do what I wanted, and never have pain again. So beautiful.”
“I never stopped having nightmares after the church shooting. Did I tell you that? It wasn’t just the gore. The bits of bone stuck in the doorframe, brain on the pavement. Not just the look of pain and satisfaction on the shooter’s dead face. It was the people crying, Ayame. They stood around in the parking lot, behind the yellow police tape, and they cried, sobbed. Some of them tried to sing through the hurt. Hymns, hopeful songs about being loved by God.
“In my dreams, their weeping is the hymn. They weep and weep and that’s their song of praise to a God that lets people die.”
Ayame just stared at me. I don’t know if she could even hear me. Ysabeau had a psychic fist around her brain stem, strangling fear, crushing out empathy, doling out dopamine hits. But she stared, and held onto the chain.
“I don’t want to kill you. God doesn’t deserve my tears, Ay. He hasn’t earned my grief.”
Still nothing.
I let the barrel of my revolver drop a little. A little more when she didn’t move. A little more again.
I squeezed off a shot, one of my last four bullets. Into the tank. It put a hole high on my side, low on the far side, spilling blood into the trough once more.
She screamed, a frustrated noise, and let go of the chain. Enrique dropped, his head splashing into the blood, chain rattling and clattering. He struggled, twisted to get his face into open air. Ayame rushed me. I tried to maneuver the gun between us but she covered the short distance, tackled me to the ground. Then we both rolled down in the trench, wallowing in foul-smelling blood. She punched at my kidneys. Kneed my groin.
Nothing could hurt me more than I hurt already. Daniels. Beatrice. Jolene. The woman I had been, all my service and honor. I’d have considered Ayame’s promise of a life empty of feelings, just then.
So she punched and kicked, and I just absorbed the blows. They meant nothing. They were happening to someone else. I grabbed her shirt with both hands, pulled her close, rolled on top of her. The stream of blood from this side of the bucket slackened as the level dropped below the hole. I held her throat with one hand. She sank nails into that forearm. More meaningless pain. What was one more flesh wound to a woman with a broken heart, who felt no hope of a painless life?
The gun had rolled away. I didn’t know where. With my free hand, I punched her in the nose, all of my weight behind it. The fight should have gone out of her, but she was already dead. Like me: an empty shell with nothing left to lose. She clawed, pushed, bucked. I hit her again and she weakened. I grabbed her hair, twisted her head around, flipped her over onto her belly. Forced her face into the spilled blood, mashed her lips against the concrete.
Her mouth and nose filled with filthy blood, some of it hers. I held her there until she stopped fighting. Two minutes. Three. Five. She died there in my arms.
“The blood is death.”
That was life with no feelings. That was life with nothing but hate to drive you. Ysabeau wasn’t alive. She’d died a long time ago, and some sick force animated her body in the night. Her promises of eternal life were empty, as empty as her veins.
“Ayame. I’m sorry. I loved you. That’s why you’re dead.”
Ysabeau used love as a weapon, kept cutting me with it.
Enrique.
I’d fought Ayame for at least eight minutes. I’d lost track. I stood, slipping once in the blood, graying out halfway up. I steadied myself on the iron railing behind me, then grasped the end of the chain. Tugged. As promised, I couldn’t pull him back up. I stepped into the bucket. There were only a couple of inches of blood left in there, thick and partially congealed, whit
e bubbles of fat floating in it. I lifted him into my arms, taking his weight off his feet.
He spluttered, spat thick, greasy blood.
Alive.
“The blood,” he said.
“It’s gone now. It’s over, Ricky.”
“Is. The life.”
“No. No. She said I could have you back. If I did the rest of it. She said I could save you.”
“You have saved me. Get me down from here. I’m going to puke and I don’t want to drown on it.”
“I can’t hold you up and work on the chains at the same time.”
“Let me dangle. Another minute won’t kill me.”
I let the chain slowly take his weight again. His black slacks had fallen up nearly to his knees, revealing his own belt looped around his ankles, then over a large metal hook. I simply lifted him off. Then, safely on the ground, took the belt from his feet.
“The blood is the life,” he repeated.
I looked around for my revolver. It glinted in dim light about fifteen feet away, safe from the pools of gore around the place. Thirsty ground had already started to drink the blood away - a feast not seen here for a generation or two. I holstered the gun.
“I’ve heard that too many times. It makes me doubt you.”
“You have to know about it.”
“So tell me. On the way out of here.”
“I need a minute. I can’t walk, Dom. My legs are dead asleep.”
I sighed, sat down next to him. I couldn’t dirty myself any more. “Say it.”
“Jesus promises eternal life to any who drink his blood and eat his flesh. But he means it metaphorically, not literally. In the Church, we bless bread and wine. Whoever eats the bread and drinks the wine is illuminated in the light of Christ. They live after death in Heaven, at the right hand of the Lord.” I dabbed at his face with my shirt-sleeve as he talked, not managing to do much.
I sighed again. “Dogma. Crosses don’t hurt her, Ricky. And I’m assuming your faith wasn’t enough, because I found you about to drown in a vat of blood. Don’t tell me whose.”
“It was enough. My faith was enough against her. She got into my head right away. I fell for the helpless-princess act. I tried to take her in, thinking she was homeless, and she immediately flattered her way into my bed. I bought the whole act. But then she tried to bite my neck. She wanted me to agree to it. I said no, she got mad. I thought she was crazy. I sent her away, but she turned into smoke, then into something… much worse than the Ysabeau disguise she wears.”
“That’s not her? Not really her?”
“Of course not. Well, I knew I was in trouble. I held up my St. Anthony’s medallion. I prayed. And as long as I prayed, she couldn’t touch me.”
“I’m so confused.”
“How did I get here, you mean? Well, just because she couldn’t touch me, doesn’t mean your friend couldn’t. I was in hiding. A friend’s house. She knew just where to find me. She came to the door dressed as a cop. Shot my friend in the guts. No use in fighting, and anyway, I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’ve even been thinking of going vegetarian.”
“So she bumped you on the head.”
“Yeah. Next thing I know I’m here.”
I stood up. “Can you walk yet?”
“I think so. Help me up.” I did. And supported him as we shuffled towards the front door. “Back to Sunday School. You need to know.”
“All right.”
“Without the Blood of Christ, without blessed wine and bread, she’s outside of creation. She put herself there. Suicide is the most unholy of sins, the only really unforgivable sin – because the dead can’t repent. She can be alive for a time only when she drinks the blood of those who are alive still.”
“I knew all this.”
“Good. That’s how to beat her. She needs to be blessed. Consecrated.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means a person of faith needs to undo her excommunication.”
I stopped. Because I half-carried him, Enrique stopped, too. “How do you know so much?”
“Inference, mostly. I never studied vampires but all that stuff about stakes and so on never made any sense.”
“That’s not an answer. How do you know about her excommunication?”
“She told me. On the way here.”
“That’s not what you said, Ricky. You said Ayame knocked you out and you woke up here.”
“Did I? My head is still spinning. I don’t remember clearly.”
I dropped him. He didn’t go down though, just stood there as if I were still supporting him. “Ricky? You didn’t resist her at all, did you? When you said you’d met someone… I knew it was her, at least later. Her coffin was in your place, Ricky. She asked if she could bite you and you didn’t say no. You said yes. She’s been on you for days.”
He didn’t say anything. I reached for my pistol, stepping away, but it wasn’t there.
“Ricky?”
He had it in his left hand. Picked my pocket. “I’m sorry, Dom. I didn’t want to lie to you, but she said I could have more if I made you believe it.”
“More what, Ricky? Put the gun down, okay?”
“More blood. She takes it from me and then gives it back from her wrist, and when it comes from her, it’s like the communion. Only a better communion. I can know what she knows, see what she sees. She loves you, you know.”
“The gun, Ricky. Set it down.”
He looked at it like he’d forgotten it. He turned it around to point at his own chest.
“Bullshit.” I stepped into him with my shoulder. He sprawled on the concrete, the gun spinning away from him. I kicked him in the solar plexus just to be sure he wouldn’t struggle with me for the gun.
Above, on the catwalk: “I had hoped for a more romantic victory. I had hoped you could have him back. For a day, even a few days, before I dashed all your hopes. Poor fool man is so infatuated, though, that he cannot think straight. And you are far too persistent.”
I had the pistol in my hands. I checked the loads: still three.
“What are you going to do?” Ysabeau said, a smile in her voice. “Shoot me?”
“I hate what you did to me. Twisting up my feelings like you did. Kissing me and making me like it. Making me mad enough to murder Daniels. I never would have done those things, those terrible things, without you standing behind me, making me hate.”
“Oh, I never touched your feelings. That was all a lie.”
“What?”
She stood there, gripping the railing of the catwalk, grinning. “I never manipulated your feelings. Others, yes, oh yes. You? Below the surface where you are always so calm, in the places you never look, oh, you wanted it. You wanted me to kiss you. To touch you. You wondered what it would be like. I gave you what you wanted. And your poor Captain? She was innocent. But you did not want her to be, did you? So easy to give you a reason to do what you always wanted to do.”
“Liar.” The gun shook in my hand. “You made me do it.”
“No, only let you do what you wanted. Do you want to kiss me again?”
I had no confidence left to crumble.
Enrique gasped and fell to his knees. I kicked him again, same place, to make sure he stayed docile a little longer.
And inside, something under the surface panicked. Guilty! I am guilty!
“Yes, I wanted to kiss you.”
She trilled laughter. “And the Captain?”
“Yes, I hated her on my own. I had license from you to hate her, but the hate was all mine. If I could tell myself you were doing it to me, I could act without conscience.”
She clapped her hands and jumped. “And do you hate me, Dominique with the French name? Do you hate me very much?”
“Yes.” In my chest, my heart slowed. I listened to her laughter. I hated it. I hated her. “Come on, then. Drink from me. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me to give myself to you. Here I am. Take what you want.”
; She floated down as if made of parachute silk, landing in front of me, tiny and fragile. A little dream. I knelt so she could reach my neck.
The bite stung, a crunching wound. She didn’t strip away pain or give me pleasure but let me feel it, the unbearable flare of dissolution. I grunted and it sounded like pleasure, like the noises I’d made in the shower when she’d come at me all unwanted.
“It all comes down to faith, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what I like about you,” she said through a mouthful of blood. Breath on my neck as she glutted on me, on my life. “No faith at all. Not a Catholic bone in your body.”
I started to go cold around the wound. To grow less sensitive to her probing tongue. I talked, mostly to keep myself from succumbing too soon to blood loss. “Not long ago, my partner and I were attacked by a man with a knife. Bust-gone-bad kind of story. I had to shoot the guy. I’m good at shooting.” While I spoke, I felt my resolve falling into place. “They sent me to the shrink.”
“Please do not tire yourself. My dear, your Enrique is right. I love you very much. I want you to be mine. I need you to hate me so much that when I kill you, you rise again, borne on wings of hate as I am. Then we can walk the earth together forever, lovers and enemies. Such a beautiful future!”
“They sent me to the shrink, and he asked why I stayed stable when other cops lost it. He wanted to know how I had basic trust in the universe to be orderly. You showed up and fucked everything up, Ysabeau, but I’ve found that trust again. There’s one thing I can still believe.”
“What is it?” she asked, backing away one step, hands clasped, genuine interest on her features, her face stained with my blood. My stolen life infused her features, left her positively ruddy. “What is there left to believe in? I have shown you there is no God. That there is no order. That you are not who you thought. That you can protect no-one you love. What is there left to have faith in?”
Distractions. She feared even at the last. I gave her what she wanted but she still obfuscated, hedged, offered confusion. I knew now what she feared from me.