by Harvey Click
I was paying no attention to the neighborhood, so when a stocky man suddenly thrust into my path, nearly colliding with me, it took me a moment to notice that he’d stepped out of a gay bar. He started to apologize, his breath fragrant with liquor; then he saw my eyes and stared for many seconds in astonished silence.
“Hmmm,” he said softly. “You’re an interesting one, aren’t you?”
He was medium height and built like a boxer. Despite his short thick neck and wide shoulders, I sensed a submissive personality. He was maybe halfway through his fifth decade, with a round, clean-shaven, bland face, soft gray eyes, and a wide mouth too sensitive for his bull body. He wore expensive clothes and too much cologne.
Then I smelled his priest blood. Usually we can smell a priest half a block away, the scent of that sanctified blood making us sick, but the holiness of this man’s blood was watered down. Though the first whiff made me queasy, all I had to do was step back a couple of feet and it no longer bothered me.
“No, no, please don’t run off,” he said quickly, his voice soft and his words a bit slurred. “I promise I won’t bite.” He chuckled uncomfortably and added, “Unless of course you want me to. Please let me buy you a drink.”
I smiled and started walking, but slowly, making it easy for him to fall in beside me, which he did.
“Please don’t get the wrong impression,” he said. “I never impose myself, but I see something in your eyes. I know that sounds like the oldest line in the world, but I see something special in you, something…” He groped for a word but couldn’t find it.
I didn’t answer. I kept walking slowly, neither inviting nor refusing him. The cologne and the occasional whiff of his blood were making me slightly dizzy, but not unpleasantly. I also smelled his fear. I frightened him and I excited him. He was like an insect drawn by pheromones.
“I have an apartment just around the corner,” he said. “I have many nice things to drink, whatever you enjoy I’m sure I have it. Courvoisier, Benedictine, Pernod. Does your taste turn to scotch? I have two kinds of single malt, both of them full. I don’t care for scotch myself, you see, I only keep it for guests. Gin, port, tequila, black rum, and wine. I have so many nice wines, I almost could start a cellar.”
He went on like this, his soothing voice no doubt a great asset for him behind the pulpit, and before long we’d climbed two flights of stairs to his apartment. It was a small white place furnished with sterile modern furniture made of chrome, glass, and creamy white fabric.
“Please, let me take your coat,” he said, just one more step toward having me ensconced in his creamy, chromey snare, though maybe that particular something in my eyes was telling him it was he who was snared. I relinquished to his eager hand my comfy cloak of normality.
“Now, what will it be? Wine? Whiskey?”
“Red wine would be nice,” I said.
“Lovely. That’s what I hoped you’d want. Let me see.” He knelt to examine a gleaming chrome wine rack, amply stocked. “Ah! How about a beautiful old Chianti? Classico riserva. Mmm.”
His obvious pleasure as he uncorked it was almost touching. He motioned to the couch, and I sat. He poured, spilling one dark red drop on the glass coffee table, handed me my glass, and said, “Salud!”
It was good Chianti.
He studied a white bookcase filled with CDs, and soon the room was quietly filled with Beethoven’s Ghost Trio. The wine and music began to soften the hard knot of my nerves into that mellow sadness that poets seem to enjoy so much. Alcohol goes quickly to my head, though the effect ceases nearly as soon as I put down my glass, the Affliction, I suppose, fighting off any competing form of toxin, but for the moment I basked in a pleasing melancholy.
He sat beside me, a little too near, and said, “The place is small, but you see I don’t actually live here. It’s sort of my playpen. I share the rent with a friend.”
“I presume you live in a rectory,” I said.
“How did you know?”
“Episcopal or Roman?” I asked.
“Episcopal.” Sensing my disappointment, he said, “But high church, very high church.”
He hadn’t brought me here to talk about theology, but that’s what we did. I asked questions and he answered them while the strings of Beethoven’s trio brushed like ghosts against the white walls and the dark panes of glass.
I asked him his thoughts on transubstantiation, and he said, “The Romans make it sound too complicated. Does the Communion wine really turn into blood, does it undergo a molecular change and all that, but they miss the point. During the Last Supper, our Lord gave his cup to the disciples and said ‘Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins,’ and the disciples drank. Are we supposed to believe they were actually drinking blood? Of course not, they were drinking wine.
“So all this fuss about transubstantiation, arguing whether the wine literally turns into blood or not, it’s all rather silly. But a real transformation does take place during the preparation of the Eucharist. I mean the transformation of the priest. You see, the priest is literally transformed during those moments, he literally becomes Jesus, back from the dead and blessing the wine for his disciples.”
But what of the priest’s blood, I wondered. Is it transformed as well? The Ghost Trio was over, and silence made the little apartment feel much larger than it was.
***
The moment I awoke last night I called for Dimitri to pick me up and drive me to the house. Carmina was waiting for me in the living room, dressed in a long, lovely red dress. I went upstairs and fetched my sword. She followed me to the room where Leo hung and groaned, and I beheaded him with one swipe.
She smiled and said, “I was wondering when you’d get around to that.”
“You’re dressed for a celebration,” I said. “But he’s not invited.”
I laid down the sword and she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me, long and deeply. Her body felt wonderful, slender and naked beneath the red silk.
“I’ve always loved you,” I said. “I’ve loved only you.”
She started to unbutton my shirt, but I said, “First let’s feed. Then we’ll have the whole night to ourselves.”
Dimitri drove us to town, and we took care of our need quickly. When we were done I said, “Let’s go to the apartment. I don’t want to be around his body.”
Carmina knew what I meant. By now it would be dissolving into a fetid mess of green pus and liquefied flesh. We don’t go gently.
She seemed to be having a lucid night, and I was happy for that. “I’d forgotten how small it is,” she said of the apartment. “You must not have had much fun here.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I got champagne from the refrigerator. We had no more than a sip before she unzipped her silk dress and let it float down her lovely white body to collapse into a red puddle on the floor. It was as if I’d never seen her before. No woman can match her.
We made love for a long while, and my mind traveled back to that night in Madrid when she stepped out of a doorway and captured my soul with her eyes. I wrapped my arms tightly around her, trying to wrap them around all of those years so I could keep every second of them with me through all the empty years to come.
Finally she fell back, exhausted and sated for the moment, and before she could recover from her reverie I clamped handcuffs around her wrists and ankles. She smiled, expecting a new game.
I inserted a needle into her jugular and another one into the large vein that runs through the crotch, I forget what it’s called, wrestling with her to keep her from tearing them out with her thrashing. The needles were attached to rubber tubes, and I stuck the ends of them in a bucket that I pulled out from beneath the bed, but already the sheets and floor were a bloody mess.
A terrible shrieking emerged from her throat, not words but a kind of glossolalia of terror. I lay on top of her and fought hard to subdue her as the bed shook with her
panic.
The blood spurted from the ends of the tubes, filling the bucket one inch deep, now two inches, now three. The shrieking died down, and I heard her voice calling my name over and over, softly and piteously, far worse to hear than the shrieking. I clasped my hand over her mouth and watched the level rising in the bucket. Finally it slowed and stopped, and I massaged her weakening body to force out a few more drops.
I got the bottles of blood from the refrigerator. They were wine bottles that I’d emptied into the priest’s sink. I removed the needles from Carmina’s veins, inserted a clean one in her bruised jugular, and began to infuse the priest’s blood. I had drained it from him soon after he’d performed an evening Mass, and I hoped there was some truth to his talk about transformation.
But apparently there wasn’t. Carmina’s enervated limbs began to writhe again, and then she screamed, but her cries weren’t the sounds of salvation. The priest’s blood must have been scalding her veins like acid, but I kept pumping it in and hoping for a miracle.
Her face was contorted with agony and rage, and I couldn’t bear to look at her eyes. Working the rubber bulb, I pumped the blood in, bottle after bottle, while she howled and vomited, until there was no more than a cup left.
I pulled the needle from her jugular and put the bottle to her lips so she could drink the last of it, but she spit the blood in my face and hissed like a snake. I got the cleaver from the kitchen and cut off her head, not cleanly and swiftly as I wanted, for the cleaver was dull, but at last the job was done.
I sat on the bed and wept.
***
I ride now in a taxi, when I can afford to ride. The Mercedes is gone, and Dimitri with it. I haven’t been able to concentrate on my investments or anything else, but it seems my money is mostly gone, to the thieving lawyer I suppose. I believe I killed him some time ago, but I’m not certain. My memory is getting bad. The rented house, the furniture, all gone, and I live in this damned little apartment now.
It’s April and the nights are short, though not short enough. I wish they’d shrink to nothing, no night at all. Sleep isn’t peaceful, but being awake is worse.
But at least I’m not alone.
I had hoped to give Carmina salvation with the priest’s blood, and then kill her while she was in a state of grace. But I wasn’t able to give her salvation, and I wasn’t even able to give her the gift of death. As I held her head in my hands that terrible night, I saw her lips were still moving and her eyes still watching me. She had existed for so many years in this unholy half-life, neither dead nor alive, and she wasn’t going to let go of it now.
So we’re together still. I’ve bought a nice antique case, small and square with a handle at the top, so I can carry her head about with me. It’s quite elegant, covered with fine leather and lined with soft velvet so she’s comfortable inside.
Each night I take her head out of the case and brush her lovely black hair as well as I can, though I have to be careful because she tries to bite my fingers. I feed her blood from a baby bottle, and I lap it up as it dribbles out the bottom of her neck, a kind of lovemaking you could say, or a kind of communion.
Carmina can’t speak with her mouth of course, having no lungs, but she speaks with her eyes, and their message is sheer hatred and horror. Her hatred for me is pure and limitless, like my love for her.
She and I walk through the black nights, always together and always alone. Her beauty is incomparable, and you’d give your soul for just an hour with her.
Sucker
After the divorce, he found himself spending much of his spare time in a cemetery. His mother was buried there, and that was his reason for coming at first, but it no longer was. Now he came because the place was peaceful and it helped him empty his mind of painful thoughts and remember that life was only a brief moment and even the worst disappointments were no more than fleeting pangs within that brief moment. He read the terminal dates on headstones: this man died at age seventy-seven, this woman at sixty-five, this child lasted only eight years, and even the longest lifespan he found engraved in the stones seemed less than a blink of time’s eye.
He liked to watch chipmunks scamper through tree roots and squirrels leap like acrobats from branch to branch, immune to any sort of remorse or regret. He envied them because his own life seemed like nothing but regret, not just his divorce but countless other regrets heaped on his back like heavy stones.
Among other things, he regretted that he had become an accountant, an occupation so dull that each workday felt gray and lifeless as he sat entombed inside his tiny cubicle juggling figures on a computer screen. As a child he had wanted to be an artist, but his mother had steered him in a more practical direction, if spending much of one’s waking life half dead inside a cubicle can be called practical.
So he bought some sketchpads and drawing pencils and brought them to the cemetery. In the past he had drawn slowly and carefully, afraid of getting any line wrong, but the scurrying chipmunks and leaping squirrels inspired him to draw quickly, not caring if every mark was perfect. He was surprised by how good some of the quick sketches looked; his hand seemed much defter when he didn’t slow it down with critical thought, or really any thought at all.
The old cemetery wasn’t well tended, and the trunk of a fallen maple provided a comfortable place to sit while he drew. At first he was content to draw tombstones and trees, but before long he began to place the figure of a young woman among them. She was slender and willowy, and he gave her a long gown that clung to her delicate form and set off the long hair that flowed over one of her slim shoulders. Most of the sketches he did with charcoal or black pencil, but when he switched to pastels he made her gown pink and her hair golden blond because the splashes of pink and gold looked good among the solemn trees and stones.
For some reason he saw her features quite clearly in his mind, though he didn’t know them from memory, and when he decided to sketch her portrait he had no trouble picturing her wide eyes, delicate nose, and childlike lips. She seemed to be in her early twenties and was quite pretty, though her lips bore a childishly selfish pout and her eyes, which he decided were pale blue, had the cool expression of someone used to getting whatever she wanted.
He decided to call her Julie, borrowing the name from the headstone closest to the fallen tree where he sat. According to the small stone, Julie Elizabeth Long was born in 1950 and died twenty-two years later, apparently single. Her parents’ larger single stone, which sat beside hers, showed that her father had outlived her by twenty-four years and her mother by thirty.
Because he could see her so clearly in his mind’s eye, it didn’t surprise him very much when he came to believe she was actually there. Sometimes he imagined her strolling among the stones, but more often she simply stood and watched him, maybe twenty feet away, usually with her hands clasped primly in front of her. Sometimes she looked quite solid and real, but more often she was insubstantial and transparent like a wraith or ghost. She cast no shadow, and yet a stray breeze would stir her hair.
Sometimes she smiled at him, and he smiled back, but more often she looked unhappy, wearing that childish pout or occasionally a hungry, sullen expression that frightened him a little.
For some reason he felt sorry for her, maybe because she wasn’t real, and with the sense of pity came longing and desire. He hadn’t dated since his divorce, and hadn’t wanted to, but now he found himself wanting this imaginary woman and even dreaming of her at night. His workweeks seemed longer than ever as he waited anxiously for the weekends so he could return to the cemetery and Julie. He realized he was becoming a bit mad, no doubt due to disappointment, loneliness and regret, but he didn’t care. Cold hard sanity had never worked out very well for him anyway.
Chill autumn winds began to blow away the remnants of summer, and the weekends were often rainy now. Even when it was raining hard he’d still visit the cemetery, bringing an umbrella instead of his sketchpad, and sometimes he’d see her drenched figure wanderin
g among the trees, but on the worst days she didn’t appear at all. He began to feel desperate, fearing she was slipping away from him, and he starting coming there each evening after work to watch for her as the night came on.
He spoke to her now whenever he saw her. “Please come closer, Julie,” he would say. “Your name is Julie, isn’t it? Please don’t be afraid of me. You sometimes look so sad, I’d like to help you if I can.” It seemed she heard him—sometimes she’d tilt her head or smile faintly—but she never spoke.
Until one cold Friday evening, when the last of the sun was painting the sky purple through the trees. He was standing near her stone, shivering with his hands buried in the pockets of his overcoat, and for some reason she walked up closer to him than she ever had before, stopping when she was only a foot or two away. She peered at his face so intently that he could almost feel her blue eyes penetrating his thoughts, and after a long moment she said, “Can I touch you?”
“Yes. I’d like that.”
He couldn’t feel her slender hands when she placed her palms on either side of his face, but he felt an icy chill that made him gasp. She kept her palms there for a long while, staring at him with a faint smile, and when she took them away he felt dizzy and so weak that he needed to sit on the fallen maple.