Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

Her head still ached from the height of Crucero Alto’s fifteen thousand feet. The landscape had gone to glaring, pallid blues and browns, mountain on mountain with the snake track of Don Enrique’s rails, Edouard’s tunnels and bridges, stretched piecemeal behind. Now the vista changed to roaring dark. She glanced at Edouard’s personal altimeter, his one everyday possession she had kept, worn like a watch about her neck. The dial read, five thousand feet. Within minutes this tunnel would open on the wall of Colca Canyon, its floor four thousand feet below.

  She licked her lips and launched one final prayer.

  The door panel blazed with light. She hauled open the screeching galley window. Squinted upward, hitched the pothook round a bat-leg and gave one fierce jerk.

  The vampire landed on the floor in front of her and she could not restrain one frantic leap. Ramon Flores yelped. Somewhere along the train another man screamed.

  “Jesu Maria, señora, that was the Indian. Quick!”

  Concepçion flung the hook aside and snatched the pot-holder, clapping it round velvet black fur, flinching from the twisting, hairless cat-head, the hissing, the bared incisor teeth. Staggering for the window she shrieked, “Now!”

  Ramon Flores yanked the emergency stop.

  Wheels, rails, frames and girders screamed as every driver locked. Despite its slowed speed the whole train slid under her and Concepçion had time to thank heaven she had not chosen to do this on the actual bridge.

  Then the whistle began.

  In seconds its normal hollow roar crescendoed, climbing in pitch and volume like an insane opera singer until she thought her ears would burst. She staggered for the galley window, twisting the pot-holder into a bundle, stretching to the best angle for a throw.

  Human shrieks pierced the whistle scream. A body hurtled round the galley jamb and crashed into her, serape flying, hands thrashing, Jesus’s voice caterwauling, “My bat, my bat! You will damage, you will hurt him, strega, bruja, malevola, let him go, let him go!”

  Concepçion thrust herself back at the window and threw.

  The bundle sailed straight out, pot-holder unrolling to leave the bat-shape black and clear on colorless sky. The pot-holder arced toward the miniature brown mazes of canyon below. Above it, Concepçion saw the bat wings open. Beat convulsively. The steam-whistle reached a high A like a soul in torment and the black crescent staggered sidelong. Then, like a small black leaf, it began to fall.

  A battering ram hurled Concepçion against the range. Jesus screamed too, louder than the steam-whistle, and flung himself head-first through the window-gap.

  Human body-weight carried him downward far faster than the bat. Mesmerized, Concepçion saw him strike the canyon side, a silent puff of dust. Then the body rebounded, over and over, vanishing into the depths.

  A great distance off, the steam-whistle was still shrieking. Someone made a gesture. Ramon Flores yanked the stop handle again.

  After another eternity, the whistle scaled down and stopped.

  ∞

  “My abuela, señores.” Ramon and Esteban goggled. Concepçion rested her aching head against the galley wall. “She knew much about bats. When I was a child, she told me they steered by the noise of things around them. I heard the engine, the other Baldwin engine, whistle on the way to Guaqui. If we only threw it—him—out, it—he—might have flown away. But if the whistle deafened him—then he could not steer himself.”

  The hush revealed uproar beyond them, shouts and outcries, pounding feet. In a moment the wrath of the Ferrocarril will burst upon us, she thought. And poor Jesus. Immortality. How long did he serve, on the Altiplano? How many times did that emaciation nourish his master? Final obscenity, that his death will serve his master’s destroyers, even as that master stole his life.

  Something banged ferociously on the exit door.

  They all jumped a measurable foot. Then Esteban peered out and suddenly began to yank at the handle, crying, “Señor Vivanco!”

  Glowering, the engineer balanced below them on sleeper ends. “Give me a hand up!”

  Crazy laughter burst in Concepçion’s lungs. She thrust the pot-hook at Esteban. “Use this!”

  One pull to reach the foot-plate and Vivanco had doubled himself over and in the door. Demanding almost before he uncoiled, “Did you get it or not?”

  “Yes.” Concepçion felt her voice shake. “The brujo is gone.”

  Vivanco made a noise like a boiling tea-kettle. “And how will you explain this—this—?”

  “A man fell from the window.” I can explain the bat later. “He was acting very strangely. Perhaps he chewed too much coca. He screamed that his master had gone out the window, he must follow. We could not control him, and he jumped.”

  She stared limpidly into Vivanco’s eyes. He was turning an odd color, like a half-bleached aubergine. “So,” she aimed to sound both virtuous and shaken, “this helpful employee pulled the emergency stop.”

  Vivanco’s jaw moved. Word-fragments percolated. Then the champing stopped.

  “You.” It was more than half a growl. “At Puno, I thought you a remarkable woman. Now, I am sure Edouard knew what he was about, to marry you.”

  Concepçion felt her eyes start. Vivanco stepped forward, giving her a full-scale bow.

  “Ma Generale, permit me to introduce myself. I am Miguel Vivanco, senior engineer on the Ferrocarril del Sur del Peru, and I humbly request to know your direction. Because in La Paz or elsewhere, I intend to call on you.”

  Vaguely Concepçion saw Ramon and Esteban suddenly beaming like godparents at a christening. Far too certainly she felt her whole face crimson in a blush.

  Then at Vivanco’s back the connecting door crashed open and Don Jose burst through like a cannonball, bawling, “Nom’ de Dios, what is this? Sixteen hours behind, and now an emergency stop—! No word, no explanation, no attendant, and then all the doors stuck fast! I will dismiss, I will jail every man who connived at this—!”

  Faster than the vampire, Vivanco turned on him.

  “Do not disturb yourself, Señor Jefe. This was a matter concerning only the honor of the Ferrocarril. And it has already been resolved.”

  Transfusion

  Deborah J. Ross

  For me, this story takes place at the intersection of friendship and faith, terror and compassion. I’d read a ton of vampire stories, but none that explored how an observant Jew and a vampire who had known only hatred might become friends and, ultimately, saviors of one another. A friend of mine, a retired physician, still talks about how meaningful the story was to her.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Once Jacob asked me if I dream, and for a long time I did not know how to answer him. I was once a man; should I not still dream like one? The days do not go by in an instant, of that I am sure. I feel each moment, the slow poisonous creeping of the sun. They are not dreams, these visions which come to me. They are memories.

  One memory in particular stands out, the night I met Jacob. The night he saved what passes for my life and in so doing, saved his own.

  In those days, the great American cities still struggled against encroaching decay. San Francisco clung to the shards of vanished grandeur while human vermin crawled her alleys. Fault lines, weakened by the nuclear bomb the Celestial Jihad had set off in Los Angeles, shivered and slipped. Hunting, I myself became a victim.

  It took me a week to dig myself free of the tons of cement and steel, each time awaking weaker and closer to despair. When at last I staggered free of the rubble, I saw scavengers picking through the darkened ruins. I wasn’t sure I could take one of them. My senses wavered and I could barely stand, yet I must play the game out until the bitter end, following these pitiful creatures until either starvation or dawn finished me.

  Starvation almost got me first. After wandering half-witless through one unfamiliar neighborhood after another, I collapsed behind a building where lights still burned in the few unshattered windows. My fingers curled around a chunk of broken concrete, and then, for the first
time in three centuries, I truly lost consciousness.

  ∞

  My first awareness was that I had been moved somewhere indoors. The time was later that same night. I felt a surge of patchy artificial energy. It overrode my hunger like a stimulant drug. I would need to act quickly, before it faded.

  I sat up, taking in the kerosene-lit room. Beneath me lay threadbare carpet, beside me a low pallet—a pile of blankets and crumbling foam pads—and there, a man almost as pale as I. Connecting us was a length of clear surgical tubing broken only by a central valve. I traced the tubing from one needle—in his veins—to the other—in mine. The valve, I noted, was open in my direction.

  My mind began to work by fits and starts, unraveling the message of my eyes. This young, aesthetic-looking stranger with his hooked nose and tapering scholar’s fingers had thought to save my life by transfusing me. He must have mistaken my coloring for anemia.

  The poor fool had offered me his blood in the one form which would give me no sustenance. His own death hovered a short time away, not just from his meaningless sacrifice but from some wrongness in his body, the lingering taint of some chemical pollutant. In retribution for his charity, I would consign him to the longer, more painful death.

  Moving carefully, though there was scant chance of awakening my nameless savior, I reversed the valve. I watched our blended blood flow back into him. For a moment, I thought of feeding, for hunger now shrieked through every cell of my body.

  But no, I would let him live, and in living, die.

  Yet even as I turned away from him, ready to plunge back into the night, I scented a tempering of the poison. I told myself a portion of my own blood now ran in him, even as his ran in me. I told myself it did not matter.

  ∞

  Forty years later, autumn twilight settled on the Mendocino hills, ridge after ridge stretching into the distance like the backs of grazing sheep. A last breath of heat shimmered up from the crusted soil and a hunting owl soared noiselessly on the shifting thermal currents.

  Breathing heavily, Jacob Rosenberg clambered to the vantage point from which he could look across the valley. He laid down his walking stick and lowered himself to a flat stone. Below him, the town lay hidden behind a shoulder of hill, the fields of ripening grain now faded to golden-gray.

  Moving carefully, for the stone, although smooth, was unforgiving, he took off his spectacles and ran his hands over his wiry white beard, massaging the indentations on the bridge of his nose. The world blurred, unknowable. He took a hand-sewn yarmulke from his pocket, placed it on his head, and composed himself for prayer. He did not own a siddur, a prayer book. It, along with his father’s fringed tallis, had perished four decades ago in the nuclear ashes of Los Angeles. He had only his memories to guide him now.

  As Jacob’s thoughts quieted, he closed his eyes, feeling the faint chill that heralded the season’s change. He found himself thinking of the observances of his childhood—the songs, the stories, the long discussions of his father’s favorite passages from Hillel and Maimonides, all tinged with the sense of delicious mystery. Soon the High Holy Days would be upon him, the Days of Awe. He would set aside a time for reflection, for putting his life in order for the new year, for examining the wrongs he had done and making restitution where he could. The valley people would not understand if he asked their forgiveness, for what had he ever done to harm them, he who’d cured their children of pneumonia and bloodrot and fevers?

  “Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam . . . ”

  Words came softly from his mouth, half-remembered prayers. The ancient syllables lingered in the air. He rocked back and forth with their rhythm, wondering if anywhere else in the world, some other of his scattered people were doing the same. At moments like these he wished there might be, just once, other voices raised with his, the community of a minyan. That there might be someone to say Kaddish for him when he died.

  He pulled himself to his feet, joints and muscles protesting. The last of the day had fled while he’d sat meditating. As he started down the path, the beam of his flashlight wavered. He caught the ghostly pattern of grass and rock, hardly distinguishable from one another. His heart beat raggedly. He caught his foot on a stone and stumbled, struggling to catch himself.

  Suddenly the earth fell away beneath him. One hip slammed against something hard. Darkness rushed past, battering his senses. His flailing hands met branches, thin and dry. He grasped at them and they broke away in his fingers. Then his body came to a jarring halt at the bottom of a gully.

  Jacob lay on the rocky ground, one leg twisted under him, hands sprawled outward. His first thought as he blinked up at the emerging stars was amazement that he was still alive.

  Years ago, when there had still been libraries, he’d read a story of an old man, an American Indian, who’d gone out into the snowy forest, built a fire, and sat with his back against a tree just out of the circle of its warmth. At the time he’d read the story, Jacob had been young and filled with passion. How could a man choose death? he’d stormed. How could a man not struggle against it, in all its protean forms—microbe and mob and tainted rain? How could he just sit there while the light died and the heat seeped from his body into the endless night? How? How?

  This night, it comes for me?

  Gradually his heartbeat slowed and his breath came freely instead of catching in his chest. His thoughts seemed unusually lucid. He had gone to the hilltop for evening prayers, he had stayed too long, and in the darkness strayed from the trail and fallen. A man of his years should rightly have broken his neck. But something had preserved him from his own folly, to arrive at this moment of wonder.

  Above him, the dark outlines of the sides of the gully melted away. The sky opened up and his vision came suddenly clear. Stars swirled overhead in milky splendor, sweeping all the heavens with their brilliance. Lying cradled by the earth, Jacob felt as if he could see forever. The radiance which filled his eyes had left those stars hundreds, even millions of years ago. He was witnessing the universe of Moses and of Abraham, the times of miracles and deliverance, still going on, not in the unimaginable past, but this very moment.

  Then the moment passed. His left knee, bent under him, twinged. Carefully he straightened it, visualizing the ligaments and tendons that might be torn, the age-brittle cartilages that might be damaged, all the injuries that he’d seen and treated over the years. The joint creaked and smarted, then his kneecap gave a resounding pop! as it settled back into place. The knee felt sound enough, even when he crawled to his feet and took a few experimental steps.

  His hands were empty, the flashlight and walking stick gone. The yarmulke had flown off his head during his tumble. He ran his hands over the ground but could not find his spectacles.

  Since there was nothing else to do, no possible way he could climb out of the gully in the darkness, he sat down, made himself as comfortable as possible, and turned his thoughts to what had happened to him, to that moment of awe. He didn’t expect to recapture it, only to remember that it had indeed happened and in that remembering to hold at bay the question that would not go away.

  This night, it comes for me?

  ∞

  I do not know why I went back the next night, back to the hospital loading deck where Jacob had found me. But I waited there, deep in the shadows cast by the yellowed lights, tasting the despair, the grime and crusted filth, searching for that faint whiff of sweetness, the last scent I had of him.

  At the emergency entrance, men with jumpy eyes greeted me with submachine guns. I paused, for what could I say to them? What reason could I give for my presence there? No hospital could give me healing, nor any priest grant me absolution.

  Wordless, I melted back into the night to wait the long hours until I felt a shifting in the pall of death. At the staff entrance, I caught sight of a figure slight and stoop-chested. Myopic, shambling. Anything but heroic.

  I knew him as I knew the silence of my own heart. But he no longer reeked of poll
ution and slow decay. Something sang like music in his blood. I followed it, powerless to turn away, knowing all the while it was not thirst which drew me, but a feeling so disused and forgotten that I no longer knew what it was.

  ∞

  Night chill seeped into Jacob’s bones, sharper than he’d expected. He drew his coat more tightly around his shoulders and wished he had a hat.

  A lump of darkness appeared along the top of the gully, for a moment as still as the rocky ground before it disappeared. The next instant Jacob sensed a figure standing beside him, substance but no trace of warmth. Against the night’s blackness, he caught the blurred paleness of teeth.

  Fingers smooth as marble curled around his arm, chill even through his coat sleeve. “You were not in the cabin when I woke,” a soft voice said. “I thought you might have gone down to the village, but you were not there, either.”

  “Thank you, Victor.” Jacob accepted his spectacles, slightly more battered than before. “You’ve been to the village and back? Already?”

  “It is two hours past midnight.”

  So late? How long had he lain there, enraptured by the stars? How long had they been waiting for him to truly see them? Years? Centuries?

  They reached the trail and climbed out of the shadowed gully. Jacob’s chest tightened, squeezing the breath from his lungs. The grasses no longer looked withered, but touched with silver. The hillsides shimmered with light.

  ∞

  Jacob had built his cabin into the rocky hillside, a single room with table, bed, bookshelves. Fireplace and kitchen area, hand-pump for water. One door led outside, facing east, the other into the deep caves. Victor lit the lantern and hung it on the hook above the table, where he placed the flashlight and yarmulke, now covered with dust and bits of dry grass.

  Jacob lowered himself to the bench. The pain in his chest had steadily increased during the journey home. Now it subsided, leaving him sweating hard. He had laid out his dinner before he left: a pitcher of water, a sliver of goat cheese, herbed beans and bread, everything covered with a clean, many-patched cloth. Candlesticks stood at the end of the table, unlit.