Weird Tales - Summer 1990

by Vol. 51 No. 4

  "True or not," I argued, "they be­lieved the unbelievable — they acted on it — and that I call superstition. What reason could they possibly —"

  "What reason? I have to say that at the time you were in no position to judge reasons, considering that we knew you only as a slight swelling inside your mother's body. But I was actually there. I saw the 'new friends' she had made, that 'aristocracy of blood,' as she called it, in contrast to her own people's hard-earned wealth. But I don't judge her, I never have. After all, she had just lost her husband — your father was a good man and it's a shame you never knew him — and then to be carrying his child, the child of a dead man . . . She was frightened, confused, and she ran back to her family and her homeland. Who can blame her if she started acting ir­responsibly? But it's a shame what hap­pened, especially for your sake."

  "You are indeed a comfort. . .Aun­tie," I said with now regrettable sar­casm.

  "Well, you have my sympathy whether you want it or not. I think I've proven that over the years."

  "Indeed you have," I agreed, and somewhat sincerely.

  Aunt T. poured the last of her drink down her throat and a little drop she wasn't aware of dripped from the corner of her mouth, shining in the crepus­cular radiance like a pearl.

  "When your mother didn't come home one evening — I should say morning — everyone knew what had happened, but no one said anything. Contrary to your ideas about their superstitious-ness, they actually could not bring themselves to believe the truth for some time."

  "It was good of all of you to let me go on developing for a while, even as you were deciding how to best hunt my mother down."

  "I will ignore that remark."

  "I'm sure you will."

  "We did not hunt her down, as you well know. That's another of your per­secution fantasies. She came to us, now didn't she? Scratching at the windows in the night —"

  "You can skip this part, I already – “

  "— swelling full as the fullest moon. And that was strange, because you would actually have been considered a dangerously premature birth according to normal schedules; but when we fol­lowed your mother back to the mau­soleum of the local church, where she lay during the daylight hours, she was carrying the full weight of her preg­nancy. The priest was shocked to find what he had living, so to speak, in his own backyard. It was actually he, and not so much any of your mother's fam­ily, who thought we should not allow you to be brought into the world. And it was his hand that ultimately released your mother from the life of her new friends, and immediately afterward she began to deliver, right in the coffin in which she lay. The blood was terrible. If we did—"

  "It's not necessary to —"

  "— hunt down your mother, you should be thankful that I was among that party. I had to get you out of the country that very night, back to Amer­ica. I —"

  At that point she could see that I was no longer listening, was gazing with a distracted intensity on the pleasanter anecdotes of the setting sun. When she stopped talking and joined in the view, I said:

  'Thank you, Aunt T., for that little bedtime story. I never tire of hearing it."

  "I'm sorry, Andre, but I wanted to remind you of the truth."

  "What can I say? I realize I owe you my life, such as it is."

  "That's not what I mean. I mean the truth of what your mother became and what you now are."

  "I am nothing. Completely harm­less."

  "That's why we must let the Duvals come and stay with us. To show them the world has nothing to fear from you, because that's what I believe they're actually coming to see. That's the mes­sage they'll carry back to your family in France."

  "You really think that's why they're coming."

  "I do. They could make quite a bit of trouble for you, for us."

  I rose from my chair as the shadows of the failing twilight deepened. I went and stood next to Aunt T. against the stone balustrade of the terrace, and whispered:

  "Then let them come."

  I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the de­funct, grand and innumerable. My li­neage is longer than time. My name is written with embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble name is mine.

  In the immediate family, the first to meet his maker was my own maker: he rests in the tomb of the unknown father. But while the man did manage to sire me, he breathed his last breath in this world before I drew my first. He was felled by a single stroke, his first and last. In those final moments, so I'm told, his erratic and subtle brainwaves made strange designs across the big green eye of an EEG monitor. The same doctor who told my mother that her husband was no longer among the living also in­formed her, on the very same day, that she was pregnant. Nor was this the only poignant coincidence in the lives of my parents. Both of them belonged to wealthy families from Aix-en-Provence in southern France. However, their first meeting took place not in the old country but in the new, at the Ameri­can university they each happened to be attending. And so two neighbors crossed a cold ocean to come together in a mandatory science course. When they compared notes on their common backgrounds, they knew it was destiny at work. They fell in love with each other and with their new homeland. The couple later moved into a rich and prestigious suburb (which I will decline to mention by name or state, since I still reside there and, for reasons that will eventually become apparent, must do so discreetly). For years the couple lived in contentment, and then my im­mediate male forbear died just in time for fatherhood, becoming the appropri­ate parent for his son-to-be.

  Offspring of the dead.

  But surely, one might protest, I was born of a living mother; surely upon arrival in this world I turned and gazed into a pair of glossy maternal eyes. Not so, as I think is evident from my earlier conversation with dear Aunt T. Wid­owed and pregnant, my mother had fled back to Aix, to the comfort of family estates and secluded living. But more on this in a moment. Meanwhile I can no longer suppress the urge to say a few things about my ancestral hometown.

  Aix-en-Provence, where I was born but never lived, has many personal, though necessarily second-hand, asso­ciations for me. However, it is not just a connection between Aix and my own life that maintains such a powerful grip on my imagination and memory, a life­long fascination which actually has more to do with a few unrelated facts in the history of the region. Two pieces of historical data, to be exact. Separate centuries, indeed epochs, play host to these data, and they likewise exist in entirely different realms of mood, worlds apart in implication. Nevertheless, from a certain point of view they can impress one as inseparable opposites. The first datum is as follows: In the seventeenth century there occurred the spiritual possession by divers demons of the nuns belonging to the Ursuline convent at Aix. And excommunication was soon in coming for the tragic sisters, who had been seduced into assorted blasphemies by the likes of Gresil, Sonnillon, and Verin. De Plancy's Dictionnaire infer­nal respectively characterizes these de­mons, in the words of an unknown translator, as "the one who glistens horribly like a rainbow of insects; the one who quivers in a horrible manner; and the one who moves with a partic­ular creeping motion." There also exist engravings of these kinetically and chromatically weird beings, unfortu­nately static and in black and white. Can you believe it? What people are these — so stupid and profound — that they could devote themselves to such nonsense? Who can fathom the science of superstition? (For, as an evil poet once scribbled, superstition is the res­ervoir of all truths.) This, then, is one side of my imaginary Aix. The other side, and the second historical datum I offer, is simply the birth in 1839 of Aix's most prominent citizen: Cezanne. His figure haunts the Aix of my brain, wandering about the beautiful country­side in search of his pretty pictures.

  Together these aspects fuse into a single image, as grotesque and coher­ent as a pantheon of gargoyles amid the splendor of a medieval church.

  Such was the world to which my
mother re-emigrated some decades ago, this Notre Dame world of horror and beauty. It's no wonder that she was se­duced into the society of those beautiful strangers, who promised her an escape from the world of mortality where shock and suffering had taken over, driving her into exile. I understood from Aunt T. that it all began at a summer party on the estate grounds of Ambroise and Paulette Valraux. The Enchanted Wood, as this place was known to the haut monde in the vicinity. The evening of the party was as perfectly temperate as the atmosphere of dreams, which one never notices to be either sultry or frigid. Lanterns were hung high up in the lindens, guide-lights leading to a heard-about heaven. A band played.

  It was a mixed crowd at the party. And as usual there were present a few persons whom nobody seemed to know, exotic strangers whose elegance was their invitation. Aunt T. did not pay much attention to them at the time, and her account is rather sketchy. One of them danced with my mother, having no trouble coaxing the widow out of so­cial retirement. Another with labyrin­thine eyes whispered to her by the trees. Alliances were formed that night, promises made. Afterward my mother began going out on her own to rendez­vous after sundown. Then she stopped coming home. Therese — nurse, confi­dante, and personal maid whom my mother had brought back with her from America — was hurt and confused by the cold snubs she had lately received from her mistress. My mother's family was elaborately reticent about the meaning of her recent behavior. ("And in her condition, mon Dieu!") Nobody knew what measures to take. Then some of the servants reported seeing a pale, pregnant woman lurking outside the house after dark.

  Finally a priest was taken into the family's confidence. He suggested a course of action which no one ques­tioned, not even Therese. They lay in wait for my mother, righteous soul-hunters. They followed her drifting form as it returned to the mausoleum when daybreak was imminent. They removed the great stone lid of the sar­cophagus and found her inside. "Dia-bolique," someone exclaimed. There was some question about how many times and in what places she should be im­paled. In the end they pinned her heart with a single spike to the velvet bed on which she lay. But what to do about the child? What would it be like? A holy soldier of the living or a monster of the dead? (Neither, you fools!) Fortunately or unfortunately, I've never been sure which, Therese was with them and ren­dered their speculations academic. Reaching into the bloodied matrix, she helped me to be born. I was now heir to the family fortune, and Therese took me back to America. She was extremely resourceful in this regard, arranging with a sympathetic and avaricious law­yer to become the trustee of my estate. This required a little magic act with identities. It required that Therese, for reasons of her own which I've never questioned, be promoted from my mother's maid to her posthumous sis­ter. And so my Aunt T. was christened, born in the same year as I.

  Naturally all this leads to the story of my life, which has no more life in it than story. It's not for the cinema, it is not for novels; it wouldn't even fill out a single lyric of modest length. It might make a piece of modern music: a slow, throbbing drone like the lethargic pumping of a premature heart. Best of all, though, would be the depiction of my life story as an abstract painting: a twilight world, indistinct around the edges and without center or focus; a bridge without banks, tunnels without openings; a crepuscular existence pure and simple. No heaven or hell, only a quiet haven between life's hysteria and death's tenacious darkness. (And you know, what I most loved about Twilight is the sense, as one looks down the dim­ming west, not that it is some fleeting transitional moment, but that there's actually nothing before or after it: that that's all there is.) My life never had a beginning, so naturally I thought it would never end. Naturally, I was wrong.

  Well, and what was the answer to those questions hastily put by the monsters who stalked my mother? Was my nature to be souled humanness or soulless vampirism? The answer: nei­ther. I existed between two worlds and had little claim upon the assets or lia­bilities of either. Neither living nor dead, unalive or undead, not having anything crucial to do with such tedious polarities, such tiresome opposites, which ultimately are no more different from each other than a pair of imbecilic monozygotes. I said no to life and death. No, Mr. Springbud. No, Mr. Worm. Without ever saying hello or goodbye, I merely avoided their company, scorned their gaudy invitations.

  Of course, in the beginning Aunt T. tried to care for me as if I were a normal child. (Incidentally, I can perfectly re­call every moment of my life from birth, for my existence took the form of one seamless moment, without forgettable yesterdays or expectant tomorrows.) She tried to give me normal food, which I always regurgitated. Later Aunt T. prepared for me a sort of pureed meat, which I ingested and digested, though it never became a habit. And I never asked her what was actually in that preparation, for Aunt T. wasn't afraid to use money, and I knew what money could buy in the way of unusual food for an unusual infant. I suppose I did become accustomed to similar nourish­ment while growing within my mother's womb, feeding on a potpourri of blood types contributed by the citizens of Aix. But my appetite was never very strong for physical food.

  Stronger by far was my hunger for a kind of transcendental fare, a feasting of the mind and soul: the astral banquet of Art. There I fed. And I had quite a few master chefs to plan the menu. Though we lived in exile from the world, Aunt T. did not overlook my ed­ucation. For purposes of appearance and legality, I have earned diplomas from some of the finest private schools in the world. (These, too, money can buy.) But my real education was even more private than that. Tutorial ge­niuses were well paid to visit our home, only too glad to teach an invalid child of nonetheless exceptional promise.

  Through personal instruction I scanned the arts and sciences. Yes, I learned to quote my French poets,

  Lean immortality, all crepe

  and gold,

  Laurelled consoler frightening to

  behold,

  Death is a womb, a mother's

  breast, you feign —

  The fine illusion, oh the pious

  trick!

  but mostly in translation, for some­thing kept me from ever attaining more than a beginner's facility in that for­eign tongue. I did master, however, the complete grammar, every dialect and idiom of the French eye. I could read the inner world of Redon (who was almost born an American) — his grand isole paradise of black. I could effortlessly comprehend the outer world of Manet and the Impressionists — that secret language of light. And I could decipher the impossible worlds of the surrealists — those twisted arcades where brilliant shadows are sewn to the rotting flesh of rainbows.

  I remember in particular a man by the name of Raymond, who taught me the rudimentary skills of the artist in oils. I recollect vividly showing him a study I had done of that sacred phe­nomenon I witnessed each sundown. Most of all I recall the look of his eyes, as if they beheld the rising of a curtain upon some terribly involved outrage. He abstractedly adjusted his delicate spectacles, wobbling them around on the bridge of his nose. His gaze shifted from the canvas to my face and back again. I'm not sure whether my face helped him understand something in the picture or vice versa. His only com­ment was: "The shapes, the colors are not supposed to lose themselves that way. Something . . . No, too much —" Then he asked to be permitted use of the bathroom facilities. At first I thought this gesture was means as a symbolic appraisal of my work. But he was quite in earnest and all I could do was give him directions to the nearest chamber of convenience in a voice of equal se­riousness. He walked out of the room with the first two fingers of his right hand pressing upon the pulsing wrist of his left. And he never came back.

  Such is a thumbnail sketch of my half-toned existence: twilight after twi­light after twilight. And in all that blur of time I but occasionally, and then briefly, wondered if I too possessed the same potential for immortality as my undead mother before her life was aborted and I was born. It is not a ques­tion that really bothers one who exists beyond, below, above, between — triumphantly outside — the clashing wo
rlds of human fathers and enchanted mothers.

  I did wonder, though, how I would explain, that is conceal, my unnatural mode of being from those people arriv­ing from France. Despite the hostility I showed toward them in front of Aunt T., I actually desired that they should take a good report of me back to the real world, if only to keep it away from my own world in the future. For days previous to their arrival, I came to think of myself as a certain stock char­acter in Gothic stories: the stranger in a strange castle of a house, that shad­owy figure whom the hero travels over long distances to encounter, a dark soul hiding his horrors. In short, a medieval geek perpetrating strange deeds in se­cret sanctums. I expected they would soon have the proper image of me as all impotence and no impetus. And that would be that.

  But never did I anticipate being called upon to face the almost forgotten realities of vampirism — the taint be­neath the paint of the family portrait.

  The Duval family, and unmarried sis­ter, were arriving on a night flight, which we would meet at the local in­ternational airport. Aunt T. thought this would suit me fine, considering my tendency to sleep most of the day away and arise with the setting sun. But at the last minute I suffered an acute sei­zure of stage fright. "The crowds," I appealed to Aunt T. She knew that crowds were the world's most powerful talisman against me, as if it had needed any at all. She understood that I would not be able to serve on the welcoming committee, and Rops's younger brother Gerald (a good seventy-five if he was a day) drove her to the airport alone. Yes, I promised Aunt T. that I would be sociable and come out to meet every­one as soon as I saw the lights of the big black car floating up our private drive.