by Andrew Pyper
Michael’s hand drifts up toward her. There’s no point in trying to get away, so Lily stiffens even more, a wooden doll awaiting his touch.
“I hadn’t yet forged my steel teeth, and I was excited and awkward as a virgin, which in a way I was,” he goes on. “Suffice it to say the business was messier and louder than the ideal. But it was a Hungarian town—people minded their own business. Eger had been traded between feudal leaders and crusading soldiers over and over. These weren’t the first screams they’d heard in the night. And in any case the girl quieted once I started to feed in earnest—the normal calming submission of shock, I would come to learn—but I could feel the terror in her body like the fluttering heart of a sparrow. I pulled away from her throat and spoke to her. Nem lesz több fájdalom, ígérem.”
“What does it mean?”
“There will be no more pain, I promise you. I meant that there would be no more grappling and biting and tearing, but as soon as I’d spoken I heard the second interpretation of my words. We both did. No more pain of this life. She’d had her share. I could taste it—the character of her blood a far more telling thing than any sommelier can read from a vintage—and knew she’d been hurt, heartbroken. Which is not to say she was pleased to be in my arms by the soggy banks of the Eger-patak as her pulse slowed to nothing. But there was, I believe, a degree of relief. It would be like a student, poorly prepared, being told she would not have to sit for the examination she’d been dreading. There would be no more exams, ever.”
His fingers stroke her cheek.
Out, out, out, Lily’s inner voice tells her. You have to get out.
There’s a look on his face that could be grief, the rising of buried regret. It gives her the sense that she might find an opening for escape if she uses the right words, the right tone. But as soon as she’s spoken she sees she’s mistaken.
“Did you know it was wrong?” she asks.
Michael pulls his hand away from her face and clutches a fistful of straw, slowly crushing it between his fingers.
“It was no more wrong than wringing a chicken’s throat,” he says. “Your right and wrong are the instruments of judges and priests, blunt tools used to build cages. But you and I—we choose freedom, don’t we?”
He inches closer and a new wave of fear comes over her. Lily speaks to hold him in place.
“What did you do?” she asks. “Once you were done.”
“By the time I had ridden back to the doctor’s house it was almost dawn and my hunger was already returning,” he says, sitting again, close enough now she can feel his warm breath. “The chambermaid had shown me not only the life ahead for me, but how feeding on human blood made me even stronger than I was before. I was drunk on the notion of my own greatness. And as it is with drunks, I only wanted more to drink.”
“She wasn’t the only one that night, was she?”
“No. When I returned the stallion to his paddock and started to my room, the groomsman stopped me. He began to chastise me for taking out a horse without his permission. And then I suppose he saw the blood on my face. He tried to close the door but I was faster now too. It felt as though I had all the time in the world to raise my hand, stop the door. Time to decide how to kill him. It would have been with my teeth if I hadn’t known him to be the ignorant filth he was. So it was that I took his head in my hands, holding him as if to bring him closer for a kiss. Instead, I snapped his spine. He was dead then, but I didn’t stop. I wrenched at him until his head was free. And then I threw his skull and heard it knock against the trunk of an oak in the darkness.”
Out, out, out. Get out!
The voice inside Lily is little more than a smothered whisper.
“It wasn’t as I had planned it. But it was happening now,” he says. “The end of my brief performance as a man. I knew that whatever followed from that moment would be my true life. I walked down toward the doctor’s house with a single word repeating through my mind. Gyilkosság, gyilkosság, gyilkosság. Murder, murder, murder. It sounded to me like a question and an answer and a reason. The only word I needed. Eszes had closed the shutters on his main-floor windows but it was no trouble to smash one open with my fist. The glass cut me. A gash from wrist to elbow. But there was no pain. It felt like nothing more than a feather being drawn down the length of my arm. Even as I heaved myself onto the windowsill I could feel the tingling healing of the wound, the sides of the cut fusing together. By the time I made my way to the bottom of the stairs and heard the doctor shouting at his wife and son to stay in their rooms the blood on my arm was already dry.”
“He knew it was you.”
“I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been up all night, waiting for me to come. Which meant I should have anticipated the rifle. The doctor stood at the top of the stairs with it aimed at me. He was wearing a nightshirt, I remember. One that revealed the blue-veined calves of his legs, the kneecaps soft as boiled eggs. I told him to put it down and he said no, even as he lowered the barrel until the gun hung loose in his arms. ‘On the floor,’ I ordered him, and again he said no, but nevertheless bent to place the rifle on the landing. A part of me wanted to ask him one last time what elixir he discovered that conquered death. But I made my way to the top of the stairs and looked into the doctor’s face and saw for the first time that he didn’t know the secret himself. It’s why he hadn’t told me. He had used a combination of ingredients and now he didn’t precisely recall the recipe. I wasn’t only alone. I was an accident. ‘My wife. Son,’ he whispered. I held him steady with my hands as I tore into his throat. His blood tasted old compared to the chambermaid’s. The mustiness of corked wine.”
Lily feels the color drain from her face and sees Michael cock his head in acknowledgment of it.
“No doubt the question of pity is now entering your evaluation,” he says. “Hadn’t I taken enough life for one night? And I might agree with you in hindsight. But you must understand that I’m not always what I seem. There are at least two versions of myself: the one who relates this account for you now, and the other who is an unstoppable cacophony of wants. The id, the subconscious, the demonic. Naming it makes no difference. It sings its own song and carries on until it is done.”
“It was that part of you that murdered that man’s family.”
“Well done, Doctor! Shall I tell you how it went? Eszes’s wife was in her bed. When she saw me enter, dripping in her husband’s blood, she sighed. It was the sound of her horror, of course, though it had the same breathy tenor of erotic expectation. It made up my mind for me. I would consume Mrs. Eszes until I’d had my fill. Afterward, I nearly forgot about the boy. I found him hiding behind the wardrobe in his room. A comical look-alike of his father, the narrow features and arrogant mouth. But his tears struck me as innocent tears. It was my first night of killing. I figured I ought to have exceptions to who I would feed on. Children, for one. I bent close to the boy. ‘I am your brother,’ I said, and left his room, pushing his father’s body aside to make my way down the stairs and out the front door into the dawn light. All this before I changed my mind and returned. If it might color your judgment, know that I made it go fast.”
He pauses and, from the stable’s silence, Lily realizes the horses have been as transfixed by his voice as she has been. They wait for him to continue, and though his story has frightened her—the way so many of the events were described as happening here—she waits too.
Michael doesn’t move. She parts her lips to speak but he raises his hand. A look of strange alertness alters his features so completely he appears a different person altogether. Or not a person at all.
He moves toward her on hands and knees and stops when his mouth hovers an inch from her ear.
“There’s something out there,” he whispers.
She listens for it but there’s only the anticipation of what he will say or do next that starts a ringing in her head.
“Stay where you are,” he says.
He doesn’t touch her but she
knows that he will, and this thought, instead of alarming her, washes her in heavy cascades of sleep. She resists it at first—no one knows she’s here, she will never open her eyes again if she closes them now—but it’s beyond her. The darkness comes upon her like the collapsing walls of a tunnel.
“Goodnight, Lily,” he says, and kisses her cheek.
There’s the single whinny of the horse in the stall next to them, a sound she understands as a warning, and then nothing.
16
* * *
She dreams of blood.
A close view of busy cutting. It’s impossible to blink, let alone look away. Something once alive is being severed, though she’s too near it to identify its size, its species. The blade moves through it in a silvery blur of flesh.
The dream is so vivid it announces itself as not a dream at all but a memory returned. It’s her own hand holding the knife. Not the Henckel from her kitchen in Manhattan but the one her mother used to skin and cut the animals she would hunt when they lived in the cabin in Alaska. Had she taught Lily to do the same, the places to enter the blade, the pressure required to separate hide from flesh? It’s the sort of thing she might do, lending her daughter the knowledge to survive on nothing more than could be brought down with a small-gauge Remington in the woods.
She’s skinning an animal but she can’t pull far enough away to see what kind of animal it is. Something prevents her from viewing the entirety of what is laid out before her, as if her mind refuses it, admitting only sufficient information to carry out the next step, and the next.
There’s a blink of darkness in which Lily drops the knife—she must have, as the knife is no longer in her hand—and she now holds a cloth.
The blood has soaked it through from her effort to clean the mess the animal has spilled. Lily goes back to trying to mop it up but only manages to spread it around like tar. This troubles her even more than the blood: she needs to make it go away. Her mother has taught her something a child should never be taught and now she wishes to be free of it. But that can only happen if she can clean up all the blood.
If it’s only that, why are you so afraid? Lily’s voice asks, reaching her even here in her subconscious. Why do you want to wake up so bad you’re trying to scream?
And then she’s awake. Screaming.
* * *
SHE’S ON HER HOTEL ROOM bed, lying atop the sheets, the chill of the room covering her like a stone lid. It’s morning: a crack of gray between the slightly parted curtains. Her legs don’t immediately respond to her wish to roll over and sit up, so she raises her head instead.
The knife, the voice within reminds her. Where’s the knife?
She looks over and sees it there, still in the blood-spattered bag on the pillow next to hers. He must have brought her from the stable and laid her on the bed and placed it there while she dreamed.
Lily washes it in the bathroom sink, wraps it in a face cloth, and stuffs it in her backpack. Then she pulls the curtain wide enough to look out at the garden, meadow, and forest she’d walked to the night before. It’s early enough that the sun has yet to burn off the fog that stays low to the ground. She’s about to step away from the window when she notices the fog is not the only thing moving through the field.
A stallion stops to look up at her from the edge of the forest, its body whiter than the mist, so that it appears to be made of cloud. It’s the Lipizzaner that occupied the stall next to Michael’s and hers, the one that whinnied at the sound of approaching footfall.
Another horse joins it, then another. Soon six of them are gathered there.
There were seven in the stable, her voice tells her. Where’s the last one? The one you touched?
Something close to panic seizes Lily.
It was him, she thinks, and is instantly certain of it. It’s how he got away. He rode the seventh horse.
At the hotel’s front desk there’s a pair of policemen, one talking into his radio and the other looking out the door as if anxious to return to an activity outside he’ll miss altogether if he stays here much longer. As she approaches the clerk at the desk Lily tells herself to appear calm. At the same time, it’s clear something serious has happened and to pretend she hasn’t noticed would call attention to herself as well.
“Everything okay?” she asks as she signs the credit card slip.
“There’s been a murder, I’m afraid,” he answers in formal English, the “I’m afraid” a mannerism that comes out bearing its literal meaning, as the man appears genuinely unsettled. And as Lily sees it in him, she is afraid too.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Do they know who?”
“A man who worked at the stables,” the clerk says. Lily immediately remembers the man who greeted her yesterday, the one with a face of exploded blood vessels.
“The horses were set free,” Lily says, feeling she has to say something but thinking of Michael, wondering how close he is.
The clerk looks at her strangely and is about to ask more when one of the police officers calls out to him.
Lily knows that if she doesn’t move now she may never move again. She slips out the front door and walks the couple hundred yards down the lane toward the stables. The police are there in greater numbers. A van, three cars, an ambulance, all with roof lights ablaze. As she passes Lily notices a circle of officers off in the trees, a sheet-covered body at their feet.
When one of them turns to look her way she returns her gaze to the road. She expects them to call her back, but she makes it to the main road without interruption and finds the bench where she was dropped off the day before. She hears the bus coming around the bend before she sees it, and in the moment before it appears she takes the cloth-wrapped knife and buries it deep in the cigarette ash of a garbage drum.
17
* * *
That night, at dinner in her hotel overlooking the river and dome of Budapest’s Parliament Building, Lily surprises herself by eating a large plate of roasted goose and potatoes. Even after she’s finished she remains ravenous. Since she’s met Michael she’s feeling it more often. Not just a healthy appetite but an aching, low and constant within her.
You don’t even know what that is, do you? her inner voice taunts her. You’re not hungry. You’re horny.
Instead of returning directly to her room she takes a stool at the lobby bar and orders a vodka soda. A celebration of sorts. She left her life behind to come to Europe all on her own and learned more than she wanted to know about an extraordinary patient. It almost got her killed, but she’d made it out. She won’t linger, she won’t make the same mistake again. There is only this night ahead of her in the four-star safety of the Hilton, and tomorrow she’ll fly home. The knife is gone. Michael has no hold on her anymore. Until he’s caught, she just has to mind her own business and wait.
The drink arrives and the alcohol warms her, drawing prickly sunshine through her chest and down the length of her arms. Her entire body alive with wanting.
“Bulls Blood.”
A man has come to sit two seats away from her. He wears a suit, the tie loosened, end-of-day bristle along the ridge of his jaw. His eyes the pale blue of a malamute’s.
“I’m sorry?”
“The wine.” He points at the huge, upside-down glass bottle at the corner of the bar. “They call it Bulls Blood.”
“Makes you strong. That the idea?”
“Not strong. Brave. Until the hangover, that is.” He smiles and shows her his teeth. Perfect except for a small chip in one at the front, which only makes them more perfect. “My nerd name is Calvin. But I’m trying to be cool right now, so I’m Cal.”
“Ellen,” Lily says.
“Well, Ellen. Can a fellow American buy you a drink in return for ten minutes’ conversation?”
Lily notes the absence of a wedding band on his ring finger. And more than this too. The laugh lines at the corners of his mouth, the pink flush of his lips. Something in his build that suggests the fitness that comes with c
ontact sport over gym workouts. One of the martial arts maybe, or boxing. Lily’s rational mind concedes that he’s good-looking.
No, her inner thoughts correct her. He’s good in more than looks.
She pulls her cell phone out of her pocket, finds the stopwatch app on the screen, and sets it.
“Ten minutes,” she says. “Starting now.”
“Okay. Well, let’s see. I’m in medical equipment sales. Pitching MRIs and CT scans in order to update the hinterlands of Europe from bloodletting and witchcraft. Not the most exciting way to make a living but, believe it or not, I find it interesting. And I get to meet all sorts of people. Which circles me back to you. What brings you to Budapest?”
“I’m just a tourist. Taking in the history.”
“It’s off-season for that kind of thing. Maybe you haven’t noticed how goddamn cold and wet it is?”
“I’ve noticed the discounts.”
“Half-price goulash,” he says, nodding in agreement. “Can’t beat it.”
They talk on about things back home, where they went to college, a debate over Chicago versus New York architecture. Just as the moment arrives when Lily decides she likes the way this man talks as much as the way he looks, the stopwatch on her phone beeps.
“Time’s up,” he says. “Do I get another ten if I buy another round?”
Lily buzzes with something more potent than alcohol. She looks at his hands, at once oversized and well-proportioned. She sees them in fists slamming into a punching bag. Sees them on her.
“Would you like to come up to my room?” she asks. She has no idea where this is coming from, but now that she’s asked this question it’s all she can think of, all she can feel.
He smiles and shows his chipped tooth again. “You know something, Ellen? I’d like that a lot.”