by Andrew Pyper
“I should explain, Lily, an aspect to my powers I have so far neglected to share,” he says. “If I choose, I can feed on the blood of a human while at the same time forcing some of my own blood into them. The result, when successful, is an individual who is neither dead nor alive, enslaved to my command. They don’t last long. I cannot make them live on like me as the Count does in Dracula. But it was Stoker’s experience with three such creatures that was the genesis for his novel.”
The auditorium dims as if someone is at the lighting board, quieting the audience before the first notes of the prelude. But Lily tells herself it’s only her consciousness dancing along the edge of night, pulling itself back from fainting.
“I had made arrangements to entrap three young women in a rented room off Oxford Street,” he says, and Lily hangs on to his words. “Call my luck good or bad, but each of them had taken to the process. They had lost their color, but none of their beauty, and only part of their lives. Have you read Stoker’s pig slop of a novel, Lily? The protagonist, Harker, is trapped inside the Count’s castle when three female vampires try to seduce him. Before the moment of consummation, Dracula intervenes, declaring, ‘This man belongs to me!’ When did Stoker jot this episode in his notes? Two days later I opened the door to that room off Oxford Street and the creatures I made rose from their blankets, eyeing the big Irishman with a hunger that could easily be mistaken for lust. Unlike Harker, Stoker showed little hesitation in submitting to the young women’s attentions. I will spare you the details, my daughter, but I’m sure you can imagine the whole writhing scene. For Stoker’s sake, it was a good thing I lingered. One, and then another, and then all three girls’ expressions changed from false arousal to real craving, their teeth closing in on Bram’s throat. ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘This man is not yours! He belongs to me!’ ”
Lily starts to shake. Not a passing shiver at the projection of this scene on the darkened stage before her, but a series of uncontrolled jolts that brings an echoing squeak from the seat under her. Michael’s hand lands on top of hers and her body stills, even if the shrieking of her mind grows even louder.
“We repaired to a public house,” he says. “And what I did next may puzzle you, Lily, given my declaration of never revealing myself to a writer ever again. But Bram Stoker wasn’t a writer. And in any case, I didn’t tell him everything. The tale I spun had nothing to do with Dr. Eszes, or the innumerable deaths required to keep me alive. Instead I spoke of myself as a kind of magician, a hypnotist who could put spells on people like the young women in the Soho room. Stoker nodded at all this. For a time our conversation turned to other things, the lewd jokes that used to delight us, but it was different now. It’s why I was surprised, a couple days on, when he asked me to the Beefsteak Room again. He came right to the point, asking if the people of my country still believed in vampires. I played along. Told him that there had been for many centuries in that part of the world tales of human-appearing parasites that existed on the blood of the living, but they were no more special—and no more real—than the forest witch who breastfeeds the trees. Stoker leaned forward. ‘You’ve told me you are a magician. Yet that’s not really what you are, is it, Michael?’ He knew. He knew, and I saw myself killing him, saw the spray of his blood on the wallpaper. It took all my will to excuse myself. I left London the next morning.”
Lily tries to stand, even to lean away from him, but she can do nothing more than what the deeper part of her wants to do.
“But you came back,” she manages to say.
“To the same seat you’re sitting in now. It was several years after our last dinner in the Beefsteak Room that I walked past the Lyceum doors and saw ‘Dracula, a Play by Bram Stoker’ on a poster out front. You must understand that in those days the public reading of a play was not done for the purpose of rehearsing, but to assert copyright over a forthcoming text. It’s why I read that poster and knew at once that Dracula was to be a book.”
Michael takes an abrupt gulp of breath, followed by a kind of growl, and Lily recognizes it as an involuntary utterance of contempt. Along with a rage that doesn’t wholly belong to Michael, but to his demonic other half.
“The date was set for the following morning. Wearing a hat, scarf, and spectacles to obscure my face, I went,” he goes on. “Bram stood behind a lectern at one corner of the stage, reading the play aloud. It was awful. Irving himself slipped in and stood in the aisle before declaring Dreadful! and walking out. I too left before the end. Outside, I stood among the throng going this way and that along the Strand and told myself there was little harm that could come out of a book taken from the text of such a lifeless play. I was proven wrong. Dracula’s success pained me so much more than Mary’s or Skivvy’s. To see how Stoker’s bogus exaggerations—wooden stakes! crosses! coffins for beds!—became embedded in the world’s imagination was too much to bear. I was humiliated. Jealous too. At least the Count was known to the world, however ridiculous. I remained in oblivion. And then, at some point after the two world wars, I started to feel hunted, as if the twentieth century itself wished to see me brought to ground.”
He wipes the back of his hand over his lips but remains silent. It occurs to Lily that this turn in his story may be a buried hint that he knows about Will.
“Yet there was something unexpected, possibly enchanted, that occurred over this second half of my life,” he says, his voice dwindling to a whisper. “There was you.”
She feels again that something physical is about to happen between them, an embrace or the infliction of pain, something shocking. But the moment is interrupted by the sound of sirens outside the theater’s walls. It brings Michael to his feet.
As he squeezes past her knees he takes her by the hand, pulling her up, so that she follows him down the aisle to the orchestra pit and around to a door that takes them backstage. Lily keeps pace at something between her fastest walk and a run. Either he knows the way in the darkness of the stage’s wings, or his vision is that of a nocturnal bird of prey, because though Lily catches sight of hanging ropes and sandbags and soundboards they don’t slam into any of it.
She’s blinded by the gray London light that hits her when he crashes through the stage door. Unlike their previous partings when he’s slipped away once he’s determined they haven’t been observed, this time he doesn’t let go of her hand.
“Stay close,” he says, before pulling her down the narrow lane and into the noise of the Strand.
24
* * *
They don’t go far before Michael takes an abrupt turn off the curb and pulls Lily into oncoming traffic.
She squeezes her eyes shut, readying herself for the impact. All around her are blaring horns, the swirled air of cabs and double deckers passing within inches. But nothing hits her. When she opens her eyes they’ve slowed to a walk under the silver awning of the Savoy Hotel where a doorman sweeps his top hat inches from the ground in a bow.
Michael slips a hundred-pound note into his hands. “You haven’t seen us,” he says.
They enter the marble lobby and proceed directly to the elevators. Lily wonders how they would appear to others in this place. A man you would describe as foreign, totally assured in his movements. A woman following after him as if he’s all she has. They would appear as lovers, certainly. Caught up in their own world, dashing into an elevator and the man pressing his floor with the urgency of anticipated pleasure.
They get out and go to the end of the hallway where Michael keys open a door that leads into a narrow entranceway before expanding into a grand suite. A king-size bed under an oil painting of the Houses of Parliament, the real thing visible through the broad wall of windows that overlooks the Thames. In the middle of the room there’s a round mahogany dining table with an ice bucket on a silver tray, a bottle of Pol Roger poking its head out the top.
“I hope you like champagne,” he says, already striding to the table where he pulls out the cork with a muted pop and expertly pours them full flut
es of amber bubbles. Lily considers making a run for the door, but then she remembers she came to London looking for him. For better or worse, foolishness or necessity. And now she’s here. Running now would be like running from herself.
“This was Churchill’s favorite, you know,” Michael says, passing a glass to her. “It’s said he had a bottle to himself every day at lunch.”
“Easy for him. What did he have to do in the afternoons? Save the free world?”
Michael laughs, and it starts her laughing. She hasn’t yet taken a sip and she feels intoxicated, the plush gilt and varnished wood surfaces of the room pitching slightly, as if the whole of London had just pushed away from a pier.
“To you, Lily,” he says, and clinks her glass. “My brave girl who has come all the way to the end.”
They drink. The wine so cold and sweet it doesn’t seem possible that it was composed of natural elements alone.
“This is an unusual indulgence for me, but I believe the occasion calls for it,” he says, breaking his lock on her eyes and looking around at the room’s ornate finishes. He motions for her to sit in one of the two chairs at the table and Lily is happy to take her place there, not trusting her legs to hold her up any longer without swaying. “In America, I favor the roadside motels, the mom-and-pop places with their rust-stained pools. Europe and Asia are easier. Every fourth door is a guesthouse with a handwritten registry and a manager happy to ignore missing sheets for a price. All paid with paper that leaves no trace behind.”
“I’ve adopted the same practice myself,” Lily says, taking another sip.
She sees his hand tighten around his glass so that she’s sure it will shatter in his fist.
“You have seen them again,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Have you spoken with them?”
“No.”
He studies her long enough with his dead eyes that she’s about to scream. Before she does, his face relaxes again, the hold on the glass loosens, and he drinks what remains in it.
“Who are they?” she asks.
“I’m not precisely sure. It’s not any regular police force—they’re too clever, and move too freely between nations for that. Their numbers are renewed, year after year, so that just when I can recognize one of their agents a new one comes along to take me by surprise.”
Lily wants to ask about her mother, the video, the completion of the circle that connects them, but recognizes she’ll have to come at these things indirectly, waiting for an opening he won’t back away from when she takes advantage of it.
“Let’s assume they want to destroy you to prevent you from destroying others,” she says. “You can understand their objective, can’t you?”
“I have gone from being born of history, to being part of it, to standing outside it altogether. A virus immune to the human events you think of as momentous,” he says, moving to the window and following the passage of a glass-ceilinged tourist boat below. “The destruction of others? Nothing can alter the course that mankind has chosen for itself. Not war or famine or the election of saviors. Your march toward the end will continue, unslowed. There will be drought and starvation and the extinction of species, one by one. In the final hours, there will only be the last of the survivors. The fiercest, most unhesitant killer. There will only be me.”
He continues to look out at the river below where another round of wailing sirens suggests a recent car accident or medical emergency taking place on the embankment. Lily’s curiosity is not enough to lend her the strength to get up to see which.
“So long as you see yourself existing outside history, you can cause as much pain as you like. Is that it?”
“What is the appropriate price to maintain an existence of true singularity?” he says, turning from the window, his face a featureless silhouette against the gray English sky. “Over my time I have killed tens of thousands, most for sustenance, though admittedly a good number—five thousand? six?—for pleasure alone. Yet I have witnessed civil wars, already fading from memory, that have put more bodies in the ground. Am I not worth a Balkan conflict, a Somalia, a Pinochet here and there?”
Lily opens her mouth to speak but he raises his hand to silence her.
“I merely propose a calculation,” he continues, stepping close to place his hands on the table. “The same thing generals and kings have done for millennia, and what presidents and CEOs do today: an accounting of lives in the achievement of some greater goal. Collateral damage. Isn’t this the term?”
“How can one life be worth the lives of thousands?”
“It’s not in me that my value lies, but in the ideas that attach themselves to me. I am not a prophet. I am a monster.”
He moves to her side and pours himself another glass of champagne, watches the bubbles rise with the attention of a scholar reading the scroll of some ancient history. She reaches for her glass but doesn’t trust that her hand is up to the job, and ends up leaving her arm upturned on the table as if awaiting a needle.
There is so much she needs to ask him but the questions slip free every time she thinks she’s captured one. She takes a moment to find her balance and ends up considering his face and, for the first time, sees herself in him. His mouth, his finest feature, the same shape as her own. Or is this, the psychiatrist in her wonders, only a narcissistic distortion? Rendering her desire acceptable by seeing it as an admiration of herself.
“What is it to be you?” she asks finally.
“You are being the doctor again.”
“I’m being curious.”
“Well then. Pretend we are sitting together outside, the two of us,” he says, and Lily is instantly alive to the sensation of it: his body next to hers, the coolness of the air, a broad square before them. It comes to her that this isn’t a scene she’s imagining. It’s a scene he’s putting in her mind. “A child walking, holding his father’s hand. I watch them and wonder what it would be like to hold that hand, to love and care so simply, just as I also wonder what the boy’s blood would taste like, the pitch of the father’s screams. I can feel these things—the impulse to kill, the tender yearnings of a parent—without contradiction.”
He turns from her and the motion breaks the connection, leaves her mind unoccupied of the horror she’d just pictured. Now when he speaks he moves about the room, touching the bedcover, surveying the art on the wall.
“You would think someone who has seen so many hideous acts—who has delivered them with his own hands—would be immune to beauty, but the opposite is true,” he says. “Every day offers the unexpected, even as I lay out traps like Prufrock’s coffee spoons, city to city, death to death. It can be a drudgery, all the space between killing. But then something wondrous appears: the way the sun emerges from behind the clouds and lightens a century’s worth of soot from a wall of brick, a man carrying flowers to his lover’s apartment. So many versions of the same sights and sounds—but I am still moved! For a moment. Inevitably, the sun sets again and the hunger returns and I remember my grim place in the course of things.”
“Which is what?”
“To embody the fears of two centuries’ worth of collective imaginings, a thing every mother promises cannot be real. The Bard’s Danish prince debated between being and not being. My fate is to know I am forever both.”
“What about my mother?” Lily says, arriving at the question she’d wanted to ask, now seizing an opportunity to voice it for the first time. “Did you love her?”
“I tried to. Wanted to.”
“Did you—” she starts, and the room spins again. “Do you love me?”
He steps away to sit on the edge of the bed and part of her wants to go to him. Lily can’t tell if this would be to hold him, or kiss him, or simply stand over him to see what it’s like to have him look up at her.
His mouth opens. What comes out is a song.
The same lullaby Lily remembers her mother singing to her, the one Michael voiced in the video. The melody all the more haunting
for being sung in a language she can’t understand.
“What do the words mean?” Lily says when he’s finished.
“ ‘May you grow to be strong. May the night be free of bad dreams. May I watch you become a woman.’ A rough paraphrase.”
Lily wipes her eyes, expecting her hand to come away wet from tears, but finds the skin dry. “You haven’t answered my question,” she says.
“You were an infant, easy to be proud of but impossible to know. Love? I mostly responded to the instinct of protection. No one would do you harm, not so long as I lived.”
“I meant now.”
He closes his eyes as if thinking of the best way to deliver what she’s asked for at the same time as he places his hands on his knees. They’re the kind of hands she likes. Strong and roughened by work. And then she remembers the kind of work that has left its mark on him and looks away.
“You are aware of my past attempts to transform a mortal into a being like myself,” he says. “I stopped trying for many years after the girls I’d half-turned for Stoker in that Soho room. And then I met the woman who would become your mother.”
Lily’s training tells her she must try to appear indifferent to whatever spell he’s cast on the air of the room, pulling her deeper into him with each breath.
But you can stop fighting now, her inner voice counters. Let go. Be part of it. Part of him.
“Who was she?”
“Even as a girl Alison was considered to be possessed of dark gifts,” he says. “This was in the Florida Panhandle in the early 1960s. People would come to the house where she grew up and, for a fee her parents would collect, she would tell them pieces of the future, or converse with the dead, or lay her hands on them to relieve their pain. They called her what her grandmother had been called two generations earlier.”
“A healer?”
“A witch.”
“Was she?”