Death came with everyone screaming around him, with the ship being bashed by unruly waves, with the crew’s bones breaking, with the horrible sound of the demons slurping from the tanned and smelling casks and the fog like a shroud that separated them from the world they’d all known and would never know again.
And the old man smiled at him, nearly nose to nose, before his head darted forward and down, and his teeth ripped holes into Julian’s throat. As the beast sucked, he felt the blood being pumped from his heart and felt something else, something absolutely foreign and cold, filling his blood stream. Memories of his possessor, new tastes, a brutal necessity to take, always take what you want, grew like a mantra booming in his very depths.
He fell forward, chest to chest with his master, willingly, because it felt good to see and feel and know greater things than all he’d acquired in his pitiful life.
He felt the moment his heart stopped pumping; the second when his sight truly began. Everything was tinted by a frosty red, a snow white. He shivered, feeling the coldness of a new existence that felt incredibly like sex, an orgasm, each moment climatic, each moment euphoria.
Later, when the hunger first struck him, their pack on the coast and bedding in a cave, the euphoria fled and he knew he would have to kill to get it back.
He ached to feel flesh against his tongue, a pulse against his teeth, reverberating through them and through his core, to clamp his jaw shut, to feel the spurt of a sacrifice that would engorge him with an eternity of other people’s hopes and dreams and years.
He shivered in the dampness, curled on his side against the rock floor of the cave, his master close by and watching.
Years passed, and they learned to avoid large forces, and they learned their weaknesses. Julian liked to pick off guards, and their blood flowing into his mouth reminded him of the sea, salty and rich and full of mysteries that he would soon master.
Further inland, decades later, after he watched his master and those like him, all but for him, die beneath a wave of Spanish conquistadors, he acquired a chainmail shirt from one who had liked very young girls, caught him in the very act in a rustic villa, his pants out of reach, his sword and pistol useless on the floor. And Julian had wandered into the desert as if he were one with its barrenness, determined to starve himself to death because the girl he killed after the man had reminded him of his own daughter…
And Brooke felt those same things, that same whirlwind of memories, his and hers, intertwining, that same need that drove him out into the world where men were as easy to pluck from the sky as children.
It was the shock that got them, that paralyzed their prey. And she needed prey. Her throat ached. Her lips were as dry as the sand blowing against the side of the house they sat on, the creatures below crying for their master to tend their hunger, and she felt that crying in herself, from deep inside, that built and built in her throat until she stood and looked toward downtown where Angel’s body lay on the carousel. She still loved him but she would use his corpse to test what she already feared, that dead blood was insubstantial, tainted with death’s touch, too cold, too thick.
She closed her eyes for a while, trying to fight herself, what Julian had done to her, thinking about her daughter out there somewhere, and wanting to see her, to hold her, to…
…taste her, to break the thin layer of skin at her jugular, to…
“No,” she screamed at herself, opening her eyes, searching the sky for the god Julian had known never existed, and now, she saw for herself had been nothing more than a crutch for her own parents. Prayer wouldn’t fix this. Penance wouldn’t. Punishment didn’t change what a person was, or had become, at their core.
She tried not to think about Natalie, but she could feel her out there, smell her, soft, young, tender, and trusting.
Julian wasn’t on the roof anymore and she couldn’t hear her brothers and her sisters tortured pleas. She had no idea where they’d gone and she felt an utter loneliness, and weakness that a moment ago hadn’t existed. She mewled softly as she took to the ground and paused near the corner of the house.
“Natalie,” she whispered, unable to think about anything else for a moment.
But slowly, Brooke realized that her sense of smell had changed. As one of the whirlwinds slowly passed her she noticed she could not discern the banal scent of blowing dust, and it had not caused her to sneeze, which dust always had, in the life she’d known before this turn of recent events.
She held her stomach as the dust devil whipped by because her insides ached as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks, felt shriveled up to the size of a golf ball, and its diminished proportions tugged at her surrounding organs, and made everything ache with it. Her bones. Her flesh. Her thoughts.
Angel’s corpse did not appeal to her, but she needed to test it for sustenance, despite how much even the idea of such an act repulsed her. And she longed for the others, her now-brethren and now-sisters, who had endured Death’s kiss and became a family rooted in bloodshed.
Her movements were slow and clumsy, a babe learning to traverse a simple landscape that in a short time would present itself conquerable. She only had to wait, she knew that in her core. The stiffness would pass once she’d sampled plasma, and it would wash the remaining memories of her other life, which tormented her so, from her mind.
Natalie’s name filled her lips as she passed rows of dangling baby shoes dabbed with dried blood. She desired them but forced herself forward, one awkward step at a time.
In her mind’s eye, what kept her going, what she wished most not to think about, was: Natalie at home laying in her bed, propped on her elbows, the light on her nightstand casting a sickly yellow glow over the page of some book or another, Brooke in the doorway, as she had stood more nights than not, watching her for a moment, thinking that her child was very sensitive, but so unprepared for the way the world worked, the sacrifices that must be made, the horrors a parent did their best to guard against. And Natalie, in her bed, lost in some fantasy place, while Brooke waited, not really wanting to disturb her but knowing her child could not stay up all night reading, and she would, if allowed. Brooke saying, Five more minutes and then you need to shut the light out and get some sleep…
And Natalie, in her mind, and in her past, turning her head with what appeared great effort, laying the book down and sitting on the edge of the bed, her pulse tapping loud in the stillness, like a flutter of wings against her skin at the jugular, her eyes still in that other place.
That tap, tap, tap, of blood pumping, and Brooke, now, licking her lips, walking faster yet still stiffly, until she overcame the corner building on the edge of town and the dark carousel lay motionless in the distance, in front of the motel, Angel’s corpse bowed at its middle, her hearing the slow drip of blood exiting his slit throat and spotting the platform below.
The old part of her, that existed and struggled against the new, whispered, Please, let his blood be enough…
*****
Peter opened the door on the right, in front of her, blocking her vision of what was right in front of them, but she could see the stars over his head and the moon fat and orange and low over the rim to the north; and she heard what at first she thought the wind rushing toward them, but discovered a second later as Peter moved out and down the steps, was not wind at all.
The funnels of swirling sand remained anchored to the dusty earth at the bottom of the steps. Peter offered her his hand, perhaps noticing the weakness both in her legs and her spirit. She took his hand tentatively, glancing into the darkness beyond the spinning columns of dirt, searching for a sign of her mother or their opponents. She saw nothing in the night’s murk, lit only by star and moon, everything washed of all color, even the irrefutable red of the sands.
She swallowed hard, placed a foot on the first step, and then the next, her body and mind feeling as if the circumstances of the last five hours had severed them.
Peter whispered as she set foot to earth, “Don’t be afraid.
”
An easy thing for him to say if I had been correct in my assumption that the vampires venom had no power over one as strange as the desert child who looked upon her with hope and sadness. But she found to her surprise that she trusted him, to a degree, because he had done nothing to threaten her, and she could also see why I loved him so, even more than the people who may have filled my days with laughter or commonplace bickering, because Peter wanted nothing but to simply live.
No, she thought, that’s not right. He wants something…
He wanted to protect her.
He wanted to see my broken heart mended.
Tears slid down the child’s cheeks.
The boy holding her hand whispered, as sand whirled, “We’ll find a way to stop him. And we’ll find your mother. It will be okay.”
She sniffled, knowing that he was lying for her sake, to lend her strength, and she was grateful. She straightened herself, her dirty shirt, her shorts, which in battle had twisted slightly to the right on her thin hips. She dusted herself off, lifted her chin, and met his gaze. “How are these going to help us get to Dorothy?”
“Step inside this one,” Peter said, pointing to the clamor of dust particles spinning wildly between the other two in front of them.
He released her hand, nodded.
Natalie frowned sadly, took a deep breath, and stepped forward, feeling the pull of the cyclone’s gravity as she neared its axis. She wondered, of course, Will it hurt? Will the sand sting my skin? Will it tear at my eyes? Will I be invisible inside the dust storm to the creatures out there in the night?
She lifted her right hand, her heart a slow, heavy pitter patter against her ribcage.
If this was some sort of trap she’d discover it soon enough.
She took another step forward and the rush of the miracle’s rotation tugged at her clothing. Her fingers broke through the outer layer. The particles seemed to flow around her hand like water breaking around some obstacle in a river.
She exhaled slowly and pushed her arm farther into the mass of it, unalarmed and thankful that whatever powers—of Peter’s, or mine—that controlled it, it obviously meant her body no violence.
Her elbow past an invisible threshold and the cyclone scooped her up, moving forward even as it gripped her and jerked her inside the light brown spinning cloud.
She floated there, her shoes six inches off the ground.
She could see Peter stepping into the whirlwind to her left, the dark doors of the church and the sanctuary beyond them, the moon above as she spun slowly, very slowly, at the heart of this strange collaboration of desert and magic.
Her heart filled with hope suddenly. It rushed in, flooded her. Surely, she felt, such creatures that could perform incredible acts as this possessed the resources to overcome even the most horrible nightmares.
She spun slowly, her eyes adjusting further to the substance right in front of her. Retracting, her vision and her brain were at odds. What she had assumed was desert sand squirmed, swimming upon the current of air they’d created on eight legs, each spider caught in a small cyclone of its own, connected to the one to its right, its left, above, and below. They shimmered with pale glory, their eyes darker than their bodies, and she nearly shrieked, the wonder she had felt mere seconds ago transformed into disgust.
But they meant her no harm, and she knew that, had already experienced a myriad number of times when they could have attacked, yet hadn’t.
Her heartbeat slowed again, but she perspired profusely.
The cyclone shifted, or felt as if it was shifting, and it took her senses a moment to realize that they were moving.
The church grew darker, smaller.
As she traveled, suspended like the nucleus of an atom, her faith returned, and she welcomed it with open arms.
They passed the barn, a dozen houses long darkened with tragedy, barren but for the things that had taken shelter in them from daylight’s deadly rays. The child still wished they could wait until that daylight returned to make their play, to strike at the heart of the matter, but she knew that Peter was right, with as many of the beasts as there were roaming the open space scarred by gray wooden houses, they would find her long before sunrise.
She kept her hands close to her sides as she spun slowly, past more black houses washed in moonlight.
She couldn’t see Peter in either of the other cyclones.
Ahead, a pale glimmer rose in the night, an ivory statue, hands at its waist, swaying slowly from side to side.
Natalie’s body made another excruciatingly slow revolution inside the vortex, and as her turn completed, she was much closer, and her throat felt so full of something solid and dislodgeable, that she nearly choked, noticing her mother standing near the edge of the road that led by the house they’d entered whereupon they’d discovered the coffin, corpse, and spider’s remains like discarded paper.
They swept alongside her, only a few feet away, Natalie performing another rotation against her will, her mother in view as the spiders carried her past.
Her mother’s clothing was dirty and torn, her eyes dark hollows and downcast, her hands pressing hard to her stomach as if experiencing birthing pains. And between eyes and stomach, her throat was a red, ravaged mess. It stained her thin shirt with splotches of darkness.
Natalie spun away from her, and up the dusty street, crying, No, no, no, as the whirlwind moved soundlessly down the back alley behind the stores lining Main Street.
What strength and hope she’d mustered felt unreachable now. A black shroud blanketed her senses, and she tried to lie to herself, to say that it was a trick of light, an imposter, or merely her own worst fear drudging its way up from her subconscious and projecting and image that held no more substance than smoke.
They neared the backdoor of the motel. The cyclone slowed. Natalie braced herself for a sudden stop that would pitch her out onto the hard, unforgiving earth, expecting bruises and scrapes, but those were the least of her worries.
Down the alley she saw movement.
And slowly she was able to identify what at first only appeared streaks of black and white lost in the shadows of the buildings. The vampires were there in mass, in rank like soldiers, but no leader before them that she could see who would issue a command.
She thought she might faint for the slight rise they stood upon revealed their numbers, hundreds, clogging the alleyway in the distance and stretching out into the barren places, columns of ten in width, and a half mile deep.
The cyclone shifted again at the rear door of the motel and as it carried her inside, without moonlight to illuminate what her eyes knew to be there, she shuddered, sorting out the fear the way her mother had once told her that she had to do from time to time on her job. Slow deep breaths, an uncluttering of her imagination, her immediate goal to plead with me for assistance in destroying Julian.
It wouldn’t be easy, not when he had an army at his command, and she didn’t know if his death would reconcile her mother to her and wipe away something that now lived and bred in her blood stream, pumping through her heart, feeding her brain.
It seemed, if anything, a long shot, for Julian’s demise to trigger some reversal of all their fates. Part of her doubted, greatly, that it was even possible now that her mother and the others were infected.
The spiders set her down gently in the motel foyer and Natalie’s limbs felt more weighted than they ever had as her body acclimated again to the ordinary world’s gravitational pull. I stood, waiting, near the large window, lost mostly in shadow, my dress the black of a mourner’s, and slightly loose on my frame as if I had lost weight or the dress had belonged to someone else. The child approaching me, stricken by the same tragedy, broken by the same love, didn’t look any better.
I said, “We’re nearly out of time.”
Natalie sobbed, whispered, “My mom…”
And though she didn’t expect it, I closed the distance between us and wrapped her up in my arms, squeezing ever so g
ently, and Natalie drawing comfort from the embrace, my smell, the way my hand moved slowly up and down her back, thinking once again of her grandmother. It raised recent memories of all of them watching the balloons rise in the distance, claiming the space between land and sky. How her grandmother had loved them…
How Natalie’s own mother had believed that the new chapter in their life worth celebrating…
And how many things they’d taken for granted, embraces like this, time with themselves and each other, a gentle and honest laugh, a smile on a face you loved, the time to let yourself dream and the belief that those dreams were within reach…
I said, “I know how you feel, little one. I’ve felt it more than a hundred times in the past two weeks.” My fingers rested beneath Natalie’s chin and lifted her face so we were eye to eye. “But it’s not over yet, remember that.”
Natalie nodded, her eyes brimming again, wanting to say: It’s not over yet… and to actually believe it, but she’d seen them lined up on the other side of town, and soon they would swarm this motel, her mother among their numbers, and what good were words then?
I said, “My Auntie once told me something important and it came true.”
“What?”
“That I could outlast them all.”
“Who?” Natalie said.
I shook my head and thought, But I don’t know that it’s true anymore…
Movement outside, a large flash of reflected moonlight, then a smaller one passing it horizontally, snagged her attention and her heart felt as if it had ceased beating.
Angel’s Explorer floated down to earth like a feather, thousands of spider silk creating a canopy above it, and the truck squatted once the wheels touched the ground and were in the process of distributing the weight equally among them, when the smaller flash of light caught her mother’s face, her head turned, blank-faced, still holding her stomach, as she passed the vehicle.
Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Page 23