A Whisper of Blood

by Ellen Datlow

  Two days later, Caitlin and I decided more or less on the spur of the moment to leave. We’d had enough and weren’t getting any pleasure at all from the place. Our bags were packed and the bill was paid within an hour and a half. Neither of us like saying goodbye to people, and as you can imagine, we were spooked by McGann’s story. It’s not something anyone would be quick to believe, but if you were there that night and seen their faces, heard their voices and the conviction in them, you’d know why both of us were uncomfortable in their presence. But it happened that as we were walking out to the car, we ran right into Miep, who was coming toward the office in a hurry.

  Something was clearly wrong. “Miep, are you all right?”

  “All right? Oh, well, no. Ian is … Ian is not well.” She was totally preoccupied and her eyes were going everywhere but to us. Then a light of memory came on in them and her whole being slowed. She remembered, I guess, what her man had told us the other night.

  “He had another dream today, after he came home from the beach. He lay down and it was only a few minutes, but when he woke—” Instead of continuing, she drew a slow line across the lower part of her stomach. Both Caitlin and I jumped at that and asked what we could do. I think we both also started toward their bungalow, but Miep shouted, really shouted, “No!” and there was nothing we could do to convince her to let us help. If that were possible. More than that though, the thing that struck me hardest was her face. When she realized we weren’t going to try and interfere, she looked over our shoulders toward their place, where Ian was, and the expression was both fear and radiance. Was it true? Was he really back there, scarred again by death, scarred again because he hadn’t understood its answers to his questions? Who knows?

  On the boat back to the mainland, I remembered what he had said that night about the Moose Church and how people should be allowed to worship whatever they want. That was the look on his girlfriend’s face—the look of one in the presence of what they believe is both the truth and the answer to life. Or death.

  Our Thoughts,

  Ted

  “The Moose Church” is a result of a terrible but rather interesting trip to Sardinia. I was so taken by the idea of the story that I decided to use it as the first part of the next novel I will be doing. As to the theme of vampirism, say whatever you will, the ultimate vampire is death.

  Jonathan Carroll

  MRS. RINALDI’S ANGEL

  Thomas Ligotti

  Ligotti is justly celebrated for his baroque journeys into the unconscious. This story is a little more straightforward and slightly less baroque in language, without, however, losing his unique voice.

  Like Carroll’s before it, this story, too, is about dreams, but here the dreamer is a collaborator despite himself, inadvertently causing great harm.

  From time to time during my childhood, the striking dreams that I nightly experienced would become brutally vivid, causing me to awake screaming. The shouting done, I sank back into my bed in a state of superenervation resulting from the bodiless adventures imposed upon my slumbering self. Yet my body was surely affected by this nocturnal regimen, exercised harshly by visions both crystalline and confused. This activity, however immaterial, only served to drain my reserves of strength and in a few moments stole from me the benefits of a full night’s sleep. Nevertheless, while I was deprived of the privilege of a natural rest, there may also have been some profit gained: the awful opulence of the dream, a rich and swollen world nourished by the exhaustion of the flesh. The world, in fact, as such. Any other realm seemed an absence by comparison, at best a chasm in the fertile graveyard of life.

  Of course my parents did not share my feelings on this subject. “What is wrong with him,” I heard my father bellow from far down the hallway, his voice full of reproach. Shortly afterward my mother was by my side. “They seem to be getting worse,” she would say. Then on one occasion she whispered, “I think it’s time we did something about this problem.”

  The tone of her voice told me that what she had in mind was not the doctor’s appointment so often urged by my father. Hers was a more dubious quest for a curative, though one which no doubt also seemed more appropriate to my “suffering.” My mother was always prone to the enticements of superstition, and my troubled dreams appeared to justify an indulgence in unorthodox measures. Her shining and solemn gaze betrayed her own dreams of trafficking with esoteric forces, of being on familiar terms with specialists in a secret universe, entrepreneurs of the intangible.

  “Tomorrow your father is leaving early on business. You stay home from school, and then we’ll go and visit a woman I know.”

  Late the following morning, my mother and I went to a house in one of the outlying neighborhoods of town and were graciously invited to be seated in the parlor of the long-widowed Mrs. Rinaldi. Perhaps it was only the fatigue my dreams had inflicted on me that made it so difficult to consolidate any lucid thoughts or feelings about the old woman and her remote house. Although the well-ordered room we occupied was flush with sunlight, this illumination somehow acted in a way of a wash over a water-color painting, blurring the outline of things and subduing the clarity of surfaces. This obscurity was not dispersed even by the large and thickly shaded lamp Mrs. Rinaldi kept lighted beside the small divan on which she and my mother sat. I was close to them in an old but respectably upholstered armchair, and yet their forms refused to come into focus, just as everything else in that room resisted definition. How well I knew such surroundings, those deep interiors of dream where everything is saturated with unreality and more or less dissolves under a direct gaze. I could tell how neatly this particular interior was arranged—pictures perfectly straight and tight against the walls, well-dusted figurines arranged well upon open shelves, lace-fringed tablecovers set precisely in place, and delicate silk flowers in slim vases of colored glass. Yet there was something so fragile about the balance of these things, as if they were all susceptible to sudden derangement should there be some upset, no matter how subtle, in the secret system that held them together. This volatility seemed to extend to Mrs. Rinaldi herself, though in fact she may have been its source.

  Casually examined, she appeared to present only the usual mysteries of old women who might be expected to speak with a heavy accent, whether or not they actually did so. She wore the carnal bulk and simple attire of a peasant race, and her calm manner indeed epitomized the peasant quietude of popular conception: her hands folded without tremor upon a wide lap and her eyes were mildly attentive. But those eyes were so pale, as was her complexion and gauzy hair. It was as if some great strain had depleted her, and was continually depleting her, of the strong coloring she once possessed, draining her powers and leaving her vulnerable to some tenuous onslaught. At any moment, during the time my mother was explaining the reason why we sought her help, Mrs. Rinaldi might have degenerated before our eyes, might have finally succumbed to spectral afflictions she had spent so many years fending off, both for her own sake and for the sake of others. And still she might have easily been mistaken for just another old woman whose tidy parlor displayed no object or image that would betray her most questionable and perilous occupation.

  “Missus,” she said to my mother, though her eyes were on me, “I would like to take your son into another room in this house. There I believe I may begin to help him.”

  My mother assented and Mrs. Rinaldi escorted me down a hallway to a room at the back of the house. The room reminded me of a little shop of some kind, one that kept its merchandise hidden in dark cabinets along the walls, in great chests upon the floor, boxes and cases of every sort piled here and there. Nothing except these receptacles, this array of multiform exteriors, was exposed to view. The only window was tightly shuttered and a bare light bulb hanging overhead served as the only illumination.

  There was nowhere to sit, only empty floor space; Mrs. Rinaldi took my hand and stood me at the center of the room. After gazing rather sternly down at me for some moments, she proceeded to pace slo
wly around me.

  “Do you know what dreams are?” she asked quietly, and then immediately began to answer her own question. “They are parasites—maggots of the mind and soul, feeding on the mind and soul as ordinary maggots feed on the body. And their feeding on the mind and soul in turn gnaws away at the body, which in turn again affects the mind and the soul, and so on until death. These things cannot be separated, nor can anything else. Because everything is terribly inseparable and affects everything else. Even the most alien things are connected together with everything else. And so if these dreams have no world of their own to nourish them, they may come into yours and possess it, exhaust it little by little each night. They use your world and use it up. They wear your face and the faces of things you know: things that are yours they use in ways that are theirs. And some persons are so easy for them to use, and they use them so hard. But they use everyone and have always used everyone, because they are from the old time, the time before all the worlds awoke from a long and helpless night. And these dreams, these things that are called dreams, are still working to throw us back into that great mad darkness, to exhaust each one of us in our lonely sleep, and to use up everyone until death. Little by little, night after night, they take us away from ourselves and from the truth of things. I myself know very well what this can be like and what the dreams can do to us. They make us dance to their strange illusions until we are too exhausted to live. And they have found in you, child, an easy partner for their horrible dancing.”

  With these words Mrs. Rinaldi not only revealed a side of herself quite different from the serene wise woman my mother had seen, but she also took me much deeper into things I had merely suspected until that day in the room where chests and strange boxes were piled up everywhere and great cabinets loomed along the walls, so many tightly closed doors and drawers and locked-up lids with so many things on the other side of them.

  “Of course,” she went on, “these dreams of yours cannot be wholly exorcised from your life, but only driven back so that they may do no extraordinary harm. They will still triumph in the end, denying us not just the restoration of nightly sleep. For ultimately they steal away the time that might have measured into immortality. They corrupt us in every way, abducting us from the ranks of angels we might have been or become, pure and calm and ever-lasting. It is because of them that we endure such a meager allotment of years, with all their foulness. This is all I can offer you, child, even if you may not understand what it means. For it is surely not meant that you should fall into the fullest corruption before your time.”

  Her speech concluded, Mrs. Rinaldi stood before me, massive and motionless, her breathing now a bit labored. I confess that her theories intrigued me as far as I could comprehend them, for at the time her statements regarding the meaning and mechanisms of dream appeared to be founded on somewhat questionable assumptions, unnecessarily outlandish in their departures from the oldest orthodoxies of creation. Nonetheless, I decided not to resist whatever applications she chose to make of her ideas. On her side, she was scrutinizing my small form with some intensity,

  engaged in what seemed a psychic sizing up of my presence, as if she were seriously unsure whether or not it was safe to move on to the next step with me.

  Apparently resolving her doubts, she shuffled over to a tall cabinet, unlocked its door with a key she had taken from a sagging pocket in her dress, and from within removed two items: a slim decanter half-filled with a dark red liquid, presumably wine, and a shallow wide-mouthed drinking glass. Carrying these objects back to me, she put out her right hand, in which she held the glass, and said: “Take this and spit into it.” After I had done this, she poured some of the wine into the glass and then replaced the decanter in its cabinet, which she locked once again. “Now kneel down on the floor,” she ordered. “Don’t let anything spill out of the glass, and don’t get up until I tell you to do so. I’m going to turn out the light.”

  Even in total darkness, Mrs. Rinaldi maneuvered well about the room, her footsteps again moving away from me. I heard her opening another cabinet, or perhaps it was a large chest whose heavy lid she struggled to push back, its old hinges grinding in the darkness. A slight draft crossed the room, a brief drifting current of air without scent and neither warm nor cold. Mrs. Rinaldi then approached me, moving more slowly than she had before, as if bearing some weighty object. With a groan, she set it down, and I heard it scrape the floor inches from where I knelt, though I could not see what it was.

  Suddenly a thin line of light scored the blackness, and I could see Mrs. Rinaldi’s old finger slowly lifting the lid of a long low box from which the luminousness emanated. The glowing slit widened as the lid was drawn back farther, revealing a pale brilliance that seemed confined wholly within the box itself, casting not the least glimmer into the room. The source of this light was a kind of incandescent vapor that curled about in a way that seemed to draw the room’s darkness into its lustrous realm, which appeared to extend beyond the boundaries of the visible and made the box before me look bottomless. But I felt the bottom for myself when the whispering voice of Mrs. Rinaldi instructed me to place the glass I was holding down into the box. So I offered the glass to that fluorescent mist, that churning vapor that was electrical in some way, scintillating with infinitesimal flashes of sharp light, sprinkled with shattered diamonds.

  I expected to feel something as I put my hand in the shining box, easily setting the glass upon its shallow and quite solid bottom. But there was nothing at all to be felt, no sensation whatever—not even that of my own hand. There seemed to be a power to this prodigy, but it was a terribly quiescent power, a cataract of the purest light plummeting silently in the blackness of space. If it could have spoken it might have told, in a soft and reverberant voice, of the lonely peace of the planets, the uninhabited paradise of clouds, and an antiseptic infinity.

  After I placed the glass of wine and spittle into the box, the light from within took on a rosy hue for just a moment, then resumed its glittering whiteness once again. It had taken the offering. Mrs. Rinaldi whispered “Amen,” then carefully closed the lid upon the box, returning the room to blackness. I heard her replace the object in its tabernacle of storage, wherever that may have been. At last the lights came on.

  “You can get up now,” Mrs. Rinaldi said. “And wipe off your knees, they’re a little dirty.”

  When I finished brushing off my pants I found that Mrs. Rinaldi was again scrutinizing me for telltale signs of some possible misunderstanding or perhaps misconduct that I might disclose to her. I imagined that she was about to say, “Do not ask what it was you saw in this room.” But in actuality she said, “You will feel better now, but never try to guess what is in that box. Never seek to know more about it.” She did not pause to hear any response I might have had to her command, for she was indeed a wise woman and knew that in matters such as these no casual oath of abstention can be trusted, all fine intentions notwithstanding.

  As soon as we had left Mrs. Rinaldi’s house, my mother asked me what had happened, and I described the ceremony in detail. Nevertheless, she remained at a loss for any simple estimate of what I had told her: While she expected that Mrs. Rinaldi’s methods might be highly unusual, she also knew her own son’s imagination. Still, she was obliged to keep faith with the arcane processes that she herself had set in motion. So after I recounted the incidents that took place in that room, my mother only nodded silently, perhaps bewilderedly.

  I should document that for a certain period of time my mother’s faith in Mrs. Rinaldi did not appear to have been misplaced. The very day of our visit to the old woman was for me the beginning of a unique phase of experience. Even my father noted the change in my nighttime habits, as well as a newfound characterology I exhibited throughout the day. “The boy does seem quieter now,” he commented to my mother.

  Indeed, I could feel myself approaching a serenity almost shameful in its expansiveness, one that submerged me in a placid routine of the most viole
nt contrast to my former life. I slept straight through each night and barely ruffled my bedcovers. Not to claim that my sleep was left completely untouched by dreams. But these were no more than ripples on great becalmed waters, pathetic gestures of something that was trying to bestir the immobility of a vast and colorless world. A few figures might appear, tremulous as smoke, but they were the merest invalids of hallucination, lacking the strength to speak or raise a hand against my terrible peace.

  My daydreams were actually more interesting, while still being incredibly vague and without tension. Sitting quietly in the classroom at school, I often gazed out the window at clouds and sunlight, watching the way the sunlight penetrated the clouds and the way the clouds were filled with both sunlight and shadows. Yet no images or ideas were aroused by this sight, as they had been before. Only a vacant meditation took place, a musing without subject matter. I could feel something trying to emerge in my imagination, some wild and colorful drama that was being kept far away from me, as far away as those clouds, remaining entirely vaporous and empty of either sense or sensation. And if I tried to draw any pictures in my notebook, allowing my hand all possible freedom (in order to find out if it could feel and remember what I could not), I found myself sketching over and over the same thing: boxes, boxes, boxes.

  Nonetheless, I cannot say that I was unhappy during this time. My nightmares and everything associated with them had been bled from my system, drained away as I slept. I had been purified of tainted substances, sponged clean of strangely tinted stains on my mind and my soul. I felt the vapid joy of a lightened being, a kind of clarity that seemed in a way true and even virtuous. But this moratorium on every form of darkness could only last so long before the old impulses asserted themselves within me, moving out like a pack of famished wolves in search of the stuff that once fed them and would feed them again.