What is he doing? came Ricari's voice clearly in my head.
Who? What?
Maria, Mother of God, I can't leave him for a second—
I had to steady myself against the wall to follow Ricari into the living room. By the time I got there, Daniel was on his behind on the floor, laughing, mouth a scarlet gash in his face, and Ricari was bent over John, chafing his hands. "You malicious dog," Ricari breathed.
"You can see me, huh? So you can see me, right?" Daniel crowed.
"He's dying," Ricari said to me sorrowfully. He let the limp hand drop.
Progressive hypovolemic shock. The term from first-year human physiology popped into my mind unbidden; the last thing I needed right now was a term for what was happening to John. He had fallen into shock with an expression of pure, sad terror marked clearly on his features; he was pale, his gums were pale, he was fading fast.
I acted almost without thinking, blindingly fast with Ricari's old blood inside me; I tore open my wrist and held it to John's pale cold mouth. "Drink it, stupid," I hissed.
"Ariane!" Ricari protested.
I whirled to look at him. "Help me!" I shouted to him.
Daniel had fallen silent, stymied, his expression bemused. He watched us with detached interest.
Ricari sighed impatiently, and obligingly opened his wrist as well. There was little blood left to spare in him, and it barely squeezed out of the four slits punctured by his teeth. I hadn't been keeping track of how many times my heart beat while my wrist was in John's mouth, so I counted two and then pulled back. John had swallowed at least twice, mostly mine, but a few trickles of Orfeo's as well. "Is that going to work?" I asked him anxiously.
"We shall see," he murmured. His eyes were very tired.
Daniel picked himself up off the floor. "Have fun, you two," he said.
"Where do you think you're going?" Ricari snapped.
Daniel shrugged and smiled. "You wanted me out of here, I'm going. Besides, I don't know the first thing, or the second thing, or probably the fifth or sixth thing… I'd just get in the way." He stretched his arms, admiring himself in the candlelight. "Please. Keep the jacket. And…" He reached into the pocket of his own jacket and tossed something at me. I watched as it skittered across the floor—my rat pocket watch, busted and dented and dirty with dried blood.
"Asshole," I muttered.
"No time," said Ricari, "look."
John was conscious again; his eyes rolled about in confusion. "What the hell… what did he do to me?"
"It isn't what he did to you," I said. "It's what I did to you."
John wiped his face, coming away with the fast-clotting, blackish vampire blood, leaving raw patches in the flesh. "God, no," he swore, "no, please, God, no!"
Between Ricari and me, we got him to the bathroom. John was staggering, looking around him with undisguised horror. "My heart," he kept sobbing, "my heart."
"It's only the beginning," I said, "but don't be afraid, I'm with you, Orfeo is with you."
"I'm not ready to die!"
"You're not going to die," I soothed him. Though you'll wish you did.
I don't know if the experience is worse when you're having it, or watching someone else go through it. It took longer than I remembered it; John vomited blood for a good hour before the rest of him started to change. Ricari held him down on the floor while he went through convulsions; sat patiently while John's soft short human fingernails tried to tear off Orfeo's skin. I held myself and cried. After a while, I took off all my clothes—no sense in them being destroyed in a tide of blood and body parts—and Ricari took his off as well.
Such a lot of flesh in a human body. I watched in sickened dismay as his skin peeled off in messy strips, his eyes turned to fluid and ran from his sockets, the muscles reduced to a gummy mass. After five hours, there was little recognizable in the bathtub; simply a human-shaped blob of tissue, with the sharpened bones protruding from the fingertips and kneecaps. "I can't believe I went through this," I gulped.
"Watch," Ricari said softly, a slick wraith gleaming with blood.
I watched. The bones were moving; the fingertips of bone were becoming longer, and the bluish gristle holding them together shone and then sprung together in a fetal fist. The mess of red tissue began to glisten brightly.
"It's complete," Ricari said. "If you want, you can go to sleep; I'll watch."
"Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss this for a million dollars."
He smiled at me from his scarlet mask.
John's body wasn't being put back together from the shed parts; it was growing back out of new tissue, almost buzzing as it arranged itself in neat, perfect, programmed pools and bunches and rows. His skin grew back before his body was completely filled out; he was quite loose, a bag of bones inside a sheath as thin and fine as spider silk. As his body grew itself out, wrinkles developed in the skin, and a fine sheen of dark baby-hair grew from his skull, growing thicker by the second.
I glanced out the bathroom door. "It's getting light," I murmured, yawning.
"Yes… we should go to sleep… this part's really boring. It's the inside of him that's organizing itself, and the fireworks are over. We should sleep so that we're here when he wakes up."
We washed ourselves and each other from the sink, since John was still occupying the bathtub. Ricari kissed me as he washed my hair and wiped the skin below my breasts and between my buttocks with a wet towel; I licked the shed blood from the skin under his chin. When we were reasonably clean, we went into the suite's bedroom, leaving the door to the bathroom open, and got into the bed, under the light summer blankets. Looking back into the bathroom, I saw the immaculate white porcelain and gilded paint streaked and smeared with blood, the floor slippery with bits of skin, shed teeth, mucous membrane. "I'm not cleaning it up," I mumbled, embracing Ricari.
"Me neither."
"I guess we'll have to call for maid service."
He almost giggled and fell into an acting mode. "I say, goodwife, could you perhaps clear up some of this muck? I was thinking of having a formal tea in that room… there's a good girl."
I pulled down his head and kissed him.
We made love, and fell asleep.
I awoke still full of the sense-memory of his hips urgently feeding his cock to me with gentle, restrained thrusts; but he was not beside me in the cold sheets. I felt for him before opening my eyes, but finding nothing, sat up at last and pushed my hair out of my face.
Ricari sat crouched in the chair, back in his black clothes, knees drawn up to his chest. He stared intently down into the bathtub.
"Ricari?" I inquired.
"There's something wrong," he murmured.
I got up and pulled my T-shirt and jeans back on, and half ran to Ricari's side. He smoothed his hair back again. Down in the bathtub, John Thurbis lay still, as red as a devil, his hair grown back to a thick, short, even mane, his face covered with a gleaming, damp beard. It was startling—he had never worn a beard in his life. "What's the matter?" I asked. "He looks all right."
"I can't… hear him," Ricari explained. "I should be able to. He has my blood in his body. I should be able to catch his thoughts, though he himself is not yet conscious… but I can't."
"You're right," I said. "I can't get anything either."
Ricari shook his head. "I think we may have erred," he said. "I think we gave him too little blood."
"Is there anything we can do?"
"No." Ricari sighed. "There is very little time to do anything, once it's started. It is far too late to do anything now. Wait—he's coming to."
I moved behind Ricari and watched the creature in the tub stirring. His skin flushed, as all vampire skin does as it wakes from sleep, and it seemed so soft and flexible, like human skin. He took a great deep breath, and moved his head back and forth, gently, experimentally.
He sat up and opened his eyes.
Then he screamed.
We moved to quiet him immediately; his scream cou
ld have broken the windows and would certainly be heard. Ricari got his hand over John's mouth, and John promptly bit him, breaking his skin with his still-blunt teeth. As soon as he tasted blood, he became silent and still.
Ricari tore his hand back. The skin was in tatters over his knuckles. Like an injured boy in a schoolyard, he crammed his fist against his mouth. "Little bastard," he hissed.
"He's afraid," I said, feeling it flow out from John into me. "He's afraid of you." I went near him, held out my arm. "John, it's all right, it's Ariane, everything's going to be fine."
John jumped with a slosh from the tub, and pinned me against the floor. He tore at my neck with his teeth. "We're in trouble," I managed to say before he sucked the consciousness out of me.
I came to again on the floor, on my side instead of on my back, slowly making out the sounds of impassioned suckling. Ricari was beside me, steadying me. "Careful," he said, "you're going to be very woozy for a moment."
The sucking sounds were coming from John, who was swiftly and hungrily draining a middle-aged Chinese woman dressed in a tourist sweatshirt and madras shorts and the cheap sandals you can buy from bins in Chinatown. She was already dead, her short neat fingernails gone blue under the translucent keratin. "What happened?" I asked.
"I went out. I had to. He was going to kill you—you're too young to sustain yourself with that much of your blood gone. He's looking better, though." Ricari gave a wry smile. "I'd better stop him, you'll need some of what's left."
Ricari detached John from the woman's body, and John promptly fell to the floor and puked. I crawled over, found a vein in her ankle, and drank the cooling, thinned blood.
Ricari looked at everything with delicate distaste. "What a dreadful mess…" He got John up. "John, can you hear me?"
John's eyes rolled, then closed. He gave a low, wordless moan.
"We have to clean you up, and then we must leave."
I was able to stand. "That's a must," I agreed.
It seemed to take hours in the gore-soaked bathroom to get me clean, and get John clean; he seemed to soak the blood into his skin. "And get that silly-ass beard off him," I told Ricari, and I had to hold John still while Ricari went at him with the straight razor. Invariably, Ricari nicked John's chin and neck, but the wounds closed themselves almost immediately. John's eyes were already assuming that glassy texture that I knew so well from spending hours gazing at Daniel and Ricari; already he was stronger than I.
But there was certainly something wrong with him. He didn't seem to be able to speak. I opened his mouth and examined his tongue, his teeth, his palate; there was nothing the matter with them. He watched me with vague curiosity and an almost autistic indifference. All the time I got sensations from him—never words, always a formless turmoil of confusion, hunger, resentment, lust, impatience. When the lather had been completely rinsed from his face, I kissed him on the lips, and he returned it, going after me with his mouth afterward as though he wanted more. I put my finger against his lips. "John, we have to go," I said.
He stood up and looked at the door as if to ask me what I was waiting for.
"So he does understand," Ricari remarked.
John looked at him coldly.
"He just can't talk."
"I think he just doesn't want to," I said.
Ricari rolled his eyes. "Wonderful."
Ricari had no things to gather. He was materialistic only about the things that touched him: clothing, his razor and shoes. I put my jacket on John, since his shirt was ruined, and he was forced to wear his blood-stiff black pants, since nothing of Ricari's would ever fit on him.
I shuffled John into the street while Ricari settled his bill at the hotel desk. The old desk clerk never looked up. I felt Ricari's intent like a cold hand under my shirt, and I guessed that the old desk clerk wasn't going to remember this night at all if Ricari had anything to do with it.
On the street while I was looking frantically for a taxi, Ricari took my arm. "Ariane, I don't know if you wanted this or not," he murmured, pressing something cold and metallic into my hand. It was the rat watch. There was a huge dent right in the middle of the rat. I grimaced, and stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans.
We taxied to John's apartment, and I went through his closet, asking, "Do you want this? Do you want this?" and all of it was met with the same cold, haughty indifference. He was completely different—but I recognized this distance in him from when he had been human. Usually, when he was stressed out or angry, he would get expansive, going on drinking binges and tearing things apart; but at the very worst times, he would just relax, and take no more interest in himself or anyone else than he would in a passing cloud. In that strange apartment, looking at his piles of jeans and blazers, he was like a great cat, simply observing and giving no more reaction than a meaningful glance of his dark eyes.
Ricari was fascinated by him. He watched this static turmoil with great interest, studying John's features and every move he made. "He is a beautiful man, Ariane," he said.
"He's an annoying man. Fine, we're taking this and this and this, since you don't care, but I don't know where we're going, so…" I gave up and collapsed on the couch, clutching an armload of cardigans to my chest. "Where are we going?"
"I was thinking," Ricari answered. "I like this coast, this ocean. We should stay on this coast."
"What, the bay?"
"No, the ocean, I said. What cities are on the ocean?" Ricari idly fingered the sleeve of a fuzzy gray sweater draped over an arm of the couch. John watched his hands, some of the disdain passing from his face.
"Not the country?" I asked.
"I don't like the country. I like people and culture."
"I thought you hated people and culture."
"Yes, well, I'm alive now, I have to deal with it, and if I have to be alive, I would like to be somewhere where I can go to a museum or hear the opera if I chose."
"Yeah, being alive sucks, huh? Well, there's Seattle, Vancouver, B.C., Portland, I guess."
"Portland," he said, a dreamy quality coming into his voice. "Reminds me of Portsmouth, in England, where I stayed for quite some time. I liked it there."
"Well, it's not England. Portland's pretty nice, I've heard. Green. Rains all the time."
"Sounds marvelous," Ricari said.
I shrugged. "I don't care," I said. "Portland then. It's about as close to the country as I'm going to get. I suggest we take the bus… less security risk than flying."
"The bus?" Ricari murmured distastefully.
John smiled—a genuine smile—and almost laughed.
I sat up and put my arms around John, kissing the side of his head. He pulled away from me again, not roughly, but distantly again, as if he wanted to be alone inside his head without my touch. When I had touched him I felt something pass between us—something very strong and definite, a bond between us, like a sticky glue. It was enough to give me shivers. I wonder what it must have been like for him. "Bus," I repeated, keeping my mind on track. "It's cheap, it's boring, nobody will have guns and stuff there. If we just chill and act like regular folks, it'll be a snap. But we should go now."
"I've not traveled by bus since the nineteen-forties," Ricari said, rousing himself. "It was dirty and foul and noisy then—I can't imagine what it's like now."
"I'll make you a perfumed handkerchief, if it'll make it any easier."
John was already downstairs, in the street, tossing his long hair and taking great deep breaths of the foggy wind like some marvelous horse. Ricari and I followed more slowly, closing the door behind us and shutting off the lights. "Off we go," Ricari sighed.
I kissed him and pressed his hand, and he smiled.
* * *
Epilogue
Ricari left me some time ago.
He bought me this house in the west hills, furnished it according to his own dark, sad tastes, and dwelt with me there for a few years. In the meantime, he taught me the fundamentals—the hunt, the kill, how to learn cont
rol, how to talk to human minds. Under his tutelage I grew strong and infinite, learning new respect and wonder for life as I took bits and pieces of it into myself. To his disgust, he never did talk me out of eating people food and drinking alcohol, and even, disastrously, tried to do it himself once. We spent many very quiet evenings together talking and reading by candlelight, moonlight, even bare starlight. And he loved me well.
One evening he simply wasn't there; I searched and called for him for hours before I found his receipt for a one-way plane ticket to Toronto. That night I spent alone, sunk in despair, knowing that I couldn't keep him with me forever, and that living was still agony for him, opera or no opera. There was nothing that could be done about it. My heart calls out for him every day, and hearing nothing, retreats back into its hard, transparent shell. No one can see the shell, but it's there, protecting me. I hope that someday, before the end, he will tell me one last time that he loves me.
I am a scientist again.
I am still Ariane Dempsey, human molecular biologist. I do my work at the Oregon Medical Institute, researching and substitute-teaching the odd lab now and again. I feel about a million years older than my fresh-faced young students, but we still laugh together, still go for drinks after school. When they ask me about my personal life, I smile and change the subject and with a quick twist of my mind, they forget all about it.
Mainly, I study myself.
All my notes from my study of Daniel were lost; the Rotting Hall was razed not long after we left it, and everything within was destroyed. I'm still in touch with one of the little girls from the Rotting Hall—Genevieve—she works at a hair salon in Hollywood now and periodically writes me a long letter telling me all about the goings-on of those kids who survived that night and the area. There's a parking lot where Verfaulenhalle used to be, and the heavy-metal club has gone country-western. If I didn't know better, I'd be angry, but it just makes me laugh. I'd better get used to this—my favorite landmarks being made into mini-malls, porno video stores, fast-food joints… parking lots-Such is L.A. Such is the world.
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