Fevre Dream
Page 17
“No,” came Joshua’s reply. “I heard you approach. And I have been expecting you, Abner.”
“He said you would come,” came another voice, from a different part of the darkness. A woman’s voice, soft, bitter. Valerie.
“You,” Marsh said in astonishment. He had not expected that. He was confused, angry, uncertain, and Valerie’s presence made it even more difficult. “What are you doin’ here?” Marsh demanded.
“I might ask the same of you,” her soft voice answered. “I am here because Joshua needs me, Captain Marsh. To help him. And that is more than you have done, for all your words. You and your kind, with all your suspicion, all your pious—”
“Enough, Valerie,” Joshua said curtly. “Abner, I do not know why you have come tonight, but I knew you would come sooner or later. I might have done better to take a dullard as a partner, a man who would take orders without questions. You are too shrewd perhaps for your own good, and mine. I knew it was only a matter of time until you saw through the tale I spun for you at Natchez. I’ve seen you watching us. I know about your little tests.” He gave a rough, forced chuckle. “Holy water, indeed!”
“How . . . you knew, then?” Marsh said.
“Yes.”
“Damn that boy.”
“Don’t be too hard on him. He had little to do with it, Abner, though I did notice him staring at me all during supper.” Joshua’s laugh was a strained, terrible sound. “No, it was the water itself that told me. A glass of clear clean water shows up in front of me a few days after our talk, and what am I to think? All the time we’ve been on the river, we’ve been getting water full of mud and sediment. I could have started a garden with the river mud I’ve left at the bottom of my glass.” He made a dry, clacking sound of amusement. “Or even filled my coffin.”
Abner Marsh ignored the last. “Stir it up and drink it down with the water,” he said. “Make a riverman of you.” He paused. “Or maybe just a man,” he added.
“Ah,” said Joshua, “so we come to the point.” He said nothing more for a long time, and the cabin seemed suffocating, thick with darkness and silence. When Joshua finally spoke, his tone was chilled and serious. “Did you bring a cross with you, Abner? Or a stake?”
“I brung this,” Marsh said. He pulled out the book of poems and tossed it through the air, to where he judged Joshua was sitting.
He heard a motion, a snap as the spinning book was snatched from the air. Pages rustled. “Byron,” Joshua said, bemused.
Abner Marsh couldn’t have seen his fingers wriggling an inch in front of his face, so thoroughly was the cabin shuttered and curtained. But Joshua could not only see well enough to catch the book, but to read it as well. Marsh felt goosebumps rise on him again, despite the heat.
“Why Byron?” asked Joshua. “You puzzle me. Another test, a cross, questions, those I might have anticipated. Not Byron.”
“Joshua,” said Marsh, “how old are you?”
Silence.
“I’m a fair judge of age,” Marsh said. “You’re a hard one, with your white hair and all. Still, from the looks of you—your face, your hands—I’d say thirty, thirty-five at the most. That book there, it says he died thirty-three years ago. And you say you knew him.”
Joshua sighed. “Yes.” He sounded rueful. “A stupid mistake. I was so taken by the sight of this steamer that I forgot myself. Afterward I thought it would not matter. You knew nothing of Byron. I was sure you would forget.”
“I ain’t always quick. But I don’t forget.” Marsh took a hard, reassuring grip on his stick, and leaned forward. “Joshua, I want us to talk. Get the woman out of here.”
Valerie laughed icily in the darkness. She seemed closer now, though Marsh had not heard her move. “He is a bold fool,” she said.
“Valerie will stay, Abner,” Joshua said bluntly. “She can be trusted to hear anything you might care to say to me. She is as I am.”
Marsh felt cold and very alone. “Like you are,” he echoed heavily. “Well then. What are you?”
“Judge for yourself,” Joshua replied. A match flared suddenly, startlingly, in the black cabin.
“Oh, my God,” Marsh croaked.
The brief small flame threw harsh light on Joshua’s features. His lips were swollen and cracked. Burned, blackened skin pulled tight across his forehead and cheeks. Blisters, swollen with water and pus, bulged beneath his chin and clustered on the raw red hand that cupped the match. His gray eyes gaped whitened and rheumy from hollow pits. Joshua York smiled grimly, and Marsh heard the seared flesh crackle and tear. Pale white fluid ran slowly down one cheek from a fissure freshly torn open. A piece of skin fell away, revealing raw pink flesh beneath.
Then the match went out, and darkness was a blessing.
“His partner, you said,” Valerie said accusingly. “You would help him, you said. This is the help you gave him, you and your crew with your suspicions and your threats. He might have died for your sake. He is the pale king, and you are nothing, but he did this to himself to win your worthless loyalty. Are you satisfied, Captain Marsh? It seems not, since you are here.”
“What the hell happened to you?” Marsh asked, ignoring Valerie.
“I was in the light of your gaudy day for less than two hours,” Joshua replied, and now Marsh understood his pained whispering. “I was aware of the risk. I have done it before, when it was necessary. Four hours might have killed me. Six hours, most certainly. But two hours or less, most of it spent out of direct sunlight—I knew my limits. The burns look worse than they are. The pain is bearable. And this shall pass quickly. By tomorrow at this time, no one will ever know anything had touched me. Already my flesh heals itself. The blisters burst, the dead skin sloughs off. You saw for yourself.”
Abner Marsh shut his eyes, opened them. It made no difference. The darkness was as full either way, and he could still see the pale blue after-image of the match hanging before him, and the awful specter of Joshua’s ravaged face. “Then it don’t matter about the holy water, and the mirrors,” he said. “It don’t matter. You can’t go out by day, not really. What you said—those goddamned vampires of yours. They’re real. Only you lied to me. You lied to me, Joshua! You ain’t no vampire hunter, you’re one of them. You and her and all the rest of them. You’re vampires your-goddamned-selves!”Marsh held his walking stick out in front of him, an ineffective hickory sword warding off things he could not see. His throat felt raw and dry. He heard Valerie laugh lightly, and move closer.
“Lower your voice, Abner,” Joshua said calmly, “and spare me your indignation. Yes, I lied to you. At our very first meeting, I warned you that if you pressed me for answers you would get lies. You forced the lies from me. I only regret that they were not better lies.”
“My partner,” Abner Marsh said angrily. “Hell, I can’t believe it even now. A killer, or worse’n a killer. What have you been doin’ all these nights? Goin’ out and findin’ somebody alone, drinkin’ blood, rippin’ them apart? And then moving on, yessir, now I see. A different town most every night, you’re safe that way, by the time the folks ashore find what you’ve done you’re gone off somewheres else. And not runnin’ neither, just loafin’ along in grand style in a fancy steamer with your own cabin and everything. No wonder you wanted yourself a steamboat so much, Mister Cap’n York. God damn you to hell.”
“Be silent,” York snapped, with such force in his voice that Marsh abruptly closed his mouth. “Lower that stick before you break something waving it around. Lower it, I say.” Marsh dropped the walking stick to the carpet. “Good,” said Joshua.
“He is like all the rest, Joshua,” Valerie said. “He does not understand. He has nothing for you but fear and hate. We can’t let him leave here alive.”
“Perhaps,” Joshua said reluctantly. “I think there is more to him than that, but perhaps I’m wrong. What of it, Abner? Be careful what you say. Speak as if your life hung on every word.”
But Abner Marsh was too angry for thought.
The fear that had filled him had given way to a fever of rage; he had been lied to, made a part of this, played for a big ugly fool. No man treated Abner Marsh like that, no matter if he wasn’t a man at all. York had turned his Fevre Dream, his lady, into some kind of floating nightmare. “I been on this river a long time,” Marsh said. “Don’t you try to scare me none. When I was on my first steamer, I seen a friend o’ mine get his guts cut out in a St. Joe saloon. I grabbed the scoundrel that did it, took the knife off him, and broke his damn back for him. I was at Bad Axe too, and down in bleeding Kansas, so no goddamned bloodsucker is goin’ to bluff me. You want to come for me, you come right on. I’m twice your weight, and you’re burned up all to hell. I’ll twist your damned head off. Maybe I ought to do that anyhow, for what you done.”
Silence. Then, astonishingly, Joshua York laughed, long and loud. “Ah, Abner,” he said when he had quieted again, “you are a steamboatman. Half-dreamer and half-braggart and all fool. You sit there blind, when you know I can see perfectly well by the light leaking in through the shutters and drapes, and beneath the door. You sit there fat and slow, knowing my strength, my quickness. You ought to know how silently I can move.” There was a pause, a creak, and suddenly York’s voice came from across the cabin. “Like this.” Another silence. “And this.” Behind him. “And this.” He was back where he had started; Marsh, who had turned his head every which way to follow the voice, felt dizzy. “I could bleed you to death with a hundred soft touches you’d hardly feel. I could creep up on you in the darkness and rip out your throat before you realized I’d stopped talking. And still, despite everything, you sit there looking in the wrong direction, with your beard stuck out, blustering and threatening.” Joshua sighed. “You have spirit, Abner Marsh. Poor judgment, but lots of spirit.”
“If you’re fixin’ to try to kill me, come on and get it done,” Marsh said. “I’m ready. Maybe I never outrun the Eclipse, but I done most everything else I had a mind to. I’d rather be rottin’ in one of those fancy N’Orleans tombs than runnin’ a steamer for a pack of vampires.”
“Once I asked you if you were a superstitious man, or a religious one,” Joshua said. “You denied it. Yet now I hear you talking about vampires like some ignorant immigrant.”
“What’re you sayin’? You’re the one told me . . .”
“Yes, yes. Coffins full of dirt, soulless creatures that don’t show up in mirrors, things that can’t cross running water, creatures who can turn into wolves and bats and mists yet cringe before a clove of garlic. You’re too intelligent a man to believe such rubbish, Abner. Shrug off your fears and your angers for a moment, and think!”
That brought Abner Marsh up short. The mocking bite of Joshua’s tone made it all sound mighty silly, in fact. Maybe York did get all burned up by a little daylight, but that didn’t change the fact that he drank holy water and wore silver and showed up in mirrors. “You tellin’ me you ain’t no vampire now, or what?” Marsh said, lost.
“There are no such things as vampires,” Joshua said patiently. “They are like those river stories Karl Framm tells so well. The treasure of the Drennan Whyte. The phantom steamer of Raccourci. The pilot who was so conscientious he got up to stand his watch even after he’d died. Stories, Abner. Idle amusements, not to be taken seriously by a grown man.”
“Some of them stories is part true,” Marsh protested feebly. “I mean, I know lots of pilots who claim they seen the lights of the phantom when they went down the Raccourci cutoff, and even heard her leadsmen cussin’ and swearin’. And the Drennan Whyte, well, I don’t believe in no curses, but she went down just like Mister Framm tells it, and them other boats that came to raise her went down too. As for that dead pilot, hell, I knew him. He was a sleepwalker, is what it was, and he piloted the steamer while he was dead asleep. Only the story got exaggerated a mite goin’ up and down the river.”
“You’ve made my point for me, Abner. If you insist on the word, then yes, vampires are real. But the stories about us have gotten exaggerated a mite as well. Your sleepwalker became a corpse in a few years of telling stories about him. Think of what he’ll be in a century or two.”
“What are you then, if you ain’t no vampire?”
“I have no easy word for what I am,” Joshua said. “In English, your kind might call me vampire, werewolf, witch, warlock, sorcerer, demon, ghoul. Other languages offer other names: nosferatu, odoroten, upir, loup garou. All names given by your people to such poor things as I. I do not like those names. I am none of them. Yet I have nothing to offer in their stead. We have no name for ourselves.”
“Your own language . . .” Marsh said.
“We have no language. We use human languages, human names. Such has always been our way. We are not human, yet neither are we vampires. We are . . . another race. When we call ourselves anything, it is usually one of your words, in one of your languages, to which we have given a secret meaning. We are the people of the night, the people of the blood. Or simply the people.”
“And us?” Marsh demanded. “If you’re the people, what are we?”
Joshua York hesitated briefly, and Valerie spoke up. “The people of the day,” she said quickly.
“No,” Joshua said. “That is my term. It is not one my people use frequently. Valerie, the time for lies is past. Tell Abner the truth.”
“He will not like it,” she said. “Joshua, the risk . . .”
“Nonetheless,” Joshua said. “Valerie, tell him.”
Leaden silence for a moment. And then, softly, Valerie said, “The cattle. That’s what we call you, Captain. The cattle.”
Abner Marsh frowned and clenched a big, rough fist.
“Abner,” Joshua said, “you wanted the truth. I have been giving you a great deal of thought of late. After Natchez, I feared I might have to arrange an accident for you. We dare not risk exposure, and you are a threat to us. Simon and Katherine both urged me to have you killed. Those of my newer companions whom I have taken into my confidence, like Valerie and Jean Ardant, tended to concur. Yet, though my people and I would undoubtedly be safer with you dead, I held back. I am sick of death, sick of fear, endlessly weary of the mistrust between our races. I wondered if perhaps we might try working together instead, but I was never certain that you could be trusted. Until that night in Donaldsonville, that is, that night when Valerie tried to get you to turn the Fevre Dream. You proved stronger than I had any right to expect when you resisted her, and more loyal as well. Then and there, I decided. You would live, and if you came to me again, I would tell you the truth, all of it, the good and the bad. Will you listen?”
“Do I got much choice?” Marsh asked.
“No,” admitted Joshua York.
Valerie sighed. “Joshua, I plead with you to reconsider. He’s one of them, however much you like him. He will not understand. They’ll come up here with sharpened stakes, you know they will.”
“I hope not,” Joshua said. Then, to Marsh, he said, “She is afraid, Abner. This is a new thing I propose to do, and new things are always dangerous. Hear me out and do not judge me, and perhaps we can have a true partnership between us. I have never told the truth to one of you before . . .”
“To one of the cattle,” Marsh grumbled. “Well, I never lissened to no vampire before neither, so we’re even. Go on. This here bull is lissenin’.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Of Days Dark
and Distant
Listen then, Abner, but first hear my conditions. I want no interruptions. I want no outraged outbursts, no questions, no judgments from you. Not until I am finished. Much of what I have to say you will find grim and terrible, I warn you, but if you let me take you from the beginning to the end, then perhaps you will understand. You have called me a killer, a vampire, and in a sense I am. But you have killed as well, by your own admission. You believe your acts justified by the circumstances. So do I. If not justified, then at least mitigated. Hear all I have to say before you condemn me and my kind.
You asked my age. I am young, Abner, in the first flush of adult life by the standards of my race. I was born in provincial France in the year 1785. I never knew my mother, for reasons I shall reveal later. My father was a minor noble. That is, he granted himself a title as he moved through French society. He had been in France several generations, so he enjoyed a certain status, though he claimed to be of Eastern European origin. He had wealth, a small amount of land. He accounted for his longevity by a ruse in the 1760s, whereby he posed as his own son and eventually succeeded himself.
So, you see, I am some 72 years old, and I did indeed enjoy the good fortune of meeting Lord Byron. That was some time later, however.
My father was as I am. So were two of our servants, two who were not truly servants but companions. The three adults of my race taught me languages, manners, much of the world . . . and cautions. I slept by day, went out only by night, learned to fear the dawn as children of your race, having been burned, learn to fear fire. I was different from others, I was told, superior and apart, a lord. I must not talk of those differences, though, lest the cattle fear me and kill me. I must pretend that my hours were simply a matter of preference. I must learn and observe the forms of Catholicism, even take communion at special midnight masses in our private chapel. I must—well, I will not go on. You must realize, Abner, I was only a child. I might have learned more in time, might have begun to comprehend the why and the wherefore of those around me and the life we led, had things continued. I would then have been another person.
In 1789, however, the fires of the Revolution changed my life irrevocably. When the Terror came, we were taken. For all his cautions, his chapels and his mirrors, my father had aroused suspicion by his nocturnal habits, his solitude, his mysterious wealth. Our servants—our human servants—denounced him as a warlock, a satanist, a disciple of the Marquis de Sade. And he called himself an aristocrat as well, the blackest sin of all. His two companions, being seen only as servants themselves, managed to slip away, but my father and I were taken.