"I don't—" But Selene stopped herself in mid-sentence. She did know. "Oh god, oh fuck, I forgot to erase the answering machine! The address of the club was on it, the time he'd be there—everything." Selene turned toward the passenger side window; she couldn't have faced Christ himself at such a moment. "It's my fault, Jamey. I might as well have killed Nick myself—I led that bastard right to him."
"If I may paraphrase one of my most reliable advisers?" One of Jamey's long-fingered hands patted her knee; she looked down and saw that his fingernails, which he'd always kept exquisitely manicured, were filthy, gnawed, and broken. "You didn't kill him, Selene. The man my father hired to kill me killed him. Can you access your answering machine from another phone?"
"No, but I'm pretty sure I forgot to erase—"
"That's not what I meant. If this Aldo knows your number, knows you're getting your messages there, that's probably how he'll be trying to contact you now."
"I could call Carson, ask him to check for—"
"No!" Again, after startling her with his vehemence he softened his voice. "It was bad enough losing Nick like that—let's not get any more of our friends involved. From here on in, it's just the two of us."
Funny, how she'd once longed to hear those words. "Are we heading for Bolinas?" she asked as the Jaguar pulled away from the curb.
He nodded, but did not speak again for several minutes. Then when he began, it was with a description of a recurring dream…
* * *
Asleep in the hold of the smuggler's sloop, Whistler had dreamed of Lourdes on the island of Lamiathos the way Hemingway's old fisherman dreamed of the lions on the shores of Africa. Comforting dreams, disturbing dreams. On Lamiathos, Lourdes was alive, dancing on the patio of their villa, while behind her the Aegean glowed deep blue with the promise of false dawn.
He couldn't see Cora. Just as well: Lourdes, dressed only in a sarong, was improvising a sort of bare-breasted Filipina hula, while the Creature awarded her a standing ovation. But Cora was all right, he knew that. Knew with the sort of knowing that came in dreams that she was only sleeping somewhere nearby. Safe. Safe as the night is long.
He turned his attention to his wife. Her hips switched, and set the sarong swaying; her hands made graceful come-hither gestures. As he approached her she lifted her heavy breasts in her palms, hefting them, offering them to him, smiling invitingly but dancing away. He pursued her across the patio, down the stone steps, across the smooth raked sand; she let the sarong slip; in his dream he was high on blood, and heard the soft whisper of the silk as it fell to the sand at her feet…
* * *
He had the dream again on Halloween night. The creak of the hatch awoke him from it; the hold was flooded with moonlight.
"Y'all secured down there, J. W.?" Jay Dubya—Buffalo Barry Klein, captain of the sloop, was from Georgia. "Looks like a squall's comin' up—might be some rockin' and rollin'."
"Where are we at the moment, Buffalo?"
Captain Klein stuck his head through the hatch. He had wide-set brown eyes and a shaggy head, wide at the brow, tapering to a narrow chin brush of a beard, hence the name by which Whistler had known him all these years. "Racin' the weather for Virgin Gorda. Figured we'd anchor till she blew over, but it don't look like we're gonna win the race."
"Okay, thanks for the warning."
The hatch closed, leaving him in darkness again. Whistler checked the bales of marijuana around him—they all seemed to be tied down securely enough—and leaned back against the curving wall of the hull. He sighed for his fading dream, but understood that it would have ended soon enough anyway, shortly after Lourdes dropped her skirt and danced into the darkening Aegean. For he'd had the dream twice before, and hadn't caught up to her either time.
Despite knowing better, despite knowing how much it would hurt, he allowed himself to think about his daughter, to remember Cora on Lamiathos, propelling herself across the patio with a sort of generalized baby wiggle that involved every muscle of her dumpling-shaped body. She was already showing signs of having inherited Lourdes's dramatic coloring; her hair was growing in black, and her eyes were turning a grave, thoughtful brown.
There, see, it didn't hurt too much to remember. He let himself think back to her first (and last—oh god, and last) birthday in September. The pink dress Selene had sent from California. The black hair long enough by then for a pink ribboned topknot. Cora had reached for the lone candle on the cake, trying to pluck the flame like a flower, flailing angrily when her mother leaned over the high chair and blew it out.
She didn't even know fire was hot. Whistler fought for control, told himself that surely Cora had been sleeping when the flames raged through the Greathouse. But Lourdes—Lourdes had almost certainly been awake at ten in the morning, waiting for him to return from the servants' quarters with his silver flask full of blood. He pictured her sitting on their enormous bed wearing that Victoria's Secret thingie, powder blue lace and satin that complemented the brown sheen of her skin.
If it hadn't been for that damned thingie—what was it?—a chemise? a teddy? Something like that—he'd have to ask Lourdes…
But he couldn't ask her, could he? Whistler felt the next thought creeping up, but was powerless to stop it, to turn his mind's eye away from a scene he hadn't witnessed, but would never forget: Lourdes in the flames, Lourdes in agony. He doubled forward as if he'd been kicked in the belly, and tried to stifle the sobs, but they were coming from too deep inside. Biting his lip to hold them back was like folding the top layer of skin over a deep welling wound…
* * *
"That must have been when I saw you." Selene spoke for the first time since Jamey'd started talking.
He glanced over at her. "Must have been. I only cried that once…"
* * *
After Jamey had cried himself out in the hold of the ship, he drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, rocking to and fro like an old Jew at prayer, unable to stop himself from thinking about Lourdes in that blue satin and lace outfit that was a good deal more lace than satin, and not much of either. The Creature, aroused anew when she stretched and yawned, couldn't take its eye off her.
And because it was as much the Creature's willful nature as it was size that had earned Whistler's member its nickname (when he was high, he had little more influence over it than Dr. Frankenstein had over his Creature), both Whistler and Lourdes understood full well that there would be no sleep that morning for either of them until it had been laid to rest.
But they had emptied Whistler's flask two hours ago. Lourdes could feel the crash coming on, and informed Whistler, in a tone of voice that Filipinas had used to subjugate Filipinos for centuries, that if he expected her to see to the Creature's needs, he'd better come up with some blood in the next fifteen minutes—"Fresh, not bottled"—or she'd have to down a few ludes and bid him a sweet good night. There were only two cures for the unbearable, unspeakable, soul-deadening depression that accompanied a blood hangover: one was more blood; the other was a good day's sleep, followed by more blood.
Ever obedient, especially when it came to drinking blood and having sex, Whistler ducked under the mosquito net canopy that surrounded the bed, and started out the door. "Not like that," called Lourdes, laughing, pointing. The Creature was poking out through the fly of his striped Dagwood pajamas, the costume for a little game they sometimes enjoyed together.
Whistler looked around the room, and on the floor at the foot of the bed (under Blondie's wig) he found the clothes he'd been wearing the previous night—black button-fly jeans and a vintage brown and black rayon Hawaiian shirt. He dressed, slipped on his watch out of habit, stepped out onto the balcony that ringed the second floor of the Greathouse on three sides, and padded barefoot down the wide curving stone staircase and out the front door of the Greathouse into a dark, cavernous courtyard. Even so late in the morning, not a shaft of sunlight could penetrate the dense rain forest canopy.
This impenetrable cano
py, of course, was the major reason the vampires of Santa Luz had selected the centuries-old Danish sugar plantation for their principal dwelling. But for a Drinker even the muted light was far from comfortable. Whistler hurried across the courtyard and around the side of the house to the servants' quarters at the back of the compound.
All the other plantation outbuildings—the mill, the tower, the stables, the factory—had long since crumbled, or been subsumed by the rain forest, but the old slave cottages lined up abutting the high stone wall that enclosed the compound had over the years been remodeled, Luzan fashion, their corrugated roofs (tin or sheets of green fiberglass) raised up on poles, and the walls left open at the top around all four sides for ventilation.
"Josephina?" he called softly at the door of the last cabin. He could have simply peered over the top of the wall, but it would have been considered execrable manners. "Are you at home?"
"Boss?" Pronounced bass, like the fish. A willowy Luzan girl of eighteen, dressed in a long white cotton nightgown, answered the door, scratching her ribs sleepily.
"I'm sorry to bother you so late, m'dear, but Mrs. Whistler and I seem to have run out of blood."
If the girl was annoyed, she managed to conceal it. After all, it was part of her job description. And as an Eldest Drinker, Whistler, who paid well and ruled lightly, was a vast improvement over the late Nanny Eames, who had paid in lashes and ruled by fear. "To drink here, or wack wit?"
"To walk with," Whistler replied—that was Luzan for to go. He handed her his flask and watched with interest as she used a razor-edged utility knife to open a tiny vein in the heel of her palm. She evinced no pain; Josephina had been donating blood since infancy, and when she turned thirteen, in a ritual ceremony, Nanny Eames had severed a minor nerve in the girl's left wrist, permanently numbing the heel of her palm and the side of her hand.
When the flask was full, Whistler took it from her; she started to pinch off the wound, but he stopped her, brought the bleeding palm to his lips, and sucked a few drops out before stanching the flow himself. As he did so, Josephina reached down and touched the bulge at the front of his jeans. She knew the Creature well, had known it since she was sixteen. But when she started to unbutton the fly to free it, Whistler shook his head.
"Miss Lourdes'd have me bal's for breakfast, an' your titties for tea," he whispered, in a creditable Luzan accent. The Whistlers only screwed around with the servants during the full-moon orgies that were the centerpiece of the Luzan vampire culture; the rest of the month they attempted to be faithful to each other (in their fashion, which allowed for the occasional threesome—or foursome, or more-some).
But Josephina, who had been conditioned by Nanny Eames to be aroused by the act of giving blood, deftly continued unbuttoning her employer; when the Creature sprang free she pulled her nightgown up to her neck and lay back on her cot.
"Oh what the hell," said Whistler, checking his watch as he knelt at the foot of the bed. "She gave me fifteen minutes. If I can't bring us both off in ten, child, then shame on me."
"Only ten?" moaned Josephina. The soft pressure of his lips made her squirm. So did the thought of how jealous the other servants would be when they learned she'd had Mr. Whistler all to herself two days before the moon was full.
Not long after that—certainly less than ten minutes—he heard a muffled explosion and jerked his head up from between her thighs. "Did you hear… ?" Then he caught a whiff of smoke and jumped to his feet, hopped out the door of the shack still tugging his jeans up, saw the back entrance to the Greathouse in flames, and started around the other way, toward the front of the old plantation house. But before he could turn the corner a hot percussive wind blew him off his feet; a microsecond later, still rolling, he heard the flat whomp of a deep basso explosion.
As he struggled to his feet, ears ringing, dazedly trying to figure out whether it had been the propane, the gasoline, or the oil tank that had gone up, the blast was followed by two more, and the point became moot. He was lying on his back looking up at the Greathouse. The back wall was gone—just gone, a ragged, smoking frame; the interior looked like the inside of a crematorium, red flames dancing in a white-hot glow.
Whistler rolled over onto his hands and knees, pushed himself up again. He staggered like a backsliding drunk around the side of the house, but when he reached the courtyard he could see the flames shooting out from a blackened dragon's mouth of a front doorway—the heavy mahogany door had been vaporized. His eyes traveled upward of their own accord and saw the bedroom curtains in flames; upward again to see the red-brown terra-cotta roof tiles beginning to blacken, resisting the flames themselves, but buckling inward as the beams beneath them gave way.
CHAPTER 11
« ^ »
"Damnedest thing, but as I stood there in the courtyard watching the Greathouse go up, my mind was as clear as if I'd been drinking baby blood," Whistler explained to Selene as the Jaguar turned onto Lombard Street, heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge. "With one part of my mind I understood everything: Lourdes, Cora, loss, emptiness. Grief—I realized, standing there, that I'd never truly experienced grief It transforms everything, you know.
"Then the forest canopy caught, and began raining fire. I covered my head with my arms—still couldn't bring myself to turn away until the heat drove me back. I ran for the slave quarters, turned the corner just in time to see them go up, too…"
* * *
But not from the flames. It was a powerful series of explosions that blew each of the huts apart in turn—boom! boom! boom! Josephina must have run to her doorway, because when the last hut, hers, went up, it blew her twenty feet in the air. Whistler saw her flying, heard the thump when she hit the ground, but by then he was ducking to avoid this new shower of debris, which included jagged shards of tin-roof shrapnel and flaming globs of melting fiberglass.
That's when Whistler understood that all this was not the result of some initial accident, that somehow the compound had been mined or wired or rigged, and was being blown apart building by building. Because he knew those cabins. No propane tanks there, no gas lines, no oil heaters. Only woodstoves. Cooking, heating, all done by woodstove.
Suddenly an odd picture popped into his mind—at least odd when you consider that the sky was at the moment raining sheer hellfire down upon his head. But he had remembered an unusually brisk evening last winter, just after Nanny Eames had died. He had looked out from one of the rear windows and seen a steady stream of servants shuttling armfuls of logs between the cabins and the woodpile stacked against the back wall of the compound…
The woodpile! That stray image proved to be the key to Whistler's survival. For the first time he thought of the ancient Maroon tunnel that Nanny Eames and old Herbert Parrish, the two senior Drinkers, used to talk about. The entrance was said to be under the woodpile, but since the pile was never allowed to fall below the line chalked two feet above ground level along that rear compound wall, neither Whistler nor any other living Drinker had ever seen it.
He wanted to break into a run, but couldn't see for the smoke and dust and falling cinders. He stumbled barefoot through the debris, arms out in front of him, blind man's bluff. Twice he fell, the first time over a smoking chunk of two-by-four, the second time over Josephina's smoldering body. She lay facedown; her back was charred meat with shreds of white cotton nightgown stuck to the raw parts; he didn't bother to turn her over.
The forest canopy was fully engulfed by the time Whistler reached the woodpile. Six feet high and deep, ten feet wide, the top layer already smoking. Jamey snatched his newly filled flask out of his back pocket—it was badly dented from one of his falls, but the silver joins had held—and took a swig for strength, then began heaving wood from the top of the pile with desperate determination. Every so often he had to stop to brush live embers from his hair or back or shoulders; he could feel the heat beginning to build, feel the first stirrings of the firestorm.
He stopped for another swig of Josephina's bloo
d, then redou-bled his efforts; the firewood flew like kindling, until at last he'd reached the bottom row. He grabbed the nearest log, couldn't budge it; tried the next, same result. By the time he'd figured out that it was a false bottom, that this last layer of logs was nailed to a heavy trapdoor, the heat had grown so intense that his rayon shirt threatened to burst into flames. With a last desperate heave he hauled the trapdoor open and threw himself down into the cool darkness of the centuries-old Maroon tunnel.
* * *
"Maroon?" prompted Selene. "As in the color?"
"As in cimarron." Jamey rolled down his window to pay the toll, kept it down as they drove onto the bridge. "Spanish for fugitive slaves. Every island in the West Indies with a slave population and a rain forest large enough to hide in had them."
* * *
The heat drove Whistler on. Behind him the flames roared like traffic on a distant freeway; ahead of him in the unimaginable darkness he could hear the frenzied chittering of rats. It was hard to judge distance in the absolute blackness—not that he had any idea how far the tunnel led, or even if there was a way out at the other end. He counted his paces; after two hundred or so the path took a sharp left—Whistler's outstretched fingers brushed the hard-packed dirt of the tunnel wall just before he would have smacked into it—and began a downward slope that continued for another three hundred paces, leveled out again, continuing on another three hundred steps before taking another sharp bend.
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