Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  “What?” said Daniel. He heard “wash.” He noticed that breathing out had become more difficult than breathing in, that the air he expelled was a weight on which he had to press. His saliva was thick and sticky, filling his mouth like honey.

  Tom loosened the cuff buttons and slid Daniel’s sleeve up his arm. Daniel watched all this, mesmerized.

  Mr. Hilxen opened another sealed packet, like the moistened towelettes airlines hand out. Tom produced an alcohol wipe and stroked it, cool, across the skin in the crook of Daniel’s arm. Then he took the instrument out from between his teeth and uncapped it, closed a hand around Daniel’s arm just above the elbow, and squeezed. Daniel watched his veins rise and saw Hilxen slide the needle of a cannula into the place where the veins forked in the crook of his arm. Daniel was curious but unconcerned. He wasn’t in pain, and though he knew he was in danger, he was happier somehow with this kind of danger than all the things he’d been anticipating, the things he’d thought he would learn.

  Tom Hilxen clipped the plastic tubing to the end of the cannula and put its end to his own lips and sucked. Daniel watched his blood run through the transparent tube. It was as if someone were writing with red ink in the air, making a signature, a series of dark loops. Daniel was drawn out of himself. He had hoped to talk. He had hoped someone would tell him. He had dreaded that someone would tell him. He watched the urbane American drink his blood. It was done with delicacy, with no great show of appetite. Mr. Hilxen had the appearance of a therapist or craftsman. There was no naked interest or possessiveness in his posture. He was polite. He sipped. But he didn’t stop. He went on, long after Daniel had slid down the seat and he had raised his eyes from his neat work to meet Daniel’s gaze to watch, with unconnected interest, the process of Daniel’s loss of consciousness.

  Bad didn’t tell Eve about Gabrielle. He found he couldn’t. He was ashamed of Dawn. More so when he saw her that evening—she’d been out early and had eaten again, had topped up, and was engorged, her eyelids puffy and mouth throbbing red. Ila was, for once, fully fed. His crepey skin was smooth, his stiff, guarded gait easy. He glowed, looked all of eighteen years old, and as refined and pale as a spirit.

  In the evening they walked the streets near the Chapel of the Gray Penitents. They found bolt-holes, a round, iron inspection hatch leading to a vertical shaft full of cables—phone and fiber-optic—and a narrow north–south running alley, sealed off by gates and shaded by deep eaves.

  Ila produced a chisel from his pocket and squatted on the street and inserted its flat head into the slot on another drain’s inspection hatch. He prized the cover up, slid it to one side, and peered into a shaft, the deep stone-lined drain. “This is by far the best place,” he said, then pushed the cover back and had Dawn try to open it. She, too, could manage. The final, nearest bolt-hole was behind the waterwheel and under the bridge at the door of the chapel. But the depths of that darkness were visible to people along the street and leaning over the wall, and it was always possible that the public—being public-spirited—would set out to rescue an unhappy vampire who took shelter there during the day.

  They came out into a main street, thronged with people, through which the occasional car moved, yellow fog lamps igniting eddies of parched leaves. Heat still radiated from the cobbles, and Bad felt he was wading up to his knees in warm water. They turned back in their tracks, checking again, then went on into the Rue des Teinturiers, where Eve asked them to stop—to wait a minute.

  Eve said she’d stay outside for a time. She’d keep her eye on the street.

  Dawn was baffled. “You made this appointment. It is you who’s been determined to find out what Tom knows about Martine. Do you think you can you trust Ila to ask the right questions?”

  Eve said she hoped to join them shortly. She just felt it would be a good idea to leave someone posted in the street.

  “Bad can do it,” Dawn said.

  “Bad might not know a vampire if he saw one.”

  Dawn seemed to accept this.

  “Besides … I’m not in any hurry to have Tom condescend to me,” Eve said.

  “All right,” Dawn said. They left her. She watched them pass through the gate onto the bridge that crossed the channeled stream. They passed through the chapel’s door, under the fresco of hooded, kneeling flagellants.

  Eve caught the eye of a dreadlocked waiter. He took her order, for tea—it was after 2:00 A.M.

  Her tea came, and Eve sipped it and watched the street.

  Perhaps twenty minutes later Eve saw a vampire, a slender woman with gnarly ropes of artificially vivid red curls, who walked carrying a round slab of steel before her—a manhole cover—held out from her abdomen to spare her elegant linen dress. The woman was watched by everyone on the street, but it was only a week before the festival and the town was fall of theatrical performers, technicians, productions setting up, and the watchers clearly supposed the manhole cover to be some prop. Eve knew it was not. She knew it belonged on the nearest bolt-hole and was the inspection hatch over the node of underground cables. Eve watched the woman carry the slab to the coping of the stone channel, just upstream of the water-wheel. The woman rested the rim of the manhole cover on the wall, then tipped it into the water. Several people near her, who’d witnessed this, attempted to speak to her. But she brushed them aside, flicked her shoulders, and pushed her grimy palms at them, without actually looking into their faces or listening to what they had to say. She had seen Eve—had recognized her. The woman crossed the street and climbed over the café’s low barrier of fairy lights. Eve looked up into the woman’s eyes. Aqua eyes, with an unstable iris that slid as she glanced to either side, her iris slow to follow the glance. The woman was wearing colored contact lenses, Eve realized. Eve saw that the woman’s part and hairline were pure white, as though her hair was thinning and it was her scalp that showed.

  “Will you please join us in the chapel?” the woman said to Eve.

  The tongue on the lock of the gate at the bridge into the Chapel of the Gray Penitents had been fastened back into its groove with black gaffer tape. Bad had stopped to finger the tape. “This makes me uneasy,” he said. “This technical savvy.”

  The first two chapels were empty, the main nave nearly so. A tall fair-haired man waited by a pillar, under the mark of inundation—1821. His eye sockets were hollows of shadow, most of the light in the chapel being cast down, reflected from the spotlit vaults of its ceiling.

  “Ila. Dawn,” the man said.

  “Gidday,” said Bad, looking for acknowledgment. He waved a hand—and was ignored.

  “Where have you been, Tom?” Dawn said.

  “We’re starting there again, are we?” Tom said to Dawn. “With how could I have thought to leave so fine a nest.” Tom’s voice dropped a degree with each word. “Where have I been? Not in the same world as you.”

  Dawn’s jaw jutted with anger. Her eyes were all pupil; she had a mist of sweat on her forehead and neck, each little bead bearing a pink tincture of blood. There was a pink patch on her shirt where it had adhered to her chest.

  “Talk,” said Ila. “Tell me about Martine.”

  Tom said he thought they should wait for his friend. And he had expected Eve.

  “It’s too late for Eve; she’s getting on, you know,” Dawn said, tense and not taking any trouble to sound convincing.

  “Yes. And I’m sure Ila—inconsistent as ever—has respect for Eve’s gray hair,” Tom said. He looked Bad over, and Bad felt that the man was assessing his body mass index, fat to muscle. “Is this your latest candidate, Dawn?”

  “This is my only candidate, my first candidate.” Dawn was fierce.

  Tom’s smirk twitched and froze.

  “My fledgling killed your nestling,” Ila said, prompting Tom.

  “Wait,” said Tom.

  “I can do that,” said Ila.

  Dawn linked her arm with Bad’s, pulled him to her, held him like a pledge. Bad began to say something, but Dawn gave him
a sharp shake, shook the breath out of him. He looked at her and she frowned. Bad was silent. Dawn and Ila were, too. Flames fluttered behind a red glass of the lamps suspended above the tabernacle.

  Tom couldn’t stay quiet. He had to talk, it seemed. He said that when a vampire walked into the salon in Genoa where Jacques Palomba worked he’d practically poured himself into her lap. “His nine years of longing had been freeze-dried by his middle-class Monaco family. He met my friend and he ran with desire. She guessed he’d been bitten before. She listened to his story and even had the grace to let him know by whom he’d been bitten. She gave him his whole truth; then she gave him to me—so that I could taste him. Could assess his candidacy. He was a lovely boy, eager and compliant—” Tom broke off and peered at Bad. He asked Bad, “Are you eager and compliant?”

  “For a start, I’m not a boy,” Bad said. He’d pitched his voice low with disgust, and it came out well in the reverberant space of the nave, wide-voweled, scornful. “Nor a hairdresser,” he added. “And I never had to be rescued.” Which wasn’t quite true.

  “Yes, of course. You’re a bit more meaty,” Tom said. Then he continued. “We told Jacques about Martine.”

  “And Jacques was so infatuated with his own past, and his story, that he went to find her,” Ila said.

  “Oh, I see. What would be curiosity in you was only vanity in my nestling?” Tom said. “Next you’ll be telling me that he attacked Martine.”

  The door creaked open—the door padded with cracked leather that stood between the hexagonal room and the main nave. Eve came in, followed by a red-haired woman. Eve hurried to Ila’s side, the timber floor crackling and complaining at this unaccustomed vigorous impact. “Tom,” said Eve.

  “Tom’s nestling was Jacques Palomba—the boy I saved in ’92. The boy in the Blessed Martine’s story. Tom told Jacques about Martine and he went to find her,” Dawn said to her sister, filling her in. “Tom’s a first-class, A-one prick,” she added, as if this, too, were meant only informatively.

  Eve said to Ila that she was worried about their bolt-holes. She spoke softly and—Bad thought—seemed a little dazed. He put a hand on her shoulder. He inclined toward her and whispered to her that Tom really was a big swinging dork. He hoped this would help her morale. It helped him to see that Tom Hilxen was pompous and managing and hadn’t been able to wait out Ila’s negative, uninflected silence.

  “Martine was a hypocrite,” Tom said.

  “Oh, Tom, you always think people hypocritical when they’re only inconsistent,” Eve said. “For heaven sake, you thought Jean was a hypocrite!”

  “Martine said we mustn’t eat except when absolutely necessary,” Tom said. “She said we mustn’t impose our strength, or the narcotic in our mouths, our mind-bending means to satisfy our bodily appetites. She said we mustn’t take pleasure in the power and freedom of our exile—exile from our lives as citizens, from our ability to be parents, from daylight. She said we must renounce the world, and the underworld. She said, ‘Don’t take.’ She meant, ‘Don’t touch.’ She was a nun. She became a nun because she was a cripple. She rejected sexual love before it could reject her. She mortified her flesh because she hated it; she hated it even once she was able to roll up a rock face like thistle seed. But Jacques walked in—a good Catholic boy—and worshiped her, appealed to her, as he’d appealed to the Venerable Martine Ramondi. She bit him. She thought she could just cheat on her diet, that she’d get away with it, like that Australian guru who told people she got all her nourishment from light yet would sneak food with such accomplished secrecy that several of her followers had to die before she was unmasked. Martine thought she could get away with it—but she hadn’t realized she was fertile. She’d been so busy living on charity—I presume—only biting Dawn, then preaching to Dawn about curbing her appetite, no doubt.”

  “She wasn’t like that!” Dawn said.

  Ila said, “Let him talk.”

  “Martine bit Jacques and made him,” Tom concluded. Or, at least, he paused.

  “But you meant to make him, anyway,” Eve said. “He was your candidate.”

  “For the rest we can only imagine what happened,” the red-haired woman said. Her English was slow and oddly cadenced, as though her first language was one that employed tonal modulation in its grammar, like Mandarin.

  “Grazide,” said Ila.

  Grazide turned to Tom, tilted her head back to look up at him—she was nearly a foot under his lanky height. She met Tom’s eyes and pointed at Ila. “Is this who I hate?”

  “Yes,” said Tom.

  “I need Tom to remind me,” Grazide said to Ila, her voice sweet and reasonable, “because I’ve forgotten.” She stroked Tom’s arm, then dropped her eyes, coy. She said Tom was gallant. He’d seen her through her change of life. He was sufficiently interesting to keep her talking, to help her retain her grammar. She favored Eve with a gracious, grateful nod. “Thanks to you, madame, I know a little of what I’ve forgotten.” She sighed but didn’t seem sad; it was more a pose of formal melancholy. “My history has evaporated,” she said. “Leaving only myself—a powdery residue.”

  Bad thought that she was fishing for compliments.

  “My fledgling killed your nestling,” Ila said to Grazide. “In Tom’s testimony so far Martine’s only made Jacques Palomba.”

  “Is Palomba dead?” Bad said.

  Tom didn’t answer Bad but Ila. “We must imagine that, having made Jacques, Martine decided not to let him live. Or even eat—she was so very against eating.”

  “Jacques’s head was cut off,” Grazide said.

  Ila shook his head. “No. It wasn’t Martine. It just sometimes happens. Astute humans do it. Jacques showed himself, and was killed. If Martine was at fault, her fault was not providing guidance.”

  “She killed him, then killed herself,” Tom insisted.

  “She was caught out” Ila said.

  Eve put her arm around Ila and he flinched away, blurred, then was several feet off, Bad’s eyes having failed to follow him. Eve dropped her arm. She said, “Ila, I think Martine did kill herself.” She glared at Tom. “Not, however, because she murdered Palomba. Martine simply couldn’t face being fertile.”

  “There’s no point in these recriminations,” Tom said, “if I can’t persuade you. Ila, Grazide believes you will take responsibility for your fledgling. She just won’t credit that it was Martine who really ran your nest, and called the shots.” He looked at Grazide. He said that Grazide had something to tell Ila. He said that when he—Tom—and Grazide met, she was shedding her last old skin, so to speak, and was afraid, thinking that what she was about to lose was what mattered.

  Ila detached himself from Dawn and Eve and advanced on Tom and Grazide. He seemed bewitched. He stopped before Grazide and put a hand to her face. He set his fanned fingers on one cheek and brought his thumb slowly in toward her eye. She didn’t blink. She let his thumb come to rest on the ball of her eye—he slid the lens from her iris. The plastic gathered, green, under his thumb, and popped out onto her cheek. The revealed eye was garnet, a red jewel. Ila looked into her eyes and laughed happily. “Stop-and-go,” he said, of her eyes. Then he said something in a language Bad didn’t know.

  “What did he say?” Grazide asked Tom.

  Eve said, “He’s speaking Provençal. He just delivered a long-delayed message from Chambord to you: ‘Chambord said to tell you that he could still tell the difference between a treasure and a curiosity.’”

  “Chambord’s proud powers of discernment are now all only air,” Grazide said. “His fame is your work, madame, a mask you choose to wear over your own art. Who would care what Chambord said—had ever said—if not for you? This man, who, I’m told, like me, knew him? Perhaps only this man. Love, like every other impurity, has left me. What is God’s has gone to God—leaving my self, whole and utterly happy. Perhaps I’m the first inhabitant of a world that has split off from this one. A world that will replace this one if fledglings don’t
kill nestlings, and nests breed and increase, and grow older, and forget, and become fully themselves, as I have.”

  Bad took a few steps backward and sat down on a pew. His joints ached—had for days now—and he was running a low-grade fever. Eve put it all down to iron deficiency. Without the aches he might have felt tranquilized and uncaring. But the pain kept him alert enough to notice Eve, who had seemed dazzled by Grazide—starstruck—shake herself and glance at her watch. She checked her watch and the window, where, Bad saw, the darkness was growing grainy.

  Grazide was speaking to Dawn now, making an offer—in the spirit of friendship, she said. Ila was reluctant to become a father again, a father to this fine young man of Dawn’s. She—Grazide—could deal with him. She moved toward Bad. Bad got up in a hurry, but Dawn had interposed herself, a hand up to halt Grazide. Dawn was perhaps more possessive than protective, but Bad was grateful. He didn’t like the look in Grazide’s exposed, bloody eye, where her pupil seemed to float like a small black seed.

  Grazide shrugged and stepped away, back into the port of Tom’s arms.

  Tom told Ila that Grazide had some good news for him.

  Eve gave a snort. Then she said, “Ila.”

  Bad followed her gaze. The windows were no longer grainy black but gray.

  “Now that I’ve changed fully,” Grazide said, “I can stand the sun. All you have to do is wait another eighty years, and keep eating; then you, too—”

  “He doesn’t believe you,” Tom said.

  “He really is very simple,” said Grazide, in the tone of someone who has had a report confirmed by her own observations. To Ila she said, “You can stay up to watch me if you like. See for yourself, through your blistering eyes, me, standing in the sun.”