Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  Eve told Ila she had a migraine; she had to stay in the dark.

  He lay down beside her and stroked her softly between her eyebrows.

  “I’m trying to keep the birds in the tree,” Eve said. “In the tree they’re soft. If a flock flies apart it’s shrapnel.”

  Ila pushed the ball of his thumb between her eyebrows. Eve’s aura grew tattered, and a few more tatters came to settle.

  Ila said he’d once had a nestling who was afraid of the dark.

  Eve hadn’t heard this story. She was intrigued, distracted, so surfaced from her aura and its logic. It was like passing from one world to another. She opened her eyes and saw Ila’s hand above her face, its weight depending only on its thumb. Because of the migraine it seemed bigger than an ordinary hand; it was a room, too, a white ceiling, the spotlit vaults of the main nave of the Chapel of the Gray Penitents.

  Ila said that Montulet was a soldier of the empire. “The first empire. My first nestling.” Ila found Montulet lying in one of the narrow canyons of old Genoa, on a night with no moon, when every household was barred to the street. Ila scented blood and found the man by smell and touch. He felt the soldier’s triple row of silver ball buttons and the leopard hide on his helmet, the static warmth of ostrich plumes. “His throat was slit. He’d been set on in the street,” Ila said. “I bit him though his blood was flowing already. Because there was no reason not to bite. Because I didn’t know I’d become fertile. My bite saved his life. It made him.” Yet because Montulet had met his assassins in the dark he was henceforth afraid of it. He always carried a lamp. Many times Ila and Montulet had sat together through the night, in the summer on the steps by the green reservoir, in the garden of a house Ila had, with a lamp between them.

  “Montulet did what I think Martine must have done. He waited up one night to see the sun. We’d been talking, and I remember that he quoted Callimachus: ‘I wept when I remembered how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.’”

  Eve asked Ila why he was thinking about his first.

  “Because my bite was to his benefit, but he didn’t turn out well. Because I was thinking that none of them turned out well.” Ila found another place on Eve’s forehead and applied gentle modulated pressure with the ball of his thumb. “I’m waiting for Martine,” he said.

  “I know. And I’m waiting for Jean. Loss is backward anticipation.”

  Ila asked Eve to tell him—once more—how Ares used to see God.

  Eve said that Jean got migraines, too, and there were times when he said he had the feeling of being stripped down to his innermost skin, but in beautiful balmy weather. Then, sometimes, the world at which he was looking would turn transparent, or seem to, as if someone were applying terrific pressure, pointing at one place with the tip of a powerful finger—from the other side. In the place that was pointed at, Jean would see what was there—a raft of cloud or a flowering bush—but these things would say what God says: “I am.”

  “But,” Eve said, “Jean got migraines, with beautiful auras. And Jean was an atheist. So he had to conclude that what he saw was a pathology. He said to me that Dante wrote that there was a place in Purgatory for those who believe but don’t profess. ‘Well, this is professing,’Jean said, ‘but am I only deceived by my spectacular brain chemistry?’ And he said that the experience, the religious experience, was more real than his doubts about it. The doubts were characteristic, he said, when he doubted he was himself—but the experience was more real than everything else outside it, including his experience of himself.”

  Again Eve felt the flat of Ila’s dry palm smoothing her brow. Ila said, “I like that story.”

  • • •

  By six the restaurant was empty of everyone but a couple of old men having coffee and grappa with the waiters. One waiter came to stand in the doorway. He threw up his hands and exclaimed over his shoulder to the others about the weather, “The valley is gone!”

  Daniel looked and saw nothing much. Eve’s house, its iron gates, salmon-colored plaster walls, and orange-tiled roof, were in sight, the roof glistening as if frosted, the whole building and street lit by a strong, diffuse white light. Then Daniel saw mist begin to pour across the roof and off the eaves, like dry ice off the edge of a stage. The line of the roof was erased, the courtyard filled, and mist strained out through the gate’s bars and crept across the street. What was solid smudged—smudged and dulled—as though the view were furred with a pale mold.

  The mist only tempered the July heat. All the same, Daniel unhooked his jacket from the back of his chair. He found his wallet and put fresh notes on the tray, the check parked under the bowl of brown sugar lumps. The waiter smiled and swooped.

  The door of Eve’s house opened. A pale figure craned out, appeared to test the mist, as people put out a palm to test the grain of rain, coarse or fine. The figure’s hair was white—so it was Eve’s friend Ila. Ila stepped out, shut the door gently, then pulled on a hooded sweatshirt. For a moment, clothes rucked up, he showed a flat, adolescent-looking stomach. The sweatshirt’s cuffs covered his hands; his face vanished into the deep hood. He walked to the gate, sloped shoulders rounded. The gate slid open. Ila darted through, then turned back to watch it close.

  Daniel put his jacket on. He waited till Ila set off, then followed.

  Ila moved quickly through the wide streets, then slowed in the Piazzetta della Fontana. Daniel waited at the head of the street, his back to the wall. He saw Ila stoop, free a hand from his sleeve to scoop water, and splash his face. Then he went on. Daniel hurried after him. In passing, Daniel looked at the splashes on the stone and discerned a deliberate handprint on the cheek of one of the spurting-mouthed faces and on the muzzle of the lion above them.

  Martine’s friend had greeted the fountain’s statues.

  Daniel took a piecemeal tour of the town, straining for a glimpse of the man he followed. Ventimiglia was sober and grubby. Its mist smelled of soap powder, of laundry on lines high overhead. Daniel followed the sound of footfalls through a street with sunken, uneven paving. He crossed another piazza, past a church whose facade was riddled with bullet holes, old scars, almost the same color as its mildew-spotted walls. He was led into another dark street, where he met a dog, pissing boldly and copiously on the ground between two water-filled plastic bottles, placed to discourage dogs.

  Martine’s friend took the darkest, narrowest route downhill. Following him, Daniel passed doorways that were blind arches. He went down streets that were tunnels, lamplit, their walls painted with pitch. Damp streets, their gutters fall of silt as slippery as spilled polenta. The last arched tunnel mouth had only brightness beyond it, a pearly filter of sun-suffused mist. When Daniel reached this opening, Ila was nowhere in sight. Daniel edged out onto black asphalt. He crossed a broken white line, then reached a low barrier, white-painted posts with chain looped between them. There was one gap in this fence, so Daniel went through it. He found himself on a rough path, a mule track, shallow steps going down through a stand of broom that still smelled buttery from the sun.

  Daniel could hear the town behind him now. He heard a truck on the road, in low gear, crawling through the mist. He heard boys playing soccer, a plastic ball twanging on pavement, bunting on a knee or head or boot. He heard a television, and someone calling from house to house.

  The track went on through a thicket of prickly pear and a stand of nodding hibiscus. The mist filled with smoke, funneling up the track, thick, lazy smoke mixed with water vapor. Daniel came upon a pile of burning cuttings. The fire was unattended, banked down. It had been bigger; the small smoking pile stood in a footprint of greasy blackened earth. The cuttings were grubbed from several cleared terraces and, two steps down from the fire, Daniel came upon the headless body of a snake. A viper. Daniel stopped and stared at the snake’s short, oiled body. The fire hissed behind him, sap sizzling in green branches.

  Daniel didn’t hear Ila. He simply coalesced in his pale clothes—out of t
he mist. His face, in the hollow of the hood, was smooth, fresh, and transparently pale. The dry lines in his skin were wholly gone. His eyes, between long white eyelashes, were rosy gray. Ila said to Daniel that “that soldier”—the soldier in the saint’s story—had also stopped to look at a snake. Though in Daniel’s account he only “stopped short of the dark place under the cypress to look at something on the path.” “It was a grass snake,” Ila said. “A black trickle in the dust, like a libation.” He made a pouring motion with one hand, shaking it free of his sleeve to do so. His cuffs were wet from the fountain. He touched the viper with the toe of his boot. The headless body moved weakly, a low swell of muscle running its length. “The soldier went”—Ila spread out his palms, open and upturned by his hips—“as if he were giving a blessing. But it was a show of gratitude. He was happy about his girl, and the snake, so he said, ‘Thank you.’ I was waiting for him, lying on the terrace behind a stand of artichoke flowers. I knew the butcher was waiting, too. The butcher was a local—I left the locals alone. Afterward I thanked the butcher for the soldier by giving him a chamois I caught. For which the butcher gave thanks to the men in the hills. But when the soldier gave thanks for the snake, he thanked God, Who was there, too, on the hillside.” Ila smiled. “If that story was a song, it would be a round. A round of gratitude.”

  Daniel fished in his pocket. His fingers had gone numb, but his hand gathered the chisel’s general shape. He produced it and showed it to Ila.

  “I carried that from Eve’s house in Nice,” Ila said. “Eve is so guilty about having abandoned you in Avignon that she’s thinking of making a big donation to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. That’s you, isn’t it?”

  Daniel nodded.

  Ila said he was going to the marina. For a moment he watched Daniel, waiting for a response; then Ila stepped backward, two steps down, and turned and submerged himself slowly in the mist.

  Daniel thought about what he’d been told. But his thoughts couldn’t seem to hold on to the signal—the past and the story he knew. The present interfered, substituting itself object for object, mist for moonlight, a dead viper for a living grass snake, a priest who bore false witness for all the story’s other people—the characters and props of a pageant Daniel had loved—soldier, butcher, cypress, billhook. Only two things remained the same. God was here, too, in the present as in the past, as much in the cold, flickering tongues of mist in Daniel’s nostrils as in the sun above the mist and a whisker above the mountains. And the vampire was the same—in the present as in the past. The vampire Ila, like God, was a witness Daniel hadn’t yet been able to interview.

  Ventimiglia’s waterfront reserve wasn’t groomed like its counterpart just over the border in Menton. Here the same sea came in against little workaday breakwaters. Daniel, counting these breakwaters, came upon the sign for the marina. He crossed a parking lot and went past the radar-topped harbor-master’s office and along a concrete jetty. At first Daniel thought the jetty was a continuation of the road; then a first squat mooring post appeared from the mist and, after that, the stern of a launch—Kembali, port of registration: Nice.

  From the mist ahead, out to sea it seemed, there came a sound, a metallic grinding.

  Daniel walked on past Marbruck of Constantina, Nina of Jersey, Woodpecker of Poole, White Lady of Saint Peter’s Port, Allegrina of Basel, and Luca of La Rochelle.

  Ila was crouching, balanced but seemingly suspended out over the water. He was busy working a ring free from a bolt in the wall of the jetty. A skiff was chained to the ring. The boat was new; it had a fiberglass hull with a light fiberglass cover bolted onto it. The cover was smashed, and visible through the jagged holes were a fluorescent yellow life vest and the varnished timber of an oar blade. The bolt was loose already, and, as Ila continued to work it, it began to inch free, the thread of its screws scabbed with grains of cement.

  When the bolt was fully free, Ila yanked the skiff to him by its chain and used the long cement-encrusted shaft of the bolt like an ice pick to further shatter the fiberglass cover. Then he climbed gingerly from the jetty and into the boat, placing his feet in the holes he’d made. He began to work on the locked catches of the cover, to wrench them this way and that.

  Daniel glanced back over his shoulder. He could see only the nearer moored boats and the damp concrete of the jetty. There was no motion in the mist. The mist was a negative presence, not an element. It appeared that the shore had simply faded, like an unfixed photographic image.

  Ila tore the cover free from its fastening. He tossed it into the sea. It drifted bumping between the skiff and the nearest launch.

  Daniel remarked that the harbormaster’s station must be unattended.

  Ila shook his head, then pulled a syringe out of one pocket of the sweatshirt. He showed it to Daniel, then flicked it into the water. From his other pocket he produced a length of transparent plastic tubing and the same kind of small Ziploc bag that Tom Hilxen had carried.

  Daniel flinched back.

  Ila dropped the tube and bag into the water. Then he sat down on the rower’s seat and threaded the oars out from underneath it. The oarlocks were hanging on the oars already, so Ila had only to set their posts into the holes in the skiff’s side, then touch the oars’ grips together to balance them. He clapped one oar gently to the skiff’s side and shot out the other to prod the jetty, to propel the skiff away from it.

  Daniel gasped. He gulped down the mist—a thin gruel. He took a step forward, hesitated an instant, the inflexible soles of his black dress shoes seesawing on the brink. Then he jumped. He landed in the boat, sprawled across the vampire’s legs.

  Ila made a thoughtful noise and picked Daniel up, one fist gripping the bunched front of Daniel’s jacket. Ila set Daniel upright on the stern seat.

  Daniel straightened his jacket and smoothed his hair. He shook his hands, trying to ease his jarred wrists.

  Ila reached back, found a life vest, and dangled it in front of Daniel. Daniel took it and put it on.

  Ila hunched forward, put the blades of the oars in the water, and began to row, a steady swing and draw.

  The oars dipped, making big circles on the silky gray water, then raised and dripped, the drips making smaller circles. Daniel looked over his shoulder and watched this tiled path recede.

  Ila rowed for a quarter of an hour. He put the boat in the current from the river and let it drift. He shipped his oars. The mist grew creamy, lit by the smothered sunset, then it drained of warmth and turned milky blue.

  Ila sat with his eyes closed. Didn’t open them when Daniel explained that he was here because Tom Hilxen had put a needle in him. “It felt like a protracted blood test,” Daniel said.

  “No, it didn’t,” said the vampire.

  Ila was right. It hadn’t. It had been an assault, an outrage, but Daniel had long ago learned to spin so fast, so smoothly on his axis, that he had seemed to stay still, deflecting every outrage. He’d always thought his guardedness was merely a manner, a matter of long habituation—and useful. But he was all shield, only shield, and he didn’t feel the things he should—like hurt, when harmed.

  “Tom is a poseur. He is a boy borrowing his father’s razor to shave the down on his girlish cheeks,” Ila said.

  “He held me down,” said Daniel.

  Ila’s eyes flashed. They were so pale that when his pupils contracted the iris seemed all white. “No, he didn’t,” Ila said.

  “All right. He didn’t. He drugged me.”

  “The effects won’t last,” Ila said. “You weren’t bitten, so you won’t dream about it, or long for it.” Ila was explaining technicalities. He was patiently reassuring Daniel. “But I do wonder—since Tom didn’t bite you—why you jumped into the boat with me.” Ila studied Daniel, speculative, then asked him to please look under that seat for a lamp—they might want one later. “To tire it with talking,” the vampire said.

  Daniel looked—the skiff was well provided, had its own small tackle box
with fishing gear and flares, and one of those chunky buoyant marine flashlights. Daniel gave it to Ila, who said he had imagined an oil lamp, its yellow light softened by the soot in its glass chimney.

  “Sorry,” said Daniel. “Do you know how to work it?”

  Ila frowned. He said he’d kept his capacity to learn. In that respect he was as young as he looked. But, lately, he’d been too tired to take new things on. He’d hibernated and starved himself while Martine stayed awake to look for a cure.

  “She hoped to cure herself of herself,” said Daniel.

  Ila smiled. “I told Eve you were listening.”

  It grew darker. The mist spilled off the mountains; it thinned and dissolved on the sea. The coast appeared: the lights of Ventimiglia and Menton-Garavan. The two capes were sketched by their sparser settlement. The moon came up and Daniel was no longer forced to check their distance from shore by the magnitude of various lights.

  Daniel switched the lamp on. Its cold fluorescent bulbs shone out from panels of faceted plastic. Ila looked at his hands in the light and tucked them back inside his too-long sleeves. He began—unprompted—to tell Daniel a story, his and Martine’s.

  “I left Marseille after having to dig myself out of the rubble of its old town,” he said. “The Germans had demolished the streets with high explosives in an attempt to ferret out the resistance. I burrowed my way out of a collapsed cellar and gradually, over weeks, made my way to where I knew I’d be safe. I went back to the caves. I had learned, long before, to regard soldiers of any invading army as fair game—though I was always more parasite than predator, preferring to bleed people and leave them alive. Preferring not to bite them because, once I had become infectious, to bite someone meant taking their life into my hands.

  “The Grotto of the Hermit looked out over Dardo on its spur of rock, and over the river. I liked to sleep there, at the back of the cave, because I knew how far the sun looked in at every season. I knew that it only put one foot through the door in early June.