and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “Olivia, we got off to a weird start. I’m sorry. I’d like to try again.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Want a sandwich?” he asks me.

  “No.”

  “You sure? You could use a little meat on you.” He’s joking. My body would plump for him sweetly if he wanted me that way.

  I pour the old man’s soup into a bowl. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that stand. Desire is an actor’s trick-handled knife. If he doesn’t want me, I’ll turn the blade around.

  “Yesterday, you said you could help me.” I slip a spoon into Gaehod’s bowl, keeping my eyes down and my voice uncertain. “I’d like that.”

  He has stopped with the bread and lettuce, the tomato and the knife. I stir the soup a little with the spoon.

  “I thought you weren’t interested.”

  “I am, but…” I look up into his fierce blue eyes. The tenderness in his face almost makes me feel ashamed. “Okay, if I’m honest, it’s mostly that I’d like to see more of you.” Almost, but not quite.

  “Olivia…”

  I pick up Gaehod’s soup bowl and push the trick blade in. “I shouldn’t have said that, about wanting to see you. I have to go.”

  Some may master their own, but few can resist the taste of another’s desire. We’re all part vampire in the end.

  ———

  The catacomb of hallways swallowed Dominic, walking beside Gaehod, perfectly dressed for a night at the Victorian opera, except for his absence of footwear. Intrigued by Olivia’s new openness to his work, eager to start working with her, Dominic was not interested in meeting the other vampires right now. But the innkeeper had stopped by his room and collected him after lunch. And he did still need several more girls to round out the study.

  Along one corridor, Gaehod stopped to look through a mullioned window. It opened into a room whose opposite wall was lined with identical, but smaller windows. In front of these windows, on benches, blank-eyed men and women sat unblinking, shoulder to shoulder, in close-packed rows. Horror fingered the back of Dominic’s neck.

  “Who are they?” he whispered to Gaehod.

  “Watchers.”

  “What are they watching?”

  “A life.”

  “Whose?”

  “It doesn’t matter—they just have to watch it all, from beginning to end.”

  Dominic suppressed a shudder.

  “It’s not so bad,” Gaehod reassured him, “a little tedious in the hours of sleep, infancy, and old age, but they are damned for one lifetime only, for the sins of their last. It’s soon over.”

  “Why?” Dominic realized he was whispering, although Gaehod made no attempt to lower his voice.

  “The last time around they had fates, not destinies. They made no choices. ”

  Dominic shook himself. “Isn’t it a little creepy for the people who are being watched every second of their entire lives?”

  “The Watchers only bear witness. They can’t do anything about the life they observe, so most of the Watched aren’t aware of them. A few will sense them, of course, and believe in angels or fashion tinfoil hats.”

  “Does it work?”

  “The tinfoil?”

  “No.” Dominic scowled at Gaehod.

  The old man returned his glare with a subtly mischievous smile and the overtly theatrical whirl of opera cape over one shoulder. “I thought you did not believe in reincarnation, Dominic,” he chided and started walking again. As they turned the corner, Dominic caught a momentary glint of light off glass. Had there been another window across the hall, behind him? He hadn’t thought to look.

  Dominic bit back his welling rage and kept walking until he was confident he could keep the anger from his voice. “Why are you showing me this?”

  “I promised you a tour.”

  “I thought you were ready to stop all this, to close this place down?”

  “I have been considering that, yes. What do you think, Dominic?”

  “I think all these underground people need help,” Dominic said wearily.

  “And of course you need your research subjects who might be easier to persuade if their familiar, comfortable home were no longer here to welcome them.”

  “I think their ‘familiar, comfortable home’ keeps them in their familiar, uncomfortable sickness. If they were forced to function in the real world, they might recognize the disconnect between reality and these stories they tell about themselves.”

  “They should dismiss these mythic selves?” Rounding another corner, Gaehod’s cape gave a skeptical swirl.

  “They should get help.”

  “My dear boy, I house the damned and the cursed: descendants of ancient races, angels, and the great-great-grandchildren of titans and elves, as well as souls punished for a single lifetime’s wrongs. They’re exquisite and deep, rare, magical beings. Why should they want to be anything but what they are?”

  “Because they’re in pain. Gaehod, I’m afraid your affection for these people keeps you from seeing how screwed up they really are.”

  “Yes.” Gaehod nodded. “Love is blind.” A warm smile split the old man’s face. “Speaking of which…” He pointed a slender finger toward a flight of stairs where a set of naked, olive-skinned legs was descending into view. The two men, young and old, stopped to watch the woman appear, rosy toes, dimpled knees, gently swaying hips, high delicate breasts, softly parted lips breaking into a stunning smile.

  “Hello, my dear,” the old man said, placing a reverent kiss on the girl’s inviting cheek.

  “Hello, Father.” She embraced Gaehod, held him against her gentle body, then continued down the hall.

  “Who was that?”

  “She’s a student from the Venice school, a hierodule, just arrived.”

  “A what?”

  “A hetaera, a nad?tu, how do you translate it?”

  Dominic recognized the Greek. “Temple slave?”

  “Temple prostitute, sacred prostitute. That’s closest I think.”

  “I can see why you enjoy your work.” Dominic turned a wry eye over his shoulder at the beauty swaying away.

  “I have tried to help them.”

  “I know you have. But, Gaehod, I think they might get more help, better, more modern help, if you closed the hotel. Psychiatric medicine has come a long way. A lot of people in tinfoil beanies do very well on paliperdone.”

  “You want me to close the hotel?”

  “Yes, Gaehod. I do.”

  “Would you be willing to champion that cause?”

  The miles of rock between him and the surface world of light and sanity, of reason and science, crushed him. How could he champion anything? “Absolutely,” he said.

  He drew breath to question the old man, but they turned a corner and he released the air in a low whistle of surprise. Dominic and Gaehod passed beneath a towering gate, high and wide and without bars, into a twilit, subterranean garden.

  The peculiar light made a contrary dusk in which color stood out more starkly rather than muting into the gloom. The golds and purples were shocking, and even the gray-leaved olive trees, whose gnarled roots clutched the bare rocks along a black river, seemed young and supple. Dominic followed Gaehod’s bare feet across brilliant, soft green grass riddled with golden crocus and bending daffodils, to the edge of the black water. There, the unmoving figure of a gorgeous woman sat staring into the water’s reflective surface.

  “I am so very sorry for your loss, my dear.” Gaehod bent over her, mingling white threads of hair with her crimson streams, and kissed her flawless brow. She sighed, but did not look up. The strange garden light stripped her of shadow.

  “I didn’t mean to.” The woman’s voice bore the indents and peaks of Ireland, rolling and enchanting, even with their burden of grief. “I haven’t killed in years.”

  “I know.”

  “I loved her.” A perfect tear, in which the whole strange garden was reflected, inverse, trembled on the delicate rim of her u
pturned eyes. Gaehod brushed it away with compassion so intimate and profound Dominic turned away.

  “Sylvia, I’d like to you meet Dominic. He is Reborn and, like you, remembers many past loves.” Sylvia’s icy gray eyes, when she turned them to Dominic, held pain miles deep.

  “If only the river I sit by were Lethe,” she said to Dominic, her Irish voice a sweet burble beside the silent water, “we could both drink and forget.” She patted the green bank beside her with a graceful hand. “Come tell me of your lost loves.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Dominic pulled his laptop bag over his head and sat down, pushing it away from him across the black grass.

  “I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.” Gaehod smiled down on them. He turned and walked toward the door, stopping only once to pet a potbellied dog and pluck a pomegranate from a shrubby tree.

  Sylvia gazed into the black water. Dominic wished he had remained standing. “I was looking for God,” Sylvia murmured, “but I saw myself instead.”

  “So you killed her?”

  She shrugged a slender black-swathed shoulder. “That killed her. Mortal blood retains deep loves and fears. When we feed, we catch the glimpses, like dreams. It’s the danger in going back to the same source too often. You become one of their fears.”

  “Or loves?”

  “I guess.” Sylvia shrugged.

  “So what kills them?”

  “If you keep feeding when you can see yourself in their blood, it… I don’t know. I guess it closes a loop or something. It stops their hearts.”

  “That’s impossible you know, right? To see memories in blood? Memory is a neurological function. The notion that even genetic information is ‘in the blood’ is purely poetic.”

  “Gaehod said you were interested in memory. Do you remember every love from every lifetime?”

  “Every one. No—but they’re not really memories, they’re delusions. I only think I remember them.”

  “How tragic!” Sylvia pulled her lips into a succulent moue. “You lose your lovers twice this way, once in the deaths you remember and then by not believing their memory.”

  “You can’t lose what you never had.”

  “Of course you can. You can lose hope where things have always been hopeless. You can lose faith although there was never a God.”

  “You can’t lose your heart if you don’t have one.”

  “You have a heart, Dominic. I can hear it.”

  Dominic felt very conscious of the meaty apparatus of humanity, of his beating heart and too-big, useless hands.

  “I didn’t mean literally,” Sylvia giggled, and slipped fragile, porcelain fingers between the buttons of Dominic’s shirt, pressing coolness and heat against the bare skin of his chest. She ran her fingers over the snaking raised lines of his tattoo. “Distract me from my sorrow, Dominic.”

  He took her fine, white elbow in his clumsy hands and extracted her arm from his shirt. Sylvia wore the same strange key bracelet that circled Olivia’s wrist. It, too, was clasped with a small padlock, and although it looked as though the key would fit into the lock, the chain was too short for the key to reach. Sylvia dropped her hand to Dominic’s crotch and began to stroke him through his constricting jeans.

  “Doesn’t that feel good?” she whispered against his neck, raising a legion of chills.

  He nodded. “It does. But I’m not going to make love to you.”

  “I didn’t ask you to. Fall in love with me instead.”

  Dominic grinned ruefully. “Make love, fall in love.” He shrugged. “I’m not going to do either.” He moved her hand from the buttons of his jeans and placed it on her lap.

  Sylvia’s spurned hand swept to the tiny black buttons of her high-necked blouse. Beneath the delicate black cotton, her pristine skin shone in the strange garden light. She pushed the halves of her shirt open and ran dainty hands over her exposed, abundant breasts. Her luminous pale coral nipples contracted in the cool air and she fanned seductive fingertips across them.

  “Do you want to touch me?”

  Mute, Dominic shook his head.

  “I can’t feel your touch. You can be as rough as you want. You cannot bruise or injure me. You can’t hurt me.” She cupped her full, inviting breasts with caressing fingers.

  “I could break your heart.”

  “I could break your neck.”

  “Do you want to?” he asked her.

  Sylvia tipped her perfect, pale face to one side, considering. Her copper hair tumbled gracefully over a milky shoulder. “No.” She smiled. “I don’t think I do. Do you want to break my heart?”

  “No, in fact quite the opposite. Sylvia, I believe I can help you. I’m working to develop medicines that might heal your heart. Would you be willing to participate in a research study? I could pay you.”

  Sylvia’s laugh rang silver and unfettered. “Darling, I’m a vampire. I have more money than I could ever use.” Sylvia looked down at her breasts in her hands. She pushed the twin globes of tempting flesh toward her lowered chin and dropped them so they shivered and rolled deliciously. “I don’t want money. I want your desire.”

  “You have that.” His voice was thick.

  “How would you touch me, knowing you cannot arouse me? How would you make love to woman for your pleasure alone, knowing she feels nothing?”

  “Physical numbness is not an uncommon psychiatric symptom. I believe you can feel. I can help you.”

  “Try.” She held the cloud pink nipples toward his dry lips.

  “I cannot become sexually involved with study participants,” Dominic ground between clinched teeth. “And in good conscience, I can’t make love to you knowing that I am incapable of having emotional or romantic feelings for you. I can’t fall in love again.”

  “I believe you can feel. I can help you.” With a sweet smile, she turned his words back on him. He reached for his laptop bag, but Sylvia knelt on the riverbank, her ripe breasts overfilling the forked fingers of one hand. Dominic’s mouth was dry, but he dared not lick his lips so close to the succulent flesh. Sylvia’s free hand pushed back the collar of his shirt, tracing the jugular thread where it beat lust and iron. A red tear splashed onto her upraised breast. It trickled down the cushion of rosette flesh, hunger, and salt.

  “Hello, lovers.”

  Tall and almost fluid, Olivia stood silhouetted in the portal, motionless. Dominic jumped to his feet and looked around for a reason to be standing. The sight of Olivia yards away affected him as Sylvia, even topless and nearby, had not. Sylvia reclined on the bank, pillowing her head in upstretched arms. Her round breasts stretched into pears, swollen marble teardrops sprung from the black veil of her unbuttoned blouse. Dominic looked from her to Olivia to the river, and back, irresistibly, to Olivia. She came toward him across the flower-spattered grass. Dominic spotted a tree growing beside the stream and, looking for something to do with his hands, reached for one of its fruits casually, but the wind swayed the branch beyond his reach. He tried another time and sat down empty-handed.

  “Shouldn’t eat the food of the dead, anyway,” Sylvia mused, still bare-breasted. “Hello, little sister.”

  Dominic stood up again.

  “Gaehod said I would find you here.” Olivia addressed only Sylvia. “I came to offer my sympathy.” She did not glance at Dominic.

  “Whatever for?”

  “For the death of your timeless love,” Olivia said.

  “Oh that. Have a seat, Ollie. Have you met Dominic?”

  “Yes.” Olivia sat coolly beside her sister. “Have you been rending your garments for grief, my sister?”

  Dominic felt the blood rise in his face. From the green ground, the two stunning women regarded him unblinking.

  “Perhaps we should go for a swim?” Sylvia suggested. She began to peel gauze-fine layers of clothing from her body.

  Spellbound, Dominic watched the hypnotic dance of fabric and flesh, then collected himself. “I think I’ll just go for a walk,�
�� he said and struck out blindly away from temptation.

  He walked away from the two exquisite, delusional women, deeper into the dark garden, straying aimlessly. Finally he sat down against a gnarled apple tree. He wasn’t having much luck recruiting vampires for his study, although they seemed willing enough participants in anything else.

  “Guess who?” a sibilant voice whispered. Dominic looked around, but couldn’t see anyone. He didn’t think Olivia had followed him. Sylvia would be swimming in the black river now, her pale, sinuous body slipping through the soundless water.

  “Guess who?”

  Dominic checked behind the tree, but found no one. He shrugged. It was a weird place. “Give me a hint,” he said to the empty air.

  “I’m shaped like a cock, but I move like a cunt, and my throat’s open all the way down.”

  “Olivia?” Dominic stood up again.

  “My tongue is forked for her pleasure, whispering ‘eat!’ Women have had food issues ever since.”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re the serpent in the tree of knowledge, right? Where are you?” Dominic searched the tree’s golden branches, but movement at the base caught his keen eye. From a hole at the root of the tree, right where he had been sitting, a forked tongue flickered in the darkness. All Dominic could see of the snake, when the tongue retreated, were twin, unblinking, black eyes, two darker places in the black of the hole.

  Time for new meds.

  “Are you going to talk me into eating an apple?” Dominic asked the hole.

  “Not if I can simply shake the tree and drop one on your head.”

  As if something deep under the ground, in the roots of the tree, were pushing it, the serpent’s head squeezed out of the small hole and onto the grass. “Knowledge, inspiration, revelation, it’s all me!” it said.

  Its iridescent, blood-red body glinted rainbows and gold in the perpetual twilight brilliance of the underground garden. Its mirrored scales and blunt, rounded head pushed along the ground and against the tree trunk. It wound, making three smooth coils up the trunk, to the height of Dominic’s hips, and lifted its head, like a bobbing arboreal erection from the tree’s trunk. “Riddle me this,” the snake said, “does not even human law make knowing the difference between right and wrong a prerequisite for punishment?”