"Wait! Damn you, wait! What about me? What do I do?"
"Follow your instincts, Victor." Her cry rolled out in her wake. "Follow your instincts. You will know." The final word echoed through the dark vault, slowly fading.
Conscious of returning, in an instant, to Tiresia's shop, I rolled off her motionless, cold body. I lowered the oil lamp to examine her face. The shriveled features and sunken cheeks of a hag glowed in the light—the hideous face she had hidden from me. Before my eyes, her luscious breasts dried up and disintegrated. That is how it began.
Chapter Seven
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Behind a false wall in Tiresia's chamber, I found her sarcophagus, lined with hieroglyphics chiseled in ancient Egypt. There I slept by day for the next eight years, at night glutting my thirst on the blood of beggars and rich merchants, boys and maidens. I even rampaged Pilate's household, first unnerving his pathetic wife, who rambled about visions of black ghosts in her room, then sinking my fangs into the breasts of his best servant girls, their juice exploding in my mouth like plump fruit.
My cock swelled as I drank blood, and the sensation—the heat, the lusty ecstasy—transcended any erotic pleasure I'd ever had.
It didn't take long, however, for me to tire of satiating my thirst, of testing my new strength, of flight, and of preternatural vision. I, like all beings, craved company. But I existed in isolation. I knew others like me existed, but not in Jerusalem. We were assigned domains by the dark powers, and our provinces did not overlap. Strange voices told me this in dreams.
Whores and boys of the street entertained me at night, and vagabonds cast dice with me. I paid my debts to them with silver piled up in Tiresia's secret chamber, from what source I knew not.
But there was only one man I wanted.
After a month of refining my powers, I found Joshu bathing in the river after dusk. From behind the reeds, I watched his sinewy arms stretch as he scrubbed his back. I inspected his thighs, as strong as columns, his belly, taut as a drum. Light lingering on the horizon painted his angular features and left the shadow of his form on the shallow water.
"Who's there?" He scanned the shore as I rustled through the reeds.
"It is I, Joshu." I stepped into a clearing on the bank.
"I thought you were dead. Where have you been?"
For the first time the aura of strength about him, spiritual strength expressed in every firm muscle of his body, struck me as superhuman. For the first time a strange shudder of apprehension passed through me.
"Who are you, Joshu?"
"I have told you, Victor. I am my father's son."
I splashed through the water toward him. I stopped so close to him I could see the tiny scar on his temple that he'd told me about. A neighbor boy had struck him with a rock when he was six or seven. "Which god is your father?"
"I have told you. The only god." He stooped over and cupped his hands to drink.
I clutched his arm. "The Roman gods are much more powerful than this god of the Jews. They outnumber him after all."
"What have they done for you?" He straightened and faced me boldly. In the light of the rising moon, his eyes revealed his love for me.
"They've made me immortal."
"Have they?"
"It's what you always speak of, isn't it? An eternal realm. Well, I've found it."
He quietly contemplated my face.
I pressed my lips against his and for a moment he leaned toward me, but then drew back.
I snorted at his rebuff. "I thought you told me I could not approach you."
"When did I tell you that?"
"In the vision."
"I don't know of what you speak."
"Deny it if you like. But here's the truth. I've the power to take you. But why should I, Joshu, when you want me? Be my consort. I can grant you immortality."
"You can never possess me." Joshu started toward the shore.
I grabbed his arm and pulled his naked body to me. "I already possess you." I shoved him away and, with a flicker, sped through the night, as light and invisible as the wind.
Wherever he went, I hounded him. When he retreated to the desert like one of the crazy Essenes, I squatted next to his camp-fire. When he paced the temple courts beneath the starry sky, I blocked his path. When he slept at the homes of those who had begun to follow him, I boldly marched through their doors.
"Why are you doing this?" he screamed one night in the desert, where he'd gone to pray. I sensed I had not been the only devil to tempt him there in the darkness. "What do you want?"
"You know what I want." I stretched out on the blanket he had spread before the fire.
"Robbing my purity means that much to you? What if you did take my body? My soul would belong only to my Father." He looked weak and drawn in the rippling light.
"Save that pig fodder for the masses, Joshu. Piety means nothing to me. And as far as you're concerned—you want me too. I'll wage war on you until you weaken, my friend. You're body isn't enough for me. I can have any I choose. I want your soul."
He suddenly broke into a fit of laughter. "Oh, Victor, had you wanted my love, my company, my teaching… But my soul?"
"Do you know who I am?" I sat up and glared at him.
"I know you belong to the night with the other demons. Except…"
"Except what?"
"For you there's still hope."
"Damn you!" I leaped up, ripped off his cloak, and threw him to the sand. I pinned back his arms and spread his legs with my knees. "Is there hope now?"
I tore at his throat with my fangs, but the second I tasted his blood a wave of nausea passed through me. I vomited the blood from my earlier victims into the sand.
"Who is protecting you? Who is keeping you from me?"
"I am free. No one commands my will. Not even my God. But I have surrendered to him." He sat up and rubbed his arms where I had gripped him. Then he reached for his cloak.
"They say you work miracles. Why don't you cast me away from you as you cast away the demons from the godforsaken creatures roaming the slums?"
His response was a prolonged gaze at me, as though he were actually considering using his powers. But his gaze also held compassion.
"You're a holy fool," I said, spitting out a remnant of the blood that had erupted from my throat. "You'll never rid yourself of me."
Indeed, I kept after him, hounding him until the very end of his divine crusade, when even his charisma couldn't save him. In the final days I nearly had him. Immortality in my company looked pretty good to someone condemned to die.
On the day when the sky darkened to the shade of midnight, I rose from my tomb and soared to Golgotha. Gazing lustfully at Joshu from the foot of his execution cross, fighting my urge to lap up the blood that dripped from his hands and feet, I invited him one last time. He listened to me but merely turned his eyes to the sky, invoked his god, and slipped into a death I will never know.
For two nights I ransacked Jerusalem's streets, torturing, murdering whoever came into my path, mangling limbs and tearing flesh with my teeth, without stopping to suck out the elixir after my first few victims.
Then, just before dawn that Sunday, as I hurried back to my refuge, it happened. I felt him.
"Joshu! What is this? What kind of spirit are you?"
I glanced around the street, gray in the harbinger glow of morning. "Show yourself to me."
He stood before me, naked and whole, not pale from death. The nail marks still on his feet and hands looked more like small tattoos than wounds.
"I am not a ghost, Victor. I live."
"As do I, my beloved." I stepped toward him, but the dawn was moments away and I had to flee. "Come with me, to safety."
But he stood immobile and I could not hesitate another second.
When I awoke later in the darkness, I felt as though I were the only being left on an annihilated earth. Joshu was gone from me. I knew this before his followers began babbling about a resurrection. He e
xisted, was immortal, but not in a world of darkness like mine. I howled like a wolf who'd devastated a flock of sheep and was now left with nothing. It was only then that I believed in the god Joshu returned to, a god of light. And it was then that I vowed to avenge my loss on this pompous being who had deprived me of the only one I ever loved.
II
The Cloister
Chapter Eight
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"Abbot Reginald of St. Sylvester speaks well of you, Brother Victor. He says you have much to offer us here at St. Thomas." Brother Matthew, a burly man, stood before a tall window in his office. He was abbot of St. Thomas, my new home, but he told me he didn't like titles. "Brother" suited him just fine.
The window looked out into the courtyard, where a gnarled old pine basked in the light of a full moon. The walls of the office bulged with thick, musty volumes. The oak floor and desk were blackened with age.
"I'm grateful for the abbot's recommendation, Brother Matthew." I assumed the tone of deference I'd perfected through centuries of monastery-hopping. Also robed in black, I sat across from him in a leather chair, venous with cracks.
"We Thomists have never accepted a monk from another order. But the accident was tragic—the demise of an ancient community stemming from the Dominicans, like ours. Order of the Divine Word—splendid name. What a pity." He shook his head.
"Yes." I studied the fat neck that rose from his black habit. His ripe jugular bulged as big as the infant snakes we ate as delicacies in Pilate's headquarters two millennia before.
"The fire was sudden?"
I nodded. "It was a medieval abbey, full of rotting wood. England is full of decrepit abbeys and convents. The unusually strong winds on the English heath didn't help. When the fire started, everyone was asleep. They weren't due to rise for matins for another hour. And the fieldwork had been grueling that day, especially for the older monks. Most everyone died of smoke inhalation. Through God's mercy I was taking my usual walk on the heath, safe from the sun's rays. My skin condition won't cause inconvenience, will it?"
"Of course not, Brother Victor." The abbot seated himself in the leather chair behind his desk. The lamp cast a rosy glow on his smooth cheeks. His eyes were small and closely set and full of the disgusting charity I never grew tired of loathing. "It's a strange condition, I admit. What a misfortune to be intolerant of the sun. Though the night has its own beauty."
"Indeed."
"And you can work in the night? It will be good to have a sentinel of sorts."
"The underground cell is not a problem?"
"Not if you don't mind the damp rooms beneath the chapel. It's where we said our private masses in the old days—a network of dank little chapels and storage rooms. We've furnished a cell for you down there. I promise you you'll not see a single ray of sun."
"Excellent. The crypt is around there too, I suppose? The one you mentioned to Abbot Reginald?"
"Yes. I hope that won't bother you—sleeping among our faithfully departed. They're good old souls." He smiled benevolently.
"Indeed not. I can pray better in that environment, reminded of mortality." I mustered a smile, and he, predictably, reciprocated. "I have a trunk full of books. They're out in the car."
"I'll get a brother to help you." Brother Matthew picked up the phone. "I'm surprised Brother Cyril didn't bring it in already."
"That's my fault. I told him I'd get the porter to help me after I spoke to you. He did carry my other bags to my cell."
The abbot shifted the receiver and gave directions to the porter I'd glimpsed as old Brother Cyril had pulled into the parking lot, a willowy boy of 19 or 20 who blushed when I saw him peering out the window.
I rose when he knocked at the door and the abbot called for him to enter. He was indeed a specimen—full lips, limpid eyes, a shock of blond hair, the bangs curling over his eyebrows. He smiled bashfully at me, then turned his attention to the abbot to receive his instructions.
"Brother Victor," Brother Matthew called as we were leaving. "Why exactly did Abbot Reginald survive the fire? He wasn't clear in his letter or phone call."
"I think he was out of the building too, Brother. He suffered from insomnia."
"I see. And he really won't accept our hospitality?" The abbot squinted in the lamplight.
"He's very old. His community is gone. He wants to be with his family in Brighton." I tried to restrain my impatience at his irritating concern.
"I see. Welcome to America, Brother, and to the monastery of St. Thomas. We'll try to help you not miss England too much. Make yourself at home."
"Yes, Brother. Thank you."
How many times over the ages had I introduced myself to an unsuspecting abbot? It was in the late 13th century that I entered the first cloister, a Dominican fortress in the Apennines full of boys hardly old enough to shoot their loads. That's when I set out in earnest on a calculated campaign to destroy the harems of Joshu's god. I'd only begun to hear about monasteries, although apparently the communities of monks had spread from Egypt into Italy 200 years before.
But let me start at the beginning.
After the death of Joshu, I spent a dozen frustrating years waiting, searching for his spirit among the old Palestine haunts. Then, despondent, I made my way back to Rome, where I spent four centuries feasting on the rich blood of patricians and the exotic blood of slaves from every corner of the empire. The Germanic invasions began in the fifth century. At first I enjoyed the excitement, the chaos. I could smell blood from the battlefields when I emerged from my hiding places after sunset. But depression gradually set in as I watched the collapse of civilization as I'd known it.
I left Rome in the eighth century and wandered through the Far East until the Barbarian raids were long over. Then I returned. More than a millennium had passed since I'd beheld Joshu. A millennium. I caught wind of these idealistic followers of Joshu huddled together, renouncing the world as he had. It seemed too good to be true. My nocturnal wanderings, glutting my appetites, had begun to bore me. I lacked a purpose, stable companionship, things I thought I could dispense with on the dark side of existence. The challenge of the secluded abbeys where pietistic young males wrestled with their carnal desires, where Joshu's spirit perhaps lingered, where I could most injure his god… that challenge baptized me into a new life. The night once again held promise.
The first millennium after Joshu's death was my adolescence as a predator, my youthful heyday. In the second millennium, as a monk, I enjoyed the fruits of experience: more finesse in my dealings with humans; more restraint over my cravings; more single-mindedness in my hunts; more concentration, hence ecstasy, in my feedings.
Between the 13th and 20th centuries, two dozen monasteries, in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the British Isles, harbored a creature of the grave unknowingly—until too late. With each abbey I left devastated, I cut a new notch in the belt squeezing my heart, the belt strapped there by Joshu. If I couldn't remove it, I could gloat over its defacement.
St. Thomas would make two dozen and one notches. And my first in the New World.
Leaving the abbot's office, I followed the boy monk, Brother Luke, down the dark hallway into the medieval-looking foyer of St. Thomas Abbey. Our feet thudded on heavy oak planks. High above us loomed thick rustic beams. The abbot had instructed the young porter to give me a tour of the buildings.
"Would you like to see the chapel first?"
Though I wasn't an expert on American accents, his drawl seemed rural. He pointed toward heavy doors surmounted by a carved image of Joshu on the abominable crucifix, the one I had stood before 2,000 years ago. In all that time I had not grown immune to the longing and bitterness the image evoked.
"Lead on, O Gabriel." I squeezed his shoulder when he beamed at the name of the angelic guide.
Lights from votive candles flickered before statues in side altars and near the sanctuary of the long, narrow chapel—an unimaginative variation on chapels since the beginning of monasticism. Choir
stalls faced each other near the sanctuary, and pews lined the body of the church. The place smelled of incense and candle wax, old varnish and sickly-sweet flowers.
"You wanna offer a prayer?" The boy whispered as though the empty chapel were filled with meditating monks.
"Thank you. Please, come with me." I touched his back.
We walked side by side down the center aisle and knelt at the communion rail. The golden tabernacle doors were embossed with a predictable scene of the "last supper." The truth is, Joshu was sick during that final Passover and couldn't eat a thing. I teased him about it—and scoffed at the foot-washing ritual that embarrassed his foul-smelling men, their feet caked with filth. He had an irresistible penchant for degrading himself.
But he had enough sense to avoid ending up imprisoned in a bread box. The Blessed Sacrament indeed! And even if he was in the tabernacle, it wasn't as a wafer that I wanted to taste my Joshu.
Brother Luke amiably gabbed as he led me through the other buildings forming the sides of the large courtyard, thick with hedges and trees now dormant in the January cold: a high-vaulted library adjacent to the chapel was in one building; in another was a social hall, a kitchen, and a refectory with two long tables for the handful of monks who lived there; a third building contained a dormitory of tiny cells, administrative offices, and, adjacent to the foyer, a richly furnished parlor for receiving guests. A fairly new greenhouse had been constructed on the north side of the refectory, behind the buildings.
"There's a room of computers next to the library. But I ain't got the key." Boy Luke stood timidly behind a heavy chair. "They put in a lot of time in there, with their research and all."
"And you have no scholarly ambitions? I thought the Thomist order pledged to carry on the work of the great St. Thomas Aquinas." Through my research I had learned all about the 19th-century offshoot of the Dominicans. Most of the monks were scholars who did research at the monastery during extended university sabbaticals. Between the monastery's enormous library collections and its modern computer technology, they had all the resources a pinheaded professor could want. They would keep their noses buried in their books and stay well out of my way.
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