"I could use your help now." I slammed him into shelf after shelf of canned goods and cereals and laundry soap until the quaint market was as devastated as an earthquake would have left it. Then, pulling him to his feet, I licked the blood from a gash in his forehead. "The night's just begun."
Waiting inside the store until a patrol car sped down the street, I dragged Michael, bruised and limping, across an alley into a large Victorian home, now shabby and divided into apartments. The unlocked back door opened onto a long, poorly lit hallway flanked by several doors. The scent was strongest from an apartment at the front of the building.
"Don't do this, Victor. Just kill me now." His dark eyes were filled with scorn.
"You're asking me for mercy?" I laughed. "No, come with me, my beloved."
The flimsy door gave way with a firm shove. A small dog scampered to the entrance and yapped hysterically.
"What's wrong, Nipper?" A woman called from down the hall. "Come see Mommy."
When the dog continued to bark, I scooped him up by the throat, strangled him with one hand, and flung him on the rug. Michael looked away.
"Nipper? Whatsa matter, girl? Come see me."
Submissive under my grip, Michael accompanied me down the hallway to the steamy room at the end. By the time the woman heard us, it was too late to run. Young and shapely, she stood in an old-fashioned tub with claw feet, reaching for a towel. She screamed at the sight of us. I jerked the towel away from her and stuffed it into her mouth. Wrapping her in one arm and Michael in the other, I carried them both into a room with a canopy bed. Like those of a mad dog, my teeth tore at her throat, her naked breasts, until blood gushed from the wounds and she lost consciousness. When Michael vomited, I shoved him to the floor and dropped her on the bed.
"What do you think—should I let her bleed to death?"
"Feed on her, damn you!" He lay on his side, deathly pale. "Put her out of her misery, for chrissake."
"Not yet." I picked up her body and laid it next to him.
"She would have been a fine catch for someone, don't you think?" I got down on my haunches and stroked her chestnut hair. Her blood trailed down the uneven oak floor toward Michael and he tried to get away from it but I held him down until the blood saturated his shirt and he vomited again.
"So, you like to play with evil forces? But you didn't bargain for this, did you."
"Kill me, Victor." As he looked up his eyes started to roll back and he collapsed in his own vomit.
"No! I'm not through with you yet." I carried him to the bathroom and dunked his head in the tub until he came to. Then I dragged him to his feet and back to the bedroom for my finale. I gulped the blood spurting from the woman's throat and breasts and lapped up the floor. My lips now dripping, I kissed Michael, thrusting my tongue down his throat until he gagged and vomited once again.
"Damn you." Michael was exhausted and ill. I nearly had to carry him to the house next door toward the scent of more blood.
Just as I tried the door a police car stopped in the alley. An officer got out and shouted for us to raise our hands. In the time it takes me to break a neck, I rose, my arm wrapped around Michael. The officer fired several shots. I winced when one struck my shoulder blade, but continued on. By the time I cleared the treetops, I felt blood oozing from Michael's stomach.
"You've been hit!" I shouted against the force of the wind.
Grimacing in pain, he did not respond.
I landed with my burden in the forest clearing, laid him on the ground, and stripped off his soaked shirt to inspect the wound. The bullet had plunged deep into his bowels. With every beat of his heart, blood spurted. Blood which, linked as it was with jeopardy to his existence, gave me no delight. Wadding his shirt into a tourniquet, I pressed it against his stomach. His rib cage heaved as he struggled for breath. His skin was as hot as summer pavement.
"Michael, don't slip away. Fight this." I shook his shoulders gently until he opened his eyes. "There's still time. You can still drink." Holding the tourniquet in place, I stripped off my shirt and positioned my nipple near his mouth. "Drink, damn it!"
He shook his head, slowly but deliberately.
"Why? Why let yourself die when you can suck life from me? Power, eternity. Eternity with me, damn you." I brought his lips to my chest, but he would not suck.
I leaned down and spoke directly into his ear as he fought for consciousness. "This god that draws you, doesn't he command you to love? Isn't that what the Gospels teach? Then do this for love. I need you, do you hear me?"
He labored more and more to take in air as he struggled to speak. "I love you, Victor."
"Then come with me!" I whispered the words forcefully into his ear.
Desperate ideas to save him flashed through my mind—whisking him away to an emergency room, retrieving bandages to bind him, tearing out the bullet with my own hand. But only moments remained for him.
"What is this heaven you have seen—that you'd sacrifice eternal freedom for? Freedom and me. What can it offer that I can't? Tell me! If it's worth eternity, I'll follow you, by God!"
Michael turned his head. He worked to focus his listless eyes on me, as though he wanted to speak. He inhaled and released a shaky breath. He did not inhale again. His gaze froze on me.
"No!" I knelt over him and shook him violently. "No, damn you. You can't leave me alone. I'm through with the night. I want my reward." Hot tears ran from my eyes. I lifted his face and kissed his lips.
"Are you satisfied, Joshu?" I called into the night sky, whose dazzling stars seemed to mock me. "What else do you want from me? Another two millennia of torture, is that it? You won't have it. I swear you won't!"
Casting a last look on the eyes no longer mysterious and penetrating, I got up and sprinted into the woods, bounding over fallen trees, snapping branches, splashing through the brook, until I reached the ledge where Michael had shown me the sun after 2,000 years of darkness. I howled like a wild animal, howled until I thought I would explode in anger. The sound resonated in the valley below and was answered by the cries of wolves deep in the thicket.
Then I tore at my hair, and clawed my face until it bled. I rolled on the rocky ground and beat it until my fists were crimson with blood. I longed to kill now, but the night was far gone and the streets of Knoxville were infested with police. So I remained brooding on the ledge until just before dawn, when I fled back to the shelter of my tomb—the tomb where only a day before Michael had slept with me.
Chapter Thirty-two
« ^ »
My sleep was fitful that day. Several times I awoke to Michael's voice and called out to him. In dreams I reenacted the killings I'd staged for him while he pleaded with me to stop. The old store-owner's face reddened as my arm tightened around his throat. The woman's white breasts spewed blood.
Late in the day voices awakened me, first distant but gradually louder until the speakers stood outside my grave.
"Here's where the blood stops." Andrews spoke. "Shit. He's in there."
I heard the sound of guns whisked from holsters.
"Don't kill him." Brother Matthew cried from a distance. "How can we be sure?"
"Get back up to your office, Brother. We'll handle this."
The abbot's footsteps grew more faint as he retreated from the crypt.
"All right, Brother Victor," Andrews shouted toward the mausoleum, "come out with your hands up, nice and slow."
For a moment I considered surrendering. When they took me up into the sunlight, I would disintegrate instantly. No more wandering, hiding, feeding. No more searching for a companion to make eternity worthwhile. But the temptation evaporated as suddenly as it had formed.
"You win, Andrews," I called. "Here I come."
I kicked open the iron gate. Facing me under the dim lights were Andrews and three other agents, all pointing revolvers at me. I approached one of the agents, a neophyte with smooth cheeks.
He backed up. "Don't take another step!"
&
nbsp; When I did, he fired. Stunned only momentarily, I grabbed the gun from his hand and crashed it against his skull. As they fired on me, I slammed the other two agents against the wall.
Andrews hit me several times while I handled the two, but I only flinched and the wounds closed immediately.
"You finally got what you wanted, Andrews." I faced him, smiling. "The serial killer. The vampire of Knoxville. Big accomplishment for you."
Andrews continued pointing his gun at me, but he looked worried. Sweat beaded on his forehead. "Reinforcements are on the way," he said as I stepped toward him.
"Too bad for them."
I took another step and he fired.
I didn't wince. "How many more bullets? One?" I couldn't resist laughing.
"What kind of a monster are you?" He backed away toward the open mausoleum. Now his gun trembled.
"Let me show you." After he fired his final bullet, I grabbed the weapon from him and tossed it on the stone floor. He tried to run, but I clutched him by the neck, flinging him to the floor. Straddling him, I pinned back his arms and lowered my face until our eyes were inches away. His were full of terror.
"Don't kill me. Please. I've got a family."
"That's a pity." I nuzzled his throat for a moment and then plunged my fangs into his jugular vein. He struggled against me longer than any of my prey ever had. Even his blood seemed to resist the force of my lips, barely trickling from his throat. But when he eventually succumbed, the blood gushed into my mouth, as robust as fine wine.
Since the other agents were still breathing, I snapped their necks. Then I waited in the dank crypt until the sun set, itching to leave, energized by Andrews' blood.
When I finally opened the door to the foyer, all was quiet, the abbot nowhere to be seen. Like a submissive lamb, he'd followed orders perfectly. He must not have heard the gunshots through the thick stone walls of the monastery. I stood outside his office door and heard him explaining everything to Brother George, who responded in gravelly monosyllables. When I opened the door, they looked up, stunned.
"Brother Victor." The abbot stood behind his desk. The blood drained from his face. He glanced at Brother George, who sat in an armchair with his legs crossed, smoking as usual.
"Mr. Andrews sent me up. He asked me to give you something."
Brother Matthew stared in horror as I approached his desk. My clothes were covered with blood and my fury, no doubt, fired my glance. Brother Matthew backed away from me toward the window. Brother George put out his cigarette and got up to rescue him.
"Now, Victor," Brother George said in his gravelly voice. "They're on to you. There's no escape. If this is a mental illness—"
The moment he touched my sleeve, I grabbed his throat, my eyes still searing into the abbot's, and squeezed the breath out of him while he thrashed about. When I released him he slumped to the floor.
"Oh God, God." The abbot frantically surveyed the room for a means to escape. Beads of sweat formed on his pink scalp. "Please, please, Victor. In the name of God," he said as I moved around the desk.
I pressed him against the window, both hands on what little neck emerged from his habit. He pounded my chest as I strangled him until his eyes rolled back in his head.
"So much for the power of your damned god!"
Rather than satisfying me, the killings only fueled my desire to strike out against the god who stole from me the only two creatures I had ever loved. I stormed to the recreation room, where the handful of monks who were not away at universities gathered for the social hour. Four old monks watched the blaring television in a corner of the large room. Two monks played pool, while another looked on from the bar. Not a single head turned when I entered; evidently they knew nothing about my crimes or the FBI's chase.
"Like a drink, Victor?" the scrawny bald monk at the bar said. Then he noticed my bloody clothes and his mouth gaped. In an instant I grasped him by the throat and snapped his spine.
The brothers playing pool had been too absorbed in their game to notice anything. While one, short and olive-skinned, leaned over the table to make a shot, I pounded his head against it with such force that he was dead in an instant. Dazed, his curly-headed opponent tried to fend me off with his pool cue. I snatched it from him, knocked him down, and punctured his heart with it. Blood rushed from his black robe like a geyser.
The monks near the television stared at me in horror, frozen in their chairs. Silver-haired Brother Augustine stood and, gathering his courage, reasoned with me, his frightened eyes darting to the bodies on the floor as he spoke. The other three rose. Two edged toward the door. I grabbed them by the throat and strangled them. When Augustine came at me I did the same to him, before turning to the last monk, the obese cook. His face pale, he backed away, clutching his chest as though his heart was failing. His eyes widened as I squeezed his throat, and he tore at my hands until I crushed his windpipe and he went limp.
I was met at the door by a new young monk, Brother Stephen, who saw the carnage and tried to flee.
"You don't think you can get away, do you?"
His terrified blue eyes looked past me at the door. Barely 20, he'd grown a soft reddish moustache after the monks teased him about his youth.
I brushed it with my fingers. Then I tore off his habit and flung his naked body to the floor.
"Oh God. Let me go, Brother Victor. Don't do this."
But without mercy, I rammed my cock into him, while he screamed in pain. When I was through, I bit into his tender throat and guzzled his blood, sweet as honey.
Maddened by a rage that had only gained momentum with the massacre, I rushed to the chapel, leaped onto the high altar and flung statues from their niches. When piles of plaster lay on the floor, fine white dust sifting down, painted hands and heads scattered over the marble, I wrenched out the tabernacle itself and hurled it into the sanctuary. The bronze doors flew open and released the ciborium, which spilled its store of wafers.
Like a wild ape, I scrambled up the reredos, tore off the crucifix that had taken possession of Michael, and hurled it across the chapel. In that moment, the room shook as though the crash had caused an earthquake. I dropped to the floor and searched the darkness, struggling to keep my balance in the trembling room.
I sensed a presence. "Who is it?" I shouted. "Who is it?" The corpus from the crucifix moved, becoming supple, taking on the color of flesh.
"Joshu! So now you come to me. To hell with you!"
"It's not too late, Victor." The man who rose before me, though radiating an eerie, unnatural light, was the Joshu I had known from life. Wrapped in the loincloth he wore at his execution, blood streaming from the thorns digging into his scalp, he stood before me in all his strength and beauty. "Heaven is not beyond you. I am not beyond you."
"So you haunt me?" I blurted. "You torture souls to bring them to salvation?"
"There's still hope, Victor."
"To hell with you, Joshu. You're a traitor!"
He looked at me as he had once looked at me, not in piety, not in pity, but in devotion, attachment. Then he turned and started back to the cross.
"Joshu, no!"
I ran to him, but my hands passed through his form, as though he were vapor. He mounted the cross and solidified once more into the immobile figure who embodied a sentimental artist's conception of him.
He had jabbed my heart again. He had betrayed me with full knowledge. How many times would we repeat this scene? I would never accept his conditions. To show him, to rebel against his god…that vow I renewed then and there.
IX
Night Again
Epilogue
« ^
My view of the above-ground tombs was partially obstructed by the tall magnolia in the front yard of the mansion. But through the second-story window I could discern a row of the white mausoleums across the street, protruding like teeth from a black mouth. A crowd near the iron cemetery gates gathered around a bearded tour guide dressed in a turtleneck and jeans, who g
estured toward the cemetery. I knew he was giving the speech he gave every night at the same hour. The day after my arrival in New Orleans I'd gone down to listen, hearing him explain the process of "falling through," whereby the decaying body, baked to ashes in the brick grave—in which the internal temperature often exceeded 200 degrees from the intense southern sun—gradually sifted through the stacked racks to the bottom of the grave, where it mingled with the dust of its ancestors. The skull and any bones still intact on the top shelf were swept to the floor when it came time to bury the next corpse. "Falling through" was the passage to an eternal family reunion of sorts.
I had risen an hour before from the mausoleum I had claimed in the cemetery, one belonging to a family whose line had died out, indicated by the last burial date (1935) engraved in the white door. No one would disturb my slumbers in that resting place in New Orleans's Garden District. But the hot chamber had made my sleep fitful, haunted by nightmares of Michael. Upon waking, rather than crossing to the antebellum mansion I'd purchased, I often strolled the streets of the District, brooding as I passed the grand porticos, the cypresses and oaks of other old estates.
Only a week had passed since my flight from the monastery, and I continued to replay in my mind the final scenes there—Michael's death, the massacre of monks, the demolition of the chapel's sanctuary. And of course, the apparition of Joshu, pale and bleeding, once again ready to comfort and to torture my soul.
Excited by his appearance, infuriated by the promise of renewed torment, I set out to conclude the ravage I had begun. With gasoline from the storeroom, I doused the volumes in the library and trailed a stream along the wooden floors throughout the buildings. Then I set the monastery ablaze. From the grounds I watched the flames shoot from exploding windows and lick the roof. Before long, the old rafters and supports burned and the structures, one by one, collapsed. The inferno heated the grounds like a desert sun.
Then, once more, I fled to a new grave, new nights, knowing not what cloister I would next find myself in, or even if I would seek another. But I swore to myself I would not abandon a predator's life until a companion promised me his eternity.
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