Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  When he pulled his mouth away from my throat, we both cried out with the same voice. It was the cry of the swan that rose from the lake when its mate was shot, the banshee cry that rocked the castle walls of Lusignan. A cry that turned every bone in my body into water.

  The Red Shoes

  We lay together by the fire until it burned down to ashes, Will’s coat draped over both of us us now like a blanket. I lay on my side, his body curled protectively against my back, his skin warmer than the fire in front of me. I told him about finding Dee’s lair and how he’d ejected Melusine and me into the water after he vanished.

  “He may not have been physically there at all,” Will said. “Over the years I’ve found that he’s able to project himself into different surroundings. He uses each place as an observation post.”

  “But then we’re no closer to finding him?”

  “There might be clues in what you saw there to find where he really is. It’s remarkable that you found one of his observation posts at all.”

  “It seems a small gain for the price.” I told him how I’d dragged Melusine to the island and watched her melt, and of the vision I’d had of Marguerite kneeling beside a pool looking down at Melusine. I showed him the Poland Spring bottle that held Melusine’s essence.

  “I suppose they could have been sisters,” he said. “Marguerite told me very little about her origins, but it would explain . . .” His voice trailed off. He was quiet for so long that I turned to look at him. He was staring up at the sky, but he looked as though he were contemplating scenes farther away than the stars.

  “Explain what?”

  “Remember when I told you that I followed Marguerite to France?” I nodded although he still wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t need my response, though, the story was already calling him. “When she left London, I went to her abandoned lodgings. There I found a painting of an old church in Paris. It was the only clue I had, so I went there. I spent weeks visiting that church, hoping that she would come, but there was no sign of her. Just as I was going to give up, I received a sign there that led me to another site. I thought she would be there, but instead I found another sign . . . that led me to another place. I believed that she had left these signs for me and devised the chase as a test of my love and that once I found her she would relent and grant me immortality. I followed her all over France. One of the places the signs led me to—not the last, but near to it—was the Château of Lusignan, the legendary home of Melusine.”

  “You think she left that sign because she was related to Melusine?” I asked.

  “It’s possible. Several of the places the signs led me to were springs . . . or sacred wells above which churches had been built. The place where I finally found Marguerite was a tower beside a sacred pool in which lived a creature who could grant eternal life . . . or take it away. I think that creature had been one of her sisters too.”

  I thought of my vision of Marguerite standing beside a pool, summoning a creature who lived beneath the water to make her mortal. “I think I dreamed of that place,” I told Will.

  “I dream about it every day when I close my eyes at dawn. It was the last place on earth where I was ever happy. I spent three days there with Marguerite, convinced that I had found the fountain of youth.” He laughed bitterly, a sound that made me feel suddenly cold. “On the third night she made me stay in the tower while she spent the night beside the pool. She came back exhausted and fell into a deep sleep. While she slept, I stole the silver box and the ring and took them to John Dee. I thought it was what I had to do to become immortal and live with her forever.”

  “But she had already become mortal,” I said. “That night must have been when she summoned the creature from the lake to make herself mortal. That’s the vision I saw. I could feel how frightened she was, but she did it because she loved you.”

  He looked at me for the first time since he had begun his story. “You must think I’m a fool.”

  “We all do foolish things. It seems to me you’ve suffered for your mistakes more—and for longer—than most.”

  He laughed. “Yes, that’s one way of looking at it. The night she found me in Paris she told me that she’d given up her immortality for my sake and she was pledged to destroy my kind was the worst moment of my then short life. I spent years—decades—searching for her. I waited for months in the church where I had found the first sign, but no sign appeared to me. Marguerite had told me that the path to the Summer Country always changed and that unless you started in the church and followed the signs, you could never find it, but still I tried to find the pool by which we had spent those three nights, but in vain. It was as if it had never existed. It was maddening. I truly thought at times that I had gone mad. I wondered if I had dreamt up Marguerite.” He cradled my face in his hand and looked into my eyes. “When you walked into my apartment, it was the first time in four hundred years that I felt anything resembling hope—hope that I could be mortal again.”

  His eyes burned into mine, but the hand that lay against my face was cold. My blood was already cooling in his veins. Soon he’d feel the cold of the grave again. It was unbearable to think of him suffering that.

  “Is there any reason why you can’t just continue to”—I struggled for the right phrase—“feed from me?”

  He stroked my hair away from my neck and touched his lips against the new wound there. “It will get harder and harder for me not to drink more each time. Already I’m addicted to your taste.” He ran his tongue over the bite marks and I felt a tingling sensation on my skin that crept into my veins. “And the more I drink from you, the more you will grow dependent on the venom I release into your system. Now it heals your skin and takes the pain away, but like an opiate you’ll want more and more of it. I’m afraid that vampire/human intimacy doesn’t usually end well for the human.”

  I thought of what it would be like to never walk outside during the day, to hunt for blood, and to live forever. Last night I had thought it didn’t sound so bad, but since then I’d experienced Melusine’s consciousness and felt how weary she was of eternal life. In the brief glimpse I’d had of Marguerite standing on the shore of the Swan Pool (as I’d begun to think of it), I’d felt her willingness to give up her immortality for one lifetime with the man she loved.

  “If I can get the box away from Dee, can you use it to make yourself mortal?” I asked.

  “I think so . . . only your friend Oberon won’t like the idea. He’s always blamed me for Marguerite’s decision to become a mortal. He won’t want me to have the box—even for a second.”

  I thought of what Dee had said about Oberon—that he wanted the box for himself to control the human race and to make the fey powerful once more. “Well, it won’t be up to him,” I said, clasping the hand Will held to my face with my own hand. “If he needs me to get the box, then he has to listen to what I want done with it. And what I want”—I pressed my lips against Will’s—“is to be able to do this over and over again.”

  “Again?” he asked, stroking his hand down the curve of my hip. “At this rate you’ll be a vampire in a week.” He wrapped his arms around me and drew me hard against him. “We’d better find that box soon.”

  Although I couldn’t see any change in the sky, Will knew when dawn was approaching. “We have to go,” he told me. “I have just enough time to get you back.”

  The fire had burnt down to ashes, but the four spiral eyes still glowed in the grass. I wasn’t sure at first how to put them out, but when I waved my hand over them, the silver faded to gray, then white, and then turned to mist, leaving no sign on the grass. Then I picked up the water bottle that held what was left of Melusine and turned to Will, wondering for the first time how exactly he was going to get me home.

  “The boat’s just around the bend,” he said.

  “Boat? I didn’t know you came on a boat.”

  “As I may have mentioned, I don’t fly. But I do keep a boat at the West Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin a
nd it’s very fast.”

  When we reached the dock, I saw what he meant. Every line of the sleek craft had been designed for speed. Even moored, it rode the waves impatiently. The name on the bow was Marguerite.

  Will helped me on board, then went down below. He came back with a pair of jeans and a striped fisherman’s sweater, which I put on over his shirt. He made a call on his cell phone before untying the boat and steering out into the bay. “I’ve told my driver to meet us at the Chelsea Piers. He’ll take you home from there. I regret that I won’t be able to escort you there myself.”

  “You’re very old-fashioned, you know,” I said, laughing and shaking my hair free in the sharp salt breeze. “I hardly need an escort.”

  “You tracked Dee down to one of his observation posts. He knows you’re getting closer. Once he realizes you’re still alive, he’ll try to kill you before you can find him again. I don’t like the thought of leaving you alone.”

  “I won’t be alone. My friend Jay’s at the house.” I laughed. “I guess he’s not the best protection.”

  Will shook his head. “Your friend Jay is very fond of you. I believe he would defend you to the death—only I’m afraid he wouldn’t last long against John Dee.”

  Will’s words came back to me when I got home. I called Jay’s name as I walked up the stairs, my voice echoing hollowly in the stairwell. No one was in the living room or the bedroom, or the little room that my father used as a study. The door to the bathroom was closed.

  “Jay?” I called, knocking on the door. “Are you in there?” Visions of Jay falling asleep in the bathtub, slipping under the water, made my hand clammy as I turned the knob. My eyes went straight to the old-fashioned claw-foot tub. The shower curtain was pushed back far enough that I could see it was empty. Someone must have used it recently, though, because there was a pile of wet towels on the floor. . . . Had Jay brought his own towels with him? I was pretty sure my father used only white towels, and these were a floral red and pink. And soaking. I noticed then that the shower curtain was moving slightly, stirred by a breeze from the open window above the tub, which was half-hidden by the shower curtain. Maybe water had gotten in . . . although it hadn’t rained on Governors Island last night . . . and Jay had put the towels on the floor to clean up.

  I closed the window, then knelt down to pick up the towels. The floral pattern on one turned into splotches of blood. I looked down at the floor. The tile was smeared with blood, even the grout was red with it.

  My heart pounding, I got to my feet and left the bathroom, still holding a bloody towel, then crossed my father’s living room to the phone. My idea was to call an ambulance, but when I got the phone in my hand, I realized I couldn’t call an ambulance for a bloody towel. Then I looked down at the phone and saw that the message light was on. I jabbed at the PLAY MESSAGES button with a shaking finger. The machine’s digitized voice told me I had twenty-two new messages.

  I let out a relieved breath when I heard Jay’s voice. He’s okay, I thought, as I listened to his characteristic hemming and hawing, maybe he’d cut himself shaving or . . . something . . . and was calling to tell me not to freak out when I saw all that blood in the bathroom. “Um . . . Garet . . . I’ve been trying your cell phone . . . yeah, this is Jay.” Jay, God bless him, was the master of the long rambling message. He’d once left me a fifteen-minute voice mail telling me the plot to a silent movie he’d just seen in his film class. “But I guess you’re not getting those messages, because I think we would have heard from you by now. So when you get this message . . .” A sound in the background interrupted him, something that sounded like a loudspeaker making an announcement in an echoing hallway. “Uh . . . yeah . . . well . . . you should get over here as soon as possible.” The message ended.

  “Where’s here, Jay?” I shouted at the phone while waiting for the next message on the queue. It was Jay again.

  “Hey, Garet, I realized after I hung up that if you hadn’t gotten my previous messages you might not know where I am . . . or what’s happened. Anyway, I’m at St. Vincent’s. It’s Beck—” His voice cracked on Becky’s name. “She tried to kill herself. Please get here as soon as you can.”

  I ran to the hospital without bothering to change my clothes. Only when I was riding the elevator up (to the psych ward—that’s where the information desk told me Becky was) did I realize I smelled like the East River, a swampy miasma that seemed to capture my situation perfectly. I was slowly being drowned. Dee had got to my father, and then he’d got to my best friend. Who would be next? Would I lose everyone and everything if I continued to try to stop him?

  I found Becky’s room, but when I first stepped in, I was sure I had gotten the number wrong. The person in the bed couldn’t be Becky. Sure, Becky was short, but this person barely swelled the tightly drawn sheets. And when had Becky ever lain that still? I’d shared a bed with her on lots of overnights and spent the night fending off her thrashing limbs. This person lay flat on her back, her white, muffled arms lying on top of the sheets on either side of her like large cotton Q-tips. Even her hair, which usually bristled with electricity, lay limp and dead against the white hospital sheets.

  But then I noticed the slumped form in the chair beside the bed and recognized Jay. The minute he saw me he sprang to his feet—Jay, who ambled through life, sprang to his feet and threw his arms around me.

  “Garet, thank God. I thought something had happened to you too.”

  “I’m okay. I lost my phone . . . and I couldn’t get home last night. . . . Damn, Jay! What happened? Is she going to be all right? Has she been unconscious since . . .” I looked down at Becky’s heavily swaddled wrists. The bandages went up to the crooks of her elbows.

  “She was out when I found her,” he said. “The EMTs said she’d lost a lot of blood, but she came to for a little while after they gave her a transfusion.”

  “You found her?” I looked hard at Jay. He’d fainted in biology class when we had to prick our fingers to test our blood types. I noticed dark stains on the knees of his jeans and a red smear on the cuff of his plaid flannel shirt. “Oh, Jay, I’m so sorry. What happened?”

  He shook his head, his hair swaying lankly against his pale cheeks. He had dark rings under his eyes. “She came over last night to talk about the record contract. I thought she’d come to argue with me some more, but she was . . . contrite.”

  “Contrite? Becky?”

  “Yeah, I know. It was really weird. She brought a bottle of wine and told me she was sorry she’d been trying to pressure me into signing the contract. She said it didn’t matter, that getting a big contract wasn’t worth it if it was going to screw up our friendship. That it was okay if we spent the rest of our lives warming up for bigger bands and playing small-town gigs. We drank the whole bottle and watched a movie on TV . . . The Red Shoes . . . which was funny, because it wasn’t in the newspaper listings or the cable guide. Becky was really excited because she said it was her favorite movie. She even insisted that we TiVo it for you. Becky opened up another bottle of wine that we found in your dad’s cupboard and we microwaved popcorn. It was nice . . . like those nights in high school when we used to stay up late watching old movies. It was foggy outside and Becky said that made it cozy—”

  “Foggy? It wasn’t foggy where I was,” I said, remembering the clear sky above Governors Island.

  Jay gave me a funny look. “I don’t know where you were last night, but it was foggy here in the Village. We couldn’t even see out the windows. Becky said it was a good thing we weren’t watching a horror movie . . . only, well I’d forgotten how creepy that movie is . . . you know that scene where the girl in the story puts on the red shoes and she dances herself to death? Well, Becky said sometimes she feels like she’s wearing those red shoes and she just wishes she could stop . . . stop touring, stop promoting the band, stop worrying over whether we were going to make it big or not. Just stop. And then when we got to the scene where Moira Shearer throws herself in front of the
train, I noticed that Becky was crying. I should have realized something was wrong, but somehow it all just made me tired. I kind of felt like I’d been dancing my feet off like Moira Shearer. I fell asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, Becky wasn’t there. I almost went back to sleep, but I heard a sound coming from the bathroom. A tapping noise. It got all confused in my head with the movie and I thought it was the ballerina from the story . . . dancing. It was so annoying I finally got up and went to see . . .”

  He covered his face with his hands as if he could block out the memory of what he’d seen in the bathroom.

  “The tapping came from the shower curtain blowing in the wind. Becky must have opened the window, because I’m pretty sure it was closed earlier. Maybe she thought about jumping, but not even Becky could fit out that tiny window. She’d found a razor blade in the medicine cabinet. She’d lined the floor with towels, so the blood wouldn’t get on the tile. You know how neat she can be.” Jay gulped air. I put my arm around him and patted his back until he was able to talk again. “I wrapped the towels around her wrists as tight as I could and called 911 right away. The EMT said that if they hadn’t gotten to her, she’d have been dead in another half hour. When I think that I almost turned over on the couch and went back to sleep—”