Divine Madness

by Melanie Jackson

  My aunt was less than thrilled, but she did her best. So did Cormac.

  Their marriage lasted only three days—well, three nights—longer. That’s how long it takes for a full transformation from a loving wife into a brain-sucking fiend. Cormac woke up with Mamita’s now very pointed, strawlike tongue probing his ear as she tried to get her first meal from his medulla oblongata. Fortunately she wasn’t very skilled and didn’t know her own strength, so Dad and Aunt Elena were able to get away without killing her. Dad always thought this was a good thing. Me? I’m not so sure. It isn’t that I’m big on spousal murder, but it sure might have spared me some grief later.

  Or not. It’s hard to know how things might have gone. I mean, you can bob and weave, but can you really escape Fate when she’s decided to punch out your lights?

  What did happen is that we left Mexico that very night, but didn’t get far over the U.S. border before Cormac came down with an ear infection that even the American doctors couldn’t cure. It left him deaf on the left side, and the high fever caused a kind of amnesia about our days in Mexico. Or so he always claimed.

  Cormac resigned from his job and we went back to Scotland to work the family croft with Uncle Seamus, who died soon after. Da refused to ever visit the Americas again. Cormac told everyone—including me—that my mother died in childbirth. Seeing how dreadful he looked and how eternally sad he was, no one ever doubted this, least of all me.

  I survived a tedious childhood, bored because I was too bright for my own good and had too few intellectual distractions. I learned to play guitar, and did well in school—very well. They had me skipping grades, setting my O-and A-levels at an early age. I could have attended any university but chose Edinburgh so I could stay close to Cormac who, though he had no specific health problem, seemed to grow frailer with each passing year. There was also a girlfriend, Moira, my freshman year, but she died in a car accident before things got too serious.

  I was young and my heart tender. I grieved for Moira for the better part of a year, but not as deeply as I should have—I see that now. Of course, there was no way to know that she would be the first and last girl I would have a long-term relationship with. Anyhow, I felt rootless afterward and wanted to get away.

  Things were actually going great for me and passing fair for Cormac, who turned easily to the family trade of crofting and seemed happy to leave his twentieth century career to his overachieving son who visited often on holidays.

  Like I said, I was growing ever more restless. My world felt too small. I was studying geology with an American called Dukie Deathergard whose father worked in some military-sponsored scientific think tank, and he was the one who lured me to North America. Deathergard—does Fate have a sense of humor, or what? Unlike his father, Dukie was a bit of a mystical poet and talked endlessly about the Four Corners area of the Southwestern U.S. where he had grown up. His love affair with the West was alluring for one whose horizons had been so limited. At his urging, I decided to spend my winter break looking at rock formations in the American West, maybe visiting a couple of grad schools, and paying my way—I naively assumed—by playing a bit of guitar on the streets as I sometimes did in Edinburgh. Cormac was nervous about these plans and sometimes muttered about having an ocean between us and disaster, but I put it down to the usual parental separation anxieties, nonspecific amorphous dread. Those of you with teens will know what I’m talking about. You’ll also be able to predict that I didn’t listen.

  I loved the States, just as Dukie had said. The rocks really were stupendous, and the country vast beyond all imagination to someone raised on a small island. We also had some fun in Las Vegas. I won often because I am good with cards. But that soon palled. I was young and easily distracted, and when a couple of the other blokes we were traveling with suggested a road trip down into Mexico, I went along without much hesitation. I had some idea about maybe getting a few lessons from real flamenco guitarists and maybe picking up some of that Latin charm that the ladies liked.

  That didn’t happen. Fate—being a bloody-minded bitch, as I have mentioned before—arranged for me to miss the guitarist I wanted to see. What I thought was a freak storm stranded him in Nogales and, quickly disgusted by Tijuana sex shows that attracted my mates, I went south to Cuatro Cienegas looking for the famous igneous intrusions that Cormac had told me about. I also knew I might still have family there—I had seen a photo with Mamita and her sister—and though she had never contacted me, I decided to see if Tia Elena was still alive.

  You can guess how it went. I didn’t see my aunt, but met Mamita at the first full moon. I was camping at the poza where she died and got a little too interested in some old weathered sticks that looked a lot like bones—and of course they were bones, her refuse pile of old kills that she had laid out like a spider’s web. Their crackling warned her I was near.

  That meeting was a shock on many levels, for her as well as for me, though she had always been certain that I was alive. Vampirism has not been kind to Mamita. Mexican vampires live longer and stronger than their European kin, but not gracefully. She had aged far beyond what any human should, and had lost all desire to be tidy in person or place. She had developed a bad habit of just flinging her kills into any nearby water. She also was not big on brushing and flossing.

  Her ugliness was shocking enough—she looks nothing like the photo I have of her—but while I was still sorting out the less-than-joyous news that this haglike monster pawing my arm was my supposedly dead mother, I met a hungry S.M. Less than delighted at Mamita’s reunion with her long-lost boy, he immediately made sure I got my own involuntary spinal tap—but not a lobotomy.

  That’s where he went wrong or Fate got careless. S.M. was having too much fun torturing me and trying to make me renounce my religion. Not that he really cared about my religion. It was just a game for him, an excuse that he knew would bother Mamita. I didn’t renounce my God that night. I might have, but it’s hard to do when you’re paralyzed and can’t speak.

  I thought for a while that my brain would implode and I would die from the horror of what was happening, but nothing that easy was in the cards. Maybe a brighter man would have known that this was the end of any chance at normal life, and killed himself when he had the opportunity, but I wasn’t so bright. I was young, and hope and fear were about equal in me then—and both were cruel.

  An agitated Mamita perched on a nearby rock and watched me being tortured. She said nothing, but apparently had one of her rare maternal impulses. While S.M. was grabbing a snack—another hiker who heard the muffled screaming and blundered in on our exciting tableau—she got me away from the poza. It was before the conversion was complete and my brains had been slurpeed. I owe her for that, because I would have ended up a crucified, lobotomized brain-sucker if she hadn’t been caring and lucid enough to intervene at that moment. Anyhow, this is what I refer to as my second birth and why S.M. is sort of my father. Of course, since he also made Mamita what she is, he’s a sort of grandfather too. I have often wondered what a geneticist would make of us, though I’ve never been willing to actually find out. I work for the government now—what I told Ninon about NASA was sort of true, though not what my job actually is. Was. So secret that I still can’t discuss it. Suffice it to say that I know what happens when the Secrets Act gets invoked. At best, governments are self-serving. At worst—and R&D programs are the worst—they are monsters without consciences who wouldn’t hesitate to make me into a lab rat if they thought I had any useful potential for the weapons program. I would kill or die to avoid that. Hell, I’d probably kill you if I had to. Sorry, but it’s true.

  If I ever get a tattoo—not likely, as I have enough scars—I think I’ll ask to have a 444 put on my chest: two-thirds of 666. While I often feel far from a human, I’m really only about two-thirds corrupt. The remainder is—was—still a human being. Or at least humane. The rest of me isn’t so nice, of course. I’ve been fairly kind in the portrait I’ve painted of myself up ’ti
l now because of telling the story through Ninon’s eyes. I know better though, and so should you.

  That trip I gained a compulsion to drink blood, an ability to hypnotize with my voice, and vampire-induced infertility. In case I was ever insane enough to think of passing this genetic curse on to my children, the option was taken from me when S.M. injected his venom into my spine. I did see a doctor about this at one point when I began having some very graphic dreams about dead babies that was putting me off sex, and found out then that my semen is a dead zone. That was a lot to gain and lose before my twenty-first birthday. I sometimes meet up with the ghost of my former self in dreams, the me I might have been if I had never gone to Mexico. Though I tell myself that I am adjusted to my circumstance, I still wake up sometimes feeling wistful and lost, though I can no longer truly imagine what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Scotland with my father and raised sheep.

  To this day my university friends have no idea how bloody lucky they were that they found their own way home from that trip. My control wasn’t great around the third day after S.M.’s spinal surgery, and I’m not sure what I would have done if Mamita had not kept me confined and brought me animal blood to drink. As it was, all they got was Montezuma’s revenge and a case of the clap that could be treated with antibiotics.

  Eventually I sort of recovered my mind and strength. Dazed and feeling like a pariah, I went back to Edinburgh and, over Cormac’s objections, I started the process of transferring to an American school. Dukie’s father was a real help. I was offered a full scholarship to—should I name the school? Would they be proud of their alumnus? Probably not. I knew that I could not take my disease and soul-shame back to live at home where it would hurt my father every time he looked at me. Besides, the Americans really, really wanted me—and not just because I can count cards and do other numeric tricks.

  I’ve done my best through the years to ignore the contagion inside me, but my body doesn’t always see things my way. It goes without saying that I’ve had some holes in my life since then, and sadly none of the usual things can plug them. I can’t get truly drunk or stoned, though I have really, really tried and consumed almost every outlawed substance, natural and man-made. The best I can achieve is a bit of buzz from jimsonweed, perhaps because it grows near Cuatro Cienegas.

  As I mentioned, I won’t do relationships, since I tend to have strong sanguinary impulses first thing in the morning. They come with the first erection of the day, and coffee doesn’t help. Also, Mamita has managed to free herself from her poza and occasionally comes to visit, and she never phones ahead so that I can get girlfriends safely away. As with many mothers, she seems to feel that none of these girls are good enough for her son.

  I spent some time in therapy, of course, but it didn’t do much to help my violent impulses and dreams. Probably because I had to lie to my therapist—after all, I didn’t want him to think I was insane. Sadly, it turns out that I have more snakes in my brain than Medusa, and some are hydras that multiply when you chop off their heads. You can’t slay them all, not at one hundred and twenty-five bucks an hour, especially when you have a high-level security clearance that’s under constant review. So instead I write novels under a couple of pen names. Paranormal fiction, they call them. Really, they’re more autobiographical. That’s where I exorcise my demons. I don’t think my employers know anything about this. I’ve been at pains to keep the hobby from them. Still, even if they do find out, it won’t be a breach of national security.

  So without drugs and relationships—and no urge to play racket ball or golf—that pretty much left work to fill the void. And I was good at that, since I had so much time to devote to it. I did have a problem with blood sweats near the full of the moon. They were annoying and leaked reddish fluid all over my lab coats and scared my colleagues who thought—and they were right—that I have a blood disorder. They’d have preferred it if I left, but thanks to the higher-ups, and to the fact that my routine physicals—always scheduled for the evening—never turned up anything unusual, they couldn’t make me.

  But that seems to be over now. I saw this morning through without any urge to rip out someone’s throat, and my white shirt is still white in spite of the moon being as round as a pie.

  Which brings me to Ninon, the midwife—she would hate to be called mother—of my latest rebirth. And anyway, since I turned her, I guess in this analogy she might be considered my daughter. Whatever her relationship to me, she is a complete enigma. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. She’s also the scariest. You think I’m kidding? You don’t know her then—though you should by now, if I’ve done my job as a writer.

  So, to sum up, my rebirths have changed me. Now I can live for longer, for stronger—like Mamita—and because of Ninon, forever. Probably. Unless this wizard catches up with us.

  I’ve heard about this Saint Germain guy from other sources, and I know there has to be more to him than long life and magic tricks. Whatever it is, it’ll be bad. I don’t think Ninon’s trying to gaslight me. If anything, she’s played her fear down. She barely broke a sweat when she was pinned under S.M. and he is the meanest thing I’ve ever encountered. And she’s told me some stuff about this Dark Man—Saint Germain’s father and her own childhood death god—and though my skin was creeping as she described him stripping her and then chaining her down for electrocution, she was utterly calm. So, if this Saint Germain can make her wary, I know we’re in for one hell of ride.

  But that’s okay. Maybe it’s leftover buzz from the lightning strike that ended my blood craving, but I feel ready to take on anything. However, if you have a weak stomach, my apologies. Best exit the story now.

  For those who like thrill rides, fasten your seatbelts. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re in for a rocky ride.

  I have met people who worshipped their broken hearts as a sign that they are superior to others because they possess such great emotion. They feed these hearts with the incense of sorrowful or wrathful thoughts, until this smoke itself becomes an addiction and they have no more reason but only their fear and rage.

  —Ninon de Lenclos

  Every action we take, everything we do, is either a victory or defeat in the struggle to become what we want to be.

  —Ninon de Lenclos

  The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

  —Ninon de Lenclos

  The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

  —Ninon de Lenclos

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Okay, we now return to our regularly scheduled program.

  I felt calm as I waited for Ninon outside her hotel, my anxiety worn off the lining of my mental brake pads that had only barely stopped my earlier panic from roaring across the steep downward grade toward insanity. What can I say? S.M. affects me that way—especially when the bastard is crawling around in my skull, committing acts of vandalism. I knew that I’d have to have some brain repairs, and soon. But for the moment I was enjoying the absence of fear and the floating feeling that followed my death by electrocution. As I said, the only substance that can still get me high is jimsonweed, and for it to have any effect I have to smoke a joint about the size of a grande burrito, or eat an entire pan of brownies so fibrous they also serve as a colon cleanser. I don’t do that often. This buzz was a rare treat.

  The Hotel Ybarra had been invaded by tourists while we were out dying. People were in a party mood, but the Cheers bar it still was not, so I listened carefully to the gossip while I waited for Ninon to pack up her cat. It was easy; my hearing had always been good, but now it was exquisite.

  There were a few tourists come to see the wonders of the pozas and a couple of boutique owners—women in their forties, I would estimate—looking for inexpensive imports that were colorful and yet still cheap. They had had a couple of margaritas to go with their new Vulcan-style face-lifts, and it was clear their credit cards were set to stun. They were going home with new stock, or they’d die trying. There
was also another Anglo, a woman recently betrayed by her “rat bastard” husband. She had no credit limit and was in monetary kill mode. Her husband—rat bastard or otherwise—should be grateful that she discovered his infidelity while in Mexico. The local jewelry was fairly inexpensive, and even if she bought out the town, this would be marginally less expensive than paying for a divorce in California where they lived and had liberal community property laws.

  The odd weather was mentioned in passing, but of vampires or death gods, there wasn’t a single murmur. That was good. I hoped Mamita had the sense to get out of town for a while. I knew that we weren’t being offered a clean escape route, a get-out-of-jail-free card from the mess we were in with either S.M. or this Saint Germain, but what we had been presented with was a quick getaway and a small detour from a really bad reality, a back road that might allow us to find a more advantageous position from which to fight the next battle. Clearly research and strategic planning were in order, and we’d do that better away from here.

  I thought it a good thing that I’d brought my portable computer along. Aside from being able to write, I figured that the internet might actually be of some help. I hadn’t had the thing open in days. Frankly, I’d been avoiding e-mail, though the town had an internet café I could have used. Partly, the avoidance was the fact that my mail is almost always disappointing. My colleagues aren’t the kind to write casually—too many security hoops to jump through even on a home computer—and just how much does any man’s penis need to lengthen, strengthen, be pumped up, or implanted? And, frankly, if you’ve seen one lesbian coed slumber party, you’ve seen them all. Of course, that wasn’t the main reason I had been avoiding my in-box.

  I was also dreading some bad news. I knew that my career at NASA was probably over. I’d been granted leave to visit Cormac and then, after the funeral, more time off to wrap up family affairs in Mexico. But vacation was long over and I hadn’t reported in. So if not at that moment, then the next time they performed a routine security check on their AWOL employee, my termination would be carried through. I would possibly be declared persona non grata and probably have my U.S. visa revoked. They might do worse if they found out what I’d been doing while on vacation—like consorting with vampires and planning the killing of a vampire god. My explanation that these creatures were not really alive, or even persons, probably wouldn’t help much either. And I am sure that an appeal for sympathy for my own vampirism would only get me labeled a security risk of the highest order. If they didn’t believe me. If they did believe—I’d probably end up as an experiment in some bioweapons research unit. Of the two, being thought insane was better.