by Rice, Anne
“But that can’t hurt you, David,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said. “But there are other things …”
Claudia laughed. “She’s in love with you, you know.”
“You would have died of the plague,” I said.
“Maybe it was not my time.”
“Do you believe that, that we have our time?”
“No, actually I don’t,” she said. “Maybe it was just easier to blame you for everything. I never really knew right from wrong, you see.”
“You had time to learn,” I said.
“So have you, much more time than I ever had.”
“Thank God you’re taking me,” I whispered. I was standing on my feet. “I’m so afraid,” I said. “Just plain ordinary afraid.”
“One less burden to the hospital,” Claudia said with a ringing laugh, her little feet bobbing over the edge of the chair. She had on the fancy dress again, with the embroidery. Now that was an improvement.
“Gretchen the beautiful,” I said. “It makes a flame in your cheeks when I say that.”
She smiled as she brought my left arm over her shoulder now, and kept her right arm locked around my waist. “I’ll take care of you,” she whispered in my ear. “It isn’t very far.”
Beside her little car, in the bitter wind, I stood holding that stinking organ, and watching the yellow arc of piss, steam rising from it as it struck the melting snow. “Lord God,” I said. “That feels almost good! What are human beings that they can take pleasure in such dreadful things!”
FOURTEEN
At some point I began drifting in and out of sleep, aware that we were in a little car, and that Mojo was with us, panting heavily by my ear, and that we were driving through wooded snow-covered hills. I was wrapped in a blanket, and feeling miserably sick from the motion of the car. I was also shivering. I scarcely remembered our return to the town house, and the finding of Mojo, waiting there so patiently. I was vaguely sensible that I could die in this gasoline-driven vehicle if another vehicle collided with it. It seemed painfully real, real as the pain in my chest. And the Body Thief had tricked me.
Gretchen’s eyes were set calmly on the winding road ahead, the dappled sunlight making a soft lovely aureole about her head of all the fine little hairs which had come loose from her thick coiled braid of hair, and the smooth pretty waves of hair growing back from her temples. A nun, a beautiful nun, I thought, my eyes closing and opening as if of their own volition.
But why is this nun being so good to me? Because she is a nun?
It was quiet all around us. There were houses in the trees, set upon knolls, and in little valleys, and very close to one another. A rich suburb, perhaps, with those small-scale wooden mansions rich mortals sometimes prefer to the truly palatial homes of the last century.
At last we entered a drive beside one of these dwellings, passing through a copse of bare-limbed trees, and came to a gentle halt beside a small gray-shingled cottage, obviously a servants’ quarters or guesthouse of sorts, at some remove from the main residence.
The rooms were cozy and warm. I wanted to sink down into the clean bed, but I was too soiled for that, and insisted that I be allowed to bathe this distasteful body. Gretchen strongly protested. I was sick, she said. I couldn’t be bathed now. But I refused to listen. I found the bathroom and wouldn’t leave it.
Then I fell asleep again, leaning against the tile as Gretchen filled the tub. The steam felt sweet to me. I could see Mojo lying by the bed, the wolflike sphinx, watching me through the open door. Did she think he looked like the devil?
I felt groggy and impossibly weak and yet I was talking to Gretchen, trying to explain to her how I had come to be in this predicament, and how I had to reach Louis in New Orleans so that he could give me the powerful blood.
In a low voice, I told her many things in English, only using French when for some reason I couldn’t find the word I wanted, rambling on about the France of my time, and the crude little colony of New Orleans where I had existed after, and how wondrous this age was, and how I’d become a rock star for a brief time, because I thought that as a symbol of evil I’d do some good.
Was this human to want her understanding, this desperate fear that I would die in her arms, and no one would ever know who I’d been or what had taken place?
Ah, but the others, they knew, and they had not come to help me.
I told her all about this too. I described the ancients, and their disapproval. What was there that I did not tell her? But she must understand, exquisite nun that she was, how much I’d wanted as the rock singer to do good.
“That’s the only way the literal Devil can do good,” I said. “To play himself in a tableau to expose evil. Unless one believes that he is doing good when he is doing evil, but that would make a monster out of God, wouldn’t it?—the Devil is simply part of the divine plan.”
She seemed to hear these words with critical attention. But it didn’t surprise me when she answered that the Devil had not been part of God’s plan. Her voice was low and full of humility. She was taking my soiled clothes off me as she spoke, and I don’t think she wanted to speak at all, but she was trying to calm me. The Devil had been the most powerful of the angels, she said, and he had rejected God out of pride. Evil could not be part of God’s plan.
When I asked her if she knew all the arguments against this, and how illogical it was, how illogical all of Christianity was, she said calmly that it didn’t matter. What mattered was doing good. That was all. It was simple.
“Ah, yes, then you understand.”
“Perfectly,” she said to me.
But I knew that she did not.
“You are good to me,” I said. I kissed her gently on the cheek, as she helped me into the warm water.
I lay back in the tub, watching her bathe me and noting that it felt good to me, the warm water against my chest, the soft strokes of the sponge on my skin, perhaps better than anything I had endured so far. But how long the human body felt! How strangely long my arms. An image came back to me from an old film—of Frankenstein’s monster lumbering about, swinging his hands as if they didn’t belong at the ends of his arms. I felt as if I were that monster. In fact, to say that I felt entirely monstrous as a human is to hit the perfect truth.
Seems I said something about it. She cautioned me to be quiet. She said that my body was strong and fine, and not unnatural. She looked deeply worried. I felt a little ashamed, letting her wash my hair, and my face. She explained it was the sort of thing which a nurse did all the time.
She said she had spent her life in the foreign missions, nursing the sick, in places so soiled and ill equipped that even the overcrowded Washington hospital seemed like a dream compared to them.
I watched her eyes move over my body, and then I saw the flush in her cheeks, and the way that she looked at me, overcome with shame, and confusion. How curiously innocent she was.
I smiled to myself, but I feared she would be hurt by her own carnal feelings. What a cruel joke on us both that she found this body enticing. But there was no doubt that she did, and it stirred my blood, my human blood, even in my fever and exhaustion. Ah, this body was always struggling for something.
I could barely stand as she dried me all over with the towel, but I was determined to do it. I kissed the top of her head, and she looked up at me, in a slow vague way, intrigued and mystified. I wanted to kiss her again, but I hadn’t the strength. She was very careful in drying my hair, and gentle as she dried my face. No one had touched me in this manner in a very long time. I told her I loved her for the sheer kindness of it.
“I hate this body so much; it’s hell to be in it.”
“It’s that bad?” she asked. “To be human?”
“You don’t have to humor me,” I said. “I know you don’t believe the things I’ve told you.”
“Ah, but our fantasies are like our dreams,” she said with a serious little frown. “They have meaning.”
Suddenly, I saw my reflection in the mirror of the medicine cabinet—this tall caramel-skinned man with thick brown hair, and the large-boned soft-skinned woman beside him. The shock was so great, my heart stopped.
“Dear God, help me,” I whispered. “I want my body back.” I felt like weeping.
She urged me to lie down against the pillows of the bed. The warmth of the room felt good. She began to shave my face, thank God! I hated the feeling of the hair on it. I told her I’d been clean-shaven, as all men of fashion were, when I died, and once we were made vampires we remained the same forever. We grew whiter and whiter, that was true, and stronger and stronger; and our faces became smoother. But our hair was forever the same length, and so were our fingernails and whatever beard we had; and I had not had that much to begin with.
“Was this transformation a painful thing?” she asked.
“It was painful because I fought. I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t really know what was being done to me. It seemed some monster out of the medieval past had captured me, and dragged me out of the civilized city. You must remember in those years that Paris was a wonderfully civilized place. Oh, you would think it barbaric beyond description if you were spirited there now, but to a country lord from a filthy castle, it was so exciting, what with the theatres, and the opera, and the balls at court. You can’t imagine. And then this tragedy, this demon coming out of the dark and taking me to his tower. But the act itself, the Dark Trick? It isn’t painful, it’s ecstasy. And then your eyes are opened, and all humanity is beautiful to you in a way that you never realized before.”
I put on the clean skivvy shirt which she gave to me, and climbed under the covers, and let her bring the covers up to my chin. I felt as if I were floating. Indeed, this was one of the most pleasant feelings I’d experienced since I’d become mortal—this feeling like drunkenness. She felt my pulse and my forehead. I could see the fear in her, but I didn’t want to believe it.
I told her that the real pain for me as an evil being was that I understood goodness, and I respected it. I had never been without a conscience. But all my life—even as a mortal boy—I had always been required to go against my conscience to obtain anything of intensity or value.
“But how? What do you mean?” she asked.
I told her that I had run off with a band of actors when I was a boy, committing an obvious sin of disobedience. I had committed the sin of fornication with one of the young women of the troupe. Yet those days, acting on the village stage and making love, had seemed of inestimable value! “You see, that’s when I was alive, merely alive. The trivial sins of a boy! After I was dead, every step I took in the world was a commitment to sin, and yet at every turn I saw the sensual and the beautiful.”
How could this be, I asked her. When I’d made Claudia a child vampire, and Gabrielle, my mother, into a vampire beauty, I’d been reaching again for an intensity! I’d found it irresistible. And in those moments no concept of sin made sense.
I said more, speaking again of David and his vision of God and the Devil in the café, and of how David thought that God was not perfect, that God was learning all the time, and that, indeed, the Devil learned so much that he came to despise his job and beg to be let out of it. But I knew I had told her all these things before in the hospital when she’d been holding my hand.
There were moments when she stopped her fussing with the pillows, and with pills and glasses of water, and merely looked at me. How still her face was, how emphatic her expression, the dark thick lashes surrounding her paler eyes, her large soft mouth so eloquent of kindness.
“I know you are good,” I said. “I love you for it. Yet I would give it to you, the Dark Blood, to make you immortal—to have you with me in eternity because you are so mysterious to me and so strong.”
There was a layer of silence around me, a dull roaring in my ears, and a veil over my eyes. I watched motionless as she lifted a syringe, tested it apparently by squirting a tiny bit of silver liquid into the air, and then put the needle into my flesh. The faint burning sensation was very far away, very unimportant.
When she gave me a large glass of orange juice I drank this greedily. Hmmm. Now this was something to taste, thick like blood, but full of sweetness and strangely like devouring light itself.
“I’d forgotten all about such things,” I said. “How good it tastes, better than wine, really. I should have drunk it before. And to think I would have gone back without knowing it.” I sank down into the pillow and looked up at the bare rafters of the low sloping ceiling. Nice clean little room, very white. Very simple. Her nun’s cell. Snow was falling gently outside the little window. I counted twelve little panes of glass.
I was slipping in and out of sleep. I vaguely recall her trying to make me drink soup and that I couldn’t do it. I was shaking, and terrified that those dreams would come again. I didn’t want Claudia to come. The light of the little room burnt my eyes. I told her about Claudia haunting me, and the little hospital.
“Full of children,” she said. Hadn’t she remarked on this before. How puzzled she looked. She spoke softly of her work in the missions … with children. In the jungles of Venezuela and in Peru.
“Don’t speak anymore,” she said.
I knew I was frightening her. I was floating again, in and out of darkness, aware of a cool cloth on my forehead, and laughing again at this weightless feeling. I told her that in my regular body I could fly through the air. I told her how I had gone into the light of the sun above the Gobi Desert.
Now and then, I opened my eyes with a start, shaken to discover myself here. Her small white room.
In the burnished light, I saw a crucifix on the wall, with a bleeding Christ; and a statue of the Virgin Mary atop a small bookcase—the old familiar image of the Mediatrix of All Graces, with her bowed head and outstretched hands. Was that Saint Rita there with the red wound in her forehead? Ah, all the old beliefs, and to think they were alive in this woman’s heart.
I squinted, trying to read the larger titles on the books on her shelves: Aquinas, Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin. The sheer effort of interpreting these various names to mean Catholic philosophers exhausted me. Yet I read other titles, my mind feverish and unable to rest. There were books on tropical diseases, childhood diseases, on child psychology. I could make out a framed picture on the wall near the crucifix, of veiled and uniformed nuns together, perhaps at a ceremony. If she was one of them, I couldn’t tell, not with these mortal eyes, and hurting the way they were. The nuns wore short blue robes, and blue and white veils.
She held my hand. I told her again I had to go to New Orleans. I had to live to reach my friend Louis, who would help me recover my body. I described Louis to her—how he existed beyond the reach of the modern world in a tiny unlighted house behind his ramshackle garden. I explained that he was weak, but he could give me the vampiric blood, and then I’d be a vampire again, and I’d hunt the Body Thief and have my old form restored to me. I told her how very human Louis was, that he would not give me much vampiric strength, but I could not find the Body Thief unless I had a preternatural body.
“So this body will die,” I said, “when he gives the blood to me. You are saving it for death.” I was weeping. I realized I was speaking French, but it seemed that she understood, because she told me in French that I must rest, that I was delirious.
“I am with you,” she said in French, very slowly and carefully. “I will protect you.” Her warm gentle hand was over mine. With such care, she brushed the hair back from my forehead.
Darkness fell around the little house.
There was a fire burning in the little hearth, and Gretchen was lying beside me. She had put on a long flannel gown, very thick and white; and her hair was loose, and she was holding me as I shivered. I liked the feel of her hair against my arm. I held on to her, frightened I’d hurt her. Over and over again, she wiped my face with a cool cloth. She forced me to drink the orange juice or cold water. The hours of the night were dee
pening and so was my panic.
“I won’t let you die,” she whispered in my ear. But I heard the fear which she couldn’t disguise. Sleep rolled over me, thinly, so that the room retained its shape, its color, its light. I called upon the others again, begging Marius to help me. I began to think of terrible things—that they were all there as so many small white statues with the Virgin and with Saint Rita, watching me, and refusing to help.
Sometime before dawn, I heard voices. A doctor had come—a tired young man with sallow skin and red-rimmed eyes. Once again, a needle was put into my arm. I drank greedily when the ice water was given me. I could not follow the doctor’s low murmuring, nor was I meant to understand it. But the cadences of the voice were calm and obviously reassuring. I caught the words “epidemic” and “blizzard” and “impossible conditions.”
When the door shut, I begged her to come back. “Next to your beating heart,” I whispered in her ear as she lay down at my side. How sweet this was, her tender heavy limbs, her large shapeless breasts against my chest, her smooth leg against mine. Was I too sick to be afraid?
“Sleep now,” she said. “Try not to worry.” At last a deep sleep was coming to me, deep as the snow outside, as the darkness.
“Don’t you think it’s time you made your confession?” asked Claudia. “You know you really are hanging by the proverbial thread.” She was sitting in my lap, staring up at me, hands on my shoulders, her little upturned face not an inch from mine.
My heart shrank, exploding in pain, but there was no knife, only these little hands clutching me, and the perfume of crushed roses rising from her shimmering hair.
“No. I can’t make my confession,” I said to her. How my voice trembled. “Oh, Lord God, what do you want of me!”
“You’re not sorry! You’ve never been sorry! Say it. Say the truth! You deserved the knife when I put it through your heart, and you know it, you’ve always known it!”
“No!”
Something in me broke as I stared down at her, at the exquisite face in its frame of fine-spun hair. I lifted her, and rose, placing her in the chair before me and I dropped to my knees at her feet.
