Bitter drink in hand, Agnes exited the building and walked to the nondescript shed on the minuscule side lawn. It was the kind of shed one would expect to be filled with an assortment of yard and garden tools. Which, to Agnes’s way of thinking was a noble purpose for a shed. Gardening was a fine pursuit, one of inestimably more value than whatever foolishness was about to transpire this evening in the bowels of the Earth.
As a general rule, she did not approve of dealings that took place below the ground. Let us out with it! Fresh air and God above as we bring the King to account on the field of Runnymede.
As she descended the steps, she carried the cup and saucer in the palm of her left hand and steadied it with the other. She was careful not to brush against the bare earthen walls. “Bloody undercroft!” she muttered.
At the bottom of the stairs was a strange kind of airlock. It was mounted into a sphere of transparent material that formed the underground reception area. She activated it with her elbow and it dilated obediently. Although the aesthetic of this place was deeply abhorrent to her, she took a moment to marvel at its construction as she walked across the steel grating to her desk.
Although the specifics of the construction were beyond her, the architect had explained it to her simply enough. Instead of going to the trouble of excavating a hole in the Earth, they had merely inserted a tube and blown a bubble of molten material with extremely high pressure. Molten material under high pressure was how the Earth reconfigured itself, after all, the man had added with an excitement that Agnes could not quite understand. She deduced that as a child he had been allowed one too many toy bulldozers.
But as the carbon-fiber material cooled, he had further explained, it formed a wall many, many times stronger than steel.
“Ah, yes,” Agnes had thought, “steel: a material valued for its strength rather than its beauty.”
The man in the hard hat had droned on. Edwin had included some rather exacting and unique specifications for this build, but that was the beauty of this design. Flexible, you see.
Agnes had glazed over shortly after that. As she seated herself at her desk and sipped her coffee, she thought it wasn’t all that bad. If only one could find a way to hang a few pictures on these curved walls.
Of course, the music helped. In the main chamber, Edwin was listening to Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello in D Major.
It was rare enough that Edwin listened to music, and Agnes took this as a good sign. Even with the passage of years, Agnes had always seen Edwin Windsor as a thing unfinished. Highly accomplished in one or two dimensions but still waiting for his growth spurts in others.
It was a terribly appropriate choice of music, she thought. Spare, mathematical, heartbreakingly beautiful. She had always thought of this, the sixth of Bach’s concertos for solo cello, as one of the few places where the composer’s relentless intellect gave way to the deep well of feeling within him. It was still, strictly speaking, counterpoint, but something about it suggested that the great composer let himself go a little bit, that he had loosened his collar, tilted his powdered wig, and really let it fly.
A great man of mental force and restraint, giving in to passion. She hoped she would live long enough to see it happen with Edwin.
The meeting room was furnished simply enough. A conversational grouping included two couches facing each other and a few chairs. Floor-to-ceiling screens that were lit from behind filled the room with a soft glow. Edwin sat on one of the couches, eyes closed and with his back to the door.
A square room was an acoustic nightmare, but this room of advanced materials backed by rammed earth was a marvel, and the acoustics where Edwin sat were almost perfect. He had suspected that sound would be a excellent in the completed space, so in concord with Agnes’s artistic notions, Edwin had had a stereo installed. Unlike so many other things in Edwin’s life, he found that it was well worth the trouble. Perhaps he would continue to use the room as a place of solitude even if the evening’s meeting turned out to be an utter farce.
And so, Agnes and Edwin waited for their guests as the recording of the cello growled and soared through the underground vaults. Despite the coffee, Agnes found herself nodding, nearly napping, as her mind wandered with the music. What devotion, what cultivation was required for the performer to fully realize such a difficult piece. Was it not the work of a lifetime? Indeed, to create such beauty, one lifetime scarcely seemed enough.
Agnes awoke with a start. The coffee was cold, the hour was late, and there in the lobby stood a man and a woman. Agnes had no idea how long they had been there.
“Bon soir, Madame. My name is M’sieur DeChevue. I have an appointment.”
“Of course, M’sieur,” Agnes said, waking up with instinctive good manners. “If you will have a seat, Mr. Windsor will be with you in a moment.”
“This is ridiculous! What else could he be doing? He knows we are coming,” Madeleine snapped in a thick French accent.
“My dear young lady, there are conventions that must be observed,” Agnes said, indicating the chairs on the far side of the underground sphere. DeChevue frowned slightly but gave a small half-bow and was seated. Madeleine pouted and also sat.
As the music ended on its final, guttural note, Agnes said, “Mr. Windsor will see you now.”
“Madeleine, you will wait here,” DeChevue said.
“But you never let me go anywhere.”
“I have let you come here, and that is sufficient. Stay seated, and make no trouble.”
DeChevue entered the room. His long coat, which was draped across his shoulders, flowed behind him like a cape. An absurd effect, Edwin thought. If clothes make the man, Edwin was moved to wonder, then what has this horrible affectation made of this individual?
The Frenchman threw his coat-cape onto the sofa and draped himself across one of the leather chairs sideways and contemptuously. He flipped his long hair back from his face and considered his surroundings with an air of lordly contempt. Edwin, a patient man, said nothing.
DeChevue still hadn’t looked directly at his host. He said, “If there is one thing that living for centuries has taught me, it is that you must change with the times or you will, no matter how powerful your abilities may be, or how beautiful and unchanging your outward form...” He paused, using an effete rolling gesture of both wrists to indicate himself. Then he continued: “You will grow old and stagnate.”
Still, Edwin said nothing.
“The music, I mean. Bach,” he said, giving the German name a dismissive phlegminess. “Of course, that sort of thing had its day, but that day passed with the Glorious Revolution. No more need for all that sacred stuff, I tell you. Glorious rationality. For everything a solution. No more mysteries, isn’t that correct? In fact, the only mysteries left are death and, well...” Again, he made an odd rolling flourish with his hands and wrists. “And the mystery of my kind.”
Edwin remembered how happy he had been, just moments before, listening to Bach.
DeChevue continued. “Of course, you and your kind are so young, so transient, you can know nothing of patience. So almost everything is a mystery to you. Including the secret history of the world. For example, did you know that the good Doctor Guillotin developed his device as a wholesale method for exterminating vampires? Yes, in times of chaos, we run free. Or, I should say, we did. Such glorious days those were. Did you know that up until Guillotin’s time, almost all vampires had been aristocrats? Of course not. You could not have known this. It is not a defect of the mind, you understand; you simply do not have the length of life required to understand the sweep and weave of history.”
Edwin pressed his lips together, as a reminder to say nothing. Let the silence do its work, Edwin thought, and he will give you all the information you could ever want. More, in fact. This was already much, much more information than Edwin had wanted. Was this what eternal life did to a person? Make it impossible to get to the point?
“Oh, foolish mortal, why else would they call that pe
riod The Terror? From fear of simple murder? No, from fear of that most perfect terror in the night. Nosferatu, Das Vampire. To put it most modestly, Monsieur, they feared moi.” DeChevue held the pause dramatically, but Edwin still did not react. “And my kind, of course. My kind. If not for Napoleon . . .” He trailed off with a wave of the hand.
This pause brought Edwin hope. He broke his silence, saying, “A revolution is a terrible thing, of course, contained only by the fact that one half of the poor can always be hired to kill the other.”
DeChevue’s laughter rang strangely throughout the acrylic, underground bubble. “How true. How true. You see,” DeChevue said to the empty room, “we were wise to have this meeting.”
When DeChevue referred to himself with the royal ‘we’, Edwin had never been less sure of an individual’s wisdom.
“Tell me, Windsor. What manner of construction is this? I much prefer stone, but this, the view of the surrounding earth, has an elegance to it.”
“If you please, Monsieur,” Edwin said, “I will provide you with all the information, but you did not come here to discuss architecture.”
“Architecture. How I love to discuss architecture. Do you know the great buildings I have seen go up? And, sadly, the great buildings I have seen come down.”
Edwin sighed and settled in for another digression. It was going to be a long night. Maybe he could speed it along by appealing to this creature’s vanity. “Forgive my impatience,” Edwin began, “but as I have a finite lifespan, the sound of so much time rushing by to such little profit makes me nervous.”
DeChevue’s eyes opened wide. As if he were surprised to find Edwin Windsor there, he took full notice of him. Then he lowered his eyebrows and dismissed all of humanity with the back of his hand. “Pfffft, your kind. I display pearls before your warm-blooded, transitory swine.” The harsh angles of that Anglo-Saxon word seemed to drag along the inside of the vampire’s cheeks as it came out. “Your horizons are too small. To my kind, a century is something like a decade. It is impossible for you to understand.”
Edwin smelled weakness. This man thought that because he hadn’t died yet, he couldn’t be killed. Should that be called the Methuselah fallacy? What other errors and imprecisions did immortality, such as this fop claimed to possess, lead to? Edwin realized that somewhere deep in DeChevue’s twisted psyche, he was afraid. Why else would he demand such elaborate preparations for their meeting?
Edwin pressed his guest. “What exactly do you want from me?”
“What I desire from all mortals: service.”
“Hmm,” Edwin said. “I am not sure I am in that line of work. I am an efficiency consultant. Perhaps I can help you put the pieces of the modern world together in such a way that it works a little better for you.”
“Pfahh, the modern world,” he spat. “You say that as if it were an improvement.” DeChevue read a list of charges: “The automobile, streetlights, democracy, and, worst of all, surveillance cameras.”
“Surveillance cameras?”
“But of course. The damn things you can, you know, pick up a dozen for a dime. Oh, they have ruined everything. There was a time when the night was...” He contorted his shoulder and lifted his arm in the air like an amateur thespian from the late 18th century. “The night waasssss...” As DeChevue continued to hiss, he dropped his head, and his long black hair flopped over his face.
Edwin struggled to pay attention as the air continued to hiss out of DeChevue’s lungs. Dramatics bored him. For Edwin, content was the thing.
“...ssssssss EVERYTHING.”
“Could you narrow that down a bit?”
“On the one hand, you have the church and the daylight hours. The respectable forces of the world. You know, follow the rules. Don’t bite anyone on the neck and suck their very soul from their body, that kind of thing.”
“Correct change, stopping at red lights?” Edwin offered.
“Yes, exactly. The tremendous forces of order and the ordinary. As the church faded in power, it was replaced by la petite bourgeoisie. Still order, you understand, but less fueled by the fear of God, whoever he may be.” Another wave of an arm encased in crushed velvet. “But streetlights,” he turned his head to spit out a curse in French, “well, streetlights, don’t you see, impose order on the darkness. They upset the natural rhythm of things. They are terrible. There are things that simply have to happen. Some men must be assassinated. Others must be eaten. You understand, of course. There are things best done under cover of darkness. It is only civilized, is it not? But now, this technologie,” DeChevue said, flipping his hair back from his face as he emphasized the French pronunciation of the word. “There is no cloak of night under which to hide. No darkened corners, no unobserved alleys. Everywhere there are the cameras. All of them, all of the peasants, they have cameras. Barbaric.”
“Yes, civilization is crumbling; we can both agree on that,” Edwin said, trying to drag this consultation back to some kind of point.
“So now, all of the forbidden, unrestrainable passions must come to the light. For no more night is left. Such arrogance to think that just because you have turned on the lights you can banish the darkness.”
“Arrogance is a failing common to many. But I still don’t understand how you would like me to help you.”
“We have several problems. Clearly, we are the superior species. You exist to serve us. To feed us. As surely as the cow has been cultivated and cared for to provide beef. Your mind is, of course, strong enough to understand this unflattering logic, but the other warm-bloods no longer accept that reality. They have forgotten your place in the world. It is because of the streetlights I think. You can no longer see the stars, so naturally you have lost your sense of place in the universe.”
“I’m not sure I can do anything about that.”
“The cameras. Can you help us with the cameras? We can no longer feed freely, as lords of the night should.”
“You need blood?”
“Yes, we need blood. But even more, we need the thrill of the chase. We need the sweet fear of the weak. We need the Night in all its glories.”
“So, blood then. I am correct in my understanding that you survive on blood?” It pained Edwin to give voice to such lunacy. While he was certain that DeChevue believed he was a vampire, he had far too much experience with men who overestimated their capabilities to take him too seriously.
“Well, yes,” DeChevue said. “If you want to be crude about it.”
“I want to be precise about it. You are the one with an unimaginative cuisine.”
DeChevue jerked upright in his seat and, for the first time in the discussion, looked directly into Edwin’s eyes. “Did you suggest?”
Edwin finished the question for DeChevue, “That a man who dines on only one food for his entire life might suffer from a lack of culinary imagination? Yes, I did. Come now, you must have thought of this. Monsieur, are you not French?” Edwin could see from the look on DeChevue’s face that he hadn’t given the matter any thought, and, even afloat in the sea of his crushed velvet attire, he was embarrassed by this.
Edwin pressed DeChevue. “The way I see it, your problem is that the rest of the world has evolved, but you have remained the same.”
“How dare you speak to me in such a way!”
“Please, I do not mean to insult you. I merely state a fact. An important and germane fact.”
“You dare! You, you, you,” he sputtered, hair flailing about, “are as beneath me as the plankton is beneath the eagle. We clearly are the superior species.”
“You hunt and catch your own food. Am I correct?”
“We are fierce predators of the night,” DeChevue said proudly.
Edwin tried again, “You hunt and gather your own food?”
DeChevue still didn’t get it. “Yes, M’sieur. We hunt, proudly.”
“You know, there is a special name for people who have to catch and kill everything they eat.”
“And that name
has been the terror of the night from the dawn of man. Which name would you like? I can supply many. Nosferatu? Das Vampire?”
“Peasant,” Edwin said. “A person who has to provide all his own food is a peasant. How is it that you have lived all this time and are still ignorant of the division of labor?”
DeChevue's mouth opened and closed several times. Each time he seemed on the verge of saying something, yet each time words failed him.
In the underground lobby, things were going no better. As a general rule, Agnes tried to avoid making conversations with dead things and crazy people. Logically, Madeleine had to fall into one category or the other. So, Agnes turned her attention to an ancient book titled “Whist: American Leads and Their History.” She quickly fell into the analysis of the cutting edge of 1895 whist strategy, the Three-Trump echo. Ridiculous, Agnes thought. No finesse, no respect for tradition. Her general distaste for America was not being improved by an introduction to its thinking on whist.
Madeleine, on the other hand, chewed gum. She smacked noisily, forming small bubbles inside her mouth and then crunching them with her molars. It generated an impressive racket.
Agnes worked hard to ignore this behavior. But the clenching of her jaw and the stiffening of her neck gave all her feelings away. Madeleine knew she was getting to her. With the mouth goo properly warmed up, she blew a bubble. Then she blew it bigger. Then a little bigger. The spectacle of a bright pink balloon larger than her head was cartoon-like in its absurdity. After all, Madeleine was dressed as some kind of bizarre cross between a Gothic princess and a French prostitute. In the wild, such a creature would have no truck with chewing gum. There should have been no way Agnes could tear her eyes away from such a spectacle.
But Agnes had great experience in dealing with absurdity. Why, just the other week, a pleasant-enough-looking young man had come to see Edwin for his help with transplanting his brain into a metal body of his own construction. A gum-chewing vampire? In the bizarre card game that was Edwin Windsor’s business life, that simply wasn’t strong enough to qualify as an opening bid.
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