American Gothic

by Michael Romkey

  “Our destination is just a bit farther.”

  Glass pulled open a slit in the plastic and went through, his hand firm around Ophelia’s wrist, pulling her after him toward whatever awaited in the middle of the room, bathed in weak illumination. She could see it moving just beyond the folds of hanging plastic, something short, an animal, maybe even a child. She bit hard on her lower lip to keep her composure.

  The tentlike enclosure occupied a small open area in the center of the room, a circular space roughly thirty feet across. In the middle of this area was an old-fashioned wooden office chair with arms, one of those stout, institutional-looking pieces of oak furniture that appear too uncomfortable for sitting. In the chair was a skinny blond woman in bra and panties. Her arms and legs were secured to the chair with thick wraps of silver duct tape. She had a ball gag in her mouth, the sort of thing Ophelia had seen on S&M Web sites she’d visited late at night when looking for diversions on the Web. The woman was about Ophelia’s age, but that appeared to be the only thing they shared, besides an unfortunate association with Dr. Glass. There was something common about the girl. She had the wild eyes of someone who had been smoking crystal, but there was madness in her eyes, too, along with fear.

  Behind Dr. Glass’s prisoner, on either side of the chair, were two blue plastic fifty-gallon drums, set up like tables and each holding a candelabra. It wasn’t until Ophelia saw the drums—the pair of them—that she guessed how bad it was really going to be. Not that the drums signified anything, but since each drum was the perfect size to hold a human body, nobody needed to paint a picture for Ophelia.

  She looked around behind her, judging her chances to escape back through the slit in the plastic, when she saw what else the psychiatrist had brought to his snug and lethal lair. Folded neatly on the floor was a black plastic apron of the sort Ophelia had seen during autopsies on true-crime television programs, a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves, and a battery-operated lantern.

  “I trust this meets with your approval.”

  She forced herself to turn back to Dr. Glass. He stood beside the girl in the chair, stroking her hair with his hand.

  “I was very careful in my preparations, not knowing how you vampires prefer to do things. There won’t be a trace of evidence, once I pull down the plastic sheeting. It’ll all fit in one of the blue drums. There’s a big incinerator at the hospital for disposing of medical waste. I know just the right time to come around, when there won’t be anybody there, and pop it in. I think you’re going to find it very convenient as we begin to explore the mutual benefits of our new association.”

  Ophelia made herself nod.

  “And what about the girl?”

  “Poor Candy.” He gave the girl a sad smile, to which she recoiled with as much horror as her bounds would allow. “Miss Priddle is also one of my patients. Alas, she has not been one of my successes, although I really did believe the electroshock therapy would help her turn the corner. We can pop her into the second barrel and no one will be the wiser. I’ll have to come back in my Navigator to get her, though. The barrels are too big for my Jag.”

  Ophelia tried to think of something to say, but her mind was spinning helplessly.

  “Dr. Glass,” she said finally, amazed at the control in her voice, “what are you doing?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Ophelia shook her head.

  “I want to become one of you. I have come to admire you very much, Ophelia. You have stripped away the lies and illusion and exposed the true inner core to everything—power and blood. They’re really the two essences that it all comes down to, aren’t they?”

  “Dr. Glass…”

  “I want to join you. I want to be one of you. I already made one sacrifice for you, but you chose to ignore it.”

  Ophelia felt as if she’d been slugged in the stomach. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t tease me, Ophelia. It isn’t nice. It was on all the television stations. The newspaper is still writing about it.”

  Ophelia took a stumbling step backward, covering her mouth with her hand to keep herself from screaming.

  “You didn’t care for those sniveling little bastards. I overheard you railing about them to your friend Zeke. Or didn’t you know that I was the one who slaughtered Letitia, Damien, and Pendragon like pigs in the cemetery?”

  Ophelia bit down hard on the fleshy place where her thumb met the palm.

  “I brought you the sacrifice. We can share her blood together.”

  It was obvious from looking at him—why hadn’t she seen it before? Dr. Glass was completely insane.

  Ophelia hadn’t seen Dr. Glass exchange his gun with the box cutter, for it was only now that she found it with her eyes. He held it loosely, in an almost offhand manner, in his right hand. The box cutter was opened, and Dr. Glass gestured at his sacrificial lamb with the exposed edge of a new razor blade as he talked.

  “Tonight, I will become a vampire, like you,” he said, his voice rising. “Tonight, I join you in sharing the sacrament of the blood, and at last I learn what it is like to be like a god.”

  “Don’t!” Ophelia cried, and ran forward, reaching for Dr. Glass’s arm. But she was not close enough to have any real chance of stopping him. She involuntarily shut her eyes as the blade arced through the air at the end of Dr. Glass’s arm. Something warm and wet sprayed her full in the face.

  “Ahhhh!”

  Dr. Glass’s orgasmic delight was more than Ophelia could stand. She felt her knees buckling and she fell to the floor and curled up as small as she could, wishing she could will herself into nonexistence. Her only chance was to play along with Glass, to pretend to revel in the poor woman’s spilled blood, but that was further than she thought she could make herself go. And so she would join Dr. Glass’s other patient, stuffed into the blue plastic drum—the drum that he would push into a roaring inferno designed to consume severed limbs and infectious garbage—a fitting enough end. Only Ophelia hoped the end would come before that. She hadn’t seen how long it took the other woman to die, once her throat was slashed. Ophelia hoped she didn’t suffer much. She hoped—she prayed—death would come equally quick to her.

  What felt like a body collapsed beside her on the plastic-draped floor.

  Ophelia opened her eyes, expecting it to be Candy Priddle, freed by slashes of the razor from the duct tape holding her body to the chair.

  It was Dr. Glass.

  Ophelia screamed and jerked herself away from him as if jolted with a powerful electrical current. Glass stared at her sightlessly. He was dead.

  “And so you see where all of this has led you?”

  Ophelia raised herself up on an arm and looked over her shoulder. Nathaniel Peregrine was standing there, looking a little unsteady on his feet, no doubt intoxicated from the rich wash of blood sprayed over the plastic sheeting behind Candy Priddle and pooling under her on the floor.

  Ophelia looked back at Dr. Glass and realized the odd angle of his head. Peregrine had snapped Dr. Glass’s neck.

  Ophelia pushed herself into a sitting position. Her eyes never left Peregrine’s. She could sense his desire, and his hunger, so many times more powerful than the pathetic Dr. Glass’s. It was like the sun’s brightness compared to the light of the candles burning on the blue plastic drums.

  “Now what?” she said.

  To which the vampire answered, “Now what indeed.”

  37

  City Lights

  THOUGH THE VAMPIRE Nathaniel Peregrine was well into his second century on the planet, he seemed entirely comfortable with the present. Aside from a melancholy that crept into his eyes upon occasion, Peregrine appeared as at home in the world as anybody Ophelia had ever known. Still, she was startled when he picked her up in a car—a forest green Volvo station wagon—as if he were a prosperous San Francisco advertising agent instead of an exotic, immortal creature who, long before automobiles were invented, had ridden a horse into battle durin
g the Civil War.

  Peregrine slid a CD into the player and adjusted the volume. The vampire’s taste in music was at least a little more than what Ophelia expected. The instrumental pieces were soft and bluegrassy, though in a sophisticated way, no hillbilly twang to the intricately arranged music for acoustic guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. And Ophelia actually liked the music, much to her surprise, though it was worlds apart from industrial Goth.

  He didn’t say where he was taking her, and she didn’t ask. The Volvo headed across the Golden Gate Bridge. He pulled off the road in Sausalito, parking outside a restaurant overlooking the water. The hostess showed them to a table on the deck facing the harbor. The city lights across the bay glittered on the water, adding to the lights of Sausalito, and Alcatraz Island, and the stars overhead. The tide was running, creating the impression of something vast and powerful flowing beyond them as they watched. There was something there—an image still unformed in Ophelia’s mind—a metaphor for something. She made a note of it. She could use it in her poetry, if she ever wrote any again.

  “It is like life,” Peregrine said, as if reading her thoughts. When she looked across at him, he indicated the bay with a nod. “Always in motion, sometimes this way, sometimes that, a force that cannot be controlled or reckoned with. The most you can hope to do is learn its rhythms and sail with them the best you can, because you certainly can’t sail against them, not for very long.”

  “What do you know about sailing?”

  “That’s my boat.” Peregrine pointed at the sleek outline of a three-masted yacht riding at anchor off the marina across the point from the restaurant. “I sailed here on her. And I will sail away on her, too, when I have seen enough of my old haunts.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Take me with you.”

  The vampire looked away from her and back out toward the sailboats, a few with lights burning inside or on deck, but most of them dark.

  A waitress came to the table and Peregrine said they both needed cognac. Ophelia knew there was no way they were going to serve her without seeing her ID, and maybe not even after she showed them the fake one that claimed she was twenty-two. But the waitress smiled and went away for the drinks. Peregrine always got what he wanted, so far as Ophelia had seen. He seemed to have the power to make people obey him. He didn’t stare at them, mesmerizing them with beady eyes, like Bela Lugosi in an old Dracula movie. Rather, Peregrine just said what he wanted and people gave it to him. At least everybody except Ophelia did. She was the only one who seemed to be able to defy him, though whether this was because of her own power or the vampire’s sufferance was unclear to her.

  “My wife wrote poetry.”

  “Did she really?” Ophelia asked with real interest.

  “Ah. So it seems there is something about me you don’t know.”

  “I’m sure there are a great many things about you I don’t know.”

  “True,” he said as the waitress returned with their drinks. “It was a long time ago—my wife, I mean. I miss her still. But you know the old saying?”

  Ophelia raised her eyebrows.

  “Life goes on,” the vampire said. “Through happiness and sorrow, through good times and bad, life goes on.” He held his glass up in toast. “To a long and successful life for you as a poet, Ophelia.”

  She touched her glass to his and took a small sip. The cognac burned her throat, but after a moment she felt it relaxing her. Peregrine was right; she had needed a drink.

  “But only one,” he said, completing her thought. “You have seen what too much drink can do to a person.”

  “My father,” she said simply.

  “I once was very much like him,” Peregrine said. “I had a hard time of it when my family died. I took my relief where I could find it.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  “No, but losing yourself in a stupor of drink and drugs—you’re just numbing yourself to the pain; it isn’t any kind of answer.”

  Peregrine drank his cognac in a single swallow, looking up to see Ophelia closely watching him.

  “I have been beyond the consolation of such palliatives since the great Change. My system processes drink faster than I can put it down my throat. It’s a different story with your father.”

  Ophelia sighed. “My father is hopeless.”

  “Yes, unfortunately I think he is.”

  “He is haunted by his past. He can’t bear to be reminded of it. And of course, he does nothing but sit in that house and drink, where his past is all around him. I’m partly to blame for that.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, I am,” Ophelia said. “He wanted to walk out of the house and never go back after my mother died. But I refused to go. It was my home. My life. I wanted to stay there and be surrounded with all the things I knew as a little girl. He tried to throw away her clothes and things—not put them into the garbage, but give them to Goodwill, to relatives, to anybody who would take them. I wouldn’t let him. We had some terrific fights over it all. The only time he sets foot in their bedroom is when he changes clothes. He sleeps on the couch in the den.”

  “He’s dying.”

  The breath caught in Ophelia’s throat. She could see from the way Peregrine was looking at her that it was true.

  “I smelled death all the way from my house across the street when I returned. It was almost more than I could bear. You can smell it, too, Ophelia. You just don’t know it.”

  “Because I’m psychic?”

  “Partly. All sentient beings, even ordinary humans, are psychic. It is a latent sense. It frightens most people. They refuse to acknowledge what they don’t understand and can’t explain. It’s like Shakespeare wrote. There are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of by most people.”

  “But my father.”

  “There is nothing anyone can do. He’s destroyed himself. His liver and kidneys are gone. There’s something growing in his lungs. I can hear it in his breathing. The years of cigarette smoking, you understand.”

  “You could help him.”

  “It is too late for him.”

  “As a mortal maybe, but you could change that.”

  Peregrine smiled but without joy. “That is your solution to everything. Do you really think it will solve your father’s problems if I turn him into a vampire? Do you think it will solve your problems and make you happy? Do you really?”

  Ophelia looked down at the table.

  “I have lived a long life—a very long life. If there is one thing I have learned through all my experiences, it is that at the very deepest level what we crave most with all our hearts and souls is love. Unless you learn to embrace this one truth, Ophelia, you will never be happy, not as a human and certainly not as a vampire. Religious teachers tell us love is the secret force binding all of Creation. I have no doubt that someday some physicists will devise an equation proving that love is the force controlling and powering the universe and all of life.”

  The vampire took Ophelia’s right hand and held it between his own, which felt almost hot to the touch.

  “I had love and lost it,” he said. “This is the way of the world. Anything we acquire we are destined to lose. One of the most important lessons life has to teach you is to let people go when it is time. Because, trust me, my dear, for so long as you live, you will be saying good-bye to people you love. If you have trouble grasping this, the destructive powers of the universe will attach themselves to you like a leech and drag you down into the depths of darkness…”

  The vampire’s voice trailed off, but Ophelia could see that he was lost in his thoughts and did not interrupt them.

  “In my own time of darkness, the devil sent a demoness in the form of a beautiful young woman to torment me,” Peregrine said. “She gave me the Change, turning me into the creature I am today. For nearly a century I followed her, and when I was finished with her, she followed me. We lived together in Rome, Venice, Paris. I tried to make a new
start without her in Haiti, but she followed me to the islands just before the start of World War One, ruining one of the few chances for happiness I have had during the course of a very tedious life.”

  The vampire’s faraway look shifted his focus until it was trained solely on Ophelia, and she could tell he was waiting for her to ask a question.

  “Where is she now?”

  The vampire shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps she is out there, watching from a boat in the harbor.”

  A chill passed through Ophelia, making her reach for her brandy. “Really?”

  Peregrine shook his head. “She is very clever, but she no longer has the upper hand. I would be able to sense her out there, if she were there. She will leave me alone now, if she knows what is good for her. You have nothing to fear.”

  The vampire’s expression softened and he began to lightly stroke her hand.

  “You are an enigma, Ophelia. You dress like a Goth, like a refugee from another time, and yet you spend your spare time with your computers and the Internet. You carve freedom from the past, yet you brood over your mother’s grave. You write poetry—rather good poetry, if I may say so—but on death and other macabre, dark subjects. You are as tortured by your past as is your poor father. If you don’t learn to come to terms with your grief, you will end up like him. Or like the psychopathic Dr. Glass. Or even worse, like me—a vampire doomed to walk the earth forever in search of love to set me free.”

  Ophelia did not dispute what he said. There was no point pretending she disagreed. Peregrine was dead-on right.

  “You know that I am fond of you, Ophelia,” the vampire said. “My wife wrote poetry, though not as well as you do. You even dress like she used to; black was very much the fashion back in the 1860s.”

  He smiled.

  “I want to help you, Ophelia.”

  His eyes held hers, looking deep into her, perhaps seeing things within her own mind that not even she could see.