Love in Vein

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Up over the edge of the altar she was roughly carried. The droning Latin prayers of Mazzetti accompanied this, and despite her terror, she felt a spasm of utter hate wash through her. She vowed her vengeance against this old man who deceived her. She would punish him! He would regret his actions of this day!

  Now she was being dropped into the hollow center of the altar. Like a thick-walled casket vault, like a coffin, it accepted her with a dark, mute finality. She felt the cold stone against her flesh, colder even than the scales that protected her.

  No! This could not be … ! She fought against the paralysis which gripped, railed against the force of the Host, but her power was nothing compared to the awesome magic of the priest.

  Looking up from her crypt, framed by its rectangular walls, she could see the streaming light of the Host still lacing her like a lethal radiation. She heard the grunting effort of the men as they lifted the capstone, an immense slab of white marble, and heaved it up to the edge of the altar.

  “Enclose the beast called lamia!” cried out Mazzetti. “And the Lord shall entomb his Adversary forever!”

  The sound of heavy stone, grinding, grating, sliding against heavier stone echoed through the hollow crypt of the altar. She cried out to them for mercy, but the sounds were only in her mind. She could do nothing but watch the rectangular slab slowly creep across the altar’s topmost edges, sealing her within like a moldering corpse.

  Except that there would be no moldering.

  There would be no mindless, black oblivion here. No, she realized with a rising panic, with a thick column of terror rising up in her mind. Instead, she would be alive in this total darkness, in this state of eternal paralysis. She would be conscious of the nothingness that entombed her.

  Forever.

  The thought shot through her being with a searing, exquisitely painful reality.

  No! The single word reverberated through her mind as she watched the last edge of light being constricted and finally pinched off as the slab slid into place. Stone met stone with a final resonant thud, leaving her in a place of total darkness, of a silence so deep and so profound that she felt she might go immediately mad…

  Coda: Scarpino, Sicily 1944

  The plane was a B-17, a bomber called the Flying Fortress. It had been coruscated by flak over Anzio and the navigator’s instruments had been knocked out. The pilot, a twenty-six-year-old farmer’s son from Kankakee, Illinois, named William Stoudt, had lost his bearings and was trying to pick up some landmarks by heading vaguely south from his target. He’d dropped his eggs just as some shrapnel ripped through his plane’s underbelly, half-closing one of his bomb bay doors, and hanging up the last 500-pounder in his bomb-release rack.

  As he struggled to get his crew home, they scurried about the tunnellike fuselage of the plane in a desperate effort to free the final bomb. Making a landing with 500 pounds of H.E. in your gut would be suicide and Captain Wild Bill Stoudt knew they were all doomed unless they could kick free of that fat boy with its tail fin hung up on the hinges of the bay door.

  Waist gunner Sammy Sharpe from Brooklyn, New York, decided to be the hero. He unraveled his auxiliary parachute and tied his silks into the bulkhead. Always a daredevil, Sammy loved the challenge of dangling himself through the bomb bay 10,000 feet above the Sicilian mountainside. Inch by inch, he lowered himself down until his boot reached the jammed-up bay door and the twisted hinge. A good kick and one of two things would happen: the thin white metal of the bomb’s fin would collapse and the pay-load would drop free, or it wouldn’t and the bomb would probably detonate against the bay door.

  Either way, the problem would be over.

  Leather touched metal and Sammy Sharpe from East 24th Street (just up from Avenue R) smiled as he watched the last halfton egg fade away. The B-17 had just passed over Palermo, so the bomb should land harmlessly in the mountains. Nothing down there for miles but a little village, and what were the odds… ?

  * * *

  Queen of the Night

  by Gene Wolfe

  “Queen of the Night,” the ghouls called her, and, more frequently, “Her Highness.”

  Because they referred to meat in the state they preferred as “high,” the usage had confused the boy when he was smaller. “Her Highness must see you.”

  “Her Highness will never approve you.” He had pictured one of them taller than any—although they were all tall—fragrant with decay, as they were.

  He could not eat the putrid flesh they relished, as he and they had learned when he was still very small. For him, meat in summer could be not more than two days in the grave, and in the dry harsh heat at the end of August (when fevers raged and many were buried) even two days might be too long. Mostly he lived on food that the pious living offered to their dead: hot breads three times wrapped in clean cloths sewn with crosses and holy verses he could not read, and the boiled turnips and cabbages of the poor, these last wrapped once or twice or even five times in clean rags that were only rarely decorated with crude religious pictures executed in the red blood of beets.

  He supplemented these foods with roots and stalks snatched from gardens by night, pears and cherries filched from orchards, and certain herbs and berries that he had discovered himself, though rarely with the fungi the ghouls enjoyed, which ofttimes made him ill.

  “If Her Highness does not approve, will I die?” he asked Eeesheeea.

  “She will approve.”

  “You may eat of me.”

  “Not dancing.” Eeesheeea bowed her head and seemed a stone.

  “I am too thin,” the boy acknowledged. The stone did not reply.

  They traveled; and no one, not even Beeetheeeor, could say when the queen would appear to judge him, or where. The spring floods brought low meat and easy, together with drowned cattle (which they disdained though the boy did not) and swine, which Neeeneeeaih claimed to relish.

  Summer was the best time. Water from farms where all the living had died, they poured into healthful wells and even holy springs, although the latter was unlucky and rarely effective. So bold were they at times in summer that they were seen by moonlight, dancing as they feasted in clothing furnished by their meat: the dead wife’s particolored kirtle (fouled now by groundwater and the ichors of decay) beneath her husband’s rotted coat.

  Autumn found them foolish and fond of jests, hiding in new-dug graves and violated mausoleums, and careless of the fading sun. It had been in autumn that they had found the boy, as Eeesheeea confided, feeding him as a prank, chortling when he vomited and leading him to waters that they hoped might hold the fever still. “When I’m bigger,” he had boasted, “I’ll be like you,” but she had shaken her head.

  Winter was the worst season, when the earth of even the freshest graves froze, and month-old meat wore flesh too hard to chew. The boy had snared a hare, skinned it with his teeth, and was sucking the largest bone from a hind leg preparatory to cracking it. “Come with us,” Beeetheeeor told him; and he did, flattered, walking alone (as it appeared) through the freezing winter night.

  Beside the dark and half-ruinous church, the caretaker’s cottage glowed with firelight; and candles stood guard at every window, save the shuttered window of the loft. “They sing,” Eeesheeea hissed. Her ears were sharper even than the boy’s. “Send back their song to them.”

  “I must hear it first,” he told her, and cupped both ears.

  The oracles are dumb,

  No voice or hideous hum

  Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;

  Apollo from his shrine

  Can no more divine

  With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

  No trace or breathed spell

  Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

  The boy grinned, and as the final note faded, replied:

  The singers all are dumb,

  They voice their hideous hum

  Right through the windows wide themselves relieving,

&nbs
p; These puppies’ worthless whine

  Can fright no folk of mine

  When o’er the haunted downs we come a-thieving,

  Our night-long dance and sprightly call

  Shall tire the pop-eyed beast from out the stall.

  Silence fell upon the cottage. Eeesheeea said, “That was better even than last time.” And he, creeping closer to the caretaker’s cottage, gloried in her praise.

  At length a man’s quavering voice ventured, “It’s the Gray Neighbors in search of a steed.”

  A woman, “Isn’t the White Lady curse enough?”

  A boy, “Will they steal Maria?”

  “The queen had been visiting them,” Beeetheeeor explained. “That is why they have opened a grave for us.”

  Soon out came the caretaker, his wife, and their son, beating pans and calling out: “Wo horse, no cow, no byre, no barn. But warn ye fair, ‘twill soon be morn!” Three times they marched sunwise around the cottage repeating this, their freezing breath a ghostly herald in the moonlight. Then the wife put a bowl of milk upon the step, with bread on one side and salt on the other. “Bread for life and salt forever. These the bonds between us sever. Milk for mercy, milk for friend. Drink, and let thy mischief end!”

  The boy drank the milk greedily and ate the bread, too; but spit out the salt, angrily scattering it across the step. Then he climbed onto the roof, put his head down the chimney and howled like a wolf. When this evoked only a terrified silence, he peered over the edge of the roof, upside down into the loft through a chink in the shutter, where he saw a yellow-haired girl, much wasted, whose wide frightened eyes stared at nothing; his forefinger soon teased out the wooden bar, and he opened the shutter and swung inside to crouch next to her bed.

  Slowly, she turned her head to look at him.

  “Tell them iron will keep us out,” he whispered, knowing it was what Beeetheeeor would want him to say. “Call to them.”

  The yellow-haired girl called, but her voice was without strength. When nobody came, the boy plucked an onion from a string of them hanging from the rafters and threw it down the ladder-hole into the fire, scattering sparks and embers over half the room, and hid under a heap of husks.

  Soon the caretaker’s wife mounted the ladder. “Maria,” she inquired, “were the fairies up here?”

  “One,” the girl said. Her voice was less than the sigh of a leafless tree. The wife returned to the ladder-hole and called, “Johann, there was one up here troubling the child.”

  The caretaker, a spare man with a long sad face, climbed into the loft as well, with a tattered old black-letter Bible in one hand. “An ouph, Maria? With a red cap?”

  The sick girl rolled her head across the pillow.

  “With cobweb wings? An oak-man?”

  She said nothing and stared at nothing, as before.

  “Describe it.”

  “Here,” the wife said, “I’ll help her sit up.”

  “She’ll be dead before the moon,” muttered the boy to himself, peeping through the husks and noting how her bones poked the threadbare nightgown she wore. “And little enough for Eeesheeea.”

  “How looked it, child?” the caretaker asked. “Tell us.”

  “He. Thin. Dirty.”

  “Young, Maria? Was he young? Shivering?”

  The sick girl nodded.

  “A cauld lad.” The caretaker shivered himself. “They start fires, they say. That must have been what he was trying to do. You have to leave them a warm coat to be rid of them.”

  “We’ve none to give,” his wife protested.

  “Iron,” the sick girl whispered. “Iron will make him go.”

  Her father rubbed his chin. “It might. Iron charms them hence at childbirth, they say. Scissors open underneath the cradle.”

  When they had gone, the boy stood up. “That was kindly done,” he told the sick girl. “We’ll trouble you no more, I think.” In the cottage below, he heard the clank of a pick-head against the blade of a spade. “I’ll do you a favor, if I can.”

  “Go away,” she told him.

  “Sometimes I can grant three wishes,” he said, and at the moment he almost believed it.

  Her head rolled from side to side, as before. “The White Lady will come tonight, and I will die.”

  “Bar the window after I’ve left,” he told her; but there was no indication that she had heard.

  Outside, Reeezthorreee had taken the spade from the back door; Beeetheeeor was already at the reclosed grave, swinging the pick. “They dug this meat up again,” Eeesheeea explained, “and broke the frost, though the ground is hard again at the top. They believed it was Her Highness.”

  Before long Beeetheeeor and Reeezthorreee cast aside the tools and dug with their claws as they always did, making the clods fly. There was no coffin, the boy saw when he peered into the grave, but a stake had been put through the meat to hold it.

  “She comes,” Eeesheeea whispered.

  Until he heard the horses’ hooves, the boy thought she meant only that Beeetheeeor was lifting the meat, as he was.

  The clouds parted to show a black carriage racing across the plain, dropping from sight into a declivity, reappearing at the crest of the hill on the opposite side, and rattling across the Roman bridge over the frozen brook. “Her Highness will approve you this night,” Eeesheeea assured him, her tone less confident than her words.

  “Is that one of our carriages?” he inquired. She did not reply, and he ran to the road for a closer look.

  When it drew up in front of the cottage, he saw that the coachman was one of the living, though he had never seen one with a face so savage or eyes so cruel. A groom scuttled off crablike to catch the boy by one arm. “Want him, ma’am? I got him for you!” Eeesheeea stood, and the groom hid behind his wild-eyed horses. A soft laugh came from the carriage.

  “I’m all right,” the boy told Eeesheeea. “I could’ve got away. You better eat before they finish it.” Neeeneeeaih had emerged from a moon-shadow to join the feast.

  “Her Highness has seen you,” Eeesheeea told him. “I am here to speak for you.”

  The voice from the carriage murmured, “Come, my child. Let me look more closely.” He went to the window and peeped through it, but there was no one inside.

  Eeesheeea said, “For seven summers he has been ours, Your Highness. We found and we claim him. If it please you, three more?”

  Bright with lions, swords, and crested helms, the door of the carriage pushed the boy back.

  In the moonlit silence that followed, he heard a shutter creak. The sick girl appeared at the window of the loft. A moment more, and she was crouching on the sill, then scrambling down the wall. Save that her eyes were open and staring, her expression was that of one who dreams, and would awaken if she could.

  A slender figure in white stood beside the boy, without having come from anywhere. His first impression was of hair; it was black, and he had never seen a woman with so much, a somber aureole about her lined and bloodless face that stirred as if in a wind, though no wind blew.

  Beeetheeeor, Reeezthorreee, and Neeeneeeaih were ranged behind Eeesheeea now. All knelt; seeing them, the boy knelt too. Eeesheeea raised her face and her hands, her eyes black with tears. “My head in surety for all he does. Have mercy on your slave, Your Highness! Just one summer more?”

  The sick girl stood at his shoulder, swaying and trembling in her nightgown. Still on his knees, he put his arm about her waist and felt her febrile heat.

  Coldly, the White Lady told Eeesheeea, “This is a child of the living, and already of age. It is time that he return to his own. I shall arrange it.” Before she finished, the ghouls vanished as though they had never existed.

  “Come with me freely,” she said to the boy, “and I will show you wonders, man-child.”

  He looked about him. “Where’s Eeesheeea?”

  “Where she has always been.”

  , He got to his feet. “This girl’s ailing. I’d like to take her back inside.
”

  “Their doors are barred,” the White Lady told him, and her coachman laughed.

  “Her mother and father will let her in if I knock.”

  “They sleep.” The White Lady’s face was as expressionless as a naked skull; the boy found himself wishing she would smile or frown—be impatient, prideful, or even angry.

  “I’ll pound on the door,” he said. “I’ll wake them up.”

  “Do.”

  He led the sick girl back to the cottage, asking whether she was all right, suggesting she might be cold, and at last pleading, “Won’t you say something?”

  Picking up the bowl that had held his milk, he rapped the door with it, and at once heard the rattle of the bar. “See,” he told the sick girl, “they hadn’t gone to sleep yet. You go back to bed and stay there.”

  The door opened, and the White Lady held the bar. She motioned to the sick girl, who went in and climbed the ladder to the loft.

  “You’re making her ill, aren’t you?” the boy asked.

  “I am breaking her bonds, one by one.”

  “Do you still want me to come with you? Promise you’ll let her alone, and I will.”

  “For one year.”

  “Forever!” It seemed to the boy that they must surely wake the caretaker and his wife, but no one stirred.

  “How long did you live among the ghouls?”

  “We call them the People.” He was sick with fear, but fought it with boyish stubbornness.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. You heard what Eeesheeea said.”

  “How long? The truth.”

  “Nine years, I think.”

  The White Lady nodded slowly. “Go back to my coach. Get in.”

  The walk from the carriage to the cottage had been short; the walk from the cottage to the carriage seemed long indeed. The boy wanted to run, to hide among gravestones as he had so often, in so many such churchyards. He was free, he knew, and could do so if he chose; he knew, also, what the White Lady would do if he did.