by Jason Dias
If this was not real, I was mad. Insane. Incompetent. But it was real. I could doubt my senses or believe what I saw. And if I believed that, then nothing made sense anymore. This was a ghost or, worse, a vampire, her eyes sliding open as the last of daylight left the sky above us. And if vampires roamed abroad in the world, then I was wrong about everything.
About the fundamental orderliness of the universe. About cause and effect. Good and evil. God. This made me wrong about God. This being proved rationality illusion, that deduction did not lead to truth.
“Hello, Dominique. What a lovely French name you have. We are going to be friends now, you and I.” She stretched, catlike, and stepped down out of the coffin like it was natural, like swinging out of bed in the morning. Her dress looked as it always had, her hair perfect as always. Her little half-smile mocked.
“What are you?”
“What you think. So stubborn. I am quite hungry.”
She moved out of the storeroom into brighter light, overhead fluorescents. She looked insubstantial out here. Like I could almost see through her. “What do you eat?”
“What you think.” She laughed, a pretty sound.
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Will you arrest me again? I do enjoy being arrested.”
I grabbed at her. But she wasn’t there. My hands went through her like mist.
“Oh, I think you will not arrest me after all. Do not worry, mon fille. I will not harm a soul. Not tonight. Come with me if you like. Keep an eye on me, yes?” She went up those narrow back steps, skirts swishing, and out the unlocked back door. I followed, neglecting to lock that door behind us.
She walked along Memorial Way towards the park, away from the graveyard. Then along Prospect Lake, an unlit street of fifties bungalows gone to seed. They had old-fashion Christmas lights, some on, others missing bulbs. The lights here stayed up year-round and wore out in the weather. Deep in the neighborhood, she let herself into a house with a red porchlight and no other decoration. Not Christmas red; more like a signal. I followed, looking behind me for witnesses like a criminal.
Furtive. In this new universe, I lacked confidence and power. I was furtive, like a mouse out at night, knowing there are owls but with no knowledge of the rules such beings might follow.
Inside the house. There were lights, all red. A lamp, an overhead in a small bathroom with a pocket door. The furnishings must have come with the house: an old couch and a chair with wooden arms, both in lurid orange; curtains in brown velvet; a putrescent green rug. Ysabeau went straight to the back bedroom along a hallway lined with old family photographs going back generations.
In the back, on a twin bed, an old black man lounged in his y-fronts and a white tee with stains on the front. He didn’t match the family photos. “You brought a guest,” he said, his accent screaming Alabama.
“She wants to make sure I don’t hurt you too much.”
He chuckled and turned his head away from her, baring his neck. Partially healed bruises graced it. I thought of the victims: no bruises on their necks. She kneeled by him on the bed, so light she did not disturb the covers or depress the mattress. She embraced him, put her lips to his throat. I wanted to turn away. Needed to. Half an hour ago the world had been normal, trembling on the edge of insanity. Now it had crossed over. I watched from the end of the bed, deep in insanity, a non-sensical world.
He moaned in pleasure, his erection small but obvious. She licked at his throat, bit down. Drank slowly, carefully, stroking his ample chest with one hand, cupping his breast. What was this to me? This dirty secret, this sordid, banal scene?
Then she finished. She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand. The man lay back all the way, smiling and peaceful as Ysabeau had been when she wakened, eyes squeezed shut. A little trickle of blood leaked from his neck onto the dirty pillow under his head to match the stains on his shirt.
“This is what you were doing the first night I talked to you.”
“Clients with specific tastes, yes. I taste them. Now we can go to work.”
To me it seemed a regrettable scene, like seeing Enrique’s skid-marked underwear on the floor after our first love-making. Gritty reality with all the romance rubbed off. To her? Just a biological necessity, no feelings in it. No ideals in her to offend.
She slipped off the bed and back down the hall, leaving no shadow and disturbing nothing. Understanding dawned. She seemed more substantial now, full of blood. And full of purpose. I trotted to keep up as she left the house.
“Where are we going?”
“We! I told you we would be friends. Do you believe that I am what you think?”
“That’s a circular question. You seem to be a vampire.”
“The vampire.”
“What?”
“In all the world, I have never seen another vampire. No other drinkers of blood. Night spirits. I sense your confusion. About the world, the nature of it. I am confused, too. I agree: if I am, there should be others. But there are no others. Your reality is secure. You can believe it. What I must tell you: when I taste the blood of a person, I know all that they know. See what their eyes have seen through all of their lives. This is how I found Sidney Carrington.”
She stopped and faced me, looking up at me in the dark. We were halfway back to the main road.
“He didn’t work alone.”
“Quite so. I have followed a long line of sinful men to him. All of them members of Mother Church.” Her tone expressed hate as much as her words. “In New York, there was a man who knew about him. They shared photographs through an infernal device. Photographs – what a wonder! Turned to so banal a purpose. So wicked.”
“And Sidney knew about Marie. Who did Marie know about?”
“One more. An exile from Philadelphia, rusticated to your little city.”
Rusticated. A new word. I would need to look it up later. “What are you going to do?”
“So many questions for which you have answers in your mind.”
We walked out onto the main road. Streetlamps. Passing cars. One rolled by, over the speed limit. I cast a shadow. Ysabeau did too, but barely, a wispy lie of a shadow. Full of blood, she had more substance, more existence.
Why can’t a vampire see herself in the mirror? Because she does not exist.
The more blood she ate, the more she existed.
She cast no shadow and no reflection; she did not show up on tape. There was nothing for a camera to detect. She lived in my mind and in hers. She had enough of another man’s blood in her veins to cast a weak shadow, but she still wasn’t real. Not all the way.
She hopped onto a bus headed downtown. Six p.m.. I noticed hunger through my terror. Ysabeau walked right past the driver, a heavyset Latina with too much eye make-up. But she looked at me until I put a dollar bill in the machine. I went back and sat next to Ysabeau. The bus trundled downtown, slowly, stopping here to let off a day worker and there to let on a night worker.
The city lit up, red and green and twinkling white. Dangling white icicles, trees wrapped in white bulbs, stars and trees and reindeer. We passed storefronts and office buildings that reflected the bus. If we slowed down, I might have seen myself riding along. I saw myself reflected in the bus window, and a glimmer that might have been a person if I squinted.
Ysabeau didn’t talk and I asked no questions. There didn’t seem to be anything else left to know. And anyway, what value knowledge in a world lacking rules?
We pulled into the station, brighter in the building than outside. She stood and I stood, let her out. Followed. She boarded another bus, headed uptown. I put another dollar in the machine. We drove through canyons of tall buildings that ended in a few blocks. North on the main, stopping and starting again, stopping and starting. Then, in a neighborhood up north where the houses took up one-acre plots, she debarked again in a grocery store parking lot. I followed.
The lights were on up here. A few years back, during the recession, the city struggled wi
th funding. They turned off the streetlamps to save money. Up here, residents sponsored street lamps to get them turned back on. For safety, and civic pride. They ended up each paying more to sponsor one street lamp that it would have cost them in taxes to keep the lights on all over town.
Meanwhile, this neighborhood exuded holiday cheer. Every yard had at least one inflatable ornament. Some had been left on to blow through the night. Everywhere lights and toys and animatronic things. Each made the electric meter at the back of the house spin a little faster.
A new emotion started to find its way through the throbbing terror: contempt. These people were wealthy but also cruel and foolish.
She went up the walk of a two-story house. When I followed, lights came on around me. I froze, then chased her as she slipped through the gate into the back yard. I covered my face from any cameras as if shading my eyes to scan a far horizon. She slipped through a sliding glass door. Through it, through the glass like it wasn’t there. Then, remembering me, she unlocked it from inside and moved the stick in the tracks there to brace it from people like us.
She went through the house like she’d been there before. It was a big place. Two stories from outside but this lower level hidden in back, the foundation fifteen feet under street level. She went upstairs, past the living area, up more stairs to the sleeping floor. Lots of doors but she knew which one.
Two people in there. A man and a woman, middle-aged, plump, Caucasian. They both snored.
“They will not wake up.” She spoke in a conversational tone of voice. “She will wake up in the morning. He will never.”
“You are going to kill him.”
“Yes. More than kill him. Kill his soul.”
“What?”
“What is it you think I do? I am going to take his blood, his life, and his soul. Then I will know everything about him. Already I know he is the one who decided to bring Father Callahan here.”
“Are you going to bite him?”
“I only bite when I am hungry.”
To make herself real enough to interact with the world. “Then what will you do?”
“Watch.”
I didn’t know if she meant I should watch or if she intended to watch. I thought about stopping her, but I had tried to touch her earlier in the night and she had slipped right through my fingers like air. What could I do? Maybe try to wake these people up. Warn them.
Except…
He was guilty of something. I felt suddenly angry. Vindictive, even. Rich assholes in homes worth more than my pension. I did nothing. Doing nothing equaled doing something. Doing something evil. And I knew it.
The man contorted. His back arched up off the bed. He twisted. His neck turned and his hands gripped into fists. His wife stirred behind him, snuffled, and resumed snoring. He’d stopped snoring. His body went limp.
“Is he…?”
“Dead? Oh, yes. Much worse than dead.”
“And what do you know?”
“I will tell you another night. Now we should go.”
She led the way down the stairs, then had me go first out the door. She shut it and locked it from inside then came through, tugging a little more this time, as if pushing through against a strong breeze. She was more real now.
I glanced at my watch. One more bus tonight if we hurried back to the grocery store parking lot.
Ysabeau drifted along, dress hardly moving as she went. That dress…
“What’s with the dress? Is it from ancient Paris?” Breathless from hurrying.
“It is the gown I was buried in.” She spoke normally.
“Have you ever tried to wear something else?”
“Why?”
I didn’t know why. Just nervous, babbling maybe. Uncharacteristic. The rage had dwindled away as that man had died in his sleep. I imagined his wife waking next to his corpse in the morning, seeing that unnatural twist in his neck, probably screaming the children away. Guilt made my neck flush. I was guilty. Whatever he had done, or allegedly done, did he deserve to die this way? Did his family deserve the aftermath?
“It happens every day,” Ysabeau said.
“What? What does?”
“Wives awaken next to dead husbands or husbands next to wives. I sense you are troubled. Guilty.”
“Have you tasted my blood that you can read my mind?” One hand went to my throat to feel for wounds.
“No. I have only lived a long time. Too, I can sense the blood in your face.”
We arrived at the bus stop just as the bus pulled in. No other riders. She sat in back and I sat in the same row. “What if you missed the bus? How would you get back?”
“The bus is just for you. I can move around as I wish. Within certain constraints.”
“Tell me what that man knew. Tell me what he did.”
“It will take time. To… digest. So to speak. You want a bit of definite, declarative knowledge. That knowledge, though, is buried in the memories of a lifetime. So much. He was not a good man, this I can say. He preached love and honesty, but he had affairs. His wife never knew. His children… he refused to pay for them to go to summer camp but he bought himself a sports car. He gave little money to charity and disparaged the homeless.”
I sat and thought. My foot tapped on the floor and my hand beat a different rhythm on my knee.
“You are very tired,” Ysabeau said. “Tonight, when you go home, you will sleep very well.”
“I might never sleep again. And don’t you make me.”
We walked from the station. Twenty minutes to the Lakeside neighborhood, another ten to the funeral home. In the parking lot, almost to the door:
“I will need to move my coffin. It is in danger now that Diana has taken ill. Inconvenient for you to arrive when you did, but her usefulness was already growing short.”
“Where will you put it?”
“You live alone.”
“No.”
“So stubborn. I could compel you.”
“You could. Why don’t you?”
She stopped at the door. “Diana is why not. I compelled her. Forcing her will to mine damaged her mind. She did things so against her most basic sense of who she was that she could not adjust to them. I would not drive you mad.”
“You already are.”
“Bring my coffin to your house. You will sleep well, and you will always know where I am. And I will promise to not kill anyone in your town without your permission.”
“You will?” I could not arrest her. I could not photograph her in the act. I could not tackle her to the ground. My anxiety ebbed. Not gone, but lessened so that I could no longer hear my heart. “OK. Let’s go.” We went into the abyssal basement and each took an end. The box weighed just a few pounds. Made of old oak, dried out and a little fragile. The brass fittings had turned green. Nobody saw us move the thing to my Caprice through the dark, secluded lot. With the back seats folded down, it fit into the trunk quite neatly.
In the car, feeling more in control of things, I said, “What about the coffin? Seems a little goth.”
“What is goth?”
“Goth? It’s what emo used to be.”
“Hm?”
“Uh, like an old gothic novel. Like a Hammer House of Horror movie. Contrived.”
“You will understand soon.”
My knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. “That sounds like a threat. I don’t like threats.” Brave words. Empty. I could not touch her.
She put a hand on my arm. I felt her touch: cool, smooth. “Silly. I mean only, there is knowledge you will soon have that will make many things seem more rational. To be patient, this is much to ask of you.”
Her speech had changed. The accent remained a constant, but sometimes her grammar slipped, growing sophisticated, and sometimes she reverted to the long-winded patterns of a native French speaker. “There is dirt in it. From your grave?”
“Oui. Yes. Consecrated. They buried me in the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents. A mass grave for paupers. Most
did not have so much as a coffin. I had cleaned at the seminary and so I was known by students and new priests. They paid for me to have a box. Perhaps they felt guilty. They all knew about their Bishop. I was not the only one. He hurt them, too.” Her voice lacked any inflection. If she felt anything about these events, I could not tell. “I woke in the dark of the box, in the dark of the night. But this, too, you will soon know of. Surrounded by corpses, all uncovered, waiting for the grave to be full so it could be covered.”
We pulled into my garage. Keeping to habit, I pushed the button to close it before opening the car door. The overhead bulb reassured me with its yellow glow.
We moved the tiny coffin from the car. At the doorway into the house proper, I paused, then stepped through, wondering about another legend. About permission and consent. “Are you able to enter my home? What if I do not give you permission?”
She laughed. “Old stories to reassure people with no power over the natural world that they were the captains of their own ships. Of course I can. And if I needed an invitation, do you not think carrying my coffin inside is permission?”
I frowned, puzzling it over. We carried the box into the guest bedroom and set it on the bed. That the bed had been stripped years ago and never remade seemed hardly relevant. I further suspected she would have no need of the nightstand or the guest bathroom, the last cluttered with boxes I had not unpacked since moving in. “That man in the house with the red lightbulbs.”
“Oui?”
“The light was an invitation?”
“No. He is, shall we say, eccentric. I helped him feel pleasure at my intrusion. Now, because of conditioning, he enjoys my visits and no harm is done.”
“So that is consensual?”
She folded her arms: a human gesture. “I am not a person. I do not worry about such things as permission or consent. I am a force, such as gravity or wind or sunshine. Lightning does not ask permission.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Perhaps you do, at that. Exodus.”
“What?”
“We blame Pharaoh for the plagues God visits on the Israelites. Did you ever read Exodus very closely? No? Each time Moses comes before him and says, ‘let my people go,’ God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and he says ‘no.’ Pharaoh knows the right thing to do and he wishes to do it, but God stops him from saying yes. And then God punishes Pharaoh and all of Egypt for saying ‘no.’”
