The dressing room was longer and longer, like a football field… like the time line of the history of the universe… and they kept on walking, and walking, and walking, with her getting bigger and bigger in the mirror until he didn’t see how she could get any bigger, and meanwhile he kept on singing his opera to her, the opera Erik was composing about Don Juan triumphing over all the powers of Hell…
She was touching the giant mirror, putting her arms through it. He reached out to hug her from behind and pull her back—she shattered into a zillion Christines, each tiny new Christine a facet in a huge mirror-tile globe spinning around and around, faster and faster, tinkling till it white-noised out his music.
And then, when it stopped and the mirror wall settled down again, like the lake smoothing out… he couldn’t see himself at all.
He was in Erik’s torture chamber, the little room with six walls and every one of them an identical mirror, reflecting each other over and over again until nobody could ever count all the reflections. There was a whole crowd of people in there with him… well, maybe just two or three, but they looked like a whole crowd, an endless mob of the same two or three faces reflected over and over everywhere… except he couldn’t find his own face anywhere! And he finally understood how a person could go crazy in the Phantom of the Opera’s mirror torture chamber…
Christine Daae sang, “He becomes a living dead man.”
Her voice woke him up. His mother’s antique hand mirror with the pearly plastic frame was lying on the hospital bedside tray table. He reached for the mirror, picked it up trembling, made sure he had the mirror side toward him, and looked in.
He saw the dent his head was making in the pillow, and a little bloodstain on the pillowcase down near the lower edge. His head wasn’t in the reflection at all.
Still watching the mirror, he used his other hand to feel his neck and the corners of his mouth. Blood, both places. He could see it on his fingers, but he couldn’t see either it or his fingers in the mirror. Just the pillow changing shape as he moved around.
He popped his fingers in his mouth and licked them clean before anybody came in and saw them. He could feel his eyeteeth growing long and sharp already. The bloodstain on the pillowcase must have come out of his neck before any blood from the dark shape’s wrist got into his mouth.
His mother’s mirror slipped out of his hand and dropped to the floor. Its bounce echoed on and on and on… like Christine Daae’s song in his brain. A vague recollection came to him that Aunt Cele had Mom’s old hand mirror down in Indiana. That meant it couldn’t be up here. He was still dreaming…
It didn’t make any difference. Some dreams were true. This one was. Not about his mother’s mirror… and maybe not about the blood on his pillow. But true in what it was telling him.
He had seen his own face for the last time in his life a few minutes ago when he’d been floating in the air above his body. All puffy and bruised—what a last sight to get of your own face! And that was it, that was the last he’d ever be able to see of it live…
He guessed he’d have to buy a portrait from one of those sidewalk artists every so often.
It seemed a stupid thing to worry about on top of everything else, but… He’d known Erik’s whole Don Juan Triumphant when he was singing it in the dream, and the hospital people came rushing in just as he finally started trying to get it back. Well, maybe it would’ve been too late, anyway.
“I hadn’t been aware he was an orphan at the time,” Mendoza commented. “He missed out on a normal family childhood in more ways than one.”
“I never had any paternal grandparents to go visit and be spoiled by, either. Thanks to that speeding UPS truck years before I was born… And then to have a truck get him, too! Exactly the same way it would have gotten anybody else who happened to be in that crossing when it jumped the red light.”
“A crossroads, of sorts,” Mendoza said musingly. “To have spent most of his life under a mild phobia of the stake, and then…”
“At least it wasn’t driven through his heart until afterward.” All the same, Amarantha shut her eyes for a moment, involuntarily reliving the horror of the desecration. And she hadn’t even seen his body until after Farwell’s Funeral Home had cosmeticized away all traces of that last indignity as well as most of what the speeding truck had done. “He wouldn’t have cared then, not when he was already dead,” she reminded her host and herself.
“No, I suppose not. Considering the instructions he left for having his body cremated.”
“He didn’t even want to test whether or not he could be brought back to life!” She wished he had left them room to try resuscitating him. Dying in your early seventies was premature even for ordinary people nowadays, and slowly as her father had been aging, he could have looked forward to twenty or thirty more years of fully active life.
“I think he came to welcome the irreversibility of change,” Mendoza remarked. “Once he became reconciled to the fact that, as far as anyone has been able to discover, there is no way to get back to not being a vampire, any other than any of us can get back to babyhood or adolescence or virginity… why look for death to be any less permanent? Whatever happens to our consciousness after death—and he for one believed that it survives the body—the way to grow is by stepping from change to change, not by slipping backward, even if and when slipping backward might be possible.”
She was only half listening. “Almost the only thing we had left from my father’s parents,” she said, “was an antique manger set that had been his grandmother’s. Maybe even his great-grandmother’s. I’m not sure exactly what it’s made of. Some kind of plaster, I think. Lord, I used to love that old set! One of my biggest thrills every Christmas was unwrapping the little figures and setting them up, one by one. Until that one year… I must have been about six or seven. I think it was during one of those phases Pop went through now and then where he’d try wearing something else than the old vampire ‘habit’ for a day or two. I seem to remember him in blue trousers and a blue pullover sweater with snowflakes that evening.
Anyway, that’d explain why I didn’t notice right away that he’d taken off his crosses…“
He guessed that a thirty-seven-year-old tenured professor with three growing children should know better by now. Wearing anything else than his traditional Lugosi-style opera suit and cape had the tang of hypocrisy, and always seemed to bring on a major or minor crisis. Why did he keep deciding, every few years, that all the times before had been pure coincidence, and try again?
It didn’t help that this time the first colleague he encountered in the faculty lounge of the Music School was Dave Groves.
“Say, old bloodsucker, what’s happening? Planning to sneak up unsuspected on some new nick beneath the mistletoe, are we?”
“Well, you know. The eve of a new decade, time for a new image…”
“Uh-unh, old bean.” The know-it-all wink that was the younger professor’s specialty. “New decade doesn’t start till sixty-one. The year ending in ‘zero’ still belongs to the old decade. Take it from me, don’t let that subject loose on your students. Stick with what you know.”
“Thanks for the stray gem from your encyclopedic knowledge, Dave, but if I took a vote on it, I’d bet ninety-eight percent of my students would say the Sixties begin a little more than a week from now.” Ordinarily, Clement would have shut his mouth on a comeback like that; but out of vampire habit he felt looser, more like everybody else—the people who could sin to their hearts’ content without any inconvenient physical side effects.
“Ninety-eight percent?” Pushing up his lower lip, Groves shook his head. “No, I can’t believe the level of misinformation is that high. Tell you what, I’ll just take you up on that bet for… oh, let’s say a dollar or two.”
“Let’s say three,” the vampire answered stiffly, and his miniature white-gold crucifix sent a twinge through his pierced earlobe at this display of stubborn pride. He ignored it.
Th
en he ran into Jane Hoffman in the hall and watched her expression flicker from lack of recognition to the kind of look that could still make him wonder, even after all these years of doing it mirrorless, if he’d combed his hair crooked or missed a patch of beard while shaving.
Without waiting for the tactful comment he could see she was trying to formulate about his change of dress, he fell back on his second line of defense: “Well, you know, my two oldest are getting to the age where it’s hard enough figuring out what to get the old man for Christmas. Just thought I’d let them have the option other kids have of choosing Pop something loud and sporty.”
The gray-haired doctor of music bestowed on him a sage nod. “I see. Very commendable. All the same, Dr. Czarny,”—Clement’s doctorate was still pending, but Jane Hoffman’s way of democratizing her title was giving it out gratis to almost every colleague—“if I might offer a word of fashion advice… the silver filigree cross is striking on your usual outfit, but I wouldn’t wear it with that sweater.”
“No? I thought it matched the snowflakes pretty well.”
“It’s hardly visible against the pale blue. And when a person looks closely enough to see it, it seems… out of place. Much too formal for its background. On your usual shirt, it’s elegant. On that sweater, just an extraneous dangle of jewelry.”
“I see. Thank you.” Lifting the cross on its chain, he dropped it between his new sweater and the matching blue shirt he wore beneath. Through a single layer of thin cotton, it felt remarkably warm. He monitored his thoughts, found angry resentment toward Dr. Hoffman with her “fashion advice,” and tried to leave it behind in the echo of his footprints on the tile floor. The whole reason he wore the cross was to help him avoid anger, not rouse it.
His necklace and earring had both cooled by the time he reached the lecture room, only to heat up again in the stress of dealing with his “Music Appreciation I” class. The Friday before Christmas break turned out to be one of the worst days in the year he could have chosen to break out of habit. Whether it was the coming vacation that made the students act more like high school than university freshmen and sophomores, or whether his usual vampire costume inspired more awe than he suspected, discipline fell apart. A few of the naturally better-behaved kids complimented their prof on his new clothes, but most of the students apparently took the change of costume as a signal to go slaphappy.
It did not improve matters that seven of the thirty-four—an easy twenty percent—chose to vote in favor of beginning the new decade in ‘sixty-one.
Discipline-wise, the day’s second class was, if anything, worse. The kids didn’t even quiet down when he signaled his anger by making a show of removing the crucifix from his ear and putting it away in the case his oldest daughter had petit-pointed for it, usually a surefire trick for reining them in. It seemed that when he was out of vampire costume, they no longer so much as pretended to take the vampirish temper seriously.
And the earring had definitely needed removing by then.
The third class comprised mostly juniors and seniors, but today they were the worst of all. He gave up trying to siphon “Advanced Theory” into their brains and let the period disintegrate early into the ‘sixty-versus’-sixty-one argument the grapevine had obviously prepared them to expect.
At least, when all three classes were added together, the total percentage voting for ‘sixty-one fell several points. Not enough: all Groves needed was three percent who saw the new decade thing his way, and he still had more than quadruple that.
Meanwhile, between classes, Prof Czarny’s office hours brought in one legitimate counseling problem, one simple headache—Bob Wilde arguing about his latest grade again (if Wilde would put half the time into studying that he put into arguing with every teacher about his grades…), and one frosh lad from Engineering School, not even a student the vampire had ever seen close-up before, wanting confidential tips on “how to give a girl a real, topflight hickey.”
Somebody or other hit with this hickey business several times a year. Young women had even solicited him to give them one in person. Occasionally older women, too, and once—he still cringed to think of it— a young man. It could take half an hour to convince them that being a vampire did not automatically make someone an expert in hickeys, that, in fact, Professor Czarny, mindful of the awkwardness and possible danger from his fangs, had never given one to anybody. Today it took the full hour, and the engineering student left for his next class still looking unconvinced, as if he might come back.
It was immediately after that visit that Clement pulled the cross up from beneath his sweater and took it off completely. He wished he had taken it off an hour or two earlier. If things kept on the way they’d been going, he’d have to work twice as hard at self-restraint without the alarm system on his temper, but he thought the holy symbol was starting to blister his skin through the thin cloth shirt.
He knew from experience that the cloth itself would be undamaged. That was something, anyway.
Trying to unwind between his scheduled office hours and the late-afternoon opera committee meeting, he again encountered Dave Groves in the faculty lounge, where Groves seemed to spend the better part of almost every school day.
In one way, it was just as well. The vampire would have hated having this matter of the bet hanging over the entire Christmas break or, even worse, cropping up at some holiday party. But in another way, it was the last thing he needed to cap off the day’s irritations.
“Oh, yes! David,” he began at once, fumbling carefully with his money clip, before the younger man could broach the subject. “You won. Congratulations.” He twitched out a pinchful of bills, eventually extracted three singles, and held them out between little finger and ring finger while putting the extra currency away with as much dignity as he could manage.
“I did?” Groves returned, pretending surprise but sounding smug about it as he accepted the money. “By how much?”
“It totaled out to fourteen percent seeing it your way.”
“That high, eh? Well, I know you, Clem. You probably bent over backward to be fair. Overstated my case until they thought they were voting the way you wanted.” Another know-it-all wink. “You’d make a lousy courtroom lawyer, you old bloodsucker.”
Actually, quite a few people had told Clement, throughout his life, that he’d have made a fine courtroom lawyer. They used to beg him, back in his student days, to go out for the Debate Team. Maybe the dracula costume had a lot to do with that, too; he certainly didn’t seem to have the touch today. In fact, he suspected most of that fourteen percent had voted for ‘sixty-one in order to annoy him, guessing or having heard where he’d put his money. But there was no way he would share that thought with Groves. “Thank you, David,” he replied instead. “I take it as a compliment to be told how fair and impartial I am to an opponent’s viewpoint. Might not be much good as a courtroom lawyer, but I’d have made a fine judge, wouldn’t you say?”
It was one of the day’s few victories-out-of-defeat. But it sent him to the opera committee meeting with a nagging doubt about taking too much pride in an irate comeback.
The meeting would have been grim enough if he’d gone into it with a quiet conscience. The Ives triumvirate obviously came prepared to do full battle for Tannhauser. Dean Ives because he wanted his latest Met-material protege in the lead, Grundman because he was the dean’s pet yes-man, and Lomax because she was clearly itching to direct it in the same lurid style she had directed Lulu and The Three penny Opera.
Dr. Hoffman sat back saying little except for the occasional comment to second whoever had spoken last. Clement found himself holding out alone for the piece that they should have done this December, and that Ives had been promising to do “next term” for the last three years, Rossini’s Cenerentola.
“You just want to sing the valet,” said Lomax.
“I do not! Tom Harringan would be almost ideal in that part.” If they’d done it when Clement had first suggested it, they
could have cast Rico Sforzi, who was born for such roles; but Sforzi had gone on to Juilliard last year.
“You did Papageno four or five years back,” Lomax pointed out.
Dr. Hoffman put in, “Superbly, too. But only because Sforzi sprained his ankle the day before we opened.”
“La Cenerentola,” said Dean Ives, “is more of a Christmas piece. I should have thought, Czarny, that you’d approve a highly moral work such as Tannhauser, especially falling as close to Easter as this spring’s opera will.”
Moral? With the Venusburg sequence, and not impossibly the music contest as well, staged by Sally Lomax in the style of a skin flick? “If you want a piece with an edifying moral,” Clement said carefully, hoping Lomax could restrain herself with Mozart, “let’s do The Marriage of Figaro.”
“We just did Mikado this month,” said the dean’s yes-man Grundman, shaking his head. “Can’t do two light comedies in a row.”
“The whole theme of Figaro is forgiveness! You can’t put it in the same category as Mikado. But if you want something heavy,” Clement argued, “why not Don Giovanni?”
Lomax said, “You just want to sing the valet.”
The vampire slipped off his rings and put them in his pocket, away from his skin. Even though silver and gold hadn’t been counted as particularly sacred metals for years, the bands were starting to constrict and burn his fingers.
In the end, the committee compromised on Tannhauser with a three to one vote, Dr. Hoffman abstaining.
Sunlight almost never gave Clement trouble but, considering his mood by the time he got out of the building, he was glad today was one of the shortest days of the year, with the sun already safely set. He hoped they weren’t having spaghetti or anything else with garlic for dinner. Tonight, unless he could simmer down quickly, even garlic—forgotten though its ancient holy symbolism was—might react on him. And he felt too tired to shake out of the anger groove and simmer down quickly.
Sisters in Fantasy Page 23
