Throat

by R. A. Nelson

  “I love you, Papi,” I said in a broken voice. “I’ll be back. I promise.…”

  After I got back in the Jeep, I wouldn’t speak. Sagan drove me to the entrance of the Space Center. “What’s wrong?” he said. I didn’t answer and he tried to keep me in the car, almost fighting with me, grabbing at my arm.

  “No,” I said finally. “No!” And I broke away, running up the highway, loping so he wouldn’t see how fast I really was. He tried to follow, but the traffic was going the other way. By the time he got the Jeep turned around, I was gone.

  At least five minutes passed before I realized where I was going.

  I had to wait for them outside their dirty little cave room for nearly two hours. I passed the time basically weeping and feeling sorry for myself. Papi’s words blazed in my head: You are my strength. I was still cursed. Right now I was nobody’s strength.

  At last the vampires returned. They had been off on another Blutjagd, this time for Lena. They didn’t seem surprised to see me. I still had my sunglasses on. I didn’t want them seeing the condition of my eyes.

  “Oh, it’s you again,” Donne said, scowling. “What are those for?” she said, pointing at my sunglasses.

  “Sometimes my eyes are sensitive, even after dark,” I said, pointing at Lena’s oil lamp.

  “That will go away after a while,” Anton said.

  “You smell of … cooking,” Donne said.

  “Thanks,” I said. If I hadn’t felt so rotten, I would have added, “And you smell of cave dirt.” They all had on the same clothes as before. I was struck again by how slightly they were built. Must be from all that fasting.…

  I waited for them to settle around me on the chairs. Lena stretched out on a pallet. “Blutjagd always makes me sleepy,” she said. “You seem … sad, Emma.”

  “I’ll get over it,” I said, wondering if she were somehow tapping into my thoughts. I bit my lip. “Was it a … good hunt?”

  “Three kills!” Anton said. “When Lena eats, she … eats.”

  We talked a good while about unimportant things. Then we talked about important things. Finally I started to feel a little better, hearing what their lives had been like. Guess misery does love company. Now they were telling me their stories.

  “Many times people are taken from behind and never see who it was,” Anton was saying. We were back outside at the Steinhaus sitting on the wall again. The night breeze felt good on my face after being in the stuffy room.

  “But I did,” Anton went on. “Mine was a woman who hid in the basement of an Episcopal church in Atlanta. We had moved down from New Jersey, and I came each week to deliver coal for my father’s business. It was a November evening, dark very early. I can still remember wishing my jacket wasn’t so thin. Hard times! Okay? The Great War was just coming to an end. If it hadn’t ended soon, I was going to enlist. Fight the Hun. It seems like such an odd thing, hey? The history of someone else.”

  He smiled and went on. “I didn’t know she was down there. I woke her dumping a load of coal down the chute. I don’t think she was a bad person. Just starving and there I was. The coal bin had high walls and a low door. Sometimes the coal would pile up and block the door and I would have to go down and pull it free.

  “She was squatting in the corner, her back against the bricks, asleep. She was much older than me. I was seventeen. She was so thin. Her hair was thin too. I didn’t even know she was alive; her eyes flew open, staring at me. I tried to get away, but I slipped in the coal and slid down, eh? She was too fast. She was on top of me almost instantly. I can still feel the pain of her bite. Afterward she was still there when I awoke again. She told me over and over she was so sorry. She wept over me. She apologized for not killing me, for letting me live. Like this.”

  Lena and Donne were watching, not speaking, just taking it in. I wondered how many times they had heard this. It was weird listening to this guy who looked like a kid but talked like an adult from some other time period. Back whenever they used coal, anyhow.

  Anton coaxed Donne to tell her story. “Come on. We each have to share. You know that.”

  “All right, all right,” Donne said. “I was fifteen. It was a man. It was dark. He basically left me for dead. What more do you want?” She glared at me.

  “I didn’t ask you to tell it,” I said.

  “What’s the difference, anyhow?” Donne said. “We’re here, aren’t we? Who wants to live in the past? I am the past.”

  “You are still young,” Anton said. I realized that he was over a hundred himself. “Donne was taken during the Depression,” Anton went on. “It has left her depressed.” He laughed.

  We sat there watching each other uneasily. Lena spoke up.

  “I do not know if years truly count for us,” she said. “As old as I am, I don’t feel one bit older than the day I was taken. More experienced, certainly. But no older. I have watched the old many times over the years, and I have become convinced that they feel older because they are older. I mean, in their bodies. Otherwise, I think it would be as it is with us.”

  “How about you?” I said. “What’s your story?”

  “Great,” Donne said, cutting her eyes at Lena. “Go ahead. It won’t kill us to hear it again.”

  Lena smiled and nodded, then looked back at me.

  “I was living in a small Utopian Christian community called Bixby in Tennessee. We were a closed society. Bixby had been founded by a man named Philip Orton who had once been an Anglican clergyman in Connecticut. Pastor Orton had a dispute with his church and renounced his formal faith, then came south with a handful of followers where landholdings were cheap. His dream was to found a Christian Eden.

  “I say Christian, but half of us, the women, were totally without freedom and subject to the dictates of Pastor Orton at all times. This is the world I was born into. When I knew the pastor, he was past sixty. I remember he had flowing white hair and wore a tall, shiny beaver hat, even indoors. I cannot even recall a single picture in my imagination of him without it. Save one. And that one time was enough.

  “The day it happened, I had been avoiding Pastor Orton for weeks. I could sense instinctively what he was after. I could feel it even as I sat in the pews of our small church. His ravenous eyes following me wherever I went.”

  “So he was a vampire?” I said.

  “Patience,” Anton said.

  Lena went on. “I was coming back from the spring one afternoon with a load of washing when the pastor came to me behind the general store and assaulted me.” She paused a moment, gathering herself. “I managed to fight him off, but I was terrified thereafter and was careful never to be alone with him.

  “I had no one to tell about this. I wanted to tell my mother what had happened, but she was so enraptured with the pastor, it was impossible. My father … with him I did not even try. He was one of Pastor Orton’s deacons.

  “After that, I hid my face as much as possible and became something of a shut-in. I felt trapped. My life, at the ripe old age of twenty, seemed as if it were essentially over. And then he came.”

  Lena’s eyes were glistening. She took in a shuddering breath.

  “Who?” I said.

  “I only ever knew him by one name,” Lena said. “Valentin.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Wait, it gets even better,” Anton said, smirking. Donne jabbed him in the ribs.

  “That really was his name,” Lena said. “The only one I ever knew him by. Valentin was a French Creole from Baton Rouge. He happened to be passing through our little community on the way to Boston.

  “It was early spring. Valentin arrived in the middle of the night in a terrible storm. He happened to come to my door first. His knock woke me, and I opened the door to the schoolhouse where I was sleeping—I was the only teacher in Bixby—and there he was, sweeping his dripping hat low and bowing to me. It was as if the Lord Himself had stepped into that room. I had never known a man could be beautiful—the men of our commun
ity were so plain. I was awed by his powerful arms, huge chest, long black hair. His voice alone, that accent, simply melted me.

  “You must understand … I was so innocent. Yet also so ready for change. I had thought of running away many times, but where to? And what would I live on? It all seemed so hopeless until Valentin came.

  “He returned each night. I could not think to dare question this. It was too good. His visits were what I lived for. Even my parents remarked that my cheeks were glowing with a new vibrancy. We fell in love. Not in one night, no. We had to be secretive about it. Valentin would only appear long after dark, after the rest of Bixby was asleep. How I lived to be near him! I cannot tell you how intoxicating it was. We made plans. I was to run away with him. I had no reason to stay. He would be my protector.

  “The night of my escape arrived. I had everything I owned tied in a small bundle. I left a farewell note in my mother’s bread box and waited in the schoolroom. Valentin arrived. He had acquired a horse for me. You cannot imagine how thrilled I was. We were just about to leave when the schoolhouse door was flung open. There stood Pastor Orton. To this day, I do not know how he found us out. I only know what happened next.”

  Lena paused for another long moment. I’m not sure I was even breathing at that point. The night, everything around me, had disappeared. “Go on,” I said. Lena collected herself and continued.

  “One moment the pastor was bellowing in a fury, rushing toward us, and the next he was flung across the room so violently, his body was broken against the iron stove.

  “Whatever Valentin had done, I had never seen it. It was almost as if avenging angels had been in the room with us.

  “There was no turning back now. We plunged into the night, the forest. I don’t know how long we rode, but we had to have traveled many miles from Bixby. We came to a natural glade in the middle of a vast forested wilderness, somewhere just over the border into Kentucky. Valentin set about putting together a makeshift camp there in all that wildness. I could not understand why he was hurrying so.

  “ ‘I must leave you now,’ he said when he was finished. ‘I am sorry, but it cannot be helped. The sun will rise soon. You must rest. I will return at sundown.’

  “I wept inconsolably. Valentin begged me to trust him and then he was gone.

  “I tried to sleep, but every sound made me leap with fear. After the sun arose, it was the longest day of my life. I was so tired, unable to think clearly. All alone in that immense forest, terrified he would never return. I think I was slightly mad by the time the sun dipped below the horizon.

  “And then he was there. The joy I felt was so overpowering, I collapsed. I must have slept several hours. When I awoke, Valentin was leaning over me in the light of a single candle. He was caressing me. He kissed me. I will never forget that kiss as long as I live. He removed my coat and shawl and began to unbutton my chemise. I trembled, but after all I had been through, all the terror and the joy, I felt I was ready for anything. Even that.

  “ ‘Forgive me, my darling,’ he said. ‘Rien ne peut m’arrêter maintenant.’ ”

  “Which means?” I said.

  “I was expecting a Creole phrase that meant he loved me endlessly,” Lena said, smiling sadly at the thought. “But it wasn’t even Creole; it was Standard French, meaning, ‘Nothing can stop me now.’ That is what he said, and then he brought his face next to my ear and …”

  “He took you,” I said.

  “He … drank from me. Drank from my throat.”

  Lena closed her eyes slowly and they stayed shut as if glued that way by the memory. She lifted her hand to her neck, touched a place just below her jaw. Her whole body seemed to sag.

  “I was horrified by what he had done. Valentin was a monster. How could this man I loved have done this thing to me? I wanted to strike at him, kill him. I remember how feeble my struggles were compared to his strength. At last I simply left, and he let me go. I did not realize it at the time, but Valentin was tracking me through that forest. He waited until I was overcome with exhaustion, slumped over a stream trying to drink, before approaching me again. But he did not approach me physically; he did so through the Call.”

  “Wait. The Call …,” I said, immediately thinking of Wirtz. How he had used that word over and over, wanting me to come to him. Lena seemed to study me for a second before speaking.

  “You have heard of this?”

  “Please, go on. I’m sorry I interrupted.”

  “Very well. When Valentin approached me again, I was terror-stricken, yet he made no aggressive moves. He was himself. Perhaps you could say he wore me down. He was very gentle in his approach. At long last I could stand it no more. I was ready to fall into his arms, a kind of rapturous suicide. But he was not really there. Not in bodily form, only his … essence, what we call the Wesentliche. He explained through this disembodied messenger why he did what he did. Valentin had never intended to fall in love that night.

  “ ‘I had not known I was still capable of love,’ he said, ‘until that moment I came through your door and saw you. I was going to attack you, leave you for dead. I had been staggering blindly through my life. Which I did not think was even a life anymore. You brought me back. You were my salvation.’

  “ ‘Then why …,’ I said, touching my throat.

  “ ‘I am eternally sorry for that,’ he said. ‘It is my selfishness. I knew you would never assent to such a transformation. A union with someone like … me. What I had become. And so … I took you instead. Like stealing from heaven. I feel as if I may be struck down even now for speaking of such a place. Yet I am telling you the truth. All that I ask is that you somehow understand that this was the only way. Our only way. You could have never lived a normal life knowing this about me. And you would grow old as I remained forever … what I am. Please forgive me and consider what I have said. What I am now asking.’

  “He thought it was his only chance. Our only chance,” Lena said. Her eyes were bright with tears. “And so … he felt he must turn me. So that we would be frozen forever in that moment. Never again to age. To spend the rest of eternity with each other.”

  Donne rolled her eyes at this. Lena didn’t seem to notice.

  She didn’t speak for a little while, as if she were caught up in a memory too painful to deal with. Finally she started again.

  “Eternity … turned out to be scarcely more than a year. But in that time, Valentin taught me everything I needed to know about … what I was. When to hunt. Where. How to feed. In the beginning, I would not speak to him. I ran away several times. When he caught me, I would beat his chest, screaming and pleading. I was certain my soul was dying. Perhaps it was already dead.”

  Lena folded her hands across her lap.

  “So … whatever happened to him?” I said. “Valentin? Why aren’t you still together?”

  “It is so … ridiculous,” Lena said. “It was in 1862 … I forget the month. We were hiding in an abandoned farm beneath a puncheon floor … an old root cellar that smelled of decaying potatoes and onions.

  “The cabin had been looted and burned. It was by pure chance that they did not come upon the cellar. When we came out, just after dark, we staggered into a nightmare world of flame, the sound of gunpowder discharging, the whistle of minié ball shot. We had stumbled onto a Civil War battlefield. Valentin took my hand and we fled. I could hear his heart pounding.…

  “I saw the flash first, a huge outpouring of flame—it was a cannon. In my memory it made a sound like a mountain breaking open. We had passed directly in front of the Union lines. I do not even know the name of the battle. Probably a minor one. For me, however, it was everything. We were so close to the lines, even with Valentin’s speed …”

  Lena dropped her head, then raised it again.

  “The cannonball … it took everything above his shoulders—he was taken from me just that suddenly. I was pitched into the mud by the blast and soaked in Valentin’s warm blood.

  “My life has neve
r been the same since meeting him. Not a day goes by that I do not grieve for him in some way. Though it has a certain … crystalline … feeling to it now. An emotion captured in amber.”

  “Don’t be fooled,” Anton said to me. “Just listen to her sometime when she sleeps.”

  Donne seemed very far away. I wondered what she was thinking. As if hearing my thoughts, she spoke up.

  “Tell her, Lena.”

  “Tell me what?” I said.

  Lena stared at Donne as if deciding whether or not she should. “I suppose it would have come up sooner or later,” she said, exhaling.

  “What?”

  “Valentin … wasn’t just any old vampire,” Donne said. “Was he, Lena?”

  “No,” she said, almost whispering. “He wasn’t. He was French Creole, but he was more than that. He was … Verloren.”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me you fell in love with a Verloren guy? Wow. So I guess not all of them are so easy to pick out on sight. Not all of them are monstrous.”

  “Oh no,” Lena said. “For you see, Emma … I was Verloren too.”

  I won’t lie. The thought blazed through my mind that I might have been tricked. That I had wandered right into a nest of Verloren and Wirtz was waiting right around the corner. Or maybe there were no such creatures as Verloren or Sonnen, and the three vampires were just toying with me. They had all that time to kill.…

  But looking at Lena’s eyes instantly dispelled that thought. Vampire lore is full of tales about the suggestive powers of the vampire stare, but what I saw in her eyes reflected nothing but pain. Pain and loss and years of getting over it.

  “But …” I didn’t know what I was trying to say.

  “Let me help you,” Donne said to me. “You’re wondering if this is all just crap, aren’t you, Emma? The Sonnen. Explosions on the sun. Cures. Fasting. Admit it.”