By Blood We Live

by John Joseph Adams

  "Why?" I sighed.

  "Because only love can mend my heart."

  I wondered at the scar there. I moved against her, opening her legs.

  "Darling!"

  I met Morodor on the first day of my second week at Fuego del Aire. And then it seemed quite by chance.

  It was just after breakfast and Marissa had gone back to her room to change. I was strolling along the second-floor balustrade when I came across a niche in the wall that I had missed before.

  I went through it and found myself on a parapet along the jutting north side of the castle. It was like hanging in mid-air and I would have been utterly stunned by the vista had I not almost immediately run into a dark towering shape.

  Hastily I backed up against the stone wall of the castle, thinking I had inadvertently run into another outcropping of this odd structure.

  Then, quite literally, it seemed as if a shadow had come to life. It detached itself from the edge of the parapet and now I could see that it was the figure of a man.

  He must have been nearly seven feet tall and held about him a great ebon cape, thick and swirling, that rushed down his slender form so that it hissed against the stone floor when he moved.

  He turned toward me and I gasped. His face was long and narrow, as bony as a corpse's, his skin fully as pale. His eyes, beneath darkly furred brows, were bits of bituminous matter as if put there to plug a pair of holes into his interior. His nose was long and thin to the point of severity but his lips were full and rubicund, providing the only bit of color to his otherwise deathly pallid face.

  His lips opened infinitesimally and he spoke my name. Involuntarily, I shuddered and immediately saw something pass across his eyes: not anger or sorrow but rather a weary kind of resignation.

  "How do you do."

  The greeting was so formal that it startled me and I was tongue-tied. After all this time, he had faded from my mind and now I longed only to be with Marissa. I found myself annoyed with him for intruding upon us.

  "Morodor," I said. I had the oddest impulse to tell him that what he needed most was a good dose of sunshine. That almost made me giggle. Almost.

  "Pardon me for saying this but I thought. . . that is, to see you up and around, outside in the daylight—" I stopped, my cheeks burning, unable to go on. I had done it anyway. I cursed myself for the fool that I was.

  But Morodor took no offense. He merely smiled—a perfectly ghastly sight—and inclined his head a fraction. "A rather common misconception," he said in his disturbing, rumbling voice. "It is in fact direct sunlight that is injurious to my health. I am like a fine old print." His dark hair brushed against his high forehead. "I quite enjoy the daytime, otherwise."

  "But surely you must sleep sometime."

  He shook his great head. "Sleep is unknown to me. If I slept, I would dream and this is not allowed me." He took a long hissing stride along the parapet. "Come," he said. "Let us walk." I looked back the way I had come and he said, "Marissa knows we are together. Do not fear. She will be waiting for you when we are finished."

  Together we walked along the narrow parapet. Apparently, it girdled the entire castle, for I saw no beginning to it and no end.

  "You may wonder," Morodor said in his booming, vibratory voice, "why I granted you this interview." His great cape swept around him like the coils of a midnight sea so that it seemed as if he kept the night around him wherever he went. "I sensed in your writing a certain desperation." He turned to me. "And desperation is an emotion with which I can empathize."

  "It was kind of you to see me."

  "Kind, yes."

  "But I must confess that things have. . . changed since I wrote that letter."

  "Indeed." Was that a vibratory warning?

  "Yes," I plunged onward. "In fact, since I came here, I—" I paused, not knowing how to continue. "The change has come since I arrived at Fuego del Aire."

  Morodor said nothing and we continued our perambulation around the perimeter of the castle. Now I could accurately judge just how high up we were. Perhaps that mist I had seen the first night had been a cloud passing us as if across the face of the moon. And why not? All things seemed possible here. It struck me as ridiculous that just fifty miles from here there were supertankers and express trains, Learjets and paved streets lined with shops dispensing sleekly packaged products manufactured by multinational corporations. Surely all those modern artifacts were part of a fading dream I once had.

  The sea was clear of sails for as far as the horizon. It was a flat and glittering pool there solely for the pleasure of this man.

  "I'm in love with your sister." I had blurted it out and now I stood stunned, waiting, I suppose, for the full brunt of his wrath.

  But instead, he stopped and stared at me. Then he threw his head back and laughed, a deep booming sound like thunder. Far off, a gull screeched, perhaps in alarm.

  "My dear sir," he said. "You really are the limit!"

  "And she's in love with me."

  "Oh oh oh. I have no doubt that she is."

  "I don't—"

  His brows gathered darkly like stormclouds. "You believe your race to be run." He moved away. "But fear, not love, ends it." Through another niche, he slid back inside the castle. It was as if he had passed through the wall.

  "If I had known that today was the day," Marissa said, "I would have prepared you."

  "For what?"

  We were sitting in a bower on a swing-chaise. Above our heads arched brilliant hyacinth and bougainvillea, wrapped around and around a white wooden trellis. It was near dusk and the garden was filled with a deep sapphire light that was almost luminescent. A westerly wind brought us the rich scent of the sea.

  "For him. We are not. . . very much alike. At least, superficially."

  "Marissa," I said, taking her hand, "are you certain that you are Morodor's sister?"

  "Of course I am. What do you mean?"

  "Well, it's obvious, isn't it?" But when she looked at me blankly, I was forced to go on. "What I mean is, he's precisely. . . what he's supposed to be. At least the way the legends describe. . . what he is."

  Her eyes grew dark and she jerked her hand away. She gave me a basilisk stare. "I should have known." Her voice was filled with bitter contempt. "You're just like the rest. And why shouldn't you be?" She stood. "You think he's a monster. Yes, admit it. A monster!"

  Her eyes welled up with tears. "And that makes me a monster too, doesn't it. Well, to hell with you!" And she whirled away.

  "Marissa!" I cried in anguish. "That's not what I meant at all."

  And I ran after her knowing that it was a lie, that it was what I had meant after all. Morodor was all the legends had said he should be. And more. My God but he was hideous. Pallid and cold as the dead. An engine of negative energy, incapable of any real feeling; of crying or true humor. Or love.

  Only love can mend my heart.

  I had meant it. How could this golden girl of air and sunlight bear any family ties to that great looming figure of darkness? Where was the sense in it? The rationality? She had feelings. She laughed and cried, felt pleasure and pain. And she loved. She loved.

  "Marissa!" I called again, running. "Marissa, come back!" But she had vanished into the labyrinth and I stood there on the threshold, the scent of roses strong in my nostrils, and peered within. I called out her name over and over again but she did not appear and, unguided, I could not bring myself to venture farther.

  Instead, I stormed back to the castle, searching for Morodor. It was already dark and the lights had been lit. As if by magic. In just the same way that the food was prepared, the wine bottles uncorked, my bed turned down in the evening and made in the morning, my soiled clothes washed, pressed and laid out with the professional's precision. And all done without my seeing a soul.

  I found Morodor in the library. It was a room as large as a gallery: at least three floors of books, rising upward until the neat rows were lost in the haze of distance. Narrow wooden walkways circ
led the library at various levels, connected by a complex network of wide wooden ladders.

  He was crouched on one of these, three or four steps off the floor. It seemed an odd position for a man of his size.

  He was studying a book as I came in but he quietly closed it when he heard me approach.

  "What," I said, rather nastily, "no leather bindings?"

  His hard ebon eyes regarded me without obvious emotion. "Leather," he said softly, "would mean the needless killing of animals."

  "Oh, I see." My tone had turned acid. "It's only humans who need fear you."

  He stood up and I backed away, abruptly fearful as he unfolded upward and upward until he stood over me in all his monstrous height.

  "Humans," he said, "fear me only because they choose to fear me.

  "You mean you haven't given them any cause to fear you?"

  "Don't be absurd." He was as close to being annoyed as I had seen him. "I cannot help being what I am. Just as you cannot. We are both carnivores."

  I closed my eyes and shuddered. "But with what a difference!"

  "To some I have been a god."

  "Such a dark god." My eyes flew open.

  "There is a need for that, too." He put the book way. "Yet I am a man for all that."

  "A man who can't sleep, who doesn't dream."

  "Who cannot die."

  "Not even if I drive a stake through your heart?" I did not know whether or not I was serious.

  He went across the room to where a strip of the wooden paneling intervened between two bookshelves. His hand merged from the folds of his voluminous cape and for the first time I saw the long talon-like nails exposed. I shivered as I saw them dig into the wood with ferocious strength. But not in any hot animal way. The movement was as precise as a surgeon peeling back a patient's peritoneum.

  Morodor returned with a shard of wood perhaps eighteen inches in length. It was slightly tapered at one end, not needle sharp but pointed enough to do its work. He thrust it into my hands. "Here," he said harshly. "Do it now."

  For an instant, I intended to do just that. But then something inside me cooled. I threw the stake from me. "I'll do no such thing."

  He actually seemed disappointed. "No matter. That part of the legend, as others, is incorrect." He went back to his perch on the ladder, his long legs drawn up tightly beneath the cape, the outline of his bony knees like a violent set of punctuation marks on a blank page.

  "Legends," he said, "are like funerals. They both serve the same purpose. They give comfort without which the encroachment of terrifying entropy would snuff out man's desire—his absolute hunger—for life."

  He looked from his long nails up into my face. "Legends are created to set up their own kind of terror. But it is a terror very carefully bounded by certain limitations: the werewolf can be killed by a silver bullet, the medusa by seeing her own reflection in a mirror.

  "You see? Always there is a way out for the intrepid. It is a necessary safety valve venting the terror that lurks within all mankind—atavistic darkness, the unconscious. And death."

  He rested his long arms in his lap. "How secure do you imagine mankind would feel if all of them out there knew the reality of it? That there is no escape for me. No stake through the heart."

  "But you said direct sunlight—"

  "Was injurious to me. Like the flu, nothing more." He smiled wanly. "A week or two in bed and I am fit again." He laughed sardonically.

  "Assuming I believe you, why are you telling me this? By your own admission, mankind could not accept the knowledge."

  "Then you won't tell them, will you?"

  "But I know."

  He took a deep breath and for the first time his eyes seemed to come to life, sparking and dancing within their deep fleshless sockets. "Why did you wish to come here, my friend?"

  "Why, I told you in the letter. I was blocked, out of ideas."

  "And now?"

  I stared at him quizzically while it slowly began to wash over me. "I can tell them, can't I?"

  He smiled sphinx-like. "You are a writer. You can tell them anything you wish."

  "When I told you before that I was a man, I meant it."

  I was sitting with Morodor high up in one of the castle's peaks, in what he called the cloud room. Like all the other chambers I had been in here, it was paneled in wood.

  "I have a hunger to live just like all the rest of the masses." He leaned back in his chair, shifting about as if he were uncomfortable. To his left and right, enormous windows stood open to the starry field of the night. There were no shutters, no curtains; they could not be closed. A sharp, chill wind blew in, ruffling his dark hair but he seemed oblivious to the caress. "But do not mistake my words. I speak not as some plutocrat bloated on wealth. It is only that I am. . . special."

  "What happened?"

  His eyes flashed and he shifted again. "In each case, it is different. In mine. . . well, let us say that my hunger for life outweighed my caution." He smiled bleakly. "But then I have never believed that caution was a desirable trait."

  "Won't you tell me more."

  He looked at me in the most avuncular fashion. "I entered into a wager with. . . someone."

  "And you won."

  "No. I lost. But it was meant that I should lose. Otherwise, I would not be here now." His eyes had turned inward and in so doing had become almost wistful. "I threw the dice one time, up against a wall of green baize."

  "You crapped out."

  "No. I entered into life."

  "And became El Amor Brujo. That's what you're sometimes called: the love sorcerer."

  "Because of my. . . hypnotic effect on women." He moved minutely and his cape rustled all about him like a copse of trees stirred by a midnight wind. "A survival trait. Like seeing in the dark or having built-in radar."

  "Then there's nothing magical—"

  "There is," he said, "magic involved. One learns. . . many arts over the years. I have time for everything."

  I shivered, pulled my leather jacket closer about me. He might not mind the chill, but I did. I pointed to the walls. "Tell me something. The outside of Fuego del Aire is pure stone. But here, inside, there is only wood. Why is that?"

  "I prefer wood, my friend. I am not a creature of the earth and so stone insults me; its density inhibits me. I feel more secure with the wood." His hand lifted, fluttered, dropped back into his lap. "Trees." He said it almost as if it were a sacred word.

  In the ensuing silence, I began to sweat despite the coldness. I knew what I at least was leading up to. I rubbed my palms down the fabric of my trousers. I cleared my throat.

  "Morodor. . .."

  "Yes." His eyes were half-shut as if he were close to sleep.

  "I really do love Marissa."

  "I know that." But there seemed no kindness in his voice.

  I took a deep breath. "We had a row. She thinks I see you as a monster."

  He did not move, his eyes did not open any wider, for which I was profoundly grateful. "In a world where so many possibilities exist, this is true. Yet I am also a man. And I am Marissa's brother. I am friend. . . foe; master. . . servant. It is all in the perception." Still he did not move. "What do you see, my friend?"

  I wished he'd stop calling me that. I said nothing.

  "If you are not truthful with me, I shall know it." His ruby lips seemed to curve upward at their corners. "Something else you may add to the new legend. . . if you choose to write about it."

  "I've no wish to deceive you, Morodor. I'm merely trying to sort through my own feelings." I thought he nodded slightly.

  "I confess. . . to finding your appearance. . . startling."

  "I appreciate your candor."

  "Oh, hell, I thought you were hideous."

  "I see."

  "You hate me now."

  "Why should I hate you? Because you take the world view?"

  "But that was at first. Already you've changed before my eyes. God knows I've tried but now I don't even f
ind your appearance odd."

  As if divining my thoughts, he said, "And this disturbs you."

  "It does."

  He nodded his head again. "Quite understandable. It will pass." He looked at me. "But you are afraid of that too."

  "Yes," I said softly.

  "Soon you shall meet my sister again."

  I shook my head. "I don't understand."