Fiend, page 14
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
At the New Year’s Eve salon, given at Lotte’s home, I met M. Renaud Lefeu at last. He had the stocky build and brown-burned face of a wheat farmer and a short crop of salt-and-pepper wool atop his head. He wore a red fez, and an orange Chinese silk scarf wrapped around his neck. His narrow eyes seemed always fixed on a point in the distance over my shoulder. I thought I would very much like to taste his blood. “Your daughter is a most engaging young creature,” I said to him.
“Rosy? Yes, she is an extraordinary young person. She really got into the spirit of traveling—even more so, I think, than I did. When her mother died, she could have chosen to stay in Oran with her nurse, rather than come with me to Japan, but she needed hardly a second to decide to join me. She has learned five languages, and is celebrated for her beauty wherever we go.”
“I can well imagine. She has extraordinary coloring; I have never seen anything like it. I assume her mother was an Algerian native?”
“No; my wife was a Persian, of unusual beauty even for that exquisite race. Nasreen was the greatest woman I’ve ever known—ancient royalty, quick, brave, and strong. She defied her family to come away with me.” Lefeu hurriedly gulped at his glass of ale and twitched his head as if shaking off a fly. “She has been dead for more than ten years, but it seems as if it were yesterday when I last saw her. I have Rosy as a reminder of her, at least. She is much like her mother in appearance and in personality. Nasreen would not stand still when she saw injustice being done. . . .”
Lefeu’s voice trailed off. Rosy herself, accompanied by Georgie, approached us then. Her sheer vitality stilled my breath, and every head turned as she passed. Her eyes sparkled with joy, becoming even more beautiful as she turned to Georgie as a flower turns toward the sun. “She must be in love,” came a whisper muted by a discreet feather fan.
I could perceive from where I stood that Rosy had fallen prey to that enchantment, that masquerade of love, the mirage of devotion, that clockwork adoration, just as I had twenty years before.
Suddenly, all was illuminated, and my blood boiled with rage.
I was a fool—now a damned, immortal fool!
The process had only slight variation. Despite my own appreciation for Rosy, she was not devoted to me; she would do as I commanded her, but she did not feel that she did it out of love. (Indeed, she barely felt it at all.) But Rosy had never tasted me. Whereas Georgie had poisoned me with the nectars of her sex, Rosy had lost her wits through the fluid medium of the passionate kisses they stole in the privacy and intimacy of Ollier’s carriage. Rosy’s mind was full of the memory of Georgie’s smoke-flavored tongue in her mouth and the sensation of long-fingered hands squeezing her breasts. She had never before experienced such sensations, such blissful tumult, and she did not know how she had ever lived without them.
I knew; I saw all. I remembered. Rosy was a child, as easily plucked as a flower. And yet I had experienced lovemaking; I had experienced lust and sensuality; and yet, I had fallen just as surely, just as completely, just as involuntarily.
But I did not let this realization prevent me from reaching my goal. I stared into Rosy’s eyes, pinning her still, while I searched her mind for further details. My stomach churned at how easily she bent to my will. I wanted so much to feel her resist me, even slightly, but it was not within her power, nor within any human’s power. She was as easily seduced, as easily misled, as I had been.
I did not want to know the whole of the truth, but I needed it, the way that she needed that very first, most perfect reciprocal lust.
You have kissed this person with your open mouth?
Yes, oh, yes, I live for it.
You have had intercourse with this person?
She hesitated, a little taken aback. No. Not yet. I will gladly give myself to him. Some nights I despair that it will ever happen, but he is a gentleman.
I almost laughed. Do you know that Jerzy is not a man? Is not “Jerzy” at all?
I don’t understand. Then, emerging faintly from her subconscious: Yes. And I don’t care.
Do you know that this is not a human whom you adore?
I saw it as through veils. She did not know that she knew.
Yes.
Don’t you understand, you stupid girl? Are you not afraid? You consort with demons!
“Orphée!” Georgie bellowed, giving me a sharp clap on the shoulder that would have knocked a lesser man over. My concentration collapsed like a house of cards. Before me, Rosy swayed, blinked, shook her head. All she knew was that she had been staring into space, daydreaming about defending her love. “Come with me to the buffet table; Madame Lotte has just made a fresh loaf!” Her pincer grip closed around my arm and all but picked me up and shuffled me into the kitchen. Rosy met her father and gave him a kiss on the cheek, both of them unaware that a savage, shameless violation of her mind had just taken place.
Georgina shoved me into the kitchen pantry and closed the door behind us. In the near-total darkness, I could see little besides her incandescent, smudged face; her eyes were like live coals in snow. “What are you doing?” Georgie demanded.
“What are you doing?” I shot back, furious myself. “Why haven’t you killed this one? Or set her free?”
“There is no way to do either, nor would I if I could. If she were to die, Lefeu would be devastated. And I cannot set her free, it would—” She cut off, and grimaced at me. “I do not wish to set her free. Do you understand, Orfeo?”
I took a deep breath and said, “No, I don’t.”
“I see” was her response.
“You are playing a very dangerous game. What has brought on your recklessness? You hardly come home during the days; you risk death from sunburn. What if you are discovered while you sleep? And why do you no longer attend Mass?”
Georgie threw back her head and laughed humorlessly, like a dry snapping twig. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “Asking me about Mass after you’ve just put me in danger. Opening her mind like that in public—that is dangerous, my friend!”
“Oh, shit on that, George, you know very well where the blame lies. Don’t you understand? You’ve got ten years’ advantage of this life on me, and even I can see that you are making a terrible mistake.”
“Allow me to make it,” she said. “Allow me to live my own life and accept my own consequences. This is how I live, how I have always lived. And if you feel so strongly that Rosy is a threat to you, take a moment of thought—” She gave a short bark of incredulous laughter. “A moment of prayer to think about why that would be.”
“I have no idea!” I said. “I have thought about it, and I cannot find an adequate reason. Everything I do or say seems to anger you. What did I do wrong, George? Why are you punishing me?”
“I am not punishing you,” she said. Her voice was strained. “I am just living. I am being myself. I thought you liked that about me.”
“I did,” I said with a sigh. “Georgina, please, I feel it’s only right that you tell me—are you going to transform her?”
“It’s midnight,” she muttered. She roughly shouldered past me out of the pantry and returned to the party, shouting a hello to some newly arrived guest. I closed the door and sat in the dark among the braided strands of garlic and jars of honey, listening to the sounds of human laughter, human excitement, human hope.
I had never felt so remote from it in all my years.
Conflagration
Revolution. Transformation. Evolution.
How abrupt a Change seems when it comes. The catalyst is perceived, but ignored; there is always some small matter that is more pressing. The coat needs a button replaced, more coal is needed for the stove, an old lady dies in her sleep on a cold February morning, another three illustrations needed immediately for the issue of the newspaper to be handed out in front of the latest campaign banquet. I had spent most of February in my room sketching the tangled shadows cast by a single candle blazing. I was hiding. I kept my mind as closed as I could; I had no desire to know what went on outside the circle of light around my desk.
Ollier’s old mother died. Maria sensed it, went up to check on the old woman, verified that she had breathed her last, and braved the overcast day to inform Ollier of his mother’s passing. He broke into such vivid and heartfelt tears that Maria even embraced him and let him cry onto her shoulder, tucking her veil firmly into the bodice of her dress. I was already in bed and falling asleep by then, too tired to build a barrier in my mind against the grief that Maria absorbed from Ollier and then radiated out into the atmosphere. I felt my consciousness slip away, wetting my pillow with impersonal tears.
When I awoke at sundown and staggered into the balcony-parlor to check the weather, as I always did, I found Maria and Georgina kneeling on the floor, before Ollier, lying on the couch with one arm limply flung out into space. I blinked stupidly at them, more astonished at seeing them both in the room at the same time, a rare occurrence. Before I could speak, Georgie turned her head to look at me. “Drink of him,” she said. “You need it.”
I took a mere mouthful from the bend of his elbow and moved across the room, away from them, until I knew if I could trust myself. “I don’t want to kill him,” I said, his fresh warm blood rushing into mine, stirring and heating it like pouring hot milk into cold soup. Ollier ate a great deal of black pepper, garlic, goose livers, and mint, and he did not smoke, so his blood was always delicious. Today’s taste, however, was peculiarly bitter. I sank down onto another couch, opposite them.
“It’s too late,” Maria said. “He won’t last the night.”
The strange taste, dispersed among the cream and spice, at last occurred to me. “Opium,” I said, already feeling chemical gravity weighting my freshly awakened limbs into the upholstery of the couch. “Raw opium, massive amounts . . . why would he do that?”
“He loved his mother,” Maria said with a faint shrug. Her cheeks were ruddy with the recent ingestion of his blood, and her hair fell in a great sloppy mass of gold across her shoulders, pooling in her lap. “He has no other family. Unless you count us.”
I crawled back to where they were and grasped Ollier’s wrist again. His head turned toward me; his eyes were open, even if only as narrow slits. I noticed for the first time that his eyelashes contained gray hairs. “M. Ricari,” he whispered, smiling a little. “I had hoped to see you before I went.”
“Why did you do this?” I asked, chafing his arm to circulate his blood. Of course, this could no longer be beneficial, but I felt I had to do something to keep him warm, comfort him, provide him with genial company. “Who’s going to drive us?” I added with a laugh, and kissed his hand.
“You never needed me to begin with,” he said. “I’ve seen you fly, monsieur; I’ve seen the Lady Georgina—or is it Jerzy now? Forgive me if I slip, my lady.”
Georgie smiled reassuringly and touched his forehead. “You may call me whatever you wish.”
Ollier opened his eyes wider then, but he could no longer see us. He only said once more: “I have seen you fly,” and then he closed his eyes and sighed away his soul.
“Quickly,” said Maria, “don’t let him get cold.”
Afterward, I felt compelled to go outside onto the balcony, though I was barely half-dressed and the wind was bitter. The opium made me nauseous yet apathetic. Those are two sensations that I dislike intensely. I put my face to the wind and stared down at the unraveling tapestry of Paris. The sun did not set; the gray gloom merely darkened to an inky lead, rendering the world in charcoal monotone. I had not seen the moon or stars for weeks. Determined to create my own light, I grasped the crucifix that rested against my heart, and thought of Ollier’s soul and his foie gras, and laughed—one of the purest prayers I have ever performed.
I returned to the apartment once I had taken command of my nausea. Ollier lay dead on the fuchsia couch, his arms folded peacefully across his chest. His jawline sagged, his ears were large and growing wiry hairs, his rein-toughened hands were covered in scars, and his knuckles bulged gnarled and twisted where they had been broken and rebroken in tavern brawls. I had simply not noticed that he grew old; he was forty-eight, but the young man only saw the young man.
We were the same age.
Maria had stoked the huge fireplace in the kitchen, bringing blazing warmth. I joined the two women there, reclining on the fur rug before the fire. Now that the nausea had passed, the opium left only a delectable heaviness, dreaminess, and relaxation, best experienced in a warm, dark room on a soft surface. “So did he just come in and say ‘I am ending my life, please consume me’? Or did you take your own initiative?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder at Maria.
“Don’t look at me,” Maria replied archly. “Do you just assume that any unconscionable act in Montmartre bears my signature? Even the ones that exist only in your own mind?”
I laughed. “Pardon me, it was just a reflex.”
“You can blame your wife,” said Maria, yawning.
Georgina gave a brief sneer. She had obviously gotten the lion’s share of Ollier and opium; nausea still wrung her insides. “You might as well blame God for taking away people’s mothers. Or for making a carriage driver depressed enough to eat a thousand grains of opium on the doorstep of his employer. He plainly wanted to be found by one of us; again, why would he have waited till sundown? Madame Ollier was dead this dawn, and he knew she was dead by ten o’clock. Right, Maria?” Georgie looked to her, and Maria gave a single, sedate nod. “So he goes about driving, takes a stop at the apothecary’s, buys enough opium to kill a horse, and then returns here.”
“Maybe he wanted to become one of us,” I mused.
They both stared at me, as though I’d suggested something outlandish. “He did not,” Georgina stated with authority.
“Did you make sure?” I said.
“As sure as I could” was her cutting response. She turned her head away from me, closing her eyes. “Leave me alone, Orfeo. Do not lash out from grief.”
I stood up, thinking to scream a much more vicious accusation back at her, but I felt so dizzy as soon as I took to my feet that retaliation fled from my mind. I stood by the fireplace, my hand resting against the mantel, staring into the blasting flames until I thought my eyes would melt. “I’m going back to the balcony,” I said, more to myself than to the women. “I have gotten too hot.”
I wondered if I would be caught in this pattern of indoors-outdoors all night, as I chipped away at a paper-thin coating of ice on the railings with my overgrown claws. It was time to make the final decision to cut them, or not to cut and let them grow as long as they liked. They grew very slowly. Would they regulate themselves, or grow out longer and longer? Still so many things I did not know. I did not know what to say to Georgie that would explain to her why I had to keep rushing from the room whenever she was there, to keep from striking her. Instead, I ran off to be alone; in privacy I fantasized about being able to scream a terrible scream at her, the cry I’d held inside me for twenty years, ashamed of it and afraid to release it. I feared its power, now banked and building; when I let it out, it would destroy everything in my path, including her hypocrisy and her wrongheadedness. If it destroyed her in the process, so be it.
I imagined her being ripped to pieces, exploding the way the glass vase had exploded, but the image gave me no pleasure. The image bore too close a resemblance to the vision of her being torn apart by gunfire or dynamite that had haunted me since she first ran away to build barricades.
The wind paused entirely for a moment, and on its next breath I caught the scent of human fear rising from the sloping street below us. I peered through the railings, willing my lazy eyes to focus. Taking the steps two at a time, holding her full skirts in her hands, a lone woman ran up toward the building, her breath leaving hot puffs of steam with every fourth step. Instantly, I recognized the strong, cinnamon scent of Rosy Lefeu. Startled, I shouted down, “Rosy! What are you doing here? Why are you alone?”
“Let me in, Ricari,” she shouted back. “I must see Jerzy!” Her voice was tight and high, and she hammered on the door with her hand. Before I could reply, the housemaid had opened the door and Rosy disappeared inside.
I turned and rushed back into the tropical apartment in time to meet Rosy, who had seemingly run up the mezzanine stairs as well. I led her into the kitchen, and she collapsed, breathing with difficulty, onto a chair. Georgie immediately loosened Rosy’s corset strings and fanned her with a wooden spoon. Maria turned her head and watched them with no expression on her face, but her mind in such a tumult that I could distinguish nothing. I stood in the doorway, bemusedly watching all at once.
“What are you doing here?” Georgie whispered. “I told you never to come here!”
Rosy half sat up, gazing at Georgina, her eyes wide with desperation. “Oh, Jerzy! Don’t be angry! I had to . . .” she began, then let her eyes travel down Georgie’s body, across the white flannel gown, the slight, but definite, swelling of breasts and hips beneath, and back at her luminescent pale face and close-cropped hair. Georgina’s face appeared unmistakably feminine when it was clean, but with the voluptuous, delicate Rosy next to her, Georgie still looked like a boy in a dress.
And her spindle-fingered, clawed hands, still resting on either side of Rosy’s body, did not appear at all human.
Rosy swallowed hard and closed her eyes, fighting off her confusion in deference to her true message. “My father—they’ve arrested my father!”
“What?” Georgina blinked, trying to shake off the opium haze. She could not, any more than Ollier could; she would be intoxicated for at least another several hours. “They can’t have . . . they have no right . . . what are the charges?”
