Fiend, page 26
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
I threw him away from me and turned over, coughing the loose teeth out. I picked up the teeth, holding my overbite in my hand, staring with dizzy eyes as the teeth disintegrated into foul-smelling, colorless slime. Daniel lay quite still, ten or so meters away, his body on the sidewalk and his face in the gutter. I walked over to him, shaking with shock, trying not to suck the bare space in my mouth, applying pressure with my tongue. My mouth filled with blood again and again. I turned him over; his forehead had a deep purpling welt where he had hit the lamppost, his eyes glazed, his arms and neck flopping limply. His mind stuttered and could not balance itself.
I kissed him and pushed my blood into his mouth.
I half-carried him inside the Dummschwallen and settled him on his side on the stage. He blinked and stared into the darkness, so much darker nearing dawn than in the dead of night. Slowly, his thoughts regained their form and his pain ebbed, the relief soothing my own pain.
“May God forgive you,” I whispered, brushing his hair from the fading bruise on his temple.
I left the theater and went home, tearing over the rooftops as I tried, in vain, to leave my distress behind me.
When I woke up, Daniel lay next to me, unconscious and cadaverous still, his cold bones tucked around me and his lips pressed against my arm.
Simple Justice
The turmoil of my emotions was echoed in the nightlife of Berlin.
Clubs and dance halls closed left and right, choked out of existence by lack of available money for either the owners or the patrons. At first I paid little attention, as my stable Swiss income was not tied to American interests, but it became more than academic as I witnessed the growing misery and desperation of the common man, embodied in the battles at the Dummschwallen. Though the talent booked was of a much higher caliber, as the opportunities at pleasanter, paying venues diminished, no performer got so much as five minutes of uninterrupted time before a fight would break out in the audience. Through my mental control, none of these fights would grow to lethal intensity inside the theater itself, but on more than one occasion the fight would take itself out onto the street and end in a savage beating or a stabbing. One night a pugnacious, loudmouthed anarchist was baited into taking a swing at a young thug in a homemade SA uniform, whereupon the thug and his Nazi companions escorted the anarchist outside and kicked his head in.
Daniel, in an orange satin gown and straw sombrero, watched the whole proceedings with a laugh and good cheer. “Let loose your animal natures!” he bellowed over the screams of the scattering, panicky audience. “It is the only thing that will save you as Berlin is razed to the ground!”
“You disgust me,” I said to him, rushing over to the anarchist. The SA thugs had run away, laughing and shouting allegiance to the Fatherland. “Are you going to allow that kind of trash in your theater?”
“Why not? I let any other old trash in. Transvestites, dogcatchers, whores, Jews, addicts . . .”
“How can you say that?” I turned the anarchist over gently, but the man was dead, and his mouth spurted fresh scarlet over my bare hands. “How can you say things like that when you yourself are a Jew?” And a whore, and an addict . . .
Daniel glared as though I had just spit on his dress. “Shut your hole, Ricari! You don’t know anything about it!”
“I know what I got from your own mind,” I said grimly, licking my hands clean before I knew what I was doing. “You are a Jew, your father is a Jew, and you can’t change that by squawking about it, any more than putting on a dress changes you into a woman.”
His face contorted with fury. “I am not a Jew!” he hissed.
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t see what difference it makes, since you don’t believe in it anyway.”
“It makes a difference because it isn’t the truth. I am not a Jew, I was never circumcized, and you can’t make me into a Jew just by saying that I am or that my father was.”
“Was?” I repeated, looking up at him. Though he tried to look away and shut me out, I saw it all in his mind clearly, like a hopelessly complicated photograph, partially rubbed out but with the details intact. His staunchly capitalist and resourceful progenitors, the Jewish cobbler and the Lutheran schoolteacher, too dull and preoccupied to bother with anything so abstract and unproductive as religion, and their only son, their brilliant, beautiful, talented, difficult son, who would not be raised as a Jew, as a Christian, would not be raised to worship anything but innovation, Berlin, and himself. Certainly, he did not worship either of them, nor honor them; rather, he despised them, for their lack of passion, their lack of vision, their commitment to an increasingly irrelevant artisan-class status quo. Their desire for him to be a shoemaker, or an upholsterer, or a tailor, or a professor or a shop owner, or anything that would make him and his family a solid living, were slaps on the bottom of his ingenuity. Though he had never been beaten as I had been, he still saw himself as viciously persecuted, misunderstood, abused, a pariah!
“You are a Jew, you know. . . . The blood of Judah runs through your veins whether or not you’ve ever read the Torah. You don’t have a choice in the matter,” I said, smirking nastily. “Now, what would you do if your Nazi friends found out?”
“They won’t find out,” he said, glancing at the dead anarchist with distaste. “And if they did, I’d hand them their dicks. You think I’m afraid of those ass-lickers?” Daniel threw his hat to the ground. “You think I’m afraid of anything? I’m in a dress and heels, my love; I have gone way past fear.”
He was still able to wring a grudging smile from me.
His painted lips twisted with disgust. “They are terrified of me; you know they hate queers even more than they hate Jews, and it doesn’t take a blood test to see that I’m not like the other boys. I’ll show you a thing or two. Let’s go find those hypocritical little balls of shit and I’ll show you how afraid I am.”
We were only able to find one of the SA thugs, standing alone at the Bahnhof, waiting for a streetcar going south; separated from his comrades, I could see that he was just a youngster, maybe seventeen at most, his fresh, beardless face and furzy brown hair naked and vulnerable in the night air. I lost my stomach for vengeance, but Daniel slinked up to him on the platform, the little spangled heels of his shoes tapping with a woman’s delicate uncertainty. Daniel turned him around with a light touch on his arm, “Excuse me,” then thrust his hand into the boy’s abdomen.
“Are you afraid?” said Daniel softly to the boy, twisting his arm. The boy gurgled helplessly, his eyes wide. “I have a secret. I’m a Jew. Bet you couldn’t tell.” Daniel took back his hand, letting the gutted boy fall to the concrete. He held up his glistening arm toward me. “Are you hungry, darling?”
In a moment Daniel was beside me, his unbloodied arm around me. “Darling, darling, don’t cry. It is simple justice, is it not?” He gazed at me with concern, sucking his claws clean and tracing the contours of my face with his damp fingertips.
“I hate you.” My voice came out muffled by Daniel’s shirt, but I knew he heard me; his heart gave a jerk inside him and his mind read as vertigo. I had never said that to him before, a statement as powerful and profound as its opposite. “Get away from me.”
But he pretended that he hadn’t heard. “What’s that, my love? I hate so much to see you in distress. Don’t let those stupid bullies get to you. I know what you need. You need to get laid. Immediately. Come on, let’s go; the night is still so young.” He held me, shunting away my repulsion, leaving me resigned and pliable.
In the back room of a beer garden, closed for the night, four women and two men tangled themselves in difficult, laughing configurations upon a giant pile of odd-shaped, mismatched cushions. The air was perfumed lightly with jasmine and rose water, but I could not wash the images of violence from my mind, no matter how hard I thrust my cock into Daniel’s ass. I muttered thoughtlessly, “Bloody Jew. Bloody Jew.”
“Oh yes,” Daniel purred in reply. “That’s right.”
I rolled my eyes in an ecstasy indistinguishable from pain, my eyes streaming, flooding my cheeks, biting back my moans. I had no right to make any sound of pleasure, for I felt none.
One of the women broke away from the tangled group and draped her warm, sleek, round body against my back, wiping away my tears with the back of her hand. “Don’t be sad,” she whispered, nibbling my ear. “Don’t think about tomorrow.”
“It is tomorrow,” I said, seizing her soft little hand and kissing it, pressing her body between mine and Daniel’s, “it is already tomorrow.”
I could see the glow of buildings burning from my bedroom window, but I watched for only a few moments before I drew my curtains closed. I stood alone in my flat, holding myself, cold and shuddering all over, listening to the shouting and clamor of men, some fighting the fire, some standing aside and watching with grim satisfaction. This was no accident; this was arson. Someone had torched the Reichstag. Some Communist; some madman with an agenda, with encouragement, with assistance. I tasted the aroma of the truth from the disordered minds of the men standing before the fire, their thoughts tangling and shouting in the void, with no one hearing them but me and similar savage, sensitive beasts.
I desperately needed to taste blood. It had been months since I’d had so much as a swallow, and my body functioned perfectly well, but I had more and more difficulty each day keeping my mind where I was and not letting it disperse over the city, settling where there was the greatest suffering and turmoil, as though distress created a vortex that drew me there. And though I had not seen him for days, I wanted to lock Daniel out of my mind, but I hadn’t the strength. I would need strange blood for that, new fresh blood, human blood.
I hungered for the taste of terror as though it were salt.
I sank down onto the floor beside my bed, contemplating crawling under it, with my hands over my ears, over my temples, trying to shut out the madness, but it permeated me utterly. The rancor and spite and uncertainty soaked me like water into a sponge.
And Daniel approached, as swiftly as the wind.
I held myself tighter. Go away, I thought but his distress swamped the distress of strangers and unfurled me from myself. Something was terribly wrong with my child, and I could not ignore it.
He crashed into my flat, his face stark, the door swinging from its warped hinges.
“What is it?” I said in a dull voice. The door hinges had long since been hopelessly damaged.
“Come with me to the Dummschwallen,” he said. His eyes examined my face. “God-shit, look at you; you look like a wraith. No matter. Come on. It will be remedied soon.”
Prenzlauerberg glowed on the horizon, a smaller blossom loosed from the brilliant orange bouquet of the Reichstag, still burning; bureaucracy burns slow and hot. But as we left it behind, I recognized the location of the smaller fire: the block of warehouses and crumbling buildings that contained the Dummschwallen.
Only the theater burned for the time being; the fire was quite fresh, and unaccelerated, but quickly and easily consuming the friable wood of the furnishings and the trunks of costumes stacked against the side walls. It had taken Daniel and me less than five minutes to arrive here. No firefighters had come, all of their attention being absorbed by the government building; left on its own, the entire block would soon burn.
“Nazis,” said Daniel. “Stupid damn Nazis.” At first I thought he was merely assigning responsibility for the arson, but then I saw, trembling with fear and yet immobile, three of the young bullies who had made the Dummschwallen a battleground for the last few years, standing so close to the door to the coal chute and the fire that sweat poured down their faces, mingling with their terrified tears.
“Drink up,” Daniel said to me, his voice tight. “I saved them for you. I already had my three.” He turned away then and ran for the telephone booth at the end of the street.
I moved the one with the smoothest face and the clearest eyes a few feet away from the building, and plunged my will into his mind. Explain. He shrieked in pain, but it could barely be heard over the roar of the fire. He babbled desperately, “We had to get back at the decadent pervert Danny Blum . . . he’s a monster who rapes little girls and boys . . . the Reichstag has everyone occupied across town . . . we knew we could eliminate this infestation of depravity and clean up this part of town . . . this is part of the Fatherland and needs cleaning up . . .”
I silenced him with a single swipe of my claws across his throat.
I lost myself so completely in draining the young man’s blood to the depths of his veins that the other two men perished, their clothing catching fire from sooty sparks from the roof. Daniel had frozen them in place, and they had to stand there, screaming, burning, their clothes searing their skins. I threw the dead man against his comrades until they lay in a broiling heap, the stench of their cooking flesh overwhelming the scent of burning varnish, wool, photographs of Theda Bara, tubes of melting lipstick, the memories, the jism spilled, the exhalations of fulfillment. All of it burned, as hot as a furnace, catching the coal dust still in the ceiling beams and swept behind the walls.
Daniel stood across the street, the wind whipping his long hair and the tails of his frock coat, his mouth working spasmodically, chewing his lower lip with one of his fangs, his eyes dry and hard. I approached but did not touch him, and he did not look at me. “This is a terrible tragedy,” I said quietly. “I am very sorry for your loss. It is everyone’s loss; it is the end of an era.”
He merely nodded, and his expression did not change; but despite the strength and vitality of three young men coursing through his veins, his spirit struggled to remain intact and not follow the dead men down to oblivion and into God’s hands.
“The whole city will burn,” he murmured. “Every brick, every stick of furniture, every toy, every ball gown, every factory, every idea. Berlin will be razed and the ground sown with salt. I will it.”
“Daniel, no,” I reproached gently. He turned his eyes to me, the flames’ reflection leaping on the gleam of his eyeballs, and stared into me, wrenching something out of my soul as he had disemboweled the young SA thug on the Bahnhof platform. I wrapped my arms around myself again, sinking almost to my knees on the sidewalk. The fire crews had arrived at last, and they ran right past us as though we weren’t there. And Daniel turned away with a twitch of his coat and walked toward the city, in the general direction of my apartment.
As soon as I could collect myself, I followed him, flitting over the rooftops to avoid the roadblocks and police on the route home. When I came in, Daniel had just finished drawing a bath. He and I undressed and stepped into the warm water together.
I had not clearly determined what Daniel had accessed inside me; it just felt like pain, like dull nails digging into my heart without puncturing it. In the bathtub he was silent and unsmiling, but he washed my sooty hair and neck gently with a soapy cloth, then pulled my back against his chest and held me. “It is I who should be holding you,” I protested without conviction, enjoying too much the sensation of being enfolded in his arms and the blood-fed warmth of his body next to mine. It had been a long time since he had been so tender; it felt like an eternity of despising him, despairing of ever being free of him, searching my heart for the last scraps of tolerance.
We lay in the water until it had gone quite cold. He kissed my temple, next to my ear, and squeezed me a little. “I almost walked in,” he confessed softly. “I almost walked in, but I couldn’t; I realized that I couldn’t do that to you.”
At once I felt the rusty nails in my heart again, digging deeper, seeking the center; I almost wished my heart would be pierced at last, to relieve the pressure.
“I saw it too,” he said, kissing me again. “I saw her . . . walk into the fire.” He had pulled the pure pain out of me, comparing it with his own. And now I witnessed it again myself, Maria’s skull outlined in flames, the smell of her blood burning, magnified and distorted through the lens of Daniel’s own rage and loss. I felt again the dull stretching trauma of Georgie pulling away, leaving a thread so tenuous between us that it was all but invisible. How did she do it? For she was only half my mother; and the other half flared and disintegrated with a scream of gases escaping charring flesh.
I shook so hard I splashed the water, and Daniel held me tighter until I stopped trembling. “I knew it would be the only way I could ever leave you, love; I should have to walk into the fire myself. I can’t get away otherwise.”
The nails in my heart reached their goal, but rather than relief, it released poison, flowing throughout my body, inundating my tattered shreds of tolerance, my compassion, my purity. My soul was stained as black as the smoke rising from the city. You’d walk into a burning building to get away from me? It was a startling shock to realize that he despised me, and longed for escape from me as much as I did from him.
“But I didn’t do it,” he added. “I didn’t do it because I love you, not because I felt any fear or any connection to this world. I thought of you, and I thought of your Maria, and I decided that I couldn’t do it. I held the young men there and went away, and came and fetched you so I wouldn’t do it, and I’m not sorry.” He crushed his lips to my ear and went on in a painful whisper. “I won’t leave you, my love. I’ll never leave you. You know that. Wherever you go, I will be with you. Forever. You made sure of it, didn’t you? I will always be with you.” He kissed me again and again.
“Yes,” I answered, wet and cold, “and I will be with you.”
There followed a paroxysm of something resembling compassion from Daniel. Now that he had finally experienced profound loss, for more or less the first time in his short life, he became extremely interested in the injustices of the world around him, and attentive to the dangerous new face of Germany.
He began by tracking down anyone who he knew was a Communist and, if they had not already been arrested, taking their lives before any of them could be discovered, as they no longer had any safe place in Berlin, or a way to escape it. And, of course, he shared his roomfuls of huddled, fear-paralyzed victims with me so I could feed without killing.
