A Drop of Scarlet, page 26
part #4 of Voice of Blood Series
I drank some more water and went back out to the front room, checking again that the door was securely locked, then waking my computer from its sleep mode and loading an airline ticket sales Web site. The next flight to Vegas wasn’t until after five in the morning, and I cursed as loud as I could. There wasn’t time for luxury. I’d have to drive. That was fine with me; better inside a car, going seventy, than stuck here, with them.
I actually called Aunty W.; she didn’t answer the phone. It was past her bedtime; all the phones got turned off when it was time to sleep. It was just her policy. If there was a real emergency, someone would come to the house, or there wasn’t anything she could do about it, anyway.
Uncle Stan and Aunt June were the same way. I resolved that I would go by their houses on my way out of town and force them to come with me. I’d explain to them on the way.
I stuffed as many clothes as would fit into the blue carryall bag and zipped it up. The liquid sound of the zipper reminded me of my bladder, which suddenly yelled for attention. I’d pee and get on the road; whatever had to stay behind, had to.
As I sat on the toilet, I thought of my dub bootlegs. I’d never be able to replace those. Okay, it’d only take a moment more.
Zipper up. Flush. Instinct drew me to the sink and I quickly rinsed my sore, discolored, scaly-skinned hands. I splashed a little water on my face, too, to make sure that I was alert.
Someone handed me a towel.
I dried my face and let the towel fall to the floor.
He was a remarkably small guy, fey and young, but with the kind of granite stillness and heaviness that I associated with very, very old people, ones who spent all day gazing right into the eyes of death and refusing to back down. He was kind of pretty, kind of funny-looking, but his face seemed stuck in melancholy mode.
“Orfeo,” I said, suddenly recognizing him. A spike of terror stabbed up into my throat, but it vanished instantly; even the concept of fear just winked out. It was all right. Him being here was all right.
“I love her,” he said in his deep, overserious voice, so odd coming out of that little body that it made me smile, since I couldn’t laugh. “And I will protect her. I am sorry. You seem like a lovely girl.”
From where he stood, his mouth fit very nicely under my chin. It was a nice mouth, with thick, plush lips, a little chilly, like he’d just finished an iced drink. His saliva tingled against my skin. I thought of the last boyfriend I’d had, years ago, back in Vegas, the summer after my freshman year. Jacob had been kind of a jerk, but making out with him was the best thing I’d ever had in my life. He would put his arms around me just like that, and suckle my neck, just like that, even if Jacob had been trying to leave hickeys, and not . . .
It didn’t hurt. It really didn’t. I felt uplifted.
At first. But after that, it was too late to complain.
XVIII
EXPLAINING DARKENING
JOHN THURBIS
Moments of extreme weirdness.
Ariane and I had agreed to begin lowering my dose of Orchid. Without the drug’s buffer, I found that I could hear and distinguish separate packets of radio transmission: staggered blips of mobile phone calls, groaning AM radio, high-pitched hissing wireless data networks. For a few uncomfortable hours before I went to sleep, it was hanging suspended in a jelly made of data, and the thoughts of the others nearby hit my mind loud and ringing with echoes, like shouting in an empty room. I had nightmarish dreams of phone sex chat lines and Empire Auto Glass adverts. But, by the time I woke up next night, I had gotten more used to it. What had been shouting had become a low mumble at the edge of my consciousness, like someone muttering an insult that you’re not meant to hear.
It was difficult not to run away, struggling to shield myself from the crowding thoughts of Ariane, Orfeo, and George. It was like the year after Dad died, being the only boy in a house of three women. I was stuck with Mum, grandmother Victoria, and aunt Lydia, all of them ostensibly there to look after me, but so wrapped up in private dramas and priorities of their own that they didn’t notice me slipping away, outside of their sphere and into my own. George and Ricari had their bizarre history, Ariane still could not fully blame nor forgive Ricari for all the trouble he’d caused her, and Ariane and George were not speaking to each other. I wanted to have done with it. I reread the Feynman lecture on probability amplitude, and sat on the Rock, watching the waves on the river, listening to the poor humans, forced to use plastic devices, radio transmissions, and wire to communicate with each other at a distance.
I missed Psychward, but was glad that she was no longer unhappy. I missed Mum, but it was best that she didn’t know. Maybe I’d drop by someday and make sure she was all right, even if I could never speak to her again.
Family outing.
It was Saturday night, and the weather was shit. The other three walked together behind me, meandering through the city, avoiding major streets. George and Ricari walked holding hands, not in a petting, snogging kind of way, but gripping each other tight, like Hansel and Gretel revisiting the woods. George held a large, store-bought umbrella high over them both. Comical to see the supermodel walking her pet shrimp. She missed me awfully, at least as much as I missed her. Too bad for everybody. Let her walk behind me and give what she’d done a bit more thought, and maybe in time I’d stop feeling a sick stew of anger and betrayal whenever I saw her. And the sight of Ricari made me want to kick him in the windpipe, but that was nothing new.
I could have taken Ariane’s hand at any time—she wanted me to—but I couldn’t bear forming another coupled unit, just because they were doing so. I didn’t want to do anything that either of them did, no matter how much it might have made me, or Ariane, feel better. I wasn’t ready to provide comfort just yet, even with the dark pall that death had cast over all of us—I was still trying to build the mental structures that would protect my thoughts.
It was odd leading the way and feeling them fall into step with me, no matter how many times I changed my stride, trying to throw them off. They could anticipate me, and did, without even thinking about it. Worse, they trusted me.
I ducked into a parking structure, anxious to be out of the biting wind and sleet for a few moments. They followed, silent, up to the second to top floor, and kept close behind me as I sought out the center pylon of the building, furthest from the weather.
Ariane shook drops from the hood of her jacket. “What the hell happened last night?” Her voice came out muffled.
“You know very well what happened,” Ricari said. He glanced up at George, and she nodded and closed the umbrella, shaking it dry with one swift, curt blow. “You saw it.”
“No, I don’t understand,” Ariane protested, but not in a stupid way; she sounded as though she were really struggling to understand a basic, practical matter. “I’m not talking about what you did. Which . . . I guess I understand why that’s necessary.”
“What do you mean, ‘you guess’? There was no other course of action,” Ricari insisted.
“Like I said, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about this morning, earlier. Just as I was falling asleep. I saw it, and I heard it, but couldn’t do anything to stop it. It’s like she wanted us to know. El and Alex. They’re gone, aren’t they. Really gone.” Ariane’s face was miserable, and her eyes looked ready to drop more tears. I took her hand then, willing to do anything to avoid seeing that, because if I saw her weeping I’d start up, too, reflexively, like a yawn. I looked into her eyes and shook my head, gently but warningly.
“No one could have done anything to stop it,” said George with a sigh. “That was what El wanted to do. None of us could see her plan; probably she couldn’t, either, until she suddenly saw an opportunity. But what’s important right now is what they left behind in their train car. And that’s what we need to discuss.”
I looked at George. “How do you know what’s in the train car?”
“Deduction,” she said. “If you could make any sense of her last scream for attention . . .” She made a face as though the disparagement, though deserved, tasted bad. “One would imagine that she assumed that their belongings would be transferred when the train came to the end of its run in Chicago, and all the passengers who continue on to New York have to change trains and have their luggage carried over. Her emotions were high, and she wasn’t thinking clearly. She’s been living in a world where she hardly ever has to carry her own things; it completely escaped her that when their train reaches Chicago, their suite will be entered and searched, and the Orchid that you sent with them will be discovered. What they’ll make of it, I don’t know. At the very least there will be a lot of nonsense about terrorists; at the very worst—”
“They’ll be able to trace it back to me,” Ariane cut in. “Greaaat. I wish I’d been able to send them back to L.A.”
Ricari shrugged. “It may take a while for them to piece it all together,” he said. “But why wait around for that to happen?”
“Are their bodies going to be found?” Ariane sounded young and scared. I squeezed her hand lightly, then let it go.
“Well,” Ricari said heavily, “what’s left won’t be identifiable. That’s a blessing, if nothing else. When we die, not very much remains.” He put his hand to his neck, where his old ivory rosary hung, and rubbed his thumb across the crucifix.
Oddly enough, it was George who began to weep, and Ricari viciously rounded on her, hissing, “Oh, save your tears for the living! At least I was there—at least I was with Maria at the end! You forfeited your right to grief. You might as well have pushed her into the fire yourself. Enough of your sniveling—help me help this child. You can’t help the dead.” Ricari, who had seemed to grow twice his usual size, suddenly deflated, and his face resumed its usual mournful expression. “We have all had loss,” he continued. “But our most important purpose is to survive. That is now the matter at hand, and the very reason why your assistant could not be allowed to live. Since you did not seem capable of solving the issue when it was at hand, I took it upon myself to complete the work that you were unable to do.”
“I really hoped that I could turn her,” Ariane said.
Ricari and George smirked at each other. “You would have known from the start if that were possible,” Ricari said. “Did you mean to apprentice her to you, or let her go on her own way? You must think these things through before you commit to such a decision.”
“Even though most of us don’t, because we’re blindly in love,” George added. “But that’s love for you. Poor planning and assumptions, culminating in hurt feelings and wasted money. And, with us, frequently corpses.”
Ricari looked aghast. “George! Not yet.”
“Gallows humor should be used as quickly as possible, before the bodies begin to smell.” George shrugged. “You’ve got hundreds of years to really give your intentions toward your assistant a good, solid thinking-over, but why would you want to waste your time doing that? The matter at hand,” she said, taking a breath, and staring intently at Ariane, “is that you must leave this life, and the sooner, the better.”
“Leave this life?” Ariane repeated. “What do you mean by that?”
“You have to die to this human world,” she said.
“But I already did,” Ariane replied.
“Not completely enough,” Ricari countered, his voice suddenly cold as ice. I remembered the first time I saw him, and heard his voice; it had that same remote, chill tone, and I couldn’t imagine what about him had attracted Ariane. How could she be attracted—sexually drawn—to a creature that bore only the slightest resemblance to a human?
The realization came to me suddenly. Any warmth, friendliness, or affection that was ever present in his voice was a mask, a performance of humanity, a way to give context to emotions that, by rights, we shouldn’t have had. We were no longer human; our feelings no longer made any sense, stripped out of their natural settings and placed into the realm of eternity and nightmare.
“Once upon a time, you could simply disappear, and be gone, and as long as you were not a figurehead or politically dangerous, no one would waste the resources searching for you. Things are different now. You have been photographed; you have been published. Students follow your work—both of you,” he gave me a slight nod. “But John has already disappeared and is presumed dead. Dr. Ariane Dempsey has existed in two separate places, in two separate forms. We have to conclude your previous identity as completely as possible, now that it seems that it would be impossible to simply erase it. Am I correct in that assumption?” Ariane answered Ricari with her silence. “I’m sorry, Ariane, but you must die, and then you must leave this place and never come back. You have had more than ten years to accept this life. Now it’s time that you begin on the life. Ariane, you’re not human anymore. I know you’ll say that you know that, but I don’t think you do.”
“Their morality is not and cannot be ours,” George spoke up. “It will very quickly make you go mad, and you’ll end up well and truly dead in no time at all. You may go mad eventually anyway; most of us do, if we make it through the years, because it is impossible to completely shed yourself of human morality. It is a goal that is not truly attainable, but is no less worthy of pursuit.”
“Like trying to be pure of sin,” I heard myself say.
Ricari nodded slowly, meeting my eyes. “Yes, John, that is similar,” he said, “but you mustn’t seriously compare the two—that’s blasphemy.”
“Of course it is,” I replied. “Therefore, isn’t it blasphemy for one of us to have affectionate, protective feelings for another one of us? Or for a human being? Or an animal? I mean, is there room in your Christian Heaven for something like us?”
George smiled at me. “Maybe you should write the first book of philosophy for us,” she said.
“No, you should.” I shook my head, finding myself smiling too. “You’re the better writer. And you’ve got two hundred years of thinking about it that you can put into practice.”
Ricari lifted his head, listening to the sound of a car entering the parking garage, four floors below us. “We have to move on,” he said. “This is extremely serious, Ariane. We should leave as soon as possible—within the week, at the latest. Margaret may not be found for several more days, but if she’s reported missing, it could be sooner.”
To my surprise, Ariane embraced me for a moment, then gently pushed me away with her fingertips. Her face was as calm and still as an ivory carving.
“Just tell me what I have to do,” she said.
XIX
SCATTERING
ARIANE DEMPSEY
Sweet Orchid sleep. Upsetting Orchid dreams.
Red snow fell in thick flakes that melted into blood as they touched the still-warm streets. The gutters were clogged and rushing with sluggish, crimson liquid, all mixed up with fallen leaves, broken glass, mud, and gravel. The limbs of trees dripped red and the air was thick with the ferrous smell. Through a break in the scarlet clouds, the sun emerged like a drill made of white light, and I was pinned on it like a bug, blood-flakes sparkling in the sudden illumination.
When I woke up, though, the sky was dark, as usual, and the few inches of snow on the ground were clean and colorless. The neighborhood was nearly silent, but for a faint sound of a television watched by immobile viewers. Nobody wanted to risk the steep hill that led to my block when there was ice on the ground. This kind of weather was rare here; maybe every other year it would snow a little or glaze the branches with ice, and the city would screech to a halt. It wasn’t just the people, either; even the usual flutter and croak of feral animals had been silenced under that frigid, black and white blankness. It felt like a betrayal, like the world was cowering from the sudden slap of cold.
I was alone in the house. John might have slept beside me, but I fell into an exhausted sleep while he was still awake, his calm, dark eyes searching my face. Ricari and George hadn’t followed us back from our journey to the Tenth Avenue E-Z Park, claiming that it was for my own safety that they not return with us, instead of being upfront and saying that my house made both of them uneasy. Maybe it was one of those little white lies that they referred to when they talked about human habits; maybe a pure vampire never had need to conceal her feelings, and dispensed with the deceptions of verbal communication.
Great theory, except that they both loved to talk, all the time.
I’d be fine, listening to them lie. I wanted to hear their voices. I wanted to hear George tell a filthy joke, or listen to Ricari’s reminiscences about Geneva, as he visited it around every seventy-five years, just in time for the old generation to have died out.
He told me that I probably wouldn’t be able to do that, nowadays. Too many cameras watching the streets, not enough dark corners to hide in. We could trick the human eye, but not the electronic one; we showed up on film and tape as well as any other object that reflected light.
It didn’t matter where I went; the only thing that was important now was that I had to leave Portland, quickly, quietly, and discreetly. The rest could be determined later, once I was somewhere safe.
I glanced at the clock. It was barely past five, and the sky pitch-black already. Winter solstice; it was going to be a long, cold night. I just hoped it would be long enough. I tried to shake off the prickly sensation lingering from my dream, got up, and hit two of the last four blood packs in the cube fridge. The blood was icy cold, as cold as the snow in my dream, but it solidified me, filling in the empty outline of my being.
I had work to do.
A large carrier bag, already half-packed, sat propped up against the wall of my bedroom. John had put together all the things he wanted to keep, which wasn’t much; a spare coat, a pair of jeans, a ragged-edged copy of The Interacting Fermion-Boson Model, a figure-eight of nylon rope, a box of razor blades, two black T-shirts, and a wool sweater. I carefully wrapped the last two blood packs in a pair of jeans, and filled the sleeves of my favorite sweater with syringes and small bottles of Orchid. I stacked running shoes and a leather jacket over the top and zipped it all up. I went through the house, room by room, wondering what else I should take, but I couldn’t find anything essential, nothing that needed to be taken on a run for my life.
