Fiend, page 28
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
I broke into a smile. “Thank you, Father.”
“Ask Him for the strength. It will come.”
“Thank you, Father, thank you. . . . I pray that my faith may never waver.”
“It must not,” the priest insisted. “Not in these times. Hold fast to your faith. Though youth and material possessions and even peace may pass away, as long as you have faith, you are never helpless, you are never alone, you are never powerless. And do not grieve for your mother; she is in God. . . . Did you say over a hundred years?”
“Yes, Father. It is true.”
He made the funniest little noise, as if saying “Well, well!” and my smile felt as if it went around my head twice. “Indeed! Most unusual. The Lord be with you.”
I left the confessional with a heavy sigh of relief, then went to the lavatory and held the crucifix under running water until the wood was clean again. It bore an indelible stain, though, as if the twisted, wooden Christ figure had indeed lost blood. I still felt triumphant, and I smiled as I slid the cross into my inside coat pocket.
I emerged from the lavatory and looked upon the two or three attendees of the last evening office, filing into the cathedral, their figures tiny and bent under the massive grandeur of the place. My blood craving had receded from a conflagration to a tolerable dull warmth, and I felt confident that I could stay for a while without making a victim, no matter how painlessly, of any of the churchgoers. And yet my heart sank when I realized that, of course, I would have to find someone else, somewhere else, to violate.
From nowhere I perceived an odd stab of pleasure, not at all the sort of sensation common to the little old ladies of St. Hedwig’s “insomnia service,” and I stared around the cathedral in search of the source of the sensation.
I did not have to search for long. Behind the altar, at the gorgeous marble crucifix, Daniel Blum stood, his trousers around his ankles, rubbing himself against the marble base of the statue.
As I watched with horror, he climbed onto the sculpture itself, lacing his legs around the base, craning his neck so that he could lick the pierced feet of the Christ. “Oh, Jesus, most holy,” Daniel drawled in a lust-drunk mumble, “fuck me. . . . I know you’re the greatest . . . the only Jew they’ll tolerate in this old folks’ home—”
I cried aloud, “Stop!”
The priests and the penitents all stared at me in astonishment, for I had not muted my voice, and the shout resounded throughout the church. Daniel turned and looked at me over his shoulder, teasingly, tossing his long, loose hair aside. “Don’t you see what he’s doing?” I demanded.
“Young man,” said the priest who had taken my confession, “you will have to lower your voice; the service is due to begin.”
“You don’t see that?” I flung out my pointing finger at Daniel’s quivering moon. The priest frowned at me a little. I blinked at them. Perhaps I was still mad; perhaps I had not recovered my senses at all. “I see him as clear as day! As clearly as I see you before me!” Daniel laughed and thrust his hips against the marble, then slid down and took his sex into his hand, stroking it furiously.
“The cross? Indeed, we all do.” The priest put a comforting hand on my upper arm, but I flinched away from him.
“No,” I said through gritted teeth, “that man. On the cross.”
“My son, are you feeling all right? You look very pale.” The priest took a closer look at me, doubting his spectacles, then staggered back, crossed himself, clutched his rosary, and kissed the cross. He had unmistakably seen my fangs.
But he had not seen Daniel. “Forget it,” I said, staring into the priest’s eyes until I knew that the moment had been erased. His mouth opened and closed silently. “Stay here. I will manage this alone.”
“Ach, Jesus! Jesus!” Daniel half-laughed, half-moaned, spurting his copious semen onto the base of the statue, flinging loose droplets onto the altar. “It’s the best I’ve ever had!”
Without bothering to conceal myself, I leapt toward him, and had collared him before he had a chance to recover from his orgasm or his blinding sense of ego. With another swift movement, I snatched him up and pulled him out of the church, soaring over the heads of the priests and old ladies, who gasped and screamed at the sight.
Daniel laughed even harder, disoriented, his trousers hanging from one ankle, outside on the brightly lit boulevard with dozens of motorcars going by. “This is the most fun I’ve had with you in years!” he declared. “Something to put a little color in your cheeks, right, Herr Ricari?”
It is very easy to break a man’s jaw when one is shorter by a few inches. My fist, with the middle knuckle extended, contacted the cleft end of Daniel’s chin, knocking him at least five meters down the sidewalk. A woman going by in a taxi stuck out her head and gaped, and I stared back at her, and without malice or intent, with only a focused spike of nervous energy, overloaded her optic nerves and struck her blind. Her shriek swooped and dove as she sped away into the city.
In the meantime, Daniel had picked himself up, kicking off his now-ruined wool gabardine trousers, hideous abrasions covering the side of one leg. “Is this what you want to do?” he asked me coldly, his voice crumbly through his distorted, hideously swollen jaw and lip. “Because I am more than happy to do this.”
“You. Are. Trying. To provoke me. You have committed the most . . . heinous blasphemy . . . a truly foul and despicable act . . . the actions of an amoral monster. The world must be rid of you.” My voice sounded strange to my ears.
He raised his bruised head in a gesture of clear-eyed defiance. “It will be, soon enough,” Daniel replied, “but not as soon as it’s rid of you.” He approached carefully, one sidelong step at a time, arms hanging loosely at his sides. “You can’t escape me.”
I shot back, “And you can’t defeat me.”
More gawkers had slowed to stare at the man without trousers, arguing in front of the Catholic church, and catcalls and whistles rang out from autombile chambers. I turned and walked away, keeping my fists clenched, until I reached a quieter side street, whereupon I leapt onto a rooftop and skimmed away, knowing that he would follow me, north, toward Prenzlauerberg, taunting Daniel with my thoughts. Isn’t the Dummschwallen over here? I heard that’s the best show in town.
That night, I would never make it; I had not gone more than a handful of blocks before Daniel appeared suddenly ahead of me at the edge of a roof, naked now, as luminescent as the moon on this starless, chilly night. His face had already healed completely. How much blood had he gorged upon while I had slept? Even he had lost track. “How does your God feel about you striking blindness whenever you feel like it? How does He feel about you deceiving your Father Confessor? Why are you running away? Shouldn’t you believe that He will protect you no matter what, as long as you’re honest? Perhaps that’s your problem. Your God knows you’re a hypocrite.”
“At least I believe in God,” I snapped back.
“I believe in God too. Me. I am God. I am the only God I’ll ever need, the only one in who I need to believe, the only one I need answer to.”
I sighed. “Fine. Worship yourself, but I demand that you stay out of St. Hedwig’s. I will not tolerate your desecration of that place just to annoy me. I wonder why I do not see you desecrating synagogues; why not, Daniel? Could it be that underneath your professed autotheism, you are actually . . . a . . . ?” I shrugged and smiled a little. His face twisted in a bitter sneer. “Like your perfect papa, whom you despised and whom you betrayed? Betrayal comes naturally to you, does it not? Maybe because you’re a . . . you know.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I only know what I get from your leaky mind. . . . My God, Daniel, you have no self-discipline; will you toilet-train yourself at last, or will you go on throwing your mental feces about? I am sick of smelling it. You shit in my mind, Daniel Blum. Your mind is a cesspool, a sewer, full of rotting half-chewed nonsense. I wish you had gone into the fire; I’d have been rid of you then.”
All traces of his smug self-assurance had evaporated, and his proud stance had sunken a little, his eyes no longer completely meeting mine. I smiled to myself, enjoying the taste of his pain, and turned away, back toward home, hoping that our connection had been broken at last.
It was not.
From behind, Daniel locked his hands around my throat, and would have crushed my windpipe had I not put my foot against his shin to push him up and away. Instead, I more or less walked up his leg, his groin, and his stomach, simultaneously kicking him in the freshly healed jaw, pushing him away and twisting out of his grasp, landing on my hands and the balls of my feet. When he dove for me, I rolled away; he rolled the opposite direction and came to a crouch, paws down, head lowered, like a wolf.
“You bloody queer,” he hissed, “that hurt.”
“Just leave me alone,” I said, enunciating clearly. “Go away.”
“I’ll see you dead first,” he replied.
He hurled me from the roof of the building, dashing me to the pavement. I rolled into the impact, but my shoulder blade broke just the same and my shoulder separated with a clack. I could not swallow the pitiful howl that tore itself free from me and bounced through the concrete corridors of the alley. I slowly found my feet, then lost them again, the streetlamps a brilliant whirlpool sucking me down onto my knees.
Daniel landed beside me, almost silently, on his bare feet. The mottled bruises on his chin stood out in welts. He held out his hand to me, the palm glistening with fresh blood. “Let me help you,” he said. I could not resist the lure of the blood, between the violent cravings of my own body and his psychic urgings taking advantage of my pain-weakened state. I clasped his arm and drank from the wound. I drank until his own legs failed and he collapsed beside me, eyelids fluttering and his body twitching as he lost his senses.
Then I walked away, leaving him where he lay and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. The streets called to me; I held Daniel’s ravenous, thoughtless hunger combined with the needs of my own depleted, injured body, and the first man I saw, a policeman sent to investigate the disturbance, fell to this appetite.
That same fate befell the next five people that I met on my way back to my apartment. By the time I arrived home, I was whole, and rational, and had even regained the capacity to hold my thoughts separate from those of the world, and more important, from Daniel’s.
I rehung my crucifix upon the wall in its place, throwing the paper cup out the window and wiping the dried blood off the wall. As soon as I had given a prayer to Christ and St. Jude, I cleared my writing desk and began, in this rare and precious privacy, the serious consideration of my escape.
Battle
Where could I go to be able to escape Daniel?
I did not want to kill him. I could not commit to the idea of erasing the existence of my only offspring, the closest thing to a child I would ever have, and the love of my life besides. Besides, I had no real idea of how to accomplish this destruction of a nearly indestructible being, short of setting him afire or leaving him in the sun. He thought of killing me all the time, of course, filling my head with a constant display of morbid images; but in life, he seemed content to simply hurt and humiliate me as often as possible.
I considered returning to Geneva, with its serene rivers and sublime Alps; but I could not bear the idea of returning yet again to the setting of such bittersweet idleness and heartbreak. A great deal of my money was still housed there, but with the telegraph, I had access to it wherever I traveled. Paris was similarly discarded. I could not go back there; even seeing photographs of it, or reading about it, made me weep.
Wherever I chose, I would have to keep the location secret, away from Daniel’s prying mind. I developed methods for keeping my thoughts from straying to one or another particular destination when I knew that Daniel had the capacity to listen in; walking around reciting the rosary over and over again was a sure-fire way to drive his attention elsewhere, at least temporarily. As it was, I found that the only way I could keep my thoughts private was to have a great quantity of fresh human blood in my veins. I provided the Canal and the bushes of the Tiergarten with a fresh body almost every day. This horrid activity made Daniel proud of me, of course; as long as I was a fellow killer of humans, he was very pleasant to me. Daniel still slept beside me almost every day, and woke me up with a breakfast of sensuality. The surreal confusion of being kissed and suckled with a tender mouth one hour, and the next hour struggling to preserve life and limb against the same being, became the parameters of my daily existence.
He cruelly mocked me every time I went undercover to St. Hedwig’s. “You can’t even show your face in there anymore; why do you go? You can’t go to confession if the priest doesn’t know you’re there. And the dried-up old women are afraid of you. You don’t need any of the symbolic blood of Christ; you can drink the real thing.”
I retaliated by decimating his harem of chorus girls, one at a time, and assigning the blame to him, whispering the accusations into the surviving call girls’ perfumed ears. Unfortunately, this gesture did not have its intended effect; he simply coolly finished off the last three girls in a single night and stacked their corpses in my bathtub. “I am interested in your powers of interment,” he said. “May I observe?”
In the meantime, I wrote letters, studied timetables, and kept my eyes on the newspapers.
The infamous Haus Vaterland reached the end of its life span, and of course Daniel and I had to attend its last hoorah. I was overwhelmed with sadness at the demise of the gaudy old place, but its time had come. With the Olympic Games consuming all of Berlin’s attention and resources, a playground like Vaterland seemed a decadent relic of the past. Germany’s finest was now the Sports-Palast filled with wholesome Aryan athletes and nubile girls performing dazzling synchronized callisthenics, not sleek Jewish sommeliers bearing trays of brimming glasses of champagne and nubile girls on a stage performing dazzling synchronized high-kicks.
The jazz bands played melancholy-drunk tunes, and the beer-garden tubas’ notes deflated in the tasteless air. I stood and looked out over the beer garden, with only a handful of its tables occupied, and crossed myself and kissed my beads. “Don’t do that in public,” Daniel said testily. He had sat quietly, lost in his own reminiscences.
“I was thinking of Liesl,” I said. “I used to meet her here all the time.”
Daniel smirked without conviction. “Too bad your God cannot turn back time, isn’t it?”
“I try not to spend my time thinking about what God cannot do, and concentrate on what He can do.”
“Which is nothing,” he spat. “Absolutely nothing.”
I sighed, too weary for this tired debate. “I’m going for a walk,” I said. “Alone, please.”
As difficult as it was, I rose and walked away from him, leaving Haus Vaterland for the last time, irritation lightening my heavy heart. Daniel did not mourn Liesl; she had served her purpose as far as he was concerned, and had gotten what she had deserved. I had always toyed with the idea of writing a letter to Freddy in Geneva, explaining to him what had happened to her, but discarded the thought when I realized that I would have to explain everything and yet he probably still wouldn’t understand. The past was past, and best forgotten by those able to do so.
I went for a long walk through Mitte, revisiting the official buildings and boulevards that I had once wandered in an attempt to acclimatize myself to a new city; now I saw it through new eyes, and more than anything I wished to erase it from my memories. I told myself as I passed each landmark, I have finished here. I shall not see this again. I am going away.
I did not return to my flat until nearly dawn, but I was not in the least bit tired; rather, I was worried that I would miss a day of sleep again if I was unable to cleanse my mind of concerns. My flat was candlelit, which I always enjoy, but my pleasure evaporated at the sight of Daniel, seated cross-legged in the center of my floor, shirtless, with my crucifix on the ground in front of him. He hummed a popular song to himself as he painstakingly pinned the bloody, tattered wings of a dead pigeon to the upright bar of the cross. The pigeon’s gullet had been stuffed with bread, its twisted little feet bound together with black thread.
Daniel looked over his shoulder and raised his hand in a friendly wave. “Hello, darling, did you have a nice time?” I heard the last nail pierce the damp meat of the wing. “Heil Hitler,” he added.
Some moments passed before I could speak. “No—! Not again, Daniel. Please. Haven’t you learned anything? Why must you do this?”
I reached for my crucifix, but he snatched it away from me, spattering blood on the rug and the trailing bedclothes, laughing. “Mine! It’s mine now. I changed it. It’s now a piece of art, and you no longer have any ownership of it.”
“A piece of art?” I repeated numbly.
“I rework the outdated, irrelevant symbols of the old world. Now this meaningless object is meaningful and concrete.” He smiled indulgently at the dead, oozing dove. “The world has changed,” he said. “It would befit you to change with it.”
I might not be able to kill him, but at that moment, I had to try.
My foot lashed out at his face, but he ducked and only the toe of my shoe grazed his forehead. He swept his arm under my bed, shoving the crucifix into the shadows. I used my active foot to pin his leg down to the floor, pressing down on his knee joint until he yelled in pain and the joint cracked. I laughed at him. “You can’t hide under there,” I said. “Give my cross back and I will let you go. And then you will leave here and not come back. I am finished with you. This experiment is a failure.”
He glanced at me over his shoulder, and I have never, before or since, seen such infernal evil in a creature’s eyes. I rocked back a fraction of an inch, blinking, astonished by the gaze, and he yanked his leg loose from under my foot.
He flung himself at me and punched me in the chest. But it was no ordinary blow. He had held a long spike of wood in his fist, grabbed from its hiding place under my bed.
