By Blood We Live
Page 10
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The pause before the connection, before the wavering magnet snaps to the metal. Darkness came close a second time. If I went in again I knew I wouldn’t come out.
Then I felt her. Not the little mouth and teeth, not the hot face, but the first tiny shift in the weight, from blood coming in to blood going out. In Kenya two hundred years ago I’d seen a doctor lance a man’s infected foot. With the first expression of sepsis the man wept. The joy of passing from pain to relief. He’d held the doctor’s hands and kissed them. It had made them intimate, like loving brothers.
Justine drank. Hard. Rushed the conversion with the weight of her need, the way nurses squeeze the drip bag to hurry fluids in. The receiving veins ache, you imagine. These were the giving veins, however. Mine. And they didn’t ache, they felt like they were haemorrhaging powdered glass.
The progression would be from slight relief, to relief, to deep relief, to the bliss of blood equilibrium. Then, since she would have to drink on, since it would be murder to stop her, from blood equilibrium to slight discomfort, to pain, to agony. Finally the fear, like a vast soft darkness edging near, that she would drink me to death.
And if I got it right, stopped her when she’d drunk enough to Turn her without killing me, we still had three bodies to dispose of—and not a half hour of the night left to do it.
There were these thoughts. But they were frail or faint next to the other thing.
The thing that had gone into me from her at the very edge of her death.
The thing she hadn’t told me but that her blood couldn’t hide: that in the werewolf, Talulla Demetriou, the spirit of my beloved Vali was alive and well and waiting for me to fulfil the prophecy.
9
I REMEMBERED.
I’d had the dream of the deserted beach before. Had been having it, in fact, since That Night almost three years ago in Big Sur. (I have a house there. One of the dozen or so sub–Frank Lloyd Wright luxury bunkers, formerly owned, though rarely lived in, by lovely and mysteriously deceased Natalie Wood.) I remember I slept late That Night, too, and woke not long after moonrise …
… A full moon.
No coincidence.
The dream had shocked me. Of course it had. The beach. The twilight. The poor-show sprinkle of stars. The someone walking behind me. He lied in every word.
That Night, when I came up from the basement, Justine was on the couch in the TV room, meticulously painting her toenails pale blue. A Day at the Races was on the plasma screen. My hands were shaking, so I stuffed them in my pockets. “Jesus, Norm, you look terrible,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Oversleep headache. I’m just going out for some air. Back in a bit.” I couldn’t tell her. Partly because the shock of having dreamed was still too giant and raw for language—I could barely stand up straight, let alone discuss it—but mainly because it would alarm her. I’d worked so hard to make her feel safe in our world. She wouldn’t like this. A dream. Fluff—dreaming? It would seem ominous to her. It was ominous.
“Don’t be ages,” she said. “I need to talk to you about the club.”
I walked. Staggered, rather, once I was out of sight of the house and free of the need to dissemble. I chased the dream images, never quite … never quite … My hands and feet and face had discrete little fevers. The world’s gears had shifted while I slept. A dream! All these years. All these years.
The first dream since Vali died.
I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.
I had waited.
Hadn’t I?
The footage threatened. The dense montage of my life that was like a cliff-face uprushing past because you’d fallen and were now plummeting down the sickening drop. More sickening still, you were abruptly and randomly stopped and forced for a split second that opened onto infinity to confront something vivid—your neck craned to see Michelangelo’s bare paint-spattered foot poking over the edge of the scaffold and the chapel’s contained heights filled with the smell of oils and plaster; a mob-capped young housemaid with red curls and a copper warming pan looking up and seeing you, her blue eyes fractured by the understanding that this was her death; Viking longships on the black Volga in the small hours, helmets and spears moonlit, one—just one—of them seeing you standing and observing from the bank, the curiously tender exchange of consciousness, then the window of connection closed; sodden soldiers in a trench full of blood, the stink of wet leather and rotting flesh, a rat swimming, chevron ripples from the lovely little head; a toilet in Rwanda with a Tutsi baby cut in half and shoved in it—before being just as violently yanked back into gravity’s grip and the nausea of all the time and weather and extremes and approximations—
I stopped and lay down on the forest floor. Sometimes lying down is just the thing. (Millions of people’s bad days would be improved if they listened to the impulse to lie down for a few minutes on the office carpet or bathroom tiles or pleasantly chilled pavement. Drunks and children know the wisdom of this—but who listens to them?) I lay down on the forest floor and the softness of the ferns and the odours of earth and evergreens gave me solace. Don’t be ages, Justine had said; but it was very hard to imagine moving anytime soon. Empty sleep for millennia, now this: a dream like a furious disease, an inverted plague that had swept life instead of death across my inner continent in a single night. I turned my head to the left and for no reason (no reason except the currently flashing narrative insistence) parted the undergrowth and looked down the slightly inclined forest floor.
Which is when I saw her.
Them, rather.
Two werewolves, a female in front, a male a dozen paces behind. They were thirty metres away, downwind—
Her scent hit me. Eliminated all time and space between now and then. Tipped the world like a kids’ ball-bearing puzzle and dropped me back to where … to when it had … Oh God. Oh God.
It was Vali’s scent.
Which was impossible.
I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.
For a moment I think I lost consciousness. At any rate I had, a few seconds later, the feeling of emerging from profound darkness, a feeling of shocked, sudden birth. Or rather, rebirth.
I will come back to you.
The female—Vali, Vali, Vali—stopped and lifted her elegant muzzle to the moon. Light silvered the long throat, the wet eyes and snout.
Then I felt her. Not the little mouth and teeth, not the hot face, but the first tiny shift in the weight, from blood coming in to blood going out. In Kenya two hundred years ago I’d seen a doctor lance a man’s infected foot. With the first expression of sepsis the man wept. The joy of passing from pain to relief. He’d held the doctor’s hands and kissed them. It had made them intimate, like loving brothers.
Justine drank. Hard. Rushed the conversion with the weight of her need, the way nurses squeeze the drip bag to hurry fluids in. The receiving veins ache, you imagine. These were the giving veins, however. Mine. And they didn’t ache, they felt like they were haemorrhaging powdered glass.
The progression would be from slight relief, to relief, to deep relief, to the bliss of blood equilibrium. Then, since she would have to drink on, since it would be murder to stop her, from blood equilibrium to slight discomfort, to pain, to agony. Finally the fear, like a vast soft darkness edging near, that she would drink me to death.
And if I got it right, stopped her when she’d drunk enough to Turn her without killing me, we still had three bodies to dispose of—and not a half hour of the night left to do it.
There were these thoughts. But they were frail or faint next to the other thing.
The thing that had gone into me from her at the very edge of her death.
The thing she hadn’t told me but that her blood couldn’t hide: that in the werewolf, Talulla Demetriou, the spirit of my beloved Vali was alive and well and waiting for me to fulfil the prophecy.
9
I REMEMBERED.
I’d had the dream of the deserted beach before. Had been having it, in fact, since That Night almost three years ago in Big Sur. (I have a house there. One of the dozen or so sub–Frank Lloyd Wright luxury bunkers, formerly owned, though rarely lived in, by lovely and mysteriously deceased Natalie Wood.) I remember I slept late That Night, too, and woke not long after moonrise …
… A full moon.
No coincidence.
The dream had shocked me. Of course it had. The beach. The twilight. The poor-show sprinkle of stars. The someone walking behind me. He lied in every word.
That Night, when I came up from the basement, Justine was on the couch in the TV room, meticulously painting her toenails pale blue. A Day at the Races was on the plasma screen. My hands were shaking, so I stuffed them in my pockets. “Jesus, Norm, you look terrible,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Oversleep headache. I’m just going out for some air. Back in a bit.” I couldn’t tell her. Partly because the shock of having dreamed was still too giant and raw for language—I could barely stand up straight, let alone discuss it—but mainly because it would alarm her. I’d worked so hard to make her feel safe in our world. She wouldn’t like this. A dream. Fluff—dreaming? It would seem ominous to her. It was ominous.
“Don’t be ages,” she said. “I need to talk to you about the club.”
I walked. Staggered, rather, once I was out of sight of the house and free of the need to dissemble. I chased the dream images, never quite … never quite … My hands and feet and face had discrete little fevers. The world’s gears had shifted while I slept. A dream! All these years. All these years.
The first dream since Vali died.
I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.
I had waited.
Hadn’t I?
The footage threatened. The dense montage of my life that was like a cliff-face uprushing past because you’d fallen and were now plummeting down the sickening drop. More sickening still, you were abruptly and randomly stopped and forced for a split second that opened onto infinity to confront something vivid—your neck craned to see Michelangelo’s bare paint-spattered foot poking over the edge of the scaffold and the chapel’s contained heights filled with the smell of oils and plaster; a mob-capped young housemaid with red curls and a copper warming pan looking up and seeing you, her blue eyes fractured by the understanding that this was her death; Viking longships on the black Volga in the small hours, helmets and spears moonlit, one—just one—of them seeing you standing and observing from the bank, the curiously tender exchange of consciousness, then the window of connection closed; sodden soldiers in a trench full of blood, the stink of wet leather and rotting flesh, a rat swimming, chevron ripples from the lovely little head; a toilet in Rwanda with a Tutsi baby cut in half and shoved in it—before being just as violently yanked back into gravity’s grip and the nausea of all the time and weather and extremes and approximations—
I stopped and lay down on the forest floor. Sometimes lying down is just the thing. (Millions of people’s bad days would be improved if they listened to the impulse to lie down for a few minutes on the office carpet or bathroom tiles or pleasantly chilled pavement. Drunks and children know the wisdom of this—but who listens to them?) I lay down on the forest floor and the softness of the ferns and the odours of earth and evergreens gave me solace. Don’t be ages, Justine had said; but it was very hard to imagine moving anytime soon. Empty sleep for millennia, now this: a dream like a furious disease, an inverted plague that had swept life instead of death across my inner continent in a single night. I turned my head to the left and for no reason (no reason except the currently flashing narrative insistence) parted the undergrowth and looked down the slightly inclined forest floor.
Which is when I saw her.
Them, rather.
Two werewolves, a female in front, a male a dozen paces behind. They were thirty metres away, downwind—
Her scent hit me. Eliminated all time and space between now and then. Tipped the world like a kids’ ball-bearing puzzle and dropped me back to where … to when it had … Oh God. Oh God.
It was Vali’s scent.
Which was impossible.
I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.
For a moment I think I lost consciousness. At any rate I had, a few seconds later, the feeling of emerging from profound darkness, a feeling of shocked, sudden birth. Or rather, rebirth.
I will come back to you.
The female—Vali, Vali, Vali—stopped and lifted her elegant muzzle to the moon. Light silvered the long throat, the wet eyes and snout.
