The Vampires

  Again to move beyond the act burning in his mind: “Once, diggit, one of my clients burned a nude picture of me; and he put up a holy palm cross on his door on the day I saw him regularly—just to see if I could cross it, man!” Blue thrust the words at the priest.

  “And did you cross?” the priest asked tensely.

  “No,” Blue smiled. “The cross freaked me out.”

  “Shit, he thought you were a vampire,” Bravo derided.

  Blue said: “The Blue Woman, diggit, she called me Prince Susej—that’s Jesus spelled backwards. I was the Lord Satan’s prince. But only like on probation, like till there was a heavy test.”

  The rattles still did not hiss before him. They had not even been raised.

  “The imitation of evil, the ritual of evil, nothing more,” the priest attempted to dismiss it all. “Insignificant cults.”

  “Yeah,” Blue’s mind converted the priest’s words into others. “Yeah, like that: And the Blue Woman was naked on the black throne. She was painted blue. And I wore only the blue rubber, man. The disciples, men and women, they performed before us: Weird things, man. And they’d kiss the inverted star on my foot while I fucked the Blue Woman. And then I’d stand and they’d lick the rubber and the woman’s cunt. And once with a long black rosary, they tied a boy and a girl— . . .”

  The priest interrupted in outrage: “Did you actually invoke Satan?’’

  “Yes!” Blue said.

  “And did he answer?” asked Malissa.

  Suddenly Blue looked at Richard, then Mark, now at the priest: as if his mind were seizing a composite of the three faces. “When I was tripping, I saw a beautiful dark face once,” he mumbled. “Was it him?” he shouted.

  A heavy silence throttled the words.

  Then: “The murder!” Malissa demanded.

  “The Blue Woman told me the Lord Satan wanted another sacrifice,” Blue muttered. “I thought that would be the test.”

  “Another sacrifice?” Malissa’s gleaming hands attempted to pull out words.

  “Yeah, there had been, you know, birds, animals,” Blue said. “Now the Lord Satan required a human sacrifice.”

  “Cam,” the priest whispered aloud.

  Blue’s voice was clear now: “He was one of Mr Stuart’s boys—he was eighteen.”

  Eighteen. The same age as Gable. The unremarkable coincidence penetrated Tarah’s mind sharply.

  “He was a Satanist?” the priest asked.

  “Who? Mr Stuart? He was like thirty-five,” Blue said. “I didn’t know it then, man, but he was like a high priest at the Blue Woman’s rites. Diggit: He’d sit behind a black scrim, and just watch. He’d told the Blue Woman about me, and the inverted star. That’s when she went out looking for me. He wouldn’t tell her where. And finally he brought me and Cam together, at that weird pad in the hills. He just said it was a heavy assignment, man. This time there were only the four of us—Cam, myself, the Blue Woman, and Mr Stuart—it was, uh, you know, the first time I actually saw him—or knew it was him behind the black scrim. We were naked—except Mr Stuart; this time the scrim was drawn, he sat on a tall draped chair and watched: like at a real heavy play. And then— . . . And then— . . .!”

  “Then!” the priest yelled.

  Blue’s hands covered his face. He blurted: “I drew Cam to me! It was the first time I had ever touched anyone that way!” Now he stood close to the priest. Without touching him, he mimed the movements he was describing.

  “The beautiful closeness that exists only in dreams,” la Duquesa said.

  “And then— . . .” Blue stuttered. “Then— . . . the greatest horror in my life!”

  “The murder,” the priest said, accepting it.

  “No.” Blue frowned. “You don’t understand. The murder wasn’t the most horrible. The greatest horror was— . . .”

  “What!” the priest shouted. Suddenly he wanted to hear the confession he had been eluding throughout the day—the confession Blue had been determined to force on him.

  “The greatest horror was that— . . .” Blue went on, “. . .—that Cam didn’t— . . . That Cam wasn’t aroused by me! He wasn’t even hard!” The dark blue of his eyes seemed to funnel swiftly into an open wound. “See, always before it was other people desiring me—their desire of me, just that, turned me on, like they were mirrors. But with Cam— . . .” His mind jumped: “I moved away from him, understanding—trying to reject him, to save my own world. But it was too late. Mr Stuart was laughing. And the Blue Woman stood on the stairs, her hands like wings, and she kept yelling: ‘A new dark prince for Satan! A new Lord Susej!—I’ll carve the ram’s head on his ankle with my tongue!’”

  Now the rattles hissed before Blue. The sparkling beads stabbed his eyes.

  Bravo roared with derisive laughter.

  “The one person you desired— . . .” Joja began. “The only one who might have filled you. And you haven’t been able to become aroused since then,” she understood the morning’s angry incident between them.

  “And that was the most terrible moment of your life,” Karen said incredulously.

  “That you lost in some ugly game. But how?” Tarah asked.

  “How? Well—uh— . . .” Blue began vaguely. “In wanting someone finally, I had failed the most important test: That’s why Mr Stuart had brought me and Cam together, that’s why he’d told us both that our clients had canceled assignments for the other—yeah, he set us up as rivals—to see who would never need anyone else: And he would be the Lord Satan’s righteous prince.”

  “Not to need anyone—is that to win?” Karen asked.

  “Yes!” Joja announced, the toughness that had propelled her through life asserting itself. She had aimed the word at Mark, verbalizing to the boy the possible withdrawal of her earlier implied allegiance to Richard; her reassertion of counter-extortion.

  Alerted, Mark touched his bare flesh at the low opening of his shirt.

  “And so you killed Cam!” Malissa said excitedly to Blue.

  Blue looked at her in bewilderment. “Kill Cam? No, I didn’t kill . . . Cam.”

  “But the murder!” Malissa said, as if a prize were being withheld from her.

  Memories on the surface of Valerie’s mind, like flotsam: A murder, a trial, suicide, murder! Her brother’s face, fascinated, gave her no hint that the words were stirring memories within him too.

  “Confess the rest in private!” the priest made one more attempt to thwart Blue’s words.

  Malissa said: “Oh, the holy father is indeed determined to be the only one to enjoy the youngman’s confession!” Cunningly, “But what guarantee do you have that he will listen then?” she asked Blue.

  “I don’t enjoy torture!” the priest said.

  “Do you come alive only then, only through listening, alone, to others tell you what you call their . . . ‘sins’—which is really the shape of their lives?” Malissa asked. “Without sin, where would you—and your God—be?”

  His right hand raised by his left, Topaze stood before Blue. “Cam was the winner!”

  “But later— . . .” The words came from Blue’s bowed head.

  “Later did you reject him?” Bravo asked eagerly.

  Blue raised his head. The sinister smile had conquered his face totally. “After the murder, then Cam was aroused by me. I was determined! All I had to do was just stand before him! And then it happened. Then he advanced. And then we made love, Cam and I. On the blood!”

  “Whose blood?” Malissa demanded.

  “Mr Stuart’s,” Blue ansewered. “I thought I told you. Cam killed him.” He stared down as if at a dead victim at his feet. “Diggit, man, Cam hit him with a heavy lamp, he smashed his skull. Then we made love on his blood. The Blue Woman was chanting over us, and Cam and I made love over and over. There was blood on our bodies, our hands, faces. We rolled in Mr Stuart’s blood!”

  A burst of red shattered on the priest’s mind.

  Valerie thought easily: Murder. Until sh
e heard him call her name in alarm, she did not realize that she had flung herself against her brother.

  “Why did Cam kill Mr Stuart?” It was Tarah who asked the question, as if from another’s motivation she would strengthen her own resolve. “Because he was outraged by his manipulation of others’ actions? Because he wanted to close the staring, accusing eyes?” With surprise, she heard the echo of the meaning of her own last words.

  “What? I told you, man,” Blue uttered. “What? Oh, yeah. Like Cam knew Mr Stuart always carried a lot of bread, and wore all kinds of jewelry—but he wouldn’t give it to Cam. Cam tried to get me to help him rip off Mr Stuart. But I wouldn’t do it—I even split from the room. When I came back, that’s when I saw Cam— . . .”

  “After you made love, you didn’t want to go with him?” Bravo asked. “You no longer wanted him?”

  Blue said: “Yeah—I didn’t want him any more. . . They caught him at the border, with all the bread and jewelry he’d ripped off Mr Stuart. I was busted too. So was the Blue Woman. There was a trial. The pigs told me Cam said I’d done it. But I confessed.”

  “You had to tell the truth—that it was Cam who murdered the man,” the priest said.

  “Oh, yeah, sure, man; and the Blue Woman, she testified to that too. And Cam stole— . . . I was acquitted,” Blue said flatly.

  The priest sighed, as if the word—acquitted—were an omen.

  “You drew his confession admirably,” Malissa’s words attempted to jar the priest into the ironic recognition of his part in the anxious confession.

  “And Cam— . . .” The etched smile on Blue’s face was fierce. “Cam was given life.”

  “You were smart, man!” Rev congratulated him. “You didn’t split, Cam did.”

  “I was innocent,” said Blue.

  “Innocent,” the priest echoed.

  “Innocent,” Richard revived the fading word. “Murder as communion over a slaughtered corpse. An act of love. But imperfect because the object murdered was not the object loved,” he seemed to evaluate Blue’s confession.

  “What terrible perversion, to believe that—even for you,” the priest said.

  “An act of love, perversion?” Richard said.

  “To call murder an act of love— . . .”

  “The ultimate purification of another, perhaps,” said Richard.

  “We’re balancing the scales, Father!” Malissa said. “An accurate evaluation!”

  “Don’t listen to them!” Valerie yelled at the priest as if she were afraid they might win him over.

  “I can’t conceive of an instance where that could be true,” Jeremy answered Richard. “Love unites, murder alienates. It’s the difference between communion and sin: Irreconcilable absolutes.”

  “Murder performed to purify,” said Richard.

  Valerie’s hand clutched her brother’s arm.

  “When the Duke— . . .” began la Duquesa. But the rest of the words were impossible to form now. The myth of her love lay shattered.

  Richard asked the priest swiftly: “To whom do you confess, Father?”—echoing his son’s earlier unanswered question.

  “To another priest,” said Jeremy.

  “But what can a priest—a pure, young priest—confess to?” Malissa asked.

  Richard’s eyes pulled Blue’s onto the priest.

  The smile on Blue’s face drowned in a sea of dark expressions. “Now you,” he said to the priest.

  18

  “I have nothing to confess to you,” said the priest in a firm voice. (A hand, blood.)

  “There is always something to confess,” said Malissa. She aimed recklessly: “Someone you killed!” Her hands, cupped, offered the last word to the priest like a present. Quickly, she withdrew them—tearing jeweled claws again—and she laughed.

  “Or someone you wanted—want—have to kill!” came Tarah’s sudden words, but they were directed threateningly at Richard. She understood Malissa had offered the act of murder as confession only as the worst for the priest to refute.

  “Or someone you couldn’t live without—and so perhaps you hastened the absence,” said Karen.

  “Confessions deal with a powerful figure in one’s life! An act!” Malissa coaxed the priest.

  “Who was it in your life, Father?” Mark looked down at his own body, stretched lazily. Quickly he intercepted Joja’s eyes on him.

  Then Richard moved in on the priest like a deadly animal about to attack.

  The marble-blue stare of the mamaloi and the papaloi burrowed into the priest. The red beads on the rattles shone like drops of liquid fire, burning blood.

  “Was it a woman?” Richard thrust suddenly at the priest.

  “Or a man!” Malissa followed swiftly.

  “A woman!”

  “A man!”

  “A woman!”

  “A man!”

  “A woman!”

  The priest stared expressionless at them.

  Then Richard broke the mesmerizing rhythm, leaving a funneling vacuum of silence. He shattered it abruptly, his words tossed violently like stones into a lake, trembling currents swallowing others: “Since we can’t arrive at the gender of the person we seek in the Father’s life, we’ll refer to that person as him-her-it!”

  “Don’t call my mother that!” the priest fell into the trap.

  “Oh, is the game called Catch, Richard?” Malissa asked delightedly.

  “And so we’ve found the powerful figure,” said Richard without surprise.

  “And so easily,” Malissa said with an edge of disappointment.

  The priest forced his composure. He would not allow them a shade of victory. “Why should you want to hear about that? It couldn’t interest your jaded curiosity for horror—because I loathed my mother purely— . . .” Loathed! The accidental word reverberated in the priest’s mind like the pealing of an infernal bell sounding doom. “I meant that I loved her purely,” he corrected himself hastily.

  “Pure loathing,” Richard said.

  Mark said: “A confession can be one word.”

  “Indeed!” Malissa approved.

  The rattles hissed before the priest. He was aware of a lovely scent. As if the rattles were emitting it, it surrounded him like mist. Instinctively he turned his head, avoiding breathing it. “I clearly meant I loved her,” he repeated. “It was a logical, perhaps inevitable, slip in view of the constant recitation of hatred in this house.”

  Richard’s unyielding stare, Mark’s lips parted as if to form a question, Malissa’s savage, wounding smile, Blue’s accusatory eyes, almost black: They attacked the priest silently.

  He knew: They had seized the slip as the key to the confession they wanted to extract from him. Because of that, his love was on trial. He would defend it, easily: “If I hadn’t loved her, with all my heart, how else could I have stood the recurrent illnesses which ruled her life and therefore mine?” That memory freed another: “The odor of death,” he remembered aloud, “hung about us constantly.” He added quickly: “And it was made tolerable only by the very love you question.”

  “Death smells like sex,” said Blue.

  “Rancid,” said Karen.

  Albert touched his hand to his lips, as if to block the words forming.

  “If I hadn’t loved her,” the priest continued his defense, “would I have allowed her life to absorb my own?”

  “And she loved you, very much,” Mark drawled.

  Looking at the boy, hearing the soft words, Joja thought of Mark’s mother.

  “So much,” Jeremy said, “that she couldn’t bear to die without me.” (Death. The body, still fighting, surrendered—the soul shrieked into eternity, howling its loss. Rage, pity, love—a war of emotions.)

  “And you couldn’t bear to see her die, without you,” Richard said.

  “Yes,” Jeremy said. “I couldn’t.” Don’t breathe deeply! he thought as the rattles hissed again. The drug which forces confessions, la malaspina, he reminded himself, dismissing the th
ought quickly; he would not allow himself to be trapped by their calculated props. “And so there is nothing here for your scrutiny,” he finished.

  “Of course not,” Richard said. “You’ve convinced us that the slip was indeed accidental. Clearly you meant ‘loved.’ Not ‘loathed.’ An accident—and not the representation of the dichotomy in your life: not a confusion between love and hate.”

  “Confuse the two?” Malissa pretended outraged incredulity. “Why, it would be as difficult—or as easy!—to confuse good and evil, reality and dreams, God and Satan!”

  “I don’t share that confusion,” the priest understood her taunt. “Love frees, and hatred ties— . . .”

  “You were close to her, to your mother,” Richard said.

  The priest’s hands locked tightly: a chain: “Bound together like— . . .” he began, and stopped, knowing again he had sprung a waiting trap.

  “But love frees,” Richard seized his words expertly, “and hatred binds—you said ‘ties.’”

  “Words change their meaning,” the priest said. Now he inhaled, deeply.

  “And yet you’ve upheld—your phrase—the existence of ‘irreconcilable absolutes’ throughout the evening,” Richard countered. “Does ‘loathe’ then change into ‘love’?”

  “Of course not; you don’t— . . .”

  “Love unites, murder alienates—you said that earlier,” Richard’s rapid verbal assault continued. “You could not conceive of murder as an act of love. But now you say love frees, and hatred ties. Which is it? Which, Father!” And now he struck: “You hated her.”

  “Shut up!” Jeremy’s fists hardened. The eyes darkened in his blood-drained face.

  “And you wished her dead,” Richard pronounced.

  “No!” Jeremy protested. But suddenly a note of pleading entered his firm voice.

  “The lifting of a heavy weight, Father,” Paul’s voice offered. “If you verbalize it— . . .”

  Had her brother joined the interrogators? Valerie saw the intimate stranger.

  The priest heard his voice protest: “I even stood and watched her as she died as if that way— . . .” As if that way I could die with her. Those words, formed in his mind, were blocked as the rattles trembled in a frenzy before him: glittering beads like tiny, coaxing demoneyes.