Chapter 13
While Ruthie was having her evening visits with Michael, Amy took the opportunity to visit their former lair in the hope of finding a sign of Robert's return. The old derelict house was replaced with a new house and the brush was cleared back to the edge of the woods leaving a smooth lawn leading up to the triple story Victorian. Amy stayed close to the woods that bordered the eastern side of the house making her way to the rear of the house and the woods beyond. These woods behind the house were the only part of the property that remained familiar to Amy as she remembered with distaste watching Ruthie hunting her four-legged prey here. Sadly, no sign of Robert could be found and the pieces of lace and ribbon Amy had fixed onto a small tree branch for Robert to find when they moved remained fluttering alone and undisturbed except by an occasional breeze. She stood among the cold leafless trees with her eyes closed mentally calling for Robert hoping that somehow he would hear her desperate call and find his way back to her. When she opened her eyes, however, it was painfully clear that Amy was alone.
Later that night, Ruthie and Amy returned to their dark, musty basement lair grim and saddened by the recent events that without each other their lives would be utterly lonely and impossible to endure. Ruthie's loss of Michael and Amy's continued yearning for Robert were sharp reminders that they could never lead traditionally normal lives and, in order to bring others into their lives, they would have to bring them in the way Amy had brought Ruthie into her life and Robert had brought her into his-by force.
The following evening as they strolled within the shadows of a shipyard, Ruthie voiced the subject: "Amy, I realize I can't ever be with Michael or with any other man and it breaks my heart."
Amy replied softly, "I'm very sorry for that, Ruthie, I truly am and my heart breaks for you as well as for myself. Especially for you because I made you what you are."
"I'm not blaming you, Amy," Ruthie stated simply, "If it weren't for you making me what I am, I might not ever have met Michael at all. I'm through blaming you and I told you that before. I guess knowing you can't have something is different than actually having the chance to have something and having to give it up."
"You could have made him like us and had him forever," Amy suggested.
"Oh no," Ruthie was adamant, "I would never do that to someone I love and respect like that."
"Why not?" Amy asked, "If it were the only way you could be together."
"I couldn't attack him and trick him like that, Amy," Ruthie explained, "he dreamed all his life of being a sailor at sea. I couldn't kill his dream like that. He had that dream all his life; he only just met me last week. Chances are if I took that away from him he'd hate me and surely wouldn't want to live with me. I'd be lucky if he didn't chop my head off in my sleep, or shove a stake through my lying heart for ruining his life."
"I suppose we'll never know what will happen," Amy replied, "I certainly never imagined that Robert would leave me. I truly believed we would be together forever."
After a short pause Ruthie asked Amy, "Would you say your life is your own?"
"In what way?" Amy followed Ruthie toward a trash heap at the edge of the yard where river rats for feeding were sure to be found.
"John said that by acting like a man her life was her own," Ruthie stooped down and scooped up a squealing, wiggling rat and felt its wriggling gradually reduced to morbid stillness as she drained its blood.
"Well, she obviously has more choices as a man," Amy continued to follow Ruthie around the trash heap, stepping over the discarded rat carcass, "but I would consider our lives as our own as well. We decide where to live and where to hunt and how to hunt. We don't answer to anyone or anything except our own physical needs. I suppose a man would also have to live by his physical needs and limitations. We're physically stronger and more powerful than men. We have to keep our condition secret just as much as John does."
"So," Ruthie discarded her second rat corpse, "our lives are our own. Then why do we want to give ourselves to men?"
"Because that is what women are supposed to do," Amy began to feel agitated thinking about her conversation with John, "it's only natural that we want and need a man in our lives to give us love and security and guidance. That is what is so strange and unnatural about John."
Ruthie remembered how her employer had abused and violated her as though she was his property and not a human being. Then she thought of Michael who never touched her without asking permission first, "I guess it depends on the man."
"Well, of course," Amy agreed, "we don't marry just any man or the first man who shows us any interest. We need to choose the right man. The man we are certain will make us happy and take care of us for the rest of our lives."
"I don't think we can ever be that sure," Ruthie was finished feeding and led Amy away from the trash and toward the railroad station where Amy hoped to find an out-of-town vagrant arriving on a stolen train ride hoping to find work on a ship or in a local mill. Throwing a nameless and basically untraceable body into the nearby Thames River left no evidence of the murder or the suspicion of the existence of vampires except for the tiny puncture wounds on the neck. Consequently, an anonymous body found in the river would be considered an unfortunate accidental death and buried in an unmarked grave.
While Amy and Ruthie stalked victims near the waterfront, Reverend Williams, following the trail of mysterious deaths in the dark city streets, persisted in his search for more bodies in addition to the living souls he hoped to save. He believed that he could feel the evil wafting through the atmosphere as it mixed with the coal soot, whale oil, salt water, mill runoff, sewage and salty air. He inspected the rat and trash infested alleys, attics and basements of neglected buildings and rundown tenements and the waterfront tenaciously searching for the source of evil he now believed was responsible for all the deaths that the city determined were caused by drunken blunders, mad animals or illness. The recent alleyway shooting was curiously accompanied by an extreme, almost absolute, loss of blood inexplicable by a single gunshot to the gut and the disappearnce of the missing blood; however, overworked city officials determined the cause of death to be a gunshot wound, even though no significant puddle of blood found around the victim. He wondered if the escape of the female pirate on the previous evening before the alleyway shooting was a mere coincidence or was she and her escape somehow connected to or part of the continuing evil in the city?