Strange Wine

  “I’m sorry. I still can’t believe I’m here saying these things to you. The whole idea is so crazy…but I’m so damned miserable…”

  “I understand perfectly, Mr. Romb. You can be completely open with me.” She didn’t say it, but the unspoken next sentence was certainly, You can trust me; I’m a doctor.

  “But it works?” He felt like a fool pressing her; she had already said it worked, had said it several times.

  “Oh, it works very well indeed. As well as snake venom. Same principle, really.” She steepled incredibly slim fingers. He watched her hands in fascination.

  “I’m not sure I understand that.”

  “Consider,” Dr. D’arqueAngel said, “if you were to be injected with infinitesimal doses of, say, the venom of the black mamba–Dendroaspis polylepis–every other day for a year or two, with the dosage increasing just slightly with each inoculation; by the end of the second year if you were on a visit to, say, Zaire, and you were struck by a black mamba, instead of almost instant paralysis and death within seconds, you might become very ill…but you wouldn’t die. Your tolerance level would have been built up so your system would fight the venom. Do you understand the parallel to my treatments?”

  He understood. But could not believe it.

  “And that’s how you’ll keep me from dying? You’ll give me periodic injections of snake venom?”

  She smiled, a mysterious and entrancing smile. “No, Mr. Romb: I’ll give you periodic injections of death.”

  “That’s unbelievable. It’s impossible. Look: I’m going to do it, I’m going to have you give me the treatments; no matter what; I’m just about at the end of my sanity, so I’m going to do it. No matter what. But tell me the truth. If it’s a con job, if it’s just craziness, then tell me. I know that sounds loony, but even if you tell me it’s all a made-up story, I’ll make the deal and I’ll pay you what you ask.” He heard himself speaking and knew it sounded hysterical, lunatic, stupid in the extreme. And he knew he couldn’t stop, knew the thin line of concern that ran vertically between his eyebrows when he was on the edge this way was there now. But he couldn’t help himself.

  “Mr. Romb,” she said, getting up and coming around the desk, “it’s real, it works, I won’t tell you it’s a myth, because I can do it. You can trust me.”

  And she leaned down and took his face in her exquisite hands and she brought her incredible face to his and she kissed him deeply.

  He felt his stomach drop away. He was light-headed and unable to breathe. For the first time in his life he felt blood pulsing in parts of his body he’d never even known had the power to send back such messages to his spinning brain. The touch of her mouth on his had stunned and awed him.

  And instantly the thought of being kissed by Sandra flooded in on him.

  He tried to speak, to ask her why she had done that, why she had withered his soul with a kiss, this unbelievably beautiful woman with the power, the power, the power to stave off death! But only sounds came. His hands moved in aimless patterns. Sounds, dumb sounds, helpless and lost.

  “It works,” she said again, whispering the words close to his face. The scent of her skin was warm and swift and strange.

  “But…”

  He wanted to ask her how it was possible, how she could put death in a needle and send it into someone’s bloodstream.

  She seemed to sense what he wanted to know. But she didn’t answer the unspoken question. She held his face and she stared at him and then she said, “It doesn’t matter how I’ve done it. Can you understand that? If you’ve come to me, and told me what you wouldn’t dare tell anyone else, then you’ll never need to know how I’ve done it. Just that I’ve done it, and no one else can duplicate it. I’ve found the secret. The process that distills the essence of death, to fractionate it, to create the antitoxin for death.”

  Her touch was cool and his skin beneath her fingers felt as though it was being carbonated, shot full of minute bubbles of energy. “Who are you?” he whispered, barely able to control his trembling.

  “I’m your doctor,” she said. “Shall we begin your treatments now?” And she kissed him forever once more.

  When he pulled into the driveway and the gates swung closed behind the Bentley, he saw Sandra standing on the portico, waiting for him. The usual nausea welled up in him. She was always waiting for him. And it was in moments like these, with her loving arms merely instants away from his flesh, that he despised himself most.

  He knew he had no one to blame for his nightmare but himself. A lifetime of believing merely being pretty and being smooth entitled him to ease and plenty had put him where he was. Pretty, he had met Sandra and pursued her. Smooth, he had known every thrust and vector of the dance of desire, and he had caught her. Pretty, he had conned his way into the family; and smooth, he had conned his way into her father’s corporation. Smoothly, prettily, he had worked his way up in the superstructure of an international conglomerate and–patiently–which entailed considerable amounts of both qualities–he had waited for the old man to die. Now he was fully and wholly in the burning center of the nightmare. No less smooth, no less pretty than he had ever been. But now in the molten core of hell, burning endlessly.

  He had everything patience and several other qualities could buy. Wealth, position, security, freedom, material possessions…and Sandra.

  Sandra, who loved him. More than life itself, Sandra loved him. First thing in the morning, himself mirrored in her eyes, she loved him. Last thing at night, the smoke of undiminished passion clouding those loving eyes, she adored him the more. Endless touches, caresses, murmurings of ardor; and always the paralyzing, certain knowledge that tomorrow she would love him a little more than today; and the day after tomorrow more than the day before. Certain, paralyzing knowledge: as one with the venom of the black mamba: instant paralysis, death within seconds.

  The idea of death became the only sanity in his lunatic nightmare burning hell of an existence.

  Sandra’s death.

  By poison. By gunshot. By swift sweet steel. By fire, incinerated, reduced to ashes and the ashes scattered over the private lake that formed the eastern border of the family estate.

  All this, as Sandra grew in his windshield eye, and he grew in the eyes of his loving wife.

  And one thing more. The touch of the lips of Dr. D’arqueAngel. Still with him, even as the serum she had injected into his arm was with him.

  It would, she had said, produce a small death. He need not worry.

  Before he could step out of the Bentley, Sandra was there, opening the door, leaning in to kiss him. His stomach did not drop away; it merely heaved. He did not grow light-headed nor was his breathing impaired. A splitting headache did make itself felt, however; and as for breath, hers made him ill. The touch of her mouth on his was an abomination.

  And the worst part was that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. She was fine, she was just simply fine, he knew that. It was all of his own making, all the abhorrence. And he wanted her dead. No less than dead. Gone. Dead. Out of his life. Out of the world. Dead.

  “Where have you been, darling? I’ve been waiting for hours. I called the Elliots and begged off. It would’ve been dreary anyhow. Wouldn’t you much rather just spend a quiet, cozy evening at home with me…?”

  Dead! Only one thought, a frozen bit of survival in the molten core of hell. Dead!

  And in bed that night, as she moved beneath him, demanding her daily ration of his life-essence, she heard him murmur, as if from far away, “Who are you?” and she put her moist mouth beside his oddly warm and distressingly warm ear and she said, “I’m your wife.”

  And in the night, he had a small heart attack; the shortest, tiniest punch of a thrombosis. But he did not die. It was a little death.

  The office of Dr. D’arqueAngel was dimly lit from hidden banks of rose-tinted lights behind the moldings of the walls. He lay on her wide couch and ran his left hand down the length of her pale body, learning for
just a moment the mythic contours and timeless silkiness.

  In the seven months of his treatments, he had become drunk with the sight and touch of her. There was always an injection, of course; but there was also–always–the hour of insensate passion. And he had grown stronger as the months went by. More strongly able to sustain the life with Sandra–against the time when she would be gone. And stronger in his relationship with the doctor. She said very little, but her need for his body had hardly required vocalizing. Now he felt like his old self again: dominant with women, secure, smooth. And extremely pretty.

  She moved out from under his hand and stood up. The sight of her, stretching in the semidarkness, sent waves of expectation through him. But in a moment, even though she was naked, he knew her professional manner was in the ascendant.

  “Your system is quite remarkable, Charles.”

  “Oh? And how is that?”

  “You’ve come along at almost twice the normal speed of past patients. I’d say your tolerance is at the level of others who have been under treatment for thirteen months.”

  “Who are these others?”

  “Now, now, Charles. Let’s not go into that again. You know what professional ethics forbid my talking about. But tell me about the most recent deaths.”

  In seven months he had not died from a serious tumble down three flights of stairs, a knifing by a mugger in the underground parking lot of his office building, inhaling a dose of virulent pesticide left uncapped by an inept gardener, drowning in his club’s swimming pool when he dove too deep and struck his head on the bottom, several dozen coronary thromboses, and a bout with the flu that had dropped into pneumonia.

  “I woke up in the middle of the night about a week ago and found I couldn’t breathe. My lungs seemed to have collapsed. It was horrible.”

  “Yes, that one’s fairly common. And what else?”

  “Some punk kids were playing on the freeway overpass, dropping rocks on the cars. A big one came through the windshield and damned near brained me. Opened a huge gash in my right temple. There was blood all over the car.”

  “How long to heal?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Startling. Absolutely startling. Yes, I’d put you at thirteen months. I think your treatments should be coming to an end in a few weeks.”

  Terror gripped his heart. It was like a giant fist squeezing through his rib cage. “I’ll still see you after…after she’s…”

  “We’ll see,” was all she said. The way a mother would speak to a child who wanted to stay up past his bedtime. We’ll see.

  “Three weeks, Charles. I’m certain we’re only talking about three weeks.”

  “Then you’ll have ten percent of everything I inherit.”

  “I’m not thinking about that.”

  “I hope not,” he said, and reached for her with a commanding manner. She came to him again, but there was very little of subservience in her surrender.

  And later she put the needle into his arm and pressed the hypodermic plunger and sent the gray, swirling mixture that she said was the essence of death into his body.

  He decided to do it the most direct way possible. In a way no one could ever question. So there would never be even the slightest whisper of gossip that Charles Romb had murdered his wife to gain control of her father’s fortune. (Nor that Charles Romb had been driven by an excess of love to eradicate the creature who loved him so slavishly.)

  On the first night of heavy rain, he insisted they go out to a movie. She wanted to stay home and give him a massage. He insisted and on the canyon road he suddenly swerved the Bentley and sent it thundering through the guard rails and into space. The car turned lazily and struck a stand of young, newly planted spruces, tearing out an even dozen before rolling past, over the rim of the plateau. The Bentley dropped another hundred feet, impacted front-end-on, flipped over onto its roof, crushing the top into the body, slid another fifty feet and came to rest on the tennis court of a wealthy hotel caterer who had moved up into the canyon as protection from the burglars and ripoff artists who flourished in the center of the city.

  Romb had made certain not to turn off the ignition when he drove through the guard rails. The impact of the crash ruptured the gas tank as he’d known it must, and the Bentley suddenly exploded with flames.

  Sandra had no doubt died at the first crunch of car against timber. The caterer’s twenty-year-old son, a beach lifeguard during the summer months, threw himself and an asbestos lounging pad into the family swimming pool, and using it as protection, rushed the wreck. He managed to drag Charles Romb’s dead body from the mangled and still smoldering debacle, sustaining third and second degree burns over one-fifth of his body.

  Sandra was dead on arrival at the hospital.

  Charles Romb was dead on arrival as well.

  No one could have been more surprised than the intern on duty when, mere moments after he had pronounced the charred and broken remnant called Charles Romb dead, the body moaned, twisted on its stretcher, and began calling for its doctor.

  But nowhere in the medical callbook or in the Yearbook of the American Medical Association could he find a Dr. D’arqueAngel.

  “You’ve healed nicely, Charles,” she said.

  He reached for her, but she motioned him to the seat on the other side of her desk.

  “It was god-awful,” he said. He had some difficulty speaking. There were still bandages covering half his face, with patches of rejuvenating flesh still puckering under them.

  “Yes, I know. It usually is. But you’ll be totally well again in a few months. It was very wise of you to get yourself transferred to a private nursing home. The startling nature of your recovery, back from the dead, might well have caused some comment.”

  He stared at her, waiting. He knew she was holding something back.

  “You’re wondering when I’m going to ask for a settlement of accounts, aren’t you?” She went around the desk, moving smoothly, and sat down. She motioned to the chair opposite once again. “Do sit down, Charles. We have a few things to discuss.”

  Romb shrugged out of his topcoat with some difficulty, wincing with pain. He tossed the coat on the wide couch and sat down. Yes, they had things to discuss. Now that he was free of Sandra, and a millionaire estimated at thirty times over, he felt his former awe of the mysterious Dr. D’arqueAngel greatly reduced. It was about time she learned precisely who held the power reins in what he planned as a very long, very pleasurable relationship.

  “Listen,” he said, crossing his legs, making certain the creases in his pants were straight, “I’ve decided to move the head office of my corporation to Bermuda; I like the climate there. I’ll want you to come with me, of course.”

  She did not smile.

  “Why settle for ten percent when you can have all of what I own? We can share it equally. I’ll give you the kind of life you’ve always dreamed about.”

  She did not smile.

  “We’re in this together,” he said, with a touch of meaning he intended as gentle menace. “I’m not sure what the law would be concerning your treatments, but I don’t think either of us would want the other running around without some, uh, check on our activities.”

  She did not smile.

  “Well? Say something.”

  She did not smile, but reached into a drawer of the desk and turned something, probably a rheostat, because the light dimmed to that half-dusk she always provided when they made love. In the semidarkness her face lost definition and all he could see clearly were her eyes…which now, for the first time, seemed incredibly old and wise.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Charles. I have my practice.”

  “You’ll have to close down your practice.”

  “I think not.”

  “I have no intention of signing over ten percent of my holdings to you.”

  “That won’t be necessary. It was never necessary. That was merely a false estimate I knew you would consider the correct sort of payment fo
r my services. My bill is totaled in quite a different coin.”

  Something unhuman and shadowy slithered through Charles Romb’s mind.

  “I think you’ll decide to keep your offices here in the city, Charles; and I think you’ll decide to be on call whenever I want you.”

  “And what makes you think that?”

  “Here is something you ought to see.” She reached into the drawer again, and he heard a switch click. A portion of the wall behind the desk folded away accordionlike, and he was staring at a screen. She worked with switches and dials in the drawer, and the screen lit up and began to hold a series of very clear slide photographs. “You’ve been curious about my other patients. Here is one of them. A very dear friend of mine named Philip.” He recognized the man on the screen as a best-selling novelist who had not published anything new in several years.

  The slides clicked on and off the screen in rapid succession. The first shot showed the novelist as a hardy young man in his late twenties. The second slide showed him seemingly two years older, slightly stooped. The third slide showed him with a touch of gray in his thick mop of hair, and his right hand was thrust into his pants pocket, apparently balled up. The slides clicked on and off much faster, and each one showed the young man in progressively more aged and physically decrepit stages of life. They seemed to blur as she ran them faster and faster, and the young man became an old man and the old man became a withered figure and the withered figure became a caricature of life, bent and twisted and clearly in constant pain. When the final slide was gone, and the screen was a square of bright light, Dr. D’arqueAngel worked her switches and the screen went off, the wall unpleated, and she was sitting there staring at him.

  She was smiling.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Romb asked. But he was afraid he knew.

  “Those are time-lapse photographs taken of my friend Philip.”

  Trembling, Romb softly asked, “How far apart? Two years each? Three? Five?”

  “Every twenty minutes,” she said.