Two
The shadows of dusk had descended on Lafayette Cemetery, but the names inscribed on the mausoleums were still easily discernible. This was true even of the worn name of Captain C. H. Kempt, who died “At Sea” in 1857, according to the epitaph. And it was true of the name of Maude Elaine Heuer, who died on December 12, 1842, evidently giving birth to Baby Evelyn, whose name appeared below hers, with the same date listed for her birth and death. Cities of the dead, they call the New Orleans cemeteries, and with good reason. The mausoleums rise like miniature mansions, some twelve or fifteen feet high, some with Greek columns and pediments, some enclosed by wrought-iron fences, some covered with English ivy. They stand shoulder to shoulder along paved lanes, under magnolias, still shiny and green in the November air. If the moldy inhabitants could slip from their shelves—stacked five or six or even twelve high—and heave open the tablets forming their doors, they might stroll through Lafayette’s streets, within the privacy of the wall surrounding their one-square block in the Garden District, where their old manses, many of them antebellum, still stand.
In the breezy twilight, where magnolia leaves scraped along Lafayette’s lanes, a sense of ghostly stirring rose, as though the spirits of the residents did amble arm in arm through their November city. But the disturbing presence did not belong to them. At the edge of the city of corpses, in an ivy-entangled tomb that rose fifteen feet to a fine Greek pediment engraved with the family name Boudreaux, the central iron door swung open and the handsome Victor stepped out. His death shroud was contemporary attire, a violet silk shirt, black jeans, and square-toed boots, hardly enough to keep a living man warm in a winter tomb—even in balmy New Orleans—once the sun has disappeared. But Victor was unconcerned about staying warm. Moreover, the sun was not far gone. Victor felt its lingering rays, though their source was no longer visible. He boldly lifted his face to absorb them, his eyes closed. He had never arisen when so much radiation suffused the air.
Securing the iron door of the tomb, he walked down the lane leading to the cemetery’s gate and peered through it at Washington Street. The sidewalk revealed no signs of a pedestrian walking a dog or strolling to the market. The great houses opposite the cemetery were quiet. Many were still empty after the hurricane. Although the high ground of the Garden District spared them from flooding, city services had only just started returning full force, and residents had only begun trickling back from their refuges in the west or north. With hardly an effort, Victor sprang up eight feet onto the wall, surveying the street once more before dropping to the sidewalk. His nostrils distended. He smelled blood. His lips parted, and the long canines extended into fangs almost two inches long.
Less than a block away, in front of a Georgian mansion on Prytania, a woman chatted on her cell phone while her leashed German shepherd pawed the ground. At Victor’s advance the black dog growled. With a fleeting glance at Victor, the middle-aged woman, in a rose mohair sweater and gray slacks, tugged the leash to quiet her animal. But the dog bared his teeth at Victor. Then, with a mere thought, hardly voluntary, let alone intense, Victor caused the dog to choke. The beast hacked as though a bone stuck in his throat. The woman slipped her phone into her pocket, and squatted, futilely cajoling her pet to cough up the obstruction.
“What’s he choking on?” Victor said, squatting beside her.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see him swallow anything.”
Victor directed another thought to the animal’s mind. The beast stopped choking, stumbled, and fell, whining pitifully before going into convulsions that stopped abruptly.
“My God!” The woman touched the dog as though trying to wake him. “Shep!” For the first time, she looked into Victor’s face and fell back fearfully when she saw his mouth.
He pounced on her throat and pierced her soft flesh. With the first drop of her blood on his tongue, she lost consciousness. He drank only as much as he required and no more. In his own neighborhood, he would leave no corpses. There was no need to do so, since the nourishment he required from each victim was not enough to kill and drinking from a victim did not render the victim a thrall. It did nothing but leave puncture marks, eventually discovered by the victim upon recovery of consciousness, which occurred with only the vague memory of an unpleasant sensation or dream, and with the alarmed sense of having suffered a seizure of some kind. New, impulsive, inexperienced vampires might drink too much in the pleasure of the moment, though even they stopped drinking when the victim’s heart reached the dangerous slow beat that signaled death. Blood from a corpse was fatal to a vampire.
Victor stepped over the woman and smiled at the animal, proud of his growing strength. His two-thousand-year-old mind had always been capable of controlling beasts, even killing them, but never with so little concentration.
He resumed walking, passing the dark Bradish Johnson House on Prytania. The massive structure, with its columns and mansard roof, sat securely behind an iron fence. He had attempted to buy the mansion when he and Kyle came to New Orleans four years ago, but it had been converted into a school for girls, and the board would not consider his generous offer. It had been just as well. He would have needed to build a wall around the place. The house was too exposed. The portico, the upper gallery, the long windows were completely visible, the large magnolias on the property confined to the perimeter. He needed a more hidden dwelling, one safe from the eyes of tourists who roamed the Garden District with their cameras, often led by guides with ghost stories to tell and vampire sightings to report—thanks to the author who had made her career on ridiculous fantasies about the undead. So, having his bid rejected was for the best. Still, he punished the representative of the school by feeding on him, a compulsive act of revenge that he indulged himself in. Why shouldn’t he?
His strolled to his own abode on First Street, just a few blocks away. It was a Greek Revival mansion with four columns supporting a straight pediment. Behind the columns was a deep portico reached by marble stairs and a gallery above for the second floor. The long, shuttered windows were darkened by drapes. One could see the mansion only through iron gates at the entrance. A tall, ivy-covered wall enclosed the property, with thick bamboo and towering magnolias all around the house. He punched in the door code on the pad near the gate and the iron pales slowly parted and opened inward. He climbed the stairs and unlocked the front door.
Inside the dark front room, which stretched across the width of the house, he turned on a table lamp, and the faint light illumined the heavy furniture, upholstered in rich colors of damask and arranged in sitting areas. On the walls hung dark oil portraits that he had purchased from a plantation auction when he moved to New Orleans. Most of the portraits were grim family members from the plantation in nineteenth-century attire—cravats and stovepipe hats, lace caps and crinolines. Over the tall mantle hung a portrait of a raven-headed woman in a red gown, standing in profile with a parrot on her finger. Through an archway, the dining room table and buffet were visible under a shadowy chandelier. The table seated twenty people, and on rare occasions Victor assembled that number of guests from a list of those who used to frequent his club in Georgetown, a converted Gothic church that served the needs of those inclined to violent and daring sexual practices. He found the visitors entertaining. He enjoyed watching their attempts to seduce one another, and he enjoyed feeding on them in the big rooms upstairs and the guesthouse behind the mansion.
All was quiet. But he knew Kyle waited for him as commanded, and he climbed the central staircase to his bedroom. He found Kyle in the custom-made bed that he’d brought with him from Georgetown. The four posts were modeled on the columns of Bernini’s baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica. They twisted to the lofty ceiling like four coiled snakes. The furniture in the large room included heavy, upholstered chairs in scarlet and cream, tables, and a tall chest of drawers made of gleaming mahogany.
Victor removed his clothes and joined Kyle under the magenta sheets. He did his protégé no violence, indulging instead a sudden tenderness for the thrall he had created in Georgetown four years ago. The creation had been an act of appropriation, to hold in check a lover, now best forgotten. Kyle was then a young priest who had become infatuated with that erstwhile lover, and he had never succeeding in abandoning his piety, despite its futility. It would never secure him a place in heaven. Heaven was not for him any longer. As a thrall, he moved between the world of the living and the undead, completely at Victor’s command, executing for his master tasks under the light of the sun, protecting him when necessary. Thralls were always dispensable, and Victor had dispensed with a number of them over the centuries—until he had discovered one that he longed to turn into his equal, in violation of certain cosmic laws against the association of vampires. The violation had devastating consequences, ultimately, his mandated separation from the vampire he had created. But Victor was beginning to understand other, beneficial consequences of his violation. A new level of power coursed through him, and in this moment it called forth if not his humane instincts—for had a onetime officer of the Roman Empire ever possessed soft sentiments?—then at least his whim to patronize and indulge. And so, he tenderly caressed Kyle, and took him in a way that the most protective, worshipful lover might have taken a girl whose maidenhead was intact.
As they lay side by side afterward, their chests still heaving, Victor took Kyle’s hand and kissed it.
“Today, it was even earlier,” he said. “When I opened the gate, I felt the rays. The sun wasn’t completely down. There was a halo of light on the trees in Lafayette.”
Kyle seemed to resist some unspoken implication of Victor’s words. He turned his head on the pillow to face his master with earnest eyes. “I’m getting better. Last week was the first time I went to Mass in months. Since before the hurricane.”
“That’s only because there have been no Masses. Didn’t I find you hovering around the cathedral twice? Haven’t I come upon you kneeling on this floor with a rosary in your hand? It’s been four years since your transformation. If you haven’t lost your religious scruples by now, you never will.”
“I’m a priest.”
“Was a priest,” Victor corrected. He could read the objection in Kyle’s mind, the objection Kyle dared not voice because to do so would only make Victor’s case. One is ordained forever. There’s no retraction of the mystical change that occurs in a man’s soul once the bishop has laid hands on him. You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek. “Now, about my proposition,” Victor continued. “Have you been considering it?”
“It’s why I went to Mass.”
“To ask God for guidance?” Victor mocked.
“I don’t know. It’s what I’ve always done. You’re right. I know you’re right. You’ve turned me into what I am. I can’t go back. But I can’t go forward.”
“Precisely. That’s my point. There’s only one way.”
“But how can you be sure?” Kyle said fearfully. “How can you be sure that the Dark Kingdom won’t demand that we separate? The way they made you separate from Paul?”
Victor tried to dismiss the feeling of tenderness that Paul’s name still evoked. He was normally a master at maintaining the coldness of a killer. But passion was different from sentimentality. Passion for Paul he had known. The tenderness he felt now was a remnant of that passion.
But despite the distracting sensation, Victor managed an answer to Kyle’s objection. “Then, I was under their power. Either I separated from Paul or they would destroy him. But then my own strength was not what it is now. I’ve told you. I lifted my head to the sun. With a simple thought, I took the life of an animal. The truth is this, Kyle. A vampire maker acquires new power. That’s what I’ve learned. The Dark Kingdom knows it.”
The Dark Kingdom was the cosmic realm that governed vampires—insofar as such rebellious beings can be governed. The Dark Kingdom was also the heaven of eternal bliss for vampires once they had served their term of two hundred years on the earth as nocturnal predators—and once each had replaced himself by creating another vampire. Not only could a vampire then ascend to the Dark Kingdom, but he must ascend there for the sake of cosmic balance of good and evil, victims and predators. At least, this was the reason that Victor had learned from agents of the Dark Kingdom. But now that he had rebelled, remaining on the earth after creating a vampire, he knew the true reason for the rule for ascending. Vampire makers grew in power, and in doing so, challenged the control the Dark Kingdom had over them.
“That’s the real reason that we are required to ascend there, once we’ve created a new being like us,” Victor continued. “All of this abstract rubbish about rules against the association of vampires for danger of concentrating our kind of power is true, but not for the reasons they give. They don’t care about the universe’s laws of balancing evil and good. They care about control. A vampire maker slips out of their control. And in that case, I can make another vampire and amass even more power.”
“That’s all you want, isn’t it?” Kyle seemed disappointed. Despite himself, he clearly wanted more from Victor.
And deigning to reassure him that he had more to give, Victor caressed Kyle’s cheek. “I want a lover with the strength to resist these urgings of yours. I want your whole heart. Not part of it. If you’re my equal…”
“I’ll never be,” Kyle interrupted, eyeing him bitterly. “You don’t want that.”
“I’m not the frightened one, am I?” Victor reasoned.
Kyle remained silent for a moment. “What if you’re wrong?”
“Why speculate?”
“Because if you’re wrong, I’m left all alone. For two hundred years. That’s the law. You told me so yourself. After two hundred years I can join you in the Dark Kingdom. If you choose to go there. And you didn’t four years ago. So if you leave me alone, a being like you, I’ll never see the day again. And I may never see you again.” Kyle stared at Victor accusingly.
“Ah, but that’s not what’s really holding you back.” Victor chucked Kyle under the cheek, playfully but with a clenched jaw. He felt like striking him.
Kyle turned his face away.
“You’re afraid of damnation. And the wheel turns back to its starting point. This is always the issue with you. No matter how many times I remind you. There is no escaping the realm you inhabit. Your God can’t draw you back into the other sphere. You’re a new being. You should be happy you can live in the daylight. And that you don’t have to feed as I feed, since it offends your moral sensibilities. Despite your cravings.”
Victor intended the final remark as a dig. For just after transforming Kyle into his present state, Victor had forced him to watch his master feed just so he would know the craving he must not satisfy. Kyle had hungrily pounced on the victim’s throat only to vomit the blood he had swallowed. “You desire it, but you can’t have it,” Victor had told Kyle, who was still on his hands and knees by the victim’s bed. “The blood you need comes only from me.” He had proceeded to offer Kyle his wrist, which he slit with his sharp nail. And Kyle had sucked like a foal.
“Why cling to a fantasy?” Victor said now. “One would think you didn’t love me.” He stroked Kyle’s smooth, firm pectoral muscle. Kyle’s stocky, athletic body still delighted him.
“I can’t help wanting you. I wish to God I didn’t.”
“I’m hurt,” Victor mocked.
Kyle turned to him, fire in his gray eyes. “You can’t imagine what it’s like. You really can’t. You went from being a ruthless human to being a predator. The only difference was that now you had to attack at night. You never had to betray everything you believed, because you never believed anything.”
Victor chuckled and turned on his back, clasping his hands behind his head. On the ceiling stretched the naked, brawny figure of Apollo. Victor had hired an artist to paint it there when he bought the house. “You say you can’t help wanting me. But you don’t love me. You can’t. Can an infant truly love? Just because it cries for a teat doesn’t mean it loves the mother who offers it. If you want fulfillment, you must leave the thrall’s life behind. You must become like me. But that’s what you fear. Once you are like me, your foolish longings will cease. You’ll no longer need your God. Perhaps you’ll no longer need me. But you will be free to choose. Now you content yourself with suffering. You see it as your due punishment. As if it will redeem you. It won’t. So leave it. Join me.”
“You don’t know that I’ll stop suffering,” Kyle blurted. “What if nothing changes for me?”
“It will.”
“You don’t know.”
“Suit yourself.” Victor got up and went to the window. The street was dark. The city had still not restored electric power to the lampposts. Perhaps he would stroll to the Quarter and find amusement in a nightclub. He took a new shirt from the enormous armoire.
“Victor,” Kyle called.
Victor turned to him. Pleased when he saw the hunger in the eyes of his thrall, he smiled. He approached the bed and teased Kyle with his bare wrist, offering it, then pulling it away.
“Please!” Kyle moaned.
Victor punctured a vein with his nail. Then he lifted his wrist as though he himself would lap the drops that beaded there. A look of panic overcame Kyle at the thought of being deprived of his nourishment. Victor laughed and finally offered Kyle his wrist. He sucked the blood with relish until he was satisfied. Then he relaxed, a dreamy look on his face. Victor stroked his pale cheek, climbed out of bed, and finished dressing.
Leaving Kyle dozing in the bedroom, Victor set off down St. Charles Street toward the Quarter, a walk of a mile and a half. As his increased power—the power of a vampire maker—surged through him with every step, he thought he had never felt as young or strong or keenly alert to every scrape and buzz in the night. Even in the first year of his nocturnal existence, two millennia before, when his newly acquired powers had astounded him, he had felt uncertain of them. He had needed to learn how to wield them, as a solider equipped with a newer, more potent weapon must integrate it into his own being. His power was now as much a part of him as the air he breathed.
He could not be certain that it was a match for the Dark Kingdom. Kyle was right. Victor did not absolutely know that another transgression would not be punished. He was only sure that Kyle had begun to wear on him, as other thralls had done. As usual, his delight in controlling his thrall began devolving into annoyance. Unless Kyle stopped groveling, he just might have to perish. Still, Victor felt affection for Kyle, and, of course, a thrall was a useful thing—especially in taking care of mundane affairs in a still disorganized city.
Yet, he would gladly trade the convenience of a thrall for the chance to test the new strength within him. What if he could create a vampire with impunity—without being forced even to separate from him, let alone to take his own place in the Dark Kingdom? The Dark Kingdom’s agents were benevolent, after a fashion, determined to protect their own, even if they were also determined to uphold the order that allowed life to flow in their realm. Or so he had learned from Sonia, the agent from the Dark Kingdom who had confronted him in Georgetown four years ago. Dark-haired, fair-skinned, and buxom, looking more like a peasant than an executive of a superior realm, she had whispered in his ear, “All life is frozen in our world, until order is restored. This is the cosmic law. Our kind of dark force cannot be concentrated. Vampires cannot associate.”
Hence the compromise. He had abandoned his vampire lover. The Dark Kingdom had been appeased.
But what if they had no choice? If they could not force him to take his place in the Dark Kingdom, could they really force him to separate from his vampire creation? Four years ago, he had been unwilling to risk testing the law. He had loved Paul, his vampire creation, and Sonia had threatened to take Paul’s life should the transgression continue. “We love our own,” she had said. “But we must preserve our own bliss, for ourselves and for those who would join us.”
Their bliss. What did he care for it? And what if Sonia had been lying all the time? He would not have risked it for Paul. But for Kyle? Certainly, he was sweet. Even comforting. But couldn’t he be replaced by a hundred charming youths in New Orleans or elsewhere? Besides, Victor could not resist a play for power. As a vampire maker, he might name his own terms for stalking the earth. As he made vampire after vampire, perhaps the light of day might once again bathe him. Perhaps there were many, many secrets withheld from him by Sonia about the true fears of a kingdom where the inhabitants begrudged one who might reign as a solitary ruler, while they, for all their bliss, no longer wielded any power at all to distinguish them from one another.
Of course, his plot was in vain without his thrall’s consent. A thrall might be created against his will, just as he might be destroyed against it. But being rendered a vampire was another matter. Consent was required. And from a thrall whose very nature rendered him dependent on his host, consent to be abandoned was unthinkable. And it was no use trying to trick a thrall because a requirement to understand the law was likewise built into the thrall’s parasitical nature.
Still, Victor’s own powers of persuasion had worked with Paul. They would eventually work with Kyle. He had no doubt.
* * * *
Bourbon Street was lively. Most of the clubs were open once again, their owners returning as quickly as the authorities had permitted them to do so. In one club, a dancer in a jockstrap gyrated on a bar top, patrons waving bills at him. He knelt to allow a burly patron access to the strap and the man gleefully inserted a ten-dollar bill, groping the boy’s crotch as he did so.
Victor passed an hour there, impassively observing patrons from a dark corner. Then he crossed the street to another club, where a crowd watched a music video on a wide-screen monitor above the bar. He considered seducing a boy with bleached hair and wearing a sweatshirt silk-screened with the name NEW ORLEANS SAINTS. He could lead the boy to a quiet side street and take his pleasure, along with a nice quantity of warm blood—the youth was young and healthy enough to withstand more than the average amount of siphoning. But all at once, he felt a surprising presence, a presence that had eluded him for four years now, and he lost all interest in his prey.
Involuntarily, it seemed, drawn by the presence, he exited the bar and followed Bourbon Street to St. Ann, where he turned toward Jackson Square. Outside the cathedral the presence vanished. Was he inside? Why this game? Angry and obsessed with encountering the one whose presence he felt, he turned down the alley on the side of the cathedral and walked toward the back of the building, where the statue of Christ rose in the fenced yard. Implacable, the statue raised its arms in a gesture of welcoming all sinners. Victor detected no vital energy there, the sensation he always felt when Joshu was present. He backtracked, stopping at a side door of the cathedral. Determining that no one was in sight to observe him, he exerted a bit of his supernatural strength to tug the door’s bolt through the door frame and entered the dark, still church.
Votive candles glowed red and blue on tiered racks. They cast their light on the plaster form of the crucified Joshu, hanging to the side of the door. He traipsed along the transept and up the center aisle and back again. He climbed the sanctuary steps to the tabernacle and placed his hand against the golden doors. He felt nothing of Joshu within them, despite the mystical fascination they held for pious believers.
“Where are you?” he shouted at the soaring vault. The sound of his voice reverberated in the empty church. He leapt onto the altar and shouted again, “Joshu! What are you afraid of?”
If the one Victor sought heard him, he did not answer. And Victor could hardly endure the longing within his being, so ancient by now, but always new, always surprising in its intensity. The feeling was the closest he ever felt to sheer desperation, to an understanding of what his thralls must have felt. But he possessed nothing of a sympathetic imagination, and the glimmer of understanding did not penetrate his predator’s heart. And like all of his most intense feelings, this one quickly transformed itself into violent anger. He sprang to the floor and crossed the transept to the crucifix. What had the young priest said about its age? Was it an eighteenth-century creation? Very new compared to his lifetime of bearing something of the real crucifix within him. He had after all stood under the dying Jesus, the one he called Joshu, fighting the urge to lap the blood that streamed from his feet. By then, Victor had already been transformed into a vampire. And not long after the day of execution, as he stole through the dark streets of Jerusalem, he had for the first time encountered the risen Joshu.
“Victor, come to this place with me,” he had said, wrapped in white burial cloths, his face shining with oil with which the women had anointed him before he was carried into the tomb hewn from the side of a stony hill.
“What place?”
“My father’s house has many rooms.”
“You want to confine me to a room? Will you share it with me?”
Joshu smiled placidly without answering.
“No? Then what do I care about your eternity? It’s frozen and empty compared to mine. You can come back when you have a better offer.”
And Joshu had come back, again and again over the centuries. Hoping to claim Victor for his eternity. But how real was Joshu’s invitation? How might one travel from one realm to another? Joshu seemed confident that it might be done, that to join him in the icy pure realm he inhabited was not only possible but was the final goal of all creatures, regardless of their realms. So like a Jew, devoted to monotheism, so self-righteous and utterly blind to other spheres and other moralities. Joshu had pursued him through the centuries as much as Victor had pursued Joshu. And to what end?
Victor reached up and lifted the crucifix from the wall. It must have weighed several hundred pounds, but to one with Victor’s supernatural strength it might have been a sculpture made of paper. With one thrust, he hurled it to the floor, and the corpus broke into three pieces.