"So, like Miss Emily is really a symbol of the Old South and the events in the story are really about the changes that were taking place—abandoning the old ways and manners," Terry said. She raised the coffee cup to her lips, masking her face below bluer than blue eyes.
I nodded. "That interpretation works for most of the critics. It's certainly about the death of illusions."
"Oh yes!" she burbled. "Like someone who wears rose-colored glasses! I mean, there's the rose colored curtains in the bedroom and the rose-shaded lamps on the dressing table . . ."
She took a sip of her coffee and I thought about how I wished I had a dozen students with her enthusiasm and curiosity. And noticed how the vein alongside her brow pulsed with each beat of her heart.
" . . . Which sort of parallels the 'rose' in the story's title. A rose for Emily is sort of what that dead man was. Like how we cut roses off and stick them in a vase or press one inside a book—to preserve them. Like she preserved him.
"And the decay," she continued after another swallow. "Though Faulkner really has Miss Emily's surroundings fading more than actually rotting. Kind of like a pressed rose would fade. And the way the old ways were fading and being replaced by the next generation." She took another sip. "But something I didn't catch until I read it a second time was that Miss Emily was actually slender and maybe even attractive while her father was still alive. It isn't until later that she takes on the appearance of a dead body that has spent too much time underwater. The way time and events are rearranged in the story sort of throws you off."
"Have you ever seen a floater?" I asked.
"Oh yes."
My eyebrows went looking for my hairline.
"On the Internet."
I smiled. It wasn't the same thing as real and close up. When the smell hits you close range with only the acrid perfume of automatic weapons fire to cut the odor, you're momentarily grateful for the distraction of the enemy trying to kill you.
"So," she continued, "I'm thinking that when Homer dies—or maybe even before, when she decides to poison him—that's when Emily starts to turn corpselike herself. She becomes that pasty, bloated, coal-eyed thing. Am I right?"
I smiled. "Why don't you ask that during the next class? These are issues that beg more than one viewpoint and it might jumpstart some other people's thinking."
She contemplated her coffee cup and then considered my lack of one. "Aren't you going to have any java?" she asked. The question came out as if my answer might be loaded with import.
"I don't drink . . . coffee." I shook my head. "Are you a fan of Faulkner?"
She gave back a little shake of her head and chased it with a half shrug. "It's more of a Goth thing."
"A Goth thing?"
"I'm fascinated by the subject of death." She smiled.
"Fascinated?"
"Stimulated." Her smile grew. "Intellectually. Emotionally. Sexually." Her lips parted to unveil perfect white teeth. "Does that appall you?"
I felt a sigh coming on. "Do you really care if it does?"
"It depends," she said, looking down into her coffee cup. She picked up a spoon and stirred it even though she had ordered it without cream or sugar.
"On what?"
"Whether or not you're a Dark Master." She looked up. "Are you?"
I looked around the coffee shop. Only three or four students remained and the counterman would be locking up soon. "Suppose you tell me what a 'Dark Master' is?"
Her face took on a solemn mien. "Dark Masters," she intoned, "are those who have transcended this life and understand that there are other planes of existence. They are sent to us to teach us the hidden pathways in our flesh and how our spirits may be unfettered from the linear view of life to death. They know the secrets of being and not being. They are transcendent, yet secret. It is said that when the acolyte is ready, a Dark Master will appear."
I fought a smile through her explanation but nearly lost my hold on it with the last sentence. Another thought sobered me. "This Rod character, he fancies himself a Dark Master, does he?"
She nodded but smiled sadly. "I thought he was, at first. He taught me things. Like how to turn my cutting into a blood ecstasy ritual."
"Cutting?"
She turned her left wrist so that I could see the inside of her forearm. There, up near the inside of her elbow I saw a series of raised red lines, like barely healed cat scratches. "I used to cut myself when I'd get depressed." She smiled—she did a little too much of that from my perspective—and said: "All the girls I hung out with would do it. Rod taught me that it can be so much more than a way of relieving stress."
"But Rod hasn't worked out," I prodded, hoping to sidestep any additional details of "blood ecstasy rituals."
"He's just a selfish manipulator. He wants sex and power. True Dark Masters don't force their acolytes, they come in response to the drawing of the ki."
"The 'ki'?"
She nodded. "You know what ki is?"
I nodded in turn. If she said: "I am the Gatekeeper, are you the Ki-master?" I was gonna lose it right then and there.
"And why," I asked, trying to anchor this sudden turn of the conversation into some seeming reality, "would you think that I'm one of these—um—Dark Lords?"
"Masters. Dark Masters." Her face grew solemn again. "You have the knowledge: I can see it in your eyes. You know things that others cannot even imagine or dream, save in the darkest depths of the soul's midnight." Now I missed the smiling. "You have power and its aura envelops you like a dark cloak."
"Golly!" I said.
Her eyes looked down but a hint of a smile returned. "I've embarrassed you."
"I think it's been a stressful night and that you need to go home and hit the books or the sheets," I said kindly. "I have business to which I have to attend."
She turned and looked out the window into the darkness.
"I don't think he's out there," I said, answering her unspoken question. Considering with what—and the force with which I'd mindsmacked him—it was likely ole Rod would want to be safely inside, behind locked doors and garlicked windows before sundown from now on. I'd probably start feeling guilty about that.
Eventually.
"Will you give me a ride home?"
I knew it would be quicker to drive her than to spend another ten minutes trying to reassure her. And, as my eyes were drawn more and more to the half-healed cuts on her (creamy, soft) arm, it was best that I conclude our business as quickly as possible.
Walking across the parking lot I fancied I could see someone standing by my car.
"Have you ever tasted blood?"
I almost stumbled. "Excuse me?"
"It's part of the blood ritual," she said. "Rod taught me."
I looked around to see if anyone was within earshot.
"Rod says my blood has a very unusual taste," she continued conversationally, making no effort to lower her voice. "He says it's very sweet."
"Is it, now?"
"I dunno. Rod's tastes like nasty pennies. So maybe mine is sweet by comparison."
"You've tasted his blood?" I struggled to keep disapproval out of my voice: we academic types espouse multiculturalism over political incorrectness.
"Sure. It's—"
"Part of the blood ritual," I answered along with her. "Are you taking precautions?"
"AIDS? Yeah. And we always sterilize our blades."
I shook my head. Sepsis and HIV shouldn't be her only concerns. "I'll bet Rod's switchblade has been places you wouldn't like."
She had no immediate answer to that and I pulled out my car keys. Perhaps the Hunger's hormonal rush was messing with my perceptions: no one was there when we arrived. And, parked in a lavender pool of streetlight it would be difficult to run and hide so quickly.
I checked the floor of the backseat before unlocking the doors.
"I want to learn from you," she said quietly as we headed down Desiard Street.
"Good. Do the homework and don't skip any classes."
"You know what I mean."
"I'm not sure that I do but it isn't important because, even if I was a Black Lord—"
"Dark Master."
"—I am an instructor at the university and you are a student. Anything extracurricular," I turned and looked at her, "anything—is out of the question."
"I don't want to go home."
"I know that feeling," I said. "Now, where do I turn?" She wouldn't give me her address, just directions as the next turn-off arrived.
"What if Rod comes over?"
"He won't."
"But what if he does?"
"Do you have a friend with whom you can stay?"
"Define friend."
I shook my head: in retrospect the coffee was a mistake. I knew that Rod wouldn't be bothering anyone for a while but she wouldn't be sure of that. "I have business to which I must attend, Theresa. Where do I turn next?" That sounded a little cold but dammit . . .
"Here," she said in a small voice. "Do I have to go now?"
I nodded. " 'Now finale to the shore! Now, land and life, finale, and farewell!' "
" 'Now Voyager depart,' " she muttered, " 'much, much for thee is yet in store . . .' "
"You know your Whitman," I said.
She looked out the passenger window. "I know my Death," I heard her say.
I swung by my office and retrieved my messages. Or "message" as it turned out. Olive had called to beg off working tonight: her sister still needed her more that I did. The answering machine listed twenty-two messages but the rest were merely bursts of silence followed by disconnects.
I opted to shut down for the evening. After Dark was really more of a hobby than a business: I didn't anticipate any clients tonight and the Hunger was still sending a low-level buzz through my body. I needed to go home and lock myself in. Maybe go down into the basement and try a little primal scream therapy.
Instead, I drove around. What waited for me at home but a big, empty house and the resonance of my own approaching madness?
I had built a large house: why not, I had money to burn and more. Except big houses are very empty when you're the only one living there.
More room for the ghosts, said a voice inside my head.
Jen? That you? Anybody there?
Nobody.
I thought about driving by the blood bank: hello, I'd like to make another withdrawal. How much? How about enough to fill my bathtub? What was that old joke about the milk bath: "Pasteurized?" "No, just up to my knees will be fine. . . ."
Maybe if I lay down and submerged myself long enough, my skin would stop prickling and burning, my muscles would stop aching and this boiler factory inside my head would shut down for the night. Maybe the Hunger would be appeased and go back to sleep.
Maybe I could just drown myself.
Thinking of a tubful of blood brought me back to the increasingly obsessive topic of Erzsébet Báthory.
Other vampires and hemofreaks were content to taste their victim's blood. But not Erzsébet. Oh no.
According to popular legend a servant girl was brushing the countess' long black hair when she accidentally pulled a little too hard on a tangle. Erzsébet slapped her so hard that she split the girl's lip and splashed blood across her own hand. Licking the blood from her fingers, my forebear discovered that she not only enjoyed the taste but that her skin seemed younger and more attractive where the blood had landed—sort of a macabre cross between Vascular Intensive Skin Care and Oil of Olé!
It launched a grisly beauty regimen.
Unlike Lizzie Borden, who had to figure out how to wash off after giving her mother forty whacks (not to mention her old man's forty-one), Lizzie Báthory was always trying out new ways to fill tub and basin with the red stuff. And it couldn't be just any old blood; it had to be virgin's blood if it was to be effective in restoring her youthful looks.
You don't have to be a whiz at algebra to see the eventual problem. According to records kept in her own hand, over six hundred young women disappeared before her bloody reign was stopped.
As you might suspect, the numbers eventually did her in.
For years the nobles refused to take action against one of their own. Erzsébet's attitudes toward the peasantry were hardly confined to her own sick and twisted little mind—as I said before, life was cheap and the nobles traded regularly in its perverse coinage. But first she made the mistake of losing her husband.
Ferencz Nádasdy, the "Black Hero" of Hungary was rarely home, spending the greater portion of their marriage on the battlefield striking terror into the hearts of the Turks. His status as a national champion protected her proclivities on the home front while he was alive. But the hazards of a soldier's life eventually caught up with him: he was stabbed to death in 1604 by an angry whore who claimed Ferencz had stiffed her after, well, "stiffing" her.
Greedy eyes began to consider the count's estates and potential scenarios wherein the family landholdings could be made forfeit.
Then the Widow Báthory made a political mistake that was her undoing.
Over a ten year period Lizzie had not only exhausted her primary source of virgins, it was beginning to look like the original formula was losing its effectiveness at turning back the clock. Anna Darvula, who was rumored to have been a witch and Erzsébet's lover, had died by then and the work of procurement had been taken over by one Erzsi Majorova. Erzsi's take on the problem was that peasant blood was too base and coarse to have the proper qualities. Her advice was to switch to virgins of more noble birth.
It was really bad advice.
When some highborn girls disappeared, the aristocracy finally stepped in and said: "Up against the wall, red-to-the-neck mother!"
She and her servants were tried for "crimes against nobility" there being no such thing as "crimes against humanity" back then. All the servants, save one, were found guilty and executed in a most unpleasant manner.
Liz, being a noble herself, was above such vulgar things as capital punishment—not so different from today, I suppose—and was placed under house arrest. Lacking the technology for electronic ankle bracelets, they did the next best thing: They walled up the doors and windows of her private chambers and slid her food in through a slot where the door used to be. Since there's no mention in any of the accounts of openings large enough to allow the emptying of chamber pots, one might question the compassion of life imprisonment over the death penalty.
Anyway, maybe the historical take on the countess was wrong. Maybe she didn't start her bloody baths as an elixir of youth. Maybe she got an overdose of sunshine and it was the first-aid treatments that got her hooked.
If so, maybe I was closer to the precipice than I initially feared.
Not the same, the voice murmured inside my head. That which you may take from the blood bank vault was given willingly.
Maybe, I thought right back, but it was given willingly so that others might live. That the precious gift of life might continue to flow through the veins of those whose time should not come prematurely. Not sit in the belly of a man who had no place among the living or the dead.
What about your time? Did your life not end prematurely? What about fairness? What about justice?
Hey, if life wasn't fair, why should I expect anything different to come afterward?
You make your own justice.
Yeah, pervert the gift of life and steal it—keep it from reaching the twelve-year-old victim of a hit-and-run accident or the father of four children undergoing open-heart surgery; head it off before it reaches the hemophiliac who just might find the cure for cancer if she lives to spend another couple of years in her lab.
Yeah.
Sure.
Make justice out of that.
The other voice shut up for awhile and I drove past the blood bank.
I turned around before crossing the Ouachita River and headed for the eastern edges of Monroe.
I drove past churches, their lighted crosses and illuminated spires offering refuge against the spiritual darkness in this world and that which came from beyond. Was there succor there for me? Or was I already damned, like some unholy Buzz Lightyear, "to eternity and beyond?"
Away from the main part of town was a huge complex of buildings—fairly new buildings from the look of things. It looked like some freeze-frame from a Jerry Bruckheimer/Nipponese Sci-Fi flick where a lustful oil refinery runs amok and tries to mate with a nuclear power station. And it was all tricked out with barbed electrical fencing, security checkpoints, and the words "BioWeb Industries" trapped inside a huge block of clear Lucite. Even from the road you could see the letters change colors, shading from blue to purple to red and back again.
I eased on down the street without stopping but I gave the place a good look-over from the front and pondered the little I knew to date.
BioWeb was involved in cutting-edge medical research and treatment options. Chalice Delacroix mentioned working in their R & D labs during our first interview and apparently was involved in the area of genetics from what I could put together so far. Call-me-Lou had been hot to discuss business with Nurse Jensen and the words "umbilical cords" had slipped from his trembling lips. I could think of only one likely reason: stem cell research.
My Hunger was momentarily forgotten as I swept back toward the highway. The security lights from the BioWeb complex glimmered in my rearview mirror like multiple beacons in the darkness.
Brighter and more promising of redemption than any glowing crucifix or floodlit steeple.
They were waiting for me as I pulled into my driveway: three adults, one child. I wasn't sure of the genders until I was close enough to make out their clothing.
Even then I wasn't sure.
The boy was white. The adults—I wasn't really sure. What skin remained showed a mottled gray. Those facial features that still existed had become puffy and distorted past any kind of racial profiling.
One of the adults had misplaced his lower jaw.
I've known women who will never appear in public without wearing makeup. This woman (I think) seemed willing to come out for a visit without putting on her face.
I opened my mouth to ask what they wanted and caught my first whiff. I turned away and nearly spewed a liter of half-digested blood. Tic-Tacs, I thought, my mind tilting crazily—they were in the glove compartment. Maybe I should offer them some.
"We have come to beg your justice," a wheezy little voice said.
"W-what?" I clamped down on my gag reflex and turned my face back to the charnel house smell.
"We seek justice, Your Excellency." The boy sounded like he had gargled with acid. His voice had a horrid, raspy timbre that grated on the ear like a bone saw.
I eased to my right, trying to put the security lights to my back before they came—damn! I was momentarily dazzled but at least I was a little closer to being "upwind."
"Why have you come to me?" I asked. A couple of days ago I might have freaked. After Robert Delacroix's dance with the damned I had progressed to the next level.
Whatever that was.
"Jussstisss," the faceless woman hissed.
Mr. Jaw-be-gone just nodded, his exposed trachea rattling as if he wanted to add something.
"Um," I said. "I'm a private investigator. I do divorce cases. Yep. That's my specialty. I don't do justice. Just divorce cases. Y'all aren't looking to do a custody battle, are ya? Because I don't—"
"You are The Baron," the boy wheezed.
"The Loa," whispered the third corpse. Not as old as the other two, I decided after a closer look. She was ("was" being the operative term) on the downward side of sixteen and now (and forevermore) and adolescent for eternity. Her skin looked like a dirty lace doily and she was missing both of her hands.
Hello, a nightlight kicked on in the back of my head. "Whoa. Hold on. Have you got the wrong guy!"
"Baron," they sighed.
"I'm not Baron Samedi."
"Help usss. Avenge ussss!" the faceless woman hissed.
The girl without her hands stepped forward and extended her right leg. I was stymied. If I couldn't put a stop to this, I might well be overrun with disgruntled dead people, all demanding some sort of revenantal recompense. And now I had a corpse threatening to do the hokey-pokey on my driveway.
I looked down and saw that someone had dumped a couple of handfuls of salt on the concrete. Okay. Certain ceremonies invoking the zombie dead required salt as a material component—that much I could remember from the "Raise Dem Bones" chapter of the Voodoo Practitioner's Handbook.
But I didn't know what it meant.
Was somebody raising the dead from the local cemetery and pointing them in my direction? Or were they self-motivated and finding their way to me here on their own?
While I considered the desirability of going on a sodium-free diet, the other two adults came over and took the girl by each arm to steady her. Her bare foot came down, toes curled and she began to scratch at the salt with her big toe.
Off in the distance I heard a cockcrow. I looked at my watch: tempus fudge-it—not quite one a.m. Someone must have goosed a rooster. I looked up to see my decaying delegation already in motion, heading off across my lawn and toward the woods.
"Hey!" I said. And then wondered what I was "heying" about. Did I really want them to come back and continue this conversation? Let rotting corpses lie—that's my motto. As they headed into the tree line I looked back down at the toe-scratches in the salt.
The crooked lines formed letters and those letters spelled a single word.
How
Dead people.
First they want justice.
Then they want vengeance.
And then they rudely walk away after starting a game of Twenty-Questions.
They made the Snow Queen seem the ideal client.
Someone came out of the woods, walking toward me. It was Mama Samm D'Arbonne. With a rooster under her arm.
"Siddown, chère," she said as she lumbered on up to the porch, "you look like you could take a load off."
I sat on the edge of the concrete slab. "I'm tired."
Mama Samm sat beside me. "You not sleepin' well, you?"
"I've had a few nightmares," I admitted.
"So it is foretold in de Bible."
"My nightmares are in the Bible?"
"And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God," she quoted, "that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams. De book of Acts, second chapter, seventeen verse."
I sighed. "I don't know which implication is more upsetting. That I'm an old man or that these are the last days."
"Honey," she said, sounding very like my Great Aunt, "I don' tink you be ready for this, yet."
"Ready for what?" I asked, staring back at the woods. "Being Dear Abby for the dead?"
"More den dat, chère. You mus' be they champion. Bot' de living an' de dead." She patted my knee. "Remember dis one ting: dere is power in de blood."
"Yeah. And you know what the vampire motto is? More power to me."
She chuckled and adjusted her rooster. He crowed again. "You make a good start, tho. Already you find de grail. Keep her close, Hefe. De Whore of Babylon, she on her way."
I groaned. "As if I don't have enough woman problems."
"And dere is one who is lost between: maybe she save you, maybe she bury you—I don' see everyting."
"No joke."
She rose to her feet, the creaking of her massive knees making me wince in sympathetic pain. "De grail is de key."
"The ki?"
She nodded solemnly. "Maybe it so. Maybe you be him for true."
"Him? Him who?"
"Samedi, Lord of de Crossroads. For de Gédé clan. They all gone missing and here you be." She reached down and touched the side of my face. "Remember, de dead who come to you, dey do not seek a selfish vengeance. Dose who come to you, dey seek justice to protec' de living."
"And who am I to give that to them?"
She stepped back and stared down at me. After a long silence she nodded. "I see wings over you. De Darkness is coming for you but you will go down to de Valley—dey will lose you dere. . . ."
Like I wasn't already lost.
"And you will help to open de way back. Maybe dat more important than de grey men and all their plots. Take dis." She handed me a little red bag, tied shut with colored strings and tiny feathers and beads. "Keep it in your pocket. Ti-bon-ange."
And with a final nod of her head, she turned and lumbered back down my lawn and into the woods.
I sat for the longest time.
I see wings over you.
Yeah, batwings . . .
Mosquitoes flying reconnaissance in from the bayou circled my head in a whiney cloud then broke formation and continued their search for sustenance out toward the road. Professional courtesy, I guess.
I gazed up at the whiteness of the moon and considered the mottled gray shadows that spotted its face like patches of corruption on a communion wafer. Grey men, I thought. Who are the grey men?
Maybe T.S. Eliot could enlighten me. There was a collection of his poetry on my nightstand. I picked myself up and brushed the salt from my rump and pants legs. Who says the dead are an "unsavory" lot?
Already you find de grail. Keep her close . . .
Something danced at the edge of my consciousness as I unlocked the door and rekeyed the security system. I meandered into the kitchen, pulled another blood bag from the refrigerator, and pressed the chilled plastic against my fevered brow. "Holy crap!" I whispered. "The grail—keep her close."
Chalice.
My headache turned savage and I stumbled toward the stairs and my bedroom. The night was still young but I wasn't as I grabbed the banister and started up. "Honey," I called, the old joke worn way past thin now, "I'm home!"
"I've been waiting for you," answered a familiar voice from the bedroom.
I pushed the door open, recognition starting to dawn even before I took in the all-too-solid white flesh, the shocking deep crimson tumble of hair, familiar lips distorted by unfamiliar fangs.
"Holy shit!" I said.
"Hello, Chris."
"Deirdre!"