Eight
“Abbot Reginald of St. Sylvester speaks well of you, Brother Victor. He says you have much to offer us here at St. Thomas.” Brother Matthew, a burly man, stood before a tall window in his office. He was abbot of St. Thomas, my new home, but he told me he didn’t like titles. “Brother” suited him just fine.
The window looked out into the courtyard, where a gnarled old pine basked in the light of a full moon. The walls of the office bulged with thick, musty volumes. The oak floor and desk were blackened with age.
“I’m grateful for the abbot’s recommendation, Brother Matthew.” I assumed the tone of deference I’d perfected through centuries of monastery-hopping. Also robed in black, I sat across from him in a leather chair, venous with cracks.
“We Thomists have never accepted a monk from another order. But the accident was tragic—the demise of an ancient community stemming from the Dominicans, like ours. Order of the Divine Word—splendid name. What a pity.” He shook his head.
“Yes.” I studied the fat neck that rose from his black habit. His ripe jugular bulged as big as the infant snakes we ate as delicacies in Pilate’s headquarters two millennia before.
“The fire was sudden?”
I nodded. “It was a medieval abbey, full of rotting wood. England is full of decrepit abbeys and convents. The unusually strong winds on the English heath didn’t help. When the fire started, everyone was asleep. They weren’t due to rise for matins for another hour. And the fieldwork had been grueling that day, especially for the older monks. Most everyone died of smoke inhalation. Through God’s mercy I was taking my usual walk on the heath, safe from the sun’s rays. My skin condition won’t cause inconvenience, will it?”
“Of course not, Brother Victor.” The abbot seated himself in the leather chair behind his desk. The lamp cast a rosy glow on his smooth cheeks. His eyes were small and closely set and full of the disgusting charity I never grew tired of loathing. “It’s a strange condition, I admit. What a misfortune to be intolerant of the sun. Though the night has its own beauty.”
“Indeed.”
“And you can work in the night? It will be good to have a sentinel of sorts.”
“The underground cell is not a problem?”
“Not if you don’t mind the damp rooms beneath the chapel. It’s where we said our private masses in the old days—a network of dank little chapels and storage rooms. We’ve furnished a cell for you down there. I promise you you’ll not see a single ray of sun.”
“Excellent. The crypt is around there too, I suppose? The one you mentioned to Abbot Reginald?”
“Yes. I hope that won’t bother you—sleeping among our faithfully departed. They’re good old souls.” He smiled benevolently.
“Indeed not. I can pray better in that environment, reminded of mortality.” I mustered a smile, and he, predictably, reciprocated. “I have a trunk full of books. They’re out in the car.”
“I’ll get a brother to help you.” Brother Matthew picked up the phone. “I’m surprised Brother Cyril didn’t bring it in already.”
“That’s my fault. I told him I’d get the porter to help me after I spoke to you. He did carry my other bags to my cell.”
The abbot shifted the receiver and gave directions to the porter I’d glimpsed as old Brother Cyril had pulled into the parking lot, a willowy boy of 19 or 20 who blushed when I saw him peering out the window.
I rose when he knocked at the door and the abbot called for him to enter. He was indeed a specimen—full lips, limpid eyes, a shock of blond hair, the bangs curling over his eyebrows. He smiled bashfully at me, then turned his attention to the abbot to receive his instructions.
“Brother Victor,” Brother Matthew called as we were leaving. “Why exactly did Abbot Reginald survive the fire? He wasn’t clear in his letter or phone call.”
“I think he was out of the building too, Brother. He suffered from insomnia.”
“I see. And he really won’t accept our hospitality?” The abbot squinted in the lamplight.
“He’s very old. His community is gone. He wants to be with his family in Brighton.” I tried to restrain my impatience at his irritating concern.
“I see. Welcome to America, Brother, and to the monastery of St. Thomas. We’ll try to help you not miss England too much. Make yourself at home.”
“Yes, Brother. Thank you.”
How many times over the ages had I introduced myself to an unsuspecting abbot? It was in the late 13th century that I entered the first cloister, a Dominican fortress in the Apennines full of boys hardly old enough to shoot their loads. That’s when I set out in earnest on a calculated campaign to destroy the harems of Joshu’s god. I’d only begun to hear about monasteries, although apparently the communities of monks had spread from Egypt into Italy 200 years before.
But let me start at the beginning.
After the death of Joshu, I spent a dozen frustrating years waiting, searching for his spirit among the old Palestine haunts. Then, despondent, I made my way back to Rome, where I spent four centuries feasting on the rich blood of patricians and the exotic blood of slaves from every corner of the empire. The Germanic invasions began in the fifth century. At first I enjoyed the excitement, the chaos. I could smell blood from the battlefields when I emerged from my hiding places after sunset. But depression gradually set in as I watched the collapse of civilization as I’d known it.
I left Rome in the eighth century and wandered through the Far East until the Barbarian raids were long over. Then I returned. More than a millennium had passed since I’d beheld Joshu. A millennium. I caught wind of these idealistic followers of Joshu huddled together, renouncing the world as he had. It seemed too good to be true. My nocturnal wanderings, glutting my appetites, had begun to bore me. I lacked a purpose, stable companionship, things I thought I could dispense with on the dark side of existence. The challenge of the secluded abbeys where pietistic young males wrestled with their carnal desires, where Joshu’s spirit perhaps lingered, where I could most injure his god … that challenge baptized me into a new life. The night once again held promise.
The first millennium after Joshu’s death was my adolescence as a predator, my youthful heyday. In the second millennium, as a monk, I enjoyed the fruits of experience: more finesse in my dealings with humans; more restraint over my cravings; more single-mindedness in my hunts; more concentration, hence ecstasy, in my feedings.
Between the 13th and 20th centuries, two dozen monasteries, in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the British Isles, harbored a creature of the grave unknowingly—until too late. With each abbey I left devastated, I cut a new notch in the belt squeezing my heart, the belt strapped there by Joshu. If I couldn’t remove it, I could gloat over its defacement.
St. Thomas would make two dozen and one notches. And my first in the New World.
Leaving the abbot’s office, I followed the boy monk, Brother Luke, down the dark hallway into the medieval-looking foyer of St. Thomas Abbey. Our feet thudded on heavy oak planks. High above us loomed thick rustic beams. The abbot had instructed the young porter to give me a tour of the buildings.
“Would you like to see the chapel first?”
Though I wasn’t an expert on American accents, his drawl seemed rural. He pointed toward heavy doors surmounted by a carved image of Joshu on the abominable crucifix, the one I had stood before 2,000 years ago. In all that time I had not grown immune to the longing and bitterness the image evoked.
“Lead on, O Gabriel.” I squeezed his shoulder when he beamed at the name of the angelic guide.
Lights from votive candles flickered before statues in side altars and near the sanctuary of the long, narrow chapel—an unimaginative variation on chapels since the beginning of monasticism. Choir stalls faced each other near the sanctuary, and pews lined the body of the church. The place smelled of incense and candle wax, old varnish and sickly-sweet flowers.
“You wanna offer a prayer?” The boy whispered as though the empty chapel were filled with meditating monks.
“Thank you. Please, come with me.” I touched his back.
We walked side by side down the center aisle and knelt at the communion rail. The golden tabernacle doors were embossed with a predictable scene of the “last supper.” The truth is, Joshu was sick during that final Passover and couldn’t eat a thing. I teased him about it—and scoffed at the foot-washing ritual that embarrassed his foul-smelling men, their feet caked with filth. He had an irresistible penchant for degrading himself.
But he had enough sense to avoid ending up imprisoned in a bread box. The Blessed Sacrament indeed! And even if he was in the tabernacle, it wasn’t as a wafer that I wanted to taste my Joshu.
Brother Luke amiably gabbed as he led me through the other buildings forming the sides of the large courtyard, thick with hedges and trees now dormant in the January cold: a high-vaulted library adjacent to the chapel was in one building; in another was a social hall, a kitchen, and a refectory with two long tables for the handful of monks who lived there; a third building contained a dormitory of tiny cells, administrative offices, and, adjacent to the foyer, a richly furnished parlor for receiving guests. A fairly new greenhouse had been constructed on the north side of the refectory, behind the buildings.
“There’s a room of computers next to the library. But I ain’t got the key.” Boy Luke stood timidly behind a heavy chair. “They put in a lot of time in there, with their research and all.”
“And you have no scholarly ambitions? I thought the Thomist order pledged to carry on the work of the great St. Thomas Aquinas.” Through my research I had learned all about the 19th-century offshoot of the Dominicans. Most of the monks were scholars who did research at the monastery during extended university sabbaticals. Between the monastery’s enormous library collections and its modern computer technology, they had all the resources a pinheaded professor could want. They would keep their noses buried in their books and stay well out of my way.
“Gotta have porters and groundskeepers, too.” He smiled sheepishly.
“Ah, I see. You are responsible for the charming landscaping, then?”
“Me and Brother Michael. We tend the greenhouse, too.”
“And is Brother Michael a stooped old farmer?”
Luke shook his head. “He ain’t but five years older than me. Lot smarter though. Reads like a fiend. Just not interested in scholar stuff.”
As the boy helped me unload my trunk from the car, I surveyed the landscape in the moonlight: the long dirt path to the monastery snaked through trees and down a hillside until it hit a country road, invisible from the promontory. Behind the buildings, acres of woods rose to the Appalachian peaks that now looked like bites taken from indigo paper. We were far from the city of Knoxville, from heavy settlement, but I smelled human blood in the cold night air, as I’d known I would.
My stay here would be short if I fed on monks again. This time I would resist the urge even longer than I had the last time. Once I started on monks—sick of feeding on drifters and prostitutes and other refuse no one missed—once I started on monks I couldn’t control my appetite for their consecrated flesh, which carried me to orgiastic heights. I would grow careless, leaving trails of blood, missing the suppers I only pretended to eat anyway, missing compline—unable to stomach invocations of Joshu. In the bloody chaos, clues would point to me and I would have to flee once again, often destroying the monastery as I had recently done in England, when the good brothers of St. Sylvester discovered too much.
My cravings defeated my own purpose. I intended to steal the souls of devout boys, not their mortal lives. Controlling a boy thrilled me as terrifically as it had during my existence as a man. My cock still hardened. I could still take a boy, though it was the sight of him surrendering his will to me, not the friction of fucking, that triggered my orgasm.
I took no pleasure in barring the doors of St. Sylvester’s, in torching the carpets and draperies, in razing the buildings that had given me security. But I had no choice, and no choice but to assume the identity of Abbot Reginald in order to make arrangements at St. Thomas. This time I would resist longer. I would stick to the indigenous food.
“People live in the mountains?” I asked, lugging one side of the trunk while Luke took the other.
“Some. Most is miners. But the mines done closed.” Luke’s breath steamed before him in the cold. “They get by on whatever they can shoot in the woods or pull out of the dirt. Michael takes them food and supplies.”
“Indeed.”
Inside the foyer, Luke unlocked a door that opened onto a dark and narrow stairway beneath the vestibule of the chapel. He flicked on the light and turned to take his side of the trunk.
“It’ll be easier if I carry it myself.” I picked up the trunk and he moved out of my way.
“My God, do you lift weights or something?”
I grinned, feeling his eyes admiring me from behind—for when I chose to I could feel any senses directed at me. “Natural, brute strength, my friend.” He did not know the half of my powers.
Deep in the bowels of the church, we walked along a flagstone corridor, past alcoves made of brick, like burial niches in the Roman catacombs where I fed upon the neophyte Christians: the first martyrs—because of me, not the lions. The widely spaced incandescent bulbs along the walls shined upon marble altars within the alcoves.
“The ordained brothers used to say their masses down here.” Luke was leading the way now. “Don’t see how you can sleep so close to the graves. Gives me the creeps.”
“With the Blessed Sacrament just above me? How can I be afraid, Luke?”
“Still …”
“Ah, I see we’re coming to the crypt.” Engraved marble tablets spaced six feet apart lined the walls. Six names were engraved on each of the tablets, which were embedded in the wall above an iron door that was soldered shut. I’d seen this sort of mausoleum many times: the coffins inside the small chambers were sealed in vaults, stacked in pairs. “How long has it been since a brother died?”
“That’d be Brother Raymond, last year. Ninety-two years old. There he is.” Luke pointed to one of the last mausoleums. The soldering was shiny still.
I deposited my trunk on the floor of my cell, a small storage room beyond the crypt, which had been furnished with a bed, a desk, shelves, and a chest of drawers. In a room across from mine, plumbing had been installed for the priests who said their masses near the crypt. A duct from the boiler room directed meager heat into the entire subterranean space.
It was after midnight, and I was growing ravenous, not having fed since the night before when I broke out of the coffin being shipped on a flight from London. When Luke offered me a fraternal embrace to welcome me, I wanted to pierce his supple throat and drink. I clutched him as I clutch my prey, willing him to immobility. Within his stunned body, I felt him succumbing. In that second I could have ordered him to do anything, he was so pliable. Latent homosexuals—a category that obviously fit him—were always the easiest to control in monasteries, where such creatures flourish. But there was no hurry. Young Luke could wait. I released the boy and he pulled away, embarrassed but not sure why.
Minutes after he had ascended to his cell, I was once again in the night air. The scent of blood drifted through the dense woods. I tore through branches, over frozen soil and brittle leaves, my preternatural sight steering me though the darkness in the direction of my prey.
The wooden shack, its porch sagging and windows boarded, nestled into the mountainside near a frozen brook. A doorless old refrigerator and a heap of rusty cans and other garbage littered the ground beside it. Light bled through the windows. Inside, a baby cried. I stood on the porch, listening to a husky-voiced woman singing. Before she could finish her lullaby, I charged through the door.
The woman, seated on a kitchen chair, cradling the baby in her arms, screamed. Of course my appearance was horrible, as always when I fed. My skin took on the jaundiced hue of a new corpse. My fangs grew in an instant to the length some stalactites take a century to reach. Fire burned in my eyes. I panted like a rabid dog.
“Oh God, please. No!” She clutched her baby to her breast when I reached for it.
I snatched the brat from her, raised it to my mouth, and, shaking off the blanket, sank my teeth into its soft belly. Its blood squirted like the juice of a plump tomato in my mouth.
Shrieking hysterically, the woman grabbed at the baby, but I held it firmly, draining it and dropping the corpse on the dingy linoleum floor. She scrambled from her chair and threw herself on her dead child. Snatching a handful of her oily hair, I pulled her to her feet and ripped off her sweatshirt. She reeked, as though she hadn’t bathed in a month. Her face was pockmarked. But her breasts, swollen with milk, enticed me. My fangs sliced into them. Her eyes rolled back. Her head dropped and her body went limp. When I’d had my fill, I let her crumple to the floor beside her child.
I hauled their bodies to the heart of the dark woods and flung them into a ditch, rolling a fallen tree over them. Then I returned to the shack and wiped up stray drops of blood. Anyone searching for the victims in their remote dwelling—whoever supplied their food and fuel—would assume they’d vacated and trudged to the warmth of the city.
Shortly before dawn I raced back to my cell. Stuffing pillows under the blanket in case anyone should look in on me during the day, I left the cold cubicle and hurried to the crypt. The iron door of old Brother Raymond’s mausoleum gave easily under my strength. I slipped into the dark, cramped chamber, where I had to stoop like a humpback, and pulled the gate firmly shut behind me. The lingering smell of decay, no longer detectable to a mortal, wafted to my nostrils, at once familiar and repugnant. Tracing the odor to the top vault of the third pair of tombs, the one farthest from the door, I pried it open. The plain pine casket was perfectly intact, probably the only one in the whole crypt in such a condition. I opened the lid, scooped out the skeleton, still dressed in a habit, dumped it on the floor to be discarded later, and climbed into the coffin. Within seconds of closing the lid, I drifted off, sated and exhausted.