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I wondered idly and viciously if I could attack him, take him, bring him down under my greater craft and cunning and taste his blood without his consent.
"I'm much too far along the road for that," he said, "and why would you chance such a thing?"
What self-possession. The older man in him did indeed command the sturdier younger flesh, the wise mortal with an iron authority over all things eternal and supernaturally powerful. What a blend of energies! Nice to drink his blood, to take him against his will. There is no such fun on Earth like the raping of an equal.
"I don't know," I said, ashamed. Rape is unmanly. "I don't know why I insult you. You know, I wanted to leave quickly. I mean I wanted to visit the attic, and then be out of here. I wanted to avoid this sort of infatuation. You are a wonder, and you think me a wonder, and it's rich. "
I let my eyes pass over him. I'd been blind to him when we met last, that was most true.
He dressed to kill. With the cleverness of olden times, when men could preen like peacocks, he'd chosen golden sepia and umber colors for his clothes. He was smart and clean and fretted all over with careful bits of pure gold, in a wristband timepiece and buttons and a slender pin for his modern tie, that tailored spill of color men wear in this age, as if to let us grab them all the more easily by its noose. Stupid ornament. Even his shirt of polished cotton was tawny and full of something of the sun and the warmed earth. Even his shoes were brown, glossy as beetles' backs.
He came towards me.
"You know what I'm going to ask," he said. "Don't wrestle with these unarticulated thoughts, these new experiences, all this overwhelming understanding. Make a book out of it for me. "
I couldn't have predicted that this would be his question. I was surprised, sweetly so, but nevertheless taken off guard.
"Make a book? I? Armand?"
I went towards him, turned sharply and fled up the steps to the attic, skirting the third floor and then entering the fourth.
The air was thick and warm here. It was a place daily baked by the sun. All was dry and sweet, the wood like incense and the floors splintery.
"Little girl, where are you?" I asked.
"Child, you mean," he said.
He had come up behind me, taking a bit of time for courtesy's sake.
He added, "She was never here. "
"How do you know?"
"If she were a
ghost, I could call her," he said.
I looked over my shoulder. "You have that power? Or is this just what you want to say to me right now? Before you venture further, let me warn you that we almost never have the power to see spirits. "
"I'm altogether new," David said. "I'm unlike any others. I've come into the Dark World with different faculties. Dare I say, we, our species, vampires, have evolved?"
"The conventional word is stupid," I said. I moved further into the attic. I spied a small chamber with plaster and peeling roses, big floppy prettily drawn Victorian roses with pale fuzzy green leaves. I went into the chamber. Light came from a high window out of which a child could not have seen. Merciless, I thought.
"Who said that a child died here?" I said. All was clean beneath the soil of years. There was no presence. It seemed perfect and just, no ghost to comfort me. Why should a ghost come from some savory rest for my sake?
So I could cuddle up perhaps to the memory of her, her tender legend. How are children murdered in orphanages where only nuns attend? I never thought of women as so cruel. Dried up, without imagination perhaps, but not aggressive as we are, to kill.
I turned round and round. Wooden lockers lined one wall, and one locker stood open, and there the tumbled shoes were, little brown Oxfords, as they called them, with black strings, and now I beheld, where it had been behind me, the broken and frayed hole from which they'd ripped her clothes. All fallen there, moldy and wrinkled they lay, her clothes.
A stillness settled on me as if the dust of this place were a fine ice, coming down from the high peaks of haughty and monstrously selfish mountains to freeze all living things, this ice, to close up and stop forever all that breathed or felt or dreamed or lived.
He spoke in poetry:
"Tear no more the heat of the sun,'" he whispered. "Nor the furious winter's rages. Fear no more. . . '"
I winced with pleasure. I knew the verses. I loved them.
I genuflected, as if before the Sacrament, and touched her clothes. "And she was little, no more than five, and she didn't die here at all. No one killed her. Nothing so special for her. "
