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I screamed.
I beat at the bars and bashed my head against them. My whit
e-faced warders rushed to the bars and then backed away in fear and peered at me across the dark corridor. I fell down on my knees crying.
I grabbed up the corpse. "Riccardo, drink!" I bit into my tongue and spit the blood on his greasy staring face. "Riccardo!" But he was dead and empty, and they had gone, leaving him there to rot in this place with me, to rot beside me.
I began to sing "Dies irae, dies ilia" and to laugh as I sang it.
Three nights later, screaming and cursing, I tore the reeking corpse of Riccardo limb from limb so I could hurl the pieces out of the cell. I could not endure it! I flung the bloated trunk at the bars again and again and fell down, sobbing, unable to drive my fist or foot into it to break its bulk. I crawled into the farthest corner to get away from it.
Allesandra came. "Child, what can I say to comfort you?" A bodiless whisper in the darkness.
But there was another figure there, Santino. Turning I saw by some errant light which only a vampire's eyes could gather that he put his finger to his lip and he shook his head, gently correcting her. "He must be alone now," Santino said.
"Blood!" I screamed. I flew at the bars, my arm stretched out so that both were affrighted and rushed away from me.
At the end of seven more nights, when I was starved to the point where even the scent of the blood didn't rouse me, they laid the victim-a small boy child of the streets crying for pity-directly in my arms.
"Oh, don't be afraid, don't," I whispered, sinking my teeth quickly into his neck. "Hmmmmm, trust in me," I whispered, savoring the blood, drinking it slowly, trying not to laugh with delight, my blood tears of relief falling down on his little face. "Oh, dream, dream sweet and pretty things. There are saints who will come; do you see them?"
Afterwards I lay back, satiated, and picking from the muddy ceiling over my head those infinitesimal stars of hard bright stone or flinty iron that lay embedded in the earth. I let my head roll to the side, away from the corpse of the poor child which I had arranged carefully, as for the shroud, against the wall behind me.
I saw a figure in my cell, a small figure. I saw its gauzy outline against the wall as it stood gazing at me. Another child? I rose up, aghast. No scent came from it. I turned and stared at the corpse. It lay as before. Yet there, against the far wall, was the very boy himself, small and wan and lost, looking at me.
"How is this?" I whispered.
But the wretched little thing couldn't speak. It could only stare. It was clothed in the very same white shift that its corpse wore, and its eyes were large and colorless and soft with musing.
A distant sound came into my hearing. It was of a shuffling step in the long catacomb that led to my little prison. This was no vampire's step. I drew up, my nostrils flaring ever so slightly as I tried to catch the scent of this being. Nothing changed in the damp musty air. Only the scent of death was the aroma of my cell, of the poor broken little body.
I fixed my eyes on the tenacious little spirit.
"Why do you linger here?" I asked it desperately in a whisper. "Why can I see you?"
It moved its little mouth as if it meant to speak, but it only shook its head ever so slightly, piteously eloquent of its confusion.
The steps came on. And once again I struggled to catch the scent. But there was nothing, not even the dusty reek of a vampire's robes, only this, the approach of this shuffling sound. And finally there came to the bars the tall shadowy figure of a haggard woman.
I knew that she was dead. I knew. I knew she was as dead as the little one who hovered by the wall.
"Speak to me, please, oh, please, I beg you, I pray you, speak to me! "I cried out.
But neither phantom could look away from the other. The child with a quick soft tread hurried into the woman's arms, and she, turning, with her babe restored, began to fade even as her feet once again made the dry scraping sound on the hard mud floor which had first announced her.
"Look at me!" I begged in a low voice. "Just one glance. "
She paused. There was almost nothing left of her. But she turned her head and the dim light of her eye fixed on me. Then soundlessly, totally, she vanished.
I lay back, and flung out my arm in careless despair and felt the child's corpse, still faintly warm beside me.
I did not always see their ghosts.
I did not seek to master the means of doing so.
They were no friends to me-it was a new curse-these spirits that would now and then collect about the scene of my bloody destruction. I saw no hope in their faces when they did pass through those moments of my wretchedness when the blood was warmest in me. No bright light of hope surrounded them. Was it starvation that had brought about this power?
I told no one about them. In that damned cell, that cursed place where my soul was broken week after week without so much as the comfort of an enclosing coffin, I feared them and then grew to hate them.
