Descent Into Madness (31 page)

              “True.” She turned, the blackness of the habit blending with the shadows as she moved to the couch. Sister Veronica smoothed her scapula as she sat. Her fingers twirled the prayer beads and she glared past me. The wood beads clanked together beneath her fingertips. “But it is powerful, Bree. To those who have faith, it is a weapon.”

              “Faith?” I asked her. “Faith in what?”

              “Aksel had faith in the magic that made that amulet. Francisco has faith in how he can exploit that magic – turn it into a weapon. Giving the amulet to you was the only way Aksel could stop him. Now you must have faith. I cannot tell you in whom or what, but you must find that out for yourself.”

              “Great sacrifices have been made because of this amulet, and you come to me speaking of faith!” I growled.               “What does it do? This trinket, what is it for?” 

              Sister Veronica’s face grew ashen and her eyelids fell.               “It protects you.”

              “I am a vampire! I have no need for protection!”

              Sister Veronica rose from the couch, walked toward me, and stood glaring into my eyes. “Yes, my friend, you have always needed protection.”

              “From whom?” I laughed. “Francisco? Not even the archivist… or the Pope wants me dead. The archivist wants my help! If the archivist finds that coward first, he may fair a worse fate than if I had found him.”

              “Not a person,” her cold voice whispered breaking my laugh. “A thing.”

              Her feet moved to the balcony door, opened it, and beckoned for me. “Come with me my old friend. We have much to discuss.”

THIRTY-ONE

W
e are all stories in the end. When found wanting and desperate as we lay dying, it all comes down to moments lived. Sad moments. Happy moments. Indescribable moments. They are all just that – all too fleeting. When that final moment comes, we reach out, hungrily, struggling to hold on to the last second, to remain. Yet we cannot stay. We must not. That is not how stories end. 

              Inbound traffic was already backing up on the Dan Ryan as I flew over the pre-dawn city. The people of Chicago were beginning to wake, eager to face the new day. These mortals below labored under the false pretenses that they were safe in their gated homes. They believed their doormen, bodyguards and handguns offered protection. When all along monsters flew above – walked amongst them – threatening their mortality. Their alarm systems and steel doors – their weapons – were no match for our kind.               There were but a few stragglers in the hospital lobby at that hour of night. Only three hapless, hung-over souls remained near the hospital’s cab-call desk – a deserted area this time of night. Two women – in their mid-twenties – hunched over armchairs in various states of despair, their vomit-covered sequined club wear clinging to their wasted bodies. Their driver, a solitary man sat beside them, covering his face with his coat as I walked in. His body slumped with the weight of a night’s indecisions and cheap liquor. He reeked of beer and stale chips, of cigarettes and drug store perfume.  

              I walked past the trio – their thoughts still focused on their drunken exploits – and headed to the elevator. The ICU was on the sixth floor and the elevator nervously hummed and clanked as it snaked its way up the shaft. A fluorescent, disinfectant glow greeted me as I stepped off and into the isolated ICU floor.

              The specialized ward, with its glass rooms fashioned in a semi-circle pod, had an octagonal nursing station in the middle; the nurses pressed behind computer screens like sardines in a tin can, diligently monitoring life signs. The gentle hum of ventilators within the ICU bubble vibrated the glass, but only my ears could detect it.

              As I reached for the buzzer, my other hand felt the amulet in my right pocket. Its coolness reminding of Sister Veronica’s defiant stare as the October wind whipped at her veil. Those comforting talks from our youth – sitting near the fountain, our toes dipped in the lake – had come full circle. She had returned to me, my friend, my confidant. Somehow, Aksel had brought her to me. Through the expanses of time and space and death and life, she was here. My guardian angel, through an amulet she came. Now I knew what I had to do. And why.

              The buzzer’s sudden sting pierced the stillness pervading that hospital hallway. Inside the glass walls, the ICU machines beeped and ventilators purred. Yet outside, the only noise was of the nurse’s, “Can I help you?”

              “I am here to see the patient in room 149, please.”

              The door opened with a click and I walked through, the aroma of sterile alcohol and hospital grade tubing violating my nose with its eye-stinging potency. Colin’s room was the second on the left. Dimmed fluorescent lighting bled through thin, patterned drapes, now drawn over the sliding glass doors. A place card taped near his room number signified he was terminal – not going to make it – left for dead. 

              The door swooshed as I opened it, yet the others did not turn their glance from Colin’s motionless body. Judith clung to her father’s side, her hand entwined in his; ruby tears adorning her cheeks. Wesley and Aleksandra stood near the window watching the city wake. Death was nothing new to them. I walked to Colin’s side, looked into his near-lifeless face and then beheld Judith’s innocence. Despite the blood and its power, she was far too young to know this pain – to feel the raw ache this death would bring into her life.

              “Wesley, Aleksandra,” I said as they turned, “take Judith away.”

              “No!” She looked up, startled. “I am not leaving my dad!”

              “Wesley, do it.” As Wesley came closer to the bed, Judith held her father tighter. “Judith, go with them; do not fight me.”

              “Mother, please; do not deprive her,” Aleksandra begged. “You do not have to do this! He will be dead before morning. Just let him pass naturally. For her sake, please.”

              Wesley met my stare and then lowered his glare, diverting his eyes instead in Aleksandra’s direction. “Trust your mother,” Wesley whispered. “She knows what she is doing.” He moved to Judith’s side and placed his hands on her own.

              “Aleksandra, stop him!” Judith urged as Wesley pulled her arms free. “Let go of me!” she yelled, thrusting her body weight against him as she held tightly to her father, “Wesley stop! Let me go! Get off me!”

              Aleksandra glanced up, glaringly, and I held her stare. “Do as she says, Judith,” she instructed.  

              “But I cannot leave him! Please, do not make me leave him! He is dying, Bree,” Judith plead as they led her near the door. “Give me this time with him. Please, Bree, this is all I will ask from you; just let me have this time with my father. Please?”

              “Take her away,” I told them as Wesley pulled her sobbing from the room.

              Lying in his bed, Colin was but a mass of organs and blood and tissue. Tubes nourished him. Machines breathed for him. Doctors kept Colin alive.  

              Reaching up, I silenced the alarms and sat down next to his bedside. The chair creaked beneath my weight, yet he remained unresponsive. There was less than an hour left until the sun crept over the horizon. The dusky light wafting through his window casted shadows over his graying face, and he already appeared dead. 

              Peter would not recognize his son, lying here lifeless in a hospital bed. Colin’s own students – who just days before had heard him lecture on Yeat’s - would not believe this man was their great teacher.

              I grabbed his hands, stroked them beneath my grasp. Their warmness startled me.

              “The silver apples of the moon, Bree,” her voice whispered from the far corner. An obsidian sliver snaked into view as her habit caught the moonlight.

              “The golden apples of the sun,” I replied. “How did you know?”

              “I know everything,” Sister Veronica whispered from the corner. “I know he is dying, just hours now.”

              “But that… that poem, that is ours,” I spat. How dare she come into his room, as he lay fragile and exposed, and defile our friendship. “That is something we will always have,” I whispered, turning back to him, my eyes falling on his withering body.

              “Bittersweet endings, professor, you always lectured about them. He hated them,” I said turning to Veronica.              

              “He preferred a real, gritty page turner. Life, he would say, it is not full of happily ever after. Now he is living it, is he not? He does not get a happy ending.” She did not reply as my eyes traveled over Colin’s ashen face.               “I wish I could share with you those golden apples, those silver moons. Or hear your voice recite Yeats and Joyce until you are blue in the face.”   

              “You could, you know,” she whispered. The habit rustled as her shoes clicked against the hospital linoleum. Her hand pressing into my shoulder felt real, felt solid. “He was not going to stop searching for you, holding out hope.”

              “No, he didn’t.” Recalling the roses, the last line of Yeats’ poem attached. That had been years ago, after meeting the night of the Field Museum gala. “But I cannot turn him.”

              “It is what he wants, Bree,” she whispered as she leaned over his face. Her fingers slid across his brow. “It is what he has always wanted.”

              “He did not even know about us until now, and now we are in the midst of chaos. And he is terrified,” I spat. “This is not what he would want. It is what you want!”

              “He wants to be with you, Bree,” she said. Her haunting glare ate at me. “As he lies here dying, as he listens to us right now, his soul is crying out to you. Listen to him! He wants you! He has always wanted you!”

              I closed my eyes, listened for his thoughts. Behind the ventilators drone and the IV dripping, his mind hissed and whispered. After the hours Wesley and Aleksandra sat vigil in this room, they had not listened to Colin – to what he needed, to what he wanted.   

              Gasping, I opened my eyes. “How did we miss this?”              

              “It is easy to miss a dying mans last words when you are not listening for them – or you do not want to hear them, Bree,” she replied. “Will you grant it?”

              “I… I cannot.” I slumped into the chair. “How can you expect me to do this, Veronica?”

              “You must! It is his dying wish!” she demanded. She came toward me with an unworldly swiftness. I knocked into the hospital bed as I stood from chair, Colin’s hand flopping to his side. .

              “He will die,” she said, “and it will be your fault.”

              “The car accident killed him,” I spat, “not me. I could not turn Mavra, or Viktor, and I cannot turn him.”

              “You caused the accident,” she retorted.

              “The amulet caused the accident,” I countered. “So it is Aksel’s fault.”

              A lump grew in my throat as Aksel’s name surfaced. Blaming him for such an unfortunate circumstance was shallow and pathetic. One death from the amulet, and the night was yet to be over. The burden he left burned a hole in my pocket.

              “And, my old friend,” she came to rest her hand on my shoulder once more, a tear in the crease of her eye, “who made Aksel? You have the power for a reason, use it,” she whispered before fading as a mist before my eyes. 

              With my right hand securing the amulet, I hovered over his body. With my left hand, I removed the ventilation tube and crooked his head to the side. My teeth pierced his salty flesh and I thought I heard him grimace beneath my tight grasp. His life splashed in, each searing ounce filling me in this chilly pre-dawn hour, warming each cell as I stood holding him above the hospital bed. Blood droplets collected on the starched, fitted sheet, the powder blue blanket already stained from the ventilator fluids. 

              His body went slack in my arms, his legs drooping on to the bed below. I closed my eyes and let droplets of my blood from my bitten wrist drip into his mouth. I waited, fighting exhaustion as his blood mixed with my cells, rehydrating me.

              Images scrolled furiously before me. Their vividness was blinding as each flash revealed another secret from Colin’s past. There he was, a little boy, his knee scraped against the sidewalk. A bike now lies askew in the middle of the lane as a group of kids taunted him. The next drop framed him as a teenager hidden in a darkened library, submerged in a sea of books.

              Instead of studying economics, he studied the red head with emerald eyes the next table over. His first kiss, with the fiery red head, that came with the next drop. Then as his breathing grew shallow, and his heartbeat slowed, the memory of Judith being born. Highlights and memories cascaded with his blood, one after another until his body collapsed in my arms.

              Looking down on Colin’s broken body, I remembered how Judith had just been there. Moments ago, I had torn her from her father. I forced her from this last hour with him.

             
I
had done that.

              Sitting next to him in that hard visitor’s chair, I recognized death’s shadowy veil nearing him. Death was there for Colin, to claim its prize. With his ventilation removed and nearly all his blood gone, I was surprised he still held on. He mocked death’s vicious scythe.

              Then he turned. His body seized in a moment of breathless abandonment. As I stood and backed against the wall, what little color he had leached from his skin. The waxen vampiric complexion spread, quickly erasing the deathly ash. His limbs twitched and fluttered; his eyelids blinked.

              He held out his hand to me and I went to his side, grasping it. It was cold now, his hand – unearthly cold. Gone forever was that mortal heat, which even in sickness a body retains.

              “Our poem, Bree, you remember?” he asked, his voice deeper with the blood.

              “Of course, Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. How could I ever forget that?”

              “You are
her
,” he said, sitting up. “In the poem, you are the girl and I am the poet. I am old now and I have wandered through hilly lands and hollow lands, looking for that girl who got away. Now you returned and saved me.”               “You left me no choice, Colin.”

              “And now I will ‘kiss her lips and take her hands,’” he recited.

              “And walk among long dappled grass,” I replied.

              “And pluck till time and times are done,” we recited together, “the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.”