The Color of Light (47 page)

Without hope of seeing her each day, the City of Light seemed dull and foolish. I slipped away one warm and lovely night, saying no goodbyes, leaving my scruffy bachelor flat exactly the way it was. Back in London, my father asked no questions, merely ruffled his
Times
and gave me a courteous little smile of acknowledgement at the breakfast table the next morning.

Some men drown their sorrow in drink or narcotics, others in violence. I prowled the streets of London, seeking relief from the relentless loop of images cycling through my brain. I drifted like a ghost among the laughing throngs of theatergoers around Covent Garden. I trolled Soho, taking comfort from the streetwalkers there, following dark-eyed, dark-haired girls down shady alleyways, calling out Sofia’s name as I expelled my frustration upon them. I walked alongside the thirsty waters of the Thames, and sanely considered the cold arms of a watery death.

The morning of August 15
^th
—
well, morning for me, but it was actually rather late in the afternoon
—
there was a knock at my door. My father’s man, telling me there was a call for me from Paris. Gentleman, name of Colby.

“Sinclair, old boy,” he was almost shouting. There was a lot of background noise. Colby didn’t have a telephone in his apartment, he used the pay phone at Café de Flore whenever he needed one. “There you are! Been looking for you! Wanted to see how you were doing!”

I lied, as men do in these situations, told him everything was brilliant, I’d gotten a bit nervous about the war, I was seeing old friends, sniffing around the galleries, trying to get back into an ex-girlfriend’s good graces.

Even with the crashing of dishes behind him, I could tell he was relieved. He gave me an abbreviated account of the latest gossip. Lulu the model had been hospitalized for exhaustion, but everyone knew it was a drug overdose; Beata had left for Prague to see if she could help her family get out of Czechoslovakia; Margaux was cheating on Leo with his arch rival, Brodov; I had missed a hell of a goodbye party for Sawyer, who was on a ship steaming towards the colonies.

It was good to hear his voice. I felt a surprising pang of homesickness.

He was getting off now. “All right, Sinclair. Sartre is glaring at me, he wants to use the phone. Sounds like you’re in good spirits. I was just a bit worried. Wanted to check on you. Big day and all.”

I frowned, though he couldn’t see it. “What big day?”

There was crackling from the international connection. Then he said dubiously, “You do know, old boy. Sofia’s getting married today.”

The world began to spin. Just in time, I put my hand out and caught the wall, steadied myself.

“Oh yes,” I said. “That big day. Well, thanks for calling, Colby. Good to hear your voice. Do look me up whenever you get back to London, we’ll go out for a drink.” And I rang off.

I don’t know how I got back to my room. I don’t remember dressing or stumbling down the stairs of my father’s house. I don’t remember how I got there, or how many places I stopped in first, but the next thing I remember I was bellied up to the bar at a tiny pub down a stinking alleyway off Covent Garden, drinking great quantities of alcohol.

By then, I had formulated a plan. First, I was going to get completely bladdered. Then, I was going to go home with the prettiest girl I could find.

After the first few drinks, the pictures on the walls seemed homier, the other blokes more convivial, the girls more lovely.

I smiled at the lovelies. A promising bit of fluff flirted with me, I bought a round for the bar. I was playing some kind of truth-or-dare drinking game that I was willingly losing when the bit of fluff asked whether I had a sweetheart. A vision of Sofia in a white wedding gown, the veil over her face, rose up before my eyes. Then the vision blurred, turning to smoke in the unhealthy air.

Behind me, a cold breeze gusted in. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. I heard the door bang shut. A rustle of fabric. Someone coming in after the theater. Whoever it was parked themselves at the bar to my left, jostled my elbow. I turned, nearly falling off my barstool. She was a tall, bosomy woman in a black silk satin evening gown sheathed in black net, embroidered with swooping, sequined black birds. Plunging neckline, bare arms, under a thin wrap. Dark hair, dark eyes, lips painted a deep alizarin crimson. My lucky night after all.

She had come in with someone, a man even taller than she was, dressed for the theater. They conferred in low, urgent tones, her big round eyes focused avidly on him. She seemed to be breathlessly devouring his every word. Suddenly, she threw her head back and laughed. He rose to his feet and paid the tab, then glided out the front door, leaving her alone at the bar.

She looked familiar. I squinted at her through the smoke, and then it came to me; friend of Leo’s, did something in fashion.

We chatted for a moment about Paris, people we knew. “What are you doing here?” she asked, putting a cigarette between her lips. I lit it for her, taking the opportunity to ogle her breasts.

“Financial matters,” I lied. “And you? Business or pleasure?”

“Always pleasure.”

She leaned over me, whispered in my ear. Too many people knew her here. She knew of a place nearby, somewhere more private. Could I follow her? I watched her shimmering bottom swish out the door; the winking sequins made her look like a mermaid. I threw money on the bar, and we headed down Maiden Lane.

The scent of roses and honeysuckle wafted through the air from a flowerseller’s booth in Covent Garden, faraway stars glittered faintly in a velvety black sky. There must have been a restaurant nearby; the smell of roasting meat hung in the air, and as my stomach grumbled, I realized I hadn’t eaten since the day before.

A third of the way up Garrick Street, the parade of storefronts gave way to a street I’d never noticed before, narrow and poorly lit, paved over with ancient-looking cobblestones. She glided into it. I hesitated.

“What is it?” she asked softly.

“A bit dark,” I conceded. “Good place for robbers to hide.”

She laughed, her bright eyes shining. “I will protect you from them,” she promised, and drew my arm under hers.

A few lengths further and the street crooked to the right, widened briefly into a shadowy court, then disappeared under a dark, covered passageway. This twisted square of broken paving stones was surrounded on all sides by the backs of other buildings facing larger, more traveled thoroughfares. The few visible windows were dark and unshuttered, like the eyes of the blind. The place she spoke of came suddenly into view, a rough looking bar called The Lamb and Jackal. Though the night was warm, I remember suppressing a shiver.

She took my hand and pulled me into the passageway, barely wide enough to allow two people to pass. My senses were assailed with the stench of piss and decay. There, she shoved me hard against the dank wall and began her assault.

She ripped open my shirt
—
I remember the tiny click of the buttons bouncing on the flagstone
—
and moved her mouth down my throat, my chest, my belly, making little sounds of pleasure, tweaking me with her teeth as she worked her way down. I pressed my hands against the slimy bricks, barely able to hold myself upright, shivering with the damp and the sheer pornographic thrill of it. It was all I could do to keep myself from coming right then and there as she undid my trousers, like a present she was taking her time unwrapping.

And then she hiked up her skirts and leapt at me, and I wrapped my arms around her hips and heaved her onto myself, and in one raw, annihilating, apocalyptic moment, disgorged into her all the rage and loss and vengeance brewing in my soul.

When it was over, I could barely stand upright. “Sorry,” I panted as she kissed the base of my throat. “That took every last ounce of my strength. I’m done in.”

“Oh, you were
merveilleux,
my darling,” she assured me.
“Fantastique.
Everything I dreamed you’d be. Now, look at me.”

She took my face in her long fingers, transfixed me with her gaze. I noticed a strange red light dancing and leaping inside her eyes, like a flame. So seductive. So hypnotic. “Beautiful,” she whispered. “So sad. Like a priest.”

She put her lips behind my ear, then continued lightly, tenderly, back down my neck. Her arms tightened around me like steel cables, and the world exploded in pain as she drove her teeth into my throat.

I think I got out one strangled exclamation, but she was inhumanly strong, and I was drunk and anyway helpless under her thrall.

She began to feed. She sucked voraciously, long and hard. It made a horrible wet noise, a grotesque parody of passion. Completely sober now, I resisted, tried to push her away, my hands falling on soft but unyielding flesh. In response she bit down harder.

“Don’t fight it, my darling.” she coaxed. “It only hurts more when you fight.”

Her eyes glittered with arousal and excitement. Paralyzed with horror, I saw her fangs glinting in the dim yellow light of the single gas lamp. I didn’t think it was possible, but the pain was a hundred times worse when she buried her teeth in my throat a second time.

I had been wrong all along; I wanted very much to live. I should never have come to this godforsaken place. I should have stayed in Paris, broken a few dozen hearts, made some impenetrable angst-filled art, maybe joined the Foreign Legion, done some good. With terrible regret, I flashed on all the things I would never do; the brilliant career I would never have, the drawings in my sketchbook that would never materialize into paintings. Fall in love. Marry. Have children. Grow old.

I couldn’t breathe, she was crushing my larynx. Something warm and wet was running down the inside of my throat. I realized that I was going to die now.

Only six liters of blood run through the human body. A physician I knew once told me that a person cannot recover from a loss of more than three. I don’t know how long it went on for, but it seemed like forever, and I think she took it all.

Finally she was done. I felt her slowly but surely letting me down to the wet pavement, like a mother putting a tired child to bed.

“Shhh, shhh,” she said in a soothing voice. “Mother will take care of you.”

She put her hand under my head and raised it a little, leaned over me. I tasted blood in my mouth, not my own. Then she laid me back down on the cobblestones.

Though I could no longer move or speak, I was still capable of tears, and I could feel them streaking down the sides of my face. I gazed up at her, kneeling on the mossy paving stones in her couture gown embroidered over with a murder of crows. Her skin was suffused with color; her lips were full and red. A coquettish little smile played over them now, like the Mona Lisa. She bent over and kissed me one last time, my blood on her lips.

“Goodnight, lover,” she whispered. “Hurry, now.” And with that, she rose to her feet and evanesced into the night.

I was alone now. As consciousness began to leave me, the pain receded. I was cold now, really cold. My chest labored up and down with the struggle to breathe. My eyelids were so heavy, I closed them; it was becoming too much effort to keep them open.

From somewhere I heard a thunderous
THUMP thump, THUMP thump, THUMP thump,
growing louder and louder while the noise from the street faded into the distance. The sound of my failing heart, beating slower and slower.

Something stirred the air like the flapping of wings. My chest rose and fell one more time. And that was all.

Tessa was crying. He squatted down beside her, rested his hands on her knees. “Sweet girl. I’m sorry. Don’t cry, Tessa, I’m right here.”

She flung her arms around him. Whatever grief-filled thing she was saying was lost in the wilds of her hair, in the place where her lips met his throat. Her tears felt warm against his skin.

“What was it like…being dead?”

He pushed tendrils of wet hair away from her face. “I was floating in this…vast, benevolent black ocean. I was warm. I wasn’t sad. And though I couldn’t see them, I could sense them, the others, millions and billions of souls, flowing peacefully along beside me.”

Her arms tightened around him. For a precious moment, he allowed himself to feel loved, taking refuge in the shelter of her embrace. Then slowly, reluctantly, he withdrew from her, returning to his perch on the armchair.

My eyes opened to utter darkness.

I reached up to touch my face, and as I did, my knuckles scraped against a rough stone surface. Slowly, I became conscious of a cold, mildewy smell. I slid my fingers forward, trying to feel around for something familiar, but everything I touched was solid rock. When I tried to sit up, I thunked my head.

The events of the previous night came flooding back to me. Where was I? Had I been buried alive? Ferociously, I pounded on the walls, called out into the nothingness. All I heard was the sound of my own panicked voice, echoing back at me.

I heaved at the lid of my prison, whaled against it with all my might. This time I was rewarded with a sharp crack. Dirt fell on my face. The slab seemed to be giving way. I pushed harder. With a horrible scraping sound it moved, then crashed over the side and smashed to pieces.

Slowly, I raised myself up. I could just barely make out my surroundings. Low ceiling. Dying flowers. More sarcophagi, tucked into the other walls. A single candle in a niche, dribbling wax. The woman from the alleyway.

“Hello, my darling,” she said brightly.

I cringed back into the box.

Today she was wearing a blush-colored satin ball gown with voluminous skirts, and long opera gloves that went almost to her shoulders. She looked like a visiting queen.

“It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “All done. Why don’t you come out of there?”

“What are you going to do to me now?” I asked her. My voice actually quavered.

She laughed, brought her face close to mine. “Whatever you like,” she answered, her eyes merry.

I seized a broken chunk of marble, brandished it at her. “Don’t come any nearer.” I warned her.

“You won’t need that,” she said, amused. “You’re stronger than I am, now. All right. I’ll stay over here. I know. It’s confusing.”