The Tale of the Body Thief (36 page)

No dreams came to me.

It was as if I’d always been human, always in this body, and oh, so grateful for this soft clean bed.

Afternoon. Patches of blue beyond the trees.

In a trance, it seemed, I watched her build up the fire. I watched the glow on her smooth bare feet. Mojo’s gray hair was covered with light powdery snow, as he ate quietly and steadily from a plate between his paws, now and then looking up at me.

My heavy human body was simmering still in its fever, but cooler, better, its aches less acute, its shivering gone now entirely. Ah, why has she done all this for me? Why? And what can I do for her, I thought. I wasn’t afraid of dying anymore. But when I thought of what lay ahead—the Body Thief must be caught—I felt a stab of panic. And for another night I would be too ill to leave here.

Again, we lay wrapped in each other’s arms, dozing, letting the light grow dim outside, the only sound that of Mojo’s labored breathing. The little fire blazed. The room was warm and still. All the world seemed warm and still. The snow began to fall; and soon the soft merciless darkness of the night came down.

A wave of protectiveness passed over me when I looked at her sleeping face, when I thought of the soft distracted look I had seen in her eyes. Even her voice was tinged with a deep melancholy. There was something about her which suggested a profound resignation. Whatever happened, I would not leave her, I thought, until I knew what I could do to repay her. Also I liked her. I liked the darkness inside her, the concealed quality of her, and the simplicity of her speech and movements, the candor in her eyes.

When I woke next, the doctor was there again—the same young fellow with the sallow skin and tired face, though he did look somewhat rested, and his white coat was very clean and fresh. He had put a tiny bit of cold metal against my chest, and was obviously listening to my heart or lungs or some other noisy internal organ for a bit of significant information. His hands were covered with slick ugly plastic gloves. And he was speaking to Gretchen in a low voice, as if I weren’t there, about the continuing troubles at the hospital.

Gretchen was dressed in a simple blue dress, rather like a nun’s dress, I thought, except that it was short, and beneath it she wore black stockings. Her hair was beautifully mussed and straight and clean and
made me think of the hay which the princess spun into gold in the tale of Rumpelstiltskin.

Again came the memory of Gabrielle, my mother, of the eerie and nightmarish time after I’d made her a vampire, and she had cut her yellow hair, and it had all grown back within the space of a day while she slept the deathlike sleep in the crypt, and she’d almost gone mad when she realized it. I remembered her screaming and screaming before she could be calmed. I didn’t know why I thought of it, except that I loved this woman’s hair. She was nothing like Gabrielle. Nothing.

At last the doctor was finished with his poking and prodding and listening, and went away to confer with her. Curse my mortal hearing. But I knew I was almost cured. And when he stood over me again, and told me I would now be “fine” and needed only a few more days’ rest, I said quietly that it was Gretchen’s nursing which had done it.

To this he gave an emphatic nod and a series of unintelligible murmurs, and then off he went into the snow, his car making a faint grinding noise outside as he passed through the driveway.

I felt so clearheaded and good that I wanted to cry. Instead I drank some more of the delicious orange juice, and I began to think of things … remember things.

“I need to leave you for only a little while,” Gretchen said. “I have to get some food.”

“Yes, and I shall pay for this food,” I said. I laid my hand on her wrist. Though my voice was still weak and hoarse, I told her about the hotel, that my money was there in my coat. It was enough money for me to pay her for my care as well as for the food, and she must get it. The key must be in my clothes, I explained.

She had put my clothes on hangers, and now she did find the key in the shirt pocket.

“See?” I said with a little laugh. “I have been telling you the truth about everything.”

She smiled, and her face was filled with warmth. She said she would go to the hotel and get my money for me, if I would agree to lie quiet. It wasn’t such a good idea to leave money lying about, even in a fine hotel.

I wanted to answer, but I was so sleepy. Then, through the little
window, I saw her walking through the snow, towards the little car. I saw her climb inside. What a strong figure she was, very sturdy of limb, but with fair skin and a softness to her that made her lovely to behold and most embraceable. I was frightened, however, on account of her leaving me.

When I opened my eyes again, she was standing there with my overcoat over her arm. Lots of money, she said. She’d brought it all back. She’d never seen so much money in packets and wads. What a strange person I was. There was something like twenty-eight thousand dollars there. She’d closed out my account at the hotel. They’d been worried about me. They had seen me run off in the snow. They had made her sign a receipt for everything. This bit of paper she gave to me, as if it was important. She had my other possessions with her, the clothing I had purchased, which was still in its sacks and boxes.

I wanted to thank her. But where were the words? I would thank her when I came back to her in my own body.

After she had put away all the clothing, she fixed us a simple supper of broth again and bread with butter. We ate this together, with a bottle of wine, of which I drank much more than she thought permissible. I must say that this bread and butter and wine was about the best human food I’d tasted so far. I told her so. And I wanted more of the wine, please, because this drunkenness was absolutely sublime.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked her.

She sat down on the side of the bed, looking towards the fire, playing with her hair, not looking at me. She started to explain again about the overcrowding at the hospital, the epidemic.

“No, why did you do it? There were others there.”

“Because you’re not like anyone I’ve ever known,” she said. “You make me think of a story I once read … about an angel forced to come down to earth in a human body.”

With a flush of pain, I thought of Raglan James telling me that I looked like an angel. I thought of my other body roaming the world, powerful and under his loathsome charge.

She gave a sigh as she looked at me. She was puzzled.

“When this is finished, I’ll come back to you in my real body,” I said. “I’ll reveal myself to you. It may mean something to you to know that you were not deceived; and you are so strong, I suspect the truth won’t hurt you.”

“The truth?”

I explained that often when we revealed ourselves to mortals we drove them mad—for we were unnatural beings, and yet we did not know anything about the existence of God or the Devil. In sum, we were like a religious vision without revelation. A mystic experience, but without a core of truth.

She was obviously enthralled. A subtle light came into her eyes. She asked me to explain how I appeared in the other form.

I described to her how I had been made a vampire at the age of twenty. I’d been tall for those times, blond, with light-colored eyes. I told her again about burning my skin in the Gobi. I feared the Body Thief intended to keep my body for good, that he was probably off someplace, hidden from the rest of the tribe, trying to perfect his use of my powers.

She asked me to describe flying to her.

“It’s more like floating, simply rising at will—propelling yourself in this direction or that by decision. It’s a defiance of gravity quite unlike the flight of natural creatures. It’s frightening. It’s the most frightening of all our powers; and I think it hurts us more than any other power; it fills us with despair. It is the final proof that we aren’t human. We fear perhaps we will one night leave the earth and never touch it again.”

I thought of the Body Thief using this power. I had seen him use it.

“I don’t know how I could have been so foolish as to let him take a body as strong as mine,” I said. “I was blinded by the desire to be human.”

She was merely looking at me. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she was looking at me steadily and calmly with large hazel eyes.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked. I pointed to the crucifix on the wall. “Do you believe in these Catholic philosophers whose books are on the shelf?”

She thought for a long moment. “Not in the way you ask,” she said.

I smiled. “How then?”

“My life has been one of self-sacrifice ever since I can remember. That is what I believe in. I believe that I must do everything I can to lessen misery. That is all I can do, and that is something enormous. It is a great power, like your power of flight.”

I was mystified. I realized that I did not think of the work of a nurse as having to do with power. But I saw her point completely.

“To try to know God,” she said, “this can be construed as a sin of pride, or a failure of imagination. But all of us know misery when we see it. We know sickness; hunger; deprivation. I try to lessen these things. It’s the bulwark of my faith. But to answer you truly—yes, I do believe in God and in Christ. So do you.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“When you were feverish you did. You spoke of God and the Devil the way I’ve never heard anyone else speak of them.”

“I spoke of tiresome theological arguments,” I said.

“No, you spoke of the irrelevance of them.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. You know good when you see it. You said you did. So do I. I devote my life to trying to do it.”

I sighed. “Yes, I see,” I said. “Would I have died had you left me in the hospital?”

“You might have,” she said. “I honestly don’t know.”

It was very pleasurable merely to look at her. Her face was large with few contours and nothing of elegant aristocratic beauty. But beauty she had in abundance. And the years had been gentle with her. She was not worn from care.

I sensed a tender brooding sensuality in her, a sensuality which she herself did not trust or nurture.

“Explain this to me again,” she said. “You spoke of being a rock singer because you wanted to do good? You wanted to be good by being a symbol of evil? Talk of this some more.”

I told her yes. I told her how I had done it, gathering the little band, Satan’s Night Out, and making them professionals. I told her that I had failed; there had been a war among our kind, I myself had been taken away by force, and the entire debacle had happened without a rupture in the rational fabric of the mortal world. I had been forced back into invisibility and irrelevance.

“There’s no place for us on earth,” I said. “Perhaps there was once, I don’t know. The fact that we exist is no justification. Hunters drove wolves from the world. I thought if I revealed our existence that hunters would drive us from the world too. But it wasn’t to be. My brief career was a string of illusions. No one believes in us. And that’s
how it’s meant to be. Perhaps we are to die of despair, to vanish from the world very slowly, and without a sound.

“Only I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to be quiet and be nothing, and to take life with pleasure, and to see the creations and accomplishments of mortals all around me, and not to be part of them, but to be Cain. The lonely Cain. That’s the world to me, you see—what mortals do and have done. It isn’t the great natural world at all. If it was the natural world, then maybe I would have had a better time of it being immortal than I did. It’s the accomplishments of mortals. The paintings of Rembrandt, the memorials of the capital city in the snow, great cathedrals. And we are cut off eternally from such things, and rightfully so, and yet we see them with our vampire eyes.”

“Why did you change bodies with a mortal man?” she asked.

“To walk in the sun again for one day. To think and feel and breathe like a mortal. Maybe to test a belief.”

“What was the belief?”

“That being mortal again was what we all wanted, that we were sorry that we’d given it up, that immortality wasn’t worth the loss of our human souls. But I know now I was wrong.”

I thought of Claudia suddenly. I thought of my fever dreams. A leaden stillness came over me. When I spoke again, it was a quiet act of will.

“I’d much rather be a vampire,” I said. “I don’t like being mortal. I don’t like being weak, or sick, or fragile, or feeling pain. It’s perfectly awful. I want my body back as soon as I can get it from that thief.”

She seemed mildly shocked by this. “Even though you kill when you are in your other body, even though you drink human blood, and you hate it and you hate yourself.”

“I don’t hate it. And I don’t hate myself. Don’t you see? That’s the contradiction. I’ve never hated myself.”

“You told me you were evil, you said when I helped you I was helping the devil. You wouldn’t say those things if you didn’t hate it.”

I didn’t answer. Then I said, “My greatest sin has always been that I have a wonderful time being myself. My guilt is always there; my moral abhorrence for myself is always there; but I have a good time. I’m strong; I’m a creature of great will and passion. You see, that’s the core of the dilemma for me—how can I enjoy being a vampire so much, how can I enjoy it if it’s evil? Ah, it’s an old story. Men work
it out when they go to war. They tell themselves there is a cause. Then they experience the thrill of killing, as if they were merely beasts. And beasts do know it, they really do. The wolves know it. They know the sheer thrill of tearing to pieces the prey. I know it.”

She seemed lost in her thoughts for a long time. I reached out and touched her hand.

“Come, lie down and sleep,” I said. “Lie beside me again. I won’t hurt you. I can’t. I’m too sick.” I gave a little laugh. “You’re very beautiful,” I said. “I wouldn’t think of hurting you. I only want to be near you. The late night’s coming again, and I wish you would lie with me here.”

“You mean everything you say, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You realize you are like a child, don’t you? You have a great simplicity to you. The simplicity of a saint.”