Vampires: The Recent Undead (52 page)

Life seemed to be brightening for all of them. Who could have guessed it would all go so terribly wrong?

Next day Dr. Bloch dropped by the shop to tell Milton how much he’s enjoyed reading
Arcana
.

“I love pulp;’ he confessed. “I like the energy, the violence, the fact that there’s always a resolution. The one thing in
The New Yorker
I never read is the fiction.”

They chatted cautiously, like strange dogs sniffing each other. Bloch explained he’d retired from practice but still did a little consulting at St. Vincent’s, the mental hospital where both of Milton’s parents had been patients.

“You’re a psychiatrist?” asked Milton, astonished. Bloch was so noisy and intrusive that he wondered how the man got anyone to confide in him.

“The technical term is shrink,” Bloch boomed. “I suppose it’s all right to say this now. Your brother was a patient of mine long ago. Somebody who knows I’m a fan of old sf told me about your shop, and as soon as I saw your face it all came back. You’re very like him, you know.”

Milton sat open-mouthed, while—like some cinematic effect—the lines of a younger face emerged from the old man’s spots, creases and wattles. How could he have missed it? Dr. Erasmus Bloch was
Dr. Erasmus Bloch
.

“When did you treat Ned?” he asked, his voice unsteady.

“In forty-eight, I think. Gave him a checkup first, naturally. Well set-up young fellow. Athletic. No physical problems at all.”

“Was he . . . ah . . . ”

“Psychotic? No. But he was hallucinating, and of course he was scared. We ruled out a brain tumor, drug use, and alcoholism—I don’t think he drank at all—”

“No. Because of our mother. I’m the same way. So what was wrong?”

“He was terribly unhappy. He’d grown up isolated, with a drunken mother and a rigid, cold, possibly schizoid father. He had violent impulses that he found hard to control. Frankly, he scared me a bit. These borderline cases can be much more dangerous than the certified screwballs. And he was
strong
, you know?”

“Yes,” said Milton, “I remember. . . . You said he was hallucinating?”

“Yes. Quite an interesting case. He believed his frustration and rage had turned him into a god or demon that had created a world. He’d written a story about it, and he loaned me a copy of
Arcana
so I could read it. Matter of fact, I read it again just last night.”

Milton nodded. “I’ve known for years that Ned wrote the story. But I never imagined he thought the—what did he call it? the Alternate Dimension—was real. I mean . . . it’s hard to believe he was serious.”

“Oh, he was serious, all right. I knew that when I saw the name he’d signed to his story.”

“Ralph O’Meagan?”

“It’s the closest Ned could come to Alpha Omega. You know, as in Revelations: ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ Yes, he actually believed he was a god and he’d made a world.”

That was a riveting insight. Milton wondered wily he’d never seen it himself. His breath came quicker, this was turning out to be the most involving conversation he’d had in decades.

“How do you treat something like that?”

“One technique for dissolving a delusional system is to move into it with the patient. It’s such a private thing, it disintegrates when he finds another person inside it. So I told Ned, “I want to hear more about this world of yours. Perhaps I can go there with you.’

“Something about that scared him. He skipped our next appointment. My nurse tried to call him, but it turned out he’d given her a wrong number. When she looked him up in the phone book, he claimed he’d never heard of me. Sounded as if he really hadn’t. Might have been stress-induced amnesia—rather a radical form of denial.”

“Yes,” murmured Milton. “That does sound radical.”

Bloch glanced at his watch, said he was due at the hospital and took his leave. Milton sat for a few minutes hugging his midsection, then got up and locked the door.

This wasn’t his regular day to dust Ned’s bedroom, but he went upstairs anyway, for the terrible past had taken him in its grip.

His key chain jangled and he sensed something beyond the door as the key turned silently in the well-oiled lock. But the shadowy room held only a faintly sour organic smell.

He opened the window, unbolted the shutters and flung them wide. Light flooded in. The room looked just as it had the week before Christmas 1945, when Ned had thrown his second-to-last tantrum and stormed out of the house.

Milton hadn’t actually witnessed it, but he heard about it later. Ned went into a fury because Mama, possibly in honor of the season, had disobeyed his orders and started drinking again. After he walked out, of course, she drank more. Milton came home carrying an armful of presents to find her staggering, and Ned forever gone.

God, how he’d hated him that day. Tearing out the underpinnings of his life just when he’d begun to be happy.

On the dresser stood a mirror where Ned had combed his hair, and a tarnished silver frame with a faded picture of him as a young sailor wearing a jaunty white cap. Ned was smiling a fake photographic smile, but his eyes didn’t smile. Neither did Milton’s as he approached and stared at him.

His face hovered in the mirror, Ned’s in the picture. Youth and decay: Dorian Gray in reverse. Suddenly feeling an intolerable upsurge of rage, he growled at the picture, “You were such a lousy stinking bastard.”

That was only the beginning. Grinding his teeth, he cursed the picture with every word he’d ever learned from chief petty officers and drunks brawling on Bourbon Street and his own unforgiving heart.

Exhausted by the eruption, trembling, clutching his ribs, Milton staggered back and sat down suddenly on the bed. Little by little he calmed down. After ten minutes he stood up and carefully smoothed the bedspread.

“Time to open the shop again,” he said in a quiet voice.

He closed Ned’s room and locked it, knowing it would be here when he came again, exactly as it was, never changing, never to be changed. The love and hate of his life, shut up in one timeless capsule.

The afternoon brought few customers, the following morning fewer still.

Milton filled the empty hours as he always did, sitting at his desk with his hollow chest collapsed in upon itself, taking rare and slow and shallow breaths, like a hibernating hear. Musing, dreaming, rearranging the pieces of his life like a chess player with no opponent, pushing wood idly on the same old squares.

How much he wanted to put his family into a gothic novel. How often he’d tried to write it, but never could. He smiled ruefully, thinking: Where are you, Ralph O’Meagan, when I need you?

All around him, stacked shelf on shelf, stood haunted books full of demons and starships, the horrors of Dunwich and Poe’s Conqueror Worm. But none held the story he longed to tell. He smiled wearily at a dusty print hanging on the wall Dali’s
The Persistence of Memory
, with its limp watches.

He knew now why people talked to noisy Dr. Bloch. It was quite simple: they needed to talk, and he was willing to listen. Shortly after eleven o’clock, Milton dug out his customer file and called Bloch’s number. It turned out to belong to a posh retirement home called Serena House.

“This is God’s waiting room,” the loud voice explained, and Milton moved the phone an inch away from his ear. “God’s
first-class
waiting room. Want to join me for lunch?”

Milton found himself stuttering again as he accepted. He locked up, fetched his old Toyota from a garage he rented and drove up St. Charles Avenue to Marengo Street. The block turned out to be one of those odd corners of the city where time had stopped around 1890. The houses were old paintless wooden barns, most wearing thick mats of cat’s claw vine like dusty habits.

But in their midst sat a new and massive square structure of faux stone with narrow lancet windows. Serena House was a thoroughly up-to-date antechamber to the tomb. After speaking to the concierge—a cool young blonde—Milton waited in a patio that was pure Motel Modern: cobalt pool, palms in large plastic pots, metal lawn furniture, concrete frogs and bunnies and a nymph eternally emptying water from an urn.

“You see what you have to look forward to,” boomed Bloch, and they shook hands.

“I can’t afford Serena House. Don’t you think my shop’s a nice place for an old guy to dream away his days?”

“Yes, provided a wall doesn’t blow in on you!”

Bloch, that impressively tactless man, laughed loudly at his own wit while leading the way to the dining room. The chairs were ivory enameled with rose upholstery and the walls were festive with French paper. By tacit agreement, they said nothing about Ned until the crème brûlée had been polished off.

Instead they talked sci-fi and fantasy. Milton found Bloch a man of wide reading. He knew the classics by Cyrano and Voltaire, Poe and Carroll and Stoker and Wells. He’d read Huxley’s and Forster’s ventures into the field. He declared that
Faust
and the
Divine Comedy
were also fantasy masterpieces—epic attempts to make ideas real.

“Because that’s what fantasy is, isn’t it?” he demanded. “Not just making things up, but taking ideas and giving them hands and feet and claws and teeth!”

After lunch they moved to poolside. Bloch lit a cigar that smelled expensive and resumed grilling Milton. “Your brother—did he die in the room where the story was set?”

He had a gift for asking unexpected questions. Milton cleared his throat, hesitated, then evaded—neatly, he thought—saying where Ned actually did die.

“No. He was found in the marshland out near the lake, about a quarter of a mile from that old amusement park on the shore.”

“Any idea what he was doing there?”

“The police thought he’d been killed elsewhere and dumped. I wasn’t much help to them—hadn’t seen Ned in years. Actually, we’d been on bad terms, and that was sad.”

“And your parents . . . what happened to them?”

“Mama drank herself to death. Daddy went senile. Alzheimer’s, they’d call it today. He died in St. Vincent’s. I got a call one night, and this very firm Negro voice said, ‘Your dad, he ain’t got no life signs.’ I said, ’You mean he’s dead?’ ‘We ain’t ’lowed to use that word,’ said the voice. ’He ain’t got no life signs is all.’

“ ’That’s okay,’ I said. “He never did.’ ”

Bloch smiled a bit grimly, exhaled a puff of blue smoke. “Tell me . . . exactly what killed Ned?”

Milton took a deep breath. He’d left himself open to such probing, and now had no way to evade an answer.

“Hard to say. He was such a mess by the time they found him. It was November, nineteen-forty-eight. The—the damage to his face and body was devastating. There was a nick in one thoracic vertebra that possibly indicated a knife thrust through the chest. But the coroner couldn’t be sure—so much of him had been eaten—there were toothmarks on a lot of the bones. . . .

“Eaten by what?”

Milton squinted at the cobalt pool. Sunstarts on the ripples burned his eyes. He said, “The c-coroner said wild pigs. Razorbacks. The m-marshes were full of them.”

Bloch’s little pouchy eyes gleamed with interest.

“Amazing. The monster in his story was a wild boar. You’re saying he wrote the story in nineteen-forty-one, and seven years later actual wild pigs mutilated his body?”

When Milton didn’t answer, Bloch said soberly, “You seem to have lived a Gothic novel, my friend.”

“I was thinking the same thing this morning,” Milton said, getting up to go. “You know, you’re filling your own prescription, Dr. Bloch. You’re moving into the fantasy.”

“Good Lord,” said he, knocking the ash off his cigar as he rose. “I hope not.”

By the time he reached the shop, Milton was finding his own behavior incredible. After decades of silence, he couldn’t believe the things he’d been saying—to Bloch, of all people.

He was confused as well, angry and fearful yet not sure exactly what he was afraid of. Sitting slumped at his desk, he worked it out.

There was the practical danger, of course. But beyond that lay a metaphysical peril: that he might somehow lose his world.
It’s such a private thing,
Bloch had said,
it disintegrates when another person moves into it.

Rising, Milton unlocked his cabinet and took out a second copy of the January ’42
Arcana
. Six others reposed in the same place, awaiting buyers. He put on white cotton gloves to protect the old brittle pages, and began leafing through them. The words of Ralph O’Meagan were an echo of long ago.

For many long weeks I lived in trembling fear of the night, when I would have to go to my room and see the lamplight on that wall. For now I knew that the world called real is an illusion of lighted surfaces and the resonances of touch, while underneath surges immortal and impalpable Energy, ever ready to create or kill.

There was no possible way of explaining to my father why I should sleep anywhere else, and no way of explaining anything to my mother at all. I tried to sleep without the nightlight, only to find that I feared the demons of the dark even more than those of the light.

Yet I grew tired of waiting and watching for something that never happened, and as time went by I began to persuade myself that what I’d seen that one time was, after all, a mere nightmare, such as I often had.

I was sound asleep, some three or four weeks after my first visit to the Alternate Dimension, when something tickling my face caused me to awaken. At first I had absolutely no sense of fear or dread. Then I felt a prickling on my face and hands like the “pins and needles” sensation when a foot has been asleep—and a memory stirred.

Reluctantly I opened my eyes. I was lying as before in that field of dying grass. One coarse stem was rubbing against my nose, other stems probed my hands and bare feet.

1 raised my head and saw the great beast once again. This time I waited until it had finished its horrible meal and had turned away, like an animal well satisfied and ready for sleep.