American Gothic (24 page)

Ophelia bit down hard on the fleshy place where her thumb met the palm.

“I brought you the sacrifice. We can share her blood together.”

It was obvious from looking at him—why hadn’t she seen it before? Dr. Glass was completely insane.

Ophelia hadn’t seen Dr. Glass exchange his gun with the box cutter, for it was only now that she found it with her eyes. He held it loosely, in an almost offhand manner, in his right hand. The box cutter was opened, and Dr. Glass gestured at his sacrificial lamb with the exposed edge of a new razor blade as he talked.

“Tonight, I will become a vampire, like you,” he said, his voice rising. “Tonight, I join you in sharing the sacrament of the blood, and at last I learn what it is like to be like a god.”

“Don’t!” Ophelia cried, and ran forward, reaching for Dr. Glass’s arm. But she was not close enough to have any real chance of stopping him. She involuntarily shut her eyes as the blade arced through the air at the end of Dr. Glass’s arm. Something warm and wet sprayed her full in the face.

“Ahhhh!”

Dr. Glass’s orgasmic delight was more than Ophelia could stand. She felt her knees buckling and she fell to the floor and curled up as small as she could, wishing she could will herself into nonexistence. Her only chance was to play along with Glass, to pretend to revel in the poor woman’s spilled blood, but that was further than she thought she could make herself go. And so she would join Dr. Glass’s other patient, stuffed into the blue plastic drum—the drum that he would push into a roaring inferno designed to consume severed limbs and infectious garbage—a fitting enough end. Only Ophelia hoped the end would come before that. She hadn’t seen how long it took the other woman to die, once her throat was slashed. Ophelia hoped she didn’t suffer much. She hoped—she prayed—death would come equally quick to her.

What felt like a body collapsed beside her on the plastic-draped floor.

Ophelia opened her eyes, expecting it to be Candy Priddle, freed by slashes of the razor from the duct tape holding her body to the chair.

It was Dr. Glass.

Ophelia screamed and jerked herself away from him as if jolted with a powerful electrical current. Glass stared at her sightlessly. He was dead.

“And so you see where all of this has led you?”

Ophelia raised herself up on an arm and looked over her shoulder. Nathaniel Peregrine was standing there, looking a little unsteady on his feet, no doubt intoxicated from the rich wash of blood sprayed over the plastic sheeting behind Candy Priddle and pooling under her on the floor.

Ophelia looked back at Dr. Glass and realized the odd angle of his head. Peregrine had snapped Dr. Glass’s neck.

Ophelia pushed herself into a sitting position. Her eyes never left Peregrine’s. She could sense his desire, and his hunger, so many times more powerful than the pathetic Dr. Glass’s. It was like the sun’s brightness compared to the light of the candles burning on the blue plastic drums.

“Now what?” she said.

To which the vampire answered, “Now what indeed.”

37

City Lights

T
HOUGH THE VAMPIRE Nathaniel Peregrine was well into his second century on the planet, he seemed entirely comfortable with the present. Aside from a melancholy that crept into his eyes upon occasion, Peregrine appeared as at home in the world as anybody Ophelia had ever known. Still, she was startled when he picked her up in a car—a forest green Volvo station wagon—as if he were a prosperous San Francisco advertising agent instead of an exotic, immortal creature who, long before automobiles were invented, had ridden a horse into battle during the Civil War.

Peregrine slid a CD into the player and adjusted the volume. The vampire’s taste in music was at least a little more than what Ophelia expected. The instrumental pieces were soft and bluegrassy, though in a sophisticated way, no hillbilly twang to the intricately arranged music for acoustic guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. And Ophelia actually liked the music, much to her surprise, though it was worlds apart from industrial Goth.

He didn’t say where he was taking her, and she didn’t ask. The Volvo headed across the Golden Gate Bridge. He pulled off the road in Sausalito, parking outside a restaurant overlooking the water. The hostess showed them to a table on the deck facing the harbor. The city lights across the bay glittered on the water, adding to the lights of Sausalito, and Alcatraz Island, and the stars overhead. The tide was running, creating the impression of something vast and powerful flowing beyond them as they watched. There was something there—an image still unformed in Ophelia’s mind—a metaphor for something. She made a note of it. She could use it in her poetry, if she ever wrote any again.

“It is like life,” Peregrine said, as if reading her thoughts. When she looked across at him, he indicated the bay with a nod. “Always in motion, sometimes this way, sometimes that, a force that cannot be controlled or reckoned with. The most you can hope to do is learn its rhythms and sail with them the best you can, because you certainly can’t sail against them, not for very long.”

“What do you know about sailing?”

“That’s my boat.” Peregrine pointed at the sleek outline of a three-masted yacht riding at anchor off the marina across the point from the restaurant. “I sailed here on her. And I will sail away on her, too, when I have seen enough of my old haunts.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Take me with you.”

The vampire looked away from her and back out toward the sailboats, a few with lights burning inside or on deck, but most of them dark.

A waitress came to the table and Peregrine said they both needed cognac. Ophelia knew there was no way they were going to serve her without seeing her ID, and maybe not even after she showed them the fake one that claimed she was twenty-two. But the waitress smiled and went away for the drinks. Peregrine always got what he wanted, so far as Ophelia had seen. He seemed to have the power to make people obey him. He didn’t stare at them, mesmerizing them with beady eyes, like Bela Lugosi in an old
Dracula
movie. Rather, Peregrine just said what he wanted and people gave it to him. At least everybody except Ophelia did. She was the only one who seemed to be able to defy him, though whether this was because of her own power or the vampire’s sufferance was unclear to her.

“My wife wrote poetry.”

“Did she really?” Ophelia asked with real interest.

“Ah. So it seems there is something about me you don’t know.”

“I’m sure there are a great many things about you I don’t know.”

“True,” he said as the waitress returned with their drinks. “It was a long time ago—my wife, I mean. I miss her still. But you know the old saying?”

Ophelia raised her eyebrows.

“Life goes on,” the vampire said. “Through happiness and sorrow, through good times and bad, life goes on.” He held his glass up in toast. “To a long and successful life for you as a poet, Ophelia.”

She touched her glass to his and took a small sip. The cognac burned her throat, but after a moment she felt it relaxing her. Peregrine was right; she had needed a drink.

“But only one,” he said, completing her thought. “You have seen what too much drink can do to a person.”

“My father,” she said simply.

“I once was very much like him,” Peregrine said. “I had a hard time of it when my family died. I took my relief where I could find it.”

“No need to apologize.”

“No, but losing yourself in a stupor of drink and drugs—you’re just numbing yourself to the pain; it isn’t any kind of answer.”

Peregrine drank his cognac in a single swallow, looking up to see Ophelia closely watching him.

“I have been beyond the consolation of such palliatives since the great Change. My system processes drink faster than I can put it down my throat. It’s a different story with your father.”

Ophelia sighed. “My father is hopeless.”

“Yes, unfortunately I think he is.”

“He is haunted by his past. He can’t bear to be reminded of it. And of course, he does nothing but sit in that house and drink, where his past is all around him. I’m partly to blame for that.”

“No.”

“Yes, I am,” Ophelia said. “He wanted to walk out of the house and never go back after my mother died. But I refused to go. It was my home. My life. I wanted to stay there and be surrounded with all the things I knew as a little girl. He tried to throw away her clothes and things—not put them into the garbage, but give them to Goodwill, to relatives, to anybody who would take them. I wouldn’t let him. We had some terrific fights over it all. The only time he sets foot in their bedroom is when he changes clothes. He sleeps on the couch in the den.”

“He’s dying.”

The breath caught in Ophelia’s throat. She could see from the way Peregrine was looking at her that it was true.

“I smelled death all the way from my house across the street when I returned. It was almost more than I could bear. You can smell it, too, Ophelia. You just don’t know it.”

“Because I’m psychic?”

“Partly. All sentient beings, even ordinary humans, are psychic. It is a latent sense. It frightens most people. They refuse to acknowledge what they don’t understand and can’t explain. It’s like Shakespeare wrote. There are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of by most people.”

“But my father.”

“There is nothing anyone can do. He’s destroyed himself. His liver and kidneys are gone. There’s something growing in his lungs. I can hear it in his breathing. The years of cigarette smoking, you understand.”

“You could help him.”

“It is too late for him.”

“As a mortal maybe, but you could change that.”

Peregrine smiled but without joy. “That is your solution to everything. Do you really think it will solve your father’s problems if I turn him into a vampire? Do you think it will solve your problems and make you happy? Do you really?”

Ophelia looked down at the table.

“I have lived a long life—a very long life. If there is one thing I have learned through all my experiences, it is that at the very deepest level what we crave most with all our hearts and souls is love. Unless you learn to embrace this one truth, Ophelia, you will never be happy, not as a human and certainly not as a vampire. Religious teachers tell us love is the secret force binding all of Creation. I have no doubt that someday some physicists will devise an equation proving that love is the force controlling and powering the universe and all of life.”

The vampire took Ophelia’s right hand and held it between his own, which felt almost hot to the touch.

“I had love and lost it,” he said. “This is the way of the world. Anything we acquire we are destined to lose. One of the most important lessons life has to teach you is to let people go when it is time. Because, trust me, my dear, for so long as you live, you will be saying good-bye to people you love. If you have trouble grasping this, the destructive powers of the universe will attach themselves to you like a leech and drag you down into the depths of darkness…”

The vampire’s voice trailed off, but Ophelia could see that he was lost in his thoughts and did not interrupt them.

“In my own time of darkness, the devil sent a demoness in the form of a beautiful young woman to torment me,” Peregrine said. “She gave me the Change, turning me into the creature I am today. For nearly a century I followed her, and when I was finished with her, she followed me. We lived together in Rome, Venice, Paris. I tried to make a new start without her in Haiti, but she followed me to the islands just before the start of World War One, ruining one of the few chances for happiness I have had during the course of a very tedious life.”

The vampire’s faraway look shifted his focus until it was trained solely on Ophelia, and she could tell he was waiting for her to ask a question.

“Where is she now?”

The vampire shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps she is out there, watching from a boat in the harbor.”

A chill passed through Ophelia, making her reach for her brandy. “Really?”

Peregrine shook his head. “She is very clever, but she no longer has the upper hand. I would be able to sense her out there, if she were there. She will leave me alone now, if she knows what is good for her. You have nothing to fear.”

The vampire’s expression softened and he began to lightly stroke her hand.

“You are an enigma, Ophelia. You dress like a Goth, like a refugee from another time, and yet you spend your spare time with your computers and the Internet. You carve freedom from the past, yet you brood over your mother’s grave. You write poetry—rather good poetry, if I may say so—but on death and other macabre, dark subjects. You are as tortured by your past as is your poor father. If you don’t learn to come to terms with your grief, you will end up like him. Or like the psychopathic Dr. Glass. Or even worse, like me—a vampire doomed to walk the earth forever in search of love to set me free.”

Ophelia did not dispute what he said. There was no point pretending she disagreed. Peregrine was dead-on right.

“You know that I am fond of you, Ophelia,” the vampire said. “My wife wrote poetry, though not as well as you do. You even dress like she used to; black was very much the fashion back in the 1860s.”

He smiled.

“I want to help you, Ophelia.”

His eyes held hers, looking deep into her, perhaps seeing things within her own mind that not even she could see.

“I want you to think about it very carefully, Ophelia, and then tell me what it is I can do to help you.” He smiled. “It is not a commonplace occurrence—a vampire putting himself at one’s service. So whatever you choose to ask me for in the way of assistance, think about it carefully and choose wisely.”

38

Two Years Later

W
HEN OPHELIA GOT home, the first thing she did was go through the big house on Mulberry Street and open the windows. She had thoroughly cleaned the house before leaving, throwing out the old mail, newspapers, and unread magazines, washing the walls and windows, waxing the floors and woodwork, which hadn’t been touched since her mother died. She hired a retired woman in the neighborhood to come every two weeks to dust, but the house smelled closed and musty after being shut for so long. Ophelia had planned to return sooner, but one thing led to another, and she’d spent the previous summer in Paris, which had been more wonderful than she could ever have imagined.

It was a pleasant day in early summer. The Northern California sky was cornflower blue, a comfortable breeze blowing in off the Pacific.

Ophelia unpacked her suitcases and put away her things. The clothes she’d brought home with her looked a little odd hanging in the closet next to her old Gothic weeds. She tried to remember when she bought her first skirt or blouse that wasn’t black or white. Ophelia hadn’t made a conscious decision to put all that behind her, but somewhere early on, she had walked into Dillard’s or The Gap and bought something that looked not unlike the sort of clothing any other young woman her age and place in society might buy. Ophelia no longer needed to look different; she
was
different, and she didn’t use the way she dressed to either advertise or disguise the fact.

She went down to the kitchen and opened a new packet of dark-roasted Starbucks coffee, enjoying the rich, smoky aroma filling the air. She still expected to see her father sitting there at the kitchen table, either drinking or passed out. He had hardly budged from that spot all the time she was in high school, like some sort of living art installation, a sculpture depicting depression and dissolution. Ophelia lingered behind the chair where he used to sit. His presence was still in the house, as was her mother’s. She could feel Mother with her as the breeze came in through the windows, lifting the antique lace curtains.

That was the good part of ghosts, she thought, the love they leave behind to comfort and reassure the living, even if we’re not able to identify the source of the good feeling washing warmly over us when we visit a place where people were, if only for a brief time, happy.

The coffeemaker made a slurping noise as the last bit of coffee was forced through the strainer and into the carafe. Ophelia poured herself a cup and sat down with anticipation to read the letter that had been forwarded to her post office box in San Francisco.

The envelope was crinkled and water-stained, as if touched by the rain. The canceled stamps were from the Seychelles, an island group east of Africa, near Tanzania, north of the island of Madagascar. She tapped the envelope on the table and carefully tore it open along the narrow edge opposite the stamps. The writing on a dozen pieces of green-lined notepaper inside were in her father’s distinctive block printing.

Ophelia greatly enjoyed her father’s letters about his adventures in the Galápagos, rounding Cape Horn, visiting the ruined Buddhist temples of Cambodia. Though she had never realized it before this correspondence began, her father had talent as a writer. He had a good eye for detail, and a philosopher’s insight into the things that made the people he met in faraway lands different, and the things that made them all the same. She kept his letters, and not just for sentimental reasons. Ophelia planned to one day excerpt them in a collection of travel stories.

But she would not share with the world, or with anybody, the early letters, which were filled with pain, regret, and sickness. Her father had gone first to Tahiti, the long crossing without alcohol on the boat a chance at least to begin to get drinking out of his system. The first letter made it plain to her just how sick he was. By the time the letter arrived from Fiji, her father wrote that he was coughing up blood. Ophelia knew that the next letter she got from the South Pacific probably wouldn’t be from her father, but a letter of condolence to tell her he had died.

Her father’s letter from New Zealand reported that he’d gotten through the bad spell and felt good enough to do some snorkeling. In the letters she’d gotten after that, one every month, her father never mentioned his health except to say he was well, and detailing trips up mountains, down white-water rivers, and through jungles that only a strong man in robust health could have endured.

One day, the letters would stop. Nobody had told her that. Nobody needed to tell her. Notice would come that the boat had sunk in a typhoon, or something along those lines, claiming the lives of her father and his friend, the captain, Nathaniel Peregrine. That wouldn’t happen for a few years, and until then, there would be the letters, which had become one of the things Ophelia enjoyed most in life, and looked forward to with great anticipation. And even when the time came, she would know they were out there, watching over her from afar. It was hard to imagine that they would not all meet again someday, perhaps when she was old and gray, though her father and Nathaniel Peregrine would look as if they hadn’t aged a day. Yet for the most part, they had gone different ways, and that made her a little sad.

Ophelia had been so certain that she was destined to become like Peregrine, but she knew now she had been wrong. Ahead of her were two more years of undergraduate classes, a master-of-fine-arts degree, and probably a doctorate, all leading to a professorship at Smith or a similar college, and a career divided between writing poetry and teaching other bright young minds to love verse as much as she did. Maybe there would even be a family in her future. She had met a boy the summer before, in Paris, and he was coming to visit her in San Francisco in July.

Ophelia read slowly, savoring every word, wanting it to last.

The note at the end was in Nathaniel’s hand, an old-fashioned script that always made Ophelia think of the writing on the Declaration of Independence. She would never be able to thank Peregrine for everything he had done for her. He had given her back her life and saved her father’s as well. Beyond protecting her from the insane Dr. Glass—who almost certainly would have killed her—the vampire had stood by her throughout the awful week when police were interrogating her and everybody else involved in the Cage Club scene about their investigation into the double murder. The fact that Ophelia had been one of Glass’s patients made them suspicious about her, but the police were never able to prove she was in the building the night Glass and the other girl died. And when it turned out that Zeke and a handful of other Ravening players were also Dr. Glass’s psychiatric patients—all of them from wealthy San Francisco families—the investigators stopped paying so much attention to Ophelia. After an investigative reporter at the newspaper discovered that Glass was supplying Zeke and some of the others with prescriptions for powerful drugs, sharing in the profits when the drugs were resold on the street, the police seemed to lose interest in finding Dr. Glass’s killer. Then a coroner’s jury agreed with the crime-scene investigators’ report that Dr. Glass was the one who had slit Candy Priddle’s throat. In the end, no one was ever charged with killing Dr. Glass. The last detective who talked to Ophelia made it obvious that the police thought Dr. Glass had gotten what he deserved.

Congratulations on completing your sophomore year at Smith,
Peregrine wrote in his brief note to Ophelia.
Keep posting your new poems on your Web site. The first thing I do when we get somewhere that has Internet access is read your latest work. (Your poem about twilight was sublime!)

Ophelia poured another cup of coffee and went upstairs and turned on her computer. A new poem about homecomings was taking shape in her mind. She would write it directly into an HTML file and post it for her vampire friend and her father to read in an Internet café in Mozambique or Sri Lanka. She’d long since stripped her Web site of the photos and other information about haunted places; they were no longer an interest of hers. But she still used the same Web domain name, which seemed appropriate enough, given the unusual circumstances surrounding Ophelia’s house, and the house directly across the street, where Nathaniel Peregrine and his family had once lived:
www.hauntedsanfrancisco.com
.