Descendant (31 page)

For the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about
it. I hated myself for being so disloyal, but the thought wouldn’t leave me alone.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she asked me, over breakfast. “You don’t have money worries you’re not telling me about, do you?”

“No, no. Everything’s fine.”

“But you’ve hardly spoken to me for the past two days, and you keep staring at me in this really strange way. It’s almost like you’ve forgotten who I am.”

I haven’t forgotten who you are
, I thought.
Maybe I never knew who you were to begin with
.

I went upstairs, opened up my bedroom closet, and took down my Kit. I looked at it for a long time before I opened it up. I loved Jill so much and this was an act of betrayal, no matter what I found out. But I had to know for sure, or else I was going to spend the rest of my life wondering what I was sharing my bed with.

She was still sitting at the kitchen table when I came down, holding a cup of coffee in both hands, watching television. The sun was shining on her hair and on her pink satin robe. She looked so beautiful that I almost went straight back upstairs, without doing what I had come down to do.

“Bill?” she said. She always called me “Bill” in case she accidentally slipped up and called me “Jim” in front of our friends. “Come and take a look at this.”

“Hold on,” I told her. I stood to one side of the kitchen door and held up the pure silver mirror that I had taken out of my Kit. My hand was trembling so much that at first I couldn’t focus properly. But then I steadied it
against the door frame, and angled it so that I could see Jill’s profile.

It took only a split-second glance to tell me what I needed to know. The woman sitting at the kitchen table had hair that was streaked with gray. There were wrinkles around her eyes, and her hands were patterned with liver spots.

I came into the kitchen and sat down next to her. “This is hilarious,” she said. “This woman thinks that her husband is having an affair with another woman, but all the time—”

She stopped, and stared at me. “Jim?” she said. “Jim, what’s happened? You look terrible.”

“I had to find out sooner or later, didn’t I?” I told her. My throat was constricted, and I found it very difficult to speak.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You had to find out
what
?”

“Come on, Jill, how much longer did you think you could keep it from me? You’re going to be fifty in a couple of years. What happens when you get to sixty, and you still look just as young as you do now?”

She lowered her coffee cup. “I couldn’t tell you. I tried to, lots of times. But I love you, Jim. I knew what you would do if I told you.”

“What did Duca do to you?” I asked her.

Her eyes filled with tears. “Can’t we just go on like we are? Can’t we just pretend?”

“Tell me what Duca did to you.”

“Jim—think about Mark. Please. Think about us. We can still be happy, can’t we?”

I stood up and went to the window. Next door, Fred Nordstrom was lathering his new green Buick Electra. He saw me and waved his soapy sponge.

Jill said, “It asked me to lie on the couch. It stood next to me, and at first I didn’t think it was going to do anything. It just talked to me, very quietly. I don’t even remember what it said.”

“Then what?”

“Jim, please! There was nothing I could do to stop it!”

I turned around. “I know,” I told her. “It was all my fault, not yours. I shouldn’t have expected you to do it.”

I tore off a sheet of kitchen tissue and handed it to her, so that she could wipe her eyes.

“I felt as if I didn’t have any willpower at all. I was lying there and I simply couldn’t move. I wasn’t unconscious or anything. I simply couldn’t make my muscles work.”

“It’s a form of hypnosis,” I said. “Some Screechers use it to stop their victims from resisting them. If you practice it for as long as Duca must have been practicing it, I guess you can make a person do whatever you want.”

“It opened up its pants. It was hard, and I was sure that it was going to rape me. I tried to call you, but I couldn’t make my voice work.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I was dreading to hear what she was going to say next.

“Duca picked up a scalpel. He showed it to me, held it right in front of my face, and it was smiling. Then it sliced the end of its penis, right across. All this blood came spurting out. Duca held its penis over my lips so that the blood dripped into my mouth.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, as if
she could still taste it. “That was when it heard you upstairs, and it stopped.”

I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down next to her. I didn’t take her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

“I don’t know. I was very confused. I was ashamed, too. I thought it was disgusting, what Duca had done to me. But I hadn’t resisted it, had I? I didn’t want you to think that I might have encouraged it.”

“But you began to change?”

Jill nodded. “I tried so hard to fight it. I needed to drink blood so badly, I felt as if my throat was on fire. I could feel what was happening inside my own body, too. I hated myself. I hated the way I was starting to smell. I hated the way I looked. I pretended that I was sick so that I could stay in my room. You don’t know how much willpower it took not to kill my own parents.

“Then Duca came for me. It said that it had to get away from England, because you were coming after it. It wanted to go to America, because it had a score to settle. I don’t know what score. It never said.”

“So you went with it?”

“It promised me blood, Jim. I was worse than a drug addict, how could I say no?”

“So you and Duca . . . you killed somebody, and drank their blood?”

“No. It was going to kill a young woman who was waiting at a bus stop, but I wouldn’t let it. I was burning for blood but I couldn’t let it take an innocent woman’s life, not for me. I drank some of Duca’s blood instead, and that’s why I am what I am. I’m never going to grow any older, Jim.”

“You’re not immortal, Jill. You’re dead. The only difference is, you’re dead but you won’t lie down.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I love you, Jim, but I’m going to have to watch you grow older right in front of my eyes! One day I’m going to have to bury you!”

I took a deep breath. This was a nightmare. Jill didn’t look any different. I couldn’t stop myself from loving her. But she wasn’t “her” any more. She was “it.” She was a thing, rather than a person.

“Jim,” she pleaded. “Please try to forgive me. You could be the same. You could live forever, too.”

“You want
me
to become a Screecher? Are you out of your mind?”

“So what are you going to do? Cut off my head, chop me into bits, and bury my body?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

“Jim, please!”

“You’re a
strigoaica
, Jill. How can I pretend that you’re human?”

“Because you love me. Because I love you.”

I pushed my chair back and stood up. “If you’re a
strigoaica
, you need to drink human blood at least once a month, don’t you, or you’ll start to lose those perfect looks?”

“Jim—”

“Come on, Jill. Whose blood have you been drinking?”

“Nobody that matters, I promise you.”

“Nobody that matters? What the hell do you mean, ‘nobody that matters’?”

“Derelicts, down-and-outs, mostly from southern Indiana. People that nobody’s going to miss. And nobody
has
missed them, Jim. Ever. Did you ever see a story in the papers about them? Did you ever see them mentioned on TV?”

“Christ, Jill, we’re talking about twelve people a year for eighteen years! That’s a massacre!”

“I have to, Jim! I can’t stop! But
strigoaica . . .
we’re not like
strigoi
. We don’t have the same need to spread the infection. We just want to be normal. We just want to be loved.”

I looked at her, and she looked so desperate and so miserable. Who would have thought that I could love a Screecher? Me, of all people, the bane of Screechers everywhere.

“I’m going out,” I told her. “I need some time to think.”

I took Ricochet for a walk around the Scenic Loop at Cherokee Park. It was a warm, gusty afternoon, and kites of all shapes and sizes were flying from Hill One. They reminded me of that Japanese print of people being caught in a sudden gale, with papers flying in the air, and their whole lives suddenly being turned into chaos, as mine had been.

Jill was a
strigoaica
. I wondered if I had ever suspected it before, and deliberately ignored it. But it really didn’t matter. What did matter was that I was morally obliged to do something. She would have to kill more people to satisfy her endless thirst for blood, and even if they were derelicts or drunks or down-and-outs that nobody else would miss, they were human lives, and I couldn’t allow her to take them.

But I loved her. I had loved her from the moment I had first seen her, in St. Augustine’s Avenue, in Croydon, on that hot summer day in 1957. So how could I drive nails into her eyes, and cut off her head, and dismember her? I couldn’t even ask anybody else to do it.

I sat down on a bench and Ricochet came up and laid his head on my knees, as if he understood what I was
going through. He was so much like Bullet, except for a tiny tan-colored smudge between his eyes.

“Goddamnit, Ric,” I told him. “If it hadn’t been for Duca—”

It was then that I thought:
Duca was caught by my mother, but she didn’t kill it. She had sealed it into a casket, and if that plane hadn’t crashed, Duca might still be preserved today. Not destroyed, not dismembered, but rendered harmless
.

Maybe I could do the same to Jill. Seal her away, so that she wouldn’t kill anybody else. Then maybe I could find a way to bring her back to life, as a human being. But how was I going to do it? Only my mother had known how.

I stood up. The kites were whirling in the wind. “Come on, Ric,” I told him. “I think I need to go to San Diego.”

I flew to San Diego the next day. I told Jill that I wanted to talk to my father. After all, he was eighty-three now, and suffering from a heart condition. I didn’t tell her that I was going to look for something that my mother may have left behind—a note, a book, a diary entry—anything that might have told me how to seal away a
strigoaica
.

Before I left, she took hold of my hand and tried to kiss me.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know what you were getting into, and I used you. I’m the one who should be saying sorry.”

In the hallway, with the light shining on us like two bloodshot eyes, we held each other close. God almighty, she didn’t feel any different. She didn’t feel dead. She was warm and soft and my heart felt as if it were crumbling apart.

“Jill,” I said, stroking her hair.

“Come back soon,” she said, and she tried to kiss me. But I couldn’t help thinking of all the people she had
cut open, and whose blood she had drunk, warm and sickly, straight from their pumping hearts.

“Sure,” I said, and left her.

I paid off the cab and stood outside my father’s house with my overnight bag. It was a warm, fragrant afternoon, and the sunlight was very bright. I was beginning to feel very tired, so that everything looked almost too vivid to be true, as if I had been smoking pot.

I was about to open the gate which led into my father’s garden when I heard a woman singing. I stopped, and listened, and gradually I felt a terrible coldness soak through me. It was a sweet, high voice. A voice I hadn’t heard in a very long time.

“
Who made doina?

The small mouth of a baby

Left asleep by his mother

Who found him singing the doina
.”

I opened the gate. My father was sitting on the veranda, with a glass of white wine. On the other side of the yard, my mother was cutting roses.

She stopped singing, and dropped all the roses onto the terracotta tiles. Her hair was dark and she looked exactly the same as the last time that I had seen her.

“
James
,” she said.

She picked up the photograph from the top of the piano, and smiled at it sadly. “Poor Margot. When the plane crashed, I tried to get her out, but her leg was caught under the seat. Of course
I
got out. I couldn’t die, even if I was trapped in that plane for the next hundred years.”

My father stood on the opposite side of the room, saying nothing.

“Don’t blame your father,” said my mother. “Love can make us blind to other people’s suffering. Love can make us very selfish, and cruel.”

I shook my head. “So it was you that Duca was after, when it tried to sail to America. Duca knew that it wasn’t your body in that airplane.”

My mother nodded. “It may be looking for me still.”

“And if it finds you?”

“If it survived, and it manages to find any of us, then I’m afraid we have a very horrible experience waiting for us.”

I didn’t know what else to say. My mother came up to me and held out her hands, but I couldn’t take them.

“I have your watch,” I told her. “I’ll make sure you get it back.”

So now you know the truth. Now you know what really happened during that summer of 1957, in South London, and now you know what happened afterward.

Now you know that when your great-grandfather first went to Romania, and fell in love with your great-grandmother, and decided to marry her, he was quite aware of what she was, and he was also aware of the price that other people would have to pay to keep her perfect for all eternity.

Now you know what blood runs in my veins, and why I was capable of being so heartless in my pursuit of Screechers, and so cruel when I finally caught up with them. I have Screecher blood in me too, as your father does, and you do.

In spite of our cruelty, though, we’re deeply sentimental, which is why your great-grandfather could never
destroy my mother, or seal her away; and which is why I could never bring myself to destroy your grandmother, although she still lies in the cellar, in a lead casket, bound by the seals and rituals which my mother was taught in her childhood.