The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life (34 page)

“The finish,” he continued. “It’s not shiny, like most coaches. I’ve had it constructed of a special material that reflects no light. It’s more difficult to see in the dim shimmer of the streetlamps. It takes better to shadows. It’s the same with the wheels.” He kicked them. “You see... soundless against the stone.”

He opened the carriage door.

Inside I was not at all surprised to discover the same eccentric use of wealth that permeated des Esseintes’s entire world. The black leather seats were ornately buttoned. The front of the enclosed cab was equipped with a small teak shelf containing a library of pocket-sized books bound in turtle-shell leather. Other insets boasted a decanter with goblets, a small collapsible writing desk, and a rack of various inks, blotters, papers, and envelopes. An inlaid ship’s telescope descended from a pivot in the ceiling.

“Be completely aware of the fact, Monsieur le Docteur,” des Esseintes said as he shut the door, “I am well versed in many ancient arts, and I can render you unconscious with but the most delicate application of pressure. If you make the slightest attempt to escape or tell anyone of your situation I will not hesitate to use any measure to stop you.”

We drove out of the stables.

The street was lined with the familiar paraffin lamps of Paris. The buildings towered protectively. As des Esseintes had foretold, the hansom wheels were abnormally silent against the granite. We moved down the evening street as though in a dream. Even the clip-clop of the horses was absent, silenced by some unknown means.

“Where are we going?”

“Who knows?”

“And Lodovico? What were you going to tell me about Lodovico?”

“In due time,” he parried.

I was about to ask another question when my companion placed a finger to my lip. I did not like the sensation. His finger was cool to the touch. A little cadaverous.

“Look around you,” he quieted. “This is
Paris
.”

I looked around. The summery evening air wafted through the windows of the carriage as we moved. There was life. It was exhilarating to be out of the house, to be in the legendary city. I had forgotten what it was like, as if I had been in a delirium for days and days. On the street corner an accordionist played.

I looked at des Esseintes. He sat back leisurely in the black cushions dapperly balancing his slender white hands upon the gilt knob of his cane. I was somewhat surprised to see a deep and honest affection in his eyes as he gazed out of the window. It was unusual for any emotion to gleam past the Cheshire cat façade. “I love this city,” he said passionately. “I love it as I love few other human achievements. It is eternal.” He turned in my direction. “For me Paris is not just in the nineteenth century. It is a montage of all ages. Every corner and crumbling wall holds a memory. When I look at the square before the Tuileries I cannot help but see it filled with a ballet for fifteen thousand people given by Louis XIV to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin. And when I look at the Champs-Élysées, who are there but mourners, mourners on that bitter-cold December morning when Napoleon’s funeral coach rolled by. I was there when they lit the Opera with the electric arc light. I have seen Sarah Bernhardt. This city is my lover, my oldest and dearest friend.”

We crossed the bridge and I noticed it was sparsely scattered with carriages and one-horse cabriolets. I looked at the skyline of the Left Bank and wondered what it was like to remember when each building had appeared in the river of time. Indeed, what a vision he was privy to. I felt another pang of envy for the insights immortality must have opened for him.

“So you want to know more of Lodovico,” he said at length. “You recall in my last account of him I was still a monk at the monastery of the Vosges. I had known of Lodovico only from his mythic reputation, but through the medium of the
abbés
I had received word of his approval of a discovery of mine, the discovery that the knowledge of the vampire was hidden in code and cipher in the common Gospel books. I have told you to be patient. You will appreciate it was more than two centuries after the ‘death’ of Sylvester II before I actually came face to face with the master, Lodovico. To be sure, much had passed. I had traversed the world. I had learned more than ten men, but still the identity and purpose of the Unknown Men was a mystery to me. I knew virtually nothing about the internal organiziation of the vampire culture.

“I must tell you what France was like in the twelfth century. Like most things, it covered a spectrum from one extreme to the other. On the dark side, it was the age of the Crusades, and all of Europe was united under the cause of the Holy War. It was the good fortune of the vampire of the Vosges that the war took place in the East. Nonetheless, it was a foreboding indication of the powers of history we were confronted with.

“On a more positive side, it was during these two centuries that French medieval civilization reached its zenith. Religions mingled in urbane amity. Great cathedrals rose from the ground. Women were imperiously beautiful and morals were loose. It was also the age of the troubadours. Do you know who the troubadours were? They were vagabond musicians. For a century and a half they scoured France singing and spreading ideas.

“The troubadours were odd characters. Many of them were wealthy, and yet they were homeless wanderers. They have been described as the most courteous men in the world, but advocated deception in love. They were proponents of lyric poetry, licentiousness, and paganism. They definitely were not proponents of the Church. Indeed, they were often anticlerical to the extreme.

“It thus came as some surprise in the middle of a blossom-laden spring when a troubadour arrived at the monastery. It was even more puzzling when the
abbés
took an unusual interest in this troubadour, and welcomed him into their secret chambers. I saw him briefly as he passed through the courtyard about an hour after sunset. He was richly dressed, like a noble, with a large hat trimmed in gold embroidery, and wore many costly furs. Strangely enough, he was on foot, like a common country juggler, and he carried his ancient violin or vielle nonchalantly under his arm.

“I caught but a glimpse of his countenance as he passed out of sight. His gleaming white face had a puckish quality to it. It was a mixture of foolishness and infinite wisdom. There was something most disarming about his smirk, his twinkling eyes.”

We passed the Asian dome of a street urinal or
pissoir
encrusted with cabaret posters.

“Good idea—those,” des Essientes interrupted. “There was a time when the sewers ran through the streets.”

He turned to me. “Well, as you might imagine the first thing I did was see if the troubadour was a vampire. I reached out with my senses. I determined the heat of that gleaming face; the beat of the hsart. To my surprise, his body temperature was the normal 37 degrees Centigrade, or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of a mortal, as opposed to the cool 20 degrees Centigrade, or 68 degrees Fahrenheit, of one of our kind. His heartbeat was around 78. A vampire’s beats a slow and healthy 35.

“I did not see much of the troubadour the first evening of his stay, but in the next couple of evenings I noticed him more and more. At first I thought these meetings were chance, but in time I resolved he was watching me. As I paced the windy parapets meditating on the deep purple mountains I would see him gazing from the tower. As I worked in my garden in the moonlight I would spy him on the balcony. He was not at all timid whenever I caught him at this, but would simply nod and continue that unsettling smile.

“Look,” my companion interrupted himself and wafted a hand at the window.

I saw that the carriage had circled west, and was now passing through Montmartre, that idyllic part of Paris with its quaint houses and hidden gardens.

“Just as day has a transition period into night, a twilight, so it is with the people of the streets,” he explained. “It is only an hour after sunset. If you are observant you’ll notice a distinct transition in their ebb and flow, an almost precise moment when the twilight people vanish, and that strange breed, the creatures of the Paris night, first begin to appear.”

I peered out the front window of the hansom at the street before us. In a narrow doorway a concierge sat in her loose blouse peeling vegetables. Next to a thick retaining wall shored up by balks of timber strolled a group of women in heavy carpet slippers and carrying baskets in their arms. In another doorway sat a girl trimming her bonnet; the girl was pale and exhausted from the heat. They seemed oddly oblivious to our presence, as if the silence of our carriage and horses made us unseen.

“In any case,” des Esseintes went on, “I was not frightened by the troubadour. What could a mortal do to me? I was perplexed. Why was he so special that the
abbés
would take him in? Why was he so interested in me?

“He had been there fully a fortnight when I finally heard him beneath my window. The words of his song came clearly to my ears:

‘Summer is a-coming in
,

   
Loudly sing cuckoo!

Groweth seed and bloweth mead.

   And blossoms the woodland now:

      Sing cuckoo!’

“I looked out into the courtyard. There he stood playing his vielle and looking up at me:

‘Ewe bleateth after lamb
,

   
Loweth after calf the cow;

Bullock leapeth, buck turns off;

   Merry sing cuckoo!’

“At first I thought he was singing for his own enjoyment. When I glanced down at him he just happened to be looking up. But when I turned to walk away from the window, the intonation of his voice made it obvious he was trying to communicate something to me.

‘
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well singest thou cuckoo
?’

“I looked at him again. He continued to smile and play. Who was this minstrel, this fool with such a knowing grin? He tossed me a final glance as he turned with vielle and arched bow in hand and started to leave the courtyard. It was a moonlit night and I could clearly see him kick the huge wooden doors aside as he left the enclosure.

“I could take the mystery no longer and was compelled to follow. When I had crossed the courtyard and reached the gate I could see him halfway down the hill. He was still fiddling that fey and whimsical song as he danced like an elf in the moonlight. Not that I wish to convey the size of an elf. In actuality he was quite tall for a man of that time, fully reaching 1.82 meters.

“Through the wooded valley he led me, through the katydids and the lacewings, the damp spring mists and the dewy ferns. When he reached the meadow and turned about merrily on the hill I could see only his silhouette against the starry sky. He was perhaps fifty meters away. I monitored him closely. There was no rapid change in his heartbeat to indicate he was tense and might be planning some secret attack. His body heat mirrored what might be expected of a mortal exerting such energy, even a little less than normal. His breathing was long and full/It was obvious he was completely relaxed, even ecstatic in his Pied Piper dance.

“We reached a rock promontory that extended out from the cliffs. Beyond were the cool gray and blue ripples of the distant mountains, and below a drop of a hundred meters. It wasn’t until he reached the very precipice that that man of flourish and wide gilt hat, that Fool of the Tarot deck, turned his eyes and froze them upon me with an almost demonic intensity.

‘Cease thou not, never now;

   Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo
,

      Sing cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now!’

“He cried out the words, and with that he began to play upon the vielle even more madly than before. I watched in amazement as his hands moved faster and faster. The music changed. It was no longer pastoral and gay. Tones twisted and screeched. It was not just the dissonance of a clumsy player, but an expanding spectrum of strange and grinding vibrations that had a peculiar effect upon my vampire ear. I felt a shiver of electricity shoot down my spine. Here a muscle twitched. There a tingle.

“What was this sorcery of music that cut to such a visceral level of my being? I could not run or move. I was drained of all muscle strength as the vibrations shimmered through me like heat discolorations upon forged iron. It was as if a strange force, a genie of sound, had swept through my body, and was coursing along each nerve and tendon... searching... changing. It moved with pattern and intelligence, guided by the skilled hands of a master magician. And then it stopped.

“I slumped forward a little, as if released from another’s grip. The troubadour lowered his vielle and bow and strode quickly forward. He gazed at me penetratingly. ‘Do you see?’

“‘See what?’

“‘Look around,’ he commanded, gesturing at the forest and the meadow behind us.

“‘Do you
see?
Can you
see?’

“‘I—’ I stammered and shrugged.

“With that he became completely agitated, and before I knew what had happened he had drawn his hand back and smacked me firmly, just above the center of my eyes and in the middle of my forehead.

“I must tell you that it is not easy to strike a vampire. No matter how unexpectedly, if you ever tried to hit me, before your fist reached the halfway point of its swing, my hand would be firmly around your wrist deflecting the force. This should give you some indication of the incredible deftness of the troubadour’s blow.

“I cannot tell you what a profound effect that blow to my forehead had upon me. It was as if I fell backward in slow motion, and broke through a mirror. There was a crystalline tinkle as shards of platinum light glistered about me and I imagined I was slowly plummeting to a placid moonlit lake far below. As I recovered from that vertigo, I immediately noticed everything had changed. The woods, the meadow, even the very air had acquired a faint but undeniable luminescence. It was as if the cataracts had fallen from my eyes. Yes. I possessed over five hundred years of wisdom and experience, and the cataracts had just fallen from my eyes. It was an overwhelming sensation, and yet oddly familiar. It was as if some part of me had always seen the luminescence. It had always been close and I had merely forgotten, like a memory hovering just below the threshold of one’s consciousness. It was the first time I completely experienced the
quiver.