The Society of S

“But taking care of her, teaching her. All those hours, wasted. You know, it’s thought in Cambridge that you’ve never fulfilled your early promise. But I’ve found the delivery system you need. We can make a substitute better than human blood. Think what that will mean for us. Think of the lives that will be saved.”

“What do you care for saving lives? You’ve killed people for no reason. You even killed the neighbor’s cat.”

He killed Marmalade. I felt guilty for ever suspecting that my father did it.

“The cat got in my way. As for the people, each one died for a good reason. Do you know how many women Reedy raped? And that fellow in Savannah — he’d murdered three teenagers and buried them in his basement.”

“What about the girl?” My father’s voice was almost inaudible now. “What about Kathleen?”

“She was an annoyance.”

I didn’t think — I simply walked into the living room. “You killed her,” I said.

Malcolm stood before the window, hands in his pockets, his linen suit outlined by gray sky. “She asked for it.” He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He’d probably known I was listening all along. “She asked me to bite her.”

“You didn’t have to! And you didn’t have to kill her.”

He took his left hand from his pocket and examined his fingernails. “She begged me to make her a vampire. You and your father are to blame for that. She wanted to be like you.” Then he turned to my father. “And she wanted to marry you. Imagine, her a vampire! The very idea of it nauseates me. She was a stupid girl.”

Kathleen wanted to marry my father? I shook my head, ready to defend her.

My father put up his hand, warning me not to respond. “We’re wasting time here,” he said to me. Then, to Malcolm: “You rant like any psychopath. Get out.”

Malcolm’s eyes were bloodshot, I saw now. His voice stayed deliberate, calm. “You’re willing to sacrifice millions of lives because of a girl and a cat? What sort of ethics are those?”

“They’re my ethics,” my father said, “based on the virtues I hold dear.”

I went to stand next to him. “That we hold dear,” I said.

Malcolm’s looked away from us, his mouth half open. As he left the room he looked up once more, at my father, and I couldn’t believe what I saw in Malcolm’s eyes. It was love.

Chapter Eighteen

One night in Saratoga Springs, when I was about to ride my bike home from the McGarritts’ house, I overheard their next-door neighbors arguing. The father of the family bellowed, his wife pleaded, and their teenaged son shouted back.

“You never wanted me!” he said. “I wish I’d never been born.”

I’ve felt that way, sometimes. Have you? All things considered, my birth set in motion events that might better have never happened. For every choice I’ve made, there are infinite other choices that might have been better ones. Sometimes I’ve envisioned those other choices as shadows of my actions, shadows that define me as much as what I did.

Bertrand Russell wrote, “All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration.” Failure of unity, he said, keeps a person from happiness. But once that person feels part of “the stream of life,” feels herself integrated with a culture and its values, she becomes “a citizen of the world.”

The day that my father had his confrontation with Malcolm was the first day I felt I might have a claim to such citizenship. My father and I were united, and we had Malcolm to thank.

My father and I dined on gazpacho and smoked salmon and salad in the living room, watching Hurricane Barry’s approach on TV. The giant orange and red spiral tunneled up a cone of uncertainty again and again as the weather station replayed its hurricane maps. The storm was forecast to reach Sarasota’s latitude later that night and make landfall north of Homosassa early the next day.

We didn’t talk about Malcolm, although I tried. As we finished dinner, I said, “How could he do such things?”

My father said, “Malcolm never acquired the habit of virtue.” His eyes let me know that the conversation was closed.

Mãe telephoned while my father was clearing our plates. She and the horses were safe in Kissimmee, along with Dashay, Bennett, Harris, Joey, and Grace the cat. My mother was watching the weather on television, too.

My father called from the kitchen, “Advise her not to travel until tomorrow.”

I relayed the message.

“We’ll see,” she said. “Ask him how he feels about living with monkeys.”

After I’d hung up, I watched the weather forecast again. A Category Five was the highest on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, and the litany of damage associated with it went far beyond wind and storm surges. The forecaster began to recite the list with inappropriate gusto. It began with “Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings. Some complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or away. All shrubs, trees, and signs blown down.”

My father came back and switched off the television. “Enough melodrama for one day,” he said.

I’d been about to tell him about the “blind” man at the intersection. I’d planned to say, I may have met the devil today. But he was right: we didn’t need more melodrama that night.

For a few minutes we went onto the balcony, but it was too humid and windy to stay long. The bay water below raced toward the shoreline in whitecaps, and rain began to fall in tiny, stinging lines.

When we were inside again, my father locked the door. Then he pushed a wall button, and a metal hurricane shutter descended, inch by inch cutting off our view of the world. He’d already shuttered the other windows.

“I’ll go to bed in a minute,” I said. “But I want to know why Raphael Montero needed to die.”

He frowned. “It’s simple, really. I had no good reason to keep on as we had been. You and your mother had left. What did I want with a house in Saratoga Springs? And that fellow Burton kept coming around, asking questions. His pestering bored me.”

“So how did you do it?”

He sat back on the sofa. “The entire business was easily managed. Dr. Wilson — you remember him, the fellow who treated your sunburn — is one of us, and he signed the death certificate. And old man Sullivan (another one of us) cremated an empty coffin and interred the ashes. Dennis” — he spoke the name with an expression of distaste — “arranged for the sale of the house, and the relocation of the laboratory here. All of your things, by the way, are in storage.”

I took a deep breath. “It was a cruel trick to play. We saw photographs of your grave.”

He seemed surprised. “Well, I thought that you would see them. I thought that the epitaph might amuse you, that it certainly would tell you that my death was a ruse.”

“It did, I guess. In the end.” I yawned. “Along with the Picardo and the roses.”

He looked baffled.

I told him about the half-full bottle and the flowers left on his grave. “You didn’t leave them, as a sign?”

“No,” he said. “I wonder who did.”

I had one more question. “May I tell Michael about Malcolm?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ari. Not now, at any rate. The McGarritts deserve to know who killed her, of course, but think of the repercussions for us. We’d have that man Burton after us again. Arthur Pym would have to disappear or die, and I’ve already died once this year.”

I persisted. “When can we let them know?”

“When we’ve resettled,” he said. “I doubt we’ll stay here.” He frowned. “Xanadu. The place isn’t to my liking, at all. Once we’ve found a new home, then you can tell Michael the truth. Let Agent Burton sit on Malcolm’s back for a while.”

Keeping secrets isn’t hard for me. But I wanted to call Michael that night, tell him what I’d learned.

Instead I went to bed, but I didn’t feel sleepy. Outside, the wind moved like an overpowered locomotive, making the building creak and sigh as it passed. My mind raced in spirals. I wondered when my mother would arrive. Would I end up living with her or with my father? Was it possible that I’d ever live with both of them? What might that life be like?

When it came, sleep was uneasy. I dreamed of shadows tall as Xanadu, of eclipsed suns, of incense, ice, and music. Then of real things, mementos of Saratoga Springs: the lithophane lamp in my old bedroom, the grandfather clock in the library, the shadowbox on the wall. But in my dream, the birds in the shadowbox were real. I heard their wings beat against the glass.

I awoke in a room full of smoke. The room had no windows, and when I opened the door, smoke swirled even thicker in the corridor. It had a strangely sweet smell. A wave of heat stung my face. The air-conditioning wasn’t working, and the lights were out.

I called for my father. I could hear the pulse of flames, coming from the direction of the kitchen. I called him again, and then I began to cough.

In the bathroom I soaked a towel and wrapped it around my head. I gulped down some water. The faucet sent out a stream at first, but tapered quickly, then stopped.

The bathroom had no windows, either. The whole central part of the condominium was windowless — a common design in water-front condominiums, I’ve come to know since. A “direct water-view” is the selling point; aside from that, the units resemble kennels.

I took a deep breath and ran to my father’s room. Its door was open, and the room, as far as I could see it through the smoke, was unoccupied.

Holding my breath, I ran to the living room, unlocked the balcony door. I yanked its handle, but it didn’t budge. I pressed the button to open the hurricane shutters. Nothing happened.

Think, think slowly, I told myself. But my mind and my pulse were racing. My lungs burned, and I began to pant. On my hands and knees, I left the room and entered the study, and I tried to open the shutters there. Nothing.

We’ve lost electricity, I reasoned. It’s common in a storm, to lose electricity. To lose electricity is nothing unusual.

I crawled to the end of the room farthest from the door, holding my breath, my mind singing its little song. Nothing unusual. Nothing unusual. Nothing.

“We’re only born once.”

Mãe says those were my first words in the hospital. And she says she replied, “Didn’t he teach you about reincarnation?”

But I doubt that’s what she really said. It wasn’t a joking matter, really. I’d spent most of a week receiving hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). The treatments were intermittent, and I was unconscious during the first two. I regained consciousness during the third treatment, waking up in what seemed to be a transparent cylindrical coffin.

My body was surrounded by 100 percent oxygen gas, dissolving in my blood and body tissues at concentrations much higher than normal — high enough to sustain life with no blood at all. I was told all of this during the third treatment by a nurse, who spoke slowly and clearly into a microphone connected to the HBOT chamber.

When I recovered the ability to think and speak, I thought, I’d ask a hundred questions about the treatment. I wondered if my father knew about it. Was it possible that we might not need blood if we had our own glass coffins at home? Then I wondered, where was home?

“Her eyes are open,” I heard the nurse say. “She’s trying to say something.”

And then my mother’s face appeared on the other side of the chamber.