The Vampire Armand

21

THEY WERE COMING for me. It was the building beside their own, a derelict heap. Benjamin knew it. In a few faint telepathic whispers I'd begged him to bring a hammer and a pick to break up the ice such as remained and to have big soft blankets with which to wrap me.

I knew I weighed nothing. Painfully twisting my arms, I broke up more of the transparent covering. I felt with my clawlike hand that my hair had come back, thick and red-brown as ever. I held up a lock to the light, and then my arm could stand the scalding pain no more and I let it drop, unable to close or move my dried and twisted fingers.

I had to throw a spell, at least when they first came. They could not see the thing that I was, this black leathery monster. No mortal could bear the sight of this, no matter what words came from my lips. I had to shield myself somehow.

And having no mirror, how could I know how I looked or what I must do precisely? I had to dream, dream of the old Venetian days when I had been a beauty well known to myself from the tailor's glass, and project that vision right into their minds even if it took all the strength I possessed; yes, that, and I must give them some instructions.

I lay still, gazing up into the soft warm snowfall of tiny flakes, so unlike the terrible blizzards that had come earlier. I didn't dare to use my wits to track their progress.

Suddenly I heard the loud crash of breaking glass. A door slammed far below. I heard their uneven steps rushing up the metal stairs, clambering over the landings.

My heart beat hard, and with each little convulsion, the pain was pumped through me, as if my blood itself were scalding me.

Suddenly, the steel door on the roof was flung back. I heard them rushing towards me. In the faint dreamy light of the high towers all around, I saw their two small figures, she the fairy woman, and he the child of no more than twelve years perhaps, hurrying towards me.

Sybelle! Oh, she came out on the roof without a coat, hair streaming, the terrible pity of it, and Benjamin no better in his thin linen djellaba. But they had a big velvet comforter to cover me, and I had to make a vision.

Give me the boy I was, give the finest green satin and ruff upon ruff of fancy lace, give me stockings and braided boots, and let my hair be clean and shining.

Slowly I opened my eyes, looking from one to the other of their small pale and rapt faces. Like two vagrants of the night they stood in the drifting snow.

"Oh, but Dybbuk, you had us so very worried," said Benjamin, in his wildly excited voice, "and look at you, you are beautiful."

"No, don't think it's what you see, Benjamin," I said. "Hurry with your tools, chop at the ice, and lay the cover over me."

It was Sybelle who took up the wooden-handled iron hammer and with both hands slammed it down, fracturing the soft top layer of ice immediately. Benjamin chopped at it all with the pick as if he had become a small machine, thrusting to left and to right over and over, sending the shards flying.

The wind caught Sybelle's hair and whipped around into her eyes. The snow clung to her eyelids.

I held the image, a helpless satin-clad child, with soft pinkish hands upturned and unable to help them.

"Don't cry, Dybbuk," declared Benjamin, grabbing a giant thin slab of ice with both hands. "We'll get you out, don't cry, you're ours now. We have you."

He threw aside the shining jagged broken sheets, and then he himself appeared to freeze, more solid than any ice, staring at me, his mouth a perfect O of amazement.

"Dybbuk, you are changing colors!" he cried. He reached to touch my illusory face.

"Don't do it, Benji," said Sybelle.

It was the first time I'd heard her voice, and now I saw the deliberate brave calm of her blanched face, the wind making her eyes tear, though she herself remained staunch. She picked the ice from my hair.

A terrible chill came over me, quelling the heat, yes, but sending the tears down my face. Were they blood? "Don't look at me," I said. "Benji, Sybelle, look away. Just put the cover into my hands."

Her tender eyes squinted as she stared, disobediently, steadily, one hand up to close the collar of her flimsy cotton bed gown against the wind, the other poised above me.

"What's happened to you since you came to us?" she asked in the kindest voice. "Who's done this to you?"

I swallowed hard, and made the vision come again. I pushed it up from all my pores, as if my body were one agency of breath.

"No, don't do it anymore," said Sybelle. "It weakens you and you suffer terribly."

"I can heal, my sweet," I said, "I promise I can. I won't be like this always, not even soon. Only take me off this roof. Take me out of this cold, and take me where the sun can't get to me again. It's the sun that did this. Only the sun. Take me, please. I can't walk. I can't crawl. I'm a night thing. Hide me in the darkness."

"Enough, don't say any more," cried Benji.

I opened my eyes to see a huge wave of brilliant blue settle over me as though a summer sky had come down to be my wrapping. I felt the soft pile of the velvet, and even this was pain, pain on the blazing skin, but it was pain that could be borne because their ministering hands were on me, and for this, for their touch, for their love, I would have endured anything.

I felt myself lifted. I knew that I was light, and yet how dreadful it was to be so helpless, as they wrapped me.

"Am I not light enough to carry?" I asked. My head had fallen back, and I could see the snow again, and I fancied that when I sharpened my gaze I could see the stars too, high above, biding their time beyond the haze of one tiny planet.

"Don't be afraid," whispered Sybelle, her lips close to the covers.

The smell of their blood was suddenly rich and thick as honey.

Both of them had me, hoisted in their arms, and they ran together over the roof. I was free of the hurtful snow and ice, almost free forever. I couldn't let myself think about their blood. I couldn't let this ravenous burnt body have its way. That was unthinkable.

Down through the metal stairwell we went, making turn after turn, their feet strumming the brittle steel treads, my body shocked and throbbing with agony. I could see the ceiling above, and then the smell of their blood, mingling together, overpowered me, and I shut my eyes and clenched my burnt fingers, hearing the leathery flesh crack as I did so. I dug my nails into my palms.

I heard Sybelle at my ear. "We have you, we're holding you tight, we won't let you go. It isn't far. Oh, God, but look at you, look what the sun's done to you."

"Don't look!" said Benji crossly. "Just hurry! Do you think such a powerful Dybbuk doesn't know what you think? Be wise, hurry up."

They had come to the lower floor and to the broken window. I felt the arms of Sybelle lift me beneath my head and beneath my crooked knees, and I heard Benji's voice from beyond, no longer echoing on enclosing walls.

"That's it, now give him to me, I can hold him!" How furious and excited he sounded, but she had come through the window with me, I could tell this much, though my clever Dybbuk's mind was utterly spent, and I knew nothing, nothing but pain and the blood and the pain again and the blood and that they were running through a long dark alleyway from which I could see nothing of Heaven.

But how sweet it was. The rocking motion, the swinging of my burnt legs and the soft touch of her soothing fingers through the blanket, all this was wickedly wondrous. It wasn't pain anymore, it was merely sensation. The cover fell over my face.

On they hurried, feet crunching in the snow, Benji sliding once with a loud cry, and Sybelle grabbing hold of him. He caught his breath.

What labor it was for them in this cold. They must get out of it.

We entered the hotel in which they lived. The pungent warm air rushed out to take hold of us even as the doors were pulled open and before they fell shut, the hallway echoing with the sharp steps of Sybelle's little shoes and the quick shuffle of Benji's sandals.

With a sudden burst of agony through my legs and back, I felt myself doubled, knees brought up and head tipped towards them, as we crowded into the elevator. I bit down on the scream in my throat. Nothing could matter less. The elevator, smelling of old motors and tried and true oil, began its swaying jerking progress upwards.

"We're home, Dybbuk," whispered Benji with his hot breath on my cheek, his little hand grasping for me through the cover and pushing painfully against my scalp. "We are safe now, we have captured you and we have you."

Click of locks, feet on hardwood floors, the scent of incense and candles, of a woman's rich perfume, of rich polish for fine things, of old canvases with cracked oil paint, of fresh and overpoweringly sweet white lilies.

My body was laid down gently into the bed of down, the blanket loosened so that I sank into layers of silk and velvet, the pillows seeming to melt beneath me.

It was the very disheveled nest in which I'd glimpsed her with my mind's eye, golden and sleeping in her white gown, and she had given it over to such a horror.

"Don't pull away the cover," I said. I knew that my little friend wanted so to do it.

Undaunted, he gently pulled it away. I struggled with my one recovering hand to catch it, to bring it back, but I couldn't do any more than flex my burnt fingers.

They stood beside the bed, gazing down at me. The light swirled around them, mingled with warmth, these two fragile figures, the gaunt porcelain girl, the bruises gone from her milk-white skin, and the little Arab boy, the Bedouin boy, for I realized now that that is what he truly was. Fearlessly they stared at what must be unspeakable to behold for human eyes.

"You are so shiny!" said Benji. "Does it hurt you?"

"What can we do!" said Sybelle, so muted, as if her very voice might injure me. Her hands covered her lips. The unruly wisps of her full straight pale hair moved in the light, and her arms were blue from the cold outside, and she could not help but shiver. Poor spare being, so delicate. Her nightdress was crumpled, thin white cotton, stitched with flowerets and trimmed with thin sturdy lace, a thing for a virgin. Her eyes brimmed with sympathy.

"Know my soul, my angel," I said. "I'm an evil thing. God wouldn't take me. And the Devil wouldn't either. I went into the sun so they could have my soul. It was a loving thing, without fear of Hellfire or pain. But this Earth, this very Earth has been my purgatorial prison. I don't know how I came to you before. I don't know what power it was that gave me those brief seconds to stand here in your room and come between you and death that was looming like a shadow over you."

"Oh, no," she whispered fearfully, her eyes glistering in the dim lights of the room. "He would never have killed me."

"Oh, yes, he would!" I said, and Benjamin said the very same exact words in concert with me.

"He was drunk and he didn't care what he did," said Benji in instant rage, "and his hands were big and clumsy and mean, and he didn't care what he did, and after the last time he hit you, you lay still like the dead in this very bed for two hours without moving! Do you think a Dybbuk kills your own brother for nothing?"

"I think he's telling you the truth, my pretty girl," I said. It was so hard to talk. With each word I had to lift my chest. In crazy desperation, suddenly I wanted a mirror. I tossed and turned on the bed, and went rigid with pain.

The two were thrown into a panic.

"Don't move, Dybbuk, don't!" Benji pleaded. "Sybelle, the silk, all the silk scarves, get them out, wind them around him."

"No!" I whispered. "Put the cover up over me. If you must see my face, then leave it bare, but cover the rest of me. Or ..."

"Or what, Dybbuk, tell me?"

"Lift me so that I can see myself and how I look. Stand me before a long mirror."

They fell silent in perplexity. Sybelle's long yellow hair lay flaxen and flat down over her large breasts. Benji chewed at his little lip.

All the room swam with colors. Behold the blue silk sealed to the plaster of the walls, the heaps of richly embellished pillows all around me, look at the golden fringe, and there beyond, the wobbling baubles of the chandelier, filled with the glistering colors of the spectrum. I fancied I heard the tinkling song of the glass as these baubles touched. It seemed in my feeble deranged mind that I had never seen such simple splendor, that I had forgotten in all my years just how shining and exquisite the world was.

I closed my eyes, taking with me to my heart an image of the room. I breathed in, fighting the scent of their blood, the sweet clean fragrance of the lilies. "Would you let me see those flowers?" I whispered. Were my lips charred? Could they see my fang teeth, and were they yellowed from the fire? I floated on the silks beneath me. I floated and it seemed that I could dream now, safe, truly safe. The lilies were close. I reached up again. I felt the petals against my hand, and the tears came down my face. Were they pure blood? Pray not, but I heard Benji's frank little gasp, and Sybelle making her soft sound to hush him.

"I was a boy of seventeen, I think, when it happened," I said. "It was hundreds of years ago. I was too young, really. My Master, he was a loving one; he didn't believe we were evil things. He thought we could feed off the badlings. If I hadn't been dying, it wouldn't have been done so soon. He wanted me to know things, to be ready."

I opened my eyes. They were spellbound! They saw again the boy I'd been. I had done it without intention.

"Oh, so handsome," said Benji. "So fine, Dybbuk."

"Little man," I said with a sigh, feeling the fragile illusion about me crumble to air, "call me by my name from now on; it's not Dybbuk. I think you picked up that one from the Hebrews of Palestine."

He laughed. He didn't flinch as I faded back into my horrid self.

"Then tell me your name," he said.

I did.

"Armand," said Sybelle. "Tell us, what can we do? If not silk scarves, ointments then, aloe, yes, aloe will heal your burns."

I laughed but only in a small soft way, meant to be purely kindly.

"My aloe is blood, child. I need an evil man, a man who deserves to die. Now, how will I find him?"

"What will this blood do?" asked Benji. He sat right down beside me, leaning over me as though I were the most fascinating specimen. "You know, Armand, you are black as pitch, you are made out of black leather, you are like those people they fish from the bogs in Europe, all shiny with all of you sealed inside. I could take a lesson in muscles from looking at you."

"Benji, stop," said Sybelle, struggling with her disapproval and her alarm. "We have to think how to get an evil man."

"You serious?" he said, looking up and across the bed at her. She stood with her hands clasped as if in prayer. "Sybelle, that's nothing. It's how to get rid of him afterwards that's so hard." He looked at me. "Do you know what we did with her brother?"

She put her hands over her ears and bowed her head. How many times had I done that very thing myself when it seemed a stream of words and images would utterly destroy me.

"You are so glossy, Armand," said Benji. "But I can get you an evil man, like that, it's nothing. You want an evil man? Let's make a plan." He bent down over me, as though trying to peer into my brain. I realized suddenly that he was looking at my fangs.

"Benji," I said, "don't come any closer. Sybelle, take him away."

"But what did I do?"

"Nothing," she said. She dropped her voice, and said desperately, "He's hungry."

"Lift the covers off again, will you do that?" I asked. "Lift them off and look at me and let me look into your eyes, and let that be my mirror. I want to see how very bad it is."

"Hmmm, Armand," said Benji. "I think you are crazy mad or something."

Sybelle bent down and with her two careful hands peeled the cover back and down, exposing the length of my body.

I went into her mind.

It was worse than I had ever imagined.

The glossy horror of a bog corpse, as Benji had said, was perfectly true, save for the horror of the fall head of red-brown hair and huge, lidless bright brown eyes, and the white teeth arrayed perfectly below and above lips that had shriveled to nothing. Down the tightly drawn wrinkled black leather of the face were heavy red streaks of blood that had been my tears.

I whipped my head to the side and deep into the downy pillow. I felt the covers come up over me.

"This cannot go on for you, even if it could go on for me," I said. "It's not what I would have you see another moment, for the longer you live with this, the more like you are to live with anything. No. It cannot continue."

"Anything," Sybelle said. She crouched down beside me. "Is my hand cool if I lay it on your forehead? Is it gentle if I touch your hair?"

I looked at her from one narrow-slitted eye.

Her long thin neck was part of her shivering and emaciated loveliness. Her breasts were voluptuous and high. Beyond her in the lovely warm glow of the room, I saw the piano. I thought of these long gentle fingers touching the keys. I could hear in my head the throb of the Appassionato.

There came a loud flick, a crackle, a snap, and then the rich fragrance of fine tobacco.

Benji strode back and forth beyond her, with his black cigarette on his lip.

"I have a plan," he declared, effortlessly holding forth with the cigarette firmly grasped between his half-open lips. "I go down to the streets. I meet a bad, bad guy in no time. I tell him I'm alone here in this apartment, up here in the hotel, with a man who is drunk and drooling and crazy and we have all this cocaine to sell and I don't know what to do and I need help with it."

I started to laugh in spite of the pain.

The little Bedouin shrugged his shoulders and held up his palms, puffing away on the black cigarette, the smoke curling about him like a magical cloud.

"What you think? It will work. Look, I'm a good judge of character. Now, you, Sybelle, you get out of the way, and let me lead this miserable sack of filth, this bad guy whom I lure into my trap, right to the very bed, and pitch him down on his face, like this, I trip him with my foot, like this, and he falls, boink, right into your arms, Armand, what do you think of it?"

"And if it goes wrong?" I asked.

"Then my beautiful Sybelle cracks him over the head with her hammer."

"I have a better thought," I said, "though God knows that what you've just devised is unsurpassingly brilliant. You tell him of course that the cocaine is under the coverlet in neat little plastic sacks all stretched out, but if he doesn't take this bait and come here to see for himself, then let our beautiful Sybelle simply throw back the cover, and when he sees what truly lies in this bed, he'll be out of here with no thought to harm anyone!"

"That's it!" Sybelle cried. She clapped her hands together. Her pale luminous eyes were wide.

"That's perfect," Benji agreed.

"But mark, don't carry a copper penny into the streets with you. If only we had but a little bit of the evil white powder with which to bait the beast."

"But we do," said Sybelle. "We have just that, a little bit which we took from my brother's pockets." She looked down at me thoughtfully, not seeing me but running the plan through the tight coils of her soft and yielding mind. "We took everything out so that when we left him to be found, they'd find nothing with him. There are so many who are left that way in New York. Of course it was an unspeakable chore to drag him."

"But we have that evil white powder, yes!" said Benji, clasping her shoulder suddenly and then bolting out of my sight to return within the instant with a small flat white cigarette case.

"Put it here, where I can smell what's inside," I said. I could see that neither of them knew for certain.

Benji snapped open the lid of the thin silver box. There, nestled in a small plastic bag, folded with impeccable neatness, was the powder with the very exact smell that I wanted it to have. I needn't put it to my tongue, on which sugar would have tasted just as alien.

"That's fine. Only empty out half of that at once down a drain, so that there's just a little left, and leave the silver case here, lest you run into some fool who'll kill you for it."

Sybelle shivered with obvious fear. "Benji, I'll go with you."

"No, that would be most unwise," I said. "He can get away from anyone much faster without you."

"Oh, so right you are!" said Benji, taking the last drag from his cigarette and then crushing it out in a big glass ashtray beside the bed, where a dozen other little white butts were curled waiting for it. "And how many times do I tell her that when I go out for cigarettes in the middle of the night? Does she listen?"

He was off without waiting for an answer. I heard the rush of water from the tap. He was washing away half the cocaine. I let my eyes roam the room, veering away from the soft blood-filled guardian angel.

"There are people innately good," I said, "who want to help others. You are one of them, Sybelle. I won't rest as long as you live. I'll be at your side. I'll be there always to guard you and to repay you."

She smiled.

I was astonished.

Her lean face, with its well-shaped pale lips, broke into the freshest and most robust smile, as if neglect and pain had never gnawed at her.

"You'll be a guardian angel to me, Armand?" she asked.

"Always."

"I'm off," Benji declared. With a crackle and snap, he lit another cigarette. His lungs must have been charcoal sacks. "I'm going out into the night. But what if this son of a bitch is sick or dirty or-."

"Means nothing to me. Blood's blood. Just bring him here. Don't try this fancy tripping with your foot. Wait till you have him right here beside the bed, and as he reaches to lift the cover, you, Sybelle, pull it back, and you, Benji, push on him with all your might, so the side of the bed trips his shins, and he'll fall into my arms. And after that, I'll have him."

He headed for the door.

"Wait," I whispered. What was I thinking of in my greed? I looked up at her mute smiling face, and then at him, the little engine puffing away on the black cigarette, with nothing on for the fierce winter outside but the damned djellaba.

"No, it has to be done," said Sybelle with wide eyes. "And Benji will choose a very bad man, won't you, Benji? An evil man who wants to rob and kill you."

"I know where to go," said Benji with a little twisted smile. "Just play your cards when I come back, both of you. Cover him up, Sybelle. Don't look at the clock. Don't worry about me!"

Off he went with the slam of the door, the big heavy lock slipping shut behind him automatically.

So it was coming. Blood, thick red blood. It was coming. It was coming, and it would be hot and delicious, and there would a manful of it, and it was coming, it was coming within seconds.

I closed my eyes, and opening them, I let the room take shape again with its sky-blue draperies on every window, hanging down in rich folds to the floor, and the carpet a great writhing oval of cabbage roses. And she, this stalk of a girl staring at me and smiling her simple sweet smile, as if the crime of the night would be nothing to her.

She came down on her knees next to me, perilously close, and again she touched my hair with delicate hand. Her soft unfettered breasts touched my arm. I read her thoughts as if I read her palm, pushing back through layer after layer of her conscious, seeing the dark winding road again whipping and turning through the Jordan Valley, and the parents driving too fast for the pitch dark and the hairpin curves and the Arab drivers who came on plunging at even greater speed so that each meeting of headlamps became a grueling contest.

"To eat the fish from the Sea of Galilee," she said, her eyes drifting away from me. "I wanted it. It was my idea we go there. We had one more day in the Holy Land, and they said it's a long drive from Jerusalem to Nazareth, and I said, 'But He walked on the water.' It was to me always the strangest tale. You know it?"

"I do," I said.

"That He was walking right on the water, as if He'd forgotten the Apostles were there or that anyone might see Him, and they from the boat, said, 'Lord!' and He was startled. Such a strange miracle, as if it was all ... accidental. I was the one who wanted to go. I was the one who wanted to eat the fresh fish right out of the sea, the same water that Peter and the others had fished. It was my doing. Oh, I don't say it was my fault that they died. It was my doing. And we were all headed home for my big night at Carnegie Hall, and the record company was set up to record it, live. I'd made a recording before, you know. It had done much better than anyone ever expected. But that night . . . this night that never happened, that is, I was going to play the Appassionata.

It was all that mattered to me. The other sonatas I love, the Moonlight, the Pathetique, but really for me ... it was the Appassionata. My Father and Mother were so proud. But my brother, he was the one who always fought, always got me the time, the space, the good piano, the teachers I needed. He was the one who made them see, but then of course, he didn't have any life at all, and all of us saw what was coming. We'd talk about it round the table at night, that he had to get a life of his own, it was no good his working for me, but then he'd say that I would need him for years to come, I couldn't even imagine. He'd manage the recordings and the performances and the repertoire, and the fees we asked. The agents couldn't be trusted. I had no idea, he said, of how high I'd rise."

She paused, cocking her head to one side, her face earnest yet still simple.

"It wasn't a decision I made, you understand," she said. "I just wouldn't do anything else. They were dead. I just wouldn't go out. I just wouldn't answer the phone. I just wouldn't play anything else. I just wouldn't listen to what he said. I just wouldn't plan. I just wouldn't eat. I just wouldn't change my clothes. I just played the Appassionata."

"I understand," I said softly.

"He brought Benji back with us to take care of me. I always wondered how. I think Benji was bought, you know, bought with cold cash?"

"I know."

"I think that's what happened. He couldn't leave me alone, he said, not even at the King David, that was the hotel-."

"Yes."

"-because he said I'd stand in the window without my clothes, or I wouldn't let the maid come in, and I'd play the piano in the middle of the night and he couldn't sleep. So he got Benji. I love Benji."

"I know."

"I'd always do what Benji said. He never dared to hit Benji. Only towards the end he started to really hurt me. Before that it was slaps, you know, and kicks. Or he'd pull my hair. He'd grab me by the hair, all my hair in one hand, and he'd throw me down on the floor. He did that often. But he didn't dare to hit Benji. He knew if he hit Benji I'd scream and scream. But then sometimes, when Benji would try to make him stop-. But I'm not so sure about that because I would be so dizzy. My head would ache."

"I understand," I said. Of course, he had hit Benji.

She mused, quietly, her eyes large still, and so bright without tears or puckering.

"We're alike, you and I," she whispered, looking down at me. Her hand lay close to my cheek, and she very lightly pressed the soft upper part of her forefinger against me.

"Alike?" I asked. "What in the world can you be thinking of?"

"Monsters," she said. "Children."

I smiled. But she didn't smile. She looked dreamy.

"I was so glad when you came," she said. "I knew he was dead. I knew when you stood at the end of the piano and you looked at me. I knew when you stood there listening to me. I was so happy that there was someone who could kill him."

"Do this for me," I said.

"What?" she asked. "Armand, I'll do anything."

"Go to the piano now. Play it for me. Play the Appassionata"

"But the plan," she asked in a small wondering voice. "The evil man, he's coming."

"Leave this to Benji and me. Don't turn around to look. Just play the Appassionata."

"No, please," she asked gently.

"But why not?" I said. "Why must you put yourself through such an ordeal?"

"You don't understand," she said with the widest eyes. "I want to see it!"