Grim Tales (15 page)

It's just the wind shaking the sash – he said to the dog, which whimpered in its sleep. The next day, when the homicide detectives were examining the body where it lay by the locked window, they could not explain the marks left on the dead man's windpipe, which had been crushed in “an unusually powerful grip.”

She was one who believed always that life – her real life – lay just out of sight. She had a dear friend, an illusionist, who would perform for her alone the most celebrated sleights-of-hand in a career that had – years before – made him famous. Now, no longer jealous of his gift, he pointed out to her, frankly, how the illusion was accomplished outside the “sight lines.” The woman came to understand that reality proceeded immediately beyond the limit of peripheral vision – an iron restraint she was powerless to escape. Then one day it happened that she heard a noise such as an animal might make when it has fastened onto the body of its prey. Turning with surprising celerity, she saw at last the beast that had all her days kept well out of sight. The last thing the woman saw on earth was this beast, this monster, flying at her.

Under each dry, fallen leaf, a world waiting for the match.

One night he found himself inside a house where all that had been kept well down in his unconscious mind was made manifest, as if put “on deliberate display” – the props of his secret dramas: a knife, rope, poison, a pair of silk stockings, a glove, a bloody handkerchief and something he would not name, whose recollection even now made him shudder. He swore they were real – he had handled them all! – and shame, repugnance and horror had been, in his mouth, like vomit. Even – he admitted – those pleasures that in dreams sometimes it had been his to know, they, too, had caused him exquisite distress as he touched their most intimate tokens. He could do nothing – he said – but suffer them. Already when he left the house, his hair was white and his face lined like that of an old man or of a man who has experienced more than can be borne in a single lifetime, much less a single night. It was – they knew – inevitable and quite natural that he would, with a glad heart, shortly take his own life.

It was – he told them – as if the world were uncovered. Like the seabed after the tide has gone out – what one finds in the soft, wet sand: things that are mired, desperate, hobbled, dying. Or something left under the snow not to be discovered until the thaw. A body. A child's. He saw – he said, his voice trembling with an emotion whose depths embarrassed them – what was, for them, underneath and rarely remarked. If remarked at all, only in dreams, in nightmare. He was out of his mind, of course; and they turned away and ran out of the hospital like children fleeing from an impossible assignment into the freedom of the sunlit playground.

He knew how to look at a person so that, even after a moment's stare, the life was absorbed. That look – so terrible in its intensity and longing – was as if barbed. When the eyes left those of their victim, they drew with it some essential element without which life is impossible to sustain. It was not uncommon that those who had suffered this stare succumbed soon afterwards to a wasting disease – often mortal.

You're playing with fire, she warned. But he would not stop – no, not even when his hands started to smoke inside her blouse.

She bared her throat to him but instead of kisses received a wound from which she bled to death more swiftly than any of the other guests thought possible.

His practice of vampirism would not have been recognizable in previous centuries. He forsook the cape, for one thing and in general had banished black from his wardrobe in favor of other, gayer colors. He slept in a bed, although a sachet of Old World earth was sewn into the mattress, emitting a dank, not altogether unpleasant odor that might have been mistaken for that of potting soil had there been plants in the room. He had also managed by slow degrees to overcome his famous intolerance for Christian symbols and garlic to the point where he could enter Oude Kerk on the arm of a woman and, later, enjoy an Italian supper with her. His manners were not so suave as Ligosi's, though certainly a world away from the uncouth Count Orlak (as played by Max Schreck in F. W. Murnau's
Nosferatu)
. In two things, however, the family trait remained: his enjoyment of a beautiful woman's neck and a mirror's inability to possess his image. These two came together tragically one night in the bedroom of a lady. Looking in from the hallway, her husband happened to glance into the dressing-table mirror and – to his astonishment – saw her, sitting alone, with head thrown back in abandonment. Embarrassed by her shamelessness, he closed the door softly and went to his club. By morning she was “white as a ghost.”