Naked, on the Edge (12 page)

Why again? Why again? Forgive me, and no more!

The blade slid smoothly, an easy rush of air and steel. With a thwack, it found its rest at the bottom of the track, throwing the head neatly into the basket. But this one bled, and profusely. The body bounced off into a large wicker casket beside the gurney.

Danielle covered her face with her hands and drove her face into the ground.

She returned to the Little Farm when darkness fell. She felt her way rather than saw it, for her eyes were full of the hideous visions of the courtyard. Marie and Clarice were on the path, panicked for the loss of their friend, and when they saw her, they ran to her and held her close.

But Danielle would have nothing of it. She said simply, "I must die."

Marie shook Danielle's shoulders. "What are you saying? Where have you been?"

But then Danielle said, "But should I kill myself I go to hell! Should I live I live in hell!"

"Oh, sweet Mother of God," said Clarice, "what has happened to you, dear friend?"

Danielle broke away, and reached the barn to see if she'd made a mistake, to see if Alexandre was waiting for her in his stall. But the straw was kicked about, and the pitchfork dropped on the floor where Alexandre had tried to protect her. His jacket was in a tangle by the wall. Danielle wailed, picked up the jacket, and clutched it to herself. Her friends stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.

"I must die, too!" she screamed.

"Danielle!" It was Clarice. "Come out of there. Talk to us! You've got us frightened!"

Alexandre's journal was on the beam. But the Bible was gone. Danielle dug through the straw, clawing and sifting the sharp, golden bits, but the Bible was not there. Alexandre had not taken it with him. But it was no longer there.

What had happened to it? She wanted it for herself, to take it with her to her death.

Danielle stood and fled the barn. She knew the answer, as surely as she knew LeBeque and Blue Eyes and the man with boils and the man at the beheading machine would go to hell for their civil and humane test. She shoved past the other maids, saying, "I shall go to the places where the prostitutes wander. I shall make myself available to a murderer, that's what I shall do! I will go to heaven if I'm murdered. For I will not live without him!"

Marie and Clarice tried to grab Danielle to hold her back, but she was too fast, too mad with grief, and they were left clutching air and the first raindrops of the evening.

They followed her. Against Clarice's concerns that they'd be relieved of their duties for leaving Bicetre without permission, they scurried after Danielle, shawls drawn up around their faces. Down one. narrow Parisian street after another they went, calling for their friend, but not so loudly to attract the attention of the increasingly frightening citizenry of the streets. The rain let itself go in full force, driving some pedestrians from the roads and leaving only the determined, the tardy and the mad.

Danielle pushed her way to the rue Leon, a small and dismal alley lined with tall, narrow whorehouses, saloons and tenement shacks, some of which leaned precariously on poor foundations. The rain blurred the lights of the lanterns which sat in splintering windowsills. Whores stood in petticoats and stockings in sagging doorways, thrusting their breasts and wiggling their tongues. Drenched clients in coats hurried for the warmth of the diseased temptresses, and vanished into the houses with low chuckles and growls. A skeletal dog limped across Danielle's pathway and wormed its way into a tenement cellar through a cracked window. In the shadows beneath rain-blackened stoops and behind rust-banded barrels lurked eyes that seemed to have no sockets. Teeth that seemed to have no mouths.

Danielle stopped in the centre of the alley. She stared up at the dark, rain-sodden sky and raised her hands as if bidding some divine spirit to save her.

"Kill me!" she said above the drumming of the rain on the cobblestones and rooftops. "Come now, there is surely someone who would relish the chance to sate their blood lust! Here I am, and there is no one to charge you for my death, for there is no one in this God-forsaken town who would care I was gone!"

She closed her eyes and kept her hands aloft. She took a breath, expecting to feel a plunging knife in her ribs, or a dagger drawn across her throat. Now, she begged silently. Let it be done and over.

She heard nothing, save the giggling of the prostitutes in their houses and the cries of babies in the tenement rooms. She said again, "Here I am! A gift, for free!"

Spattering rain and muted laughter.

Then, "No, I don't want to die. God forgive me." And then again, "Yes, die I must! Release me!"

And then a hand on her forearm and a whisper, "Sister, you're soaked to the skin!"

Danielle opened her eyes to see a pair of red orbs gazing intently at her, mere inches from her own. The skin around the eyes was as white as a corpse's. Danielle gasped and floundered, but the full red mouth smiled and said, "Fear not, dear. I have what you want. You are certainly a young thing, yes?" Cold fingers gently brushed Danielle's hair from her neck and tipped her head to the side ever so slightly.

Danielle could not move her gaze from the red eyes, and she thought for the briefest moment, This is just a painted whore. A whore who kills on the side to assuage her anxieties. That's fine. That's good. A whore may kill more kindly than a man would have.

"I will release you to life that is not life, death that is not death. My gift to you. The gift many of us have asked for because of the dreadful state of our mortal existence as women on earth. Hold, dear, hold now."

Danielle held her breath.

"Danielle!" The scream was from behind, and Danielle tried to look back but the whore with the white face and cold hands held her as strongly as any man.

"Danielle!" It was Marie, somewhere back at the entrance to the alley.

"Shh," cooed the red-eyed whore, "shh." The white face dipped to Danielle's bare neck. A searing pain shot through the flesh, the muscle, and into the very core of bone. Danielle screamed, but the scream was met with the whore's shushing and the shifting of the rain in the wind.

Then there was warmth and numb peace, and a swirling giddiness that caught her thoughts and threw them like pebbles in the wind. She almost laughed, almost, but then she fell into herself and there was no bottom and no light and she fell and fell and thought, This is death. I shall find you, Alexandre. In the good Lord's paradise, I shall find you!

T
hey settled in Buffalo, New York in February of 1889, when Danielle insisted that the population of Sisters had grown too large in New York City. Marie was tired of moving. So was Clarice. But Danielle was always restless. No matter the availability nor the quantity of prey or the relative safety of their hideouts, she was happy in one place no more than a matter of months, and then began insisting they move on. Marie and Clarice, not wanting their friend to venture off on her own, always went along.

They had stayed in Europe for over eighty years, moving from Paris to Lisbon to London and countless smaller cities and towns, taking the blood they needed to survive, meeting with other Soeurs de la Nuit - Sisters of the Night - and sharing their stories, their pain. Laughing with them when some memory was amusing, mourning with them when a memory was too harsh.

The Sisters were an order of the undead, much like the lone wolves of their kind but different in their need and sympathy for each other. They lived on the blood of others, most often the blood of thieves and rapists, murderers and wife-beaters. They drank their fill, often passing the dazed man about to their fellows for a share, then killed their victims with a twist to the neck. The Sisters did not have a desire to bring such villains into eternal life with them.

On the rue Leon so many years past, a Sister had heard Danielle's pitiable cries and had come to her aid. Marie and Clarice, who had fallen at Danielle's side, were likewise brought into the world of forever.

At first they had been unable to accept their new reality, and had hidden in a whorehouse cellar for nine days, trying to go out in the morning but unable, and finding themselves nauseous when presented plates of turnips and pork yet ravenous when offered a drunk card cheat. Danielle had cried for Alexandre; Marie and Clarice had just cried. Yet with increased feedings and encouragement from the other Sisters who tended them, they grew into their new selves.

They returned to Bicetre one starry evening, and while Marie and Clarice took out their rage on several doctors who had taken advantage of them then tossed them out, Danielle had gone to the lantern-lit office of Monsieur LeBeque and had tortured the man to near death as his champion the Marquis de Sade would have done, though she, unlike the libertine, took no orgasmic pleasure in the act. When he was reduced to a mere remnant of what he had been, clothed in shredded flesh and pawing at the air in hopeless desperation, she drank his noxious blood and twisted his neck about.

But Danielle felt no satisfaction.

For 117 years Danielle had found no satisfaction, no peace. It was she who wandered without purpose, followed closely by her two loyal friends, watched over by them, often protected by them. Yet they knew her restlessness and her longing for what she had once had, briefly, had not drained from her even as her own life had done.

She longed for Alexandre.

She pined for him and ached for him. Her days' sleeps in random cellars and stalls, attics and storehouses, were troubled with dreams. She cried his name out and awoke herself with her cries. Sometimes she would bite her own wrists to relieve the agony of her heart, or to bring her consciousness to a close once and for all, but it could not be done.

There was nothing for Marie and Clarice but to love her, still.

Buffalo was a thriving city in the western corner of New York State. It was Clarice's suggestion once Danielle began making noises that New York City was too crowded with their kind. Not just the loners but the Sisters as well. Marie and Clarice liked the fellowship, but Danielle grew irritable with them very quickly. And so when Marie suggested Buffalo, Danielle was ready to move.

They travelled by train at night, dressed modestly as women of the time were expected to do, in prim grey dresses of wool and cotton that pressed their bosoms tightly into their chests, their undergarments that cinched their waists unmercifully. When alone, they dressed as they pleased, and often went naked, but to pass in public they played the charade.

Marie had a brochure in her lap that touted the city's finer points. "They call it the 'Electric City of the Future'," she read, holding the paper to the light of the lamp beside her on the wall. The train jerked constantly, and she had to move her head with the tremors to keep up with the printed words. "More electric lights are in use here than in many other places in the United States. What do you think of that, Danielle?"

"That sounds fine," said Danielle. She picked at the cloth-covered buttons on her bodice, imagining her hands were Alexandre's. His hands were beautiful. She would never forget those hands. Marie continued to read and Danielle heard nothing but the tone of her voice.

Then: "Danielle?" It was Marie.

"What?"

"You've been silent for hours. It's nearly dawn and the train is still miles from Buffalo. We must find a sanctuary."

The Sisters moved gracefully from the passenger car to the storage car. It was here that luggage was stacked, and flats of tools and boxes of foodstuffs and sacks of material and paper. They curled up into three crates filled with nails, and awakened that evening on a loading dock along the Erie Canal. Quietly, they removed themselves out and away before the dockmen got to the crates.

It was easy to find the part of town that revelled in drink and sex for money. It was not unlike the seedy sections of any city, except that here the dens and whorehouses sat toe to toe with grain elevators and shipyards. The number of undead was small; Danielle estimated no more than five or six from the vibrations in the air. They were the only Sisters. They stopped outside the gate to a large, canal-side elevator and teased the lone watchman at the gate into letting them in.

"We're from France," cooed Marie. "Just freshly arrived, Monsieur. We've never seen such a structure. It has us quite mesmerized. Please?" She touched her red lips coyly, but kept her face down so he would not see her bright red eyes.

The man, flustered with the attention, said, "I don't do no whores. Go on 'bout your business."

Marie feigned horror at the suggestion. "Whores? Mon Dieu! Sir, we are ladies in the truest sense, sisters come from another land to learn what we may. But if we offend, then we shall be gone." The three turned away, and the man relented.

"Well, then," he said quickly. "I'm sorry, ma'ams. I meant no disrespect. Come in and I'll show you how the grain elevators work here in ole Buffalo." He unlatched the gate and the ladies came through, invited. But his brief introduction to the history of the canal was cut off as the three of them fell on to him and took his blood, then his life. They then found a comfortable hide-away in a small storeroom next to the elevator.

The following days tumbled one into the other. The Sisters slept undetected in the storeroom during the day, pressed like shadows behind old bits of furniture covered in cobwebs and many months' worth of dust. At night they walked Ohio and Erie Streets, dressed like ladies, unthreatening and demure, finding human creatures on which to feed and, when done, throwing the twisted bodies into the canal with the other sewage.