The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life (8 page)

I poured Niccolo a cognac without stopping to think that he never drank, and he accepted it greedily, rolling it 3lowly in the snifter as he savored the aroma. “Ahh, brandy,” he sighed. “It has been so long since I’ve sniffed brandy.”

I poured myself one and sat down in the chair opposite his when suddenly a rustling in the corner caused Niccolo to lurch forward in his seat. “It’s all right,” I said as a brown, furry creature crept out from behind one of the aspidistras. “It’s only Deirdre, our hedgehog.”

He eyed me inquisitively as the little animal nosed along the baseboard and waddled out through the partially open door. “She eats beetles,” I explained, and Niccolo sank back into his chair. “Many English households have them.”

After many long moments he finally stared directly into my eyes. “Signore Gladstone, I cannot express enough gratitude for your assistance, but I must ask you again: Why did you do it?”

“Help you escape?” I replied, and contemplated the question for a moment. “I suppose I did it because you were in trouble. You were quite right: People were beginning to fear you, and besides, what is that old saying? Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

The faintest hint of a smile crossed his face only to be crowded out once again by his continued uneasiness. “Is that the only reason, because you think I’m an angel?”

I took a long sip of my cognac before I answered. “I have to admit that you pique my scientific interests as well. I mean, the fact that your metabolism heals itself so miraculously fast is of more than a little interest to the physician in me. And, of course”—I hesitated—“I want to know why you haven’t aged a day since the first time I saw you.”

“Signore Gladstone,” he said chuckling evasively, “I have no memory of this meeting. And, besides, how can you be so sure it was me? How long did you say it was? Almost forty years ago?” He continued to laugh quietly, and sniffed the brandy again, but still he did not drink it.

For the first time I grew uneasy, even frightened in the young man’s presence. I stood up and got a large red book bound in Russian leather from one of the walnut cases, and quickly thumbed through it. When I found the engraving of the London
Madonna of the Rocks
I offered it to him. He hesitantly accepted it. “It’s no coincidence,” said once again, gazing intently into his dark and deceptively innocent eyes. “Every line, every delicate contour is exactly the same.” I leaned closer and placed my hand upon his shoulder. “I helped you escape, Niccolo. The least I deserve is to know who and what you are.”

At this he hissed the same outraged hiss of a cat before it strikes, and pounced upon me. It was then, as the terrifyingly angelic face was only inches from my own, that I saw he had filed the canine teeth on either side of his mouth into points. “You’re such a fool,” he shrilled, and although he had not touched his drink his breath was warm and moist with brandy. He continued his exhalations slowly, even passionately, as his lips drew close to my flesh.

I screamed and struggled to escape, but the slender and frail hands held me with unusual strength. Then, as suddenly as he had leaped up from the chair, he threw me down and walked over to one of the windows. “Aren’t you going to run now?” he asked bitterly.

I gasped and tried to compose myself. “Why should I?” This remark startled him greatly. “My teeth! Look at my teeth!” He stepped forward and opened his mouth, revealing the teeth he had filed down.

“Why on earth would you do that to yourself?” I asked as I stepped forward and scrutinized them. They had been filed into tremendously sharp points. Moreover, they must have been abnormally long to begin with, for they protruded a good eighth of an inch below his other teeth.

I might have been mistaken but he seemed amused. I reached up and gingerly touched one of the canines, making sure not to puncture myself. As I slowly withdrew my hand I recalled the peculiarities of his metabolism, his refusal to eat, and his miraculous ability to heal. A shudder passed through me. “You’re awfully strange,” I said.

“Stranger than you suspect.”

I chuckled. “What are you, a vampire?”

He smiled.

I felt as if all of the wind had been knocked out of me by a heavy blow. Every fiber of my being doubted even the remotest possibility of such a preposterous notion and yet at one and the same time I realized it was absolutely true. “Am I in danger?” I asked.

“You are in the presence of the vampire!” he hissed and began to pace furiously.

I wanted to run but I summoned all of my courage and remained. “But am I in danger?” I repeated.

At this his expression softened, and he regarded me imploringly. “Couldn’t I have taken you in the garden? Or couldn’t I just as easily have killed you now?” shook his head sadly. “Signore Gladstone, I have never had any intentions of ever hurting you. Indeed, I have given you a trust that I seldom give any human being. It is very rare for a vampire ever to reveal himself. It is too dangerous.”

“Then why are you confiding in me?”

“Because you are different from all others,” he answered. “In you I sense a curiosity, even an admiration. You knew I wasn’t human. You knew it in the hospital, and yet you had compassion instead of ignorance and fear. But tell me, Signore Gladstone, now that you know exactly what I am, what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t rightly know,” I returned. “You’re not well enough to be put out on the street, but—” I stopped abruptly.

“—but you have your family to think about.”

“My two daughters are away visiting, but they’ll be home in a couple of days.”

“
Mio caro,
Dottore Gladstone, you are so naïve. Do you think vampires are so crass as to go around biting children?”

I blushed. “Isn’t that what people say?”

Niccolo folded his arms indignantly and sat back down in his chair. “That’s what the rabble says. But what does the rabble say about medicine, about disease? What superstitious prattle circulates about anything that people don’t understand and are afraid of?” He paused and reached for his cognac. “That isn’t to say that there isn’t a basis to the legend. We do subsist primarily upon blood, but we don’t just go around leaving conspicuous marks on random necks. That’s dangerously flagrant. It starts panics and witch-hunts, and innocent people end up with silly things like stakes in their chests. The first law of survival in the world of the vampire is never to attract attention, and besides, we don’t have to worry about where we get what we need. There are many individuals who offer themselves freely to the vampire.” There was a rustling and we both noticed that Deirdre had once again entered the study and was nosing along the baseboard. A large wood spider scurried out and she gobbled it up greedily. Niccolo chuckled and swirled the golden liquid around in his snifter as he continued to inhale the bouquet. “Oh, no, there are other things that the vampire is much more concerned about than blood.”

“And what are those?” I asked, returning to my chair.

He smiled. “Well, first there’s pleasure and the delights of the senses. The older you get the more you realize you should drink life’s liquors before the cup goes dry, as friend Omar puts it. Once you’re no longer afraid of dying and not getting into heaven you become numbed with abandon. Yes, pleasure is always a concern, but come now, Dottore Gladstone, you’re an intelligent man, can you tell me what the most important thing is to a vampire?” As he regarded me the firelight made strange patterns upon his face. “Think about it. If you were a vampire, what would you feel? What would be important to you after you watched the entire folly and pageant of humanity pass before your deathless eyes? Well, I’ll tell you: You would soon realize that being a vampire is a very special thing. Of course, at first it’s frightening because you’ve been taught you’re one of the undead, a monster. But then you realize you’ve changed in ways that don’t seem monstrous at all. Yes, your metabolism becomes so refined that you can digest only blood, and that may seem a little monstrous, but there are many wonderful things as well. Your senses become incredibly acute. You can smell what kind of hard rock candy a child has in his pocket, and you can sense the heat of a man’s footprints hours after he has paced a carpet. You no longer get colds in the winter, or sneeze from the goldenrod, or get cholera when an epidemic ravages everyone around you. And when you get hurt, your wounds heal as if touched by saints. Cuts don’t bleed and scars fade like mosquito bites. And you know what else?” His voice lowered to a reverent hush. “You can see many things other men don’t see. You can watch the sharp lines of cliffs grow soft, religions that people once died for, die themselves and be forgotten, and great cities rise and fall, for you see, my dear Dottore, you never grow old.

“Now contemplate that, Dottore Gladstone. What would be important to you if you had all the advantages of being a vampire, and you realized you were immortal? Not blood, or helpless young women wandering into dark old castles. Knowledge would become your Holy Grail, knowledge and all the learning you could glean about this phenomenon we call humanity, about a universe awesome enough to create such a thing as a vampire.”

After many long moments of silence I shifted my weight excitedly in my chair. “Is it you, then? Are you the angel in the painting?”

Niccolo drew in his breath very slowly, and then nodded. “I was the model who posed for the master, Leonardo.”

To my amazement his confession didn’t surprise me in the least, and I realized that I, or some part of me, had known how old Niccolo was from the very first time I set eyes on him. As I glanced at the smooth, youthful hands I noticed all of his cognac had evaporated, and I proffered him more. He accepted it eagerly.

“Were you a vampire when you knew Leonardo?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Was Leonardo a vampire also?”

“No.”

“How did you meet him and what was he like?”

“Our meeting was planned,” Niccolo said, and paused before he added, “by Lodovico.”

As he murmured the name I thought I noticed an almost imperceptible trace of sadness in his voice.

“You see,” he continued, “I am not the only vampire. There are many others, and many of them are much older and wiser than I. The oldest and the wisest one I’ve ever met was Lodovico.” Niccolo tilted his head back against the chair as he gazed dreamily off into space. “Ahh, Lodovico,” he sighed. “What do I tell you about Lodovico?

He was as mysterious as he was overwhelming. Not only was he as clever and conniving as a pope, but he was wealthy and dashing as well. All of the young women of Florence were in love with him, not to mention a number of the young men.

“At that time Lodovico was obsessed with discovering what he called the enigma of the vampire. What did the existence of vampire mean? Were we devils? Were we genetic mutations, or were we some strange and mysterious facet of that entire collective organism we call humanity? Lodovico became convinced we were some sort of evolutionary experiment being performed by the collective being of the race, and set out to discover clues to substantiate this theory. In the incredible genius of Leonardo he discerned, perhaps, another evolutionary mutation. That is why he planned our meeting. He knew Leonardo was very fond of beautiful young men. Lodovico wanted me to allure him, to be accepted into his confidence so that I could observe him. However, as with all of the missions Lodovico sent me on, the aesthetics of our meeting had to be striking, even surreal. This was intended to disconcert Leonardo, and keep him on unsteady ground so there would be less of a chance of his figuring out our meeting was anything other than accidental.

“He was a very young man then,” Niccolo continued. “He had just moved to Florence from his father’s house in Vinci, and had been accepted by the workshop of the master, Andrea de’ Cioni Verrocchio. It was at that time that he also expressed his first interest in detailed anatomical studies, and joined the physician’s guild of St. Luke. As a member of this guild he was afforded access to the morgue in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and was able to perform extensive dissections of the human body.

“On one of the evenings Leonardo was planning to visit the morgue, Lodovico managed to dispose of the cadaver intended for his dissection, and I took its place.” Niccolo’s voice became oddly passionate. “I still remember the first thing he murmured as he lifted the sheet and found me resting motionless on the slab. ‘
Amantissimo
,’ he whispered, ‘most beloved.’ I scarcely breathed as he gently caressed the musculature of my ribs and shoulders. His long, thin hands carefully examined every bone and ripple, and finally, almost hesitantly, he allowed a single finger to brush across my lips. Then he stood admiring me for many long moments. It was only when he finally picked up the knife and touched its cool blade against my flesh that I sat up quickly, feigning terror.

“That’s how I met the master, Leonardo. I told him that the last thing I remembered was being thrown from a horse, and that I had no memory of who I was or how I had gotten there. He cursed himself for nearly destroying me, and took me back to his single room over Verrocchio’s studio. He wanted to employ me as a model, but I told him I could never visit him when the sun was shining. Of course, this puzzled him greatly, but he respected my wishes. And so, night after night, he would sit in the moonlight for hours scratching his red chalk over vast sheets of yellow paper.

“I learned a lot about Leonardo for Lodovico, particulars of his diet, how many hours a day he spent on his work, and even the time between each beat of his heart. However, it was his accomplishments which most impressed Lodovico, for Leonardo had an energy that would take most mortals many lifetimes to develop. In time Lodovico decided to do what he chose to do only a few times throughout his long life. He chose to make Leonardo a vampire.”

Niccolo gazed directly toward me. “You ask me what Leonardo was like,” he said abruptly. “Well, I’ll tell you what the most uncontrollable force in his life was, what feeling dominated his every unguarded moment. He was tortured by his passions. He never once repeated the words to me that he had whispered when he thought I was dead.”