A Taste of Blood and Roses Page 5

  She turned to the table, picked up the still hot glass in her tongs and turned from him, showing the slender curve of her shoulder as she dipped it into the water at her side. Steam hissed from the meeting of heat and cold. Wilhelm held his breath. Too soon, he thought. Too soon, it will crack. He reached out, as if to stop her, but moments later she spun easily, retrieving the goblet from the potential destruction of the cooling vat and placing it on the table once again. Turning to him, she reached down and gripped the stem in delicate fingers.

  Exactly as it had happened before. The tilt of her chin, the sparkle in her eye - daring things she didn’t understand and promising things he could not resist.

  Again Wilhelm backed to the wall. Hard. No give.

  When your back is to the wall, my son, his father had said once, that is when you find your measure as a man.

  The wall had never felt so solid and unyielding, and it had been more than a century since Wilhelm was a man.

  “It was just like this,” she said softly, moving closer. “My dream. Exactly like this.”

  She held out the goblet. It glittered and shimmered as the candle-flames danced. Breathtaking. Mesmerizing. Wilhelm shook his head. One quick motion, and he could be gone. She wouldn’t even see him pass, and he could melt in with her other dreams, a forgotten image she couldn’t place as reality or fantasy as the years passed.

  But Wilhelm would not pass. He would endure, not fading. Not changing except that a bit more of the individuality he clung to would slip. Things grew grey over the years. The color faded, like old-silver plate, roughly used.

  The goblet glittered, and through that glitter he read the question in her eyes.

  “It is . . . “ he replied, “exactly as it was. Exactly.”

  “My dream?” she asked. Her eyes told him that she knew.

  “My life,” he replied, reaching out so very carefully to grip the stem of the goblet. He plucked it from her fingers, turning it so it caught the light, winking at him like an old lover. The urge to dash it against the wall and run surged through him and Wilhelm handed it back quickly. “It was not a dream, that life,” he spat bitterly, “but a nightmare.”

  “Tell me,” she breathed softly. The words floated on the air, hesitating. Waiting for his response as if presented on an altar.

  “You do not know what you ask,” he replied.

  “I know you,” she replied quickly, stepping closer. “I have watched you in the shadows, watching me. I have seen you in my dreams, appearing no younger than you do now, but long ago. I have walked with you in the moonlight, and in the sun.”

  “I don’t even remember the sun,” Wilhelm lied.

  “It remembers you,” she said, stepping closer still, and smiling. In that smile, the sun peeked through for just an instant, and Wilhelm’s resolve melted away. He turned and strode to where the coals burned brightly in the hearth and stared into their depths. He was aware that she watched him, aware of her breath, and the way her skin brushed softly against the material of her blouse.

  “It was another world,” he said finally. “This place, the streets you walked to come here, the bus that transported you from your home. None of it could have existed, even in the wildest imagination. It was, in many ways, a calmer time. Things did not happen so quickly – and when they did . . .” he spun to catch her gaze in his own, searching her expression – and deeper – “they lasted.”

  He turned back to the fire and added. “That is what she told me. That is what you told me, the last time you offered me that bit of glass.”

  “I remember,” she said softly. “I told you that I capture the images in the glass so that they can live forever.”

  Wilhelm nodded. Then he added, “And you wanted to live forever, as well. To be like the glass, inviolate and bright, shining like a star throughout the ages. I told you it would be so, that your art would transcend time. You told me I was a fool.”

  She finished, “because the glass is not alive, but we are.”

  She stepped closer. Wilhelm shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts and sort them, past to present and present to future.

  “It was I,” he said softly, “who became like glass. It was I who stepped from the heat into the bitter cold of ice and watched my world wither, and then again. I have watched generations of men live and die, love and lie. I have watched even the glass, the art and the song, the grand temples and endless cities – end. Nothing is eternal.”

  “You are,” she whispered.

  He shook his head violently. “I grow more like the dust with each passing day. Less of the man and more a glass replica walks each night. Nothing moves me, save hunger, and that hunger robs the world of heat, one heart at a time.”

  “You brought me back,” she whispered.

  Again, he shook his head. “You have dreams, but the dreams are not reality. You have seen things that occurred before your grandparents were born, and you cling to those things, but they are not yours. They aren’t even mine any longer. They are cold breaths of death, blown over the world in casual disdain.”

  “No,” she said softly. She grabbed the goblet and shook it in Wilhelm’s face; her eyes flashed. He knew that flash, knew the tone of her voice and anticipated the way her head would tilt, just so, when the anger took control.

  “Look,” she cried, her voice strong, the words piercing. “Look at her. The woman. You have seen her before, and you lost her. You see the demons, tugging at her, dragging at her feet and grasping for her soul, but she stands.” She moved closer, stroked Wilhelm’s cheek with the smooth glass and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  Wilhelm struggled, but she was quick, and he reacted too late. The proximity of her skin, the red-hot pulse of her blood, was too strong. He had no strength to resist her, and still she pressed closer, molding herself to the front of his body.

  “No,” he whispered.

  She drew the goblet between them so that they pressed into the glass from both sides.

  “The woman is me,” she said, her voice hoarse. “The demons clutch at me every day, clawing their way up my legs and whispering to me in my dreams of dirt and worms and decay. They whisper the inevitability of death. They have tormented me since I was a little girl and the only thing that has saved me - the one vision that drew me from day to day and comforted me by night was of you. Of this,” she rolled her breasts across him, the goblet now held tightly between them as she melted over him like a second skin – wax that encased him and stifled motion – that vibrated with tension and motion and heat.

  “You are my savior.” She breathed the words into his ear. Her lips pressed against his skin and the soft puff of her breath teased his ear. Her hands gripped his hair, her legs sliding in serpentine coils to lock behind his knees. Her hair glistened in the flickering light as she tossed her head back.

  And that was his dream. Wilhelm had lived it so many times that her breath seemed his own, and the words warped to “I am your savior,” as he reached out and drew her closer. She gasped and arched, throat smooth and pulsing – eyes closed.

  Wilhelm gripped her tightly, releasing his frustration into the taut dead muscles of his arms. She cried out, the sound empty and cold, alive and explosive. The goblet shattered, and Wilhelm spun her, drove into her, pressed her to the wall. The shattered shards of glass impaled her. They cut into her flesh, and into his. She bled and Wilhelm shook with the insanity of it, bared his teeth against the sudden ache, and screamed. The glass dug through his chest, impaled his heart, did nothing.

  She writhed, slippery with her own blood and the clotted miasma that flowed from his lifeless veins, but Wilhelm pressed more tightly and dragged his body up, then down, then side to side and held. A cross of shadows, blessing her. He met her gaze as she stared at him in horror. She was weak, but found the strength to speak – words death-whispered over drying lips.

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t let me go. I belong with you – forever.” The words trailed away, and Wilhelm close
d his eyes. He shook his head quickly, one sharp negation as she grew limp in his arms. The scent and sensation of her blood drove through his resolve with the bitter sharpness the glass was denied. Already his flesh healed, as she faded.

  He wheeled away and released her to fall in an arc toward the cold stone, everything moving slowly. Every moment stretched endlessly into the past, where he had lived, and to the future, where he would mourn this new past. He stumbled with the effort of not feeding. There might be a faint spark remaining to her life – the risk of it was too great. The goblet had shattered into thousands of diamond-bright prisms, flicking bits of candle light among themselves and glittering wetly. A single large shard caught his eye, and he stood very still, just for a moment, as the glass woman stared up at him, stricken, mirroring the pain in her eyes.

  Wilhelm turned and spoke into the empty room.

  “I am your savior,” he said softly.

  Then he was gone, sliding into the streets beyond and the shadows, following the scent and heat of pounding, pulsing blood that flowed through the rooms and houses, roads and alleys of the city. Somewhere in that blood, she wailed. Somewhere she clawed and fought, working her way back. In the blood, there was life.

  Twice broken, the bits and pieces of lifeless glass leaked her spirit to the stone floor, so close to the flames where it was born that her blood did not lose its heat. Wilhelm didn’t see. He hunted, and he fed, and her eyes danced before his gaze – the crystalline goblet mocked him with its brittle perfection – the betrayal in her expression his shroud.

  Within the hour he returned, sated. Seated on the floor, working carefully, he separated the bits and pieces of the goblet, drawing free the knife-long shard from her heart. Scraping the smaller pieces from her skin with long, pale nails. Picking each tiny grain from the mortar between the stone tiles of the floor, and driving his fingers into his own flesh to claw free what lay imbedded within, though it cost him some of his strength to release the newly consumed blood.

  He framed them on a single tile, some end to end, others matched broken bit to cracked dream. Wilhelm was not an artist, but her image was as familiar to him as his name – more – and he drew her in the glass, spreading the pooled blood between the splintered remnants of her gift. When it was complete, he sat and stared, rocking slowly up and back. Then Wilhelm rose and turned away.

  Outside the world was awakening. He turned, and strode from the room.

  Behind him, etched in hundred-year-old dust, her face beseeched the shadows. The fire in the corner was a pile of dead ash and crumbled brick. The rose-hint of dawn spread across the floor and seeped in through cracks in the broken walls. Vines wound up and over those walls, and snaked across the floor, reaching for things long gone. Wind gusted and sent the woman’s dust-particle image dancing into corners so long void of life that the earth threatened to re-claim the very foundations upon which they rested.

  * * *

  Ice chip stars glittered brightly. A single strip of clouds, silver-lined and glowing with frustrated brilliance obscured the moon. Wilhelm glared at them, as though they sparkled in the sky to mock his vision. He stepped forward, brushed the curtains aside, and entered a darkened hall. He studied the stained walls, and the ratty carpet. He sensed the age beyond the tacky exterior, and the elegance of the hall’s origin. No light marred the perfection of shadow except the low, mellow glow of flickering firelight at the far end of the hall, and around a corner.

  He had walked this hall before. Silently. Alone. He knew what waited around that corner, and he knew that he must hold his silence. Anything less – or more – and the magic might pass. He would walk empty corridors to forgotten lives. Alone.

  Miracles in the Night

  I have traveled roads long and weary, darkness my companion and destiny my guide. I have seen the sun rise and set on the courts of kings, and I have seen those kingdoms crumble back to dust. I have shared wine with women, war with men, and the night with no one. I have no name, and yet I am. Death does not stalk me; not though I dream a thousand nights for his cold embrace. This is my destiny.

  Though I was born to poverty and ignorance, I have aspired to eloquence and power. I am a success story on an epic scale, one with a tragic footnote. This story I have put down that those who follow in my footsteps will understand that I was here, that I endure, even now, even in the social wasteland of this place that they now call Norfolk, but that has none of the charm, or the old-world civility, of the original city of that name.

  I came here out of boredom, out of an incessant need for travel, a yearning for change. I have spoken with derelicts, madmen so soused on wine and midnight dreams that they could barely remember their given names, but whose words wove the tapestry of society with clarity and vision. I have stalked men, and women as well, from upper to lower class, knowing each, loving few, ending the existences of all but one. That is my story.

  I prowled the docks, for they are near the sea, near those whose adventuresome souls and yearning hearts mirror in some small way the eternal quest that drives me onward. The men of these later days do not have the heart, nor the strength, of those whom I knew in earlier times -- in greater times -- but the spirit is still there, and it was that I sought. Something different, something new. Someone who might relieve the unbearable weight of boredom that bears down on my shoulders every waking moment of the night. I never dreamed of entertainment, I sought only a moment's relief.

  I thought momentarily of the bars. There is always music. Caustic and violent as the modern groups tended to be, there was still the allure of poetry, still the message of their souls to be picked free. I decided against it. It was a night to wander beneath the stars, to find something unique. Somehow I felt it, and I have learned to trust my instincts.

  And so the docks -- the waves -- the moonlight dancing on choppy, off-shore swells and glistening in the captured pools of salt-spray on the rocks. I moved as silently as the breeze, as effortlessly as the gulls who owned the daytime sky.

  I dream, at times, of those moments -- the price of immortality -- the daylight lives and trivial pursuits of those upon whom I fed. I can remember, even now, the graceful swooping movements of birds, their arrogant cries. Such dreams are an empty pursuit -- painful.

  I saw him as I crossed from one darkened alley to another, walking along a row of abandoned warehouses without concern, despite the hour and the solitude -- despite the danger. We were not in one of the better neighborhoods, those held no interest to me. It was the edge of things, the borders of the "real" world, that caught at my senses and gave me a reason to go on.

  From the instant he caught my eye, I knew I'd found what I was looking for. He wore what appeared to be a robe, sweeping to the ground at his feet. It was sewn and patched together of a hundred colored rags, of old shirts and pants, even socks, wash-cloths, towels and sheets. It was multicolored and ragged, and in the moonlight, with his long gray hair and unruly beard, with the staff he held in his right hand as he moved, he might have been an ancient prophet, Moses with his robe of many colors moving through the night.

  I swept past him far to one side, coming at him from the front, where he could see me clearly, moving slowly and watching him with wondering eyes.

  He never flinched. His eyes were filled with light and energy, the one thing about him that bore witness to an intelligence buried beneath the veneer of madness, of secrets he knew and none would guess. I smiled, and as I drew near, I held out my hand.

  He stared at me, not offering his own hand in return, but he stopped as well, as though he'd spotted, or guessed at, my own nature. He did not turn to run, nor did he cower, but he stood there as an equal, calm and self-assured.

  "You are Death?" he asked calmly?

  I shook my head. "I am not, nor are you Moses, but there is a strange light about you."

  "I am a prophet," he said matter-of-factly. "I have seen things -- many things. They will not listen."

  "They never have," I told him. "From
one who knows only too well, they never have. Walk with me?" I asked him, but there was not really a question involved. He moved at my side easily, comfortably.

  "I did not think you were Death," he told me, "because I have not yet foreseen my own."

  "You see everything?" I prompted.

  "No, only that which matters. To me, life matters very much, so I believe I will see Death, and I will know him."

  "You are not so far from the mark," I admitted slowly. "I have been as the angel of death to many -- too many to count. Does that frighten you?"

  "No," he answered immediately. "Death is for all -- I have always known that. If you were Death, I would walk with you anyway -- what would be the point in resistance?"

  "You are a religious man?" I asked, thoroughly intrigued. We were moving back toward the beach, along the water now. There were the flashing lights of boats -- naval vessels -- and the occasional backfire of a car's engine as backdrop to our conversation -- nothing more.

  "I am a religious man," he replied, his eyes growing far away, "In a sacrilegious land. I am a prophet in a world of non-believers. I am the answer to questions better left unanswered, and so, am unwanted as well. There is no soul in mankind any longer."

  "And yet you believe in your own?"

  "I live within my soul. It is my soul that draws me onward, that shows me ways when others see walls, that opens windows where others see only air. There are veils, shuttered portals all around us, but we have trained ourselves to ignore them. There are windows to the soul, but man has bricked them over.

  "There is poetry, still, but it is empty. It is re-played pain and endless unfulfilled dreams. They do not know what will fulfill them, so they build towers to reach a God they do not believe in, hoping that when they arrive they can take over and all will be well.

  "There is religion in the world, but there is no passion. The passion is for things of the Earth, things of the flesh. There is no passion for spirit, or for beauty. There is more passion for death -- it must be pleasant for you?"