Only as the elevator opened on our floor did I realize how unusual my actions had been. I, two hundred years old, ferocious and proud by nature, had just gone on an errand for a mortal girl because she asked me very directly to do it.
Of course there were mediating circumstances! I'd kidnapped her and brought her over hundreds of miles! I needed her. Hell, I loved her.
But what I'd learnt from this simple incident was this: She did have a power, which saints often have, to make others obey. Without question, I'd gone to get the food for her. Cheerfully gone myself, as though there were grace in it.
It took her less than six and one half minutes to devour the meal.
I've never seen anyone eat so fast. She stacked up everything and took it into the kitchen. I had to draw her away from the chores, and bring her back into the room. This gave me a chance both to hold her warm, fragile hands and to be very close to her.
"What is your advice?"
She sat down and pondered, or drew together her thoughts.
"I think you have little to lose by cooperating with this being. It's perfectly obvious he could destroy you anytime he wanted. He has many ways. You slept in your house, even after you knew that he, the Ordinary Man, as you call him, knew the location. Obviously you aren't afraid of him on any material level. And in his realm, you were able to exert sufficient force to push him away from you. What do you risk by cooperating? Suppose he can take you to Heaven or Hell. The implication is that you can still refuse to help him, can't you?
You can still say, to use his own fine language, 'I don't see things from your point of view.' "
"Yes."
"What I'm saying is, if you open yourself to what he wants to show you, that does not mean you have accepted him, does it? On the contrary, the obligation lies with him to make you see from his perspective, or so it seems. Besides, the point is, you break the rules whatever they are."
"He can't be tricking me into Hell, you mean."
"You serious? You think God would let people be tricked into Hell?"
"I'm not people, Dora. I'm what I am. I don't mean to draw any parallels with God in my repetitive epithets. I only mean I'm evil. Very evil. I know I am. I have been since I started to feed on humans. I'm Cain, the slayer of his brothers."
"Then God could put you in Hell anytime he wanted. Why not?"
I shook my head. "I wish I knew. I wish I knew why He hasn't. I wish I knew. But what you're saying is that there is power involved here on both sides."
"Clearly."
"And to believe in some sort of trickery is almost superstitious."
"Precisely. If you go to Heaven, if you speak with God. . . ." She stopped.
"Would you go if he were asking you to help him, if he were tell-
I brought the meal inside the apartment and set it down for her on the table.
The apartment was now flooded with her mingling aromas, including that of her menses, that special, perfumed blood collecting neatly between her legs. The place breathed with her.
I ignored the predictable raging desire to feast on her till she dropped.
She was sitting crouched over in the chair, hands locked together, staring before her. I saw that the black leather folders were open all over the floor. She knew about her inheritance or had some idea of it.
She wasn't looking at that, however, and she seemed absolutely unsurprised by my return.
She drifted towards the table now, as though she couldn't break out of her reverie. Meantime, I stirred about in the kitchen drawers of the apartment for plates and utensils for her, found some mildly inoffensive stainless-steel forks and knives and a china plate. I set these down for her, and laid out the cartons of steaming food—meat and vegetables and such, and some sort of sweet concoction, all of it as alien to me as it had always been, as if I hadn't recently been in a mortal body and tasted real food. I didn't want to think about that experience!
"Thank you," she said absently, without so much as looking at me. "You are a darling for having done it." She opened a bottle of the water and drank it all greedily.
I watched her throat as she did this. I didn't let myself think about her in any way except lovingly, but the scent of her was enough to drive me out of the place.
That's it, I vowed. If you feel you cannot control this desire, then you leave!
She ate the food indifferently, almost mechanically, and then looked up at me.
"Oh, forgive me, do sit down, please. You can't eat, can you? You can't take this kind of nourishment."
"No," I said. "But I can sit down."
I sat next to her, trying not to watch her or breathe her scent any more than I had to. I looked directly across the room, out the glass at the white sky. If snow was falling now, I couldn't tell, but it had to be. Because I couldn't see anything but the whiteness. Yes, that meant that either New York had disappeared without a trace, or that it was snowing outside.
"What could you possibly lose by doing it?" she said.
I didn't answer.
She walked about, thinking, her black hair falling forward in a curl against her cheek, her long black-clad legs looking painfully thin yet graceful as she paced. She had let go of the black coat a long time ago, and I realized now that she wore only a thin black silk dress. I smelled her blood again, her secret, fragrant, female blood.
I looked away from her.
She said, "I know what I have to lose in such matters. If I believe in God, and there is no God, then I can lose my life. I can end up on a deathbed realizing I've wasted the only real experience of the universe I'll ever be permitted to have."
"Yes, exactly, that's what I thought when I was alive. I wasn't going to waste my life believing in something that was unprovable and out of the question. I wanted to know what I was permitted to see and feel and taste in my life."
"Exactly. But you see, your situation is different. You are a vampire. You are, theologically speaking, a demon. You are powerful in your own way, and you cannot die naturally. You have an edge."
I thought about it.
"Do you know what happened today in the world," she said, "just this one day? We always begin our broadcast with such reports; do you know how many people died in Bosnia? In Russia? In Africa? How many skirmishes were fought or murders committed?"
"I know what you're saying."
"What I'm saying is, it's highly unlikely this thing has the power to trick you into anything. So go with it. Let it show you what it promises. And if I'm wrong . . . if you're tricked into Hell, then I've made a horrible mistake."
"No, you haven't. You've avenged your father's death, that's all.
But I agree with you. Trickery is too petty to be involved here. I'm going by instincts. And I'll tell you something else about Memnoch, the Devil, something maybe that will surprise you."
"That you like him? I know that. I understood that all along."
"How is that possible? I don't like myself, you know. I love myself, of course, I'm committed to myself till my dying day. But I don't like myself."
"You told me something last night," she said. "You said that if I needed you I was to call to you with my thoughts, my heart."
ing you he wasn't evil, but that he was the adversary of God, that he could change your mind on things?"
"I don't know," she said. "I might. I would maintain my free will throughout the experience, but I very well might."
"That's just it. Free will. Am I losing my will and my mind?"
"You seem to be in full possession of both and an enormous amount of supernatural strength."
"Do you sense the evil in me?"
"No, you're too beautiful for that, you know it."
"But there must be something rotten and vicious inside me that you can feel and see."
"You're asking for consolation and I can't give that to you," she said. "No, I don't sense it. I believe the things you've told me."
"Why?"
She thought for a long time. Then she stood up and went to the glass wall.
"I have put a question to the supernatural," she said, looking down, perhaps at the roof of the cathedral. I could not see it from where I stood. "I have asked it to give me a vision."