"Was this transformation a painful thing?" she asked.
"It was painful because I fought. I didn't want it to happen. I didn't really know what was being done to me. It seemed some monster out of the medieval past had captured me, and dragged me out of the civilized city. You must remember in those years that Paris was a wonderfully civilized place. Oh, you would think it barbaric beyond description if you were spirited there now, but to a country lord from a filthy castle, it was so exciting, what with the theatres, and the opera, and the balls at court. You can't imagine. And then this tragedy, this demon coming out of the dark and taking me to his tower. But the act itself, the Dark Trick? It isn't painful, it's ecstasy. And then your eyes are opened, and all humanity is beautiful to you in a way that you never realized before."
I put on the clean skivvy shirt which she gave to me, and climbed under the covers, and let her bring the covers up to my chin. I felt as if I were floating. Indeed, this was one of the most pleasant feelings I'd experienced since I'd become mortal-this feeling tike drunkenness. She felt my pulse and my forehead. I could see the fear in her, but I didn't want to believe it.
I told her that the real pain for me as an evil being was that I understood goodness, and I respected it. I had never been without a conscience. But all my life-even as a mortal boy- I had always been required to go against my conscience to obtain anything of intensity or value.
"But how? What do you mean?" she asked.
I told her that I had run off with a band of actors when I was a boy, committing an obvious sin of disobedience. I had committed the sin of fornication with one of the young women of the troupe. Yet those days, acting on the village stage and making love, had seemed of inestimable value! "You see, that's when I was alive, merely alive. The trivial sins of a boy! After I was dead, every step I took in the world was a commitment to sin, and yet at every turn I saw the sensual and the beautiful."
How could this be, I asked her. When I'd made Claudia a child vampire, and Gabrielle, my mother, into a vampire beauty, I'd been reaching again for an intensity! I'd found it irresistible. And in those moments no concept of sin made sense.
I said more, speaking again of David and his vision of God and the Devil in the cafe, and of how David thought that God was not perfect, that God was learning all the time, and that, indeed, the Devil learned so much that he came to despise his job and beg to be let out of it. But I knew I had told her all these things before in the hospital when she'd been holding my hand.
There were moments when she stopped her fussing with the pillows, and with pills and glasses of water, and merely looked at me. How still her face was, how emphatic her expression, the dark thick lashes surrounding her paler eyes, her large soft mouth so eloquent of kindness.
"I know you are good," I said. "I love you for it. Yet I would give it to you, the Dark Blood, to make you immortal-to have you with me in eternity because you are so mysterious to me and so strong."
There was a layer of silence around me, a dull roaring in my ears, and a veil over my eyes. I watched motionless as she lifted a syringe, tested it apparently by squirting a tiny bit of silver liquid into the air, and then put the needle into my flesh. The faint burning sensation was very far away, very unimportant.
When she gave me a large glass of orange juice I drank this greedily. Hmmm. Now this was something to taste, thick like blood, but full of sweetness and strangely like devouring light itself.
"I'd forgotten all about such things," I said. "How good it tastes, better than wine, really. I should have drunk it before. And to think I would have gone back without knowing it." I sank down into the pillow and looked up at the bare rafters of the low sloping ceiling. Nice clean little room, very white. Very simple. Her nun's cell. Snow was falling gently outside the little window. I counted twelve little panes of glass.
I was slipping in and out of sleep. I vaguely recall her trying to make me drink soup and that I couldn't do it. I was shaking, and terrified that those dreams would come again. I didn't want Claudia to come. The light of the little room burnt my eyes. I told her about Claudia haunting me, and the little hospital.
"Full of children," she said. Hadn't she remarked on this before. How puzzled she looked. She spoke softly of her work in the missions . . . with children. In the jungles of Venezuela and in Peru.
"Don't speak anymore," she said.
I knew I was frightening her. I was floating again, in and out of darkness, aware of a cool cloth on my forehead, and laughing again at this weightless feeling. I told her that in my regular body I could fly through the air. I told her how I had gone into the light of the sun above the Gobi Desert.
Now and then, I opened my eyes with a start, shaken to discover myself here. Her small white room.
In the burnished light, I saw a crucifix on the wall, with a bleeding Christ; and a statue of the Virgin Mary atop a small bookcase-the old familiar image of the Mediatrix of All Graces, with her bowed head and outstretched hands. Was that Saint Rita there with the red wound in her forehead? Ah, alt the old beliefs, and to think they were alive in this woman's heart.
I squinted, trying to read the larger titles on the books on her shelves: Aquinas, Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin. The sheer effort of interpreting these various names to mean Catholic philosophers exhausted me. Yet I read other titles, my mind feverish and unable to rest. There were books on tropical diseases, childhood diseases, on child psychology. I could make out a framed picture on the wall near the crucifix, of veiled and uniformed nuns together, perhaps at a ceremony. If she was one of them, I couldn't tell, not with these mortal eyes, and hurting the way they were. The nuns wore short blue robes, and blue and white veils.
She held my hand. I told her again I had to go to New Orleans. I had to live to reach my friend Louis, who would help me recover my body. I described Louis to her-how he existed beyond the reach of the modern world in a tiny unlighted house behind his ramshackle garden. I explained that he was weak, but he could give me the vampiric blood, and then I'd be a vampire again, and I'd hunt the Body Thief and have my old form restored to me. I told her how very human Louis was, that he would not give me much vampiric strength, but I could not find the Body Thief unless I had a preternatural body.
"So this body will die," I said, "when he gives the blood to me. You are saving it for death." I was weeping. I realized I was speaking French, but it seemed that she understood, because she told me in French that I must rest, that I was delirious.
"I am with you," she said hi French, very slowly and carefully. "I will protect you." Her warm gentle hand was over mine. With such care, she brushed the hair back from my forehead.
Darkness fell around the little house.
There was a fire burning in the little hearth, and Gretchen was lying beside me. She had put on a long flannel gown, very thick and white; and her hair was loose, and she was holding me as I shivered. I liked the feel of her hair against my arm. I held on to her, frightened I'd hurt her. Over and over again, she wiped my face with a cool cloth. She forced me to drink the orange juice or cold water. The hours of the night were deepening and so was my panic.
"I won't let you die," she whispered hi my ear. But I heard the fear which she couldn't disguise. Sleep rolled over me, thinly, so that the room retained its shape, its color, its light. I called upon the others again, begging Marius to help me. I began to think of terrible things-that they were all there as so many small white statues with the Virgin and with Saint Rita, watching me, and refusing to help.