The Vampire Tapestry (12 page)

“What is it?” he called. “What’s the matter?”

Dr. Weyland panted, “Something in the blood...bad blood...”

When Roger came back Mark hurried to tell him. Dr. Weyland was still in the bathroom. They could hear his hard, strained breathing.

“That guy must have been a pill-popper or something,” Roger muttered. “He told me he was just looking for some good grass. Maybe he was really sick.”

“What about Dr. Weyland?” Mark said. “That’s all he’s had to eat today, and he’s throwing everything up.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it—I took the last package of blood from the fridge with me and dumped it; it was spoiled anyway. Listen, it won’t kill him to start fasting a day early.”

* * *

Next afternoon Roger called from one of the shops. “Mark? Listen. Alan just called. There’s an item in the paper about a college student found dead this morning in Riverside Park—guess who. That greedy monster you’re so worried about took too much. You might give that some thought. Alan wants me to come over—more complicated arrangements for May Eve. I’ll see you later.”

Mark took his work and a camp chair out into the yard. He couldn’t concentrate. Inevitably, he went down the hall.

The vampire sat on the cot with his back against the wall, doing nothing.

“That guy died,” Mark said.

He got no reply. Dr. Weyland’s shirt looked rumpled. It was buttoned wrong so that the collar stuck up on one side. His gaze was flat and unfocused. A vein stood in his temple like a smear of ink.

“You’re like a wild animal,” Mark continued. “You hear like a fox, don’t you—everything we say around here. You heard Roger say Alan doesn’t want him to bring any more people for you, so you tanked up while you had the chance.”

“Yes,” Dr. Weyland said, “against hunger. I drank what I could while I could, even though I tasted some impurity. I had to eat; I had to try. I protect myself as best I can, as might also be said of you.”

His sudden glance seemed to pierce right through Mark. “But I had no profit of it, and I am hungry now; truly hungry, bitterly hungry, with a hunger you know nothing about and never can. Reese, who has his own appetite, guesses. He means to use my hunger to break me to my role in his performance.

“Your uncle was right, you should have stayed the other night to see Reese display the antagonist he means to subdue. In reality I can give Reese nothing—but he can take from me. He ‘builds me up,’ as Roger put it, in order to stand higher himself when he has cast me down. He presents me as some mystical and powerful being which he alone, the leader, the master, can conquer and destroy.” His knuckles whitened where he gripped the side of the cot. “Do you hear, do you understand? Let me out or Reese and his people will kill me.”

“Stop saying that! Roger—”

“Stop dodging, face the truth! Roger can’t help now even if he wants to. He consoles himself for his loss of control with thoughts of how rich he’ll become from Reese’s enterprise. Against that the slaughter of a mere animal, an investment made on a whim, weighs very little. Have you noticed, Roger never refers to or addresses me by name? He is preparing himself to be indifferent to my death.”

Mark struck the bars with his fist. “Shut up, Roger’s not a coward, he’d never let anybody get killed!

You’re the killer, and you’re a dirty liar, you’d say anything to turn me against Roger so I’d let you go!

You’d do anything, you freak, you murderer!”

“And you,” replied the vampire with weary bitterness, “are clearly Roger’s kin. He makes his preparations and you make yours. At the level of name-calling there’s nothing to be said or done. Go tend to your schoolwork.” He closed his eyes.

Mark turned away. “Old liar,” he whispered furiously to himself. “Murdering old lying freak!”

* * *

The weather turned warmer. Mark spent as much time away from Roger’s as he could, sitting through foolish movies, wandering blankly down quiet museum halls. Neither his school assignments nor Skytown could hold his attention even when he took all his papers to the library and tried to work there. Once he fell asleep on the carpeting in the muted glow of the gem exhibit at the museum. A noisy class of children came in and woke him. He left and found himself walking uptown toward his mother’s: running away. He could no longer remember the college student’s face. The young man’s death seemed to him now like...like a kid getting his arm pulled off by a bear at the zoo, except of course he hadn’t stuck his own arm through the bars to the bear. Roger had done that for the man, literally. Alan Reese had sort of done it, too, through Roger. Sometimes Mark scarcely believed it had really happened. He hadn’t seen the student die; maybe it was a mistake, maybe the newspapers had gotten the facts wrong or exaggerated for some reason, or maybe Reese had lied to Roger.

All that was taking Mark’s mind off what mattered now: the possibilities of Reese’s Great Sabbat on May Eve.

His thoughts veered away in a panic. What was he supposed to do, go to the police station and bring the cops back to Roger’s? That might stop Reese, but it would get Roger into a lot of trouble, and Dr. Weyland too, once people knew what he was. Or should he stay around in case Dr. Weyland was right about a kid’s presence being a restraint? Suppose being there didn’t help? How was Mark supposed to stand it, watching Reese do...whatever he was going to do? Or should he let the vampire loose on the city to save him from Alan Reese?

Mark was only a kid, how could he take it on himself to do those things? He told himself that none of this craziness was his own fault. Remember what the school psychologist had said about the divorce: “Not everything is about you; grown-up people are responsible for their own lives.” And Dr. Stimme had said,

“You are not in charge of things that you have no power to change. Though sometimes you can be a good influence...”

Mark turned and trudged back toward Roger’s.

Roger was away all day and for several evenings, saying that he had to consult with some people about maybe opening a new store on the East Side, or complaining that with May Eve coming up he had to be at Reese’s beck and call all the time over the details. Mark thought Roger was just not comfortable around the apartment these days.

So it was Mark, not Roger, who watched the vampire starve. Dr. Weyland spent his days huddled over, hugging his hunger, each breath a shaking, exhausted hiss of pain. It was Mark, not Roger, who came home Tuesday to find the water pitcher knocked over. He couldn’t tell whether Dr. Weyland had drunk first and dropped the pitcher afterward, or dropped it first and had to lap up the spilled water like a dog. After Tuesday, Mark laid out a row of filled plastic cups each morning so that the weakened vampire wouldn’t have to lift and pour from the heavy pitcher.

It’s an act
, he told himself.
He fakes being so hungry just to get to me.
But he didn’t believe it. The vampire seemed curled around his suffering, holding it private to himself—as private as anything could be, when anyone might come and look through the bars into his tiny cell.

* * *

On Wednesday evening Mark went to the ball game with his father. He longed for a shared pleasure that would bring him close enough to his dad to—maybe—share the nightmare that waited back at Roger’s. The sharing didn’t happen. He wasn’t allowed to like the game itself for the speed and grace of the players, the wonderful way they leaped up with everything they had. What his father savored was the violence.

He shouted and sweated, and he pounded Mark’s shoulder to drive home to him every ecstatic moment of impact. Mark felt those heavy hands trying to pummel him into some kind of fellowship of force. It was Dad’s idea of closeness to a teenage son.

Dad couldn’t help it; he had hitter’s hands, hands like Alan Reese’s. On the way back to Roger’s his father said, “Is there anything you need, Mark? Anything I can do for you? Just say the word.”

Sure
. “Everything’s cool, Dad.”

Roger was out, as usual now. When Mark let himself in, he found that the vampire had worked free one of the legs of the cot. The length of pale wood lay by the gate, battered and splintered from his efforts to beat open the gate lock with it.

Dr. Weyland himself sat cramped against the wall, gasping. One of his slippers had been kicked off across the room.

Mark said, “Drink some water, maybe you’ll feel better.” He got no response. An hour later Dr. Weyland had not moved, and Roger was still not back. Mark dialed Wesley’s number. Since the blood deliveries had ended, Wesley hadn’t come around.

“Wesley, please come over. You’ve got to help.” To his horror he heard a catch in his voice and stopped to gulp down a big breath and steady himself. “It’s hurting him really badly, Wesley. Please bring some blood. I’ll pay for it myself. Roger won’t ever know.”

There was a pause. Then Wesley said, “He’d find out. And I don’t want to get mixed up with Alan Reese. The vampire’s just putting you on, anyhow, trying to soften you up so you’ll spring him. You watch out for him.”

“I think he’s dying, Wesley.”

“Look, he’s Roger’s baby, I told you. Go home, walk out of it. Don’t let this thing get to you, Markie. Go on back to your mother’s.”

“Can you give me Bobbie’s phone number?” Carol Kelly had paid for the Housman paper. Mark thought maybe he could bribe Bobbie to help.

Bobbie was home. In a sleepy voice she said Alan Reese was mad about her getting Julie into the vampire deal. He’d put a heavy curse on her so that she was sick. Julie? Julie was smart, she’d taken off for California, out of range of Alan’s bad magic. It was too bad about the vampire—if she wasn’t so sick, Bobbie said kindly, she would come over and let him do it, you know; you could really groove on that, it was like some dreamy kind of kiss...Had Mark tried talking to Wesley?

He sat by the phone and gnawed at his nails. Tomorrow night was May Eve. He mixed a batch of sweet lemonade and put it in the cups for the vampire. It was all he could think of to do.

* * *

On the morning of the last day Mark was too nervous to eat his cereal. He stared at Roger across the kitchen table, hoping he would see some kind of good sign in Roger’s face, some promise that tonight things would go all right. Maybe Dr. Weyland was wrong about Roger.

“You’ll be late for school,” Roger said, poking at the runny yellow of his breakfast egg with his fork.

“I don’t want to go today.”

Roger smiled brilliantly. “Big night tonight, right? Okay, don’t worry, I’ll see that you’re all squared away with the school for today.”

“I think he’s dying, Roger,” Mark said. “I’m scared he’ll die if we don’t feed him something.”

“What, feed him and ruin all his conditioning?” Roger got up, dabbing at his chin with his napkin. “Forget it, Markie. Reese said absolutely do not feed the animal, and we’re going along with his arrangements. He has the whole thing under control. The man may be an egomaniac, but he does see that things get done right, and this is a show that has to be done right.

“Did I tell you? Alan’s invited some hotshots from out of town for tonight. He’s so pleased with himself over it that he’s picking them up himself at the airport. Then he wants to make the preparations with everybody at his place. I’ll be coming back ahead of the others to set up some things he hasn’t even told me yet. The performance isn’t really due to begin here before nine o’clock. So find yourself something to keep you busy till after dinner, and leave the vampire show to Reese.”

Roger himself spent the morning padding about the apartment in his bathrobe neatening up, in a state of jittery cheerfulness that Mark couldn’t bear. Near noon there were phone calls from two of the shops and Roger had to go out.

The apartment was no more tolerable with Roger gone than it had been before. It seemed to be empty of all but Dr. Weyland’s merciless appetite and the almost palpable agony of Dr. Weyland’s fear. Overhearing the breakfast conversation as he overheard everything, Dr. Weyland would know the schedule now, which must make the waiting more terrible, the hunger more keen. Mark couldn’t go down the hall. He felt like an intruder in the apartment. He walked slowly to the public library and sat staring into space a long time, a book uselessly open on the table in front of him. He wandered in the park. Around midafternoon he returned to Roger’s.

Dr. Weyland did not seem to have moved at all since morning. He lay silent as death on the collapsed cot, his long body bent in sharp angles like a snapped stick, knees and forehead pressed to the wall. Mark sat down wearily in his own bedroom, trying not to think ahead to the night. A sound woke him in his chair, a horn blaring outside. Even without looking at his watch he could tell that hours had passed. The light had changed, dusk was coming on.

Dr. Weyland had moved at last. He sat huddled in a corner of his room, knees raised, head down and buried in his folded arms. Mark could see a tremor in his shoulders and in the taut line of his neck. His left sleeve was torn, pulled back to hang from the thin bicep, above the crook of the elbow where he had his face pressed, where his mouth was tight against the tender inside of the arm with the raised blue veins—from which he was sucking—drinking—

“Don’t, don’t do that!” the boy shrilled. Into his mind flashed the image of a trapped coyote in the museum film, chewing off its own foot to escape the steel jaws and death by thirst. He saw the mangled limb, clotted blood and bone—

He flew down the hallway for the key, rushed back, fumbled it into the lock with sweaty, shaking fingers. He lunged at Weyland, weeping, and with frantic strength beat his arms down. There was a dew of blood on Weyland’s lips, a red smear on one seamed cheek. His eyes were blank slits in dark sockets. Mark swallowed nausea and, kneeling, pressed his own arm against the bloody mouth. Warm breath flared onto his shrinking skin.

All in one motion, like being hurled down by an ocean tide, he was seized and pinned breathless to the floor. There came a faint sting and a surging sensation in his arm, and then a growing lightness in all his limbs.

Eyes tight shut, he cried, “Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, oh please don’t, please!” He was borne under, his head full of the wet sound of the vampire swallowing. On a rush of terror he screamed, “Oh, Mom, help!” and beat wildly at Weyland with his free hand. Dark spots spattered his vision.