Sips of Blood Part 36

Sade kicked aside a fallen book. The room to his right filled his heart with glee. She was there. Waiting. Unable to escape him.

He touched the k.n.o.b of the door and hesitated. Slowly he rubbed the faceted gla.s.s. His chill already permeated the room, he knew. While holding the k.n.o.b, he lightly tapped an index finger against the wood panel of the door. Hardly audible by most, but meant to echo inside Marie's head.

Suddenly the door was pulled open and Marie's favorite slave stood in the doorway.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

Sade reached out and touched Wil's healing chest.

"She is sharing her blood with you." He tsked.

Wil went to push his hand away, but Sade grabbed Wil's hand and squeezed, squeezed until Wil on his knees begged him to stop. Sade pulled back his own hand and kicked Wil to the side.

A dead man lay on the bed: Marie's last meal. Beyond the body he sensed La Maitresse on the floor. Quiet now, she lay in a crooked ball, her neck out of kilter, her mind racing, her time decreasing in seconds, moments.

"Liliana has been destroyed."

"What?" Wil's mouth hung open.

Marie made no sound.

"At the cemetery mon enfant was torn apart by raging, demented husks called vampires."

"Vampires? What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" asked Wil.

But Marie was still.

"Une belle enfant, une belle femme lost to me forever."

"She's dead?"

"Elle a eu une existence miserable between an uncle too enchanted to free a lovely jeune femme and a grandmother wrapped in her own hedonism. We were wrong, Marie. We should have let her go long ago." Sade walked around the bed to confront his mother-in-law. "Vouz allez cruellement souffrir."

"What in h.e.l.l are you talking about?" asked Wil, on his feet, looking lost.

Sade looked at Wil. "Monsieur, you are one of us, or perhaps almost one of us." Sade looked over at Marie. "You always liked the slow, excruciating way. Now you will not be able to complete your creation. A creation you swore you never would consider making. I know you can't help but lie. I was to be freed from the Bastille, only I didn't know that I would immediately be taken to an insane asylum. But I grew in strength there, Marie. A strength you cannot imagine in a puny body like yours.

"Monsieur, I noticed you have a fireplace. Does it work?"

"h.e.l.l, on a hot day like this, what does it matter?"

"Does it work, monsieur?" Sade stared directly into Wil's eyes.

"Yes."

"Fire wood is outside?"

"Yes. Needs to be chopped, but it's there for winter."

"C'est l'hiver, ma pet.i.te amie."

Sade turned away from Marie and strode out of the room. He hesitated at the threshold and looked over his shoulder to see Wil moving closer to Marie.

"Monsieur, you must show me where the ax and firewood are."

"I'm not helping, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Sade sighed. "Monsieur, do you know why you are healing so quickly?"

"I know why I have these scars."

"No, no, monsieur, that is not the point. It was a test to see how quickly you could recuperate. You see, she is turning you into one of us."

"G.o.d help me, I'll never be like either of you."

"True, since she will not have the opportunity of completing her vicieux work. I'm not sure what you will become, monsieur, and I don't really care. But you will find yourself with a strange thirst, and you will need to feed just as she has on this poor old man."

"My father."

"Ah! La vengeance est douce, monsieur." Sade saw the blank look in Wil's eyes. "Revenge, monsieur. Do you not seek to avenge the death of your father?"

"I don't want any more killing."

"Monsieur, that is the philosophy that caused my poor Liliana's demise. If you wish to survive, you will learn to enjoy the stalking, the smell of fear, and the golden feel of prey pressed between your palms."

Wil shook his head.

"I hope you will at least not try to stop me."

Wil backed away from Marie and walked over to kneel by the side of his father's bed.

Holding his father's hand, Wil silently asked his father for forgiveness. If he had never come home, his old man would still be living his grouchy hermit life, grumbling at neighbors, refusing Wil's calls. Caring for his mother's grave. Now Wil would have to care for both parents. He knew that his mother had been buried deep enough so that his father could eventually join her. It would only be a matter of opening the grave, inserting Keith's coffin, and adding Dad's date of death to the tombstone.

The house belonged to Wil now. His father had never prepared a will, unable to leave his possessions to an ungrateful son and unable to disinherit his wife's only child.

His throat felt parched. The skin on his chest itched. He looked down at himself. Initially the top layer had swollen into something that looked like the crust of a freshly baked pie. That layer had fallen off in a solid piece, and he had stomped on it until all the sc.u.m had gone down the shower drain. Layers had continued to rapidly peel away, until now there were only splotches left of the old burn.

Gurgling sounds interrupted his thoughts, and he looked up at his father's mouth. Lips still agape, the old man had not uttered any sound. The gurgling persisted, and he remembered Marie. He turned to his right side and saw how she hissed and heaved trying to speak, reaching out to touch his dirty faded jeans, dragging herself across the rough wood floor. A splinter of wood protruded from her right palm, big enough so that he could see it plainly catch on the woven cotton blanket that got in her way.

"Kill me." Her words had come out distorted, but she was not requesting to be killed, he knew, for she repeated the sentence more slowly, attempting to enunciate where her voice box failed.

"Don't... let... him... kill... me."

"Why should I stop him, my mistress?" The words were spoken coldly and sarcastically.

Her hand waved at his chest, and again she reached, but couldn't touch him.

"You'--re... life," she wheezed.

"I don't think he wants to kill me, my mistress." Mistress came out with tawdry disgust.

"Bl--ood." She made a leap and fell against his body.

"Get away from me," he said, pus.h.i.+ng her back, watching her head fall uselessly against the leg of the bed.

Wil stood to look at his father's body. Finding a penknife on the nightstand, he used the point to jab his fathers arm.

"d.a.m.n you! You sucked my father dry," he yelled.

"Oui, monsieur, Marie is a sangsue. What you would call a vampire. Now help me start a fire. You must have newspaper or something I could use."

"Lighter fluid." Wil stared darkly at Sade.

Sade smiled. "Good to retain a sense of humor, monsieur. You will be needing it. Meanwhile, you torture my poor Marie with this lingering wait. Even she would prefer it over, oui, Marie? Ah, no! I am afraid Marie has a grip on her existence that she refuses to unlock.

"Paper, monsieur, lighter fluid, anything, I must be gone by morning quand nous serons dans la merde. A translation for you, monsieur, when the s.h.i.+t hits the fan."

Wil did not a.s.sist Sade; instead, he checked the wounds upon his chest. He healed much faster than normal. His strength had increased to the point where he no longer could gauge the power behind his moves.

A vampire, he thought. A humorless chuckle caught his breath when he thought of his friends in Greenwich Village who had pretended at vampirism. How they would envy him.

He smelled smoke and rushed to the living room, where he found Sade adjusting the fireplace damper.

"Monsieur, a good cleaning certainly is in order here. My... former housekeeper can recommend a reliable chimney sweep. She always saw to that.

"Marie, come view the fire." Sade started toward the bedroom.

Wil a.s.sumed that Sade was mad, with talk of vampires and setting a fire in midsummer. He watched as Sade carried Marie to the living room.

"Come, sit before the fire, Marie." Upon setting her down on the oval rug in front of the fire, Sade lifted an oil lamp in his hands.

"Better than lighter fluid, monsieur." He dumped the full contents of the lamp onto Marie's head, rubbing the oil into the fine fibers of her hair.

Marie twitched and wrinkled her face horribly. The oil seemed to run into her eyes and mouth. She attempted to spit the oil out, and Sade scooped the oil from her chin to press between her lips.

Wil's body felt tired. His arms ached, his legs wobbled unsteadily, and his heart beat so faintly that he couldn't be sure he still lived.

"I am sorry for the mess, monsieur, but there is a shortness of time." Sade reached for the ax that he had carried in with the wood. "I cannot tarry with you any longer, Marie. I have someone waiting to begin her new life, and she is eager." Sade swung back the ax and lowered the sharp edge quickly on Marie's neck. The head rolled away from the body, stopping short of the flagstones leading to the fireplace.

"She, too, is eager, monsieur." He smiled at Wil and shrugged when he received no response.

Blood soaked the oval rug and had splattered the old Barcalounger his father had used every night.

Wil looked down at his right hand and found that blood had marred his skin, round red dots blotching the blue and white of his veins and skin. The smell of his mistress' blood caused his breath to catch. By the time he noticed the odor of burning flesh, he found himself standing on the oval rug, lapping at his right hand.

"Feel free, monsieur. Don't be embarra.s.sed. I will certainly not fight you for that crone's stale hostile blood." Sade made a magnanimous hand motion toward the headless body dripping its contents. "If you do not hurry, it will be wasted in the fibers of that disgusting cheap rug." Sade continued to poke at Marie's burning head, which melted in the fireplace.

The blackened flesh shrivelled and layered itself onto the burning wood.

"I will take the skull bones with me, monsieur, and dispose of them when I am sure that they are ground into unformable ashes. You, monsieur, are wasting time." Briefly he used the poker to indicate Marie's headless corpse. "You will need the nourishment. I suspect it will take you a while to understand certain aspects of your new life, but here, allow me to guide you this once." Sade walked over to Wil and pressed the hot poker on Wil's left shoulder, driving him down onto his knees directly in front of the spilling blood. Sade left Wil there to drink his full.

Wil realized he was alone when the stickiness of Marie's blood made him feel dirty. Blood no longer flowed from between the body's shoulders. The staleness of blood, wool, and dirt emitted by the oval rug turned his stomach, and he lifted himself to his feet and returned to his father's bedroom to curl up next to the cold body.

"Profit from the fairest period in your life; these golden years of our pleasure are only too few and too brief. If we are so fortunate as to have enjoyed them, delicious memories console and amuse us in our old age. These years lost... and we are racked by bitterest regrets, gnawing remorse conjoins with sufferings of age and the fatal onset of the grave is all tears and brambles... But have you the madness to hope for immortality?

Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade

Excerpt from

Quenched Book Two Histoires de Le Vampire Marquis de Sade * * *

Prologue.

Fog dampened every surface, sinking into clothing and through flesh to chill the bones of the San Francisco inhabitants. Day bowed out to allow night's darker citizens to walk the streets, moving freely in each others shadows. Homeless huddled under a freeway overpa.s.s setting up their bedrooms on cement sidewalks. One man swept the sidewalk with a flimsy broom, losing straw with every pa.s.s, but cleaning away the day's trash, dumping it at the curb. Slices of cardboard rested atop mounds of blankets, clothes, and personal property that the man had collected into his Safeway cart. He had separated himself from the homeless crowd half a block away in order to retire for a decent night's sleep.

"Lookit old Sam across the street. He's going to wear himself out with all that tidying up. I can hear him huffing and puffing from here." The black man spoke the words with a smile on his face. He liked Sam, but like the others on the block thought Sam to be an eccentric. "Cliff, how much dirt you think he manages to eliminate with all his effort?"

Cliff rubbed his red beard and thought a while. In the midst of his meditation, Cliff set his hands flat on the ground and lifted his behind, twisting his neck to the side, allowing himself to check the sidewalk on which he sat. Relieved, he plopped his rear back down on the ground. "I'd say he ain't accomplis.h.i.+ng much."

The black man scratched his crotch and leaned back against the overpa.s.s wall.

"But he sure gives himself a workout each night, don't he? Cliff, if you ever see me, myself, and I, Emory Lansing, doing something like that, call the police and have me locked up."

"s.h.i.+t, I couldn't do that."

"I know you'd miss me, but living with a nut is no life."

"s.h.i.+t. I ain't got the change to call the police, and if I walked up to a cop to complain, he'd probably throw me into a cell."

"Lucky for you that you'll never have to face that tragedy. I mean having me put away in a loony bin. Jail you'll manage on your own. But I come from good solid stock. n.o.body in my family ever go bonkers. Had an old aunt that used to like to go down to the local bodega in Harlem topless on hot summer afternoons. Wasn't nuts, though; just too lazy to get completely dressed for such a short trip."