Southern Comfort
- Prologue -
A winter storm was brewing; the wind was high and the sky dark with impending rain. Already the sound of distant thunder could be heard. A couple of carriages clattered in the distance, people trying to get home before the storm broke.
Stepping out of the shadows of the trees, the vampire wrapped her cloak more closely around her even though she did not feel the chill. Easily scaling the wall, she entered through an upstairs window. The scent of blood, the sound of beating hearts, drew her on.
Inside the great house, inside the nursery, candlelight flickered, and a low fire burned on the hearth. A slender dark-haired woman sat on the side of a child's small bed, her narrow shoulders slumped. She was dressed in traveling garb, a simple dress, bonnet, and cloak, and as the vampire drew nearer, she realized that the woman was weeping.
It was the sight of the child, however, that gave the vampire pause. He was sound asleep, his dark hair tumbled over his forehead, his thick lashes brushing cheeks still plump with youth and innocence. There was something that seemed to tug at her very soul, though she could not identify it.
As the vampire stood and watched, the woman bent and kissed the boy's forehead lightly. He stirred and murmured something, but did not awaken.
"My baby," the woman whispered brokenly. She rose from the edge of the mattress with reluctance, and the vampire saw her in profile, saw the gleam of tears on her cheek, catching the light of the struggling fire. "Good bye."
Lightning blazed beyond the leaded window of the nursery, and thunder threatened to burst the sky, but still the child did not awaken.
The woman turned, half-blinded by obvious grief, unaware of he vampire's presence because the vampire had willed it so.
The vampire was confused; the woman didn't appear to be leaving her child willingly, and yet she did not bundle him up and carry him away with her, as a thousand, nay, a million, other women would have done in a like situation.
The vampire followed the woman out into the hallway, where a young, thin, eager-looking lad awaited. She felt a surge of fury even before the lad spoke.
He flung himself away from the wainscoted wall to stand behind the woman, and his very being seemed to bristle with hatred. "Leaving so soon, Catherine? Why don't you take your brat with you?"
She whirled and slapped the lad hard across the face. "You know," she whispered. "Damn you, you know why I have to leave him --- because no matter where we went, your father would hunt us down and tear Nathan from my arms. I would die before I'd see that happen!"
Watching from a little distance away, those words struck the vampire as being strangely prophetic. Just how prophetic, she would find out very soon.
The lad grabbed at the woman, wild-eyed, shaking with some unholy passion. "Why did you waste yourself on that old man?" he rasped, speaking of his father. "What do you see in this lover, this cousin of yours? Don't you understand that I can love you as no one else ever could?"
The woman struggled in the lad's grasp, her eyes bright with fury, despair, and fear. "Robert, let me go! This instant!"
At that moment a door closed heavily downstairs, and then an older man started up the stairs. His handsome face was contorted by angry confusion. "What in the name of hell and all its demons is going on here?" he demanded.
The woman was still fighting to free herself. The vampire briefly considered intervening, but decided against intruding into what was obviously a domestic affair.
The lad raised his voice to an unnaturally high, thin pitch, and his fingers bit into the woman's shoulders as he tightened his grip on her. "She was leaving you, Papa!" he cried. "Your wife was running away, but I stopped her!"
The expression on the older man's face was one of wounded bewilderment. "Release your stepmother, Robert," he ordered, hurrying up the stairs. "Have you taken leave of your senses?"
"Bitch," the lad whispered, and then he flung the woman from him. She struggled to regain her balance, a look of startled horror on her face. Not even the vampire could move fast enough to prevent what came next, as the woman tumbled not down the stairs, but over the railing that edged the uppermost landing.
Catherine did not scream as she fell, and there was no sound after her body struck the marble floor below, except for the lad's rapid breathing and the tick of the long-case clock on the first landing.
The older man broke the silence first, with a choked sigh. "Good God," he cried, scrambling, groping his way back down the stairs, like a man blinded. "Catherine! Oh, dear God help us, Catherine!"
"Oh, Catherine," William Halder whispered brokenly, kneeling beside his wife's motionless body, there on the marble floor of the entryway. He took her limp hand and smoothed the knuckles with a circular motion of his thumb. "Cathy...."
The vampire followed, still invisible to both Robert and his father, as the former moved slowly down the stairs. Above, in the nursery, the child slept, heedless of the fact that his life had just been altered forever.
"Will she die?" Robert rasped when at last he'd reached his father and the stepmother he had clearly both loved and despised.
"I hope not," William said in an agonized whisper. "Dear God in heaven, I hope not." Tears gleamed in his eyes. "All the servants are out, so you'll have to go for help. Get Dr. Blanchard, quickly!"
Robert lingered, clenching and unclenching his fists, his collar wet with perspiration. "But what if she dies?" he asked. "They'll say I killed her I'll hang or spend the rest of my life in prison..."
William stroked Catherine's pale forehead with a tender motion as she stirred and murmured, trapped beneath a crushing burden of pain. The older man spoke with quiet determination. "I know you didn't mean for this to happen, Robert. And you are, after all, my son. I will do whatever I must to protect you."
Robert's look was hot with contempt and totally void of pity as he glared down at the unconscious Catherine. "She was nothing but a whore," he said. "She even tried to lure me to her bed..."
The elder Halder closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and a crimson flush climbed his neck to throb in his face. "Enough," he growled. "Get the doctor before I change my mind and hang you myself!"
At last Robert turned and hurried toward the door, but the expression on his face was hard with a hatred terrible to see, even for a vampire.
William was weeping quietly, pressing Catherine's small hand to his mouth. "Oh, darling," he pleaded. "Forgive me."
Catherine stirred again and moaned softly. "Nathan," she said in the merest shadow of a whisper. "Help him... Robert will... kill him..."
A ragged sob escaped William. "No, my darling --- I promise you --- Nathan will be safe. Please, Catherine --- were you truly leaving me?"
"Yes," Catherine said. Her eyes were open now, though there was a faraway look in them, as though she looked beyond William, beyond the walls of that grand house, beyond the stormy night sky.
"Why?" William said, although he must have known.
"I wanted... needed your love... you wouldn't give it." Catherine's gaze shifted, then locked with the vampire's. The vampire saw quiet acknowledgment in the woman's eyes.
It didn't surprise the vampire that Catherine could see her, while she was invisible to the two men. The dying could often discern shapes where the living saw only thin shadows, or nothing at all.
After that, Catherine closed her eyes and lapsed into the enfolding warmth of a coma, one from which she would never recover.
William kept his vigil at his wife's side, smoothing her hair now and then, or stroking the curve of her pale cheek. Presently Robert and the doctor burst into the foyer, along with two men they must have recruited along the way.
The doctor, a diminutive man with a balding pate and blue eyes as fierce as those of a Viking, dropped to one knee to examine Catherine. He looked up after about a minute. In a soft voice he said, "You'd better prepare yourself for a loss."
Catherine was carefully placed on a long panel of mahogany, the extension piece from the huge table in the dining room, and carried upstairs to her deathbed by the two strangers.
When those men had gone and Dr. Blanchard had joined William and Robert in the study, their uninvited guest was present too, a part of the night, morbid curiosity holding her here, watching and listening.
It was there, in William Halder's august study, that the story of a carriage accident was concocted. A wrecked coach would be easy enough to procure, they agreed grimly, and from that night forward they would all swear that Catherine Callaghan Halder had met with tragedy as she fled her unhappy marriage.
The vampire's feelings were mixed as she left the study for the nursery upstairs, where the child still lay sleeping. Once again, there was something drawing her toward him, tugging at the very center of her being. He was beautiful, that child, with his mother's coloring and his father's strength of features, and she stood watching him for as long as she dared.
Gazing at him, she mourned her lost humanity bitterly, if only briefly. This sleeping child represented the children that she would --- could --- never have.
Still, somehow, she knew that she would see that child again.
She did not know that he would become her lover, albeit for only one brief night.
Finally she went to the window. Wrapping her cloak tightly around her and pulling the hood up over her head, she slipped out into the rain and melted into the shadows.
She would feed elsewhere tonight.
- The Field Hospital -
When Nathan Halder slept --- a rare event in itself --- his dreams were haunted by the bone-jarring thunder of cannon fire and the screams of schoolboys-turned-soldiers. Not a moment passed, sleeping or waking, when he didn't want to lay down his surgical instruments and go home to Atlanta, but he couldn't leave the wounded. The color of their tattered uniforms meant nothing to him, though some of the other doctors refused to treat "the enemy."
That particular summer night was hot, weighted with the metallic scent of blood and the more pungent stenches of urine and vomit. After operating for nearly twenty hours straight, Nathan had stretched out gratefully on the soft, cool grass covering an old grave, there in the sideyard of the small clapboard church, and plunged headlong into a fitful slumber. In the early hours, well before dawn, something awakened him, something far more subtle than the cries and moans of the injured boys inside, sprawled end to end on the hard wooden pews.
Aching with despair and fatigue, Nathan lifted himself onto an elbow and scanned the churchyard. There were so many wounded, such an impossible number, that they spilled out on the crude sanctuary to lie in neat rows on the grass. Even so, this was only one of many improvised hospitals, all overburdened, overwhelmed.
Some of the patients shivered or sobbed in their inadequate bedrolls --- if they were lucky enough to have a blanket in the first place. Some moaned, and some had suffered only minor wounds and were just marking time, waiting to be sent home or to rejoin the Confederate troops at the front. The Yankees, of course, would be marched to some prison camp, or hauled there in whatever rickety wagon could be spared.
Nathan came back from his musings and squinted. Something was different; he had an eerie, fluttering feeling in the pit of his stomach, made up partly of excitement and partly of fear. He dragged himself upright, his back against the cool marble headstone, ran blood-stained fingers through his dark hair, and strained his tired eyes.
And then he saw her.
She was a creature made of moonlight, moving so gracefully between the rows of fallen soldiers that she seemed to float. Her gown was pale, sewn of some shimmering, gauzy fabric, and her ebony hair tumbled down her back in a lush cascade.
Nathan rubbed his eyes, then the back of his neck, mystified, certain that he must be hallucinating, or at least dreaming. This was not one of the good women of the town, who had been assisting so tirelessly with the injured of both sides since the terrible battle earlier in the month; none of them would have worn something so impractical as a white frock into the midst of such filth and overwhelming gore.
An angel, then? Nathan wondered. Some of the stricken boys had spoken of a beautiful guardian spirit who came in the night and gave nurture and comfort to those who were the nearest to death. Of course, they'd been seeing what they wanted to see, being so far from their mothers, wives, and sweethearts.
Nathan narrowed his eyes again, trusting neither his vision nor his reason. The woman did not vanish, as he had expected, but instead knelt beside a sorely wounded lad and drew him against her bosom with such tenderness that Nathan's throat tightened over a wrenching cry.
Her glorious hair, seemingly spun from the night itself, was like a veil, hiding the lad's head and shoulders from view.
Nathan finally gathered enough of his senses to start scrambling awkwardly to his feet. "You, there," he said in a low but forceful voice. "What are you doing?"
The creature raised her head, her exquisite face pale and glowing like an alabaster statue in the silvery wash of the moon. The boy lay in her arms, his head back in utter abandon, an expression of sublime jubilation plain in his features. Even from that distance, Nathan knew the soldier was dead.
The doctor scrambled to his feet, swayed slightly from weariness and hunger, and started toward the woman. She laid the boy on the ground with infinite gentleness, bent to kiss his forehead, and then rose gracefully to her full height. Just as Nathan drew near enough to see her clearly, she turned to face him. Her gray eyes briefly flashed silver and a look of recognition swept across her face. She favored the physician with one brief, pitying smile, and then vanished like so much smoke.
Nathan gasped, shaken, terrified that he was at last and indeed losing his mind, and oddly joyous, all of a piece. After a moment or so he composed himself and crouched beside the boy the woman had held so lovingly, searching with practiced fingers for a pulse.
There was none, as he had expected, but he felt the familiar mixture of rage and grief all the same. The soldier had obviously been trying to raise a beard, and he'd produced peach fuzz instead. His features were more those of a child than a man.
Damn this war, Nathan thought bitterly, and damn the politicians on both sides for sending mere children into the fray. He was about to straighten the boy's head, and cover him so that the overworked orderlies would know to carry him away in the morning, when he noticed the odd marks at the base of the lad's throat --- two neat puncture marks, just over two inches apart.
"What the hell?" Nathan whispered.
Reggie Sugarheel, an earnest but largely incompetent fellow who had been dragged out of some second-rate medical college and pressed into government service, suddenly appeared, squatting at Nathan's side. "That'll be one less to bawl and snuffle for his mama," the other man said.
Nathan reminded himself that he was here to attend the sick and injured, not to kill, then glared at Sugarheel. It galled him to ask an opinion of this crude oaf, but sometimes even idiots possessed insights that escaped other minds. "Look at these marks," he said, pointing to the boy's throat. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"
Sugarheel shrugged his shoulders, reaching into the torn blood-stained pocket of the dead lad's gray tunic. "Not as I recollect." He found a small tintype, probably intended for the soldier's mother or young bride, and ran a dirty thumb over the cracked glass while he pondered the already fading throat wounds. "Looks like something a snake would do."
"You're the only snake in the vicinity," Nathan pointed out impatiently, snatching the photograph in its blood-specked leather case from Sugarheel's grubby grasp. "Rustle up a couple of orderlies, and don't touch this boy's personal belongings again."
Sugarheel's expression was wry and defiant. "Most of these lads carry a paper with the name of their folks and such. I just wanted to make sure his kin got any valuables he might have."
Nathan felt a crushing weariness, deeper than physical exhaustion, something that lamed the spirit. "That's the chaplain's duty, not yours. Make no mistake, Doctor --- if I catch you stealing, be it from the quick or from the dead, I'll cut you open like a bloated cow and fill your guts with kerosene. Is that clear enough, or were there too many syllables for you?"
Hatred replaced the amusement in Sugarheel's narrow, pockmarked face, but he didn't respond. Instead he got to his feet and ambled off to fetch the requested orderlies.
Nathan rose a moment later, after silently bidding the fallen soldier Godspeed, and stumbled back to the soft mound, hoping to sleep again, knowing with despairing certainty that he would not.
The battle had ended days before, Nathan reminded himself as he moved among the wounded. The little church on the outskirts of town still brimmed with them, as did the whole town, and the graveyard had long since been filled. In many ways the aftermath was worse than the fighting itself, for there were no surges of adrenaline now, no stirring drumbeats, and certainly no talk of glory. This carnage around him, the crushed or sundered limbs, and the dysentery, this was the true nature of war.
A boy dying of gangrene clutched at Nathan's wrinkled shirt as he passed, grinding out a single word. "Doctor..."
Nathan braced himself, knowing the child-soldier was about to plead for something to kill the pain, and there was nothing left to give. The supply of morphine, inadequate in the first place, had been exhausted long before. "Yes, son," he said gruffly. "What is it?"
"Ah reckon the Lady will come for me tonight, as she came for those others Ah heard about," the lad said. Instead of desperation, Nathan saw hope in the youthful face, along with agony. "She'll take me to heaven."
Several moments passed before Nathan's suddenly constricted throat opened up again so he could speak. Three days had passed since he'd seen the beautiful specter, and every moment of that time he'd been telling himself she'd been a figment of his imagination. "The Lady," he said, somewhat stupidly.
The boy released his grip on Nathan's shirt. "You ever see her?"
Nathan sighed. He was on the verge of collapse as it was, and he didn't have the strength to lie. "I thought I did," he admitted. "What's your name, lad?"
"Phillips, sir. Private Charlie Phillips, Seventh South Carolina. Ah fell when the Yankees tried to take the crossroads." Again the boy grasped at Nathan, this time closing grubby fingers around his wrist. "You get them to take me outside and lay me in the sweet grass," he rasped. "They say she won't come inside the church --- that's mighty strange, for an angel, don't you figure? --- and Ah want her to take me."
Tears stung Nathan's eyes, and he looked away for a moment. Damn, but it still galled him that he couldn't save them all, every last one, instead of just a few lucky ones here and there. After all this time in medicine, first as a civilian and then as an army surgeon, he continued to find the reality nearly unbearable. "You seem to know a lot about this Lady," he said.
"She's about all anybody talks about," Phillips replied weakly. It was plain that he was barely holding on, and the stench of his infection came near to choking Nathan. "Will you get me outside, Doctor, so's she can find me?"
Nathan raised a hand and signaled for a pair of orderlies. They were actually ambulatory patients, these ready helpers, one of them hailing from New York City, the other from somewhere in the Alabama countryside. For them, the fighting was over; one of them would be sent home, with a permanently lame leg to continually remind him of his brush with glory, and one to a prison camp.
"This here is Private Charlie Phillips," Nathan performed the introductions with proper dignity, once the orderlies had reached his side. "He wants to see the blue sky when he looks up. Get a stretcher and find a place for him outside."
"Yes, suh," said the boy from Alabama. The lad from New York simply nodded rather than speak in his grating form of speech.
As gently as they could, the Confederate and the Yankee shifted Phillips onto a canvas stretcher stiff with dried blood and hauled him through the open doorway and down the steps. Nathan followed as far as the church porch and stood watching them, gripping the rail.
He should have been thinking about home, he supposed, or about those peaceful, idyllic days before war had torn the nation into two bleeding parts. Instead his mind was full of the mysterious woman he'd seen moving among the fallen soldiers three nights before. Had she been real? he wondered yet again. After all, he hadn't been the only one to see her --- she was the hope and comfort of many of the wounded, and their description of her matched the vision Nathan himself had glimpsed.
His hands tightened on the railing until the knuckles ached. The reasoning, scientific part of him said she could not be an angel or a ghost as the others believed. No, as beautiful and real as the Lady was, she was merely a projection of all their tormented brains --- his, those of the other doctors and orderlies, and, most of all, those of the dying patients themselves. The power generated by such grief and suffering had to be formidable.
Nathan watched as Phillips was carefully laid out on the grass, in a space left by a boy who'd passed on that morning, and found himself wishing with his whole heart that the Lady was real. Just then, he very much needed to believe in some benevolent force, however strange and inexplicable.
He got through the rest of that day by rote, and at sunset a messenger rode in, painted with dust and so weary he could barely sit his horse, bringing word that four doctors would arrive within the week to relieve Nathan Halder and the others.
The news filled Nathan with both relief and despair. He was mentally and physically exhausted; soon he would be of little or no use to the fallen soldiers around him. Still, he hated to leave them, and even more, he feared that he would never see the Lady again.
That night, while Nathan sat waiting, his back to a birch tree, she returned. It was about two in the morning, he reckoned, though he did not take out his pocket watch, and she went straight to Private Charlie Phillips of the Seventh South Carolina.
Nathan was fascinated, stricken by her beauty and her magic, unable to move from his post by the tree and approach her as he'd hoped to do. Instead, he simply watched, powerless and silent, while she smoothed back the dying child's rumpled, dirty hair and spoke softly to him.
As Nathan looked on, the lad raised his arms to her, like a babe reaching for its mother. She drew him close and held him tenderly, and for a moment Nathan believed she truly was an angel.
She rocked the boy against her bosom for a sweet, seemingly endless interval, then bared his fragile neck and buried her face there. Phillips shuddered in her arms and then went still, with that same trusting abandon in his bearing that Nathan had seen in the other soldier, the one she'd taken on her last visit. The Lady seemed to nuzzle him, and when she lifted her head, her gaze met Nathan's. Again, her eyes flashed silver with recognition.
He felt some kind of quaking, deep in his being, but even then he knew it stemmed from excitement, not fear. He willed her to come to him, and she did, gliding along with steps so smooth that she appeared to be floating.
When she stood only a few feet from him, her dark tresses tossing in the slow summer breeze, her pale skin bathed in moonlight, he believed in whatever she was, believed with the whole of his spirit.
"Who are you?" he managed to whisper after a long time. His voice was a raspy sound, scraping painfully at his throat.
She drew nearer, knelt beside him, and touched his hair. At first he thought she wasn't going to speak, because she was just a vision, after all, and therefore without a voice. Then she smiled, and Nathan felt a pinch in his defeated heart as she said, "What does it matter who --- or what --- I am?"
"It matters," he confirmed.
"Perhaps it does," she said. She reached up and pulled a comb out of her hair and put it into Nathan's hand. "Very well, then. I am quite real, and this shall be your proof."
"You truly are an angel," Nathan marveled hoarsely, looking at the mother-of-pearl comb in his hand.
She laughed softly. "No," she said. "My name is..." she hesitated briefly, "my name is mine, and I am quite another kind of specter." She searched his eyes for a long moment, an expression of infinite sadness in her face, and then lightly kissed his mouth.
He felt a surge of sensation, both physical and emotional, and was completely lost to her in the space of a single heartbeat. He groaned and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, she was gone.
Nathan was paralyzed for a time, full of confusion and wonder and a peculiar, spiraling joy, but when he could move, he groped for the comb. It was there in his hand, real and solid to the touch.
He caressed it, as though the object itself had the power to work magic in a word sorely in need of just that.
Nathan Halder was weary. He slumped down with his back against the birch tree and immediately tumbled headlong into a fathomless sleep, but after a little while he began to dream of Amelia. He saw the five-year-old chasing butterflies in a sun-spangled meadow, her laughter riding softly on the breeze.
He called to his child, shouted her name over and over again, but she couldn't hear him. It was as though an invisible wall stood between them, transparent, eternal, and utterly insurmountable.
Nathan sat bolt upright, prodded awake by a stabbing sense of grief, and felt the wetness of tears on his face. "Amelia," he whispered hoarsely.
"Your wife?" The Lady's soft voice did not startle him, even though he hadn't known she was there. She stepped out of the shadows to lay a cool hand on his forehead.
Nathan shook his head, full of a misery that was at once ancient and brand-new, and even though he suspected that the Lady knew all about Amelia, despite her question, he answered readily. "My daughter. She was five."
The Lady sat down on the grass beside him and gathered him close in her arms. He realized in that moment of bittersweet tenderness that she was everything to him --- goddess and lover and comforter --- and the weight of the love he bore her was terrifying.
"What happened?" she asked, although she knew all the secrets of his heart. He was aware that she had asked only because she knew he needed to answer it, and he loved her all the more for her charity of spirit.
"My wife, Theresa, fell in love with an old friend of mine and left Amelia and me behind. Secretly I blessed the bastard for stealing the woman before she drove me mad with her sniveling and her petty concerns, but Amelia was a child, hardly more than a baby, and she missed her mother." A memory came back to haunt Nathan then; he saw Amelia standing at one of the windows on either side of the door of the townhouse they'd rented in Atlanta, her face pressed to the glass, waiting for her mother to come back. "She was listless, Amelia was, as though her spirit was dying. She fell sick in the fall, and by Christmas she was consumed by fever. When the new year came, she was gone."
The Lady pressed her dry, smooth cheek against his damp, beard-roughened one. She didn't speak --- indeed there was no need for that, for Nathan knew her feelings as though they were his own.
He put his hands on either side of her smooth and unbearably beautiful face with those impossibly bright silver eyes.
She turned her head slightly and kissed the palm of his right hand. "Nathan. Nathan Halder," she murmured. Then, without another word, she rose, graceful and unhurried, and then vanished.
Nathan believed for a few moments that she wasn't real at all, that he had only dreamed her. He patted the pocket over his heart, and felt the reassuring presence of the mother-of-pearl comb. It was only in the morning when he realized that she had known his name although he had never told her.
- The Homecoming -
The Lady was rapidly becoming an obsession.
Nathan Halder thought of her constantly, the woman he knew only as 'the Lady.' He wondered who and where and indeed, what she was, and agonized over the distinct possibility that he would never see her again. Despite years of scientific training and a purely practical turn of mind, he felt certain she was not a mortal woman.
He fingered the comb she'd left in his keeping; he carried it next to his heart now, as faithfully as small children and elderly women wore religious medals. No, the mysterious Lady was not an ordinary human, but she had not been born in Nathan's imagination, either, as he had once feared. She was quite real, as real as this talisman she'd given him.
The war seemed to be a world away. He stretched in his hammock, which he'd suspended between two birch trees behind the summerhouse on his father's estate, out of sight of the great house. Hands cupped behind his head, Nathan reflected that it would be a mercy if he could just return to his work --- the local hospitals were overflowing with wounded soldiers and victims of the current typhoid epidemic --- but he had already pushed his normally sturdy body beyond its considerable limits. If he did not rest, he risked physical collapse, a state that would put him completely at his father's mercy.
Despite the leaden heat of that summer afternoon, Nathan shivered. He would get through his confinement, and that horrific war awaiting him just beyond the gates of the magnificent house like a sleek and violent beast, simply by living from one moment to the next.
And perhaps, if he'd done anything right in his life, anything deserving of a reward, he would see the Lady again and begin to learn her secrets.
Nathan Halder sat glumly in his father's august study, an overfull snifter of brandy close at hand, gazing out one of the windows overlooking the formal rose garden that had been his mother's pride. In one hand he fingered the comb the Lady had given him, as though it were a rosary instead of a simple mother-of-pearl comb.
Only a few feet away, in the carefully cultivated soil of the garden, the roses conducted a silent riot of color, their reds and pinks and yellows gaudy and rich in the afternoon sunlight. It seemed ironic to Nathan that such shameless beauty could exist in a world where young boys played soldier, blowing each other to shreds at the behest of generals and politicians and merchants and bankers.
"You needn't go back, you know." The voice came from the broad archway behind Nathan, the doorway leading into the main part of the house, and though it was unexpected, it did not startle him.
He did not turn to face his father, but instead closed his fingers tightly around the strange, simple comb. His inner organs seemed to stiffen as he bolstered himself against this quiet, ruthless man who had sired him.
"Do not suggest buying my way out of the Army again, sir," he warned, without turning his head. "I volunteered and I will serve my time."
Nathan could imagine William Halder's rage, as fathomless and cold as a well lined in slippery stones. "When will I understand you?" William asked, and the clink of crystal meeting crystal echoed in the muggy, ponderous room as he poured a drink of his own.
Nathan sighed but still did not turn his attention from the lush roses, which seemed to frolic even in the still air, like trollops in gaudy dresses. "Perhaps never," he replied. "We are too different from each other."
"Nonsense," blustered William, who preferred not to entertain realities that weren't to his liking. Robert, William's elder son and Nathan's half brother, looked and thought like their father and was a fawning sycophant in the bargain, but that apparently did not satisfy the old man. "Nonsense," William said again. "You are flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. We are more alike than you want to believe."
Suppressing a shudder at such a prospect, Nathan dropped the comb into the pocket of his starched linen shirt --- he had long since tossed aside his suit coat --- and summoned up a somewhat brittle smile. "Think what you wish, Father --- as you always do."
William was a portly man, with a wealth of white hair, a ruddy complexion, and shrewd blue eyes that were often narrowed to slits in concentration. Whatever his other faults, and they were many, his mental powers were formidable, and he could discern much that would escape a lesser mind.
"Surely you won't try to convince me that you --- even you, with your curious ideas of mercy --- actually want to go back to another of those damnable field hospitals. Good God, Nathan, the places have got to be horrible, beyond comprehension."
Nathan's broad shoulders sagged slightly. "They are," he confessed in a tone that betrayed more than he would have revealed by choice. He rubbed his temples with a thumb and forefinger, remembering the incessant screaming, the sound of saws gnawing at bone, the vile, smothering stenches.
William took a pensive sip of his brandy, looking out at his late wife's roses as though in fascination. Nathan knew the expression was deceptive; he would have wagered the last decade of his life that the older man didn't even see the blossoms. Finally, when he was damn good and ready, he spoke again.
"Why, then, do you insist on going back?" he asked, and for a moment the question seemed reasonable to Nathan, and he did not know how to answer. "Well?" William prompted him when an interval had passed. "Is it because you want so badly to spite me?"
Nathan sprang up from his chair, invigorated by a sudden rush of fury, and turned his back on the man who had sired him to gaze up at the woman in the portrait displayed above the mantelpiece. "Damn it, Father," he bit out after several seconds when he did not trust himself to speak, "when are you going to realize that the sun and the planets do not revolve around you?"
"When," William countered quietly, "are you going to realize that in throwing your life away like this you injure yourself far more grievously than you could ever hurt me?"
Slowly Nathan turned to face the other man. "I am not 'throwing my life away,' " he said coldly in measured tones. "I am a doctor, Father. Is there a more logical place for me to be than in the midst of suffering and pain?"
"Yes," William said with a patient sigh. "You could be a society doctor, like many of your schoolmates, and treat rich ladies with the vapors."
Again Nathan felt such contempt that he dared not speak. Instead he moved close enough to the place where he had been sitting to retrieve his half-finished brandy. He tossed back the contents of the snifter and felt the fire spread through his veins, the sudden, almost painful slackening of the muscles in his neck and shoulders.
"Nathan," William went ruthlessly on, his voice level and sensible like that of a snake charmer. "Listen to reason. I have friends who can arrange an honorable discharge. You can spend the rest of the war in Europe if that's what you want, learning those new surgical techniques you're forever yammering about."
Nathan closed his eyes, shaken and shamed. A part of him wanted to do just as his father urged, to flee the carnage plaguing his own continent and lose himself in the knowledge he craved, to pretend there was no unnecessary pain in the world, no savagery.
"No one would blame you," William pressed, probably sensing his advantage.
Nathan came back to himself in a flash of conviction, and hurled his empty snifter against the polished black marble of the fireplace. The crystal shattered into thousands of glittering shards, and he wondered if that was not how God must see his creation: as broken, shining bits of something originally meant to be beautiful. "I would blame me," he said softly.
William sighed again. "Would that your sainted mother, God rest her soul, had taken her stubbornness to the grave with her," he said, "rather than leaving it in your keeping."
Nathan said nothing. He was, in fact, already looking toward the doorway, yearning to be away.
As had ever been, William did not seem to know when to quit. "If you will not put the war behind you for your own sake," he said, "then do so for mine. I need you here, under this roof."
"You have Robert," Nathan replied, unmoved.
William offered no comment on that statement; he could not fault his elder son without faulting himself, for they shared the same thoughts and feelings and opinions. "Why in the name of heaven do you hate me so much?" he asked. "You have never been abused, and you have lacked for nothing. I saw that you had the finest possible education, even when you insisted on wasting that marvelous mind of yours on ordinary medicine. Tell me --- I think I deserve to know --- why is it that you have chafed and strained against me from the time you learned to grip the rail of your baby bed and hold yourself upright?"
Nathan raised his eyes to the lovely, guileless face in the portrait over the mantel, the face of his mother. Somewhere deep in his mind her sweet voice echoed, shaping the words of some silly lullaby. Finally he turned to William. "I don't hate you," he said. "I cannot spare the energy hatred demands."
"But you do not love me, either. You never have."
"Wrong," Nathan said in a low, insolent voice. "She loved you once," he gestured toward the painting that dominated the room, "and so did I. Until I saw that you were destroying her with your polite cruelties and gentle betrayals."
William threw up his hands, then let them slap to his sides in frustration. His face was redder than usual, and the white line edging his mouth gave evidence that he was shocked as well as infuriated. "Great Scot," he whispered. "After all this time, are you telling me that you have scorned my every effort to be a father to you because of a few fancy women?"
"She thought you loved her," Nathan said, looking up at his mother's face, feeling again the terrible helplessness and despair he'd known as a small child. She'd wept over her errant husband, the beautiful, naïve Catherine Callaghan Halder, until Nathan had thought his own heart would break. And in the end her abiding grief had caused her death.
"Catherine was weak," came a third voice from the inner doorway.
Nathan's gaze shot to his half brother, who was fifteen years his senior. Robert may have been a comfort to Catherine, even a friend, for he'd been quite near her own age; instead, he had tormented her for taking his dead mother's place in that yawning tomb of a house.
A charge moved in the room, a silent crackling, nearly visible due to its sheer strength.
"Do not tempt me to do you harm, brother," Nathan said to Robert. "The pleasure of the prospect is very nearly more than I can resist."
Robert, who would look exactly like William in another thirty years, started to speak and then wisely restrained himself.
Nathan pushed past him to enter the wide hallway beyond.
William shouted his name, but Nathan did not turn back. Instead he kept walking, his strides long, until he was far from the great house and the others who lived beneath its heavy slate roof.
- The Death of the Patriarch -
It was late in the afternoon three days later when Nathan Halder at last returned to his father's house, having spent the intervening time with an old friend from school. He stood in the yard, gazing up at the fine stained-glass window that had once graced a medieval cathedral. With a shrug of his shoulders, he went to the front door and went in.
He was met by Robert as soon as he had crossed the foyer. "Where the hell have you been?" his brother snarled, gripping Nathan's shirtfront in clenched fists.
Nathan threw Robert's hands off. "What the devil do you care?" he countered, just as furiously.
Robert paled, but with fury not fear. He knew, in some part of his withered little soul, that Nathan would never do him actual physical harm, because it would have been a violation of his personal code of honor. "It's Father," he said. "He's taken sick, and the doctor says he's dying. He's been asking for you, though I can't think why he'd make the effort. He must know, as I do, that you don't give a damn about him now any more than you ever have!"
Nathan had believed himself to be utterly without sentiment where his father was concerned, but this news shook him, distracted him from the mysteries of the Lady. "Is he here, or did you have him taken to a hospital?" he snapped, already backing out the door.
"Father would never set foot in a hospital," Robert snapped back. "Besides, there isn't a bed to be had because of this damn war. You ought to know that better than anyone."
Nathan ignored his half brother, wrenched open the door again, and strode up the staircase and down the hallway to his father's bedroom. He found the old man sitting up, though he looked smaller, as the dying often do, as if his body were crumbling in upon itself.
William held out one hand imploringly and croaked Nathan's name.
Nathan realized, with shattering suddenness, that the little boy who had loved and idolized his father still lived, tucked away in some part of his psyche. His own caring struck him with the force of a meteor, and tears sprang to his eyes. "Papa," he said, clasping the offered hand in both his own and brushing his lips once across the knuckles. He started to pull away. "I'll get my bag..."
"No," William protested. "Don't... go. I want you to listen. I'm sorry, Nathan, so sorry... for all the things I did and... all the things I should have done... and didn't. I loved you, and... I loved your mother. But I didn't have your strength... none of us did. Not your mother... not Theresa or Amelia... not Robert. You were always so... impatient, so intolerant."
Nathan's shoulders heaved as grief assailed him. A sob tore itself from his throat. It seemed to Nathan that his half brother's voice came through a pipe or tunnel, from somewhere far off. "Don't try to talk."
"I've made my peace with you, Robert," William said quite clearly. "Go now, and let me do the same with your brother."
Nathan sat down on the edge of William's deathbed, still too overcome to utter any of the words that crowded his heart and throbbed in his throat.
His father spread one surprisingly strong hand behind his son's head and pressed him close, into his shoulder. "Forgive me," he pleaded again. "Forgive me for not being the man you are."
In the next moment Nathan felt the old man's spirit leave his body like warm vapor rising into the air. It was as simple --- and as complex --- as that, and having witnessed the phenomenon a hundred times before did nothing to lessen its impact.
He drew back, looked into the familiar face, and saw empty, staring eyes. Gently, with practiced fingers, Nathan lowered his father's eyelids.
Regret filled him, regret that he had waited so long to face and accept the love he'd always borne for this man. He sat there for a long while, keeping a lonely vigil, and only when Prudence, the family's longtime housekeeper, came in, sometime later, did Nathan stand and move to the window where he stood staring out at the moonlit courtyard below.
"He's gone," he said quietly.
Prudence wept and wailed and began to pray, and it seemed to Nathan that, for all her noisy suffering, she was better off than he was. She knew how to release her emotions, at least, while he'd carried his own around like the carcass of an albatross.
"You made his life miserable, you know," Robert said in a wooden voice as he and Nathan stood in the formal parlor that morning. The undertaker and his assistant were upstairs, in their father's room, preparing the old man for viewing and subsequent burial.
Nathan was still dazed, by the death of his sire, and the realization that he had indeed loved William Halder, faults and all, despite his own utter conviction to the contrary. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. "Spare me the discourse on my shortcomings as a son," he said wearily, looking out the window. "I'm well aware, believe me, that I might have been a little more tolerant."
"'A little more tolerant'?" Robert said furiously. The last time Nathan had glanced in his direction, his half brother had been standing next to the mantle, brooding over a glass of bourbon. "You crucified him daily with your damnable contempt, your self-righteous assumption that he didn't want to be better than he was. The man craved your respect and affection, God help him, every day of your life, and you withheld those very things!"
Nathan closed his eyes tightly, for nothing possessed the power to wound quite so deeply as the truth. While he regretted some of the choices he'd made, and bitterly, he'd dance with the devil before apologizing to Robert. "Are you through?" he inquired with biting politeness.
He heard the musical explosion of glass shattering against stone and turned at last to see that Robert had flung his drink onto the hearth. "No, God damn you, I am not through! My father is dead, and his suffering was compounded by your arrogance and insensitivity!"
"What do you expect me to do?" Nathan asked reasonably, his voice as cold as his manner. "Resurrect him? Turn back the clock to the time he was driving my mother to despair, perhaps, and decide that it was all right for him to break her heart with his women? Declare that, after all, 'boys will be boys'?"
Robert's handsome if faintly ineffectual face went ruddy with anger. "You bastard! I want you to say you're sorry."
"Apologize to you?" Nathan rubbed his chin, which was stubbly with a day's beard-growth. "Never. I've done you no wrong, Robert."
Robert's features contorted. "Haven't you? That's my father lying up there with embalming fluid in his veins! If it hadn't been for you, he might still be alive!"
"I won't take the blame for his death," Nathan replied. He came down with a fever and couldn't rally his strength. I had no part in that."
"You robbed him of his strength!" Robert insisted, and Nathan began to fear that if his half brother did not contain his temper, he would burst a blood vessel. "Papa expended all of it, worrying that you had finally vanished forever. He might have used that fervor to cling to life!"
Nathan shook his head and sighed, too weary and too stricken to be diplomatic. "Damn it, Robert, open your eyes --- you just accused Father of wasting energy, yet your hatred for me and your petty jealousy are eating you alive!"
Robert turned away then, lowered his head onto the arm he'd braced against the mantel, and gave a choked sob.
Nathan started toward him, realized there was nothing he could say that would give the other man comfort, and stopped himself. Nothing less than his younger brother's complete humiliation would satisfy Robert, and Nathan wasn't willing to supply that.
Prudence rushed in just then, eyes swollen from weeping, carrying a broom and dustpan. She glared accusingly at Nathan and Robert in turn, and bent to sweep up the shards of glass littering the hearth. "Land sakes," she huffed. "A body'd think you two could keep civil tongues in yor heads at a time like dis, but no --- here you is, bellowin' at each other --- an' wid a dead man in de house, too."
Robert lifted his head, seething with abhorrence, and flung a scalding stare in Nathan's direction, at the same time straightening his perfectly tailored coat. If he'd heard Prudence's admonition, or even taken note of her presence, he gave no indication. "You've destroyed the entire family," he said. "How I wish your whore of a mother had died before ever giving birth to you!"
Nathan took a step toward his brother, his voice deceptively quiet. "I know you're suffering, Robert, and I'll abide your insults because of that. If you value your hide, however, you will not speak of my mother again, except in the politest of terms. Do you understand me, sir?" The last word dripped with sarcasm.
Prudence stepped between the two of them, her great, warm girth quivering with outrage, a dustpan full of broken crystal in one hand and a broom in the other. "If Ah has to take a buggy whip to the both of you so's you'll behave respectful-like, dat's just what Ah'll do! Dis ain't no time to be workin' out your brother troubles."
Despite Prudence's words, which made a great deal of sense, Nathan still wanted to slam his fist into Robert's smug, haughty face, and he expected that his half brother was thinking similar thoughts about him. He breathed deeply, purposely relaxed his hands, and turned away, intending to return to the window and his private musings.
Robert made that impossible by spitting defiantly, "Stay out of this, old woman. This is my house now, and I'll speak to his bitch's whelp in any way I choose."
Nathan crossed the space that separated him from his sibling in two strides. Ignoring Prudence's fluttering fury, he grasped the lapels of Robert's suit coat and hoisted him onto the balls of his feet. "Nothing will appease you but an opportunity to draw my blood, it would seem, Brother," he hissed. "Well, then, so be it." He flung the older man free, and Robert scrambled, his face purple with anger, to keep from losing his balance. "We'll settle this out back," Nathan finished.
Robert nodded, spun on his heel, and headed for the door. Nathan was right behind him, but Prudence waylaid him by gripping his elbow, with surprising strength, in one large black hand. "Dat man up dere don't deserve to have his only sons brawlin' in de backyard like a pair o' drunken field hands, no matter what his failin's might have been!"
Nathan's head felt light, and he saw the familiar parlor and the woman who had comforted him from childhood through a shifting haze of red. "On the contrary," he rasped, "my father pitted Robert and me against each other from the first." He wrenched his elbow free of Prudence's grasp. "This is exactly what dear Papa always wanted, to see the two of us fight like roosters until one left the other bleeding in the dust. And you know it as well as I do."
Great tears welled in Prudence's eyes. "Don't do dis," she pleaded. "Masser Rober's hurtin' somethin' terrible, him bein' so close to your papa, and he ain't right in de head."
Nathan shoved splayed fingers through his rumpled hair. "I'm sorry, Pru," he said gruffly. "I would do anything in the world for you, you know that, anything except run from my brother."
He heard Prudence weeping as he moved along the hallway leading to the rear of the house and the yard beyond it.
Robert was standing in front of the summerhouse, waiting, his jaw hard with conviction, his eyes flashing. He'd already taken off his coat, draping it neatly over the back of a wrought iron bench, and was in the process of rolling up his sleeves. "I half expected you to disappear again, little brother," he taunted.
Nathan wore no coat, and no gold links bound his cuffs to his wrists. He pushed up his shirtsleeves, one at a time, ashamed of the wicked joy he felt at the prospect of doubling up his fists and pummeling Robert into a whimpering pulp. "You knew better," he said with a grim smile. "Of course, you can still save your worthless ass by taking back every rotten thing you've ever said about my mother. If you don't, I'm going to stuff parts of you down every gopher hole on this property."
Robert faltered slightly, but didn't relent. On the contrary, he poured salt into raw, gaping wounds. "Did you know she ran away with another man, the night she died, your sainted mamma, just the way your wife did years later?"
Nathan felt cold and sick, as though some evil creature, some dragon of the invisible realms, had opened its mouth and spewed forth its vile, frigid breath. "Enough," he said, all but strangling on that single word.
His half brother smiled, resting his pale clerk's hands on his hips. "Oh, no, Nathan," he said. "That wasn't nearly enough. You're going to hear the truth about your mother, the beautiful Catherine, at long last. She was leaving Papa the night she died in that carriage accident, running away with a lover, just the way your wife left you. And, just like Theresa, Catherine was abandoning her child as well. She didn't want you, Nathan."
Nathan laughed, actually laughed, though bile scalded the back of his throat and he really believed, in that moment, that he could kill his half brother without compunction. "You're lying, about all of it," he said. "My mother died of a fever. And she would never have abandoned me --- never. If you're looking for a way to make my blood boil, brother, you'll have to do better than that."
Robert made a contemptuous sound. "Fool. They brought Catherine home after the accident, and she never regained consciousness. Papa only told you she was suffering from a fever to save your precious feelings --- ask old Dr. Blanchard if you don't believe me. She'd broken every fragile bone in her body in the wreck, and they carried her back here to die. The truth was, she'd been whoring with some second cousin of hers. They'd conceived a bastard, Catherine and her sweetheart --- she lost the poor little creature, of course, only hours before she passed on." He sighed philosophically. "That was for the best, no doubt."
Nathan's knees felt weak. In his mind he heard Catherine Halder's lilting voice singing a lullaby, felt her hands tucking the blankets in around him, knew again the brush of her lips across his forehead. "You're a liar," he said.
Robert went on as though Nathan hadn't spoken. "Personally, I've always wondered if you weren't the by-blow of one of Catherine's many admirers," he said. "Papa was in his late forties, and he hadn't sired a second child by my mother or, to my knowledge, any of the paramours that came later."
Because Robert's assertions challenged some of his most basic beliefs about himself, because he sensed a grain of truth in them, Nathan was shattered. "Suppose you're right," he said in a low, raw tone of voice. "Let's assume my mother was indeed a tramp, and I was sired by one of her lovers. Why did you wait until now to say these things, when you've obviously hated me for so many years?"
Robert indulged in a slow smile, even though he had to know he was about to take a trouncing from a younger, stronger man. "Papa wanted to pretend you were his. You were everything he would have asked for in a son, you see. Isn't that ironic? You, Nathan, were the prodigal, always running off to some far country, or landing yourself in the middle of this damnable war. You tormented him, and he loved you for it, cherished you for it." He paused, took a deep breath, and tilted his head back to search the azure sky for a few moments. "Obviously I couldn't tell you the truth. I would have been disinherited for my trouble."
Nathan ran a hand over his face. The fight had not even begun, and Robert had already defeated him, already broken him. "Can you prove any of this?"
"Of course I can --- if I hadn't, you would be able to discount everything I've said on grounds of petty jealousy and spite. I have letters addressed to the lovely Catherine, as well as some she'd written herself but never had a chance to post."
"I want to see them," Nathan said. He was reeling inwardly, fighting for balance. He turned and moved away, toward the house.
Robert would not leave matters at that. Instead he came after Nathan, grabbed him by one shoulder, whirled him around so that they stood face to face.
"You've already won," Nathan said grimly, shoving a hand through his hair again. "What more do you want?"
Robert didn't bother to answer, he just flung his right fist at Nathan, who saw the blow coming and blocked it by raising one arm. He was baffled, for a few moments at least, by his brother's insistence on provoking him, for this was truly a fight Robert couldn't win. Then, in a blaze of revelation, Nathan realized that Robert wanted the pain, needed it to expunge demons of his own.
Closing his hand, Nathan brought his knuckles up hard under Robert's chin. The punch connected; Robert's teeth slammed together and a tiny bubble of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
"Is that enough?" Nathan demanded, clenching his teeth. He almost missed the uncontainable anger he'd felt only minutes before; now he was numb. There was no fury inside him, no joy or sorrow. Nothing. "Or do I have to beat you senseless?"
Robert threw another punch, and this one was more accurate. He caught Nathan square in the center of his solar plexus, forcing the air from his lungs.
Adrenaline surged through Nathan's system, though his emotions were as dead as the man who had sired him. He hurtled into Robert headfirst, as he'd done many times as a boy, when his brother had tormented him until he lost control. The difference was, Robert was no longer bigger and stronger than Nathan.
The conflict continued from there, fairly equal at first, and Nathan reveled in it. He got as much pleasure, in fact, from taking punches as he did from throwing them. While the battle raged, he did not have to think about the impossible, fantastical situation with the Lady, the loss of a father he had not known he loved, and now this second, and somehow more wrenching, forfeiture of a mother he had adored.
Finally, his own face bloody and his knuckles bruised, Nathan sent Robert to the ground with a right cross, and Robert did not rise. He half lay, half sat, one shoulder braced against the edge of a garden bench, breathing hard and deep. His eyes were blackened and nearly swollen shut, and yet there was an expression of redemptive bliss on his face that made Nathan want to tie into him all over again.
Instead, he turned and stumbled toward the house.
The undertaker and his helpers had brought William's body downstairs by that time; he was to lie in state the next morning, when there would be a formal ceremony, followed, of course, by the burial.
Capshaw, the mortician, assessed Nathan's rumpled, grass-stained clothes and bleeding face with undisguised disdain. He and the old man had played poker together, among other things, and there had been a certain grudging friendship between them. "You haven't changed," he said, reaching into the fancy mahogany coffin his helpers had brought in to straighten William's ascot.
Nathan forced himself to the side of the long library table that had been moved into the parlor to support the casket and the sizable man reposing inside. He curled his fingers around the side of the coffin, heedless of the small bloodstains he left on the white satin lining, and stared down into the pale, still face of his father.
Or the man he had always believed was his father.
"Was my mother leaving him, the night she died?" he asked, mindful of the words only after they had left his mouth. It was a question Capshaw might well have the answer to, since he was close to the family and had probably prepared Catherine Halder's broken body for the grave.
The undertaker cleared his throat. "This is no time to be discussing..."
Nathan raised his eyes, locked his gaze with the other man's "Damn you, just tell me," he rasped.
"Yes." Capshaw sighed the single word, sending it out of his mouth on a rush of air. "Yes, Catherine was leaving William. And don't devil me about it, Nathan, because that's all I'm going to say. Perhaps you don't have any respect for the dead --- perhaps you've become hardened to it, seeing so much destruction on the battlefields --- but I do. William was a good friend to me, and I won't see his death turned into a parlor theatrical!"
Nathan studied his father's cold, marblelike features, as if expecting to see some answer written there. Then he turned and moved away, walking slowly, like a man entranced, toward the main staircase.
He took refuge not in his room, but in the nursery where he had slept and played as child. It had been kept much as it was, in the hope, Nathan supposed, that there would be other children after the disastrous loss of Amelia.
One of her dolls was still seated in a miniature rocker next to the fireplace, as if waiting for the little girl to come back and claim it. Nathan touched the toy as reverently as if it were some holy object, a belonging of Saint Paul or even Jesus Christ, then wrenched his hand back.
He'd lost everything, he realized. The Lady. His child, his father, his illusions that there had been one person in his life --- Catherine --- who had loved him selflessly, eve his own identity. Nathan no longer knew who he was.
It would have been a mercy if he'd been able to weep then, or curse the heavens, but he was still without feeling. His was a dead soul, entombed in living flesh.
Presently Nathan returned to his own room.
He wasn't surprised to find a packet of letters resting on his bedside table, tied with a faded ribbon. Beneath them were a few miscellaneous pages of expensive vellum, still faintly scented with his mother's perfume, their edges crumbling with age.
He left them long enough to go to the washstand and cleanse the blood and dirt from his face and hands. Then he carried the letters to a chair near the window and hunched there, stretching out his long legs, to read.
The loose pages told him all he needed to know; Catherine Halder had indeed been leaving her husband for a lover, and she made no mention of her son.
Doubtless, he'd been nothing more to her than an inconvenience, despite the soft lullabies he remembered, the gentle nurturing, the tender words. Had Catherine lived, then he, Nathan, would have been as bereft as his own child was, years later, when Theresa abandoned her.
He laid the letters aside, closing his eyes, willing the Lady to come to him, willing her to be real, to take him away from this world, a world in which he no longer had a part.
- The Visitor in the Night -
Somehow Nathan Halder passed the night without awakening Robert and throttling him. Nor did he himself awaken when a dark shadow appeared at his bedside, bending down, laying a hand on his forehead and whispering in low tones into his ear.
He stirred and awoke, gradually becoming aware of the presence of the Lady. "Have... have you come to take me, Lady?" he asked.
She drew back, smiling and shaking her lovely head, like a mischievous nymph bent on luring him into some enchanted place. She kept her distance, watching him with those magical silvery eyes, before moving in closer. He tried to reach for her, to touch her, yet his arms wouldn't move.
He began to feel the lightest of caresses. It seemed to him that fingertips brushed the sensitive places beneath one of his ears, made circles around his nipples, whisked ever so slightly across his mouth.
He moaned and tried to reach for her again, but again he was unable to do so. In the next instant he began to feel her touch in more intimate places, across his belly, the small of his back, along the insides of his thighs.
Nathan gasped with pleasure, but she silenced him with a soft "Shhh" and proceeded to tease the length of his shaft. He was completely in her power then, as effectively restrained by his own desire as he might have been by iron manacles.
He was not aware of his clothes being removed --- they seemed to melt away like thin ice under a spring sun --- and not only was his body bared to her attentions, but his soul as well.
He whispered an exclamation, a plea, and then felt her touching him everywhere, inside and out, even though he still couldn't reach her. Her mouth drew at his nipples, not one, but both, warm and wet and greedy. At the same time, impossible though it was, her tongue traveled the length of his shaft and teased the tip until he cried out in a ragged, glorious, despairing voice.
At last she moved closer, her clothes seeming to magically disappear as his had. She then allowed his hands to touch her, surrendering herself completely to him. He turned her gently onto her back, this impossibly beautiful angel, and gripped her wrists, pressing her hands gently to the bed, just above her head. Then he mounted her, and she parted her silken thighs slightly, her silver eyes glittering in the darkness.
He glided inside her with one long stroke. Within moments they were both wild with passion, rolling over the wide bed, first one taking command, and then the other.
After that, he was hers completely. She was a gentle but relentless conqueror, having him thoroughly, again and again, until it all culminated in one cataclysmic, soul-rendering release.
He awoke confused and uncertain whether the Lady had truly visited him in the night.
With the morning came a drizzling rain and a steady stream of visitors. Like crows in their black garb, the mourners passed by the casket single file, peering inside to see how death suited William Halder.
All morning and all afternoon they came, the grieving, the curious, the indifferent, the relieved, and the secretly pleased. They ate hungrily of the food Prudence and her small staff had prepared, and speculated among themselves about Robert and Nathan and the bruised state of their faces.
Nathan hated every moment of that interminable day and dreaded the one to follow, for that would bring the funeral, the eulogies, the grim and final business of burial. To him, the world looked dark, and it was difficult to believe that the sun would ever shine again.
After the last of the sorrowful callers had left, the two half brothers accidentally found themselves alone in the large dining room. Robert took a piece of smoked turkey from a platter and bit into it, regarding Nathan through swollen eyes. "We'll have the reading of the will tomorrow, after the ceremonies," the elder brother announced, reaching for another piece of meat.
Nathan shrugged his shoulder. "I don't give a damn about that," he said.
"Good," Robert replied. "Papa was closeted away for hours one day, just last month, with his laywers. I recall that he was especially exasperated with you at that time, so don't be surprised if you find yourself in the street, with nothing to live on but that pitiful stipend the army pays you."
Although Nathan's stomach rebelled at the very sight of food, he knew only too well that he would not be able to think clearly or function well in an emergency if he did not eat. He went to the long table, against his will, and filled a plate, taking slices of turkey and ham, some potato salad, and a serving of Prudence's famous fruit compote. Then, by a deft motion of one foot, learned in boyhood, he drew back a chair.
He paused for a few moments, regarding the food he'd taken. As he took up his food, Nathan raised his eyes to Robert's face. "Take it all," he said, only a little surprised to realize that he meant it. "Take the money, take this goddamned mausoleum of a house, take the illustrious Halder name and the power that goes with it."
Robert blanched, his fingers tightening over the back of a chair. Plainly he hadn't been expecting Nathan's acquiescence, but another fight instead. "You can't be serious," he said.
Nathan ate a few bites of ham, chewing each one thoroughly, before answering. "You murdered my mother," he said at last. "And that old man lying in there with his eyelids stitched together covered up for you. As far as I'm concerned, if I never see you or this place again, it will be too soon."
Sweat beaded on Robert's upper lip. "I killed Catherine? Where did you get such an idea?" he demanded hoarsely, pulling back a chair of his own and collapsing into it. "And why is that you can't speak of our father with some semblance of respect, even now?"
"I loved him," Nathan conceded. "But respect is another thing. As for my mother's death... well... Let's just say I now know the truth."
Robert's hand trembled visibly as he reached for a carafe of Madeira and then a wineglass. "I didn't lay a hand on her," he said.
"You're a liar," Nathan replied, still eating. He knew his calm manner was unnerving his brother, and he was pleased by the fact. "She was going to leave this house and our esteemed father, and you intercepted her. There was an argument, and you gripped her by the shoulders. She struggled, and you wouldn't release her --- until you thrust her away from you in a moment of fury. That was when she tumbled backward over the railing and fell twenty feet to the floor of the foyer."
Robert had managed to pour wine, but his subsequent attempts to raise the glass to his white lips failed because he was shaking. "Pure fantasy," he managed to get out at last.
Nathan stared at him for a long, purposely disconcerting interval. "It happened just that way," he insisted quietly, "and we both know it. Kindly don't insult me with your denials."
After casting a yearning look at his wine, Robert wiped one forearm across his mouth. "If you really believe this... this delusion, when why haven't you tried to avenge Catherine's death?"
Nathan smiled grimly. "There has hardly been time for that," he said indulgently. "Still, we're young, you and I," he added with a shrug of his shoulders. "There's no rush."
At last Robert made a successful grab for his glass and raised it tremulously to his lips. After a few audible gulps, his color began to return, and he was steadier. "Is that a threat?"
Again, Nathan shrugged his shoulders, reaching for a platter and helping himself to some of Prudence's cold rice salad. "It might be. Then again, it might not. To be quite frank, I haven't decided how I'll deal with you." He chewed thoughtfully for a few moments, swallowed, and then gestured at William with an offhanded motion of his fork. "Rest assured, though, that I will deal with you."
Robert swallowed the rest of the wine and reached for the carafe while he could. "You don't scare me," he said, though his manner and the pallor of his complexion gave the lie to his words.
Nathan smiled again and finished eating. Rising, he strode out of the room.
Instead of climbing the stairs, however, he stopped in the massive foyer and remembered the dream the previous night. He stood on the exact spot where his mother's shattered body had struck the cold, hard floor. As he looked up at the rail of the highest landing, he imagined the whole terrible scenario, assimilating the fear that his mother must have felt as she fell, the blinding pain that would have assailed her at impact.
Let it be over now, a voice said inside his head. Forgive your father and brother and go on.
Forgive them? another voice answered. That would mean saying they were right in what they did!
Wearily, torn between conflicting emotions, he went up the stairs to his room.
Morning took Nathan Halder by surprise. By rote, Nathan Halder washed and dressed and went downstairs to the dining room, but even as he filled his plate at the sideboard and went to the table, his thoughts were muddled. He was not aware of Robert's presence until his brother spoke.
"Nathan."
Robert had taken a seat at the head of the table, but he wasn't taking breakfast. A hot cup of coffee steamed before him, and he poured rum into the brew as Nathan looked at him in cold silence.
Robert was flushed now, his eyes feverishly bright, like those of an animal approaching the last stages of rabies. "I think you should go away," he said. "To Europe, perhaps, or maybe out West. I'm sure Papa left you enough money to make a new start."
Nathan pushed back his chair, dropped his fork to his china plate with a deliberate clatter, and stood. "You've waxed generous, all of a sudden, even reasonable. Why is that, Robert?"
His brother started to answer, choked on his own words, and began again. "I want to be fair, that's all."
"You want to be fair," Nathan repeated softly in a marveling tone. "Of course you do. And Mr. Lincoln wants to hand all of the North to General Lee, tied with bunting." His voice hardened. "Damn it, do you take me for a fool? You'd murder me in my sleep if you thought you could get away with it!"
Robert closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and swayed in his chair. He didn't speak again as Nathan turned and strode out of the room.
Nathan Halder stirred uncomfortably in his sleep, dreaming again of a night nearly a quarter of a century before. In that dream --- which he'd first had the previous night --- he was six years old again, and his mother was still alive, sitting on the edge of his bed, stroking his hair with a gentle hand, saying her tearful farewells.
The he had once been opened his eyes, something Nathan had not done in reality, and reached up to wrap his arms around Catherine's neck. "Good bye, Mama," he said into the fragrant softness of her neck.
She embraced him, this other Catherine, and he felt her tears on his face. Then she stood and walked toward the open doorway, never looking back, yet not seeming to see the young, dangerously passionate Robert hovering ahead of her. Waiting.
Nathan, still wrapped in the dream, thrust himself out of bed and ran into the hallway. He'd screamed a warning, putting all his strength into the effort, but not a sound had come from his throat.
He watch, in horror, as Robert and Catherine argued, saw his half brother grab his mother by the shoulders and shake her, heard his father's stern order to let her go. Then, cold as a corpse, paralyzed with fear, Nathan had watched as Catherine tumbled over the stair rail.
It was torment enough, seeing that horrid spectacle once, but the scene kept repeating itself, over and over again, with a slow, macabre pace.
Nathan thrust himself back to the surface of consciousness, unable to bear it any longer, only to feel his heart lurch at the sight awaiting him.
Robert was standing at the foot of the bed, hardly more than a shadow in the thick darkness, so still that he might have been part of the furniture. As Nathan stared him, still half asleep, still half entangled in his nightmare, the clouds that must have covered the moon moved on, flooding the room with an eerie silver light.
A fragment of that light caught on the nickel-blue barrel of the dueling pistol clasped in Robert's right hand.
"I'll say you were killed by robbers," he said in an odd, strained voice, "deserters who broke in looking for gold and whiskey. Everyone will be me, just like before."
Nathan dared not move, either slowly or suddenly. "Put down the gun," he said in a low, even voice. "They won't believe you, Robert. This is murder, and you'll surely hang for it."
He might not have spoken for all the response he received.
"I hope you burn in hell," Robert said, and then light blazed from the pistol's barrel. There was an explosion, though Nathan couldn't tell whether it had come from within himself or outside, and then there was only darkness.
Robert watched dispassionately as Nathan sank back against his pillows, a strangled, gurgling sound coming from somewhere deep inside him. In the moonlight Robert made out the torn place just below Nathan's right nipple, and saw the matting of dark chest hair turn slick and crimson with blood.
The elder brother moved to turn up the lights, the dueling pistol dangling from his left hand now, resting hot against his thigh, burning right through his trouser leg.
There were murmurings in the hallway, and sounds of rushing this way and that, but Robert felt no urgency, no fear. Smiling grimly, he drew up a chair next to Nathan's bed and sat down to watch him die.
The world, he told himself, would be better off without the likes of Nathan Halder --- if indeed he was entitled to the surname at all --- just as it was better off without tramps like Catherine.
Nathan was unconscious, but even then he struggled, and a muscle in Robert's jaw tightened. Perhaps, he reflected coolly, it would be necessary to reload the pistol and fire a second bullet. This time the barrel would be pressed to Nathan's throbbing temple."
"Lady," Nathan choked, though he had not roused. "Lady..."
The bedclothes were sodden with blood now, Robert noted with satisfaction. Surely no one could lose so much blood and still live.
He settled back in his chair, undisturbed by the continued noises beyond Nathan's bedroom door. It might as well have been another country, another continent, that hallway. Another world.
Robert relaxed, stretching out his legs and crossing his booted feet. "I don't suppose anyone will believe that story I made up about robbers," he mused aloud, half to himself and half to Nathan.
Just then Prudence burst in, massive in her nightdress and wrapper. "What happen' in here..." she began, but then her eyes found Nathan, and she gave a weeping scream and trundled to his bedside. "Sweet Jesus in heaven, you done shot him!" she cried. "You done murdered yor own brother..."
Robert sighed as Prudence tried to staunch Nathan's blood-flow with a corner of her wrapper. She was wailing in despair all the while, and when a cluster of other servants jammed into the doorway to gawk, she shouted for someone to get a doctor, and after that a constable.
Meanwhile a storm was rising outside, the clouds blocked the moon, and the wind rattled the sturdy leaded windows in their frames.
"I did the right thing by killing him, Prudence," Robert said calmly. "He's a bad seed --- evil, just like his mama was. You'll come to see that, all in good time."
Prudence left her patient long enough to round the bed and snatch the dueling pistol from Robert's limp grasp. "You gone crazy, dat's what," the housekeeper said wetly. "You gone plump out o' yor mind!"
She stormed back to Nathan and laid the dueling pistol on the other nightstand.
"What made you do such a thin', Masser Rober'? Ain't dere been enough grief and sufferin' in dis house o'er de years?"
Robert didn't mind answering the question. In fact, he was certain that, once he had, no further explanations would be required of him. He looked at Nathan, whose flesh was pallorous and gray --- except, of course, where the blood soaked him --- and he could not disguise the hatred he felt.
"I stayed here, all those years, and learned the banking business. I did what Papa wanted, always. I put aside my own wishes, my own dreams, to honor his." Robert felt his very soul contort within him; it was an ugly pain. "Nathan here was the prodigal, fancy free, and his briefest appearance in this house was cause for killing the fatted calf. Still, fool that I was, I believe Papa appreciated my sacrifices, that someday I would be rewarded for my loyalty. And what happened? Papa left everything to Nathan --- the house, the bank, the fortunes we made together. All of it was Nathan's, except, of course, for a pittance of an income earmarked for me."
"Dear Jesus, save us," Prudence muttered. She'd taken off the wrapper now and made a bandage of sorts, but Robert knew her efforts were hopeless. The white flannel she pressed to the wound was already turning scarlet. "You had no call to do this --- Masser Nathan would have done right by you. Ah don't think he even wanted dis old house, nor much money, neither."
Robert recalled the things Nathan had said earlier, in the family dining room. He had claimed that he didn't want any of their father's bequests, but Robert hadn't believed it then and he didn't believe it now. How could anyone fail to want all that surrounded him, and with the full measure of his soul at that?
Monumental as it was, his father's final betrayal wasn't the whole reason for what Robert had done. Somehow Nathan had found out the truth about the night Catherine died, and he'd sworn revenge. However mild his tone, Nathan had meant what he said. He would have dogged Robert to his very grave, making him wonder, making him sweat.
Robert offered none of that to Prudence, though, for she had always favored Nathan over him, just the way William Halder had done.
"You hold on, precious," Prudence was murmuring close to Nathan's ear. "You just hold on --- don't you go off nowheres. Ah won't have you dead and haunting dis place, and always gettin' underfoot when Ah'm tryin' to get my work done!"
Robert closed his eyes as the muscles at his nape clenched.
The constable and an army doctor arrived at the same time.
"It was him," Robert heard Prudence say, and of course he knew without looking that she was pointing a finger in his direction. "He done shot his own brother. And o'er money, too."
Robert was hauled, none too ceremoniously, to his feet, by the redheaded, blue-eyed policeman. "Afraid you'll have to come away with me, Mr. Halder," the big Irishman said.
The doctor had already torn off his suit coat and begun working over Nathan.
"It's hopeless," Robert told him pleasantly as his hands were wrenched behind him by the Irishman and bound with heavy iron cuffs.
The physician spared him one scathing glance and returned to his futile efforts.
- The End of the Line -
The rain went on throughout the night and the morning, casting an added pall over the circuslike ceremony at William Halder's graveside. Word of the shooting in the Halder mansion had gotten out fast, and folks had come from every corner of the city, whether they'd known the dear departed or not, to stare and speculate.
God knew, the undertaker thought disgustedly, it would be years before folks stopped chattering about how one brother had shot the other one in his bed, while their dead father lay downstairs in his coffin, and how Robert Halder had been brought to the funeral in handcuffs.
It was a damn pity, all of it, though there was one redeeming element in that ugly situation. Poor William was at peace, and he'd never have to know that he'd spawned a murderer.
Not that Nathan Halder was the kind of son a man relished having, either. He'd been stubborn his whole life through, that boy, tormented by things inside him that no one else could see, and he'd broken his father's heart on more than one occasion with his cussedness.
The undertaker sighed. Well, Nathan was barely clinging to life; that was a fact, for he'd been to the house and seen the young man lying in his bed, unconscious, with half the blood in his body drained away.
Like as not, there'd be another funeral in a few days, and when they hanged Robert Halder, still another.
It made a man wonder, that it did. William Halder had worked hard all his life and if he hadn't always been completely ethical, well, a fellow did what he had to do to make his way. And now it was all gone, blown apart like a house built of matchsticks struck by a high wind.
The vampire had overheard enough hushed conversations in the house to piece together the events of the day. It was with a sense of shock and with a heavy heart that she made her way up the stairs. The mortal life span was short enough as it was, without having to do something like this to each other.
The young man lay dying on the bed; her sharp senses and long centuries of experience left her no doubt of that. A heavy woman in simple calico sat next to the bed, weeping quietly. Sensing that something was going on in that room that she couldn't quite see nor hear, she grew restless, folded her hands, and began to pray under her breath.
The vampire remained huddled in the shadows in a corner of the room, and presently the housekeeper yawned and went away.
The vampire hurried to Nathan's side, taking one unresponsive hand into both her own. His spirit was retreating, straining at an invisible tether, trying to escape the pain.
There was something that she could do to keep him here. Yet, she could not bring herself to do it. He was a doctor, a physician, a healer, a giver of life. She could not condemn him to a life of taking from the living.
And there was more. She had seen that in him at the field hospital, when she had first looked into his eyes. His faith was too strong, he believed with all his heart, all his being, in a better world, a better life. A better life than she could offer him, a perpetual, shadowy existence that was her own lot, never seeing the light of day.
No, the best thing to do was to let Nathan Halder depart this world, let him return to his Maker and be received in that place where she could never venture, and she loved him enough to do just that.
She raised her hand to her lips and brushed the knuckles with a kiss as light as the pass of a feather. "Good bye," she whispered. Then she rose and turned away, and would have departed forever, except that he spoke to her.
She heard him, not with her ears, but with her mind.
Lady. The single word was an entreaty.
She whirled to stare at him, waiting, her whole being suspended.
Help me.
She was in agony. I am helping you. Look for the Light, and follow it.
You are the light.
No! Don't you see? I am the darkness.
Don't leave me, Lady.
She stepped closer to him, standing at his bedside. Without another word, she bent over him, covering him with her cloak.
Clasping him to her bosom and putting her mouth to his throat, the Lady gave the Doctor his final kiss.
Putting the mother-of-pearl comb into her hair, she turned and left. It would be the last time she would ever feed under this roof.
Robert Halder was released on bail, put up by William's faithful attorneys, in just a few days after his half brother's death. Before he could ever be taken before a judge, he consumed a scandalous amount of bourbon and flung himself over the very railing Catherine had tumbled from years before.
He broke his neck in the fall, sparing the hangman from having to do the job for him.
- Epilogue -
It was a warm and muggy night, which was not unusual for Georgia. The motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson FLH Electra Glide, red with white bags and white seat, its 74 cubic-inch Panhead engine purring smoothly, roared into the outskirts of Atlanta, having left Savannah shortly after sunset. The woman looked much too slender to be riding such a large bike, but then, many things about her were deceptive. The bike and its rider made its way toward the downtown area.
The vampire had left here a long time ago, as Sherman's Federal army approached, destroying and burning everything in its path. Now she had come back for the first time since then.
A lot had changed in the intervening century. And some things hadn't.
Atlanta was still a bustling city, buses and cars and trucks careening through the streets, the sounds of engines, tires, and horns mingling as they echoed off the artificial walls of the man-made canyons. Throngs of people moved on the sidewalks, talking, laughing, holding hands. Alone, the vampire stayed in the shadows, ignoring the scent of blood, of life, and keeping down the Hunger. She was hunting tonight, but not for blood. Not yet.
She felt herself being drawn somewhere --- or to something. She moved down unfamiliar new streets below glass and steel towers, obeying the tug, finally turning down a wide, tree-lined boulevard. She soon found herself in an older, residential section of the city. Obeying the something pulling at her, she continued moving down the roads into another neighborhood. Here the buildings were widely separated, surrounded by manicured gardens. The houses were large and old, most of them dating back to the Colonial era. Very elegant.
Except for the house in front of which she stopped. Stopping the engine, she dismounted, removed her helmet, hung it on the handlebars, and walked across the cracked sidewalk to the wrought-iron fence.
She was mildly surprised, standing in the night and staring at the wreck of that once-grand house, to see its degeneration. Certainly no one in the Halder family had survived to live in it and pass it down, but William, having been a farsighted soul, had made provisions for even that. The mansion would be held in trust indefinitely.
She stared, feeling an unexpected pang of regret as she noted that the roof had caved in in places, and the windows had been broken out as well --- including the fine stained-glass one that had once graced a medieval cathedral. The pillars supporting the roof over the veranda had long since fallen and disintegrated. The grounds, once manicured, were a tangle of weeds, the roses gone wild decades ago, and the marble fountain that had once given a certain Grecian glory to the loop of the grand driveway was a ruin, marred by the lewd lettering of vandals.
She briefly wondered about her own family's house on the other side of the Atlantic, the house in which she had been born over six centuries ago, a house that she had last seen nearly two centuries ago. At that time, it was still being held by a branch of her family. Had that house, too, decayed like this one, or was some family still living in it, still maintaining it? Possibly a branch of her own family?
She rested her forehead against a rusted iron rail of the fence, not caring who might see her, too engrossed in her memories to realize that she was not alone.
"Personally, I think they should tear it down," a blustery male voice said. "It's an eyesore --- brings down the value of the other estates in this area."
She looked over her shoulder and saw an older man with bright blue eyes. He was dressed in plaid trousers, his shirt open at the throat. A battered fedora did little to conceal an abundance of white hair. With him on a leash was a smallish German shepherd that barked, lunged at her, and then made a whimpering sound and backed away from her until the strip of leather would allow it to go no farther.
She ignored the dog for the time being. "What happened to this place?" she asked, turning around to face him and leaning back against the fence. "It used to be one of the finest houses in Atlanta."
"Hush, Heidi!" the man scolded, but the dog would refused to be soothed. With the perceptiveness of its kind, it knew that she was no ordinary human, even if its master didn't, and began to leap and plunge desperately at the end of its tether, until the old man could barely restrain it.
"They say it used to be downright grand," he finally replied, turning his head back to her. "But there was some kind of trouble here, a long way back. What it all comes down to is, people started saying the place was haunted, and the rumors stuck. Why, when I was a boy, we wouldn't even look toward this house, for fear of being sucked right in and gobbled up by the ghoulies!"
By this time the dog was going wild; she looked down and made eye contact with it. The dog whimpered and dropped flat as if had been shot, resting its head on its paws and rolling its eyes back as it continued to look up at her. The animal's owner stared down at it for a moment and shook his head, confounded, then finished up his discourse with, "You from around here? I don't recall seeing you before."
She looked up at him and smiled sadly. "I've been away for a while." Since before your grandparents were born.
The eye contact broken, the dog was released from her control, and it immediately sprang back up to its feet, lunging forward once with a snarl before again backing away from her, growling and straining at the leash.
"Don't know what's gotten into this mutt," the old man fretted, looking down at the dog, shaking his head again and pulling back on the leash. He then looked back up at her, nodded in friendly farewell, and allowed the dog to pull him on down the sidewalk, calling back to her over his shoulder with a laugh, "Have a care you don't get yourself bewitched or something!"
She raised a hand and gave a casual wave. "Bewitched," she echoed with a somber chuckle. What an understatement.
She looked at the old house for a while longer, remembering --- for not all her recollections were unhappy ones, of course. One hand went to the back of her head and the mother-of-pearl comb there. Finally, with a sad shake of her head, she turned to walk away, returning to her Harley.
Putting on her helmet and mounting the bike, a touch of her finger on the electric starter brought the engine to life. Turning around in the street, she headed back into the city, the sound of the engine echoing faintly off the façades of the stately houses lining the street, her long black hair billowing behind her like a flag.
Back into the city and the world of the living. She still had to feed tonight, but she was not going to do so in the shadow of that house.
Perhaps even a vampire feared being gobbled up by the ghoulies. Or in her case, the memories of the people who had lived --- and died --- in this house a century ago.
More stories by AK.