Vampire junction, p.15
Vampire Junction, page 15
He felt grateful, too, for Bayreuth's covered orchestra pit. Ordinari ly he'd have been peeved at not being able to exert full control over the s ingers, and especially irritated that the audience might not see him and li onize him properly. But now he preferred anonymity. His face was not too fa miliar to German audiences (or indeed, he reflected, to any audiences), and he was in any case replacing someone else, so nobody paid any attention to the wiry old man as he came down the wide side steps of the red brick mons trosity that was Bayreuth, down to the lawns, where people were already mil ling about. Stephen Miles was not recognized. Or was he? Occasionally, as h e passed a small group of people, they would fall silent for a moment. Was it disappointment, that the ersatz Wagnerian conductor they had brought in at the last moment was not up to snuff?
A pretty little student tugged his arm. An autograph. He obliged offhand edly, then stalked off in the direction of the fewest people.
An old woman now. Wearing black. With a veil over her face. "Herr Mil es-"
"I'm busy. I have to meditate before the last act. Sorry."
That was what he should be doing. After all, the final act of Wagner's Götterdämmerung encompassed nothing less than the destruction, by fire, of th e entire universe. It was seeing Valhalla burst into flames at the Met, in hi s late teens, that had first drawn him to Wagner.
"Herr Miles, do you not remember me?" She lifted her veil and threw it back over her black, feathered hat.
So old, though. . . she had seemed ancient even then . . . "Frau Stolz!"
"Forgive me for continuing in German," she said, and went on in that l anguage. "I heard you were in this country, and I could hardly miss one of y our performances, after all these years." She did not smile. He knew that sh e wanted to talk about Konrad, but she did not mention his name. He decided to get it over with.
"I visited your son's grave, Frau Stolz, in Thauberg. You are no longer living there?" he asked her in German.
"No, in Munich." She led him away from a crowd of matrons in flamboya nt attire, all screeching their appreciation of the opera and belting out t he Redemption by Love theme from the third act. She took his hand now. They passed a thicket of rosebushes, set off by a marble sundial. "I heard your Mahler on the radio, and found out the date of your Bayreuth appearance. Y
ou say you saw the grave?" she added, eyeing him suspiciously.
"No. It was not there."
"I knew it!"
"You've not been back to Thauberg, then, in thirty years?"
"No!" she said, a trifle quickly. "I have been. . . sick."
"Yes?" he said, trying to show concern, although in truth all he wan ted was to escape from this maddening woman. Even thirty years ago she had made herself a thorough nuisance, with her doom-laden pronouncements abou t young Konrad's satanic origins.
"More than sick, Herr Miles. I was in a mental home."
He pitied her then. He too had known what those places were like. He remembered it. . . the place they'd sent him to, to treat his pyromania . .
. only Carla Rubens had seemed to understand him. And now she didn't under stand anymore.
"You seem sad?" said Frau Stolz. Still no emotion.
"I too have been. . . mentally ill."
"I am well now. I had to see you. I wanted to tell you something-"
"Where is your son's grave, Frau Stolz?"
"He has no grave. He is not dead."
"But I saw him. . . the chest-wound. . . didn't someone try to stab him with a sharpened chairleg? Most bizarre," Stephen said uncomfortably.
"I did it! I"
He backed away.
"I did everything I could. I first tried garlic and crosses, but he did no t fear them," she said, relentlessly backing him against the rosebush.
"What superstitious twaddle! This is the twentieth century . . . " he said, trying to fight off his own terrors.
"I had to do it. I sharpened the chairleg. I crept up to him in his sl eep. Do you not understand? He had blood on his mouth every night, when he c ame home from the Opernhaus. Do you think I didn't know what he was doing to that Fraulein Rothstein?"
He tried to dodge her now. The squealing matrons were on the other sid e of the bush, and Frau Stolz clutched his arm and said, "I took to followin g him. He was a devil child! I wanted only to help someone after my own was shot in the war, but no . . . I received no decent child for my pains, but a vampire!"
"A vampire . . . "
"I it was who killed him . . . afterwards 1 claimed to have done it, they took me away, they confined me to a mental hospital, and the psychoana lysts said it was a delusion, an accident, a senseless murder by a madman, there had been other cases in the town, severed necks and stakes through he arts, and I said it was Konrad who had done them and they gently persuaded me it was not so ... they traced my childhood and found traumas I never kne w existed, and they convinced me and released me from the asylum...."
"I must go."
"He is alive and you must kill him! You are the only one who might bel ieve me. I implore you. Kill him, Herr Miles, kill him!"
"Frau Stolz-"
But she was walking away from him, across the immaculately-mown law n with its benches and cul-de-sacs of sculpted hedges. The sunlight strea med down. Her stern demeanor and severe clothing made her seem out of pla ce. It was as if they had somehow met in an intersection between past and present.
A distant blare of trumpets and Wagner tubas... he must hurry back. At Bayreuth they sounded no bell at the end of the intermission; instead, the scattered hordes were summoned to worship with selected leitmotifs from the opera itself, thundering out over the lawns and courtyards. God, it was like living in the middle of one of those Cecil B. de Mille spectacles. Time to hurry back. Time to burn down the universe!
He turned back towards the opera house, remembering what Amelia had said only the week before: He drank my blood.
*labyrinth*
Carla and Timmy were at the breakfast table when Maria announced th at someone from Stupendous Sounds Systems was here. Carla looked up and s aw a slender black woman. Her hair was long and fell in ringlets over her chic suede suit. She sat down with them, and Maria poured coffee.
"I wanted to meet you at home before we go to Stupendous, Timmy," she said. "Oh, what a neat house."
"It's in poor taste," he said. Carla saw that he was appraising her very carefully. "Where's Blade?"
"I don't know. He just walked out on us, I think. He's done that before, you know. What a flake!"
Timmy looked at Carla, an I-told-you-so look. Her hands had started to shak e.
"Oh, Carla," Timmy said, "I want you to meet Blade's temporary replac ement, Melissa Pavlat."
"Missy."
"Of course," Carla said, smiling nervously. "Hi."
"Carla is my analyst."
"Cosmic," said Missy. "You know, I think I've gotten to the stage in my career when I oughta get a shrink myself. Good for the image, you know
? You expensive?"
"She works for me full time," Timmy said possessively.
"Oh, ex-cuse me!"
"So, Missy," said Carla, trying to make conversation, "Things are prett y messy over there with Blade's disappearance, I suppose."
"Shit, no. Never more mellow. I got it all under control, baby. You kn ow what we got in store for you, Timmy?"
"No."
"First, the tour you know about. Couple of weeks from now it starts. Bu t then there's the video game-"
"Video game?"
"Ain't it just cosmic? Bloodsucker, it's called. You're a vampire and you have to jump these trains that are rushing around these mazes, see, and once you hop them you gotta attack the passengers, and they all have all dif ferent scores for killing kids and businessmen and little old ladies, and th en they have these Van Helsing-type characters chasing you, and if you pass through-get this-a Vampire Junction you go ZAP and get these superpowers and you can give the old stake-in-the-heart treatment to the Van Helsings for a while and-get this-the machine plays your song, kid, all the time the vampi re's got the superpowers. It's more than a Pac-Man clone . . . it's got some thing for everyone! Get it?"
"Cool," said Timmy.
"And with every machine they produce, kid, royalties! Fat fucking roya lties! Plus your song sounding in every arcade in America, insinuating its w ay into the unconscious mind of every trigger-happy kid in the country!"
"I'll take it."
"Take it? The company already signed!"
"What about my contract?"
"Kid, you gotta get that chauffeur, or butler, or adopted father or what ever he is of yours to read all the fine print. We make the deal, Timmy-boy, a nd we split the take sixty-forty. Our favor."
"Well, who cares. I've got plenty of money. But a video game based on m e . . . I guess every kid dreams of that."
"Well, I wanted to wait till next week and surprise you with the finishe d product, but I thought you might be sad about Blade leaving us in the lurch like this. You liked him, didn't you?"
"He was . . . very nice."
"Aw, you poor kid. Want to come to the studio now? We've got a versi on of the whole album on the 16-track, and we're gonna mix it down today."
"Sure," he said. He got up, indicating to Missy that they should leave; and then they were gone.
For a while Carla sat finishing her breakfast. She was thinking over al l that Timmy had told her last night in session, the bizarre goings-on at the Opernhaus Thauberg.
Perhaps she should warn Stephen. But where would he be now? In Germa ny? She could call his agent. . .
She finished her coffee and started up to her room, wondering what sh e would do until Timmy came home. She could swim, or play tennis with one o f the staff; she could get Maria to drive her somewhere, to a mall or to so me touristy thing.
She could make more notes. None of these alternatives seemed appetizin g.
As she was about to turn the knob into her bedroom, she realized what i t was she wanted to do.
No! I don't want to go upstairs again. I'd be like those airhead young women in horror movies who simply have to go into the one dark spot where the y know something terrifying lurks. Or like Bluebeard's wife, insisting and in sisting until he yields up the keys to the darkest chambers of his castle. No
. But she did want to go back to the attic. It's broad daylight, she thought.
If that girl vampire is there, she won't wake up . . . isn't that what Timmy said?
Again she knew how deep she had fallen into his fantasy. She was accept ing all his statements, outlandish as they were, as facts.
I am not the darkness, she thought. It is day. They can't get me.
She tied her robe a little tighter, and turned away from the door, and found the hidden staircase that led to the attic ... paused a moment. She wen t back to her room, and plucked one of the crucifixes that Maria had provided off the wall-a little one, about a hand's-breadth high, a longfaced pouting Jesus in gold strapped to a silver cross. Then she found the stairs again and ascended.
Must remember not to look too close-
Two paces left, three backwards-
Corridor walls bursting into hellflames, oriental demons tormenting the damned, and. . . Four paces sideways-A skullface, peering from the window of a train rushing at her, veering at the last moment, with a clatter that turned into the sound of skeletons col liding and a whistle that became a screaming child. . .
The room with the trains, still set up as they had been left at the last session: the couch. More piles of boxes, and beyond the mirrors, mist . . . s he looked down at the little Opernhaus model . . . beside it Timmy had set up a tiny cemetery, each tombstone no taller than a fingernail . . . just marble chips with the names scratched on them with a needle.
Timmy didn't have to be there, then. He wasn't somehow dreaming this room into existence, having it blink out whenever they weren't there. That was something for her notebook.
Though the attic was fluid as a funhouse, there were certain rooms in it with an objective reality.
Was that comforting?
Comforting to know that she might actually be going mad?
Carla left the room. As soon as she had gone a few paces, she realized t hat she had lost her way.
She had known all along she would lose her way.
Now she reached the Rapunzel room, as she thought of it. An open coffin
. She knew what she would find there. Stone walls; outside, the medieval cast le walls overlooking lush terrain . . . but not the Valley, not even Californ ia . . . maybe . . . France? In the field, two knights jousted.
She tried to glance past the coffin, but she couldn't resist getting closer.
For some reason she felt no fear at all.
There it was . . . the corpse of Kitty Burns . . . her eyes stained with hastily applied mascara, her cheeks anemic, her hands crossed lightly over th e crotch of her jeans. Caria was uneasy now. What if I can't get back, she tho ught. She held out her cross and backed out slowly.
And stepped into another stone room. Another coffin: a middle-aged man in a business suit. Handkerchief and gold Parker pen neatly tucked into the coat pocket. This one's skin was gray, rubbery.
Another room. Two corpses, two coffins; young men. Another room: this one looked like a transvestite in high heels and a taffeta dress.
I've got to find a way out of here!
She stepped back again. How many paces to the right was it, damn it?
How many?
And she whirled round and she was in another room and there was a glas s coffin full of seawater and seaweed trailed from it and left green stains on the tiled floor, and she saw the young girl that lay there with the bite marks all over her body, and the wall was all TV sets stacked all the way up to the ceiling and side by side and there were no windows, only the TV sets
, and they all showed a windy seascape and a sharkfin slicing the water and coming nearer and nearer and now the jaws and the icecold eyes bursting from the water, a hundred sharks coming at her, bursting free of the screen, and she was in the dark green water and couldn't scream, and the corpse's face contorted into a fanged smile, and she gasped and swallowed only salt water, drenching her nostrils, pouring down her lungs, and-
"Quickly," a child's voice: flutelike, innocent. "Come with me."
She opened her eyes. She was in the piano room that she'd once found bef ore. She was still in the attic then, she still hadn't found a way out of here
-
"Timmy!"
"It's all right."
"The sharks-"
"You had to find out. I hide nothing from you, Carla."
"This room-"
"-is all rooms, Carla. There are no single rooms here in this attic, but all flow into each other. They are dreamrooms, but here the dream is the only reality we can know."
"There are more of them! This place is becoming-"
"A vampire junction? Surely not. But there are more of us now. We have put Kitty under restraint, but she still grows bolder and bolder. She won't l isten to reason."
"Can't you kill them?" Carla was hysterical.
"My own kind . . . "
"No, no, are you weeping?" Carla put her arms around him. Like embra cing marble: the softness an illusion. Cold. Had he been weeping? He was o nly a child and cosmic dilemmas racked his mind. .
"Do not pity me. I do not weep," he said. "We do not have tears."
"You're hiding something," Carla said. And truly believed, for the first time, that she could heal him.
*fire*
The underworld of Bayreuth: passageways. Somewhere, a soprano sang ov er and over from a practice room the words Weialeia, weialeia . . . the sir en song of the Rhinemaidens who were about, unsuccessfully, to try to seduc e Siegfried into giving up the ring and averting the curse. From another ro om sounded a quartet of Wagner tubas, rich and watery, as if out of a marbl e bathroom . . . perhaps they had retired there to try something out away f rom the rest of the orchestra.
Stephen opened a little door and stepped into the orchestra pit, whi ch was completely concealed from the audience by an awning. Most of the or chestra was there already, engaged in tuning or chatting softly; he found the podium and glanced overhead at the monitors which would be his only wa y of knowing what the singers were actually doing. Part of the set, an eno rmous canvas Valhalla that would be concealed from the audience until the last moment, when a scrim would be pulled back and Valhalla would burst in to flames, was descending from the flies.
"How much time do we have?"
"Five minutes," someone whispered.
The score was already open to the right page. There was a note there; i t must have come during the intermission.
Herr Miles: a telephone call. You could not be found. From California
. From Carla Rubens. She said that you must be told that you are in very gr ave danger. You must come to her as soon as you can. You are in danger.
What on earth was this all about? He'd called the woman twice, three tim es, and she had just brushed him off. She'd been no help at all, and now . . .
a bizarre warning.
But she was with the boy! And the boy was evil! So Frau Stolz sai d. So all the evidence said. After all, wasn'tit an evil presence they had be en summoning up, that day in Stephen's childhood?
No. I'm not going to trust her.
He lifted his baton.
Is this the last time?
The thought had crossed his mind before. But the step he now must take, the final step of the journey that had begun when he fled the burning house into the arms of Francis Locke and then stood swinging a censer in the colleg e chapel of Saint Cecilia's face to face with a supernatural entity . . . thi s step must be away from music.
He would no longer flee.
He would walk through fire into the arms of darkness.
At his downbeat, music surged around him. Music of the primeval fores t and of the dark river that flowed through it, out of which the temptress Rhinemaidens were about to appear.
As he started to conduct, he became aware of . . . a new fire in him.
Had he suddenly grown young again? He delved into the forest music, findin g new nuances, new shadings. The players began looking up from their music stands in surprise, following his new tempi only by the skin of their teeth
