Vampire junction, p.37
Vampire Junction, page 37
*Redemption by love*
The staircase swept to a fire-girt mountain peak. The snow was littere d with corpses of the heroes who had been rash enough to brave the magical f lames. But fire was Stephen's friend; hadn't he played with fire since he wa s a child? The fire knew Stephen and did not scorch him; it even parted to a dmit him.
And he stood in a chamber of infinite mirrors. It was the heart of the a ttic, and therefore the dark heart of human consciousness.
Toy-train tracks crisscrossed the floor. Engines whistled as they hurt led over bridges improvised from leather books, across bedsheet meadows, thr ough plastic tunnels. In exquisite miniature were the Opernhaus Thauberg, th e chapel at Saint Cecilia's, even the graveyard that once contained Konrad S
tolz. Castles sprouted from padded armchairs. A tundra of hairpin evergreens
-all reflected a million times in the mirrors.
He recognized a couch from Carla's old office. And there was Carla. S
he said: "For an age he's waited for us, Stephen. Look, I've drawn a little chart." She pulled a pad from her pocketbook and held up a hand-drawn diag ram-
"You see," she went on, "what a complex relationship entwines us."
He didn't speak. The fire-he felt the fire as one feels a living entity, a lover-was already eating out the bowels of the house.
"You remember when we first met? Not at the home, but a chance meeti ng long before then, when I was a student and you handed me a doughnut at Carnegie Hall? No, of course not. But I never forgot you. You see, we've a lways been plagued by these mysterious coincidences. It's a conspiracy of fate. Fate prods us, eliminating our options one by one, until we each hav e only one road left-"
"The way to Vampire Junction." Then, "Are you-"
"Yes. I am a vampire." He saw it in her feline movements, in the phos phor sheen of her face, in the glowering darkness of her eyes. "Listen. It'
s not what you think. A thousand years ago Timmy Valentine began to change.
To feel compassion was only the germ of metamorphosis. It started as. . .
an unquenchable yearning for completion. Part of him sought out his anima a nd his shadow; and since he was himself on the shadow universe, for him tho se archetypes existed in our world . . . though they had not then yet been born. Do you understand? We three were made for, impelled toward, each othe r. We will now enter a crucible of transformation, we will wrap ourselves i n a chrysalis of self-renewal, and we will rise phoenixlike from these flam es, transfigured, invincible."
"Hard to believe." He could see this truth just ahead, but he didn't wa nt to grasp it yet. He was afraid. He wanted to cling to the firejoy, to exul t in the flamedance of the town and the house. He said, "And the reason our m arriage didn't work out before-it was because we didn't have Timmy yet?"
"Something like that."
"And the Gods of Chaos? What was their part in this?" "Oh, come. You'
ve always known that they weren't important. That moment in your childhood, when you and the Gods of Chaos saw the night-child-what did they see? Ghos ts, monsters, gibbering phantoms. Personifications of their inner selves. B
ut you, though they had tried to twist you, were not twisted. So you alone saw all the way through the millennial horror to the primal innocence. . .
not a monster, but an angel . . . not hatred, but love!"
A fireshimmer in the air between him and Carla. . . the boy's shape wri nging itself from the haze. . . at last they stood face to face again. Sixty years dwindled to nothing. The mirror-hall and the chapel with its stone fan-vaulting were the same place. The boy had not changed either, for his was the substance of eternity.
He gazed into the eyes, dark as polished obsidian, yet, like obsidian
, forged from a volcano's heart; the eyes framed by a complexion of Dresden china and by the blue-black hair woven from shadows. He trembled with the same emotions the ten-year-old choirboy and acolyte had felt. The tingle of an exquisitely sensual terror. The helplessness. The shock of having recog nized an absolute beauty.
He said, "I've set fire to the way behind. I can't turn back."
And Timmy spoke at last, the melody of his voice edged by profoundest melancholy. "I greet you, my shadow. And I'm sorry that, in our previous m eetings, I never dared acknowledge this truth."
"And I greet you." They would have embraced, but fear interposed itself
, fear of that igneous darkness in Timmy's eyes.
"He's so old," Carla said, "and so alone. Only he has survived the vamp ire's infancy, with its elemental rage and blood-lust, its childlike supersti tious dread of cult objects. He has experienced the first inklings of compass ion; and now he is approaching a new threshold. And as he is our spiritual se lf, so we are his humanity."
"Why do I cast no reflection?" Timmy said. "Because you are my two so uls."
Beyond the couch was an iron-barred oaken door. Stephen wondered why he hadn't seen it before. Timmy said, with a twinge of impatience, "It wa s always there, if you cared to look. You Wagnerians are so melodramatic.
You never see anything until you hear its leitmotif!" And laughed a bewitc hing laugh.
"You mean all this could have been avoided if only I'd spoken to you in college chapel-"
More laughter, like windchimes. "Oh, Stephen, always after the simple answers. You want to burn your way through life like a ball of fire."
Somewhere in the house, a clock struck. One. . . two. . . three. . . thirteen
.
"It's time," Carla said, her upper lip quivering with nervous anticipation.
The flames had burst through the floorboards and were racing down the t rain tracks and devouring the books and vaporizing the plastic mountains. In the firelight their fangs flickered.
In utmost bewilderment Stephen cried out: "How can you say I saw love wh en I saw burning cold and darkness?"
The boy vampire's smile dazzled like the sunlit sea. "I am the dark sid e of love," he said, "the ocean of chaos upon which the universe is built. Wi thout me love has no meaning. In the darkest heart of universal darkness, 1 a m the memory of light."
He beckoned toward the door.
Rumbling racked the entire house. An earthquake? A volcano? "Will you step through already?" Timmy shouted, stamping his foot in a childish tant rum. "I haven't got all day."
The boy and the woman opened their arms wide to receive him. The boy was the moon and the woman was the earth and he would be the shining sun.
The door creaked open; behind it, a slit of blinding sulphurous incandesc ence. Brimstone fumes tendriled from the opening, swirling, misting the mi rrors, hugging the three in a spectral embrace. Nausea welled up. He could n't breathe. I'm dying, he thought, I'm actually dying!
"Is it the door to hell?" he cried, remembering Don Giovanni and Docto r Faustus, dragged bodily into the underworld.
"Such hubris!" Carla was smiling beatifically through the clouds of s moke. "What evil have you done?"
The boy's voice rang out, trumpet-clear over the thunder-roar: "There is no evil! There is no hell!"
Stephen succumbed then to their frozen embrace. Their perfume, laced w ith putrescence, pervaded his nostrils. As the door swung wide, he kissed fa nged mouths and caressed snow-pale flesh, and he seemed to grow young again; the door palpitated like the vagina of a cosmic earthmother as the three da nced out their love on each other's bodies and he felt the firewarmth flow f rom his body and encircle the others, he felt secure at last in the closed t riangle of their mingled passions-
*fire*
-and now the Mage caresses the Sibyl's wrinkled flesh and Stephen and Carla are there too, they are conjoined with the shuddering earth; Sibyl, possessed by Carla, responds, her shriveled body wakened to violent passion
. The earth rumbles. Outside the window the boy sees brightness and smells death. A burning wind, glittering with glowing dust-stars, invades the Mage
's sanctum. They have been anointed with a slippery poultice that contains, among other ingredients, the boy's own severed and pulverized testicles. T
he three make love. It is not the love that Carla and Stephen and Timmy wil l share in the future, but a selfish, possessive lust, and the Mage pauses often to make ritual passes that invoke the sexual magic of the erupting ea rth. From somewhere outside the boy hears a column ripped out by the roots and smash into the side of the wineshop. Inflamed now, the Mage rises rampa nt, his teeth bared; the boy barks in sharp pain as the leopard Mage leaps and satisfies both his lust and his hunger on the boy's body, he exults, he roars over the screams of the dying, while the Sibyl claps her monkey hand s and the folds of her eyes quiver and she giggles and croons over her long
-awaited death-
*fire*
-and as Stephen gazes awestruck Carla becomes the earth and her cunt becomes the Sibyl's cave and Timmy and Stephen crawl upward into the tunnel, the ho t magma glistening, the passageway glowing redhot, shaking; their feet blist er against the searing lava but still they run upward, and now, in the womb that is the sunlight, time shudders to a stop, the fangs tear into him, he s urrenders to darkness that is no longer darkness but fierce illumination, he climaxes again and again, they share their orgasms as they shatter the fina l door in Bluebeard's castle and become one and three and three and one, as hawklike they soar up to the ineffable brilliance, and then-
*fire*
-the peak of Vesuvius flowers in a thousand colors-
*fire*
-they are born-
*fire*
-and they come to the Mage's sanctum, and they see the lava streaming in through the atrium from the wineshop and they are in the boy's consciou sness as he struggles to tear himself free from the embrace of the leopard and the monkey and though they are invisible, extradimensional, they feel h is terror and the pain from the wounds of fang and claw, they interpose the mselves, they try to make themselves real, for a moment they flicker into t he reality of Pompeii before the unbearable heat drives them screaming back to the shadow-land. The Mage, astounded, has reverted to human form and wi thin the instant that the shadows from the future have impinged upon his co nsciousness the boy tears himself free from his deadly embrace with a supre me effort and begins to run and sees the smoking lava lapping at the doorwa y and doubles back to the window and the Mage darts eaglelike at his face, his knifebeak stabbing at his brows, his cheeks, making the blood spurt, hi ss as it encounters encroaching lava, and the Mage shouts in his screeching voice: "We must complete the ritual . . . we must . . . or we will be neit her dead nor alive nor undead ... a wisp of our immortality will remain, we will lose our substance yet never acquire insubstantiality, we will haunt the earth as nightmares within nightmares, shadows of shadows, resonances o f resonances-" and the Sibyl tries to grasp him in her frail arms, but the boy jumps from the Mage and the Sibyl and the flames lash the walls of the house and the earth trembles and roars as in an agony of childbirth-
*fire*
-a child's footsteps patter on a splintering mosaic, bitter-toast smell of charring feet, fleeing, mountain thunder, then blood, spatter spatter spatter b ursting spatter spatter spatter boiling on the hot mosaic stones spatter spatter spatter
*fire*
-Stephen and Caiia hover ghoul-like over the marble columns that snap lik e bones over the screaming and the fire running through the streets and fangs g litter in the ash-hail they glitter spatter glitter spatter glitter spatter
*fire*
-the last vampires stagger screaming from the drugstore and the genera l store and an arcade machine vaults from the parlor and collides with the c harred hulk of Prathna's car, and still dragging the unconscious Brian the t wo boys look up, the snow has melted from the Main Street and corpses are bo unding downhill, slipping and sliding in the dirty slush, and -white flame f ountaining from black Vesuvius-
-and Carla and Timmy and Stephen are borne skyward, erupting, on the tide of the bursting magma-
-and ash rains on the boy, already half-dead from leopard bites, and C
arla and Stephen experience with him the nausea of the brimstone fumes and t he lacerations of streaking embers and the suffocating engulfing powder trap ping him as he struggles to breathe and his blood spatter spatter on the mos aic stones-
-the drugstore roof collapses spraying the street with Coke cans-
-the Mage and the Sibyl open their arms to greet death, the Sibyl rej oices that she has cheated eternity, the Mage's mind is riddled by doubt as he succumbs to the molten lava, and stones from the ceiling crash on top o f them and their bones crack and the Sibyl is pulverized under an Ionian co lumn and rubble streams down, burying them completely, and-
*fire*
-the boy screams, "God is love!"-
-the snow shifts on the mountain peaks. It begins to roll downhill. It st reams into the town of Junction, an avalanche set off by the boy's shrill cry-
-the statue of Konrad Stolz tumbles from its gravestone and splits into z igzag halves on the gravel-
-the three spirits of the future fly skyward, sunward from the flames of the city, as an ocean of oozing fire descends to engulf Pompeii and colum ns poke out like twigs from the lava crests and thousands upon thousands of souls are embedded like insects in the glowing crimson sea-
-they are born, they flower from the bowels of the mountain-
-the fire has reached Valhalla, where the gods, the first constrainers of chaos, sit statue-still on their golden thrones and yearn for death-
*fire*
Stephen stirs in the arms of the woman and the boy. Touches their faces
, their limbs, which have lost their coldness. Thus it is that he knows he ha s crossed the boundary. In the single protracted orgasm of this troilistic un ion he has experienced the death and rebirth of universes. He is overwhelmed by wonder. Beyond the fire, his attenuated hearing perceives even the music o f the spheres. As the house collapses around them, eternity seeps into him in all its pain and rapture. There is a thirst that can never be slaked, and an absolute beauty that chills the heart.
27
*dissolve*
-the boom of a distant explosion. And a fireglow on the snow, the color of the encroaching sunrise.
"Don't look back," PJ said to Terry. "Just help me pull this fucking thing
."
Terry tugged at the poles and cloth that PJ had put together for the unco nscious Brian. "I'm cold."
"I know, I know. Come on, pull."
They heaved, freeing it from the snow. "How did you know how to make this thing?"
"It's a travois, stupid. Tra-vwa. The Shoshones use them when they mo ve camp. I know stuff like that. Mom taught me.
"Where are we going?"
"To the reservation, I guess."
"How the fuck are we going to get there? Shit, it's started to snow again.
"
"My people know many things," PJ said. Terry had never heard him talk this way before. Oh, he was always saying wistful things about wanting to go live with the Indians, but now he had so much certainty. PJ said, "1 kno w how to build snowhouses that conserve warmth. I know how to hunt. I've ne ver done it, but I guess I'll figure it out somehow.
"What about him? What if he's dead?"
"He ain't dead."
"What if he dies?"
"We'll bury him."
"What if. . . I mean, your mom bit him, and. . . "
"We got stakes, don't we?"
"Yeah. Yeah."
They hunched into the wind and went on. Though it was bitterly cold, h is grief seemed to melt away as they thrust onward into the snow. Behind the m fire sparkled in the forest, a heart-breakingly beautiful sight. From here it didn't look at all as if a whole town had been consumed by fire and madn ess.
"We survived," he said, without joy.
And PJ let out a wild whoop, which was lost in the wind's incessant how ling.
*dissolve*
As winter draws to an end, the roads will become passable once more. A train will pull into the charred ruins of the Junction station. It will be a moonlit night, and the passengers, if any, who look out will be able to see t he devastated remains of the town. It will be a picturesque, if bleak, sight.
The moonlight will glitter in thousands of shards of shattered mirror glass that have blown down from the house on the mountain. It will gleam on naked r ivets protruding from blackened posts and doorframes; it will glisten on the marbled innards of arcade games, inexplicably piled up at the bottom of Main Street. There will probably be no passengers at this point; those that might be there will probably be asleep, since Junction is a stop of no significance
.
This time, though, three new passengers will board the train. They will take a compartment, first class, all to themselves. One is a middle-aged wom an; another an older man; the third a young boy with delicate, androgynous fe atures. Our hypothetical passenger will notice, perhaps, the unusual sheen on their pallid faces; he will naturally attribute it to a trick of the pervasi ve moonlight.
When they speak to each other it will not be a human discourse at all
, but the language of the night, which we mortals perceive as the stridulat ing of cicadas or the baying of distant wolves or perhaps merely the suspir ant sifting of the wind. Even if we knew the meanings of their words, their nuances would pass unperceived. But our hypothetical bystander, with some glimmering of the nightspeech, might glean by his hypothetical eavesdroppin g this conversation:
"It was a beautiful story. I wish I had it to experience all over again."
"There was so much more I could have told you, Carla. Like when I ex changed harsh words with Caravaggio in Rome in the piazza in the rain. . .
or sucked blood from the bound feet of the Empress of China."
"Lies, all lies."
"Truth, my dear friends, is merely the prevailing percentage of our private illusions. . . "
