“Jim,” she pleaded. “Please try to forgive me. You could be the same. You could live forever, too.”
“You want me to become a Screecher? Are you out of your mind?”
“So what are you going to do? Cut off my head, chop me into bits, and bury my body?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”
“Jim, please!”
“You’re a strigoaica, Jill. How can I pretend that you’re human?”
“Because you love me. Because I love you.”
I pushed my chair back and stood up. “If you’re a strigoaica, you need to drink human blood at least once a month, don’t you, or you’ll start to lose those perfect looks?”
“Jim — ”
“Come on, Jill. Whose blood have you been drinking?”
“Nobody that matters, I promise you.”
“Nobody that matters? What the hell do you mean, ‘nobody that matters’?”
“Derelicts, down-and-outs, mostly from southern Indiana. People that nobody’s going to miss. And nobody has missed them, Jim. Ever. Did you ever see a story in the papers about them? Did you ever see them mentioned on TV?”
“Christ, Jill, we’re talking about twelve people a year for eighteen years! That’s a massacre!”
“I have to, Jim! I can’t stop! But strigoaica. we’re not like strigoi. We don’t have the same need to spread the infection. We just want to be normal. We just want to be loved.”
I looked at her, and she looked so desperate and so miserable. Who would have thought that I could love a Screecher? Me, of all people, the bane of Screechers everywhere.
“I’m going out,” I told her. “I need some time to think.”
The Sacred Seal
I took Ricochet for a walk around the Scenic Loop at Cherokee Park. It was a warm, gusty afternoon, and kites of all shapes and sizes were flying from Hill One. They reminded me of that Japanese print of people being caught in a sudden gale, with papers flying in the air, and their whole lives suddenly being turned into chaos, as mine had been.
Jill was a strigoaica. I wondered if I had ever suspected it before, and deliberately ignored it. But it really didn’t matter. What did matter was that I was morally obliged to do something. She would have to kill more people to satisfy her endless thirst for blood, and even if they were derelicts or drunks or down-and-outs that nobody else would miss, they were human lives, and I couldn’t allow her to take them.
But I loved her. I had loved her from the moment I had first seen her, in St. Augustine’s Avenue, in Croydon, on that hot summer day in 1957. So how could I drive nails into her eyes, and cut off her head, and dismember her? I couldn’t even ask anybody else to do it.
I sat down on a bench and Ricochet came up and laid his head on my knees, as if he understood what I was going through. He was so much like Bullet, except for a tiny tan-colored smudge between his eyes.
“Goddamnit, Ric,” I told him. “If it hadn’t been for Duca — ”
It was then that I thought: Duca was caught by my mother, but she didn’t kill it. She had sealed it into a casket, and if that plane hadn’t crashed, Duca might still be preserved today. Not destroyed, not dismembered, but rendered harmless.
Maybe I could do the same to Jill. Seal her away, so that she wouldn’t kill anybody else. Then maybe I could find a way to bring her back to life, as a human being. But how was I going to do it? Only my mother had known how.
I stood up. The kites were whirling in the wind. “Come on, Ric,” I told him. “I think I need to go to San Diego.”
Who Made Doina?
I flew to San Diego the next day. I told Jill that I wanted to talk to my father. After all, he was eighty-three now, and suffering from a heart condition. I didn’t tell her that I was going to look for something that my mother may have left behind — a note, a book, a diary entry — anything that might have told me how to seal away a strigoaica.
Before I left, she took hold of my hand and tried to kiss me.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know what you were getting into, and I used you. I’m the one who should be saying sorry.”
In the hallway, with the light shining on us like two bloodshot eyes, we held each other close. God almighty, she didn’t feel any different. She didn’t feel dead. She was warm and soft and my heart felt as if it were crumbling apart.
“Jill,” I said, stroking her hair.
“Come back soon,” she said, and she tried to kiss me. But I couldn’t help thinking of all the people she had cut open, and whose blood she had drunk, warm and sickly, straight from their pumping hearts.
“Sure,” I said, and left her.
I paid off the cab and stood outside my father’s house with my overnight bag. It was a warm, fragrant afternoon, and the sunlight was very bright. I was beginning to feel very tired, so that everything looked almost too vivid to be true, as if I had been smoking pot.
I was about to open the gate which led into my father’s garden when I heard a woman singing. I stopped, and listened, and gradually I felt a terrible coldness soak through me. It was a sweet, high voice. A voice I hadn’t heard in a very long time.
“Who made doina?
The small mouth of a baby
Left asleep by his mother
Who found him singing the doina.”
I opened the gate. My father was sitting on the veranda, with a glass of white wine. On the other side of the yard, my mother was cutting roses.
She stopped singing, and dropped all the roses onto the terracotta tiles. Her hair was dark and she looked exactly the same as the last time that I had seen her.
“James,” she said.
She picked up the photograph from the top of the piano, and smiled at it sadly. “Poor Margot. When the plane crashed, I tried to get her out, but her leg was caught under the seat. Of course I got out. I couldn’t die, even if I was trapped in that plane for the next hundred years.”
My father stood on the opposite side of the room, saying nothing.
“Don’t blame your father,” said my mother. “Love can make us blind to other people’s suffering. Love can make us very selfish, and cruel.”
I shook my head. “So it was you that Duca was after, when it tried to sail to America. Duca knew that it wasn’t your body in that airplane.”
My mother nodded. “It may be looking for me still.”
“And if it finds you?”
“If it survived, and it manages to find any of us, then I’m afraid we have a very horrible experience waiting for us.”
I didn’t know what else to say. My mother came up to me and held out her hands, but I couldn’t take them.
“I have your watch,” I told her. “I’ll make sure you get it back.”
So now you know the truth. Now you know what really happened during that summer of 1957, in South London, and now you know what happened afterward.
Now you know that when your great-grandfather first went to Romania, and fell in love with your great-grandmother, and decided to marry her, he was quite aware of what she was, and he was also aware of the price that other people would have to pay to keep her perfect for all eternity.
Now you know what blood runs in my veins, and why I was capable of being so heartless in my pursuit of Screechers, and so cruel when I finally caught up with them. I have Screecher blood in me too, as your father does, and you do.
In spite of our cruelty, though, we’re deeply sentimental, which is why your great-grandfather could never destroy my mother, or seal her away; and which is why I could never bring myself to destroy your grandmother, although she still lies in the cellar, in a lead casket, bound by the seals and rituals which my mother was taught in her childhood.