Fifty years ago, Rogasz would not have been able to enter a church…or a mosque or a synagogue or even a museum displaying sacred Egyptian antiquities. Something had changed since then: a weakening, a diminishment. Holy water was merely wet. The Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita—just paper and ink, with no more power to harm him than the Sunday funnies. One night, only a few months past, he had choked a nun to death by making her swallow her crucifix.
He knew he was not sane.
The church he chose to enter was normally lit with huge floodlights, bright enough to discourage graffiti artists and drug deals on the front steps. Tonight, however, the street was dark: the deep guilty darkness of shadows who know they shouldn't be there. Something had cut the electricity on this block, whether the riot, or the drug war, or even one of the car accidents Rogasz had produced with his reckless driving. It didn't matter; whatever the reason, night had closed in on the church like a hungry dog that had been waiting for a sign of weakness.
Every door was locked, dead-bolted and chained. Rogasz chose the one he wanted to enter and it flew open before him, the locks shattering on their own rather than waiting for him to use force. Within, there sounded a brief chitter of bats reacting to the vampire's presence; then the little animals squeezed themselves out through chinks in the roof and walls, letting silence descend on the sanctuary.
Rogasz walked through the vestibule and advanced down the aisle, his ears and eyes scanning for…whatever one could learn from churches. Despite the darkness outside, the vampire's preternatural vision could catch the background glimmer of the city filtering through the stained-glass windows. Time-bleached images of Christ and the disciples alternated with newer ones that appealed to urbanite longings—doves, and sheaves of grain, and grape-laden vines.
"Teach me!" screamed the vampire. He stood on the altar, arms stretched wide to the vaulted ceiling. His shoes left smears of dirt on the white altar cloth, gritty footprints tracked across the words I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE.
"Teach me, teach me, teach me!" he cried into the darkness. "Change me into something different!"
No answer but silence.
"Make me better! Make me good! Make it stop being stale."
He pulled out his knife and slashed it viciously across his own face. "See?" he shouted…but the cuts only oozed jellied blackness and shut themselves sluggishly. "See? See? Stupid, stupid, stupid."
Outside the church, things began to burn.
A few of the fires were started by deliberate arson—old scores being settled in a city stretched so thin it was flammable as paper. Other fires simply happened: people sitting in front of their television sets suddenly found themselves poised with a matchbook in one hand and a lit match in the other, seeing how long they could hold the match before its heat made them let go. Maybe the flame would go out as it fell, or the match would gutter on a dirty plate left over from supper and set on the floor beside the TV chair. In some households, however, the match landed on a rag rug, or in a basket of never-finished knitting that had long outlived the need for baby sweaters or booties. The burgeoning flames gave off an incense of paralyzed sadness, holding viewers in a melancholy trance until they quietly conceded it was too late.
The sound of fire sirens seemed so weak in the deepening night…like an infant's last cry of starvation.
Rogasz sat at the church's grand piano, softly playing one minor chord after another. He couldn't remember how he'd moved from the altar to the piano bench. Any key higher than middle C buzzed unpleasantly; when he looked into the open piano, he saw his knife lying across the strings of the upper octaves, rattling with the vibration of the notes.
He pulled out the knife and jammed the blade into his thigh. After that, the piano sounded better.
One soft chord after another—it had been years since he had played. Long ago, when the sun still shone, every civilized man could read Latin, dance the minuet, and play Bach by memory. Rogasz had been doing precisely that, mere minutes before his tryst with a woman who called herself Juliet. He'd considered her a casual indulgence, the amusement of a moment…but that amusing, indulgent moment led to the short, sharp violation and centuries of night-bound withering.
"Juliet," Rogasz called to the empty darkness. "I forgive you." He said it mostly to curry favor with the god who was supposed to inhabit this church; yet he found that at this second, his heart held no hatred for the long-lost woman. She had drunk his blood and stolen his sunrise, but even rage could burn itself out. "I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you," he said aloud, striking a chord with each phrase.
A tiny rustle came in response…Hallucination, he thought at first, but his keen eyes soon picked out a shabby figure sitting in the darkness. A teenage girl, a street kid, sat in a back pew and silently tried to shift her weight to a more comfortable position. Of course it wasn't Juliet—Rogasz had tracked that bitch down less than a century after she created him, and now she was dust on the boots of Prague—but this girl had something of the same look. Tired. Controlled.
"Is there anything you'd like me to play?" he asked, staring directly at her.
She jumped, apparently startled he could see her in the darkness. Then she shrugged and said, "Whatever."
"Is that the name of a song?"
"Play what you want. Just keep your distance."
He wanted to tell her what a fool she was—he could bolt from one end of the sanctuary to the other and sink his teeth into her throat before her brain had a chance to react. The words Stupid, stupid, stupid quivered on his lips.
But…
But…
After a few experimental notes, he knew his fingers could no longer manage Bach. Too many centuries had passed without practice…and his daggerlike fingernails clicked unpleasantly on the keys. He went back to slow minor chords, improvising a bittersweet tune to fit against them.
The next time Rogasz looked at the girl, her eyes were half closed.
Outside, the fires spread through the night—fires without noise, without fire chiefs yelling through bullhorns or alarms clanging into the darkness. To be sure, every fire crew in the city was making a stand, staked out around propane tanks, ammonia dumps, chemical manufacturing plants; but that left everything else to burn, spreading the flames unchecked from each building to its neighbors. Dispossessed families simply fled into the night…and none of them could say whether they intended to return, whether they would even file insurance claims on their homes or just wipe the ashes off their shoes and move on.
The stained-glass windows of the church grew brighter as the fires approached. Flickering light wavered behind the faces of saints; the dove of peace shimmered. One window read BEHOLD I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK…and the light in Christ's stained-glass lantern glinted with a beam that shone goldenly across the pews.
The light showed a legion of rats, streaming into the church.
They were, of course, fleeing the fires: running from nests behind ancient basement furnaces or dashing from summer lairs inside the garbage heaps that cooked in every alley. Some had flooded up from the sewers—climbing through gratings and road-work sites as the sewer water began to steam from nearby flames. In other parts of the city the animals soon headed for water again, diving into cooler sewers, into the harbor, or even into backyard swimming pools, snorting against the sting of chlorine. But here, in the blocks around the church, they were drawn by the presence of Rogasz, diverted by the vampire's aura to gather at his side.
Hundreds of rats poured silently into the sanctuary. They did not squeak. Their claws scarcely made a sound on the hardwood floor. Like an audience filing in for a concert, they congregated in a circle around the piano.