And the circle grew.
"Shit!" squealed the girl in the back of the church. Dozing with the soft music, she had just woken to find a rodent army surging through every door. In an instant, she had scrambled up to stand on the pew, climbing as high as she could above the invading horde…not that she was a timid little kid afraid of mice, but a thousand full-grown sewer rats, their fur matted with urine and feces, were enough to daunt any human.
"What the hell's going on?" she shouted.
"It's the fire," Rogasz replied. "They've come to the church seeking sanctuary."
"Rats? Are you crazy?"
"I expect so."
"Fine," the girl said. "You be crazy. I'm getting out of here."
"You wouldn't survive," Rogasz told her, putting a hard edge into his voice. "Can't you see we're surrounded by flame?"
He nodded toward the stained-glass images. Firelight raged outside now, blazing fiercely through the windows on both sides of the church. "If you went outside," Rogasz said, "you'd suffocate from the smoke."
"So I should stay and burn instead?"
"Have faith," he told her. He said the words because good people said such things, and because he wanted to win the approval of any deity who might be listening. "Have faith, have faith, have faith. Haaaaaave faith. Haaaaaaaaaave faith."
The girl died an hour before sunrise. Some of the rats survived, though.
Fires on the horizon brought a false dawn to the city; but the vampire could feel true sunup only minutes away as he approached the Adversary's bus shelter once more. Rogasz had not escaped the church unscathed—he had played the piano till it burst into flame, its strings snapping one by one with enough tension to drive the broken ends through the burning wood around them. One side of the vampire's face was baked raw, oozing fluids. He had stopped playing because his right hand no longer worked.
The gray predawn streets were mostly empty, except for jeeps of uniformed men driving grimly through the smoke. Three hours ago martial law had been imposed at last, and already the soldiers had fallen under the city's spelclass="underline" an urge to scurry from one safe place to another, a willingness to blind themselves to everything in between. No patrols stopped the vampire. None even glanced in his direction…not because he had invoked some supernatural concealment but because the patrols had become their own islands of consciousness, turned inward and brooding.
Unchallenged, Rogasz made his way to the bus shelter. He walked with a limp; for some reason, he'd never removed the knife from his thigh. The Adversary was once more leaning in the shelter's doorway, his face smudged with soot. "Busy night, little brother," he said.
"I went looking for God, but I haven't changed," the vampire replied. "People die and I have no grief."
"You can't mourn for everyone." The Adversary shrugged. "Only heaven has enough tears for that."
"But I want to feel something. I want to be moved. Moved! Pushed away from wherever I am and over the line."
"What line?"
"The dawn," Rogasz said. "Over the edge of dawn into the light."
"The sun rises every day, little brother. Don't blame me if you decide to hide from it."
"But it will kill me."
"There, you've seen through my plan." The Adversary laughed. "All this time, I've been secretly tempting you to suicide. That's a big bad mortal sin." His face abruptly turned grim and he looked at Rogasz in disgust. "Do you think redemption is free? Stupid, stupid, stupid."
"But I tried—"
"Listen," the Adversary snapped, "whatever price you've always avoided paying, that's precisely what it costs. Understand? If you want things to be different, you have to let go of the thing you're trying to keep the same. Simple logic."
"I could think of a hundred counterexamples…" Rogasz began.
"Then I'll see you back here a hundred more times." The Adversary disappeared in a puff of smoke that smelled of burned rat hair and the screams of children.
Dawn came. The dark day of the soul. Rogasz greeted it.
In the first hour, there were still too many cinders in the air to admit more than a ghost of sun. The vampire felt his hair smolder, but that was all.
In the second hour, people began to come out of hiding. Some wept; some had faces of stone. One man walked through the ruins of a tenement, calling for his dog. Rogasz helped him shout, "Skeeters! Skeeters! Skeeters!" The vampire knew there was no life left under the debris, but he liked having something he could yell over and over, hearing his voice echo off the scorched masonry.
By the third hour, the ash was finally settling out of the air. Fires still burned in some neighborhoods, but a day fire is a sheepish thing compared to a night one. As the haze cleared, the sun broke through. Rogasz spent a few minutes dodging it, then gave up. The good side of his face burned to match the other, but it was a dry burn, like a piece of leather curing in the desert.
Sometime in the fourth hour, a beagle came in response to the vampire's calls. By that time, the man looking for Skeeters had gone away, so Rogasz had no idea whether this was the right dog. "Skeeters, Skeeters, Skeeters," Rogasz said, and the dog wagged its tail.
For much of the fifth hour, the vampire lay on a stone bench in front of a law office. A sign on the office door read CLOSED WHILE EMERGENCY CONTINUES. No emergency was visible. The dog lay on the ground beside the bench, sleeping in the sun. Rogasz didn't sleep, but he closed his eyes, feeling daylight sear into him like a welding torch. "I am being purified," he told the dog. "This is what redemption feels like."
In the sixth hour, a policeman yelled at him, "You can't sleep there, fella." But when the officer got closer, he said, "Holy shit! Just stay put, don't try to get up. I'll call an ambulance." No ambulance ever came—not in this city, on this day—and at some point the policeman left, too.
As afternoon drew on, the shadow of the law office fell across the bench where Rogasz lay, and after a while he felt strong enough to sit up. The dog followed him down the street, past an army checkpoint that waved him through with directions to the nearest hospital. When Rogasz turned the opposite way, none of the soldiers bothered to correct him.
In time, vampire and dog reached the church where Rogasz had spent the previous night. The walls had toppled in, but by some quirk of combustion, the massive pipes of the organ had survived the fire. They stood side by side, towering over the rubble like a stockade wall, their false gold paint leprous with blisters.
Rogasz searched until he found the body of the girclass="underline" peaceful looking, he thought, once he had arranged her limbs properly. He wrenched the metal frame from the grand piano's skeleton and propped it, harp-shaped, over the girl's head. With a blackened stick of wood, he wrote
JULIET
JULIET
JULIET
on the frame, then called the dog to see what he'd done. "This is Juliet," he told the dog; then he remembered Juliet was someone from long ago, and this was just a dead street kid whose name he'd never known.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," he murmured. "I should have asked her name. That's what clean people do—they ask each other's name." He leaned over the corpse and shouted, "Why didn't you tell me your name? Stupid!"
The dead girl answered with silence…not a profound silence, just the flat silence of death. When the living don't speak, they're always saying something with their silence; but a lifeless body has no implied message, no secret it might whisper if coaxed or intimidated. The corpse was now an "it," not a "she"—a thing lying on rubble, as meaningless as air.