“You okay, Max?”
“I don’t know. Better than him, anyway,” I said, nodding at Melifaro. “What was that?”
“That was magic of the 212th degree, my friend. What did you think of it?”
“What do you think I think!”
“I think it’s all very strange. Technically, you should be in the same condition he’s in.” We both turned around to gaze at the frozen figure of Melifaro.
“Tell me, you did begin to fall asleep, didn’t you? What happened next?”
“To be honest, I didn’t know whether I was falling asleep or dying. I thought . . . I didn’t want to die in the company of that monkey. Dumb, wasn’t it? And when the candlestick flew at me, I finally got furious—at the stupid piece of iron, at the monster in the mirror, even at you, for some reason. And I decided, no way, I’m not dying here! And, that’s about it.”
“Well, you’re a piece of work, kid! Until now it was thought to be absolutely impossible; and then he up and gets offended! And refuses to die, to spite all his enemies . . . Funny. But all the same, how do you feel?”
Suddenly I wanted to laugh. Who does he think he is, Doctor Dolittle? But paying attention to my sensations, I realized that I really didn’t feel quite right. For example, I understood perfectly what had happened here. I didn’t need to question Juffin. I already knew that twice he had tried, unsuccessfully, to conquer the strange power that resided in the mirror. The third time he simply made the world in the room stand stock-still. I even knew how he had done this, although I couldn’t have repeated it even to myself. I also understood that now it was impossible to destroy the creature in the mirror without harming Melifaro—the spiderweb had bound them together like Siamese twins.
At the same time . . . at the same time I was tormented by other, unrelated, questions. For example, how would Sir Juffin look if I took a splinter of glass from the broken window and dragged it across his cheek? And what would his blood taste like? And . . .
I licked my parched lips.
“Max,” Juffin ordered sternly. “Get a grip on yourself, or else you’ll crack up. I can help you when we leave this room, but it would be better if you managed on your own. Compared to what you’ve already done, it’s a piece of cake!”
I fumbled around in the basement of my soul in search of the small, sensible fellow who often comes to the rescue during emergencies. It looked like he wasn’t home.
Suddenly, I thought of some old B-movie about vampires. The main characters had faces white with greasepaint and mouths unappetizingly smeared with blood—like babies left with a good-for-nothing nanny and jam for breakfast. I imagined myself in that guise: Max, the regular guy, beloved of girls and house pets. At first I felt ashamed; then I burst out laughing. Juffin joined in.
“What an imagination you have, lad! Oh, you kill me!”
“It’s not my imagination, I just have a good memory. If only you could see that movie!” I cut myself off abruptly, and asked, “Wait, you read my thoughts, too?”
Juffin, unperturbed, confirmed my suspicions. “Sometimes. If it’s necessary for the task at hand.”
But by then I wasn’t even listening to him. I was consumed again by the desire to take a sip of his blood. One small sip. My stomach knotted up in a spasm of hunger. I couldn’t think of anything but the taste of Juffin’s blood. Ugh, how vile! I’m getting obsessed!
“Am I losing my mind?”
“Something like that, Max. But it’s doing you good, it seems. You know, I think that if you were able to withstand my curse, you can certainly deal with your own madness! I can cure you, so if you’re in trouble, let me know. But . . . you know . . .”
I did know. Along with madness came the secret knowledge, which I had so suddenly come to possess. And the circumstances were such that the qualified help of a psychologically unbalanced vampire were far more useful to Sir Juffin than the confused bleating of the normal, ignorant Max. On the other hand, if he accidentally cut his hand, I could . . . again, I started to drool. I feverishly swallowed my bitter saliva, grabbed a shard of glass, and slashed my own palm. Sharp pain, the salty taste of blood—it brought me an unprecedented sense of relief.
“Could you help me up, Juffin. My head’s spinning . . .”
He smiled, nodded, and held out his hand. I stood up, wondering how I could have spent my whole life at such dizzying heights. The floor was on the other side of the universe, if anywhere. Leaning on Juffin for support and carefully shuffling my benumbed feet, I moved out into the corridor.
I knew what was in store for us. The powers summoned to life by the curse of my protector had upset the balance of the World. Nothing to write home about, even by the standards of the Left Bank—but on the scale of the house! Any closed space is immediately saturated through and through with this harmony-destroying radiation. We had to “stop life” in the place right away, already gradually losing its contours, to restore order to it. There was no time to spare.
All that happened is still right before my very eyes, though at the same time the memory is vague.
At first we seemed to roam aimlessly through the enormous house. The people in gray tried to run away from us, although some of them snarled at us and bared their teeth.
Sometimes they behaved even more bizarrely. In the large salon with the fountain, where Sir Makluk had received us the first time, two boys executed an intricate ritual dance in complete silence. They gracefully ensnared themselves in what looked like neon streamers. When we approached them, however, we saw with horror that the streamers were their own intestines, which the boys were pensively drawing from their own stomachs. There was no blood—and no pain, either, apparently. The viscera glistened in the twilight of the huge hall, reflected in the streams of water from the fountain.
“There’s nothing we can do to save them,” Juffin whispered. With a careful gesture he suspended the scene. Now that the curse that stopped the World had been carried out, there was no need to start the whole process all over each time. The curse followed behind Juffin like the train of a garment, and I, in some way, helped him carry it. The only thing to do was to wrap each room as we came to it in the shadow of the curse, forcing people to freeze in the most eccentric poses.
We wandered through the house; our journey seemed to have no end. Sometimes I was beset by the thirst for blood, but I was too preoccupied by warding off the attacks of the frenzied household items hunting us down. More than anything else, I was insulted by the attack of a thick volume of the Chronicles of Uguland.
“Hey! I read you, you jerk!” I shouted indignantly, fending off the assault of the savage fount of knowledge with a weighty cane with which I had sensibly armed myself at the start of our campaign. Sir Juffin put a stop to this scene, as well.
In one of the rooms I saw my own reflection in a mirror and shuddered. Where had those burning eyes and sunken cheeks come from? When had I become so emaciated and haggard? I had eaten not so very long ago! Actually, from Count Dracula’s point of view, I had never eaten anything worthwhile. Ugh! How disgusting! But it wasn’t too difficult to keep myself in check. A person grows used to everything. We’ll leave it at that.
We roamed through the house. It seemed that was the way it would always be from now on: time had stopped, we had died, and ended up in our individual, honestly earned purgatory. In one of the rooms, we came upon Sir Makluk himself. He was occupied with domestic duties: he was industriously rolling up an enormous bookcase, with all the books inside it. The most amazing thing was that he was already halfway finished. The old man turned to us and asked amiably how we were doing. “Soon everything will be well,” Juffin promised, and Sir Makluk froze in the middle of his monstrous labors. Yet another statue in this newly established wax museum. A youth in gray was shuffling around on the threshold, quietly snarling and clapping his hands rhythmically. In a moment, he froze, too.