Love Lies Bleeding (in My Hands)

Honestly, I slept better and felt safer at night. That was when the Mansion felt less ominous and threatening, and more like a delightful riddle. I felt welcome and wanted, and the atmosphere never felt dangerous. The loud parties, the piano recitals, the cocktail hours, it was all very Old World, and seemed grand to me, and dazzling. Old World was, of course, exactly what it was. All that, the glitter, the tiny magicks and the occasional bigger ones, was not for my benefit alone, but I was part of it, the mark, the human, the stupid innocent high and oblivious. The temptation must have been almost overwhelming, and that I survived at all feels still almost like a mistake, sometimes.

The hamlet was small and very rural, and the Mansion hid at the back entrance of it, right on the verge of the billowing wheat fields and the great cherry orchards and strawberry fields and blackcurrant bushes and the fragrant, mysterious woods that stretched into the horizon behind them. The main building was built using gray stone and red granite and although it in some ways looked like any other mansion in the world, in others it seemed totally unique, like a fabulous question mark looking down on the land before it, marveling and presiding gracefully at all the glory. Who wouldn’t have been impressed?

It was night when we first drove up there, and the drive from the Capital seemed to take hours. When Rome said we were turning on the driveway, it still felt like an hour passed before the car stopped and everybody spilled out on to the gravel and the gigantic lawn, wet from the early hours dew, the scenery and gardens nearby covered in parts in low-hanging summer mist swirls, or so I thought, in my drunken haze.

The Mansion stood erect, bedazzled as if ready for a celebratory procession. All the windows were lit, the courtyard fairy lights were on, and we were promptly approached by what appeared to be a butler or some other high-ranking servant in full monkey suit, and I mean tails. Turned out all the help dressed up to the nines there, and not only at night. Rome wanted everyone looking spick and span all the time. What a lot we must have seemed in comparison. I hadn’t even remembered to put on shoes after the party, as I noticed with a pleasant mix of amusement and half-worry as I felt the moist grass, the liquid nighttime, wet my bare feet.

I think that feeling, the wonderful, tactile emotion of having wet grass caress my toes and ankles, bringing back memories of childhood, added to what had just happened at the party with J.B., was what I held on to for so long afterwards, when things had already started to look iffy. I was so mesmerized by her, so drunk, and high on Rome’s high-quality weed, whatever it was, it could have been micro doses of LSD even, to make me happy and acquiescent and mistake that high for love. God, I hope not. Because to me, still, it was love. I loved that night, the raucousness of us, all the beautiful women and gorgeous men around me, behaving as if I were royalty, just because I was in J.B.’s company. It was like a drug in itself. I was intoxicated, a little bit in love with the lot of them.

What carelessness! But when J.B. suggested, casually, that we tag along to an afterparty at Rome’s, I instantly, in my lovesick, post-coital fervor, and hopelessly high to boot, said yes. I had just completed a huge project, and no one was going to miss me for a few days at least. I told her this. Now that I have had plenty of time to reassess the moment though, over and over, what I have come to realize is that no matter how sad it makes me or how betrayed I feel, I don’t believe anymore that anything at all was suggested to me casually in all the time I spent there. But back then – I just never wanted that feeling to end. How J.B. made me feel. So I told her I would not be missed.

As I said. Careless.  

I was not to get out of there for over three months. Maybe you’d like to say I was stupid. And maybe I was. But at first it didn’t seem like I was being held prisoner at all. It never does. Of course, love is a prison of our own making, and making the rash call to go out there in the first place – well, I guess the fault would have to be my own, wouldn’t it?

Marlon was the only other human besides me they kept around. I have thought about this a lot, and I am now convinced of it. The groundskeeper couldn’t have been more than thirty years old, maybe even younger, but he had the clear signs of alcohol abuse all over him. He was withdrawn and monosyllabic. He always smelled of day-old hooch and his face, underneath that massive red beard and the constant filthy straw hat, was blotched and raw, his eyes bloodshot and angry. He had a boxer’s build, but he was going soft in the middle, and the way he behaved in front of Rome and the others makes me think that he was either in on their secret, or held something over their heads, or that he was a bit simple, with the constant bottle of whiskey nearby, his brain fried from years of drinking, and therefore convenient to have around.

And indeed, he always seemed not far away. Many times I stumbled upon him in the kitchen or in one of the sitting rooms, even. Unpleasant as he may have been, he obviously had his share of the carnal pleasures that went on in the Mansion, because at the many parties I often saw him with a woman, always a different one, not exactly attending the party, because he was, after all, help, but somewhere in the vicinity, near the apple trees maybe, or walking towards his hut with his arm around someone, and once I think I saw him sitting on one of the lawn chairs dragged out near the vegetable garden while clearly having fellatio performed on him by a shadow kneeling on the dirt.

For whatever reason, I sensed danger there, and never even thought of asking him for help. Quite the opposite: I considered him an enemy.

The Mansion itself was quite remarkable; three stories high with a whole bunch of locked doors and sealed-off rooms. The third story was where Rome slept, and it was strictly off-limits from absolutely everyone except for her innermost circle. J.B. was allowed there. I, of course, wasn’t, and now that I think of it, I don’t think I ever even saw any stairwell leading higher than the second story anywhere in the house at all. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one, perhaps I just missed it. But something tells me maybe the third floor was sealed off in more ways than just by supernatural means. Rome and the others certainly had a way of working around futile stuff like missing stairways or solid walls.

There was a back entrance to the main building for the help through the kitchen and the boiler room with plain, artless cement stairs, and the man who came to clean up after parties, usually super early, at the crack of dawn, left it open to air the kitchen downstairs. No one expected me to ever use it, or even be up when the door was open. Except one day I was up and did use it. The sun was already hot in the sky, and they were all on the lawn having breakfast and what appeared to be some sort of palaver, and for a split second I really saw with whom I was sharing the house.

I don’t think they saw me, although I think I let out a small gasp of horror. I raced back, retracing my steps as silently as I could, almost falling in the strange dark pit in the boiler room where the gigantic oil tank sloshed and hummed. My heart was pounding so hard I was sure anyone could hear it, and maybe it was heard, because just as I had organized myself back to bed, J.B. came in, seemingly to see if I was awake. Maybe they did know, after all.

I had never thought I could witness something so grotesque and brutal, and still be able to have sex straight after the way I did that morning. But there was no way around it. And she was so beautiful when she knew I was looking.

The enormous canyon, a crater almost, was a sudden, deadly drop in the middle of the woods. J.B. let me use one of the bikes from the shed, and on one of my leisurely rides I came upon it quite unexpectedly one day. You might ask why I didn’t use the bike to get the hell out of there as fast as I could. I don’t know why I didn’t. I believe I was kept close to the Mansion by a spell, either tactfully fed upon me the very first night there, which seems the most likely, or by forcing it on when I was sleeping.

To get to the crater one had to go through the large, fenced in area of vast fields that I never found out to whom they belonged, maybe it was all Rome’s, and I shudder to think what it means if it was. Biking through, right on the edge of the dirt and the muddy ditches, I often saw an old couple in what appeared to be straw hats and old-fashioned berry-picker uniforms in the far distance. Even in the scorching sun, I was never really able to take a good look at them. First I thought they were scare crows, but soon I realized they always stood in a slightly different place. What they were doing on a gigantic field of wheat I had no idea, but as the summer progressed and I found myself needing to go look at the crater more and more often, I came to rely on seeing them around. At least that way I knew I wasn’t all alone out there.

Except, of course, I was. Now I think I know who or what were, and I believe Rome had had them planted there to guard me, never to interfere, but to check if I ever ventured too far into the woods or if someone else was trying to interfere with me. See, they needed me, at the Shallow River Mansion, and there was no way Rome was going let anything happen to me. Anything, that is, they themselves weren’t already doing.

Then one day I did venture too far. I had no idea the quake would actually materialize out of thin air; I had brushed off all their warnings as a fantastic, gothic horror tale.

That day, when the woods began to tremble and the horrible ear-breaking low hum echoed in my ears, it was head-splitting and seemed to be coming from the earth itself, I was right on the edge of the crater, and instantly felt sure the ground was going to give from beneath me. I ran to my bike, I don’t think I have ever run so fast in my life, and almost didn’t make it, because a terrible roaring sound of rocks and dirt crumbling and falling had begun right behind me. Immediately I knew the ground was falling, it was a sound not unlike an avalanche, and I had been too close to the edge. I had deliberately ignored what had been specifically said to me, because I had started to wonder about a lot of things, indeed I had started to wonder, and I felt the crater was there to hide something, or to cloak something, a force I had no idea how to fight. I had a feeling that if I got close enough to see at the bottom, some enormous realization would be bestowed upon me, about what was going on, why they were all acting so strange, why I felt hung over and sick to my stomach all the time.

And I did get too close to finding out. As I biked faster and faster towards the fields and the hamlet that lay in the far distance, I once again saw the Berry Pickers, only this time they were closer to me than ever before. I could see their large hats tilted a little on the side, and from the shadows I could sense worry, almost like a panic, on them, as if the feeling was somehow emanating from their archaic outfits. Even then, though, I never actually saw them move toward me at all. They just stood there, in the far end of a tractor road leading up to the grand strawberry patches and the unending rows of blackcurrant, and I swear I saw one of them make a slight, unbelieving pointing gesture at me. From underneath their tilted hats I might have seen their mouths form two black holes of amazement, or surprise, but maybe it is just my imagination fixing the image as I think back.

I was so sure everything was going to end that day. All I could think of at first was that they were going to kill me once I got back to the Mansion, and no matter how many times I told myself later that I had been totally deluded and crazy, J.B. would never let anyone lay a finger on me, on some deep, honest level inside I became certain that my original fear was the truth.

I finally made it back to the hamlet, racing through the streets to get to the Mansion as fast as I could as if my tails were on fire, and although I kind of knew the roaring had stopped, I had left it somewhere in the woods behind me, I could still hear it ring in my ears, and the near miss of losing my life made me sweat and tremble. It feels funny now to think about how scared I was, since I was very much in the process of losing it anyway, my life, but that was my feeling that day. Panic-stricken, frightened of being caught or found out, shivering and anxious in the heat of the midday sun. For some reason I never suspected I would be now responsible for letting the whole village be swallowed, sucked into the earth. Even in my somewhat incoherent, troubled state I instinctively seemed to know, the way you just know things, that the power of the Mansion protected the hamlet, that the woods had power only to the outskirts of town. In some ways I could not have been more wrong, but the basic intuition about the collapsing earth not being able to get to me once I got back to the vicinity of Rome’s Mansion was true.

No one was home, or at least so it seemed at the time. I waited, in agony, the whole day, pacing the downstairs rooms I was allowed in, checking and rechecking every window, waiting for someone, anyone, to show. I was so frightened I would have welcomed even Marlon, whose lazy, self-absorbed, fat guts I had grown to hate.

At twilight, the servants returned with a message that an urgent issue had required Rome’s attention, and she had flown everyone to the Capital to deal with it. They would be spending the night, maybe more, and I should just relax and help myself to dinner and have Simone draw me a bath.

I must have known, on some level, what was really going on, but on the surface, I was just happy to get away with it. Naturally, I hadn’t gotten away with anything, the issue at hand was of course my idiotic wakeup call on what lay at the bottom of the canyon, and they must have been to the woods all night that night and two more nights, fixing it, because the next time I dared to bike anywhere near that far over a week later because I was still very much on edge, jumping at every sudden sound, I was shocked to find the woods and the canyon completely unchanged.

Thinking back, it astounds me how long it took to realize what was happening to me, what all those servants and Rome’s entire entourage really were. Sometimes, if I opened one of the huge, heavy wooden doors by mistake and found myself in a room full of furniture covered with white sheets, or beds made to who knows what purpose, I would catch a small glimpse of someone just disappearing from the edge of my vision, or a form, slowly diminishing like a balloon losing air, on the bed beneath the covers.

Maybe I didn’t want to see it. I was often too drugged up anyway, and what I didn’t do to myself personally, Rome made sure someone else did.

Then Marlon disappeared. That finally should have alarmed me. I was just too much in love with J.B. to really see the writing on the wall. I had been cautious in Marlon’s presence the entire time, so I think it couldn’t have gone exactly unnoticed there – although there was plenty of space, everyone seemed to be constantly huddled or thrown together. They traveled in twos or threes at the very least, and my permit to go off on my own must have stemmed from Rome’s belief that I was already lost, that they had me for life. Plus, naturally, the drugs and spells they must have been using to keep me from running.

But of course it did alarm me. No matter how much I loathed him, I guess by then I knew what the deal was with my hosts, and having the one other human suddenly gone was a forceful eye opener. But Jane could be very convincing. It was about two weeks before I finally got with the program and planned my own half-assed, crazy-lucky, terrible escape, and truthfully, I didn’t really stop to consider what had happened to him at all. Jane looked incredible that day, blushed and sanguine. So I’m thinking it was her. I think she killed him for me.

Jane Bosch. That was the name of the woman who almost killed me. My great love. God, her name, along with everyone else’s. I should have known they were all made up. Then again, maybe I did know.

I would like to think that she did love me. I never thought for a second that she was acting under orders from Rome that first night. It just happened between us. And perhaps because of her, they didn’t finish me off right there at Rome’s, when I fell from the backseat right on the lawn. I was certainly in no position to fight off anyone that night. How many others I saw during my stay, just in passing, victims, oblivious, willing victims like me! How many lives they took while I smoked their weed and drank their liquor and pleasured myself with Jane all night long into the hot summer days. And I never dared ask what happened to any of the others, how they got back into town in the morning, where they disappeared to when the sun came up. I was such a coward. But, also I guess I was lucky. If one can consider it lucky to be alive after what they did to me.

I still sometimes dream of her. It always ends the same, though, with me running a spear through her heart, the one I had found in the shed, sharpened on the spot while sweating buckets, thinking someone must see me or hear me, smuggled uncomfortably in the main house inside my jacket, and stashed between the headboard and the mattress for three whole nights before ultimately deciding and then scrounging up the courage to make my move. And sometimes there’s all the ruckus that really happened after I had done the deed. Rome bursting in through our second story window, looking to kill, her disciples pounding and hammering the door. The growling, the snarling, glass everywhere, in my hair, all over the floor, the soles of my feet bleeding. The bloodlust in their frenzied eyes, their Queen’s teeth gleaming as if phosphorescent in the night.

Now, for the rest of my days, I need to watch out for Rome. We both may have lost J.B., but Rome is the one who will live forever to hold a grudge. One day I will be too old and feeble to see her coming, to fight back. I may have gotten something in the way of collateral, or residual strength, from the fact that I killed someone I loved; that always brings one unmentionable power for a while, even if one doesn’t want it at all. But in my case, I could never have escaped without it. The whole idea of escaping Rome’s crowd would have been laughable without my borrowed strength.

That, also, is a little bit funny. That I had the means of escape the whole time. That I was sleeping next to her every night.

But I suppose it’s all alright. It isn’t much of a life anyway, hiding, constantly looking over my shoulder. You know, I tried to locate the hamlet a few months after I got out, after I had been released from the hospital. I couldn’t find it in any of the maps, there seemed to be no such place existing as Shallow River. It didn’t turn up on the computer, not that I ever thought it would. Nor was I able to drive there. I had this foolish notion about a year later that I would go out there, guns blazing, during one late afternoon when I knew they were sleeping, and just torch the entire place. I was heart-broken and hopeless and really have no excuse for my enormous stupidity. But I never found it. I didn’t even come close. I drove around for hours, panting almost, murderous, wanting to end their lives so desperately I could taste it. It was totally pointless. Perhaps Rome had had it cloaked. Perhaps they had changed what it looked like entirely. Maybe they had moved their whole operation elsewhere.

Now I live as near the Capital as I dare, alternating hiding and trying to trace her. It’s both frustrating and horrible. I can’t sleep. And the blood transfusions? The doctors tell me there’s a good chance I will be needing them for the rest of my life.

What did turn up on the computer, though, was that ash is the most potent and powerful material to use for a stake, and that their kind always make sure to get rid of them once, or if, they settle on a permanent residence. It occurred to me recently, during the Wolf’s Hour as I lay awake, how I happened on the stack of spears, or stakes, while looking for a bicycle pump inside the shed where the groundskeeper had kept his tools and his hooch. They were hidden cleverly almost in plain sight so that the stash looked just like some innocent pieces of firewood, right behind his many empty whiskey bottles and the lawnmower, both things he would have known the creatures had absolutely zero interest exploring. A botanist like Marlon would have known without a doubt what kind of wood those spears were. I drifted into an uneasy slumber then, and had a dream where I finally saw the face of one of the Berry Pickers, pointing at me in horror, and in the dream he was not trying to spy on me, but protect. The ancient face, the old man’s wrinkled, toothless mouth forming the petrified o, traces of red still visible in his massive gray beard. I awoke with a gasp, red in the face, thinking how dearly I owed the poor, rude, dead man I once wrote off as misguided, useless, and evil.

So, perhaps, when Rome finally comes, I will not only welcome her vengeance, but embrace it.

This is for J.S. Meresmaa

Grand kudos for B.T. and E.J. for the gorgeous title as well as general fabulousness and inspiration

      

Picture manipulated with PhotoLab, honoring the famous Frog Brothers: “Vampires Everywhere!”