Beautiful Blood

She took a match from the box, ignited it with the nail of her thumb, and lit the pipe. Her cheeks hollowed as she drew in smoke. She leaned back amid the pillows, letting smoke trickle out between her parted lips. “Ohh…” she said breathily, and gave a delicate shudder. She closed her eyes for a second and drew in more smoke. After a third lungful, she looked as if she filled out her skin more thoroughly, as if she had ripened all in a moment. Her eyes were brighter, a’dance with gleams.

“Touch me,” she said, lightly slurring.

With reluctance, for part of him, the lesser part, wanted to resist this fake, this chemical fraud, he gloved the side of her breast, rubbing the nipple in a circular motion with the ball of his thumb. Her eyelids fluttered down and she bit her lower lip and made a musical noise, barely audible, a noise with which he was most familiar, though he had not heard it for many months. To hear it now affected him strangely. It raised the flag of his desire, yet he also felt a chill, as if her arousal endangered him. She caught his hand, brought it to her mouth and licked the tip of his forefinger. In her face he saw the refinements of love—her features had softened, her gaze was doting, her manner one of fervid devotion.

“Richard…” she said, leaving the remainder of the sentence unspoken, yet not unheeded.

A horse and rider went by on the street, the percussive sound of its hooves fading to muted pops. Shamed by his weakness, Rosacher picked up the pipe.

6

That night Rosacher dreamed of a cavernous room with a slight curvature to its ceiling, so long that neither end was visible. Upon the walls of the room flowed the black-on-gold patterns of Griaule’s blood, like the cryptic symbols written by God upon a serpent’s scales, seeming characters in a long-forgotten script. And perhaps it was the dragon’s bloodstream in which he stood, unaffected by its currents, breathing without difficulty, altogether comfortable and calm, for whenever he shifted about the patterns rippled and distorted as if his movement had disturbed a liquid medium. He tried to focus on the pattern, to track a single shape as it changed and changed again. To his bewilderment, one of the shapes straightened and grew larger, resolving into an anthropomorphic figure that approached him at a brisk pace. A man, judging by the size, yet Rosacher assumed him to be a preternatural creature. As the man drew near, Rosacher saw that his hands were wrapped in bandages and he was attired in a black suit with an unfashionably long jacket. Another bandage obscured the left side of his face and a slouch hat with its brim turned down shadowed his features, subduing a tangle of graying hair. There was no chair, yet he sat and crossed his legs as if there were a chair beneath him, one fashioned of the flowing black-and-gold blood.

“Hello, Richard,” he said at length in a grating voice.

Rosacher, startled to hear him speak, stepped backward, slipped and would have fallen had not the blood supported him, forming a cushion-like surface into which he sank.

“What is this place?” Rosacher asked, struggling to sit up—the pillowy stuff beneath him was so slick, he had difficulty achieving a stable position.

The man chuckled.

“We’re inside Griaule, are we not?” asked Rosacher, glancing about, searching for some further clue to substantiate the notion.

“In one way or another, we are always inside Griaule,” said the man. “On the brightest day, we are part of his shadow.”

This declaration bore the stamp of an oft-repeated phrase and Rosacher bridled at it, as he would at anything that smacked of zealotry.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“A messenger.”

“Have we met? You appear to know me.”

“We have a minimal acquaintance, yet I doubt you would acknowledge it. But I know you well enough, though I had forgotten how callow you were.”

The man loosed a terrible, racking cough that doubled him over. On recovering, he fussed with his lapels and smoothed down the fabric of his trousers, as if worried lest they wrinkle.

“Be careful when next you wake,” he said, wheezing, his voice raspier than before. “Do not react to anything you may hear or see. Don’t cry out for help. Slip from the bed as quietly as you can. Your enemies are near.”

“Am I asleep now?”

“You are, yet this is no dream. Heed my warning or you will not see daybreak.”

“If not a dream, what is it? A sending of some kind?”

“Don’t be preoccupied with the nature of the experience. Listen to me!”

The man was possessed by a second coughing fit, of longer duration than the first, and Rosacher volunteered to examine him if he so wished, saying that the cough suggested some deep-seated malady.

“It’s nothing,” said the man, struggling for breath. “Did you hear what I told you to do?”

“Yes. Don’t say anything. Slip from my bed.”

“Quietly!”

“Yes, yes. I understand. Quietly. I’d see to that cough if I were you.”