The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life Page 5

  “What happened?” I asked the driver as I examined the man. His dark trousers were sticky with blood. I could see that both of his legs were badly broken.

  “He just stepped out of the shadows,” the driver returned. “I tried to swerve to miss ’im, but he must have fallen under the wheel.”

  I shook my head as I carefully turned the man over on his back, and it was then that I saw. It was he, the young man, the angel from the Madonna of the Rocks. There was no mistaking the pale, angular face and the reddish-golden curls. What was most startling of all was that although forty years had passed since I had first seen him in the garden, he still possessed the face of a young man only seventeen or eighteen years old. I hesitantly touched his cheek to see if he were real. My shock must have been written all over my face.

  “What’s wrong?” the driver asked. “Do you know ’im?” For a few moments I remained silent, filled with disbelief, and then I nodded. “Yes, I know him.”

  The driver helped me place him gingerly in the backseat of the brougham and we sped on to Redgewood. After we arrived at the hospital I searched the young man’8 pockets in hope of discovering any clues to his identity. All I found were several crisp hundred-pound notes, a small vial containing a fragrant oil, and a gold pillbox containing a number of shiny black pills. Because of the severity of the fracture it was necessary for the nameless young man to undergo surgery, and this I insisted upon performing myself.

  Under the bright lights of the operating table I examined him carefully. His hands were as sleek and youthful as a child’s. There wasn’t even the vaguest hint of a wrinkle upon his smooth face. When I saw this, I realized it was impossible that he could be the same young man I had seen in the garden. I dismissed the resemblance as an uncanny coincidence, but I remained captivated by the haunting familiarity of his face.

  As I began to set the bones I discovered the cause of the young man’s pallor. His blood was more of a straw color than red. It was apparent he was in the last stages of leukemia. His pupils were also so incredibly dilated I suspected he had very recently used some sort of atropic drug, perhaps cocaine or belladonna. When I had completed the operation I accompanied the intern as he wheeled my strange young patient to a private room.

  I remained by the young man’s bedside for the next three hours, partially out of a sense of responsibility for the accident, and partially, I confess, because his resemblance to the angel still held me transfixed. When he finally stirred from his slumber I almost froze with excitement. I grabbed his hand and patted it gently. “Don’t worry. It’s all right.”

  His grogginess faded and he stared at me questioningly. “You’re in safe hands,” I continued. “There was an accident. You walked in front of my carriage. The driver couldn’t stop.”

  “I remember everything distinctly, signore, he stated with a thick Italian accent.

  “Your legs were pretty badly broken,” I went on. “I spent almost two hours operating on you.”

  “How convenient to have stepped out in front of a physician,” he returned as his eyes searched the room. “Where is my evening coat?”

  I pointed to the chair by his bedside and he reached into the pocket. He withdrew the gold pillbox and placed one of the shiny black pills in his mouth.

  “May I inquire as to what those are?”

  “No,” he stated simply as he swallowed the pill without water.

  “Are they for your—” I hesitated “—are they for your leukemia?”

  “You mean, are they morphine to ease the pain from an advanced state of Virchow’s leucocythemia, characterized by the abundance of white corpuscles in my blood?” he questioned dryly.

  “Why, yes,” I said, marveling at his technical grasp of the disease.

  “No,” he answered again. I straightened slightly as he stared directly into my eyes. Once again I was struck by the familiarity of the very tilt of his head. The manner in which he pursed his brow made me realize he knew I was examining him closely. “You are very anxious about something, Dottore. What is it?”

  “What makes you think I’m anxious?”

  “The rapid beat of your pulse in your temples.”

  I nervously allowed one finger to brush against the side of my forehead. “You’re very observant to notice that.”

  “You have not begun to imagine how observant I am,” he replied “For example, I can tell you that they are mopping the floors directly above this one. I can smell the carbolic acid, and the fumes are coming from above, from the transom, not from beneath the door. From the gait of their walk and the pressure of their footsteps I can tell you a woman is in the room directly to the right of us, a very old and frail woman, and to the left a rather heavy man is deep in slumber.” Then, with a strange melancholy, the young man withdrew the vial of aromatic oil and flung a few drops into the air The room became perfumed with a sweet and pungent odor.

  “Whatever are you doing?” I asked.

  “It’s oil of lily and palm,” he explained. “I can smell death in this hospital. I can smell death very close by. If I were to venture a guess I would say that the heavyset man will die within a day or two. The lily and the palm represent death. I always sprinkle a little of this oil when I know that death is very close.”

  I shivered a little at the young man’s ghoulish eccentricity when his penetrating gaze once again caught my eye. “But tell me, Dottore,” he continued, “why does your pulse beat so rapidly when you look in my face?”

  “It’s nothing,” I dismissed.

  He continued his icy stare, “Well,” I conceded, “it’s just that very long ago, when I was a little boy, I once met a young man who looked very much like you.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Almost forty years.”

  He chuckled slightly. “Well, it couldn’t have been me then, could it?” Without waiting for an answer he threw the bedsheets back and deftly lifted himself up against the headboard. “Would you be kind enough to get me a wheelchair so I can get out of here now?” he said as he struggled to control a grimace of pain.

  “Where are you going?” I asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know,” he returned. “I have no home or friends in London, but it would be completely out of the question for me to stay here tonight.”

  I was a little taken aback. “But you must stay here; in fact, you must stay here for many nights to come. I told you, your legs were very badly broken and you’ll be very lucky ever to—” I stopped myself short.

  “—ever to walk again,” he filled in and laughed a light and airy laugh. And then, with a voice so wrought with self-assurance it frightened me, he said, “I’ll walk again.”

  “Yes,” I returned. “Perhaps you will, but nonetheless it would be completely impossible for you to leave the hospital tonight. You must stay in bed.”

  At this the young man became visibly upset. “Per piacere,” he pleaded, “you don’t understand. I cannot stay. You just don’t understand!”

  “I think I do,” I said and he eyed me suspiciously. I held the lamp up to his face and he uttered a little cry as he covered his eyes. “You’re afraid you won’t be able to continue your habit. What was it, cocaine?”

  He glared at me. “If I stay you must make perfectly sure no sunlight comes into this room.”

  “I’ll make sure the blinds are kept drawn—”

  “—not enough!” he snapped.

  “I’ll have the nurses put sheets over the windows. We do that with patients who are acutely sensitive to light.”

  “No!” he shouted and gripped my arm. “Boards!”

  I regarded him sternly. “My good fellow, I think putting boards over the window is a little extreme. I guarantee you, we can keep out all of the sunlight by simply nailing a few bedsheets up.”

  “Lei non capisce,” he said as he sank back heavily into the bed. “It is not because of any cocaine habit that I am so against staying here.”

  I looked at him inquisitively. “May I in
quire as to what it is then?”

  His expression became deadly serious. “My dear Dottore, if you have ever believed anyone, you must believe me now. I am not safe here. People fear me and if I am forced to stay here very long they will begin to hate me.”

  “What reason do they have to fear you?”

  He shrugged. “Because I am different, I guess.”

  “Come now—” I began, but he only shook his head with solemn resignation.

  “Trust my words, Dottore. Watch and listen very carefully, and you will see for yourself.” With that he ended and drifted off into a troubled silence.

  I was struck by his words. I was still convinced he was using some drug that dilated his eyes and suspected his worries were no more than eccentricity and perhaps momentary confusion from the shock of the accident. Nonetheless, the gravity of his expression moved me, tugged at something deeper than my proper and traditional common sense.

  “Do you have a wife or family I should inform of your accident, or any other affairs I should handle for you?”

  “No,” he sighed, “there’s no one.”

  I nodded. “In that case, I think you should be getting some rest now. I’ll look in on you tomorrow afternoon to see how you’re doing.” As I turned to leave I remembered one more thing. “I’m sorry, in the excitement of your waking up I completely forgot to introduce myself. My name is Dr. Gladstone.” I smiled at him once again and he nodded slightly. “Could I inquire as to what your name is?” I prodded.

  “Niccolo,” he said, and a faint flicker of pride spread across his worried face. “Niccolo Cavalanti.”

  V

  When I left Mr. Cavalanti’s room that evening, curiosity possessed me to check the occupants in the rooms on either side of his. I was impressed to find there was, indeed, a frail and elderly woman in one of them and a heavyset man deep in slumber in the other. I was not surprised when I mounted the stairs to the third floor and was greeted by the fresh antiseptic smell of carbolic acid. So he was right in these matters, I thought to myself. He was a very keenly observant young man, as he had said. But what I did not know at that time was that he was also very correct about people fearing him. I saw to it that no sunlight came into the room, as he requested, and this in itself created a certain degree of notoriety. But what really set the sway of opinion against my ethereal young acquaintance was that he refused to touch a drop of food or drink. Whenever a meal was placed before him he would inhale the aroma of each dish carefully, as if absorbing some nourishment from the vapors, and then push the plate aside without touching a thing. After three days of this absolute fast he had developed quite a reputation among the internes and staff of Redgewood, and not a favorable reputation at that. For some reason his odd habits were interpreted as sinister and malevolent. The nurses on duty started avoiding his room, and a low form of gossip began, alleging that he was different At first I greeted this chatter as ridiculous. When I confronted Mr. Cavalanti on the matter he insisted he never ate. I humored him in this assertion and took it as another example of his eccentric paranoia, but as the days of his fast continued, and he revealed no sign of weakness or deficiency, even I became suspicious. On my way to Redgewood one afternoon I paid a visit to the National Gallery, and when I set eyes on the frail and delicate being seated beside the Virgin, I felt a cool chill of adrenaline rush through my body. There was too much coincidence, I told myself. Had I encountered a being who was truly of a different substance, a different vibration? Had my carriage actually injured an angel?

  By the seventh day of Mr. Cavalanti’s fast the entire hospital was in an uproar. By some stretch of the imagination he might have remained unharmed by his abstinence from food, but everything medical science taught us said he could not have survived that long without water. Disregarding normal body functions, even the amount of water lost through the lungs in every exhalation of his breath should have left him dangerously dehydrated. Such a loss should have resulted in an abnormal thickening of the blood—what little of it Mr. Cavalanti had—and cyanosis, a bluish coloration of the skin caused by lack of oxygen in the blood, should have set in. Nonetheless, Mr. Cavalanti did not suffer from cyanosis. He remained as anemically pale and animated as ever.

  I begged him to take some sustenance, or to allow me to have him fed intravenously, but he adamantly refused. With this I was left with the choice of either putting him under sedation, or allowing his deadly fast to continue. It was a decision I found impossible to make. To put him under sedation I would have to use force, and I could not extricate myself from the fear that perhaps this was the wrong thing to do. After all, his metabolism obviously was very different, and he already had survived an impossible seven days. If I did give him an injection, would I be saving a strange young man from his own madness, or if he was something unearthly, a being with a more sublime body structure, would our coarse and material medications rip through his veins like molten lead? I found myself trapped in an insurmountable state of indecision, a state that my colleagues neither understood nor approved of. There was talk that I was flagrantly ignoring my responsibilities as a physician in catering to Mr Cavalanti’s “condition,” and I became more and more uneasy about the possible consequences of this disapprobation.

  On the morning of the eighth day when I entered Redgewood I discovered a name on the assignment sheet that filled me with panic: Hardwicke. Dr. Cletus Hardwicke had nobly assigned himself to this case. The audacity! I was outraged. Fate had assigned us to the same institution, but we avoided each other like old tigers. After all these years why should he suddenly want to confront me? I rushed to the second floor. As I neared Mr. Cavalanti’s room I noticed that the door next to it was open. Inside was a figure draped in a sheet. The heavyset man had died.

  Outside of Mr. Cavalanti’s room itself a small group of nurses and internes had gathered. As I struggled to push through them I became aware of the sickening odor of paraldehyde. My alarm increased. Before I had a chance to reach the door I rushed headlong into the bloody little man. It was the first time in many years I had had occasion to scrutinize him so directly Age crept in his ugly features; his thinning, reddish hair was streaked with gray, brown spots dotted the bulbous forehead. Bluish veins embroidered his fingers. His brow was bushier, and his eyes, even more piercing.

  “Why?” I demanded as I took his arm and pulled him away from the door.

  At first he was frightened, but when his gaze met mine he calmed. He knew me all too well. He knew I was not capable of violence of any form. As we stared at each other that same familiar and inscrutable amusement drifted into his expression.

  “Gladstone,” he said placidly, almost amiably.

  “Why have you seen my patient?”

  “I thought it best.”

  “I smell paraldehyde.”

  “We tried to put your Mr. Cavalanti under sedation.”

  “Tried?”

  “It’s the damnedest thing, Gladstone,” he said shaking his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  I watched his face closely. What was he up to? What was he orchestrating now?

  “After three internes and a nurse struggled to hold that young man down I administered enough paraldehyde to knock out a man twice his size—”

  “And?”

  “And he got awfully sick, but after he finished coughing and retching he just sat there and looked at us, cursing in Italian and saying we were fools.” He shook his head.

  “Why were you giving my patient paraldehyde without my permission?”

  He regarded me with surprise. “Your patient? Dr. Gladstone, all I know is that there’s a young man in there who hasn’t eaten in eight days, and if you weren’t considering intravenous feeding, somebody had to.” He looked at me incredulously. “But come now, John. That’s not the point I gave that young man enough paraldehyde to knock out a man twice his size. Do you hear me? Twice his size!” Something fanatical glimmered in the eyes of the little man before me, something that for
the slightest mote of a second seemed to overwhelm even him. He ruffled his feathers as if once again regaining control. The internes nearby shifted nervously.

  Dr. Hardwicke glanced at them and then back at me. I could see in his expression that he was not dismissing what he had just witnessed, a medical enigma of no small import. He was much too clever to allow a flare of human irrationality to jeopardize a situation pregnant with as yet unknown possibilities. He looked again at the internes watching and judging our every word. His smile returned. “... but come now, Dr. Gladstone, you seriously wouldn’t allow a patient to continue to refuse intravenous feeding without prescribing paraldehyde yourself, would you?”

  “Well...” I stammered nervously. Of course I objected, but the last thing I wanted Cletus to know—anyone to know—was the fantastical belief I had allowed to take root in my mind. It was impossible, but for some unknown reason something within me asserted with increasing conviction that there was a linkage between the angel of my childhood and the helpless creature in the room beyond. It was not out of any fear over my own future and reputation that I wanted this absurd and desperate notion concealed. It was concern for him, the boy Hardwicke looked at me searchingly. “Something strange is going on, isn’t it?” His voice was self-assured, but I could tell he was merely fishing. “How much do you know about this Mr. Cavalanti, anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, people just don’t exist without food.”

  “Obviously not, Dr. Hardwicke. He must be secretively obtaining food and water—his secrecy due to his psychological condition. I have not previously prescribed paraldehyde because I never seriously entertained the notion that Mr. Cavalanti had survived eight days on absolutely nothing.” I looked at the internes and the nurses. My vision returned to the little man. “In the future I will thank you to follow respected and ethical medical procedure and consult me before you administer any treatment to one of my patients.”