The Tale of the Body Thief

Miami--the vampire's city. South Beach at sunset, in the luxurious warmth of the winterless winter, the breeze moving in from the placid sea across the dark margin of cream-colored sand to cool the happy mortal children. The sweet parade of fashionable young men displaying their cultivated muscles with touching vulgarity, or of young women proud of their streamlined modern limbs.

Old stucco hostelries, once the crumbling shelters of the aged, are reborn in smart pastels, sporting new names in elegant neon. Candles flicker on the white-draped tables of open-porch restaurants. Big shiny American cars push their way along the avenue, slowed by the dazzling human parade. To the north rise the towers of Miami Beach. To the south and to the west are the dazzling steel skyscrapers of the downtown city with its high, roaring freeways and busy cruise-ship docks. Pleasure boats speed along the sparkling waters of the canals past sprawling red-tiled villas draped with red and purple bougainvillea, past swimming pools shimmering with turquoise light.

On the horizon, great white clouds mountain beneath a roofless, star-filled heaven. Ah, it never fails to take my breath away--this southern sky.

City of water, city of speed, city of tropical flowers, city of enormous skies. It's never really dark in Miami. It's never really quiet. And it is for Miami, more than any other place, that I periodically leave my New Orleans home.

It is the perfect city for the vampire. There is menace beneath the shining surface of the city. There is desperation and throbbing greed and endless risk. It never fails to yield to me a mortal killer--some twisted, sinister morsel who will surrender to me a dozen of his own murders as I drain his memory banks with his blood.

What luck for me that such a celebrity had surfaced in my favorite city. What luck that he had struck six times in these very streets--one of those splendid human trophies whose gruesome modus operandi occupies whole files in the computers of law enforcement agencies, an anonymous being anointed by the worshipful press with the flashy name of the Back Street Strangler.

Ah, I would have crossed a continent to snap him up--this slayer of the old and infirm who come in such numbers to these warm climes. And he is here, waiting for me. To his dark history, detailed by no fewer than 20 criminologists and easily purloined through the computer in my New Orleans lair, I have added the crucial elements: his name and habitation. Through his blood-soaked dreams, I found him. And tonight I will end his illustrious career in a cruel embrace, without a scintilla of moral illumination.

Please understand that there is no nobility in this. I don't believe that rescuing humanity from such a fiend can conceivably save my soul. I don't believe that the power of one good deed is infinite. What I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is infinite. And my guilt is like my beauty--eternal.

Nevertheless, I like saving innocents from their fate. And I like taking killers to me because they are my brothers and we belong together. Why shouldn't they die in my arms instead of poor merciful mortals who have never done any willful harm? These are the rules of my game. I play by these rules because I made them.

Ah, Miami, the perfect place for this little Passion play.

•

I stand at the front windows of the rooms I maintain in the swanky little Cavalier Hotel on Ocean Drive, my Champs-Élysées of the moment, my Via Veneto. I enjoy the premium brand of solitude of the rich, complete privacy only steps from the flashy street.

But it is time to dress for the man of my dreams.

Picking from the usual wilderness of boxes, suitcases and trunks, I choose a suit of gray velvet, an old favorite with a subtle luster. The coat is slim, with narrow lapels, spare and rather like a hacking jacket with its fitted waist, even more like a graceful old frock coat from earlier times, perfect with the tight gray-velvet trousers. We immortals fancy old-fashioned garments. Sometimes you can gauge the true age of an immortal simply by the cut of his clothes.

As for the white silk shirt, it is so soft that you can ball it in the palm of your hand. Why should I wear anything else so close to my indestructible and curiously sensitive skin?

The soles of my fine boots are immaculate, for they seldom touch the earth. My hair I shake loose into a shoulder-length mane of yellow waves. I smooth brown lotion over my cheekbones and neck to camouflage the skin. What do I look like to mortals? I honestly don't know. I cover my blue eyes, as always, with black glasses, for their radiance can entrance and mesmerize a chance encounter. Over my delicate white hands, with their telltale glassy fingernails, I draw a pair of soft gray-leather gloves.

Seven o'clock. The tiny green numerals of the digital clock glow. I close my eyes, letting my head drop to the side, bracing myself for the full effect of the amplification of my preternatural hearing. It is as if I have thrown a technological switch. The soft purring sounds of the world outside become a chorus from hell--full of sharp-edged laughter and lamentation, full of lies and anguish and random pleas. I cover my ears.

Gradually I see the blurred images of thoughts rising like a million fluttering birds into the firmament. Give me my killer, give me his vision.

He is in a small dingy room, very unlike this one yet only two blocks from it, just rising from his bed. His cheap clothes are rumpled, sweat covers his face, a thick nervous hand reaches for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, then lets them go, already forgotten. He is a heavy man with shapeless features and a look of vague worry or dim regret.

It does not occur to him to dress for his evening, for the feast for which he is hungering. He shakes himself, greasy hair falling onto his sloping forehead, eyes like black glass.

Standing in the silent shadows of my room, I continue to track him, to follow down a back staircase, out into the garish lights of Collins Avenue, past dusty shop windows and sagging commercial signs, propelled onward to the as yet unchosen object of his desire.

And who might she be, the lucky lady wandering blindly toward this horror through the sparse crowds of early evening in this dreary region of town? Does she carry a carton of milk and a head of lettuce in a brown paper bag? Will she hurry at the sight of cutthroats on the corner? Does she grieve for the old beachfront where she lived so contentedly before the architects and decorators drove her to cracked and peeling quarters farther away?

And what will he think when he spots her, my ugly angel of death? Will she remind him of the mythic shrew of his childhood who beat him senseless, only to be elevated to the nightmare pantheon of his subconscious?

Ah, well, I will tear out his menacing heart before he has his way with her, and he will give me everything that he has and is.

•

I walk slowly down the steps and through the smart, glittering art deco lobby with its magazine-page glamour. How good it feels to be moving like a mortal, to touch the chrome handles of the glass doors, to wander out into the fresh air. I head north along the sidewalk among the evening strollers, admiring the refurbished hotels and their little cafés.

The crowd thickens as I reach the corner. Before a fancy open-air restaurant, giant television cameras focus their lenses on a stretch of sidewalk harshly illuminated by enormous white lights. Trucks block the traffic; cars slow as passengers and drivers watch. A loose crowd has gathered, only mildly fascinated, for television and motion picture cameras are a familiar sight in South Beach.

I skirt the lights, fearing their effect on my highly reflective face. I make my way around the corner, and again I scan for the prey.

He is racing, his mind thick with hallucinations, so that he can scarcely control his shuffling steps.

With a little spurt of speed, I take to the low roofs. The breeze is stronger, sweeter. I hear the gentle roar of excited voices, the dull music of radios, the sound of the wind itself.

I hit the pavement of Collins Avenue so swiftly that perhaps I seem simply to appear. But nobody is looking.

And in minutes I am ambling along, steps behind him, threading through a cluster of tough guys who block my path to pursue the prey through the doors of a giant ice-cold drugstore.

Such a circus for the eyes, this cave full of every imaginable kind of packaged foodstuff, toilet article and hair accouterment, 90 percent of which existed not at all, in any form whatsoever, during the century in which I was born. Sanitary napkins, medicinal eye drops, plastic hairpins, felt-tip markers, creams and ointments for all nameable parts of the human body, dishwashing liquid in every color of the rainbow, cosmetic rinses in colors still undefined. What would Louis XIV think of Styrofoam cups, chocolate cookies wrapped in cellophane, disposable pens that never need ink?

I've watched the progress of the industrial revolution with my own eyes, but I'm not entirely used to these items myself. Such drugstores can keep me enthralled for hours on end. But this time I have prey in sight.

Why has he come to this place? Young Cuban couples with babies in tow are not his style. He wanders the crowded aisles unnoticed by anyone but me, his red-rimmed eyes sweeping the cluttered shelves.

Lord God, but he is filthy, all decency lost in his mania, craggy face and neck creased with dirt. Will I like this? Hell, he's a sack of blood. I can't kill little children anymore. Nor can I feast on waterside harlots. My conscience is killing me, and when you're immortal, that can be a long death. But look at him, this dirty, stinking, lumbering killer. Men in prisons get better food than this.

And then it hits me as I scan his mind once more, as though cutting open a cantaloupe. He doesn't know what he is. He has never read his own headlines. He does not remember episodes of his life in any discerning order and could not truly confess to the murders he has committed, for he does not truly recall them. He does not know that he will kill tonight. He does not know what I know.

Ah, sadness and grief, I have drawn the worst card, no doubt about it. Lord God, what have I been thinking of to hunt this one, when the starlit world is full of more vicious and cunning beasts? I want to weep.

•

But then comes the provocative moment. He has seen the old woman, seen her bare, wrinkled arms, the bent hump of her back, the shivering thighs under her pastel shorts. Through the glare of fluorescent light, she makes her way idly, enjoying the buzz and throb of the crowd, her face half hidden beneath the green plastic of a visor, her hair twisted with dark pins against the back of her small head.

She carries in her basket a pint of orange juice in a plastic bottle and a pair of soft slippers folded into a neat little roll. To this she adds, with obvious pleasure, a paperback novel from the (continued on page 98)Body Thief (continued from page 76) rack. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Yes, I loved it, too.

He falls in behind her, so closely that surely she will feel his breath on her neck. Dull-eyed and stupid, he watches her inch her way closer and closer to the register, drawing a few ragged dollar bills from the drooping collar of her blouse.

Out the door they go, he with the plodding concentration of a dog after a bitch, she making her way slowly with her gray sack hanging from its cut-out handles, veering awkwardly around the noisy bands of brazen youngsters. Is she talking to herself? Seems so. I don't scan her, this little being walking faster now. I scan the beast behind her, who is wholly unable to see her as the sum of her parts.

Pallid, feeble faces flash through his mind as he trails her. He sees drooping breasts and hands with veins like tree roots. He hungers to lie on top of old flesh, to put a hand over an old mouth.

When she reaches her small, forlorn apartment building, which seems to be made of crumbling chalk, like everything else in this seedy section of town, he comes to a sudden swaying stop, watching mutely as she walks through the narrow tiled courtyard and up the dusty green cement steps. He notes the number of the painted door she unlocks, or clamps on to the location, and, sinking back against the wall, he begins to dream very specifically of killing her in a featureless empty bedroom, no more than a smear of color and light.

Ah, look at him, resting against the wall as if stabbed, head lolling to one side. Impossible to be interested in him. Why don't I kill him now?

But the moments tick, and the night loses its twilight incandescence. The stars grow more brilliant. The breeze comes and goes.

We wait.

•

Through her eyes, I see her parlor as if I could see through doors and windows--clean, though filled with careless old furniture of ugly veneer. But all has been polished with a scented oil she loves from a carefully kept bottle. Neon light enters through the curtains, milky and as cheerless as the view of the yard below. But she has the comforting light of her own small, carefully positioned lamps. This is what matters to her.

In a maple rocking chair with hideous plaid upholstery, she sits with her new paperback. What happiness to be once more with Francie Nolan. The old woman's thin knees are barely hidden by the flowered cotton robe she has taken from her closet, and she wears blue socklike slippers on her small misshapen feet. Her gray braid is loose. On the black-and-white television screen, dead movie stars argue without making a sound. Joan Fontaine thinks Cary Grant is trying to kill her. How could anyone trust Cary Grant, I wonder--a man who looks as though he were made entirely of polished wood?

She doesn't need to hear the voices; she has seen this movie, by her careful count, 13 times. She has read the novel only twice, so she will take special pleasure in revisiting those paragraphs that she does not yet know by heart.

From the shadowy garden below, I discern her neat concept of self, without drama, detached from the acknowledged bad taste surrounding her. Her few treasures could fit in any cabinet. The book and the lighted screen are more important to her than anything else she owns, and she is aware of their spirituality. Her functional and styleless clothes are not worth her concern.

My vagabond killer is near paralysis, his mind a riot of moments so personal they defy interpretation.

I slip around the building to find the stairs to her kitchen door. The lock gives way easily when I command it to do so. The door opens as if I had touched it, though I did not.

Without a sound, I slip into the linoleum-floored room. The stench of gas rising from the small white stove is sickening. So is the smell of the soap in its ceramic dish. But the room touches my heart. Cherished Chinese plates of blue and white are neatly stacked and displayed. Behold dog-eared cookbooks. How spotless her table with its shining oilcloth of pure yellow, her waxen green ivy growing in a round bowl of clear water, which projects upon the low ceiling a single quivering circle of light.

She has no inner antennae to sense the presence of the monster who stands, sunk into madness, in the nearby street--nor of the spook who haunts her kitchen now. The killer is immersed so completely in his hallucinations that he does not see those who pass by. He does not see the police car prowling, nor the suspicious looks of the uniformed men who suspect that he will strike tonight, but do not suspect who he is.

A thin line of spittle dribbles down his unshaven chin. Nothing is real to him--not his life by day, not fear of discovery--only the electric shiver that hallucinations send through his hulking torso and clumsy limbs. His left hand twitches. The left side of his mouth catches.

I hate this man. I don't want to drink his blood. He is no subtle and crafty killer.

It is her blood I crave.

•

How thoughtful she is in her solitude and silence, how small, how contented, her concentration as fine as a light beam as she reads the paragraphs of the story she knows so well. She first read this book when she was a young secretary smartly dressed in a red wool skirt and a white ruffled blouse with pearl buttons on the cuffs. She worked in a tall office tower, infinitely glamourous, with ornate brass doors on its elevators and dark yellow marble in its halls.

I want to press my lips to her memories, to the tap of her high heels clicking on the marble, to the shape of her smooth calf under the pure-silk stocking she put on so carefully, so as not to snag it with her long enameled nails. I see her red hair. I see her extravagant and potentially hideous, yet somehow charming, yellow-brimmed hat.

That's blood worth having. And I am starving, starving as I have seldom been.

Below in the street, a faint gurgling comes from the lips of the killer, clearing its way through the torrent of sound that pours into my vampire's ears. The beast lurches away from the wall and into the little courtyard and up the steps.

Will I let him frighten her? It seems pointless. I have him in my sight, do I not? Yet I allow him to put his metal tool into the round hole near her doorknob. I give him time to force the lock. The chain tears loose from the wood.

He steps into the room, fixing upon her without expression. She is terrified, shrinking back in her chair, the book slipping from her lap.

Ah, but then he sees me in the doorway--a shadowy young man in gray velvet, glasses pushed up over my forehead. I gaze at him in his own expressionless fashion. Does he see these (concluded on page 176)Body Thief (continued from page 98) iridescent eyes, this skin like polished ivory, hair like an explosion of light? Or am I merely an obstacle between him and his goal?

He bolts. He is down the stairs as the old woman screams. And I am after him, not bothering to touch the ground, letting him see me poised for an instant under the streetlight as he turns the corner. We go for half a block before I drift toward him, a blur to unnoticing mortals. Then I freeze beside him and hear him groan as he runs.

For blocks we play the game. He runs, he stops, he sees me behind him. Sweat pours down his body; it soaks his dirty undergarments; the synthetic fabric of his sleeveless shirt is soon translucent with it, clinging to the hairless flesh of his chest.

At last he comes to his seedy flophouse and pounds up the stairs. I am in the top-floor room when he reaches it.

Before he can cry out, I have him in my arms. The stench of his dirty hair rises in my nostrils, mingled with the chemical fibers of the shirt. But now it doesn't matter. He is powerful and warm in my arms, a juicy capon, chest heaving against me, the smell of his blood flooding my brain. I hear it pulsing through ventricles and valves and painfully constricted vessels. I lick at it in the tender red flesh under his eyes.

The fountain opens--ah, his life was a sewer. All those old women, old men. They were like dried cadavers floating in the current; they tumbled against one another without meaning as he went limp in my arms. No cunning. No malice. Crude as a lizard he had been, swallowing fly after fly. Lord God, to know this is to know the time when giant reptiles ruled the earth, when, for many millions of years, only they beheld the falling rain or heard the thunder beyond the mountains.

I let him go, tumbling soundlessly out of my grip. Good enough. I close my eyes, letting the hot coil of his blood penetrate my hard, powerful, white body. In a daze, I see him scrabbling on his knees across the floor. So clumsy, shirt soaked transparent across the broad span of his sloping back. So easy to pick him up from the twisted and tearing newspapers, the overturned cup pouring cold coflee onto the dust-colored rug.

I jerk him back by his collar. His big empty eyes roll up into his head. Then he kicks at me, blindly, this bully, this killer of the old and weak. His shoe scuffs my shin. I lift him to my hungry mouth again, my fingers sliding through his hair, and feel him stiffen, as if my fangs were clipped in poison.

Again the blood floods my brain. It electrifies the tiny veins of my face. It pulses through my fingers, and a hot prickling warmth slides down my spine. Draught after draught fills me. Succulent, heavy creature. I let him go once more, and when he stumbles away, I go after him, drag him across the floor, turn his face to me, toss him forward to struggle again.

He is speaking to me now in something that ought to be language but is not. He pushes at me, but he can no longer see clearly. For the first time a tragic dignity infuses him, a look of outrage. In his mind, I am enfolded in old tales, in memories of plaster statues and nameless saints. His fingers claw at the instep of my boot. I lift him, and when I tear his throat this time, the wound is big. It is done.

The death comes like a fist in my gut. For a moment I feel nausea, and then simply the heat, the fullness, the sheer radiance of the living blood with the last vibration of his consciousness pulsing through my limbs.

I sink down onto his soiled bed and lie there for a time. I stare at his low ceiling. And when the sour smells of the room and the stench of the body surround me, I rise and stumble out, as ungainly as he was, letting myself go soft in mortal gestures. At this moment I don't want to be the weightless one, the winged one, the night traveler. I want to be human and to feel human, and though his blood is threaded through me, it isn't enough, not nearly enough.

What has become of my promises? The stiff, bruised palmettos rattle against the stucco walls.

"Oh, you're back," she says to me.

Such a low, strong voice she has, no tremor in it. She stands in front of the ugly plaid rocker with its worn maple arms, peering at me through her silver-rimmed glasses, the paperback novel clasped in her hand. Her mouth is small and shapeless, showing yellow teeth, a contrast to the dark personality of the voice, which knows no infirmity.

What in God's name is she thinking as she smiles at me? Why doesn't she pray?

"I knew you'd come," she says. When she takes off her glasses, I see that her eyes are glazed. What is she seeing?

What am I making her see? I who can control all these elements flawlessly am so baffled that I could weep. "Yes, I knew."

"Oh? And how did you know?" I whisper as I approach her in the embracing closeness of her little room.

"Yes," she says airily but definitively, "I always knew."

"Kiss me, then. Love me."

How hot. she is, how tiny her shoulders, how gorgeous in this final withering, the flower tinged with yellow, yet full of fragrance still. Pale blue veins dance beneath her flaccid skin in eyelids perfectly molded to her eyes when she closes them, in skin flowing over the bones of her skull.

"Take me to heaven," she says. Out of the heart comes her voice.

"I can't. I wish I could," I purr into her ear.

I close my arms around her. I nuzzle her soft nest of hair. I feel her fingers on my face like dry leaves, and they send a soft chill through me. She, too, is shivering. Ah, tender and worn little thing, creature reduced to thought and will, body as insubstantial as a fragile flame. Just a little drink, no more.

But it is too late. I know it when I taste the first spurt of blood. I am draining her. Surely the sound of my moans must alarm her, but then she is past hearing. They never hear the real sound once it begins.

Forgive me.

Oh, darling!

We sink down together onto the carpet, lovers in a patch of nubby faded flowers. I see the book fallen there, and the drawing on the cover, but this seems unreal. I hug her so carefully, lest she break. But I am the hollow shell. Her death comes swifdy, as if she herself were walking toward me in a broad corridor, in some extremely particular and very important place. All, yes, the yellow marble. Even up here you can hear the traffic, and that low boom when a door slams on a stairway, down the hall.

"Good night, my darling," she whispers.

Am I hearing things? How can she still make words?

I love you.

"Yes, darling. I love you, too."

What the hell are you doing?

She is dead. I lie on the floor and stare blankly at the ceiling, smelling cordite in a corridor.

Her clock is ticking on the table. From the overheated heart of the television comes the pinched and liny voice of Gary Grant telling Joan Fontaine that he loves her. And Joan Fontaine is so happy. She thought that Gary Grant meant to kill her.

And so did I.

"I want to press my lips to her memories, to the shape of her smooth calf under the pure-silk stocking."

"How hot she is, how tiny her shoulders, how gorgeous in this final withering, the flower tinged with yellow."