Descendant

The Face in the Mirror

We were married at Kenwood Heights Christian Church on Saturday, April 28, 1962. It was a bright, warm day, and pink cherry blossoms blew over us as we left the church.

I saw a man in a long dark coat standing on the opposite side of the street as we climbed into the wedding car. His face was white and he looked strangely two-dimensional, more like a black-and-white photograph than a real person. I looked at him and he looked back at me, but there was no way of telling if he was a Screecher or nothing more than a curious passerby. But who wears a winter overcoat, on an April afternoon, in Louisville?

The years came and went, and we lived the kind of life that most everybody lives in Louisville — playing golf, eating out at Mike Linnig’s Place, going to Churchill Downs in May and betting against the crowd. I was William Crowe and Jill was Jill Crowe and we were happy. We bought a black Labrador and called him Ricochet.

In March, 1965, Jill gave birth to Mark. He was a quiet, introspective boy who always preferred playing on his own, but he was very clever, and by the time he was eleven years old he could play the piano as well as his grandfather.

I’ll never forget, though, that summer morning in 1977 when he came into my study and stood there for a long time, saying nothing, and the way that the sun shone red through his ears reminded me of Ann De Wouters’s little boy, kneeling in front of the window in Antwerp, all those years before.

He looked so much like Jill — dark-haired and almost too pretty, for a boy.

“What am I?” he asked me. Not “who am I?” but “what am I?”

I looked up from the papers on my desk and smiled at him in amusement. “You’re a twelve-year-old boy. Haven’t you looked in the mirror lately?”

“No, but what am I?”

I leaned back in my chair. “You’re an American. But you’re part Burmese, and part Romanian, and part Irish.”

“I feel as if I’m something else.”

“Something else like what?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Well, tell me what it’s like, this feeling.”

He frowned. “It’s like being alone. It’s like being different. It’s like being inside somebody else’s head.”

I ruffled his hair. “You’re growing up, that’s all. You’re a boy now, but there’s a young man inside you, trying to get out.”

But I remembered his words three years later. It was just past 11:00 in the evening. I was sitting in the armchair in the corner of our bedroom, trying to finish the cryptic crossword that I had started earlier that day, and cooling off after my shower. Jill was sitting in front of her dressing table brushing her hair.

“Do you know what I’d like to do for my birthday this year?” she asked me. “I’d like to go to Mexico.”

“You know I hate Mexican food. All those beans. All those burritos.”

“Molly and David went to Mexico and they loved it.”

“OK,” I said, dropping my newspaper on the floor and standing up behind her. “If you want to go to Mexico, we’ll go to goddamned Mexico.”

I kissed her on top of her head. But it was then that I thought: she’s going to be forty-nine years old next birthday. Forty-nine years old and she doesn’t have a single gray hair or a single line on her forehead. In fact, she looks exactly the same as she did when I flew back to England in 1961, eighteen years ago.

“What’s the matter?” she said, looking at me in her dressing table mirror. “You look like something’s bothering you.”

“Nothing, no.” But then I thought: her figure is just the same, too. She has no cellulite on her thighs, her stomach is flat, her breasts are still big and firm. I had seen men turning around to look at her in the street, and I had always taken it for granted that they were looking at her because she was so attractive. But supposing they were wondering what a woman who had the face and the figure of a thirty-one-year-old was doing with a gray-haired man of sixty-one?

For the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I hated myself for being so disloyal, but the thought wouldn’t leave me alone.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she asked me, over breakfast. “You don’t have money worries you’re not telling me about, do you?”

“No, no. Everything’s fine.”

“But you’ve hardly spoken to me for the past two days, and you keep staring at me in this really strange way. It’s almost like you’ve forgotten who I am.”

I haven’t forgotten who you are, I thought. Maybe I never knew who you were to begin with.

I went upstairs, opened up my bedroom closet, and took down my Kit. I looked at it for a long time before I opened it up. I loved Jill so much and this was an act of betrayal, no matter what I found out. But I had to know for sure, or else I was going to spend the rest of my life wondering what I was sharing my bed with.

She was still sitting at the kitchen table when I came down, holding a cup of coffee in both hands, watching television. The sun was shining on her hair and on her pink satin robe. She looked so beautiful that I almost went straight back upstairs, without doing what I had come down to do.

“Bill?” she said. She always called me “Bill” in case she accidentally slipped up and called me “Jim” in front of our friends. “Come and take a look at this.”

“Hold on,” I told her. I stood to one side of the kitchen door and held up the pure silver mirror that I had taken out of my Kit. My hand was trembling so much that at first I couldn’t focus properly. But then I steadied it against the door frame, and angled it so that I could see Jill’s profile.

It took only a split-second glance to tell me what I needed to know. The woman sitting at the kitchen table had hair that was streaked with gray. There were wrinkles around her eyes, and her hands were patterned with liver spots.

I came into the kitchen and sat down next to her. “This is hilarious,” she said. “This woman thinks that her husband is having an affair with another woman, but all the time — ”

She stopped, and stared at me. “Jim?” she said. “Jim, what’s happened? You look terrible.”

“I had to find out sooner or later, didn’t I?” I told her. My throat was constricted, and I found it very difficult to speak.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You had to find out what?”

“Come on, Jill, how much longer did you think you could keep it from me? You’re going to be fifty in a couple of years. What happens when you get to sixty, and you still look just as young as you do now?”

She lowered her coffee cup. “I couldn’t tell you. I tried to, lots of times. But I love you, Jim. I knew what you would do if I told you.”

“What did Duca do to you?” I asked her.

Her eyes filled with tears. “Can’t we just go on like we are? Can’t we just pretend?”

“Tell me what Duca did to you.”

“Jim — think about Mark. Please. Think about us. We can still be happy, can’t we?”

I stood up and went to the window. Next door, Fred Nordstrom was lathering his new green Buick Electra. He saw me and waved his soapy sponge.

Jill said, “It asked me to lie on the couch. It stood next to me, and at first I didn’t think it was going to do anything. It just talked to me, very quietly. I don’t even remember what it said.”

“Then what?”

“Jim, please! There was nothing I could do to stop it!”

I turned around. “I know,” I told her. “It was all my fault, not yours. I shouldn’t have expected you to do it.”

I tore off a sheet of kitchen tissue and handed it to her, so that she could wipe her eyes.

“I felt as if I didn’t have any willpower at all. I was lying there and I simply couldn’t move. I wasn’t unconscious or anything. I simply couldn’t make my muscles work.”

“It’s a form of hypnosis,” I said. “Some Screechers use it to stop their victims from resisting them. If you practice it for as long as Duca must have been practicing it, I guess you can make a person do whatever you want.”

“It opened up its pants. It was hard, and I was sure that it was going to rape me. I tried to call you, but I couldn’t make my voice work.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I was dreading to hear what she was going to say next.

“Duca picked up a scalpel. He showed it to me, held it right in front of my face, and it was smiling. Then it sliced the end of its penis, right across. All this blood came spurting out. Duca held its penis over my lips so that the blood dripped into my mouth.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, as if she could still taste it. “That was when it heard you upstairs, and it stopped.”

I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down next to her. I didn’t take her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

“I don’t know. I was very confused. I was ashamed, too. I thought it was disgusting, what Duca had done to me. But I hadn’t resisted it, had I? I didn’t want you to think that I might have encouraged it.”

“But you began to change?”

Jill nodded. “I tried so hard to fight it. I needed to drink blood so badly, I felt as if my throat was on fire. I could feel what was happening inside my own body, too. I hated myself. I hated the way I was starting to smell. I hated the way I looked. I pretended that I was sick so that I could stay in my room. You don’t know how much willpower it took not to kill my own parents.

“Then Duca came for me. It said that it had to get away from England, because you were coming after it. It wanted to go to America, because it had a score to settle. I don’t know what score. It never said.”

“So you went with it?”

“It promised me blood, Jim. I was worse than a drug addict, how could I say no?”

“So you and Duca. you killed somebody, and drank their blood?”

“No. It was going to kill a young woman who was waiting at a bus stop, but I wouldn’t let it. I was burning for blood but I couldn’t let it take an innocent woman’s life, not for me. I drank some of Duca’s blood instead, and that’s why I am what I am. I’m never going to grow any older, Jim.”

“You’re not immortal, Jill. You’re dead. The only difference is, you’re dead but you won’t lie down.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I love you, Jim, but I’m going to have to watch you grow older right in front of my eyes! One day I’m going to have to bury you!”

I took a deep breath. This was a nightmare. Jill didn’t look any different. I couldn’t stop myself from loving her. But she wasn’t “her” any more. She was “it.” She was a thing, rather than a person.

“Jim,” she pleaded. “Please try to forgive me. You could be the same. You could live forever, too.”

“You want me to become a Screecher? Are you out of your mind?”

“So what are you going to do? Cut off my head, chop me into bits, and bury my body?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

“Jim, please!”

“You’re a strigoaica, Jill. How can I pretend that you’re human?”

“Because you love me. Because I love you.”

I pushed my chair back and stood up. “If you’re a strigoaica, you need to drink human blood at least once a month, don’t you, or you’ll start to lose those perfect looks?”

“Jim — ”

“Come on, Jill. Whose blood have you been drinking?”

“Nobody that matters, I promise you.”

“Nobody that matters? What the hell do you mean, ‘nobody that matters’?”

“Derelicts, down-and-outs, mostly from southern Indiana. People that nobody’s going to miss. And nobody has missed them, Jim. Ever. Did you ever see a story in the papers about them? Did you ever see them mentioned on TV?”

“Christ, Jill, we’re talking about twelve people a year for eighteen years! That’s a massacre!”

“I have to, Jim! I can’t stop! But strigoaica. we’re not like strigoi. We don’t have the same need to spread the infection. We just want to be normal. We just want to be loved.”

I looked at her, and she looked so desperate and so miserable. Who would have thought that I could love a Screecher? Me, of all people, the bane of Screechers everywhere.

“I’m going out,” I told her. “I need some time to think.”