Stories: All-New Tales

Walter Mosley. JUVENAL NYX

SHE NAMED ME JUVENAL NYX and made me a child of the night.

I was attending a Saturday-night meeting at Splinter-the Radical Faction Bookstore, presenting the Amalgamation of Black Student Unions’ stand on when and how we would agree to work with white radical organizations. For too long, we believed, had our systems, movements, and ultimate liberation been co-opted by white groups pretending, maybe even believing, that they were our friends and allies. But in the end we were saddled with goals outside our communities, diverted into pathways that abandoned our people’s needs and ends.

The speech went very well, and the people there, both black and white, seemed to take my words seriously. I felt that the articulation of our goals was in itself a victory, a line drawn in the quick-drying cement that had been poured into the frame of the coming revolution.

I was very young.

She approached me after the series of speakers had made their comments, pleas, pledges, and calls for solidarity. She was short and white, pale actually, wearing loose-fitting jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. She wasn’t pretty and didn’t do much in the way of makeup. Only her eyes were arresting. They were very dark, maybe even black, with a patina of silver glowing underneath now and then.

“I like what you had to say,” she told me. “Any man must stand on his own before relying on the help of others.”

Her use of the word man made me curious. I assumed, from the way she dressed, that she’d be a feminist.

“That’s right,” I said. “The black man doesn’t need Mr. Charlie to pave the way. It’s the white man who wants our power.”

“Everyone wants your strength,” she said.

With that she looked into my eyes and touched my left wrist. Her fingers were cold.

“Will you have coffee with me?” she asked.

No, was in my throat but “Yes” came out of my mouth. “Only for just a bit,” I added awkwardly. “I have to get back to my people and report.”

“I AM FROM RUMANIA,” she told me at the café across the street from the bookstore. “My parents have died and I am alone in the world. I work sometimes doing freelance copyediting and I go to meetings at night.”

“Political meetings?” I asked, wondering at the moonlight that emanated from behind her eyes.

“No kind in particular,” she said, dismissing all content with the shrug of a shoulder. “I go to readings and lectures, art openings and the like. I just want to be around people, to belong for a while.”

“You live alone?”

“Yes. I prefer it that way. Relationships seem to lose their meaning, and after a few weeks I crave solitude again.”

“How old are you?” I asked, wondering at the odd way in which she spoke.

“I am young,” she said, smiling as if there was a joke hidden among her words. “Come home with me for the night.”

“I don’t chase after white girls, Julia,” I said, because that was the name she’d given me.

“Come home with me,” she said again.

“I’ll walk you to your door,” I said, reluctantly, “but after that I have to get back to Central House.”

“What is Central House?”

“The officers and senior members of the BSUs around the city have rented a brownstone in Harlem. We live together and prepare for whatever’s coming.”

She smiled at my words and stood.

“JULIA,” A MAN SAID when we were halfway down the block from the café. “Wait up.”

He was tall and brawny, white and blond. He might have been a football player at some university, maybe the one I was attending.

“Martin,” she said by way of a tepid greeting.

“Where you going?” He had a thick gauze wad taped to his left forearm.

When she didn’t answer he gave me an evil look.

“This is my, my girlfriend, dude,” he said.

I didn’t reply. Instead I was preparing for a fight I didn’t think I could win. He was very big and I am, at best, a middleweight.

“Just walk away and you won’t get hurt,” the footballer added.

His tone had a pleading quality to it. This made him seem all the more dangerous.

“Hey, man,” I said. “I just met the lady, but you aren’t gonna make me go anywhere.”

He reached for me and I got ready to throw the hardest punch I could. I wasn’t about to let that white boy make me turn tail and run.

“Martin, stop,” Julia said. Each syllable was the sound of a hammer driving a nail.

Martin’s fingers splayed out like a fan and he drew the hand back as if it had been burned.

“Go away,” she said, “and don’t bother me again.”

Martin was well over six feet tall and weighed maybe two-forty, most of which was muscle. He shook like a man resisting a strong wind. The muscles of his neck bunched up and corded and he grimaced, exposing his teeth in a skull-like grin. After a minute or so of this strain, Martin turned his back to us and staggered from the sidewalk into the street and away. Cowering as he stumbled off, he gave the impression of a man reeling from a beating.

“You were ready to fight him,” Julia said.

I didn’t answer.

“He would have hurt you,” she stated.

With that she took my arm and walked me across downtown Manhattan to the pedestrian entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t question our walk. There was a buildup of energy in my blood and muscles from the fight I’d almost had, from fear of the pounding I would have surely received.

On the way she told me about her life in Rumania, her escape from the Communists to Munich where she lived with Gypsies for a time. It was a cool October evening and I listened, feeling no need to respond. For her part, she held on to my arm happily prattling about a life that seemed like a story out of a book.

When we got to the other side, she walked me to where there were many warehouses and few residences. We came to a stairwell leading down to a doorway below the surface of the street. She pushed the door open without using a key.

We went down a long hallway until coming to stairs that took us down at least three more levels. There we came to another hall and then to a door that she produced a key for.

IT WAS A SMALL, dimly lit room with a maple table in one corner and a single mattress on the floor. There were no windows, of course, and the room smelled dry and stale, like a tomb that had been sealed for centuries.

The door closed behind me and I turned to look Julia in the eye. The moons there were luminescent and her smile took my breath away. She shucked the blue T-shirt, stepped out of the loose pants, and she was naked. I realized as I lunged for her that this uncontrolled sexuality had been coming on ever since Martin had threatened me. I pulled down my pants and Julia started laughing. I dragged her to the small bed and we were together. My pants were around my ankles. My shoes were still on my feet but I couldn’t take the time to remove them. I had to be in her. I had to fuck her and to keep on fucking. Nothing could stop me. Even my orgasm only slowed down the gyrating urgency for a moment or two.

All the while Julia was laughing and talking to me in some foreign tongue. Now and again she’d pull my hair back and examine my eyes with those eerie lights in hers.

I writhed on top of her while she entwined me with her cold legs and arms. I could not stop. I could not pull away. For the first time in my life, I felt, I knew what freedom was. I understood that this passion was the only thing that touched the core of my being.

I AWOKE NOT REMEMBERING having lost consciousness, yet I must have passed out, because I was now in another room in a bed with a frame. My wrists and ankles were chained to the four corners of the bed and I was naked.

This room was also windowless and stale. It felt as if I was far underground, but I yelled anyway. I screamed and hollered until my throat was raw, but no one came. No one heard me.

As hours went past I thrashed and called out, but the chains were strong and the walls thick. There was a columnlike yellow candle burning for the little light Julia had left me, and I wondered if I was meant to die in that underground tomb.

At times I worried that this was some white supremacist plot against the BSU of New York. Had they captured me to make a statement? Were they going to lynch me or burn me? Would I be a martyr for the cause?

It was many hours later when the door came open and Julia walked in. I yelled for all I was worth before she could close the door, but she wasn’t bothered. She smiled and came to sit next to me on the bed.

She was wearing a red velvet robe that flowed all the way down to her bare feet. There was a hood, but it hung down behind her head.

“This is a room within a room that is itself within a larger room,” she said. “We are far underground and no one can hear you.”

“Why you got me chained down like this?” I asked, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.

In answer, she stood up, letting the sumptuous robe fall to the floor. She was as naked as I. The breath left my lungs, but I don’t know if it was her nakedness or those eyes that left me stunned.

She smiled again and knelt down at my side. She moved her head quickly and bit into my left forearm.

I have spent many days over the next few paragraphs of description.

How can I explain a feeling completely foreign, a feeling that pushed every emotion I could possibly experience past the threshold of my ability to bear it? The pain was a song that I cried out to in cracked harmony. The flow of blood was not only my life but the lives of all who came before me. Her quivering joy was a wild animal in my chest clawing and ripping to escape my silly so-called civilized existence.

My back arched upward and I cried out for release-and for the pain to continue. I wanted to bleed into Julia more than I had craved sex. I was an infant again-so excited by the new sensations of life that I needed the chains to contain my ecstasy.

When I slumped back to the mattress, I no longer existed. I was the husk of the cocoon of a moth that had transformed itself from worm to flight. I was filled with nothing, surrounded by nothing. I was not dead because I had never truly lived. The flailing larvae and the fluttering bug had used my inert being merely for the transition, leaving me nothing but emptiness, like the transient aftermath of a weak smile.

“Juvenal Nyx,” a voice whispered.

“What?” I rasped.

“That is your name.”

I drifted for many hours that seemed like weeks or months. I was not unconscious or asleep but neither was I aware of the world around me. In this limbolike ether I was approached by various entities representing sentients that claimed no race, sex, or species.

“You are in danger of knowledge,” one such being, who seemed to be a yellow nimbus with no origin, said.

“Of being found out?” I asked in some fashion other than speech.

“Of knowing,” the empty halo of light replied.

“I don’t understand.”

“Then there is still hope.”

“JUVENAL,” A HUMAN VOICE SAID.

I opened my eyes and saw Julia, again in jeans and T-shirt, sitting at the foot of the bed. She was staring at me in a way that I can only describe as hungry.

“Julia.”

The smile did not leaven her rapacious eyes.

“You are a sweet man.” Though she whispered these words I heard them as a shout down a long, echoing hallway. “I scented your sweetness before I entered the bookstore. I came there for you.”

“You let Martin go after biting his arm,” I said, “didn’t you?”

“I let them all go after the first bite,” she said. “Hundreds of them…thousands.”

I, the old me, sighed in relief.

“And I want to let you go too,” she said, “but your blood sings to me.”

She touched my inner right thigh halfway between knee and groin. Her cold fingers rubbed that spot. Just the touch caused an echo of dark delight.

She bent over me and hovered an inch away from the place she’d touched, her lunar eyes gazing into mine.

“Bite it,” I said in spite of the panic in my chest.

OVER THE NEXT FOUR days she drank from my other arm and leg, and finally from my abdomen just above the naval. I was in constant ecstasy and dread. I didn’t eat, sleep, or feel the need to relieve myself. My body was in a state of total repose except when she fed on my blood.

“We never drink much,” she told me one evening after having feasted. She was lying back with her head against my thigh, savoring her perversion. “It doesn’t take much to keep us alive. We aren’t like your people who need to kill and squander to keep themselves going. Just a cupful of fresh blood and we can live for many days.”

“Then why do you bite me every day?” I asked. There was no fear in my question. Just after the bite I felt drugged, yielding. I simply wanted to understand what she was saying.

She sat up. Her once-black eyes were now white with that strange light.

“We cannot multiply like you,” she said. “We must create our progeny. Our bite contains a drug that would quickly become a poison to most people. To some, however, those that are sweet, we can pass on the trait that makes us unique. These we call our lovers.”

“You love me?”

“I love your taste.”

“You mean like I love a good steak?”

A wave of disgust passed over her face.

“No, not death, but the life that lives in you and in me simultaneously. The feeling of being that I carry in me that is you. This, this taste is the most exquisite experience that any living creature can know.”

“What about Martin?” I asked when I got the feeling she might leave. I hated it when she left after biting me. It was as if I needed her there with me to keep the darkness away.

“Our bite, like I said, is a drug. It makes those we feed on want us. Usually they forget or remember us as a dream, but sometimes they stalk us. This is one possible consequence of the symbiosis between us. I made the mistake of taking you to the place where Martin had met me. His hunger is strong, but if I were to bite him again he would certainly die.”

“How long ago did you bite him?”

“Two years.”

“And the wound still needed a bandage?”

“Probably not. Sometimes they wear the dressing as a reminder.”

“Do you…,” I began, but she put her cold hand on my forehead and I passed out.

WHEN I AWOKE, THE morning after the last bite, the chains had been removed. On a single straight-backed chair I found my clothes-neatly folded. Lying across the soft pile was a cream-colored envelope with the name Jɬ¤ÊËÌ NÍÎ printed on it. The room was quiet and I knew somehow that Julia was gone for good.

My bites throbbed but didn’t hurt.

I rushed out of the door that led into a hallway that completely encompassed my cell. There was a door from that hall into another corridor that surrounded the first hallway. There was no furniture or even a carpet in the two buffering halls. The only other room I found was a small toilet. Seeing this I realized that my body was coming back to me and I had to go.

Dear Juvenal,

You are mine from now until the far-off day when either you or I cease to exist. That may not be for many years, even centuries. You will discover many things about yourself over the next weeks and months. Do not fear them. Do not despair. You are mine as if you came from my own womb and I am yours, though we cannot see each other for a long time. Trust in your instincts and your urges. Give in to your hungers and passions. One day we will be together again-when it is safe for both of us. These rooms are now yours. Use them as I have.

I love you,

Julia

The letter was written with a fountain pen and each word was wrought for me.

I went back into the cell and looked around. The floors were bare, unfinished pine. The bed was simple. There was only the one chair. That room could have been a poem about Julia’s life and now mine.

I sat down hearing far-off music, like cellos, in the distance. After a while I realized that this music was the singing in my blood.

After a long time of sitting there, wondering what drug she put in her mouth before biting me, I stood up and walked away from her subterranean chamber, never intending to return.

THE DAY WAS BRIGHT, glaring. Everything sounded crisp and loud. I had been in darkness for so long that my eyes hurt and the sun burned against my skin.

But there was also a crystalline quality to the air and vistas. I crossed the bridge feeling light, weightless. The people around me seemed burly and somewhat bumbling. I felt friendly toward them. I was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge before I realized that I hadn’t thought about race once that day. White, black, and brown, they all seemed the same to me.

I chided myself to snap out of it and see the political and racial landscape as I knew it was. I tried to tell myself that my imprisonment had damaged my sense of reality, that Julia had robbed me of my ability to see clearly.

But try as I might I couldn’t find fault with the men and women going on their way. And Julia…her moony eyes and slight accent brought no anger or fear, recrimination or desire for revenge.

I walked on feeling lighter and happier with each step. The world seemed to be singing some joyous hymn to its own life and destiny. The birds and bugs and even the chemical scents in the air made me feel nostalgic for something that had passed away but lived on in sense memory.

I laughed and did a little jig as I went.

I decided to walk all the way up to Harlem and Central House.

I felt like some kind of prince walking up crowded Fifth Avenue. The people were my unwitting subjects and I was beneficent royalty. In amongst them, now and again, I saw bright-colored coronas reminding me of the yellow halo that had warned me about knowledge.

When I got to Central Park, the song in the sky turned strident. It was howling, but I didn’t mind it. The trees whispered of their age and gravity. They had gone one way while I had taken the opposite direction. There was a thrumming in my blood and I was so light-headed that I had to take a seat on a park bench.

I was grinning at the people going past. Some glanced at me with worried looks on their faces. Long ago, last week, I would have said that it was because I was a black man, filled with the purpose of my race, but then I thought that they couldn’t possibly understand the experience that flowed in my veins.

The sun was screaming at me and I decided to stand. It was only then that I realized how weak I was. I fell face forward to the pavement. It didn’t hurt because I was unconscious before I hit the ground.

SOMEWHERE THE SUN WAS setting. Its final shout over the horizon was followed by a silence so profound that I was yanked out of sleep, as if someone had dumped a hundred pounds of ice on my bare skin. I leaped up from the hospital bed and gazed out of the window into the burgeoning darkness of twilight.

“What’s wrong with you, guy?” a man said.

I turned to see him. He was one of six other men in beds around the room, a white man with a gray beard and a darker, though still somewhat gray, mustache.

“How did I get here?” I asked.

“They just dragged you in. We thought you was dead.”

I was still dressed. The excitement of the day was replaced by the certainty of night. The thrill that filled me was dark and dangerous.

I was in the street before I realized that I had no shoes on my feet. But I wasn’t bothered by the touch of my skin on the concrete and asphalt.

I headed back to the park. Once there I searched out my prey.

SHE WAS A YOUNG brown-skinned woman walking down a quiet lane. There was no fear emanating from her. I headed in her direction and, while passing, I put an arm around her waist, pulled her to me, and bit, with a lower tooth I’d never had before, into her neck. It was a pinprick, a small wound that would heal quickly. She fought me for all of eight seconds and then I felt her hand caress the back of my neck.

“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you doing to me?”

Her blood flowed slowly into my mouth. It was the richest, most sumptuous meal I’d ever had. It was steak and butter and thick red wine that gods ate on the high holidays of their divinity.

“Please,” she whispered in a wavering voice. “What’s happening to me? I feel it everywhere,” and she rubbed her body against mine.

I drank more and more.

She told me things in that park while people wandered past thinking that we were lovers who couldn’t wait for closed doors.

As I tasted her rich bounty, she whispered the secrets of her life. Her desires and disappointments, loves and mistakes flowed as her blood. I realized somewhere in the back of my mind that I was somehow feeding on her soul as well as the serum of her life.

This delightful experience lasted for a quarter hour and then suddenly the tooth retracted painfully into my lower gum. I pulled back from her and she reached out for me.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Juvenal Nyx,” I said.

“What did you do to me?” She brought the fingers of her right hand to her neck.

“It’s a drug.”

“I,” she hesitated, “I want more.”

“Meet me here tomorrow at the same time and I will bring it to you.”

She was about to say something else, but I put a finger to her lips.

“Go,” I said and she obeyed immediately.

I WAS RUNNING THROUGH the park with all the fleet lightness of a young deer or the quick-footed predator on its trail. I was laughing and uncontainable. My first prey would forget me. If she didn’t, if she came back, I would not return to that spot for many weeks. I knew, somehow, that the drug of my bite would turn toxic in her veins if I ever bit her again.

I sped all the way to Harlem, but when I got to the street where Central House stood I balked. For the first time I understood, in my intellect, that things had changed. I had been going on my senses up until that block. But then I realized that I couldn’t just walk into the political commune in bare feet, with blood on my breath.

I went into the alley of the building across the street and scaled the wall with little difficulty. When I reached the rooftop I hunkered down, black skin in gathering darkness, to spy on my friends.

CECIL BONTEMPS AND MINERVA Jenkins walked out of the front door of the house late in the evening. I concentrated on them with all of my senses. They talked about the meeting they’d just quit. It was a summit about me, my disappearance. They mentioned a white girl I was seen leaving with.

“Jimmy was always a flake,” Cecil said. “Prob’ly shacked up and high as a kite with that chick.”

An animal growled and I started, looking around the empty roof. It was only then that I realized the bestial noise had come from the anger in me.

“Jimmy don’t get high,” Minnie said. “You know that. Something’s happened to him. We should do like Troy says and go to the police.”

“We cain’t have the police rummagin’ around Central,” he said. “What if they found our weapons?”

We had been stockpiling rifles and ammunition for the coming revolution. We kept them in a trunk in the basement, ready for the day that martial law was declared on the Black Man.

“We got to do something, Cecil.”

“Okay. Yeah. All right. Let’s go down to that bookstore again.”

I STAYED ON THAT roof for three days eavesdropping on my onetime comrades. In the day, the sun would rise, bellowing across the sky, and I’d fall into a coma after a while. At night I roused and watched my friends as if they were prey.

On the fourth evening I chased a young man down an alley three blocks north of Central House. I yoked him in a doorway and bit into his shoulder. He whimpered and cried as I drank of the serum of his life. It felt uncomfortably sexual. I realized that unless it was necessary, I’d prefer the blood of women.

“What did you do to me?” His speech was slurred, but he was still afraid.

“Go,” I said in a deep voice that was alien to me.

He ran.

I’d forgotten about Central House by that time. For the rest of the night I prowled the streets, looking but not wanting, a danger but not a threat.

At dawn I returned to the Brooklyn warehouse where Julia had taken me. Two floors below the room she’d first taken me to was the tomblike chamber that would be home from then on. She’d left the key to the door in my pocket.

In the darkness, far below the street, I could hear the faraway singing of the sun. I felt safe in my vault-dangerous too.

THAT WAS THIRTY-THREE YEARS ago, October 1976. Since then I’ve inhabited the underground chamber that Julia somehow owned. The title had been signed over to me, and I lived there, sleeping in that bed or sitting on the straight-backed chair, going out now and again for a cupful of blood from some unwary pedestrian. Sometimes I’d bite them just enough to introduce the drug into their system, then use their money to let a hotel room where slowly, over the course of the evening, I would lick their necks and growl like a great wolf.

I have killed no one and discovered many things about my mutation.

One very important detail is that I heal very quickly.

I found this out one evening when a gang of young men decided to attack me and the woman I was feeding on in Prospect Park. There were eight of them, but I was at full strength and so fought them off after some effort. I realized later that I had been stabbed three times in the chest. Certainly my lung was pierced and possibly I’d sustained damage to my heart.

I considered going to the hospital, but something kept me from human company when I was wounded and so I went home to die.

For many days I lay on the floor of my chamber feeling the pain in my chest. But after a week or so I revived enough so that I could go out and feed. Now all that’s left of my fatal wounds are three whitish scars on my chest.

I don’t read books or go to movies, watch television or follow the news. The only human contact I’ve had up until quite recently has been primarily limited to the whispering euphoria of my victims. I’ve fed every few days or so and have lived on the sustenance of human blood and the soul seepage when they are under my sway. I can sit for days in my underground chamber savoring the soft murmurings of my victims. Their words about secret desires and unfulfilled dreams imbue me with the possibilities of a life that has been denied me. Sometimes I drift for hours in the secrets told me from swooning lips. I can see the images that they remember and feel the emotions they have hidden from everyone else.

For the first few years I only went after women because of the intimate nature of my bite. But as time has gone by I have also preyed upon some men. My taste for blood has been refined and I seek out certain flavors and scents. Some nights I go out and there is no one for me. And though I prefer young women, there are others who demand notice.

I have discovered other things about my nature. I am, for instance, allergic to the full moon. Those nights, if I am exposed to lunar regency, I develop a fever and a headache so powerful that I am blinded by its potency. If I go out in the full moon, I remain incapacitated for over a week.

This is how I found out another quirk in my physical characteristics. When the fever is upon me I am weak, so much so that most normal people can fend off my attack. And because the malady lasts for so long I am further weakened by the subsequent lack of sustenance. In this diminished state I am forced to seek out quarry that is likewise incapacitated.

After the first time I was weakened by the lunar allergy, I came upon an old woman confined to a wheelchair who had been left for a while by an unprofessional attendant. The attendant had gone down to the water not far from my crypt and was talking at a phone booth. While she was there I snuck up behind the old woman and bit.

Her dreams were fragmented and her blood thin, but it was all I could do. I hoped that she would not die from my attack. I find that since my transformation I have an instinctual reverence for life in all its myriad forms. Spiders and roaches, rats and human beings all have a right to life in my eyes. I drank half a dram of the old woman’s tasteless blood and hurried away to revive.

Four weeks later I saw the woman walking with a new nurse. She was healthy for a woman her age and chattering happily with the new helper. I realized then that my bite has certain curative properties. I remember smiling at my elderly prey as I walked past. She looked as if she recognized something about me, though that should have been impossible seeing that I’d attacked her from behind.

ANOTHER PART OF MY life has been the coronas, empty circles of light that are seemingly invisible to the human eye. They come in every color and have a variety of natures. Some are predatory, attacking and destroying others of their kind. Some are able to communicate with me. Not many approve of my being. I don’t know if it is that they don’t want to be seen or if they are repulsed by my urges and needs. Regardless-we exist on different planes and cannot touch or affect each other in any physical way.

The only corona I recognize is the yellow being that approached me while Julia was making me into Juvenal Nyx. It appears to me at times, imparting cryptic messages about knowledge and perception.

“You are on the path to knowing what should be secret,” it has said more than once-not in words but the meaning has crossed the void between us and settled on my mind.

I paid little attention to these messages until nine months ago.

I was down on Water Street watching the old woman who had been wheelchair bound before I bit her. By now she no longer had a nurse and was herself looking after what might have been a toddler grandchild.

I felt paternal toward the old woman and ancient in my bones. It was a summer evening and the sun was far enough behind the horizon that I didn’t have to worry about light-headedness.

“Come,” a voice in my head said.

I turned and saw the jagged yellow corona floating in the air behind me.

I stood to follow, but the strange piping voice then said, “Later.”

“Come later?” I asked the empty air.

The corona disappeared and I went back to my subterranean home to wait for it to reappear. I had eaten quite recently and so had no need to hunt.

Late that night the yellow light appeared in my chamber. It did not speak but led the way up and out of my home. It brought me to the pedestrian entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge and faded from sight.

I walked out on the pathway. It was late in the evening and unseasonably cool, so I was one of the few people out strolling. When I had just passed the first pylon of the bridge, I caught sight of a woman who had climbed out on a girder and was now about to jump.

My condition makes me quite agile and strong. I ran straight out across the girder and caught the woman by her wrist just as she was falling over the side. I pulled her up and held her around the waist in case she wanted to try again.

“This is not a good idea,” I said. My voice was dry and cracked, as I rarely spoke out loud.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” she replied.

For some reason this made me smile.

“You were going to kill yourself,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen now,” she said, “obviously.” She looked back over the side a little wistfully. “You want to buy me some coffee?”

HER NAME WAS IRIDIA Lamone. She’d been born and raised in northern California and had come to New York to study painting.

“I married my high school boyfriend, but we don’t really get along anymore,” she told me at the Telltale Bean in Brooklyn Heights.

There was no hint in her demeanor that she’d just tried to kill herself.

My senses were in such a heightened state from the corona and saving a life that it took me a while to identify the potency of her scent. There was a bouquet to her blood that I had never experienced before. It drew me on a primal level. I found myself having to hold back from biting her right there in the coffee shop.

“Is that why you tried to kill yourself?” I asked.

“Tarver is always depressed,” she said. “He mopes around the house when he’s not working and he’s jealous of my painting. Whenever I’m working he finds some way to interfere. Either he needs my attention or finds something wrong with the house. He comes in with plumbing problems and unpaid bills-anything to distract me, anything so he doesn’t have to feel bad about me living my life.”

“That’s not really an answer,” I said.

“I don’t owe you an answer, Juvenal. What kind of name is that anyway?”

“I was very sick once,” I said. “A woman saved my life and after that she suggested that I go by the name Juvenal Nyx.”

“Why?”

“It means ‘child of the night.’”

“It’s like you were named after a poem.”

“The disease left me with certain allergies to natural light. If I go out in the sun, I get weak. If I stay out long enough, I lose consciousness.”

“And do you get a rash?” she asked. She was smiling, less than an hour out from her attempted suicide.

“No, but I get a kind of allergy to bright moonlight too.”

“Wow. And you call this better?”

“It is best. I know the parameters of my existence and experience ecstasy every night.”

This was true though I had never spoken it. I wasn’t cursed or debilitated. I didn’t miss my family or friends. The life I had known decades before seemed to me like a rat trapped in a researcher’s maze. My sex, my race, my repetitious existence-these were the chains of mortality, the bonds that I had shrugged.

“Ecstasy?” she uttered.

The look in her eyes told me that I loved her. The scent on her breath was the odor of procreation.

“Why did you try to jump?” I asked.

“It just all came together,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I didn’t want to go home to Tarver and I was sure that I’d never paint again.”

“Why not just leave him?”

“Because that would kill him and then I’d have his death on my head.”

“And so you’ll do it again?”

“I don’t think so,” she mused.

Iridia had dark bronze skin and large almond-shaped eyes. Her gold-brown hair was long and thick, tied back into a braid that was reminiscent of a broad rope.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I believe in fate and you saved me at the last possible moment, when I had given up.”

“Because I saved you, you won’t try to kill yourself again?”

“Not just because you saved me,” she said. She reached across the table and took my cold hand in hers. “I had already jumped. I could feel the gravity give way beneath me. I had given myself up to death and then you caught me and held me.”

We gazed into each other’s eyes and I was lost.

“Would you ever give up the sun?” I asked.

“Never,” she said. “I’m a watercolorist and I need it to feed my heart.”

“But you were willing to die,” I argued.

“Not anymore.”

It was at that moment I came into control of my life. All that had gone before was immediately obvious and clear. I had existed as human being for twenty-two years following the pathways that were prescribed. I had a race and gender, nationality and language. I was what the world made me. And then, when Julia came, I was what she made me. So tenuous was my existence that the transformation she wrought tore apart the paper-thin fabric of my identity. I hadn’t even been able to maintain my name. I had, for fifty-five years, never made a choice on my own. I was always led, always formed by others’ hands. Even my school politics came from a knee-jerk desire to belong.

Iridia had found her identity with a simple gesture, had changed her direction when she saw a new light.

“Will you come home with me tonight?” I asked.

“But I have to go back to Tarver in the morning.”

“All right.”

I WANTED MORE THAN anything to bite Iridia, to change her from human being to predator child. The fang in my lower jaw throbbed as we kissed, as we made love, but I would not bring it out.

I knew, instinctively, that if I turned her, we would have to separate. That is why Julia left me before I awakened to my powers. The scent of love for us is fatal. Once we make our children, we are compelled to devour them.

This hunger yawned in me like the chasm under Iridia when she leaped from the Brooklyn Bridge; it is why I had never come across a being like myself. We are very rare. Our love is truly a hunger, and we, like our human forebears, are our own best prey.

“WHAT’S YOUR REAL NAME, Juvenal Nyx?” she asked in the early hours of the morning after we’d made love for hours.

I had to think for a few moments before saying, haltingly, “James Tremont of Baltimore.”

“You don’t sound sure,” she said before kissing my naval.

“It’s been so long.”

“You’re not that old.”

“I’m older than I look.”

Her nostrils flared and the gland under my jaw swelled with venom. I pressed against it and kissed her left nipple.

“Bite it,” she whispered.

“A little later,” I said.

“I want it now.”

“How will I ever get you to come back if I don’t make you wait?”

She sat up in the bed, in the empty underground room.

“I’ve never met a man like you,” she said.

“Then we’re even,” I replied, thinking that I hadn’t talked so much in decades.

“You really don’t need music or books or even paintings on the wall?”

“For a long time I thought that the only things I needed were food and sleep.”

“And now?”

“So much more that I can’t even begin to articulate it.”

“I’ll have to tell Tarver about tonight,” she said softly.

“Yeah.”

“I won’t leave him.”

I wanted to tell her that the love wrenching my chest could never live with her-my hunger for her soul was too great.

“Will we see each other again?” I asked.

“I won’t leave you either,” she said with certainty.

“Why not? You hardly know me.”

“I know you better than I’ve known any man,” she said. “You saved my life. And I think that’s what you were made for-saving lives.”

I TOOK AN OFFICE on the top floor of the Antwerp Building and put up a sign that read: JUVENAL NYX: PROBLEM SOLVER.

I fastened little business cards to phone booths and bulletin boards around the city, had Iridia’s brother, Montrose, make me a small Web site, and took out an ad in two free papers. I borrowed the money for these investments from some of my wealthier victims. I plan to pay them back and so have chosen to overlook the undue influence I had over them.

I decided on the path of self-employment because this is against the nature of my being. Creatures like me are supposed to be hidden in the night, secreted away from the world in general. We’re supposed to live off humanity, not aid people with their real and imagined plights.

It was time for me to go against the tide of my fate.

My business hours are from sunset to dawn, and I will listen to any problem, any problem at all-from severe acne to the threat of death or imprisonment. I accept and reject jobs, collect fees based on the client’s ability to pay, and spend every weekend with Iridia.

I find missing persons, cure a variety of minor illnesses, and even save a life now and then.

Tarver Lamone hates me, but I don’t worry about him. I can usually sense danger when it’s near and it’s pretty hard to do me harm. I worry about Iridia sometimes, but she is so certain about right and wrong, and her own indecipherable path, that I have not figured out how to say no to her.

And I am addicted to her nearness. Once, when she had to go home to California for three weeks, I fell into a state of near catatonia that lasted for almost a month. It took Iridia and Montrose breaking into my subterranean condo and her sitting with me for hours to bring me back to consciousness.

IT DOESN’T SOUND LIKE the good life, I know, but it has its bright sides. Every day I get calls from people who need someone like me. I’ve helped children with their homework and ladies shake their stalkers. I cured one man of acrophobia and permanently paralyzed a serial killer who wanted to stop his trade.

Everything was going fine until one early morning, at six minutes past twelve, when a woman walked into my office.

I’m six feet and one half inch in height. She was quite a bit taller than I, with skin whiter than maggots’ flesh. Her hair was luxurious, long and black. She might have been beautiful if it hadn’t been for the intensity of her laser green eyes. The gown she wore was either black or green, maybe both, and her high-heeled shoes seemed to be made from red glass.

“Mr. Nyx?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, feeling an unfamiliar wave of fear.

“You’re young.”

“I’m older than I look.”

She glanced around my office. The décor was much like my underground home. There were three straight-backed oak chairs and a small round oak table under the window that looked out on Brooklyn. The only decoration that hung on the wall was a watercolor of a patch of weeds in the bright sun.

“May I sit?” she asked. Her voice was neither masculine nor feminine, hardly was it human, it sounded so rich and deep.

“Certainly,” I said.

She lowered herself into the closest chair and I sat across from her. She looked into my eyes and I concentrated on not looking away. This made her smile. It was a predatory smile-on this subject I consider myself an expert.

She was beautiful in the way that fire is, dangerous and untouchable.

Her nostrils flared and then, after a minute had passed, she handed me a card that read ÒËÓ¤Í Î. ¯¤Ò¡ÌË in red lettering at the lower left-hand corner.

That was all, no job title, profession, address, or phone. There was no e-mail or emblem. If you didn’t know what that name meant, then you didn’t know anything.

“How can I help you, Ms. Demola?”

She smiled and stared for another spate of seconds.

“The painting surprises me,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“Your hours, your profession. You don’t seem like a sun worshipper.”

“My girlfriend’s a painter. She gave me that for an office-warming present.”

“Serious?” she said.

“Come again?”

“Is it serious between you?”

“Why are you here, Ms. Demola?”

“I’ve lost my pet.” Her smile would seduce emperors and frighten children.

“Dog?”

“A rare breed, large and quite vicious.”

“I don’t know…”

“I worry that Reynard may be dangerous.”

The light in her eyes shifted, and either I was made to pay attention or the words themselves moved me.

“Dangerous how?”

“He’s a carnivore and he’s large,” she said in way of explanation.

“If a dog’s attacking people in the city, I’m sure animal control will be out after it.”

“Reynard is a sewer rat in spite of his size. I believe that he’s found his way into the abandoned subway tunnels under the city. There are, I believe, people living down there, people who might not be on the radar of your animal control.”

I’d spent some time in the various abandoned catacombs beneath the city. I’ve hunted there and spent some relaxing days deep under the ground, away from the sounds of the city.

“How big are we talking?”

“Big.”

Mahey carried a large white bag that looked to be made of some kind of naked flesh. From the sack she took a blue velvet roll, maybe a foot and a half in length. This she handed to me.

I unfurled the cloth, revealing a simple black knife, somewhat less than a foot long. The handle was part and parcel of the metal blade.

“Carry this with you,” she said.

“I didn’t say I was taking the job.”

“Don’t let’s be coy, Mr. Nyx.”

I wanted to argue further, but instead I rolled the dark metal blade back up and stood.

“I guess I better be getting to work then.”

“You can see me to my car downstairs,” she said, a little less formal than she had been.

When we got into the close quarters of the elevator, I was assailed by the odor of deep woods. It wasn’t a sweet smell, but there was lightness and dark, decay and new growth. It was almost overpowering.

On the street there was a cherry red Lincoln Town Car parked at the front door. A short, porcine man in a bright green suit stood at the ready, waiting for Ms. Demola.

As we approached him, someone shouted, “Hey, Nyx!”

He was jogging across the street, coming right at me. It was Tarver Lamone wearing white exercise pants and a gray sweatshirt. He was moving pretty quickly when he pulled a pistol out of the pouch of the sweatshirt. I was so surprised that I didn’t move immediately. The chauffeur was taken off guard also, but Mahey was anything but slow. She reached out and put four fingers on the forearm of Tarver’s gun hand. The whole arm turned to spaghetti and hung down, lifeless.

“He is not yours to kill,” she said in an almost matter-of-fact tone. “Not tonight.”

Tarver dropped the pistol and screamed. He turned and ran away. His gait was odd because the right arm was still hanging loosely at his side.

I turned away from him to stare at my Amazonian client.

“What was that?” I asked.

“You were not made for love, Mr. Nyx,” she said. “Its spikes and spines will stake you as certainly as Reynard’s great teeth.”

With those words she moved toward the car door, now held open by the piggish driver.

I watched them drive away and wondered, for the first time, if this rebellion against my nature was a good thing.

GRAND CENTRAL STATION WAS pretty much empty at one in the morning. I moved to the entrance of the IRT and made it to the downtown platform, populated with a few midnight commuters: young lovers and drunks, street punks and the homeless. A local train came and almost everyone got on.

I went to the far end of the platform and jumped down to the track. I was moving pretty fast, and so even if anyone saw anything, they wouldn’t have been able to stop me.

Half a mile north there was a metal ladder that led down to a network of sub-subterranean tunnels and corridors. One of these led to a crawl space that took me even farther down, to another set of passageways and access tunnels. Some of these paths led to offices and utility stockrooms used by subway workers for storage and relaxation. There were forgotten conduits also, some of which brought underground travelers to places that made up a city below the city.

I had been walking down a completely darkened tunnel for half an hour when a sudden stench almost brought me to my knees. I lit a match. Usually I can move in the dark with no light at all. It’s one of the abilities I developed after meeting Julia. But though I can move without bumping into things, I can’t really see.

The match revealed a rotting, decimated corpse. It had been human, but I couldn’t tell if it was man or woman. The groin, belly, and chest had been ripped out and the face was chewed off completely. Much of the flesh was gone. Only the hands were somewhat intact, but they were gnarled and filthy.

Whoever it was, they hadn’t been dead for long, but down under the subway there was lots of life that sought out dead flesh. Roaches, rats, and flies swarmed around the corpse. I staggered away wondering about Mahey X. Demola’s pet.

Along the path I discovered six more corpses. The odor was cloying. The scuttling sounds in the darkness were upsetting, even for me.

I was headed for the underground commune called the City of Light, named for the electric hookup a man named Nathan Charles had connected years before. There were lamps, fans, video players, and even computers in the cavern down under East Seventy-Third Street. I had been down here before during my nocturnal wanderings, had gotten to know some of the people who inhabited this strange place.

As I made my way toward the underground cooperative, I feared that there would be more bodies-many more.

“Who’s there?” a man asked and a bright light shone in my night eyes.

All my senses were temporarily blinded by the glare, but I’d recognized the voice.

“It’s me, Lester, Juvenal.”

“Juvy?” The light moved away. “What you doin’ down here, son?”

“I heard that there was some kinda dog down here attacking your people. I thought I’d come down and help.”

“Help yourself an’ get your ass outta here,” one of my few friends told me. “Whatever it is down here attackin’ us, it ain’t no dog. It’s a fuckin’ monster, man. Shit. It ripped off Lonnie Bingham’s arm wit’ just one swipe. He died screamin’.”

With the light out of my face, I could see my friend Lester. He was my age (and therefore looked much older), tall like me, black, and bald. I’d met him on one of my sojourns in the underground caverns. I liked him because he hadn’t been to the surface in thirty years. He ran the City of Light, a beneficent mayor of the out crowd.

“How many people have died?” I asked.

“There’s a dozen missin’. We made us a bunker in the north quarter. Everybody’s there right now. The thing cain’t get in, but we ain’t been able to get out to bring down food and supplies. We need a big gun too.”

There came a howl through the vast network of tunnels, caves, and caverns. The sound entered all of my senses: a sour taste and acrid smells assailed me, my skin ached, and visions of violent screams danced before me. My entire body tingled, then suddenly my attention was drawn to a spot up ahead.

“That’s it,” Lester said. “That’s the beast.”

“It’s up ahead,” I said. “You go on, L. Go get your supplies and weapons. I’m gonna take care of this here dog.”

“You crazy, Juvy? You just a kid, man. You cain’t hurt that thing. I shot it point-blank wit’ my twenty-two pistol an’ he hardly even slowed down.”

Lester grabbed my arm and I pushed him away. I’m much stronger than normal men. Lester hit the ground and rolled a few feet. I turned my back on him and kept going.

The thing wailed again. This cry brought on hallucinations. I could see people running from beasts of all sorts. I smelled death and the stars themselves began to cry. I saw men and women being raped then slaughtered-then eaten. Their attackers were vicious beings who looked like children but who were older than the oldest trees in the forest.

When the vision ended I found myself on my knees with a pain like a spike through my brain.

I got up and moved quickly toward the City of Light.

IT WAS LESS THAN even a shantytown in a hollowed-out grotto of stone. There were tents and lean-tos, fire cans and furniture under the electric light that had christened the town of eighty or so. At the far end from the entrance was a huge metal door. No one knew what the vault was for. Now it held the remainder of Lester’s people.

Above it on a natural stone ledge crouched Mahey X. Demola’s pet. He was covered with golden fur except for the snout, which was a striped black and blood red. His paws were nearly hands, and though he squatted down on all fours I believed that he could stand upright and tall.

A growl sounded in my throat. All rational thought fled my mind. A rage, deep and frightening, sang through my muscles, and the beast above me howled.

I saw an eye in the darkness above Mahey’s dog. It stared at me and wondered while the creature leaped from its ledge.

I saw the golden blur coming. I wanted to dive and roll, then grab and rend and bite and tear. But instead I was dazzled by that eye, wondering what it could mean…

Reynard slammed into me and I went flying. He was hard as stone, and I was, for the first time in decades, merely human. Reynard swiped at me, raking his claws first across my face and then on my chest.

I hit him with both fists and had no effect whatever. He bit into my arm then butted me with his high crown. I fell to the ground, senseless but still hating. Reynard hovered above me, his mouth a stench-filled yawn of hunger, hatred, and vicious anticipation.

There came seven small pops. I thought for an instant that it was the sound of Reynard ripping off one of my limbs, but then I heard a gurgling cry. It was my name being spoken.

Juvenal.

The thoughts cascading at that moment didn’t have a linear progression. Lester’s face was there and his.22 pistol-that had made the pops. He used his weapon to try to save me, dooming us both in the process. The small-caliber gun was his only weapon.

The black iron knife, shoved in my belt, was mine.

I didn’t try to unroll the blue velvet. While Reynard looked up to see what was stinging his face, I plunged the blue roll into his chest.

His howl was what I can only call a cacophony of exploding stars. I was falling, careening through an emptiness that was unending. I was impossible and so was the idea of me. I was bleeding and hating, killing…

“Juvy, stop!” Lester yelled. He was trying to pull me off the beast’s corpse. I was plunging the knife into its inert body again and again. I was outraged by the visions he’d shown me. I wanted him to take them back.

“He’s dead, man!” Lester cried and he managed to pull me back.

I was weakened by the wounds and loss of blood, but the rage still filled me.

The knife pulsed in my grip and I turned away.

“Juvenal,” Lester called.

“Not now, man,” I said. “Not now.”

I STAGGERED AWAY DOWN tunnel after tunnel, having no idea where I was going. The iron knife thrummed in my hand. It felt good. It felt diseased. It felt alive and angry, like a bumblebee clenched in your fist.

I came across an abandoned campsite in a recess in a wall. There I pulled out a soiled trench coat. I put it on to hide my bloody wounds and held the blade up in the sleeve of the coat.

I climbed up into the subway and made it to the Twenty-Eighth Street stop. I climbed out and staggered into the gathering dawn.

“Mr. Nyx,” a gruff voice, which maybe shouldn’t have spoken in words at all, called.

It was Mahey’s piggish chauffeur standing next to the cherry red limo.

He held the back door open and I didn’t have the strength to refuse.

“Hello, Mr. Nyx,” Mahey said when I fell into the seat beside her.

I didn’t respond.

“Did you find Reynard?”

“Yeah. You didn’t say what you wanted me to do, so I killed him.”

“Just so. Do you have the knife?”

It was throbbing against my forearm. I didn’t want to give it up. But those green lights would not be denied. I pulled out the blade and handed it to her. She took a plastic sheet from her skin purse and took the thing without actually touching it.

She placed the knife in the bag and gave me a smile that was supposed to be friendly. Then she produced a wad of cash and handed it to me.

“Where can I drop you, Mr. Nyx?”

I SLEPT ON MY office floor for more than sixty hours.

My small suite of offices has a bathroom with a change of clothes hanging in the closet. After two and a half days of comatose sleep, I washed off at the sink and dressed. Then I went to sit in a chair at the window and thanked the night that I was still alive.

My physical wounds were almost healed, but the memories still pained me. Reynard and I had something in common. He was a creature like me. His howls carried knowledge and his stench spoke of an alternate history to the evolutionary blunderings of known life.

And Mahey also was part of my hidden lineage. I was sure of this. And what was that black blade that she wouldn’t touch? And that eye which I imagined but am also sure of its existence?

There came a knock on the door.

I wondered for a moment if it was Tarver with his gun or maybe Mahey, or one of her henchmen, with a pulsating black knife.

A creature like Reynard would not knock.

“Who is it?”

“Eerie,” she said.

I opened the door and the woman I loved all the way down to the molecular level stood there before me dressed in yellow and white.

She looked me in the eye and I looked back.

“We have to talk,” she said.

I ushered her in.

Perched in chairs across from each other, it was the first time in months that we’d come together without a kiss.

“Yes?” I said.

“Tarver’s in a mental ward, out of his head and with his right arm completely paralyzed.”

“Uh-huh?”

“He goes in and out, but at one point he said that you did this to him.”

“Oh. Well, you see-”

“What’s going on?” Iridia asked.

“Tarver came here with a pistol,” I said.

“What?”

“He came up to me and pulled it out, but before he could shoot, the woman I was with, a client, blocked his arm. He screamed and ran away, but as far as I could see she didn’t cut him or anything.”

“But then how did he get paralyzed and crazy?”

I hesitated. Up until that moment, my identity, my abilities were secret. Secrets are like the night: they hide from sight that which we suspect and fear. But I no longer wanted to live in darkness. Iridia, the love of my being, was not someone I wanted to hide from. And even if the truth made me lose her, at least she would know me, if only for a while.

“I want to tell a story about a woman named Julia,” I said. “She named me Juvenal Nyx and made me a child of the night.”