little panes of glass.
I was slipping in and out of sleep. I vaguely recall her trying to make me drink soup and that I couldn’t do it. I was shaking, and terrified that those dreams would come again. I didn’t want Claudia to come. The light of the little room burnt my eyes. I told her about Claudia haunting me, and the little hospital.
“Full of children,” she said. Hadn’t she remarked on this before. How puzzled she looked. She spoke softly of her work in the missions … with children. In the jungles of Venezuela and in Peru.
“Don’t speak anymore,” she said.
I knew I was frightening her. I was floating again, in and out of darkness, aware of a cool cloth on my forehead, and laughing again at this weightless feeling. I told her that in my regular body I could fly through the air. I told her how I had gone into the light of the sun above the Gobi Desert.
Now and then, I opened my eyes with a start, shaken to discover myself here. Her small white room.
In the burnished light, I saw a crucifix on the wall, with a bleeding Christ; and a statue of the Virgin Mary atop a small bookcase—the old familiar image of the Mediatrix of All Graces, with her bowed head and outstretched hands. Was that Saint Rita there with the red wound in her forehead? Ah, all the old beliefs, and to think they were alive in this woman’s heart.
I squinted, trying to read the larger titles on the books on her shelves: Aquinas, Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin. The sheer effort of interpreting these various names to mean Catholic philosophers exhausted me. Yet I read other titles, my mind feverish and unable to rest. There were books on tropical diseases, childhood diseases, on child psychology. I could make out a framed picture on the wall near the crucifix, of veiled and uniformed nuns together, perhaps at a ceremony. If she was one of them, I couldn’t tell, not with these mortal eyes, and hurting the way they were. The nuns wore short blue robes, and blue and white veils.
She held my hand. I told her again I had to go to New Orleans. I had to live to reach my friend Louis, who would help me recover my body. I described Louis to her—how he existed beyond the reach of the modern world in a tiny unlighted house behind his ramshackle garden. I explained that he was weak, but he could give me the vampiric blood, and then I’d be a vampire again, and I’d hunt the Body Thief and have my old form restored to me. I told her how very human Louis was, that he would not give me much vampiric strength, but I could not find the Body Thief unless I had a preternatural body.
“So this body will die,” I said, “when he gives the blood to me. You are saving it for death.” I was weeping. I realized I was speaking French, but it seemed that she understood, because she told me in French that I must rest, that I was delirious.
“I am with you,” she said in French, very slowly and carefully. “I will protect you.” Her warm gentle hand was over mine. With such care, she brushed the hair back from my forehead.
Darkness fell around the little house.
There was a fire burning in the little hearth, and Gretchen was lying beside me. She had put on a long flannel gown, very thick and white; and her hair was loose, and she was holding me as I shivered. I liked the feel of her hair against my arm. I held on to her, frightened I’d hurt her. Over and over again, she wiped my face with a cool cloth. She forced me to drink the orange juice or cold water. The hours of the night were deepening and so was my panic.
“I won’t let you die,” she whispered in my ear. But I heard the fear which she couldn’t disguise. Sleep rolled over me, thinly, so that the room retained its shape, its color, its light. I called upon the others again, begging Marius to help me. I began to think of terrible things—that they were all there as so many small white statues with the Virgin and with Saint Rita, watching me, and refusing to help.
Sometime before dawn, I heard voices. A doctor had come—a tired young man with sallow skin and red-rimmed eyes. Once again,