The Quality of Mercy
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"Ashes to ashes.. dust to dust .. We come here today… "
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He'd always hated the rain, but today it was a mercy. It fell from the sky in a non-stop gauzy veil that softened the stark image of the bare dirt in front of him and shielded him from the curious gaze of the other mourners. It had begun before dawn and still it hadn't let up. Icy droplets rolled off his bare head and slid down the back of his neck and beneath his collar, soaking him to the skin under the stiff white cotton of his shirt. He welcomed the saturation. It was as if he'd been desiccated by her death, never shedding a tear, not even on the day she died. Now the endless sopping drizzle that ran across his forehead and along the hollowed contours of his cheeks and off his jaw in a steady dripping stream finally gave her the tears that she deserved.
He lifted his head and scanned the crowd, trusting his perfect vision to pierce the gloom and see the one person he was desperate to see, the one person on this god-forsaken globe he feared. He would be here somewhere, he knew it. Although fiercely private, he felt confident the announcement would have caught the man's attention somewhere in his travels. He was here. He had to be.
In the end, when it was just him, alone at the gravesite -- he thought the other would show himself then, but the wind rose and the sky darkened and still he didn't come. Finally he sighed, and accepted the fact that their meeting wouldn't be here, at the place of his own choosing, and thought perhaps that after all these years and the crushing weight of his victory that maybe it was only right to concede one skirmish to his opponent.
So the fellow wanted some privacy for what was to come? So be it. He let the single rose he'd been clutching between his fingertips fall to earth and retreated with leaden steps from the hole in the ground that now contained the whole of him.
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The sound when it came was so slight he wouldn't have heard it but for the fact that he'd been sitting here, waiting for it. He was grateful now that he'd kept to his plan and placed himself in the darkest shadow in his study. A sting of unshed tears reddened his eyes when the voice he hadn't heard in a lifetime spoke to him.
"I came here to keep the promise I made to you on your wedding day."
The intervening years hadn't dulled the predictable sense of honour. The man had come for retribution as he'd said he would. He smiled within the shadows and poured every bit of scorn he had into his voice.
"Remind me. It couldn't have been to love, honour and cherish, because Beth made that one."
The wince was slight, but it was there. "It's been a long time. I suppose I should thank you for looking after her so well." The voice lowered. "'And for not turning her."
"Forty eight years, three months and nineteen days to be exact; the happiest days of my life. And don't thank me today of all days for not turning her," he sneered. "What you wanted, what made you happy never figured in any of the decisions we made together as a couple. You were a nonentity to us, Mick."
It was a calculated cruelty and he was pleased to see the other man lift his chin and turn his eyes to the ceiling, looking back to stare into the shadows where he sat only when the clenching of his jaw had stilled.
"I promised that your punishment could wait until she passed." He held up a wooden stake with a sharply elongated point. "One day for every day of your marriage, Josef."
Josef snorted in derision. "You always were an unmitigated candy ass. If I were you, I'd be here to kill me. Guess that's just one more reason why I was the better man."
Mick's eyes flared silver and his tone held an edge of steel that had never existed before. "I can always change my mind."
"That would require a lot more testosterone than you've accumulated in both your lifetimes, Mary Anne. You've come, you've said your piece, now why don't you just put your squiggle in the condolence book like a good little girl and run along with all the other nobodies who didn't love her."
The century-old vampire roared and in a frighteningly fast manoeuvre reached into the shadows and tossed Josef onto his face on the floor. He could hear the agitated pacing behind him.
"Get up, GET UP, you bastard. Get up and give me the satisfaction of putting up a struggle before I stake you."
It was time. He lifted himself, one knee at a time, and slowly turned to face his would be executioner. The effect was instantaneous. Mick reeled back in horror and surprise, the stake slipping from his fingers and bouncing harmlessly on the soft Persian carpet underfoot.
"But what - ? How could you possibly – ? How - ?"
He closed his fist around Josef's upper arm and hauled him in front of the dark mirror of the study's night-time window and shook him like a terrier.
"HOW?!"
The full head of hair had only ever gone completely white around the temples, the rest of it remaining an attractive russet pepper and salt, a source of vanity his wife never tired of teasing him about. The skin under his chin was loose and whenever he spoke the crepey folds around his throat moved like his memory of the stiff ruffles of his mother's best taffeta skirt. Although his eyes remained warm and alert, the wrinkles around them were deep and many.
Josef squeezed his eyelids tight against the sight and turned his head away. Not to banish an unwanted vision of his ageing face, no, never that, rather to shut out the agony of every happy memory contained in each line that time had etched there.
He sighed and shrugged his arm from Mick's grip, pulling at his cuffs, smoothing the front of his black mourning suit. "It was one of the many things my people developed when they were searching for a cure for Sarah."
Mick staggered, the full extent of Josef's betrayal weakening his knees. He looked at his former friend, his face stricken and he whispered, "All those years… you knew you had a cure all those years and you kept it from me?"
"It wasn't a cure, Mick, it was a death sentence." His lips twisted and an ironic flick of his fingers indicated his current state. "It wasn't like Coraline's. It wasn't temporary. Mine was a one-way ticket to hell and I never really understood why you wanted it. Then."
Mick's face turned white, but it was the white face of shock he saw, not the release of the monster within. The man was a trembling, chalk-faced wreck. Tears began to roll down his face and splash salty abstract patterns onto the dark navy silk of his dress shirt.
Josef's voice was cold. "My mortality was my gift on her thirty-fourth birthday. I'd seen enough, done enough." He paused to maximise the effect of his next words. "We both wanted children. I never would have believed it before, the way I ached to put a baby in my woman's belly. She so wanted us to have a family before she hit forty – raise the children while we were still young."
Mick moaned in anguish, as if his insides were being shredded, organ by organ.
"When that didn't happen – "
"You stole my life," Mick interrupted in a hoarse whisper. "You were my best friend and you stole my life. She and this - ," his hand waved toward Josef's face, "were the only things I ever wanted. She loved me. The humanity could have been mine. I could have had my life back." His head sank into his hands and he began to sway, then he looked up, his eyes like ice and said through gritted teeth, "You were my friend! My brother! You stole my life."
"The only thing that's truly yours in this life is what you can take and what you can keep," Josef said harshly. "Face it, Mick, you didn't cut it. You failed. You never were much of a vampire and I wasn't surprised that in the end Beth didn't find you much of a man. Oh, she had a misguided loyalty to you, I will give her that. I had to work hard to win her away from you. All those assignments I kept giving you overseas and interstate - who did you think was keeping her company all those long lonely nights without you? Who made her laugh, walked her home, held her hand when something happened?" His voice darkened. "Who made things happen so she'd need to come to me, confide in me? I made you irrelevant and you let me. You took her devotion for granted and in the end she welcomed me. She welcomed me."
Josef's lips twisted and he eyed Mick with contempt. "Did you ever even fuck her the way a real man would have, you limp-dicked sorry excuse for a monster? No wonder she was so grateful when I eventually took her to bed. She used to beg me for it."
It was too much, too much and Mick snapped, his fist striking out and landing with a crunch against Josef's cheekbone. The old man flew across the room and crumpled against the wall in an untidy mess. He rose to his feet unsteadily and wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, made sure their gazes were locked then said,
"Seeing her face every night as she climaxed under me was the highlight of my human existence."
Mick roared and flipped Josef's desk over but held his ground at the other end of the study, his fists tightening, loosening, tightening. "Shut up or I'll kill you - "
"Tell me tough guy, did she ever scream when you were screwing her - ? "
" - shut the fuck up - "
" – Oh, maybe in frustration, you pussy, you light-weight. She liked it hard, Mick, and - "
" – or I swear to God, I'll fucking kill you -"
" - I can just hear your voice when she wanted it a little harder," his own rose in a high mocking tone, " – oh no Beth, you're so delicate, I might hurt you - "
The imitation must have been too close to home because he hadn't even seen Mick move before the strong, young hand was around his throat and his ankles were dangling two feet off the carpet. He'd forgotten how truly frightening the vampire visage was when released in all its fury and Mick wasn't holding back, his head rearing back for a killing strike.
Thank God.
It was then he made his mistake and allowed a split second of relief to flash across his eyes.
"You coward." Mick tossed him to the floor with disdainful flick of his wrist. "You fucking coward. You want to die, is that it? You can't go on without her so you figure if you ride me hard enough I'll do the dirty work for you. Fix it, just like I always have? You hoped I'd do it over her grave didn't you? So you could join her there in the ground. I saw you waiting there for me. You left her there all alone, man. All alone." He sobbed once, an ugly grating gulp of inconsolable grief. "Well maybe I should end your life, " Mick said bitterly, "your human life. Maybe I should turn you right here so you have to live on without her for eternity. God knows I have to."
"Not that, Mick." He knew his face was white and was sure it was the first time his friend had ever seen genuine fear in his eyes. "Please not that. Just do what you've wanted to do for half a century and end me. I can't - I can't do this mortal coil bullshit without her."
And then as if his admission to Mick were the thunderclap that heralds the healing rain over parched and dusty ground, he drew a huge wracking breath and yelled out his grief for his dead wife, poured it out in great gulping howls, railing at the universe in the long forgotten language of his youth, cursing himself for still living, smashing his office furniture to pieces and tearing shreds off the clothes on his body. When he began to scratch bloody welts on the skin of his face Mick pulled him hard into a tight embrace and held him there, rocking him slowly, feeling the inevitability of his friend's approaching death in the frailty of the old man's bones.
"She used to cry for you every Christmas, you know - ," Josef said finally, his voice cracked and hollow against Mick's shoulder. " - wonder where you were. She knew you'd be alone. She tried to hide it for my sake, but she never stopped caring for you, worrying about you, wanting the best for you. She missed you, you stiff necked son of a bitch." He stepped back, straightened his spine, looked Mick right in the eye. "I missed you."
And for one moment it was as if the decades had rolled away like clearing storm clouds and none of the ugliness had ever touched their friendship. Then they were both crying, both sobbing, the two men who loved her, crying for her and for each other, for the time lost to anger and to guilt, their heads on each other's shoulders, tears washing away the stain of today's encounter. Josef wanted to say more, needed to say more before he went to his final rest with Beth, only in his sorrow he couldn't breathe, his throat constricting around the two small words that had lain there waiting, unspoken for half a century. He gasped.
"I'm sorry."
And with that final grace came inspiration and he saw a path to redemption for himself and maybe, if he was willing, one for Mick.
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She'd worn a veil to the funeral, so Mick had had no warning. Her hair was the colour of autumn and she had his own lively brown eyes rather than her mother's sparkling blue, but the smile was all her own. In his eyes she was the living image of Beth when they'd first known her, the most precious thing in the world to him. He'd hidden her from the tribe for thirty years.
Josef turned to his friend with the ghost of his old wicked smile and raised an eyebrow, and although he was an old man, his grip on Mick's elbow was like iron.
"I can't undo the past but maybe I can give you a future if you're man enough to take it. Beth conceived naturally at the age of forty-four after we and seventeen of the world's best IVF specialists had given up hope."
He turned a tired, indulgent smile toward his daughter.
"Irina, this is your mother's friend and my friend, Michael St John. Trust him. He'll always be there for you."
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