Long I Lay In The Ground

Chapter 9

I step outside, over looking the city. Al-ys's words have burned a typeset image over my field of vision, yet my ears still ring with what has so recently been said in these rooms.

Velvet night with her caress and promise call to me, whispering all sorts of enticements through the violet air as I dwell in a fugue, and eventually the fleeting delights she offers win out over the sure knowledge that my own careworn company will drive me to despair. I want what I cannot have - the solace of my Al-ys - and I've been stricken by the plight of Edward and Jane. I teeter on the verge of misery, my toes already curling over the edge.

Walking, walking, I walk until the dawn chorus, worrying where Jane might be. The fact that she can take care of herself doesn't mean that she can't get into trouble, and all three of us were distressed by last night's argument. Edward is safe in my hotel room, I am safe in my wandering, but is a fourteen year-old girl with a savage streak and a heart of darkness safe anywhere?

Back on my balcony I watch the lightening of the sky, moved almost to tears as I always am at the softness of lavender and pink.

A haggard Edward greets me at ten o'clock, clearly having slept in his clothes. Being rumpled and unshaven makes him even more handsome, in a bohemian, unkempt way.

I offer breakfast.

"I don't want to take anything from you," he states flatly.

"Oh, don't be precious. You need to eat. What will it cost for eggs and coffee? Twenty dollars? Pay for it yourself, if you must."

"I will. Is Jane here?"

"No, she didn't come back, and I haven't heard from her."

He sighs, paces, fidgets.

"Do you want to hear the story? Of Jane and me? I feel like telling it," he says.

Yes, I certainly do want to hear how this unlikely partnership had come about. After ringing down for his breakfast, I sit opposite him at the wrought iron outdoor setting on the balcony. He's quiet for so long the food arrives before he has spoken.

He thanks me, though he barely picks at it. Pouring himself coffee from the plunger, he begins.

"I was the only child of a lawyer father, and a mother who did charity work in the community. My parents wanted me to be cultured, and enrolled me in piano lessons when I was five. To everybody's surprise, my teacher said that I showed a great deal of promise, and could possibly have a future in music. The lessons continued, and I was expected to practice an hour a day, which rose to two hours as I got older. I never questioned it, because without siblings there was nobody to play with and nobody to distract me. After school, once my homework was done, I played piano until dinner time. After dinner, I played until bedtime. I became somewhat reclusive, as you can imagine, but I never missed the company of others because there was no space in my life for anybody. Music was my company, and my increasing level of skill was its own reward.

"When I was seventeen, both my parents died, and I barely noticed. I could say that I immersed myself in music to cope with their loss, but that's not the case. I was already immersed. My contact with my parents had for years consisted of all of us passing one another in the hallway as my father rushed to court, and my mother rushed to attend some event or duty that she had volunteered for. I'd become accustomed to spending most of my time alone, and my tutor was responsible for getting me to various performances or exams or whatever. I was aware that other people my age had friends, but I wasn't sure what purpose friends might serve.

"After my parents' death the courts sent me to live with a guardian for a year, until I turned eighteen, and by this time I was playing in public often, at performances organized by my tutor, and earning money. There'd been a reasonable sum from my parents' life insurance as well. My guardian - a distant uncle - was nice enough, but I inherited the apartment I'd always lived in, and following my eighteenth birthday I moved back into it.

"I finished school, having done rather well, and was accepted to a conservatorium. I did well there, too, since I had no outside life. Although it was there I discovered that - oh, never mind."

He stops for more coffee.

"Discovered what?" I ask, wondering.

In the morning light, a small fire of red appears high across his fine cheekbones.

"Apparently, I was considered intriguing by girls because I barely spoke. I barely changed my clothes, or washed my hair either, but somehow I was also deemed attractive. I got quite a bit of female attention, which was all foreign territory to me," he states. "At first I was completely naive, but within months, that naivety was a distant memory. There were more girls than I can remember, and parties and nightclubs, and sex on offer every time I turned around. I didn't actively seek it, but I never declined it, either. Then when I discovered I'd gained a reputation, I didn't understand how it had happened or what to do about it."

Little boy lost, I think, and he even looks baffled telling me.

"And Jane?" I prompt softly.

"Yes, Jane," he answers. "I have a piano in my apartment of course, and it's rather a nice one - the best my parents could afford. However, it's an upright, and I needed to practice on a grand. I found a practice studio with a very good piano, and I was going there several nights a week, after college. I became aware there was a girl hanging around, although she didn't speak to me. She just seemed to be listening from outside the building - she was always there when I left. I was a bit concerned about what someone her age was doing hanging around, because I'd be coming out of there at ten or eleven at night, and she was just a kid who should have been at home at that hour, but it was a couple of weeks before either of us spoke. She approached me under the streetlight - this wayward urchin, ethereal and pale - and asked if I'd take her home with me.

"It was the first real look I'd had at her, because she'd hovered in the shadows up until then, and I was saddened at how dirty she was. Her clothes didn't really fit, and they were filthy and even torn. To my shame, I thought she was soliciting. Half of me suspected that she was probably a junkie and a thief, and just plain bad news - the other half figured she was probably homeless and needed help. When I asked her where she lived she said her parents had recently thrown her out, and she begged to come to my apartment and just have a bath. She said she wouldn't bother me any more after that. I said I'd do as she asked, and I added that I didn't want anything from her, in case she thought I was expecting favors in return.

"Back at my place I put her clothes in the washer while she was bathing, and I cooked her a meal and found her a t-shirt to wear while we waited for her things to dry. I also looked up various services and organizations for homeless teens and printed a list out, ready for her to read. I'd scraped together all the cash I had at home, and I planned to offer her my spare room for the night, and see her on her way in the morning.

"But the girl who came out of the bathroom was completely different to the one who'd gone in. She'd seemed so small and afraid when I'd spoken to her at the studio, like a miserable and broken little flightless bird. When she came out of the bathroom, she was the Jane you know now. Her poise was electrifying. Even wearing a man's t-shirt that was ridiculously too big for her, she managed to appear elegant and proud. While I was still trying to get accustomed to the 180 degree turn around in her demeanor, she started to talk about music. She offered a critique of my playing that took my breath away - it was severe to the point of harshness, and yet utterly fair. I was astonished at how well she knew what she was talking about. She flayed me to the bone, really. And then she offered to tutor me.

"Stalling for time, I asked for her qualifications, and of course, she didn't have any. None on paper anyway. The breadth of her knowledge was her qualification. We sat down at my bench, at the piano, and she took me note for note through the piece I'd already been working on that night back at the studio, and for the past several nights. My technique was vivisected. As little as an hour later, I already knew I was playing better than I ever had before. Neither of us ate the dinner I'd prepared - we were too busy. Finally at about two am, I told her to stay the night, and I went to bed, my head spinning.

"The next morning I quizzed her, and she wasn't at all forthcoming with information about herself, but she repeated that her parents wouldn't be looking for her. I said I'd find her somewhere to live, and I'd see to it that she got into a school, and I'd keep an eye out so that she never had to be on the street again. She wouldn't give direct answers about any of that, either. She stayed the next night, and the next, with us working together on music for hours and hours again. I'd slipped out and bought her some clothes since her own were in such a state, and I'd gotten a few other things for her as well - a hairbrush, toiletries. I bought cokes for the fridge in case she wanted them, and cookies and icecream. I had no idea about fourteen year old girls.

"I was still attending college, so I was out during the days, but she refused to go to school. I'd run into obstacles anyway, trying to enrol her when I wasn't her legal parent or guardian, so despite my efforts, I couldn't get her in anywhere. She continued to be obstinate about it, and I already had a lot on my plate. I admit I let it slip in view of the fact that I was so busy, and she was already so inexplicably well-educated.

"The next thing I knew she was booking appearances for me, and arranging interviews and reviews, and I became even busier. I should have been more worried about the school side of things, and about tracking down her parents, but it was all such a whirlwind. It was literally weeks before I realized I'd never actually seen her eat. Even then - there were no alarm bells to ring - nothing to tell me anything was amiss other than the fact that I was harboring an abnormally precocious teen who clearly wasn't anorexic because she wasn't losing any weight. I was more worried about what the authorities would do or say if they caught up with her, and caught up with me. After all, she was underage. I never laid a finger on her - but who would believe I was housing a fourteen-year-old girl because of her prodigious knowledge of classical music, and because she'd become both my tutor and my manager?

"Then one night I'd performed somewhere, and Jane had come along. By then I'd bought her suitable clothes. We were speaking to people afterwards, and she introduced herself as my sister. She said she'd been interstate at private school and that our mother and father had wanted her out of the limelight, but that as she and I were one another's only family since our parents' tragic deaths I'd brought her to live with me. It was so smoothly delivered, and so credible that no-one doubted her, and that's how we've been perceived for a couple of years now. No-one has ever even checked. When she acts as my manager it's always over the phone, and she uses another name and changes her accent. It can't go on forever, obviously, this public charade, but I owe so much to her acumen and ambition and skill."

"She owes you too, I'd say. You gave her a home, a name, a purpose, and respectability. You gave her the society she couldn't have had otherwise."

"Oh, don't you think she would have gotten her talons into somebody else? Don't you think she will again? She'll change her hair and her looks and her voice and be someone else's sister," Edward says. "She and I have a shelf life."

"I think you underestimate her regard for you."

"Regard has little to do with it. Her indomitable instinct for self-preservation rates far more highly."

"You sound as though you mind. What is Jane to you?"

"Ah, now we're getting to the crux of it, aren't we? I can't tell you the nights I've lain awake wrestling with the question of what Jane is to me. Aside from the obvious that is - the Svengali to my Trilby O'Ferrall. The absurdity of our situation is not lost on me. And neither is the unconventionality. I haven't yet told you how we came to be embroiled in our unnatural agreement."

He looks around him, swears softly, and apologizes. "My jacket? I need a cigarette," he says, standing up. His jacket is thrown across a chair inside.

"Do you mind?"

Passive smoking poses no threat to me, and I don't find the odor offensive. "Not at all," I reply.

He is silent for the duration of the cigarette, contemplative and inward looking. He pours himself another coffee, though it must be cold by now, and sits awhile with his elbows on his knees and thoughts elsewhere. He looks unreachable.

When he speaks again, it is with harshness.

"She drugged me. The first couple of times, she drugged me. I don't know what it was, but it made me slow and warm and heavy. One night we'd come home from a concert and I'd been received well and I'd had a few drinks. I'm not much of a drinker, but I keep alcohol at home, and I like a whisky now and again. Jane and I were listening to gypsy music, both too wound-up to sleep yet. She brought me a drink and I was light-headed after a few minutes. Another few minutes and I couldn't stand up any more. Jane was cooing, telling me to trust her, telling me she meant me no harm, which didn't make sense. When she took my wrist and brought it to her mouth I thought she wanted to kiss me, and I said no. Kissing someone on the inside of the wrist is an intimate act, and was entirely inappropriate between surrogate siblings, particularly when one of them is so young. But of course, it wasn't a kiss. Or it was - but I felt her teeth, and felt licking and tugging. It was obscene, Bella. I don't have to tell you how sensuous it is to have someone suck your flesh. I took pleasure from it, and I was disgusted with myself. I would have pushed her away, but because of whatever it was she'd dissolved in my drink I lacked the strength. And when I woke the next morning I was lying on the couch with a splitting headache, and no mark whatsoever to indicate that the whole thing hadn't been a dream."

He rubs at his temples, fingertips disappearing into his standing-on-end hair.

"I couldn't bring myself to speak to her about it, because it sounded too surreal. Sister dear, did you slip me some sort of narcotic and then commit a freakish and bizarre assault on my arm? I said nothing, and told myself it hadn't happened, although in my paranoia I started taking massive vitamin supplements. But even though I started a campaign of vigilance, and wouldn't let her bring me any food or drink, she somehow managed to drug me again two weeks later. And this time, biting me she sent a trail of fire coursing up my arm. The next morning I wasn't hungover - there were no ill-effects at all. I felt fine. Again, there was no evidence that she'd done anything to me and I put my good mood down to the vitamins.

"And slowly, over a few days, I became aware of a change. I felt a general lift in my well-being, as though I'd always been just below par before, but now I was better. My energy level increased. I was more focussed, and things seemed to be clearer. It was like there were more hours in the day, and I could work harder. And another thing - my appetite increased. I was eating like a horse. And it wasn't just my appetite for food... My libido had been a demanding presence once I'd discovered women were attracted to me, but it began to get almost unmanageable. I channeled it into piano practice, and gym sessions.

"And best of all, the more practice I did, the more dextrous my hands were. Signals from my brain were getting to my fingers so quickly I felt like a conduit - whatever was in my head set sparks in my hands instantaneously. I was playing better than I ever had in my life. Better than most people ever do, to be honest.

"Putting two and two together, it wasn't hard to see that all this was all a combination of my new vitamin regime and improved health, my hard work, and the lessons from Jane. She'd been giving me insights into music theory I'd never had before. The exercises and scales she set me were more challenging than any I'd had from other tutors. She'd found me pieces to learn that were so obscure they didn't fit into any of the historical periods I was familiar with, and they stretched me. I convinced myself that nothing untoward had ever happened between her and me, and that I'd simply had some weird dreams I should forget about.

"Then one morning I was sipping on a juice I'd poured myself from the fridge, when I detected an odd element in the taste. In a flash I knew I recognized that faint trace of something chemical and wrong. I knew Jane had spiked the drink, and that my suspicions about what she'd been doing were true. Furthermore, she intended to keep doing it.

"When I confronted her, she broke down crying, but she confirmed my accusations. It was a very, very strange conversation, although I suppose it might not seem strange to you, since you suffer from the same condition she does. She explained that she had an affliction - a one-in-a-billion genetic condition so rare that there isn't a name for it. I couldn't believe my ears when she described it to me. Firstly, she admitted she could only ingest human blood, although she only needed small amounts of it. Then she went on to list a range of other aspects to the condition - her immune system was superior to ordinary people's and it was almost impossible for her to get sick. Her senses were so acute as to be more like an animal's than a human's. Her rate of aging was far slower than anybody else's. And incredible as it all was, there was a ring of truth to it. I'd never, ever heard of such a thing, but she made it sound plausible, and she was desperate for me to believe her."

I'm starting to get angry, and as if he can sense a shift in my state of mind Edward looks up. Jane is now seeming to me childish again, where I had been thinking of her as mature. She had been deceitful and manipulative, establishing that Edward was a decent man who would not take advantage of a teenage girl, but she was the one taking advantage. She had blatantly lied to him to enlist his support, pretending that she was a biological phenomenon with an unidentifiable abnormality. He had come to be genuinely fond of her, with no clue that she was so unscrupulous.

"What is it, Bella? Am I making you uncomfortable?" he asks.

"You're not making me uncomfortable, but your tale is. What happened then?" I say.

"Jane said she was sorry for abusing my trust and the generosity I'd shown her, and for violating me the way she had. She thanked me for giving her a roof over her head and clothes, and for allowing her into a musical world she could only ever have hoped to glimpse from a distance, and she said she'd be a burden to me no longer. This was her farewell. I told her not to make any decisions but to sleep on it and we'd talk more in the morning. But by the morning she was gone, and I searched for days. Remembering how she'd been when I met her, a grubby angel with a heart full of opera and holes in her shoes, I couldn't bear to think of her going back to that life. Now that I knew about her peculiar diet I couldn't imagine what she'd had to do in order to eat, but I kept picturing her starving and weak and begging people to help her. In my visions she'd get hurt. Her needs are so unnatural that I couldn't imagine people being willing, and I could all too easily imagine her lying somewhere bruised and beaten after telling someone what she wanted from them."

"Well, I asked a lot of questions in a lot of unsavory places, and eventually I found her. She was so despairing and upset she didn't even argue about coming with me, and I was so grateful to have her back and know she was safe that I was prepared to do what I needed to do to keep her. We entered into our unorthodox arrangement with very few qualms from me, once I understood how little sustenance she required. After a few weeks she informed me that her condition did have a name, and that she hadn't wanted to tell me what it was because of all the associations it had. She said it was called Vampirism and she'd been born with it, and it was nothing to do with the likes of Count Dracula, or any other fictional figures. She could wear crucifixes, attend church, go out in the sunlight, and was perfectly happy to be around garlic, although she couldn't eat it."

I am stunned at the web of half-truths Jane had woven to ensnare this man.

"And Bella, that was what she told me and that was what I believed. I never heard of the "hunting" business until yesterday. She's never spoken of her past, and I've never pressed her about it. I thought it must be too painful for her to revisit. I know she's chronologically older than she looks, but I don't know how old she is. How she has arrived at her musical knowledge I have no idea. But I do know now that though she has the appearance of being defenseless, she is highly resourceful. After yesterday's revelations, I have no fears for her safety or survival at all. I have more fears for society at large. I don't know what to do, Bella. All this time I've seen her as unusual and vulnerable and in need of protection. Now I see that she's very dangerous. As are you."

His splendid green eyes bore into me as he makes this declaration. I can see that he's tired and he's still shocked. Much of what he is relating troubles him, as evinced by changes in the tone and evenness of his voice, but this last sentence is delivered calmly. He is unafraid of me.

There are a couple of possible reasons for this, one being that he trusts me. I like this reason. The other is that amongst all her other omissions, Jane has never told him that she could break him in half. Edward is sitting here honestly thinking that because he is a man, and a big man at that, and I am a woman, and a smallish one, he is much more powerful than I am. I like this reason, too. I like that he is confident of his body. I find Edward compelling and very attractive. It's disturbing.

But there is so much to tell him. Jane has misled him into thinking that she and I are human. He doesn't know we are supernatural. He doesn't know that vampires are real.

"Jane must be stopped. In light of what she was saying, she should be in a hospital for the criminally insane. They'll look after her. They'll give her plasma, or something. I have to find her. Oh, God. Last time she left me, I don't think she really tried to disappear, so it wasn't too difficult to locate her. This time - who knows what's going on in her head? Last time we hadn't fought. But Bella, Jesus Christ - do I have to turn you in, too? Couldn't you just - I don't know - take a twelve step program?"

He stands up and moves towards me. My God, he is fearless. I am seated, and he kneels at my feet.

"Help me find Jane, and we'll get her somewhere she can be looked after, and maybe there'll be a solution for her - something you and I haven't thought of. And Bella, you've said you don't have a provider. Jane hardly took anything from me. I'm big, I'm strong, I'm healthy. I could give a lot more. I could give you enough. Be with me, and I'll give you what you need."

What on earth is he saying? I know what he's saying.

"I won't turn you in. Promise me you'll never harm anybody else, and I'll be yours. You won't have to hunt. We can live together - make our association look like a real relationship. You'll have me whenever you want me. We can even marry if you want. Help me with Jane, and make a vow to me that you won't kill or hurt anyone again. In return I will make a vow to you - whatever you ask of me."

This is unexpected. He is at my feet in supplication, as men used to be, but he is not a supplicant by nature. He is not a supplicant now. He is making me a proposition - his blood, to save lives. But what does he get for his part of this bargain? He gets my pledge that I will not kill. If I could breathe, his nobility and courage would take my breath away.

I could fall for this man.

And a lightning bolt of illumination flashes through my mind - is Edward the one My Heart sees for me?

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