Withered Gold, the Night, the Day

The sound of fire sirens seemed so weak in the deepening night... like an infant’s last cry of starvation.

Rogasz sat at the church’s grand piano, softly playing one minor chord after another. He couldn’t remember how he’d moved from the altar to the piano bench. Any key higher than middle C buzzed unpleasantly; when he looked into the open piano, he saw his knife lying across the strings of the upper octaves, rattling with the vibration of the notes.

He pulled out the knife and jammed the blade into his thigh. After that, the piano sounded better.

One soft chord after another — it had been years since he had played. Long ago, when the sun still shone, every civilized man could read Latin, dance the minuet, and play Bach by memory. Rogasz had been doing precisely that, mere minutes before his tryst with a woman who called herself Juliet. He’d considered her a casual indulgence, the amusement of a moment... but that amusing, indulgent moment led to the short, sharp violation and centuries of night-bound withering.

“Juliet,” Rogasz called to the empty darkness. “I forgive you.” He said it mostly to curry favor with the god who was supposed to inhabit this church; yet he found that at this second, his heart held no hatred for the long-lost woman. She had drunk his blood and stolen his sunrise, but even rage could burn itself out. “I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you,” he said aloud, striking a chord with each phrase.

A tiny rustle came in response... Hallucination, he thought at first, but his keen eyes soon picked out a shabby figure sitting in the darkness. A teenage girl, a street kid, sat in a back pew and silently tried to shift her weight to a more comfortable position. Of course it wasn’t Juliet — Rogasz had tracked that bitch down less than a century after she created him, and now she was dust on the boots of Prague — but this girl had something of the same look. Tired. Controlled.

“Is there anything you’d like me to play?” he asked, staring directly at her.

She jumped, apparently startled he could see her in the darkness. Then she shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

“Is that the name of a song?”

“Play what you want. Just keep your distance.”

He wanted to tell her what a fool she was — he could bolt from one end of the sanctuary to the other and sink his teeth into her throat before her brain had a chance to react. The words Stupid, stupid, stupid quivered on his lips.

But...

But...

After a few experimental notes, he knew his fingers could no longer manage Bach. Too many centuries had passed without practice... and his daggerlike fingernails clicked unpleasantly on the keys. He went back to slow minor chords, improvising a bittersweet tune to fit against them.

The next time Rogasz looked at the girl, her eyes were half closed.

Outside, the fires spread through the night — fires without noise, without fire chiefs yelling through bullhorns or alarms clanging into the darkness. To be sure, every fire crew in the city was making a stand, staked out around propane tanks, ammonia dumps, chemical manufacturing plants; but that left everything else to burn, spreading the flames unchecked from each building to its neighbors. Dispossessed families simply fled into the night... and none of them could say whether they intended to return, whether they would even file insurance claims on their homes or just wipe the ashes off their shoes and move on.

The stained-glass windows of the church grew brighter as the fires approached. Flickering light wavered behind the faces of saints; the dove of peace shimmered. One window read BEHOLD I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK... and the light in Christ’s stained-glass lantern glinted with a beam that shone goldenly across the pews.

The light showed a legion of rats, streaming into the church.

They were, of course, fleeing the fires: running from nests behind ancient basement furnaces or dashing from summer lairs inside the garbage heaps that cooked in every alley. Some had flooded up from the sewers — climbing through gratings and road-work sites as the sewer water began to steam from nearby flames. In other parts of the city the animals soon headed for water again, diving into cooler sewers, into the harbor, or even into backyard swimming pools, snorting against the sting of chlorine. But here, in the blocks around the church, they were drawn by the presence of Rogasz, diverted by the vampire’s aura to gather at his side.

Hundreds of rats poured silently into the sanctuary. They did not squeak. Their claws scarcely made a sound on the hardwood floor. Like an audience filing in for a concert, they congregated in a circle around the piano.

And the circle grew.

“Shit!” squealed the girl in the back of the church. Dozing with the soft music, she had just woken to find a rodent army surging through every door. In an instant, she had scrambled up to stand on the pew, climbing as high as she could above the invading horde... not that she was a timid little kid afraid of mice, but a thousand full-grown sewer rats, their fur matted with urine and feces, were enough to daunt any human.

“What the hell’s going on?” she shouted.

“It’s the fire,” Rogasz replied. “They’ve come to the church seeking sanctuary.”

“Rats? Are you crazy?”

“I expect so.”

“Fine,” the girl said. “You be crazy. I’m getting out of here.”

“You wouldn’t survive,” Rogasz told her, putting a hard edge into his voice. “Can’t you see we’re surrounded by flame?”

He nodded toward the stained-glass images. Firelight raged outside now, blazing fiercely through the windows on both sides of the church. “If you went outside,” Rogasz said, “you’d suffocate from the smoke.”

“So I should stay and burn instead?”

“Have faith,” he told her. He said the words because good people said such things, and because he wanted to win the approval of any deity who might be listening. “Have faith, have faith, have faith. Haaaaaave faith. Haaaaaaaaaave faith.”

The girl died an hour before sunrise. Some of the rats survived, though.

Fires on the horizon brought a false dawn to the city; but the vampire could feel true sunup only minutes away as he approached the Adversary’s bus shelter once more. Rogasz had not escaped the church unscathed — he had played the piano till it burst into flame, its strings snapping one by one with enough tension to drive the broken ends through the burning wood around them. One side of the vampire’s face was baked raw, oozing fluids. He had stopped playing because his right hand no longer worked.

The gray predawn streets were mostly empty, except for jeeps of uniformed men driving grimly through the smoke. Three hours ago martial law had been imposed at last, and already the soldiers had fallen under the city’s spell: an urge to scurry from one safe place to another, a willingness to blind themselves to everything in between. No patrols stopped the vampire. None even glanced in his direction... not because he had invoked some supernatural concealment but because the patrols had become their own islands of consciousness, turned inward and brooding.

Unchallenged, Rogasz made his way to the bus shelter. He walked with a limp; for some reason, he’d never removed the knife from his thigh. The Adversary was once more leaning in the shelter’s doorway, his face smudged with soot. “Busy night, little brother,” he said.

“I went looking for God, but I haven’t changed,” the vampire replied. “People die and I have no grief.”

“You can’t mourn for everyone.” The Adversary shrugged. “Only heaven has enough tears for that.”

“But I want to feel something. I want to be moved. Moved! Pushed away from wherever I am and over the line.”

“What line?”

“The dawn,” Rogasz said. “Over the edge of dawn into the light.”

“The sun rises every day, little brother. Don’t blame me if you decide to hide from it.”

“But it will kill me.”

“There, you’ve seen through my plan.” The Adversary laughed. “All this time, I’ve been secretly tempting you to suicide. That’s a big bad mortal sin.” His face abruptly turned grim and he looked at Rogasz in disgust. “Do you think redemption is free? Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“But I tried — “

“Listen,” the Adversary snapped, “whatever price you’ve always avoided paying, that’s precisely what it costs. Understand? If you want things to be different, you have to let go of the thing you’re trying to keep the same. Simple logic.”

“I could think of a hundred counterexamples...” Rogasz began.

“Then I’ll see you back here a hundred more times.” The Adversary disappeared in a puff of smoke that smelled of burned rat hair and the screams of children.

Dawn came. The dark day of the soul. Rogasz greeted it.

In the first hour, there were still too many cinders in the air to admit more than a ghost of sun. The vampire felt his hair smolder, but that was all.

In the second hour, people began to come out of hiding. Some wept; some had faces of stone. One man walked through the ruins of a tenement, calling for his dog. Rogasz helped him shout, “Skeeters! Skeeters! Skeeters!” The vampire knew there was no life left under the debris, but he liked having something he could yell over and over, hearing his voice echo off the scorched masonry.

By the third hour, the ash was finally settling out of the air. Fires still burned in some neighborhoods, but a day fire is a sheepish thing compared to a night one. As the haze cleared, the sun broke through. Rogasz spent a few minutes dodging it, then gave up. The good side of his face burned to match the other, but it was a dry burn, like a piece of leather curing in the desert.

Sometime in the fourth hour, a beagle came in response to the vampire’s calls. By that time, the man looking for Skeeters had gone away, so Rogasz had no idea whether this was the right dog. “Skeeters, Skeeters, Skeeters,” Rogasz said, and the dog wagged its tail.

For much of the fifth hour, the vampire lay on a stone bench in front of a law office. A sign on the office door read CLOSED WHILE EMERGENCY CONTINUES. No emergency was visible. The dog lay on the ground beside the bench, sleeping in the sun. Rogasz didn’t sleep, but he closed his eyes, feeling daylight sear into him like a welding torch. “I am being purified,” he told the dog. “This is what redemption feels like.”

In the sixth hour, a policeman yelled at him, “You can’t sleep there, fella.” But when the officer got closer, he said, “Holy shit! Just stay put, don’t try to get up. I’ll call an ambulance.” No ambulance ever came — not in this city, on this day — and at some point the policeman left, too.

As afternoon drew on, the shadow of the law office fell across the bench where Rogasz lay, and after a while he felt strong enough to sit up. The dog followed him down the street, past an army checkpoint that waved him through with directions to the nearest hospital. When Rogasz turned the opposite way, none of the soldiers bothered to correct him.

In time, vampire and dog reached the church where Rogasz had spent the previous night. The walls had toppled in, but by some quirk of combustion, the massive pipes of the organ had survived the fire. They stood side by side, towering over the rubble like a stockade wall, their false gold paint leprous with blisters.

Rogasz searched until he found the body of the girl: peaceful looking, he thought, once he had arranged her limbs properly. He wrenched the metal frame from the grand piano’s skeleton and propped it, harp-shaped, over the girl’s head. With a blackened stick of wood, he wrote