Strange City Read online

  I put aside my fear. I had to confront Hortator. Already I knew that he was close by. From the dozens of clamoring voices in the building, my attenuated senses were able to isolate him. I could even hear his blood as it oozed through his veins; for every crea­ture's lifeforce pulsates to a personal rhythm, unique as a fingerprint, if one has only the skill to pick it out.

  I was becoming angry. I stalked to the door and flung it open. There came a blast of foul and icy wind. I stepped inside and slammed the door shut. There was no mistaking the odor now. I descended steep steps into a tomblike chamber where several out-landishly attired men and women sat deep in conver­sation, sipping delicately from snifters of blood.

  "Rh negative," said one of them disgustedly, "not exactly my favorite."

  "Let me have a sniff—pe-ugh! Touch of the AIDS virus in that one; oh, do send it back, my dear Travis."

  "Whatever for? I think it lends it a certain je tie sais quoi," said Travis, "that ever-tantalizing bouquet de la morl..."

  Two other creatures looked up from a game of cards; their faces had the pallid phosphorescence of the dead; their eyes glittered like cut glass, scintillant and emotionless.

  A slightly corpulent man, sumptuously clothed in velvet and satin, waved languidly at me. "Heavens," he said, "what a surprise! We don't get many Red Indians here."

  "Get him out of here," one of the cardsharps hissed. He was attired like one of the Spanish black robes.

  "Yeah, dude," said a young man, of the type Julia had described to me as punk. "Or card him at least." He cackled at some incomprehensible joke.

  "Whatever for? He's obviously one of us. Either that, or he's in desperate need of the services of an orthodontist," said the man in the velvet.

  "We don't know him," said the other cardplayer, a woman, whose hair stood on end and fanned out like the tail of a peacock, and who wore a full-length cloak of some thick, black material.

  "Perhaps we should ask him who he is. See here, old thing—very, very old, I'm afraid—I'm Sebastian Melmoth, your humble host. And you are?"

  "I am Nezahualcoyotl," I said, "the Voice of the Hummingbird. I'm looking for a certain person. He calls himself Hortator."

  "Oh, I see. Well, you really mustn't get to the point quite so fast; it's not very dignified, you know. Let a century or two go by first."

  "I have let five centuries go by."

  "Perhaps you'd care for one of our sanguinary cocktails?"

  "I've already supped tonight, thank you."

  "And might I ask you what Clan you belong to?"

  "I know nothing of Clans. If you won't tell me the whereabouts of Hortator, please direct me to some­one who can."

  "Are you an anarch?" asked the woman with the peacock hair. I could only look at her in confusion.

  The other cardplayer rose and sniffed at me. "Unusual bloodline," he said. "Not a pedigree I'm familiar with."

  "Now look here," said Sebastian Melmoth, "he's obviously a vampire. But he doesn't seem to have the foggiest notion about how to behave like one. Tell me, Nezzy old chap, if you were in fact to find Hortator, what would you do?"

  "I shall kill him."

  The others began to laugh at me. I felt like some peasant on his first trip to Tenochtitlan. "Why do you mock me?" I said.

  "Well!" said Sebastian Melmoth. "That's simply not done anymore. Not without the consent of the Prince. Who doesn't even know who you are, so I don't see why he would grant your request."

  It was then that I heard his voice. "Kill me?" The voice had deepened with the centuries, but I still rec­ognized it. There he stood, towering over Melmoth, in the full regalia of a Mexica warrior, the jaguar-skin cloak, the helmet fashioned from a jaguar's head, the quetzal plumes, the earrings of gold and jade. Behind him there hung a life-sized painting of the white men's Xipe Totec, the god nailed to a tree; a soldier was hammering a stake through his heart, a beautiful woman watched with tears in her eyes.

  "Kill me?" he repeated. "Why, Nezahualcoyotl?"

  "Because you tried to kill me!"

  "That was a foolish thing. I admit it. I placed too much credence in the Spaniard's superstitions. I know now that you're not that simple to kill. In fact, you look very well for someone who hasn't had a drop of blood in half a millennium."

  "You are part of the old things, the things that should have died when the world ended. I understand now why I have been preserved by the gods. It is so that I can take you with me, you impious creature who twice refused the honor of a sacrificial death. I have been sent to put an end to your anomalous existence so that no part of the Old World will taint the New."

  "Did your god tell you this, old man?"

  Suddenly I realized that I had heard no voices from the gods since awakening inside the glass box in the San Francisco Museum. There was no more certainty in me, there was only ambiguity and confusion. My grand revelations no longer had divine authority. Perhaps it was true that they were the hallucinations of a madman. Perhaps if I had my votive objects I could summon back the voice of the hummingbird— the sacred blood-cup, the drum, the gold-tipped thorns for piercing my own flesh.

  "Huitzilopochtli!" I cried out, despairing.

  "You fool," said Hortator. "No god brought you to this place. There is no divine plan. It was I who told Julia Epstein where to dig. It was I who chose the moment to bring you back out of the earth. It was I, not Huitzilopochtli, who summoned you hither!"

  "Why?" I said.

  "Oh, don't imagine that I want to renew some mon­strous cosmic struggle between you and me. It's much simpler than that. Buried with you, in the chamber at the heart of the pyramid, there were certain artifacts, were there not? Magical artifacts that will enhance my power. Your coming back to life along with the items I need is something of an inconvenience, but I'm sure you won't last long, because you simply don't understand how things work in this new world, this age of vampires."

  Then it was that the memory of the apocalypse returned to me, bursting all at once through the wall I had erected to shield myself from its pain. I could not bear these creatures or their future, with their petty rules and their ignorance of the great cycles of the cosmos. I turned and strode away, taking the steps two at a time until I reached the Alexandrian Club, where lulia was sitting nervously at a corner table.

  "Where did I come from?" I screamed at her. "How did you come to possess my body? And where are the artifacts I was buried with?" I had to have them. I had to try to summon Huitzilopochtli. Surely I would hear his voice again if I went through the ritual of the sacred blood-cup.

  "Quiet now," she said, "you're making a scene."

  "I have to know!"

  "Yes. Yes. But not here. It's dangerous for me."

  We drove into the darkness. San Francisco sparkled with man-made stars. A thousand strange new odors lanced the air: frenzied copulations; murderers and thieves skulking through the back streets; and the blood music, singing to me from every mortal inhabi­tant of the city, from within the topless towers of stone came the pounding of a million hearts, the roar of a million bloodstreams. Oh, one could be a glutton in this city, if one were a creature such as I. No won­der they had congregated here.

  "I told you," said lulia. "Things are different now."

  "What did Hortator mean when he said that he had summoned me back from the dead—by telling you where to dig?"

  "Oh, he was being melodramatic. But he did drop a few hints."

  "Before or after he made love to you?"

  "You're not jealous, are you?"

  "Of course not." I was silent for a while. The woman had a way of baldly confronting me with the truth. I didn't like it. I loathed the very idea of a city crammed with vampires, living by complex rules, observing silly hierarchies. But what could I do? The car raced over the bridge once more; Tenochtitlan, too, was a city of many bridges, a floating city. San Francisco was like a bloated, savage parody of my vanished kingdom.

  Julia said, "I'll tell you, if you like. We have
a series of weekly lectures at the museum. Hispanic studies, you know. Hortator came to a few of them. He would ask penetrating questions. Then he started telling me things. There was a big earthquake in Mexico City, you know. The Velasquez Building was leveled to the ground. He told me—convinced me—that there was a major find hidden beneath it, a secret room, he told me, next to a secret passageway. He told me he'd seen it in a dream. I laughed when he drew me a map. Well, that was the thing, you see. We had been using sonar to excavate those tunnels, and the computer scan matched his drawing to the centimeter."

  "And you found me there."

  "You were lying in a massive obsidian sarcophagus. You had a stake through your heart. I assumed—fool­ish me—that because of that, you were quite, quite dead—too many Dracula films, I suppose—so that it would be safe to put you on exhibit."

  Memories of the apocalypse . . .

  The king in all his splendor. This time not on the crest of a grassy hill, watching a pretended battle, but atop a pyramid of stone, looking down on the conquistadores as they swept through the city in a river of blood and fire. Man and beast conjoined now, the man-things glittering in their silvery skins, the beasts whinnying and pawing the pathways paved with the dead, arms and legs flying in the air as the cannonballs smashed through stone and adobe and human flesh.

  And I beside him, I the mouthpiece of the god of the Mexica, aghast and powerless, raging. "You didn't have to play dead for them. They're just mortals. You've treated them like gods."

  "They are gods," said Moctezuma. "There was noth­ing I could do."

  Hortator had poisoned his mind. He had fed Moctezuma a diet of his own bad dreams, told him that the Spaniard was indeed Quetzalcoatl.

  I looked into the eyes of my king; and I saw such sadness, such desolation that I could not bear it. It must be a terrible destiny to be the one chosen to preside over the end of the universe. Was there no way to turn back the sun? No. Beside us as we sat, each one wrapped in his private melancholia, my deputy priests were grimly carrying on the day's duties, plucking out the hearts of victims who waited in an endless queue that stretched all the way down the thousand steps and into the conflagration in the market square.

  "Don't tell me that you accepted the word of this man-beast as the word of a god!" I cried.

  "Wasn't it?" the king said. "In truth, I felt a certain wrongness about it all."

  "Then let me call on Hummingbird to turn back the tide of time!"

  "What difference does it make now?"

  "Majesty," I said, "when the king himself no longer believes in the old truths, how can the earth sustain itself?"

  "Perhaps I've been a little distracted," said the king. He was wavering.

  I knew that I could not stand idle. I left the king's side, I entered the sacred chamber behind the altar, whose walls were caked with the blood of ten thou­sand human sacrifices. I paused only to suck the juices from a fresh, still palpitating heart that one of the priests handed me. The soldiers were hacking off the limbs of the still convulsing victims, casting down the arms and legs, as has always been the custom, for the poor to dine on. The sight of the city's daily routine being carried out even now, on the brink of utter annihilation, would have moved me to tears, except that I had shed none in a thousand years. The priests worked quickly and efficiently, up to their elbows in coagulating gore. I hardly looked at them; I chucked the drained heart onto a golden platter before an image of Hummingbird, then entered the secret passageway behind the altar that led downward, downward to the hidden chamber where lay my sar­cophagus and the tools of my art.

  In the tunnel, the sounds of death were muffled. Cannon like the distant whisper of thunder in the rain forest. The screams of the dying faint, like the cries of jungle birds. The clash of metal on stone like the pat­ter of rain on foliage. I took the steep steps two at a time. Soon I was in the heart of the pyramid.

  When I reached the chamber, I found that the seal was broken. Not with the magic words, but shattered with gunpowder. Several of the man-beasts were already there, ransacking the place, gathering up the treasures into sacks. "How dare you?" I screamed. The man-beasts rushed at me. I summoned up my inner strength. I struck out blindly with both fists, and two of the Spaniards slammed against the stone walls. One of them died on the spot; the second more slowly, a little string of brain oozing down from his helmet. The third man-beast gaped, turned tail, started to run. Then his greed got the better of him and he returned to gather up one of the sacks of gold. He glanced at me; I was draining his dead friend's blood into the sacred blood-cup so that I could call on Hummingbird.

  I closed my eyes. I called on the name of my god.

  Huitzilopotchtli . ..

  I felt myself sinking into the well of unconscious­ness that was the presence of my god. I heard the familiar buzzing in my left ear that presaged the com­ing of Huitzilopotchtli. I smiled.

  My child .. .

  Came the whisper of the Hummingbird's wings, the tiny voice from the heart of the flames. I thrilled to its dark music. I allowed it to wash over me like the cur­rents of the sea. I relinquished my being. The pres­ence of the divine was more fulfilling even than the taste of blood, than the memory of women.

  My child . ..

  Abruptly, the trance was broken. I was jolted into consciousness. Even now, telling the story to lulia five hundred years later, the memory will not come back as a woven fabric; it is in tatters.

  Hortator stands before me, no longer in the attire of the Unblemished Youth, but wrapped in a metal skin from head to toe, like one of the conquistadores. With him are a dozen of the white-skinned creatures. He has delivered to his masters an entire world, an entire civilization.

  "I know what you are now," he cries, "creature of Satan. They've told me everything." Several more of the Spaniards come in behind him, brandishing their swords and their flaming torches and their muskets. Seeing their dead comrades they cry out, back away; but Hortator laughs. "I know what you are now, and the lesuits have told me what I must do to kill you."

  Confused, uncomprehending, I lash out—

  He dodges my blow, leaps across the sarcophagus, seizes the drum of Xipe Totec and begins to pound on it, a slow relentless rhythm. I scream. He pounds. I lunge. He leaps, each leap drawing more celerity from the power of the drum. He flies along the walls, he twists, he turns, he is a whirlwind, a tempest—

  Huitzilopotchtli! I cry out.

  No answer. I reached into the profoundest dark­ness of the well within. Where was my god? I see Hortator bearing down on me, brandishing a sharp­ened wooden stake.

  As though from infinitely far away I seem to see the stake rive my stony flesh, rip apart my rib cage, pierce my heart.. .

  Huitzilopotchtli!

  Huitzilopotchtli!

  Then, and only then, the god responds. The pyra­mids above us start to tremble. Cracks appear in the ceiling. Rocks start to rain down.

  "Flee!" cries Hortator. I hear, through the fog of pain, their footsteps, metal clanking on stone. I hear some of them cry out as the cave-in crushes them.

  I clutch at the wooden stake. But it is too late. I feel its leaden weight within me, feel it still the sluggish pump that is my heart, I feel the blood slow from a spurt to an ooze. I feel my heart muscle tighten around the unyielding wood like a vagina. I feel violated. I feel powerless for the first time since my changing. Then, all at once, I am spiraling downward toward the long sleep of ultimate forgetting.

  And now, another underground passageway, another secret chamber. Five hundred years in the future, in a world I did not belong in, I stood with Julia Epstein among the shelves and shelves of artifacts of my people, all labeled, boxed, marked in white paint in the strange curlicuish script of the man-beasts.

  Crate after crate I ripped open. "What is it you're looking for?" said Julia. "This is valuable stuff—you can't just throw it around like it belonged to you."

  "It does belong to me."

  "Half a millennium ag
o. But they're priceless antiq­uities now. And they haven't been appraised by the insurance company yet, so—"

  I saw a tattered quetzal-feather robe that had once belonged to King Moctezuma's grandfather. I saw my sacred blood-cup, chipped now. I lifted it from its box. ..

  "Careful with that thing! It dates back to Olmec times."

  "I know. I made it."

  She was silent for a moment. "The drum!" I said. "There was a drum fashioned from human skin."

  "I've seen that," she said, "in Hortator's apartment."

  So that was how he had made it out of the collaps­ing tunnels—with the power of celerity conferred by the drum of Xipe Totec! I was furious now. He had no right to my ritual objects. I was more determined than ever to exact revenge. Perhaps he thought I would be a useless anachronism, but I would teach him not to usurp my magical tools. They had told me at the Vampire Club about new laws that forbade the killing of vampires without permission from some prince, but what did I know of princes? What did I care? I was more ancient than any prince.

  But even as I spoke, we heard the sound of shatter­ing glass, and the high-pitched wail that I now knew to be an alarm that would eventually summon the museum's security. Then came a distant thumping sound, uneven, like a fibrillating heart. I knew that sound well. The hollow pounding contained in it the scream of a dying man.

  "Hortator!"

  "Why do you have to go on fighting him?" Julia said. "Don't you realize that the war between you two has no meaning anymore?"

  "Julia, I must have a little of your blood."

  She closed her eyes, craned her neck, bared it to me as a warrior bares his heart for the sacrifice. "I need the blood," I said, "so I can summon forth the voice of the Hummingbird."

  "There's no voice," she whispered. "It's in your mind, the right brain speaking to the left, a hallucina­tion of godhead. Don't you understand that people don't see visions and hear voices anymore? You come from the age of gods; we live in the age of conscious­ness; it's not the god who commands us anymore, it's we ourselves, our ego, our individual being. People like you, people who still hear the voices of gods, they put them in insane asylums now."