THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION

 All alone with an angry vampire next to two bleeding corpses, young Richard Blaine 

finds that a library can be a very dangerous place to ask the wrong question.

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION

“The question that keeps you alive at St. Marok’s is: ‘What am I missing?’”

– Richard Blaine

 

I studied the limp bodies of Ice and Easy. So vital and deadly just moments ago.

Now, just vacant houses of flesh.

The two birds have flown. In what strange tree do they now sing?

I smiled bitterly at myself.

My task for today was a six-hour self-accusatory depression.

Did Marcello miss them already or were they to him just useful tools?

No matter.

He was the less for their dying regardless of what he told himself about their deaths.

Whenever someone who knows you dies, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be.

Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several judgements slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools.

Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

Abigail Adams studied me in turn.

“Why so sad? Do you really think that those two would have mourned you in the least?”

I shrugged. “What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”

I smiled sadly and twisted the words of Dorothy Parker,

“What fresh hell have you brought to my doorstep, Mrs. Adams? You want that invitation to Mr. Morton’s mansion, too?”

“Oh, dear heavens, no! I want nothing to do with that thing no matter what designation it gives itself.”

She held up her slender right hand. “Bide. My ghouls are here to attend to their dietary needs.”

“Not right here!”

“Oh, do be sensible, Mr. Blaine. They will not break their fast here. They will take the bodies out the hidden passageway to the alleyway behind this orphanage.”

“This place has a hidden passageway?” I asked and immediately regretted sounding like a loon.

Of course, this building had secrets. It was nearly as old as the city itself.

As it turned out, the two ghouls, smelling of mildew and unwashed flesh, came out of a cavernous pit in the floor which slid open as if it had been recently oiled.

My shivers got goosebumps.

The way they moved. Jerkily, almost spider like … as if their muscles had forgotten how humans used their bodies.

I forced myself to look them straight on. I would grant them personhood if only by recognizing their existence.

Only by the wildest stretch of language could you call what they wore clothes. 

Tattered ruins of evening clothes … or burial ones … clung to them, looking as if they would fall off at any moment.

“Oh, do not bother trying to be polite to these caricatures of their former incarnations.”

Her thin lips curled.

“There is only one ghoul in all of New Orleans who retains her personality. As long as she stays in her crypt, I will stay my hand.”

“You’re a real sweetheart, ma’am.”

“I am a revenant, whelp, and the empress of all the American revenants. What gave you the fanciful notion that I was good?”

I made a face, “Sooner or later, I am bound to meet someone with power that is decent.”

“Look elsewhere, Mr. Blaine. I am not that person.”

I was tired of her games. “Why are you here?”

“Curiosity. I heard that the entity which now calls itself Morton was interested in you. I wanted to see why.”

“That’s easy, Mrs. Adams. The Lost Gospels of Henry the Lion.”

“No. Though that volume is indeed cursed, there are more intriguing volumes in that cretin Stearns’ collection of arcane lore.”

She sighed, which impressed me as she did not breathe.

“They invoke mysteries hinting of knowledge ancient, extraterrestrial, even possibly divine: the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex, the Smithfield Decretals, and the Book of Soyga.”

She pointed a long forefinger at me.

“No, Mr. Blaine. There is something about you, yourself, that unsettles that Entity …  and that unsettles me.”

The ghouls had gone, carrying the corpses of the killers with them.

I jumped as the blindingly white habit of Sister Ameal popped up from the still open passageway in the floor.

“I cannot trust you to stay out of trouble long enough for me to teach Miss Mayfair one simple self-defense lesson, can I?”

Mrs. Adams snapped, “You! I heard you were still a paid assassin in Portugal.”

Sister Ameal shrugged.

“I grew bored. I joined the convent to become a nun and enter the intrigues of the Vatican. I should have stayed an assassin. It was a more honest profession.”

“That is not the reason.”

“No, but I do not owe such as you the truth. Now, clamor down into the sewers where you belong.”

“I will not! Unlike most of my subjects, I can walk in the daylight.”

“But not in the Son-Light. Helen, my dear, you can enter the library now.”

“No!” screamed Abigail Adams, and with a rustle and sweep of satin gown, leapt down into the dark passageway, brushing roughly past the chuckling nun.

Helen, with mussed hair, poured into men’s jeans and white shirt, stormed into the library.

“Sister Ameal, you are too free with my secret!”

The nun easily climbed out the opening in the floor like a gymnast.

“Be of good cheer, Miss Mayfair. Mr. Blaine is too smitten with you to logically assess what just transpired.”

I glared at her. “And thanks for keeping my secret, too, Sister.”

Both giving me knowing Mona Lisa smiles, Miss Mayfair and Sister Ameal spoke as one. “What secret?”

 

“There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be...”

― John Lennon

Don't let the title below mislead you, the music is fitting for a conversation with a vampire next to bleeding corpses.