Home » Archives » January 2004 » David Parker's Journal: 5

01/09/2004: "David Parker's Journal: 5"

I must have stood there fully five minutes, trying to will Tatiana to reappear in the darkened room. But she was gone. She came, she left – most painfully for me, she always left – when the spirit moved her. You can never control another person. Not really. And even if you could, I wouldn’t have wanted to. Still, if I possessed the magic to do just one thing, one wish, I would use it to make her come back – and stay.

I fell to brooding.

Why had Tatiana come back now? It was not that I had forgotten her. I could never forget the woman who had given me the Dark Gift. But at least I had gotten to a place in time where she no longer consumed my waking thoughts, and my dreams at night.

I had written an entire opera about Tatiana and her family and their murder by the Communists during the Revolution. Indeed, it was the last piece of music I had written. I completed it six months earlier and hadn’t written a single note since. The score to the opera, lovingly written out in my hand, was fully three inches thick. It sat on a table in the music room, near my piano, two candles on either side of it, and Tatiana’s picture above it on the wall, a shrine to the beloved.

Life’s elemental hopeless came falling back down on me there, standing on the third floor of Hibernian Hall. We never get what we want. And when we do, it never lasts. The few brief happy days we get in life are only a covert way to increase the torture. It’s a glass of water held out to man dying of thirst: You might get a sip or two now and then, but never enough to satisfy your need to drink, only just enough to keep you alive and prolong the agony.

The familiar old black wolf that once hunted me through the streets of Chicago – Depression – again had my throat firmly in its grasp. It bit down, hard. My anguish was so sharp that I almost cried out in despair.

If the Illuminati needed me to do something, or even if they only wanted to warn me, why did they have to send Tatiana? Unless, of course, no one else would come. I had been shunned. I was anathema to the Vampiri. They all hated me, even my old friend Mozart, after the terrible things I’d done, driven by weakness, by my excessive love of pleasure and sensuality, but mainly by the Hunger.

I began down the stairs, thoughts cascading avalanches of self-pity, sorrow, and regret done on my reeling head. I paused and leaned my shoulder against the wall on the verge of weeping.

The building was quiet, perfectly quiet. Even the ghosts in the old Irish social hall were observing me with cold disapproval. What would the dead make of a vampire trembling on the edge of a break down? I was closer to I’d been in years to giving into my own worst cravings, to quench my agony in an orgy of flesh and blood. Did the spirits’ silence mean that even the dead feared me? Or was their silence mere mockery?

A floorboard creeked behind me.

I spun around to look up at a female form. There was never any question it was Tatiana. The woman had a thin, almost consumptive face. She looked down on me from the blackness of the landing above, her hollow eyes burning with anger. She was barefoot, wearing ragged bell-bottom jeans embroidered with a peace symbol, and a tie-dyed T-shirt.

“Be gone, spirit!” I cried.

The apparition vanished.

It was a wonder I didn’t vanish, too. I was no more than a ghost myself, a specter lingering behind on the earth long after my reason for being was gone. The only thing chaining to this mortal coil was the small relief that came when I sat down at my piano, but that was leaving me, too, by degrees, like the last rays of light leeching out of the western sky at the end of day.

I stood outside and looked up and down the street. The sidewalks were deserted. All the better. I was in no mood for temptation. A few blocks toward the river and a few more to the east were a seedy collection of bars, where there were always hookers standing outside, looking to be picked up. I would not go that way but straight home. Perhaps I could exorcise my demons by pounding on the Steinway.

I plunged my hands into the pockets of my jacket and began back the way I’d come. The smell of fire and wet, burned wood was heavy in the air.

What had Tatiana meant when she said the wrong shop had been burned?

I stopped as if encountering an invisible barrier and stared in the window to my left. It was an antique store. There were two on the block, one on either side of the social hall. It was the other that had burned. I peered inside with the same uneasiness I’d felt earlier.

The sign on the door said: The Olde Curiosity Shoppe.

“The entity that burned down the antique store,” Tatiana had said then paused. (Vampires are blessed, and cursed, with total recall.) “It picked the wrong shop.”

The “entity”? What was that about? “It”?

If the wrong shop had burned, it seemed likely whatever “it” had come to destroy could still be found inside the remaining antique store.

On the other side of the glass, the room was filled with a dusty clutter of rocking chairs, lead-glass windows, wooden.

It didn’t make sense to me, but if I was going to figure out what Tatiana was talking about, there was only one thing to do.

I reached for the door latch, focusing my mind to turn the tumblers in the latch until it opened with a flat click.