A Blood as Bright as the Moon

1

THE GLOBE

WE LIVED IN Frankenstein, which is ironic, I guess. When I say this, I don't mean that we lived in the village-we wouldn't have lasted long. We lived in the castle atop the hill, a small mossy ruin without a roof. Its arched windows framed enough empty, egg-white sky to convince everyone that the castle was deserted, a crumbling vestige of old times, where only colonies of bats dwelt, and the occasional ghost.

That was true enough.

The village itself was not much, just a road cutting through a narrow valley, with small clumps of cream-coloured houses on either side of it, climbing the slopes of the hills with the obduracy of goats. Their slanted roofs nestled together against the woods, which in that part of the Rhine region are deep and dark and patient.

There was a repair shop by a bend in the road, and a train station with two trains passing through each day, one that went to Mannheim, and the other which ran in the opposite direction, towards Kaiserslautern. A gasthaus stood by the tracks, with a black knight painted on its side wall. A shallow brook snaked behind it. A little further off, past the brook, an austere, angular church loomed over the eastern part of the village. Purple briers flanked the stone steps climbing to the portal, where graceful black letters carved above the entrance announced, "How lovely is thy dwelling, O Lord," and gave the year of the church's foundation: 1871. On the left, a gravel pathway led to the graveyard, which for most of the year was more densely populated than the town it served.

In Frankenstein it didn't take long to know the faces of everyone, and I had become an expert at recognising the traits of distant relatives coming to visit for Easter, a nose in the shape of a gargoyle, a pair of legs curving outward at the knee, a beard the colour of foamy stout. It was my responsibility. As we owed our continued existence to the secrecy of it, streets had to be patrolled, town borders policed, the train station surveilled. Since my vision was keen, and my nose for trouble honed by a lifelong inclination to suspect the worst, watch duty always fell to me. In fact, I volunteered for it.

I had a reason; and the reason was the last house in Frankenstein.

It was-perhaps it still is-painted bright blue, with a steep gable roof from which a single dormer window poked out. It sat away from the rest of the village, closer to the forest than to the nearest neighbour. It had no fence, but two lanky pencil pines growing in front of the entrance gave it a modicum of privacy. At the back, where the dormer window was, the forest's larches- black in the summer but golden now that October had yellowed each needle with a seamstress's patience-scratched at the wall.

No one knew I visited this house every night when I was out keeping watch. Not Regina back at the castle, who'd have thrown me out had she suspected; nor my dear friend Agata, to whom I confessed everything-except this.

I climbed the tree closest to the dormer window, my black Chesterfield melting away into the shadows. My nails dug in the wet bark until I reached a bough polished with long nights of waiting. The wood knew my spine well.

The light was on in the study, though the room was empty. Upon the large oak desk, ancient of build and oriental of fashion, a half-drunk glass of wine stood beside an old Adler typewriter. It had no paper in it, but a large, leather-bound book was propped against the keys. I recognised it. A Treatise on the Diseases of the Nervous System, by James Ross, M.D., LL.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London.

I liked the woodcuts in it, the precise lithographs, and oftentimes-when I was sure the family was away in Ingolstadt-I had snuck inside to look at its pictures of brains in various states of malfunctioning, wondering just where it was, that mine was wrong. I never found an answer.

The October air was mellow, damp with the possibility of rain, and the window had been cracked open, which is how I heard him before I saw him. His footsteps along the corridor were slow; sleepy perhaps, yet still purposeful. He was not an idle man. Finally, he appeared.

Martin Hunger.

Husband of a wan Frenchwoman with the endangered sophistication of a Sumatran cochoa, father of a ten-year-old son who liked to read mystery novels, and a seven-year-old daughter who liked to pick mushrooms in the woods, Martin Hunger was professor of physiology at the University of Ingolstadt, a surgeon of the brain with a reputation for flawless execution, and a world-renowned expert on congenital diseases of the mind. The blue house at the end of Frankenstein had belonged to his great-grandfather on his mother's side, and the family always came back in the summer, sometimes in the winter too, if small restorations were in order. This time he had come alone.

He was wearing a checkered dressing gown. It was too small for his square chest, greying but still lined with muscles-too small, and too short. His wife's. I could picture him soaking in the immaculate bathtub, a ghostly steam rising from the warm water, his weary eyes closed, until an urgent idea had pierced through his doziness like a ray of moonshine from a shuttered blind. He'd risen from the tub, water splashing everywhere from his sudden jolt, grabbed the first thing he could find, wrapped it around himself. The dressing gown clung to his wet shoulders, and I could see wet footprints shining on the wooden boards.

Martin's hair was already thinning on the peak of his wholly German hair, but around the ears it still shone with filaments of red gold. He was in his forties, though the wrinkles around his eyes, always squinting, made him look older. He put on his glasses, sat down, and craned forwards upon Ross's Treatise.

A slight hump of the back, accentuated by years spent with his nose inside medical atlases, pulled the dressing gown away, and from the shadows outside I saw his neck, the taut skin pulsing, the bluish bas-relief of the vein running close to the surface before it disappeared below the collarbone. The cross he always wore was dull with use and age, save for Christ's angular knees, which shone like glassy doorknobs.

My arms ached with want.

There would be a creak as they'd push open the window frame, but Martin wouldn't hear it. His concentration braved children's crying, telephones ringing, radios blaring-what was a creak in a night such as this, when a sharp wind blew from the west, rattling the old house? Fused with the shadows of the trees whispering outside, my own shadow would slink in unnoticed, creep towards his back, raise up to meet the soft dip between shoulder and neck.

It would have been easy; too easy, almost. My arms and shadow knew better. They knew what I had to ask Martin, and that was not the way to get his attention.

How, then? I couldn't rap at the windowpane, or scratch at the wood until he saw me. He'd think a hungry soul had risen from the grave to torment him, my sight would stop his heart. I looked like a revenant.

No rouge could disguise my sallow cheeks. No powder could attenuate my bony features, or do something for the black hollows under my eyes. No brush had bristles strong enough to untangle the prickly blackthorn of my hair. I would have to wear a mask not to scare Martin to death, and while I often thought about asking the Baron for one-he had hundreds of them-the truth is that I was frightened to put my question to Martin. As long as it lived only in my mind, I could fashion the answer I wanted. Asking it would make it real, which meant I'd have to live with the real answer.

So I kept to the dark, and watched on, spying Martin's face for something I had no name for, and the fine layer of skin above his carotid for something I knew all the names of-in all languages. It was an agony, but a hopeful one.

Martin read from the Treatise for a while, then he jumped up, rushed to the bookshelf on the opposite side of the study. He was closer now. Through the open window, he smelled of fresh cotton, of soap. He got on the tips of his toes and dragged down a large volume bound in maroon cloth, which looked like it weighed more than his daughter. He dropped it on top of the Treatise, started browsing it. The belt of his dressing gown had given, and now it hung loose around his waist. Thick blond hairs curled below his navel. A drop of water crawled down his ankle.

Again, I felt the urge to slip inside, to sneak from shadow to shadow, find his neck, kiss it, bite it. But he would never answer me then.

I let myself fall to the ground. A weasel rummaging through the leaves yelped and scuttered away from me, darting towards the forest. I ran after it. The gaunt elms on that side of the valley rose from the mist like so many desolate phantoms lingering on a battlefield. A pale eagle-owl flew in front of me, the tip of its wing brushing against my cheek.

I only slowed down when I reached the trail leading up to our castle, because the path was steep, my breath short with more than the run. It was just as well. I didn't want Regina to see me flushed, didn't want her asking questions. I pulled on the roots of a fallen horse chestnut half-sunk in the muddy side of the hill to hoist myself up the final curve.

Somehow tall and squat at the same time, all red rock dripping with dark creepers, Castle Frankenstein leaned against a large stone shoulder, itself red in colour. The stone was so bulky that the road to the castle had to draw a wide bow around it, and what lay beyond was blocked from view. When I approached the gate...