Blood Family

St“And he said: whoever finds the correct interpretation of these sayings will never die.”

-Gospel of Thomas

Dr Reedy, a thin, particular, meticulous man, with a sallow face and badly cut brown hair, closed the book, and looked into the darkening sky. He allowed the ancient words of the text to take flight and then settle in his mind, suggesting a whole, new, secret path of meaning. Dr Reedy knew the power of words. Not just their power to conjure the world out of the meaningless chaos it would otherwise be; but also as the Priest had once told him; the universe itself was made from the words of God. Mountains and rivers, the forest and the sea, mankind and the animals, all these were part of God’s language, if we could only read it.

Dr Reedy remembered the revelation when his eyes deciphered the Greek hieroglyphs in the Turkish monastery, where God had spoken to John the Divine through a crack in a cave, the sea murmuring in the distance. Dr Reedy had read the beginning of the Gnostic Gospel of John in that same sacred cave, to that same hushed rush of ocean: “In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him not any thing was made. In him was life, and life was the light of men. The Word moved on the waters, shined in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not…” Vertigo was what Dr Reedy had felt, as the truth of that profound act had saturated his mind; the divine language, the logos the Priest had spoken of came alive, as Dr Reedy looked out from the cave towards the ocean.

Back in his tidy, book lined office, with its views of the glass lined new buildings of the city (so much money gone into building those….) he couldn’t help but wonder if God was some kid with a word processor program, writing out the little destinies his characters would face. And yet this new, or rather, ancient text, written in Arabic on yellowing vellum, opened a doorway, used words like a key, just as the Priest had promised it would. It contained a mystery, which he knew his mind could grasp for only a few moments longer. He opened his own journal and made a copy of the letters, whilst they still breathed with Logos, with divine life.

It was the beginning of what he was searching for. Dr Reedy believed that a particular combination of words, patterned like a poem or a spell, could transform his mind, and his reality; take him to the place of the seventh heaven, which, according to the Priest, was inside and outside time, in a place nearby the world. The Priest was so cryptic. Yet if these words were real, and he sensed they were, he was already part way transformed. Heaven could descend; he could live forever. The gift of eternal life was part of the covenant he sought, not just as a metaphor, or a promise to the faithful, sung of in hymns in church on Sundays. The Priest in Turkey had spoken of it as reality, and Dr Reedy really wanted to know what that meant.

“Be Warned,” wrote the ancient prophet of the secret text; “The gateway to the Seventh Paradise is guarded by demons, is sealed by a great band of magic, will open only to those pure of heart, and perfect in their knowledge. If you read these words, the gateway shall make itself known to you, you shall follow a path of golden stairs, the stars shall shine more brightly, and the Seventh Heaven, the very throne of God, will know of your approach. Tread carefully, for the treasure that is within your grasp is beyond price.”

Dr Reedy thought he should write a few lines of his own poetry after reading this. He drew a doorway in his journal, surrounding it with curling vines and creepers. He tried to express his longing, his pure longing, for a return to that paradise which the Priest had allowed him to glimpse even if it had just been an act of imagination. Everything in his life, his marriage to Shona, his two daughters, his academic position, all had seemed tiny, fleeting sparks of light compared to the light that had shone within him that day, in the monastery. The world, and his place in it, had made sense to him, as if it was a place of love and meaning - if only for a moment.

He had been sworn to secrecy by the Priest; he must tell no-one of the Books. And up till now he had obeyed. His lips had tasted nectar, and would do anything to taste it again. He returned to the world, as the Priest had asked him to. To the bitter squabbles with Shona, to his ungrateful and precocious and embarrassing daughters, to the mayhem which his tidy mind abhorred. He waited, with a restless ecstasy, for The Word to be revealed once more.

He had written one word “ Golden”, in his journal, when there was a heavy knock on his door. Pulling himself out of his reverie he assumed the mantle of his position as tutor at the City University.

“Enter”, His voice was loud and booming, at odds with his thin frame, and diminutive physicality.

A dishevelled, pale, weary looking student came into his room and sat down. Dr Reedy peered at the student warily. The kid was wearing pallid makeup, a velvet coat, sunglasses. He was here to talk about poetry.

The vampyre looked at Dr Reedy with restless hunger, feint hearted desire, boredom and yet now and again, interest. They were discussing Don Juan by Lord Byron. The vampyre was explaining how he roared ROARED with laughter at the bathos, the limp dicked irony of the thing. He wasn’t sure from what Dr Reedy said next if Dr Reedy agreed.

He was sure Dr Reedy had said: “Byron must have been bored with the flesh, the acres of it, wherever he went.”

The vampyre’s mouth began to salivate at the thought of flesh. Perhaps that was Dr Reedy’s thought rather than his spoken word, perhaps flesh repulsed Dr Reedy. Wild , livid, gaudy bosoms heaving on a gondola in Venice. That was when the vampyre had met Lord Byron a few centuries back, they had “feasted”, each in their way, on the beautiful, lusty courtesans there. He wanted to stress to Dr Reedy, that Lord Byron was never bored with anything, he wanted more until his last, dying, leech infested day. And the vampyre had an appetite which could match his old friend, Lord Byron.

The vampyre felt the dark compulsion of his blood as Dr Reedy continued to think or talk. Unfortunately, he had fallen in with some heroin vampyres, beautiful goth punks and punkettes, who had dazzled him with their life force, got him singing in their band, got him using the heroin elixir to sustain himself between blood feasts. He was known to them as Luke. Luke’s addiction stirred in his veins with a violence. Yet at least the heroin allowed him to tolerate sunlight, and emerge during the day.

The daytime world seemed like the negative of a Polaroid to Luke; everything was the inverse colour of what it should be in the final print. And the cacophony of the every day world and its people seemed like an ugly riot, and made Luke long for the silence of midnight and moonlight.

He watched the clouds speeding through the sky and sighed. Heroin vampyres could be as boring as the daylight world. The vampyre went with them to their drug rehabilitation sessions, (he was going to one after this tutorial). Here they were given sinister substances which blotted out their pleasure centres. All their words were taken from them too, all their words for love, for freedom. The faceless therapists sucked them all in. Without words, love disappeared from their souls as if it had never existed. Luke had to sit and watch as his little friend Jo was left without language, was left only with her gnawing empty, wordless rage and desire. Still, to be honest, that was how the vampyre had always existed, he had an endless, monotonous, ravenous desire that had become repulsed by higher sentiments like love.

The vampyre was chortling now as they got further into the poem, and yet he watched carefully, as Dr Reedy seemed distracted. Dr Reedy’s eyes kept going to a little journal on his desk. The vampyre felt an uncontrollable desire to steal the book, sensing that within it, lay some secret which he, long damned and desolate, should know about.

And so the next time Dr Reedy gazed out onto the tumultuous clouds, Luke misdirected him, and slipped the book into his satchel. Dr Reedy, whose mind was flying off somewhere with Lord Byron, did not even notice.

When Dr Reedy arrived home, Shona was crying, horrific, hysterical alcoholic sobs about something Dr Reedy couldn’t empathise with. He looked at her with her long, wild black hair and harpy eyes, and felt for a moment like strangling her. Instead he quietly turned down her incoherent rant so that it sounded like a background wail on a hackneyed soap opera. He went into their kitchen, where Shona had tried, and apparently failed to cook a lasagne, and made himself a cup of green tea.

The pure tea clarified Dr Reedy’s mind. He sighed with pleasure at the thought of the journal, with its notes from the sacred text, the book that he thought he had put in his briefcase. His anticipated re-reading of it was an escape from this domestic hell.

On the way home he had been thinking about literal and metaphorical. He thought the student, Luke, had perhaps the same problem as himself, reading poetry as if it was literal truth, as if it was more real than the world, not fiction at all.

Yet if the heaven he had read of today was a metaphor, if the Priest and all his mysteries were a conjuring trick, then this life and all its pain, were really too much to bear. His daughter Lin came in and slammed the door and ran upstairs, looking like an extra in the Night of the Living Dead. His other daughter, Crystal, would be at her music lesson. At least Dr Reedy hoped so. And for a moment, he thought he could hear some faint, crystalline melody, in his mind, and he smiled, and thought it was the music of the spheres. Dr Reedy believed such places of ideals really existed.

Lin Reedy’s hair was thick with gel, dyed black and crimped. Her mischievous eyes were lined with layer upon layer of kohl, with a point at each corner, mysterious and Egyptian, she thought. She had made her clothes herself from PVC and velvet; it was a semi fetish outfit, which she wore with an adolescent combination of innocence and knowing. She was going out into the wild night, fuelled up with half a bottle of ill gotten cider, eager for adventure and knowledge, blissfully oblivious to danger.

Lin did not know what the night had in store. She was entranced by the trailing lights of the cars, which she watched through the taxi window, and the purple clouds, which hung over the city like a genie.

It was magical the way that the night time city was transformed into a lair of mystery, with vampyres and werewolves down every alleyway. The big shop fronts were like paintings in a gallery, full of hyper real beauty, which she could only look at, never touch. By contrast, the night time city was hers. She felt the beauty of her charmed life, as she hurried along the city street, catching the shocked stares of grey suited straggling office girls as they left their wine bars. She would never never belong to that world, she watched with satisfaction as it scurried away, and the netherworld she believed in breathed its presence, in, out, seeping in with the black shadows, tainting the very air she breathed

She hurried down the steps to the nightclub, proffering her fake id to the doorman. The angular chords of the music chimed in her head, seeming to open out her mind, as if it was a treasure map, full of wild oceans and unknown islands. She launched herself onto the dance floor, feeling the energy and pull of the music surge through her, feeling abandonment and the lure of the netherworld. She felt herself transform, as her wild arms flailed around her, into something as pure and beautiful and dangerous as a lynx.

She had seen the vampyre watching her as she danced, and she knew he was a real vampire, not just a good looking young goth, because there was a mirror which ran behind the dance floor, and his reflection was nowhere to be seen. He had pale, faraway eyes, which as you would expect, were quite mesmerising, quite hypnotic. She found herself falling into his predator gaze, and imagining herself in an ancient castle in a black forest in another land. It felt as though she had already met him in a dream. How delicious! She would be his vampire bride.

She left the dance floor, trailing her power and energy behind her as if she too was a hunter. At once he was beside her at the bar (still no reflection in the bar mirror, she noted.) He proffered her a drink, which glowed purple and white under the UV light, and seemed to emit trails of smoke

“Elixir!” He smiled, and she looked straight into his cool, steady eyes, and took a sip.

“How old are you,” she asked, as the liquid went down her throat and strengthened the life-force that now pulsed fiercely in her veins.

“1692” he said.

And she didn’t disbelieve him for a moment

“You’re like someone whose just been born,” he said, “ an innocent.”

How she longed to be an innocent no more. She stood closer to him, enveloped by the energy of his lust and longing. She saw a loneliness in his face, as if he was the last of his kind. With the perfect trust only the innocent possess, she placed herself in his power, and brushed her lips against his.

The vampyre’s lair was a spacious gothic apartment in a deconsecrated church. It amused him to bring his evil into a place which once was holy. The air was heavily scented with patchouli oil, which he burnt in old metal burners, to disguise the meaty smell of blood, and his own lifeless aroma. In the main room, there was a bunch of tiger lilies in front of a stained glass window. The window scattered fragments of colour, from an image of an ancient saint, across the wooden floor and onto Luke’s huge bed. Luke didn’t sleep in a coffin, they were too uncomfortable, though he kept one in storage in the spare room, in case he ever needed real rest.

He did not want rest now; that was the last thing on his mind. He smiled mockingly at the glass saint in the window, as he pulled Lin Reedy down into the lush pillows of his feather bed, the energy of his blood lust surging through his veins like wild fire. And the glass saint looked still and mournful, as if he was aware that he was powerless to act.

Dr Reedy had searched everywhere for his journal, but could not find it. He must have left it at work, with the original text. Mentally, he tried to recreate the imagery from the dream vision of the script. The seven gateways to the seven paradises, the golden ladder, the light growing stronger and stronger, almost blinding him with its intensity. It seemed to him, in his reverie, as if he was on a sort of cosmic elevator, ascending higher and higher, past cloud capped cities, past valleys and mountains, until a golden doorway, and within, a golden room with a golden table were within sight. This was the gateway to the first heaven. Within would be the home of the blessed.

Dr Reedy felt exultant that the words had worked their magic, and that he had been permitted this vision. A loud bang - a glass being put down heavily on the table - rudely brought him back to the world. He felt incensed. There was Shona, glaring at him, her smeary lipstick, her red eyes, and the half drunk glass of whisky all indicating she was about to attack him for some failure to live up to her idea of what a man should be.

“Our daughters are not home yet,” she slurred.

Dr Reedy looked at her with disgust. “What would you like me to do about that?”

“Stop reading hieroglyphs? Realise there’s a world going on outside books, a world with men and things, which our daughters are ill equipped to deal with.”

“I’ll get my coat, and go and get them then,” he said, as he really couldn’t bear to be in the same room as this monstrous woman.

“From wherever they are,” said Shona, seemingly placated.

Dr Reedy got his coat and drove into the night, not knowing where to find his daughters, not sensing the Hell which stirred because he had seen, or imagined he had seen, the first gateway. Road signs seemed to change their meanings, as if malevolent spirits were intent on misdirecting him, sending him on some misadventure, where truth and reason were forever obscured. On and on he drove, it started to rain, a dark forest appeared outside his car window. He realised he was utterly lost. He stopped the car in a lay-by, and shivered as he looked into the black mass of trees. He thought of the opening of Dante’s Inferno “Midway upon the journey of our life, I awoke to find me astray in a dark wood, confused by ways with the straight way at strife”.

Dr Reedy had a strange idea that he could go up and onward in his quest - for heaven, for his daughters - or he could take a wrong turn, as he obviously had, and end, without knowing it, somewhere blasted and lost and desolate. The forest, like Dante’s was “wild and dense and dour.” Dr Reedy fumbled in the glove compartment for chocolate, and looked into the night sky hoping the tiny fires of the stars would point him in the right direction.

The vampyre lolled in ecstasy, anticipating his drink from the virgin’s neck, the sweet nectar that would make him warm and something like alive. Lin was half undressed, abandoning herself to the excitement and danger, knowing in her heart, this could be fatal, but so captivated by the dark poetry of the moment, that she was prepared to risk everything, even her very self, her very soul. She felt him get on top of her as if he was a cold shadow, as if he brought the secret night, the mystery of the grave, all that she intuitively longed to know of. She had a sudden sense of the redness of her heart, she felt herself offering herself to him, she felt longing and oblivion. He had stripped her completely naked now, and was looking at her, anticipating a delicious mortal. And yet, for a moment, he hesitated, as if to be in the presence of such fearlessness made him suddenly ashamed of what he was. A car passed in the street, illuminating the colours of the glass saint’s robe so they reached, like long fingers across her white skin, and up into his eyes. He shielded his eyes, feeling unexpected pain, feeling vanquished. All of a sudden, he thought of the Gateway, the secret letters he had read in Dr Reedy’s journal. He was in no mood for blood sport now.

It was like the Gateway, or the saint, had drawn a charmed circle around the little innocent, and for that moment he was unable to penetrate it. He thought instead of stairways floating off into the stars. For a millisecond he felt hope that his long life of desolation could, by this girl’s hand, be over. Then hell stirred within him like a black ocean, and he pulled the heavenly stairways out of the imagined sky and into the fuming waves of his mind. He smiled, with his wolvine mouth at Lin. She looked at him with perfect trust. He felt devastated by that look and vowed to take her soon.

Dr Reedy had returned home feeling bewildered, as if he was still lost, even though the road signs on his journey had suddenly started to make sense. His other daughter, Crystal, was waiting for him, looking prim and girly in her neat cashmere jumper, a jumper the colour of delicate salmon. She smiled at him winningly as he came through the door, tossing her straightened shoulder length blonde hair back from her face. And Dr Reedy felt a horrific sense of failure, as if he would never live up to her expectations. She handed him her report card.

As he expected it was all straight As. She had a bright shiny mind did Crystal, good at cutting through an argument, at deciphering a new meaning in an old poem. It made Dr Reedy weary and slightly jealous of his daughter. Perhaps he had shielded her, by encouraging her literary pretensions, into ignoring the horror of her mother, into seeing only the beauty, the transcendent aesthetics of life.

“Well done,” he said dryly, and wondered whether to offer her a cash reward. Meanness got the better of him, and he perused the comments of her teachers, bitterly.

“A dazzling student.”

“This girl is going places.”

Crystal suddenly felt unhappy for no good reason, as if this was all a charade. She was a dutiful daughter to the point of stupidity, and where had it got her? The grades on her card felt meaningless, and she wondered if she should tell her Dad something shocking, such as the fact that she was having sex with the Head Boy of her private school, in the back of his private car. She enjoyed this secret, this thing that she was sure Lin had been doing for years, though the intensity of the emotions it induced in her kept leaving her weepy, for no good reason.

“I would like to go to Venice,” she said, surprising herself.

Dr Reedy looked at her sharply. “Who with?”

“Some people from school. They are going to go interailing this summer,” she lied.

“That’s not for you,” said Dr Reedy, some malformed paternal urge to protect her manifesting, instead, like he would suffocate her with a pillow, rather than let her live and trust in life.

Crystal didn’t argue, she was dutiful, and had learnt long ago to expect little from her dad. She sometimes imagined the beautiful, dazzling life her teachers comments on her report card would seem to entitle her too, and nearly screamed at the reality of the black shoe she was forced to live in instead.

Just then, her more exciting, more honest, more rebellious sibling lurched through the door, staring at the two of them with pure hatred and disgust.

“Happy families,” she sneered.

Dr Reedy was about to say something like “What time do you call this?” But he was just too weary of the pair of them, and contented himself with a smouldering glare.

Lin watched her sister eating strawberry creams, curled up on the William Morris print chaise longue, reading the Morte D’Arthur. Lin both despised and admired her sister, despised her superficial conformity and dull blonde prettiness, admired the fact that they were sisters, and her sister was the cleverest girl in school.

When they were younger their thoughts and lives had been entwined like they were vines on the same creeper. They would go on family holidays, and spend hours together gazing into rock pools, tickling sea anemones to watch their pink tendrils grasp and retreat, and pretending they could see mermaids hiding in the depths of the water.

One girl fair, one girl dark; this difference became more apparent to Lin as they grew older. She began to feel her sister was the lovely one. Her sister knew the right answers to placate their father, her sister would be cherished, would find a way in life. Lin became like a shadow to this golden princess, creeping two years behind her. Crystal was now 17, Lin 15. When Lin looked at Crystal, it was as if she was hoping to find her own reflection, hoping to see some glimmer of gold in her own lank dark locks. She instead saw only how odd and lonely she was. Compared to Miss Popularity she was as malformed as a bat, and awkward and blind in the everyday world.

And as they both started menstruating at around the same time, as their sharp asexual bodies started to bud with unwanted femaleness, they grew close once more, and then split apart like a fruit that had been cut in two. Lin embraced her own otherness, the darkness that she dwelt in, which came, perhaps, from her father’s lack of interest in her, which opened a doorway to the hopelessness of the world. Lin found her only release in her daring journeys into the night and the city. And Crystal chose her pink, pretty, perky artificially prolonged girlhood. She was sweet enough to make Lin sick.

Lin had escaped the vampyre’s lair, rather disappointed that something more terrible had not happened to her. The vampyre had some sort of fit, struck, unfortunately, by conscience or remorse. A tiny instinct for self preservation had made Lin hurriedly dress and leave whilst the vampyre writhed under the glass saint’s mournful gaze. Lin’s ancient female instinct cursed the vampyre for not being evil enough. Not evil enough to end things. She had liked her taste of oblivion, which the vampyre had seemed to offer.

Now Lin sat on the floor by her sister, still half wishing she was as pretty as her, wondering what it would be like to wear those preppy clothes, and not feel the lure of the netherworld.

“What is it you are reading?” she asked, hoping Crystal would stop reading and save her, save her from the evil which she sensed was lurching towards her life like a blood spattered hound. Although she realised she wanted that evil, it fascinated her just because it was an unknown future.

“You wouldn’t like it,” said Crystal, with what she hoped was another winning smile.

Crystal did not want to patronise her younger sister, but she suspected Lin would not respond to the quests and fair maidens of the Morte. Her sister liked comic books with twisted, dark heroes, not bold knights seeking holy things.

Crystal herself thrilled to the metaphysical jeopardy the heroes and heroines of the Morte’s quest were placed in, inwardly squealing with terror and delight as honour and virtue were tested. And yet her pale, strange sister looked the very image of Morgan Le Fay that afternoon, privy to a magic and mystery which Crystal could read of, but never own for herself. She would be too afraid to do that, too afraid of real femaleness and power.

“It’s the quest for the grail,” she explained, hoping she had not hurt her sister too much.

Crystal wondered for a moment what it would be like in real life to be confronted with mortal danger, a castle of enchantments, a dark knight, a Belle Dame Sans Mercy. Would it be as thrilling if you were confronted with real terror, away from the safety of the book? Would you feel heroic as you stood against things, or just engulfed in fear? Crystal hardly dared believe such things would happen in the real world.

She put her book to one side.

“What’s up little sister? Man trouble?”

To Crystal’s surprise, Lin started to smile. A very rare occurrence. Crystal suddenly longed to know of the adventure her sister must be involved in.

Shona Reedy was having an affair. She wished her family would leave the house, so that she could continue it. As it was Sunday there was little chance of that.

He was a sculptor, her lover, with strong, sensitive hands. It was his hands she had first noticed and desired, when she met him in the coffee shop in the park. They protruded from his jumper, possessed of a beauty and life she had never seen before, flitting to the sugar and milk, holding the spoon and the jug with a care and delicacy, as if each object was precious and could change its form just by him holding them.

The rest of him - his name, Jack, his rumpled face, his blonde spiky hair, his inarticulacy with words, all seemed pleasingly simple and unchallenging to her after her complex life with Dr Reedy.

He had taken her to his little cottage on the borders of the park, which was filled with strange objects that he had acquired from second hand markets - huge earthenware broken pots, an old out of tune piano, dusty dried flowers, and velvet curtains where the doors should be. It was like stepping through a time tunnel when she entered through the door, noticing the stone floors and the hearth. It was like Jack was some sort of hermit or cunning man from the middle ages.

She was eager for him to handle her like he had handled the spoon and sugar - carefully, measuring her out, until he had got just enough of her. He had looked at her and hardly said a word. He had kissed her like it was the first time he had ever kissed anyone; and so tenderly. And his hands had moved over her body, feeling its shape. His hands were inquisitive and yearning, bringing molten pools of heat to her body’s surface, as if he could mould her into something new.

And she had indeed become something new over the last few months, as the affair continued. No longer lost to herself, no longer forgotten, no longer just another housewife in suburbia, living cooped up like a chicken in a pen. Her life had become heady with excitement and daring, she had become someone’s lover.

She loved being a lover. The sex had caught her unawares - how much she needed and enjoyed it - like it was a delicious drink of the best champagne. She measured out her life in the spaces between her illicit meetings with Jack, as desperate as any junky for her next fix of pleasure. She couldn’t bear the thought that one day it would be over, and she would be once again doomed to her loveless life with Dr Reedy.

All the trappings of her comfortable life with Dr Reedy, all the nice antique furniture, tastefully re-upholstered by her, and the matching curtains, and the aspidistra plants in their Victorian jardinières - all these seemed things seemed to mock her as she prowled around the house. She felt like they no longer belonged to her, that her family had become strangers.

Sometimes she would be seized by a fit of guilt, and try and cook a perfect lasagne, or today, a Sunday dinner from scratch. Less and less this happened; her family had to content themselves with ready meals she picked up on her way back from the park. And even as she sat down to eat the machine produced food with her family, her mind and soul would be elsewhere, would be longing to be in Jack’s dilapidated bedroom, under the candlewick covers, beautiful and alive once more. Not once more. She had never felt as alive as she did with Jack, and each time it was better. She sighed with longing, despite herself, but Dr Reedy, and her daughters, did not notice as they tucked in to their frozen Yorkshire pud, instant mash, and reconstituted beef. She wondered forlornly if they’d ever really noticed her.art writing here…