Strange Wine (33 page)

“Who are these others?”

“Now, now, Charles. Let’s not go into that again. You know what professional ethics forbid my talking about. But tell me about the most recent deaths.”

In seven months he had
not
died from a serious tumble down three flights of stairs, a knifing by a mugger in the underground parking lot of his office building, inhaling a dose of virulent pesticide left uncapped by an inept gardener, drowning in his club’s swimming pool when he dove too deep and struck his head on the bottom, several dozen coronary thromboses, and a bout with the flu that had dropped into pneumonia.

“I woke up in the middle of the night about a week ago and found I couldn’t breathe. My lungs seemed to have collapsed. It was horrible.”

“Yes, that one’s fairly common. And what else?”

“Some punk kids were playing on the freeway overpass, dropping rocks on the cars. A big one came through the windshield and damned near brained me. Opened a huge gash in my right temple. There was blood all over the car.”

“How long to heal?”

“About an hour.”

“Startling. Absolutely startling. Yes, I’d put you at thirteen months. I think your treatments should be coming to an end in a few weeks.”

Terror gripped his heart. It was like a giant fist squeezing through his rib cage. “I’ll still see you after…after she’s…”

“We’ll see,” was all she said. The way a mother would speak to a child who wanted to stay up past his bedtime. We’ll see.

“Three weeks, Charles. I’m certain we’re only talking about three weeks.”

“Then you’ll have ten percent of everything I inherit.”

“I’m not thinking about that.”

“I hope not,” he said, and reached for her with a commanding manner. She came to him again, but there was very little of subservience in her surrender.

And later she put the needle into his arm and pressed the hypodermic plunger and sent the gray, swirling mixture that she said was the essence of death into his body.

He decided to do it the most direct way possible. In a way no one could ever question. So there would never be even the slightest whisper of gossip that Charles Romb had murdered his wife to gain control of her father’s fortune. (Nor that Charles Romb had been driven by an excess of love to eradicate the creature who loved him so slavishly.)

On the first night of heavy rain, he insisted they go out to a movie. She wanted to stay home and give him a massage. He insisted and on the canyon road he suddenly swerved the Bentley and sent it thundering through the guard rails and into space. The car turned lazily and struck a stand of young, newly planted spruces, tearing out an even dozen before rolling past, over the rim of the plateau. The Bentley dropped another hundred feet, impacted front-end-on, flipped over onto its roof, crushing the top into the body, slid another fifty feet and came to rest on the tennis court of a wealthy hotel caterer who had moved up into the canyon as protection from the burglars and ripoff artists who flourished in the center of the city.

Romb had made certain not to turn off the ignition when he drove through the guard rails. The impact of the crash ruptured the gas tank as he’d known it must, and the Bentley suddenly exploded with flames.

Sandra had no doubt died at the first crunch of car against timber. The caterer’s twenty-year-old son, a beach lifeguard during the summer months, threw himself and an asbestos lounging pad into the family swimming pool, and using it as protection, rushed the wreck. He managed to drag Charles Romb’s dead body from the mangled and still smoldering debacle, sustaining third and second degree burns over one-fifth of his body.

Sandra was dead on arrival at the hospital.

Charles Romb was dead on arrival as well.

No one could have been more surprised than the intern on duty when, mere moments after he had pronounced the charred and broken remnant called Charles Romb dead, the body moaned, twisted on its stretcher, and began calling for its doctor.

But nowhere in the medical callbook or in the Yearbook of the American Medical Association could he find a Dr. D’arqueAngel.

“You’ve healed nicely, Charles,” she said.

He reached for her, but she motioned him to the seat on the other side of her desk.

“It was god-awful,” he said. He had some difficulty speaking. There were still bandages covering half his face, with patches of rejuvenating flesh still puckering under them.

“Yes, I know. It usually is. But you’ll be totally well again in a few months. It was very wise of you to get yourself transferred to a private nursing home. The startling nature of your recovery, back from the dead, might well have caused some comment.”

He stared at her, waiting. He knew she was holding something back.

“You’re wondering when I’m going to ask for a settlement of accounts, aren’t you?” She went around the desk, moving smoothly, and sat down. She motioned to the chair opposite once again. “Do sit down, Charles. We have a few things to discuss.”

Romb shrugged out of his topcoat with some difficulty, wincing with pain. He tossed the coat on the wide couch and sat down. Yes, they had things to discuss. Now that he was free of Sandra, and a millionaire estimated at thirty times over, he felt his former awe of the mysterious Dr. D’arqueAngel greatly reduced. It was about time she learned precisely who held the power reins in what he planned as a very long, very pleasurable relationship.

“Listen,” he said, crossing his legs, making certain the creases in his pants were straight, “I’ve decided to move the head office of my corporation to Bermuda; I like the climate there. I’ll want you to come with me, of course.”

She did not smile.

“Why settle for ten percent when you can have all of what I own? We can share it equally. I’ll give you the kind of life you’ve always dreamed about.”

She did not smile.

“We’re in this together,” he said, with a touch of meaning he intended as gentle menace. “I’m not sure what the law would be concerning your treatments, but I don’t think either of us would want the other running around without some, uh, check on our activities.”

She did not smile.

“Well? Say something.”

She did not smile, but reached into a drawer of the desk and turned something, probably a rheostat, because the light dimmed to that half-dusk she always provided when they made love. In the semidarkness her face lost definition and all he could see clearly were her eyes…which now, for the first time, seemed incredibly old and wise.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Charles. I have my practice.”

“You’ll have to close down your practice.”

“I think not.”

“I have no intention of signing over ten percent of my holdings to you.”

“That won’t be necessary. It was never necessary. That was merely a false estimate I knew you would consider the correct sort of payment for my services. My bill is totaled in quite a different coin.”

Something unhuman and shadowy slithered through Charles Romb’s mind.

“I think you’ll decide to keep your offices here in the city, Charles; and I think you’ll decide to be on call whenever I want you.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“Here is something you ought to see.” She reached into the drawer again, and he heard a switch click. A portion of the wall behind the desk folded away accordionlike, and he was staring at a screen. She worked with switches and dials in the drawer, and the screen lit up and began to hold a series of very clear slide photographs. “You’ve been curious about my other patients. Here is one of them. A very dear friend of mine named Philip.” He recognized the man on the screen as a best-selling novelist who had not published anything new in several years.

The slides clicked on and off the screen in rapid succession. The first shot showed the novelist as a hardy young man in his late twenties. The second slide showed him seemingly two years older, slightly stooped. The third slide showed him with a touch of gray in his thick mop of hair, and his right hand was thrust into his pants pocket, apparently balled up. The slides clicked on and off much faster, and each one showed the young man in progressively more aged and physically decrepit stages of life. They seemed to blur as she ran them faster and faster, and the young man became an old man and the old man became a withered figure and the withered figure became a caricature of life, bent and twisted and clearly in constant pain. When the final slide was gone, and the screen was a square of bright light, Dr. D’arqueAngel worked her switches and the screen went off, the wall unpleated, and she was sitting there staring at him.

She was smiling.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Romb asked. But he was afraid he knew.

“Those are time-lapse photographs taken of my friend Philip.”

Trembling, Romb softly asked, “How far apart? Two years each? Three? Five?”

“Every twenty minutes,” she said.

Charles Romb heard, quite distinctly, somewhere in the universe, an escape-proof steel trap spring shut with a deadly clang.

“You see, Charles, everyone needs love. I’m sure you know that better than most people. Some need more love than others; Sandra, for one example. Others need hardly any; you, for another example. I need quite a lot. I’m a very demanding woman, Charles. I have to be. Not only is it my nature, but one finds as one grows older, much older, very much older, that attractive lovers seem to want equally attractive lovers. Life can be very lonely for the old and the ugly.”

He was about to say,
But you’re neither, you shouldn’t have any problem finding thousands who would pay to make love to you
, but before he could speak he saw her eyes. They did not seem to belong in that exquisite face. They belonged in the face of a creature awesomely ancient and withered.

“I’d like you to meet Philip,” Dr. D’arqueAngel said, still smiling. She pressed a button in the desk drawer and a door Romb had never noticed before slid smoothly into the wall and something barely human crutched its way into the room. In the half-light Charles Romb could barely make out the definition of body and features, but it was obviously the popular novelist, grown hideously old and wretched. He dragged himself through the doorway and took only two steps before his rotted lower limbs failed to support him. He fell, and began to crawl toward the woman.

When he reached her, he laid his head in her lap and she stroked his head as one would a faithful lapdog.

“The treatments must be continued, Charles. Otherwise I’m afraid the remissive process begins in something under a year. Deterioration accelerates and is impressively rapid and total.”

Romb could not speak. The sight of the novelist groveling for a caress was loathsome–and fascinating.

“I practice preventative medicine, Charles. On my own behalf. The distillate of death has to come from
some
where. And from my own point of view even more important, the antitoxin. The merest fractionate of the essence that has the most salutary effects on preserving one’s youth.” She made a negligible gesture as if what she was about to say didn’t really mean much: “Since I have no call for it, I use it myself.”

Hoarsely, Romb asked, “How many of us are there?”

She named a captain of industry, a prominent actress, the owner of a successful chain of parking lots, a television newscaster with his own late-night talk show, that year’s leading presidential candidate from the party out of office, a husband and wife team of diplomats assigned to the United Nations, a famous criminal lawyer given to courtroom theatrics, and a leading nightclub comedian. “My patients form a small but sturdy community of donors. Each supplies the others. Very carefully calibrated amounts of life, to stave off death, Charles. Not too much, not too little, each time; the balance is so delicate. Periodically I have to find a few more strong sources of supply, such as yourself. But when one of my, er, friends grows recalcitrant, threatens to tip the balance, well, I’m afraid in the interests of the common good I have to exercise a degree of corporal punishment. I withhold treatments.”

She stroked the novelist’s head meaningfully.

“After that, I’m afraid the patient can be maintained only at the level of deterioration that obtains when the treatments are resumed.”

There was not, Romb realized, nearly enough smoothness or prettiness in the possible world.

“Give up this idea of Bermuda, Charles. I think you would find the climate most disagreeable…very quickly. And give up the idea of dispensing your love elsewhere; we need all you can give, you see. Stay here in the city with all of us. We’ll treat you well, and with only the slightest inconvenience, a daily office call for your donation and your injection, you’ll live to be, oh, I’d say two or three hundred years old.”

The novelist whimpered in pain.

“I need love, Charles. Quite a lot of love. Love, as I’m sure you’ve heard said, keeps you young and happy.”

In the semidarkness Charles Romb sat frozen in his chair considering two or three hundred years with a small death on each day of that time. He sat staring across at the ancient eyes of Dr. D’arqueAngel, dreading the moment when her secret flesh would touch his. Unparalleled love was to be his future. For a very long time. And the only sounds in the room were the husky, sensuous breathing of the shadowed woman, and the whimpers of the creature at her feet.

From the burning core of his molten hell Charles Romb screamed.
Sandra!
he screamed, in the silence of his soul. But from the terrible darkness of that place there was no answer, no answer at all.