Gus had carved out his own digs, concentrated in one quadrant of the campus’s main plaza. His domain started beneath the only remaining building original to the asylum, Buell Hall; ran beneath the Low Memorial Library and Kent Hall; and terminated at Philosophy Hall, the building outside of which was a bronze statue of a naked dude just sitting there, thinking.
The tunnels made for a cool crib, a real villain’s lair. The failure of the steam system meant he could access areas rarely visited in at least a century—the coarse black fibers sticking out of cracks in the underground walls were actual horsehairs used to strengthen the plaster mix—which had led him into a dank subbasement of iron-barred cells.
The loony bin. Where they caged up the maddest of the mad. No skeletons in chains or anything like that, though they had found scratches in the stonemasonry, like the jagged clawing of fingernails, and it didn’t take much imagination to hear ghostly echoes of the hideous, soul-baring screams from centuries past.
This was where he kept her. His madre. In an eight-by-six cage made of iron bars running ceiling to floor, forming a semicircle creating a corner cell. Gus’s mother’s hands were manacled behind her back with a pair of thick wrist cuffs he had found under a table in a nearby chamber, for which there was no key. A full-face black motorcycle helmet covered her head, much of the finish chipped away from her repeated headlong ramming against the bars during the first few months of her captivity. Gus had superglued the neck curtain of the helmet to her flesh. This was the only way he could fully contain her vampire stinger, for his own safety. It also covered the growing turkey wattle, the sight of which sickened him. He had removed the clear plastic face plate and replaced it with a padlocked iron flat, sprayed black and hinged at the sides. He had baffled the ear molds inside the helmet with thick cotton wadding.
She could therefore neither see nor hear anything, and yet, whenever Gus entered the chamber, the helmet turned and tracked him. Her head turned, eerily attuned to his walk, following him across the room. She gurgled and squealed as she stood in the center of the rounded corner cell, unclothed, her worn vampire body grimy from the asylum’s century-old dust. Gus had once attempted to clothe her through the bars, using cloaks, coats, then blankets, but they all fell away. She had no need for clothes and no concept of modesty. The soles of her feet had developed a pad of calluses, as thick as the treads on a pair of tennis sneakers. Insects and lice wandered freely over her body and her legs were stained, tanned by repeated defecation. Chaps of brown skin were delineated around her veiny, pale thighs and calves.
Months ago, after the fight inside the Hudson River train tunnel, once the air had cleared, Gus had separated from the others. Part of it was his nature, but part of it was his mother. He knew that she would soon find him—her Dear One—and he prepared for her arrival. When she did, Gus got the drop on her, bagging her head and hog-tying her. She fought him with ridiculous vampire strength, but Gus managed to jam the helmet on her, caging her head and trapping her stinger. Then he manacled her wrists and dragged her by the neck of the helmet to this dungeon. Her new home.
Gus reached in through the bars, sliding up her faceplate. Her dead black pupils, rimmed with scarlet, stared out at him, mad, soulless, but full of hunger. Every time he raised the iron shield, he could feel her desire to unleash her stinger, and sometimes, if she tried repeatedly, thick curtains of lubricant oozed out of any fissure in the seal.
In the course of their domestic life, Bruno, Joaquin, and Gus had formed a great, imperfect family together. Bruno was always ebullient and for some reason, he had the gift of cracking up both Gus and Joaquin. They shared every duty in the household but only Gus was allowed direct contact with his mother. He washed her, head to toe, every week and kept her cell as clean and dry as he humanly could.
The dented helmet gave her a machinelike appearance, like a banged-up robot
or android. Bruno remembered a bad old movie he saw on TV late one night called Robot Monster. In the film, the titular creature had a steel helmet screwed atop a brutish apelike body. This is how he saw the Elizaldes: Gustavo vs. the Robot Monster.
Gus pulled a small pocketknife from his jacket and unfolded the silver blade. His mother’s eyes watched him carefully—like a caged animal’s. He pushed back his left sleeve, then extended both arms through the iron bars, holding them above her helmeted head as her dead eyes tracked the silver blade. Gus pressed the sharpened point against his left forearm, cutting, leaving a thin incision of less than half an inch in length. Rich, red blood spilled from the wound. Gus angled his arm so that the blood ran down to his wrist, dripping into the open helmet.
He watched his mother’s eyes as her mouth and stinger worked unseen inside the helmet, ingesting the blood meal.
She got maybe a shot glass’s worth of him before he pulled his arms back outside the cage. Gus retreated to a small table he kept across the room, ripping a square of paper towel from a thick brown roll and applying direct pressure to the wound, then sealing the cut with liquid bandage squeezed from an almost-empty tube. He pulled a baby wipe from a pop-up box and cleaned off the bloodstain on his arm. The length of his left forearm was scored with similar knife scratches, adding to his already impressive display of body art. In feeding her, he kept tracing and retracing the same pattern, opening and reopening the same old wounds, carving the word “MADRE” into his flesh.
“I found you some music, Mama,” he said, producing a handful of battered and burned CDs. “Some of your favorites: Los Panchos, Los Tres Ases, Javier Solis …”
Gus looked at her standing inside the cage, feasting on her son’s blood, and tried to remember the woman who raised him. The single mother with a sometime husband and occasional boyfriends. She did her best for him, which was different from always doing the right thing. But it was the best she knew how to do. She had lost the custody battle, her versus the street. The barrio had raised him. It was the street behavior he emulated, rather than that of his madre. So many things he regretted now but could not change. He chose to remember their younger days. Her caressing him—treating his wounds after a neighborhood fight. And, even in her angriest moments, the kindness and love in her eyes.
All gone now. All disappeared.
Gus had disrespected her in life. So why did he now revere her in undeath? He did not know the answer. He did not understand the forces that drove him. All he knew was that visiting with her in this state—feeding her—charged him up like a battery. Made him crazy for revenge.
He placed one of the CDs in a luxurious stereo system he had pillaged from a car full of corpses. He had jimmied a few speakers of different brands and managed to get a good sound out of it. Javier Solis started singing “No te doy la libertad” (I will not give you freedom), an angry and melancholic bolero that proved eerily appropriate for the occasion.
“Do you like it, Madre?” he said, knowing all too well that this was just another monologue between them. “You remember it?”
Gus returned to the cage wall. He reached inside to close the faceplate, sealing her back in the darkness, when he saw something change in her eyes. Something came into them.
He had seen this before. He knew what it meant.
The voice, not his mother’s, boomed deep inside his head.
I can taste you, boy, said the Master. I taste your blood and your yearning. I taste your weakness. I know who you are in league with. My bastard son. The eyes remained focused on him, with a hint of a spark behind them, like that tiny red light on a camera that tells you it is passively recording.
Gus tried to clear his mind. He tried to think nothing. Yelling at the creature through his mother brought him nothing. That much he had learned. Resist. The way old man Setrakian would have advised him. Gus was training himself to withstand the dark intelligence of the Master.
Yes, the old professor. He had plans for you. If only he could see you here. Feeding your madre in the same manner he used to feed the infested heart of his long-lost wife. He failed, Gus. As you will fail.
Gus focused the pain in his head on the image of his mother as she once was. His mind’s eye stared at this image in an attempt to block out everything else.
Bring me the others, Augustin Elizalde. Your reward will be great. Your survival will be assured. Live like a king, not as a rat. Or else … no mercy. However much you beg for a second chance, I will no longer hear you. Your time is growing short …
“This is my house,” said Gus, aloud but quietly. “My mind, demon. You are not welcome here.”
What if I gave her back? Her will is stored in me along with the millions of voices. But I can find it for you, invoke it for you. I can give you your mother back …
And then, Gus’s mother’s eyes became almost human. They softened and became wet and full of pain.