The Burden of Memory

I remember. . . .

I remember the way the moonlight would shine upon your hair.

As we strolled along the Champs Elysees, waiting for some unlucky cutpurse to accost us, I would proclaim my love for you to the wide, listening night. And you would laugh, and kiss me, and call me silly. But I knew your teasing words for the I love you, toos that they were.

I remember Prague, and the beauteous wonder it became in winter. You: as pale as an icicle against the backdrop of a fairytale.

I recall that particular winter was a lean one for Europe. The cutpurses and desperation-forged brigands were thick on the ground.

We never ate so well as that year.

I remember the wedding in Bruges . . . you ate the bride and I ate the bridegroom, and we shared the little flower girl between us as dessert. Ah, but she was as sweet as candy. . . .

And then we danced a waltz in the bridal bower among their strewn corpses.

I remember how grand it all was . . . with you . . . how unutterably perfect. I remember looking into your eyes and feeling a love so deep and everlasting that not even death had sundered or changed it.

Then he showed up and he. Ruined. Everything.

I remember first seeing the old man in the village of Annecy several days earlier; I recall with especial vividness his wild, white hair and his even wilder eyes. I further remember his reappearance on this fateful night, waylaying us by the banks of the Rhone—the holy words on his lips burned no worse than the water he splashed us with.

In that instant, I knew who he was . . . man of myth, rumor, and legend. The Horror. The Scourge. I knew who he was, and I trembled, beloved. Not for my sake, but for yours.

I remember the carved wooden stake in his hand as it drove into your chest. I remember your scream . . . and the way your limp body fell into the cold waters of the rushing Rhone.

I remember this and scream also as, stumbling, I fall to my knees at his feet and gaze up into his wide, crazed eyes. The wooden stake, black with your blood, and sizzling, plunges into my chest. I feel no pain in the place where my heart used to beat. Nothing could compare to the pain of losing you. Not even this.

Finally, with my ultimate in-drawn breath, I remember you, my beloved, to the wide, listening night. I remember you and I curse his name with the last of my life. With my final exhalation, before oblivion takes me, I hiss: “Van Helsing!”

END