"Please tell me about the light," she demanded.
"I believe we have to talk," he said quietly, his voice so low that she had to strain in order to hear it.
"This place," she began. "It's so...strange."
"And yet it is a part of who I am," he replied. "I created this place to be able to separate myself from the community whenever I feel the need to...pursue my studies."
"Your studies?"
He sighed and she scanned his face for any clue as to why this might be so difficult for him.
"I'm afraid this is going to be a very long talk," he said at last. "Wouldn't you like to rest first?" She just shook her head, and he smiled. "But at least you should eat something."
She agreed to that and he set about preparing some tea. She watched him go through the routine of heating water and preparing teapot and mugs. All the while her mind worked frantically, trying to figure out exactly what it was about him that seemed so strange. Finally he set a tray on the table and offered her dried fruit and crisp bread.
"It's not very much, but it's nourishing," he apologized. "I don't require much when I'm down here."
Until now, Catherine had paid no attention to the demands of her body, but the moment she took the first sip of her tea, she felt ravenous.
"Please chew slowly and carefully," Vincent advised her. "Otherwise your stomach might reject it."
For many long moments they ate together in companionable silence, but finally Catherine could contain her curiosity no longer.
"Your studies," she began between bites, "what kind of studies are they?"
Vincent took a deep breath. "Actually, I'm not sure where to start."
"How about the blood in my hair even though there's no wound on my head?" she suggested. "Or that odd blue light which seems to come out of nowhere?"
He nodded resignedly. "It's what some would call magic, Catherine."
All she could do was stare at him in bewilderment as he put down the slice of bread he had been eating and leaned back in his chair.
His face was strangely devoid of expression as he began to speak. "It started when Devin left and I realized that I could never be part of his dream; that I could never be part of anybody's dream. One day, I happened upon a book on Magic and Alchemy which captured me completely. After I had read it twice, I thought that nothing, nothing was impossible at all, that I just needed to find the proper rites and charms in order to turn myself into a normal-looking human being."
Catherine felt her heart turn over in her chest. "Oh, no!"
"Over the years, my view of things gradually changed, but not my desire to become a...normal man. There were times when I hardly thought of it, but then there were times when I was obsessed with the idea. When you came into my life, Catherine, my need to be transformed became so overwhelming that I even turned to Paracelsus' scriptures which I had discarded the moment I realized that they dealt with black magic. That was a long time ago. But then there came a time when I was desperate enough to try anything."
She looked at him questioningly.
"It was when you met Elliot Burch and I thought I would lose you. I thought if..."
"Oh Vincent," she gasped and quickly rose from her chair, putting her arms around as much of him as she could grasp. "I know I was blind back then, not only where Elliot was concerned, but mainly because I didn't realize sooner how much I was hurting you."
She felt him stiffen under her touch and released him.
"It wasn't your fault, Catherine," he murmured. "How should you have known that I...that someone like me would dare..."
His voice broke off, and she raised her hand to stroke his hair. "To fall in love with me?" she asked quietly.
He hung his head. "Yes."
"You're right," she confessed. "I didn't realize that from the start. At least not clearly enough. And although I know now that I loved you from the first time I heard your voice, it took me a while to become aware of the true depth and nature of my feelings for you."
Slowly his head came up and he cast her a tentative glance. "I was never able to understand fully how such a thing was possible; how a beautiful woman could feel anything other than gratitude, or at most friendship, for someone such as me."
Gently cupping her fingers around his chin, she held his gaze with hers. "But I did, Vincent. I fell in love with you even though I wasn't aware of it right from the start. It was a lot of little things which made me realize what I really felt for you. There was that sense of well-being whenever you were close. The anticipation when I knew you would come. The joy I felt when you gazed into my eyes without looking away. The thrill when you took my hand or held me against you. Oh, Vincent, I began wanting you so much that I had a hard time keeping it from you."
His fingers closed around her wrist and he dislodged her hand from his chin, pulling it against his heart. She half-expected him to say something, but when he didn't, she continued, "And then there were those dreams, Vincent."
"I know," he rasped and looked away.
"You do?" she exclaimed, feeling a blush spread over her face. "Oh my."
An unexpected smile flickered across his face, but all too quickly he grew serious again. "Those dreams tortured me, yes, but at the same time they were the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. Those dreams made me want even more to have a normal body."
Slowly withdrawing her hand from his chest, she knelt down before him. "Normal by what standards?" she asked. "You do have a normal body, Vincent. It's completely normal for you, and..." She paused, momentarily unsure if she wasn't taking this too far. "You are beautiful," she said at last.
"Beautiful!" he tossed out between gritted teeth, and the bitterness in his voice tore at her heart.
"To me you are beautiful," she insisted, placing her palms on his wrists. He tensed and she took her hands away, giving him space to stand up and start pacing. She watched him spin around again and again and couldn't help thinking how much she would have loved to hold him now, to caress all the tension away from him and show him exactly how beautiful she found him.
He froze and lifted his hands before his eyes. "To have...these...touch you would be unthinkable. I want hands that can hold you, caress you...hands to love you with. But these...?" His fists fell to his sides and he dropped his head in a gesture of resignation.
Swallowing hard, Catherine gained her feet and took a few steps toward him. He didn't move and she stopped, suddenly too shy to go to him and touch him. She had always thought she knew the man before her quite well, but now she found that she hadn't even scratched the surface yet.
"As I understand it," she said quietly, "magic always has a price. What would have been yours to pay, assuming your transformation had worked?"
Slowly turning around to face her, Vincent shrugged. "What makes the path of sorcery so dangerous is that it is the opposite of every life situation you may think of. Most people settle down in the realm of the functional. They have left the realm of the unknown and the mysterious behind and have turned their backs to the world of the foreboding and the exulting.
"To be given a chance to enter the world of mystery and magic is sometimes too much to bear. The danger of being waylaid by the high adventure of the unknown is a grave one. You may forget the initial quest if you sink into the unknown and begin to love it for its own sake. The price may be your health, your sanity, even your heart and soul.
"It may sound strange but I found some measure of protection in the fact that I had only one single goal. Keeping my undivided attention focused on it, obviously prevented me from getting lost in otherwise very common temptations."
"And that one goal was to alter your appearance?" Catherine asked when his voice fell away.
He nodded shyly. "That was what I wanted more than anything else in this life."
"But what about your ability to heal and to create light?"
"You could say those were by-products which I found along the way. That's not unusual. Even people who only mean to study the realm of the spirit without magical goals acquire simple powers like that."
"How do you come to know all that?" she asked. "Did you meet others who...studied magic like you?"
He shook his head in negation. "My second protection against black magic was that I was studying so many different books on the same subject. That way I developed a sense for discriminating black magic from white magic. And after trying the shape-shifting rite once..."
"You did?" she exclaimed breathlessly. "What happened?"
"I became very ill," he replied. "I almost died."
"And yet you wanted to try the same sorcery again?" she whispered hoarsely, unable to stay away from him any longer. She stepped up to him and took his hand in hers.
He released a heart-wrenching sigh. "After what happened
with the outsiders, I thought there was no way I could live with what I
was...what I am...any longer."
Leaning her head against his arm, she asked, "You mentioned
that you had to make a conscious decision to kill the way you did." Instantly
she felt his muscles tense beneath her cheek.
"That is one thing I learned along the way, one of the prices I had to pay. Whenever I call upon that source of superhuman strength within me, I have to give up humanity. In most cases that decision is taken out of my hands. The moment rage sets in, the strength is there and all rationality is gone. But this time it was different. For days I'd been able to sense the...beast below the surface as it was trying to break through. To my own amazement, I was able to hold it at bay quite well, although my instincts told me to fight, to eliminate the danger once and for all even when you were in danger, Catherine, even then my mind prevailed and urged me to find a solution other than the obvious one. But I clamped down on it. I wanted you safe again...right away. And so I released...the beast."
She thought about it for a while. "Was that the reason why you told me not to come below?" she finally asked. "So that I wouldn't interfere with your newfound control over your instincts?"
"That's part of the reason, yes."
"And the other part?"
He gave a helpless shrug. "The thought that you should see me if I...if I lost my humanity yet again..."
She encircled his waist with her arms, grateful when she felt him return the gesture, and they clung to each other in silent desperation. Suddenly she felt his muscles ripple beneath her touch and he tensed within her embrace. A low growl rumbled through his chest and he wrenched away from her.
"Vincent," she called out. "What is it?"
He sucked in a few quick gasps, obviously struggling to regain control over his breathing. "It's nothing," he rasped. "I'm just a little queasy."
"Are you sure?" She went to him, intending to feel the skin of his neck for any sign of fever. With a swift reflex, he caught her hand and held it away from him.
"Tell me more about magic," she demanded at last, hoping that talking would steady him. "Obviously you learned to master quite a few things, like the light for example. And from the blood in my hair I gather that you can heal, too."
"Most things only work down here," he said with a shrug. "I don't know why. I've tried to accomplish the same things in my chamber at home, but there was nothing."
She looked up at him curiously. "But some things do work at other places as well?"
He nodded against her head. "Healing, for example, but I kept that from the others, because most of them are wary of me already."
"Why do you think some things work and others don't?" she pursued the topic.
"Healing isn't sorcery," he explained. "It's just an extended use of the laws of nature. Things like that have been known within all cultures around the world."
"And the blue light?" she asked.
"That is sorcery," he admitted with a smile. "Of the most harmless kind, as is the constant temperature in this chamber."
Relieved that he appeared to be his old self again, she smiled back at him. "I can imagine that comes in handy in a world like yours." Growing serious again, she asked, "Where did you find those manuscripts and who wrote them?"
The tension was back in his posture and Catherine regretted instantly that she had asked.
"Paracelsus wrote them," he replied reluctantly. "When he was exiled, he left them in Father's study, together with some of the other volumes on Alchemy you can see on those shelves. At first I tried to read them secretly in my chamber, but their teachings eluded me. Only when I brought them down here, away from the hub of our community, did they begin to make sense. Gradually I realized that Paracelsus had left them behind deliberately, so that they would be found and studied by someone who might become his apprentice."
"And that someone was you," she whispered, suddenly more afraid for him than she could say.
"Yes," he replied quietly. "The more I studied, the more I realized that there must have been a time when Paracelsus did exactly what I've been doing down here. He studied everything he could get and then drew his own warped conclusions."
"Which he wrote down in those scriptures," she deducted.
"Yes, but at one point he chose the wrong direction. He turned away from the light and chose a path of darkness and selfish goals. He is a very powerful sorcerer, Catherine, and he has developed the art of shape-shifting to perfection."
"Of course," she said with dawning comprehension. "The way he assumes other people's appearances is truly uncanny. Can you do that, too, Vincent?"
"I believe I could," he replied, "but it's not what I want. Not by far. I don't want to have someone else's body in order to deceive others. I need to discover who I am...beneath..." He indicated his own body. "Beneath all this."
"All this," she said, grabbing his sweater and giving a soft tug, "belongs to the man I love, and I honestly wouldn't want you to change even the tiniest bit."
Suddenly he gripped her upper arms and held her away from him. "Those are just words, Catherine. You don't really know what you're talking about. For me, this body means that I can't give you even the smallest things like a simple walk in the sunshine. And with hands like these I could never touch you like...like a lover. You may believe otherwise, but that's the truth, and nothing can change that truth."
His outburst had caught her completely off-guard and she was at a loss as to how to respond. When he released her at last, she staggered and groped for the backrest of a chair to steady herself. Vincent seemed strangely oblivious to her plight. He just stood with his back to her, staring at the wall.
Gathering her thoughts, Catherine responded in a low, even voice, "Vincent, don't you see? We are lovers already, and whether or not you touch me with your hands doesn't change too much about that truth. And as for walking together in the sunlight..."
"You dreamed of that," he interjected without looking at her.
"And of your buying me ice cream?" she asked softly. "But, Vincent, in that dream the world outside was changed, not you."
She was answered with silence. Finally he sighed and turned around to face her. "The odd thing is that we could do that any time."
"What?"
"Take a walk in the sunshine together."
"But how?"
"It only requires a spell of the simplest kind to make people see things differently from what they really are."
"Sometimes I think that requires no spell at all," she replied drily, and very much to her relief he smiled.
"I meant that I can make them see what I want them to see," he amended, "and conceal from them what they must not see without really changing anything else. It's more like hypnosis than sorcery, I think."
"Did you ever try that?" she wanted to know.
"When I was younger, yes, but it was a very unsatisfactory experience, and it never lasted long, because back then I lacked the strength to maintain the spell for longer periods of time."
She shook her head incredulously. "I can hardly believe we're having this conversation."
He smiled. "You're holding up very well, considering..."
"Considering that I'm talking to a sorcerer?"
Shaking his head, he replied, "The strange thing is that I found most of the things which others consider sorcery, to be natural and inherent in anybody. It's just that those abilities remain dormant if they aren't trained."
"You mean I could learn it, too?"
Smiling again, he cast her a meaningful look. "I think you have already learned a lot...well, to some degree."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
"For example, I produced a spell so that no one would discover me down here, but it didn't work with you. Also, I tried to protect myself through a charm when I was bathing, yet you found me there as well."
Hoping he hadn't noticed her blush, she remarked, "I seem to have the right antidote for your attempts to keep me away."
Slowly he walked toward her and enfolded her in his arms. "I'm glad you do," he whispered hoarsely.
"So am I," she replied, and with a mischievous smile he couldn't see, she added, "I wouldn't want to have missed the sight of you in there for anything in the world." She felt him tense briefly and relax again. "What are you thinking?" she inquired carefully.
"That you should rest now," he said, very much to her disappointment. But he was right, she was tired. Her eyelids were drooping already and her vision was slightly blurred. She was reminded of the handwriting she had tried to decipher earlier.
"I couldn't read even one single word of those manuscripts," she said, noting that her speech was oddly slurred.
"Paracelsus did that to prevent anyone else but me from reading them," came Vincent's reply as she found herself being led to a cot at the far end of the chamber. She couldn't remember lying down; all she knew was that sleep felt incredibly sweet when it claimed her at last.