American Gothic by Michael Romkey

man.
    Peregrine had the best room in the hotel, at the front of the building, overlooking the town square. He turned the latch and went in.
    “Hello, darling.”
    Madame Delphine Allard sat on the bed, her arm around the shoulders of the young woman who had served them supper in the hotel’s dining room before Peregrine rode off to inspect the Union line and then to go in search of Robert E. Lee. The girl was naked and trembling, her face streaked with tears. Peregrine’s nostrils flared as he took in a deep breath, gathering in that single motion the vibrations, scents, and sounds of the hotel, an island surrounded by rain and night. The girl was the only mortal left alive.
    “I have been amusing myself while you were away,” Madame Allard said. She began to caress the girl with her free hand.
    “I noticed,” Peregrine said.
    The serving girl appeared to be a year or two older than Madame Allard, but that was an illusion. Delphine Allard was nearly two hundred years old. She had lived all over the world, but her base was the house on Chestnut Street, in the city where she’d dropped her mortality and become a vampire.
    “So tell me,
chéri,
how does it feel, your revenge? Is it every bit as delicious as I promised?”
    “It’s a beginning.”
    “And the remembering? Has it freed you of that?”
    Peregrine winced a fraction of a second before the hotel shook with a volley of thunder louder than a battery of nine-pounders firing in unison. From the stables came the scream of a horse crying out in fear. The poor terrified beasts, Peregrine thought.
    “I saved her for you, my love,” Madame Allard said, and gave him a wicked smile. The girl was looking up at Peregrine, too, her eyes wordlessly begging for mercy. He slowly unbuttoned his cape and let it fall to the floor but made no move.
    “If you cannot lose yourself in revenge, my love, then you must lose yourself in pleasure,” Madame Allard said.
    Peregrine hesitated a moment longer, then moved toward the women on the bed.

PART TWO
HAITI
----
    1914

13
    House Calls
    D R. MICHAEL LAVALLE made his diagnosis standing in the doorway of the one-room hut. He pulled up an unfinished wooden chair, the home’s only seat, beside the bed, put his medical bag on the dirt floor, and opened it.
    The naked child was listless in his mother’s arms, almost comatose. The little boy did not move when the cold stethoscope touched him except to roll his enormous eyes away from his mother’s face to look up at the physician.
    “This lad has dysentery,” Lavalle said.
    The mother nodded dully. There was hopeless acceptance in her face, as if it was a given that the boy, her one precious possession in the world, would be taken from her so that she could go back to having nothing. She was like most of the women Lavalle had met on that part of the coast: tall and stork thin, with large, clear eyes and skin as black as that of her forebears, who had been kidnapped and brought to the New World in the holds of slave ships. Lavalle was one of a handful of Europeans living on the island’s southern coast. The slave revolt a century earlier had killed or driven out most of the Europeans, and in the ensuing years there had been little white mischief to dilute the purebred African racial lines outside the capital.
    “Do you know the causes of dysentery, madam?”
    The child’s mother shook her head. Of course she did not. Since coming to the island Lavalle was reminded daily that a simple discourse in public education would extend the average life span far beyond the pathetic forty or so years that was typical. The government had funds for a luxurious presidential palace and elaborate official rituals—including a staff composer paid a salary to devise dance tunes to entertain the ruling family—but nothing for public health.
    “Dysentery is caused by waterborne bacteria,” Lavalle said.
    The woman gave him a blank look. The doctor sniffed. How sadly typical, he thought. He took