by Paula Guran
They are not all her progeny. Some have come here from as far away as Chicago, Manhattan, Ottawa, Boston, Philadelphia, traveling long night-bound miles to witness her glory and to be counted among this number. One of these is a coal-haired woman named Marjorie Marie Winthrop, who was only nineteen years old the night the Overlook Mountain House burned. She’s one of the youngest among the court, and she comes and goes, erratic as the weather. The Lady would never count her as loyal; Marjorie Marie has always been too distant and consumed by her own hauntings and obsessions. Vampires are haunted, obsessed things, every one among them. But some, like Marjorie Marie, much more so than others. She sits on stairs that once led up to the hotel’s wide south piazza, smoking, wrapped in the raw-bone wind and trying to recall how it felt to shiver.
She isn’t alone on the stairs. The man with her was a colonel in the War Between the States, a Union soldier in Lincoln’s army, and for decades he has loved Marjorie Marie, in the careless, detached way that vampires love. He sits with her, listening to the laughter and screams and catcalls of the court. His mother named him Hiram Levi, but somewhere down more than a century and a half of life and this existence stranded between life and the grave, somewhere and somewhen he sloughed that name off, like an old skin. Marjorie Marie knows him only as Willie Love, the name he adopted because of his fondness for the harmonicas, guitars, and the voices of the Delta Blues.
“You talk an awful lot,” she says to Willie Love. She’s soft spoken, and her voice still carries a hint of a Southern Appalachian accent. “Sometimes, I think you’re the wordiest dead man whom I’ve ever met.”
Willie Love is always going on about writing books, though, to Marjorie Marie’s knowledge, he’s never set a single word down on paper. Instead, he seems to carry it all filed behind his red eyes.
He smiles and spares a quick glance at the swirling sky, then continues as if he hasn’t been interrupted.
“I was saying, if we conceive of any given human being as the embodiment of the Taoist concept of yin and yang, and of the taijitu—which symbolizes yin and yang—each body being black and each soul being white—two distinct things that form a complete whole, distinguishable, divisible, but also intrinsically linked—then what occurs in our passage is that our souls have been, as it were, inverted—in part, the white turning to black—and then melded with our flesh. Refashioned, made indivisible, inextricable, indistinguishable.
“Inextricable,” she says, and Marjorie Marie takes a long drag on her cigarette. The smoke reminds her of being alive and her breath fogging in the cold. Even though she can’t inhale, she has long since learned the trick of drawing the smoke into her mouth, then letting it leak slowly from her nostrils and lips. She doesn’t feel the nicotine, her metabolism—as much a ruin as the hotel at her back—being entirely incapable of taking it up. Those intoxicating molecules are not passed along through her sluggish bloodstream to cross the blood-brain barrier and act upon waiting acetylcholine receptor proteins in the adrenal medulla, the autonomic ganglia, and the central nervous system. But it helps, regardless, just having something in her mouth, something to take the edge off the endless oral cravings and keep her hands busy.
“Imagine,” he continues, “the yin and yang as a paint bucket full of black and white paint, and a stick is inserted into the paint, and it’s stirred until it’s not black and white, but only a uniform black.”
“Wouldn’t it come out grey, instead?” she asks him. “Not black, but grey?”
“You’re being pedantic,” he says.
“Yeah, but black and white make grey.”
“Pedantic and too literal. It’s a metaphor.”
“Still, black and white make grey.”
Then Marjorie Marie and Willie Love are both silent for a time, letting the cold night hang heavy between them, filled with the noise from the court. And the ceaseless wind. It’s a wild night on the mountain, a wendigo’s breath rattling through the trees and roaring across the snow gathered between their trunks, burying root and stone and last autumn’s rotting leaves beneath crystalline dunes.
“Is there more?” she asks, finally.
“There’s always more,” he replies. “Isn’t that the way it works?”
“I don’t know. You’re older than me.”
“Older don’t make me no way wise, girl.”
Marjorie Marie has smoked her cigarette down almost to the filter; she drops the butt and grinds it out against the concrete step with the ball of her bare left foot. Then she lights another. The smoke, seemingly immune to the wind, hangs about her face like a question mark. She has the amber eyes of a lynx. She took her dinner from the mother, and the woman looked into those eyes, and the vampire looked into the woman’s soul, her divisible soul that would soon be freed by her death.
Willie Love continues:
“There’s that dot of white in the black and, likewise, that point of black in the white half. I think of them as the eyes of the taijitu. When we died, you and me, those eyes were plucked from out their rightful places and swapped, so all the white was then in the white and all the black was then in the black. The inherent balance of yin and yang was pried apart. Violated. So, our bodies have no soul remaining to keep them alive and animate, and our souls have no body to tether them to the earth. But, see, instead of death, dissolution, whatever, our souls are tied down to—well, I’m not precisely sure what—a piece of magickal material and secreted away. What remains of our souls, now fused, returns as ghosts to haunt our corpses. Our bodies should be decaying away to nothing but bones or less, right, right? Dust. But, no, instead they are puppeteered around by our fused black souls, and so long as we feed on the life of others—”
“It sounds to me, Willie, like you’re rambling, just pulling this stuff outta your ass. We should go back to the party.”
“You hate those fucks, and you know it,” he sneers. “I know you know it. You don’t want to be in there, not any more than I do.”
“Whatever,” she says, shrugs, and takes another drag on her cigarette. The tobacco is good. She can’t inhale; her lungs have nor drawn breath, haven’t inflated, in all those one hundred and eleven years since her death at the hands of a pretty Romanian moroi.
“As I was saying,” he continues, “ Let’s take it just one step further, and let us say that the process our transubstantiation and rebirth, that it seared out the eyes of the yin and yang—”
“The black and white dots?”
“Right. The black and white dots. So the pieces of our bodies that were in our souls—existing there to maintain balance—are gone. And see, Marjorie Marie, this is why we cast no reflection, why holy water and crucifixes burn us, why our unhallowed flesh cannot bear the touch of sunlight. Because the pieces of our soul that existed within our bodies are gone. Hence no breath, no pulse, no heartbeat or blood pressure. No shitting, no pissing, no fucking ejaculations.”
“You miss those, do you?” she smirks.
“Fuck you,” he says, then laughs and tosses a dumpling-sized lump of shale towards a paper birch. It hits the trunk with an audible thump, audible at least to their ears, even over the cacophony of the wind and the Lady’s bacchanal.
“I used to miss orgasms,” she says, “but I got over that a long time ago.”
“You were just a kid,” he says. “A kid in nineteen aught four, at that. And unmarried. How many orgasms did you ever have?”
“A few,” says Marjorie Marie, and she says it a little defensively. “I had a few. Enough to miss them for a time.” And wanting desperately to change the subject, to divert his attention from whatever had passed for her sex life before her death at the hands of the Romanian vampire, she says, “There’s more, isn’t there.”
“There’s always more,” he replies. “Isn’t that the way it works?”
“You say so, yeah, that’s the way it works.”
She smokes, and Willie Love talks.
“Yeah, so maybe it goes like this. The magick of ou
r passage, I mean. Rather than looking soulless, we look like haunted, possessed corpses.”
“Speak for yourself, dead man.”
“But there’s something different about her,” he says, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. And he turns his head and points back towards the Lady of Silver Whispers.
“Of course there’s something different about her,” says Marjorie. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t be her, now would she? She’d be just be another one of us leeches. I figure it’s cause she’s older, because she’s been around since God was in diapers”
“No,” he says, frowning a slight sort of frown. “No, it not so simple as that, I think. You look at her, or I do, and what I see is a weak vampire—because I’m only seeing the original black half of her, not the white and black made into one blackness. Whatever happened to her, she lost her soul. It wasn’t fused like yours and mine. We assume she’s like us, but she isn’t. And what we see, that ain’t the all of it. She’s like an iceberg, and what we see is only half of what’s really there to be seen. If you look hard, if you look really long and hard, you start to glimpse what’s hidden below the surface.”
“Honestly, I’d prefer not to.”
“I know,” says Willie Love. “I see how you are around her.”
“She’s a bag of spiders,” says Marjorie Marie.
He laughs again, then adds, “You best be careful what you say aloud, girl. Don’t ever think no one’s listening in. There’s always ears. There’s always eyes. De mortuis aut bene aut nihil, as they say.”
“I’ve made it this long, haven’t I? And without you to play the good shepherd?”
There’s a sudden, violent gust of wind, howling past at thirty miles per hour, thirty or forty or fifty, and trees bend and trees snap. Branches tumble to the ground, and snow devils whirl like dervishes in the Ulster County night. But that wind doesn’t touch Marjorie Marie or Willie Love. Their life-in-death curse sets them well beyond the reach of the elements, and the gust parts for them like the Red Sea for Moshe Rabbenu. Not so much as a hair on Marjorie Marie’s head is stirred by the blow’s fury.
She shuts her eyes, bored with thinking on Willie Love’s metaphysical prattling. He’s not the first vampire she’s known who cobbles together absurdities and nonsense in a topsy-turvy attempt to understand a thing that cannot be understood, not by minds that once were human. Minds that are still—for all their newfound alienness—not much more than the minds of humans. Marjorie Marie pushes his voice aside and lets her thoughts wander, instead, back through decades, through a century and then some, and she can hear the gentle conversations of the women and men, the privileged, monied families, who’ve come from bustling Eastern and Midwestern cities to spend lazy summer days and easy warm nights in the hotel, to gaze out at the majestic view. She sees them plainly, seated and standing, arranged along the south piazza at her back, attended by black servant boys with cool drinks. The women in their fine gingham and calico day dresses, hems lined with Irish lace, their wide hats adorned with feathers and silk flowers. The men in their tall beaver-skin top hats, playing checkers and cribbage and cards, string ties, bow ties, spats and frock coats. Billy Murray is singing “I’m Afraid To Come Home in the Dark” from the silver horn of a Victrola. It is a perfect summer day, and the fire that will bring down the Overlook Mountain House is more than two decades away. The new century holds in store horrors these people do not even begin to suspect, not from the gentle, sun-washed perspective of the south piazza. They are protected, momentarily, and the future is a slow train coming, with neither the wail of a steam whistle nor the rumble of steel wheels on steel rails to warn them of its murderous intent. They’re babes left alone on the tracks.
“Did you hear that?” Willie Love asks, and she opens her eyes.
“I hear lots of shit, old man.” And she does. She hears the fractal whisper of the spiraling snowflakes as they brush one against the other. She hears the heartbeat of a fisher cat sleeping in its den not far from the ruins. She hears the footsteps of a red fox, padding along a fallen log, as it stalks a rabbit, and she hears the lazy blink of an owl watching the fox. She hears the court, like a lesser storm raging beneath the clouds. She hears the flow of xylum sap in a maple’s trunk.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” she adds.
“It was nothing.”
Marjorie Marie glances back over her shoulder towards the ragged throne of the Lady of Silver Whispers and all the noisy debauchery, and then she stares up into the falling snow and the low clouds, scanning the sky for any hint of dawn.
“They’ll be at it all night,” says Willie Love.
“Why the fuck do we even fucking come up here every year?”
“Where else, love, would we go?”
Baby dear, listen here—
I’m afraid to come home in the dark.
The fox pounces. The rabbit screams. The owl flies away.
“We’re like the demons down under the sea, the tenants of Ol’ Sheol,” Willie Love says, and he lights the ragged stub of a cigar. “The flesh and life forces as one, rather than two discrete things. Which is, of course, naturellement, soulless in the way that humans understand souls. There is nothing remaining to transcend. Nothing has survived that is able, upon the final destruction of the flesh, to flee the body. There are nails, carpet tacks, hammered in all about the tatty edges of our vanquished élan vital.
“Willie, do ever actually bother to think about this shit before it comes tumbling out of your mouth?”
Singing just like a lark ,
There’s no place like home .
But I couldn’t come home in the dark.
“But,” he goes on, undaunted, “this means there is still a consciousness, a spark, the qì if you wish—the Hebraic ruah, the lüng of Tibetan Buddhism, ad infinitum, ad nauseaum—a force there animating the dead flesh, and the dead flesh can be both summoned and guided by magick the way a human soul can—if one is so disposed and has at his disposal the tools, the acumen, and the etheric, nether connections. Ergo, our souls didn’t pass on to heaven or hell or whatever, whatever and whichever somewhere. We are, by the curse of our makers, no more than pretty, hungry birds with broken wings.”
He rubs at his forehead, then just stares at her awhile.
“What?” she asks. finally, his eyes beginning to make her uncomfortable.
“You’re still out there rooting about for your own answers, however much you might mock my suspect conjectures.”
And at first she doesn’t reply. It’s her own goddamn business and certainly none of his, and she has the decency to keep it to herself, not hold forth on the steps of the Overlook Mountain House, lecturing to her indifference and the freezing night and all passing nocturnal beasts.
“Marseilles?” he asks, pushing, apparently done torturing her with his treatise on the trapped souls of the undead.
“No,” she says. “Not fucking Marseilles.”
“Well, sure as shit not that delusional cobblestone alleyway in le quartier du Montparnasse, within spitting distance or a stone’s throw from Cimetière du Montparnasse. Not that, sweets, no matter how romantic would have been your undoing so near to the final resting places and narrow houses of Maupassant, Man Ray, Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Simone de—”
“It wasn’t Marseilles,” she says again, interrupting his catalog of those interred in Montparnasse Cemetery.
“I heard you went back to Bucharest,” he says. “So, I just assumed—”
“Who told you I went back to Bucharest?”
Willie Love takes the damp, smoldering cigar stub from his mouth and frowns at her. “Well, did you? I thought you were past this, Marjorie?”
And for a week he never got home till the break of day.
At last poor Mabel asked the reason why.
Said Jones, “I’m goin’ to tell the truth or die.”
She rubs at her lynx-gold eyes, trying to drive away the unwelcome ghost of a song committed to an Edis
on hard black wax cylinder in 1907. That and all those mumbling, well-heeled Edwardian phantoms who haven’t a clue their time on earth has come and gone and will not come again.
“I spoke with Constantin Vasile,” says Willie Love.
“You were checking up on me?” Marjorie Marie asks, not bothering to hide her incredulity or to mask the anger creeping into her voice. Fuck this, she thinks. I was better off back there with the Lady’s three-ring circus of freaks and fuckwits.
“No, I wasn’t checking up on you. There was another matter. And Constantin mentioned that you were in Bucharest, that you spent a few nights in his attic. He’s worried about you.”
In a workshop on Strada Pericle Gheorghiu, Constantin Vasile carves crucifixes and rosary beads and miniature wooden saints.
Marjorie Marie shuts her eyes again.
Baby dear, listen here—
I’m afraid to come home in the dark.
On the south piazza, a chubby red-headed man from Boston is complaining about Roosevelt’s increasingly radical economic policies. No one seems to be listening to him. Children are laughing.
Was it Marseilles?
Wasn’t it?
Here she has a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces, does Marjorie Marie Winthrop, and she’s never been especially good with puzzles. And, what’s more, what’s worse, this is a puzzle missing at least half its pieces. Missing because they were stolen—those memories of her death—by the one who murdered her. Marjorie Marie doesn’t know why. She’s never had a chance to ask the bitch, the creature who’s chosen never to be anything more substantial than a shadow at the corners of Marjorie Marie’s vision.