Vampires Don't Cry: A Mother's Curse

by Hall, Ian

  “Berthier.” My soul told me. “Constance Berthier is my mother’s name.” I’m not exactly sure if I’d ever heard the name before, but I knew it as my mother’s maiden, family name. “Berthier of the house of Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Marshal of France under Napoleon.” My mouth fell agape, my eyes searching for reasons why I should know this.

  Dr. Mortence spun in circles, laughing as he did so, then suddenly fled the room, grabbing Sarah by the arm, dragging her out into the corridor. The large door slammed behind them, leaving me in my new room, confused and afraid.

  I sat back on the bed, my back on the pillows. His words had parted the curtains into a dark part of my mind which had been hidden for so long, and now I felt petrified to repeat the process. Confused at my sudden insight into the English language, I tried to stop thinking at all, only to have the space filled with all sorts of gibber-jabber, which scared me more. Poetry in flowery English, dark and dainty prose, diary entries, and songs all spun in my head, competing for recognition and volume.

  “Go away,” I said out loud, the words strange and almost unbidden, but still the maelstrom of voices continued in my mind. I pressed my hands hard against my skull, trying to shut out the barrage, but instead it grew. I turned to the wall and hammered my forehead against the paneling, sending shards of wood onto the floor, then, just as I thought my head would surely burst…

  It stopped.

  “I am Valérie Marneffe Berthier Lidowitz,” I addressed the empty room. The timbre of my voice had changed to a smooth lilt, an inflection of French in my otherwise clear English. I wiped the splinters of wood from my forehead and stood straight. “My father is Pieter Lidowitz, assistant to the Russian Ambassador to Rome.” I smiled at my newly found knowledge, confident in its authenticity and its impeccable source, my mother, Constance Louisa Berthier.

  They had met at a Paris function in 1856, and fallen in love immediately: I accessed my mother’s memory like I would read a diary. It felt the best day of my life, and I spun slowly in the room, my bare feet burning on the oak floor. And as I lived with her to the end, it felt also the worst day of my life, knowing that our lives had been torn apart on that fateful evening in Florence.

  ~ ~ ~

  Dr. Bruno Mortence, and my supposed uncle, Dr. David Calloway, used me over the next three years as both a pincushion and a firing board. I lived under the influence of one drug or another most of the time, and with the arrival of a Chinese herbalist, Wang To, they took turns in practicing their particular specialties for weeks at a stretch. They were under the belief that I could access not only my mother’s memory at the time of her death, but somehow her spirit which had followed me, and I could communicate with it too. Initially I thought them utterly mad, but as the time passed, some clues began to surface in my memory which I couldn’t easily explain away. It seems that I had been named Valérie Marneffe after a character of dubious morals in a novel by celebrated author Honoré Balzac. Mother’s memories of him are quite confused, but I recognized many instances where they seemed to be quite intimate. Balzac died in 1850, before mother met father, but it seems that he left quite a legacy behind with her.

  Mother married late in life, just after her thirty-ninth birthday, but it had been through choice rather than chance. She caroused Paris as a wealthy socialite for many years, dropping her grandfather’s name at every occasion. Even fifty years after his exile, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte exuded a certain notoriety and mystery.

  This information, I drip fed the doctors, but they always wanted more.

  Although my full rage never manifested itself in America, I remained a prisoner, always under some physical shackle. As I neared my eighteenth birthday, I began to question both the validity and longevity of their study of me. To my surprise, having played the perfect patient, at each pressing for increased freedom, the terms of my captivity constricted rather than diminished. After one small outburst, in which I examined their motives, my walks in the gardens were immediately quashed. Weeks later, when I questioned their new confinement of me, my door suddenly became locked between ‘treatments’.

  In times of introspection, I wondered if they intended to release me at all, or keep me prisoner into their dotage.

  I remember quite clearly the night the world changed again.

  In my dark room, on the cusp of the last round of drugs, I felt hands upon me. Not medical hands, you understand, but the definite pressure of male hands, rubbing on my bare shoulders and downwards toward my breasts. I gave a sluggish shrug, and the hands vanished into the night, not to return. The air held the unmistakable odor of Dr. Calloway.

  Dr. Mortence would inject me each afternoon, then question me relentlessly for hours. In the darkness, long after the next such ministration, I felt the male presence again, pressing my skin and touching my breasts under my bed linen. This time when I feigned waking, he did not leave. Emboldened by my docility, he pushed his hand inside my shift.

  “What?” I lifted my head in the darkness, hearing footsteps, and the closing of the door.

  Valérie, you are safe here no longer.

  My mother’s voice told the truth, if I remained under this medical treatment, I feared the nightly visits would escalate in frequency and boldness.

  ~ ~ ~

  When I awoke, the next day, I determined it would be my last with these jailors, and prepared for escape. Because I had been free of any rage since the ship three years previously, my bindings during my treatments were flimsy, designed for the doctors’ use rather than my restraint. When Sarah untied me to give me breakfast, I sprung.

  I had intended just to run away, but my swing with the porridge plate proved heavier than I’d intended. I hit the poor woman directly over the eye, bursting her eyelid wide open, causing her to stumble backwards onto the floor, where she lay, unconscious. With frantic fingers I untied the buckles on my legs and jumped from the bed. I had intended to flee, but the smell of fresh blood infused my nostrils. I stopped to touch the blood seeping from her wound, then dipped my finger in the dark liquid and raised it to my lips.

  It tasted better than any honey. I fell to the floor and instinctively pushed her head to one side, diving past her high collar to puncture the artery I knew to be there. With the slightest suction, blood flowed freely into my throat.

  Easy, you don’t want to kill her.

  I drank, letting the warning wash away unnoticed. “It’s mine” I mumbled into her neck.

  VALÉRIE!

  I jumped up, and looked round the room.

  Forget the meal. Get outside! Run!

  Knowing my mother’s words held far more importance than feeding, I hurriedly wiped my mouth with a bed sheet, and took off. I ran free, for the first time in my life.

  ~ ~ ~

  The world outside proved far bigger than anything I might have imagined, an endless garden, and I took my time exploring it, touching, smelling and tasting all that I could, fearless of ridicule or punishment. A bounty of living creatures provided for my every need; I never went hungry or naked. I never longed or went unfulfilled. For those all-too brief years of liberty, the red veil lifted and my vision cleared of rage. My inner self lay in peace. Only my precious locket and my mother’s instructions kept me company through those first months.

  As I roamed this wild new land, I found the seasons just as interesting as the country, and luxuriated in all, finding comfort in all its forms. But even as I grew, the world around me changed, growing smaller and cramped, its people forced to move westward. As the new Americans expanded to cover every spare mile of earth I found myself pushed deeper into the backwoods until the new land began to squeeze me, like the shackles of old.

  The people had grown cautious, always carrying guns, and that made me nervous. I knew I was not like these people, but the weapons carried their own danger, they evened the difference between us. Young girls became old women; yet the reflection that greeted me in the clear crystal brook never aged.

  I watched them at a
distance. Their English sounded rough and ineloquent, as jaded and unrefined as the people who spoke it. They went about their lives caught in a trance, day in, day out, the same, unbroken routines, women bent over washboards, scrubbing at the ever-present grime, men with their tools and weapons, building and tearing down, useless and endless drudgeries. They traded time for coins; and in the end both were lost. From my safe vantage I watched young children take up the yoke of their parents’ futile legacy, knowing they would carry it through all their short years until they too became too old to drag it another inch. Most would succumb to the abuse inflicted on their feeble bodies before they ever got the chance to enjoy the fruits of their efforts. And so the next generation would spring up and do the same. Civilization had snared them, snagging their very souls, imprisoning them within a life of monotony.

  In the name of expansion, civilization had arrived from Europe and turned to barbarism. At first I hated them, later, my hatred softened to pity.

  Dr. Fabrini’s voice sounded in my head often, “You have an innate distaste for anything man-made, Valérie.” I could not deny the truth behind his indictment.

  Their intrusion did afford me one luxury, I now had a veritable pantry of large, fleshy beasts to draw my food from, all conveniently penned for easy pickings.

  On a humid summer night, the moon full, and bright, I eased into a farm. The good, civilized folk were asleep in their shelters. I hadn’t eaten for some days and my craving for the rich, viscous bovine blood felt at its peak. When even the shuffling of the dogs had finally ceased, I edged in closer to the boundary between my world and theirs. The farm was small, and I thought it unguarded. I’d barely sunk my incisors through the cow’s thick flesh when I heard the explosion off in the distance.

  The bullet ripped through my back and out my chest.

  College Daze

  Theresa Scholes, 1958, Rutherford, Pennsylvania

  I woke naked in the early morning sun, sore and bloody. I gingerly flexed my arms and legs, but it appeared I was still in one piece. So much for my instincts, of all he men in Rutherford, I had chosen a vampire to feed on. I sat up, finding my shoes completely gone, my clothes just tatters on the ground, my car keys miraculously still in a torn pocket. I got quickly to my feet and drove home against the low yellow morning sun, quietly thankful that I was invisible below the shiny chrome of Jason’s car.

  I got into the house without alerting mom, and I showered quickly. The self-esteem that I’d had the night before had evaporated, and I sank into a blue funk of depression. As I lay on my bed, my body still wet, I cried. Big tears of sadness and self-pity coursed down my cheeks to the pillow.

  I’ve never been so glad of a door bell ringing, and moments later, mom announced that I had a visitor. In the deep depths of my own depression, Valérie had come to save me from myself.

  I felt so stupid telling her all about it, but she held my hand as I did so. “You can’t hide crap like that, Theresa.” She said, patting the back of my hand like it was a puppy. “Things always get back to Amos. I’m not really sure how, but they always do.”

  We talked for a while, then went for a soda. The normality of the shop displaced some of my anxiety, and the slow walk did me some good.

  “You have to recognize the need to feed, dearie.” She leant across the table, her head close to mine. “It’s now a normal thing in your life. You have to anticipate it before it gets too strong.”

  She looked to either side, as if she was going to drop her biggest secret yet. “For those vampires turned with sex, and that’s most of them in Amos’s cadre, I can tell you, the need to feed comes together with a need to copulate; again, for us, it’s completely natural. It’s as ordinary as going for a pee. It’s the way we were turned, unless we focus properly, it’s difficult to separate them.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” I gave a wry grin.

  We held hands over the small table, our heads close together. “You need a pet,” she said, looking up at my teary eyes.

  “I already have a cat, Henrietta, and she won’t come near me anymore.”

  Valérie laughed. “No, dummy. A human pet. A man! One who you don’t mind the look of, but also one who you don’t mind throwing away either. You keep him for sex, and a bit of a feed, then send him on his way with a smile on his face.”

  “But every time I think of sex, I’m hungry.”

  “I know!” she said abruptly. “And that’s why I’m telling you to get a pet. The way you’re going about it right now is dangerous to yourself; you can’t be out of control. It’s not safe, and Amos won’t stand for it. He’ll punish you, and you know what that means.”

  Over the afternoon, we began a stage by stage plan to get me a safe man-friend. “A loner,” Valérie proposed, “preferably someone with their own place, who would be pleased with some attentive female company.”

  “A single man,”

  “Or divorced, separated,” Valérie added.

  “That’s probably an older man then,” I said. “Young men don’t usually have their own homes.”

  “And living on his own.”

  Valérie waved her finger in the air. “You need a man who would have less reason to flaunt his new girlfriend if she was half his age. We need some level of leverage over him.”

  “He’s got an important job.” I said. “He can’t be seen to have an affair going on with a teenager, he has to keep it secret.”

  We both had fun with the possibilities, and by the time Valérie had to leave, I felt much better.

  The problem was, now that we’d sorted out the type of man I needed, where would I find one?

  I sat at Community College the next day, in the middle of English, when the penny dropped. Right in front of me, sitting at the front of the class reading our essays, stood the perfect target. Mister Raymond Cribbens; mid-thirties, unmarried, not bad looking, by no means a social butterfly, and he had one more trait which made him perfect; if he had an affair with a student, he’d have to keep quiet about it.

  I filed out of class with a smile on my face, possibly the first one for ages. “Great lesson, sir,” I beamed. He looked up and stammered a smiling thank you, and I knew I had chosen well.

  He took chess club after class on Thursday nights, so I grabbed a chess book from the library that night and pulled an old games compendium from our play drawer at home. I’d be a chess player in three days.

  ~ ~ ~

  On Thursday evening I dressed for seduction, short skirt and tight blouse. The chess club itself turned out to be boring; I mean what did I expect? The room rapidly filled with geeky boys with too much to say most of the time, and the inability to listen. I introduced myself, and I let Mister Cribbens see my short skirt ride up my thigh a few times. And I smiled a lot. All in all, I weathered the storm, and waited until the end. Then I stood on the driver’s side at the school gates in the gathering darkness, hopefully looking as forlorn as I could.

  Sure enough, Mister Cribbens’ car moved past the gate, then stopped. He wound his window down. “Have you got a ride home, Theresa?”

  I began the tears as soon as I said my first word. “My mom should have been here a while ago.” I cried, approaching the car. “I’m certain she was paying attention when I told her the time.” I could see the fleeting pass of concern on his face, then I bent down to the window. “You couldn’t drive me home, Mister Cribbens, sir, could you?” I made sure to exhale as I spoke, letting my words and my breath cascade over his face, just as Valérie had coached. “I’d be very grateful, sir.”

  “Sure,” he didn’t even hesitate. “Climb in. Where do you stay?”

  Once inside, I snuggled as close as I could and not alarm him. Every word had been scripted earlier, every syllable breathed towards his face. By the time he got me home, I could have jumped him there and then, and he wouldn’t have cared. But I didn’t. I played Valérie’s best student, and leaned over to him as the car came to a halt. I braced my hand high on his leg. “Oh, sorry, s
ir. Took me by surprise.”

  “That’s okay, Theresa,” he gave a nervous grin.

  I ran my hand up his leg and trailed it off as I got near his crotch. Placing my other hand on his shoulder, I breathed into his ear. “I like a man who knows when to stop.” I smiled my best. “And when to keep going.”

  With a playful wave, I was out of the car and running up the drive to the house. I didn’t look back; Valérie had taught me not to. I counted. Fifteen seconds for the car to begin to move away. He’d been looking at my legs alright. Or my ass. Either way it fit the plan.

  The new game at school gave me fresh impetus in life. I had a purpose, even if it seemed totally selfish. I did my homework, and a couple of times caught his eye across the room. We smiled at each other, and I’m sure that he paid more attention to me than any of the others. I checked his class schedule for his next free period, and “accidentally” left my pen behind. I made the appropriate apologies to my next teacher, and set off back to the English department. Before I knocked, I looked inside; he was alone, cleaning the blackboard.

  “Mister Cribbens?” I leaned inside the doorway. “Sorry to disturb, sir.”

  He turned to me. “No problem, Theresa, how can I help?”

  “I think I left my pen here, sir.”

  “Oh, okay. Take a look.”

  I crossed to my desk, and sure enough, on the floor where I’d left it just minutes before, there it was. I bent from the hip, knowing my skirt would ride up at the back, giving him a great view, and I’m sure I heard him catch his breath. I stood up and turned back to him. He couldn’t hide it, he’d been watching, his cheeks a little flushed.

  “Thanks, sir.” I walked right up to him, our chests almost touching. He was maybe five, six inches taller. “I’m ever so grateful for the ride the other night, sir.” I breathed up into his face. I knew it sounded contrived, but I had to play him slow to make it work properly. “It was a bit out of your way.”