The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  The thought of Dr. Weyland haunted her: Dr. Weyland as the charming, restless visitor prowling the Club kitchen, Dr. Weyland thrusting young Denton aside with contemptuous strength, Dr. Weyland as the heartless predator she had at first thought him that morning in the parking lot of the lab building.

  * * *

  She was walking to the bus stop when Jackson drove up and offered her a lift. She was glad to accept. The lonesomeness of the campus was accentuated by darkness and the empty circles of light around the lampposts.

  Jackson pulled aside a jumble of equipment on the front seat—radio parts, speakers and wires—to make room for her. Two books were on the floor by her feet. He said, “The voodoo book is left over from my brother Paul. He went through a thing, you know, trying to trace back our family down in Louisiana. The other one was just laying around, so I brought it along.”

  The other one was Dracula. Katje felt the gummy spot where the price sticker had been peeled off. Jackson must have bought it for her at the discount bookstore downtown. She didn’t know how to thank him easily, so she said nothing.

  “It’s a long walk to the bus stop,” Jackson said, scowling as he drove out through the stone gates of the college drive. “They should’ve fixed it so you could stay on in faculty housing after your husband died.”

  “Our place was too big for one person,” Katje said. Sometimes she missed the house on the east side of campus, but her present lodgings away from school offered more privacy.

  He shook his head. “Well, I think it’s a shame, you being a foreign visitor and all.”

  Katje laughed. “After twenty-five years in this country, a visitor?”

  He laughed, too. “Yeah. Well, you sure have moved around more than most while you been here: from lady of leisure to, well, maid work.” She saw the flash of his grin. “Like my aunt that used to clean for white women up the hill. Don’t you mind?”

  She minded when she thought working at the Club would never end. Sometimes the Africa that she remembered seemed too vague a place to actually go back to, and the only future she could see was keeling over at the end while vacuuming the Club rugs, like a farmer worn to death at his plow . . .

  None of this was Jackson’s business. “Did your aunt mind her work?” she snapped.

  Jackson pulled up opposite the bus stop. “She said you just do what it comes to you to do and thank God for it.”

  “I say the same.”

  He sighed. “You’re a lot like her, crazy as that sounds. There’s a bunch of questions I want to ask you sometime, about how it was when you lived in Africa; I mean, was it anything like in the movies—you know, King Solomon’s Mines and like that?”

  Katje had never seen that movie, but she knew that nothing on film could be like her Africa. “You should go to Africa and see for yourself,” she said.

  “I’m working on it. There’s your bus coming. Wait a minute, listen—no more walking alone out here after dark, there’s not enough people around now. You got to arrange to be picked up. Didn’t you hear? That guy jumped another girl last night. She got away, but still. Daniel says he found one of the back doors to the Club unlocked. You be careful, will you? I don’t want to have to come busting in there to save you from some deranged six-foot pre-med on the rampage, know what I mean?”

  “Oh, I take care of myself,” Katje said, touched and annoyed and amused all at once by his solicitude.

  “Sure. Only I wish you were about fifteen years younger and studying karate, you know?” As Katje got out of the car with the books in her arm he added, “You told me once you did a lot of hunting in Africa when you were a kid; handling guns.”

  “Yes, a lot.”

  “Okay. Take this.” He pulled metal out of his pocket and put it in her hand. It was a gun. “Just in case. You know how to use it, right?”

  She closed her fingers on the compact weight of it. “But where did you get this? Do you have papers for it? The laws here are very strict—”

  He yanked the door shut and said through the open window, “You going to holler ‘law’ at me, you can just give the damn thing back. No? Okay, then, hurry up before you miss your bus.”

  * * *

  Dracula was a silly book. She had to force herself to read on in spite of the absurd Van Helsing character with his idiot English—an insult to anyone of Dutch descent. The voodoo book was impenetrable, and she soon gave it up.

  The handgun was another matter. She sat at the Formica-topped table in her kitchenette and turned the shiny little automatic in the light, thinking, How did Jackson come by such a thing? For that matter, how did he afford his fancy sports car and all that equipment he carried in it from time to time—where did it all come from and where did it go? He was up to something, probably lots of things, what they called “hustling” nowadays. A good thing he had given her the gun. It could only get him into trouble to carry it around with him. She knew how to handle weapons, and surely with a rapist at large the authorities would be understanding about her lack of a license for it.

  The gun needed cleaning. She worked on it as best she could without proper tools. It was a cheap .25-caliber gun. Back home your gun was a fine rifle, made to drop a charging rhino in its tracks, not a stubby little nickel-plated toy like this for scaring off muggers and rapists.

  Yet she wasn’t sorry to have it. Her own hunting gun that she had brought from Africa years ago was in storage with the extra things from the old house on campus. She had missed the presence of that rifle lately. She had missed it because, she realized now with a nervous little jump of the heart, she had become engaged in stalking a dangerous animal. She was stalking Dr. Weyland.

  She went to sleep with the gun on the night table next to her bed and woke listening for the roar so she would know in what direction to look tomorrow for the lion’s spoor. There was a hot rank odor of African dust in the air and she sat up in bed thinking, He’s been here.

  It was a dream. But so clear! She went to look out the front window without turning on the light, and it was the ordinary street below that seemed unreal. Her heart drummed in her chest. Not that he would come after her here on Dewer Street, but he had sent Nettie to the Club, and now he had sent this dream into her sleep. Creatures stalking each other over time grew a bond from mind to mind.

  But that was in another life. Was she losing her sanity? She read for a little in the Afrikaans Bible she had brought with her from home but so seldom opened in recent years. What gave comfort in the end was to put Jackson’s automatic into her purse to carry with her. A gun was supposedly of no use against a vampire—you needed a wooden stake, she remembered reading, or you had to cut off his head to kill him—but the weight of the weapon in her handbag reassured her.

  * * *

  The lecture hall was full in spite of the scarcity of students on campus this time of year. These special talks were open to the town as well.

  Dr. Weyland read his lecture in a stiff, abrupt manner. He stood slightly cramped over the lectern, which was low for his height, and rapped out his sentences, rarely raising his glance from his notes. In his tweeds and heavy-rimmed glasses he was the picture of the scholarly recluse drawn out of the study into the limelight. But Katje saw more than that. She saw the fluid power of his arm as he scooped from the air an errant sheet of notes, the almost disdainful ease with which he established his dominion over the audience. His lecture was brief; he fulfilled with unmistakable impatience the duty set every member of the faculty to give one public address per year on an aspect of his work, in this case “The Demonology of Dreams.”

  At the end came questions from the audience, most of them obviously designed to show the questioner’s cleverness rather than to elicit information. The discussions after these lectures were reputed to be the real show. Katje, lulled by the abstract talk, came fully awake when a young woman asked, “Professor, have you considered whether the legends of supernatural creatures such as werewolves, vampires, and dragons might not be distortions out of n
ightmares at all—that maybe the legends reflect the existence of real, though rare, prodigies of evolution?”

  Dr. Weyland hesitated, coughed, sipped water. “The forces of evolution are capable of prodigies, certainly,” he said. “You have chosen an excellent word. But we must understand that we are not speaking—in the case of the vampire, for example—of a blood-sipping phantom who cringes from a clove of garlic. Now, how would nature design a vampire?

  “The corporeal vampire, if he existed, would be by definition the greatest of all predators, living as he would off the top of the food chain. Man is the most dangerous animal, the devourer or destroyer of all others, and the vampire preys on man. Now, any sensible vampire would choose to avoid the risks of attacking humans by tapping the blood of lower animals, if he could; so we must assume that our vampire cannot. Perhaps animal blood can tide him over a lean patch, as seawater can sustain the castaway for a few miserable days but can’t permanently replace fresh water to drink. Humanity would remain the vampire’s livestock, albeit fractious and dangerous to deal with, and where they live so must he.

  “In the sparsely settled early world he would be bound to a town or village to assure his food supply. He would learn to live on as little as he could—perhaps a half liter of blood per day—since he could hardly leave a trail of drained corpses and remain unnoticed. Periodically he would withdraw for his own safety and to give the villagers time to recover from his depredations. A sleep several generations long would provide him with an untouched, ignorant population in the same location. He must be able to slow his metabolism, to induce in himself naturally a state of suspended animation. Mobility in time would become his alternative to mobility in space.”

  Katje listened intently. His daring in speaking this way excited her. She could see he was beginning to enjoy the game, growing more at ease on the podium as he warmed to his subject. He abandoned the lectern, put his hands casually into his pockets, and surveyed his listeners with a lofty glance. It seemed to Katje that he mocked them.

  “The vampire’s slowed body functions during these long rest periods might help extend his lifetime; so might living for long periods, waking or sleeping, on the edge of starvation. We know that minimal feeding produces striking longevity in some other species. Long life would be a highly desirable alternative to reproduction; flourishing best with the least competition, the great predator would not wish to sire his own rivals. It could not be true that his bite would turn his victims into vampires like himself—”

  “Or we’d be up to our necks in fangs,” whispered someone in the audience rather loudly.

  “Fangs are too noticeable and not efficient for bloodsucking,” observed Dr. Weyland. “Large, sharp canine teeth are designed to tear meat. Polish versions of the vampire legend might be closer to the mark: they tell of some sort of puncturing device, perhaps a needle in the tongue like a sting that would secrete an anticlotting substance. That way the vampire could seal his lips around a minimal wound and draw the blood freely, instead of having to rip great, spouting, wasteful holes in his unfortunate prey.” Dr. Weyland smiled.

  The younger members of the audience produced appropriate retching noises.

  “Would a vampire sleep in a coffin?” someone asked.

  “Certainly not,” Dr. Weyland retorted. “Would you, given a choice? The corporeal vampire would require physical access to the world, which is something that burial customs are designed to prevent. He might retire to a cave or take his rest in a tree like Merlin, or Ariel in the cloven pine, provided he could find either tree or cave safe from wilderness freaks and developers’ bulldozers. Locating a secure, long-term resting place is one obvious problem for our vampire in modern times.”

  Urged to name some others, he continued, “Consider: upon each waking he must quickly adapt to his new surroundings, a task which, we may imagine, has grown progressively more difficult with the rapid acceleration of cultural change since the Industrial Revolution. In the last century and a half he has no doubt had to limit his sleeps to shorter and shorter periods for fear of completely losing touch—a deprivation which cannot have improved his temper.

  “Since we posit a natural rather than a supernatural being, he grows older, but very slowly. Meanwhile each updating of himself is more challenging and demands more from him—more imagination, more energy, more cunning. While he must adapt sufficiently to disguise his anomalous existence, he must not succumb to current ideologies of Right or Left—that is, to the cant of individual license or the cant of the infallibility of the masses—lest either allegiance interfere with the exercise of his predatory survival skills.”

  Meaning, Katje thought grimly, he can’t afford scruples about drinking our blood. He was pacing the platform now, soundless footfalls and graceful stride proclaiming his true nature. But these people were spellbound, rapt under his rule, enjoying his domination of them. They saw nothing of his menace, only the beauty of his quick hawk-glance and his panther-playfulness.

  Emrys Williams raised a giggle by commenting that a lazy vampire could always take home a pretty young instructor who would show him any new developments in interpersonal relations.

  Dr. Weyland fixed him with a cold glance. “You are mixing up dinner with sex,” he remarked, “and not, I gather, for the first time.”

  They roared. Williams—the “tame Wild Welshman of the Lit Department” to his less admiring colleagues—turned a gratified pink.

  One of Dr. Weyland’s associates in Anthropology pointed out at boring length that the vampire, born in an earlier age, would become dangerously conspicuous for his diminutive height as the human race grew taller.

  “Not necessarily,” commented Dr. Weyland. “Remember that we speak of a highly specialized physical form. It may be that during his waking periods his metabolism is so sensitive that he responds to the stimuli in the environment by growing in his body as well as in his mind. Perhaps while awake his entire being exists at an intense level of inner activity and change. The stress of these great rushes to catch up all at once with physical, mental, and cultural evolution must be enormous. These days he would need his long sleeps as recovery periods from the strain.”

  He glanced at the wall clock. “As you can see, by the exercise of a little imagination and logic we produce a creature bearing superficial resemblances to the vampire of legend, but at base one quite different from your standard strolling corpse with an aversion to crosses. Any questions on our subject—dreams?” But they weren’t willing to drop this flight of fancy. A young fellow asked how Dr. Weyland accounted for the superstitions about crosses and garlic and so on.

  The professor paused to sip water from the glass at hand. The audience waited in expectant silence. Katje had the feeling that they would have waited an hour without protest, he had so charmed them. Finally he said, “Primitive men first encountering the vampire would be unaware that they themselves were products of evolution, let alone that he was. They would make up stories to account for him, and to try to control him. In early times he might himself believe in some of these legends—the silver bullet, the oaken stake. Waking at length in a less credulous age he would abandon these notions, just as everyone else did. He might even develop an interest in his own origins and evolution.”

  “Wouldn’t he be lonely?” sighed a girl standing in the side aisle, her posture eloquent of the desire to comfort that loneliness.

  “The young lady will forgive me,” Dr. Weyland responded, “if I observe that this is a question born of a sheltered life. Predators in nature do not indulge in the sort of romantic mooning that humans impute to them. Our vampire wouldn’t have the time for moodiness. On each waking he has more to learn. Perhaps someday the world will return to a reasonable rate of change, permitting him some leisure in which to feel lonely or whatever suits him.”

  A nervous girl ventured the opinion that a perpetually self-educating vampire would always have to find himself a place in a center of learning in order to have access to the i
nformation he would need.

  “Quite right,” agreed Dr. Weyland dryly. “Perhaps a university, where strenuous study and other eccentricities of the active intellect would be accepted behavior in a grown man. Even a modest institution such as Cayslin College might serve.”

  Under the chuckling that followed this came a question too faint for Katje to hear. Dr. Weyland, having bent to listen, straightened up and announced sardonically, “The lady desires me to comment upon the vampire’s ‘Satanic pride.’ Madame, here we enter the area of the literary imagination and its devices where I dare not tread under the eyes of my colleagues from the English Department. Perhaps they will pardon me if I merely point out that a tiger who falls asleep in a jungle and on waking finds a thriving city overgrowing his lair has no energy to spare for displays of Satanic pride.”

  Great God, the nerve of him! Katje thought, torn between outrage and admiration. She wanted him to look at her, to see knowledge burning in one face at least, to know that he had not flaunted his reality tonight only before blind eyes. Surely he sensed her challenge, surely he would turn—

  Williams, intent on having the last word as always, spoke up once more: “The vampire as time-traveler—you ought to be writing science fiction, Weyland.” This provoked a growing patter of applause, signal of the evening’s end.

  Katje hurried out with the crowd and withdrew to stand aside under the portico of the Union Building while her hot heart cooled. Dr. Weyland’s car was across the street, gleaming in the lamplight. To him, she thought, it was not just a car but his access to physical mobility and a modern mechanical necessity that he had mastered. That was how he would think of it, she was sure. She knew something of his mind now.

  With the outwash of departing audience came Miss Donelly. She asked if Katje needed a lift. Katje explained that a group of women from the staff cafeteria went bowling together each Friday night and had promised to swing by and pick her up.