The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “All right,” gasped the vampire, transferring his grip to the corner of the sink.

  Mark backed out of the tiny bathroom and stood against the wall. He heard the watery noises, the faint groan of relief, the fumbling for the flush handle. He thought, This is crazy: he pees like me or Roger, but he drinks people’s blood.

  Helping him back to his cot, Mark noticed that the vampire needed a bath and a change from his stained white shirt and rumpled pants. They had taken away his belt and his shoes.

  “Wait,” the vampire breathed.

  Mark backed toward the gate. “Why?”

  “Stay and talk. I must not sleep. If I do, I could easily drop into the sleep of years that takes me from one era to another. Then my life would sink to so low an ebb that my body would be unable to heal itself. I would die. Your Uncle Roger would be annoyed. So talk to me. Tell me things.”

  God, this was weird. “What things?”

  “What do you do all day?”

  “I’m in school, ninth grade.”

  A small silence, and then the vampire murmured, “That seems appropriate. I too am something of a student. Tell me about school.”

  Mark sat down on the floor across the room from the cot and talked about school. After a while he got a blanket from his closet and folded it under himself, and he brought a glass of water from the kitchen to moisten his throat.

  The vampire lay still and listened. If Mark let a little time go by in silence, the vampire said, “Talk to me.”

  * * *

  When Mark got back from school the next day Wesley was there. “Your dad called, said he’d like to hear from you.”

  “Oh, yeah, thanks, Wesley.” Both Mark’s parents accepted Roger’s apartment as Mark’s neutral refuge from their endless hassling. Nevertheless, they tried to keep tabs on him by phone.

  “Okay,” Wesley continued, “our friend is bathed and shaved, got clean pajamas on and fresh bandages. He’s all set for a couple of days, except for the feeding. Now, you have to go inside his room for that. Even if you shove a glass of blood across the floor at him, he can’t lean down and pick it up. He can sit up on his own, though—enough, anyhow, so you won’t have to touch him. Carry the glass in and hand it to him, but keep clear of him.”

  Mark looked into the icebox for something to eat. There were plastic pouches of blood heaped up on the top shelf in back. He blinked fast and looked away. He said, “I thought you weren’t scared of him.”

  “I wasn’t scared to give him some of my blood yesterday, but he’s healing awful fast. He’s scary, all right. He’s in a lot better shape than he should be, an old guy with two fuckin’ bullet holes in him. Be careful.” Wesley, washing his hands at the kitchen sink, laughed suddenly and turned off the water. “Look at me, washing up like after handling a patient at the hospital! I guess I’m just a natural for nursemaiding Roger’s vampire, right? Roger sure thinks so.”

  He shook his head and tucked away the dishtowel on which he had dried his hands. “Myself, I liked it better when I was just fixing this place up for Roger.” With Wesley’s help and at great expense, Roger had reconverted the entire ground floor of the brownstone from two tiny apartments to one comfortable one.

  Shutting the icebox door on the sight of the blood, Mark said, “You give it to him cold, right out of the fridge? Isn’t that sort of a shock?”

  “Well, it’s probably not a bad idea to heat the stuff up a little first—but not too hot.”

  “I know how. I used to heat up the bottle for Aunt Pat’s baby that time I stayed with her.” At the sink counter Mark spread peanut butter on a slice of bologna.

  Wesley unwrapped fresh gum. “You’d make a good hospital attendant, thinking of a thing like that. If you could keep your distance, that is.”

  Mark felt ashamed that Wesley thought he wasn’t cool enough. He considered telling Wesley about helping the vampire at night, how he kept his distance then all right, but decided not to say anything. Wesley might tell Roger.

  He politely asked Wesley what was owing for the fresh blood supply, and Wesley went into the living room to wait while Mark got the money box out of the oven. Roger kept it there on the theory that no burglar would look inside a kitchen fixture. He avoided banks because they made reports of interest income for taxes, and he said he preferred to forgo the interest and the taxes both. The money was safe; the apartment was fortified New York City style with barred windows, grilles on the back doors, even strands of wire strung along the top of the wooden fence that enclosed the sour scrap of yard. It was like something out of a prison-camp story. Stalag Manhattan.

  With only one prisoner.

  As Wesley counted his bills in the hallway by the front door Mark said, “You know, I almost wish Mr. Weinberg’s friend the doctor had taken this vampire away for the scientists to study. It feels funny, having somebody locked up here like this.”

  Wesley, chewing, looked at him. “You figure even a guy who drinks blood has a right not to be grabbed and shut up in Roger’s apartment like he was a stray dog, is that it? That’s Roger’s lookout. You’re a minor, you got no say, so don’t go feeling all responsible. Stay laid back, all right? Right.”

  When Mark had the apartment to himself he got the paper bag and spread the vampire’s belongings on the coffee table in the golden light of afternoon: a ballpoint pen, blue; a felt-tipped pen, red; two pencils with broken points; four small index cards covered with unreadable handwriting; a rubber band, three paper clips, a horn-handled pocketknife; two keys; one case containing a pair of glasses with dark, heavy rims, the left lens cracked; and two quarters.

  Mark passed up the knife after a moment’s hesitation and pocketed one of the quarters as payment for last night’s favor.

  Then his mother phoned. She promised she wouldn’t bring up the touchy subject of plans for his summer vacation, and he relaxed a bit. She sounded tired and anxious. How was he, she wanted to know, how was Roger? Did Mark need anything from home? Had his father called? Did Mark have enough pocket money? He was not to become any kind of a drain on Roger. How was school? Was he seeing that nice Maddox boy he’d brought home last week? Was he eating right? When was he planning to come home?

  Never, he thought. He said, “I don’t know, Mom. I just need to be able to settle down without a bunch of fighting going on all the time. I’ve got a lot of schoolwork to do before the term ends.”

  “I wish your father wouldn’t phone me when he knows you’re probably home. He only does it to—”

  “I have to go, Mom. I’ve got some things to do for Roger.”

  “Just remember, when your father calls you, you remind him that this little interlude that his foul temper provoked isn’t coming off my time with you. When you leave Roger’s, you come back here to finish our six months together, darling. I love you, Markie.”

  Love you too, Mom; but you could never say that kind of thing out loud to either of them, because they’d put an edge on it and turn it around and cut you with it. She’d say later, ‘He loves me, not you, he said so’; and if Dad believed that even a little he’d think you were on her side. Then he’d take it out on you somehow, and you’d spend your time crying like Mom; crying and complaining.

  He said, “Bye, Mom,” and hung up. Then he sat there chewing his nails and wondering when he’d get used to his parents hating each other. Other kids got used to it with their folks. Maybe being an only child made it worse. On the other hand, Dad and Roger didn’t seem to derive any special benefits from being brothers.

  One time, one time only, he’d gone weeping to his father, begging him to patch it up, put the family back the way it was supposed to be. His father had said, “Is that what you do when you can’t get what you want, cry like a girl? Who taught you that, your mother?”

  The worst of it was that Mark had spoken as much out of feeling for his father as out of his own misery, knowing that his dad was wretched, too.

  Thinking about them didn’t help. He got up energetically
and went into his room, where he pulled out the drawings for the botanical gardens of Skytown. He was working on plants picked up from different planets, right now one adapted from a book called A Voyage to Arcturus, which was mostly boring but had this terrific tree that grabbed up small mammals in its branches and ate them. But what kind of an animal would it eat? A rat? A weasel? Weasels were vicious; you wouldn’t mind if it ate a weasel. Inside the cage of branches he drew a weasel, working from the picture in his encyclopedia.

  At last, reluctantly, he put the Skytown plans aside; there was work more pressing. He had to do a paper for Carol Kelly for her English class on a poem by A. E. Housman. If he didn’t get to it soon, there wouldn’t be enough time to work on it. Completing the job was important. Carol Kelly was getting awfully chummy lately. There was nothing like a cash transaction to push a relationship back into shape.

  He settled down to the poem, trying to make sense of it.

  * * *

  The evening after that, instead of packaged blood Wesley brought Bobbie, one of Roger’s former girlfriends. Going down the hall between Wesley and Roger, she kept laughing and saying, “It’s just one of your theater friends fooling around, right, Roger? Come on, I know you—it’s a joke, right?”

  Then she was sitting there on the cot in the little white room and not laughing at all. She looked down with wide eyes at the vampire’s head bent over her arm. Mark could only bear to watch out of the corner of his eye.

  “Oh,” she said softly. And then, still staring, “Oh, wow. Oh, Wesley, he’s drinking my blood.”

  Wesley said, “I told you. No joke.”

  “Don’t worry, Bobbie,” Roger said, patting her shoulder. “You won’t grow fangs afterward—Wesley hasn’t, anyway.”

  She put out her hand as if to push the vampire’s head away, but instead she began to stroke his hair. She murmured, “I read my tarot this morning and I could see there would be fantastic new things, and I should get right behind them and be real positive, you know? But I never thought—oh, this is so far out, this is a real supernova, you know?” Until he finished she sat enthralled, whispering, “Oh, wow,” at dreamy intervals.

  When the vampire lifted his drowned, peaceful face, she said earnestly to him, “I’m a Scorpio; what’s your sign?”

  * * *

  Roger came home, having at last fired a store manager he disliked. He took Mark out for Chinese dinner and talked angrily about the mess the manager was leaving behind—unrecorded orders, evidence of pilfering and jacking around with receipts . . .

  Mark handed him a note from school. “They want a signature on this.” Roger was good at signing his brother’s name.

  “Sent home early for sleeping in class? What gives?”

  Mark braced himself and explained.

  Roger looked at him in openmouthed astonishment and the beginnings of outrage. “You mean you’ve been having midnight chats with our friend for the three nights he’s been with us? What’s he told you?”

  “Nothing. He just listens. Last night I told him Childhood’s End, The Mysterious Island, and some Ray Bradbury stories.”

  “And he doesn’t say anything?”

  “Nothing much.”

  Roger’s mouth got thin and pressed together. “Tonight you take the tape recorder in with you, and you ask some questions and get some answers before you tell him a goddamn limerick.” Roger had been trying his questions on the vampire for shorter and shorter periods, perhaps because his efforts were always failures. Mark did no better. When he asked his memorized questions that night, they were ignored.

  The vampire merely remarked, “Scheherezade has joined the Inquisition, I see. Fortunately, I can manage now without these diversions.”

  * * *

  Roger was going away for the weekend, leaving Mark to look after the vampire. You had to keep Roger from taking advantage. He did it without thinking, really; he just sort of forgot about your interests in the pursuit of his own.

  “Look, Roger,” Mark said, “I’ll take care of the place for you—water the plants and do some cleaning up and all that, like before, to pay you back for letting me stay here. But you’re away a lot partying or checking out the shops, and that means I’m stuck with . . . him, in there. That’s a big responsibility.”

  Roger was packing a rainbow sweater in nubbleknit acrylic he had borrowed from the uptown store for the weekend. “You can always go home,” he said. Mark waited. Roger sighed. “Okay, okay. Five dollars a week.”

  “Ten.”

  “Bloodsucker!” Roger said. “All right, ten.” So simple, no tearing your guts up over everything like at home. “Listen, there’s a special reason why I’m going up to Boston. I want to consult with a few friends about this vampire. There must be ways to get incredibly rich on this thing.”

  With Roger gone, Mark settled down to the paper for Carol Kelly. Looking for a book of poetry criticism in the living room, he was distracted by a remnant from Roger’s fling with superexotica, The Two-Duck Pleasure Book: Balkan Folk Wisdom, by R. Unpronounceable. Beguiled into browsing for enlightening dirty bits (“ . . . method of contraception is for the woman to get up after intercourse, squat on the floor, and inserting her index finger . . .” Yuucchh), he spent a fascinating half hour.

  Then he pulled out a book on Lapland and found the vampire’s face looking at him from the back cover of the volume next to it.

  No mistake; it was the same man, only in a three-piece suit with a beat-up raincoat slung around his shoulders. He was looking straight into the camera with an assertive stare, as if daring the photographer to soften his imperious features. Mark studied the strong planes of forehead and cheek, the jutting nose, the long, shapely mouth with lips muscular-looking as if slightly compressed on some inner tension. He could look at the photo as long and hard as he liked, while looking at the living man for any length of time made Mark nervous.

  The book was called Notes on a Vanished People, the diaries of some hitherto unknown German traveler in South America. The translator and editor pictured on the book jacket was Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and director of the Cayslin Center for the Study of Man at Cayslin College upstate. “New light on pre-Columbian history,” proclaimed the blurbs. “A stupendous find for anthropology, with erudite, provocative commentary by Dr. Weyland.”

  Mark recalled now having seen that forbidding face somewhere else recently—in the news, it had to be. He dug through the piled-up papers and magazines on the end tables until he found what he was looking for in a copy of Time. Then slowly, thoughtfully, heart pounding, he went down the hall, the book in his hand.

  The vampire dozed, lying on his side with his knees sticking forward off the cot. Wearing pajamas and showing bandages at the opening of the collar, he looked a lot less impressive than in the photograph.

  Mark said, “Dr. Weyland?”

  The vampire opened his eyes. Mark let him see that he was holding Notes on a Vanished People. There was no observable reaction.

  “I just thought you might be hungry,” Mark said lamely.

  “I am.”

  Mark had bought a stoneware mug so that he wouldn’t have to see the blood being drained out of the glass. He stood carefully out of reach while Dr. Weyland drank.

  “How’d you get shot?” he asked.

  “You know my name. Do a minimum of research: look in the newspapers.”

  “I did. All anybody says is that you disappeared.” Mark added aggressively, “I bet you did something dumb and somebody guessed about you and tried to kill you.”

  The vampire studied him a moment. “You would win your bet,” he said, and he set the mug on the floor and lay back down.

  Mark browsed through Notes on a Vanished People over a TV dinner that night. A lot of the book was boring, but there were some intriguing sections in the long introduction. Here Dr. Weyland described his suspicions that the German’s notebooks existed, the search for them, and the struggle—against doubters wh
om Dr. Weyland demolished with a keen wit—to establish the authenticity of the documents once they were found. There were also some chilly passages about missionaries of the traveler’s day and modern anthropologists. Pretty interesting background reading if you might be the first person to contact the inhabitants of the distant planets on scouting expeditions from Skytown . . .

  * * *

  Late on Sunday a stranger came to the door. “Bobbie tells me there’s a vampire here,” he said. “Show him to me.” He stood not exactly with his foot in the door, but turned so that his thick shoulder seemed about to snap the chain.

  “I’m sorry,” Mark said quickly, “but my uncle isn’t back yet from Boston, and I’m not allowed to let in anybody I don’t know.”

  “My name is Alan Reese. Roger knows me. I’m sure he must have mentioned me to you.”

  “I have to keep the house rules,” Mark said, putting a whine into his tone. He was thinking back to when Roger had been into sorcery. This must be the Reese he’d gotten mixed up with about then. Reese looked ready to bulldoze the door down, and capable of it, too, with a powerful torso and a wrestler’s neck as broad as the head it supported.

  But he only smiled, shrugged, and retired to sit on the steps into the areaway, reading a paperback book from his pocket. Plainly, he was going to wait for Roger.

  Mark did the dishes and watched him from the window over the sink. Reese wore whipcord pants and an embroidered Mexican shirt, and he had brought a large black briefcase. His face was puffy and pale, the skin freckled and smooth like a boy’s. There was more to be read in his thick hands than in his face. He tore out the pages of the book as he finished them, and before flipping them into the garbage can by the steps he absently crumpled them in his fist.

  Leaving him unwatched didn’t seem safe somehow. Mark stayed by the sink and sharpened the knives. Then he rearranged all the silver in the drawer.

  Finally Roger came, arguing briefly with the cabby over the tip. Mark saw him turn to face Alan Reese with surprise. One of those big paws fell heavily on Roger’s shoulder. The two men stood talking. Roger nodded a lot, hesitantly at first, then with vigor.