by Unknown
“Leave Sophie out of things!” Panic seized Peg. Mark knew it, and took cold delight in it.
“Mark.” She tried to grab his arm. “Mark!” Sunlight caught his fair hair as he passed into the crowd. Peg took slow, deep breaths. Another night, that was all. Tomorrow it would mostly be over. She’d find some way to protect Sophie; she could persuade the others to help watch her place, tonight.
I’ve had too much wine, Peg thought, and with that came the drunken, primitive urge of her kind to ‘hunt’ — in broad daylight this time. She felt the stinging in the front of her mouth, her nostrils — the young caterer with the tumour would do…
Peg came sharply to her senses. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever loathed herself this much, or when she had hated Mark more.
Peg disliked the cloying scent of the big, white lilies all around her.
She sat towards the rear of the funeral chapel. With no theatre makeup, she was recognizable now as the Peg of long ago. Still, she was cautious. She watched as the Board members arrived, along with a number of others from the Group. It was a private funeral, the home owned by a Tyme and Nevermore member. Most didn’t bother to come, as it was both a sham and an unhappy obligation. Peg’s attendance was part of her punishment.
She wondered where they’d obtained the cadaver for the coffin. It was a closed-casket service, but the Group always purchased a body just in case there were questions. There were always ‘friends’ willing to swear to the deceased’s identity. Wheels within wheels: a death certificate, brand new persona, and everything from a legitimate source … the Group reached deep into the community.
I’m dead, Peg thought, stifling a growing hysteria. I’m someone else, now…
Organ music played softly as Len and Nel entered. With a nod to Peg, they went through a door near the side of the coffin and altar, where Mark had gone earlier.
What a joke that we were once called ‘the undead’, Peg thought. We are dead, all of us. Worse, those of us who belong to Tyme and Nevermore are trapped, manipulated…
It wasn’t like that everywhere. There were other organizations in Europe that were far more liberal, and better at gaining public support. Peg’s frequent trips to France had garnered her many friends, both in and outside her afflicted community.
More Group members came in, and soon the generous chapel was full. Peg was surprised by the numbers. The nods and half bows of respect the newcomers gave her were both moving and disconcerting.
Peg grew restless when Len and Nel didn’t return. Nel had promised to sit with her during the service, which was about to begin. Peg rose, adjusting her veil, nodding here and there as she made her way to the front and the door behind the altar. Turning the doorknob, she slipped through.
The passageway beyond led to the basement work and storage area. Angry voices carried up from below, and Peg hurried across the hall and down the narrow stairs, turning right onto a wide landing. Nel, Len, Carlos and several others were engaged in a heated debate with Mark.
“Come on, all of you — is this any way to behave at my funeral?” Peg joked.
“We were talking about that,” Len replied. “We’ve been trying to corner Mark alone for days. I was just asking him how many of these travesties he expects us to go through. Tell me, Mark, do you think you can cover things up forever? You’re good, you and the Board, I’ll give you that. But someday you’ll come up against someone who can’t be influenced, and whatever you’re up to will be exposed — it’ll ruin all of us!”
Clutching his laptop and a small silver casket, Mark looked unnerved, though he stood his ground. Peg couldn’t remember ever seeing him like this. She suspected that Mark, roused, could be very dangerous. He was overwhelmingly strong and could still make his way through cracks in a wisp of vapour.
“Peg’s right,” he said. “This isn’t the time or place. Peg, I got the silver casket — our little joke—”
“Don’t change the subject, Mark.” Len’s voice rose. “Peg’s the one who’s been talking to us, making us question things — not that we haven’t been thinking on our own. A lot of us are unhappy with the status quo—”
“And I’ve been digging, Mark,” Carlos broke in. “You haven’t been straight with us about the source for the blood bank — and none of us likes the idea of foreclosing residential mortgages and putting families out in the street—”
“You’ve been busy, Peggy,” Mark said, fixing his dark eyes on her. “I’m surprised and disappointed. You know the rules.”
“We did just talk, Mark,” Peg said. “Most of us think we can do more generous things with Tyme and Nevermore’s assets. And there’s the ability we have to sense things — that could be put to use in the medical community, and in other ways—”
“As for rules,” Carlos broke in, “has he told you about your forfeit, yet, Peg? Your real punishment?”
Anger grew in Mark’s face. “Carlos, that’s none of your—”
“He hasn’t, has he?”
“What do you mean?” Peg felt a sudden chill.
“You have to sell the Group your family home,” Nel said gently. “They’ve prearranged papers. You must pay the proceeds back into the Corporation. And the Board insists you end all thought of friendship with that girl you’re so attached to.”
“Sophie? My home? No!” Peg stepped forward, tearing off her veil. She wondered if anyone upstairs had heard the commotion, particularly the Board members who were present.
“I won’t do it, Mark.” The depth of her outrage surprised her. “And you’ll leave Sophie out of it — I want your word!”
She blocked his way, but Mark, angered by her defiance, shouldered her aside. Len stepped in and pushed him. Mark dropped the laptop and suddenly they were fighting.
“Stop it!” Peg cried. The sound, the full sense of their rage half-consumed her.
Both were formidably strong and determined. Peg tried to separate them. Nel and Carlos came to help, but Mark flung Carlos halfway across the landing. Len pinned Mark to the railing; it heaved and cracked, giving way, and Mark went over and down into the darkness below.
Peg heard a hideous, snarling sound. Someone flipped a light switch for the lower basement and Peg raced down the stairs. Mark lay amidst a mass of old furniture and half finished caskets. A sharp piece of scaffolding protruded from his chest; it had pierced him back to front. He struggled to free himself, trying to change shape, his face slipping in and out of focus.
“Help me!” Peg cried to the others.
“Stake’s the wrong way ‘round,” Nel sighed, but she and Len came anyway. When they finally freed Mark, he was a bloodless, shrunken figure, labouring to breathe. He still clutched the small silver casket.
“It’s no good,” Len said. “Peg, he shouldn’t be — I didn’t mean to—”
Above them, Carlos had recovered. He seized Mark’s laptop, typing frantically. “Lock the door going upstairs, Carlos,” Peg called. “Carlos!”
It was too late. The faces of Board members and others peered down from above as Mark gave Peg’s hand one final squeeze.
“Sorry, Peggy,” he said. There was a flash of the old Mark, a softening of his expression and an odd tenderness, and then he was gone.
“I’ve hacked the database,” Carlos shouted up the stairwell. “I’ve sent information places you really should be concerned about! You go for Peg, I’ll make it worse!”
Peg stood up, shaking. “You heard him,” she said, not looking up at them. “It’s over. You can do whatever you want to me, but others want change too. You can’t hang on to the old ways any more.”
There was a panicked scuffling from upstairs as they pushed back through the door, doubtless to salvage what they could of Tyme and Nevermore, and what passed as their lives. A few waved approval. Peg stooped and closed Mark’s eyelids, gently arranging his arms and pressing his hands around the small silver casket.
“You can have this, at least,” she whispered. Nodding to the others, she
turned and mounted the stairs.
“Your papers — all your ID and everything — Carlos fixed it, got them back,” Nel said. “They’re waiting in the car, with your passport and travel documents. Len and I will drive you.”
“Thanks Nel.” Peg squeezed her friend’s arm as she started up the dark lane.
“Don’t worry about the house — I’ll stay in it until you decide what to do!” Nel started towards the waiting car at the bottom of the lane.
Peg swung the bright lantern in front of her, dabbing at her hastily applied makeup. The lane seemed particularly beautiful tonight, though she couldn’t linger. She had to get to Sophie. The plane might be a private jet, but time was tight. The media was everywhere, and the troubles of the Group and the sudden disappearance of its director were all over the evening news.
She hoped Sophie would understand. Peg had to get them both away, for now, even if the others wouldn’t come. The Board members were dangerous and would surely enact vengeance when they weren’t dodging the press. Carlos had picked his targets well, destroying just the right amount of access and information, and creating a superb degree of chaos. The refuge in Paris was a godsend — Peg’s friends there, both her kind and those in the general community — would help. Sophie would be put up with a regular family.
Peg knew that if she didn’t make this change, what lay ahead was bleak. The appreciation of life that had grown in her this past while would diminish; the cold would creep back into her heart and bones, and she would be more alone and unhappy than before.
She could feel that life about her: soft as sounds that mingled in twilight, yet strong, like some cosmic concert. It was a universal, constant hum, where the essence of every living thing, however insignificant, registered in its own way.
A resonance.
That ability of Peg and her kind to sense what humans could not was rooted in that force. She’d helped the young caterer, yesterday. There was hope. For those of her kind who wanted better, wanted more, there was a way.
Until then, there were her friends in France, and Sophie, if she’d listen. But how should she explain what she really was?
When we’re safe, I’ll tell her the truth, Peg thought. Give her a choice. It’ll be a shock, but otherwise I’m no better than Mark.
The familiar violin sounded from Sophie’s back garden. Tchaikovsky, played with passionate fury, the bow sawing across the strings. Back doors up and down the lane began to slam as the neighbours lost patience with Sophie at last. Peg laughed and turned in at the gate.
Every lantern in Sophie’s garden was alight. She paced the pathway, working her bow ruthlessly, and only stopped when she saw Peg. Disbelief, then joy crossed her lamp-lit features.
“Peg? Oh my god, I thought — I tried to get hold of you. I went to your house, but those friends of yours were all over — they were so close-mouthed, I thought … you seemed ill, when I last saw you…”
Her own excitement, and the sound of Sophie’s heart beating, grew inside Peg. She was on the threshold of a challenging new world. A warning whistle from down the lane — likely Len — told her to hurry.
“I’m sorry you were worried,” she said, reaching for the latch. “I should explain. I wasn’t at my best, but I’m much better now…”
The New Forty
By Rebecca Bradley
The simple truth is, they lack empathy. Soulless, self-absorbed, prowling the night for good times and quick fixes; nothing in their heads except sucking liquid down their throats and jumping on each other like apes in the zoo. Mindless, shameless. And the vampires are just as bad.
Oh, the young!
But I am not as bitter as I may sound. It is only that, after centuries of observation, I understand them a little too well. These days I observe them on talk shows, the youthful of both species, especially the undead. The rising stars of the new-epoch vampire movies, the super-models of vampire chic, vamp-rock bands with names like Bloody Waters, Grateful Undead and Bled Zeppelin. How perfect are their cold, shapely cadavers, and how beautifully they match the new tenor of the world. If ever there was an age when my kind could come from the shadows and blend right in, that time is now.
My kind? Their kind, rather. I have no kind. Even among vampires, I am a freak, a sport, an accident. A common slattern the first time around, spawned into a class and age where women did not give birth so much as whelp litters of unplanned annual brats, whose short lives and hacking deaths recapitulated those of their ancestors. Not mine, though. My father died when I was small, my mother when I was perhaps ten; whereas I survived two husbands and all seven of my own poor whelps, and plodded on dismal and solitary to the extraordinary age of sixty-four.
Then I became a witch, by definition, and through no true fault of mine. In those times, it was enough to be beyond the menses and to live alone, to have wrinkled flesh, grey hair, gaps in one’s jaw, and a reputation for wisdom. Perhaps I should have known better than to be wise. They took me for torture, and cast me between-times into a cold cell with vermin for company, and my own bodily effluents, from blood to puke, for what is now called interior décor: colour-coordinated wall- and floor-coverings that reflected the inner me and gave the place atmosphere, in the language of the home-renovation shows to which I am now addicted. One day, they tossed me a cellmate.
We exchanged no words. I never properly saw his face. The mob had beaten him bloodily enough to kill a Christian outright, so his very survival proved him to be a creature of the devil and fodder for the stake. After they clanged the door shut on us, I crawled across the cell to steal his coat and check his pockets, on the chance of a crust of bread. He was sprawled motionless on his belly, but when I turned him over, he struck like a snake out of his swoon, straight for my gullet, biting so deep I heard his teeth click together inside my flesh. I think I bit him back, since the taste of his blood was in my mouth when I woke up; or maybe he bled into me from his many wounds. At any rate, by then he was gone from the cell and I was a twice-born accident, who barely knew my father and never knew my sire.
I knew about the devil, though, and how his minions could come to even virtuous old women in the night to tempt them into vile congress. This, I assumed with shame and fear, was what had happened to me. And it also appeared that the devil took care of his own. Just as the prison door had opened for the Apostle Paul in Philippi, the door to my cell swung obligingly off its hinges, and no living thing stirred in the gaol. I ran out and into the dark wood and away from the sleeping town.
So there was I, a babe again, new to the ways of a strange new world — but a babe in a withered body with deep fissures in its face. Yes, I felt a difference as I ran. For the first time in twenty years my hips and back did not hurt me, my old bones moved easily in their sockets, my breath did not wheeze in my throat. Even the welts and breaks from my torture were miraculously painless.
How I ran! First from fear, later from the joy of running freely under an icy moon, setting the farm dogs whining and cringing as I passed. I outran a deer in the king’s forest and — on fresh instinct — caught it with a strength that was novel to me, twisted its beautiful neck, and drank from its throat. So now I was not just a witch but a poacher, eligible for the rope as well as the stake; but I was also a small mewling child overcome with the newness of everything.
Back to the talk shows.
“Look, Oprah, we’ve got feelings too. We’re very sensitive, very nurturing with our young. For us, newborn vampires are like newborn babies. We stay close, we do everything we can to help them through what is often a difficult, highly emotional transition. We teach them—”
“…to kill?” says Oprah, with the frown that signals she is asking a hard-hitting question. The audience cat-calls and applauds.
“Hey,” says the strikingly handsome young man. His pale marble skin glows under the studio lights. “I find that remark both vampirist and personally offensive. You’re thinking of the bad old days, when we did what we had to, just to survive.
That doesn’t mean we liked it.”
Liar. He’d rip her throat out now if a half-billion people weren’t watching, and he’d like it very much. Mortals haven’t known us long enough to read the body language. And as for sensitive and nurturing, I saw little of those qualities during my own difficult, highly emotional transition. There were many things I had to discover painfully for myself, starting with the fatal nature of sunlight.
It was only by luck I did not immolate myself out of sheer ignorance when my first post-mortem sun rose. I hid whimpering under the bracken and dug myself my own little grave in the forest dirt, among the worms and moles; and at sundown, I clawed my way out again with still-smarting hands.
Beyond a vague theory that I’d accidentally sold myself to Satan, I had no idea of what I had become. Not even the sudden attraction to blood — several moles and a badger had helped me pass that first long day — felt out of the ordinary. Later that night, when the nest tracked me down, I knew only that I should be afraid of them, deathly afraid, yet somehow I was not.
Three handsome youths and two beautiful maids surrounded me among the trees, luminous in the moonlight, richly dressed — quality folk they looked like, such as I’d seen before only as passengers in liveried coaches, holding their noses as they were whisked through the stinking streets of our town. They stared at me with surprise and all-too-evident distaste. Much later, I wondered if one of them was my sire. At the time, I did not even know enough to ask the question. Then one of the youths laughed harshly.
“God’s truth, who’d have thought that was worth turning?”
“You have to admit,” says Oprah coyly, “that you’re all — how shall I put it — a little better-looking than the average human. In fact, I’d say you’re all drop-dead gorgeous, no pun intended. So, is becoming a vampire like having a beauty treatment, or what?”