by Unknown
“Oprah, modesty forbids my answering that.” He laughs, oh so decoratively. Oprah and the audience laugh along. “But to be perfectly honest, appearance doesn’t matter much to us. We can’t help what we look like.”
More lies. Back in the shadow days, only the young and beautiful were candidates for turning. The old, the ugly, the worn, the imperfect, were simply dinner. And now I know how lucky I was, that long-ago moonlit night in the king’s forest. Under a different alpha, they might well have torn me to shreds, in the same spirit as humans once exposed nonstandard babies on hillsides. But all I knew of them then was that they were neither gamekeepers nor inquisitors.
“Help me,” I said to them, holding out my sun-blistered hands. “Take me with you.”
The lad snickered. “Why should we? What use would you be to us?”
“I know things,” I faltered. “I’m good with herbs, and helping at childbirth. Women come to me for counsel.”
Judging by their laughter, they thought that was hilarious. I can see why, in retrospect, but at the time I was stung to anger. I snapped at them, “You could show respect, then, for my grey hairs, and some pity for a poor old woman in distress.”
“Grey hairs?” cried one of the girls through her laughter. “Your age is nothing to us, hag. Why, I could be your three-times-great granddam — though I dearly hope I’d never have a grandchild as ugly as you.” Then she lifted her head to laugh more freely, giving me a much better view of her teeth.
That is how I learned I had joined the legendary undead. I recognized her for what she was. I ran my tongue around the inside of my own mouth: no teeth had grown back, but the remaining stumps had become long, strong and sharp. The beautiful ones found my howl of discovery very amusing indeed. But when they tired of teasing me — those youths and maids who were old before I was born — they ran off on a further merry chase and left me alone. That was more dreadful to me than their derision. I ran after them.
“So you see it as a kind of liberation? An empowerment of the vampire community?”
“Absolutely, Oprah. An end to centuries of discrimination and ostracism. And — yes — a long-overdue end to the victimization of a misunderstood minority. Believe me, we welcome the opportunity to become full, productive members of society.”
“And do you see that as a challenge?”
“Absolutely, Oprah.”
I am tempted to throw something at the screen. How well they have learned their lessons, these vampires-for-the-twenty-first-century. And how they adore being a demographic. But I could tell them a great deal they don’t know about being a minority, a demographic of just one, and what always set me apart from the others was not just my raddled face. I gained the first inkling of this truth on that first night, when I ran wailing after the beautiful ones and caught up with them just after they downed their prey.
He was a lad I knew, one I had helped deliver into this world some sixteen years before. A good enough boy, hardworking and honest, perhaps a little lumpen. He was courting, I knew that too, and in my opinion it was well past time he should be decently married to the smith’s middle daughter.
When I crashed through the brush, all five of them were suckling at him, fastened to his body like piglets to a sow, but he was still alive and conscious. His eyes widened when he saw me. Hope? Appeal? Or did he see me as one of them, truly a chattel of the devil, just as the witchfinder had said?
The next moment, the alpha made the question moot by biting into the artery at the base of the boy’s thick peasant neck. “Here, granny,” he said, grinning up at me, “I’m of a generous disposition tonight. There’s a mouthful or two left in the beast — come see how fine it tastes. And then go away, because the sight of you offends us.”
“The beast’s name,” I said, “was John.” I turned and walked into the darkness, and never once looked back.
“But you have killed people, right? How do you feel about that now?”
“That’s an excellent question, Oprah. Sure, we’ve had to kill people in the past, simply to survive. Does that make us evil? I don’t think so. It makes us no different from any other nation or ethnic group in the history of the world.”
For once I agree with my good-looking colleague, whom I last saw in London wearing a fashionable swallowtail coat and chowing down on a thoroughly Dickensian street urchin. The fact is the youthful of my species are no more evil than the human young they used to be. They are no more than Peter Pan with fangs, butterflies in amber, trapped forever in the borderline psychopathy of youth. They are the ultimate expression of neoteny. Life never gets the chance to knock the stuffing out of them.
But life had already left me with very little stuffing by the time I was turned. I never could bring myself to prey on humans — too much damned empathy to start with, too liberal a schooling in the sharing of mortal pain.
After parting from the beautiful ones, I became the terror of small forest creatures as I worked my way slowly across the wilderness of several southern counties. In London, I took a new name and became a poor widow from the country — who would notice another ravaged beldame among so many? In fact, it was not a bad choice of what is now called ‘lifestyle’.
For many years I supped handsomely on the vermin of Whitechapel and Lambeth, and slept in safety in the great underground palace of the London sewers. Plagues and fires came and went, fashions changed and changed again, generations of mortals flowed past me, but the rats and the sewers went on forever. Early in the regency, I conceived a bright idea: why not dress as a man and work for the borough as a rat-catcher? Why not get paid for what I was already doing? The bounty on the barrow loads of bloodless vermin I delivered became the foundation of my later fortune, now nicely diversified in a number of offshore investment banks.
Naturally, I saw others of my kind in London’s rich hunting ground. They rarely saw me, though, since I preferred to observe them discreetly from a distance. Their ethnology became a hobby of mine: their feeding and mating habits, pecking orders, kinship patterns, ritual behaviours. I could write a book on them, and probably will. On the few occasions when they recognized me as undead, they reacted much as my first vampires in the forest had done, with a mixture of amusement and distaste.
“Now, can I ask you something personal, something that literally millions of women out there are just dying to know?”
“Certainly, Oprah.”
She leans forward to an intimate closeness. In the audience, and presumably all over the television-viewing world, many other women lean forward as well. “Do vampires — fall in love?”
The vampire closes the gap even further. “Yes, Oprah, we totally do fall in love. And we are perfectly capable of forming stable, loving relationships.”
“Do you, er — go out on dates?”
“We most certainly do.”
Dates? Hunting parties, in the shadow times. Nowadays, courting vampires dance the night away, or go out to dinner in one of those new specialty restaurants. The first cross-species marriages are being watched closely by sociologists and tabloid journalists. Romance is in the air — and not just for the young.
I had long thought I was beyond all that. I was old. Average life expectancy for mortals did not go much beyond fifty until well into the twentieth century, and persons of my apparent age were both rare and hopelessly over the hill. I began to dress better and more expensively as the nineteenth century wore on and my pest-control business expanded into a small commercial empire, but I did not dress to attract lovers. Who, apart from the obvious fortune-hunters, would want to court such a withered old crone?
Then a curious thing happened. For whatever suite of reasons, the brief lives of mortals began to stretch. More people began to live beyond their fifties, and then their sixties; more and more began to outlive the biblical threescore and ten. Suddenly, I was surprised to learn from magazines that life began at forty; and then, not much later by vampire standards, that fifty was the new forty. And then it was sixty. Cle
arly, the boomer generation was starting to catch up with me. As the new millennium approached, I was amazed to find I was a relatively youthful and potentially attractive woman.
“Yes, Oprah, I think you can safely say the world is seeing a new breed of vampire. And I have high hopes that a brighter future lies ahead for us all.”
Amen to that. The face-lift did not take, alas, but the dentures make a remarkable difference. Then there is the transforming power of makeup, a clever stylist, and a personal shopper with a taste for good labels.
The roses are from a virile gentleman of seventy-six who is happy to give up golfing in the sun for my sake. Tonight, we shall make a little champagne ceremony of his turning. And why not? Immortality, like youth, is wasted on the young.
Red Blues
By Michael Skeet
Your hand closes around the neck. Just for a second, you let your slender, grave-cold fingertips caress the gentle curve. Long since a stranger to the subtleties of tactile sensation, you nevertheless rejoice in the smoothness of the back of the neck, in its slender vulnerability. Then you press those fingers down, firmly but not too hard.
You begin to play.
Fingers flying over the strings of your vintage Gibson, you give them your twenty-seventh variation on the verse of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” It’s your tenth night of a two-week gig in this club and the tenth time you’ve played this song they think they know. No one in the audience, though, has heard it the same way twice. You’ve memorized a lot of different versions of this song.
As Garrett and Holman join in for the chorus, you switch to variation one thousand eighteen. The two fit well together: their tempos match, and the flourish of sixteenth notes you’ve crammed into each bar of the chorus gives the impression of furious improvisation. After two choruses of this you head into the bridge, keeping the tempo but dropping back to an earlier variation on the tune, with more eighths than sixteenths and a couple of strategically placed discords to give the punters the impression of something new going on. Then it’s back into the chorus — a different variation again — and as you head home you begin scouting the audience, looking to see if she’s here tonight. It takes one more chorus until she drifts into view through the smoke and by then you’ve already caught her scent. As you scatter a series of eccentric chords through the final bars of the song, you’re already planning tonight’s conquest, with the same thoroughness you’ve planned tonight’s set.
When you look up to begin the next number, though, she is gone. You could make her stay, could weave a web of pheromones and waking dreams around her until she has no more will than your Gibson, but you have rules you follow in cases such as this. There will be no coercion; she invites you in, or you wait another day and try again. You wait.
Most people misunderstand the beauty of jazz. They revel in its unpredictability, its scattershot virtuosity and the emotion with which their favourite practitioners approach it. For you, though, jazz is complex mathematics, a poetry of numbers. Improvisation is what people resort to when memory fails them. You have built a house of memory over hundreds of years, and in the last six decades, since you took up this music as a distraction, your memory has not failed you once.
You are in mid-set on the eleventh night when you detect her presence, then see her sitting down with a group of friends. She brushes her hair behind one ear as she orders a drink. You’re playing “A Shine on Your Shoes.” You’ve kept the sprightly tempo of the original, but from the bridge you set off into an extended solo that quotes from just about every Dietz-Schwartz tune on the sound track of the film The Band Wagon. None of your audience recognizes the gesture, but they appreciate the overall effect, and that’s enough. You’re surprised for a moment when Garrett, on bass, actually matches you note for note during your two-bar segment of “Dancing in the Dark”, but you recover quickly enough and return his smile with a nod. The intuitive pattern-matching instincts of human beings can still, it seems, take you by surprise.
Instinct is no substitute for experience, though. As Garrett takes a verse, you fix your gaze on her. She has given you a good chase, but she will weaken in the end. They always do. She knows you are watching her, and fights against the hold of your eyes. When she wins, you concede gracefully. There is no hurry. You are never in a hurry.
You isolate her scent from amongst the charred nicotine and oxidized alcohol smells even before you begin playing on your twelfth night, and that knowledge brings you one step closer to conquest. She still resists your eyes, but you can smell her growing interest as easily as you can see the small shift of her shoulders and tilt of her head as she begins, mid-way through the set, to isolate herself from her companions. It’s time to focus the music directly onto her, and to let her know what you are doing. “Drop the next one,” you say to Garrett on your right. He passes the message to Holman behind his drum kit, and you forget about “I Got Rhythm”, swinging directly into “How About You?”
The music is light, fanciful, and the version you’ve chosen to remember has plenty of airy frills at the end of each line of the chorus. It’s appropriate to your mood, now that you’ve seen her, and you know that before the night is over she will be yours. In a gesture that echoes your mood, you let Garrett have two choruses to himself; you actually enjoy the fat, staccato thumping of the bass as his thick, calloused fingers fly over the strings. Garrett looks like an old man, but is in fact only thirty-eight. You’ve appreciated the irony since you’ve known him: you look like you’re not a day over thirty, when in fact you’re about fifty-five thousand days over thirty. He’s been a heroin addict since the evening of his first professional gig sixteen years ago. In a sense that has made him a good partner. You don’t bother him about what he puts into his veins and he doesn’t bother you about what you take out of theirs. There is no feeling between you — there could never be — but you look out for him, do what you can to keep him alive in spite of himself. Consistency in companionship is something your kind is drawn to. You used to tell yourself that it was the heroin that kept you from deepening your relationship with Garrett, but in the last fifty years you’ve made a habit of keeping your professional and private lives separate. Good sidemen may be easy to find, but understanding ones aren’t.
Your private life is beginning to intrude now, the hunger demanding your attention before you’re ready. She’s brushing her hair back behind one ear, drawing attention to the pale band of her neck; the gesture almost causes you to miss your entry for the final chorus. Not for the first time you wonder if this one is aware of her effect on you, has been playing you over the two weeks you’ve been hunting her.
“Savoy Blues” is next, the first song you learned. Chess had been your distraction of choice before then, its multiplicity of potential moves appealing to the strong sense of memory that develops in the living dead. But after a century chess was losing its appeal, and the first time you heard Lonnie Johnson play — 1926, in Chicago — your mathematician’s soul was somehow able to discern from a single two-minute performance the infinite potential jazz might have to an undying intellect. Through Johnson you met Eddie Lang, and it’s not entirely your fault that Lang died so young — nor can Charlie Christian’s death a few years after that be laid solely at your feet. At least a part of them lives on in you.
That part emerges as you begin “Seven Come Eleven”. You are no fan of bop, but enough of Christian’s blood continues to mingle with yours that you are almost compelled to echo the scatter-gun single-line riffing, the eccentric chords and rhythms of the pioneer of bebop guitar. The audience loves it, too. Their desire for novelty overrides all other considerations; it’s one of the things you dislike about bop. The precision of swing demands more of both performer and listener. Nobody has time for that any more, not even here.
Now she is leaning over her table, transfixed as your fingers fly over the strings, her desire to unite with the music so strong you can taste its musky flavour on your tongue. She is yours, now, captur
ed by the music. You do not have to guess: you know it in your blood, your skin.
Nevertheless, when you pack your guitar at the end of the set, she is nowhere to be seen. Somehow, she is breaking free of the music’s spell.
Tonight, the last number in your set is “The Red Blues”. The lyrics — and the musical for which it was written — hardly represent Cole Porter at his best. But Porter was a great tunesmith, even in his declining years. This tune is superb raw material. You have an affinity with this song; playing it allows you to project into the mind of each member of the audience something dark but compelling, an emotional thunderstorm. Every entity has a piece of music to which it resonates; “The Red Blues” is yours.
Is it hers? She has come late, settling into a seat alone only a few minutes before. At least she is here. You have only one night after this song and you are loath to degrade yourself by forcing her into your grasp. You’re going to have to do something, though.
What you decide to do is to put more than your memory and technique into this song. It’s what you’ve seen humans do and though the prospect is distasteful, you are willing to try it. There are limits to patience, after all.
You don’t look at her as you start playing; it requires all of your concentration to do this. Fingers flying over the strings, you make the music black with night and eternal despair, letting it fill you until the hairs on your neck are standing erect with it. Then you pour out of you all the fear and rage and power of the night, sending them splashing into the club and willing the listeners to soak it up, drown in it.
Then you sit up, the strings still vibrating with the final notes. The room is silent. Even the wait staff is immobile and voiceless. No one looks at you; they are all wrestling with themselves — some in tears, some struggling to suppress cries of horror or triumph according to their natures. Feeling uncomfortably numb, you wonder if this phenomenon is repeatable, if someday you’ll be able to study the impact you have on your sidemen.