Thirst

by Pyotyr Kurtinski

  New blood/ I liked the sound of it, as what vampire would not, and I liked the idea of going to America. So did my father, who thought I had been acting peculiarly since my return from a tour of Eastern Europe, which I had undertaken immediately after receiving my degree from Oxford. My father had gone to Oxford himself, and he was an admirer of Great Britain, especially its banking institutions. (If ever a man was unsuited to Oxford, it was my father, but he had swotted his way through with grim Dutch determination. The London School of Economics, not in existence then, would have been a far better place for him.)

  My father hoped that, following graduation, I would spend several years working in one of England’s great banks, preferably the Bank of England, for which I had absolutely no training, and then return to Amsterdam to join him in the banking business. But I would have none of that. I wanted to see something of the world before I settled behind a desk in dull old Amsterdam. We had fierce arguments before he finally and reluctantly agreed to finance a tour of Europe, which would last no more than six months rather than the usual year. After that, I was to put my nose to the grindstone, so on and so forth. That was the agreement, but I had no intention of keeping my part of it. Agree I did, and willingly. I had no money of my own, you see, and as it was, I was in some danger of being cut off without a guilder. But it was worth the risk—anything to get away from my father and his moral lectures about the virtues of thrift, hard work, sobriety, and early and sensible marriage.

  So off I went, drawn to Eastern Europe more than anywhere else on the Continent. Even now I can’t explain what took me there. I had no compelling interest in vampires or their world—a conscious interest, that is: I am sure my unconscious was responsible, the dark desires of the unknowable mind. It was a journey that was to change my life forever.

  Armed with letters that my father wished me to present to the heads of important banks in Paris, Berlin, and Geneva, I went to none of those cities. Instead, I traveled by coach to Munich and from there to Vienna, which sits across the Danube from Budapest, in Hungary, the place where Eastern Europe begins. Crossing the great river one dark evening, I knew somehow that I was leaving my old life behind. But there was more exhilaration than sadness in this knowledge, and although I was only twenty-three, I could feel my past life slipping back into the mists of memory.

  Far from following any sort of itinerary, I really had no idea where I was going. A visit to the castle of Prince Dracul (b. 1431) was certainly on my itinerary; I would be a poor tourist if I had left Hungary without seeing that. And I saw it in all its sinister splendor, or so I thought at the time; naturally, I would not see it as sinister now. It was so eastern looking, almost Oriental, not at all what I expected. Many bloody legends have grown up around the name Dracul; to the descendants of the peasants who lived in the shadow of his terror, he will forever be Vlad the Impaler.

  I wandered on to Castle Csejthe, home of the Countess Erzsebet of Bathory, whose story was not legend but fact. At least 650 peasant girls, brought to the castle by the countess’s agents, died by her hand. The countess drank their blood, bathed in their blood, and when at last her crimes were discovered, her accomplices were beheaded and the countess herself walled up in a dungeon for the rest of her days. She was fed through an iron grille, but it is not recorded what her captors fed her. She died in 1640. Never a true vampire, she deserves to remembered.

  In the village of Csejthe, in the shadow of the castle, I became a vampire, something my unconscious must have yearned for. A beautiful woman made me a vampire. Of course, I had no way of knowing that she was a vampire when she took me to her bed in the ramshackle inn that she kept with the help of her ancient grandfather. The castle and village were crumbling and only that inn remained. Soon I discovered I was the only guest there; that should have been warning enough: Obviously the inn existed solely to lure unwary travelers. Perhaps I was dimly aware of the danger within its walls, but I didn’t care. Since then I have read of many such places and people. Notable among them are Kate Bender and her hotel on the desolate Kansas prairie and Buck Scales and his ranch on the road to Santa Fe. But these mass murderers were not vampires.

  I thought my woman of Csejthe somewhat old—forty, at least. In time, I was to realize she was ageless. I arrived at the inn as the sun was going down, and she welcomed me with an enigmatic smile that I found enchanting. Her jet-black hair was streaked with silver, her lovely face dead white. For so rude a place, the fare was excellent: roast pork heavily seasoned and sweet, heavy country wine. Later I was to wonder if the roast might not have been cut from the haunches of some tender young traveler. But no matter; it was delicious. I don’t know if the wine was drugged; it might well have been. Be that as it may, I was tired, sated with food and drink, ready for bed. In those days I had an insatiable appetite for women, and even now, two centuries later, my craving for sex remains undiminished. If you find that hard to believe, you must realize that a man does not change his basic nature because he becomes a vampire. A greedy man will be a greedy vampire, and so on through evil, insecurity, and even saintliness. I was a lustful youth; so I am a horny vampire.

  On that particular night, I was very horny, and the wine wasn’t the reason. It was bliss to lie in that woman’s billowing bed and allow her to undress me. She had a remarkable body for a woman of her age: rounded and firm, white as marble. Soon she was fellating me, and I drifted off to sleep after I ejaculated in her mouth: When I regained consciousness, I found her sucking not my penis but my neck. It must have been the not unpleasant prick of her sharp teeth that awakened me. She was drinking my blood, and she must have been doing it for some time. Already I was weak, dying, in fact, and I barely had the strength to rise up and grapple with her. Somehow I knew I was lost if I didn’t recover the blood she had taken from me. We fought, bloodying the bed, until my teeth sank into her throat.

  I drank. I sucked her blood until she was dead. I felt my strength returning as I drank my own blood and hers. As I lay beside the corpse I felt the change within me. Even now I can’t describe the metamorphosis: All I knew is, 1 was no longer the young man I had been. For me, time had stopped and I would eternally be the age of twenty-three. I was a vampire and would live forever.

  Shaping the next sentence in his mind, thinking back to the events of that long-ago night, Van Diemen was stirred from his reverie by the dull boom of the great library clock. Could it be six o’clock already? Had time gone by so quickly? Even though he wanted to go on writing, he knew that he must stop. Morning had dawned, and he must go to his bedchamber and dream away the daylight hours in his coffin. Without further delay, he put down his pen and walked toward the stone steps that went up to the tower.

  Two

  The door of Van Diemen’s bedchamber could be opened only by voice command. So finely was the mechanism of the lock attuned to the timber of his voice—not the accent, for he had none—that no other voice could open it. The most gifted mimic in the world couldn’t do it. Not even a recording of Van Diemen’s voice could do it. The man who designed and fitted the lock, a Swiss electronics genius, assured him of this, and a famous show-business mimic and a tape recording were used to test it. The famous mimic, who could do voices no one else could do, was paid famously, and it was worth every penny. Security, complete as man could make it, was beyond price.

  “Open sesame,” Van Diemen said now, and the steel door slid back without a sound. It was not the door that had been hung in 1800, many years before electronics, when the castle was built to Van Diemen’s specifications. The original iron door had been secure enough for its time; since then the world had changed, become more dangerous, and so had the door.

  Once inside, Van Diemen shot the two thick deadbolts welded to the back of the door. The extra precaution was necessary because a vampire could not be too careful. A man of the eighteenth century, Van Diemen did not altogether trust modem devices. Gray morning light came from a single slit high in the wall. Most of the stone chamber had the gloom
of a crypt; a vampire did not have to rest in total darkness any more than he needed to sleep in a coffin. But Van Diemen was a traditionalist who honored the old ways; vampires had slept in coffins since time immemorial, and so did he. This arrangement was, in its way, a show of respect for the undead. All that aside, a coffin was so comfortable and gave him a safe feeling since it was so far removed from the alarms of the world.

  Van Diemen closed his eyes, prepared to lose himself in nothingness. It was so quiet in the tower; no sounds intruded on the stony silence because he willed himself not to hear what was unpleasant. Underneath the pillow on which his head rested was scattered a handful of dry red earth from the grave, or what they said was the grave, of the blood-hungry Countess Erzsebet. For all he knew, her body might have been burned, her ashes cast into the wind. It made no difference. Carrying away the handful of dust had been a gesture, nothing more. He was pleased to be part of the great tradition.

  So often on these mornings, before his mind sought rest, he thought of what it meant to be a vampire. Never once in the past two hundred years had he regretted what he had become. No extremes of soul-searching, for want of a better word, could bring him to that. Toward the woman of Csejthe he felt nothing but everlasting gratitude. Yet as the years fell away behind him and eternity stretched ahead, he continued to examine and reexamine the question of his existence, his being, as if he had never done it before. A vampire of complacent or less sensitive nature might have said, “Be grateful for what you have. Do not question it.” But he did. Sometimes he wondered what his life would have been like if he hadn’t become a vampire. Of course he’d be dust by now, a gaping skull, a scatter of brittle bones. Yes, he knew that, but what would his survivors have written on his gravestone? That he had been a famous man? What would have killed him? A cuckolded husband? A fall down tavern stairs? The lingering horror of cancer? And what age would he have been? Taken in the full bloom of youth, perhaps on the field of battle, or shuffling off this mortal coil in doddering old age? So many questions.

  It was vanity that made him wonder about the life he might have led; in his dream life, he would have been a celebrated man, or so he hoped. But that wasn’t all of it: He had an inquiring mind. He was a bit of a gadabout in his thinking, yet he did consider many serious subjects. Was there, for instance, such a thing as a moral vampire? Could a being such as himself, who killed in order to live, even consider the possibility of a moral life? The answer to those questions had to be no because a vampire didn’t just kill to survive; he loved to kill. There was no getting around that.

  Van Diemen didn’t know if there were vampires who hated to kill, or at least did it with reluctance; there might be but surely he wasn’t one of them. For him, the hunt for a victim was as exciting as the killing itself, and there was a strong streak of sadism in him that could not be suppressed or denied. Earlier that night, why had he said, “You’re lost all right,” to the terrified Puerto Rican if not to enjoy the thrill of the other man’s fear? Oh, well, no use going on about it.

  It was the same with sex. How many stormy nights, gorged with blood, body strong and warm, penis erect, had he swooped down on some woman making her way home along a silent street or foolish enough to be jogging alone at a late hour on the edge of some park. How many women had awakened to find him standing by their beds. And all this in spite of the fact that he had five mortal mistresses waiting for him in various parts of the city. Young and beautiful, they lived in luxury, and they were willing to do anything that pleased him, no matter how bizarre to them. He had chosen them well and lavished money on them. All he asked in return was that they be available between the hours of dusk and dawn.

  It was an unusual arrangement, to be sure, but he insisted on it. If one of the women didn’t like it, he would find another. He’d only had to find replacements twice in recent years. One of the women had refused to settle for her very generous severance pay. She’d thought she could make a stink though she had no idea who Van Diemen really was or where he lived. She’d even hinted at a palimony suit; so he had to settle her another way, sucking her dry before he dropped her body far out at sea. It was so convenient being able to transform himself into a giant bat.

  That metamorphosis had not been easy at first: He had spent years in the effort, calling on all his reserves of willpower before he had taken flight one stormy night early in the nineteenth century. Electrical storms always brought out the best—and the worst—in Van Diemen. On nights when the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, his hunger for women became insatiable. But always he would feed before he set out to find a woman, and in this way, he could give her his fullest attention. If he happened to find a woman in a place too public for sexual frenzy, he would seize her in his great curved beak and carry her to some secluded spot, where he could enjoy her in safety. A vampire but not a necrophile, he preferred a living woman to a corpse, but all too often the women he seized died of fright before he was ready for them. Even so, a lovely corpse had its uses, and he made the most of what he had.

  But such nights were rare. Usually, when the skies were untroubled by storms, he might visit one of his five mistresses. Five seemed the right number for him, though there was nothing cabalistic about it. He was wealthy enough to support fifty extravagant women, and though the thought amused him, there was no point to it.

  Indeed, he had much more in his life besides sexual intercourse. He had his library and his art collection, and now he had his writing. Much as he enjoyed women, their prattle could and did become tiresome. It was his mistresses who did the prattling; the women he picked up didn’t get a chance to say anything. At times he was tempted to enforce the rule of silence on his kept women, but this restriction, he knew, would be asking too much. So when he came calling, it was always as the relaxed sophisticate, the pleasure-loving rich fellow who paid the bills. Having fed first, he would appear at their apartment doors ruddy faced, energetic, and ready for action. Invariably, he would arrive by the taxi he had hailed a few blocks away. The taxi made the arrangement seem normal. Van Diemen smiled. It would be sure to make his mistresses suspicious if he flew in the open window, though he often felt the urge to do it, sadist that he was.

  But, no, he did none of that. Sometimes he brought flowers; once, naughtily, he presented the lady of the evening with a wreath stolen from a fresh grave in Woodlawn Cemetery. But it was Halloween; so she saw the present as a joke. It was important to keep his mistresses in the dark as to who he was, where he had come from. Of course, he could dispose of them if they became too suspicious, but even that would not be necessary. All he had to do was disappear, never to be seen again. What could they do about it, if they felt the need to do anything? However, it was best to let things go their normal way.

  Naturally, some of his women had their suspicions. How could they not?

  His background story, deliberately vague, was that he was an international financier with offices, houses, and apartments all over Europe. Most of his mistresses were readers of People magazine, and they were thrilled to have sex with someone so vital and rich. Van Diemen fed their hunger for money and insider gossip with casual references to Prince Charles, Ross Perot, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Madonna. He didn’t know if they believed him; he just knew they wanted to believe him. The main thing was, he was loaded and never tight with the money.

  Another of his recent mistresses hadn’t been content with the large amounts of money he had given her; the beauty had begun to bug him about marriage. After failing to disabuse her of this notion, Van Diemen had been forced to get rid of her, dropping her from a great height into the filthy Harlem River. His usual routine would have been to dump her off the tip of Long Island, at Montauk Point, where the sharks were; this time, coldly angry, he had made an exception. The woman he put in the dead mistress’s place was better in every way, and her only complaint was that Van Diemen never took her anywhere.

  Van Diemen smiled a little wearily. It was time he rested. He sank down into the r
egion of familiar dreams, none of them disturbing, and the daylight hours passed.

  It was getting dark when he awakened, and he rose without any reluctance. The moment his eyes had opened, he was completely refreshed, full of the sense of well-being, eager to be up and around and doing things. While he slept, his two middle-aged servants, Sandor and Drina, Hungarians of low but functional intelligence, would have cleaned and dusted the library, the place where he spent most of his waking hours. By now they would have retired to their quarters; their orders were never to bother him at night for any reason. They were not allowed to enter his bedchamber, not that they could have if they decided to be disobedient. The thought never entered their heads. Their duties were simple: take in the mail, feed the mastiffs that roamed the grounds of the estate, see to the library, and always make sure that a magnum of iced champagne was ready for their master when he rose.

  Sandor and Drina were not vampires, but they came from a family of great longevity that had served vampire noblemen for centuries. Vampirism was as unnoticed as the air they breathed, the food they ate. Their ancestors had been loyal to lordly vampires; fear and familiarity were mixed in their obedience in equal parts. Sandor and Drina were brother and sister, and Van Diemen had brought their grandparents from Hungary soon after the castle was built. Their parents were born in the castle. They had also died and were buried there. Sandor and Drina were in their fifties now, and Van Diemen could expect them to live for another thirty years. By then they would be feeble, perhaps senile as well: How much more convenient it would be if they had had children. Years back, when Drina was still of childbearing age, Van Diemen had encouraged them to copulate. No encouragement was needed. They had been having sexual intercourse since their teens, but no pregnancy had resulted. Thinking back. Van Diemen decided it was just as well. The offspring of such a couple could only be more feebleminded than themselves. In time Van Diemen would have to find replacements for his servants, but there was no need to worry about that just yet.