Blood and Chrysanthemums

by Nancy Baker

  “I came to see if you were well,” she said softly.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “My hand bleeds. It is nothing.” Despite her protests, he took her hand in his and kissed the bloody streak his comb had left across her soft, cool skin. Her blood tasted like a strange, exotic spice. When he looked into her eyes, they were very dark. Then she drew her hand away and rose to her feet. The moonlight seemed to shine through her robes, outlining her slender body.

  “I must go.”

  “No.” He was half on his feet before he thought, hand out to reach for her.

  “You would have me stay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he answered and caught her sleeve in one hand. She opened her arms and the robes fell away, leaving her naked body gleaming whiter than the silk of the moonlight. Then he pulled her down onto the mats and drowned in the nets of her hair and cool depths of her flesh.

  When he woke, the room was in darkness and he was alone. The scent of her hair clung to him, the taste of her blood was in his mouth. A great weariness hung on him like a burden and it took many moments before he could rise from his blankets and stumble to the doorway. For a moment, he stared unbelieving at the sky and the moon that rode high over his head. It had been that way when the Lady of the Autumn Moon had come to him and surely it must have sunk away during the long hours he had spent in her arms. If the sky were true, he had slept the whole of one day and part of the night.

  Then he looked about him and his disbelief deepened. The garden that the previous night had been merely overgrown was now choked in weed and vines. A tree bent over the pool in which he had bathed, dropping its leaves to lie on the clouded water. The house around him was equally changed. The heavy eaves had collapsed in places and the wooden veranda beneath his feet was crumbling with rot.

  He rushed from room to room, calling for the lady or her maid, but there was no answer save for an owl’s mournful cry somewhere in the forest.

  As he searched, there came the dreadful realization that the lady with whom he had spent the night was no mortal creature, but some ghost or demon into whose lair he had wandered. Her evil accomplished, she had returned to whatever strange realm might claim her.

  For the second time, the young man fled through the woods, leaving behind the ancient, decaying house and the haunting cries of the owls. But he could not flee from the strange and terrifying hunger the lady had left in him and he knew, now that it was too late, that the omens had been true and his journey cursed from the very first step.

  Chapter 20

  October, 1902

  It did not happen exactly like that of course.

  The lady was less supernatural than the story would suggest. The young man was certainly more arrogant.

  But we of the Fujiwara family love words almost as much as we love power and we have given this country great poets as well as manipulative regents.

  When I wrote this journal in my own language, it seemed that I could not help but turn the events into art, the reality into fiction. Fiction was safer for me.

  Now that I have resolved to translate it, as practice in the English which I have struggled to learn, I have also resolved to try to keep the poetry but to add some truths to it as well.

  The diary was dangerous when I began it and is more dangerous now. Yet it is important to me to continue it, to translate it. Perhaps it is only vanity, though I prefer not to believe that. Over the centuries, I have written it for many reasons. It records a past I have feared I might forget. It has allowed me to gain whatever understanding of my state that I have achieved. So I shall continue, despite the new risks that have arisen.

  I have read Mr. Stoker’s book. Though I puzzled through it in his native tongue and not mine, one thing is clear.

  The West has words for what I am, even if the East does not.

  I am, of course, the young man whose unfortunate journey is chronicled in the first tale of this diary. My name is Fujiwara no Sadamori (I cannot yet think of it backwards, as the West demands). I was born in AD 1015, as the West counts years. In thirteen years, I will be nine hundred years old.

  It took me some time to determine the nature of my curse, as I had no convenient mythology to guide me. I searched all the tales of ghosts, demons, and shape-changing creatures that I could remember, but I could find nothing that described my state. During this first time of despair, I wandered in the woods. I almost perished when I fell asleep in a meadow and woke to find the sun burning my flesh, as if it meant to sear it from my bones. I was racked with hunger and thirst, unable to stomach either water or such food as I could find. It was not until I managed to kill a rabbit and bit its throat to drain its blood that I discovered what I now needed to survive.

  On the fourth night after my encounter with the Lady of the Autumn Moon, I came upon a peasant in the woods. I thought that I meant only to hail him, to seek his help, but when he saw me he was frightened. The chase was brief, for I found that I had new strength and speed, despite my hunger. When I caught him, it seemed that a kind of madness came upon me. When it faded, the hunter was dead and my throat was burning with his blood.

  I stayed three more nights in the forest, torn between terror and fascination at what I had become. And last, it became clear to me that the curse, the dark change the lady had wrought in me, had not turned me into a mindless monster. I could not creep about the woods and hills and be content.

  At last, after a long debate with myself about my course, I went to my new posting and said only that I had been attacked by bandits, barely escaping with my life, and, lost and ill, had wandered in the woods for several days.

  I had odd habits, but no one in the province knew me and the locals were willing to believe any eccentricity of a court aristocrat. The barons and their warriors thought me effete for my careful avoidance of the sun. The concubines offered to me thought I was some strange sort of monk, saving my seed to gain greater enlightenment. I do not know what the peasants upon whose blood I fed thought of me, if they had time to think in the moments before they died.

  Gradually, I began to realize that while I was more than mortal, I was less than an all-powerful demon. I had no magical powers beyond my new strength and a will that, with practice, I could briefly impose on others. As the years passed and, behind the powder that whitened it, my face stayed the same, I began to think that I might not die.

  The time went by with surprising speed. Once I passed beyond the stage of blind obsession with my new existence, I found that my life was not all that different than the one I had expected. I did what governing was required of me and watched the nobles around me ape the court of Heian-kyo, hoping through poetry and moon-viewing and the careful cultivation of a fine hand that they could join the “dwellers among the clouds” and knowing all the while that the rank they coveted could be granted only by blood, not by achievement. They thrust their daughters at me and some I took, after my fashion, though of course none of them ever produced the heirs upon which their families had counted.

  Twice I went into the forest to search for the Lady of the Autumn Moon but there was no trace of her. I was never to see her again.

  After forty years, I announced that I was retiring and, after a pilgrimage to Ise, would become a monk. After nights of feasting and gifts, I started back towards Heian-kyo. As before, I was not allowed to travel unescorted and so rode with a company of ten. Four bore my palanquin, two were servants, two, soldiers from the local garrison. The last were sons of a local family, who hoped to find their future in the capital or the monastery.

  We were one day into the mountains when the bandits attacked. As I waited in my palanquin, they killed all my escort save one; one son was allowed to escape back down the trail. As the sun sank, I stepped from the concealing curtains and onto the darkening path. Five bandits were there, three stripping the bodies of wealth, one digging through p
acks searching for wine, the last watching me with a faint smile. When he held out his hand for the promised payment, I killed him and then his fellows. I left one of my bloody robes on the pathway. When the authorities came upon the bodies they would assume that my escort and the bandits had perished battling each other and that I surely must have crawled into the woods to die.

  Alone, I set out for the home of my childhood.

  Chapter 21

  Queen Street was quieter than the last time she had been here, when the summer heat had opened the windows of the street-side restaurants and the people lingered in the steamy air. Now they walked with more purpose, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, as if they could feel the first breath of winter in the breeze.

  Ardeth drifted through the crowds on the sidewalk, just as she had done so many nights before. She had donned her hunting clothes: short black skirt, loose black jacket. She was not really hungry, not yet, but, once she had decided to come back here, there was no other way to dress.

  The sound of acoustic guitar floated to her from ahead on the sidewalk. A small group of people had paused to watch two musicians play and sing. Ardeth hovered on the edge of the circle for a moment, watching. They weren’t bad. Not as good as Sara, of course, but not bad. One of them was even rather attractive, with the beginnings of a dark scruffy beard and blue eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Even the musicians seemed to have acknowledged the coming winter, she thought, noticing the bright woollen fingerless gloves on his hands.

  A shudder of déjà vu swept through her suddenly. She had been here before, had stood on the edge of the crowd and watched two men play and sing. One of those men was now dead, killed when the lassitude she had left in him after drinking his blood had pitched him into the path of a speeding car. The other man was now her sister’s lover.

  Shivering, Ardeth turned away and continued down the street. Don’t think about that, she told herself savagely. Don’t think about the fact that Mickey doesn’t like you, has never really forgiven you for Rick’s death. It was Sara he risked his life to save, not you.

  The street was too full of memories: the corner where she had met her first victim as he was panhandling, the place where Mickey and Rick had played. She forced the images away. She had been happy here, in a way. There had to be places that held no bad memories, place where she had taken pleasure in her rebirth.

  There was a burst of laughter from behind her, then she was engulfed in a wave of black. A group of young men and women surged by her, their dark clothes, white faces and dyed hair proclaiming their destination.

  She could go there too, she realized. The place they sought held no painful memories, only the promise of shelter and satisfaction in the crowded darkness.

  She followed them down the side street, down the flight of stairs that led to the basement club. As the door opened, the thunderous music wrapped around her and pulled her into the funeral gloom. The club was red, smoky haze, lit by crimson lights and candelabra. Everywhere she looked, there were pale face, red mouths, black heads. It was like being surrounded by mirrors.

  She had come here several times during the summer of her rebirth. It had been a perfect place to hide and the perfect place to hunt.

  Where better to hide than a club full of people who looked even more exotic than she did? Where better to hunt than a crowd of people who wanted to meet vampires . . . or be them?

  Ardeth let the music draw her out onto the dance floor. It loosened her spine with its snaky rhythms and blotted out her memories with the rumble of guitars. She closed her eyes and allowed the world to recede into dark smoky space.

  When she opened them, there was a young man dancing beside her. He had a spiky crown of bleached hair with skin nearly as white. Rings glinted in his ears, through his nose, in his lip. When he looked at her, she saw that his eyes were like her own, a soft brown that somehow didn’t match his stark image.

  She smiled a little and his lips echoed the motion. Two confused, contradictory thoughts flickered through her mind. I wonder what else he has pierced? I wonder if he can be as young as he looks?

  It would be so easy. Easier than the boy in the frat house. She had only to let a hint of what she was show through and he would go with her into some sheltering alley. He would welcome her with open arms and, if she let him remember the truth of the experience, come back looking for her.

  Then it would be easy to do it again. And again. She looked around the room at the dark mass of people reflected in the mirror. Perhaps this could be her life once more. Perhaps here she could find a place where she belonged.

  The music slowed slightly, shifted to a subtly, sensuous rhythm. The boy moving at her side smiled and, at the answering flicker of her eyes, moved closer. He looked as if he wanted to speak to her, but the music was still too loud for that. Ardeth was grateful for the noise, for the anonymous crush of the bodies brushing around them. When he put his hand on her shoulder and leaned closer, shouting something, she shook her head and smiled. Her hips touched his.

  He didn’t try to speak again, just let the music melt their bodies closer into the smoky heat. Ardeth felt his hands stroke the line of her spine then drift up to brush the nape of her neck hidden beneath the fall of her hair. She closed her eyes and put her head against his shoulder. His throat was inches from her mouth. Easy, she thought dreamily, watching the slow turn of the skeleton earring that dangled from his ear. It would be so easy. Just a simple movement and I could be feeding, here on the dance floor. Just that one simple movement and I could stay here forever in this sweet dream.

  Except that none of it would be real, she realized with icy clarity. All the pale faces and black lined eyes did not reflect her as she had thought with such blind narcissism. It was simply that she had remade herself in the image that they worshipped. They wanted their vampires beautiful and dangerous, exotic and otherworldly. They wanted the tragic aristocrat, the fallen angel, the irresistible sexual force.

  Face it, Ardeth thought bitterly, that’s what you wanted too. Oh, it was more than that with you and Dimitri, but that was there was well. You wanted him to be that image and you made yourself over to embody it. And when neither of you could live up to it, when the reality of love and need and straightforward mechanics of night-to-night existence got too much for you, you ran away. Both of us ran away, she reminded herself harshly. And he went first.

  The boy who held her turned his head and smiled again. For the first time, she noticed his eyeteeth had been filed to sharp points.

  A wave of nausea swept over her. The ceiling seemed suddenly too low, too close. The white faces hung around her in the darkness, their painted lips sneering. Disgust, at them, at herself, churned her throat. She pulled away from the boy’s arms and fled from the dance floor, stumbling through the press of people and forcing her way back out into the clean, chilly air.

  She leaned for a moment on the wall outside the door, breathing hard. Even this had been tainted now. She could never go back without seeing its falseness and the mocking image of a fictional life she could never lead. Rozokov, let me go, she thought, her anger warping and twisting as it sought a reason or a target. If I could just stop thinking about you, I’d be fine. She forced herself to stand and start walking again, moving blindly back to Queen Street and the dubious shelter of the crowd.

  At last, she found herself outside The Gold Rush, staring at Sara’s picture, gazing back at her from the publicity photos. Black Sun was playing inside, or would be in a while. She could go in and watch . . . except that someone might remember her face from Sara’s poster campaign to find her lost sister. Would it matter? She asked herself. You are planning to come back. Why not now?

  She didn’t have an answer to that, but still she put on her sunglasses before she went inside to ask Sara. They had agreed on a code, just in case. “Just tell her Chris Lee was by,” Ardeth said, trying hard not to smile at the name Sara had chosen. “If she’s got a min
ute, I’ll meet her out back.”

  The doorman agreed to send the message backstage and Ardeth went around the back door, waiting in the narrow alley until the door opened. The painful déjà vu came again. She remembered Mickey stepping out into the alley and telling them that Sara had been kidnapped and the price of her return was her surrender.

  But it was Sara herself this time, dressed in torn jeans and band T-shirt, her hair a copper corona around her face. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods? I thought you were returning to the old Ardeth?”

  “Just looking around. Maybe I’ll return to the not-so-old Ardeth instead.” The uneasiness in Sara’s voice had sparked a sharpness in her own and there was an uncomfortable silence.

  “You going to come in and catch the set?” Sara asked at last. “We’re doing your song—‘Gone Missing.’”

  “You still sing that?” Ardeth asked, remembering the last time she had seen Sara play. She had stood in the audience, listening to the lament for a lost sister, her heart torn between anger that her sister had somehow laid claim on her disappearance and sorrow at the realization that Sara missed her, grieved for her.

  “Of course. It’ll be on the record when we do one. Didn’t you like it?”

  “It’s a good song. Even I could tell that. But I’m not missing anymore.”

  “Yes, you are, Ardy,” Sara said softly. “We both know that my big sister is never coming back.”

  “Sara . . .” She wanted to go on. She wanted to cry out, I’m here, can’t you see me? Can’t you feel me? But the words would not shape themselves.

  “You can still make it to the airport,” her sister repeated. “Akiko said they wouldn’t take off until midnight. I double-checked. It’s only ten now.”