“‘Weak heart,’ says she, ‘weak heart; weak fiddlesticks! There ain’t nothin’ weak about that woman. She’s got strength enough to hang onto other folks till she kills ’em. Weak? It was my poor mother that was weak: this woman killed her as sure as if she had taken a knife to her.’
“But the doctor he didn’t pay much attention. He was bendin’ over Luella layin’ there with her yellow hair all streamin’ and her pretty pink-and-white face all pale, and her blue eyes like stars gone out, and he was holdin’ onto her hand and smoothin’ her forehead, and tellin’ me to get the brandy in Aunt Abby’s room, and I was sure as I wanted to be that Luella had got somebody else to hang onto, now Aunt Abby was gone, and I thought of poor Erastus Miller, and I sort of pitied the poor young doctor, led away by a pretty face, and I made up my mind I’d see what I could do.
“I waited till Aunt Abby had been dead and buried about a month, and the doctor was goin’ to see Luella steady and folks were beginnin’ to talk; then one evenin’, when I knew the doctor had been called out of town and wouldn’t be round, I went over to Luella’s. I found her all dressed up in a blue muslin with white polka dots on it, and her hair curled jest as pretty, and there wa’n’t a young girl in the place could compare with her. There was somethin’ about Luella Miller seemed to draw the heart right out of you, but she didn’t draw it out of me. She was settin’ rocking in the chair by her sittin’-room window, and Maria Brown had gone home. Maria Brown had been in to help her, or rather to do the work, for Luella wa’n’t helped when she didn’t do anythin’. Maria Brown was real capable and she didn’t have any ties; she wa’n’t married, and lived alone, so she’d offered. I couldn’t see why she should do the work any more than Luella; she wa’n’t any too strong; but she seemed to think she could and Luella seemed to think so, too, so she went over and did all the work—washed, and ironed, and baked, while Luella sat and rocked. Maria didn’t live long afterward. She began to fade away just the same fashion the others had. Well, she was warned, but she acted real mad when folks said anythin’: said Luella was a poor, abused woman, too delicate to help herself, and they’d ought to be ashamed, and if she died helpin’ them that couldn’t help themselves she would—and she did.
“‘I s’pose Maria has gone home,’ says I to Luella, when I had gone in and sat down opposite her.
“‘Yes, Maria went half an hour ago, after she had got supper and washed the dishes,’ says Luella, in her pretty way.
“‘I suppose she has got a lot of work to do in her own house tonight,’ says I, kind of bitter, but that was all thrown away on Luella Miller. It seemed to her right that other folks that wa’n’t any better able than she was herself should wait on her, and she couldn’t get it through her head that anybody should think it wa’n’t right.
“‘Yes,’ says Luella, real sweet and pretty, ‘yes, she said she had to do her washin’ tonight. She has let it go for a fortnight along of comin’ over here.’
“‘Why don’t she stay home and do her washin’ instead of comin’ over here and doin’ your work, when you are just as well able, and enough sight more so, than she is to do it?’ says I.
“Then Luella she looked at me like a baby who has a rattle shook at it. She sort of laughed as innocent as you please. ‘Oh, I can’t do the work myself, Miss Anderson,’ says she. ‘I never did. Maria has to do it.’
“Then I spoke out: ‘Has to do it!’ says I. ‘Has to do it!’ She don’t have to do it, either. Maria Brown has her own home and enough to live on. She ain’t beholden to you to come over here and slave for you and kill herself.’
“Luella she jest set and stared at me for all the world like a doll-baby that was so abused that it was comin’ to life.
“‘Yes,’ says I, ‘she’s killin’ herself. She’s goin’ to die just the way Erastus did, and Lily, and your Aunt Abby. You’re killin’ her jest as you did them. I don’t know what there is about you, but you seem to bring a curse,’ says I. ‘You kill everybody that is fool enough to care anythin’ about you and do for you.’
“She stared at me and she was pretty pale.
“‘And Maria ain’t the only one you’re goin’ to kill,’ says I. ‘You’re goin’ to kill Doctor Malcom before you’re done with him.’
“Then a red color came flamin’ all over her face. ‘I ain’t goin’ to kill him, either,’ says she, and she begun to cry.
“‘Yes, you be!’ says I. Then I spoke as I had never spoke before. You see, I felt it on account of Erastus. I told her that she hadn’t any business to think of another man after she’d been married to one that had died for her: that she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that’s true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it—if she wa’n’t like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin’ everybody without knowin’ what it was doin’.
“Luella she kept gettin’ paler and paler, and she never took her eyes off my face. There was somethin’ awful about the way she looked at me and never spoke one word. After awhile I quit talkin’ and I went home. I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o’clock, and when Doctor Malcom came drivin’ past and sort of slowed up he see there wa’n’t any light and he drove along. I saw her sort of shy out of meetin’ the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn’t go home with her, and I begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all. It was only a week after that that Maria Brown died—sort of sudden at the last, though everybody had seen it was comin’. Well, then there was a good deal of feelin’ and pretty dark whispers. Folks said the days of witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella. She acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn’t go there, and there wa’n’t anybody to do anythin’ for her. I don’t know how she did get along. I wouldn’t go in there and offer to help her—not because I was afraid of dyin’ like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was about time that she did it and stopped killin’ other folks. But it wa’n’t very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was goin’ into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad. I used to see her goin’ past from the store with a bundle as if she could hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and ’tend when he couldn’t hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn’t go out to help her.
“But at last one afternoon I saw the doctor come drivin’ up like mad with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said that Luella was real sick.
“‘I’d offer to go in and nurse her,’ says she, ‘but I’ve got my children to consider, and mebbe it ain’t true what they say, but it’s queer how many folks that have done for her have died.’
“I didn’t say anythin’, but I considered how she had been Erastus’s wife and how he had set his eyes by her, and I made up my mind to go in the next mornin’, unless she was better, and see what I could do; but the next mornin’ I see her at the window, and pretty soon she came steppin’ out as spry as you please, and a little while afterward Mrs. Babbit came in and told me that the doctor had got a girl from out of town, a Sarah Jones, to come there, and she said she was pretty sure that the doctor was goin’ to marry Luella.
“I saw him kiss her in the door that night myself, and I knew it was true. The woman came that afternoon, and the way she flew around was a caution. I don’t believe Luella had swept since Maria died. She swept and dusted, and washed and ironed; wet clothes and dusters and carpets were flyin’ over there all day, and every time Luella set her foot out when the doctor wa’n’t there there was that Sarah Jones helpin’ of her up and down the steps, as if she hadn’t learned to walk.
“Well, everybody knew that Luella and the doctor were goin’ to be married, but it wa’n’t long before they began to talk about his lookin’ so poorly, jest as they had about the others; and they talked about Sarah Jones, too.
“Well, the doctor did die, and he wanted to be
married first, so as to leave what little he had to Luella, but he died before the minister could get there, and Sarah Jones died a week afterward.
“Well, that wound up everything for Luella Miller. Not another soul in the whole town would lift a finger for her. There got to be a sort of panic. Then she began to droop in good earnest. She used to have to go to the store herself, for Mrs. Babbit was afraid to let Tommy go for her, and I’ve seen her goin’ past and stoppin’ every two or three steps to rest. Well, I stood it as long as I could, but one day I see her comin’ with her arms full and stoppin’ to lean against the Babbit fence, and I run out and took her bundles and carried them to her house. Then I went home and never spoke one word to her though she called after me dreadful kind of pitiful. Well, that night I was taken sick with a chill, and I was sick as I wanted to be for two weeks. Mrs. Babbit had seen me run out to help Luella and she came in and told me I was goin’ to die on account of it. I didn’t know whether I was or not, but I considered I had done right by Erastus’s wife.
“That last two weeks Luella she had a dreadful hard time, I guess. She was pretty sick, and as near as I could make out nobody dared go near her. I don’t know as she was really needin’ anythin’ very much, for there was enough to eat in her house and it was warm weather, and she made out to cook a little flour gruel every day, I know, but I guess she had a hard time, she that had been so petted and done for all her life.
“When I got so I could go out, I went over there one morning. Mrs. Babbit had just come in to say she hadn’t seen any smoke and she didn’t know but it was somebody’s duty to go in, but she couldn’t help thinkin’ of her children, and I got right up, though I hadn’t been out of the house for two weeks, and I went in there, and Luella she was layin’ on the bed, and she was dyin’.
“She lasted all that day and into the night. But I sat there after the new doctor had gone away. Nobody else dared to go there. It was about midnight that I left her for a minute to run home and get some medicine I had been takin’, for I begun to feel rather bad.
“It was a full moon that night, and just as I started out of my door to cross the street back to Luella’s, I stopped short, for I saw something.”
Lydia Anderson at this juncture always said with a certain defiance that she did not expect to be believed, and then proceeded in a hushed voice:
“I saw what I saw, and I know I saw it, and I will swear on my death bed that I saw it. I saw Luella Miller and Erastus Miller, and Lily, and Aunt Abby, and Maria, and the doctor, and Sarah, all goin’ out of her door, and all but Luella shone white in the moonlight, and they were all helpin’ her along till she seemed to fairly fly in the midst of them. Then it all disappeared. I stood a minute with my heart poundin’, then I went over there. I thought of goin’ for Mrs. Babbit, but I thought she’d be afraid. So I went alone, though I knew what had happened. Luella was layin’ real peaceful, dead on her bed.”
This was the story that the old woman, Lydia Anderson, told, but the sequel was told by the people who survived her, and this is the tale which has become folklore in the village.
Lydia Anderson died when she was eighty-seven. She had continued wonderfully hale and hearty for one of her years until about two weeks before her death.
One bright moonlight evening she was sitting beside a window in her parlor when she made a sudden exclamation, and was out of the house and across the street before the neighbor who was taking care of her could stop her. She followed as fast as possible and found Lydia Anderson stretched on the ground before the door of Luella Miller’s deserted house, and she was quite dead.
The next night there was a red gleam of fire athwart the moonlight and the old house of Luella Miller was burned to the ground. Nothing is now left of it except a few old cellar stones and a lilac bush, and in summer a helpless trail of morning glories among the weeds, which might be considered emblematic of Luella herself.
SANGRE
Lisa Tuttle
Lisa Tuttle was born in Texas but has lived in the United Kingdom for nearly four decades. Her novels include Windhaven (with George R. R. Martin), Familiar Spirit, Gabriel, Lost Futures, The Pillow Friend, The Silver Bough, The Mysteries, and the first in the Jesperson and Lane series, The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist & the Psychic Thief.
The author of numerous short stories, including the International Horror Guild Award-winning “Closet Dreams,” her fiction has been collected in A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories, A Nest of Nightmares, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation, My Pathology, and Stranger in the House. She has also edited the anthologies Skin of the Soul and Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity.
“Although I’ve often used the vampire theme metaphorically,” says the author, “I think ‘Sangre’ is the only time I’ve written about a traditional, blood-drinking vampire …”
GLENDA STEPPED OUT of the shower and stopped before the mirror. Her hair looped up and confined beneath a shower cap left her long neck bare and made her eyes look larger and darker.
“You look Spanish,” Steve said.
She didn’t turn, but continued staring at herself in the mirror, her beautiful face impassive.
He put his hands on her wet shoulders, bent his head to kiss her neck.
“Dry me,” she said.
He picked up a towel and patted her reverently, tenderly dry. She reached up and pulled off the cap and let her hair tumble, a flow of honey and brown, to her waist. He caught his breath.
“When is checkout?” she asked.
“Noon.”
Now she turned to face him. “And then what? After we leave an hour from now, then what?”
“Anything you want. I’ll take you to lunch anywhere you say, and then we’ll have time to do a little shopping before you have to be at the airport. Anything you want.” His eyes pleaded with her.
“Anything you want,” she mimicked. Her face contorted in anger; she gave the towel he still held a jerk and wrapped it around herself. “How can you?”
“Glenda—”
“I’m not talking about today! I’m talking about what after today? When I come back, do we just pretend it never happened? Do we just forget about us? How can you take me out and screw me, and then go tripping home to my mother? And what is this trip to Spain thing? Can’t you handle it anymore? Mother getting suspicious?”
“Darling, don’t. Of course I don’t want you out of the way. I love you. And I love your mother. Believe me, this is as hard for me—”
“Oh, sure it is. Just tell me this—why should I be the one to lose? What happens to me after you marry my mother?”
“Sweetheart, try to understand …”
“Oh, yes, I’m the one who has to understand, and Mother’s the one who doesn’t suspect. Just how long do you think that’s going to last?”
“In time,” he said, straining for patience, for the sound of wisdom in his voice, “in time I hope we … the three of us … can work something out. But this is very difficult. You, you’re young, while people like your mother and myself are very much shackled by the old morality; you can accept relationships that are … more free … and in time, maybe after your mother and I are married, the three of us can …” he faltered and stopped. Her expression mocked him.
“I never lied to you,” he said, suddenly defensive, suddenly angrily sure that he was making a fool of himself. “You knew what you were getting into; you knew who I was when you became my mistress—”
“Mistress.” She said the word with loathing, and he caught the steely glint of hatred in her eyes. He tried to recoup but before he could speak she shook her head impatiently and let the towel drop.
“Well,” she said. “We’ve still got an hour.”
Debbie opened her mouth and desperately forced a yawn as the plane began to take off. As the air pressure stabilized she turned to Glenda and said approvingly, “Your stepfather is good-looking.”
“Steve’s not my stepfather.”
“July. Right after I come back from Spain.” Glenda laid her cheek against the window and shut her eyes.
“He looks awfully young.”
Glenda shrugged. “A couple of years younger than my mother.”
Debbie bent her dark head over her copy of The Sun Also Rises when it became obvious that Glenda was in no mood for conversation. The two had played together as children and remained friends into the same college in an undemanding, almost superficial fashion.
Glenda chewed her lip. “Look what he gave me,” she said suddenly, holding out her hand. “Steve, I mean.” It was a silver ring, very simple, the ends bent into a curving “S” design. It had been made for her while she watched in the narrow dark handcrafts shop, clutching Steve’s hand with emotion she didn’t show on her calm face.
Debbie nodded. “Pretty. He’s paying for this trip, isn’t he?”
“He insisted. And Mother—well, she’s so hung up on him that whatever he says is fine with her.”
“I think it’s great,” Debbie said. “Your mother getting married again. And you like him so much, too.”
“Oh, we’re great friends.”
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 26