The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  “Excusez-moi,” she said as he approached, turning her great dark eyes on him. “Do you have the time?”

  He stopped, looked at his watch. He had on little round wire-rimmed glasses, like Sawyer Ballard. “Sure,” he agreed, eyeing the white globes of her breasts, just visible over the neckline of her dress. “I’ll give you the time. But not if he’s watching.”

  “Run,” I urged him. “Run away while you still can. She’s a monster.”

  “Look in my eyes,” she commanded. He tore himself away from admiring her breasts, met her gaze. His chin was smooth and hairless; he was barely old enough to shave. “Lovely.” she murmured. “Just lovely.” And then her hands were pinning him to the brick wall, her long fingers loosening his tie, undoing his shirt collar.

  It was all gruesomely familiar. Her lips gaped wide in a smile, and then she was upon him. He wrenched himself upright, tried to work her fingers off of his shoulders, but she was relentless. In another moment, his legs buckled under him.

  I could have saved him. At any time I could have stopped her, hauled her off of him. But I stood and watched. Hypnotized. Mesmerized. Salivating.

  She lifted her head. Blood stained her lips a glossy red. “Go on,” she said solicitously, gesturing at the poor boy shuddering on the paving stones.

  “Good God!” I said. “I’m going to get the police.” But I didn’t move. I was staring at the pool of blood widening under his head. Staring at his torn throat. Licking my lips.

  Something strange was happening to me; I could feel muscles in my face working. My mouth felt swollen, distended. Puzzled, I raised my hand, touched my fingertips to my teeth.

  Fangs. The strange swollen feeling came from sharp triangular fangs, descending from the top of my gums.

  I choked on the words. “What have you done to me?”

  “I made you better.” she whispered, with a secret smile.

  I stumbled away, away from the terrible sight, away from the impossible, hallucinatory truth. I didn’t get far; the world began to spin, and I went down, whacking my head on the pavement.

  She was there at once, sympathetically tsk-tsking. She took a handkerchief out of a little satin bag, dabbed it on my forehead.

  “Raphael Sinclair.” she said firmly. “You can be angry at me later. But now, you really must drink. We can’t have you fainting all over town.” She got her arms under me, lifted me to my feet. I was too weak to resist. She deposited me in on my knees before the dying boy.

  His eyes were open; he was breathing very quickly, short shallow breaths. He had lost his glasses. They lay near his hand where they had fallen, the lenses cracked. Fiercely, I shook my head no.

  “Why not?” she said. “Of course. You are squeamish. You would prefer a steak. Well, my dear. The time for steak is over. Right now, we must hurry. You may be immortal, but it is still possible to starve to death.”

  He was weeping now. A terrible price to pay for choosing the wrong way home. In a daze, I watched his life gushing out of him into the cracks between the cobblestones. The coppery smell of blood filled the air. Insatiable hunger expanded in my chest, taking over my brain like an electrical storm. Revolted, desperate, I crouched over, touched my tongue to the blood coating the paving stones.

  The taste hit me like a thunderbolt.

  Rich, velvety, winey, briny, delicious blood. It filled my stomach and slaked my thirst; it banished the cold and made me hungry for more.

  I took his head in my hands as if he were a lover, turned his face away from me. And then I put my lips to his throat.

  I sucked and I sucked and I sucked. I drained the life out of him and into myself, until my hands were warm and his body was cold. And when I was done—when there was no more—I sat back on my knees and heaved a sigh of relief.

  The days after that are dark and filled with half-memories.

  At nightfall, I would wake up cursing Anastasia—for it was Anastasia, if you haven’t guessed by now—for making me a monster, swearing I’d rather die than live this way. By morning, I had my fangs in some frightened shopgirl who’d stopped to give me the time. Remarkable what a human being is capable of in the struggle to survive.

  She was in London for business, not pleasure. The man I had seen her with was Rudolph von Theissen, a wealthy German attaché with corrupt tastes who was her sometime lover, as well as the financial backer of her fashion enterprise.

  She’d been biding her time, waiting for me, ever since that first time we met in La Coupole all those months ago. When I asked her why, she laughed, lolling over on the cream-colored satin sheets. “Of course, you are beautiful,” she said. “Also, you were embracing tragedy with both arms, like a man who lies down in front of a speeding train. The way you followed around that Jewish girl, knowing you never had a chance! Let’s face it, my darling. It was only a matter of time. All I did was give you a push.”

  I moved in with my ancestors at the mausoleum in Highgate. It felt appropriate, somehow, and it offered a certain amount of privacy that was lacking in the center of London. There was allegedly a Highgate vampire roaming the grounds, but I never saw him. For a short while, I filled his undead shoes.

  Through the long, hot end-of-summer days I slept in the cool stone sarcophagus that had served as my coffin. I rose at sundown to stalk the sad, the lost, the lonely, unfortunate enough to stray across my path. Though the gates were closed and locked at night, there was always someone foolish enough, or grieving enough, to slip through.

  The pale young widow who couldn’t bear to part with her new husband’s company, though he lay in his grave. An old pensioner with leaking eyes who couldn’t believe his wife of forty-seven years had predeceased him. A sylph-like creature who returned night after night to weep at the crypt of a boy who fell in the Great War. A twelve-year-old orphan who wanted only to be reunited with her mother in heaven. A hollow-eyed mother dressed all in black who had sat by a sick child’s bed and would not leave that child’s side now, though he slept in the ground.

  I became a connoisseur of death. I found that if I stared into my victims’ eyes long enough, they would surrender themselves up to me with little or no struggle. I found that I could draw life from different places on the human body; the blue artery on the underside of a wrist, the chalice of a soft belly, the inside of a silky thigh. By trial and error, I found that I could take just enough so that my benefactor lived to walk out the gate the next morning. I found that some girls rather liked it. To make love in a graveyard is to shake a fist at death.

  Eventually, I lost track of time. Every day was like the next, distinguished only by who I consumed and how. The leaves turned yellow and red and brown, then fell. The air grew brisk, then bracing, then cold. Snow dusted the Victorian angels and winged cherubs, frosted the roofs of the mausoleums as if they were gingerbread houses. A white mist clung to the ground, like ghosts filtering through the trees. I could never get warm, unless I had just fed. I chose one fellow for the size of his coat.

  One night, long after dark, I heard footsteps. I halted in what I was doing, finding a final resting place for a furtive-eyed fellow with a shovel and a bag—God knows what he was looking for, but I found him first—lifted my head, and listened. It seemed to be coming from a close, circular path overhung by beech and hornbeam trees that wound its way through a city of Gothic tombs, part of the old Western section.

  There were no signs of stealth, no hushed whispers, just the slow click-clack of stiletto heels and the papery swishing of many yards of silk. With the wind moaning and the bare black branches crooked like witches’ fingers, even I was a bit leery.

  I made out a tall, regal, dark-haired woman in an orange silk sari. No hat, no gloves, no fear. Anastasia.

  I resisted the urge to duck into the nearest doorway and hide until she passed. But I brushed myself off—I had become rather disheveled during my tenure in Highgate, what with the one suit of clothes and no bathing and all—ran my fingers through my hair in a futile attempt at gro
oming and stepped through the squealing metal grille.

  She halted, put her hand to her heart and gasped. Then she broke into laughter. “Ça va, Monsieur Sinclair?” she said warmly, taking in my dishabille.

  “What do you want?” I growled. I pushed open a sarcophagus. Inside was a skeleton dressed in wispy Victorian weeds, the long hair still rich and red, bony fingers clamped around a posy of dried black violets tied with a black ribbon.

  “I wanted to meet this Highgate vampire that I’ve been hearing so much about,” she replied vivaciously. “It looks like you have gotten over your bourgeois squeamishness, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Couldn’t have done it without you.” I snarled, dumping body and bag atop the skeleton. The bones made a rattling sound like dice being thrown across a gaming table.

  Anastasia rolled her eyes. “So much sturm und drang. Well, my darling. I came to see how you are doing because tomorrow I am leaving.”

  I replaced the sarcophagus cover, a heavy stone thing that weighed hundreds of pounds. If that was so, I would be truly alone. “What about your boyfriend?”

  She looked reflective. “Rudi was called back to Berlin. That’s the coup de grâce for my little fashion house.” She looked at me more closely. “Can it be you do not know? You haven’t seen the papers? Hitler sent his tanks into Poland. Britain and France declared war. It has begun.”

  Poland. Sofia, my Sofia. I felt a sharp, familiar pain.

  “There’s nothing like a war,” Anastasia went on mistily. “Buildings on fire. Bombs falling from the sky. Smoke filling the air. Confusion everywhere.” Her eyes glimmered with the kind of expression usually reserved for acts of passion. “Women and children left to manage on their own. Girls sent out to do a man’s job. Bodies scattered across the countryside. Chaos. And everywhere, everywhere, soldiers in adorable uniforms.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty nice place here.” By this I meant that I had stolen an oriental rug from a clothesline in Hampstead and also a nice feather quilt.

  Her big round eyes fastened on mine. “Come with me, Raphael.” she said, extending her hand to me. It gleamed white as bone in the moonlight. “I’ll show you the world like you’ve never seen it.” And after a moment, I acquiesced, abandoning the cemetery to the absent vampire and the creeping vines forever.

  We drifted around for a while after that. There was no rush for Anastasia to return to Paris; the fashion houses were all closing up shop or moving in anticipation of war.

  We did as rich people do; while ordinary Londoners tearfully evacuated their children to the country to keep them safe from the brutal, take-no-prisoners warfare Hitler had perfected in the medieval town squares of Poland, we went touring.

  We headed south, warming ourselves on Greek islands, the fabled Côte d’Azure, the Dalmatian coast. By day we slept in rooms shuttered from the sun. By night we walked the streets, feeding on easy pickings from the service industry that always revolved like satellites around the idle rich.

  On June 3, 1940, bombs began to fall on France. Three weeks later, Hitler was posing for snaps in front of the Eiffel Tower. We were in Antibes when Anastasia got the telegram from Rudi. His frau and four stocky children were staying firmly put in the castle on the Rhine. For the duration of the war, he installed Anastasia at the Ritz.

  I wasn’t ready to return to Paris. The memories were too new, too raw. It was like watching the movie of my life story playing out around me, but all the major actors had left for other projects, and there was nothing left but the sets.

  So I journeyed to London, taking over my father’s house. When the neighbors commented that they hadn’t seen the old boy for some time, I told them he’d been called upon to invent something for the war effort, very big, very hush hush. They nodded wisely, say no more, say no more.

  The Germans started bombing in August.

  Anastasia was right; war is beautiful, especially at night. The wail of the air raid siren. The deafening drone of bombers flying low overhead, grouped so tightly that they blocked out the moon. Searchlights crossing and crisscrossing the sky. Entire blocks of eighteenth-century Georgian townhouses erupting into giant fireballs, shivering and splintering down into the street. The continual thunderous thud-thud-boom of exploding shells approaching, reverberating off the buildings, the earth shaking beneath my feet. Unidentified glowy things floating through the blackness and then incandescing into a rain of fire. Crackling orange firepits of burning rubble that used to be a grocer, or a school, or a cathedral.

  This was my Blitz. Smoke limiting visibility, making it very easy for a fellow to find a meal. Helpless lovelies trapped in the ruins of collapsed buildings waiting for a bloke to pull them out. Solitary men clutching binoculars, perched atop buildings, hoping to be the first to spot the airplanes. Tasty tidbits sheltering in the shadowy recesses of the Tube. Armies of the newly displaced, heading for the outskirts of the city, or camping out in the split-open ruins of their homes. In wartime, people disappear all the time.

  “You said you took over your father’s house,” said Tessa. “Where did he go?”

  “I, ah,” he looked uncomfortable, lapsed into silence.

  She paled. “Did you…um, did you…”

  “Did I drink his blood? No. Don’t be silly. Seems a bit like incest, doesn’t it? I let Anastasia do that.”

  She cringed. She was trying to hide it, but he was looking right at her, she definitely cringed.

  Still love me now, sweet girl? Time to change the subject. “Did I ever tell you where I got that one?” He was gazing at the Rembrandt.

  “I thought all the Rembrandts were in museums.”

  “Not this one.” Lovingly, he admired the fleshy feminine figure, the filigree brushwork, the crabbed little men hidden in the shadows, before going on. “Anastasia phoned me in London. She was accompanying Rudi to the East, would I like to come along. This would be late in the spring of 1941.”

  “This Rudi. Was he a Nazi?”

  “Yes. I don’t remember his title exactly. Reich Commissioner of the Department for Raping Countries of Their Natural Resources, something like that.”

  “And you two were…friends?” She had to prod herself to get the word out, as if it tasted bad on her tongue.

  “Friends?” His eyebrows came together. “Not exactly. We shared a lover. He could be useful.”

  Tessa didn’t say anything, but he knew what she was thinking. It was occurring to her for the first time that someone she loved, someone she trusted, might have been on the wrong side of World War II. What could he say? He was guilty, incredibly guilty. As if this were the worst thing he’d admit to tonight.

  With a sibilant hiss, the logs in the fireplace lapsed into ashes. How much should he tell her? he wondered. His stories were part of Tessa’s history, she had as much a right to them as he did. But knowledge was a double-edged sword. What dreadful images might he set free to pursue her, night after night, through her dreams? What was necessary, and what was dangerous?

  He’d lost the thread of the conversation. “What was I saying?”

  “Anastasia. The East. Rembrandt.”

  Her voice anchored him in the present. He adjusted the painting a fraction of an inch. “Right then.”

  Rudi had promised Anastasia a pleasure trip to see the ruins of a castle she used to live in, belonging to the bloke who’d changed her. Well. Belonged to him before he was staked, beheaded, and burned, that is.

  But first, he had the Reich’s interests to look out for. The places we would visit produced oil, coal, chemicals, copper, zinc and wheat, essential resources Hitler required to continue making war. He rolled his eyes in telling us this information, as if we were children and he was dragging us to a boring grownup chore before going to the park.

  We traveled by night, stopping by day in the grandest hotels Old Europe had to offer. After dark we emerged to dine on clean, safe streets, in well-manicured parks, on well-fed, gainfully employed citizens of the T
hird Reich.

  At a cocktail party in Amsterdam, Rudi introduced me to someone who mentioned that he was holding something especially nice, for a real connoisseur, very confidential, a real bargain. The next evening, there was a soft knock at the door of my room. A nervous little man was selling a painting for a friend who needed the cash, a small Rembrandt, Susannah bathing. I would be doing him a favor, actually. American dollars only, bitte.

  This is when I began to acquire art in a serious way.

  In Amsterdam, there were the Michelangelo drawings, a sweet Madonna, a playful child, the pencil lines as fresh and spontaneous as the moment he’d finished it. In Vienna, I came into possession of the Klimt, also a set of Art Nouveau silver, place settings for forty-eight, in a glossy Rococo wooden box. In Budapest, I picked up the Botticelli and a castle-sized Persian rug, the one in my Great Room. In Prague, I met a man on the old Charles Bridge, under the sculpture of a crucified Christ ringed with golden letters in an exotic alphabet that I recognized from the storefronts in Le Marais. It was a misty night, the great domes of the Old City swam in and out of view in the distance. I was offered a Vermeer, a servant girl pouring milk in the light of the sun streaming in through a window. The seller looked hunted, distracted. He needed to leave the country, he said.

  Of course I knew that the Jews were being persecuted. Everyone knew. You couldn’t walk past a restaurant, a movie theater, or a park bench without coming across those idiotic signs shouting that Jews were unwelcome. What did I care? I was beyond that. In my worldview, the living were all equally delicious.

  All around me, people were disappearing. Somewhere not far away, young men were dying. Just over the border, airplanes flew overhead, raining death from the sky.

  It was open season in Europe, a moveable feast. But I never saw another vampire. I don’t know why. I read somewhere that Hitler believed in the supernatural. Perhaps the undead were frightened too, staying undercover until it all blew over. They alone had all the time in the world.

  It was the middle of June by the time we turned south toward Romania.