In Concert

by Melanie Tem

  “My name is—”

  He thought she hesitated, although the various substances he had taken into his body this evening and many previous evenings had the attraction of making perception unreliable.

  “—Katherine Harker.” Another hesitation, as if she expected some response. “We have met.”

  The surname was familiar but not uncommon, and he discerned no physical resemblance to the Harker he had once known. Doing his best to be, if not quite gallant, at least polite, he reached to tip his hat and discovered it not on his head. Perhaps he had not worn it, or perhaps he had left it at his table where another patron might find and wear or discard it. “Please,” he said, “forgive the memory of an old man.”

  “It was a long time past and a very brief encounter,” she said, “and not under the most favorable of circumstances. But it changed my life.” She gave a harsh laugh. “More accurately, it caused me to want to change my life.”

  Social protocol dictated he inquire as to the particulars, and he wished not to be impolite, even to creatures as unwholesome as she. But a wave of sickness overcame him. He swayed. When she caught and held him, he saw her more closely.

  No taller than his shoulder, and he was not a tall man, she had dark greasy hair and dark complicated eyes shadowed by dense lashes. Her cheekbones made high cliffs, her lips were cracked and slightly parted, her teeth broken. By nature she might be beautiful, but obviously her current situation was extreme. Her hands shook where they clutched his arms.

  “Miss Harker.” Saying the name, he suddenly felt as if he could have known her very well. “How nice to see you again.”

  The doddering old fool did not know who she was, nor did he care. Although using the name Harker had been a risky self-indulgence, she need not have worried; clearly, he was well past his heroic prime. But she knew of no one else who could turn her into what she longed to be.

  Again he stumbled and she caught him, then pushed him away, afraid of her own instincts, afraid of what he might smell on her though she thought she remembered the Master scoffing at human olfactory capacity. Van Helsing looked like a man pondering whether he had wandered abroad in his nightshirt; the image was not as amusing as it might once have been.

  “Pleasant to see you as well, sir,” she mumbled, glancing about. When a man grinned and beckoned, she took ridiculous offense.

  “You ought to be escorted,” Van Helsing slurred into her ear. “All manner of rough creatures about. Believe me, I am versed in such things.”

  Revulsion flooded her throat, belly, groin. The Master had talked like that. “I love you,” the Master would whisper or snarl through endless nights of food displayed and denied, through long hours hiding from the daylight, when the hunger he induced in his countless brides kept them awake and nearly drove them altogether out of the dark. “You, most beautiful and most hungry. All manner of creatures are abroad in the night and day. Such as this one, my darling!” flinging bones of cattle or wild dogs and making his arousal clearly visible as the chosen bride scrambled to mine for the little blood still in the marrow.

  Often his favorite, and his favorite victim, she had, at his leering behest, more than once trawled like a pig the bloody waste pits behind hospitals for sustenance and, indeed, for pleasure. His and her own. She could taste it now. She could taste it. She bent her head to the old man’s neck.

  Rather more easily than she would have expected, he extricated himself from what had become almost an embrace as though he knew already what she would beg of him. He still slurred, however, and shambled as he took a step or two away from her. “The night does have its appeal, though, does it not, my dear?”

  Was the most honorable Abraham Van Helsing making a dishonorable suggestion? Nearly as weak now with memory and unholy desire as this weak old enemy she desperately needed, she nonetheless caught up with him in a single stride and in the light from a grimy streetlamp examined his face for intention. He looked wasted and ill; she detected no lechery in him, only relief, bafflement, despair. Her fate was in the hands of a baffled, despairing old man.

  He was still talking, perhaps not to her. “A woman should not be left to manage the darkness alone. I would rush the night’s passage myself if I did not feel such emptiness in the mornings.”

  “Ah, the mornings,” she agreed. “I manage the nights better, too.”

  A passing hack driver cut his horse with the whip, and although the animal reacted not at all, she nearly swooned to the quick odor of its blood. And to the odor of human blood as well; perhaps the tip of the whip had flicked the driver’s forearm, or perhaps she was smelling Van Helsing’s blood through thin flesh and vein, a thought she dared not long entertain.

  Since the Master’s blessed, cursed murder, she had managed a base survival with small meals of rats and bird hearts, once or twice an addict with blood so diluted it was almost not blood, the occasional newborn and its afterbirth, the occasional child weakened by disease. Hunger had made her delirious, and out of that delirium had come yearning for life without the sickness. The blood fever had distorted all memory of her life before the Master had come to her, but what she remembered, what she must have again, surely was better than this. Eventually out of her desperation had come: Be like him. Be like the destroyer, the only one in the world more powerful than the Master. She had not since tasted live blood.

  Scurrying at the base of a building. Blood, blood everywhere, and the terrible need. The need to eat. The need to keep her vow. The need.

  Van Helsing turned into an alley. She followed him.

  The woman seized his face and brought it close to her own to stare at him. Van Helsing shuddered, reminded not only of the madness of his own late beloved wife but also of a butcher appraising a cow. Vehemently she whispered, “I require your assistance, Dr. Van Helsing. Your protection, if you will.”

  Too tired and inebriated to articulate a refusal, he shrugged and went on. When he missed the grimy doorway to his building, he turned back abruptly and they collided. He felt the surging desperation of her, the decadent ardor. She seemed remarkably strong for a woman, especially a woman in such straits. No doubt she was dangerous. But perhaps for once he would not be alone in the morning, not quite so empty.

  At some point on the many stairs up to his flat, he realized she was supporting him with a hand at the small of his back, and he asked himself who was protecting whom. But when she gasped at the rat bright-eyed and -fanged on the landing, he put himself between her and the vermin. He had seen much worse.

  Dimly he recalled she had more than once spoken his name, so perhaps she knew who he had been. Dimly he recalled that the name she had given him for herself—he doubted it was truly her name—had meant something to him, suggested something, but it eluded him and he made no effort to chase it down.

  The gray cat that now and again shared his flat—which sometimes he indulged himself by thinking of as Fee Verte for its liquid green eyes— hissed and put its back up as they entered. Van Helsing had received aloofness from this scrawny creature as often as affection, but he had not before been the target of its hostility, and he wondered at it. Behind him, she gave a small cry. Pitying what he took to be unreasonable fear, he shielded her from the cat as he held the door open for it to slink out into the stairwell, perhaps to dispatch or be dispatched by the huge rodent gnawing there.

  Uninvited, she settled herself onto the settee his wife had, in her calmer moments, so enjoyed for its prim elegance. It was slovenly now and unsteady. He made a vague, belated motion of hospitality, then realized the disorder that had overtaken his living quarters, as if a tide of filth and misery had seeped in under the door, spread and ruined everything. Papers lay scattered like ashes, books sprawled half-devoured. Stench rose from soiled plates and utensils, rotting meat and soured milk and moldy bread and fruit nearer liquid than solid, clumps of stiffened and odoriferous clothing, spilled and long-unemptied chamber pots. He should be ashamed.

  He should offer her refreshment,
could not think what food or drink he had that would be fit to consume. He should offer her a place to sleep, his own bed the only choice and he would spread a blanket on the splintery floor. He should ask her again for her name. Green smoky unconsciousness overcame him, and he was dimly aware of falling.

  Someone laughed outside the battered door, and she started. The hunger in her, tearing at her brain like insects in a feeding frenzy, sometimes made her hear things. Sometimes she felt pursued, and when she was aware enough to know that nothing pursued her but what had taken life inside herself, she was not soothed. Men shouted and cursed in the noisy street below. Church chimes announced the eleventh hour. The despair of the night was young, and, worse, the hope.

  Stiffly crumpled at her feet, Van Helsing could not truly be regarded as sleeping, able to be awakened by pleas or threats or by any sort of touch. She considered touching him. She considered kneeling beside him, lying upon him, touching him with open mouth and tongue and then with teeth.

  She must move quickly away from him, but her strength was insufficient; she shuffled as far as the confines of the flat allowed. He was her only hope, small and despairing as it was. More than any other creature not like herself, he knew about creatures like herself. He had studied. He had come close. He had destroyed the Master. He could destroy her. She had allowed herself the fancy that he could also save her, teach her how to change her essential nature or at least bear witness while she did so herself. Turn her.

  The journey to London had taken a heavy toll, but she had maintained her vow along the way, keeping her distance from villagers and shopkeepers, able to imagine their veins filled with substances other than blood, minimally sustaining herself with raw meat pilfered through unfastened kitchen doors and buried rags from women’s monthly bleeding she smelled and unearthed and forced herself to suck. She had heard he was in London and had developed a mighty opium-laudanum-absinthe habit. But once in the immense, crowded, odoriferous, clamorous city, she had been baffled by the search. This evening’s serendipity had been a long time coming, and had cost her dearly.

  Now here she was, and here he was, and he was unavailable to her. He well might sleep through the night, and the first light of day—even the gritty, overcast, nearly sunless light of London in winter—would cause her further anguish. She would have to find some corner to cower in, and cover herself against the sun’s direct and accusing gaze.

  She kicked him. He groaned and twitched his shoulder. She hissed his name, shrieked it. He stirred. He began to retch and she stooped to turn his head so his own vomitus would not choke him, thinking she might vomit herself, wondering as she watched the noxious puddle sink into the floor whether there might be anything in it for her. When he seemed to have finished, she wiped his mouth with the end of his own rumpled shirt and sat back away from him. He sank into oblivion again.

  Something scratched at the door. She nearly lost her balance as she scrambled to her feet. The scratching came again. She opened the door. Instantly the scrawny gray cat sped past her yowling, claws raking her ankle. The roiling of its small reservoir of blood made her tongue swell. She did not see where in the flat it hid itself, but it would not be difficult to find. Its odor pulsed. She shut the door carefully and turned back into the room.

  That night Van Helsing’s opium dreams were convoluted tales of intrigue and adventure, loss and mourning, evil and great good and the vast territory between. They gave the illusion of meaning. Mostly, they were deep green. Mostly, he was alone.

  He emerged to find himself choking on bile, hands turning his head so that his neck seemed in jeopardy, foul breath in his own foul face.

  He emerged to the sensation that his flat was underwater, under blood, detritus from his life floating in the viscous fluid.

  He emerged to the instantly clear sight of the woman who had called herself Katherine Harker. Crouching near to him, she held the green-eyed gray cat Fee Verte stretched long and flat across her indecently exposed thighs, its throat and belly slit wide. Her long teeth dripped.

  He sank again, knowing it to be delirium. He had seen so much worse.

  He awakened again, clutching the petrified claws of a woman whose name he should know as well as his own, but try as he might he could not bring it to his lips. Then he looked out to see it was the paw-like leg of a chair he gripped from where he lay on the floor. His wife howled from her crouch on the other side of the room, tongue out and mouth slavering, her once sweet nature parodied in mad laughter.

  He struggled to his feet. Surely he could summon sufficient will and strength to stop what was happening to her, even if it meant beating the demons from her body, driving them out of her heart with that symbol of everything she’d once held sacred.

  But he was falling. The gravity of all his failures tore him down.

  “Van Helsing! Are you injured?”

  Her hands were upon him, helping him to stand, the capable hands of this good woman. But it was that poor woman he’d met out in the street. What was her name? He wanted to say Harker but that couldn’t be.

  He saw the redness in her eyes, her gaze flitting away to the corner like some winged thing, then back again, trying to force him to see only what she wanted him to see. But he turned his head just enough to find the gray fur pressed behind the curtain, the streaks of red visible even in the clutter on the floor, and that crimson kiss on the back of the hand soothing his face.

  He felt a moment of true sadness before realizing the death of his only companion was not the most important implication of this gruesome discovery. He struck her across the face.

  She howled. Her back pulled her upward until she was almost his height, her eyes slitting as the skin of her face tightened.

  But instead of attacking him she sprang backward. The shelves behind her splintered, book spines ripping and paper exploding into the air as if a cage of birds had been let loose in the room. She threw herself over the chair and into the small table by the window, knocking off his only photograph of his wife. With a cry he reached for it, but it cracked the window pane and fell.

  “Demon!” he shouted, and scrambled toward the bed for the leather physician’s bag he had not seen in months. He pawed frantically at the bed linen, threw garbage and sour garments behind him at the creature he’d invited in, hoping to delay her until he could once again feel the confidence of the spike in his hand and the power of the mallet that could send her back to Hell. For he knew now what she was. Expecting her on his back at any moment, teeth ripping out his throat, he found himself slowing, ready. More than ready.

  She thrust her hand against her teeth, which instinctively bit down. Her own meat was tasteless and pale but she could not let go. Having come this far, having at last forced herself into his presence, she had been unable to deny herself a simple meal of his pet cat. She was lost. Meaning to call his name, she howled wordlessly around her own bloody flesh.

  He was coming for her with mallet and blessed spike heavy in his hands. She wrenched her hand out of her teeth and crooned, “Van Helsing! Don’t be shy, Van Helsing.” He stopped. “Please!”

  With tears in his eyes, he shook his head. “I cannot. I haven’t the strength to raise the mallet anymore. It might as well weigh the world.”

  Diving into the garbage, sewage, wreckage in which he stood ankle-deep, she fed. He groaned but he stood by. With fingernails and teeth she tore out fibers of the threadbare rug, then bits of half-dissolved wood. There was blood in all of it. There was blood in everything. In him, too.

  “Stop! Stop it, woman!” Lowering himself to his haunches and then to his knees, he stared her in the face. His broad forehead looked animalistic now. His mouth contorted. “Such a pitiable pair we are.” He ripped his shirt down the front and pulled away his collar. “Drink if you must. I myself have drunk quite enough for one evening, and now self-pity inebriates me past enduring.”

  In the decimated and dingy little flat, a clean space of silence formed. The pair of them were alone in this
place at the end of this human century, which would bring neither of them release. Street noise pulsed at the broken window but had little to do with them. Something cleared in her head: a memory of life before the Master. She had sat alone in a room above a street like this one, sat by a broken window letting too much of the cold in, her lover long gone and herself reduced to whoring. And then the Master had come. Despair, preceded only by despair.

  “Would you,” Van Helsing inquired pleasantly, “like a cup of tea?”

  By the time he had brewed their tea, set it in chipped china cups in a space he cleared with his elbow on the rickety table, tipped the trash off two flimsy chairs and dragged them into an arrangement simulating companionability, she had put the flat into a semblance of order. Having already rid it of much debris, she had only to set its remaining objects right and gather or conceal broken things she had no idea how to organize. In lamplight, presentability was easy to achieve; daybreak, even through the small sooted window, would make more noticeable the hidden things. Daybreak was not far off.

  Shakily but with practiced elegance, he gave a small bow and held a chair for her. She nearly curtsied. Disheveled from their earlier exertions, both of them bearing stains of various external substances and bodily fluids not mentionable in polite company, they sat together politely, even comfortably, and sipped their tea. He did not wish for absinthe or opium. She granted no notice to the steady pulse of his blood.

  When after a while he stood up, she thought he would leave her or order her away, and she felt a vast sorrow. Instead he leaned, with some difficulty, across the table to pry open the window. The cracked pane wobbled but did not fall out. The air that burst in was almost violent in its sweetness. Sitting down again, he swayed and she reached to hold his arm until he was settled, then eased herself back into her own chair and folded her swollen, shaking hands in her lap.

  “A fine morning, my dear,” he observed. When she said nothing, he continued, “Uncharacteristically clear and bright.”