The lit display of an expensive dress shop arrested her attention as we approached it. The mannequin within it wore a red silk evening dress generously studded with rhinestones. Its skirt was fashionably short.
Sarah stared at the dress longingly.
“Do you like it?” I asked her.
She frowned. “I couldn’t afford it on a student’s income. My budget’s strained to the hilt as it is.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“Will you? You ought to get to know a woman better, before you start buying clothes for her. I might be one of the wily females who use men for their money.”
“I didn’t say I was going to buy it.”
“What are you going to do? Steal it?”
I paused, considering how she might react. “I prefer the term ‘requisition’ to that of ‘theft.’ I need to ask something of you. You are to stand here and not move. No matter what you see, remain here, and wait for me. I promise you no harm shall come to you, nor any shame. When my theatrics are complete—for I can see you believe I am being theatrical—you shall have your dress. Do I have your agreement?”
She hesitated, her eyes troubled, then nodded.
“Good,” I said. “Now remember: don’t move from this spot, no matter what you see.”
I began my shape-shifting then, in front of her, my body fading slowly, its atoms rearranging under my direction, until I became transparent, and then a ghostly outline, and finally, conscious mist.
I seeped my gaseous form through the space beneath the locked doorway of the dress shop, entered its darkened interior, and returned myself to human form behind the door. Carefully switching off the alarm system, I climbed up into the bay of the display window and removed the red silk dress. Flinging it over my arm, I turned to Sarah, who watched with dumbfounded eyes, her mouth a perfect o, on the opposite side of the plate glass. I waved.
Behind the sales counter, I found garish plastic bags imprinted with the store’s name and its flowery logo. I carefully noted the price of the dress—$85.00—and rang it up on the cash register. And bagging the dress for Sarah, I let myself out, first resetting the alarm and pristinely locking the door behind me.
I held out the package containing her prize. She backed a step away from me, her eyes searching up and down my body, then moved forward, reaching for the bag.
We walked mutely down 19th Street, then cut left onto Walnut.
“How did you do that?” she finally asked.
“I’ve told you. I’m a vampire.”
She was silent at first, then, “Or perhaps a master illusionist setting up an innocent dupe.”
I walked slightly ahead of her and stopped under the sharp glow of a streetlamp. She caught up and stood under its light.
Taking her hand, I brought it to my mouth.
She flinched.
“I will not harm you. I won’t do anything to you without your acquiescence.”
She relaxed.
I parted my lips and brushed her fingertip over one elongated frontal incisor, pausing on its needle point, then the other. I lowered her hand. “Perhaps a master illusionist with two false teeth.”
“Nothing against my will?”
“Nothing without your expressed consent.”
She continued walking.
I fell in beside her. “I find you enticing…and puzzling. You’re not really afraid of me. In fact, you’re intrigued and willing to risk the adventure of my acquaintance.”
She stopped again and stared at me. “How did you—,” she began, then halted, making a decision. “A painting I’m working on at my apartment might possibly express why I’m not afraid of you. Startled, perhaps, but not afraid.”
We were silent the rest of the way. Even her mind remained silent, except for images of the painting she wished to show me, which I could only glean in segments: a languid hand, the vision of a rose, a woman’s face in flickering shadows.
We approached a small greystone building, its outer entrance containing a walled, shadowed alcove, which I noted for future use when stalking. Sarah fumbled in her pocket and withdrew her keys. We entered a drab hallway and climbed to the second floor. Another lock turned, and we were in her apartment.
She switched on the living room light. In one corner was a niche containing her easel with her canvas on it, and a kitchen cart. The cart’s top shelf was filled with brushes, tubes of paint, willow reed charcoal, and bottles of linseed oil and turpentine. Its bottom shelf held stretched canvases stacked according to size, sketch pads, and two spraycans of fixative and varnish.
Against the wall, across from the doorway, a small bed was covered with a floral comforter and heaped with pillows. To the right of the entrance, a chest of drawers stood, followed by a captain’s chair which faced the room’s one window. Below the window a small television sat on a long bookcase, its shelves packed to overflowing. Off to the left of the doorway were two small rooms, a bathroom and a kitchenette, and between them, a closet.
I walked over to her makeshift studio, to her work-in-progress. It was nearly finished, barring a well-sketched rose, its petals, stems and leaves unpainted.
“Now you can answer a question that puzzles me,” Sarah said. “Why does death court and claim people who haven’t fully lived yet?”
The fragmented elements of her painting, seen flickering in her mind, coalesced before me. A woman approximating Sarah’s age sprawled half-on, half-off a darkly-upholstered plush sofa. Her blind but staring blue eyes, the laxity of the rosebud mouth, the rigidity of her posture were unflinchingly portrayed. Whoever she was, she was beautiful. She lay on her stomach, head turned to the viewer, arm trailing the rug, the fingers of her hand spread, as if they reached for the rose.
“She was my friend Natalie,” Sarah said. “She seemed to have this love for life that I often envied, a really positive can-do attitude. She drew people to her, both male and female. She never lacked for company, never seemed worried or troubled. Then one night she…up and took a mess of barbiturates. Then she called me. I don’t know, maybe she changed her mind, didn’t want to die. But she didn’t say, ‘Come over. I’ve just taken an overdose of drugs.’ No cry for help. Just told me it was important, to get over there immediately. She sounded funny, and when I asked if she was okay, she just said she wasn’t feeling well. When I got there, I knocked and I knocked, and finally I tried the door. It was unlocked. I went inside and I found her just like that, except there was no rose. The rose symbolizes life. I believe she was reaching for life when she called me, called for me.”
She fell mute.
“I’m very sorry to hear about your friend,” I said. “Did she leave a note or some other indication explaining her suicide?”
“No. No, nothing. Somehow I had to both accept her death and resurrect her. The rose is that symbol, because the bush it stems from blooms again in the Spring.”
I regarded her with cruel amusement. “Then you haven’t accepted death. Those who die an ordinary death are lost forever.”
“That’s not true.” She firmly locked eyes with me. “I believe in another world, another dimension, a continuation of the soul.”
She told me of her father, who had died when Sarah was fifteen, and of her waking dream in which his soul had come to her and told her not to grieve.
“An illusion of your mind,” I grimly refuted her. “I have died. There is nothing beyond for mortals. Even a rose bush dies if its roots are torn from the earth.”
* * * *
Sarah believed in a fatuous god who controlled a universe both physical and spiritual. She was certain her friend Natalie had been resurrected, and that she, too, would be transported into a greater world upon her own death. I asked her then why her god had created vampires. She answered that I was damned, most probably for some spiritual infraction, and condemned to walk the earth until I found atonement.
The waging of our philosophical battle became a challenge to her, as I knew it would. I argued with her man
y a night, until her eyes drooped and I left her to her rest; as a mortal, she had to face the day.
Our strange alliance of vampire and mortal continued for two years. I both fascinated and repelled her. She couldn’t face the empty darkness I insisted human death led to. She insisted I had brought that darkness upon myself, had robbed myself of something greater. I denied this, defying her at some intrinsic, primal level, and by her reaction, knew that I would win.
She had graduated from the Academy, taking a job as a layout artist for an advertising firm while continuing her fine art career on the side. Her superb canvases soon found favor and fortune among regional art galleries, and Sarah began painting full-time.
I waited patiently for the moment, the event, that would bring Sarah into my world, my coup de grace. My patience was rewarded. Sarah’s mother died in a senseless and sudden auto crash.
On the evening following her mother’s funeral, I waited, uninvited, for Sarah at her apartment. My unexpected presence only momentarily startled her.
“Have you come to gloat?” she asked. The acid in her tone disturbed me.
“No, I’ve come to comfort you.”
“You?”
“Do you think I like death any more than you do? I’ve held it back for over two centuries!”
She didn’t answer, kicking off her black pumps, and undoing her long brown hair from the tightened prim upsweep she had styled it in. I rose and went over to her, helping her remove the pins, smoothing and untangling the strands.
“Sarah,” I said, “do you doubt that I fear the day death will steal you from me, steal your talent and your courage, steal the wonderment and vibrancy you bring into my endless life? If I had my way, you would never die, my sweet lady, you would live forever.”
“I will. But not in the world you inhabit.”
“So you say. But I know you won’t survive. Not unless you accept and return the vampiric kiss.”
She faced me, her soft eyes blazing with released anger. “And will you instruct me on my first kill in this vampiric afterlife of yours? And on how to cover up the death by making it look like a crime of violence? Is that what I’m worth to you?”
“I would protect you. Eternally.”
“You once said you would never thwart my will. I want you to go and never return.”
“And leave you to face death alone?”
“The loneliness won’t last long.”
“But the darkness will last forever, Sarah.”
“You’re the one who lives in darkness.”
“But I live.”
She began to cry, turning her tear-streaked face away from me. I probed her thoughts. She had no brothers nor sisters, and only distant relatives.
“Let me take care of you, Sarah. I’ll be your family, your home, your hearth.”
“Why are you doing this to me? Why are you being so cruel?”
“Because I love you,” I answered her softly. “And because you love me.”
“Love,” she muttered, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “What makes you think I love you?”
“It’s been nearly two years, Sarah. Why have you refused every other man’s advances?”
“How do you know what I’ve done with other men? You’re not here every night.”
“I know. Or do you deny what I’ve said is true?”
The tension between us quickened, and I, who am succored by blood, felt her essence, her blood, flow toward me. “You once wondered if I could sexually satisfy you, if I would measure up. I cannot. I share life in my own manner. Will you share it with me, save yourself from the darkness to come, and bring your light to the darkness of my nights?”
I felt her acquiesce before she slowly lifted her gaze to my face. From her eyes, a fresh flow of tears descended, then she was suddenly in my arms.
I stroked her through the night, and when I sensed her readiness, I lowered my lips to her neck, suckling and kissing her, and then drew the sweetness of her life into my veins until she hung on mortality’s periphery. Then pierced my own neck for her to drink back the nectar of our mingled blood.
* * * *
In the days that followed, I made good on my promise, shielding her and easing Sarah carefully into her vampiric life. I moved her belongings into my Delancey Street home, and when she thirsted, I carefully chose a victim and rendered the mortal unconscious out of Sarah’s sight. Then, she would drink until sated, and wander off while I disposed of the kill.
Through vampiric friends and human consorts, we spread a plausible story, with a doctor’s diagnosis backing it up, of Sarah’s developing a sensitivity to sunlight. She continued to paint and exhibit her work, but receptions were only held in the fall and winter months, and the artist always arrived fashionably late.
We continued to debate theology, as a pleasant game of intellectual thrusting and sparring. I should have realized the change when it came over her, for Sarah began to make sarcastic, snide remarks on beliefs she once held sacred while mortal. When I teased her chidingly about it, she gaily explained she was playing God’s Advocate for the sport of it.
Sarah’s paintings also changed. Instead of celebrating life, they depicted its emptiness. One painting particularly disturbed me, of homeless street children scrounging in a trash bin. Food did not seem their aim. One small girl stood off from the rest, holding a prize she had requisitioned. She held the red silk dress, torn and stained.
“Where is the red silk dress?” I asked.
Sarah shrugged her shoulders, busily varnishing the canvas. “You’ll recall I wore it to my last opening. Some eager young admirer spilled wine on it. I did throw it out.”
When I further questioned the altered mood and subjects of her latest paintings, she shrugged that off, too, but not without a hint of bristling.
“You brought me to darkness. Did you think that wouldn’t affect my work? Or did you think I’d remain Little Mary Sunshine, forever lighting your eternal nights?”
“Do you still love me? Or has that, too, changed?”
She hesitated, and I saw the vampire’s ennui cross her face. “No,” she said, “I still love you.”
To this very moment, the ambivalence of her answer still haunts me. She had changed, and I was responsible. Her sacrifice had never been complete.
Love often isn’t enough.
* * * *
Sarah had been hunting with me, but soon took to stalking without me. She decided the civilized world was far too logical to believe in vampires, just as she had not, before our meeting, and that law enforcement officers would miss the closed punctures in her victims’ throats, or mistake them for skin eruptions. She was careful not to deplete her victims’ blood to the point of high suspicion.
In the master bedroom of the town house, she slept in an antique four-poster, completely surrounded by a thick black velvet bed curtain. The shutters on the room’s two windows were tightly locked from the inside and inner curtains covered them, allowing no daylight in. Snug in her black velvet tomb, she insisted she was safe. I felt no such assurance, and slept in my coffin in the basement, fastening it from within.
She began to work on a painting she said would please me, because it had the vibrancy, the unadulterated honesty she knew I craved and relished in her art. She insisted I not see it while it progressed, at first making me suspicious, for we had never hid anything from each other before. But she allayed my worries by treating the mystery as if it augured a wonderful surprise.
I could no longer read her thoughts, for she had learned the trick of vampirically blocking them, although she had rarely employed it with me until now. I did not block my own from her. Perhaps that was why she became arduously attentive to my other needs and desires, taking delight in the smallest pleasures, communicating her excited innocence, mesmerizing me with the brightness of her view.
They were the happiest weeks of my immortal life. I began to look forward to the unveiling of the painting, believing it presaged a new era of conten
tment between us.
And so I rose in good spirits early that Sunday evening in November and searched the house for her. I finally climbed to the renovated attic where she’d set up her studio, insisting jocularly that she needed strong northern light. To humor her, I hired carpenters to install two large, opposing bay windows, one overlooking Delancey Street, the other, our courtyard garden, filled with night blooms.
The door to the attic was left slightly ajar, but no sound came from within.
“Sarah?”
No response.
I quietly opened the door to her studio.
The easel sat in the middle of the spacious room, its back to me. The sheet with which Sarah had draped the newest painting to conceal it from me lay in a heap on the floor behind the easel.
The painting, exposed and unguarded, rested on it.
I hesitated. Would she be angry if I viewed the work before she wished me to? Or had she planned this, the sheet not falling by accident?
I decided to risk her displeasure, stepping around the easel to view her work.
The scene before the easel halted me mid-step. A horrid pile of clothing, bones and dust lay on the polished, hardwood floor.
The skull laughed at me, a short distance from the jumbled remains of the woman I had thought would stay beside me forever.
Sarah, obtaining her long-coveted, steathily planned release, had in doing so abandoned me. Fury coursed through me, a twisting spiral. Grief also swelled, commingling like lightning within a tornado’s funnel, crashing against the unaged flesh of my body, trapped within me, unreleased.
I reached down and picked up the blue shift she had worn the day we met. A belated reminder to me that I had not won. Had never won.
The Vampire Megapack Page 11