The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  The last remaining piece of our personal jigsaw fell into place a couple of days later, when we were in overlapping shifts. I got home about five, while Sheena was on two-to-ten, and I'd been in for an hour or so when the doorbell rang. It was a woman, who looked to be about four years older than me. She had bleached blonde hair, but she was too well dressed and neatly polished to be placed in the same category as the slags at work.

  "I'm Elizabeth Howell," she said.

  It took a full ten seconds for the penny to drop; I had never taken the trouble to work out what "Libby" must be short for. When it did, reflex made me say: "Sheena's not here. She's at work."

  "I know," she said. "Can I come in for a minute?"

  I opened the door wide and stood aside to let her go past. By the time I'd closed it and turned around again, she was already well into her tour of inspection. She made not the slightest attempt to cover up the fact that that was what she was doing. She carefully examined my furniture, my bookshelves, my CD collection, and my PC before turning her critical eyes on me. I tried to meet them squarely, taking note of the fact that although they were blue, they were much darker than Sheena's. Physically, Libby favoured her mother. She was handsome, even voluptuous, but anyone who had seen Mrs. Howell would have been able to imagine her slowly morphing into something wide and soft.

  "Crockett says you're all right," she observed.

  "Crockett?" I queried. Again the penny was ridiculously slow to drop. She meant Davy, obviously.

  "Wasn't as obliging as our Suzy," she admitted. "Wouldn't take the nickname on—but I keep trying. Don't like to fail."

  "Davy told you I was all right?" I said, slightly surprised.

  "Said you'd probably be good for her. Don't know about that, myself. She's head over heels. Never good to be that dependent. If you muck her about, you know—"

  "You'll do terrible things to me," I finished for her. "Fine. By the time Sheena's had her pound of flesh, blood included, and Davy's ripped my head off, I'll be past caring."

  "Fucking sociology graduate," she said. "Think you know it all. Well, you don't."

  "So tell me the rest," I said, trying to suppress my annoyance and keep my tone light. She was Sheena's sister, after all.

  "I will," she said, "when the time's right. Until then—"

  "Don't muck her about. Believe me, Elizabeth—can I call you Libby?—I'm not about to do that."

  "Call me what you like," she said. "Just tell me that you're as mad on her as she is on you, and that you're man enough to handle it." She was staring at me, trying to give the impression that she had a built-in lie detector.

  "I'm as mad on her as she is on me," I told her. "I hope I can handle it, because it's going to fuck me up worse than anything it can do to her if I can't. Satisfied?"

  She didn't go so far as to nod. "Mum says come to dinner on Saturday," she said instead, finally condescending to complete the errand on which she'd presumably been sent, probably because her mother didn't trust Sheena to deliver it or bring back an accurate answer. "It's her wedding anniversary."

  "Wedding anniversary?" I echoed.

  "Is there any law that says a widow can't celebrate her wedding anniversary with her daughters?' Elizabeth Howell demanded. It would have been anything but safe to enquire, even in jest, whether Mrs. Howell also celebrated the anniversary of her divorce, or the anniversary of her son's conception. I guessed that the anniversary was just an excuse, although I couldn't quite figure out what it was that Libby and her mother were excusing.

  "We'll be there," I assured her.

  "Seven-thirty," Libby said in a much friendlier tone. "Maybe you are all right. Our Suzy certainly thinks so."

  "Our Suzy?" I challenged, having realised that I had failed in my duty when I'd let it go before.

  "Oh, all right," she said. "Sheena. Don't see why I should keep it up, now that she's as good as out of the Goth gang, but if it's what she wants… do me a favour, will you, and tell her no if she asks you to dye your hair."

  "She seems to like it the way it is," I said, "but if she were to ask, it'd be black before you could count to five. Sorry."

  Libby shrugged. "Probably the right answer," she conceded grudgingly. "See you Saturday."

  I relayed the entire conversation to Sheena, virtually word for word, when I met her from work.

  "They're just trying to be friendly," she assured me. "It's just an excuse to make a big show. It'll be hell, but it's best to go through it."

  "Well," I said, "if ever Mum approaches you about springing a surprise birthday party for me, you have my permission to tell her to go jump off Wigan Pier."

  It wasn't hell, although it was a bit of an ordeal—more like purgatory, really. No mention was made of the supposed anniversary, which had served its purpose in getting us to turn up. The food was average and the canned lager Mrs. Howell had thoughtfully but mistakenly laid in for me was drinkable in spite of the gas. I probably put one too many away while Libby and Sheena shared a six-pack of Strongbow. Little brother Martin had obviously been instructed to talk to me about football, but he felt that his duty had been done once we had exchanged a few ritualistic utterances about the leakiness of the United defence away from home and the falsity of the assumption that a four-all draw at Everton counted as "value-for-money entertainment," when all that really mattered was bagging the three points. Libby was friendly enough, although her relentless campaign to win Sheena away from Phoneland by extolling the virtues of Gap became rather tedious once the cider had loosened her up.

  We managed to escape at half-past ten. Sheena made a show of having to see me home and muttered vaguely about getting a taxi back, although no one was really under the illusion that she had any intention of coming back. We could have stayed on the bus all the way into town and then got another outward-bounder practically to the door, but it was easier and a little quicker to get off opposite Rookwood Recreation Ground and walk up Harehills Lane, so that's what we did.

  By the time we got to my place it was ten past eleven, and I thought there wasn't enough time for adventures in imaginary history, but Sheena had other ideas. She was happy enough to go directly to bed, but once there she didn't want to pass Go without going all around the board, so we took refuge under the duvet and turned out the light. Knowing that she'd have to do a little work to get me into the mood, Sheena started talking while I lay back and listened. It was standard stuff, at first.

  Morgina was in the principal harbour of Atlantis—what would now, I guess, be Valletta—about to board a ship. The sailing ships of Atlantis were akin to dhows, but tended to be much larger than the Arab vessels that inherited their design. They often carried passengers to Atlantean colonies in Clarica—the modern Sicily—and the north African coast, and they often set sail by night if the tides and winds were favourable. Morgina was bound for the Clarican city of Avra.

  Morgina was excited, because she had never left the Atlantean mainland before, and slightly frightened by the awful silence of the sea. The night was bright enough when the boat set sail, but the sky soon darkened as clouds gathered, overtaking the craft because the wind blew faster at altitude. It began to rain, but it wasn't a storm, and Morgina didn't take shelter down below. The raindrops weren't cold, and they fell with an eerie gentleness, like sentimental tears—not tears of grief but the kind you shed at the end of a film when lovers are reunited after an interval of heart-rending separation and danger.

  Belowdecks, some of Morgina's fellow passengers began to sing, as if to shut out the rain and the loneliness, but Morgina resisted the inevitable temptation to join in, because she wanted to savour the rain. When she opened her mouth to take in the falling drops, she found it sweet, almost as if there were a trace of blood in every slowly descending drop…

  We were touching all the while, caressing each other, slowly and unhurriedly. We were perfectly relaxed, all the more so for having escaped the tension and embarrassment of the family dinner. If I'd had to set my mind to t
he serious business of invention I would have had to concentrate, but even that obligation had released its hold. I wasn't entranced, and I wasn't drifting off to sleep…

  But for the first time, I remembered. I really and truly remembered, with a certainty that would have instantly dismissed all doubts and confusions arising from the knowledge that there had, after all, never been any such place as Atlantis, had some such dismissal been necessary. As it happened, though, I didn't remember being in Atlantis or any of its satellite states.

  What I remembered was being on a tiny island, not much larger than a sandbar. The interior was covered with thorn-laden scrub, interrupted by a few scrawny date palms, but I'd already stripped the trees of their unripe fruit—at considerable cost to the integrity of my skin, which was scored all over with streaky scabs. I'd managed to squeeze a little moisture from leaves and a few inedible fruits, but there was no gentle rain to supply me with fresh water, and I was fearfully thirsty. I was lying on the thin strip of sand that separated the scrub from the breaking waves, and would certainly have been unconscious had it not been for the torment of my thirst, because I was very weak. My eyes were open, and I was staring up at the sky, desperately wishing that the clouds obscuring the stars would break, although I rolled my head from side to side occasionally, hoping that I might glimpse the lanterns of a passing ship.

  I never said a word to Sheena. I was too startled, too amazed. I felt that if I spoke, I would break the spell, and I didn't want the experience to evaporate like a dream. I wanted to examine every detail of the apparent memory, and the fact that it was painful only made it more fascinating, more intriguing. If I gave any indication at all to Sheena that I had been transported, it could only have been my body language that conveyed the hint. I said nothing—but she knew. Or maybe it was Morgina who knew. One way or another, the tale that Sheena was spinning changed, seamlessly, into an account of an errand of mercy.

  "The ship is too slow," Sheena/Morgina reported. "It'll never get there in time, and I know it. I can't go below to join in with the singing. I have to use magic. It's dangerous, but it's the only way. I have to fly, no matter what the risk or the cost. It's very difficult, to sing my own song when I can still hear the other, but it has to be done, and the sound of the rain on the sea helps me. I sing my spell, and I know it's going to work, even though I've never sung such a spell before, because the need is so great. I sing the spell, and I take wing from the deck of the ship. I fly so fast that I'm out of the shadow of the rain-clouds within minutes, although I can see darkness on the horizon again almost as soon as the moonlight touches me. The clouds on the horizon are different, high and cold, remote and uncaring, but they don't matter."

  I couldn't remember my name, but I didn't think of that as strange, I was in dire straits, and names didn't matter. Only thirst mattered, and the possibility of relief. I had known, once, exactly who I was and where I was bound and how I'd come to be marooned on that tiny strip of land somewhere between Europe and Africa, but all of that had been driven deep into my mind, to leave the surface of my thoughts free for desperation and hope. In another world, the hope would have died, and in due course the desperation would have died, too, as I shrivelled into a desiccated corpse, silver-grey upon the amber sand, fading by slow degrees to whiteness. But this was an age of miracles, and there was no need to die.

  A winged shadow fell out of the soulless night, and metamorphosed into a human female. I had no idea who she was, and could not have recognised her had I known her name. There were no mirrors in Atlantis; for all Morgina's skill in description, she could not describe her own face.

  She was small and slender, and the pale features of her black-framed face were so perfect that I wished I could see their true colours. But I was also seized by a premonition that something was wrong, that my need had demanded something from her that was more than she had to give, no matter how clever or willing she might be.

  She had no water, but she cut her forearm above the wrist and gave me blood to drink. The blood was sweeter and more intoxicating than wine, and it quenched my dreadful thirst, if only for a little while.

  Having done that, my saviour sank down beside me on the sand utterly exhausted, and began to caress me with her fingers, and what had been memory faded by slow degrees into a dream, which extended in the way dreams sometimes do, rendering time elastic, so that the night went on forever… or would have done, had forever been a possibility.

  But forever was not a possibility, and the dream was already faded, like a photocopy of a photocopy. It evaporated, as did the darkness of the night.

  Morgina tried to pull away then, but I caught and held her.

  Stay, I said, insistently but not aloud—and she consented to be held while the sun rose and the dark world filled with colour.

  Newton only pretended that there are seven colours in our rainbow because he thought that seven was the appropriate number. In fact, there are five: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet—but Newton must have remembered fragments of past lives spent in imaginary histories, and must have known that there really were seven colours in the rainbows that shone in Atlantean skies. Two of them have been lost, and no longer have names, but I know now that they lay beyond red and violet, not within like Newton's invented colours.

  The colour of the sun was yellow, and the sea was blue. The date palms and the thorn bushes were green—but Morgina's face and costume were tinted with colours I had never seen before. I know now that we only think that blood is red because we have lost the ability to see the other colour with which the red is mingled, just as we have lost the ability to taste blood as vampires taste it, and draw that special nourishment from it for which vampires ceaselessly thirst.

  Had I drunk more frequently or more abundantly of Morgina's blood, I would have been more vampire than I was when the sun rose on that tiny island, forgotten even though it lay within the boundaries of the empire of Lost Atlantis. Alas, I remained far too human.

  As soon as the light hit her, she began to dissolve. I felt a terrible sense of betrayal, because I had always believed—always known—that vampires did not dissolve in sunlight, because that was the one aspect of the myth that really was a myth—but I stifled a scream when she tried to speak. I needed to hear what she was saying, even though her voice had already decayed to the merest whisper.

  "The spell was too costly," she told me. "But nothing really dies, and nothing changes its inmost nature. Don't be afraid. I shall return with the night, and you will not go thirsty, no matter how long you remain here."

  I was already awake, as far as far could be from any mere dream, but it wasn't until I opened my eyes that I found Sheena dead.

  I was hysterical, of course, but I think I managed to do all the right things in the right order. I phoned an ambulance, and then I set about trying to resuscitate her. I breathed air into her lungs and I pummelled her chest until the paramedics from St James's arrived and took over. It was only after their arrival that I actually lost control. I remember shouting "She's only nineteen fucking years old, for fuck's sake—how the fuck can she have a fucking heart attack?," but I don't think the paramedics held it against me. That wasn't why they wouldn't let me accompany the corpse to the hospital. I was sufficiently coherent, in any case, to give them the address and phone number of her official next of kin, so that they could send someone else to deliver the terrible news.

  I couldn't stay in the flat, and I certainly couldn't face Mrs. Howell and Libby, so I started walking eastwards, towards the rising sun, and I continued until I reached the urban wilderness of Whitkirk.

  Davy was already up and about, busy with noise. I leaned on the doorbell until it penetrated the wall of sound. When he opened the door, he seemed angry, but as soon as he saw me the anger metamorphosed into something else—something essentially unfathomable.

  "Is she… ?" he asked, but couldn't force the final word past his lips.

  "This might be a good time to rip my head off," I told hi
m angrily. "You seem to have got to the head of the queue—but then, you always knew that you would, didn't you?"

  "It wasn't your fault," he said, standing aside to let me in, then closing the door to exclude the world from our private business. "However it happened, it wasn't your fault."

  "If you weren't so much bigger than me," I told him, "I'd be seriously considering the possibility of ripping your head off. I must have been blind and stupid not to see it. First you, then her sister. I thought it was just run-of-the-mill protectiveness. Even when she spelled it out in letters of fire, telling me in so many words that there was something I didn't know, it didn't click. But you knew, didn't you? Whatever the big secret was, you were in on it and I wasn't."

  "We would have told you," he said. "When the time… we didn't expect… I'm sorry. We didn't know… so soon."

  The message was clear even though the sentences weren't complete. They hadn't expected it to happen so soon—but they had expected it. They would have told me eventually, but they wanted to be sure that it was serious first. They wanted to convince themselves, as far as it was possible, that I was, in Libby's phrase, "man enough to handle it." I understood all that. The one thing I didn't understand, and desperately needed to know, was why Sheena had been part of the conspiracy of silence. She had known me through and through, even if her sister and her ex-boyfriend hadn't.

  "So tell me," I said to Big Bad Davy, "exactly how it comes about that a nineteen-year-old girl can have a heart attack."

  Davy sighed. "Do you know what protein C is?" he asked.

  "No," I answered sourly. "I'm only a fucking sociology graduate."

  "It's one of the clotting factors in the blood. Do you know what homeostasis is?"

  "Feedback," I said. "Like a thermostat. If you're talking about people, it's the control mechanism that regulates body temperature. You get too cold, you shiver to generate heat. You get too hot, you sweat to lose it."