by Tanith Lee
I sat down on Cassi’s bed and put my head between my knees, but it didn’t help, and I’d known it wouldn’t. So I lay back, with the letter balled in my hand, and presently I pushed it inside my frock, between my breasts where the pendant was. Next to my heart.
She’d found God, and she’d found out. Yes, that made sense. She’d had intimations, but they would seem so crazy, she’d have to go crazy before she could accept them.
When I felt a little better, I opened my purse and took out the miniature bottle of what I’d mixed up from the red juice in the container.
It’s blood. We all knew it, didn’t we? It’s flavored with pomegranate and tomato and a synthetic grain of hashish, which acts as a preservative, and to disguise reality in the presence of securiguards. It’s the blood of the deer on Hammerhead Plateau. Brought home and first stored cold with a concentrator, it thereafter keeps several days, even in my luggage.
It’s going to help you, Sabella. Yes it is. Drink, it’ll make you strong. In spite of the sunlight, in spite of Cassi, in spite of spite. Drink.
But the fruity odors, this time, made me gag.
I sat there shivering, feverishly turning my black straw hat between my hands. On this occasion, Sabella, it isn’t going to work.
Get home, Sabella. Quick, Sabella.
Get home.
I put the cross in my purse and left the casket, and as I shut the bedroom doors, the crumpled letter stirred against my breast.
A black Pig lurked in the hall.
He’d seen me weeping in the chapel, and I must look awful now. I explained how affected I was by everything, how I wished I’d known her better. I put in a couple of lies about childhood meetings, when I was twelve or thirteen. (Cassi had visited Easterly, in the years before we moved house. I don’t think she properly saw me. My mother bored her; it was duty.) But humanity loves confession and painful reminiscence. We’re all bloodsuckers, one way or another. I sold my uncle on the idea that I had to go home and pull myself together and we would sign papers another day, and that was how I got free.
There were about ten minutes left of the sun as I hurried across the lawns to the pine trees. The gray shade came over me at the same instant the sun turned boiling red. I walked into the deep shadow, and threw up violently, wrenching every muscle in my body.
There was a silly little ornamental cistern nearby, for watering the lawns, recycled tap-water probably unrefined, but I rinsed my mouth and was thankful. (Do even cisterns require thanks of me?)
Then I went to the cab and leaned on it, sore and aching, too weak to get inside.
It was coming on dark. The sun had dropped while I was ill. The night was like a cool bath, even the top of the cab was cool to my hands, my forehead.
And then I heard him coming up, over the dry needles. I knew who it must be. You get to know one certain step from all others, the step of the deer, picking its path to you through the wolf-dappled night.
He put his hands on my shoulders. Gentle, gentle.
“Sabella?”
He knows my name. He must have heard the Hog using it outside the chapel.
“Sabella, are you all right? Oh, Sabella.” Gently he moved me around to confront him. His handsome face was holy with its concern, eyes limpid, wanting to aid me any way he could. “You look ghastly. No. I don’t mean that. You look wonderful, but you look sick.” He was a saint. He was meant to be a saint. No, Sabella. He held me in his arms, tenderly, he smoothed my hair. I was trembling so much it must have been hard for him to soothe me so delicately. His skin was warm, aromatic of youth, cleanness, masculinity and desire. I could scent his life through his skin. I could scent his blood.
He eased me into the cab.
“Now, where to?”
“It has the directions,” I said.
“But where? I’ll pick up my transport tomorrow. I’m coming with you.”
“I don’t want you to come with me, Sand.”
“You need someone with you.”
“Not you.”
“Why not me?”
My brain was going out. I was losing consciousness. He had gotten in beside me and pressed the starter, and the cab moved out between the trees onto the high road back to town.
Again he put his arm round me. I looked up against his shoulder, through his warm dark hair, into the knowing eyes of the snake at his throat.
We were at the hotel, and I didn’t remember much of the journey. Sand Vincent had got my door-opener, and brought me into the room and pressed the master switch for the side lighting. Then he picked me up (I weigh one hundred and seven, it was comparatively easy for him) and laid me down on the bed. Like a fool, I still had my sunglasses on. He took off those, and my shoes.
“You need to sleep,” he said. “It’s taken it out of you.”
“Sand.”
“Yes?”
“You’ve been very kind.”
“I’m not leaving you,” he said, “if that’s what you’re leading up to.”
“I want—I need to be alone.”
“I’ll wait in the corridor, then. But that’s as far as I go.”
“Please, Sand. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, I’ll be in Hammerhead. Sand doesn’t know my route beyond Brade. It’s a big country.
Why did I leave, anyway? Would it have mattered? There are still investment papers to sign for Hog Koberman. The Hog will pursue me, grunting. Anxious to see me be a pig too, greedy for cash. No, I came here because Cassi reached out from the grave and summoned me.
“I’ll wait in the corridor.”
We’d been silently at work on each other all the way from the cemetery. Like two acids, smoldering each other away.
“Take the chair.”
“I’ll carry it into the corridor.”
“No. Don’t bother.”
He sat down in the chair. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t see him studying me. Inside my lids, the room was empty. It wasn’t Cassi that made me come here. It was I, myself.
Of course, I know now I’m going to do it. And now I know, I’m getting stronger. My pulse was beating against that scrap of Cassi’s vitriol on my breast, but I could feel the second pulse, too. It was mild, lethargic at first. It was coming back from limbo, the limbo it goes to, between.
The excitement. What’s it like? It’s in every part of me. It’s like—I don’t know what it’s like at this time, have nothing to compare it to, drink or drugs, or sex or religion. When I was thirteen, when I was—changing, my mother took me to Revivalist meetings. Christ had caught on in a big way in Easterly. It has been remarked, the manner in which colonies retreat to the old fashions of Earth, the clothes, the decor, the religions, as if in search of anchorage. But remarking it, it still comes fresh and sudden, new to the new planets as if they had invented it. In the new C.R. copper-brick church, momma held my hand tight, and I saw the faces of men and women burning as if the great light were about to shatter out of them, dynamite inside glass. You could almost take hold of the tension, the glorious poise on the brink of ecstasy, and then the fall.
“Sand,” I said, and he started. I can lie so still I seem dead, let alone sleeping, “I’m going to take a shower.”
His eyes were luminous.
“Yes,” he said, and rested his head against the back of the chair.
It was altered between us. He’d ceased asking me if he could help. He sensed he could help me.
I went into the cubicle and ran the shower, and as it ran I took off my dress and undergarments and when I came to Cassi’s letter, I flushed it away through the chem-flush lavatory.
I looked at myself in the jets of the shower, at my body. Sand was going to want my body very much. (Whores do it for payment, Sabella.) The pendant around my neck on the hair-thin white-metal chain was glinting, pulsing, though usually only I c
ould see it pulse.
The sleazy hotel room was warm. I shut off the shower and went out rain-wet, and I called his name very quietly, and Sand moved out of the chair and around and saw me. For a moment his reaction was dual, arousal and nervousness, quite normal, human: I’m beautiful, I’ve scared him.
I crossed to him, and slipped off his jacket. I was unsealing his shirt, quietly, quietly, and he said, “Sabella, are you certain you—” And then no more, because it was a gesture of some kind the decent human response was forcing him to make. The animal human response was already making him tremble, as I trembled when he held me before. He placed his hands at either side of my face and leaned and kissed me long and slow, and the unhuman response was beginning to well through him, what the unhuman part of me was causing to happen to him. He said my name several times as he kissed me along my throat, my shoulders, and put his mouth to my breasts. The stone lay against his cheek. (Sometimes, stretched on the wolf hills, a boy, misled by the white refracted gleam of the stone, would say to me, Is this a frecking diamond, baby?) But Sand brushed the pendant aside.
And then we were on the bed. His skin smooth and marvelous, his loins blossomed into a single hard fierce flame.
I always feel concern at this moment. Even with the basest of them, I feel a concern to make them happy. Of course, I know the reason. And I, I’d had no exquisite delight in it, not before, and not with Sand. The sensations of touch, of clasp, of physical excitement, are all for the other, the partner. Yet the prelude is sweet, being a prelude. Inside me, his rhythm was tidal. Numb to it, yet I could measure its perfection.
“Sabella—”
“Darling,” I whispered, “there’s something we’re going to do now, something you’ll like—”
“Whatever you want—whatever—”
I had the trick of this movement, being practiced. We rolled a little, and he laughed breathlessly, and then I was over him, and though we were still joined, the wonderful rhythm had broken, to allow the second rhythm to begin.
The snake shifted under my fingers, upwards two inches along his neck. His neck was strong and vital, the color of amber. I ran my tongue along the vein there, the golden vein which throbbed and spoke to me. And then I put my lips to the golden tube of the vein and kissed with the drawing kiss which bruises, brings the thing within to the surface. This was how I found the way, through this kiss, this bruising kiss, tasting the blood beneath. Sand moaned and clung to me, closing his arms around my waist, my hips, to hold me to him forever. The eye-teeth don’t require great length, they are nearly long enough in most of you. They only need to be razor sharp, with points like needles, to pierce without tearing, without hurt, as the sun pierced through the globe of quartz. I pressed the flesh, the vein, with my fingers, molding it for my mouth. As I made the wound, he shuddered, and when I began to draw again with my mouth, the shudder became convulsive. I was strong, stronger than he supposed, I could retain my position with total facility, and then I must, for as the pump began, he came. And continued to come. (How could we guess, in the beginning? How could we revoke when we understood?) This orgasm, which follows the rhythm from his vein into my mouth, this climax which goes on and on, long after the fluids of it are exhausted, while this other fluid lasts, on and on and will go on until I stop drinking, or until he faints. This is what the mystery is. This is what kills.
Why does it happen in this way? I don’t know. I’ve thought of the story that hanged men climax on the rope, the trigger of the throat, the thrust of blood into the brain and loins. Or of a surge of life whose symbol is sex, is seed, life rearing against death, for blood flowing away is the symbol of death. I’ve thought of the sometimes sensual pleasure of the beast giving suck. I’ve thought of the female spider eating her mate during intercourse. I can think. But I don’t know.
And for me?
My excitement had concentrated and changed. I was no longer excited, I was beyond excitement, beyond the world. A lion crouched over its prey, you see me like that. No. It was a quite spontaneous need, like needing air to breathe. And then I was breathing air when ten minutes before I was breathing mud. I could go on, like him, different but the same, on and on. But I mustn’t. I forced myself, forced myself, as if fighting against gravity.
I could picture his face. You’ve seen the faces of those who die in agony; did you never note that lovers look like this at the peak of joy?
I must, I must.
I raised my head.
Who told you it was messy? Great gouts and slobberings—no. A slender trickle from the one (why more than one?) minuscule wound, a thread of scarlet.
Sand’s head lolled aside. He was unconscious.
I loved him, just for a minute, I loved him and I grieved for him and my pity was part of the beauty, before the shame began.
* * *
* * *
It was four hours to sunrise when Sand came to. He felt slightly dizzy, yet flooded by well-being, and hungry, as generally they did. He lay on one elbow, sometimes smiling lazily, and I fed him the steak I’d dialed for, and told him I’d already eaten my share of. My feeding him seemed quite suitable, playful and friendly, to him. Subconsciously, I believed, he understood it was his right, as prey, to be cosseted. In the light wine I’d already mixed the vitamin concentrate I’d ordered from the hotel pharmacy, along with the food. By morning, Sand Vincent would feel no more than tired. In a day or so, not even that. Unless—but I wasn’t going to consider an alternative. There was a five o’clock Brade lift-off from Aresport. Mine. Even though I’d have to travel some of the route by day. I could make it now.
“That was one hell of a high,” Sand said to me as we lay on the bed. “But you’re one hell of a lady.”
He didn’t remember it all, not consciously, just that I was a good lay. In the beginning, even after I learned to control myself, to stop in time, I’d kill them because I thought they’d remember. But they wouldn’t have. The truth is too absurd, it gets covered over and forgotten.
Then he put his hand to his neck and ran his fingers under the snake, and winced.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was enjoying it, too.”
He grinned. Sometimes they said, “You’re a vampire!” It was a joke. You both laugh about it. But any pharmacy sells coagulant creams and healfast jel in handy purse-size packs. There wouldn’t be a mark much more than a pale bruise by sunup.
“You enjoyed it too, did you,” he said. He skimmed his hand across my body. He slid himself toward me, stroking me, eager again, the way they are always eager. Then, he saw the stone. “Christ,” he said, “it can’t be a ruby, this size, can it?”
The pendant stone is scarlet, pulsing, warm, alive.
“Just stained crystal.”
“I thought it was colorless. Why did I think that? Sabella, you’re lovely.”
I let him kiss me, then I eased away.
“I’d like to, Sand, but I’m so damn tired. In the morning?”
“No, beautiful. Now.” And he started all over me, dreamy and stupid, with this lust the lodestone brings.
“This is to be rape then, is it?” I said. He blinked, and his face emptied. He let me go. “In the morning,” I said.
“Woman, I won’t let you out of this room until we do.”
He fell asleep almost immediately, and in his sleep, came back to me, lying against me trustfully as a child. But the sleep was too deep for him to wake when I left him, put on my clothes and took up my piece of luggage and went away.
I paid the hotel bill through until noon next day. Sand would be ready to leave by then. He’d start at once feverishly trying to find me, obsessed by me in a way he could barely figure. But the compulsion would shrivel gradually when he didn’t locate me. As long as he never saw me again, he’d be safe.
It was four years since I’d had a man. I intend the word ‘had’ in all its meaning—sex, con-tri
ck, sustenance.
Four years. I’d tried to stop when my mother died. And I’d stopped. Lapsed. Stopped. Two years of lapsing, regaining ground, four years of keeping ground. But the craving never goes away. The beasts of the field appease, but I am a huntress, and my natural prey strides through the steel prairies, rides the gold mountains of the cities, the neon caves of the towns.
There are wolves on all the hills, even the hills of glass.
* * *
* * *
In the plane, as the sun was slitting the sky below and I darkened my window, I thought for the first time, If Cassi sent me her curse and a jeweled cross she wanted to scorch me, why did she also leave me eighty thousand tax-paid credits?
II
WE MOVED AWAY from Easterly because one night when I was fourteen, I went for a drive with a boy I picked up on the highway near the bearshop. It was insane instinct on my part, callousness on his. He deserved something but not what he got. The highway auto-patrol found his body in the bushes. Everybody thought he’d left his car for the usual reason, and a wildcat had attacked him, which caused a stir since Easterly isn’t hunting country. He’d died of heart failure, as always. But I’d made a mess of his neck. If you allow your teeth to meet in the vein there’s a hemorrhage at once. My mother waited up for me that night, and when I came home with strange hot colors on my dress, she locked us in my bedroom, and she questioned me. Six hours of questioning, but the same question, which I answered truthfully, which she would then ask me again, imploring me, mutely, to recant, to say I’d lied. We were both sobbing and shouting, and she hit me sometimes. She’d taken me to medics before, but she’d never really told them anything. The medics would prescribe for anemia. As for psychiatry, nobody reckoned it anymore, and religion, in my case, had failed. Now she had this terrible thing to face, to cope with. Her little daughter had done something momma couldn’t admit, couldn’t even believe, and momma still had to hide it from everyone. So she fastened on the believable aspect, that I’d been laid at fourteen and had lizards in my pants. Then, I got really sick. I started passing out, getting heat stroke after half an hour in the sun. There was a doctor who said it was photophobia, and a doctor who said it was psychosomatic. And then I killed a boy again, and the same story of wildcats went around and the men got up a shooting party, and momma and I moved west.