Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

She startles, clutching the bed covers to her chin. Her eyes are pools of astonished innocence. I catch her warm scent; soap and rosewater, with a hint of smooth female musk beneath. She’s terrified—not in a make-a-screaming-rush-for-the-door sense, but in the deeper way that turns the victim deathly still. Yet there’s fascination in her gaze. Before she acts, she needs to know what I am. And that’s the space I have to work in.

  “How did you get in?” she whispers. “Who are you?”

  “A ghost,” I reply. I move just enough to let her see me. Her lips open. I glimpse myself in the looking-glass on her dressing table—it’s a myth that we cast no reflection—and I see what she must see; a high, curved cheekbone, shapely nose and jaw, long black lashes. Pallid features a sculptor might have chiseled with idealistic fingers, shaded by hair that is dark, formless and too long. My eyes are deceptive; they’re the green-brown of hazel nuts and they look gentle, pensive. They tell you nothing about my character.

  “Just a shade, fair child,” I tell her gently. “I need your help. Would you help me?”

  There’s so much history in this house, Blackwater Hall. I should know, for I built it.

  Eight years the construction took me, and in 1704 the Hall was finished, standing magnificent beside the River Blackwater amid the rich landscape of County Waterford. My wife Mary was weeks from giving birth. Years, it had taken us to conceive a child! Now all my dreams were close to fruition. Soon we would be leaving the decrepit tower of my Norman and Anglo-Irish ancestors and moving into the new mansion, a place grand enough to befit our heirs. Such struggles I’d had to keep my estate from the hands of the conquering English! I even changed faith from Catholic to Protestant to save it from confiscation—and yet it slipped from my hands anyway. All gone in one terrible night.

  Perhaps this was divine punishment. To me, it meant little to betray my religion, since I never was devout. All I cared about was keeping my lands—not out of greed, but passion. I loved my birthright so deeply, I valued it even above my immortal soul. Some say Irish Catholicism is only one step away from paganism, that the faerie folk were never destroyed, only assimilated into the new faith and given the names of saints so the people could still worship without heresy. I believe in those darker, older gods: devouring black mother Callee and her ilk. They never went away, only vanished into sea and stone, tree and sky. And that dreadful night, three of them came to wreak vengeance. Three ancient gods with burnished skins and writhing hair and terrible golden eyes.

  They took me, and reforged me into what I am.

  The trinity who chose me personified that very peculiar delusion some vampires have—that they have become mythological personalities, demi-gods. And who’s to say they are wrong? We slip into another reality when we change, a soup of dreams and nightmares that some call the Crystal Ring. It swarms with archetypes born from the human subconscious (and from the subconscious of other beings, too, I don’t doubt). Who is to say that the thought-form of a god or an archangel can’t take over a newly made vampire, fusing with a soul that has been broken apart like a raw egg?

  I digress.

  When I recall my human self, I peer through a veil. I recall Mary as beautiful, a tall fine woman. We loved each other, I thought … I’d been patient with the long time it took her to conceive, as I had with the long construction of the house. Wasn’t that enough to prove my devotion? Apparently not, by her standards. Mere days before the house was ready for us, it came to pass that I discovered her in the old tower house in the company of some stuttering, milkweed clerk from Dublin. She was packing, ready to run away with him.

  Each time I return to Blackwater Hall and stand once again in the courtyard, the grey walls rising like thunderclouds above me, I relive that night. The yellow ropes of Mary’s hair hanging over her breasts, the swell of her belly beneath her clothes as she made her confession. “The child is not yours, Sebastian. In ten years, you could not give me a child. You care nothing for me—all you love is the house! My lover has come for me and we’re leaving.”

  She shrank away then as if I would strike her, but I didn’t. Instead, I ran into the courtyard of the new house and screamed my rage at the heavens. The black sky split open, and the deluge of rain sent me skidding to the door of a cellar. Somehow I’d gashed my arm in my anguish and blood was dripping from me.

  In a few fatal minutes I’d lost everything. I had no wife, no child, so what now was the use of a grand hall? There was wood stacked inside and I meant to set light to it, to burn my dream to its foundations.

  The darkness inside the cellar was absolute, but I knew its shape: a long chamber with racks set ready for storage. Only a store-room … yet it felt in that moment like an ancient torture chamber, silent but for the drip of water and the sobbing of the damned. I remember sinking down against the wall in my despair, my last moments of being human…

  Then someone shut the door.

  They’d been shadowing me for months, years. In retrospect, I felt they’d been watching me all my life. They had marked me as “special” in some way, prime raw material for vampire-hood. Who knows why they chose this moment? Perhaps it was my anguish that drew them. Or merely the scent of my rain-watered blood.

  They were vampires and yet they were angels. I mean that they believed they were angels, messengers from a punishing God, something more than mere demons. Simon, a magnificent golden man with extraordinary deep yellow eyes like a cat’s. Fyodor, an attenuated male with silvery flesh and snow-white hair. Rasmila (Callee?), a woman with dark brown skin, her hair a fall of blue-black silk.

  In that annihilating moment, all my human concerns fell away in a blast of lightning from heaven.

  “Sebastian,” they said, their voices as mellifluous, amused, and coldly sonorous as bells. “Don’t be afraid. We have come only for your blood and your soul.”

  Only.

  I remember how different the world looked, afterwards. Nets of light webbed a clear deep sky; I’d never before seen with such clarity, never dreamed that such crystalline beauty was hidden from mortal eyes. I could see for miles; northwards to the Galtee and Knockmealdown mountains, to the towers of Cahir Castle, the Golden Vale of Tipperary and Cashel of the Kings; closer at hand, my own beloved estate. The stump of the old stone tower was a shadow behind the new house, which appeared a great, pristine mansion like a gold casket swathed in deep blue twilight. Three storeys it has, with tall imposing windows, a pillared portico that soars the height of the frontage. All was wrapped in night-colors I’d never seen before. The air was sweet and icy, like wine.

  How unutterably beautiful it was, the home that I built for myself. For us.

  And then I walked away.

  I left, only because of what I became. What need had I for anything of the mortal world? I needed no wife or child, no home, no land or wealth, none of that. All I needed was blood, and the wonder of my new senses.

  I had no intention ever of coming back. And yet…

  Here I am again, unseen in the shadows, a ghost haunting the ruins of my own life.

  There are two ways I might proceed with Elizabeth. The road of instant violation and swift death; or the slower path of enthrallment, followed by a wasting decline into madness. Each has its own pleasures, so I am undecided. I live in the moment, watching how the warm light gilds the swell and dip of her breasts, the way her tongue flicks out to make her lips glisten.

  “A spirit?” she whispers. And then, “I know you. I’ve seen you before.”

  This shocks me. No one is meant to see me! Her parents never have, nor their servants nor any of their numerous visitors and relatives. They’re aware of me; I am the guilty secret that no one mentions. They shiver and start at shadows, but they don’t see me. “When have you seen me, fair one?” I ask very gently.

  “When I was a child. You never spoke to me before.”

  When last I was here, Elizabeth had indeed been a small child. Her older brother lay dying of a mysterious wasting disease, so crazed by strang
e ecstatic nightmares that they called the priest to exorcise him… Ah, memories. She doesn’t know that I was responsible. Obviously she glimpsed me, yet never connected my appearance to his death.

  “What did you think, when you saw me?”

  “I don’t know. You were just a face in the shadows. A sad and restless soul with such beautiful eyes.”

  “You weren’t afraid, then?” I smile in relief. “You know I’m a friend.”

  “Yes,” she murmurs. So, she has some dim memory of me, which has imprinted itself favorably upon her. And thanks to that—after her initial alarm—she’s receptive. She sees me, not as a threat, but as someone familiar, fascinating. A lonely, mysterious phantom!

  The idea of killing her, swiftly or slowly, loses its appeal. Instead—to win her trust! Her love. There’s a novelty.

  “You are the ghost of Blackwater Hall,” she says, speaking as decisively as a child.

  “Yes.” I laugh softly at that. “I suppose I am.”

  Her eyes grow more intense. “You’re him, aren’t you? You’re Sebastian Pierse, who murdered his wife and her lover, and then disappeared.”

  “And been in torment over it ever since,” I concur. “She betrayed me most sorely, but I wronged her the more. Now I seek atonement.”

  “My parents and grandparents have always feared you,” she whispers. “They are always looking over their shoulders in the dark. They brought in priests to cleanse the place—but it didn’t work, did it?”

  I try not to laugh at this, since she’s so sincere. I speak with quiet, desperate need. “Elizabeth, it is the dearest wish of my heart to trouble the household no longer. But I’ll never be at peace unless you help me.”

  “Help you, how?” She is trembling. We’re half in love already. The warm weight of her body so close is driving me mad.

  “Should I pray for you?”

  “Yes. Let me come to you at night like this, and we’ll pray together. A link with the living …”

  “I can’t have a man in my room!” she says in a panic. “I’m to be married.”

  “But I’m not a man, I’m a soul in torment. Connection with a living being, that’s all I need.”

  “All?”

  “And a sip of your life-blood.”

  She blinks. It doesn’t sound much, put like that. She touches my hand, doesn’t flinch when I sit beside her. “You’re very solid, for a ghost,” she says.

  We talk like this for a long time, a game of thrust and parry that grows ever more intense. There are soft touches between us; my fingertips on her hand, hers on my sleeve. Confidences are shared. She holds nothing back.

  I gather she is dreading this marriage to a man older than herself. It is no love match, clearly. As our dialogue strays into more intimate areas, she confesses that she fears the wedding night. “George will expect me like this—all pure, untried and nervous. But I … I don’t see why I should be lying here ignorant and frightened!”

  “You deserve pleasure,” I tell her. “He will not give you pleasure; you are just a possession to him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can tell, from your words, exactly the sort of man he is. Domineering, certain of his rights. He will have despoiled a hundred women in his time and yet expect his wife to be a perfect innocent. He will use you brutishly.” My outrage is genuine. “I can’t bear to think of him hurting you.”

  She chafes her lip with her teeth. I want to bite that rose-pink pillow. I see in her eyes a violet fire of rebellion. At last she asks, “Will you show me, then? So that when the time comes, I’ll know what to expect and I won’t be afraid. Will you, Sebastian?”

  “Nothing would please me more.” I speak with complete sincerity.

  “But he must never know!”

  “He won’t,” I reassure her. “It will be our secret. After all, with a ghost, it doesn’t count.”

  At last I lean in and feel the sweet, fresh warmth of her neck against my mouth. She sighs. I am lost.

  When I became a vampire I walked away from Blackwater Hall. I left others to find my wife and her lover in the old stone tower, where I had left them marinating in pools of their own blood. I took ship to America, like the long wave of Irish emigrants after me, thinking never to return. I put an ocean between myself and the old country; I wanted no more of its shadowy magic, its religions and superstitions, its wars and the endless struggle I’d had just to hold onto what was mine.

  In those early years of my new existence, I was savage and bitter. Yet as time passed, as bitterness faded and I brought the bloodthirst under control, I began to think of the house again.

  Some sixty years after I left, I came back. Just curiosity, you understand. I discovered that the scandal of Sebastian Pierse—who’d murdered his wife, her lover, and her unborn infant before vanishing—was local legend; a folk-tale told by old men in their cups. My estate had been claimed by the British and awarded to a family of English Protestant settlers. They were decent enough folk, I concede, who looked after the estate well and were fair to the tenants. I’d no argument with the way they ran my affairs.

  And yet, they had no right to be there. I owed it to the house and to myself to haunt them a little, to frighten the old men, to feed on the young and strong. To turn a capable wife into a crazed neurotic, to kill a first-born son here, a beloved daughter there. Just to darken their lives once in a while, as the generations came and went.

  So every few years I return to Ireland for old times’ sake, and listen with pleasure when people say, “That Blackwater Hall is haunted; it’s cursed the family are!” And I slip silently into the house and torment the hapless inhabitants a little more. I could have killed them all, but I let them stay and survive. Why?

  If I were of a more violent disposition, I would have ousted the usurpers long ago. I prefer to play a long and subtle game.

  How much more sense it makes to let them stay, to enjoy the slow burn of revenge over a century or three. I tolerate them for the pure pleasure of haunting them.

  “Just a sip, just a drop of your lifeblood,” I whisper to Elizabeth in the darkness. “It must be freely given. Without it, I’ll fade from Earth and be dragged into hell.” In the euphoric convulsions of our lovemaking I draw on her neck as she groans with delight and pain. I resist the urge to take too much; she’s too delightful to me, alive. And so she thinks she’s saving a poor damned soul from the abyss!

  For a while, anyway. By the time she realizes the falsehood, she no longer cares.

  It helps that I have this supernatural glow of beauty—the honey in the trap—that her new husband lacks. And she has the darkness in her soul that welcomes me, loving the danger and deception of it, loving the sheer sin.

  I was right about the husband. He’s some remote cousin of hers and his name is George. He’s an older man, experienced in the ways of the world to the point of debauchery. He’s handsome enough in his way; tall and strong, with a ruggedly arrogant face, thick brown hair, an overpowering sense of arrogant masculine entitlement. (Probably I would have been just like him, had my human life progressed as planned). George has made a fortune from trade in Dublin. He’s been everywhere and done everything, and yet he expects as his due a shimmering, untouched maiden on his wedding night! To me, he seems coarse and charmless. There can be no love in this match. Society has shackled her to him, but her hidden self writhes and lashes against it like a serpent.

  Elizabeth acts well the part of his new bride. How innocently she glides from church to bridal chamber, trembling and virginal, God-fearing and full of nervous anticipation. How flawlessly she feigns pain and inexperience! Attentive to detail, she even covertly pricks her finger on a pin to fake a few drops of virgin blood (ah, her sweet blood) on the sheets. Drunk on wine, blind in his triumphal lust, the husband suspects nothing.

  As he takes her, grunting and oblivious, she looks at me over his shoulder. Her lips part and her eyes shine as she smiles at me, her secret lover in the shadows.


  Every girl should have one.

  I am standing once again in the courtyard, which still seems to echo with the screams of Mary and her pallid weed of a lover as I tear them apart, feasting on their blood, ripping the still-moving fetus from her womb to suck the tender fluids from it as if from an unborn lamb…

  I write about all this as if I still cared, but in truth, I don’t. When the unholy trinity of vampires came to feed on my blood and grief in the rain—golden Simon, dark Rasmila and pale Fyodor, as white as ectoplasm—I entered a clearer state of consciousness in which human pain no longer tore me. Since I was determined to burn down Blackwa-ter Hall at the time, you could say that they saved the house, my three demon-angels. Should I thank them?

  Whenever Elizabeth and George are absent, I walk through the salons as if I own the place. It has an eerie grandeur. There are high ceilings with elaborate plaster decoration, impressive fireplaces surmounted by coats of arms, rows of long windows hung with gorgeous curtains. Exotic rugs sprawl on polished floorboards. Along the walls are the antlered heads of stags, staring out with black marble eyes. And countless dark portraits of ancestors, fixing their painted gazes on mine.

  Double doors lead from one great room to the next; here a drawing room that is insistently golden; wallpaper, frames, curtains, the scrolled woodwork of chairs, all gold. There are chairs lush with needlepoint roses, tapestry stools and firescreens. Too many ornaments; clocks, statuettes, vases, elephants carved of onyx and jade. More paintings, huge mirrors rimmed with gilt.

  None of this stuff is mine. Only the shell matters.

  These great rooms—which feel so alien to me, even though I commissioned them—fill me with delicious, creeping awe. This place has the feel of a theatre, each room a lavish set waiting endlessly for the actors to arrive. The house creaks. Speaks. Upstairs there are nurseries and playrooms where expensive toys have been played with too little. Alas, the mortality rate of children has been tragically high over the decades—and not all my fault, far from it.

  Feeding upon infants is a dull game, after all. True pleasure lies in toying with the adult inhabitants. I goad them, rather as a dog scratches at fleas, to remind them they should not be here.