Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  Some regard the house as ugly. All things decay, of course. Each time I come I see further hints of weathering, paint peeling, rust-marks streaking the render. Perhaps Blackwater Hall is, as some claim, a brute of a place, as desolate as a prison fortress. Well, I don’t ask anyone to admire it. It’s the mirror of my soul. It is my soul.

  In truth, I’ve no need to reclaim it, because it was never truly taken from me. It can’t be taken; it’s as if it exists partly in the Crystal Ring, an etheric house that transcends its earthly form. It transcends beauty itself.

  If I speak of my house like a lover, it is because I regard it as a lover.

  On the surface, Elizabeth is the good wife, attending church, managing her household, pretending to be thrilled when her husband brings her some trinket. She affects ignorance of his gambling, drinking and whoring when he’s away in Dublin or in London. Like the dutiful wife she is, she turns a blind eye. But she has a secret.

  Me.

  Our limbs twine like snow in the moonlight, blood streaking darkly down her throat. Blood on snow. She knows by now that I’m no ghost, that my needs are nothing to do with saving my poor tormented soul—but she’s beyond caring. We are both too addicted to this sensual game. When she feels faint, I hold her up and give her dark stout to drink, to strengthen the blood.

  She knows that if we keep doing this, it will kill her, yet she cannot stop. Neither of us can. Urgently she welcomes me to her bed, whenever the husband is absent.

  Then one night, panting in the aftermath of passion, she cries, “You must leave me alone, Sebastian.” She pushes me away into the wreckage of bed sheets, her essence still sweet on my tongue. “I need to have children. Can you give me children?”

  I laugh and reply, “I hardly think so. We both know that I can’t.”

  Even in life, as I’ve mentioned, I failed to impregnate my wife. Whatever cold essence now spurts from my member, it is as clear as ice water and as sterile as poteen. There is no life-force in it.

  “Then you have to go, and leave me to my husband!”

  So I do as she asks—out of curiosity, not compassion. I let her alone for a few years, and children she has. Three rosy daughters and two sons, who suck as greedily upon her breast as ever I have feasted on her neck. The beating urgency of life will always win out against the vampire.

  Why did I indulge her? Well, I have patience. Of course the temptation was there, to guzzle the life from those rosy children, from mother and father too, all in one debauched night—but I didn’t. What am I, a fox in a flapping hencoop, to go on killing and killing until nothing moves anymore? No.

  I was too soft on Elizabeth but, you see, if I’d destroyed her—and it would have been so easy, done in a moment—I’d have destroyed the very conditions that made my existence worthwhile. I was in love, a little. If not with her, then with the situation.

  I still had to feed, of course, and so I went away for a while, a fair few years in fact, and found entertainment elsewhere. I might even have lost interest and never gone back at all—but by coincidence, nearly twenty years on, we meet at a ball in Dublin.

  Elizabeth greets me with the same sly smile of recognition and, as I bow gallantly, we both know—the game is on again. She is tangibly older of course—flesh thickening, her stiff layers of corsetry and clothes giving her the grandeur of a duchess. Still a desirable woman, though. She still has the gleam in her violet eyes, once so innocent, now full of shrewdness; knowing and sultry. I still desire her—how not? Her flesh is as plump with blood as ever and the blood as sweet in its promise.

  Later, at Blackwater Hall once more, we face each other in her bedchamber, but something is different. The first thing she says to me is, “Make me a vampire.”

  I only look at her. Somewhere deep inside me, dreary horror wells, a kind of tired revulsion.

  “That’s what I want,” she insists. She clasps my arms, imploring me with luminous eyes. “Look at you, forever young and powerful, fearing nothing! I want that too!”

  “Never.” I tear myself from her. Surely my contempt must pierce her to the heart. “I couldn’t do it, even if I wanted to. It’s not a simple process. It takes three vampires to create a new one.” And I explain a little about Rasmila, Fyodor, and Simon.

  “Then find two others to help you,” she persists, addressing me as if I were some inept boot-boy.

  “Don’t you understand?” I say patiently. “The gathering of three means that the change can’t happen by accident. It must be planned. Which means that it must be desirable.”

  “But it is. I desire it.”

  “Desirable to them. To me.”

  She looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. The look makes me angry.

  “Who do you think you are, Elizabeth?” I say with cold spite. “You were never anything to me but blood-filled flesh. What, you think you’re worthy of immortality? No, you are not so special. You are no different from any other mortal. A lump of ageing flesh.”

  Strangely, she doesn’t appear to react much. Her eyes narrow a little, but she keeps her burning, wounded anger contained inside her. She doesn’t scream or beg. I’m too dismayed at her tiresome request to care about the feelings she is hiding.

  Eventually she says, in a surprisingly cutting tone, “What you’re telling me is that you, alone, lack the power to transform me. You can’t do it without help. Poor Sebastian.”

  I should have killed her for that. Should have done so long before now. I hate it when I let them reach this stage.

  I go away then, leaving her standing ghost-like in the centre of the large and shadowy bedroom that, so often, had witnessed our convulsions of ecstasy.

  Unbelievable as it may seem, I almost entirely forget she ever made this request. It passed from my mind in the manner of a lover’s tiff. Some months later I arrive at the house again, as jaunty as a young suitor who’s gone off, got drunk, and returned later utterly oblivious to the fact that his lady friend has been seething with rage all this time.

  I can’t altogether have forgotten, though, because I feel wary. I don’t approach her at once. Instead I haunt stairwells and alcoves for a time, watching the family from a distance. It amuses me to do this, but I’m sure Elizabeth knows I’m around. She’s uneasy and over-sensitive, just as she used to be in the old days when I would look at the pale peach column of her neck with such delicious longing.

  Actually, I have some vague intention of starting on one of the daughters now. Or maybe a son, for a change. Or all of them. They must be of an age to make it fun.

  Alas, it seems I’m too late. Where did the time go? All but one of the offspring appear to have left—farmed out to schools or to relatives in order to become ladies and gentlemen, ready to marry money and enter society—they’re out there in the world, but Elizabeth and her husband are still here. Their youngest is about eight, a plain bookish boy who doesn’t interest me.

  Still, I’m a patient man. I can wait for the son to grow up and come home with a trembling, fresh young wife, or even wait for grandchildren… After all, the house is mine. Generations will come and go but I will always be here, like a curse.

  Only something is wrong.

  I start to notice changes in Elizabeth. She’s lost weight; she looks younger, more slender, her hair restored to its lustrous gold. She’s languorous, pleased with herself—as she used to be in the early days with me. The changes aren’t just in her, but in her husband George, too. It’s as if his coarseness has been fine-polished away, and he no longer strides around like a drunken officer, slapping the furniture with a riding crop. Instead there’s a thoughtful quality about him, a shine to his hair and a pale bloom to his skin.

  Have I been blind? Isn’t it strange, how we don’t see what we don’t expect to see? Some ghastly trick has been played upon me, here in my own house. Voices seem to be whispering and laughing at me from the corners of ceilings. Stags stare at me from black glass eyes. Something is pulling at me, an unseen current whirling me along, r
endering me as wide-eyed and vulnerable as Elisabeth on that first night. As if in a trance, I walk into the drawing room and they are sitting in chairs on either side of the fireplace, George and Elizabeth, just as if they have been waiting for me to arrive. They sit perfectly composed, like brother and sister, hands lightly clasped in their laps. They are gazing at me with liquid eyes and their skin glows like candle-flames shining through the thinnest possible shell of wax.

  “How did you do it?” My voice almost fails as I speak, emerging hoarse as an old man’s.

  “We met your angels,” she answers simply. “Your three angels. They came back. I knew what they were and I persuaded them to transform us.”

  I should have remembered. The vampire’s kiss, when it does not kill, brings madness. Not always in the form of wilting terror, but sometimes as a kind of megalomania.

  “Why? They can’t be persuaded. They take only those who are special, chosen. That is what they told me.”

  “And it’s what they told us, too,” she answers serenely. “You take yourself too seriously, Sebastian. Perhaps they changed us simply to annoy you.”

  “But him?” I point at the husband, who looks back at me. He sits motionless as only vampires can, fixing me with his all-knowing, pitiless gaze. “That—that coarse, arrogant, drink-raddled merchant?”

  “Why would I want to be immortal, without my husband at my side?” she replies, genuinely surprised.

  “You hate him, and all he represents!”

  “No, I don’t. It was your idea that I hated him, that he maltreated me. Your perception, not reality. I love my husband. Have you no idea of the wonders I’ve shown him? We are one soul, George and I.”

  So, all the arts she learned from me, she has taught him in turn! And far from being suspicious at her knowledge, it turns out he was delighted with it, enthralled! Unbelievable.

  And now they are holding hands, and he lifts hers to his mouth, pressing her knuckles to his lips. She laughs, showing the tips of her new fangs. “What, did you think you alone were the custodian of this delicious dark secret? Selfish Sebastian. You wouldn’t share, so we found another way, and now we don’t need you anymore.” And she laughs again. Laughs at me!

  So this is what I did.

  I went away and dressed myself up as a priest, and I arrived in the nearest village all disheveled, with a crusading fire in my eye; a man of the cloth, on a mission from God. First I found the local priest and plied him with whisky as I told my story. Despite his unpromising appearance, he was soon full of holy ardor. He was a fiery fellow, eager to make his mark on the world, to impress his bishop and win the undying admiration of his congregation, or something on those lines. I wound him up and set him spinning.

  He gathered the populace, and I spun my story; that Elizabeth and George were undead, that they’d sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for immortality, that I’d been hunting such creatures down across Europe, Britain and Ireland for years in order to bring them the mercy of death. Oh, a rare tale I wove.

  I’d come to warn them, to help them purge the evil. Were they with me? Oh yes, by God, they were!

  The priest fell in eagerly behind me like a captain behind a general. He took me for the scholar and holy man I purported to be and he wanted to play the hero, scrambling for his share of my glory. Turned out I’d walked into a community already possessed by rumor and fear. Elizabeth and George were young vampires, you see, not yet adept at hiding their tracks. There had been deaths, injuries that set a fair old fire of stories blazing. I’d walked in at the perfect time to become the savior of the community.

  All I had to do was to point and say, “They’re the guilty ones,” and the entire town became a mob, ablaze with righteous vengeance.

  They will fight like tigers, I warned, so we’ll go in a big band like an army. Some of us will probably die, but that’s the risk we must take to be free of this curse.

  They don’t sleep in coffins, I told them, but they are more dangerous by night and more apt to be off their guard during the day, from the necessity of pretending to be human. Don’t bother with a stake to the heart, I said—that will only make them mad. No crosses, either, you’ll only waste time while they laugh. Simply hack off their heads, I instructed. Hack the heads and the bodies into pieces, then throw the pieces onto a bonfire.

  That should do the trick.

  And so it happened that I led a vast, inflamed army to Blackwater Hall—priests and farmers, blacksmiths, washerwomen and their big daughters, stomping along with rolled-up sleeves, everyone—and they took Elizabeth and her husband by surprise and overwhelmed them.

  Too inexperienced to vanish into the shadows of the Crystal Ring, they fought for their lives with fangs and nails. They fought with all the desperation of mortals—and thus they fell, hacked to pieces.

  The mob spared the little boy, who watched as his parents were cut down before his terrified eyes. Had he known what they’d become? How could he not? And yet, I still believe he didn’t know. His parents had kept up a front of humanity for his sake, ensuring that he only saw what they wanted him to see.

  I still wonder what nightmares haunted him down the rest of his years. At one time I would have been eager to know…would have sought him out wherever he was, and hidden in the shadows watching the liquid shine of his gaze questing for me in the darkness…

  Strange, I never did. I lost my taste for it, somehow.

  In the midst of this carnage, I slipped away.

  A column of smoke rose behind me, turning the air bitterly fragrant like autumn—but it was a pyre that burned, not the house itself.

  Their children survived. The older ones, I understand, never set foot in Blackwater Hall again. The youngest son, however—once he’d reached an age to make his own choice—lived there until his death; a bachelor. Quite eccentric, quite mad. He never threw anything away, it seems. He filled the place with collections; with animals stuffed rigid under glass domes, with drawers full of fossils and coins, with butterflies pinned in glass cases and huge, ugly beetles impaled on cards. As if, by heaping talismans around himself, he built a great nest in which to hide from the darkness outside.

  A grand job he did of tormenting himself; he didn’t need any help from me at all. Some years ago, he died and since then Blackwater Hall has lain empty, a shell loved by no one. And here it remains, falling into slow decline. Sometimes I still come back.

  I view the familiar sweeps of grass, magnificent lone trees, copses, the river gleaming like milk in the vaporous gloom. In the distance, the mountains are soaked in layers of folk tale and myth, haunted forever by the black goddess Callee. And there it stands, Blackwater Hall; a great mansion, broodingly desolate. The walls are mottled and flaking, as if the place is shedding its skin with age. The windows, fogged like cataracts with dirt, stare indifferently at long-neglected gardens and stables.

  I stand outside and gaze at it for hours, watching it decay by slow degrees. I’m filled with the sensation that it was not I who built the house after all, but some greater power acting through me. In darker moments I feel that I have simply been used in order to create a theatre for some great drama that has yet to unfold. In my mind the house is a sighing black tomb, and in place of antlered stags along the walls, there are horned demon heads.

  Thus the house remains to this day—its walls gray with neglect, paint cracking, windows netted with cobwebs and dust. Somehow it withstands the vigorous, mindless invasion of life—the nesting of birds and bats, vegetation trying to drag it down with green tendrils. I wander the grand salons and bedrooms, corridors and attic nurseries, where rocking horses stand motionless under the soft, endless fall of dust. The edifice endures like an ancient castle fortress, tired yet impervious to time.

  Was it I who sucked the life from this house? Will it ever be done with its revenge? I wanted the family gone and yet, without them, it is nothing. The house is dead yet here it stands, undead. Blackwater Hall draws me back, I swear, like a jealous lov
er. I know it is not done with me yet.

  One day it may yet spring to life again. Some rich and enterprising young family might take on the Hall and restore it to glory, filling the rooms with fresh colors, with the chat and bustle of their lives, with scents of flowers and cooking; with the vigor of their own throbbing, blood-filled bodies. Children will run laughing and screaming along the endless corridors. Doll’s house doors will be opened, gigantic child-faces staring in awe through the windows. Rocking horses will creak into life.

  And on that day I will be here, waiting to claim my own.

  IN MEMORY OF…

  Nancy Kilpatrick

  Award-winning author and editor Nancy Kilpatrick has published eighteen novels, one nonfiction book, and has edited thirteen anthologies. Of those, eight of the novels are vampiric, including her popular Power of the Blood world. Two additional volumes collect some of her vampire short fiction: The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick and Vampyric Variations. Three of the anthologies she’s edited are Love Bites; Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead; Evolve 2: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead. A goodly number of her two hundred and twenty published short stories fall into the undead realm. She writes on other themes, but vampires are still near and dear to her heart. This has propelled her to acquire, over the years, a vast book collection of vampire fiction and nonfiction that now totals well over 2,200 titles. Look for her upcoming (non-vampire) anthologies: Expiration Date (spring 2015) and Nevermore! Murder, Mystery and the Macabre (fall 2015). Check nancykilpatrick.com for updates, and join her on Facebook.

  In the following story, Kilpatrick weaves real historical characters and a few facts into an unusual tale of psychic vampirism…

  If memory serves, yellow marigolds and blue narcissus clotted the flowerbeds of my father’s estate in Clontarf that August. The gardener had outdone himself, and it was as though at every turn, life itself permeated the grounds—short-lived life. But 1875 was the spring of my years. Barely seventeen and dreamy, the way Irish girls were then, my future stretched before me like an endless bare canvas, awaiting whichever colors and brush strokes I deigned to paint upon it. Had I but known the outcome of that fateful afternoon, surely I would have fled to the bluffs, hurled my young body over the cliffs and onto the jagged rocks below.