by Paula Guran
I looked at him seriously. “Oscar, I refuse to engage in a battle of witty repartee with you. You have broken my heart.”
I waited, but his reply at first was silence. His eyes seemed to sparkle yet were, at the same time, imbedded with impotent sorrow, the latter catching me off guard.
Auntie was, of course, in the parlor with us, although the hour was late and she must have been exhausted—when I glanced across the room, she was dozing by the window.
Oscar, it seems, had observed this also. We sat side by side on the loveseat before the fire. He moved closer and his arms encircled me. I cannot express the apprehension laced with arousal that filled my being. The silence in the room felt like a vise, holding me tightly in its grip, as tightly as Oscar’s arms held me. Heat blazed through my body, as if I’d fallen into the fireplace; incineration threatened.
I recall noticing his lips as they came toward mine, twisted into a shape I can only describe as portraying cynicism. I felt both horrified and kindled, but I could not turn away. As his mouth found mine, I experienced a peculiar sensation, as if the breath from my body were being sucked from me. I know I began to panic, arms attempting to flail, legs kicking, noises coming from me. And then I watched helpless as blackness rushed toward me. In a moment of some hellish truth, I recognized that the universe itself was simply empty, Godless, friendless, a place so hollow that love had no reason to exist. And then, I remembered nothing more until I stood at the door, saying farewell to Oscar.
“So, this is goodbye,” he said cheerfully, as though it were a happy occasion. I struggled to feel something, and yet I felt numb.
“Have a good trip back to England,” I managed. “And be well. You will always be in my heart.” The last was not something I felt, but something that came to me, like words on a piece of paper, as though they had no connection to either myself or the situation.
“Ah, but Florrie, you have no heart,” Oscar laughed. “At least not anymore.” His voice was cold. And while the emotional impact escaped me, my dear body felt the attack and shuddered. In that moment, I recognized my fate. My essence had been taken from me and I would forever be vacant.
I did not hear from Oscar for two years. My parents had finally found a match for me of which they approved. He was an Irishman, of good breeding, a civil servant with ambitions to be a writer. Oscar, in his theatrical manner, sent a letter on hearing of my engagement. He declared that he was leaving Ireland, “probably for good,” so that we might never have need to set eyes on one another again. He demanded that I return the golden cross, since, he stated, I could never wear it again. He would keep it in memory of our time together, “the sweetest of all my youth,” he said. I could not help but picture that cynical twist to his lips as I read without passion this melodramatic epistle. I kept the cross.
The man I married was a giant, handsome enough, an athlete, an avid storyteller, but was never the good provider Mother had hoped for. In that way he was like Oscar. And in one other. His literary aspirations drove him to write for both the theater, and for print. Since I’d always entertained the notion of acting, once he discovered this, he endeavored to win me over; I enjoyed a short career on the stage and made my theatrical debut in a play written by my husband. On opening night, I received an anonymous crown of flowers, death-white lilies—I knew they had been sent by Oscar. That was just his style.
I need not reiterate my own marital history. Because my husband obtained a modicum of fame in his lifetime, all of the “facts” of our life together are a matter of record. The birth of our son Noel. The various tragedies of my husband’s professional life, and a scattering of successes. His illnesses, one of which led to his death. The fact that he left me exactly £4,723. Suffice it to say that outwardly our lives appeared normal, at least for those who travel in theatrical and literary circles. But a part of me went missing, and my husband was keenly aware of this lack. And, he knew the source. I told him. It consumed his spirit as surely as my own had been swallowed.
As to Oscar Wilde, over the years I watched him ingest the souls of others—the poor woman he eventually married, Constance Lloyd, and Lord Alfred Douglas, the man with whom he had a lifetime affair, but two of the many whose lives were altered irrevocably. Indeed, Oscar portrayed himself accurately enough in The Picture of Dorian Grey. You have likely read the accounts of his life. As always, he sums himself up best: “I was made for destruction. My cradle was rocked by the Fates.” Had I but the fortitude, I might have felt some compassion for his trials and tribulations. And in the end, when Robert Ross wrote that macabre account of Oscar’s death, describing how “blood and other fluids erupted from every orifice of his body,” I could view the words with but a scientific interest. Oscar had left me incapable of compassion. Nay, incapable of all feeling.
Try as he might, my loving husband could not overcome the damage caused by Oscar Wilde. And although I failed as a wife, still, in at least one regard I inspired my husband; his greatest work will live on, of that I am convinced, even as the works of Oscar Wilde seem to cling to life from beyond the grave. I have sworn it to myself that I will preserve my husband’s memory and protect his works to the end of my life—it is the very least I can do.
My husband was more than an insightful man, he was intuitive. If you have not as yet, perhaps you will eventually hear of him and the dark novel which depicts, in metaphor, the agony of the hollow existence of the woman whom he held dear, whose very soul had been absorbed for the refreshment of a psychic vampire.
A Personal Reminiscence,
by Florence Balcombe Stoker
Widow of Irish Writer Bram Stoker
1925
Author’s note: Many of the “facts” in this story are true, howbeit spun by the author into a work of fiction. Oscar Wilde did court the beautiful Florence Balcombe. He presented her with a gold cross necklace, which he asked her to return—she refused. He was known for his dalliances, including with the women mentioned in this story. Florence Balcombe went on to marry Irish writer Bram Stoker, by most accounts neither the happiest nor the saddest of marriages, and gave birth to one child, a son. She enjoyed a very brief career as an actress on the London stage. Stoker, of course, penned Dracula for which, after his death, she fought and won a lawsuit against Germany filmmaker Murnau for copyright infringement. Part of her compensation was that all copies of the silent film Nosferatu were turned over to her for destruction although, somehow, a few reels managed to survive the fires. It is this lawsuit and its consequences for which Florence Balcombe is best known.
WHERE THE VAMPIRES LIVE
Storm Constantine
Storm Constantine has written over twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction and more than fifty short stories. Her novels span several genres, from literary fantasy, to science fiction, to dark fantasy. She is most well known for her Wraeththu Chronicles—The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit (1987), The Bewitchments of Love and Hate (1988), The Fulfillments of Fate and Desire (1989)—and the Wraeththu Histories, The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (2003), The Shades of Time and Memory (2004), The Ghosts of Blood and Innocence (2005). Although not vampires, the post-human Wraeththu are magical and sensual hermaphroditic beings who, when their story first began almost thirty years ago, broke new ground in speculative fiction. In her single vampire novel, Burying the Shadow (1992), humankind meets its collective end and a highly eroticized universe of vampires takes its place.
In “Where the Vampires Live,” Constantine asks: How can you love someone who is so beyond all that is real it is impossible even to give them a name?
Zenna knew where the vampires gathered after sundown. She could climb out of the attic window, jump onto a limb of the ironwood tree outside and be free of the house, unheard and unseen, in minutes. She would run like a white hind between the dappled shadows of night, perhaps shape-shifting as she ran; hind to girl to hind. Her feet would seem barely to touch the ground. Her hair would be full of moths, drawn to it as if to a white flame.
Ariel would watch secretly from her own window, further down the house, full of envy, wistfulness and other aches she could not identify.
Ariel was Zenna’s cousin, and she had come to live in the Green House in the spring, right at the edge of the forest, far from town. Ariel’s father had died many years before and recently her mother had suffered some kind of disgrace that had affected her ability to be a mother—apparently. Ariel did not know what had happened; all she knew was that her mother had seemed to become someone else, a stranger in familiar skin. This troubled her so much she couldn’t bear to think about it, so it came as rather a relief when her uncle and aunt had offered to take her in for a while.
It quickly became clear to Ariel, who was well-mannered and prudent, that she was the kind of daughter that Maeve and Darn would have liked to have had. They tried very hard not to show it, but Ariel was aware of the irrepressible leaps in their spirit when she asked for things politely, or did chores without being asked. Zenna was a wild creature; wilful, often bad-tempered, but seductively fascinating. When she turned on her light, none could fail to be blinded by it, hypnotized into adoration. Getting her own way was a trait inbuilt into her being. She had magic in her that made it happen. No one could dislike her, because it is impossible to dislike a beautiful wild thing, a rare spirit of nature, just because it is naturally wild. But sometimes, watching her cousin, Ariel could not help but remember something her maternal grandmother had once said. “Some people are cursed in life, darlin’. Watch out for them. When a soul touches you on the inside, so that the whole world goes black but for them, take care. For they can take you to a doom.”
There had been more to this conversation, one of many lectures Granny gave on the potential horrors of life, but Ariel had forgotten the rest now. All she could think about, remembering those words, was what it would be like to be black on the inside, as if a hooked finger had poked through your skin and bone and had touched your heart, leaving a dark spot that grew and grew.
“Do you believe in vampires?” Zenna asked Ariel that one summer afternoon, as the girls sat by the pond in the garden. The day was hot. The air smelled green.
Ariel laughed politely. She always did that when she didn’t have an answer.
“Well, do you?”
“I don’t know … Do you?”
Now it was Zenna’s turn to laugh, and this was a very different sound from Ariel’s. “Do you know,” she said, “people always say ‘you can’t be too careful.’ But the fact is: you can.” She jumped to her feet. “Come on,” she said.
Come where? Down to the greenwood, where the shadows are brown and gold. Down to where the earth breathes so loudly you can hear it with human ears. Step through a barrier from here to there. It’s where otherness comes alive.
Zenna took Ariel to a place deep in the forest. They passed a tumbledown wooden shack covered in ivy. Zenna said the body of the woman who had lived there was still lying on the floor behind the door. No one knew that she had died. She had become mostly ivy. Ariel shuddered and ran on. When she held Zenna’s hand it was as if her feet too barely touched the ground. If they ran fast enough the world became a blur and it was possible to see another world beyond this one—always there, but you can’t see it normally.
Zenna’s destination was a dragonbark grove. The trees there were ancient; they were tall yet they stooped beneath the weight of their own age. Five of these trees were still alive; three dead, lying on the ground and riddled with insect nests. Zenna sat down on the spongy wood of one of the dead trees. There was a dampness to this grove, even though the sun was hot and high summer reigned in the greenwood. It was the breath of the earth, oozing out through mulch and mold. The canopies of the living trees were immense, the wings of dragons. Despite the absence of breeze, the leaves fluttered high overhead as if impulses from the roots shivered through them; impulses to fly.
Zenna swung her legs, leaning back on stiff arms.
“Are they here?” Ariel whispered. She wondered whether this was a game, and whether she was playing it right.
“At this time of day? Are you kidding?” Zenna sighed. “I wonder if they sleep beneath the dead leaves, but of course you’d never find them, even if they did. They would just become part of the soil, or would look like soil anyway. They are not what you think.”
Ariel wasn’t sure what she thought vampires to be. In her mind, all she saw was a flash of red eyes, some fangs glinting, a hiss of silk. “What are they?” she dared to ask.
“Very much creatures of earth,” Zenna replied. “They are not about death, nor come from death. They are the greatest example of life. They live on life itself.”
“Blood …”
“Well yes, everyone knows that.” Zenna stood up.
“Have you actually seen them?” Ariel asked.
Zenna glanced at her cousin over her shoulder. “It is actually very difficult to see them. They are camouflaged. At night they must be clustered on the roofs of houses, standing beneath the trees in gardens, watching and waiting for a place of entry.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Why?” Zenna pulled a scornful face. “They don’t kill people, you know. That’s just made up, because people are scared of what they don’t understand. But if you are bitten, you are never the same again.”
“You become like them?”
Zenna paused. “No. You are never the same again because you don’t become like them.”
“But have you seen them?” Ariel persisted.
Behind Zenna’s silence, Ariel could hear the cracklings and rustlings of the forest. It was never silent. It seemed to be quiet but was full of noise. Things moved unseen.
At last Zenna said, “You can only see them for yourself. This isn’t something that can be told.”
Perhaps it was just a game, the wild fancy of a girl at the cusp of womanhood, seeking romance and danger in the breathing forest. If Zenna had come across a strange creature in this place, it might not be a vampire, but something else, far less mysterious and far more dangerous.
“I would like to see for myself,” Ariel said.
“Then wish for it,” Zenna said. She held out her arms and turned slowly in a circle, head thrown back. “Wish for it with all your might. But you will never know when it might come true.” She was clearly in love: with the place, with an idea, with life itself.
Ariel did what she thought people were supposed to do when making a wish. She closed her eyes, very tight, and thought hard. I want to see the vampires. Even as she thought this, half of her was playing a girlish game, but the other half was standing at the brink of fear, holding out a tiny flickering candle into the dark. This half was actually a very old part of herself, who was wise enough to know even the most outlandish wishes can come true.
Two days later, Zenna shook her cousin awake in her bed, in the dead hours of the night. Ariel awoke from a dream of red flowers, something to do with a white dog, a star that could speak. She blinked at the pale vision of Zenna, whose eyes were wide and dark. “What? What?” she hissed, suddenly afraid. Was the house on fire?
“I need you to come with me,” Zenna said.
“Why? Where?”
Zenna pursed her lips, screwed up her eyes and shook her head briefly. “It’s your wish,” was all she’d say. “Please hurry.”
Ariel got out of bed and put on her clothes. Were there vampires on the roof now? If she listened carefully enough, would she hear them scratching at the slates? Part of her was lecturing the rest of her many parts with a quiet and patient voice. Don’t go with her. Whatever she’s found, whatever she wants to show you, it won’t be what she thinks it is. A good girl now would say “no”. Why are you putting on your shoes?
“Don’t put on your shoes,” Zenna said. Perhaps she could read minds and could hear the measured voice of Ariel’s inner good girl. But her reasons were different. “We must go barefoot. It’s quicker that way.”
At night, the forest dares to
speak aloud. As Ariel ran with her cousin, she could hear the immense cracks and groans of the trees, as if they were flexing their stiff ancient spines, pulling painfully their twisted roots from the possessive soil. The breath of the forest was now loud in Ariel’s ears. All manner of creatures might lurk in the darkness; humans were interlopers in this particular time and space. But when Ariel held Zenna’s hand and ran so fast, she felt she became something other than human and that this would protect her. She would not let go of Zenna’s hand, whatever happened.
The dragonbark grove felt as if something had just finished there; it had the air of a room where twenty people had just walked out of the door. All that is left is the smoke of their conversations, wisps that will eventually fade away. The bright moonlight made it possible to see almost as clearly as if the sun were in the sky.
“The vampires were here,” Ariel whispered. It was clear to her now that Zenna had wanted to share this experience and had come for her quickly. A pang of affection went through Ariel’s heart. It felt like a long, white-hot pin.
“It’s not just that,” Zenna said. She let go of Ariel’s hand and immediately Ariel felt fear, not affection. The pin was cold in her heart, making her breathless. Zenna was already walking away through the dappled moonlight; she was like a white hind again, lifting her feet delicately. Ariel blinked. She ran after her cousin.
Zenna had come to a halt before the greatest of the dragonbark trees; it must be their queen. “Here,” she said. “Look.” A pause, and then, with the slightest tremor of doubt: “Can you see?”
Ariel came to stand beside her cousin, and Zenna took her hand again, lacing their fingers lightly. With her free hand, Zenna pointed gracefully at the foot of the queen tree.
For a time Ariel could see nothing. She realised she didn’t believe, and that in itself was quite shocking to her. But then she could see: there was someone curled up among the knuckles of the roots. As she looked closer, she could see that this someone was trembling. They were half covered with leaves, perhaps their shadowy garments were actually made from leaves. Zenna dragged Ariel nearer, her fingers had closed tightly about Ariel’s own.