by Tanith Lee
‘Speak about the cities.’
‘You wish it? Very well. I stayed one night in Paris, another in Prague, in Bucharest – In the stillness of the night, after the sun has set, a sound begins to go up. At first I didn’t understand what it was. Then … I understood. A huge screaming, an enormous cry, of agony and despair. Then there are the wine-cellars. Red wine. They drink it and vomit. They resort to anything of a red colour. Vinegar even. Or paint. Sometimes they attack each other. There was a square; the moon was high and white. A hundred, or two hundred lay there. I imagined they were dead. Just before the dawn began to come, a handful of them stirred and started to crawl away. The rest – I saw a man and a girl in the fields of ruined crops beyond the old city wall. His mouth was at her throat, and she held his wrist to her lips. They made no movement. Shall I go on? There were great bonfires burning not six miles from here. I avoided the place. We raced by and the red glare filled the carriage and I heard bells ringing. There was a rumour Prague had burned, like one of those bonfires, and Belgrade; Moscow is blowing with the ashes of those who died in the sunlight, willingly.’
‘And westward?’ he said quietly.
‘Everywhere the same. All Europe, America. Eastwards: Asia, Australia. All continents. All climes. It spread too far. And this came after.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He murmured something she did not hear. She did not ask what it was, but her sad intelligent eyes came to his face again, a question. ‘I was considering the whales,’ he said. ‘How it was believed they would be hunted out, so great was our need for what we might get from them. And so eventually there would be no whales to hunt. And what then? But you,’ he said, ‘how did you manage to travel so far?’
‘It’s simple. There was a young girl I had found. I kept – hid – her in my apartment. And then, when I accepted how things were, I was extra careful. She was very sweet and innocent. Very loyal. I had to leave her at Bucharest. I saw to it myself. I cried when I sealed her in the box. It was in a private vault – she was safe enough, that way. But. She has nothing to come back to. I felt I should have stayed with her. She was so young. But she insisted, at the very last, that I go on. My driver deserted me a mile from the city. After that, I drove the horses myself.’
‘And why did you?’
‘Why?’
‘Why did you go on? Why have you sought me now, if not to curse me?’
She looked down, at her hands. The candleshine glowed through them, gentle, revealing the shapes of bones, but no rosiness of blood. Beyond, the room was black now. In the window, framed by velvet drapes irrelevant as thought, the bleak nightscape was featureless, real only in unreality.
‘You were the first,’ she said. ‘You re-made me in your image – father, lover, god – who could I run to but you, when the world was crumbling? There must be very many who would have run to you, if they could.’
In her eyes, cast up like wreckage on an ocean he seemed to see reflected the nights of her past that had involved him, that had formed this moment, and all brief future moments between them. The night he had seen her. The night he had – what word? – wooed, perhaps – wooed her. The night when she had sought him, drifting then as now, like a blanched paper doll over the lawn. She had sunk into his arms beneath the tall black tree. As the leaves rustled, she had sighed. He had lifted the blonde hair back from her throat, kissed her, kissed her and drunk from her crystal brim the ruby liquor of her blood. She had come to him three nights, for she was young and vital. The exquisite experience they had shared, that continually he had shared, that she would afterwards share with others, was mystical and beyond description. Yes, beyond description, which could only liken it to gluttony, to sex, to lust, or to some arcane religion … Unique, the ecstasy of the vampire, the sharing, the given gift of eternal life. Of course she died, on the fourth night. He did not see her daylight burial, but he saw her rise, resurrected from the stone tomb, drifting to him again over the sable grass, going out to hunt, to share, to take her gift of blood and joy and everlasting life to others, who, in their turn, would become as she. As he.
He was the Fountainhead. And, unlike the cistern, which contained, the fountain overflowed. Overflowed into godlike creation of sons and daughters, sprung not from his loins, but from his psyche. How could he have known, have reasoned it out? How could he, or any of his ‘children’, his disciples, have predicted that one became two. That two became four. And twenty and a hundred, and a thousand, a million … Each one he took, remade as himself, he gifted. They in turn gifted those they took, re-made. Some perished, it was true, discovered and destroyed. But always enough remained of the – the race he had founded. Their numbers swelled. The fountain overflowed. It covered and consumed; the Flood. They drained the human world, sucked it dry, laid it out to rest, and beheld it return – as they had. As They. At last, beyond their kind, there were no others. A world all vampire, all hunter, with nothing left to prey upon.
Then began the bestial time. They seized the beasts and despoiled them. But the beasts did not satisfy. And even so, they beasts became as they were. Here and there, a freak chance, one human remaining, found, overwhelmed, lost. The blood in their own veins, second-hand, could kill. Despite this they rent each other, or fell upon each other in grief, the cannibalism of panic and anguish. For even everlasting life could not survive without its sustenance. Blood was not only food and drink, the succour of the flesh. It was that mysterious spiritual thing, that occult bonding, that brought life, and sustained it. No vampire could survive without it. Not only did they starve, their souls starved. Both starvations were agonising and terrible, and slowly, as if with nails driven through organs, joints and brains, by reason of their nature, they died.
She had not needed to tell him, really, of the awful crying that had risen in the streets – Bucharest, London, New York, Paris, Moscow; across golden lands and green, and white and grey. The howling of the damned.
The sorrow in him now was a void of silence. He was not sure that he cared that Berenice had come to him at the ending of the world, or if he were glad, or if it only made him more afraid. Love is dying, he told himself, causer of this.
‘I’m touched you are here,’ he said. He turned to the doorway. ‘I shall call Ygore for you. Amusing, is it not? Something so rough and ready. But I promised him in the beginning I would make him one of us. He’s too stupid to grasp that to be one of us, now …’
She said softly. ‘Don’t call him. Please, I want no more than those things you also have. You spoke of the inevitable.’
‘But did you guess what I must mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you certain, Berenice? The sun brings a death of unspeakable horror. It may seem to last a million years of hurting. Those flaming white and yellow hells of pain that writers have described so ably. The other death, of famine, is scarcely less appalling, and besides, prolonged.’
‘I must eventually experience one, or the other. There’s no escape. Is there?’
‘None,’ he said, compassionate, almost tender.
She smiled a little. ‘The first time I went to you, not understanding, I thought it meant death – total death. I was in error. Perhaps this other death too – But no, I do see. Yes, I do.’
‘The Bible has it,’ he said, strangely. ‘The Third Horseman, who is famine, and the Fourth, who is death.’
Far away, through the hollow ribs of the castle, Ygore’s grisly imbecile laugh dully resounded. Between the velvet drapes of the window, there was another sour red glaze beginning on the sky – not yet dawn, but fire, somewhere.
Berenice had unfastened the ribbon from her throat. The two small marks, like tiny leaden stars, put the Count in mind of a branding, less upon her neck than across his forehead.
Though, unlike Cain, he was not to be the first murderer. But the last.
Presently he took her hand.
Down in the depths of the castle, Ygore too fell silent. Intuitive as he was, he grasped fully that the time
had come when he might end his own masquerade. Unlucky from birth, he had been maltreated by his fellow men. It had taken the vampire overlord to rescue him – a whim, maybe, some blind jest … But it had saved Ygore’s neck, and perhaps his strong and intelligent mind. True, he had acted that he was the fool and peculiarity the Count naively always thought him. And also he had let the Count, and his guests, make free of his, Ygore’s blood. A small price for the much nicer life he had led at the castle. Besides, the Count had taught him to read, and so opened up for Ygore a world far better and more beautiful than any, among the ignorance of his times, he could probably ever otherwise have known. For all this then, he blessed the Count. And now, the Count must die, and vilely, as were all his people.
Ygore could do nothing to save them. He had done all he could. Even to letting them enjoy their mockery at his expense. A great actor, Ygore. And – so full yet, so full of life.
He did not know what would become of him now. Indeed he dreaded the sunrise, his true and kindly heart aching and cringing in advance of the cries he would soon hear from above. He would bury their ash at least, with due respect. And then –
Crouched like a sad and humpbacked crow, Ygore foresaw his lonely future. As the Count had become the Last Murderer, Ygore knew the Laws of Life had other aims. His system, boosted by the many vampiric onslaughts it had endured yet not been finished by, would give him at the very least longevity. Perhaps therefore, when the shadow had fallen and had passed, one mostly human man might emerge from the rubble of all things, upon the surface of the blackened and broken world.
As the sun began to split the edges of the horizon with thinnest gold, Ygore stood, and braced himself against a pillar of stone. He was already weeping, but he did not stop his ears. The last thanks he owed his unthinking master was endurance in the face of another’s pain. He had obligingly acted the idiot for centuries. Now he would be himself.
MIRROR, MIRROR
In the early winter a vampire began to call at our house. What made it so terrible was that my mother, who was wise and lovely and perfect, was infatuated with her. Inside a week she was calling the vampire ‘Miriam’, and they would sit overcast afternoons face to face, on the long backless couch, which caused them to lean together like two dark tulips in a vase.
Both wore black, my mother because she was still in mourning for my father, though he had died five years before. The vampire because, presumably, she favoured sombreness, just as she liked the night and the winter days when the sun was hidden in a cloud. Miriam the vampire’s dresses were long, with tight boned waists and flounces. She wore black hats with veils fixed to her hair with an enormous ruby pin. When she came in the house she would draw out the pin and take off the hat. She would then play with the pin as if with a red berry or a drop of frozen blood. She was eccentric, and did not put up her hair as my mother did. Miriam’s hair hung to her waist like the black cloud that kept the sun in. She was extremely beautiful, in an awful way, her face so white and smooth without a single line, so it was like the face of a child turned to marble. Her eyes were black and rather dull but large enough they must be called beautiful too. Her lips were the pale pink of a faded sugared almond kept in the dark.
All the children on the block knew that Miriam was a vampire. The moment we saw her we knew. The way she came from nowhere as soon as the sun was obscured, and vanished again if it chanced to escape. The way she walked in her black clothes and now and then looked at us with soft hatred, as if we were flowers she would uproot. Adults passed Miriam often with a second look, but without an inkling of what she was. We were aware, sadly, we too would move eventually into that realm, where we would be half-blind and half-deaf. It was the fee that must be paid for losing our half-dumbness. So soon as we had learned to speak fully, to control language, our other senses would be mutilated.
But for now, we saw the vampire and we recognised her. We understood it was only a question of time. And then, as in a horrible game, it was my gate she approached, and our narrow patterned steps she ascended. On my mother’s door she knocked, and my mother fell in love with her at once and let her in.
I have no idea what excuse Miriam made for coming to the house. Perhaps that she was looking for some lost relative. It did not matter really. Within minutes, seconds, she had won. And I, returning from play, found her there on the long couch, her hat beside her, the pin twirling in her fingers, and her other hand uplifting a smoking cigarette in a long holder of bone.
My mother introduced her by some foreign name I could not assimilate and have forgotten. In any case soon it was ‘Miriam’.
Soon, too, I came to know the particular grey afternoons, like dusks, when I would enter the house and find my lovely mother in the thrall of the vampire, on the long couch, with the long windows and long ruched blinds behind them.
‘Look, here’s Miriam.’
And the table would be piled with dainty cakes and jugs of homemade lemonade, and the matte lacquer teapot, none of which Miriam, of course, could ever be persuaded to sample, although my mother would beg her: ‘You’re so slight, Miriam. And with the winter coming … I must try to fatten you up a little, darling.’
When Miriam’s leaden eyes would go over me, there would come the soft flicker of hatred once again. How easy I would be to pluck. When Miriam gazed at my mother her look was quite unreadable and dense. Yet in it my mother seemed to find irresistible magic. My mother had once stared into my eyes like that, but no more.
There was another reason too why the vampire had come to our house, beyond my mother’s loving and marvellous nature.
Just as she must avoid the sun, and all holy things, sacred wine and bread, the cross, Miriam must avoid a looking-glass. And in our house there was none. The night my father had died of pneumonia, my mother had veiled all the mirrors, and later she had sent them away like wicked servants who had stood by and coldly watched her husband’s final struggle and defeat. In rather the same way, maybe, she had locked up a drawer in the bureau that contained all his treasures, things I did not know about, as if no-one must be permitted to look.
For Miriam, naturally, a house without mirrors, which would refuse to reflect her and so would give her away, was a wonderful piece of luck. How had she known? But then, everything about her was mysterious and foul. Where for example did she come from and return to out of the twilight? Probably a graveyard, but none of us had dared to follow. The very swish of her skirt warned us we must not.
‘Oh, Miriam,’ said my mother adoringly, ‘do try a little of this raspberry cake. I baked it just this morning.’
But Miriam did not touch the cake, only smoking her pale cigarettes in the ivory holder, and fiddling with the strange fruit of the ruby pin.
How long would it be before she could delay no more, before the exquisite foreplay could no longer be drawn out, and she pulled my mother into her rustling embrace and pierced my mother’s human neck, and drank her blood?
Every night, when I kissed my mother goodbye before the journey into sleep, I examined her throat closely. Once she had scratched herself with a little brooch she sometimes wore, and my heart stopped. But it was not the mark of teeth.
I had never tried to tell her the truth, for I knew infallibly that despite her wisdom, because of the blindness and deafness of her adult state, she either would not hear or could not grasp what I would say. And if she found that I was Miriam’s enemy, she might keep us apart. Probably my presence in the room, or the possibility of my arrival there, were part of the reason Miriam had held off from her deadly kiss.
In the monosyllables of our dumbness and lack of language, I conferred with other children. What could I do?
‘If only there were a mirror,’ said Dorothy.
Then Dorothy hung her head and made her confession. ‘The vampire came to our house once. I saw her in the hall. There’s granny’s old green mirror there like a pond. And my mother saw in it. I couldn’t see in the mirror, only my mother did, but she blinked, two or t
hree times, as if something had got into her eyes. And then she said to the vampire, “No, I can’t help you.” And she shut the door.’
Dorothy and I realised that Dorothy’s mother, being partly blind, did not comprehend what she had glimpsed – Miriam’s invisibility in a reflecting surface. But nevertheless some preserving instinct had been activated.
It seemed to me that, since my mother was special, she, seeing or not seeing Miriam in a mirror, would know the truth fully. For my mother had beheld a fairy woman once in the park when she was all of 17. She had told me solemnly about the tinsel antennae and the tiny wings. So she had more sight left than most adults. It was only that Miriam had put a spell on her.
How then to bring Miriam to a mirror and to let my mother see?
In a way it might be easy, for when Miriam was in the house, my mother paid me scarcely any attention. I could have eaten all the cakes on the table. Then again, Miriam was subtly conscious of me, as one would be of an animal one did not like prowling in the room.
Dorothy ran up to me in her big old garden. It was a sunny wintry morning, but by two o’clock the cloud in the east would have swallowed up the sun, turning it from gold to smothered silver.
In Dorothy’s hand, a misty foretaste of that silver sun.
‘My shell mirror,’ said Dorothy. ‘It’s all I’ve got.’
We considered the mirror, staring down into each of our faces, puzzled to see ourselves so different from what we knew we were.
‘There’s a little loop,’ I said.
‘Yes, I hang it on the wall. Then when I sit my doll on the chest, she can watch her face.’
Dorothy and her doll were making a sacrifice for my sake, and I took the mirror carefully. It was the size of a small pumpkin, and the shells that decorated its edge hardly hid any of the surface. Yet it was light too, and would hang from the loop.