by Tanith Lee
I took it home quickly. My mother was busy in the kitchen, sifting flour and stoning summer damsons, sensing of course that darkness was coming, and so, Miriam.
I wandered about the room where Miriam would sit, looking for a spot to set the mirror. Normally Miriam would surely detect such a thing at once, but I sensed that she was by now so involved with my mother, the clean scent of her, cologne and brushed hair, my mother’s delicate skin with the tiny fairy antennae lines about the mouth and eyes, that Miriam’s vampire cleverness was slightly dimmed. If I could only find a place that she avoided, perhaps she would not realise.
Ultimately it was simple. The area of the room that Miriam intuitively did not care for was, not unnaturally, the two long windows. She would seat herself on the backless couch, turned away from them, and would not look in that direction even if my mother went through this part of the room. My mother also had taken to pampering Miriam’s aversion. When she guessed that Miriam would be coming, my mother let down the ruched yellow blinds, and today, already, they were in place.
Going upstairs I took a large safety pin from my mother’s pottery bowl. Returning with it below, I stood on a chair and attached the loop of the mirror to the yellow ruched blind of the second window. Something useful occurred. The reflected yellow folds of the blind shone into the mirror, like a buttery sun into a pond. It was not easy to see. I got down, crossed the room and stood in my usual position, just beyond the table where the cakes and tea were laid. It seemed to me that Miriam, sitting on the right of the couch as she always did, would now be reflected from the back into the mirror. Except there would be nothing to show.
As the sun moved low over the sky and the cloud rose after it like a bank of fog, the light died from the windows and the mirror too turned dull.
A glorious smell of baking drifted from the kitchen. But I felt sick with hope and rage.
At two o’clock, as the cakes were lifted from the oven, cloud absorbed the sun and all down the block grey dusk breathed out into the day. The sun was pale at first as a lemon, and then it melted entirely. And as I glared out from my bedroom window, I saw the black figure of the vampire walking up the street. About her slender ankles her black skirts bounded like little dogs, and in her hat the red pin smouldered like a coal.
I ran downstairs, and as I stationed myself behind the table, our front door was knocked upon.
My mother came, washed and powdered and sweet, with combs in her hair.
‘Oh, Miriam,’ she sighed. ‘Oh, Miriam. How good to see you.’
The vampire glided into the room as she had so often done, and as so often over me her dead eyes glimmered, and with her colourless tongue she licked her lip, thinking, I suppose, of when she could pull me up and throw me on the compost. How aggravating for her that I was always here, always about. How she would have liked to cut off my head and be done with me. Her hatred was so vast, so cushiony, she could not catch sight of mine, nor of my excitement.
She drew out the ruby pin and let fall her ghastly hat. She lit a cigarette in the bone holder. But she did not sit down.
I would not let my eyes go to the blind. Not yet. She must not have a hint. I squinted instead at her black buckled shoes and her nasty flounced yipping dog of a skirt.
My mother entered with golden cakes and the steaming teapot. Patting them on the table, she added the frosted decanter of sherry.
‘Something to warm you, Miriam?’
But Miriam gently shook her head. What could warm her, after all, but one thing only?
‘It seems so long since I saw you, darling,’ said my mother, and she sat down on the long couch, to the left. I would not glance at the mirror on the blind. I stared at Miriam’s ruby pin spinning in one set of her fingers, and the other set with the smoking bone of the cigarette holder.
She gazed at my mother, and seduced, Miriam also sat.
Then I looked straight up into the mirror.
What I saw was so ludicrous, so terrifying, that it produced a spontaneous and unforeseen reaction.
I had forgotten, or never thought, that while Miriam would not be caught in any reflective surface, her clothes were still corporeal.
And so I beheld a corseted black dress sat upright on the couch, straight as a rod, and in the air there flashed a turning jewel, and then, floating some four inches free of the black cuff, an ivory holder and a cigarette, which borne higher up into the headless space where the collar of the dress ended, sparkled with sudden life, and out of nothing came a gush of smoke like a cloud.
Never before or since have I known the sensation, but at that instant my blood ran cold. Cold as liquid ice beneath a river at midnight.
And I screamed.
From the corner of vision I noticed my mother’s head jerk up. What Miriam did I could not see, but in the looking-glass her clothing did not shift.
My mother spoke to me sharply, but I was beyond response. My eyes were wide and fixed, glued to the image in the mirror, the headless dress of the invisible smoking woman.
And then my mother was beside me. I felt her kneeling, staring into my face. I wanted to shriek that she must turn round, look there, there – but no further noise would come out of me and I could not seem to move.
My mother stood up abruptly.
‘How foolish children are,’ she said, quietly.
These terrible words loosened all my limbs, and I flopped down on the floor. I was able to look about now, and saw my mother go over to the bureau. She was unlocking the drawer with my father’s treasures in it.
‘But then,’ said my mother, slipping in her hand and taking something out, ‘here’s a thing I’d like to show you, darling.’
From my mother’s hand depended a golden crucifix that shone and burned brighter than either the coal of the ruby or the cigarette.
The vampire started up. She snatched on her hat and drove the pin into it, as it seemed right through her skull.
‘Oh, must you be going? What a shame.’
My mother saw Miriam to the door. Miriam opened and slipped round it like a puff of smoke, already perhaps vanishing.
My mother shut the door. She held the crucifix in her hand, and slowly her gaze settled on me.
‘Silly child, not to have told me. Did you think I wouldn’t believe you?’
I stammered something.
‘Or did you only suddenly see?’ asked my mother.
‘The mirror!’ I cried.
‘What mirror?’ inquired my mother.
I babbled that surely she must understand, she must have seen into the mirror on the blind – though how? – for why else had she fathomed what Miriam was?
‘Oh, yes,’ said my mother calmly, ‘of course I saw. Her dress without anyone in it. But not in a mirror.’ I gaped at her miraculousness. She smiled, and said, her voice trembling slightly, ‘I saw the reflection in your eyes.’
NUNC DIMITTIS
The Nunc Dimittis is the traditional Gospel Canticle of Night Prayer (Compline). It begins: Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace. (Now you are releasing your servant, Master, according to your word in peace. – Luke 2:29)
The Vampire was old, and no longer beautiful. In common with all living things, she had aged, though very slowly, like the tall trees in the park. Slender and gaunt and leafless, they stood out there, beyond the long windows, rain-dashed in the grey morning. While she sat in her high-backed chair in that corner of the room where the curtains of thick yellow lace and the wine-coloured blinds kept every drop of daylight out. In the glimmer of the ornate oil lamp, she had been reading. The lamp came from a Russian palace. The book had once graced the library of a corrupt pope named, in his temporal existence, Rodrigo Borgia. Now the Vampire’s dry hands had fallen upon the page. She sat in her black lace dress that was one hundred and eighty years of age, far younger than she herself, and looked at the old man, streaked by the shine of distant windows.
‘You say you are tired, Vassu. I know how it is. To be s
o tired, and unable to rest. It is a terrible thing.’
‘But, Princess,’ said the old man quietly, ‘it is more than this. I am dying.’
The Vampire stirred a little. The pale leaves of her hands rustled on the page. She stared with an almost childlike wonder.
‘Dying? Can this be? You are sure?’
The old man, very clean and neat in his dark clothing, nodded humbly.
‘Yes, Princess.’
‘Oh, Vassu,’ she said, ‘are you glad?’
He seemed a little embarrassed. Finally he said:
‘Forgive me, Princess, but I am very glad. Yes, very glad.’
‘I understand.’
‘Only,’ he said, ‘I am troubled for your sake.’
‘No, no,’ said the Vampire, with the fragile perfect courtesy of her class and kind. ‘No, it must not concern you. You have been a good servant. Far better than I might ever have hoped for. I am thankful, Vassu, for all your care of me. I shall miss you. But you have earned …’ She hesitated, then said, ‘You have more than earned your peace.’
‘But you,’ he said.
‘I shall do very well. My requirements are small, now. The days when I was a huntress are gone, and the nights. Do you remember, Vassu?’
‘I remember, Princess.’
‘When I was so hungry, and so relentless. And so lovely. My white face in a thousand ballroom mirrors. My silk slippers stained with dew. And my lovers waking in the cold morning, where I had left them. But now, I do not sleep, I am seldom hungry. I never lust. I never love. These are the comforts of old age. There is only one comfort that is denied to me. And who knows. One day, I too …’
She smiled at him. Her teeth were beautiful, but almost even now, the exquisite points of the canines quite worn away. ‘Leave me when you must,’ she said. ‘I shall mourn you. I shall envy you. But I ask nothing more, my good and noble friend.’
The old man bowed his head.
‘I have,’ he said, ‘a few days, a handful of nights. There is something I wish to try to do in this time. I will try to find one who may take my place.’
The Vampire stared at him again, now astonished. ‘But Vassu, my irreplaceable help – it is no longer possible.’
‘Yes. If I am swift.’
‘The world is not as it was,’ she said, with a grave and dreadful wisdom.
He lifted his head. More gravely, he answered:
‘The world is as it has always been, Princess. Only our perceptions of it have grown more acute. Our knowledge less bearable.’
She nodded.
‘Yes, this must be so. How could the world have changed so terribly? It must be we who have changed.’
He trimmed the lamp before he left her.
Outside, the rain dripped steadily from the trees.
The city, in the rain, was not unlike a forest. But the old man, who had been in many forests and many cities, had no special feeling for it. His feelings, his senses, were primed to other things.
Nevertheless, he was conscious of his bizarre and anachronistic effect, like that of a figure in some surrealist painting, walking the streets in clothes of a bygone era, aware he did not blend with his surroundings, nor render them homage of any kind. Yet even when, as sometimes happened, a gang of children or youths jeered and called after him the foul names he was familiar with in twenty languages, he neither cringed nor cared. He had no concern for such things. He had been so many places, seen so many sights; cities that burned or fell in ruin, the young who grew old, as he had, and who died, as now, at last, he too would die. This thought of death soothed him, comforted him, and brought with it a great sadness, a strange jealousy. He did not want to leave her. Of course he did not. The idea of her vulnerability in this harsh world, not new in its cruelty but ancient, though freshly recognised – it horrified him. This was the sadness. And the jealousy … that, because he must try to find another to take his place. And that other would come to be for her, as he had been.
The memories rose and sank in his brain like waking dreams all the time he moved about the streets. As he climbed the steps of museums and underpasses, he remembered other steps in other lands, of marble and fine stone. And looking out from high balconies, the city reduced to a map, he recollected the towers of cathedrals, the starswept points of mountains. And then at last, as if turning over the pages of a book backwards, he reached the beginning.
There she stood, between two tall white graves, the chateau grounds behind her, everything silvered in the dusk before the dawn. She wore a ball gown, and a long white cloak. And even then, her hair was dressed in the fashion of a century ago; dark hair, like black flowers.
He had known for a year before that he would serve her. The moment he had heard them talk of her in the town. They were not afraid of her, but in awe. She did not prey upon her own people, as some of her line had done.
When he could get up, he went to her. He had kneeled, and stammered something; he was only 16, and she not much older. But she had simply looked at him quietly and said: ‘I know. You are welcome.’ The words had been in a language they seldom spoke together now. Yet always, when he recalled that meeting, she said them in that tongue, and with the same gentle inflection.
All about, in the small café where he had paused to sit and drink coffee, vague shapes came and went. Of no interest to him, no use to her. Throughout the morning, there had been nothing to alert him. He would know. He would know, as he had known it of himself.
He rose, and left the café, and the waking dream walked with him. A lean black car slid by, and he recaptured a carriage carving through white snow –
A step brushed the pavement, perhaps twenty feet behind him. The old man did not hesitate. He stepped on, and into an alleyway that ran between the high buildings. The steps followed him; he could not hear them all, only one in seven, or eight. A little wire of tension began to draw taut within him, but he gave no sign. Water trickled along the brickwork beside him, and the noise of the city was lost.
Abruptly, a hand was on the back of his neck, a capable hand, warm and sure, not harming him yet, almost the touch of a lover.
‘That’s right, old man. Keep still. I’m not going to hurt you, not if you do what I say.’
He stood, the warm and vital hand on his neck, and waited.
‘All right,’ said the voice, which was masculine and young and with some other elusive quality to it. ‘Now let me have your wallet.’
The old man spoke in a faltering tone, very foreign, very fearful. ‘I have – no wallet.’
The hand changed its nature, gripped him, bit.
‘Don’t lie. I can hurt you. I don’t want to, but I can. Give me whatever money you have.’
‘Yes,’ he faltered, ‘yes – yes –’
And slipped from the sure and merciless grip like water, spinning, gripping in turn, flinging away – there was a whirl of movement.
The old man’s attacker slammed against the wet grey wall and rolled down it. He lay on the rainy debris of the alley floor, and stared up, too surprised to look surprised.
This had happened many times before. Several had supposed the old man an easy mark, but he had all the steely power of what he was. Even now, even dying, he was terrible in his strength. And yet, though it had happened often, now it was different. The tension had not gone away.
Swiftly, deliberately, the old man studied the young one.
Something struck home instantly. Even sprawled, the adversary was peculiarly graceful, the grace of enormous physical coordination. The touch of the hand, also, impervious and certain – there was strength here, too. And now the eyes. Yes, the eyes were steady, intelligent, and with a curious lambency, an innocence –
‘Get up,’ the old man said. He had waited upon an aristocrat. He had become one himself, and sounded it. ‘Up. I will not hit you again.’
The young man grinned, aware of the irony. The humour flitted through his eyes. In the dull light of the alley, they were the colour of leo
pards – not the eyes of leopards, but their pelts.
‘Yes, and you could, couldn’t you, Granddad.’
‘My name,’ said the old man, ‘is Vasyelu Gorin. I am the father to none, and my non-existent sons and daughters have no children. And you?’
‘My name,’ said the young man, ‘is Snake.’
The old man nodded. He did not really care about names, either.
‘Get up, Snake. You attempted to rob me, because you are poor, having no work, and no wish for work. I will buy you food, now.’
The young man continued to lie, as if at ease, on the ground.
‘Why?’
‘Because I want something from you.’
‘What? You’re right. I’ll do almost anything, if you pay me enough. So you can tell me.’
The old man looked at the young man called Snake, and knew that all he said was a fact. Knew that here was one who had stolen and whored, and stolen again when the slack bodies slept, both male and female, exhausted by the sexual vampirism he had practiced on them, drawing their misguided souls out through their pores as later he would draw the notes from purse and pocket. Yes, a vampire. Maybe a murderer, too. Very probably a murderer.
‘If you will do anything,’ said the old man, ‘I need not tell you beforehand. You will do it anyway.’
‘Almost anything, is what I said.’
‘Advise me then,’ said Vasyelu Gorin, the servant of the Vampire, ‘what you will not do. I shall then refrain from asking it of you.’
The young man laughed. In one fluid movement he came to his feet. When the old man walked on, he followed.
Testing him, the old man took Snake to an expensive restaurant, far up the white hills of the city, where the glass geography nearly scratched the sky. Ignoring the mud on his dilapidated leather jacket, Snake became a flawless image of decorum, became what is always ultimately respected, one who does not care. The old man, who also did not care, appreciated this act, but knew it was nothing more. Snake had learned how to be a prince. But he was a gigolo with a closet full of skins to put on. Now and then the speckled leopard eyes, searching, wary, would give him away.