by Tanith Lee
So in his version of the article that Chaikassia would later receive and glance over in her great room, in the tall building in the cold, moon-bled desert, an article complete with a most beautiful photograph of her, taken some twenty years before, she would see, if she looked, only what she might expect from one devoted, loyal and bound by her magical spell. But that was not what the rest of them would read, marvelling and sneering, or simply turned to stone by fear at the tricks destiny or God could play.
But the real article would anyway make little stir. It wasn’t even going to be very lucrative for him, since the travel expenses had been so high. And it was of interest only to certain cliques and cults and elderly admirers, and to himself, of course, which was why he had agreed to write it, provided he could interview her, by which he had meant meet her, look at her, be with her those three hours.
The photograph used in the real article was chosen by his editor. It was very cruel. It showed her as she had become – not even, he thought, as she had appeared to him. But perhaps some of them, with imaginative muscles, would still see something in it of who she was, had been. Was, was. This phantom of his adolescence, who would now be the haunting of his dying middle-age.
Who remembers Pella Blai?
She was once said to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, or at least, on TV. She had the eponymous role in that fantasy series of the previous century, La Vampiresse.
The storylines of the series were gorgeous if slender. It was all about a (seemingly – somewhat) Russian vampire, located (somewhere) between the Caucasus and Siberia, though God knows where. A winter country around 18-something, of moonlit gardens and gravestones, and wolf-scrambled forest. And here she flew by night under the moon, gliding at first light down into her coffin, as any vampire must.
Though never at the top of the tree (not even her famous pearl-hung Christmas Tree at Bel Delores), Pella enjoyed much success, and most of us forty years and up know the name. But then the whole ethos of this kind of romantic celluloid vampirism slunk from prominence.
What she did with her between-years remains something of a mystery. And even the lady herself never now talks of them. But there is one very good reason for that.
Diagnosed in her fifties with Alzheimer’s disease, Pella lives out her final years in a luxurious private clinic somewhere south of the northern USA. It is a clinic for the rich and damned, a salutary lesson for any visitor of what fate may bring. But in the case of Pella Blai, there is one extraordinary factor.
For the strangest thing has happened. Another blow of fate – but whether savage or benign, who dare say? For Pella Blai’s disintegrating brain has by now wholly convinced her that she is not herself at all, but the heroine she played all those years back on TV, on screen, and about whom she wrote her own novel: the one true vampire left alive on Earth.
Her only memories then, and perhaps continually reinvented, concern the role she acted and has now come to live, Chaikassia, the eternal vampire. (And please note, that is pronounced Ch’high-kazya.)
Bizarrely, inside this framework, she is pretty damn near perfectly coherent. It is only, they tell you, when she comes out of it, and just now and then she does, that she grows confused, distressed, forgetful and enraged. When she is Chaikassia, and that takes up around ninety percent of her time – she’s word-perfect. No-one seems to know why that is. But having spoken some while to her, I can confirm the fact.
Chaikassia’s wants and wishes too, are all those of a vampire – let me add, a graceful and well-bred vampire. And to this end, the amenable if expensive clinic permits her to sleep in some sort of box through the day. While at mealtimes she is served ‘blood’ – which is actually a concoction of fruit juice, bouillon and vitamins – the only nourishment she will knowingly take. They can even leave a decanter of malt whisky in her room. She never touches it – what decent vampire would? ‘For guests’ she tells you, with her Russian aristocrat’s grace, learnt in her earliest youth in a winter palace of the mind – her mind. Which is all so very unlike the real Pella Blai, the hard-drinking daughter of an immigrant family dragged up somewhere in lower London, England.
Frankly, having met her only last month, I venture to say there is nothing left of that real Pella at all. Instead I talked with a being who can make herself appear in mirrors to deceive us all, and who passes at will out through the bars of her nocturnal windows. A being too who never takes your blood if she has promised not to, but who once, with one of the fake books from her gallery, broke the nose of a reporter who offended her.
And this being lives in a high white tower in the middle of a moon-leached desert, as far away from the rest of us as it is possible to get. And, until the last of her mind sets in oblivion and night, and finally lets her free forever, I swear to you she is, without any doubt – La Vampiresse.
SCARABESQUE:
THE GIRL WHO BROKE DRACULA
Friday is the Day of Freya (the Nordic Venus): the Day of Love.
The girl in the night:
It was summer, the sun just gone, the sky Lycra blue. So far not a streetlamp lit, not a star. But the girl carried midnight with her. It made up her long hair, her long dress, the long boots she wore. It filled and surrounded her eyes, and sprinkled from her ears in tiny shiny drops. At one shoulder only was a silken scarlet slash, left by some descending sun much older than the orb recently fallen behind the high street. That ancient sunset had also splashed her lips and nails. And a bone-white moonlight her skin.
She moved in her own darkness, personal to her as all fantasy, yet externalised into armour and a mask.
Some of the late shoppers up by Sainsbury’s certainly stared at her, in disapproval and contempt, envy … lust. Not only at and of her body, but of her insulting ability to be alive. She was slender and young. She looked beautiful, and strange.
‘Fucking goth,’ said someone.
She heard the voice, the girl, but she was in her armour, sealed in safe as any knight – or night.
She walked through the tree-hung alley to the station, and met only a cat, also coal-black and white of face. They exchanged a momentary greeting, and like sentries on some castle wall, passed on.
No-one was in the booking hall, the ticket office shut. But the night-girl had her ticket.
She stood on the platform and waited for the train.
Already she could smell, over the treey scent of the suburbs, the hot-cinder pheromones of London.
Her name was Ruby Sin.
Behind her, in a one-room flat of the dilapidated house across Woolworth’s car park, she had left lying the body of her schizophrenic other half. That was a girl of the day and the working week, with short, mouse-brown hair and nervous pale eyes. She was called Sue Wyatt.
Ruby Sin had to kill Sue Wyatt every Friday evening. First in a bath with salts of cedar, frankincense and myrrh. Then with black clothing and red and black costume jewels, and a long black wig. Next smothering her in black and white and red make-up and nail polish. All through the murder, poor Sue Wyatt stared in horror and fear – but at the end her eyes were shut behind jet-black contacts. Dead, dead, left behind on the floor like a shed toenail clipping.
A man on the train reminded Ruby Sin of Sue Wyatt’s father. She had seen him before once or twice, travelling up to town behind his newspaper. He wore an expensive middle-aged suit and strongly smelled of cologne and aftershave. But of course, it could never have been Sue’s father – he would, at this hour or earlier, have been travelling the other way, out to Guildford.
Nevertheless, she never liked to see him there.
He got out at Waterloo, as always.
It was dark by now, after ten, and London opened like the well-lit basement area of a huge department store, whose upper floors were coloured neons and an unreal, darkly milky sky.
Ruby Sin walked obliquely westward, toward the pub known as the Vixen, on Carder Street.
Here in the metropolis, very few turned to gaze at her – a herd
of hoodies once, and later a guy who sailed by on a skateboard, and flicked her sleeve in apparent approval of her looks.
The pub was packed, standing room only by now. Music throbbed and tangled, while yellow light slid over the pub’s skeletons in metal, and posters strafed with painted blood.
Big young men, bare-shouldered in black leather, allowed Ruby Sin to squeeze her way up to the bar. She gestured for her drink, the usual sour red wine, in sign language. Then she pressed her way into a corner. She slotted herself between the heat-palpitating tables and the shouting patrons. She lifted her head into the smoke and music. The band being played was Lash. She knew the words, so she did not need to hear them.
The first sips of wine, the percussion’s thud, these enabled Ruby Sin to continue inward and upward on her journey of self-release.
She appeared cool and static, but her brain was growing by the moment lighter. It was beginning to fill with the dream that every night pathetic Sue Wyatt also indulged, lying on the flat mattress opposite Woolworth’s.
This was, nearly, a Cinderella dream, of going out into the night disguised as Ruby Sin. In excited terror, almost nauseous with it, heart pounding and missing beats, Sue Wyatt then saw behind her closed eyes and all over the inside of her body a dark male Being who walked between the crowds, as a full-fed black leopard sometimes walks between the restless passivity of feeding deer.
But to Sue Wyatt in the dream, ‘Who are you?’ said the leopard, and she must answer. So she (who anyway, in these fantasies under the sheet, was already re-possessed by Ruby Sin and so dead again) appropriately said, ‘Ruby Sin.’ ‘And I,’ he said, ‘am Darkness.’
There was never sex in these fantasies. There was only a fearful prolonged hiatus, and dialogue like a slow, fencing duel, during which she was always about to fall and he about to catch and seize her. She knew he would then obliterate her. But it would be an orgasm of the spirit, not the genitals.
Besides, it can never happen. Never does.
Finally every night she (or Sue) collapsed asleep from exhaustion. And sometimes then really she dreamed of him, though still she never saw his face.
Stood in the Vixen on Friday, waiting, also like Cinderella – but in reverse – for midnight, Ruby Sin burned slowly up like a black candle. For she believed, if only on Fridays, that one night he would come out of the lacy, metallic, leathery, rubber crowd, out of the reds and blacks and silvers, the knives and spikes of steel and hair.
One night. In the end.
She was only 24, after all. She had been waiting ten years. Which of course had lasted forever. But any Friday, the first forever might finish. And then the next wonderful Forever would begin.
‘Hi, babe,’ said a young man. His jet-black mane was streaked with blue. She had never seen him before, or she had and he had been different. But she had seen others who might have been his clones. ‘Want to get us both a drink?’ he asked her, crisping the note temptingly before her eyes.
Sue Wyatt, who had to serve customers by daylight, when her vampire other-self slept in a shadow-coffin of the psyche, would have been polite. Oh, no, thanks, Sue Wyatt would apologetically have replied.
But Ruby Sin coldly turned her head away.
‘Fuck yourself then,’ said the blue-streaked goth. He spoke mildly. More a formality. Fifty years ago he would have said substantially the same: Please yourself then, he would have said.
Ruby Sin however did please only, did fuck only, herself.
She sipped her second wine, which had to last. Soon it would be midnight, and the club would open.
As always, it had occurred to her that the night-stalking leopard might be there, not here.
Ten years of waiting. Since she was 14.
Her family, the Wyatt family, had lived – perhaps still did – in a nice cul-de-sac near the river. Lots of greenery, trees and lawns, a semi with white walls and pseudo Tudor accoutrements.
Oliver Wyatt worked in the city, at one of those mysterious male jobs that were quite lucrative. And Sue’s mother, Jane, was the manageress of a small smart dress shop. The income was good. They wanted for nothing – three bathrooms, a well-stocked fridge and freezer, closets of clothes, cabinets of videos and even a few shelves of books. There were also two cars, his a silver Merc, and Jane’s a blue Vauxhall Nova: her ‘little runaround.’ There were holidays in Italy or the Lake District.
Sue went to a good school as well. She was supposedly quite ‘bright,’ if only she would ‘concentrate.’
An only child, Sue wandered through her childhood fairly happily, admiring her parents, accepting them as the alpha male and female. Because she was amiable, impressed and reasonably obedient, they were adequately satisfied with her, though a little disappointed by her lack of looks.
Once she was past 11, Sue saw less darkly through the optic glass.
The view of both her parents and herself altered. She knew she was plain, skinny, unpromising, and that her mother was a bit over-made-up and a bit shrill, her father stuffy and quite prim.
It was the day after her fourteenth birthday that Sue looked into her mirror. Something in the amber setting of sunlight caught her face. It showed – not exactly beauty – but a possibility. She stood marvelling, until the light moved on and left her there, marooned and ugly again.
Two weeks later she found out about Dracula.
Somehow, like much else, he and his kind had passed her by.
She had if anything been scared of the idea of vampires – afraid of an enduring image, fostered in her by a male cousin when she was six, of the insectile undead crawling up the brickwork of the wall toward her, in the hardly tomb-black luminescence of the Guildford night.
Now everything had changed. Insidiously at first. Next by advancing wild leaps. She had begun to menstruate the year before. Perhaps it was hormones, mostly. She never thought of this, and never would, because the clever little informative books Jane had given her child to read seemed to have nothing whatever to do with the physical, let alone the mental, life of Sue Wyatt.
At midnight the club across from Carder Street opened its doors.
The club’s name, written in purplish-blue light, was The Family Axe.
Two girls, about twenty, were in front of Ruby Sin in the queue that waited to get in. One was all in shimmering white, with a necklace of glass blood drops. The other wore black male clothing from the Victorian era, sequined, and with a boned external corset. Sometimes they glanced back at Ruby Sin with their long eyes.
The darker one said to her at last, as the line trod forward again, ‘I’ve seen you here before.’
Ruby Sin said nothing.
The girl in white commented, ‘She don’t talk.’
‘Don’t you?’ asked the girl dressed like a combination Liberace-Byron-Frank N Furter.
Ruby Sin barely heard them. Her own black eyes had skimmed the slowly moving crowd. Although He was nowhere in view, as once or twice before she sensed Him. He was here, somewhere here, in the essence of the loud daylit night, the polluted overcast of swarthy milk. This did not mean, of course, that she would see Him.
The black- and white-clothed girls leaned their heads together and murmured.
Up by the doors, the bouncers, Chick and Zara, were checking customers before admitting them. To enter here you must be properly attired in one of the many goth fashions, reasonably sober, and not in any way off your skull.
Even at this instant, Chick was shaking his cropped head at two guys in yuppie gear, plainly high on some powder. Chick was built like a human ox, his arms trying to burst the sleeves of his parachute-silk-effect jacket, his thighs straining the seams of his black jeans. But the yuppies were just too far gone to give up; one even playfully wagged a finger at Chick. ‘What yer gonna do, pussy-pie?’
Chick moved, but before he could take hold of them, Zara had both guys by the arms. She swiftly manhandled them out of the line and down the street, turning them as she did so to face away from the club. She must have
said something too. One of the yuppies stared at her, greenishly. Then they both scuttled off.
Zara came back flipping the tail of her severely tied-back hair. She was half South American, thin as whipcord and about as strong.
Ruby Sin had no trouble in gaining admittance. Nor did the two girls in front of her.
Inside the dark-bright foyer, another female bouncer, blonde Chloe, felt the girls over, investigated any pockets and purses. From Ruby Sin’s little beaded bag came a stick of mascara; two crayons, for lips and eyes; a Kleenex; some money; and a door key to the flat by the car park.
The second male bouncer, Barry, had found some pills on the tall goth male with blue-streamered hair.
‘They’re fuckin’ Nurofen!’
‘Expecting a bad headache, are you?’
Beyond the foyer the music was beginning in fractalled shards of sound: the Damned. A huge dark space rose and rose, splintered with light that pinpointed or swirled or blinked.
Ruby Sin moved into the space, and the sound and the light undid the lid of her brain, so her spirit could fly right up, and look about, clear-sighted as a hawk, from the tower-top of her body. The beating heart of the song remade her flesh. She was all part of it now, the night. Safely locked in, yet her soul flying free, connected to her only by a hair-fine silver chain.
Even as Ruby Sin stood at the ground-floor bar, pulsing in the music pulse, under the hanging festoons of swords, axes, scimitars, ordering one double vodka with Cherry-Red, her soul was fluttering up to the gallery that overhung the dance floor.
Her soul perched there on the rail, and that was when Ruby Sin, at the bar, felt something – some one – touch her …
The most intimate of touches.