by Tanith Lee
They walked side by side, not particularly fast, and now and then he spoke to her in his low, extraordinary voice.
Not once had he asked her what she wanted, or told her what he might want. Only at one point, there was an off-license, curiously still open, lit yet deserted, and going in he took a bottle of wine from one of the shelves and left a twenty-pound note lying on the counter. No-one came to remonstrate, or to accept the money. No alarm sounded either as he entered or as he left with the bottle.
He undid the foil cap and drew out the cork, somehow, with his white teeth. How strong they must be. But naturally they would be.
‘My father,’ Anduin said, once he had passed her the wine and she had drunk some, ‘rides with a gang of bikers. He looks younger than he did. Or perhaps he’s older again, or he’s doing something else. He has always refused to credit that I exist, as if that could unmake me. My mother was Spanish-Hungarian. Where she is I’ve no idea either. But I’m hardly alone. There is the Family. My Family,’ he added, ‘is very old.’
‘Yes,’ whispered Ruby Sin. She held out the bottle to him and he drank.
His family was old as history. Older.
‘What do you think?’ he asked her gently, as they turned down a long and winding alley under high blank walls. She said nothing. He said, ‘I mean, what do you think I am?’
Ruby Sin stopped. She had to. Her heart was leaping and choking her. She could not anyway have said his name – not even that other name, which must be a modern lie, a camouflage. Scarabae.
But he turned to her now and, for the first time, touched her, putting his hands on her upper arms. It was like warm electricity. And it burnt straight through her sleeves, her skin and flesh and bones, and touched her soul, just as it somehow had on the gallery at the club.
‘You don’t know me, but you think you do, don’t you? And you’re not afraid,’ he said.
He was not like any other ever imagined, let alone seen. His face was perfect, like a carving, and the eyes were made of real jewels, black as obsidian.
As in all her fantasies, Ruby Sin should now play with him the verbal fencing game of her dreams.
But nor would these words come.
She said, ‘This isn’t my hair. It’s a wig. My hair is brown. Short. And … it’s contacts, the colour of my eyes.’
‘Ah, darling,’ said Anduin. He drew her to him and held her close, folding her in against the contoured strength of his alien, supernatural and astonishing, real body. ‘Don’t you think I can guess all that? You only look like my kind. Your kind is different.’
‘Then –’
‘It’s you,’ he said, his mouth against her temple. ‘I am interested in you. Tell me what you’re called.’
She shuddered. ‘Sue.’
He laughed, and she felt the laugh move through his chest, and through her breasts, as he held her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Your true name.’
Ruby Sin thought. She knew he did not mean her invented name. Then she remembered what was written on her birth certificate, which she had stolen, even if it were hers, from her mother’s box file, nine years ago.
‘Susanna.’
‘Beautiful,’ said Anduin. ‘That’s a Hebrew name. Do you know what it means?’ She shook her head against him. Something like the warm, delicious sleep of snow-death was stealing over her. ‘It means the lily. Susanna the Lily. Come on,’ he softly said. ‘It isn’t far now.’
Sue’s parents had left for their jaunt to town just after eight o’clock that Friday morning. They would have been off a little earlier, but Oliver’s car had acted up, and there was a small row. They left in a flurry, Oliver scowling and Jane huffy. ‘Do that homework!’ was the parting shot, as the Merc slid away like a shark up the cul-de-sac, and out into the land of adult pleasures.
But Sue went into the house. As she had a free period this morning, and it was not a day for the cleaning woman, Sue was supposed to do the washing up before she left for school.
Instead she ran upstairs and drew the video of Dracula out from under her bed. Going down again to the spacious cream and maroon sitting-room, she set up the TV and pulled the heavy drapes.
Before she sat down to watch her fantasy world brought to life, she poured herself a stiff Fino sherry. She had got into the habit of sometimes sneaking one before school in any case. Now it wasn’t fear that drove her to it, only an extreme excitement that made her mouth arid, her palms damp.
Sherry swallowed; she started the film.
What unrolled before her was a magic carpet. Lush, erotic, full of terrors, lamped by beauty and desire, spiritually appetising, and so intense that this alone might have persuaded her forever to some elevated and unusual form of yearning. It woke her fully from the dismal torpor of a pallid existence. It tore her open to show her the passion and cruelty, the creation and artistry that might just be there in her own self.
She was at an age of turnings. Beginnings.
The influence could well have been wonderfully good.
After she had played the movie through, some (well-trained) part of her thought she must now behave rationally. Sue wandered out, dazed, into the kitchen. She saw the stacks of last night’s fouled plates and glasses. And stared at them, unrecognising, like a being from another world.
Anyway, it was now too late to clear up any of this mess; she would have to do it this evening, before her homework, when she got back from school.
So then she thought of school. A couple of hours of dull geography, badly taught, and lunch in the noisy friendless dining room. Then a double period of maths – incomprehensible horror, presided over by sarcastic Mr Brenn.
This, her world. Not flame, peacock eyes, perverse delirium, tragic galvanic love. Solely this … crap.
She moved to the phone like a robot. When someone answered, she spoke into it like a robot, too, pre-programmed and clever, and with a London accent.
‘Hallo, this is Mrs Wyatt’s cleaning lady. I’m afraid Sue’s been ever so sick. She won’t be in, very sorry. Mrs Wyatt? No, dear, I’m afraid she’s off to town. Doctor? Oh, he’s been. Says it’s a bit of tummy trouble, that’s all. You know what they’re like at that age.’
It was a fair impersonation, even if Sue’s voice was a little too high for Jane’s cleaning woman. The accent was exact. (Sue had heard Jane scornfully mimic the cleaner very often.)
After she put the phone down, still in a sort of trance, Sue made herself a piece of toast. Then she had another sherry and put the film on again.
She watched it through altogether five times. The intervals between the shows were brief – enough to allow her to pee, to eat more toast, to pour two more sherries. Somehow the sherry combined with the movie, in a way Sue did not analyse.
The more she watched the film, the more she felt herself changing. She knew that she was becoming part of it. She knew also that, by the sorceress process of reiteration, she was making it come to life.
She wanted nothing else. Even if – yes, even if it meant her death.
But then it did not mean death. The vampiric kiss meant, evidently, immortality. Yet really, she could not think beyond that embrace of fire, that thrashing whirlpool of scarlet –
It was after 9 pm, the film once more just ended, when the other idea came to her, swimmingly.
Again then like a robot, Sue got up and left the sitting-room, and unstumblingly glided her newly coordinated way up the cold (she had forgotten to revive the central heating), dark house. Not a light burned, only the blue post-video screen of the TV downstairs.
There was suddenly something tremendous about being alone here, in this masonry tower that no longer had anything fake, let alone fake Tudor, about it.
There was nothing worthwhile, nothing art nouveau or Victorian, available to her here. But nevertheless, there were adult things – things to do with erotic mysteries. Intuitively, infallibly, she sought them.
In her parents’ vast bedroom, Sue opened her mother’s forbidden drawers. Here lay the
black silk kimono, the black silk uplift bras and narrow black lace panties with their red ribbons, the expensive perfumes and costly make-up. And, on a perch inside the wardrobe, the long black wig that Jane sometimes put on, either for a party, or to entertain Oliver in bed. It had clips, the wig, to fasten it securely into Jane’s short-cut hair.
The 14-year-old Sue had no compunction now. She drew the curtain, put on the lights about the mirror.
A miracle had happened, as she had known it must.
Sue Wyatt was already mostly gone.
Her name now must be Mina, or Lucy.
Her clear white skin, large eyes that were full of the shadows …
She had watched her mother make up several times, though never being allowed herself to use more than powder. As for the lingerie, Sue knew how to put on underclothes. And if these were generally a little too big for her, there were also some that had been deliberately purchased that were too small for her mother.
Sipping the last of her fourth sherry, Sue-Mina-Lucy stripped.
She ignored her body in the harsh light until she had reclad it in black lace, red ribbon and balconied wire, and draped over it the short black kimono, which on her almost reached to her ankles.
Then she dressed her face – the first time ever – in the fruits of the tree of carnal knowledge.
These were the accoutrements of Jane’s excursions and rutting nights. Sue did not even consider that her mother might well be putting them on herself, much later, when she and Oliver came home.
Sue managed her face quite well. In fact, very well. Her eyes were shaded with dark grey and the lashes inches thick in black, her face white, lips carmine. She did her nails, too, perhaps not quite so skilfully, but the effect was, in the mirror, not bad. Lastly she drew on and pinned the black wig, over and into her own mousy hair.
There then she stood. A contemporary Mina-Lucy. Truly. Finally.
Gorgeous, and sexual, ripe as the moon for one searing scarlet cloud …
Mina-Lucy turned out the lights again and went along to her own bedroom, by the flicking gleam of two of her mother’s aromatherapy candles.
Mina-Lucy shut her bedroom door, set the candles at the bedside, and, going to the window, flung it open on the still, frosty, garden-darkened night.
Despite any streetlights, once she lay back on her bed, Guildford became Transylvania.
Her head spun a little. She smelled, over the perfume, the cold and the freshness of chilled autumn trees and the river-dark forest, freezing falls. She shivered and did not mind it. Her ears roared, as if the cataract poured there – it did; her waiting blood.
She anticipated Him.
She knew He must come to her.
Her own intensity would lure Him to her.
Up the wall, up the brickwork, an insect, a bat, graceful and crawling, young again in hopes of the feast she would be for Him …
Up and up – scaling the wall of her body … His hands on her … His mouth closing, savage and ecstatic, on her throat …
Of all that she anticipated, what came was not any element of it.
What came was sleep.
Drained by excitement and desire, drunk on Fino sherry, the candles, and her mother’s lavishly sprayed scent, Sueminalucy fell miles down into a sleep of undeath.
She woke again just before 11.30 to scalding light and her father’s furious voice shouting in the doorway: ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’
The building was condemned. Like all the others in the street.
Briars and nettles stood up like ornamental iron railings.
Anduin pushed wide a piece of boarding that had looked immovable, and courteously held it for her, like an open door.
He must live in a squat of some kind – as she had once tried to do, in her case rather unsuccessfully.
But even a squat … surely there would by now be some lights visible? None showed anywhere, except for a pair of street lamps, one at either end of the row of tall, dead houses.
‘Appearances,’ he said, ‘deceptive.’
She nodded mutely. Did not care.
As they crossed the garden, summer smells of garbage, sweating grass, the fragrance of night trees. Something rustled, and two tiny pins of eyes flashed garnet.
‘It’s only rats,’ he said.
There was a boarded door that was also opened. Then, in blackness, an uncarpeted staircase in surprisingly good repair.
They climbed, up and up.
He undid the last door, not with keys, but by pushing a button in the frame. Another eye flashed, not a rat’s: technology.
‘It knows my fingerprint,’ said Anduin.
And they walked through into a suite of rooms at the top of the derelict house.
Hanging lamps bloomed on, soft honey colours and rose, through white and indigo glass. The ceilings lifted high, and their 1800s plasterwork of cherubs and fruit had been renewed and gilded. A huge fireplace, marble, was empty but for a terracotta pitcher that looked like something from an epic Roman film.
There was a long window – full of daylight. Of course not. It must be illuminated from behind. The opaque glass had no picture, but a complex pattern, the red of blood, the blue of moons that make wishes come true.
He was moving toward her with two goblets of greyish crystal in his hands, full of the wine he had taken or bought on their journey here.
‘What a lovely face you have,’ he said. ‘Lovely Susanna who is a lily.’
Something broke inside her. It was like eggshell porcelain breaking at a single quiet sigh.
‘Please don’t,’ she said. She started to cry. She felt the tears like burning cotton pulled from her eyes, loosening the waterproof mascara. ‘Don’t fuck me,’ she pleaded, weeping.
He removed her wineglass and put down his own. He drew her, lightly, without threat, onto a couch with a high carved back. He held her hands. ‘Why not?’
‘Please – no. Just … please … just drink my blood. I know you will, you can – I want it so much. But not … not to have sex.’ And incredibly, unknowingly, in the words of some clichéd Victorian heroine, now given frightful veracity: ‘Anything but that.’
He had filled the doorway, as stabbing light filled her bedroom and all the house – it had been set on fire.
He bellowed.
‘The place is a tip – you haven’t done a stroke, have you, haven’t done the washing up – you are a parasite, Sue. Worthless. Your poor mother breaking her ankle like that – I’ve had to leave her in the bloody hospital – and then the ruddy traffic – and now this, this shambles. You know you’ve destroyed that video, don’t you, which anyway you shouldn’t have been watching? It’s an 18, Sue, for adults only. You’ve broken the law.
And something’s happened, the damn thing’s got itself all wound round itself – snapped when I pulled it out – and all that washing up, just left there, stinking. Do you expect your mother to do it? Christ almighty, she’ll be on crutches for six bloody weeks.
You need to buck your ideas up, girl. And look at you. What in Christ are you up to – is that your mother’s bra you’ve got on?’
Made moronic by shock and terror, Sue sat up to face this ranting being, supposedly her father.
She felt as sick now as she had lied she was to the school.
‘Sluts dress like that,’ said Oliver Wyatt. His voice, however, had become less strident. He looked at her, long and hard. ‘Prostitutes,’ he added.
Then he came over to the bed and slapped her, once, across the face.
This stunned her. She cried, but far away. He pushed her backward, and when she felt the bra, like tape and ankles, break across her breasts, she thought it was only one more part of the punishment.
As indeed it was.
‘Filthy little cunt,’ he panted, his sweat and spit dribbling down her face and neck, ‘this is what filthy little cunt bitches get –’
The pain was like thunder. He split her. Like an evil lightning.
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When he left the room, still thickly raging, muttering, her bed was steeped in the blood of her ripped virginity. But there had been little menstrual accidents in the past. Even when she now threw up all over the carpet, vomit reeking of sherry and shame. Even that could be blamed on one more bad period.
Downstairs she heard far off the furious resentful crashing as he washed up the plates.
‘I thought it could only happen once,’ she said, in the elegant rooms above the derelict house. ‘But after a week, he did it to me again. First of all he said it served me right; it was to teach me a lesson. But then he came into the bedroom when Mum was asleep from the painkillers for her ankle. He said, I didn’t tell her you broke the tape or left the washing up. So don’t you tell her about this. Don’t tell your mother; she’ll be angry with you.’
‘Fathers often have a bad record among the Scarabae. How long did this go on?’
‘Another year. Then I heard … a girl at school told a teacher her father was abusing her. The whole school got to hear about it. And I saw it wasn’t meant to happen. And her father had said just what Dad had said, Don’t tell. So when he came in again, I said to him, You’d better stop now, or I’ll tell Mum, and you’ll go to prison. He said, She won’t believe you. They’ll put you in a madhouse. I said, You have a big purple birthmark on your willy. How could I know unless I’ve seen it? He said – incredibly, as if he forgot, and pompously, the way he always spoke – I’d never let any daughter of mine see me unclothed. And I said, Yes, exactly.’
‘Clever Susanna the Lily,’ said Anduin.
She said, ‘I ran away soon after. By then he’d had to pay me to keep quiet. He was scared of scandal, and the police. And Mum.’ Ruby Sin breathed in and breathed out. She said, on no breath at all, ‘He had to pay for the video, too. Coppola’s Dracula. The one I broke.’
‘Lie back,’ Anduin said. ‘I’m not my father. Or yours. My kind – you know us. Yes, we’re vampires. And I think this was agreed between us, you and I, many centuries ago. Do you trust me?’