by Tanith Lee
‘Only you.’
Sueminalucy lies deep on cushions. Through the dim gold of the lamps, He bends above her. He is shadow and He is light. A solar midnight, the dark of the sun.
Scaling the impossible wall …
He strokes her breasts, kisses them, sweetly. He makes love to her, which no-one has ever done, or been allowed to do. At last, he cups her centre strongly in one hand and lowers his mouth to her throat.
The bite is agonising. Marvellous. What she has dreamed of.
As he draws her blood into his mouth, she comes in long, full, pouring waves of joy, crying aloud, and does not recall any other such cries ever, nor realises that anyone else has ever known this paroxysm, since the beginning of the world.
‘Sleep now,’ he says.
She is tired … or perhaps he has put something into her wine.
But this time she can slumber fulfilled. What she has always longed for has occurred. The real virginity is taken at last. Now her immortality can commence, her life as Ruby Sin. Or Susanna.
She woke up in the prepaid taxi with strangely obscured number plates, which was carrying her ‘home’ to the flat facing Woolworth’s (and quite near the bank, where, once every month, she could access fifty pounds, courtesy of Oliver Wyatt).
She was drowsy and disorientated, but not unhappy or ill. Someone had put a clean dressing on her neck. And wound over it a priceless piece of black-and-red Chinese silk, dating from around 1760.
In the flat, though, she sobbed till hours after sunrise, keeping the noise down to avoid other tenants coming to complain.
At about 9 am, memory of the past, she called in sick.
‘Well, Miss Wyatt, this really is most awkward. It is Saturday, you know. Our busiest day.’
But Susanna did not bother with that, and a few weeks later anyway, she sacked herself, and moved farther into London, telling Oliver, by e-mail straight to his laptop via a booth, that she would now need one hundred and fifty a month.
Oliver apparently thought he had no sure way to reach her, only she could reach him – or Jane. He could have bluffed it out by now. But he paid up.
How then does she spend her Friday nights? Susanna, in garments of darkness and blood, still prepares herself, and travels to the heart of the metropolis. She walks, walks the byways of the city, up and down, round and about. She has no time now to visit clubs or pubs. Only once did she visit The Family Axe, but the bouncers were different ones, and besides would not say anything about a man called Anduin, let alone Scarabae, or Dracula.
She is looking for the street of derelict houses she was at first too entranced, later too sleepy, too satiated, to identify. She should have asked the taxi driver that night. Yet he had seemed rather unusual, rather silent. It might have been no use.
So far (two years now), neither Susanna nor even Ruby Sin has found a clue.
Anduin has therefore returned into her dreams and fantasies, where, like before, his face is fading from her inner eye. But then, he was a demon lover, and he and his mansion have vanished from the Earth. As they normally do.
VERMILIA
He wrote: ‘She is a vampire. Now I know. I thought I was alone.’
He felt the inevitable amalgam. Shock and excitement, jealous resentment, unease.
He would never have said The city is mine. How could it be? There must be several others, like himself. But he had never met one, here. Not here. And, otherwise, none for half a century.
They kept to themselves. Like certain of the big cats, they did not live easily together, the vampires. They drew together for sex, sometimes even for love. Then parted. Eventually.
And if one was sensed, then generally, they would be avoided – by their own kind.
But now, now he wondered if he had wanted …? The one who said no man was an island, was quite wrong. Every man is, every woman is, both prey and predator. Alone.
And she was an island lit by gorgeous lamps, smooth and lustrous in her approach, her hidden depths and heights alive with unknown temptations.
Of course. She was a vampire.
Flirtatiously he wrote: ‘What now?’
The first time he saw her, was across a crowded bar. It was just after sunset, vampire dawn. She had that fresh look a vampire had, waking to the prospect of a pleasant ‘day’. Obviously, there were others who had it, too – certain night-workers who enjoyed their jobs. But vampires loved their employment. Most of them. The stories of guilt and angst were generally spurious – or poetic.
She moved about the bar, sometimes sitting, crossing and uncrossing her long pale legs in their sheaths of silk. She had black hair with a hint of red, and a bright red dress with a hint of blue, sleeveless and body-clinging, the sort that only a woman with a perfect figure could wear. And her figure was perfect.
The face was something else again – sly and secretive, with elusive eyes. The mouth crayoned the colour of the dress. For this vermilion colour, he coined a name for her almost at once: Vermilia.
She would be pleased, he later thought, once he had seen her at work. Vampires tended to obscure their true names, at least from each other. The invented name he would offer her, like a first gift.
Why she had initially caught his attention he was not so sure. Possibly vampiric telepathy, empathy … For there were other attractive women in the bar, even with perfect forms, and faces that were actually beautiful, if only in the synthetic contemporary manner.
Naturally, she did not look like that. She would have appeared as well in a sweeping Renaissance gown, or corseted crinoline.
From involuntary observation, he began to watch her.
It was soon apparent she was there to secure company. But, she was selective. She would speak to men, engage their interest – even allowing a couple to buy her a drink – but then she would drift away. Not for a moment did he take her for a hooker. She was not – businesslike. You could see, she liked what she was doing. For her, it was foreplay.
That night, himself, he had no rush. He had taken rich sustenance for three consecutive nights, draining his source with civilised slow thoroughness. She had died, happily, in the hour before sunrise. Tonight, then, was a leisurely reconnoitre, no more. He would not need blood again for 72 hours at least.
He felt nothing for his prey, or very little. He was seldom rough or cruel – there was seldom any need. To seduce, to entrance, was second nature to his kind. Was he thinking Vermilia might be a worthy successor to the last dish? Probably not. After someone so lovely as the last young woman who had died, he would have preferred a very different type, perhaps even ugly. You did not want always the same flavour.
Besides, he soon began to realise about Vermilia.
She was drinking red wine. It was a human myth that vampires could not eat, or imbibe any fluid save one. They did not need to, certainly, but they could. He himself disliked alcohol, and drank mineral water, but that was his personal taste. He understood also she did not favour red wine because it reminded her of blood. What else was ever like blood?
Finally, she was with a boy, stood right up to the bar now, across from him as he watched her. For a second even, her eyes slid over his face. Did she see him?
Sense him, as he had begun to sense her? Maybe not. She was intent on her prey.
The boy – he was a boy, though probably forty years of age, arrested in some odd gauche slim adolescence of human immaturity – was fascinated at once. He bought her another wine. Then another.
‘Yes,’ he wrote, ‘right then I did truly suspect. I was sure she was not a professional. Therefore, and in any case, why fasten on this oddball character, plainly not rich, not handsome, and not wise?’ A new flavour?
They were there for about twenty minutes more. He even caught phrases from their conversation. ‘You do? Wow.’ And she, ‘Let me show you. Would you like that?’ They were not talking about sex. It was a building, the building where she lived. Some old-style architecture, that had been used in a movie, she said. He did not
catch the name of the director or actors in the movie. Conceivably she made it up. He was almost sure by then.
When they left the bar, he left also, sidling out into the hot night, to follow them unseen.
The city was black, jewelled but not lit up by its coruscating terraces of lights. Humanity idled by, skimpily clad, drinking beers and snorting drugs from cones of paper. Police cars shrilled through the canyons, rock music thumped.
They reached the famous building. It rose high above, and did look extremely gothic, with some sort of gargoyles leaning out from the fortieth floor.
The foyer was open to anyone, at least to any vampire, dim and shadowed, with carven girls holding up pots of fern, and the doorman watching a TV. Either he waved to Vermilia, or thought he waved to some other woman he knew to reside there. To him, the doorman said, not turning, ‘Hot night, Mr Engel.’
‘It is.’
Vermilia did not turn either. She was showing her boy the statues and the cornice, and summoning an elevator.
He got in with them. Vermilia did not glance. The boy looked slightly embarrassed, then forgot, the way a vampire could always make a human forget.
They got off at the fifty-first floor. He rode up to 52. When he came back down the stairs, they were still outside her apartment.
The corridor was dimmer even than the foyer. The doors were wide-spaced and no-one was there. He stood like an invisible shadow by the stair door, and looked.
‘Oh – I forgot my key. Or I lost it.’
‘Maybe I can pry it open with this –’ The credit card twiddled in boyish old fingers.
‘Honey,’ said Vermilia.
It occurred to him she did not live here at all, liked the chancy stuff of doing it right now, in the corridor.
She had her arms round the boy’s neck. The boy kissed her, sloppily, the way you would expect. Then she put her face into his neck.
He gave a little squeal.
‘Ssh,’ she said softly. ‘It’s sexy. You’ll like it.’ Then a pause, and then, ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Ye-aah, I guess …’
It did not last long.
As she pulled away, a vermilion thread was on her chin. It might only have been smeared lipstick.
The boy breathed fast. He turned to try to open the door.
She said, ‘Oh, leave that. Let’s go out. I’d rather go out.’
‘But I thought maybe –’
She was already by the elevator again.
The boy shambled after her, pressing a surprised handkerchief to his bleeding neck. ‘Hey – you drew blood –’
‘Sorry, honey.’
The elevator came.
He knew she would lose the boy somewhere in the crowds.
He let her go.
He went back to his living space, and wrote about it in the book he kept. He wrote, ‘She did not relish his blood. She took only a little. Must then have gone looking for someone else.’
And then, flirtatiously again, ‘What now?’
But he knew. He would go after her. As no-one else could, he could find her. Hunt her down. Oh, Vermilia …
He had never thought of them much as victims, the ones he took. Some he even allowed to recover, and forget him. The best, he drained over three, four, five nights, at the end eking it out. There was no other pleasure in the world like it.
Sex, the closest, was anaemic beside it. He would never have tried to describe the delight, the power and the glory. There were no words in any language, or from any time.
The night after he saw Vermilia in the bar, he took a girl off the sidewalk near the park. Perhaps it was Vermilia’s fault, in some incoherent way. He did not control himself, and drained the girl, among the trees. Her passage from slight surprise to thrill to ecstasy to delirium and oblivion, was encompassed in two hours. Because he had been incautious, he had then to obscure her death, to cut her throat – almost bloodless – and roll her down the 3 am slope into the kids’ wading pool. One more puzzle for all those whirling car-bound cops.
The next night he began the hunt.
He was very perplexed not to find her at once, Vermilia.
But the reason he did not was very stupid. He had never thought she would return instantly to the bar, and do exactly the same there as before.
When she left with her new beau, a muscled moron, he let her have him. Did not even bother to go in the building with them – the same building.
Presently, about half an hour after, the moron came plunging out, looking both smug and unnerved.
He went up to him. ‘Say, are you okay, son?’
‘Sure, sure – some weird babe.’
‘You gotta be careful.’
‘Yeah, old man, I guess you do.’
He knew the moron, who had surgical dressing now on his thick neck, saw him as some cobwebby, bent old guy, leaning on a cane.
The moron swaggered off, proud of his youth. She must have let him have some sex, in payment. Perhaps the blood had been good; he looked strong. But it was not always that way; sometimes the puny ones had the nicest taste.
He went in, and the doorman, watching TV, called out, ‘Mind the floor, Mr Korowitcz. Woman spilled the wash bucket, still damp.’
The elevator took him up to 51, and he walked along to her door. Presumably it was her door. Of course, she might have taken the stairs, as he had, last time. But why would she? Unless she had seen him – there was always that.
He tried the door.
He was thinking, she might assume it was the moron back, angry maybe, or just wanting another helping.
Or she merely might not answer.
Then the door opened.
She looked right up at him in a cool still amazement that made him aware she had, somehow, not sensed him at all, not properly seen him, until that moment.
Later, writing, he wrote: ‘Should I have been more careful? I? I was innocent after all, worse than the “boy” in the bar. How could I guess?’
She said, ‘Who are you?’
‘A … kindred spirit.’
‘Really?’
She looked glad enough to have him there. But that was usual. To the one he focused on, he was everything, a prince among men. With his own kind, it was not quite the same. Even so. He was all her conquests had not been, and more. What struck him was that she did not seem at all wary. No, she was inviting – if not exactly yielding.
‘May I come in?’
She laughed. ‘I see. I have to ask you over the threshold.’
‘I think you know better than that.’
‘Do I?’
‘We,’ he said, peremptorily, ‘decide. Asked or not.’
‘My.’ She pivoted. ‘Come on in, then.’
As he passed her, she ran her hand lightly along his arm. Even through the summer jacket, he felt the life of her.
The apartment was in keeping with its grand façade and foyer, and just as dimly lit. What startled him was its total ambience of cliché. Velvet draperies hung, and tall white candles burned, dark perfumes wafted, Byzantine chant murmured, stained glass obscured the windows. There were no mirrors he could see. This room was exactly what humans expected a vampire’s apartment to be. Yes, even to the skull on the real marble mantle, the ancient dusty books, and the chess-set in ivory and ebony stood ornately to one side.
He had never come across, on the rare occasions that he met them, any vampire who lived like this, and he himself did not. His room was inexpensive and plain, without curios. Without, really, anything.
She had a piano too.
Now she walked over to it, and ran her fingers over the keys – clashing with the chanting. He could tell from the way she did that, too, she could not play the thing at all. Show then. Just for show.
‘Like a drink?’ she said. ‘Or am I being forward?’ And she snapped her teeth.
He smiled. Grimly. Her vulgarity – he would have preferred to leave. But something – herself, obviously – held him there.
A dr
ink … She was perverse, kinky, a freak. Vampires did sometimes like such games together. He too had done so, long, long ago. Acting prey-predator, drinking each other’s blood. It could be amusing, as a novelty. But that was all it was. She, though, he could tell from some infinitesimal quivering in her, found the idea a turn-on.
Was it just possible she did not believe he was what he was – one of her own kind?
He walked over to the sofa and sat down, sinking miles deep. She moved about him, round the room, prowling like a cat, and now, to his disgust, lit some sort of incense She must be very young. She looked about 25 – maybe less than a hundred, then. For vampires, though immortal, did age, in their own way. No sags or wrinkles, but something in the line of the bones, the way they were.
‘But tell me about yourself,’ she coyly said.
And she came and sat down beside him, leaning back a little, displaying herself, her eyes gleaming now, yet still elusive – reflective, like the mirrors she did not have.
‘Nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘You know that. Our lives are all very much the same.’
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
He looked at her. Why was he?
‘You,’ he said.
‘I’ve put my spell on you. I did that the other night, didn’t I? Across the bar. I thought, my oh my.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. I bet you spied on me with Puddie.’
‘With whom?’
‘Puddle. That guy.’
‘Which one?’
She smiled, and her teeth glinted. He could see their sharpness. She was not being careful. Of course, with him, that would be a futile precaution.
‘You know what I do. And I know what you do,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s do it.’
‘You want that with me?’
‘You bet I do. Oh yes. So much.’
He did not want to drink from her. Later, he wrote, ‘I wanted nothing less than her blood. That was my fatal mistake. But she had – as she said so naively, foiling me further, cast a spell on me of some sort. And for me, Vermilia was the first of my kind for all that time.’