Vampires: The Recent Undead Part 16

True. I did the world no favors by sparing Brigid's life. I could argue that in killing her, I could unleash a worse predator inside me. But that's bulls.h.i.+t rationalization. I let her live because I wouldn't risk the personal h.e.l.l that could come with killing her.

I have a good life here. A d.a.m.ned near perfect one. Would I kill to keep it? I'd rather not find out. Someday, I'll be tested. Just not today.

I pulled out the watch I'd swiped from Hans when we were struggling with Tee.

"Anyone want a Rolex?"

La Vampiresse.

Tanith Lee.

British author Tanith Lee has written around ninety books and close to three hundred short stories in a variety of genres including both adult and young adult fantasy, science fiction, Gothic romance, historical novels, and horror. Her prose is always intelligent, often darkly twisted, exotic, and lush. Vampiric themes appear frequently in her fiction, most notably in short novel Sabella: or the Bloodstone and the novels of the Blood Opera series-Dark Dance, Personal Darkness, and Darkness, I-which reveal the life of the Scarabae: elegant, mysterious, seductive creatures of few words and many secrets. Additional vampire novels include The Blood of Roses, and Vivia. Some of her shorter works are considered vampire cla.s.sics. These include "The Beautiful Biting Machine," "Red As Blood," (which twists Snow White's tale into something darker), "Bite-Me-Not, Or Fleur de Fur," and "Nunc Dimittis" (adapted for the cable TV series The Hunger in 1999). The t.i.tle character of "La Vampiresse" embodies the charisma, power, and presence of the vampire in an unusual way. This story is another with the makings of a cla.s.sic.

Tanith Lee has won the British Fantasy Society's August Derleth Award, two World Fantasy Awards, and two Spanish Gilgames Awards. She was named a Grand Master at the World Horror Convention in 2009. She is married to the writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine. They live on the Suss.e.x Weald, near the sea, in a house full of books and plants. Norilana Books is currently reissuing some of Lee's early novels: including The Birthgrave Trilogy and the five books of the Tales of the Flat Earth opus.

Going up in the elevator, he felt a wave of depression so intense at what he was about to do, that he almost rushed out at another floor. But then what would he see? The eerie elongate building was frosted with a dry desert cold. On the ground floor he had already encountered strange sliding, creeping or slipping shades. He had glimpsed creatures-things-he didn't want to be at large among. And anyway, there was the man with him in the lift, "helping" him to reach the proper place.

How is she today?" he had asked, when they first got in.

"As always."

"Ah."

And that was all.

Ornamental, the elevator had fretted screens of delicately wrought white metal. Its internal light was soft, but not warm. When the cage finally rattled to a halt, and the screens parted, a cold blast hit him from an open window.

"Is that safe?"

"What?" asked the man.

"That window-surely-"

"That's fine. See the grill?"

He looked and saw the grill. And in any case, now they were in the heart of a desert night. The sunset had been sucked under, sucked up like red blood, in the minute or so of the elevator's ascent. Stars glittered out in the black sky, undimmed even by the lights of this immense, automated mansion. Soon a moon would rise.

"Thanks," he said humbly to the attendant. Should he tip him? Perhaps not. The man was already undoing a door, and it seemed he should go through-go through alone. And now after the depression, for a moment he was afraid.

"Am I okay in there?" He tried to sound flippant.

The attendant smiled suddenly, contemptuous as a wolf. "Sure. It's all right, you know. She's sated."

"She is?"

"Yes. Quite."

"Sated."

"Yes."

"How?" he heard himself ask. The ghoulish word hung there in the slightly-warmed cold air.

The attendant said. "Best not to ask, mister."

"No . . . "

"Best not to ask," the man repeated, as fools or the nervous or the indomitable often did.

But this time he resisted, himself, doing so.

And then he was through the door, which-as it seemed with its own laughter-shut fast and closed him in.

The first thing he saw in the great wide room was the Christmas tree. It was that blue-green variety, about two meters tall and growing in a stone pot. He knew of the tree, had indeed seen pictures of it, both stills and film. Probably not the same tree. but the same type of tree and decorated in the same way, for it was hung with long pearl necklaces.

The room was luxurious. Thickly carpeted with deep chairs upholstered in what looked like velvet, or leather. The drapes were looped back from two tall windows, in one of which the moon was now coming up from the desert.

In fact, this whole room was very like the other room, the room he had seen photographs of. Not absolutely, he supposed, but enough.

He looked around carefully. On a gallery up a stair were book-stacks lined with volumes of calf and silk, gilded. A globe stood up there on a table, and down here, one long decanter filled with dark fluid and two crystal goblets.

"It isn't blood."

He snapped around so fast a muscle tw.a.n.ged at the top of his neck.

Christ. She had risen up silent as the moon rose, out of that chair in the corner, in he half light beyond the lamps, a shadow.

"No, truly, not blood. Alcohol. I keep it for my guests."

He knew what to do. And if he hadn't known, he had had it droned into him by everyone he had had to deal with, lawyers, his own office, and inevitably, the people here. So he bowed to her, the short military bow of a culture and a world long over. But not, of course, for her.

"Madame Chaika.s.sia."

"Ah," she said. "At last. One who knows how to say my name."

Naturally he knew. He had known from the day he saw her in the interview on TV. Rather as he had seen the actress Bette Davis in an interview years before and she had been asked how her first name was p.r.o.nounced. So that he therefore knew it was not p.r.o.nounced, as most persons now did, in the French way, Bett, but-for he had heard the actress herself reply-as Betty. And in the same way he knew the female being before him now did not p.r.o.nounce her name as so many did: not Che'-kasee-ah, but Ch'-high-kazya.

She did not ask who he was. They would have told her when they said he would be coming. After all, without her permission, he would never have been allowed into this room. And all the way here, if the truth were known, he had been sweating, thinking she would, after his journey of two thousand miles and more, suddenly change her mind.

"Help yourself," she said idly, "to a drink."

So he thanked her, and went and poured himself one. To his surprise, when he sipped it, it was a decent malt whisky. Despite her words he expected anything but alcohol. Yet obviously, they knew she would never drink this.

When she beckoned to him, he sat down facing her where she had once more sat down. The side lamps cast the mildest glow, but behind her the harsh white neon of the moon was coming up with incredible rapidity. It would s.h.i.+ne into his face, not hers.

In the soft flattering light, he studied her.

Even under these lamps she looked old. He had been prepared for that. No one knew her exact age, or those who did kept quiet. But twenty, twenty-five years ago, when he had seen her in that interview, or more recently in little remaining clips of film, she had looked only a glamorous thirty, forty. Now he would have said she was well into her sixties. She looked like that. Except, of course, she still was glamorous, and she still had her wonderful mask of bones on which the flesh stayed pinned, not by surgery, but by that random good luck which chance sometimes handed out, just now and then, to the chosen few.

In fact, she was still beautiful, and he had a feeling even when she looked seventy, eighty, one hundred, she would still keep those two things, the glamour and the beauty.

Although, again, probably she wouldn't live that long, not now. Now she was in captivity and ruined.

She lost a little more each day, they had told him that. A little more.

But you'd never know.

Her hair was long as in the old pictures and just as l.u.s.trous and thick, though fine silver wires of the best kind of gray silked through it. She wore a minimum of makeup, eye shadow, and false lashes. No powder he could detect. And though her lips were a startling scarlet, it was a softer scarlet to suit the aging of her face.

Her body, like her throat, was long and slender. She wore one of those long black gowns, just close enough in fit he had seen, in her rising and sitting, her figure looked, at least when clothed, like that of a woman half her apparent age. And she had on high heels-black velvet pumps on slender tapering pins. She had surrendered very little. that way.

As for her hands, always the big giveaway, she wore mittens of thin black lace, and her nails were long and painted dull gold.

"Well," she said. "What do you wish to know?"

"Whatever you are kind enough to tell me."

"There is so much."

"Yes."

"Time," she said. She shrugged.

"We have some time."

"I mean, my time. Such a great amount. Like the snows and the forests. Like the mountains I saw from the beginning of my life. And always in moonlight or the light of the stars. So many nights. Centuries, and all in the dark."

She had hypnotized him. He felt it. He didn't struggle. But she said, "Don't be nervous," as if he had stuttered or flinched or drawn back. "You know, don't you, you are perfectly safe with me tonight?"

"Yes, Madame Chaika.s.sia."

"That's good. Not everyone is able to relax."

"I know," he said, "that you've given your word. You never break your word."

She smiled then. She had beautiful teeth, but they were all caps. Thank G.o.d, he thought, with a rare compa.s.sion, she had not needed new teeth until such excellent dentistry had become available.

He could remember the little headline in the scurrilous magazine: False Fangs for a Vampire.

"Do you know my story?" she asked, not coyly, but with dignity.

Surely it would be impossible not to respond to this pride and self-control? At least, for him.

"Something of it. But only from the movies and the book."

"Oh, my book." She was dismissive. Any authorial arrogance had left her, or else she had never had any. "I did not write everything I should have done. Or they would not let me. Always there are restraints."

"Yes," he said.

She said, "It must surprise you to find me here."

He waited, careful.

She sighed. She said, "As the world shrinks, I have been taken like an exotic animal and put into this zoo-this menagerie. And I have allowed it for there was nothing else I could do. I am the last of my kind. A unique exhibit. And of course, they feed me."

At the vulgar flick of her last words, he found, to his slight dismay, the hair crawled on his scalp. Then curiosity, his stock-in-trade, made him say, "Can I ask you, Madame, in the realm of food, on what do they-?"

"On what do you think?"

She leaned forward. Her black eyes that had no aging mark on them beyond a faint reddening at their corners, burned into his. And he felt, and was glad to feel, an electric weakening in his spine.

If only I could give you what you need.

He heard the line in his head, as he had heard and read it on several occasions. But he kept the sense not to say it.

She had given him her word, La Vampiresse, that she would not harm him. But there was one story, if real or false he hadn't been able to find out. One journalistic interviewer had teasingly gone too far with her, and left this place in an ambulance.

So he only waited, letting the recorder tick unheard in his pocket-they had said she didn't object to such machines, providing she didn't have to see or hear them.

And she leaned back after moment and said, "They bring me what I must have. It is taken quite legally. And only from the willing and the healthy."

He risked it. "Blood, Madame."

"Blood, monsieur. But I will tell you something. They must, by law, disguise what it is."

"How is that possible?"

"They add a little juice, some little meat extract or other. This is required by the government. Astonis.h.i.+ng, their hypocrisy, would you not say?"

"I'd say so, yes."

"For everyone knows what I am and what I must have to live. But in order to protect the sensibility of a few, they perpetrate a travesty. However," she folded her hands, her rings dark as her eyes, "I can taste what it really is, under its camouflage. And it does what it must. As you see. I am still alive."

He had been an adolescent when he saw her first, and that was on film. He was not the only one whose earliest s.e.xual fantasies had been lit up all through by La Vampiresse.

But also, romantically, he had fallen in love with her world, recreated so earnestly on the screen. A country and landscape of forests, mountains, spired cities on frozen rivers, or winter palaces and sleighs and wolves, and of darkness, always that, where the full moon was the only sun. Russia, or some component of Russia, but a Russia vanished far away, where the aristocrats spoke French and the slavery of serfdom persisted.

As he grew up, found fleshly women that, for all their faults, were actually embraceable, actually penetrable, he lost the dreams of blood and moonlight. And with them, perhaps strangely, or not, lost too the romance of place. So that when, all these years after, he had been looking again at the film, or at those bits of it which had been-aptly-dug up, he was amused. At himself, for ever liking these scenarios at all. At the scenarios themselves, their naivety and censored charms. Oh yes, the imagination, in those days, s.e.xual and otherwise, had had to work overtime. And from doing it, the imagination had grown muscular and strong. So that in memory after, you saw what you had not been shown, the fondling behind the smoky drape, that closed boudoir door, or even the rending among the hustle of far-off feeding wolves . . .

Altogether, he was sorry the romance had died for him with his youth. What was more-though they had only been, to begin with, such images, a recreation-coming here he grew rather afraid she too, La Vampiresse herself, would also disappoint. Worse, that she would horrify him with scorn or pity or disgust.

But now, sitting facing her, he had to admit he was nearly aroused. Oh, not in any erotic way. Better than that-imaginatively. Those strong imagination-muscles hadn't after all wasted completely away. For here and now he was filling in once more the hidden or obscured vision. So that under her age, still, he could make out what she had been and was, in her own manner.