Vampires: The Recent Undead Part 46

Her attention was caught by a noise. Her nose wrinkled, quizzically.

Genevieve had taken out her rubber duck and quacked it.

"Come on, Racquel," she said, as if to a happy dog. "Nice quacky-quacky. Do you want it?"

She quacked again.

Racquel attempted a horrendous smile. A baby tear of blood showed on her cheek.

We took our leave of the Anti-Life Equation.

Junior was afraid of his daughter. And who wouldn't be?

I was back in Poodle Springs, not a place I much cared to be. Junior's wife had stormed out, enraged that this latest drama didn't revolve around her. Their house was decorated in the expensive-but-ugly mock Spanish manner, and called itself ranch style though there were no cattle or crops on the grounds.

Genevieve sat calmly on Junior's long gray couch. She fit in like a piece of Carrara marble at a Tobacco Road yard sale. I was helping myself to Scotch.

Father and daughter looked at each other.

Racquel wasn't such a fright now. Genevieve had driven her here, following my lead. Somehow, on the journey, the elder vampire had imparted grooming tips to the new-born, helping her through the shock of turning. Racquel had regular-sized fangs, and the red in her eyes was just a tint. Outside, she had been experimenting with her newfound speed, moving her hands so fast they seemed not to be there.

But Junior was terrified. I had to break the spell.

"It's like this," I said, setting it out. "You both killed Linda. The difference is that one of you brought her back."

Junior covered his face and fell to his knees.

Racquel stood over him.

"Racquel has been turning for weeks, joining up with that crowd in the desert. She felt them taking her mind away, making her part of a harem or a slave army. She needed someone strong in her corner, and Daddy didn't cut it. So she went to the strongest person in her life, and made her stronger. She just didn't get to finish the job before the Anti-Life Equation came to her house. She called you, Junior, just before she went under, became part of their family. When you got to the house, it was just as you said. Linda was at the bottom of the swimming pool. She'd gone there to turn. You didn't even lie to me. She was dead. You took a mallet and a spike-what was it from, the tennis net?-and made her truly dead. Did you tell yourself you did it for her, so she could be at peace? Or was it because you didn't want to be in a town-a world-with a stronger Linda Loring. She was a fighter. I bet she fought you."

There were deep scratches on his wrists, like the rips in his s.h.i.+rt I had noticed that night. If I were a gather-the-suspects-in-the-library type of d.i.c.k, I would have spotted that as a clue straight off.

Junior sobbed a while. Then, when n.o.body killed him, he uncurled and looked about, with the beginnings of an unattractive slyness.

"It's legal, you know," he said. "Linda was dead."

Genevieve's face was cold. I knew California law did not recognize the state of undeath. Yet. There were enough vampire lawyers on the case to get that changed soon.

"That's for the cops," I said. "Fine people. You've always been impressed with their efficiency and courtesy."

Junior was white under the tear-streaks. He might not take a murder fall on this, but Tokyo and Riyadh weren't going to like the attention the story would get. That was going to have a transformative effect on his position in Ohlrig Oil and Copper. And the PSPD would find something to nail him with: making false or incomplete statements, mutilating a corpse for profit (no more alimony), contemptible gutlessness.

Another private eye might have left him with Racquel.

She stood over her father, fists swollen by the sharp new nails extruding inside, dripping her own blood-the blood that she had made her mother drink-onto the mock-Mission-style carpet.

Genevieve was beside her, with the duck.

"Come with me, Racquel," she said. "Away from the dark red places."

Days later, in a bar on Cahuenga just across from the building where my office used to be, I was coughing over a shot and a Camel.

They found me.

Racquel was her new self, flitting everywhere, flirting with men of all ages, sharp eyes fixed on the pulses in their necks and the blue lines in their wrists.

Genevieve ordered bull's blood.

She made a face.

"I'm used to fresh from the bull," she said. "This is rancid."

"We're getting live piglets next week," said the bartender. "The straps are already fitted, and we have the neck-spigots on order."

"See," Genevieve told me. "We're here to stay. We're a market."

I coughed some more.

"You could get something done about that," she said, softly.

I knew what she meant. I could become a vampire. Who knows: if Linda had made it, I might have been tempted. As it was, I was too old to change.

"You remind me of someone," she said. "Another detective. In another country, a century ago."

"Did he catch the killer and save the girl?"

An unreadable look pa.s.sed over her face. "Yes," she said, "that's exactly what he did."

"Good for him."

I drank. The Scotch tasted of blood. I could never get used to drinking that.

According to the newspapers, there'd been a raid on the castle in the desert. General Iorga and Diane LeFanu were up on a raft of abduction, exploitation, and murder charges; with most of the murder victims undead enough to recite testimony in favor of their killers, they would stay in court forever. No mention was made of L. Keith Winton, though I had noticed a storefront on Hollywood Boulevard displaying nothing but a stack of Immortology tracts. Outside, fresh-faced new-born vampires smiled under black parasols and invited pa.s.sersby in for "a blood test." Picture this: followers who are going to give you all their money and live forever. And they said Dracula was dead.

"Racquel will be all right," Genevieve a.s.sured me. "She's so good at this that she frightens me. And she won't make get again in a hurry."

I looked at the girl, surrounded by eager warm bodies. She'd use them up by the dozen. I saw the last of Linda in her, and regretted that there was none of me.

"What about you?" I asked Genevieve.

"I've seen the Pacific. Can't drive much further. I'll stay around for a while, maybe get a job. I used to know a lot about being a doctor. Perhaps I'll try to get into med school, and requalify. I'm tired of jokes about leeches. Then again, I have to unlearn so much. Medieval knowledge is a handicap, you know."

I put my license on the bar.

"You could get one like it," I said.

She took off her gla.s.ses. Her eyes were still startling.

"This was my last case, Genevieve. I got the killer and I saved the girl. It's been a long goodbye and it's over. I've met my own killers, in bottles and soft-packs of twenty. Soon, they'll finish me and I'll be sleeping the big sleep. There's not much more I can do for people. There are going to be a lot more like Racquel. Those kids at the castle in the desert. The customers our bartender is expecting next week. The suckers drawn into Winton's nets. Some are going to need you. And some are going to be real vipers, which means other folk are going to need you to protect them from the worst they can do. You're good, sweetheart. You could do good. There, that's my speech. Over."

She dipped a finger-tip in her gla.s.s of congealing blood and licked it clean, thinking.

"You might have an idea there, gumshoe."

I drank to her.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Karen Russell.

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The New Yorker's debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. She is the author of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Swamplandia!, both published by Knopf. Both literary and fantastic, her "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" is one of those stories that different readers will find different meanings in. I suspect that essays have already been written about it, but at its core it is a story about both love and monstrosity-as vampire stories often are.

In October, the men and women of Sorrento harvest the primofiore, or "first fruit," the most succulent lemons; in March, the yellow bianchetti ripen, followed in June by the green verdelli. In every season you can find me sitting at my bench, watching them fall. Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I've been sitting here so long their falling seems contiguous, close as raindrops. My wife has no patience for this sort of meditation. "Jesus Christ, Clyde," she says. "You need a hobby."

Most people mistake me for a small, kindly Italian grandfather, a nonno. I have an old nonno's coloring, the dark walnut stain peculiar to southern Italians, a tan that won't fade until I die (which I never will). I wear a neat periwinkle s.h.i.+rt, a canvas sunhat, black suspenders that sag at my chest. My loafers are battered but always polished. The few visitors to the lemon grove who notice me smile blankly into my raisin face and catch the whiff of some sort of tragedy; they whisper that I am a widower, or an old man who has survived his children. They never guess that I am a vampire.

Santa Francesca's Lemon Grove, where I spend my days and nights, was part of a Jesuit convent in the 1800s. Now it's privately owned by the Alberti family, the prices are excessive, and the locals know to buy their lemons elsewhere. In summers a teenage girl named Fila mans a wooden stall at the back of the grove. She's painfully thin, with heavy, black bangs. I can tell by the careful way she saves the best lemons for me, slyly kicking them under my bench, that she knows I am a monster. Sometimes she'll smile vacantly in my direction, but she never gives me any trouble. And because of her benevolent indifference to me, I feel a swell of love for the girl.

Fila makes the lemonade and monitors the hot dog machine, watching the meat rotate on wire spits. I'm fascinated by this machine. The Italian name for it translates as "carousel of beef." Who would have guessed at such a device two hundred years ago? Back then we were all preoccupied with visions of apocalypse; Santa Francesca, the foundress of this very grove, gouged out her eyes while dictating premonitions of fire. What a shame, I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

A sign posted just outside the grove reads:.

CIGERETTE PIE.

HEAT DOGS.

GRANITE DRINKS.

Santa Francesca's Limonata-.

THE MOST REFRISITING DRANK ON THE PLENET!!.

Every day, tourists from Wales and Germany and America are ferried over from cruise s.h.i.+ps to the base of these cliffs. They ride the funicular up here to visit the grove, to eat "heat dogs" with speckly brown mustard and sip lemon ices. They snap photographs of the Alberti brothers, Benny and Luciano, teenage twins who cling to the trees' wooden supports and make a grudging show of harvesting lemons, who spear each other with trowels and refer to the tourist women as "v.a.g.i.n.as" in Italian slang. "Buena sera, v.a.g.i.n.as!" they cry from the trees. I think the tourists are getting stupider. None of them speaks Italian anymore, and these new women seem deaf to aggression. Often I fantasize about flas.h.i.+ng my fangs at the brothers, just to keep them in line.

As I said, the tourists usually ignore me; perhaps it's the dominoes. A few years back, I bought a battered red set from Benny, a prop piece, and this makes me invisible, sufficiently ba.n.a.l to be hidden in plain sight. I have no real interest in the game; I mostly stack the pieces into little houses and corrals.

At sunset, the tourists all around begin to shout. "Look! Up there!" It's time for the path of I Pipistrelli Impazziti-the descent of the bats.

They flow from cliffs that glow like pale chalk, expelled from caves in the seeming billions. Their drop in steep and vertical, a black hail. Sometimes a change in weather sucks a bat beyond the lemon trees and into the turquoise sea. It's three hundred feet to the lemon grove, six hundred feet to the churning foam of the Tyrrhenian. At the precipice, they soar upward and crash around the green tops of the trees.

"Oh!" the tourists shriek, delighted, ducking their heads.

Up close, the bats' spread wings are an alien membrane-fragile, like something internal flipped out. The waning sun washes their bodies a dusky red. They have wrinkled black faces, these bats, tiny, like gargoyles or angry grandfathers. They have teeth like mine.

Tonight, one of the tourists, a Texan lady with a big, strawberry red updo, has successfully captured a bat in her hair, simultaneously crying real tears and howling: "TAKE THE G.o.dd.a.m.n PICTURE, Sarah!"

I stare ahead at a fixed point above the trees and light a cigarette. My bent spine goes rigid. Mortal terror always trips some old wire that, leaves me sad and irritable. It will be whole minutes now before everybody stops screaming.

The moon is a muted shade of orange. Twin discs of light burn in the sky and. the sea. I scan the darker indents in the skyline, the cloudless spots that I know to be caves. I check my watch again. Ifs eight o'clock, and all the bats have disappeared into the interior branches. Where is Magreb? My fangs are throbbing, but I won't start without her.

I once pictured time as d black magnifying gla.s.s and myself as a microscopic, flightless insect trapped in that circle of night. But then Magreb came along, and eternity ceased to frighten me. Suddenly each moment followed its antecedent in a neat chain, moments we filled with each other.

I watch a single bat falling from the cliffs, dropping like a stone: headfirst, motionless, dizzying to witness.

Pull up.

I close my eyes. I press my palms flat against the picnic table and tense the muscles of my neck.

Pull UP. I tense until my temples pulse, until little black and red stars flutter behind my eyelids.

"You can look now."

Magreb is sitting on the bench, blinking her bright pumpkin eyes. "You weren't even watching. If you saw me coming down, you'd know you have nothing to worry about." I try to smile at her and find I can't. My own eyes feel like ice cubes.

"It's stupid to go so fast." I don't look at her. "That easterly could knock you over the rocks."

"Don't be ridiculous. I'm an excellent flier."

She's right. Magreb can shape-s.h.i.+ft midair, much more smoothly than I ever could. Even back in the 1850s when I used to trans.m.u.te into a bat two, three times a night, my metamorphosis was a shy, halting process.

"Look!" she says, triumphant, mocking, "you're still trembling!"

I look down at my hands, angry to realize it's true.

Magreb roots through the tall, black blades of gra.s.s. "It's late, Clyde; where's my lemon?"

I pluck a soft, round lemon from the gra.s.s, half a summer moon, and hand it to her. The verdelli I have chosen is perfect, flawless. She looks at it with distaste and makes a big show of brus.h.i.+ng off a marching ribbon of ants.

"A toast!" I say.

"A toast," Magreb replies, with the rote enthusiasm of a Christian saying grace. We lift the lemons and swing them to our faces. We plunge our fangs, piercing the skin, and emit a long, united hiss: "Aaah!"

Over the years, Magreb and I have tried everything-fangs in apples, fangs in rubber b.a.l.l.s. We have lived everywhere: Tunis, Laos, Cincinnati, Salamanca. We spent our honeymoon hopping continents, hunting liquid chimeras: mint tea in Fez, coconut slurries in Oahu, jet black coffee in Bogota, jackal's milk in Dakar, cherry c.o.ke floats in rural Alabama, a thousand beverages that purported to have magical quenching properties. We went thirsty in every region of the globe before finding our oasis here, in the blue boot of Italy, at this dead nun's lemonade stand. It's only these lemons that give us any relief.

When we first landed in Sorrento I was skeptical. The pitcher of lemonade we ordered looked cloudy and adulterated. Sugar clumped at the bottom. I took a gulp, and a whole small lemon lodged in my mouth; there is no word sufficiently lovely for the first taste, the first feeling of my fangs in that lemon. It was bracingly sour, with a delicate hint of ocean salt. After an initial p.r.i.c.kling-a sort of chemical effervescence along my gums-a soothing blankness traveled from the tip of each fang to my fevered brain. These lemons are a vampire's a.n.a.lgesic. If you have been thirsty for a long time, if you have been suffering, then the absence of those two feelings-however brief-becomes a kind of heaven. I breathed deeply through my nostrils. My throbbing fangs were still.

By daybreak, the numbness had begun to wear off. The lemons relieve our thirst without ending it, like a drink we can hold in our mouths but never swallow. Eventually the original hunger returns. I have tried to be very good, very correct and conscientious about not confusing this original hunger with the thing I feel for Magreb.

I can't joke about my early years on the blood, can't even think about them without guilt and acidic embarra.s.sment. Unlike Magreb, who has never had a sip of the stuff, I listened to the village gossips and believed every rumor, internalized every report of corrupted bodies and boiled blood. Vampires were the favorite undead of the Enlightenment, and as a young boy I aped the diction and mannerisms I read about in books: Vlad the Impaler, Count Heinrich the Despoiler, Goethe's bloodsucking bride of Corinth. I eavesdropped on the terrified prayers of an old woman in a cemetery, begging G.o.d to protect her from . . . me. I felt a dislocation then, a spreading numbness, as if I were invisible or already dead. After that, I did only what the stories suggested, beginning with that old woman's blood. I slept in coffins, in black cedar boxes, and woke every night with a fierce headache. I was famished, perennially dizzy. I had unspeakable dreams about the sun.

In practice I was no suave viscount, just a teenager in a red velvet cape, awkward and voracious. I wanted to touch the edges of my life. The same instinct; I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars. One night I skulked into a late Ma.s.s with some vague plan to defeat eternity. At the back of the nave, I tossed my mousy curls, rolled my eyes heavenward, and then plunged my entire arm into the bronze pail of holy water. Death would be painful, probably, but I didn't care about pain. I wanted to overturn my sentence. It was working; I could feel the burn beginning to spread. Actually, it was more like an itch, but I was sure-the burning would start any second. I slid into a pew, snug in my misery, and waited for my body to turn to ash.