by Gemma Files
Just in case.
Because you never knew, right?
Ever.
She felt the vampire’s eyes tangle in her hair, like bats.
“Okay, say it comes up. Then what?”
He paused, considering.
“I burn,” he said, at last. “And you—watch.”
Uh.
Then, seeing her wince: “But I take it you’ve done that before.”
Sonia blinked.
June 25, 1991; the Antichrist’s birthday, Grandpop always said.
They were up on the ridge that morning, north by northeast, following a tip on some Iraqi deserters supposedly seen at the outermost well. Handler and Koo walking point, Raycee behind. Horse bones to the left, picked clean, under a saffron bell of sky. Mortensen’s radio was still leaking static, even set as low as it went; it’d been that way since orientation back in Saudi. He kept fumbling with it, knocking the receiver on his helmet. When the job at hand gets second place, everybody suffers (DI Turner’s favourite phrase, his breath halfway up your windpipe like a pepperoni fart.) Sonia was in mid turn, Cut that shit out on her lips, when Mortensen’s foot met the mine.
Bright black string-man against the sand, stretched too thin to catch hold of. Too thin not to snap.
And Handler behind her, repeating: “Holy joe, Sarge. Holy joe. I mean, Jeeze.”
Screaming.
Her cheeks were wet.
Something touched her mind then, softly. Something—red.
Now listen.
A clawed hand peeled memory flat and laid it aside, folding the moment back on itself. Flame and noise shrank; a line, a dot. Handler faded.
No more time for words.
Sonia recognized the vampire’s words, cool now as clean sheets on a fevered forehead.
No—need.
O shadowless angel, reasonable beyond humanity.
A toilet flushed. Grillo would be back any moment, with Essen close after. The vampire drew his long legs back, clumsy, as the dark around him dimmed. Four square feet. Three.
Dawn shivered the window’s frame.
Step down, thought Sonia. Stay SAFE.
The vampire bent from it, until bone grated and locked.
Another thought, most insistently: Let this bastard BE.
“I’m nuts,” she muttered, stating the obvious. Then: “Mortensen’s dead, man. It wasn’t—I—couldn’t do anything.”
That’s no excuse, the vampire’s no-voice replied.
Sonia moaned.
Jesus Christ, get out of my HEAD—there’s enough of us in here already.
But her thumbs pricked, crawling, under the jacket. Her lips went dry; mouth, groin, nipples set abruptly alight. Her limbs shook. Fistfuls of tiny red ants emerged from her brain’s grey folds, each clamouring—in his voice—to be heard.
You came for a taste of power, the vampire not-said. To sit where my shadow should be, and watch. I commend your honesty. But let me go, and I offer you everything. Simply that. Let me free, and I swear I’ll come back for you. I’ll make you sister to the moon, mother of snakes. You’ll live forever.
Handler, keening. Grillo knocking at the rec room door.
Only free me.
Where the vampire ran out of corner, smoke began to rise.
Please.
Sonia’s heart shook, blue with eyes. She drew a breath—which came back out as a word:
Yes.
“Hey, Kopek!” Grillo yelled. “What—”
Sonia turned, and—
—figure it OUT, dick—
—rammed her head into the nearest fire alarm.
Double uh.
Glass sprayed. Essen came running, keys ready, as her knees hit the floor. Grillo knelt beside her. He turned her face up with one huge hand, almost gentle:
“Oh, Kopek, you crazy bitch.”
Well, THAT’s news.
The impact had broken her nose, again. It hurt, but no sweat; she’d felt worse. She opened her mouth to speak, coughed blood and snot instead. Everything inside her head turned suddenly liquid.
Clangaclangaclangaclanga—
Essen sniffed. “Fuck me,” he said. “Smoke.”
Inside his cell, the vampire was starting to char. He howled along with the alarm, tearing chunks from the walls. Padding flew. Sonia thrashed on the floor outside, keeping time.
Come on, come ON—
And the sun was a spilled lamp, everywhere at once.
Like napalm.
Grillo threw one leg over her knees, and held it there. Shouting to Essen: “I can’t hold her much longer here, man—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Essen fumbled with the keys, misread labels, swore. Supplies, furnace, front lobby, elevator—
—clangaclangaclangaclangaclang—
—Quiet Room.
The vampire’s hair finally caught fire. He tore at it with both hands, skipping a whole octave.
“Essen!”
“Got it,” Essen replied.
Truncheon out, he kicked the door open.
And Sonia and Grillo turned as one at the sound, to see—
(incoming)
—Essen blown back in one red blast, throat unravelling as he went. His head hit Sonia’s thigh, cracking the femur. Grillo, next in line, had time for a yelp; then two blood necklaces (jugular, carotid) broke at once across the wall behind him, dripping. Sonia gaped up, shading her eyes, from his suddenly slack palm. Her lips skinned back in a snarl of protest.
“The fuh—”
A sole syllable, choked at birth.
Poised for flight, the vampire—by the light of his own wings’ blazing, studied her face. Behind her brow, his words.
The first rule, my little Sergeant: Leave nothing living.
Bones bells ringing.
Even mad as you are, you must see that.
Synaptic mortar rounds.
(incoming)
But you’ll die out there, Sonia thought. Then, instantly reconnecting her own dots with impeccable non-linear logic: Or maybe not—with my blood inside of you.
Up and down, the stairwells sang with running feet. Suddenly sure she’d probably never know one way or the other, Sonia gulped, then stared.
You made—me a—promise. Shaky breath. “Motherfucker.”
Blue eyes crinkled, half-amused.
So I did.
Sonia blinked. In that one second, she felt the last eight years drop away like a thought gone wrong; a flurry of sloughed skin. She was home, whole, happy. She’d never left. Married to Gio from down the street, womb full and kicking. Makeup perfect, home congenial, flesh unscarred except for a little acne. Sanity intact. Never split wide and left to bleed, under an empty sky. Never burnt and screaming. Never splayed in her own pain like a cow in razor-wire, black with flies, while faceless things stood by and laughed and laughed laughed laughed—
—but before she could react, dead man’s fingernails dug as her pulse. Lifted her, effortlessly, ceilingward.
And squeezed.
Hail Mary the Lord is with thee blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus—
Sonia’s chest narrowed; became a vise, screwed beyond its limit.
“Did it never occur to you, though,” the vampire said, “that I might have been—lying?”
And leaned down.
—now and at the hour of our deaths—
Smiling.
(IN)
In the Poor Girl Taken by Surprise
“Aren’t you a little slut, to eat the flesh and drink the blood of your own grandmother?”
—“Little Red Riding-Hood,” traditional.
THIS IS AN OLD STORY. Most stories are. Anyone who says different is lying, or perhaps simply misinformed.
/> But thus, and even so:
Once upon a time, my darlings, these woods were full of wolves—yes, even here in the wilds of Upper Canada, where the light which seeps between evergreens and maple trees alike is as brown and stinging as though it comes filtered through a thousand mosquito wings at once. Here where the sky is clogged with bark and cobwebs, where black biting flies hover thick under the branches and each step stirs the pine-needle loam up like hay, or sodden grey-brown snow; here amongst the tangle of crab-apple trees and blackthorn bushes, where even the quietest footfall is enough to send little toads hopping clear, like brown clumps of dirt with tiny, jewelled eyes . . .
Even here in these dim and man-empty places, where things leap from tree to tree far overhead, just out of sight. Where under the mulch and muck of dead leaves a veritable feast of dust lies waiting—a fine, dun carpet of ground and yellowed bones.
Which is why, if you hear footsteps behind you as you make your way along the forest’s paths, it may be best to stop and hide and wait—as quietly as possible—until they pass you by. And if you see something high in the leaves above, something that looks like eyes travelling fast through the darkness, it may be best to ignore it, even if one is sure it can only be swamp gas—though in truth, there are few real swamps nearby, unless that sump of downed maples and frozen mud you struggled your way through to get to The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise tonight counts as such.
For there are so many things in these woods left still uncounted, even now: Trees whose branches rise high as church-spires, a perfect shape for the keels of bewitched canoes to scrape themselves upon. Caves in which squat the dried-out corpses of savages, hunted beyond endurance and sick with strange diseases, who starved to death rather than allow themselves to be captured and corralled like animals; their hungry ghosts may yet be heard keening at twilight, ill-wishing any white man whose shadow dares to cross their doorstep. A lake that goes up and a cathedral that goes down and a woman dressed all in birch-bark walking, rustling, with her left hand clutched tightly to her chest—that dead-white skeleton hand whose touch to the unwary forehead means madness, whose touch to the unwary back means death . . .
Yet here we sit snug and warm and dry nonetheless, traders and settlers and immigrants bound for even more distant places alike, before this open, welcoming fire; here we may eat and drink our fill and go ‘round the circle in turn, each of we travellers swapping a story for our place beneath this roof ‘till morning. And I will be more than glad to add my own contribution to that roster, if only it should please you to bend your ear and listen.
Might it be that you have a place already set at your table for a poor old woman such as I, Monsieur? Madame? A place at your sideboard for a starving, childless widow, mesdames et messieurs, s’il vous plait?
Oh, no matter; I have walked far tonight, expecting to go yet farther, before I saw your sign and heard your merriment. But I am not yet so weak with hunger that I cannot seat myself.
* * *
Once upon a time, and a time it was . . .
. . . there were two sisters who lived all alone, with no mother and no father to care for them, in the very deepest and darkest part of the woods. They lived in the house of their grandmother, who was often away on long trips, but they were not lonely, these two; never so, not in each other’s company. For they were used, from long experience, to making their own amusements.
And what brought this lopsided little family to the heart of the forest, deux gamines and one old woman, so far away from everything that is soft, feminine and civilized? Their property dated back to before the Plains of Abraham, before the French Revolution; granted land in perpetuity, as dowry and domain, ‘till one of them might be inclined to sell or give it away—and if that sounds like a curse rather than a gift, then so be it. A not-so-self-imposed exile in the no longer-New World for reasons untold, or (at least) unspoken.
The name, messieurs? Ah, but our names have come to mean so very little here in this empty country of ours, have they not? Just as our definitions tend to . . . shift, down the centuries. Tessedaluye, Tesse-dal’oeuil, Tete-de-l’oueil—“head of the eye,” no? Or perhaps a misapprehension never corrected: Head of something very, very different. L’oueil, la luce, la loup . . .
And so it was, after all: Tete-du-loup, “head of the wolf.” Wolf’s-head.
A strange name, certainly. And yet I know it as well as though it were—my own.
The savages who had occupied this particular plot of land began to shun it soon after the family first arrived to take possession of their new hunting-grounds. For they were ferocious hunters, these ones, male and female alike; from winter through spring, summer and fall, each season to its own sort of prey. In the old country, it had been whispered that the Tessedaluye kept their own calendar, and maybe even their own prayer-book too—had pledged themselves neither wholly to the Catholic nor the Hugenot faith, in those dark days after Catherine de’Medici and her brood split France limb from limb, twisting the wound so that it would never heal cleanly again. Which made them no sort of Christians at all, perhaps.
Or not good ones, at any rate.
And where was this house, you ask? Oh, not so very far from here at all. Not so very far that they were not often diverted by the light and noise of The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise which spilled towards them from across the lake, since they had never seen a public-house before, or travellers in such numbers: music, laughter, the rumble of ox-carts, bright city-bought fabrics, men and women dancing like leaves in the wind. These things were mysteries and amazements to the two sisters, poor solitary bumpkins that they were!
For they knew many things, these girls, you see, though the ways of Man were not among them. How to trap a rabbit, and skin it. How to tell the track of stag from that of moose. How to cook a hedgehog under an earthenware bowl, peel its stinging quills free, and crack it for its tender meat. What parts of every creature may be dried for carrying, which must be hung awhile before they become palatable, which may be pickled, or otherwise preserved. And which parts are best eaten just as they are, raw and red and dripping, on the very spot where they were butchered.
The human animal, only, was one they had never hunted. Let alone . . .
. . . tasted.
* * *
Girls are curious creatures, a fact their grandmother was well acquainted with—fated to be wild in their season, just as she had been in hers. So even though she understood that her warnings would (in all probability) go unheeded, she was constrained to voice them anyway.
Come close, my darlings, come closer; listen to me a while, before I go where I must. We do not meddle with those we do not know, yes? Therefore keep always to the safest path, the well-trod road of needles rather than the easier-seeming road of pins—back and forth to Grandmother’s house, where you may pull the bobbin and the latch will go up, open the door and come in.
And perhaps you should have stayed behind, old woman, if you feared so for their safety; this is what you may be thinking, and not without cause. But we cannot always choose the way things happen. I have my habits and my instincts, just as they . . . did.
A cry from the back, now: You, sir, repetez-vous? Ah, were they pretty, of course. For the most important questions must be answered first, naturally.
Well. We all know the tale of Rose Red and Snow White, do we not? From which one may gather that one was coarse and the other fine, one dark and the other fair. One might have been considered pretty, even in this company. The other—
—the other, not so much.
It was winter by then, which made things harder. Winter settles hard upon us all in this inhospitable place, am I mistaken? For when the light grows thin and the nights long, there is very little to amuse one’s self with, aside from sleep. Or hunting when the hunger takes you, which is often enough.
The people at the inn, also hungry—some of you here amongst them, no do
ubt—tried their hand at hunting as well. But when one does not know the territory, c’est difficile. The girls watched their distress mount, counting down the days to their grandmother’s return, and I think that it must have seemed to them that without their aid the men and women of The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise must surely pine and die like bear-cubs woken too early, beaver kits trapped in an icebound lodge . . . for they were tender-hearted creatures, as all girls are. Yes, indeed.
Almost as much so as they were also born hunters, long-used to watching and waiting while prey struggled deeper and deeper into its own trap. To check for signs of struggle in the snow or drops of blood in the underbrush, for the uneven prints of some weakened thing, for whatever Nature herself might have selected—pre-ordained, in her own magnanimous way—for them to cull.
* * *
The Feast of Stephen, Saint Stephen’s Day, has long been set aside for charity. So that was the day our two sisters set out for the inn across the lake, bearing gifts with which to barter their welcome: furs they had cured themselves, berries and fruits they had stored, a goodly portion of meat left over from their own store-room.
How they must have smiled when they drew within sight of these doors, as the moon rose and the snow began to fall—a night much like this one, come to think! For inside was light, warmth and singing, pedlars with their wares spread out on tables, all manner of strange and interesting folk from all manner of places they had never dreamed on, let alone been. And how the inn’s inhabitants must have smiled to see them coming, also: These two girls, unaccompanied, with their basket of goods and their gawky, gawping stares. Like veritable manna from Heaven.
I was far away by then, mes amis, following my quarry under a lead-colored snow-storm sky. Yet I do believe, nevertheless, that I can reckon the very moment during which my granddaughters’ rash actions led them somewhere they had never wanted to be.
You at the back—yes, you: I have no doubt you thought my Sylvie “pretty,” when you knew her. And my Perrinette, with her puppyish ways; you must have thought her a bad bargain in comparison, though well worth the price of such company. When you fed them both grog and gin, played your fiddles and dared them to dance with each other, dressed them up in your cheap whores’ cast-offs and rouged their lips and cheeks to make them look more . . . appetizing? Oui, madame, c’est veritable: I know for fact that you were there that night as chief inciter, if not ring-leader, in those drunken revels. And how, you may well ask?
