The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Katje was furious with him and with herself. She should have chanced the head shot, she shouldn’t have let Jackson hold her back.

  She could see Daniel’s car now, wheeling into the parking lot.

  Jackson said tightly, “I got accepted to computer school in Rochester for next semester. You can bet they don’t do vampires over there, Mrs. de Groot; and they don’t do blacks with guns either. Me and Nettie got to live here; we don’t get to go away to Africa.”

  She grew calm; he was right. The connection had been between herself and the vampire all along, and what had happened here was her own affair, nothing to do with these young people.

  “All right, Jackson,” she said. “There was nothing to see.”

  “Check,” he said. He turned toward Daniel’s car.

  He would do all right, Katje thought; maybe someday he would come visit her in Africa, in a smart suit and carrying an attaché case, on business. Surely they had computers there now, too.

  Daniel stepped out of his car into the rain, one hand on his pistol butt. Katje saw the disappointment sour his florid face as Nettie put a hand on his arm and talked.

  Katje picked up her purse from where she had dropped it—how light it felt now, without the gun in it. She fished out her plastic rain hood, though her hair was already wet. Tying the hood on, she thought about her old .350 magazine rifle, her lion gun; about taking it from storage, putting it in working order, tucking it well back into the broom closet at the Club. In case Weyland didn’t die, in case he couldn’t sleep with two bullets in him and came limping back to hunt on familiar ground—to look for her. He would come next week, when the students returned, or never. She didn’t think he would come, but she would be ready just in case.

  And then, as she had planned, she would go home to Africa. Her mind flashed: a new life, whatever life she could make for herself there these days. If Weyland could fit himself to new futures, so could she. She was adaptable and determined—like him.

  But if he did sleep, and woke again fifty years from now? Each generation must look out for itself. She had done her part, although perhaps not well enough to boast about. Still, what a tale it would make some evening over the smoke of a campfire on the veldt, beginning with the tall form of Dr. Weyland seen striding across the parking lot past the kneeling student in the heavy mist of morning . . .

  Katje walked toward Daniel’s car to tell the story that Buildings and Grounds would understand.

  Part II:

  The Land of Lost Content

  “These guys found this big old Mercedes-Benz sedan jammed into a clump of bushes in the county park, with the driver collapsed all bloody at the wheel,” Wesley said. “They said they’d get the cops or take him to the hospital, but the guy said no. Well, they know Weinberg, and they called him. Figured the Mercedes man had his reasons and Weinberg might be able to make something out of it and tip them for it.

  “Weinberg came and got this guy and tucked him up quiet at his U-Store-It near Hartford. He had the car hauled out and cleaned up, and he sold it for a nice price. Whoever this guy is, he took good care of his car.”

  Wesley paused to unwrap and break in a fresh stick of gum.

  “But who is the guy?” he continued. “Nobody knows. I brought down everything they found on him, over in that paper bag. There’s no wallet, no ID, and he wouldn’t give any name. Weinberg called this doctor he knows. The doctor took two slugs out of the Mercedes man, one here and one here.” He touched his own chest and belly. “And he brought some whole blood to transfuse so the guy wouldn’t drop dead while Weinberg was still trying to find out who might have a worthwhile interest in him.

  “Now here’s the weird part. They hung up the blood bottle and put the needle in, and the next thing you know the Mercedes man pulls the needle out again and busts it off, and he starts sucking the fuckin’ tube. Sucking up the blood, you see what I mean? Drinking it. That’s when Weinberg decided this one was for you, Roger. He said he didn’t know anybody else who’d know what to do with a goddamn vampire.”

  Roger laughed delightedly, hugging his knees, and looked at Mark to see how he was taking all this.

  The whole thing sounded to Mark like a loony hangover from the days when his Uncle Roger had been, in many of his successive crazes, a good market for outlandish items from Weinberg’s unadvertised stock. Weinberg the fence was the only crook Mark knew and his first evidence that there were Jewish gangsters as well as all the other kinds.

  Trust Roger to know people like that. Whenever things heated up too much between Mark’s parents—this time it was over plans for his summer—he came to stay with Roger. He reveled in more freedom here than a fourteen-year-old school kid would be allowed anywhere else.

  But what the heck was this? You walk into Roger’s place, unannounced as usual, and everything looks like always: sliding door open to let in spring air from the yard, all the living-room plants looking wilted with neglect, Wesley sprawled on the couch chewing gum, and Roger perched in the big leather chair bright as a jungle bird in his scarlet silk shirt and tie-dyed jeans. Roger owned a string of fashion outlets and liked to dress off the men’s racks.

  Then before you even have a chance to put away your pack and your school briefcase they tell you, straight-faced, that Roger has bought a vampire, and Wesley has just delivered him here, to Roger’s garden apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. A vampire.

  Mark kept his expression carefully noncommittal.

  Roger said to Wesley, “Do you believe the guy really drank blood?”

  Wesley shrugged. He was an ex-Marine, working these days as a hospital attendant. In his spare time he did odd jobs for Roger. He said, “I seen guys do real weird things when they’re shot.”

  Roger said, “Did this vampire say anything to them while they kept him at the U-Store-It?”

  “Said he couldn’t sleep. Who could, with two holes in him and no dope to put him out? Weinberg wanted some for him in case he started yelling, but the doctor said he wouldn’t use anything without doing a bunch of tests first because the guy seemed to be built kind of odd, and he didn’t know what the drugs would do. Real interested, this doctor was; I bet Weinberg told you that, Roger, to hurry you up—making out like he was worried the doctor would get hold of this vampire first to study him. Uh-huh, thought so. How much did you pay for this character, anyway?”

  “Are you still game to help find out if he’s worth the money?” Roger countered. Wesley shrugged again. They both got up. “Come on, Mark, you don’t want to miss this.”

  It wasn’t a joke. They were serious. All of a sudden the dim hallway to the guest rooms looked scary.

  The living room was the center of the apartment. The kitchen and Roger’s bedroom and bath were to the right, up front. On the short hallway leading left were closets, a guest bathroom, and two small spare rooms. One of the spare rooms was Mark’s when he was staying here. Across the hall from it was a much smaller room, white and bare, with a tiny half-bath adjoining.

  Mark opened the door to his own room and glanced in. Bed, dresser, drawing table, bookcase, old map prints hanging on the cool blue walls, window curtains with wild birds on them, Scandinavian striped fur rug on the floor—all reassured him. If use was made of the room in Mark’s absence, Roger cleaned up any signs of it afterward. Mark never asked about that. He liked to think of the room as his own.

  On the other side of the hallway the wooden door to the smaller bedroom stood open. No wonder the apartment smelled of plaster dust. Wesley had been at work here, installing square pipes flush against the sides of the doorway. Between the pipes hung a tall gate of metal bars. In the back wall there was one barred window glazed with frosted, wire-mesh glass, the kind used to keep out burglars. The bleak little chamber, transformed by the gate into a cage, contained a prisoner.

  A man lay on his back on a cot against the wall. He was too tall for the cot; his feet hung over the end, and the blue blanket that covered them came up only to his
chest. His face was turned away. He had gray hair. One arm hung down, the hand resting knuckles-up on the linoleum.

  Mark, inwardly braced to see a dangerous monster, felt relieved and disappointed. But maybe the man’s face was awful with fangs and a million wrinkles, like the face on the Dracula book that Mark had browsed through on a Marboro bargain table last week.

  Roger, unlocking the gate, must have sensed Mark’s reaction. “Doesn’t look like much, does he?” he said uneasily. “I wonder if Weinberg’s trying to put one over on me.”

  They went inside and walked over to the cot. The man turned his head. He had a long, lined face with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes that he seemed hardly able to hold open. His mouth looked dark and crusted, and Mark thought, blood, and felt a twinge of nausea. Then he realized that it must be like when you have a bad fever, and your mouth gets so dry your lips blacken and crack.

  Wesley rolled up the sleeve of his blue work shirt. Sitting down carefully at the head end of the cot, he slipped an arm under the man, raising his head and shoulders against his own side. The man’s lips curled back in pain, showing plain teeth, no fangs. Wesley said in a soothing, coaxing voice, “Okay now, you want to try a little, ah, drink?”

  The man stared at nothing, ignoring the bared arm that Wesley held extended in front of him.

  Mark said in a small voice, “Aren’t you scared, Wesley?”

  “Nope. I got lots of blood. Bled a fuckin’ flood when I got hit in Nam, and I’m still here.”

  “I mean, if he bites you won’t you turn into a vampire too?”

  Roger said, “Don’t be silly, Markie. If that were true, even if there was only one real vampire to start with, pretty soon we’d be all vampires and no people. It can’t work like that; it doesn’t make any sense. Wesley’s safe.”

  Wesley grunted. “Only no biting on the neck, that’s too personal. He can take it from my arm, like at the doctor’s.”

  But the supposed vampire seemed disinclined to take it at all. Roger said furiously, “He’s a fake! He must be some pal of Weinberg’s who got shot up, so he’s looking for a place to hide. I am not running a rest home for incompetent stick-up men or whatever this is—I’d rather sling him out in the street for the cops to find.”

  The man on the cot made no protest, no plea, but he gathered himself for an effort. His long, thin fingers closed on Wesley’s forearm. The sound of his labored breathing filled the little room. He bent his face over the pale inner surface of Wesley’s elbow.

  Wesley jumped slightly and said, “Son-of-a-bitch!”

  Roger stood rapt, lips parted, watching. Wesley sat there holding the man propped against him, watching too, cool again. God, Mark thought, Wesley was something: he never let anything really get to him.

  At length the vampire drew back, licked his lips once, and subsided loosely onto the cot with a whispered sigh. Wesley got up, flexing his fingers. “Will you look at that,” he said. There was a puncture in the vein in his arm, surrounded by a bruiselike discoloration.

  Roger, gaping, said dazedly, “Uh, you want a Band-Aid?”

  “No, it’s only bleeding a little bit. Damndest thing I ever saw. I better lie down a couple of minutes, though. I feel kind of dopey.” Wesley ambled away toward the living room, still looking down at his arm.

  They followed him out. “The gate locks automatically when you shut it,” Roger said. He looked back at the man on the cot. “Jesus,” he breathed, “it’s true.”

  Wesley was lying on the couch. Roger crouched down next to him. “How did it feel?”

  “Like giving fuckin’ blood, what else?”

  “You sure you’re okay, Wesley?”

  “Sure.”

  “I want you to get me supplies for him.”

  Wesley frowned. “I could lose my job, monkeying around with the hospital blood bank.”

  “I know you’ll do what you can, Wesley,” Roger said airily; which meant he had something on Wesley and wasn’t interested in hearing about his problems. “I can store the stuff in the fridge, right? And if sometimes you can’t get blood from the hospital, bring it on the hoof.”

  “Shit,” Wesley said, clenching his fist and crooking his arm up. “I can’t do this fountain-of-youth trick too often, you know.”

  “Then find somebody to fill in for you.”

  Wesley departed to return the rented van in which he had brought the vampire. Roger hung the key to the barred gate on a nail in a kitchen cabinet. “I’ll leave this one here, Mark, but you won’t need to use it unless there’s an emergency.”

  Roger, an elfin thirty, had a heart-shaped face, fine-featured and lively. He wore his blue-black hair cut full, and he tossed it off his forehead with a dramatic gesture whenever possible. If angels had dark hair they would look like Roger, Mark thought, though an angel probably wouldn’t get himself thrown out of four different schools as Roger had.

  Mark knew himself to be plain and gangly and sallow, his appearance not helped at all by owlishly magnifying eyeglasses. He had realized fairly recently that Roger liked to have him around as a foil for Roger’s own good looks, but Mark didn’t mind much. He knew that he was going to make his own way with his brains. He knew, too, that Roger was a dabbler, never getting the benefit of his own intelligence, too easily bored, too greedy for the taste of the experiences he gobbled up.

  Roger left Mark to unpack and in a little while came back down the hall carrying one of the kitchen chairs. This he set down outside the gate, and, sitting astraddle with his arms on the top of the chair back, he faced his new acquisition.

  He had a portable tape recorder with him, and he switched it on and began asking questions: What’s your name? How did you get to be a vampire? Are you in communication with other vampires? How much blood do you drink at a time? Who shot you?

  Every time Mark looked up from arranging his bookshelves, he saw that the vampire was ignoring Roger and following with a sickly gaze what Mark was doing in the bedroom across the hall.

  Once Roger had gone off to bed and there would be no interruptions, Mark got the plans for Skytown out of his briefcase and laid them out on the drawing table. This personal project ran currently to forty drawings depicting the systems of his one-man space station. Scientific accuracy was not his main concern, although he kept a tight rein on any impulse to outright fantasy. Mysterious vistas of space and carefully scaled perspectives and details of a space-going home were what fascinated him. Working with his Rapidograph under the fluorescent lamp, he forgot Roger, his parents, and even the vampire.

  When he got up to brush his teeth in the bathroom down the hall, he was startled to find the vampire staring at him again. Returning, he shut his door and opened it only when he had turned out his light. Better to leave it open than lie in the dark wondering what was going on out there. Wesley had installed a night light in the cell, enclosed in a little wire cage and connected to a switch in the hallway. The vampire was illuminated, stretched motionless on the cot.

  Mark turned on his side and lay listening to the muted sounds of traffic. In his head he tried to picture the details of the energy-gathering vanes of Skytown, sweeping shapes against a background of stars. Maybe there would be a special robot team to tend the vanes; or maybe he would reserve to himself the adventure of working outside in his space suit with stars for company.

  Gradually, reluctantly, he became aware of a faint shuffling sound across the hall: movement, effort. Shivering slightly in his underwear, he got up and ghosted barefoot to the doorway.

  The vampire stood leaning against the wall, facing in the direction of the little bathroom that adjoined his cell.

  Mark sneezed.

  The vampire looked at him.

  Mark whispered, “I’ll go get Roger.”

  But he didn’t. Something in the vampire’s posture, a faint shrinking in the already cramped shoulders, made it clear that he sensed what Mark knew—that Roger would make a humiliating joke out of this: a vampire who had to go to the bath
room just like everybody else and couldn’t manage it on his own, poor thing. In acute discomfort Mark remembered how that last summer at camp had been. For no reason he’d found himself wetting the bed every night. Every morning he’d had to go rinse out his sheets and hang them outside to dry behind the cabin where everybody could see them. Very funny, ha ha.

  He crossed the hallway and whispered through the bars, “I’ll help, but if you try anything I’ll yell my head off and Roger will come and—and beat you up. He keeps a hunk of lead pipe by his bed for burglars.”

  He padded toward the kitchen, already regretting the impulse. Cautiously, he groped in the dark for the key. Not to wake Roger, not to invite Roger’s mean side to come out, was important. He really hated Roger’s mean side.

  He unlocked the gate and entered the cell warily. He didn’t want the vampire to get the idea that he could obtain favors just by looking weak and pathetic. He said, “Roger’d kill me if he knew I came in here. He’d send me home. What do I get for taking that chance?”

  The vampire peered at him. Then came his rasping whisper, “You may, if you wish, put yourself on the level of attendant in a public lavatory. I was carrying change in my pockets.”

  The change would now be in the paper bag that Weinberg had given Wesley. That would do, though the vampire had tried to make it seem grungy to take payment. The main thing was not to let anybody reach you.

  Mark moved nearer. The vampire draped a sinewy arm over his shoulders, and for a moment Mark thought in terror that he was being attacked. Then he realized that the man was so weak that he had to lean almost all of his weight on his helper. Maybe walking even these few steps would make him keel over. Maybe he’d die. It would have been better to have wakened Roger. Then if anything went wrong it wouldn’t be Mark’s fault.