The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  No one had laid an unfamiliar hand on his door. No faint shine of oil from a nervous palm’s pressure gleamed on the door panel, no heel-ruck rumpled the loose rug on the living-room floor. He set down the books, turned on the lamp beside the living-room couch, and moved unhurriedly through the house savoring the quiet for what it divulged: soft hum of the electric clock, occasional whish of a car passing outside, faintest whisper of music from the pianist’s house one street over.

  In the kitchen the refrigerator began to grind its motor as he opened the door to get ice. He kept a basic food supply for guests and for appearances’ sake—peanut butter, relish, pickled artichoke hearts, an egg carton, cheese, bottles of Bitter Lemon. One of his women visitors liked Bitter Lemon—the same one who had brought him, last week, that casserole wrapped in aluminum foil and these oranges going soft in the vegetable bin. Once, in order to excuse the refrigerator’s sparsely filled shelves, he had told her that he ate out a lot at McDonald’s. She had begun bringing him bags full of food, with the emphasis on fruits and vegetables.

  He took a glass from the dish rack, polished off the water spots with a paper towel, and ran tap water in over two ice cubes. That first interwhirl of tepid and cold currents delighted him always, and he liked the mineral flavor of the local water. The house had a functional well which he had reconnected to the plumbing. Wasting good water on the grass while drinking chemically nasty stuff from the city mains was absurd. These days palatable water was often harder to find than clean blood.

  In the living room, sipping water, he flipped on the television set: blank, blank, a shrill, silly movie, an ad for hamburgers. Off. What he liked to watch was ballet and basketball. Also occasionally The Incredible Hulk, which he had passed up this evening for Jennifer Chadwick’s colloquium.

  He was not yet hungry enough to hunt. Perhaps some work—he ran his palm over the fine-grained leather of his briefcase but set the case aside and picked up instead one of the new batch of paperbacks. Good, a Ruth Rendell mystery. Fictional depictions of the criminal mind and its law-enforcement counterpart always entertained him. He stretched out on the couch.

  When he stopped to think about it, for all its pressures and demands this was a very comfortable life.

  The phone rang; he had dozed off, book on his chest. He came sharply awake: “Yes?”

  Silence. Then low, distressed breathing.

  “Alison?” he said. “Is that you?”

  “Oh hell,” she choked. “I swore to myself that I would not do this!” She hung up.

  How odd, he thought, looking at the telephone, if one night it rang and when he answered he heard Floria Landauer’s voice. Now, what had put that into his mind?

  He got his bathrobe out of the closet and went into the study, shrugging the robe on over his shirt and pants. The nights were still chilly, and he hated the stuffy smell emitted by the old-fashioned floor heater.

  He had equipped the front bedroom with desk, filing cabinets, typing table, metal bookshelves whose contents overflowed in neat stacks on the floor, and a couch on which he often slept. He turned on the light. The neighbors were used by now to the sight of that light burning at all hours. Mrs. Sayers had offered him a sleep-inducing herb tea.

  Thinking of Floria Landauer reminded him; seated at the desk, he took a thin file from the lower drawer and opened it. Back in September, upon first occupying the house and the job and the office at the university, he had begun a letter to her. He had produced a series of typed paragraphs, written at ever-increasing intervals and finally abandoned altogether.

  Rereading them now, he recognized that these writings were a group of reflections, similar in form to her notes about him which she had given him to destroy. He had done so—but he had read those notes of hers first. The novel experience of catching glimpses through another’s eyes of himself—and at a time when he had been uniquely open to observation—had impressed him deeply.

  * * *

  Dear Dr. Landauer,

  [Begin with conventional pleasantry, cordiality? No; but some gesture of appreciation?]

  I learned today that the department head here has a machine called a “pacemaker” in his heart. Complete replacement of the body’s systems by means of new technology in order to avoid death seems to be a current human goal. If my body systems do not, when damaged, repair themselves or regenerate, I cannot have them replaced. Someday, surely, I must die.

  Imagine waking from a long sleep to find people totally mechanized, myself the only “human” (i.e., mortal) left. Speak for the mechanical men: Clank. Please don’t drink my oil. If any oil remains.

  *

  I found this poem in a story by Saki:

  “Sredni Vashtar went forth,

  His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth

  were white.

  His enemies called for peace, but he brought

  them death.

  Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.

  *

  No stranger myself to red thoughts, I understand this poem well; but I could never have produced it. I can map ideas in words. I cannot make art with words. Perhaps words are the wrong medium. Speech is a human invention, used to trade endless scraps of gossip, complaint, desire. I have adopted speech, I think. It is not a tool that comes naturally to me. Do I have a medium of my own?

  *

  I have always used words for deception and manipulation (as I believe I once remarked to you). With you, words identified truths. To this I attribute some of the intensity and fascination of the experience.

  *

  Alison, dulled and dimmed by the dreams in which she floats, is a food source to be cultivated, nothing more. She was easy to approach. She never saw me at all, but rather the fatherly part I played. They are not difficult to victimize, these blind people, though some make their way—if they are fortunate—to your office, Dr. Landauer, where you attempt to focus their vision on the world outside. No wonder you were disconcerted when I came to you, as it turned out, for inward vision.

  *

  When I told you that I remember none of my dreams, I thought I sensed a degree of skepticism or at least reserved judgment on your part. Yet it is true that the much-praised freshness and originality of my writing on dreams springs from my own personal naïveté with regard to the experience of dreaming. Sometimes when I consider the remarkable activity and inventiveness of the human mind in sleep I speculate: what might I learn of myself that the silence of my own dreams keeps from me? Still, although our work together led toward this very territory, I do not now attempt to explore further by the methods you showed me; a closure of inquiry that causes me both regret and relief.

  *

  Sometimes I think that in each waking life I learn the same lessons. How could I know, since on waking I have only shadows from past lives, no details? That is, languages and skills accrue from life to life; but what else do I discover and then forget? Do I progress over and over down the same path from ignorance to knowledge? I feel that I am in the midst of such a progress now.

  *

  Having a voice implies the existence of others. One does not need a voice to speak to oneself. Except for the need to entice my prey, I could be mute.

  Moreover, without the necessity of outwitting clever victims I could be—not mindless, but unthinking. Sitting in the sun as a cat sits, its mind an effortless murmur of sensory input flecked with a point of attention here, a fragmentary memory there—but primarily a limpid stream merging with the palpable environment around it.

  *

  A neighbor brings me books, this time among them some stories by Ray Bradbury. I remember Mark telling me these stories one night soon after my imprisonment began, and how his voice lost its flat, guarded tone and grew supple, rich, and happy as he spun one fantasy after another. I think the vitality of his mind saved me then as the vitality of his blood saved me later. The stories, read tonight, provoked me to reflect that in such a tale I would be explained as—a device brought from some other
planet in order to take samples of human history. Extraterrestrial origin is indicated by my long life, based on a premise of self-repair and self-replacement, in contrast to the multiple lives and rapid turnover typical of indigenous life forms. I look like human beings—I can pass for one of them. I must drink their blood for sustenance; thus I cannot go off by myself and ignore their history. Preying on them insures an outlaw status that prevents me from revealing myself to them.

  And so on and so on, this sort of construction is not difficult, but why bother? What reason would extraterrestrials have for an interest in the history of human beings? The obvious importance of humanity in the universe? A far from proven point. This kind of thinking can lead to nothing of mine.

  *

  I heard Oblonsky, learning of the destruction of a local Pueblo II site by bulldozers, mutter under his breath, “Thank God, that’s one less to sift through.” Even with computers to help, humans shrink from the entire weight of their past. I think my own long past would crush me to death, if I could remember its details. As it is, intrusions from past lives endanger me—consider Tosca, an involuntary look backward, and the consequences . . .

  Irv asked me last week whether I could show his students how to make a knife from flint, as he invariably fails in the attempt. I said I could not do it, either—a lie. I do not recall making a flint knife, but I know I have done so, and the skill remains in my hands. My product would be too fine.

  * * *

  Such dangerous materials, and he had actually forgotten about them! What was the matter with him? These pages must be destroyed. The slight mystery of the blue hatchback reminded him: he must not let the security of this life lull him into recklessness.

  First, however, he turned to the typewriter and made a final entry on a fresh page.

  The sex occasionally required with Alison has been little different from conversation and other forms of social falsehood that I customarily employ in the hunt for my food. All are part of the performance of my present life. Of course the whole department knows about Alison and me. They are supposed to. Our affair is a “convincing detail.” I think sometimes of you and me, how different that was. Perhaps I desired, there at the last, to repossess a part of myself I had unwittingly given you. At other times I think I wanted to touch a part of you that our speaking together had revealed to me.

  Some experiences one seeks only once. I do not wish to do again what we did then. I never consider flying back East and visiting, or dialing your number on the telephone from here. What I like is that we were separate, and then together, and are now separate again, and can each separately think back on that time. I like the feeling of sharing a secret. Secrecy is natural to me, comfortable, reassuring.

  He reread this several times. It satisfied him. He took all the pages into the kitchen, burned them, and flushed the ashes down the disposal unit.

  Back in the study, he began drafting an article he had promised The Journal of Human Wisdom about vocabularies used to distinguish victims from aggressors in human relationships—an article destined to become part of his book. His records of the uncompleted Cayslin dream project, though still a plentiful source of raw material and ideas, would yield him only a series of papers and not the major work on dreams he had planned. Hence the predation study, a new labor that absorbed and invigorated him. Scholarship was the best game humankind had yet invented: intricate, demanding, rich with risk and reward—akin in many ways to the hunt itself. In the present instance he took special pleasure in elucidating a territory with which he was uniquely familiar.

  As he worked, his hunger grew. It would not wait for a drive out to caving country tomorrow, and he did not wish to encourage Alison by calling her back and seeing her tonight. He left after midnight to hunt.

  The mountains a dozen miles from his house were dotted with overnight camping sites. Nearing the campground he had chosen, he turned off his headlights and drove off the road by starlight, easing his car over the needle-carpeted, sandy earth into a concealing stand of brush and trees. Then he put on Indian boots with one-piece, upcurving soles that left scarcely a mark, an old black sweater from the Army surplus store, and a Navy watchcap over his gray hair.

  He left the car and walked down from the ridge and along a stony, willow-lined arroyo. The arroyo sand was stippled with tracks—rabbit, snake sign, small rodents, marks of people’s boots and sneakers, but no dog prints. Good.

  Beyond, on a broad, sloping flat, the Forest Service had put in tables, latrines, lean-tos, and fireplaces of rocks and cement. He could see several cars and motorcycles parked there. The darkness carried air currents smoky from banked fires.

  For a little while he stood among the trees at the edge of the camping area, watching and listening. Nothing stirred. He began to make owl sounds, loud enough to bring a light sleeper awake. Sure enough, after a time someone emerged from a shelter, a woman wearing long johns and shuffling along in unlaced hiking boots. She clumped over to a two-holer in the clearing, returned shortly. A bite, but the hook had not set.

  Weyland gave her time to settle back into sleep. Then he picked up a dry branch and snapped it with a loud crack. Let that go for a while (picturing the open eyes of someone awakened by that sound, someone lying wondering—noises like that punctuated the forest night all the time—slipping back into sleep despite the vague discomfort of a full bladder) and then another owl hoot. This time, in a person plucked out of the top layer of sleep, bladder pressure might prevail.

  It did. A man in undershorts and thong slippers came out shivering among the trees to urinate.

  Weyland ghosted up behind him, caught him expertly by the neck, lowered him unconscious to the ground, and knelt beside him on the dry and slippery pine needles to feed. Afterward he rose and went light-footed away, leaving the man to waken later, groggy and chilled, wondering perhaps what in the world had led him out here to dream strange dreams among the tall pines . . .

  * * *

  The following afternoon Weyland found that a cave indeed existed where he had expected to find one. He had a good instinct for caves. This one proved well suited to his purpose: too high above the ground to be an attractive den to wild animals, and deep enough to reach a place where water slid over stone. He knew he needed moisture near him when he slept, although whether he actually arose in a stupor of sleep and drank or not he did not remember. He supposed that his lungs might take from the air sufficient water for his body’s reduced needs.

  The general location was excellent—an inaccessible area that even on this Saturday afternoon showed no signs of human invasion. The entrance to the cave was well hidden and difficult to reach. Though a determined team attack using sophisticated mountaineering techniques would succeed, casual explorers would not be able to reach the opening even if they perceived it. Climbing to the cave mouth Weyland had used the prodigious strength of his arms and hands to traverse a nearly vertical wall, exploiting tiny bulges and cracks in the rock not as holds—they were too small—but as leverage points. A human being, with strong lower but comparatively weak upper limbs, could not do the same.

  He was well pleased with his good luck. A vampire could scarcely find a place to lay his head these days, unless he settled for the treacherous tunnels of abandoned mines into which no sensible caver would set foot. On the other hand, no sensible vampire would enter there either. During spring break he had located several possible sleep sites down at Carlsbad, in the vicinity of the famous caverns. In one of the most extensive cave systems in the world, any reasonably remote section had a good chance of not being invaded by explorers for a long time to come. But Carlsbad was a five-hour drive. Having a usable site closer to home made him feel more secure.

  He looked out from the cave’s mouth over the brushy foothills. The space, the quiet, the absence of people, were restful; the country invited him. Pictures drifting sometimes in his mind suggested to him that he had originated in some dark northern place of black forests and lush, gray-skied plains. How
different from this spare, dry country, wide as the sea under its keen blue sky, harshly marked by time as he was himself. He felt kinship with these scored hillsides, he found some reflection of his own endurance and self-sufficiency. To go to ground in this part of the world would not be uncongenial.

  At his back was the cool breath of the cave. It quelled his confidence and compelled his attention. Crouched on the dusty limestone floor, he turned and looked, not out the bright opening, but into the depths.

  If I wished to sleep . . . but I do not, he thought.

  Long sleep was his last resort, his refuge from otherwise inevitable disaster. Such sleep held its own dangers. No creature lies down at night assured of rising again in the morning to a livable day. For himself, he reflected, the odds increasingly favored calamity: cave-in, discovery, some change bringing loss of the moisture he must have—or waking to a world too complex for his powers of adaptation, or too poisoned, or too bare of human life.

  He drew the smooth coils of his climbing rope between his hands. Waking was the worst part.

  He woke a living corpse from some superstitious tale in Irv’s transcripts: skin colorless and shrunken over bone, mind like a cavern with consciousness rattling about in it looking for direction. He was a ghost, a phantom, without hunger but knowing that he must feed soon or die; knowing that he had lived before though not just when or how, and that the knowledge of previous lives would be available at need—but not specific events, not discrete memories; knowing that he must not seek to stir up those memories. Nothing must distract him from the immense task of learning his way about the new world facing him.

  Suddenly there blinked into his mind a sign he had seen outside a garage downtown: RE-TREADS CHEAP. His mood lightened into grim amusement. He gathered his gear and descended to head back toward his car.