The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  As he passed the ruins of an abandoned homestead, only the stone-and-mortar hearth standing, he saw a small herd of deer. The wind was in his face. He paused, his body instinctively adopting a hunting tension. When the deer raised their heads, he was motionless in a grove of cedars, his backpack stowed behind a stump. They drifted nearer. He chose a young one with new horns, and when they passed he sprang out.

  His momentum slammed the beast down as the others fled like quicksilver. He straddled the deer, wrenching the head back so that the twisting body could not gather under him and rise or the hard, sharp hoofs kick him.

  Unthinkingly, he bent to the curve of the throat where the great artery beat—then drew back from that stunned and terrified life. He had not drunk animal blood since long, long ago, before humans, growing so numerous and strong, had become his sole prey. Drinking from the deer now would make him sick.

  He let go, springing clear of the flying hooves. Panting, he lay on his back, looking up into the blue pit of the sky as the earth beneath him drummed briefly with retreating hoofbeats. He had not landed on cactus or an anthill, by good fortune, but what foolishness he had committed: wasted energy was wasted food. He didn’t care. Strength needs to be used, speed needs to be used. He felt better.

  As he got into his car he saw a distant glint as if of sun on glass—perhaps the flash from a pair of binoculars. Alarmed, he cruised the area for almost an hour but found only the remains of someone’s picnic.

  He returned home to find a note from Alison thrust under his door. She would be going up to the pueblo with Irv on Sunday and hoped to see Weyland there, maybe to talk to him privately for just a few minutes. Much to think about there, but now he needed sleep. After a shower and a drink of water, he napped on the sofa in his bathrobe.

  When he woke, he found he had jammed his forehead and knees against the backrest. His body was covered with a clammy sweat. He knew that he must have been dreaming, although he never remembered his dreams. It was as well. He had surely been dreaming of starving in the cell at Roger’s apartment in New York and dreading the sadistic histrionics of Alan Reese.

  Extraordinary, he thought: I provide their nightmares, and they provide mine.

  After he had showered again and dressed, he went into the bedroom and opened a window which gave on the back yard, the tops of other houses, and beyond them the mountains. He sat and looked out, slipping into a mode of quiet attentiveness, senses alert, mind drifting. Smoke of burning leaves, car backfire, child voices, somewhere a rackety power mower, flowers, grass, dust, a trace more moisture in the air than last night . . .

  He looked at his watch. An hour had passed. Nothing jarring, nothing out of place had registered with him. Yet he felt uneasy—a holdover from the unremembered dream, or nervousness at having possibly been observed in the canyon.

  He went out to talk to Mrs. Sayers, whom he found crawling about her lawn attacking crabgrass with vicious-looking pointed tools. Asked about the blue hatchback, she said she knew nothing about it but would inquire. A neighborhood should keep on guard against prowling strangers.

  Weyland thanked her for the mystery novels. He went back in and made himself settle down to read about the social lives of wolves.

  That evening he hunted on the campus, avoiding the central mall with its ruckus of massed voices and twanging instruments. Irv would be there. Weyland did not want to see or be seen by him.

  He was not at his best, and the hunting went badly. He did not feed until the following morning, when, driving to the pueblo, he picked up a young woman in a long cotton dress and buckled boots heading for Denver with her calico cat in her arms. As Weyland fed, the cat arched its back and hissed at him.

  * * *

  In the brilliant afternoon light on the village plaza a long double snake of people danced. The women wore black dresses rimmed with borders and sashes of bright red and green, and at each step their flat wooden headdresses bobbed, their necklaces of silver and turquoise swung, the pine boughs in their hands quivered. The men wore white kilts, body paint, and trimmings of feathers, bells, and fur. They held rattles that spat dry sounds as gestures were made signaling a turn. All turned, turned back again, danced.

  The singers, men in bright shirts with bandanas around their temples, moved alongside, following the drummer and an old man whose eyes were tiny squint-holes in his withered face—were perhaps even sightless. His knotted brown hands swooped toward the sky as he chanted.

  At the ends of the lines children stumped along, dressed as the adults were. One of the dance marshals paused to kneel and retie a child’s belt.

  Alison murmured something, addressing Irv, but her eyes glanced in Weyland’s direction and away again. She had obviously been trying to nerve herself up for the private talk she had mentioned in her note. Knowing that she would not speak intimately with him unless they were alone, Weyland had made sure he stayed at Irv’s elbow.

  Unfortunately, Irv was standing in the sun. Weyland tugged down against the glare the brim of the old, battered, but still silky Panama hat he had found while hunting in a Goodwill store. He was tall enough to see over the crowd without effort. It didn’t matter. He was bored. One group of dancers left; another arrived and danced what appeared to be the same dance to the same or a very similar chant. The dancing style was insistent, unvarying, and unindividual. One did what one’s line of dancers did.

  Weyland had already dismissed the village as a possible hunting ground. Anglos were far too obtrusive here, even on dance days. Today Indians, tourists, and a scattering of nuns stood around the walls of the low adobe buildings edging the plaza. Everywhere dogs slept, sniffed, or squabbled.

  Irv seemed immersed in contemplation of the dance. Nearby a young Indian told an Anglo couple about having floated beneath polar ice while in the submarine service. Alison cleared her throat but did not speak. Weyland thought about leaving.

  Alison said, “Give me the car keys, Irv, would you? I’ve got a headache. I’ll go nap in the back seat for a while.”

  “You’re not feeling well?” Irv emerged from his thoughts. “We’ve finished our business here; there’s no reason we have to stay longer.”

  “No, you stay and watch. I just want to close my eyes.” Alison looked at Weyland. He did not offer to accompany her to the parking lot. She left.

  Irv said, “She was terrific this morning, so enthusiastic. I didn’t realize she wasn’t feeling well.”

  This time Weyland sensed that Irv would not accept less than a confession from him. “She’s sensitive,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t treated her as considerately as I might have, and right now we’re at a difficult stage of our . . . our . . .” He trailed off, avoiding Irv’s eyes.

  Irv sighed. “Come on, let’s stretch our legs a little. I’m awfully glad you said that. I have to admit that for a while I thought you were using your position to, well, take advantage. Female graduate students are so vulnerable to us. I’m glad your real feelings are involved, even though right now they must give you both a lot of pain.”

  Weyland said, “She’s been a comfort to me in a new place, and I’ve meant . . . something to her, I trust.” How Irv longs to hear honest love, or anguished compulsion, he thought; anything other than simple exploitation.

  “I meant to ask sooner,” Irv said, “but I’ve had so much on my mind—if there’s anything I can do to help . . .”

  Weyland shook his head. “Not for me, but if you can get Alison to talk to you . . .” Which was, of course, already happening. Irv had only to be there, to be his usual warm, welcoming self, and Alison would find it easier than she imagined to abandon Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland permanently.

  But Irv was not his usual self. He kicked at stones as he walked, and now there was a tense, dark look on his face. He said, “I need to do some talking myself, Ed. Something happened that’s eating me alive.”

  What’s this? Weyland wondered. Am I about to receive some great, unwanted dump load of Irv’s personal pain?
No—the outward focusing so characteristic of the man was turned off, the light seemed gone from his face. He looked as blind as the old Indian singer on the plaza. The silence stretched, filled by the throbbing of the drum on the other side of the thick-walled church beside which they walked. What’s the trouble? Weyland thought. But he wanted so firmly not to know the answer that he could not bring himself to ask the question.

  They rounded the corner of the church, and two women, just out of the gate of the tiny graveyard, stepped into their path. “Irv!” they said. “What a surprise.” “How nice to see you.”

  Irv made subdued introductions. “Dorothea Winslow, Letty Burns, meet my colleague Ed Weyland from the university. You two are a long way from Taos today.”

  The tall woman with the solemn face nodded so that the shadow of her wide hat dipped. She wore a homemade-looking dress of moss-green cotton and a pink cardigan slung from her shoulders. Her shorter companion, Winslow, looked with a faint frown from one man to the other.

  Weyland had heard that name before. There was money connected with it. One of the talents for which he had been hired was that of cultivating funding sources for the department. This visit to the pueblo, so far uncomfortably fraught with others’ emotions, might be turned to good use after all. He bowed slightly, European style, over Dorothea Winslow’s hand.

  “Good to meet you, Professor,” she said. “I heard your lecture in January on space and landscape in dreams.” They traded gossip about university people Dorothea knew. Letty Burns talked to Irv about Chicago, where he had gone to school. She had just spent some time in that city.

  Suddenly Dorothea, whose troubled look had deepened, turned and said, “While you two hash over Chicago, Dr. Weyland and I are going to have an intellectual discussion.” She touched Weyland’s sleeve lightly and led him ahead of the others, saying in a low, tense voice. “What’s the matter with Irv?”

  “Irv?” he repeated, startled. “Why, nothing.”

  “No. Something.” She walked a little away from him, looking at him sharply. “Something.”

  He studied her. She was compact, sunburned, her fox-narrow face framed in flying wisps of white hair that had escaped from her bun. She wore sandals, faded corduroy slacks, a buff shirt of doeskin, and a strand of red coral across her weathered throat. He guessed that she was about sixty.

  “Irv has been worried lately,” he offered reluctantly. “Do you know of some particular problem . . . ?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing I’d care to talk about,” she said. She moved nearer to him again as they reached the foot of the slope down from the churchyard and turned along the dirt road leading behind the plaza. The drum still sounded. For some moments they walked without speaking.

  Then she said, “Even this far from the plaza you can feel the drumbeat drive right up out of the ground through your soles, can’t you—the beat of a communal heart. It doesn’t beat for you, does it, Professor?”

  “No more than for any non-Indian,” he returned steadily. Nothing to worry about in her remark, surely.

  “You are not ‘any non-Indian,’ ” she said. “If I were still painting, I’d paint you.”

  “You were a painter?” he said. Up ahead the blades of a windmill turned against the sky. He watched the windmill, wishing they were sitting and talking instead of walking so that he could look more easily into her face. “Why did you give it up?”

  “To try something else: drawing with my eye, following the contours and outlines of the subject millimeter by millimeter, skipping nothing. When you’ve done that, the subject is fixed in your memory in a way that just doesn’t happen when you transfer a mental image to paper or canvas.”

  He did not know what to answer. His mind cast back to the sketches Floria Landauer had made of him.

  Dorothea said, “Why did you come out here, Professor?”

  “I’d been ill in the East. I wanted a change.”

  “I came twenty-two years ago to paint, if you please, the mystery of the desert.”

  “And did you?”

  “Hardly,” she laughed. At the windmill they turned onto a tarmac road. “But painting led to looking, and that’s led to—paying attention. I’ve paid attention to you, Dr. Weyland. In the lecture hall in January I tried to draw you with my eye, but I saw that you do not draw. You have a stylized, streamlined quality, as if you were already a drawing rather than a man.”

  Weyland looked back. Irv and Letty had stopped at the end of the unpaved road and were squatting by the windmill, doodling with sticks in the dirt as they talked.

  He felt betrayed by chance in broad daylight. How did this woman walking the blacktop at his side see him so well? His mind raced. He said, “The range of variations in the human form must be wider than you thought.”

  “Apparently.” She flashed him a look of ironical approval. “The range of variations in the human form—that must be the explanation. But then, suppose it isn’t? I like a world with wonders in it. Mind you, just because you’ve noticed something doesn’t mean it’s yours to meddle with.” She stopped and looked back at Irv and Letty Burns. “I wouldn’t say anything to you now, except it rocked me, almost walking into Irv by the church, seeing all that hurt in his face—and there you were with him.

  “But his trouble has nothing to do with you, does it? You’re not a part of that. You’re just made from a different mold.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “I don’t quite understand . . .”

  “Something’s wrong, all right,” she said. “I’ll have to get him to talk about it.” She walked back toward the others. He followed a few paces behind her.

  “ . . . the last I heard,” Irv was saying wearily, settled on his haunches with lowered head. Letty stood up, arms crossed, looking past Dorothea at Weyland.

  “You have family here, Professor?” she said.

  Dorothea said mildly, “Leave the professor his secrets, Letty. Everyone’s entitled to their secrets.”

  The drumming had stopped. Dancers, jingling and rattling in costume, could be seen trooping out of the plaza. Irv said that the dancing would start again after a break, but that he for one had seen enough dancing for today. Weyland swiftly echoed this, and they all walked toward the broad dirt lot in which visitors’ cars were parked.

  What more would Dorothea say to Weyland, or of Weyland to the others? Possibly nothing. Possibly he had misunderstood, misread her, thrown off by these people’s strong feelings about each other. His best course, he knew—his only course—was patience.

  Art. They spoke of art and of the dancing as an art form. Repetitious, Letty said, from set to set, from year to year even. No, Dorothea said; each season’s dance was a unique part of expressing over and over certain basic themes to insure continuity and regeneration. These themes could never be mined out, she said, they were so rich and full of power.

  Then they were in the parking lot. Seeing Alison step out of Irv’s car to meet them, Weyland thought, that at least has worked out as I hoped. She and I have had no quiet moments alone—of which somehow there have been more than enough today with other people.

  Introductions were made; they lingered at the car, talking, talking. Irv described an oral-history tape made that morning with an old woman of the pueblo. Suddenly Dorothea put her hand on his arm and said in the middle of his sentence, “Irv, I have a terrific idea. Come home with us tonight. We haven’t had a chance to just sit and gab away an evening in a long time. Bring Alison. You can show her the famous Libyan explorers’ message on the rock in the arroyo.” Her chuckling voice said this was a joke. Her face looked anxious.

  “Thea, thanks, but the end of the term’s coming. I’ve got everything to do that I’ve managed to put off until now.”

  “Forget all that,” Dorothea said. “You need a break, even just overnight. Come back with us.”

  Letty said, “You do look beat, Irv. Come on, cut loose for a little.”

  Alison looked at Weyland. She said, “I
ought to ride back to Albuquerque with you, Dr. Weyland. We still need to discuss those exam questions.” Single-minded Alison, he thought darkly, closing in for a private talk he had been avoiding all day. What overbearing arrogance they had about the importance of their cursed feelings!

  Irv put his hand over Dorothea’s and said, “Honestly, I can’t. I’m expecting a phone call at home tonight or maybe tomorrow night. It’s important. Suppose I come up in a few weeks.”

  Dorothea said, “We’re not going to wait that long. I’ll be in touch.” She held his hands and gave him a peck on the cheek. For Alison she had a brief, abstracted goodbye; for Weyland, a searching look and then a nod, a gesture of what he felt to be simultaneous acknowledgment and dismissal. She walked away kicking quick spurts of dust from under her sandals, Letty stalking alongside.

  Alison did not press the suggestion of riding back with Weyland. Having made her bid, she had apparently lost her nerve again. She ducked into the passenger seat of Irv’s car.

  Leaning against the fender, his forehead furrowed above his dark, frank eyes in his usual expression of hopeful concern, Irv said, “Would you rather Alison went back with you?”

  “She lives closer to you.” Weyland was watching the two women’s figures receding toward the far corner of the parking lot.

  * * *

  The anthro building still stank the next morning. There had been rain showers during the night. Weyland knew his windows would be swollen tight, assuming he could get inside to try to move them. For some reason his key would not turn in the lock of his office door.

  He had been up all night listening to the rain and thinking: Had he been exposed? Had he somehow escaped exposure? What exactly did Dorothea know or suspect? Near dawn he had hunted, without finesse, in a motel he knew of that had particularly flimsy door latches. His first victim’s blood had been spoiled with barbiturates, so he had run the risk of approaching another.

  Driving to the office in a light rain, he had nearly run out of fuel and had yet again been outraged by the astronomical price of gas. At times like these he speculated gloomily that on his next waking he might well find the world reduced to muscle, wind, and water power, if not actually to postnuclear devastation. He was no longer sure that he had achieved the prime requirement of a successfully specialized predator: choice of an equally successful prey. He chafed at the thought of his own existence dependent on the feeble and undisciplined will of humankind.