The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “Ye gods,” she said, “and he left you his last message!”

  She was gone. He sank into his seat and leaned back, shutting his eyes. He could feel a vein jumping hectically in his temple. A feeling of defeat overcame him. He had fumbled the challenge, he had lost.

  Dorothea was maddened by loss. Eventually her sight would clear again, but in the meantime her hostility might draw other attention to him—that of the authorities, of Irv’s friends, relatives, colleagues, who could tell, even enemies, agents of whatever calamity Irv himself had fled. Irv’s note had ensnared Weyland, and Dorothea, flailing about for a remedy for her own suffering, would undoubtedly embroil him more deeply still.

  He could not afford the lightest scrutiny or inquiry into his own life. No spotlight, not even the outer edge of one meant to illuminate Irv’s death, must fall on him. Therefore, he must not be found where such light would fall.

  When he left the building the pickup truck was still there. Dorothea was sitting on the lawn. Letty knelt behind her, kneading her friend’s neck and shoulders. They were facing away from Weyland. He slipped around the corner of the building.

  * * *

  He never liked to drive up to his own garage, observable by any lurking watcher. He preferred always to park at a comfortable distance and walk home, alert to unusual signs which he would not notice from behind the wheel.

  Tonight he stopped the car in a deep pool of shadow under a sycamore three blocks from home. Turning off lights and motor, he sat a while with the windows open looking out on the night. The car was a decent machine—a Volvo sedan he had bought secondhand—though nothing like the beautiful Mercedes lost to him in the East. This one he could give up with much milder regrets, and give it up he must, along with the rest of the identity of Edward Lewis Weyland—he had made up his mind to it.

  He reflected on the sour humor in the situation: at last that other woman, Katje de Groot, the huntress whom he had so disastrously hunted at Cayslin College, was to have her way. Weyland would die. What a pity, to discard the pleasures and perquisites of a well-paid and respected career, the rewards of demanding work well done. The book on predation would never be finished now. That career was ended.

  The first steps were taken. His errands this afternoon—laundry, groceries, the shoemaker—had enabled him to break the several large bills he kept by him into traveling money of smaller denominations. Yet he found himself oddly reluctant to go home and begin his final evening as Weyland.

  The trouble was that an identity so well tailored as this one induced an inevitable reluctance to cast it aside. The fit was too perfect: the irascible, hard-working, brilliant scholar had expressed too many aspects of his real nature.

  However, Dorothea had left him no real choice. She had seen through Dr. Weyland with her art-beyond-art, and her knowledge coupled with her lacerated feelings over Irv’s death made her dangerous.

  Fortunately, he was not without resources. He was in his own way an artist, a practitioner of the art of self-invention. Dorothea had seen him as the stylized performance of a man, and she had seen well. He would now set about redrawing himself as someone else, and he took wry pleasure in the thought that he could borrow his new role from Dorothea’s friend—from Letty.

  He had thought it all out during this afternoon of errands. If Letty could hit the road, so could he. He would be for a while, literally as well as metaphorically, one of Irv’s taciturn drifters, someone who casually turns up cleaning out a dairy barn, digging sewer lines, working a loading dock, or sweeping a warehouse floor for his keep. He’s heading for Seattle to see the Space Needle, this quiet, undemanding fellow with no attachments except to his battered old Panama hat. The sort who keeps to himself, perhaps he hints at a family deserted because of unnamable pressures. That would account for his avoidance of all forms of red tape and official questions. Maybe he has abandoned some career too commonplace to provoke curiosity: bookkeeping, something like that. A name—a fitting name would occur to him.

  In a way he looked forward to this rougher life—too few baths, too much weather, too little money—because he knew that in such hard country he could hold his own. He was far stronger than the human beings whom its rigors often destroyed. And meanwhile all the impossible complications accreted around the person known as Weyland would be left behind.

  From the vantage point of the center, Irv had spoken only half the truth. Art can be used to separate as well as connect.

  A couple came out of a house down the street and drove away. Watching their taillights vanish, he felt his hunger push into the foreground of his consciousness. He would have to attend to that before long. When the street was silent again, he got out, locked his car, and walked homeward.

  He saw the blue hatchback parked in the dirt alley that ran behind his house. The New Jersey plate was familiar. He had seen a similar vehicle somewhere in the parking lot at the pueblo on Sunday, he realized, but he had been too rattled by the encounter with Dorothea to attend to what his eyes had told him.

  Now, flooded with the memory of lying caged and wounded in a tiny cell at the mercy of probing, hurtful hands and a vicious heart, he knew that Alan Reese had come after him at last.

  He had risked precisely this danger by relocating West—and under the same name—instead of vanishing in New York into his chosen bolt hole there, a disused loop of subway tunnel. He had hoped Reese would be put off pursuit by the near-death of Roger, perhaps impeded by related entanglements with the authorities. The gamble was lost. Irv was not the only one with deadly secrets in his life.

  The urge to flight fluttered in the pit of his stomach. He had money in his pocket; he could go now. He stood where he was, thinking, I will not flee in ignorance, in panic, I will not be harried like a fox before hounds.

  He set down his briefcase under a privet hedge and, silently entering the alley, made his way to his own back yard. Searching outside the house, listening, studying the shadows, he found no trace of watchers. Someone was inside: the living-room blinds had been let all the way down. He stepped up onto the looped metal handle of the sprinkler system and leaned his head against the cool window glass.

  After a little, someone moved in there, a shift of weight, a soft clearing of the throat. Only one, he thought.

  He stood across the street again, invisible against the black mass of Mrs. Sayers’s big spruce tree, looking at his own house and thinking, So, here is disaster, a mistake grown from other mistakes. What to do? Not talk, not think, none of their ways. Let go of reason, trust to buried memory. If he could release his grip on his human surface and sink back into the deeper, darker being at his core, his root-self . . . this was not so simple as in simpler times. He suffered a frightful moment of imbalance and disorientation. Then something hot and raw began coiling in his body.

  I am strong, I am already bent on departure, and I am hungry; why should I not hunt the hunter in my own house tonight? He walked up the flagstone path to his front door.

  As soon as the latch clicked behind him, a lamp flashed on. He flung up one arm to shield his eyes, pretending to be far more dazzled than he actually was.

  “Stand still, listen to me!” Reese hissed. He half sat, half crouched in the wing chair in the corner, his thick torso tensed over the weapon he held braced in the crook of his beefy arm—an automatic rifle with a skeletal stock. The muzzle was trained on Weyland’s chest.

  With a shock Weyland remembered the tearing pain of the two little bullets from Katje de Groot’s pistol.

  Reese talked. From Weyland’s entrance, he had not stopped talking. “ . . . Of course I had a more civilized beginning in mind. I wanted to leave in your office an invitation to a more formal meeting than this, but I couldn’t get in.” His voice took on breath, deepened, slowed to an almost hypnotic smoothness. “ . . . realizing that my previous approach was inadequate . . .”

  An apology? More like a preamble to a new proposal, a kind of partnership . . . voluntary support network . . . stea
dy blood supply . . . Church of Blood . . . carefully scripted and rehearsed ceremonies . . . nationwide organization . . . He used the word “worship,” the word “devotee,” the word “cult.” An old tale, and to Weyland’s unspecific but educated memory a transparent one. First they serve, then control, then destroy and replace you. Whether they label it religion or domestication, the process is the same.

  Reese’s tone smacked of oily self-congratulation. “Now this fellow you’ve been spending so much time with has killed himself and forced my hand—because he’s forced yours. I am right, aren’t I, in assuming that your flurry of activity today was set off by his death?

  “An inquiry will be held, no doubt. What are you afraid they’ll find out? Do you really think anybody will notice a little puncture wound on the dead man’s neck?”

  Weyland stared at him. This creature, fatuously ignoring the factor of departmental propinquity, had leaped to the conclusion that Irv had served as one of Weyland’s sources of nourishment.

  “Oh yes, you may well stand dumbstruck, vampire. I’ve been watching you. I was behind you most of the way today. It occurred to me that you might decide to discreetly remove yourself from the reach of any awkward questions, maybe even withdraw for a long sleep. I don’t know how many other hiding places you’ve checked out besides the cave you went to on Saturday. I thought I’d better get in touch right away, while I still knew where to find you.”

  Softly Reese added, “You’d better believe that I’m both serious and formidable. I’d already made extensive preparations for this conversation.” He tapped his jeans pocket.

  “For example, I have here the letter that Katje de Groot left for the Cayslin College administration when she went back to Africa last winter. As for poor Roger, after he got home from the hospital the neighbors tried to get him put away because he was acting strange, but his family fixed things up. He’s living with friends in Boston, more or less his old life, trying to write a book. We both know what it’s about, but whether it ever gets published is up to you.

  “Mark ran away after I talked to him outside school one day, and nobody has been able to find him. But the therapist, Landauer, is back in the city. A lieutenant of mine is keeping an eye on her for me. In fact, I have all these people under surveillance except for Mark, and he’ll turn up.

  “The point is, if you cooperate I can find ways to insure that they’re no threat to you.”

  Rage took Weyland all in a rush. Spasms of his jaw muscles shot pain into his temples, and the vision of his flaring pupils blurred. Reese saw or sensed this, for his voice turned harsh: “And if I have to cut you down right here, their testimony along with an autopsy will make a hero out of me.”

  “I can find ways,” “If I have to cut you down . . .”; not “my men,” “my followers.” Weyland’s mind cleared. Here is Reese cracking the whip to drive the tiger into its cage, but where is his audience? The man is a sadist and an exhibitionist; why has he come to me unattended?

  Reese settled back slightly in his chair. “If you’d prefer the kind of partnership I mentioned, let me clarify the nature of the relationship I propose. Partnership implies trust. But you could say yes at gunpoint and then as soon as your partner’s back was turned slip away and sleep for fifty years. I could end up spending my life looking for you.

  “I don’t think you realize just how fortunate you are. I’m sure you’ve lived through ages in which a man who didn’t trust you would have no choice but to put out your eyes or cut your hamstrings to insure your obedience. However, in these more squeamish and ingenious times . . .” He took from his pocket a stoppered vial of fluid. “Thorazine. They use it at the State Mental Hospitals to keep the crazies docile. Tonight you take the first of many merry doses.”

  Weyland watched him set the glittering glass tube on the lamp table, and he felt Reese watching him, in turn, with those small, cold eyes like needles.

  “You’re sweating, vampire. Don’t you like your good luck? At best this stuff will make you into a willing zombie who doesn’t care what happens, and I won’t have to experiment with other, stronger drugs. At worst, the Thorazine could react with your special chemistry and burn your brains out.

  “Either way, I win. It’s a funny thing about cults—sometimes they flourish better after their god is dead. Look at Christianity! A lot can be done with testaments, spirit communications, physical relics—the death of the deity gives the High Priest a free hand. And there’s no more risk of setting up a ceremony with people coming from all over at great personal inconvenience and then finding that the star attraction has run away.” He twisted his fist around the gun barrel as if the metal could bend. “I had a film crew come to Roger’s place on May Eve. On my word, people flew in from New Orleans, from England. For nothing. A fiasco.

  “Everything you wrecked that night—influence, acceptance by important people, my followers’ belief in me—you’re going to get back for me, all that and a lot more.”

  More. Greed. Weyland knew about greed. He studied Reese.

  How old was the man—thirty-seven, thirty-eight? No longer young, and aging swiftly as human beings aged. His cotton pullover clearly showed his heavy body running to fat. Take away the extra padding, and lines would show in his round, slick cheeks—unchanged, that face, from the days in New York, the freckled skin gleaming faintly with sweat, the thin lips hungrily parted. His hair was freshly cropped, a sun-bleached stubble: to hide new gray?

  More. He wants more than his fair share of everything.

  Offer it to him.

  Weyland stepped to the couch and sat down.

  Reese leaped to his feet with a guttural shout, the gun flung up as if to fire—but there came no slam of bullets, no deadly roar.

  “Sit down.” Weyland spoke firmly, driving his voice past the fear-knot in his throat. “Cleanse your mind of cheap theatrics; you’ve come to me for more than that. I’ll explain. Listen carefully. I’m not a patient teacher.”

  Sinking back onto the edge of the wing chair’s seat, gripping the gun with both hands, Reese said in a voice thick with hate, “Fine, go ahead—you may never be able to speak a clear sentence again. Talk while you can, entertain me. When I get bored, I’ll see that you take your medicine. And meanwhile, if you move again without my permission, I’ll blow you apart.”

  A moment’s breathing space, Weyland thought. Skillfully exploited, perhaps much more . . . What is my way here, what tone must I take?

  When people came to see Irv privately, what did they come for? His warmth, his supportive advice, his healing sympathy. I am not warm, I am cold. Can I win Reese with my coldness? Does he want that for himself?

  Try. I have nothing to lose.

  Calmly he said, “While I’m nearly resolved that you are the correct choice, tests must still be passed. The first test is of your attentiveness, your self-control, your intelligence. Try hard. Success means a life like ours.” Would Reese take the bait? “Long life, secret, and secure in the strength of the predator.”

  “Not very inventive,” Reese said. “If I’m supposed to believe that there are more of you, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  “A small number of us exist,” Weyland lied. “We practice . . . birth control, figuratively speaking, and a very fine discrimination in our judgment of who is and is not fit to become one of us.”

  “Good,” said Reese, “that’s a much higher grade of bullshit.” He laughed, but his little eyes stayed wide open, as though he were unwillingly engaged by vistas of immense time; Weyland began to hope.

  He felt he had known men like this in other times—the ones who stood apart and manipulated others in fear and contempt. They pretended to be different, to be safe, to have achieved what they could only yearn for: the true, most secret of secret societies, the philosopher’s stone, Faust’s bargain. Reese professed to scorn what he was now hearing. Yet Weyland guessed that in his heart he longed to believe.

  Weyland said with icy approval, “Your suspicio
n does you credit; also your desire to take from me, not to be given. These are signs of the hunter in you. But you are not yet a wolf. Oh, a wolf among men, perhaps, but by our standards that’s not much. You must drop your pose of authority and become a student. Otherwise, you get nothing from me, nothing you truly desire. And that would be a pity. On the day you first came to me at Roger’s, your worth was manifest. By the touch of your hands I knew that you deserved more than a little human life.”

  “Liar! You were hurt and humiliated that day. Revenge is what you’re after, not some phony blood brotherhood.” The gun muzzle rose slightly as if Reese’s hands had an eagerness of their own to repeat the hurt and the humiliation.

  How well and with what profound hatred Weyland remembered the burning, rapacious grip of those hands. But facing such a shrewd and deadly adversary, hatred was a perilous indulgence. With immense effort he checked himself, putting away the force of rage in favor of the force of his own imposing presence. He made himself sit easily but not slackly, his hands relaxed on his thighs, only a mild flicker of scorn in his manner as he replied in a schoolroom tone, “Yes, I was hurt, but like the devil you profess to worship I can see good in what most consider evil. Now as then, you show the qualities that a predator must have: singleness of purpose, the sense of one’s own advantage, the ability to be cruel. You came here to declare yourself my master. I want you to become my kin.”

  “How?” jeered Reese, gesturing with the gun held rock-steady in his two thick hands. “By putting down my weapon and coming over there to kiss your ass?”

  Why this childish diction? Weyland seized on what Alison had said: You have the face of everybody’s dream-father . . .

  He said sternly, “The gun is unimportant, a sign of your human weakness, a toy. You may keep it if you wish. All I require from you is your consent to be made mature.”

  Reese guffawed. “Thorazine can’t do your brain any harm; you’re already crazy. Or is it just senility brought on early by panic?”