Mrs. Dracula: Vampire Anthology

by Logan Keys

  If I thought that I felt bad in the safety of my bedroom, it was a hundred times worse by the time I made it down to the docks to unlock the bar. The whole way, the messenger boy kept up a constant stream of nonsensical chatter. At least I didn’t have to respond, he talked on and on without any apparent need for affirmation.

  “Here you go, boy,” I said, coming back from the till and pressing a shilling into his hand. His face brightened considerably at the good tidings, and I felt a wicked sense of delight that I’d overpaid him out of Wally’s pocket.

  The dim light inside the bar was a balm on my rough eye sockets. Once I reassured myself that Wally wouldn’t be poking his head in, I helped my recovery along with a single shot of brandy to steady my nerves.

  “Hey up, pretty lady,” Drunken Mike said, taking his usual seat at the bar. “Didn’t know if anybody would be making their way in here today.”

  “You know that somebody will open up for you, my dear,” I said, drawing his usual pint and then following it with a shot of the house whiskey. “Even if the rest of the town falls ill, we’ll ensure that your needs are met.”

  “Pity it ain’t all my needs, eh,” Mike said, tipping me an exaggerated wink. I turned aside before my shudder could trigger any worse physical response. Even an old drunk doesn’t like a barmaid throwing up on him.

  For the few souls that straggled into the bar that day, it didn’t truly seem worth my while. Even poor Mike seemed melancholic without a stream of men with whom to pass idle chatter.

  “Hey, up,” he said a few hours later when the shadows were lengthening out so long that full sunshine seemed like a playful dream. “Who is your pretty friend, there?”

  I looked over at the bar windows to see a face of unmatchable beauty staring back at me. A gleam flashed in the depths of her dark eyes when she saw me and waved a single forefinger in recognition.

  “Move over, Mike,” I said in a sudden fit of anxiety. “Give the lady some room.”

  Despite my rudeness, he willingly obeyed. Too dumbstruck for a moment to think of raising a protest.

  “I know you said you worked in a bar,” the woman said. “But I’m sure that I didn’t imagine it would look like this one. It’s so…” she looked about her with a quick and intent gaze. “So rustic,” she finally settled on.

  “Would you like a drink?” My heart was hammering in my chest as hard as my head was pounding. Silly woman. I felt like a schoolgirl being noticed by the head boy.

  The woman pressed the tip of her tongue to the middle of her upper lip and let it stay there for one teasing moment. Then she withdrew it and looked about her again. “Well, I would appreciate a drink,” she said. “But the bar does seem rather empty.”

  “Do you know this lady, then?” Drunken Mike interrupted, whiskey giving him the courage to interrupt.

  I opened my mouth to introduce them and then frowned deeply. I knew this woman. Of course, I knew her. I’d met her… Somewhere. Her name was… Something gorgeous that danced nimbly away from the tip of my tongue.

  “We are known to each other,” the woman said, her voice warm and breathy. “Tell me, sir, how do you know the lovely Phyllis?”

  “I was friends with her husband once,” Mike said. “Before the Spanish Flu paid him an untimely visit.”

  A shudder ran up my back and gooseflesh rose in painful lumps along my arms. I felt the chill of a corpse wrapped tightly in a cotton sheet, stained with the bodily excretions of two days or more of feverish tossing and turning. Cold, clammy, already black before the fire pit could burn it into charred remains.

  “Steven,” I suddenly blurted out in a panic. Hadn’t he been in danger? “You were with Steven.”

  “Ah, yes,” she replied with mournful eyes. “The poor soul is no longer with us, I’m afraid. In the end, he proved too weak to fight off what ailed him. Now you, sir,” she turned her flirtatious smile back to Drunken Mike. “You look like a man who could easily fight off any disease.”

  “Aye,” Mike said, his normally running tongue lagging into stillness. He took a drink to refresh himself and opened his mouth to try again but no words issued forth. With his speech failing him, he made effective use of his facial expression by twisting his brow into a deep frown.

  “I believe that Mike will outlive us all,” I said, wiping down the bar with quick strokes of the cleaning rag. An easy job since there’d been no patrons to soil it. “When the flu stole away my family, Mike barely came down with so much as a sneeze.”

  It didn’t start off as an accusation, but by the time my words landed, they were sharpened like tiny spears. I turned to shuffle about the liquor bottles, confused and frightened by what was happening.

  “I’ve never really fancied strong males,” the woman said. “I like my men weak.” She leaned over the bar and grabbed me by the collar of my dress, pulling me back until her face nuzzled in beside my neck. “I do, however, like my women strong.”

  At her words, energy buzzed and sizzled through my veins, igniting my heart into a frenzy of pulsing action. For a moment, it seemed that my blood pressure would rise and rise until the top of my head exploded.

  I pushed away. My pupils were expanded out to the size of pennies, and my mouth dropped open to breathe in the warm taste of copper in the air. I saw that she now had her head buried in the neck of Drunken Mike. Above the curl of his hair, her eyes fixed on mine, half in lust and half in a dare.

  Contrary to my harsh words, Drunken Mike soon proved that he wasn’t infallible. Far from it. He dropped like a paving stone when she’d barely pulled enough blood to color her cheeks.

  “I’ve received word from my husband,” she said when Mike’s body lay spent and gray between us. “He was to sail into Lyttelton later this month, but he’s changed his mind and decided on the Cook Islands instead.”

  A small frown creased the center of her forehead, the hint of annoyance at a thwarted plan. There and gone, but not so quick that I, who’d also once been a wife, couldn’t see it.

  “Come with me,” she asked, extending her hand. “Travel as my companion. I fancy a barmaid with a thousand life stories to tell, standing at my side.”

  I reached out and took her offered hand, letting her fingers caress the inside of my old woman’s palm. A tickle of desire, of teasing lechery. A promise that my sexual usefulness wasn’t yet at an end.

  “Come with me,” she whispered, encircling my waist with her arm, “and I will put a girlish blush back in your cheeks. I’ll clear your skin of blemishes and wipe the cloudiness from your eyes. Your entire life could be a carnival.”

  My mind spun, turning back to the time when my family had celebrated the end of the great war a few days early. Carnival Week had been in full swing, so the celebration of the false armistice had seemed fitting. By the time news of the real armistice reached our shores, my family had all been struck down with influenza. This, despite me piling the kids into a tram on an endless loop that pumped bitter zinc sulfate into the air.

  Carnivals were pink cotton candy going into mouths that soon secreted the pink of blood-tinged froth.

  She leaned forward until our foreheads touched, so close that my eyes saw her only as a blurred shadow. “Come with me, and I’ll let you live forever!”

  A glut of bile rose up the back of my throat, and I threw up over poor Mike’s outstretched leg. Another retch brought up the last of my stomach contents, though my stomach continued to strain, again and again.

  Forever.

  In the few years that had passed since my family’s death, I’d wished often and hard for the everlasting night to come and steal me. Long days had passed while I neglected to drink or feed and waited impatiently for the inevitable end.

  A preacher had reached out to me, had guided me back into my current shadow of living. He’d taught me to go through the motions until my body and mind began to feel again. The gratitude I felt in my heart for him was balanced on a keen blade against my righteous anger. The beguiling gospel o
f a man so full of answers when I wanted to turn from the world, yet so sparing when I demanded to know why God let my children die.

  In that time, a year seemed too long a concept to grasp at. The pain of breathing and moving and coping and living for that many days in a row was a request that tore me apart.

  To live forever would be torturous—agony unceasing. With each passing day that my children grew deader and my husband’s body colder, my heart would fill with corresponding pain.

  “Come with me,” she whispered, offering me a curse that she’d long ago mistaken for a gift. Whether she understood the truth of it yet, one day I knew that she would spurn what she’d once grasped for. Too late, she would hope for never and writhe in the indignity of forever.

  “Kill me or go,” I whispered back to her, standing over the soiled corpse of my last friend. Her cold, dead hand reached for me as other, warm and loving hands had once sought me out. Gently, I pushed it away.

  She went.

  HELL HATH NO FURY

  Logan Keys

  PRESENT DAY

  Bittersweet memories are all that I have from this age. I couldn’t bring anything with me but faces and names that are tattooed on my mind and heart.

  “Do you think they smelled? I mean, no showers, right?”

  So many tourists nowadays. They loiter through places that would have fed such weaklings to their dogs. They “selfie” their way through areas where empires once crushed such entitlement underfoot.

  The past wasn’t one of thin skin and easily hurt feelings, no, it was bone and blood, and yes musk, but also a natural order of things.

  The mighty survived.

  The vapid were only interesting as they fell from their perch.

  Powerful people were unafraid to flaunt above the conquered.

  The spoils of war were as they should be, enjoyed.

  Despite all of its failings, it was an era of respect. No gesture was empty. You did what you meant. You said what you planned on backing up.

  Everything has meaning when life is hard and short. The future being uncertain, and your next meal never a guarantee, it made everything…sweeter.

  I blink through the flash that the two-young people are using. Arms held outward, their phone on a stick, they do a peace sign that turns into bunny ears. Apparently, hilarious.

  It’s night at the coliseum, and even this late people trample in and out of the relics of the past, never understanding how the magnificent Ancient Rome forged the foundation of all progress.

  I stare up and up to see the massive walls that still stand the test of time. Seeing her in ruins doesn’t corrode the image in my mind one iota.

  “No,” I say, interrupting the two’s giggles. “Not as much as you’d suppose. The smell, I mean. They were a clean people, the Romans. In fact, without the cloistering perfumes and aftershaves of today, the natural oils…well…it was lovely, I’m sure.”

  They gape at me.

  They hadn’t seen me before.

  None see me unless I allow it.

  Over time, I have become a part of the darkness as if it were a friend.

  When they check their phone later, the glare from where I was standing will have distorted their picture too much to show anything of significance.

  I wrap my shawl around my head and move on. But then hear what they think that I cannot. “Like we care? Bitch.”

  Women are jealous of me. It’s the perfection of our kind that draws out the claws of theirs. But being here, now, I am reminded of what it used to be like, to have a real foe, a true enemy, and one who would rise to the fight, threats far from empty.

  I smile, remembering Irena with ease. Gods, what a magnificent creature. As bold as a vampire, as fragile as a young human girl, but only in the physical–a true and wondrous nemesis.

  How I regret every day that I did not change her. That I withheld the dark gift from one so promising.

  But if I’m honest, it was my own jealousy that betrayed my good sense.

  Irena never made it to the history books, most women are not accurately portrayed there. When she’d tilted her pretty chin, golden hair bouncing around eyes as oval as almonds—making her seem as young as a child, but beneath the soft skin was a mind as shrewd as a serpent, and equally deadly—the entirety of Rome bowed beneath her gaze, they just didn’t know it.

  Little did the Romans guess that most of their wars began and ended with Irena. Or at least her type.

  Beauty has nothing to do with a woman ambitious enough to play a man like a fiddle.

  In fact, Irena was far from most beautiful in Rome–that position held firmly by yours truly for a time–but alas, she was easily my equal in every way that counted.

  She knew a certain thing, a thing that if all women knew, they’d rule every nation and never look back again: That a woman’s strength is not in strength, but in seeming as if she is the opposite of strong. A woman’s power is in the fact that she can make a man feel needed, and when needed, he is as good a tool as any sharpened blade without the woman to even be in peril while doing the wielding.

  She stays behind, clearly safe, all while ready to cut down the entirety of the world.

  Women move kings to move armies.

  That was Irena’s way. And what was best about her was she’d come from common lines, barbarian lines, and not a drop of true Roman blood ran in her veins. Yet, if you’d lived during the rise of the Roman Empire, you’d have called her as we did: The Lady of Rome.

  I sigh in memory, the sights, the smells, all of it coming rushing back again.

  Nostalgia is really the only thing that moves me so, anymore.

  And it is for Irena that I slide from the darkness and with two swift clicks–like pencils breaking–I snap the necks of the two youths who had slighted me so. But more importantly, they’d slighted my friends. People I remember as a generation of true worth.

  I don’t drink from these after they fall, I simply step over their limp bodies, and onto their phone until it busts enough that I feel satisfied. I work swiftly so that no one will notice until I am gone.

  But something has changed.

  I pause. Turn to face the shadows.

  “Are you there?” I ask, my voice shaking despite my stiff spine.

  He doesn’t answer.

  He never does.

  Rome 64 AD

  “This is where people typically dine.”

  The man and his servants watch me carefully under false smiles. A new tenant asking to see her home in the middle of night is not as suspicious in Rome as other places, but…still.

  He’s more jewelry on than half of the women in Rome and his double chin jiggles when he speaks. “We’ve aired everything out. I woke the slaves for this house, and everyone else is in the garden.”

  “Garden?” I fan myself. I’m not used to this cloistering heat in the summer.

  “Oh yes! I forgot to mention. There are statues, even a waterfall.”

  He leads the way and I smile at the slaves, but they keep their eyes downward out of respect. They are all nationalities here, each a conquered place that Rome has left its footprint.

  “Who are these people?” I ask the man who’s handled this property since we purchased.

  We’ve never visited Rome, not until now, too busy. But now I find myself desiring to come out of my solitude. Rome has a draw.

  “These are the Gladiators most recently acquired.” He covers his mouth but everyone can hear him say. “And still alive.”

  “Gladiators?”

  “Oh, were you not aware? Most of these homes have their own to cheer for in the games. Essentially slaves, of course, until they win enough tournaments. You are free to use them however you wish. Some of the ladies…well. But, if you’d rather not have any, and if that’s a problem perhaps I can…”

  “No. That is all right by me.”

  He smiles a conspirator’s smile, and opens his fan.

  I pass in front of the men. They are all fit for
battle. Hard warriors of every race. One is tall enough to be a giant, but he is not the one that catches my eye.

  While gladiators, servants, even the man showing me my abode, mostly avoid my gaze, there is one who is staring straight through me. Though he meets my gaze, he sees nothing.

  I know that expression. I have worn it myself once upon a time.

  It is a longing for death. It is a wish for it to come and place its breast against his own, to kiss him, and steal the breath of life from his lungs.

  I almost shudder remembering when I’d felt like that. It was a time that I, too, was ready to give myself over to the darkness, and not the living darkness I am afforded now.

  He bears no resemblance to anyone I have ever met. Not just a stranger. Stranger than strange. As if he’d dropped here from the sky, and isn’t quite human.

  Oh, how I understand the sentiment.

  “Gladiator,” I say.

  “Yes,” he replies, tight lipped, then as if remembering, bows his head. But the eyes, they stick to my gaze. The word had not been a question but he’d answered it.

  Both of us, pretending.

  I find myself smiling for the first time in a long time.

  He does not smile. He regards me with hatred.

  I understand that feeling as well. I own him body and soul. Having been owned before, I know all too well what it is to regard one’s master.

  And for him, he’s seeing his mistress for the first time. A face finally to pour out all of that hatred onto. Someone who will send him to his death for her house’s prestige with little thought to his life, family, who he is. And if he dies, she will move on as if it was the same as losing a purse or any item that is swiftly replaced.

  No doubt he is wondering why one, so young as I, have such an abode. Perhaps my family is wealthy and I was a child bride. It is not unheard of, but he’s seeing something else as well, a familiarity.

  “This is your trainer for your gladiators, Garess,” the property manager says.

  He bows to me. Garess is a foreigner. But I, too, am a foreigner and most cannot place me. Truly, if I were in poor clothing, I would appear a slave far more easily than a Roman. Alas, no one cares when you are as rich as I am.