by Glen Duncan
“Hurry,” she said. “The sun’ll be good for me but not for you.”
I’d known from the start she knew what I was, but to have it casually confirmed like this was another sweet shock. I thought: Has she been with other vampires?
“If you have to dig, I can help you. That’ll give us more time.”
She spoke with such swift control, as if we’d known each other for years, as if she knew just the sort of moronic dazes I was liable to fall into. She was as tall as me, supple, dark-eyed. She’d seen thirty winters in her human life and now would never look a minute older. Her face—the bold eyes and wide mouth ready to find delight—said she was at fierce peace with what she was. Whatever terms her condition demanded she’d met them long ago. The thought that monstrosity had stripped her of a right to live had never crossed her mind. She’d had her teeth and nails in life’s pelt from birth; this wasn’t going to make her let go.
“It won’t hurt you, will it?”
The fire, she meant.
“No. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Modernity tells you vampires are afraid of fire. Well, that’s true, but only in the way you’re afraid of it: we don’t, any more than you do, want to get burned. We don’t much fancy, you know, going up in flames. We’re certainly not impervious to the charm of its warmth. We feel the cold and the heat much less than you do, but that’s not to say we don’t feel them at all. I was cooler without the bearskin, but I could have gone out—as the modern idiom has it—stark bollock naked and wandered in the snow for several hours without much more than minor discomfort. (The more delicious and immediate discomfort—and speaking of bollocks—was that sans cloak I was left in only footwear and a doeskin loincloth, loose enough to make my feelings apparent.) The fixings for fire were—to my luck, or in accordance with the forces softly engineering this encounter—available. Amlek and Mim had slept here with me not long ago. We’d fed early and come back to the cave hours before dawn. Amlek had found flint and lit a fire, more for aesthetics than warmth, since the night had taken a reminiscent turn, and the scar of the burning near the cave mouth was still visible. There was very little dry stuff, but I found the flint and did what I could, and in a few minutes had a dozen small flames frolicking. Fir trees growing fifty feet below the cave supplied pine cones, which, together with what dead wood I could find, would be fuel enough till sunrise. I busied myself with the flames, poking and prodding and blowing, conscious all the while of her watching me, the space between us rich with our potential movement through it, to each other. The ghost of myself was already moving through it, an erotic whole-body version of the phantom limb. And still the fever of incredulous certainty enriched the thud of every passing second.
Then, suddenly, I stood up and turned, and there we were. Looking at each other. The fire marked her with little wings of light: cheekbones, knees, one bare shoulder. We didn’t speak. Her face was full of knowledge of me. The lights in her dark eyes were steady. We didn’t speak. It was a concussive pleasure, the not speaking. I only realised I’d been thinking: You’re not alone anymore when I felt coming from her: No, we’re not.
There was no decision. One minute we stood facing each other, the next I felt the little distance between us going, going, dissolving into fluid warm nothing, until our arms were around each other and there was the shape of her perfectly fitting my own.
35
THE MYTH OF male and female as an originally single hermaphrodite being survives, even now. My other half, you say. Read literally it shortchanges homosexuals—which ought to be more than enough to let literalists know their reading needs work. Genitals aren’t the issue. The issue is the feeling of homecoming. Of recognition. Of re-encounter. Of knowing that you knew each other once, were forced into separated forgetfulness, mistook others for each other (wilful myopia or innocent near-misses) but now, by sheer chance or ineffable design, you’ve found the real each other again. Thank the gods. Thank accident. Thank the determined universe. At any rate the impulse (endearing, if you think about it) is to thank something.
And my cup, obviously, ran over. A brand-new sex life and a life-changing lover to share it with. We didn’t congratulate ourselves. Shared intuition said it would be asking for trouble. We were very quiet and careful, going about our loving business. We didn’t want to attract the universe’s attention. We didn’t want the universe noticing it had made an obscene mistake and, appalled at its negligence, rectifying it at a brutal, hurried stroke.
“How is this possible?” I whispered to her (since the universe might be listening) in the firelight. We’d made the cave home, temporarily. Clearly the cave was ours. Clearly the world was ours. We were deep in the mesmerised phase of quiet entitlement. I’d often wondered about the point of the everything. Well, here it was.
“I don’t care how,” she whispered back, clambering onto me. “Only that.”
“I love you.”
“I know.”
She did know. She was delighted and appalled at her greed for it. If she hadn’t loved me my love would have invited her cruelty. If she hadn’t loved me my love would have made a tyrant of her. Fortunately, she did love me.
“That’s it, just like that. Oh God, that’s good. That’s what good means.”
I’d never known peace and pleasure and profound necessity as I knew when I was inside her. She liked to sit astride me (“cowgirl,” as contemporary pornography has it, in one of its rare female-friendly coinages), said I hit her in just the right place like that. (The G-spot was thousands of years in the future. But just as people knew sound reasoning before Aristotle formalised logic …) She liked to sit astride me with my hands on her hips, occasionally lowering her mouth to mine for kisses that took us both out into the void. There were these dips into darkness which momentarily solved our selves’ separateness. But the real sweetness—you’d say the human sweetness—was in the moments either side of transcendence, the frenzied attempt to get all, enough, everything of each other, the delighted disbelief in what we were experiencing, the outrageous undeserved gift of it. Oh, we made rare pigs of ourselves! We often fell asleep having just come, in whatever position we’d ended up in. And yet there was a little infallible gravity of tenderness that always drew us, half-asleep, back into each other’s arms. Sometimes we’d become aware that we’d both woken, and were thinking.
“Stop thinking,” she said, when this happened.
“You’re thinking,” I answered.
“I’ll stop. You stop, too.”
“Okay.”
Once—and only once—she said: “My lifetime will be the blink of an eye next to yours.”
I almost said: “I won’t go on without you.” But didn’t. Because even though I believed it I knew it would annoy her. She knew I was thinking it, anyway. We were in the cave, lying naked on the bearskin. The fire was low, but we were flushed from lovemaking. She was on her side, one leg bent. I was lying with my head resting on her thigh, breathing the smell of her cunt, which to me had become (had always been; I’d just forgotten it, along with all the other things I’d forgotten and was now being given back) the smell of love. The thought of losing her filled me with frantic energy. Energy that didn’t know what to do, but couldn’t stop believing there was something it could do.
“Promise me something,” she said.
“What.”
“Promise me you’ll live as long as you can.”
I didn’t answer. Nothing I could say seemed right. She was aware of that, too.
“Just promise me,” she said.
After a long time breathing the smell of her and trying to imagine existence without it, I said, “All right. I promise I’ll live as long as I can.”
It shouldn’t have felt such a difficult promise to make.
I told Amlek about her, but not the others.
“And you’re saying … With her it’s …?”
Naturally this was the big thing. Naturally this was what he couldn’t get over.
“Yes,” I told him. “Everything. As when we were human.”
It was just after sunset on my farewell night. Vali was waiting for me in the cave three miles away. Amlek and I sat in a plane tree overhanging the river. The water was a large peacefully moving intelligence. He knew I was leaving with her. I hadn’t needed to tell him.
“How long will she live?”
He regretted it immediately.
“Not forever,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“For a little while.”
“Really, I’m sorry.”
“But she’s alive now.”
“Of course.”
For a few minutes we sat in silence. In silence saying goodbye. I felt him thinking of the time and space immediately ahead of him without me in it. Sadness, yes, but also his self’s excitement to be free of anything against which to measure itself. To be the only answer to his own questions.
We didn’t arrange anything. Time, place. We shared blood. We’d see each other again.
“Rem?” he called, when I was moving off in the darkness.
“What?”
I felt him grinning.
“She doesn’t have a sister, does she?”
When I got to the cave Vali wasn’t in it. Its smell had changed, too. Hers was still there, but mixed with a human’s, raw and acrid, discharged in fear or rage. I realised, as I followed both odours back down towards the river, that I was trembling. Here was the cruel joke: We give you bliss then take it away. I’d been right all along.
But I found her, alive, unharmed, less than a mile away. A shallow valley of turf and pale stones descended to a narrow stream with thorn trees growing on its banks. She was kneeling over the body of a man and she was holding a rock in her right hand. The man was face-down. His head was bleeding. The smell of which, though I didn’t need to drink until tomorrow night, pulled on my instinct like a child tugging its mother’s hand.
“He’s not dead,” Vali said.
I knew that from the blood. We can’t drink from the dead.
“Who is he?” I asked her. She looked beautiful. The warmth of what had happened still in her.
“His name’s Mabon. He’s from my tribe. I can’t believe he followed me all this way.”
I understood. He wanted her.
“If he’s come this far,” I told her, “he won’t stop now. Does he know?”
What you are.
“Yes.”
A little flicker of respect for poor Mabon, desire to rip his head off notwithstanding.
“I can’t kill him,” she said. “I won’t kill him.” Which meant: And I don’t want you to kill him, either.
“Tomorrow’s full moon,” she said. “I’ll be able to travel as fast as you. Soon we’ll be far from here. Too far for him to follow. He’s not a bad person.”
“He doesn’t have to be a bad person to be a dangerous one.”
“I don’t care. We’re not killing him.”
“Okay. You’re the boss.”
Pause.
“Am I?”
Said with just enough play to stir my cock.
“You are a bad person,” I said, moving towards her.
We kissed, and felt the option of fucking here, by poor prostrate Mabon—on top of him, why not? But she rejected it. Trivial piquancy. The sort of mean symbolic gesture someone smaller might need. Not her. Little cruelties suggested she still needed help to be reconciled to the big ones. She didn’t.
Mabon, in any case, was showing signs of consciousness, so we took our leave. It was my plan to travel east by the river, skirting the mountains. Water meant people, and the mountains meant easy concealment.
Tomorrow, it had passed between us, we would hunt together.
36
WE HADN’T TALKED about it. We’d known not to. It was the only thing we were uncertain of. She was afraid I’d forgotten what she turned into. I hadn’t, but still, I didn’t know: that first night in the cave, if she hadn’t returned to her human form, would I have lain with her?
“How far is the camp?” she said. It was almost moonrise. We were in a cave I’d kicked a mountain lion out of the day before. He’d put up a fight for a while, but I was too fast. I’d said to him: Look, give up, will you? You’ve lost a lot of blood. It’s only going to get worse for you. And with what was unmistakably a sigh, followed by a roll of the neck and a stretch that was meant to make it look as if boredom had got the better of him, he’d turned and slouched away.
“Less than a mile,” I told her. “Is it always this bad?”
She smiled. Stupid question. She was pale and shivering and wet with sweat. I couldn’t touch her. When it had first started I had very gently put my hand between her shoulder blades. She said: “I love you, but if you do that or anything else to my skin I’ll kill you.”
“Do you want water?” I asked her now.
She shook her head, no. When she swallowed her throat swelled for a moment—then returned to normal.
“I wish I could help you.”
“Shshsh. It’s … Oh fuck, it’s coming. Move.”
Again, I watched. The same process in reverse. More alarming this time: The beast becoming beauty relieves. Beauty becoming the beast unnerves. Her skull shuddered. Her jaw leaped forward with a wet crunch. Her legs lengthened before her arms and torso, so for a moment her head was a remote spectacle the way a stilt-walker’s is. Her dark eyes darkened. Hair hurried out with a sound like distant burning. She fell onto all-fours, rolled onto her side, clutched her gut, convulsed. Her scent pounded out of her, filled my face and limbs with wealth. The soft kernel of that smell was between her legs. I’d found it that first time, kissing her there in her human shape. Now at the first inhalation my cock rose. At the same time I imagined Amlek saying: It’s still basically a dog, Rem. A big dog walking on its hind legs. Of course the romantic antidote was that it was my beloved on the inside—but that wasn’t true. I didn’t want the woman inside the beast. Nor did I want the beast around the woman. I wanted Vali, all of what she was, every point on the scale of her nature. This was her and the dark-eyed woman ready to laugh and kiss and see through you and fuck you was her. They weren’t divisible. Nor, it turned out, was my desire. This revelation was a warmth spreading through me. I could feel happiness in my face. There is nothing of you I don’t want.
There would be a discrepancy … There would be practical … The discrepancy would leave us with certain practical … I laughed, quietly, seeing in her eyes she’d picked this up and was thinking, me on all-fours, of course, was seeing us in that position, her snout buried under the burst ribs of a victim.
The image gave her hunger a final push, and the last vestiges of her human shape surrendered.
My thirst didn’t need a push. It had been three days. One more and it would start to hurt. I kept swallowing. My fangs were live, my blood loud with the murmur of my countless drunk-down dead. You’d think it’d get old, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. Every victim’s unique, quenches in its own way and adds its way of being to yours.
They’d posted lookouts. Two, within shouting distance of the camp.
We took one each.
They didn’t get to shout.
I hadn’t known how it would be. Only that it would be unlike anything else.
Which it was.
I drank a lot, fast, alone with my drink. Partly because the thirst was three days old and at the first spurt and whiff of blood (my guard was a young man, leanly muscled, full of strength and as yet undischarged love; love was there in him, waiting, almost ready—and now would never find its way to anyone) took away everything but the need to satisfy it. Partly too (the intractable logistics, which as much as love or art or imagination make the world what it is) because I daren’t risk a draught from her victim: if his lights went out while I was drinking, mine would too, and his lights were in her hands. But partly—let me be scrupulously honest—because now that we’d come to it I didn’t know what she’d want. We ha
dn’t, I repeat, talked about it. Only moved towards it via irresistible gravity.
I rose, slaked, inwardly aswirl with my young guard’s life: the dizziness when he first saw the sea, his child’s mind imagining it pouring off the edge of the earth in a giant dark green waterfall but where did the water go? He was almost sucked over the edge with it, he’d felt himself fighting its terrible pull, actually turned away and put his arms around his mother’s hips and pressed his face to her thighs, though the big open salt air of the shore was also calming, an offer of love, like his mother’s love but too big—
Vali was down on all-fours, looking back over her shoulder at me, legs spread, backside thrust up. Her muzzle winked and dripped gore. Her blood-scented breath went up in rhythmic signals, contemptuous of all restraint. It was an appallingly recognisable version of the way she looked at me when she was in human form, in that same position of brazen, insistent availability. A look of dark understanding. I know you. You know me. This. This. This.
Her body’s aliveness when I went, cock blood-packed and aching, into her was an all but unbearable sweet assault. She was full of sly power. Drownable in. Her victim’s life flailed in her. Her greed was there in the pulse of her cunt that my own pulse rushed to join, until we were in thudding synchronicity I’d never felt before, something in time with the heart of … Of what? The universe. Life. Everything. The glimmering lode or stubborn tremor of corruption was essential, the awful fact of pleasure that increased proportional to her victim’s suffering, a relation I—lustless for centuries until now—had in my mortal days only ever glimpsed, as a ghost through smoke. But it was there with us (as the divisions between things dissolved, and the full moon swam in the river above us and the mountain opened on a vault of stars), the great spirit of cruelty, of enlargement by theft, that whether we liked it or not was close to the heart of what we were. This was what she’d had to find room for. The monster gave, if nothing else, an honest ultimatum: Find room for this or die. And she had found room. She’d forced her own growth to accommodate it, let the moon month by month shrink guilt and sadness until they were only two forlorn rooms in the house of many mansions. Rooms she went to less, would go to less, would revisit with diminishing nostalgia. This, I now knew, was why we hadn’t talked about it. She hadn’t known (intimations, yes, but not certainty) whether it would be this way for me, whether I would find room for it.
