In the Garden of Sin

by Louisa Burton

  “Go settle between the stout little legs of your precious Clara,” Galiana told him. “Bind yourself in wedlock and spend the rest of your short, dismal human existence filled with misery and regret. It’s what you deserve, what you’ve chosen over my gift of immortality. You spat on that offer. Now I spit on you.”

  This she did, before turning and stalking away, her gold-brocaded, sable-lined mantle billowing behind her. Turek wiped his cheek with the back of his hand as the onlookers guffawed.

  Partly to avoid a precipitous romance with Clara and partly because of the altruism that had driven him to medicine in the first place, Turek found himself spending more and more time tending to victims of the Great Plague, which overtook Bologna in June of that year after having spent the preceding months crawling northward from the trading port of Messina in Sicily. It was grueling work, not just physically but emotionally. Most victims of that terrible pestilence, no matter what he did for them, succumbed after a mere day or two of fever, vomiting, and diarrhea, with blood oozing from every orifice and their hands, feet, and noses black from gangrene.

  During this time, he prayed constantly, not just for his patients but for himself, so that he might be spared the pestilence that had struck them down. In his simple faith and naïveté, he actually believed this would do some good—until the morning he awoke raging with fever, his lungs seizing up, fingers and toes discolored, lymph nodes swollen to the size of eggs.

  The disease progressed swiftly. Within an hour, he could barely move, and disorientation was setting in. By that time tomorrow, he would likely be dead. He was all alone in the house, the other boarders having either fled Bologna or died, and Clara having gone to stay with her sister’s family in the country, where she felt safer from contamination.

  The blood trickling from his mouth reminded him of Galiana as she’d looked after drinking blood from the throat of the street cleaner.

  He tossed a silver denaro down to a boy on the street and asked him to fetch Galiana Solsa from her villa. “Tell her I’m dying and that I’m sorry for everything, but that I need her to come to me as soon as possible. She’ll know why.”

  She did come, only to laugh like hell when he begged her to turn him into what she was. “Desperation has made a believer of you, eh, Anton?” she asked as she poured herself a glass of wine.

  He didn’t know what he believed, except that he didn’t want to end his days being hurled into a burial pit with hundreds of other reeking corpses. He knew all too well how impotent the medical profession had proven itself in dealing with this hellish contagion. Galiana was his only hope.

  She taunted him as he lay curled up on his sweat-soaked straw mattress, shaking, weeping, pleading… “I’ll do anything you ask of me, give you anything you want…”

  “What do you have that I could possibly want, you pathetic pezzo di merda? I have wealth, beauty, immortality…”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he groaned. “Why did you come, then?”

  She chuckled as she sipped her wine. “If you had the opportunity to watch someone you despise bleed to death from the inside, his eyes filled with terror, would you not take it?”

  “Christ. No.”

  “No?” With a nonchalant shrug, she said, “Then perhaps it is just as well you die now. You wouldn’t make much of a bloodsucker with that attitude.”

  She mocked and tormented him through the night as he grew steadily weaker and more insensate. She said she’d been spending much of her leisure time these past few months planning his murder, amusing herself by concocting scenarios that would maximize his suffering. It wasn’t just an idle fancy, she told him. She had fully intended to put him to death in as gruesome and painful a manner as possible. “It would appear that fate has taken the burden of dispatching you out of my hands.”

  At one point, she removed her little jeweled dagger from its sheath on her girdle and told him that when he died, or sooner if she grew tired of waiting, she was going to cut off his cacchio and have her cook fry it up for her like a sausage.

  A while later, complaining of hunger, she knelt at the side of Turek’s bed, opened his linen drawers, and withdrew the organ in question. Laughing at his consternation—“Just a little sip, Anton, something to tease my palate, eh?”—she removed her false teeth, pulled back his foreskin, and pierced the glans very shallowly and delicately. He felt a sharp sting, then the warm pressure of her lips closing around him and the rhythmic caress of her tongue as she encouraged the flow of blood. It rushed into his cock, causing it to fill and rise despite his weakened state.

  She sucked and stroked him, then got on top of him and started fucking him hard and fast. Using the dagger, she slit the bodice of her silken gown and chemise to expose her breasts so that she could rub her nipples. The suction of her tight little snatch, especially when it started pulsating with her orgasm, undid him, and he came much harder than he would have thought possible under the circumstances.

  As the night wore on, he continued to beg her to turn him; she continued to refuse. Only when he was literally on the verge of death, with his last breath rattling from his throat, did she pierce her right nipple at the very tip with her dagger and slide it into his mouth. He suckled as eagerly as a newborn infant as she stroked his hair, murmuring endearments, calling him “il mio piccolo cucciolo affamato.” Her hungry little puppy. In the Piazza di Maggiore, he’d been a cane bastardo— a bastard dog.

  Turek was too far gone at that point to register the reduction in rank. In fact, so delirious was he that he initially mistook the sensations of vampiric conversion—the euphoria, vertigo, and intense sexual arousal—for the process of death. When it was all over and he realized she had turned him, he was pathetically grateful, falling to his knees before her. He kissed her hands and thanked her for her mercy.

  “You think this was an act of mercy?” she asked with a smile that looked almost pitying. “You really don’t know me at all, do you? I came to realize after you so summarily discarded me that it was really for the best—from your point of view— that I hadn’t turned you. I realized you aren’t the right sort to make a good vampire, that you could never be at peace with it, that you would always, on some level, think of yourself as evil, wrong, unclean. Make no mistake, Anton, my turning you was not an act of mercy, but of retribution.”

  “Even so,” he said, “you saved my life.”

  “I replaced your life with another, very different form of existence. Had I wanted to save it as it was, I could have done so. I could have cured you of the plague and let you live out the rest of your tedious human existence, but that would hardly have satisfied my appetite for vengeance, and as I—”

  “You could have cured me?” he said. “There is no cure for the plague.”

  “As a matter of fact, I can cure many conditions subject to humans—and Follets, as well—by the simple expedient of replacing their blood. I have developed the ability to not only extract blood through my fangs but to expel it, enabling me to transfer it from what I call a provider pigeon to a recipient. I simply feed on the provider in the usual fashion, thoroughly draining him, and then—”

  “Thoroughly draining him?” Turek said. “The provider would have to die, then, for this… transfer to take place.”

  “Only if he’s human. I will choose a human provider in good health if the point of the transfer is to cleanse another human’s body of some deadly pestilence, which I will do from time to time in return for a pledge of enslavement. But the provider can also be a Follet with some blood-borne attribute that the recipient, human or non, wishes to adopt, like shape-shifting. Follet providers don’t die. They simply generate a new supply of blood, and in less than a day, they’re good as new.”

  “But then how do you replace the recipient’s blood?” asked Turek. “If you were to bleed him dry first, he would die.”

  “Again, only if he’s human, but it isn’t necessary to empty his veins completely before refilling them. After having thoroughly tapped th
e provider, I open a major artery in the recipient, and while he’s bleeding out, I pierce a second artery with my fangs and begin discharging the new blood. As it flows through his vessels, it helps to flush out the old. When the transfer is complete, I lick the wounds to close them up.”

  The physician in Turek was astounded and intrigued. “Will I be able to do this, too?”

  She gave a scornful little laugh, as if the question were ludicrous. “The ability to transfer blood is exceedingly rare, Anton. Most Upír don’t even realize it’s possible. It took me almost two millennia to acquire the gift, and a great many years to perfect my technique. I’ve been able to do it successfully only for the past few centuries. As vampires age, they grow steadily stronger and more powerful. You shall see—if you manage to survive as a vampire, which is by no means certain.”

  He asked her why he didn’t have fangs. She told him they would develop within his gums over the next few days. As they grew, they would push on the two incisors to either side of his front teeth until those teeth loosened and fell out, to be replaced much as a child’s adult teeth grow in to replace his milk teeth. She told him that from now on, sexual arousal and hunger would be inextricably linked. In fact, for the foreseeable future, he would be unable to satisfy the first—in other words, to achieve orgasm—without being in the process of satisfying the second. Over time, as his body acclimated itself to its new vampiric physiology, he would develop the ability to climax when he wasn’t feeding—although the blood-haze tended to produce orgasms that were incredibly powerful.

  She explained which veins and arteries on the human body provided the best access for their purposes, the most efficient and commonly used being the carotid on the side of the neck. Telling him it was best for him to work up a healthy appetite before his first blood-feed, she removed all the food and wine from his room, leaving him only a bucket of water for washing and drinking. He was still too weak and confused to question or resist her, even when she took his keys and locked him in, promising to return when he was good and hungry with “a nice little pigeon for you to break your fast with.”

  The next three days were interminable as Turek paced the little room waiting for Galiana to return. He felt strong and whole again—better than ever, in fact—and that was something, but there was a crawly sensation in his upper gums that was maddening, and he’d never been so famished in his life.

  When his lateral incisors were loose enough to yank out, he did so. Behind their empty sockets he felt two bony ridges in the roof of his mouth. The flesh covering them stretched out thinner and thinner until at last the fangs themselves were exposed, folded back into channels, like scalpels tucked into scalpel-shaped niches in a satin-lined case. He pushed and prodded them, trying to get them to unfold, to no avail.

  Eventually he fell asleep and dreamed of pigs being slaughtered, their screams filling the air as the blood sprayed from their throats, drenching him. He awoke with an adamantine erection, his fangs fully extended and throbbing. He stroked them, fascinated with the curved smoothness of them, their length, their hollow, pinpoint tips. The gums from which they emerged were so sensitive that rubbing them felt like rubbing his cock. He was excruciatingly aroused, so much so that he felt certain he could ease his lust by his own hand without being in the process of feeding, regardless of what Galiana had said. However, all he achieved for his efforts in that regard was frustration and eventually pain.

  He fell asleep again, only to awaken to the presence of two people in the room with him—Galiana and Clara, whom she’d fetched from her sister’s house in the country. Clara threw herself on Turek, babbling about how grateful she was that he was still alive. Galiana had told her how he’d fallen ill with the plague, only to heal himself through prayer, and that he’d been asking for Clara the entire time.

  She kissed him, the first time she had ever done so. Turek returned her kisses carefully, mindful of his fangs. Galiana left, closing the door behind her. He heard the key turning in the lock.

  Clara felt incredibly soft and heavy and warm in his arms, her flesh seeming to hum with the blood coursing through it. He couldn’t stop rubbing her, squeezing her, yanking at her clothes so as to feel her body against his. She rucked her skirts up, opening her legs for him and saying something about marriage, to which he grunted an affirmation as he licked her throat, tasting salt and savoring the roiling heat beneath the surface.

  He sank his cock into her first, and then his fangs, deeply, hungrily, clutching her hard and tight as she struggled, clamping a hand over her mouth to stifle her cries. Driven by newly acquired instinct, he worked his tongue against the flesh of her neck to get the blood flowing. He groaned in bliss when it started drawing up through his fangs in rhythmic surges, creating a sensation similar to that of ejaculation, only in reverse.

  The thumping of Clara’s heart was like a drum being pounded all around him, echoing, reverberating, driving the fierce, insistent pumping of his hips. Drunk with the novel influx of fresh blood, he was only dimly aware that she had stopped struggling and was ardently meeting his thrusts.

  He came with volcanic intensity, ejecting what felt like years of pent-up seed as he bucked and thrashed atop Clara, who was no longer moving. As he lay there sucking in hoarse breaths and shaking, his fangs still embedded in her throat, he felt a cool, soft hand stroking his naked buttocks. Galiana had returned—he had no idea when—and was now sitting on the side of the bed, saying “You can unseat your fangs now, cucciolo. There is no more blood to be had in this one. You’ve drained the little porca quite thoroughly.”

  It was true, he realized. Clara was as white as marble, her filmy eyes rolled up and her mouth agape. She looked for all the world like a statue of a saint depicted in a state of rapture.

  “I killed her,” he said, both awed and appalled at what he’d done. “Mein Gott.”

  “Your God is through with you, Anton,” Galiana said as she rose and crossed to the door. “You are an abomination in His eyes, a demon.”

  “Nein,” he whispered, shaking his head dazedly. But of course, it was true. A demon. That was exactly what he had become, what she’d turned him into, at his own request—a bloodsucking monster, godless and godforsaken.

  Turek’s gaze sought out the little crucifix nailed to the wall over the bed, to which he used to offer such fervent prayers. His stomach lurched, and he wretched, but nothing came up.

  Standing in the open doorway, Galiana said, “You will leave Bologna and never seek me out again. If you attempt to communicate with me in any way, I will make you extremely sorry. I almost killed you once, in a most unpleasant fashion. I can still do it, cucciolo. I can chain you up and burn you to death in increments—first your feet, then your hands, your legs, your arms… You’ll die in agony with no chance of ever coming back. Do not make the mistake of doubting my sincerity in this.”

  “I don’t,” he rasped.

  “In future years, you will curse me for turning you. I meant it when I said that you don’t have what it takes to live contentedly as an Upír. Just remember that you begged me for this. You were foolish to have done so, and now you will spend eternity paying for that mistake.”

  “Wait,” he said as she turned to leave, yanking his drawers up as he struggled up off the bed, his mouth smeared with blood. “Where are you going? I… I don’t know what to do. What am I… suppose to do with her?” he asked, pointing to Clara’s body. “And how do I…how do I find more…”

  “Pigeons? You didn’t ask me to teach you how to be a vampire, you simply asked me to turn you into one. You shall have to sort through the details by yourself, I’m afraid. I have no desire to hold your hand while you do so.”

  “But…”

  “Arrivederci, Anton. We are through with each other until the end of time.”

  As it happened, they were through with each other only for the next four and a half centuries. After failing to locate Grotte Cachée upon his release from the Bastille in 1789, Turek had returned to
Paris, where he spent the next few years venting his bloodlust in a city gone mad with it. Follets of a predatory bent, including vampires of every race and subrace, flocked to Paris in great numbers during those years. Such beings found human turmoil intensely seductive, not only because it made people more susceptible to demonic machinations, but because those machinations were less likely to be noticed in an already brutal and chaotic environment.

  Also prowling at night for the blood of unsuspecting Parisians was Galiana Solsa. Turek tried to avoid her, but she tracked him down. Gratified to find him so cold and bitter— evidence, she said, of his “vampiric maturation”—she swept him once again beneath her dark wing. The searing passion of their first few weeks together would never be renewed, but at least he was no longer alone.

  She’d been right about him, of course, about the human weaknesses that had kept him—would always keep him— from true fulfillment as an Upír. Most vampires tended to be comfortable with solitude, but Turek could never quite accustom himself to it. For centuries after his conversion, he had felt his aloneness all too keenly. Had he not, he would hardly have slid so easily under the thumb of Galiana, with her unrelenting, strutting rapaciousness.

  Of course, it never would have come to that—his playing the lapdog in perpetuity to that vicious cunt—had he prevailed in his campaign to win over the only female for whom he had ever felt true reverence, true devotion: Ilutu-Lili.

  In the brief time he’d had alone with her during the Hellfire’s two-week visit to Grotte Cachée in 1749, he’d tried to reason with her, to make her understand that she was, in her way, as much of a vampire as he. You’re a creature of dark passions and terrible, ungovernable hungers, as am I, he’d told her. We are really much the same, the succubus and the Upír—both predators seeking our own particular sustenance, which we derive from humans—willing or unwilling. We both do our prowling at night, for the most part. We are both singleminded in the pursuit of our prey. And we are both susceptible to the same means of destruction—immolation—which makes me suspect that your race and mine are perhaps more closely related than one would think.