“Indeed, I do, my lady,” replied Edmund.
“There might be a way,” she said, in a strangely distant tone, “that a good mechanician might earn a conversion to vampirism.”
Edmund was wise enough not to interpret this as an offer or a promise. He accepted a measure of the new wine and said: “My lady, there are matters that it would be as well for us to discuss in private. May I send my son to his room?”
The Lady Carmilla’s eyes narrowed just a little, but there was hardly any expression in her finely etched features. Edmund held his breath, knowing that he had forced a decision upon her that she had not intended to make so soon.
“The poor boy has not quite finished his meal,” she said.
“I think he has had enough, my lady,” Edmund countered. Noell did not disagree, and, after a brief hesitation, the lady bowed to signal her permission. Edmund asked Noell to leave, and, when he was gone, the Lady Carmilla rose from her seat and went from the dining room into an inner chamber. Edmund followed her.
“You were presumptuous, Master Cordery,” she told him.
“I was carried away, my lady. There are too many memories here.”
“The boy is mine,” she said, “if I so choose. You do know that, do you not?”
Edmund bowed.
“I did not ask you here tonight to make you witness the seduction of your son. Nor do you think that I did. This matter that you would discuss with me – does it concern science or treason?”
“Science, my lady. As you have said yourself, my loyalty is not in question.”
Carmilla laid herself upon a sofa and indicated that Edmund should take a chair nearby. This was the antechamber to her bedroom, and the air was sweet with the odor of cosmetics.
“Speak,” she bade him.
“I believe that the archduke is afraid of what my little device might reveal,” he said. “He fears that it will expose to the eye such seeds as carry vampirism from one person to another, just as it might expose the seeds that carry disease. I think that the man who devised the instrument may have been put to death already, but I think you know well enough that a discovery once made is likely to be made again and again. You are uncertain as to what course of action would best serve your ends, because you cannot tell whence the greater threat to your rule might come. There is the Fraternity, which is dedicated to your destruction; there is plague in Africa, from which even vampires may die; and there is the new sight, which renders visible what previously lurked unseen. Do you want my advice, Lady Carmilla?”
“Do you have any advice, Edmund?”
“Yes. Do not try to control by terror and persecution the things that are happening. Let your rule be unkind now, as it has been before, and it will open the way to destruction. Should you concede power gently, you might live for centuries yet, but if you strike out . . . your enemies will strike back.”
The vampire lady leaned back her head, looking at the ceiling. She contrived a small laugh.
“I cannot take advice such as that to the archduke,” she told him flatly.
“I thought not, my lady,” Edmund replied very calmly.
“You humans have your own immortality,” she complained. “Your faith promises it, and you all affirm it. Your faith tells you that you must not covet the immortality that is ours, and we do no more than agree with you when we guard it so jealously. You should look to your Christ for fortune, not to us. I think you know well enough that we could not convert the world if we wanted to. Our magic is such that it can be used only sparingly. Are you distressed because it has never been offered to you? Are you bitter? Are you becoming our enemy because you cannot become our kin?”
“You have nothing to fear from me, my lady,” he lied. Then he added, not quite sure whether it was a lie or not: “I loved you faithfully. I still do.”
She sat up straight then, and reached out a hand as though to stroke his cheek, though he was too far away for her to reach.
“That is what I told the archduke,” she said, “when he suggested to me that you might be a traitor. I promised him that I could test your loyalty more keenly in my chambers than his officers in theirs. I do not think you could delude me. Edmund. Do you?”
“No my lady,” he replied.
“By morning,” she told him gently, “I will know whether or not you are a traitor.”
“That you will,” he assured her. “That you will, my lady.”
He woke before her, his mouth dry and his forehead burning. He was not sweating – indeed, he was possessed by a feeling of desiccation, as though the moisture were being squeezed out of his organs. His head was aching, and the light of the morning sun that streamed through the unshuttered window hurt his eyes.
He pulled himself up to a half-sitting position, pushing the coverlet back from his bare chest.
So soon! he thought. He had not expected to be consumed so quickly, but he was surprised to find that his reaction was one of relief rather than fear or regret. He had difficulty collecting his thoughts, and was perversely glad to accept that he did not need to.
He looked down at the cuts that she had made on his breast with her little silver knife; they were raw and red, and made a strange contrast with the faded scars whose crisscross pattern still engraved the story of unforgotten passions. He touched the new wounds gently with his fingers, and winced at the fiery pain.
She woke up then, and saw him inspecting the marks.
“Have you missed the knife?” she asked sleepily. “Were you hungry for its touch?”
There was no need to lie now, and there was a delicious sense of freedom in that knowledge. There was a joy in being able to face her, at last, quite naked in his thoughts as well as his flesh.
“Yes, my lady,” he said with a slight croak in his voice. “I had missed the knife. Its touch . . . rekindled flames in my soul.”
She had closed her eyes again, to allow herself to wake slowly. She laughed. “It is pleasant, sometimes, to return to forsaken pastures. You can have no notion how a particular taste may stir memories. I am glad to have seen you again, in this way. I had grown quite used to you as the gray mechanician. But now. . . .”
He laughed, as lightly as she, but the laugh turned to a cough, and something in the sound alerted her to the fact that all was not as it should be. She opened her eyes and raised her head, turning toward him.
“Why, Edmund,” she said, “you’re as pale as death!”
She reached out to touch his cheek, and snatched her hand away again as she found it unexpectedly hot and dry. A blush of confusion spread across her own features. He took her hand and held it, looking steadily into her eyes.
“Edmund,” she said softly. “What have you done?”
“I can’t be sure,” he said, “and I will not live to find out, but I have tried to kill you, my lady.”
He was pleased by the way her mouth gaped in astonishment. He watched disbelief and anxiety mingle in her expression, as though fighting for control. She did not call out for help.
“This is nonsense,” she whispered.
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “Perhaps it was also nonsense that we talked last evening. Nonsense about treason. Why did you ask me to make the microscope, my lady, when you knew that making me a party to such a secret was as good as signing my death warrant?”
“Oh Edmund,” she said with a sigh. “You could not think that it was my own idea? I tried to protect you, Edmund, from Girard’s fears and suspicions. It was because I was your protector that I was made to bear the message. What have you done, Edmund?”
He began to reply, but the words turned into a fit of coughing.
She sat upright, wrenching her hand away from his enfeebled grip, and looked down at him as he sank back upon the pillow.
“For the love of God!” she exclaimed, as fearfully as any true believer. “It is the plague – the plague out of Africa!”
He tried to confirm her suspicion, but could do so only with a nod of his head as he foug
ht for breath.
“But they held the Freemartin by the Essex coast for a full fortnight’s quarantine,” she protested. “There was no trace of plague aboard.”
“The disease kills men,” said Edmund in a shallow whisper. “But animals can carry it, in their blood, without dying.”
“You cannot know this!”
Edmund managed a small laugh. “My lady,” he said, “I am a member of that Fraternity that interests itself in everything that might kill a vampire. The information came to me in good time for me to arrange delivery of the rats – though when I asked for them, I had not in mind the means of using them that I eventually employed. More recent events. . . .” Again he was forced to stop, unable to draw sufficient breath even to sustain the thin whisper.
The Lady Carmilla put her hand to her throat, swallowing as if she expected to feel evidence already of her infection.
“You would destroy me, Edmund?” she asked, as though she genuinely found it difficult to believe.
“I would destroy you all,” he told her. “I would bring disaster, turn the world upside down, to end your rule. . . . We cannot allow you to stamp out learning itself to preserve your empire forever. Order must be fought with chaos, and chaos is come, my lady.”
When she tried to rise from the bed, he reached out to restrain her, and though there was no power left in him, she allowed herself to be checked. The coverlet fell away from her, to expose her breasts as she sat upright.
“The boy will die for this, Master Cordery,” she said. “His mother, too.”
“They’re gone,” he told her. “Noell went from your table to the custody of the society that I serve. By now they’re beyond your reach. The archduke will never catch them.”
She stared at him, and now he could see the beginnings of hate and fear in her stare.
“You came here last night to bring me poisoned blood,” she said. “In the hope that this new disease might kill even me, you condemned yourself to death. What did you do, Edmund?”
He reached out again to touch her arm, and was pleased to see her flinch and draw away: that he had become dreadful.
“Only vampires live forever,” he told her hoarsely. “But anyone may drink blood, if they have the stomach for it. I took full measure from my two sick rats . . . and I pray to God that the seed of this fever is raging in my blood . . . and in my semen, too. You, too, have received full measure, my lady . . . and you are in God’s hands now like any common mortal. I cannot know for sure whether you will catch the plague, or whether it will kill you, but I – an unbeliever – am not ashamed to pray. Perhaps you could pray, too, my lady, so that we may know how the Lord favors one unbeliever over another.”
She looked down at him, her face gradually losing the expressions that had tugged at her features, becoming masklike in its steadiness.
“You could have taken our side, Edmund. I trusted you, and I could have made the archduke trust you, too. You could have become a vampire. We could have shared the centuries, you and I.”
This was dissimulation, and they both knew it. He had been her lover, and had ceased to be, and had grown older for so many years that now she remembered him as much in his son as in himself. The promises were all too obviously hollow now, and she realized that she could not even taunt him with them.
From beside the bed she took up the small silver knife that she had used to let his blood. She held it now as if it were a dagger, not a delicate instrument to be used with care and love.
“I thought you still loved me,” she told him. “I really did.”
That, at least, he thought, might be true.
He actually put his head farther back, to expose his throat to the expected thrust. He wanted her to strike him – angrily, brutally, passionately. He had nothing more to say, and would not confirm or deny that he did still love her.
He admitted to himself now that his motives had been mixed, and that he really did not know whether it was loyalty to the Fraternity that had made him submit to this extraordinary experiment. It did not matter.
She cut his throat, and he watched her for a few long seconds while she stared at the blood gouting from the wound. When he saw her put stained fingers to her lips, knowing what she knew, he realized that after her own fashion, she still loved him.
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
A Place to Stay
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH IS A NOVELIST and screenwriter who lives in North London with his wife Paula and two cats.
His first novel, Only Forward, won the Philip K. Dick and August Derleth Awards, while Spares was optioned by Stephen Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG and translated in seventeen countries around the world. His most recent novel was the Sunday Times best-seller The Straw Men. The author’s short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and six are currently under option for television. A new collection, More Tomorrow and Other Stories, was published by Earthling Publications in 2003, and he has recently completed his fifth novel, The Lonely Dead.
As Smith explains: “ ‘A Place To Stay’ was one of those stories where the place came first, and the story afterwards, seeping into the environment like flood water into a cellar. Having spent a week in New Orleans myself a few years ago, I know I found it increasingly hard to summon up enthusiasm for leaving. I still fantasize about the muffelettas at the French Bar, in fact, and it’s been about eight years now. I’d love to go back, but the Old Quarter is like a pitcher plant: it’s all too possible that I might not be able to scramble out a second time.
“There would be worse places to spend eternity, I guess . . .”
As you would expect from a writer of Smith’s talent, the following is definitely not your ordinary type of vampire tale.
“JOHN, DO YOU BELIEVE in vampires?”
I took a moment to light a cigarette. This wasn’t to avoid the issue, but rather to prepare myself for the length and vitriol of the answer I intended to give – and to tone it down a little. I hardly knew the woman who’d asked the question, and had no idea of her tolerance for short, blunt words. I wanted to be gentle with her, but if there’s one star in the pantheon of possible nightmares which I certainly don’t believe in, then it has to be bloody vampires. I mean, really.
I was in New Orleans, and it was nearly Hallowe’en. Children of the Night have a tendency to crop up in such circumstances, like talk of rain in London. Now that I was here, I could see why. The French Quarter, with its narrow streets and looming balconies frozen in time, almost made the idea of vampires credible, especially in the lingering moist heat of the fall. It felt like a playground for suave monsters, a perpetual reinventing past, and if vampires lived anywhere, I supposed, then these dark streets and alleyways with their fetid, flam-boyant cemeteries would be as good a place as any.
But they didn’t live anywhere, and after another punishing swallow of my salty Margarita, I started to put Rita-May right on this fact. She shifted herself comfortably against my chest, and listened to me rant.
We were in Jimmy Buffet’s bar on Decatur, and the evening was developing nicely. At nine o’clock I’d been there by myself, sitting at the bar and trying to work out how many Margaritas I’d drunk. The fact that I was counting shows what a sad individual I am. The further fact that I couldn’t seem to count properly demonstrates that on that particular evening I was an extremely drunk sad individual too. And I mean, yes, Margaritaville is kind of a tourist trap, and I could have been sitting somewhere altogether heavier and more authentic across the street. But I’d done that the previous two nights, and besides, I liked Buffet’s bar. I was, after all, a tourist. You didn’t feel in any danger of being killed in his place, which I regard as a plus. They only played Jimmy Buffet on the jukebox, not surprisingly, so I didn’t have to worry that my evening was suddenly going to be shattered by something horrible from the post-melodic school of popular music. Say what you like about Jimmy Buffet, he’s seldom hard to listen to. Finally, the barman had this gloopy eye thing, which felt
pleasingly disgusting and stuck to the wall when you threw it, so that was kind of neat.
I was having a perfectly good time, in other words. A group of people from the software convention that I was attending were due to be meeting somewhere on Bourbon at ten, but I was beginning to think I might skip it. After only two days my tolerance for jokes about Bill Gates was hovering around the zero mark. To me, as an Apple Macintosh developer, they weren’t actually that funny anyway.
So. There I was, fairly confident that I’d had around eight Margaritas and beginning to get heartburn from all the salt, when a woman walked in. She was in her mid-thirties, I guessed, the age where things are just beginning to fade around the edges but don’t look too bad for all that. I hope they don’t, anyway: I’m approaching that age myself and my things are already fading fast. She sat on a stool at the corner of the bar, and signalled to the barman with a regular’s upward nod of the head. A minute later a Margarita was set down in front of her, and I judged from the colour that it was the same variety I was drinking. It was called a Golden something or other, and had the effect of gradually replacing your brain with a sour-tasting sand that shifted sluggishly when you moved your head.
No big deal. I noticed her, then got back to desultory conversation with the other barman. He’d visited London at some point, or wanted to – I never really understood which. He was either asking me what London was like, or telling me; I was either listening, or telling him. I can’t remember, and probably didn’t know at the time. At that stage in the evening my responses would have been about the same either way. I eventually noticed that the band had stopped playing, apparently for the night. That meant I could leave the bar and go sit at one of the tables. The band had been okay, but very loud, and without wishing them any personal enmity I was glad they had gone. Now that I’d noticed, I realized they must have been gone for a while. An entire Jimmy Buffet CD had played in the interval.
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