Red Grow the Roses

by Janine Ashbless

  As Naylor says, if Reynauld were a farmer he would insist on keeping his livestock free-range, organic and in the most humane conditions possible. He would even give some of them names.

  You’ll have to be very, very lucky to meet Reynauld. To attract his attention, you’ll have to move in the right circles, go the right parties, make your face known where he – or, more likely, those he entrusts with choosing for him – will find you. It’s not that he’s a snob about the social calibre of his paramours, but that he simply has no time to absent himself from the echelons of power. Even eternal life is not time enough.

  So this is Reynauld’s style of feeding: he lies in a bespoke handcrafted bed on an ocean of satin sheets, and there are six women with him. He likes to feel himself surrounded by feminine bodies, accommodating and delighted; to smother himself in soft curves, in warm flesh whose capillaries thrill with life. It’s the giggles of pleasure that he appreciates, the soft appreciative moans as he takes a tender nibble, the tangle of smooth limbs which seems to have neither beginning or end, the wriggling press of bodies that seems ultimately to be not many individuals but one all-encompassing Female. He works vigorously at giving her satisfaction; he’s not a lazy lover despite being hopelessly outnumbered. So his hard, dark body is in constant active motion in the middle of all that feminine flesh, his cock plunging into pussy after pussy.

  The women often play together too, either from genuine desire or from the assumption that it will arouse him as it does other men. And it does arouse him, very much. In particular, watching living humans sucking at one another makes his cock harden and his balls clench. Provoked and rampant he will mount and ride them all, in turn.

  You must understand that the women are all there voluntarily, in full knowledge of what he requires, and that not one of them will go away in the morning sexually unsatisfied, and that they are probably not the same ones who will grace his bed tomorrow. Reynauld does not have to hunt: there are more than enough women who are only too eager to follow up on the rumours of this wealthy, handsome man who’s kinky for group sex and drinks a little blood, never more than a few mouthfuls from each of his paramours in a night, and in return is the most exquisite, prodigious lover. Most of them are young and every one of them is beautiful. Those that show unhealthy attitudes – too addicted to the bites, too clingy, too jealous – are coolly and firmly deposed from his favoured circle. It’s easy enough to fill the gap with another model, another talented actress, another rising TV personality. Thus he keeps a list of select and discreet bedfellows on call, the cream of the City, and treats them with courtesy and generosity.

  Not one of them is permitted any delusions of emotional intimacy.

  You’ll never find a man in that emperor-sized bed. Reynauld has no aversion to feeding from men, but he will not tolerate another cock among his hens. Ben calls them his harem, which Reynauld finds mildly offensive. But it’s better than ‘pets’.

  Yet for all his authority and his confidence in the way he has chosen for his kin, Reynauld lives with a creeping fear. It looks him in the face every dawn, when he surges gasping from sleep like a man struggling from deep water. He does sleep now, whereas in the past he never needed to. He is growing older: not weakening, but drifting inexorably to the shadows. For decades he has struggled to remain conscious during daylight hours, even for as little as a few minutes, but these days he knows the battle is lost. As the sun rises he slides into a blackness so complete that even physical damage can’t wake him, so he must be sure to be somewhere safe when the dawn strikes. ‘Safe’, in the old days, used to mean a shuttered room. These days it is a basement beneath The Bonding, behind a steel security door that would shame most bank vaults, with a lock that depends on fingerprint recognition and a manual seven-digit backup key known only to himself and Amanda. He trusts no one but her, and mistrusts his peers outright. If they knew how constrained he was it would make him terribly vulnerable.

  For the first time he is beginning to feel anxious about the others.

  Inside the vault is an airtight steel box with heavy bolts on the inside of the lid. It is, he recognises sourly, a sarcophagus in all but name. Reynauld despises the gothic accoutrements of the vampire condition. He doesn’t even like the word ‘vampire’, so redolent of Technicolor B-movie kitsch – medieval/Victorian wenches in 70s makeup and cheesecake heroes strutting through faux Romanian villages – and he uses other synonyms instead, but practicality has led him to this pass: he must be safe while he rests. Worse still, he has found that he can no longer pass out painlessly upon even the softest of mattresses within. He must have newly-dug earth beneath him to make the transition bearable; something about the scent, he admits, is soothing. Again, no one but Amanda knows. She’s the one in charge of ordering in bags of topsoil along with The Bonding’s other supplies.

  His worst nightmare is coming to pass: he is turning into something less than human, instead of more. Reynauld is following the same path that Roisin treads before him, and he dreads it. He will become in time as she is now: a thing of shadow and nightmare, an insubstantial haunting without true form or individuality. It is inevitable. And Reynauld, who has fought more than any other vampire to retain his humanity, rails with all his heart against this. He who has had so many names and homes now makes sure to hoard mementoes of each one. He takes out his souvenirs when he is alone – a broken cup, a lace handkerchief, a calling card, a hundred different pieces of inconsequential tat – and turns them over in his hands, reliving the memories, making sure that they are still strong.

  He’d died in the spring, when the mountain crocuses were just opening …

  He’d been sent out from the House of Wisdom to find a book. Such journeys were far from uncommon because the Caliph had ordered that a copy of every book of human knowledge, in whatsoever language it was written, be brought to the House and copied there into Arabic, to make the building an unequalled treasury of the understanding of man. Agents of the House were dispatched, so often as news came to them of a particularly valuable tome, as far as Constantinople and Alexandria and Ethiopia to make purchases. Kerim, as he had been called then, had been translating a torn scroll when he’d come across a reference to a heathen astronomer – a woman, to his surprise – who had been buried with her books in the Zagros Mountains to the east, many years ago. He’d made application to be allowed to search out these volumes, and had set out from Baghdad with an entourage of two trained warriors and three servants; they aimed to travel fast and provoke as little notice as possible.

  High in the Zagros they’d found the little village indicated in the fragment, and heard that the cliff face at the head of the valley was known as Umm Hol, which had excited Kerim greatly because that was the name of the dead astronomer herself, or perhaps her title, since it meant Mother of Terror. They’d made their way to the cliff face and there, high over the valley floor, had spotted a slit-shaped opening in the bare rock that seemed to have been backfilled with rubble. Faint carvings suggested an inscription below that opening, but they were weathered beyond legibility. Constructing ladders of ropes pinned to the rock-face and working in turns, they’d unloaded the rock infill into the stream bed below, working quickly because the villagers had turned hostile and often came to throw stones at them. By the end of the first day they’d got inside the cave chiselled into the cliff, and in the middle of that night they’d uncovered a stone sarcophagus cut from the rock itself. It had taken three men to slide back the slab that covered it, and then Kerim had bent over to see what had been hidden beneath for untold years.

  A hand, filthy and stick-thin, had shot out of that dark space and sliced into his neck. He’d fallen back on to the floor, and then seen another arm seize the servant from the other side of the tomb and drag him in, snapping his spine. Slumped against the cave wall and trying desperately to staunch the blood running from his throat, Kerim had watched the other men panic. The other two servants had blundered toward the exit; one fell out as the other pus
hed him. The torches had gone flying, shadows leaping wildly about the cave. The two soldiers had pulled their swords and struck at the creature, but it had done them no good; it had risen out of the tomb, striking swifter than an arrow flies from the bow: blackened, skeletal, mere rags of skin on bone, with blazing eyes and long yellow teeth. It had gorged itself on the living and slain them all, and finally made its way to Kerim, who’d been barely clinging to consciousness. Its cadaverous face looming over his was the last memory he had of his living years.

  It had spared him death, he’d found out, because it was acute enough to realise it was centuries since it had last moved among men and it wanted a guide. Spared him death, but not torment. For the rest of the night and all the next day and night, as the changes had ripped through his tissues, he’d suffered the agonies of rebirth while Umm Hol hissed questions in archaic Persian and lapped the blood oozing from his throat. Luckily for him the tomb faced east: as the dawn sun lanced over a mountain ridge the creature had retreated hissing, wisps of smoke rising from its exposed skin, then crawled back into its sarcophagus and pulled the slab over itself. On the second night it had gone hunting and returned with a goat whose blood it had fed to him.

  On the second morning Kerim had woken to find his neck healed. He’d risen, discovered himself unable to bear the dawn light in his eyes, and withdrawn into the shadows at the back of the cave. He had seen what the light did to his captor; he didn’t imagine himself immune. Three men with poles had been needed to move the lid of the tomb the first time, but he did it himself now. Umm Hol, replete with the blood, lay within – no longer a leathery corpse but a slender woman with hair like a midnight sea. Her lips had been full and red, as moist as the crease between her legs, and her dark nipples had seemed to stare up at him. Without hesitation he’d plucked her body from the sarcophagus, embraced it in his arms and walked out on to the sunlit apron of rock.

  Umm Hol had burned, screaming, to greasy ash and cinders in his arms, but to Kerim’s stunned dismay he himself had remained unharmed.

  He hadn’t even had a name for the thing he had become.

  It’s been a long road he’s walked since that day, and everything he has learned he’s discovered on his own, without guidance from vampire-kind. He has done things he’s now ashamed of, and walked in the darkest of places. But somehow over the years he’s finally managed to work out a peace with himself and his nature – a peace which still holds, for the moment.

  So this is Reynauld, who sits in the dark before an old tin chest of junk, turning the pieces in his hands, gazing at the past but seeing with dread the future.

  6: Five for the Symbols at Your Door

  The man walked up to the shop window, scanned the name on the frontage and frowned. The line Mind Body & Spirit seemed to fill him with dismay. Cerri, standing behind the till, watched through the glass as his gaze dropped to the window display itself: witchcraft books and crystals and goddess statues and a jolly Ganesha figure that held lit incense in one outstretched hand. His expression, which had been tense up to this point, dropped like a failed soufflé and set into a stodgy solid of disapproval.

  Cerri bit her lip thoughtfully. This was probably him. She was even surer when he looked around for the building number and checked a small piece of paper in his hand. Then his gaze fell on the lintel over the door, and she watched as he physically recoiled, taking a step back across the pavement and nearly backing into a passing mother and pram. Cerri continued to watch as he apologised. After that he looked around, walked away a few paces, hesitated and turned back to look at the shop.

  Enough, she thought, reaching the door and opening it. His eyebrows shot up as she gestured to him with a crook of her fingers and a smile. He didn’t look at all pleased, but he sidled back toward her.

  ‘You’re Doug?’

  ‘Uh … Douglas.’ He was younger than she’d been expecting, or perhaps just had an open youthful face. He looked like he’d grown that goatee in an ill-advised attempt to make up for eyelashes so long that they were almost feminine, but it had come out an unfortunate gingery shade despite his blond hair above. He was wearing a jacket and open shirt and chinos and she didn’t think she’d ever seen a man look so ill at ease.

  He was cute, she thought. Cute like a puppy. And nearly as helpless.

  ‘And you’re Cerri?’

  ‘That’s right. You want to come in?’

  His gaze drifted up again, to the lintel where the iron pentagram was fixed. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You asked for help.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He started to back away. ‘I won’t waste any more of your time.’

  ‘It symbolises the whole human being,’ she said, more firmly. ‘The five points represent earth, air, fire, water and spirit.’ She smiled. ‘Absolutely nothing to do with devil worship, I promise.’

  His mouth opened a little, his eyes searching her. She waited, giving him the chance to take in her long corded braids, the blue and lilac hair weaves, the stud through her nose, the rather generous cleavage of her low-cut dress. This was his last chance.

  ‘Um,’ said he.

  ‘Amanda said you were looking for help. Come on in.’ Turning back into the shop interior, she didn’t wait to see if he would obey. But she was pleased when he did. Once inside he looked around with undisguised suspicion at the bright and glittery New Age wares, as if he expected the walls to start running with blood.

  ‘Drop the latch, will you? And turn the sign over so it says Closed.’ He cleared his throat, but she carried on before he could question her: ‘I’m assuming you’d like this to be confidential?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted faintly. ‘That’d be good.’

  ‘Right. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘Camomile, or sage, or raspberry ‘n’ rose-petal? It won’t be poisoned. Or spiked.’

  He flushed. ‘Raspberry then?’

  ‘This way.’

  She led him through the door at the rear of the small shop and up the stairs to her apartment. She was rather proud of her flat, as she was proud of her cleavage: she knew it made a favourable impression on most people. Everything was light and clean, the floors all bare pale wood, the walls cream, the furniture draped with white throws. She took him into the living room where a case of books was the only thing that clashed with the decor, and sat him down. He glanced at the pictures hung on the walls: framed collages of dead leaves and pressed flowers and natural objets trouvés. He brushed a large driftwood stump beside his chair with nervous fingers.

  ‘The pictures are nice. Did you make them?’

  Cerri nodded, pleased. ‘I sell them online. Back in a sec.’

  When she came back in with mugs of tea he was still perched in the armchair, his elbows on his knees, but she was fairly sure he’d been peering at the books on her shelf.

  ‘You’re a Wiccan,’ he said, as if concluding an investigation.

  ‘I’m a pagan,’ she corrected. ‘But not Wiccan. And not,’ she added with a grin, ‘any sort of Satanist. Promise.’

  ‘OK.’ He had a look that said he was reserving judgement, but willing to talk. She took the light out of his eyes with her next words though.

  ‘So, what’s your problem?’

  He looked down into his fragrant tisane. ‘I’m not sure that …’ He let the sentence hang miserably.

  ‘Let me make it easier. It was Amanda Grey who rang me and asked me to help you.’

  ‘Amanda?’

  ‘Silvery hair, expensive clothes, very respectable looking? You had an appointment with her at nine this morning.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes … She didn’t tell me her name. Amanda.’

  ‘So it’s something to do with vampires then?’

  Doug’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know about them?’

  ‘You’d be amazed how many people know.’ She slipped her shoes off and tucked her feet up beneath her on the sofa. ‘What’s your story, Doug?’

  He swallowed. ‘I’m be
ing threatened by one.’

  ‘A vampire?’

  He nodded.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Didn’t Amanda tell you?’

  ‘She hasn’t told me anything except that you need help. Start at the beginning, Doug.’

  ‘Right.’ He wet his lips. ‘Well, a week ago this man … came up to me. He started to make threats. He’s been round my house and … waiting for me after work. He stands in the garden at night. He turns up out of the blue …’ He shivered. ‘You can’t see him coming. He’s just there. I went to the police, of course. I said I was being stalked and threatened. When I told them what he’d said they …’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘They said it wasn’t police business.’

  ‘What had he said?’

  Doug stared across the room at the window, a muscle in his jaw flexing. ‘He said he was going to rip out my throat with his teeth and … um … make use of my still-warm body. And that, apparently, is not something the police see fit to take seriously.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But they gave me a number to call, said it was a special harassment helpline, and I was given an interview with this woman. Amanda. It didn’t seem right to me. Little office, no nameplate on the door, barely any furniture. I didn’t believe it was straight up. And she wasn’t exactly sympathetic.’

  ‘But she believed you?’

  Doug snorted, bitterly. ‘Oh, yes, she believed me. She took notes on everything and then told me to Lie Back and Think of England.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Words to that effect anyway. She said the man was lying, that he wouldn’t kill me or cause any permanent damage: that he was just trying to scare me. That was how he got his kicks. She said he’d only take a little blood – maybe a pint – and there wasn’t any health risk, so that’s all right then. Then she showed me the door.’