by Tara Moss
I thought of the picture I’d found in the desk drawer. ‘I was wondering if you’d heard from Samantha because I found a picture in her desk that might be important to her,’ I explained. I went over to my cubicle, put my briefcase and coat down, and returned to reception with the creased photograph.
That’s when I saw the tattoo on her arm. I’d seen it in the photograph before, but not really noticed it. Now it registered – now it really registered, and I was totally sure.
‘Yeah, that’s her,’ Morticia said, and nodded. ‘You may as well throw it away. I don’t think she’s coming back for it.’
You’re probably right about that, I thought. But if she does come back, you won’t want to hang around . . .
So what do you do on your first day of knowing that the world is not at all what you thought it was? That vampires exist? That you’ve been communicating with the dead . . . and the undead?
You work, apparently. You work really, really hard.
With few scientific answers available to account for my recent discoveries (rational thinking would have been my dad’s approach), I decided to bury myself in research for the article I planned to present to Pepper. She arrived late, looking a whole lot more rested than I did, but she seemed preoccupied and she didn’t hassle me for my notes from the launch. That suited me just fine, especially as every question about BloodofYouth I sought answers for only led to further questions.
I played the BloodofYouth DVD and read every subtitled word of Dr Toth’s speech. Strangely, there did not seem to be any revolutionary new ingredients in this apparently revolutionary new cream. I called the actor, Toni, to ask her if she knew that the patent for the product was only made up of things like methylparaben, butylparaben, ethylparaben, isobutylparaben, propylparaben, simethicone and some perfume – all common ingredients in skin creams, apparently, and nothing that could logically cause the dramatic results she claimed. But Toni didn’t answer the phone. I sent her an email and hoped for a speedy response so I could include her quote in the piece I presented to Pepper. I sent a similar email to Henrietta at the PR company, but expected a more cautious response from her, if any.
Weirdly, my Internet searches for BloodofYouth resulted in a lot of hits about the buzz surrounding the product, but very little information. The product website was basic. The company was based in Eastern Europe as far as I could tell, and it was not attached to any major cosmetic company, as I imagined most big products were. BloodofYouth seemed to have brought America to a fever pitch in a remarkably short period of time, and for no obvious pharmaceutical reason. I was intrigued, and even more so when Dr Toth, the doctor behind the ‘revolutionary’ product, came up only in searches related to BloodofYouth. He did not seem to be attached to any university, scientific institution or major company. Who was he? I was determined to click on every single link referencing him online.
At noon I stepped out to pick up some takeaway and when I returned with a tray of sushi, I noticed a bouquet of flowers sitting on my desk. It was so big I could see it clearly from across the room and I am ashamed to admit that the sight of them made my heart skip a beat. Long-stemmed red roses? For me? It took a moment before the obvious dawned on me, and my hopes fell in a heap. Naturally they would be for Skye, not for me. Doubtless it was something from her boyfriend or an admirer. A get-well card would be attached. Who had I imagined would send me flowers? I’d never been sent flowers in my life.
Silly.
Morticia was eating a bagel for lunch. She had her Doc Martens up on the reception desk, and she gave me a wink. ‘You sure made an impression on someone at the launch . . .’
‘The flowers?’ I looked at them again. ‘They’re for me?’ Can ghosts send flowers? I wondered fleetingly, and was glad the idea didn’t escape my lips.
‘Yup,’ Morticia said. ‘They arrived just after you left.’
‘Oh . . .’ I hurried towards my desk, and Morticia trailed behind, still chewing. When she stood waiting next to me, I flashed her a look.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘It’s no secret, is it? Who are they from?’
I raised an eyebrow at her and she got my drift.
‘Okay, fine,’ she said reluctantly. ‘If you don’t want to tell me who your boyfriend is, that’s fine.’ She slunk away, disappointed, and plonked herself at reception with an exaggerated flop.
I took off my coat and sat in my chair. Oh boy . . . The flowers were completely gorgeous; plump red and long-stemmed. They didn’t have any scent, but they were exquisite to look at. And there were so many of them. It was quite a romantic gesture – but from whom? I found a small white envelope stuck to the side of the bouquet with a pin. I took a breath, pulled the pin out and opened the envelope. I slid the little rectangular card out with my eyes closed.
I held the card in my hand, and opened my tired eyes.
Dear Pandora,
It was lovely to see you last night. Please give me your number.
I’d like to show you New York.
Jay
My heart fluttered and I put the card down on my desk. Inside the envelope was a second card, this one a little less romantic. It was Jay’s business card for Men Only magazine. It had his email address and cell number on it.
Oh boy . . .
I got home, remembered to knock, and slipped inside Celia’s penthouse bursting with questions. ‘Good evening, Great-Aunt Celia.’
‘Hello, darling Pandora,’ she replied, and closed her book. ‘Oh dear, you do look a bit fatigued.’
I nodded. ‘I know, I know. But I don’t care – I’m a genius!’ I cried.
‘Oh, I see,’ she replied, ever understated.
I held up a printout of an email I had received from an actor in Romania – an actor who had a website listing his appearance in a commercial for BloodofYouth among his credits. He had responded eagerly to my enquiry, probably because he didn’t mind getting famous if there was a scandal. This was gold. Absolute gold.
‘I’ve got them! There is no Dr Toth – they had an actor play him. He’s a fabrication!’ I waved the piece of paper triumphantly.
‘Well, it seems you’ve had an interesting day.’
‘Oh, there will be a scandal when this breaks,’ I told Celia excitedly. ‘Pepper gave me until tomorrow morning. I think she’ll be well impressed.’ How could she resist running the story? It was huge.
‘And what about everyone else? Will they be impressed?’ Celia asked. She didn’t seem as overjoyed as I was.
‘Who? The public?’ I asked. ‘They will be amazed and rather cross to discover they are being sold an expensive lie about a beauty product that’s no more revolutionary than the hand cream they buy at the local supermarket! There is no secret ingredient. It’s hogwash!’ I declared.
I’d heard stories about this kind of thing – how marketing basic products with fancy labels and beautiful advertising campaigns could earn a fortune under false pretences – and now I’d found a classic example, from what appeared to be a fraudulent company to boot. This beat the heck out of my idea for an article about vintage clothing. Yet Great-Aunt Celia did not seem as excited as I’d expected.
‘There is no secret ingredient?’ she repeated slowly, and raised an eyebrow. There was something very odd about the way she said the words. It was as if she already knew the answer, and was asking the question solely for my benefit.
‘No,’ I confirmed. I frowned. ‘The listed ingredients are all found in other products.’ That’s what I’d discovered, and easily too. There was nothing new about it, and the manufacturers must have thought they could get away with their claim to be revolutionary because so many products had got away with similarly exaggerated claims before. They were crazy if they thought it wouldn’t catch up with them.
‘Hmm,’ Celia said, not sounding convinced.
I frowned again. In my enthusiasm, it seemed I had missed what she was trying to tell me, but I couldn’t imagine what that might be.
‘Well, goo
d luck with the article, darling.’ Celia looked down, and crossed her ankles. ‘Now, have you thought any more about what we were talking about last night?’ she asked, smoothly changing the subject.
‘We were talking last night about your age. And about . . .’ Vampires.
‘Oh yes, my age – my favourite subject,’ she said.
‘I’ve been thinking about our conversation,’ I said, although in truth I’d been so caught up in my BloodofYouth research that I hadn’t given it much thought since my conversation with Morticia about poor, deadly, undead Samantha. I tried to recall one of the many questions that had been buzzing around my brain as I’d walked to work that morning. ‘You said Lucasta women have gifts. So is your special gift immortality?’
Celia sighed. ‘Well, no,’ she said patiently. ‘Please sit down.’
I did, taking my usual place on the edge of the hassock while my host reclined glamorously. I was still vibrating with excitement about my article on BloodofYouth. I began tapping my foot impatiently, caught myself and stopped.
‘Darling, the Lucasta women have all had gifts, different gifts, different strengths, but none of the Lucasta women has ever been immortal,’ my great-aunt explained. Then she pinched her brows together. ‘Well, none that I am aware of. I suppose some of them may have become undead, but if so they never dropped me a line. I think that would be rude, don’t you?’
Celia’s face was as elegantly deadpan as ever.
Undead was a significant new word in my big-city vocabulary, it seemed, along with psychic and spontaneous combustion. I knew I’d have a lot to learn when I left Gretchenville.
‘I can see you are a clever girl with an inquiring mind, Pandora. I know you aren’t going to give this up, this business about my age and identity. But if I tell you, you have to promise not to tell anyone. Okay? Really. Not Georgia, and not any of your friends at work.’
I nodded vigorously. ‘I promise.’
‘I’ll make you keep this promise,’ she warned me. ‘And I have ways of making sure this promise is kept.’
Somehow I believed her.
Could I really promise though? What if Celia told me she was a mass-murdering impostor? Of course, I didn’t believe that, but still, what if?
Celia smiled, almost as if she’d heard my thoughts. ‘Be patient, and you will have all the knowledge you want,’ she told me. ‘First of all, I think you should see this.’ Celia reached behind her and pulled a large photo album into her lap. ‘This should settle any qualms you have about identity.’
The book she handed me was heavy, and a little dusty. It was filled with yellowing photographs and newspaper clippings from Celia’s past life as a high-flying designer for the stars. Here she was with Lauren Bacall – whom she’d designed that knockout red dress for – and Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner.
My eyes grew wide. ‘Oh wow! Celia, this is amazing.’ I pored over the images, finding myself quite star-struck. I even recognised one of the photographs as one my mother used to have on her vanity. This was indeed Celia.
‘This was on the set of Ziegfeld Girl,’ Celia explained. ‘That’s Judy Garland.’ She turned the page over to show a black and white image of two women standing in front of racks of elaborate costumes. I saw feathers, sequins, furs. ‘That’s Lana Turner with Judy. Such a lovely-looking woman, don’t you think?’
I paused when I came to a photo of two women who looked very alike. One of the women was Celia, I could tell, though her face was a little rounder then. The woman she was with looked like she could be Celia’s older sister. ‘Who is this?’
‘That’s Hedy Lamarr.’
I squinted. I knew the name, though not well.
‘I fell in with Hedwig for a while,’ Celia mused, tapping the image with her fingernail. ‘She was known as Hedy by all the Hollywood types, but I called her Hedwig, her real name. She was a very troubled woman, but so very intelligent, with a body for fashion and a head for science. She was quite mathematical. And she knew all kinds of things too. She had “gifts”, a bit like you, Pandora. She could have been a Lucasta.’
I gazed at the woman’s face in the photograph. There was something quite extraordinary about her eyes. I recognised something about her. She had been quite famous in her day, but of course those days had been the 1930s and 40s. Most people would have forgotten her by now.
‘Did you know that she coinvented spread-spectrum communications technology with the composer George Antheil?’ Celia asked.
I shook my head. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. She took me under her wing for a while when I was young and new to Hollywood,’ Celia explained. ‘She was the first to get me interested in science. Frequencies and so on. She had escaped her awful husband, an arms manufacturer in Vienna, and come to Hollywood armed with all kinds of political and military knowledge. By the time we met her film career was at its peak. Only a few years later, things became difficult for her.’ She looked at the photograph thoughtfully. ‘On a trip to New York we found this place. It was very rundown, but she could see that it was unusual, and I could too . . . Pandora, your abilities will shine here. Mine did. Moving here changed everything for me.’
She closed the album and sighed delicately. ‘So, can you see now that I am your great-aunt? That I am not an impostor?’
I nodded. None of this explained her youthful appearance, but I could not doubt her identity. ‘What happened to Hedy?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Hedwig. After I bought this place we drifted apart. It was the distance from Hollywood. Back then you didn’t just jet back and forth on a whim, like the stars do now. She was getting older and she went a little mad after her looks began to fade and Hollywood turned its back on her. By 1951, it was practically over for her. Hollywood eats up beautiful women and spits them out.’ Celia pursed her lips angrily. ‘They always have. She was only in her mid-thirties by then. Can you imagine? And she was not exactly the type to fade away quietly. That beautiful mind of hers was too much of a burden for her, I guess. She ended up in the headlines later in life for stealing underwear from a department store. She wound up in Florida, quite poor. She wrote me a letter once saying that she’d probably earned and spent nearly thirty million dollars, and then found she hadn’t enough to buy a sandwich. Her friends tried to help her out, but she was a proud woman. And who could blame her? I just wish she’d stayed in New York. She might have been present when Deus first called on me. He would have liked her a lot, I think.’
This, I could tell, was getting to the really interesting part of the story.
‘Pandora,’ she began, leaning forward. ‘I have a special friend. His name is Deus. He is . . . Sanguine.’
Sanguine? ‘You mean he is cheerfully optimistic?’ I asked. I knew the word from reading the dictionary, something I did a lot of in Gretchenville. Sanguine also meant ruddy of complexion, if memory served, but I doubted Celia would think that worth telling me.
My great-aunt chuckled. ‘No, darling. Not cheerful. He is, you know, Sanguineus.’
I frowned. I had the word filed away somewhere. Sanguineus . . . I thought of museums, textbooks. It was used in the Latin names for things. I thought of snapper, the fish. Scarlet snapper. Red.
‘Sanguineus: of blood,’ I said triumphantly as soon as it came to me. And then I thought immediately of the other familiar term: exsanguinate, to drain of blood, and my complexion did a little exsanguination of its own. ‘Do you mean he’s a vampire?’
Celia’s serene face tensed, and her cherry lips curled in distaste. ‘Darling, you really should know that we don’t use that word. It’s rude. I should have made that clear last night. Beings like Deus are Sanguine.’ Right. Cheerful vampires. That was better than melancholic, I supposed.
‘Vampire is a terribly pejorative term,’ Celia continued. ‘Well, vamp is sort of okay. Some of them use it in jest, or with irony, I suppose, the way African-American rappers use that horrible N word which I can’t bring myself to say.’ She wrinkled her nose.
‘In any event, I wouldn’t count on getting away with using the V word around a Sanguine. They are not likely to take it in good humour. But whatever you do don’t go calling them Nosferatu. It’s an old Slavonic expression meaning “plague carrier”.’
Oh god. Vampires. Sanguine. It’s real.
Hearing her say it aloud made me exhale suddenly. I went a little limp, and I felt Great-Aunt Celia’s icy hands hold me firmly by the upper arms. I’d been holding my breath.
‘Just take a breath now,’ she instructed me.
I did.
‘Do you need to? Breathe?’ I asked.
‘Of course. I told you, darling, I am not undead.’
Oh good. Celia is alive. I am not living with the undead. That’s nice.
‘Technically Deus doesn’t need to breathe, but, darling, no one will force you to meet him – though if you do meet him you’ll find he’s quite a gentleman, so don’t excite yourself. As I was saying, you mustn’t believe the things you read in those silly books of yours.’ She was speaking about her vampire friend casually now, in a tone one might use to discuss a friend who was a vegetarian or Scientologist. I felt a little freakout coming on, but I suppressed it. Who was I to say what was strange, or who my great-aunt could consort with? As the ‘weird girl’ who’d talked to the dead Gretchenville butcher, I was in no position to judge.
I nodded. ‘Okay, so Bram Stoker was wrong.’
‘About many things, yes.’ She thought for a moment. ‘And Sanguine don’t sparkle in the daylight, like those silly books everyone’s reading at the moment.’
‘… And there are no “vegetarian” Sanguine.’
Gulp. Right.
‘But vampires are immortal, right?’
Celia shook her head. ‘Only the gods are truly immortal,’ she said. ‘And even they are rumoured to have fallen. Everything passes, young Pandora, though some creatures don’t age or decay. Some creatures live so long it makes our short lives seem as insignificant as the fleeting lifetime of a butterfly.’
