The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  There was a sort of vestibule, vaguely lighted by old ornate lanterns. Beyond that was a big paved court, with pruned trees and raised flowerbeds, and then more steps. Casperon had gone for my luggage. I followed the wretched sallow man who had let me in.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him as we reached the next portion of the house, a blank wall lined only with blank black windows.

  “Anton.”

  “Where is the family?” I asked him.

  “Above,” was all he said.

  I said, halting, “Why was there no one to welcome me?”

  He didn’t reply. Feeling a fool, angry now, I stalked after him.

  There was another vast hall or vestibule. No lights, until he touched the switch and grayish weary side-lamps came on, giving little color to the stony towering space.

  “Where,” I said, in Juno’s voice, “is he? He at least should be here. Zeev Duvalle, my husband-to-be.” I spoke formally. “I am insulted. Go at once and tell him—”

  “He does not rise yet,” said Anton, as if to somebody invisible but tiresome. “He doesn’t rise until eight o’clock.”

  Day in night. Night was Zeev’s day, yet the sun had been gone over an hour now. Damn him, I thought. Damn him.

  It was useless to protest further. And when Casperon returned with the bags, I could say nothing to him, because this wasn’t his fault. And besides he would soon be gone. I was alone. As per usual.

  I met Zeev Duvalle at dinner. It was definitely a dinner, not a breakfast, despite their day-for-night policy. It was served in an upstairs conservatory, the glass panes open to the air. A long table draped in white, tall old greenish glasses, plates of some red china, probably Victorian. Only five or six other people came to the meal, and each introduced themself in a formal, chilly way. Only one woman, who looked about fifty and so probably was into her several hundreds, said she regretted not being there at my arrival. No excuse was offered however. They made me feel like what I was to them, a new house computer that could talk. A doll that would be able to have babies . . . yes. Horrible.

  By the time we sat down, in high-backed chairs, with huge orange trees standing around behind them like guards—a scene on a film set—I was boiling with cold anger. Part of me was afraid, too. I can’t really explain the fear, or of what. It was like being washed up out of the night ocean on an unknown shore, and all you can see are stones and emptiness, and no light to show the way.

  At Severin there were always types of ordinary food to be had—steaks, apples—we drank a little wine, took coffee or tea. But a lot of us were sun-born. Even Juno was. She hated daylight, but still tucked into the occasional croissant. Of course there was Proper Sustenance too. The blood of those animals we kept for that purpose, always collected with economy, care and gentleness from living beasts, which continued to live, well-fed and tended and never over-used, until their natural deaths. For special days there was special blood. This being drawn, also with respectful care, from among the human families who lived on the estate. They had no fear of giving blood, any more than the animals did. In return, their rewards were many and lavish. The same arrangement, so far as I knew, was similar among all the scattered families of our kind.

  Here at Duvalle, we were served with a black pitcher of blood, a white pitcher of white wine. Fresh bread, still warm, lay on the red dishes.

  That was all.

  I had taken proper Sustenance at the last hotel, drinking from my flask. I’d drunk a Coke on the road, too.

  Now I took a piece of bread, and filled my glass with an inch of wine.

  They all looked at me. Then away. Every other glass by then gleamed scarlet. One of the men said, “But, young lady, this is the best, this is human. We always take it at dinner. Come now.”

  “No,” I said, “thank you.”

  “Oh, but clearly you don’t know your own mind—”

  And then he spoke. From the doorway. He had only just come in, after his long rest or whatever else he had been doing for the past two and a half hours, as I was in my allotted apartment, showering, getting changed for this appalling night.

  What I saw first about him, Zeev Duvalle, was inevitable. The blondness, the whiteness of him, almost incandescent against the candlelit room and the dark beyond the glass. His hair was like molten platinum, just sombering down a bit to a kind of white gold in the shadow. His eyes weren’t gray, but green—gray-green like the crystal goblets. His skin after all wasn’t that pale. It had a sort of tawny look to it—not in any way like a tan. More as if it fed on darkness and had drawn some into itself. He was handsome, but I knew that. He looked now about nineteen. He had a perfect body, slim and strong; most vampires do. We eat the perfect food and very few extra calories—nothing too much or too little. But he was tall. Taller than anyone I’d ever met. About six and a half feet, I thought.

  Unlike the others, even me, he hadn’t smartened up for dinner. He wore un-new black jeans and a scruffy T-shirt with long torn sleeves. I could smell the outdoors on him, pine needles, smoke and night. He had been out in the grounds. There was . . . there was a little brown-red stain on one sleeve. Was it blood? From what?

  It came to me with a lurch what he really most resembled. A white wolf. And had this bloody wolf been out hunting in his vast forested park? What had he killed so mercilessly—some squirrel or hare—or a deer—that would be bad enough—or was it worse?

  I knew nothing about these people I’d been given to. I’d been too offended and allergic to the whole idea to do any research, ask any real questions. I had frowned at the brief movie they sent of him, thought: so, he’s cute and almost albino. I hadn’t even got that right. He was a wolf. He was a feral animal that preyed in the old way, by night, on things defenseless and afraid.

  This was when he said again, “Let her alone, Constantine.” Then, “Let her eat what she wants. She knows what she likes.” Then: “Hi, Daisha. I’m Zeev. If only you’d got here a little later, I’d have been here to welcome you.”

  I met his eyes, which was difficult. That glacial green, I slipped from its surface. I said quietly, “Don’t worry. Who cares.”

  He sat down at the table’s head. Though the youngest among them, he was the heir and therefore, supposedly, their leader now. His father died two years before, when his car left an upland road miles away. Luckily his companion, a woman from the Clays family, had called the house. The wreck of the car and his body had been retrieved by Duvalle before the sun could make a mess of both the living and the dead. All of us know, we survive largely through the wealth longevity enables us to gather, and the privacy it buys.

  The others started to drink their dinner again, passing the black jug. Only one of them took any bread, and that was to sop up the last red elements from inside his glass. He wiped the bread round like a cloth then stuffed it in his mouth. I sipped my wine. Zeev, seen from the side of my left eye, seemed to touch nothing. He merely sat there. He didn’t seem to look at me. I was glad of that.

  Then the man called Constantine said loudly, “Better get on with your supper, Wolf, or she’ll think you already found it in the woods. And among her clan that just isn’t done.”

  And some of them sniggered a little, softly. I wanted to hurl my glass at the wall—or at all their individual heads.

  But Zeev said, “What, you mean this on my T-shirt?” He too sounded amused.

  I put down my unfinished bread and got up. I glanced around at them, at him last of all.

  “I hope you’ll excuse me, I’ve been traveling and I’m tired.” Then I looked straight at him. Somehow it was shocking to do so. “And goodnight, Zeev. Now we’ve finally met.”

  He said nothing. None of them did.

  I walked out of the conservatory, crossed the large room beyond and headed for the staircase.

  Wolf. They even called him that.

  Wolf.

  “Wait,” he said, just behind me.

  I can move almost noiselessly and very fast, but not as noise
less and sudden as he apparently he could. Before I could prevent it I spun round wide-eyed. There he stood, less than three feet from me. He was expressionless, but when he spoke now his voice, actor-trained, I thought, was very musical. “Daisha Severin, I’m sorry. I’ve made a bad start with you.”

  “You noticed.”

  “Will you come with me—just upstairs—to the library. We can talk there without the rest of them making up an audience.”

  “Why do we want to? Talk, I mean.”

  “We should, I think. And maybe you’ll be gracious enough to humor me.”

  “Maybe I’ll just tell you to go to hell.”

  “Oh, there,” he said. He smiled. “No. I’d never go there. Too bright, too hot.”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  I was seven steps up the stairs when I found him beside me. I stopped again.

  “Give me,” he said, “one minute.”

  “I’ve been told I have to give you my entire life,” I said. “And then I have to give you children, too, I nearly forgot. Kids who can survive in full daylight, just like me. I think that’s enough, isn’t it, Zeev Duvalle? You don’t need a silly little minute from me when I have to give you all the rest.”

  He let me go then.

  I ran up the stairs.

  When I reached the upper landing I looked back down, between a kind of elation and a sort of horror. But he had vanished. The part-lit spaces of the house again seemed void of anything alive, except for me.

  Juno. I dreamed about her that night. I dreamed she was in a jet-black cave where water dripped, and she held a dead child in her arms and wept.

  The child was me, I suppose. What she had feared the most when they, my house of Severin, made her carry me out into the oncoming dawn, to see how much if anything I could stand. Just one minute. What he had asked for too, Zeev. I hadn’t granted it to him. But she—and I—had had no choice.

  When I survived sunrise, she was at first very glad. But then, when I began to keep asking, When can I see the light again? Then, oh then. Then she began to lose me, and I her, my tall, red-haired, blue-eyed mother.

  She never told me, but it’s simple to work out. The more I took to daylight, the more I proved I was a true sun-born, the more she lost me, and I lost her. She herself could stand two or three hours, every week or so. But she hated the light, the sun. They terrified her, and when I turned out so able to withstand them, even to like and—want them, then the doors of her heart shut fast against me.

  Juno hated me just as she hated the light of the sun. She hated me, loathed me, loathes me, my mother.

  Part Three

  About three weeks went by. The pines darkened and the other trees turned to copper and bronze and shed like tall cats their fur of leaves. I went on walks about the estate. No one either encouraged or dissuaded me. They had then nothing they wanted to hide from me? But I don’t drive, and so there was a limit to how far I could go and get back again in the increasingly chilly evenings. By day, anyway, there seemed little activity, in the house or outside it. I started sleeping later in the mornings so I could stay up at night fully alert, sometimes, until four or five. It was less I was checking on what went on in the house-castle of Duvalle, than that I was uncomfortable so many of them were around, and active, when I lay asleep. There was a lock on my door. I always used it. I put a chair against it too, with the back under the door-handle. It wasn’t Zeev I was worried about. No one, in particular. Just the complete feel and atmosphere of that place. At Severin there had been several who were mostly or totally nocturnal—my mother, for one. But also quite a few like me who, even if they couldn’t take much direct sunlight, as I could, still preferred to be about by day.

  A couple of times during my outdoor excursions in daylight, I did find clearings in the woods, with small houses, vines, orchards, fields with a harvest already collected. I even once saw some men with a flock of sheep. Neither sheep nor men took any notice of me. No doubt they had been warned a new Wife-of-Alliance was here, and shown what she looked like.

  The marriage had been set for the first night of the following month. The ceremony would be brief, unadorned, simply a legalization. Marriages in most of the houses were like this. Nothing especially celebratory, let alone religious, came into them.

  I thought I’d resigned myself. But of course, I hadn’t. As for him, Zeev Duvalle, I’d been “meeting” him generally only at dinner—those barren awful dinners where good manners seemed to demand I attend. Sometimes I was served meat—I alone. A crystal bowl of fruit had appeared—for me. I ate with difficulty amid their “fastidious” contempt. I began a habit of removing pieces of fruit to eat later in my rooms. He was only ever polite. He would unsmilingly and bleakly offer me bread and wine, water . . . Sometimes I did drink the blood. I needed to. To me it had a strange taste, which maybe I imagined.

  During the night, now and then, I might see him about the house, playing chess with one of the others, listening to music or reading in the library, talking softly on a telephone. Three or four times I saw him from an upper window, outside and running in long wolf-like bounds between the trees, the paleness of his hair like a beam blown off the face of the moon.

  Hunting?

  I intended to get married in black. Like the girl in the Chekhov play, I too was in mourning for my life. That night I hung the dress outside the closet, and put the black pumps below, ready for tomorrow. No jewelry.

  Also I made a resolve not to go down to their dire dinner. To the older woman who read novels at the table and laughed smugly, secretively at things in them; the vile man with his bread-cloth in the glass. The handful of others, some of whom never turned up regularly anyhow, their low voices murmuring to each other about past times and people known only to them. And him. Zeev. Him. He drank from his glass very couthly, unlike certain others. Sometimes a glass of water, or some wine—for him usually red, as if it must pretend to be blood. He had dressed more elegantly since the first night, but always his clothes were quiet. There was one dark white shirt, made of some sort of velvety material, with bone-color buttons . . . He looked beautiful. I could have killed him. We’re easy to kill—car crashes, bullets—though we can live, Tyfa had once said, even a thousand years. But that’s probably one more lie.

  However, tonight I wouldn’t go down there. I’d eat up here, the last apple and the dried cherries.

  About ten thirty, a knock on my door.

  I jumped, more because I expected it than because I was startled. I put down the book I’d been reading, the Chekhov plays, and said, “Who is it?” Knowing who it was.

  “May I come in?” he asked, formal and musical, alien.

  “I’d rather you left me alone,” I said.

  He said, without emphasis, “All right, Daisha. I’ll go down to the library. No one else will be there. There’ll be fresh coffee. I’ll wait for you until midnight. Then I have things I have to do.”

  I’d got up and crossed to the door. I said through it with a crackling venom that surprised me, I’d thought I had it leashed, “Things to do? Oh, when you go out hunting animals and rip them apart in the woods for proper fresh blood, that kind of thing do you mean?”

  There was silence. Then, “I’ll wait till midnight,” he flatly said.

  Then he was gone, I knew, though I never heard him leave.

  When I walked into the library it was after eleven, and I was wearing my wedding dress and shoes. I told him what they were.

  “It’s supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it,” I said, “for the groom to see the bride in her dress before the wedding. But there’s no luck to spoil, is there?”

  He was sitting in one of the chairs by the fire, his long legs stretched out. He’d put on jeans and sweater and boots for the excursion later. A leather jacket hung from the chair.

  The coffee was still waiting but it would be cold by now. Even so he got up, poured me a cup, brought it to me. He managed—he always managed this—to hand it to me without touching me.
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  Then he moved away and stood by the hearth, gazing across at the high walls of books.

  “Daisha,” he said, “I think I understand how uncomfortable and angry you are—”

  “Do you.”

  “—but I can ask that you listen. Without interrupting or storming out of the room—”

  “Oh for God’s—”

  “Daisha.” He turned his eyes on me. From glass-green they too had become almost white. He was flaming mad, anyone could see, but unlike me, he’d controlled it. He used it, like a cracking whip spattering electricity across the room. And at the same time—the pain in his face. The closed-in pain and—was it only frustration, or despair? That was what held me, or I’d have walked out, as he said. I stood there stunned, and thought, He hurts as I do. Why? Who did this to him? God, he hates the idea of marrying me as much as I hate it. Or—he hates the way he—we—are being used.

  “Okay,” I said. I sat down on a chair. I put the cold coffee on the floor. “Talk. I’ll listen.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  A huge old clock ticked on the mantlepiece above the fire. Tock-tock-tock. Each note a second. Sixty now. That minute he’d asked from me before. Or the minute when Juno held me in the sunrise, shaking.

  “Daisha. I’m well aware you don’t want to be here, let alone with me. I hoped you wouldn’t feel that way, but I’m not amazed you do. You had to leave your own house, where you had familiar people, love, stability—” I had said I’d keep quiet, I didn’t argue—“and move into this fucking monument to a castle, and be ready to become the partner of some guy you never saw except in a scrap of a movie. I’ll be honest. The moment I saw the photos of you, I was drawn to you. I stupidly thought, this is a beautiful, strong woman that I’d like to know. Maybe we can make something of this pre-arranged mess. I meant make something for ourselves, you and me. Kids were—are—the last thing on my mind. We’d have a long time after all, to reach a decision on that. But you. I was—looking forward to meeting you. And I would have been there, to meet you. Only something happened. No. Not some compulsion I have to go out and tear animals apart and drink them in the forest. Daisha,” he said, “have you been to look at the waterfall?”