Fantasy

by Rich Horton

  “Your point?” I asked.

  “My point—” She caressed one of the spikes again. “My point is, that horrible cure spoils everything.”

  “I guess I can understand that. Having to be around people knowing that you can’t turn them—must be very frustrating.” I chuckled. “Like being impotent and frigid all at once.”

  Misty’s lips curled with elegant disgust. “When I said that horrible cure spoils everything, I mean it spoils everything. Not only can we not turn you, we can’t feed on you, either. The blood’s no good. Now do you get it?”

  “Well, yes, I did know that—” I cut off. I had known it, but I hadn’t actually given it much thought.

  “Worse, now they’re giving the cure to people who have never been vampires,” Misty said. “We can’t reverse the cure on them—it doesn’t work. So they’re permanently immune to us. The food supply isn’t just disappearing, it’s evaporating, faster all the time. At this rate, we’ll be gone in a generation.”

  Vaccination and cure in one handy vial. “Wow.” I frowned. “That fast? Are you sure?”

  Misty looked like she wanted to slap me.

  “But surely some vampire genius will come up with a way to counteract that immunity, too,” I said.

  “Not if we all die out first,” Misty growled.

  “I doubt that’ll happen.”

  “Yeah? Well, some of us don’t want to take any chances.” She nodded at the glass I was holding. “Now drink up.”

  I glanced down at the red-brown liquid. “You spiked my drink? I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you, shocked.”

  She leaned into me again. “Feel anything yet?”

  I made a thinking-hard face. “Nope. Are you sure you didn’t make a mistake and put in vodka instead?”

  “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to live forever?”

  “Of course I do. I just don’t want to be undead forever.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know. It’s complicated. There are a lot of different ­reasons.” I looked around for a place to put the glass down, spotted a small end table, and set it there next to a replica of Aladdin’s Lamp. “I guess what it comes down to is, I’m just over it. Besides, who says it’s going to be forever? Once the people supply dries up, we’ll be forced to prey on each other. And the more of us there are then, the quicker we’ll die out. You’re really just delaying the inevitable.”

  “So?” Misty looked offended. “What’s wrong with that? Who wouldn’t delay the inevitable if the inevitable is their own destruction? Who doesn’t?”

  I sighed and stood up. “Look, Misty, we can argue this for hours, but in the end, I’ll still be a lost cause. Meanwhile, you’ve got people in the other room champing at the bit to let you turn them again. Why don’t you give them all a break by making an exception to your three-groups-of-thirteen rule? Just this once?”

  She folded her arms huffily. “You’re so completely secular you can’t understand the need someone else might have for spiritual ceremony and ritual.”

  “Then take two groups of thirteen and tell the other twelve they’ll have to find someone else.”

  “Do you not understand how excruciatingly rude that is?” Misty said, irritated and incredulous. “Honestly, Lily, who raised you— wolves?”

  “No, thank God,” I said emphatically, and I didn’t feel even a minor twinge for that one, because I really meant it. The cure for lycanthropy makes the one for vampirism pale in comparison; it’s like rabies shots, only a thousand times worse. In fact, I knew someone who had had the supreme misfortune to experience both. He told me that if he had to choose between the two, he’d take the rabies shots. Or the silver bullet.

  “You really don’t feel anything?” Misty said again, standing up and turning me so she could look deeply and longingly into my eyes.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  She studied me for some unmeasured amount of time with those moonstone eyes, trying to will a change of heart in me. I found myself almost wishing she could, but that wasn’t possible. Once you’re immune to a vampire’s bite, you’re immune to the whole package, including mind control.

  Finally she stepped back. “Okay. You’re right—it’s no good. You can go.” She gestured at the door.

  I took a step toward it and then hesitated. “Is there some other exit I could use? If I go back out there and tell all those people they aren’t turning tonight, they’ll tear me limb from limb and make gravy from my bones.”

  Her mouth twitched.

  “Come on. I’d do the same for you. You know I would.”

  Now she heaved an enormous sigh which, given that corset and the fact that she didn’t really have to breathe, was quite an accomplishment. “Oh, all right. I’ll let you out the fire exit. This time. But don’t let me see you back here unless you mean business or I will toss you to the mob.”

  I chuckled without humor. “No danger of that.”

  “No?” Suddenly she looked sly.

  “This cure reversal of yours will be long out of my system before I get within a mile of this place again.”

  “Maybe.” The evil in her blood red smile was sincere. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  At least there wasn’t any bullshit about how we ought to keep in touch or go out for coffee sometime.

  * * * *

  Grace left a few messages on my answering machine. I didn’t return any of her calls, of course, and after two weeks she took the hint and left me alone. I suppose I should have turned them all in, Mistral and Grace and the other thirty-seven, but I really couldn’t bring myself to do it. Nor did I feel even the slightest bit of regret over what I had passed up.

  I did make a few discreet inquiries about this cure reversal, but no one seemed to know any more about it than I did. One doctor I talked to insisted it was a complete scam—the vampire takes your five hundred bucks, then lets you drink half a cup of corn syrup and red dye #2 spiked with Rohypnol. “It’s really awful,” she said while she wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around my arm. “You wake up the next day in a cheap hotel room with nothing to show for it except a bad headache and an especially colorful hickey. Completely humiliating. Fewer than half the victims file a report with the police or even go for counseling.”

  I’d be tempted to believe that, except I can’t picture Misty stooping to that kind of low-rent scam.

  And then again, if the blood supply really is drying up quickly and permanently, who knows what kind of desperate out-of-character behavior even a pretentious brat like Misty could be driven to?

  So I’m still wondering about Misty’s claim that she spiked my Bloody Mary mix with this cure. If it really is a scam, I’ve got nothing to worry about. But if it’s real—

  If it’s real and it hasn’t dissipated out of my system, if it’s dug in like a virus, biding its time until the day comes when I suddenly catch sight of my own mortality, maybe as a shadow on an X-ray or simply as the unremarkable, oh-so-common feeling of getting older…well, what then? I was twenty-five for over a hundred years, and right now I’m not really that much older.

  But I will be. And when I am, I wonder what I’m going to want then. And where I’m going to get it.

  TWO HEARTS, Peter S. Beagle

  My brother Wilfrid keeps saying it’s not fair that it should all have happened to me. Me being a girl, and a baby, and too stupid to lace up my own sandals properly. But I think it’s fair. I think everything happened exactly the way it should have done. Except for the sad parts, and maybe those too.

  I’m Sooz, and I am nine years old. Ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. Wilfrid says it was because of me, that the griffin heard that the ugliest baby in the world had just been born, and it was going to eat me, but I was too ugly, even for a griffin. So it nested in the Midwood (we call it that, but its real name is the Midnight Wood, because of the darkness under the trees), and stayed to eat our sheep and our goats. G
riffins do that if they like a place.

  But it didn’t ever eat children, not until this year.

  I only saw it once—I mean, once before—rising up above the trees one night, like a second moon. Only there wasn’t a moon, then. There was nothing in the whole world but the griffin, golden feathers all blazing on its lion’s body and eagle’s wings, with its great front claws like teeth, and that monstrous beak that looked so huge for its head.… Wilfrid says I screamed for three days, but he’s lying, and I didn’t hide in the root cellar like he says either, I slept in the barn those two nights, with our dog Malka. Because I knew Malka wouldn’t let anything get me.

  I mean my parents wouldn’t have, either, not if they could have stopped it. It’s just that Malka is the biggest, fiercest dog in the whole village, and she’s not afraid of anything. And after the griffin took Jehane, the blacksmith’s little girl, you couldn’t help seeing how frightened my father was, running back and forth with the other men, trying to organize some sort of patrol, so people could always tell when the griffin was coming. I know he was frightened for me and my mother, and doing everything he could to protect us, but it didn’t make me feel any safer, and Malka did.

  But nobody knew what to do, anyway. Not my father, nobody. It was bad enough when the griffin was only taking the sheep, because almost everyone here sells wool or cheese or sheepskin things to make a living. But once it took Jehane, early last spring, that changed everything. We sent messengers to the king—three of them—and each time the king sent someone back to us with them. The first time, it was one knight, all by himself. His name was Douros, and he gave me an apple. He rode away into the Midwood, singing, to look for the griffin, and we never saw him again.

  The second time—after the griffin took Louli, the boy who worked for the miller—the king sent five knights together. One of them did come back, but he died before he could tell anyone what happened.

  The third time an entire squadron came. That’s what my father said, anyway. I don’t know how many soldiers there are in a squadron, but it was a lot, and they were all over the village for two days, pitching their tents everywhere, stabling their horses in every barn, and boasting in the tavern how they’d soon take care of that griffin for us poor peasants. They had musicians playing when they marched into the Midwood—I remember that, and I remember when the music stopped, and the sounds we heard afterward.

  After that, the village didn’t send to the king anymore. We didn’t want more of his men to die, and besides they weren’t any help. So from then on all the children were hurried indoors when the sun went down, and the griffin woke from its day’s rest to hunt again. We couldn’t play together, or run errands or watch the flocks for our parents, or even sleep near open windows, for fear of the griffin. There was nothing for me to do but read books I already knew by heart, and complain to my mother and father, who were too tired from watching after Wilfrid and me to bother with us. They were guarding the other children too, turn and turn about with the other families—and our sheep, and our goats— so they were always tired, as well as frightened, and we were all angry with each other most of the time. It was the same for everybody.

  And then the griffin took Felicitas.

  Felicitas couldn’t talk, but she was my best friend, always, since we were little. I always understood what she wanted to say, and she understood me, better than anyone, and we played in a special way that I won’t ever play with anyone else. Her family thought she was a waste of food, because no boy would marry a dumb girl, so they let her eat with us most of the time. Wilfrid used to make fun of the whispery quack that was the one sound she could make, but I hit him with a rock, and after that he didn’t do it anymore.

  I didn’t see it happen, but I still see it in my head. She knew not to go out, but she was always just so happy coming to us in the evening. And nobody at her house would have noticed her being gone. None of them ever noticed Felicitas.

  The day I learned Felicitas was gone, that was the day I set off to see the king myself.

  Well, the same night, actually—because there wasn’t any chance of getting away from my house or the village in daylight. I don’t know what I’d have done, really, except that my Uncle Ambrose was carting a load of sheepskins to market in Hagsgate, and you have to start long before sunup to be there by the time the market opens. Uncle Ambrose is my best uncle, but I knew I couldn’t ask him to take me to the king—he’d have gone straight to my mother instead, and told her to give me sulphur and molasses and put me to bed with a mustard plaster. He gives his horse sulphur and molasses, even.

  So I went to bed early that night, and I waited until everyone was asleep. I wanted to leave a note on my pillow, but I kept writing things and then tearing the notes up and throwing them in the fireplace, and I was afraid of somebody waking, or Uncle Ambrose leaving without me. Finally I just wrote, I will come home soon. I didn’t take any clothes with me, or anything else, except a bit of cheese, because I thought the king must live somewhere near Hagsgate, which is the only big town I’ve ever seen. My mother and father were snoring in their room, but Wilfrid had fallen asleep right in front of the hearth, and they always leave him there when he does. If you rouse him to go to his own bed, he comes up fighting and crying. I don’t know why.

  I stood and looked down at him for the longest time. Wilfrid doesn’t look nearly so mean when he’s sleeping. My mother had banked the coals to make sure there’d be a fire for tomorrow’s bread, and my father’s moleskin trews were hanging there to dry, because he’d had to wade into the stockpond that afternoon to rescue a lamb. I moved them a little bit, so they wouldn’t burn. I wound the clock—Wilfrid’s supposed to do that every night, but he always forgets—and I thought how they’d all be hearing it ticking in the morning while they were looking everywhere for me, too frightened to eat any breakfast, and I turned to go back to my room.

  But then I turned around again, and I climbed out of the kitchen window, because our front door squeaks so. I was afraid that Malka might wake in the barn and right away know I was up to something, because I can’t ever fool Malka, only she didn’t, and then I held my breath almost the whole way as I ran to Uncle Ambrose’s house and scrambled right into his cart with the sheepskins. It was a cold night, but under that pile of sheepskins it was hot and nasty-smelling, and there wasn’t anything to do but lie still and wait for Uncle Ambrose. So I mostly thought about Felicitas, to keep from feeling so bad about leaving home and everyone. That was bad enough—I never really lost anybody close before, not forever—but anyway it was different.

  I don’t know when Uncle Ambrose finally came, because I dozed off in the cart, and didn’t wake until there was this jolt and a rattle and the sort of floppy grumble a horse makes when he’s been waked up and doesn’t like it—and we were off for Hagsgate. The half-moon was setting early, but I could see the village bumping by, not looking silvery in the light, but small and dull, no color to anything. And all the same I almost began to cry, because it already seemed so far away, though we hadn’t even passed the stockpond yet, and I felt as though I’d never see it again. I would have climbed back out of the cart right then, if I hadn’t known better.

  Because the griffin was still up and hunting. I couldn’t see it, of course, under the sheepskins (and I had my eyes shut, anyway), but its wings made a sound like a lot of knives being sharpened all together, and sometimes it gave a cry that was dreadful because it was so soft and gentle, and even a little sad and scared, as though it were imitating the sound Felicitas might have made when it took her. I burrowed deep down as I could, and tried to sleep again, but I couldn’t.

  Which was just as well, because I didn’t want to ride all the way into Hagsgate, where Uncle Ambrose was bound to find me when he unloaded his sheepskins in the marketplace. So when I didn’t hear the griffin anymore (they won’t hunt far from their nests, if they don’t have to), I put my head out over the tailboard of the cart and watched the stars going out, one by one, as the
sky grew lighter. The dawn breeze came up as the moon went down.

  When the cart stopped jouncing and shaking so much, I knew we must have turned onto the King’s Highway, and when I could hear cows munching and talking softly to each other, I dropped into the road. I stood there for a little, brushing off lint and wool bits, and watching Uncle Ambrose’s cart rolling on away from me. I hadn’t ever been this far from home by myself. Or so lonely. The breeze brushed dry grass against my ankles, and I didn’t have any idea which way to go.

  I didn’t even know the king’s name—I’d never heard anyone call him anything but the king. I knew he didn’t live in Hagsgate, but in a big castle somewhere nearby, only nearby’s one thing when you’re riding in a cart and different when you’re walking. And I kept thinking about my family waking up and looking for me, and the cows’ grazing sounds made me hungry, and I’d eaten all my cheese in the cart. I wished I had a penny with me—not to buy anything with, but only to toss up and let it tell me if I should turn left or right. I tried it with flat stones, but I never could find them after they came down. Finally I started off going left, not for any reason, but only because I have a little silver ring on my left hand that my mother gave me. There was a sort of path that way too, and I thought maybe I could walk around Hagsgate and then I’d think about what to do after that. I’m a good walker. I can walk anywhere, if you give me time.

  Only it’s easier on a real road. The path gave out after awhile, and I had to push my way through trees growing too close together, and then through so many brambly vines that my hair was full of stickers and my arms were all stinging and bleeding. I was tired and sweating, and almost crying—almost—and whenever I sat down to rest bugs and things kept crawling over me. Then I heard running water nearby, and that made me thirsty right away, so I tried to get down to the sound. I had to crawl most of the way, scratching my knees and elbows up something awful.