Then I suggest that maybe we should take the silver nails and nail my parents back into their coffins. It won’t be such an inconvenience for them because they’re immortal, so we could live out our lives and maybe let them loose again when we’re eighty or so—but at the first mention of silver Heinrich hisses and recoils as if I’d handed him a live snake.
Which is very odd. But do you expect me to have a normal boyfriend?
Then Heinrich has to leave. He leaves, quickly.
“I love you!” I shout after him, but he’s vanished into the darkness.
* * * *
There is indeed Hell to pay when I get home, close to dawn, about the same time Momma and Poppa do, and even Poppa is beside himself with rage, his eyes burning red, his fangs dripping. He’s gotten his bat-tie repaired. Both wings are flapping furiously.
“You are one disobedient minion!” Momma screams as she oozes toward me in that odd, rolly-polly slink that is so hard to describe. Her eyes are all fire too, and her fangs are out.
“Damn it, Mother! I’m not a minion! I’m your daughter!”
Just then Max shambles into the room, a gigantic, live cockroach wriggling between his teeth. His back has been broken in several places, almost tied into a pretzel, though he doesn’t seem to feel any pain. Vampires really do have powers science can’t understand. Max is now a genuine hunchback of the finest quality, two-humped like dromedary.
“Now that’s a minion!” I shout.
Momma shouts too, orders to Max, who is surprisingly agile despite his condition, and surprisingly strong, not to mention horrible smelling as he grabs me and drags me up the front stairs like a sack of laundry, while both of my parents are hovering over me, their faces hideous masks with red eyes and gleaming fangs, like something seen in a dream, and the cockroach in Max’s teeth seems to be saying, “You’re a naughty, naughty girl and you’re grounded for life!”
Maybe they’ve put the whammy on me, because there is a gap in my memory, and when I wake up I am on my bed in my bedroom. The first thing I do is put my hand to my throat to see if I feel warm, and I do. That calms me a little, but I get up woozily, and only gradually discover, to my increasing rage, that the door to my room has been nailed shut, and there are boards nailed over all the windows.
My little prison consists of the bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. Someone or something (probably Max, who seems to have razor-sharp teeth these days) has gnawed a bit of the bottom of the door away, enough to make a slot where food can be slid in to the prisoner.
There’s a bowl of soggy Cherrios on a plate, but there’s a bug swimming in it and I push it back out.
So that’s how it is.
Yes, it is. I can’t go to college anymore. I can’t go anywhere. I am held prisoner, starving, occasionally able to nibble on the less disgusting things Max provides. (The lunchmeat isn’t too bad. I can even manage the stale donuts.)
Every evening I hear my parents rise from their coffins. I hear everything. I think my senses are heightened beyond what is normal. The lids creak, I think, because they like it that way. They could oil the hinges, but it would be against proper vampire style. They go out. They come in a little before dawn, exchanging a few pleasantries. “Did you have a good time, Morris?” “Yes, Honey Love.” Sometimes I overhear a few words about, “What are we going to do with our daughter? What can we do?” followed by assurances (from Poppa) that all parents go through this with teenaged daughters and things will work out.
Yes they will. Thank God for the Internet. Max is too addled and I don’t think my parents ever quite understood what computers are for, particularly a wireless connection through a laptop. (They’ve ripped out my phone.) If I am typing away, they think I am doing my homework.
(“Could we let her go back to school?” Poppa asks. “She’s still working so hard.” Momma just hisses like a snake and that settles that.)
I type away, day and night. By day, idiot Max the hunchback is there to make sure I don’t escape. At night, my old friend Sylvie still hovers outside the window like a Halloween version of Tinkerbell in a trailing shroud, tapping her skeletal fingers on the windows, asking me to let her in. I don’t, but she’s still out there, certain to make sure I can’t go out.
Where did she get the shroud anyway? She was wearing jeans and a top when we buried her. But I can’t bring myself to care anymore.
I type and type. I find Heinrich again, and we exchange e-mails fast and furious.
I too am a creature of darkness, he types. You might not be happy with me. I have a terrible secret.
Yeah, yeah. I DON’T CARE!
You sure?
YES I AM SURE. COME AND GET ME!
I shall rescue you, then, as a knight would rescue a maiden imprisoned in a tower. It’s very romantic, really.
Yes, it is, and I spend my days and nights dreaming of him, imagining that I am with him, that he is in my bed, doing things a nice girl like me doesn’t talk about. I spend hours before my mirror trying to make myself presentable for him. We talk over the Internet every day, sometimes all day, but the one thing I can’t understand is why I have to wait. Why can’t he come and get me right now?
These things have to be done right, for the sake of romance, he types.
I don’t care!
But you should, my Sweet. There is, too, the matter that my power will not be at its greatest until the end of the month.
I have experienced enough of his power to last me a lifetime and I want more, but I do, ultimately, have to wait. The routine goes on. I listen to what Mom and Dad say to each other every morning after they come back from terrorizing the countryside. I can even hear the soundtrack of the movies Poppa plays inside his coffin.
I cross the days off the calendar.
28th, 29th, 30th.
And then, just after sundown, the front door explodes like it’s been dynamited, and I hear Max yelping and then such screams and snarls as you’ve never heard before, like there’s a rabies outbreak at the zoo, and furniture is crashing.
Then Max is whimpering outside my door.
“It might hurt the Master and Mistress! It might hurt them!”
Crash! Smash! Howl.
It?
I pound on the door.
“Max, can you hear me?”
He whimpers and whines and slobbers. I hope I have his attention.
“Max! Let me out!”
“Can’t!”
The chaos downstairs continues. It doesn’t sound as if Mom and Dad are getting the best of it. The whole house begins to shake and sway. If this goes on much longer, the place may be ripped off its foundations.
“Max! I can help them!”
Max stops whimpering, and in a voice that sounds almost like his old self, asks a surprisingly intelligent question. “But why should you help them after what they’ve done to you?”
“Max! They’re my parents! Can’t you understand that?”
Then he’s tearing away the boards nailed to the door, and in a moment I’m walking downstairs into what used to be the living room, with Max shambling somewhere behind me.
There isn’t much of the downstairs left. The walls are out. The TV is smashed to bits and smoldering. Most of the furniture is in splinters. Wading through what used to be the dining room, a huge, hairy Thing faces off against my parents, circling as they do. Momma’s dress is in tatters. Poppa’s cape is gone, and his vest and starched shirt are shredded, and everybody’s claws are covered with I-don’t-want-to-know-what. Everybody’s eyes are blazing like furnaces. They lunge at one another, jump out of the way, parry and thrust with their whole bodies like fencers.
“Stop it! All of you!” I scream at the top of my lungs, and somehow, like my hearing and my sense of smell, my voice has become something it didn’t use to be, and the whole house shakes with the sound of it, and they all stop, and turn toward me, their eyes still blazing, fangs gleaming.
Quickly I reach into one of the few surviving pieces of fu
rniture, a little sideboard cabinet, and take out two of the long silver nails I had carefully placed there when we opened my parents’ coffins for the first time.
It’s trite, I know, and not what you’d expect from someone of my background, but I actually hold up the two long nails like a cross as I say, “Now everybody back off.”
They do, equally recoiling from the silver nails.
“Mom, Dad…is that you, Heinrich?” The Big Hairy Thing nods, breathing heavily. “Mom, Dad, you have to learn to let go. I’m grown up now. You have your life—or unlife or whatever it is—and I have mine. I’m not a minion. I’m your daughter. I ask you to respect that. Do you think you actually can? Do you?”
The fire fades from their eyes, and their fangs retract. Heinrich, a.k.a. the Hairy Thing, just stands there, panting.
Before anyone can say anything, I continue.
“Mom, Dad, I’ve got an announcement to make. I’m not the same as I once was. I’ve been…bitten.”
For an instant I can see Momma’s eyes beam with pride, in the sense of our little girl has grown up, but then she seems just confused, because she knows it isn’t what she thought.
I turn to show her the bruise on my neck, which I’ve had for a month now. “That ain’t a hickey, Momma.”
She just looks stupefied.
“Momma, I want you to meet Heinrich. I love him.”
The Hairy Thing leans over, as if to lick my face, the way a dog would, but then whines and draws away from the silver.
That is when I realize my hands are smoking and the silver nails are burning me. I let them drop to the floor, and before anyone can react, I rush over to the window, tear aside the drapes, and let the light of the full moon flood what is left of the dining room.
I begin to change then. Fur grows on my arms and legs. I feel my whole body melting, falling down, hardening into something else. My senses are much sharper than they’ve ever been before. It’s as if I can hear a cloud passing across the face of the Moon, like silk wiped across glass, and I can hear every sound of the night. I can see in ways that I’ve never seen before, through things, sensing heat and life. Were I so inclined I could tell Max where every bug in the whole damn house is hiding.
But I am not so inclined. Heinrich nuzzles me behind the ear. We play. I try to say something more to my parents, and I think I actually do manage to say “His middle name is Wolfgang.”
And my mother sputters, “But he’s not Jewish!” and she is sobbing in Poppa’s arms. “We’ve lost our daughter!”
“No,” Poppa says, “It’ll be all right, Honey Love, as long as the…er…cubs are brought up Jewish.”
Howling, Heinrich Wolfgang Schroeder and I leap through the window, out into the night.
What beautiful music we make.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, C.Y.C. (Certified Yenta Consultant) in these last two stories.
HOW IT ENDED
Jehan, a knight of Auvergne, who had been called the Brave in his youth after he had taken up the cross and served in the holy wars, and now was called Jehan the Good to his face and Jehan the Placid or even Jehan the Fat behind his back, stirred awake on a winter’s morning.
He sat up in bed, shivering. His breath came in white puffs. He reached over to the nightstand, broke the ice in the fingerbowl, then wiped his face.
The sharpness of the cold air on his wet face was good. It reassured him.
Yet he sat with his knees raised up under the covers, his arms locked over his knees, and he was not reassured.
“The dream again?” The lady Asenath stirred beside him. Her grey hair had come undone and streamed all over the pillow, yet her face was still marble-white and beautiful. It made her look, he thought, like something cast away among leaves and vines.
“It was the dream.”
“Vapors of the mind. Forget it.”
But he could not forget how he had dreamed of a slain knight lying in an empty field, beneath the sun and stars. All his short life this young knight had served God and the cause of righteousness, and yet now God and righteousness seemed to have tossed him aside like so much rubbish. Seasons pressed gently yet relentlessly upon him, first the dry leaves, then frost gleaming off his shattered hauberk (for he had been struck with a spear through the breast); and then snow covered all. In spring, flowers grew between his bones, birds took the last strands of his yellow hair to make their nests, and his great helm was made the habitation of worms.
Jehan dreamed these things in the night, and in the morning the dream was not quite over, lingering even as he regarded his wife sleeping beside him, as he thought of his three sons, as brave as ever he had been, all of them now gone to the Holy Land to fight for God with great distinction. The youngest, knowing he would inherit no lands, had even carved out a dukedom for himself by the Sea of Galilee, in the very homeland of Our Lord.
Should he, Jehan, not then be content?
Yet he was afraid as he regarded the age spots on his hands, as he thought how the top of his head was bald and his whole body grew gross and decrepit. These were the first touches of the grave, he knew. He thought it even as the dream did not end, but continued while he sat awake, in his memory like an echo and the soul of the slain knight lingered, and could not rise up to Paradise nor slide into the pit, but struggled to get free like an animal caught in a trap. It cried out in a voice that was no more than a faint breeze rustling last autumn’s leaves, but a voice nonetheless, filled with sorrow and longing and bewilderment that all his courage and chivalry had brought him to this.
Jehan looked at his spotted hands and wept softly, for something he could not put into words, a truly nameless dread.
His wife got up, wrapped herself in a robe, and came around to his side of the bed. She kissed him gently on the forehead, then tugged him by the arm.
“Come here.”
He let her lead him to the window, where he stood in the bracing cold and beheld his own lands, untroubled by war and witches all these years, stretching as far as the eye could see. True, he held them in trust for a duke, who held them for the King, but for all practical purposes they were his, and he had grown fat on the profit of them.
The fields lay brown and still beneath a steel-grey sky. He could smell snow in the air. Crows soared above the stubble of last year’s crop.
He saw the mill by the river, near the castle gate, and beyond, a new cathedral rising up, one tower complete, the other half-built; and houses clustered around like piglets around a great sow. His wife said, “Look. This is not a dream.”
It must have been in a dream then, still dreamed while he stood there awake, that the slain knight heard a voice calling his name, out of the darkness on the first evening of summer. Dared he hope to awaken from the nightmare of death? Dimly, his mind came to itself. His limbs stirred. With a great heave, he stood up. Worms tumbled onto his shoulders.
And a voice sang to him, beautiful beyond words, it seemed, and he dared further to hope that it was a voice of an angel, summoning him to paradise. Yet he did not rise above the earth.…
“Be thankful for what you’ve got,” Jehan’s wife said. “God has been very good to us.”
“How can I be certain?”
Playfully, half-angry, she buffeted him on the temple. “Ah, you’ve got worms in your head. They’ve eaten your common sense.”
Clumsily, groping, like a player impersonating his way through a play when he has completely forgotten his part, the dead youth walked, his armor rattling, mud pouring out of the joints, scraps of rusting metal trailing behind. Yet he found some semblance of strength, as bone came together unto his bone, and the mud and rotted leaves and few scraps of flesh remaining fused together in imitation of life.
He opened his eyes.
And the voice sang in his mind, as if in a dream that lingered even when he stood there awake; and voice was not that of an angel, for there was an edge of sor
row in it, but it called him nonetheless; and he could almost make out the words.
But Jehan’s wife only laughed and said, “Do me the favor of remaining alive for a while. We have work to do.” She put her arms around him from behind, placed her chin on his shoulder, and nuzzled her cheek against his. “Besides, I still love you. What would I do without you?”
What indeed? Therefore he rose and dressed, called for his servants and his breakfast, and went about the business of the day, some dull matter involving rents and tenants and an inconsistency in accounts.
All the while, as he endured these things, listening to stewards complain about one another and about the burghers, and to the burghers complaining about the stewards, Jehan the Good, the Gracious, Generous, Caring, or Reasonable (called thus to his face) otherwise known as Jehan the Old, the Inert, Stingy, Bald-Head, or Sluggard realized with the force of quiet revelation that he could not be absolutely certain that he had ever awakened from his dream at all. He could just as readily be a dead man dreaming himself alive.
It was like the first piece of plaster falling from a ceiling, a tiny speck, but the beginning of the end nevertheless.
Adventures came to him. As a knight, he turned toward adventure like a plant toward the sun. A demon swooped down out of the sky, its black, swirling wings blotting out the sky like ink spilled on an illuminated page. Stars shone faintly through it; and a face like a leprous, pale moon rose and spoke to him, bidding him to lie back in his grave, to rest and be still.
“I cannot rest,” said the dream-knight, for the music within his mind would not let him rest, nor had he any grave.
The blackness darkened, the stars gone. Only the moon-face remained, rising slowly above the horizon, saying, “Tarry then, and despair until my master Satan fetches thee.”
Yet again a maiden’s voice, sorrowing and beautiful beyond words, called the knight by his name. Therefore he did not despair, but with greater urgency drew his rusted sword and struck. The demon’s blood poured down through the sky like an aurora; and the leprous face vanished.
He walked more surely now, beneath a summer sky filled with brilliant stars.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 29
