Afterward, she lay naked beside him, smoking a cigarette. “What the hell was there to be scared of?” she said. “Have I brought anything back with me? No. And believe me, I willed it.”
Noah lay on his side, stroking her taut belly. “What did it—he—look like?”
She grimaced. “Pretty much how you’d think. At first, he was crouched down, wrapped in this immense cloak of black feathers. It looked like it had been made from the whole wings of a single vulture. I could just see the slits of his eyes peering over the top. He looked like a vulture himself … like a vampire! Although he was crouched down, I could tell he was a giant; magnificent, wise and savage.”
“That’s pretty powerful imagery,” Noah said.
“Then he stood up and opened his cloak of wings. Beneath it, he was dressed in animal skins. His body was covered in some kind of paint, but it wasn’t blood. There were patterns in it like primitive cave paintings. He did have bones in his hair and wore a necklace of bones. Bird bones, I think. You’ll be pleased to know he had pointy teeth. All of them.”
“Filed down?”
“Probably.” She took a fierce draw off her cigarette. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I saw what I wanted to see, or was influenced by what you said earlier.”
“What about what he said through you?”
“I don’t know. It was as if he’d known me before, obviously. He seemed to know you too, in a way. Lamech was the father of Noah in biblical myth, wasn’t he?”
Noah nodded, uncomfortable with the idea that the entity might be aware of him.
“If the whole thing wasn’t subjective,” Lara said, “maybe I lived in his time once. Maybe we were lovers. I certainly felt really horny when I came out of it.”
“He doesn’t sound very attractive!”
Lara stubbed out her cigarette and reached for Noah’s crotch. “Oh, but he was! Beautiful, in fact. His eyes were amazing, this deep piercing blue. Christ, I wanted him to possess me. Utterly. It was the archetypal thing.” She laughed huskily. “I’d have been quite happy for him to sink his teeth into me.”
Noah leaned over and nipped the skin of her throat. “Come on, let’s go to bed. It’s getting cold in here.”
They made love several more times. Noah felt euphoric, hardly daring to believe a woman such as this could come into his life. She was full of humor and warmth, serious about her ability yet amusingly irreverent. She was uninhibited, open, mysterious, and fey. A witch woman. A priestess.
“Where have you been all my life?” Noah said.
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she replied, and they giggled like children at the stupid clichés for several minutes.
About four o’clock, Lara said she was tired and turned onto her side in the bed. Noah studied her for some time, drinking in each detail of her smooth contours, the spill of dark hair upon the pillow. He passed his hand in the air above her body, and she squirmed and made a sound of pleasure as if she felt him stroking her aura.
“Beauty,” he whispered. “Love.” He lay down to sleep, closing his eyes with the afterimage of her white flesh burning in his mind.
Waking came with a shock in the gray of predawn twilight.
He was aware at once of cold, and saw that the bed beside him was empty. A terrified pang of loss coursed through him, then he saw her clothes still draped on the pale wicker chair by the window and told himself she had gone to the bathroom, or else to get herself a drink.
He lay on his back and pulled the duvet over his chilled torso. A hiss in the corner of the room made him start.
“Lara?”
He sat up. Most of the room was still in shadow, but he thought he could make out a dark shape hunched in the corner near his clothes rail. “Lara …”
He reached to turn on the bedside lamp, but the switch did not respond. The bulb must have gone.
Again, a hiss, low and sibilant.
Something moved in the shadows, sidled forward. He saw the eyes clearly first: a deep piercing blue. She was naked and had covered herself in what looked like dark paint, which was possible because there were a few tins left in the garage. Her hair was wild and strawlike, filled with a sticky substance. Her tongue protruded unnaturally from her mouth, like that of the destroyer goddess, Kali. Her teeth could not possibly be pointed. There were no tools in his house she could have used to do that. She hissed and stamped with one foot.
“Lara.”
He got out of bed slowly. This was so different to the time before with Sarah. Lara wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t raving or weeping.
Her eyes followed him as he skirted the room.
He held out his hands in the universal gesture of peace. “Lara, wake up. You’re dreaming. It’s not real. Lara.”
She made a threatening lunge toward him, growled and stamped both feet. He jumped back. It was unreal. He couldn’t feel anything, because it was so unreal.
The night had come into the room. Not darkness, but the essence of night, the absence of light. The cold of the Earth before the first dawn rose.
“Lara …”
She came for him then, scuttling with crablike speed across the room. She grabbed him by the shoulders and he felt the sharp prick of her fingernails. She stank of rotten meat and there was a crust around her lips. She was bleeding from the mouth. Her teeth were filed away to ragged points.
What pain she must be in. What pain …
He fought back. This wasn’t Lara. This was the darkness he had hidden from for so long. Perhaps it had always been here, lurking in the shadows of his house, in his memories.
She was so strong, like a tigress. She pushed him back onto the bed and straddled him. Her breasts looked heavier than they had been earlier, scored with the marks of her own fingernails. She uttered a shriek and lunged for his neck.
He should be afraid, shouldn’t he? This thing, this monstrous abomination dredged from the primal soup, was feasting on him, tearing at his flesh, kneading his skin with its claws, sucking the life from him. It stank of Hell. Yet he was aroused by it. He wanted her and she let him do it, her body bucking in frenzy.
And he saw it then, the tunnel into history. The rivers of blood that carried the memories of humanity. It is within all of us, he thought. We have tamed it and dressed it up in a silk suit. We have made it dead. We have contained it in books and films and lascivious dreams. We have contained it in nightmares. But ultimately, it is within us all the time. And it is alive, pulsing, warm and wet, stinking of musk and spoiled meat.
Lara wasn’t stronger than Sarah. The opposite was true. Because Sarah had rejected this. It was what she had seen and felt and had never spoken of. The search for Nosferatu didn’t begin in the grave, but in the reptile brain, the primordial remnant of beast within every human mind. It was demonic. It was divine.
In the late morning, with bright sunshine coming into the kitchen, they were politely formal with each other. She said she had badly chipped a tooth falling over in the dark. They didn’t talk about how she’d decorated her body. The mess in the kitchen had been cleaned up by the time he had come downstairs and she was freshly showered, smelling of his patchouli body wash. She joked about her loathing of dentists as she carefully drank hot coffee. He made toast, then apologized and offered something softer: scrambled eggs perhaps? She wasn’t hungry, she said.
He rubbed his neck. “Ah well …”
She had to go to work at two. Worked part-time in a local shop. Perhaps she could get an emergency dental appointment before she went in.
He had work to do too. The book would be late to his publishers otherwise. Nice day, though.
Yes, nice day.
At the door, she pecked his cheek in a brief kiss. “We must do this again,” she said.
“Must we?” Many words hung unspoken between them.
She smiled. She looked very tired and there were purple rings beneath her eyes. “I think I got what I wanted. Didn’t you?”
“Lara …”
�
��You can call me. Or not,” she said. “I don’t need you now, Noah, but I kind of like you.”
He watched her run down the path to the road. She had rejected a lift. He leaned his forehead on the doorframe. Once your eyes are open, you can never close them. Sarah knew this.
He shouldn’t see Lara again. He should attempt to forget all that had occurred. They’d been drunk. She’d broken one tooth, that’s all. It had been less than he’d imagined. As if to remind him otherwise, his neck twinged painfully. He felt light-headed, sick, suddenly able to imagine the future, the long, slow, agonizing stretch of it, the descent into realms he dared not think about.
He shouldn’t see her again. But she was just his type, wasn’t she? Just his type.
PRINCE OF FLOWERS
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand is the author of many genre-spanning novels and collections of short fiction, as well as a longtime reviewer and critic for a number of publications.
Her acclaimed novels include Winterlong, Aestival Tide, Icarus Descending, Waking the Moon, Glimmering, Black Light, Mortal Love, Illyria, Radiant Days, Mortal Love, Generation Loss, Available Dark, and its recent sequel, Hard Light, along with the movie tie-ins The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride, 12 Monkeys, Catwoman, and a series of Boba Fett Star Wars books for middle-grade children. PS recently published her novella, Wylding Hall, and some of the author’s stories are collected in Last Summer at Mars Hill, Bibliomancy, Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories, and Errantry. With Paul Witcover, Hand also created the cult comic series Anima for DC in the early 1990s. She is a multiple winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the International Horror Guild Award, along with the Mythopoeic Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
“This was my first published story,” reveals the author, “bought by Tappan King for The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1987; it appeared early in 1988. In a phone conversation, Tappan said that I would be a good writer for the 1990s, because my work had ‘heart and also sharp little teeth.’
“At the time I was living in Washington, DC, and working at the Smithsonian. The demonic puppet of the title was something I bought on my lunch hour one afternoon, walking from the Mall to a dim little shop called The Artifactory. I fell in love with the puppet and paid fifty dollars for it, a huge chunk of my meager paycheck; but when I brought it back to my cubicle at the National Air and Space Museum I announced that it would bring me luck. It did: shortly thereafter I wrote the story, and even though it took a year or so, I finally sold it.”
HELEN’S FIRST ASSIGNMENT on the inventory project was to the Department of Worms. For two weeks she paced the narrow alleys between immense tiers of glass cabinets, opening endless drawers of freeze-dried invertebrates and tagging each with an acquisition number. Occasionally she glimpsed other figures, drab as herself in government-issue smocks, gray shadows stalking through the murky corridors. They waved at her but seldom spoke, except to ask directions; everyone got lost in the museum.
Helen loved the hours lost in wandering the labyrinthine storage rooms, research labs, chilly vaults crammed with effigies of Yanomano Indians and stuffed jaguars. Soon she could identify each department by its smell: acrid dust from the feathered pelts in Ornithology; the cloying reek of fenugreek and syrup in Mammalogy’s roach traps; fish and formaldehyde in Icthyology. Her favorite was Paleontology, an annex where the air smelled damp and clean, as though beneath the marble floors trickled hidden water, undiscovered caves, mammoth bones to match those stored above. When her two weeks in Worms ended she was sent to Paleo, where she delighted in skeletons strewn atop cabinets like forgotten toys, disembodied skulls glaring from behind wastebaskets and bookshelves. She found a fabrosaurus ischium wrapped in brown paper and labeled in crayon; beside it a huge hand-hewn crate dated 1886 and marked WYOMING MEGOSAUR. It had never been opened. Some mornings she sat with a small mound of fossils before her, fitting the pieces together with the aid of a Victorian monograph. Hours passed in total silence, weeks when she only saw three or four people, curators slouching in and out of their research cubicles. On Fridays, when she dropped off her inventory sheets, they smiled. Occasionally even remembered her name. But mostly she was left alone, sorting cartons of bone and shale, prying apart frail skeletons of extinct fish as though they were stacks of newsprint.
Once, almost without thinking, she slipped a fossil fish into the pocket of her smock. The fossil was the length of her hand, as perfectly formed as a fresh beech leaf. All day she fingered it, tracing the imprint of bone and scale. In the bathroom later she wrapped it in paper towels and hid it in her purse to bring home. After that she started taking things.
At a downtown hobby shop she bought little brass and Lucite stands to display them in her apartment. No one else ever saw them. She simply liked to look at them alone.
Her next transfer was to Mineralogy, where she counted misshapen meteorites and uncut gems. Gems bored her, although she took a chunk of petrified wood and a handful of unpolished amethysts and put them in her bathroom. A month later she was permanently assigned to Anthropology.
The Anthropology Department was in the most remote corner of the museum; its proximity to the boiler room made it warmer than the Natural Sciences wing, the air redolent of spice woods and exotic unguents used to polish arrowheads and axe-shafts. The ceiling reared so high overhead that the rickety lamps swayed slightly in draughts that Helen longed to feel. The constant subtle motion of the lamps sent flickering waves of light across the floor. Raised arms of Balinese statues seemed to undulate, and points of light winked behind the empty eyeholes of feathered masks.
Everywhere loomed shelves stacked with smooth ivory and gaudily beaded bracelets and neck-rings. Helen crouched in corners loading her arms with bangles until her wrists ached from their weight. She unearthed dusty, lurid figures of temple demons and cleaned them, polished hollow cheeks and lapis eyes before stapling a number to each figure. A corner piled with tipi poles hid an abandoned desk that she claimed and decorated with mummy photographs and a ceramic coffee mug. In the top drawer she stored her cassette tapes and, beneath her handbag, a number of obsidian arrowheads. While it was never officially designated as her desk, she was annoyed one morning to find a young man tilted backward in the chair, shuffling through her tapes.
“Hello,” he greeted her cheerfully. Helen winced and nodded coolly. “These your tapes? I’ll borrow this one some day, haven’t got the album yet. Leo Bryant—”
“Helen,” she replied bluntly. “I think there’s an empty desk down by the slit-gongs.”
“Thanks, I just started. You a curator?”
Helen shook her head, rearranging the cassettes on the desk. “No. Inventory project.” Pointedly she moved his knapsack to the floor.
“Me, too. Maybe we can work together sometime.”
She glanced at his earnest face and smiled. “I like to work alone, thanks.” He looked hurt, and she added, “Nothing personal—I just like it that way. I’m sure we’ll run into each other. Nice to meet you, Leo.” She grabbed a stack of inventory sheets and walked away down the corridor.
They met for coffee one morning. After a few weeks they met almost every morning, sometimes even for lunch outside on the Mall. During the day Leo wandered over from his cubicle in Ethnology to pass on departmental gossip. Sometimes they had a drink after work, but never often enough to invite gossip themselves. Helen was happy with this arrangement, the curators delighted to have such a worker—quiet, without ambition, punctual. Everyone except Leo left her to herself.
Late one afternoon Helen turned at the wrong corner and found herself in a small cul-de-sac between stacks of crates that cut off light and air. She yawned, breathing the faint must of cinnamon bark as she traced her path on a crumpled inventory map. This narrow alley was unmarked; the adjoining corridors contained Malaysian artifacts, batik tools, long teak boxes of gongs. Fallen crates, clumsily hewn cartons overflowing with straw were scattered o
n the floor. Splintered panels snagged her sleeves as she edged her way down the aisle. A sweet musk hung about these cartons, the languorous essence of unknown blossoms.
At the end of the cul-de-sac an entire row of crates had toppled, as though the weight of time had finally pitched them to the floor. Helen squatted and chose a box at random, a broad flat package like a portfolio. She pried the lid off to find a stack of leather cutouts curling with age, like desiccated cloth. She drew one carefully from the pile, frowning as its edges disintegrated at her touch. A shadow puppet, so fantastically elaborate that she couldn’t tell if it was male or female; it scarcely looked human. Light glimmered through the grotesque lattice-work as Helen jerked it back and forth, its pale shadow dancing across the wall. Then the puppet split and crumbled into brittle curlicues that formed strange hieroglyphics on the black marble floor. Swearing softly, Helen replaced the lid, then jammed the box back into the shadows. Her fingers brushed another crate of smooth polished mahogany. It had a comfortable heft as she pulled it into her lap. Each corner of the narrow lid was fixed with a large, square-headed nail. Helen yanked these out and set each upright in a row.
As she opened the box, dried flowers, seeds and wood shavings cascaded into her lap. She inhaled, closing her eyes, imagined blue water and firelight, sweet-smelling seeds exploding in the embers. She sneezed and opened her eyes to a cloud of dust wafting from the crate like smoke. Very carefully she worked her fingers into the fragrant excelsior, kneading the petals gently until she grasped something brittle and solid. She drew this out in a flurry of dead flowers.
It was a puppet: not a toy, but a gorgeously costumed figure, spindly arms clattering with glass and bone circlets, batik robes heavy with embroidery and beadwork. Long whittled pegs formed its torso and arms and the rods that swiveled it back and forth, so that its robes rippled tremulously, like a swallowtail’s wings. Held at arm’s length it gazed scornfully down at Helen, its face glinting with gilt paint. Sinuous vines twisted around each jointed arm. Flowers glowed within the rich threads of its robe, orchids blossoming in the folds of indigo cloth.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 17
