Blue Eyes said simply, “Just one more test subject, sir. At the request of one of the officials here at Bicetre.” He nodded toward a second-story window, where the visage of LeBeque could be seen, his head wrapped in a bandage, his arms crossed furiously.
“We’ve got no papers,” repeated the man at the control.
“Who’s to care?” said Blue Eyes. “He’s a dangerous maniac who’s been housed at Bicetre for years. He nearly killed the official in the window there. He’d kill you or me were we to unbind him. Who’s to know, but you, these witnesses and a few babbling idiots in the windows above.”
The man looked at Alexandre, then at the blade which he’d just raised back into position.
“A live one will tell you more of what you need to know,” said Blue Eyes. “And then he’ll merely be a third corpse.”
Alexandre tried to scream around the gag, but only garglings came out. Danielle put her hands over her ears, but could not take her gaze from the dreadful sights.
“Well,” said the man, whirling his hand impatiently and pursing his lips as though he had his doubts, though the temptation of a live subject was too much to pass. “All right. Quick, then. This should be our final test.”
And they made quick business of Alexandre Demanche. The man was bound at the ankles and placed with much huffing and grunting upon the wooden gurney. His head was slipped through the neck trough, and then secured when the wooden slat above was brought down and locked. Alexandre, still in his gag, strained to look around as the man in charge reached out to release the heavy blade.
He spied Danielle trembling in the shade behind the wagon. His expression screamed what he had spoken back in the barn, though the words did nothing but confuse the already terrified mind of his young lover.
Why again? Why again? Forgive me, and no more!
The blade slid smoothly, an easy rush of air and steel. With a thwack, it found its rest at the bottom of the track, throwing the head neatly into the basket. But this one bled, and profusely.
Danielle covered her face with her forearms and drove her face into the ground.
She returned to the Little Farm when darkness fell. She felt her way rather than saw it, for her eyes were full of the hideous visions of the courtyard. Marie and Clarice were on the path, panicked for the loss of their friend, and when they saw her, they ran to her and held her close.
But Danielle would have nothing of it. She said simply, “I must die.”
Marie shook Danielle’s shoulders. “What are you saying? Where have you been?”
But then Danielle said, “But should I kill myself I go to Hell! Should I live I live in Hell!”
“Oh, sweet Mother of God,” said Clarice, “what has happened to you, dear friend?”
Danielle broke away, and reached the barn to see if she’d made a mistake, to see if Alexandre was waiting for her in his stall. But the straw was kicked about, and the pitchfork dropped on the floor where Alexandre had tried to protect her. His jacket was in a tangle by the wall. Danielle wailed, picked up the jacket, and clutched it to herself. Her friends stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.
“I must die, too!” she screamed.
“Danielle!” It was Clarice. “Come out of there. Talk to us! You’ve got us frightened!”
Alexandre’s journal was on the beam. But the Bible was gone. Danielle dug through the straw, clawing and sifting the sharp, golden bits, but the Bible was not there. Alexandre had not taken it with him. But it was no longer there. What had happened to it? She wanted it for herself, to take it with her to her death.
Danielle stood, and fled the barn. She knew the answer, as surely as she knew LeBeque and Blue Eyes and the man with boils and the man at the beheading machine would go to Hell for their civil and humane test. She shoved past the other maids, saying, “I shall go to the places where the prostitutes wander. I shall make myself available to a murderer, that’s what I shall do! I will go to Heaven if I’m murdered. For I will not live without him!”
Marie and Clarice tried to grab Danielle to hold her back, but she was too fast, too mad with grief, and they were left clutching air and the first raindrops of the evening.
They followed her. Against Clarice’s concerns that they’d be relieved of their duties for leaving Bicetre without permission, they scurried after Danielle, shawls drawn up around their faces. Down one narrow Parisian street after another they went, calling for their friend but not so loudly to attract undo the attention of the increasingly frightening citizenry of the streets. The rain let itself go in full force, driving some pedestrians from the roads and leaving only the determined, the tardy, and the mad.
Danielle pushed her way to the rue Leon, a small and dismal alley lined with tall, narrow whorehouses, saloons, and tenement shacks, some of which leaned precariously on poorly placed foundations. The rain blurred the lights of the lanterns which sat in splintering windowsills. Whores stood in petticoats and stockings in sagging doorways, thrusting their breasts and wiggling their tongues. Drenched clients in coats hurried for the warmth of the diseased temptresses, and vanished into the houses with low chuckles and growls. A skeletal dog limped across Danielle’s pathway and wormed its way into a tenement cellar through a cracked window. In the shadows beneath rain-blackened stoops and behind rust-banded barrels lurked eyes which seemed to have no sockets. Teeth which seemed to have no mouths.
Danielle stopped in the center of the alley. She stared up at the dark, rain-sodden sky and raised her hands as if bidding some divine spirit to save her.
“Kill me!” she said above the drumming of the rain on the cobblestones and rooftops. “Come now, there is surely someone who would relish the chance to satiate a blood lust! Here I am, and there is no one to charge you for my death, for there is no one in this godforsaken town who would care I was gone!”
She closed her eyes and kept her hands aloft. She took a breath, expecting to feel a plunging knife in her ribs, or a dagger drawn across her throat. Now, she begged silently. Let it be done and over.
She heard nothing, save the giggling of the prostitutes in their houses and the cries of babies in the tenement rooms. She said again, “Here I am! A gift, for free!”
Spattering rain and muted laughter.
Then, “No, I don’t want to die. God forgive me.” And then again, “Yes, die I must! Release me!”
And then a hand on her forearm and a whisper, “Sister, you’re soaked to the skin!”
Danielle opened her eyes to see a pair of red orbs gazing intently at her, mere inches from her own. The skin around the eyes was as white as a corpse’s. Danielle gasped and floundered, but the full red mouth smiled and said, “Fear not, dear. I have what you want. You are certainly a young thing, yes?” Cold fingers gently brushed Danielle’s hair from her neck and tipped her head to the side ever so slightly.
Danielle could not move her gaze from the red eyes, and she thought for the briefest moment, This is just a painted whore. A whore who kills on the side to assuage her anxieties. That’s fine. That’s good. A whore may kill more kindly than a man would have.
“I will release you to life that is not life, death that is not death. My gift to you. The gift many of us have asked for because of the dreadful state of our mortal existence as women on Earth. Hold, dear, hold now.”
Danielle held her breath.
“Danielle!” The scream was from behind, and Danielle tried to look back but the whore with the white face and cold hands held her as strongly as any man.
“Danielle!” It was Marie, somewhere back at the entrance to the alley.
“Shh,” cooed the whore, “Shh.” The white face dipped to Danielle’s bare neck. A searing pain shot through the flesh, the muscle, and into the very core of bone. Danielle screamed, but the scream was met with the whore’s muffled laughter and the shifting of the rain in the wind.
Then there was warmth and numb peace, and a swirling giddiness that caught her thoughts and threw them like pebbles in the wind. She a
lmost laughed, almost, but then she fell into herself and there was no bottom and no light and she fell and fell and thought, This is death. I shall find you, Alexandre. In the good Lord’s paradise, I shall find you!
They settled in Buffalo, New York, in February of 1889, when Danielle insisted that the population of Sisters had grown too large in New York City. Marie was tired of moving. So was Clarice. But Danielle was always restless. No matter the availability nor the quantity of prey or the relative safety of their hideouts, she was happy in one place no more than a matter of months, then began insisting they move on. Marie and Clarice, not wanting their friend to venture off on her own, always went along.
They had stayed in Europe for over eighty years, moving from Paris to Lisbon to London and countless smaller cities and towns, taking the blood they needed to survive, meeting with other Soeurs de la Nuit—Sisters of the Night—and sharing their stories, their pain. Laughing with them when some memory was amusing, mourning with them when a memory was too harsh.
The Sisters were an order of the undead, much like the lone wolves of their kind but different in their need and sympathy for each other. They lived on the blood of others, most often the blood of thieves and rapists, murderers, and wife-beaters. They drank their fill, often passing the dazed man about to their fellows for a share, then killed their victims with a twist to the neck. The Sisters did they have a desire to bring such villains into eternal life with them.
On the rue Leon so many years past, a Sister had heard Danielle’s pitiable cries and had come to her aid. Marie and Clarice, who had fallen at Danielle’s side, were likewise brought into the world of forever.
At first they had been unable to accept their new reality, and had hidden in a whorehouse cellar for nine days, trying to go out in the morning but unable, and finding themselves nauseous when presented plates of turnips and pork yet ravenous when offered a drunk card cheat. Danielle had cried for Alexandre; Marie and Clarice had just cried. Yet with increased feedings and encouragement from the Sisters who tended them, they grew into their new selves.
They returned to Bicetre one starry evening, and while Marie and Clarice took out their rage on several doctors who had fucked them and tossed them out, Danielle had gone to the lantern-lit office of Monsieur LeBeque and had tortured the man to near death as his champion the de Sade would have done, though she, unlike the libertine, took no orgasmic pleasure in the act. When he was reduced to an eyeless, tongueless remnant of a human, clothed in shredded flesh and pawing at the air with raw, nubbed fingers, she drank his noxious blood and twisted his neck about.
But Danielle felt no satisfaction.
For 117 years, Danielle had found no satisfaction, no peace. It was she who wandered without purpose, followed closely by her two loyal friends, watched over by them, often protected by them. Yet they knew her restlessness and her longing for what she had once had, briefly, had not drained from her even as her own life had done.
She longed for Alexandre.
She pined for him and ached for him. Her days’ sleeps in random cellars and stalls, attics and storehouses, were troubled with dreams. She cried his name out and awoke herself with her cries. Sometimes she would bite her own wrists to relieve the agony of her heart, or to bring her consciousness to a close once and for all, but it could not be done.
There was nothing for Marie and Clarice but to love her, still.
Buffalo was a thriving city in the western corner of New York State. It was Clarice’s suggestion once Danielle began making noises that New York City was too crowded with their kind. Not just the loners but the Sisters as well. Marie and Clarice liked the fellowship, but Danielle wore irritable with them very quickly. And so when Marie suggested Buffalo, Danielle was ready to move.
The traveled by train at night, dressed modestly as women of the time were expected to do, in prim gray dresses of wool and satin that pressed their bosoms tightly into their chests. Their undergarments that cinched their waists unmercifully. When alone, they dressed as they pleased, and often went naked, but to pass in public they played the charade.
Marie had a brochure in her lap that touted the city’s finer points. “They call it the ‘Electric City of the Future,’” she read, holding the paper to the light of the lamp beside her on the wall. The train jerked constantly, and she had to move her head with the tremors to keep up with the printed words. “More electric lights are in use here than in many other places in the United States. What do you think of that, Danielle?”
“That sounds fine,” said Danielle. She picked at the cloth-covered buttons on her bodice, imagining her hands were Alexandre’s. His hands were beautiful. She would never forget those hands. Marie continued to read and Danielle heard nothing but the tone of her voice.
Then: “Danielle?” It was Marie.
“What?”
“You’ve been silent for hours. It’s nearly dawn and the train is still miles from Buffalo. We must find a sanctuary.”
The Sisters moved gracefully from the passenger car to the storage car. It was here that luggage was stacked, and flats of tools and boxes of foodstuffs and sacks of material and paper. They curled up into within three crates filled with nails, and awakened that evening on a loading dock along the Erie Canal. Quietly, they removed themselves before the dockmen got to the crates, and wandered out to Ohio Street to the scents of filthy water and ozone. A railroad track was in the middle of the street, and in the yellow glow of street lights an engine bearing a number of freight cars clacked and rattled past.
It was easy to find the part of town that reveled in drink and sex for money. It was not unlike the seedy sections of any city, except that here the dens and whorehouses sat toe to toe with grain elevators and shipyards. The number of undead was small, Danielle estimated no more than five or six from the vibrations in the air. They were the only Sisters. They stopped outside the gate to a large, canal-side elevator and teased the lone watchman at the gate into letting them in. “We’re from France,” cooed Marie. “Just freshly arrived, Monsieur. We’ve never seen such a structure. It has us quite mesmerized. Please?” She touched her red lips coyly, and winked.
The man, flustered with the attention, said, “I don’t do no whores. Go on ’bout your business.”
Marie feigned horror at the suggestion. “Whores? Mon Dieu! Sir, we are ladies in the truest sense, sisters come from another land to learn what we may. But if we offend, then we shall be gone.” The three turned away, and the man relinquished.
“Well, then,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry, ma’ams. I meant no disrespect. Come in and I’ll show you how the grain elevators work here in ole Buffalo.” He unlatched the gate and the ladies came through, invited. But his brief introduction to the history of the canal was cut off as the three of them fell onto him and took his blood, then his life. They then found a comfortable hideaway in a small storeroom next to the elevator.
The following days tumbled one into the other. The Sisters slept undetected in the storeroom during the day, pressed like shadows behind old bits of furniture covered in cobwebs and many months’ worth of dust. At night they walked Ohio and Erie Street, dressed like ladies, unthreatening and demur, finding human creatures on which to feed and when done, throwing the twisted bodies into the canal with the other sewage.
Things were as they had been for a long time. Until early March, when Danielle was pretending to sip coffee at a shop soon after nightfall and she spied through the grease-iced window a fruit peddler on the street pushing his cart and wiping his brow with a large and muscular hand. The man’s face was not familiar—a hollow and sunken face it was—and the body thin and unspectacular. But the hands she knew. The hands were Alexandre’s. She gasped.
Marie and Clarice, seated at the tiny round table with their friend, reached for her. “What is it?” whispered Clarice.
“Alexandre,” said Danielle.
“You’re mad!” said Marie. “What blood have you drunk last, that you would think you have seen yo
ur dead lover?”
“It’s him.”
“It’s a fruit vendor, for Christ’s sake,” said Clarice. “Get your wits, and now. Don’t lose your head.”
Danielle tore free and raced out to the street. The vendor was gone, and she spent the rest of the night tracing his path by his scent and the scent of his rotting pears and apples. But the smells of the Electric City were strong, and mingled, woven together into a brash and stinging tapestry, and she lost track.
They retired when the darkness began to dissolve into day, and for the first time since her rebirth in Paris, Danielle felt a new hope. A new reason to embrace her immortality.
She would be with Alexandre again.
Each subsequent evening she placed herself in the same shop, at the same table, buying a cup of tea she never drank, and gazed out for the fruit peddler. Even when the shop closed at eight, she stood on the corner with her irritable friends, and studied each of the dirt-coated vendors and scraggly, mobile merchants. Surely he lived in Buffalo. Fruit peddling was not a job that took one from town to town. She only stopped in her vigil to tend to her need to feed, then returned beneath the moon or the stars or the rain or the fog to catch her love and his cart.
Several weeks later, at quarter past three in the morning, while Marie and Clarice were seated on a trolley bench comparing loose stitching in their gloves, there was the shouting of drunken men and laughter from up the street, and then a small crowd stumbled past in a makeshift parade. One man was seated in a fruit cart, another pushed, while the rest danced beside them as if they were celebrating the King of Fools. The man in the cart, nearly out with drink, was Alexandre. Danielle motioned to her friends, and they followed the mob to a rickety tenement house near the railroad station. The men dumped the cart, fruit and all, then stumbled off to the street corner and out of sight.
Danielle hurried to the drunk man’s side, pushed away the squashed fruit that covered him, and took his hand in hers. “My love,” she said. Her heart hammered as if it was still alive. “My love, I’ve found you! Alexandre, it’s me, Danielle!”
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 51
