It was Mona who had crated Diva Demona, but it was Victorine who would not let her die.
Mona bit down on the soft flesh inside her cheek. No matter what Victorine decided to do with her irretrievable leftovers, Mona had already escaped, years ago. That crazy life was forever past tense and she had grown up into a strong and unapologetic woman. A passionate writer who had mulched under the nightmares and ecstasies of the past to create fertile ground for unflinching fictions. She knew who she was.
She had missed three lights, lost in reverie. She wanted to laugh at herself, but her old apartment was less than a block away. She hustled across the street, determined to pass by that pit of hook-tipped memories without looking back. Two buildings away and then one. Her breath caught in her chest, and she cursed herself for a superstitious baby. She counted her footfalls as she walked along the coiled iron railing that fenced in the building’s cluster of sad, dented garbage cans, passing the cement steps to the basement and the hot smell of fabric softener from the laundry room. Then the battered metal door with the number “3” still missing, visible only as a row of holes and an outline of older, lighter paint. She could see the ranks of mailboxes through the scratched safety glass. Her old mailbox still had the word BOX written on it by Victorine as part of some obscure joke. She stepped away from the door and leaned her back against someone’s car, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Her gaze crawled up the building’s brick skin toward the window of that forgotten world, that place where she had lived a thousand lifetimes ago. The black lace and velvet curtains were faded and dusty. Mona didn’t know what she was expecting to see: maybe her own younger self peering down at her. Instead, she saw nothing but the still and ratty backside of those old homemade curtains that had seemed so deliciously gloomy and perfect back then when Victorine had stitched them together from balding velvet and tattered scarves out of the dollar barrel at Dizzy Dot’s used clothing store.
Mona stepped away from the car and passed her hand over her eyes. When she looked back up a skinny young Asian girl on rollerblades was opening the door with a keychain sporting more toys and trinkets than keys. She looked back over her shoulder, her glitter-glossed lips twisted into a sardonic smirk.
“You coming in or what?” she said.
Mona wanted to say no, but instead she put her palm against the open door. The metal was cool and gritty, scarred with fine scratches and scribbled names nearly worn away to nothing. The girl wheeled away down the hall without another word. Mona swallowed and went inside.
1/21/91
My Beloved Slut,
One year we have been together. It was one year ago that I first held the delicate stem of your vulnerable throat between my fingers. First felt the dance of blood beneath your white skin. First tasted the luscious nectar of your submission. You are still as precious to me as you were on that first blood-kissed night. I will always love you, my exquisite slave, dark companion of my soul.
Yours in Eternal Darkness,
Mistress Demona
Victorine’s lips tasted of tears and clove-sugar. She licked them repeatedly as she read the letter a third time before laying it back in place on the tattered bedspread. She stretched for the elderly tape player on her bedside table and ejected The Cure, tossing the cassette into the clutter. From the careful formation on the bed beside her, she selected a black and silver tape and slid it reverently into the machine. It was a much-played copy of the only demo Diva Demona ever cut. Its title, written in silver marker, in her mistress’s own dramatic hand, was Licking Shadows.
The music unfurled in the aromatic dimness, swirling like incense around Victorine’s naked body. Its gorgeous, hypnotic rhythms painted the inside of her closed eyelids with images of Diva Demona. When her mistress’s voice slithered from the speakers, Victorine’s flesh crawled with anticipation. Each visitation was stronger and longer-lasting than the one before it, and Victorine was sure that this time Diva Demona would come to stay.
She smelled her first. The exotic scent of Night’s Breath, mingled with the subtle tang of passionate sweat and the secret musk of her thick, unshorn bush. She was afraid to open her eyes too soon, afraid that she might spoil it. Every tiny hair, every millimeter of skin was excruciatingly sensitive and she could feel the heat of her mistress’s presence just seconds before she felt the touch.
Victorine gasped, tiny, secret muscles clenching deep inside her, and her eyes flew open.
Diva Demona stood over her, eyes burning and hungry black lips turned up in a sardonic smile. She was clad in torn black lace and a heavy leather corset, leather gloves and tall boots that laced all the way up her long white thighs. Her edges were hardly blurred at all, though her features still held a sort of soft-focus smoothness that bled out into the air around her.
“My most exquisite slave,” she said. Her voice sounded slightly muddy, like a recording copied too many times.
Victorine’s heart melted.
She slid to the floor and pressed her lips against the soft leather of her mistress’s boots. She could almost taste the rich but vaguely unpleasant flavor of boot polish.
“My life for you, mistress,” she whispered. “Anything for you.”
Black-nailed fingers twined in the sticky snarls of Victorine’s hair, pulling her up to the tips of her toes, yanking her head back to expose the scarred flesh of her throat. Her scalp burned and the knots of scar beneath her chin ached in curious anticipation, like track marks longing for the needle. She wanted to open her eyes, to drink in the living image of her beautiful mistress, but she was paralyzed with desperate desire. It didn’t matter. Every angle, every curve of Diva Demona’s fierce body and proud face was burned into her memory. She could see the lush black lips part, revealing shining canines like twin scalpels, seconds before she felt the caress of cold leather and the vicious, crushing pain of her mistress’s bite.
Then, like a stiletto to the heart of her fantasy, the harsh voice of the doorbell.
Fighting for control outside the door of her old apartment, the doorway to the past, to the tomb of Diva Demona, the new Mona stood, hands opening and clenching without purpose. What the fuck did she think she was doing anyway? She had no desire to see Victorine or her new Diva knock-off. She told herself a thousand times to get out, to let dead dogs lie, but yet here she was. A film of chilly sweat coated her body. Her heart pirouetted madly. She had to piss. She could hear her own muffled voice, singing. She rang the bell again, following it up this time with her fist against the painted metal.
The door opened and in the thin slice of darkness, Victorine’s narrow white face, first suspicious, then blank with shock.
The past ten years had been cruel to her former slave. Her hair and makeup was identical, but the face beneath was worn and plague thin. Her body beneath the tattered black kimono was hardly more than a skeleton, sharp bones straining against gray, unhealthy skin. She even smelled wrong. Under the heavy mask of her perfume lurked the thin, acrid stench of a skewed metabolism, of madness. Her unclean throat was smeared with blood.
“Victorine,” Mona forced herself to say. “We need to talk.”
Then, from over Victorine’s knife-blade shoulder, a voice, her own. So young and arrogant, pretentious, real as flesh.
“Who dares to interrupt our pleasure?”
Mona would not allow the sickness in her belly to rise up and drown her. Anger was her only strength as she pushed the grimy door open all the way.
The apartment was unchanged, a meticulous shrine, just the way she remembered it.
And standing in the middle of the clutter with leather fists on her hips and black eyes blazing, was Diva Demona.
The air between them seemed to gel to a hideous thickness, skewing off into monstrously distorted perspective. Her own burning, kohl-smudged eyes stared back at her from the end of a howling tunnel. Greedy animal paws clutched at her intestines, pulling and twisting. She staggered to her knees in a pile of dirty black lace.
The stench of
stale sweat seemed like the only normal thing in this mad new world, and Mona’s floundering brain clung to this simple truth like a life preserver as the tips of her fingers began to split and bleed, spontaneous stigmata opening like crimson orchids, drops of blood slithering through the strange air towards a vast and gaping mouth (her mouth), pink tongue tasting, shiny black lips peeled back over fang teeth and there was blood in her mouth, just like it used to be, sweet and sickening, real as memories. She felt so weak, each beat of her heart like lifting a tremendous weight while Diva Demona stood above her, suddenly pure of outline like a living photograph superimposed on to the blue screen of the real world.
Mona’s bloody hands seemed a thousand miles away, cold as moon rocks. Her flesh felt insubstantial, fading slowly, dissipating like some theoretical gaseous element. She felt so tired, but at her core was a white-hot rage slowly burning through the layers of narcotic lethargy. That thing walking around in Mona’s cast-off skin was not her. It was nothing but a figment of Victorine’s twisted imagination, clothed in fragments of dead love. Mona was real, flesh and blood, and she was furious.
“No,” she said, forcing her numb lips to move. Heat pulsed though her body, bringing distant limbs back into focus. “You can’t have this. I own who I am.”
Mona closed her cold fingers into a fist and punched up through the apparition’s pale chest.
The fine skin parted like rotted silk and a dull pain gripped Mona’s struggling heart, but she would not flinch. Beneath the flesh of this lanky doppelgänger lay not the heat of living organs, but a strange chaos of texture that came loose beneath her fingers. There was a screeching wail that twisted up through the octaves until it lost all resemblance to Mona’s voice and when she pulled her hand free, she held a fistful of crumpled letters.
The apparition before her clutched at the gaping hole in its chest, dried rose petals falling from between its fingers. The thing’s face began to lose detail, its imitation of Mona’s dark eyes melting into twin holes, lipsticked mouth splitting into a reptilian slash.
Grabbing a wrought-iron candelabra from a low table (Mona remembered buying it in a second-hand shop, a gift for Victorine’s nineteenth birthday), she thrust the five burning candles into the monster’s softening face.
A scream that was like two voices woven together and as one faded, the other swelled until Mona thought her eardrums would burst. She squeezed her eyes shut, vertigo filling the cavity of her skull and coursing through her belly. She felt as if she were suffocating, choking on the stench of burning. When she was able to open her eyes, she saw dull orange flames swathed in black smoke. The sagging old bed was burning, careful piles of letters swallowed by the greedy flames and Victorine was screaming, beating at the fire with her bare hands. Her ratted hair caught in a burst of carnival color and her screams became more frantic as she spun round and round like a flaming angel. In that moment, she was beautiful again and Mona remembered what it had been like to love her.
It must have been Mona who was screaming then when she sprang up and ripped the velvet curtains from the window. Throwing the heavy cloth over Victorine, she tackled the shrieking angel, knocking her to the floor.
The flames had begun a slow creep across the walls, tasting the photos and finding them good. All around them, the remnants of Diva Demona were being devoured one by one.
Victorine fought fiercely as Mona struggled to drag her out into the hallway, all the while ignoring the soft, reasonable voice in her head that whispered, Leave her. Let her die if she wants it. Let her die and Diva Demona will die with her.
It was all so preposterously B-movie-esque, monster and mad creator die together in the flaming ruin of the collapsing laboratory while the credits roll serenely over the destruction. But Mona knew that it could never be that simple. Diva Demona was a part of her and always would be. Victorine’s patchwork version was gone, her festering obsession cauterized, cleansed and scraped clean. Letting her die now would be selfish and unnecessary, like shooting ex-lovers to avoid the uncomfortable experience of running into them at parties. Throat rough with ash and determination, Mona half carried, half dragged the girl she used to love out of the past and into the uncertain future.
There were already fire trucks outside the building when she staggered out into the street. Someone official took the struggling burden of Victorine from her arms and although she was still mostly covered by the singed velvet, Mona could see the skin that showed was shiny and lobster red, split bloodlessly in some places and charred black in others. Mona sat down on the curb, light-headed and dizzy with blood pulsing and churning in her throat. She hoped that she had done the right thing.
“One more time, Mona,” the low voice of the producer suggested in the intimate space inside her headphones. She turned slightly and saw Minerva giving her the thumbs up from the board. Then the music filled her head and she listened intently, waiting for her cue.
This new version of her old song was a little slower, more muscular. Nocturna and the new guitar player had both brought their own strange twists to the familiar notes, giving it a life of its own.
Mona took a deep breath and came in soft over the driving bass, her heart beating hard in her chest.
As she sang, she found herself playing around the sounds more than she ever had before, weaving in and out of the spaces between the notes.
“Do you remember how it used to be,” she sang. “When you and I were one. Come home to me, my long-lost sister, and embrace the damage done.”
And somewhere between her memory and her mouth, the old words gained a kind of rich melancholy that seemed to transform the simple lyrics into a love song to a lost era. It felt so good, so cleansing. When she was through, there was a sheen of tears in her eyes.
Minerva burst into the booth and pressed a wet kiss to Mona’s forehead.
“That was fucking inspired!” she said, yanking one ear of the headphones away from Mona’s head and then letting it snap back.
“Ow, hey!” She pulled the headphones off and smiled. “Come on.” Minerva took her chilly hand. “Don’tcha wanna hear how fabulous you are?”
Sitting in a folding chair behind the science-fiction glitter of the mixing board, Mona listened to herself. In her own ears, her voice sounded almost alien, like a living thing. There was an edge beneath the words, a rough tenderness that she had never heard before.
“There’s a whole lot of living in that voice,” the producer said, pushing brittle hair back from his eyes. “The old version was too pure, y’know. I don’t go for that ethereal shit. You want to hear ethereal go to a fucking church. But this new version, it’s meatier, more honest. I like it.”
Minerva leaned in and handed Mona a pair of cassettes. One was new and unlabelled and the other was black and silver, labeled with her own handwriting.
“Why choose, when you can have both?” she said.
Mona turned the old demo over in her hands, fingers tracing the little silver roses she had drawn years ago.
“Where the hell did you dig this up?” she asked.
Minerva grinned. “You can’t dig up what isn’t buried, honey.”
Mona slipped the tapes into her pocket, thinking of the past, of letters and lost love and the indelible images they leave behind, burned into the skin of history.
“I’ll remember that,” she said.
BEWITCHED
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on three occasions, and was well acquainted with many of the era’s other literary and public figures, including Henry James, her closest friend and author of the classic supernatural novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898).
Although Wharton began inventing stories when she was six, she did not publish her first novel until she was forty. She was a productive writer, producing fifteen novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, along with poetry, book
s on design and travel, literary criticism, and a memoir.
Among her most famous works are the novelette Etham Frome (1911) and the novel The Age of Innocence (1920). She also wrote a number of her own supernatural stories, and these have been collected in Ghosts (1937), The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (1973), The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural (1996), and The Triumph of Night (2008).
“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard),” the author explained. “It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”
Which probably makes the story that follows a classic of vampire fiction …
I
THE SNOW WAS still falling thickly when Orrin Bosworth, who farmed the land south of Lonetop, drove up in his cutter to Saul Rutledge’s gate. He was surprised to see two other cutters ahead of him. From them descended two muffled figures. Bosworth, with increasing surprise, recognized Deacon Hibben, from North Ashmore, and Sylvester Brand, the widower, from the old Bearcliff farm on the way to Lonetop.
It was not often that anybody in Hemlock County entered Saul Rutledge’s gate; least of all in the dead of winter, and summoned (as Bosworth, at any rate, had been) by Mrs. Rutledge, who passed, even in that unsocial region, for a woman of cold manners and solitary character. The situation was enough to excite the curiosity of a less imaginative man than Orrin Bosworth.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 55
