I cannot look at him for there is blood pouring over me, in my eyes, my mouth, down my wounded chest, then there is a shower of grave dust. The rug beneath me is thick and soft as I draw my dying breaths. There is the sound of running footsteps and doors opening and closing, but all is muted to me. I’m not cold, but warm as death reaches for me.
But I don’t mind. I don’t mind dying with all my deeds done.
In front of me I think I see beacons, my sisters burning before me, April and Sophie, smiling. I think I see all the other girls, the day-daughters who have come and gone, the great rolling tally of years. I see them all though I do not know their names.
Then there is darkness and they fade from sight, and I see no more.
I did not expect to wake, and when I realize why I have, I want to weep.
The dark lies on me like a blanket, but I can see through it as if it’s pure daylight down here. My throat hurts and my mouth is dry. My chest aches where it was pierced, but when I put my hand to the torn place, feel through the ragged rips in the fabric of my dress, I find no holes, no rents in my torso, just smooth cold skin.
A tiny glimmer catches my attention, bobbing as it slowly descends the night stair. I am in the undercroft. I lie on a bed of marble.
Oswain’s kind face looms over me; beside him is Rikke, her eyes sad and silver in the strange light. They seem reluctant to speak. Oswain offers a hand and helps me sit up. I can smell them both; they are warm and full of life. I push the thought aside, as hunger buzzes nastily in my head.
“The blood,” I say. “His blood?”
Oswain nods. “Entered your wounds. Healed you inside out. Changed you.”
I look around the undercroft so I do not need to see the pity in their eyes. My gaze comes to rest on the mound of mummified children.
“The babies?” I ask. The Steward glances away, blinking. Rikke peers at him, perhaps thinking it is his tale to tell, but when he opens and closes his mouth, once, twice, and no words come out, she explains.
“The Lord and Lady played games with each other—being as they were, all that time, anyone would begin to hate the other. The Lord tolerated his wife’s obsession only so long. The fonder Our Lady became of her day-daughters, the more perverse grew the Lord. He would begin to woo girls until finally he bedded them. Those that became pregnant thought themselves safe—he told them he loved them, that he wanted only them, that his Lady was old and desiccated.” She takes a breath, glances at Oswain, who is now sobbing quietly, his shoulders quaking.
“But as they grew great, as the evidence of what had been done came clear, the Lady knew herself betrayed and found her love diminishing; her daughters had failed her. When they gave birth, she took their children away and the Lord … the Lord dealt with the day-daughters. The Lady thought the babies adorable for a time, but they cry as babies do, then she found them too much trouble. Eventually, she would stop their crying the only way she knew how, but she still didn’t like to part with them so she kept them here.”
We are silent for a while. I wonder which of the tiny dead dolls belonged to April. Sophie was not here long enough. I have a tiny niece or a nephew, lying there amongst the dead.
“You should kill me, Oswain,” I say gently. “I do not wish to live like this. Even now I can smell you—your blood. Kill me and I will not fight you. There are garlic bulbs aplenty beneath the meadowsweet. And my knife—where is my knife?”
“Adlisa, we are a city of many souls. Do you remember when I spoke to you of vacuums? Who do you think might fill the one you’ve created? Hmmm?” I notice he does not answer me about the hawthorn dagger.
“You could. You are kind and wise,” I say, stretching my arms above my head, expecting to be stiff and sore but finding my cold limbs strangely limber, pliable, although my flesh is marble.
He shakes his head. “My power derives only from being the representative of the manor house. Without a Lord and Lady, there is no figurehead, no sense of order from above. You have created this situation, Adlisa, you must fix it.”
I blink hard, thinking if I close my eyes for long enough everything will go away. Then a thought. “The visitor? Our Lord’s supplicant?”
Oswain’s hand goes to where the Steward’s Gaze usually hangs and I notice at last the jewel’s absence. His fingers jerk, spider-like, seeking a phantom limb. He does not need to tell me that in the chaos of my making, the guest sneaked into the Steward’s room much as I did earlier, that the gem is by now far away from Caulder.
Rikke looks at her feet, then into my eyes. “You must feed, Adlisa. One of the winepresses?”
“You will need to find a new one. I fed them all on garlic and belladonna.”
Oswain nods. “I’d wondered what you’d done. You terrible, clever girl.”
“I don’t want to live like this,” I repeat, and there is a break in my voice and I wonder if I can cry now that I am like this. Or is it merely the echoes of the pity a dead thing feels for itself? Could I walk out into the sun or is the sleep that comes with the daylight too profound? Or is it simply that I am starting to feel what the Lord and Lady felt for so long: a desperation to hold onto life. A refusal, a denial of true death, a determined clinging to some sort of existence.
“Adlisa, we will find a cure,” says Rikke, and Oswain gives her a warning look. I know what he is thinking: The girl is dead, make her no false promises. She ignores him. “There is a great library far from here, at Cwen’s Reach, a repository such as few can imagine. The women of St. Florian’s gather rare and arcane books, copy them to make sure the knowledge never passes from the world. I am sure, Adlisa, that in one of those books is the secret to curing you. I will write to my sisters, some will remember me there. You are not without hope.”
Her voice is so sincere, so filled with faith that I want to believe her. I want to believe her the way children believe the fairy tales they’re told at their mother’s knee. And I see how it will be for me for some years, listening to the stories she tells me of this place, of her time there, of how she came there and why she left, of how the answer to my unfortunate condition lies there, and how, one day, we will find it.
Until then, my life will be darkness and blood.
A NORTH LIGHT
Gwyneth Jones
Gwyneth Jones is an author and critic of science fiction and fantasy, and a writer of teenage fiction under the pseudonym “Ann Halam.” Recent credits include The Grasshopper’s Child, book six in the Bold as Love cycle, and the young adult novels Siberia and Snakehead.
Her short fiction has been collected in Seven Tales and a Fable, Grazing the Long Acre, The Buonarotti Quartet, and The Universe of Things, and she is a winner of two World Fantasy Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the SFRA Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement in science fiction criticism.
“Maybe every writer of fantasy fiction has a vampire story in them,” says Jones. “This is my second foray. My teenage vampire novel (The Fear Man) won the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night Award in 1995; but that was a pro-vampire version, in which the children of the night were aliens among us, and some of them at least were capable of virtue.
“‘A North Light’ takes a harsher view. It’s sort of a modern version of the J. Sheridan Le Fanu story ‘Carmilla’ (note the coincidence in names), and treats of the vampire as tourist and tourist as vampire. I think there’s a lot to be said for the analogy. But from personal experience, I am convinced that there are Bed and Breakfast landladies (in Erin’s green isle and elsewhere!) who would be the match for any sophisticated undead bloodsucker.
“Poor Camilla! Redemption is such a humiliating fate.”
A CAREFREE TRAVELER’S life is full of evenings like this one. You have the money, you have the looks, you have the style; you even have what used to be called the letters of introduction, in the old days. Yet still you find yourself winding along the disturbingly narrow lanes, livid green pasture on either
side, a voluptuous sunset overhead, and nowhere to spend the night. The grass, growing in a stiff Mohican strip down the middle of the asphalt, confesses that this is a route only used by those high-slung, soot-belching, infuriating tractors. The desk staff at the quaint, olde-worlde (but surprisingly expensive) little inn that just turned you away—with the offensive smugness of a fully-booked hostelry in high season—obviously sent you on a wild goose chase.
Never again! you say to yourself.
But the lure of the open road will prevail. Wanderlust.
“My God, here it is,” breathed Camilla.
The house stood foursquare and somewhat sinister in its bulk of yellow stone, at the top of one of those endless rank pastures. No trace of a garden, except for a bizarrely suburban machicolation of cypress hedge. The gate at the road announced the services of JONAS O’DROSCOLL, BUILDER. Also, VACANCIES. But VACANCIES cannot be trusted.
“Should be okay,” said Sheridan, scanning the whereabouts and liking the isolation. “It’s fucking huge for a B&B. Unreal!”
“Not at all,” she corrected him. Camilla was always wise to the local ways. “Traditional Irish rural industry needs bedrooms. The only crop that thrives in this country is babies. Breed them up for emigration, ship them out and look forward to a comfortable retirement on their earnings.”
“That’s cold-blooded, isn’t it?”
She laughed. “I like it. It shows a fine ruthlessness. Children as a business venture, why not?” She was childless herself.
“Bring me tangle-curled barefoot peasant girls,” groaned Sheridan. “Bring me a reeking cottage with a pig looking out—”
Mine hostess was at the door, a young woman with mouse-brown hair cropped short as a boy’s, her large behind embraced in boyish dark blue jeans; pink cheeks, naïve round hazel eyes and a cute, piggy turned-up nose. The tourists smothered their giggles as she welcomed them in to a stark, tiled hallway with a huge varnished pine dresser and varnished pine umbrella-stand. Pokerwork signs hung on the walls, inscribed with the rules of the B&B (ALL CREDIT CARDS; ROOMS MUST BE VACATED, etc). Miniature warming pans, decorative teacloths, china donkeys on a knick-knack shelf. Everything excruciatingly new. The travelers caught each other’s eyes and sighed. Their hostess was Noreen O’Driscoll. She’d had a phone call from the inn, and she could show them to an en suite room. She beamed naïvely when they accepted the astonishing price of a night’s lodging; displayed flushed puzzlement when they insisted on shaking hands.
Camilla and Sheridan liked to shake hands with the natives. They followed her round denim bottom up the varnished pine stairs, savoring the touch of that scrubbed peasant skin—already worn down (she can’t be more than twenty-five or so, poor girl) to the texture of spongy sandpaper.
Room number four, en suite. How many rooms are there? Maybe six, maybe eight. Maybe it goes on forever, into the antechambers of Hell. Thick yellowy varnished pine, brass number plates. The wallpaper in number four is the same as in the stairwell: strawberries and strawberry flowers, in shades of pastel brown and pastel apricot. The bed takes up most of the space. The bedding is … pastel apricot, poly-something, with the same debased, dreary strawberries and strawberry flowers. There’s a fitted wardrobe, a vanity unit. A window with meager flimsy curtains provides a magnificent sea view. As they stare at the room, Noreen frankly stares at them, these two exotic birds of passage, tall and slender, blonde and sophisticated (he is tall, she is blonde). Her round, bright eyes are filled with a peasant’s ingenuous hunger for sensation.
“This is fine,” says Sheridan briskly. “We’ll take it.”
Noreen looks at Cam, a little puzzled (Camilla must remind Sher that he’s in a country where menfolk do not make domestic decisions. It’s his place to be silent!). But she also looks very happy. They are welcome, they are accepted, they are fascinating: all is as it should be.
When they were alone, Camilla sniffed the towels and moaned softly. The polyester sheets, cheap enough to start with, are worn to a grisly fungoid sheen; and why in the world, in a house so big, does this “double room” have to be so mean and cramped? It’s a battery cage for tourists. “I can’t stand these places,” muttered Camilla. “I cannot bear them. The sheer effrontery! I thought Ireland was supposed to be romantic.”
“That’s my line,” said Sheridan. He had to stoop a little to look out of the window. Beyond the pasture, a wide sea shore under a fabulous sweep of sky, but the back of the house is like a builders’ yard. A heap of sand under a tarpaulin, a stack of roof tiles. The children are playing: two boys of that touching age between childhood and adolescence, trying to humiliate each other with BMX bike tricks. A girl a little older, chivvying a terrier puppy. A couple of infants. Unseen, above, he smiled on them benignly.
“The light is wonderful.”
She could hear the children’s voices. “How can you tell? It’s nearly dark.”
“Exactly.” He turned with a knowing grin. “I’m sure you’ll find something to do.”
Camilla went on grumbling as they carried up their bags, unpacked, and made futile efforts to render the battery cage habitable. But when they ventured into the lower regions, in search of advice about an evening meal, she was the one who accepted the offer of a cup of tea—condemning them to a tête à tête with Noreen in the Guests’ Lounge and TV Room. Mine hostess brought tea and fairy cakes (one per guest). Later she brought the baby, eight-month-old Roisin, suffering from the colic; told Camilla the names of her other children; confided the state of her husband’s business. Camilla tasted the admiration in Noreen’s eyes, and drew more of it to herself insensately, out of habit, like a pianist running over her scales: she couldn’t help it. She really meant no harm. Why are you dressed as a boy? she wondered. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in a nice print frock and an apron? Thus the wheel of fashion turns, and it gets harder and harder to find the true wilderness experience. Peasants the world over have Coca Cola and Internet access. But their lives (sadly enough, agreeably enough) are no less empty. An attractive stranger is still fascinating, same as she ever was.
Noreen jigged the grizzling baby with businesslike indifference. Camilla admired the family photographs (Noreen in a huge white dress that would have looked better on a pickup truck, clasping her red-faced builder to her side). Sheridan sat there in his black biker jacket and his black jeans, one long leg crossed over the other, saying little, grinning secretly. “Jaysus,” remarked Noreen, in astonishment. “It seems like we’ve been friends forever! And will you look at the time. Jonas’ll be home and no dinner cooked!”
They went out to eat at a roadhouse with pretensions (Noreen exhorting them from the doorstep to be careful of “the drunk driving”). In the morning Camilla declined to rise for the Full Irish Breakfast. Folded between sickly polyester surfaces, the smell of bad laundry in her nostrils, she listened to middle-aged Americans tramping heavily down the stairs. She could tell by the sound of their voices that there was nothing worth getting up for in that dining room. I won’t stay another night, she thought. I won’t. A quarter-hour later, a tap on the door: Noreen with a tray of tea and wheaten bread. “Are yez poorly?” asked the young housewife, gravely concerned. “He says I’m to tell you he’s gone out to take a look around the possibilities. He says you’ll know what he means.”
“Sheridan’s a photographer,” said Camilla. “He loves the light here. How nice of you to bring me the tea. You shouldn’t have. I’m so sorry to be a nuisance.”
So Noreen stayed, and talked, and stayed, and told terrible stories about rude unreasonable tourists. (Camilla having deftly established that she and Sheridan were actually neither English nor American). Downstairs baby Roisin’s grizzling rose to a roar. Camilla heard her, but Noreen didn’t. When she left at last, her round eyes were bright as stars, she turned at the door for a lingering glance: came back and patted Camilla’s toned and slender forearm with shy, blundering tenderness.
“You have a good lie-in, Camilla. Ye’ll be
right as rain.”
It’s so simple, so harmless, such a breeze, to elicit the kindness of strangers. The wheaten bread, poisonously tainted with an overdose of soda, was crumbled, uneaten. Camilla sat up in bed, licking her lips and smiling. She negotiated the battery cage to reach the tiny en suite, and crouched on the edge of the bath that doubled for a shower-stall, which was the only way to get a good look in the mirror above the basin.
“I’m not a bad person,” she murmured.
Whatever possesses anyone to build a bathroom with a light from the north? An unkind light, clear and shadowless, that picks out every tiny pore. But this is not a luxury hotel. An Irish B&B is not designed to coddle the guest’s sensitive amour propre. Passing trade, never passing this way again, too much attention to detail would not be cost effective. A fine ruthlessness, thought Camilla, indulgently, as she applied her makeup. She could afford to be indulgent. She was feeling much better, all the draining little experiences of yesterday soothed.
Outdoors, in the clear light that had painted a disquieting picture on Camilla’s mirror, Sheridan walked around the shore of the sea-lough. He stopped on a rocky outcrop above the water and sat cross-legged, taking camera lenses out of his bag. A boy of twelve or thirteen came sailing along on a bicycle. The tall man had seen the boy coming from a long way off. Without appearing to do so, he was displaying his wares. The bike swerved to a halt, leaving an impressive skid mark on the gravel track. Sherdian grinned at the sound, and went on thoughtfully laying out his big black truncheons of lenses, his electronic light meters, his tripod. Here comes the boy, the last, late beauty of childhood wrecked by a bullet-headed haircut, magnetically attracted to the stranger: a dignified scowl on his face.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 68
