by Lynne Murray
“No, I’m sorry, uh, Sir John,” I sighed. “Maybe the VA hospital could give you some British contact information or referral to some agencies.”
He looked at me expectantly. He already knew I was going to help him. Damn my co-dependent nature, this was beyond stupid and into dangerous. Maybe I was still angry enough at Hal and the world to do something crazy. But the old guy did not appear dangerous and he was more than a little charming. I felt sorry for him about to lose his shed crash pad.
“All right. Come on. It’s not far. “
“Let us to this hospital. The touch a plump and rosy young nurse or three would revive me in no time.” He saw my scowl and swiftly amended. “Even a few words with some other old soldiers would steady the nerves.”
Other old soldiers with bottles in paper bags? He took my arm and I did not protest. Again that piney, foresty smell.
I didn’t have a sense of violence about him, but I did remove my arm from his grip and kept just out of reach as we walked toward the car. He paused outside the car as if needing an invitation. I opened the door and said “Here you go,” feeling like a fool, but something about his presence dispelled fear and inspired amusement. His bulk was enough that it took some maneuvering to get him into the passenger seat. But I had purposely bought a reasonably roomy VW Beetle because of my own size. Sir John didn’t try to buckle the seat belt, and I wasn’t about to reach over to help him fasten it.
It was only a few blocks and a few hills to the Fort Miley VA Hospital. I knew the route intimately. My late husband had been in and out of it several times in his last years.
I paused at the main entrance on Clement Street. “The hospital is right up there.”
Sir John gave a disheartened sigh. “That’s a long march uphill for an old man at night. Not fond of hills. Less altitude, more breath, I say. Are you sure you wouldn’t have a place for me to sleep?”
I sighed. “I’ll drive up the hill and drop you in front of the hospital.” At the top of the hill, I stopped for the stop sign before driving into the drop off area. No visible pedestrians. A cab was just pulling away and a Muni bus waited at the terminal just beyond, doors open, motor off, the driver not visible.
Sir John suddenly reached out, grabbed my neck and pulled me across the seat.
“Hey!” was all I could say before I felt a sharp stab of pain just below my chin. My god, he must have a knife. I leaned forward onto the horn, but I didn’t hear it sound. I was pinned in by the steering wheel in front of me and his body holding me by the neck cutting off breath and any scream for help.
My last thought was Kris, you fool—you should have run when you had the chance. But instead of fear, I felt overwhelmed with an almost pleasurable, drowsy tugging at my mind, like a drug, pulling me down into dark oblivion. Then nothing.
Chapter 21
Hal Roy’s spoken notes
silver flash drive/voice recorder
undated
Jack was a hard habit to break. Aunt Reba didn’t want to try. As I heard the story later, she had installed him in the old house to begin with, but moved him out to the shed when they quarreled.
After a summer of wild rambles with Jack, I went off to boarding school, then to college. I tried to patch together a suitable life for myself, but I couldn’t stay away from Jack.
Every time I left San Francisco my life seemed to slow down. I didn’t start to live again until I stood outside the shed ready to open the padlock, help Jack out of his coffin, open a bottle of wine and delve between the thighs of the ladies who gravitated to him. My only fear was that I would arrive and find he was gone. I deputized Ned and Lucy to keep an eye on him in case my aunt could not. When I came back he was there and waiting for me.
We talked into the night, serious conversation wrapped in laughter, and punctuated by Jack’s own style of orgy. He asked about my education, and I told him. He grasped it all and turned it back to me as a joke. He had read so much over the centuries, but he never seemed to have had the urge to master any serious course of study—not that it was book learning that drew me to him.
I could never take him all in—just when I expected him to be a lowlife rogue, he would turn philosopher on me. His easy grasp of every world he entered hinted at a mastery of secret knowledge that I wanted more and more. When he told me it was dangerous, I knew I had to have it.
I only told a few people about Jack. Ned and Lucy because I had known them since high school, but no other friends at school or girlfriends. This was one thing I could not share. They all would have thought I was insane. Even if I had brought them here to show them—well, I couldn’t trust anyone that much. After college it was either going to be grad school or the army for me. I went with a graduate program in international politics and United States foreign policy.
“I served as a page to a great lord,” Sir John said. “Got my education in his service, and my knighthood on the battle field. One must needs be a knight in those benighted times. But you must be a scholar.” He patted my shoulder. “Let’s have a brave debauch to send you off to battle the books.”
Chapter 22
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 5th continued
I opened my eyes to find myself behind the wheel. The only sound was the engine of the car. A glance at the gearshift showed it in Park. I recognized one of the remoter parking lots at the edge of the Fort Miley VA Hospital grounds. I had no memory of how I drove here or when I stopped the car. I took a deep breath and realized I felt good. Beyond good. Obscenely good, relaxed and drained of tension, as if I’d just come from a session with Hal and hours of lovemaking.
“How goes it with you, lady?” a deep rumbling voice asked near my ear.
I turned and gasped to see the round face of the white-haired, white-bearded stranger in the passenger seat.
“Mistress Kit.”
It all came back in a rush—Hal’s house, the shed. Sir John—who was now looking at me with an unreadable expression. His voice radiated kindly concern, but there was a kind of self-congratulation on his face that made my heart sink. He certainly looked better, as if he had shaken off the effects of a hangover.
“You jumped on me!”
“I bent over you. You fainted.”
“I’ve never fainted in my life.”
“No? You did seem to rally.”
I felt distanced from my body, as if I were floating just slightly above it. Considering the odd setting, I should not have felt this way. A faint trickle of fear invaded my euphoria. “What did you do to me?”
“I swear I took no liberty with your person.” He laid one plump hand across his heart. “Look to your clothing, my lady—not a button undone, not a fold misplaced.”
Embarrassed, I looked down and put up a hand to feel how my blouse seemed to have been buttoned up to the top button. Odd. I never do that.
“The last thing I remember was the stop sign just before the admissions entrance. How did we get here?”
“You drove through there, out here, and then—I know not what overcame you.”
“Let’s go back to the entrance.”
I had to turn the car around. It was pointing toward the dark trees and bushes of Land’s End that separated the VA from the ocean and San Francisco Bay.
I pulled through to the Admissions area drive-through under the hospital that I remembered so well from Mark’s stays here. The wards loomed back into the darkness of the hospital night—a slower pace than daytime, but never totally sleeping. A taxicab pulled in ahead of the car, and a middle-aged man on crutches climbed out slowly. I looked at the dashboard clock and found it was eight p.m. It felt much later.
I fumbled a few bills out of my purse and pressed them into Sir John’s hand. “You have to go now. You can follow that guy who just got out of the cab. There’s an information desk in there.”
Sir John took the bills, and stuffed them somewhere up inside that huge coat. “Most kind, my lady. Fare thee well.” He made a produc
tion of getting out of the car, and even bowed dramatically. Nice touch—one last gasp of Shakespearean fantasy.
I drove away feeling saddened. He would probably end up sleeping in the park with a bottle I’d given him the money to buy. But I felt I had to do something, and I needed him out of the car.
It wasn’t until I got home, unbuttoned my collar and looked in the mirror that I saw the two puncture marks on my neck.
Chapter 23
Sir John Falstaff’s words
on black digital recorder, undated
I am little better than a man trapped in amber—and what a prodigious stone it would take to hold the man in full.
Time to reset that stone.
I whisper in the dark into this small black lump, like a weightless stone, and it whispers back my words. Hal gave it me to learn my secrets while I slept. As if I did not know how to hide it from the daylight and from him. If they could hear this smooth stone repeating my words back to me, the folk I knew where I was born would burn me as a witch, if not as a vampire first. If I can elude their clutches for centuries, can I not sidestep this nosy pup? If I whispered my secrets to anyone who asked I would not have lived a hundred years past my first death.
“Minions of the moon, under whose light we steal,” the Bard said of us. He meant robbing purses by moonlight, but I steal dearer than that. A famous glutton I may have been—I sup no more on roasted fowl, no more stave off the cold with sack sherry, cakes and ale. Cruel, is it not? A man of famous appetites now lapping up small drops of blood. I drain a taste of life from several in an eve, killing none and yet making a meal.
The belly that I forged in life still leads the way like the prow of a ship, identical to the day I died these many—ahem! I shall not say how many centuries ago.
I could haunt this bustling hospital for many a night if necessity did not demand I move my coffin. First, a visit to my lady Reba. Easily tracked by the bloodhound I’ve become. Her scent’s a luminous road to where she is. Someone under these harsh lights will gladly drive me to her, and never remember the journey.
Poor Reba, once so young and wild. Sipping her life was like drinking bolts of lighting. Now near the end. She must be old—indeed, she has no choice. Her mind’s long gone. I’d never bring her over to share undeath with me. But I might take her last breath. Where she is now, if she had her wits she might beg me to do so. Or she might be glad if I just drop in from time to time to take a little blood and leave a little pleasure. For her. And mayhap the night nurse as well.
Can I do that and make a jest of this, my long half-life? I can. And mortals gladly pay a small piece of life for the rare entertainment I can offer.
Young Hal has plans to root me out of my earth, and now his shed’s a risky place. So to gather my forces and find a likely wine cellar, windowless closet or basement, where an old man might store a casket and sleep the daylight hours. Times change, tunes change. The old fox needs a new den.
Chapter 24
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 6th
I woke up late and rushed to get ready for my first client, followed by a day so full of interruptions and unexpected demands that I had no time to think about the two marks on my neck covered by a blouse with a high collar. It was already dark when I stood on Vi’s back steps and knocked on her kitchen door holding a box of pastries from a bakery down the street.
When she answered the door Vi was in such a state of rare excitement that she could barely stand still.
“Oh, thanks, wonderful! Put it on the counter and come through to the front room—you have to see this.” She led the way through the hall.
“My lady, your presence honors us.” Sir John’s smiling presence made the air shimmer with anticipation that I totally mistrusted. He half rose and sketched a bow, then settled back into the big wing chair next to the tall bookcases that framed the fireplace. The huge greatcoat I’d seen him wear was draped over the back of the sofa.
“How did you get in here?”
He smiled, inclined his head toward Vi.
“Kit, this is so exciting.” She waved a spiral notebook at me.
“Oh, God.” I felt the blood stirring inside me as if I were blushing all over, yet there was also a chill down my spine. Vi’s front room, where I had stood a hundred times, seemed strange and alien. Even my own psychology reference books in the bookcase opposite Vi’s vampire books looked alien, as if I were seeing them through someone else’s eyes.
Vi sat down on the sofa and leaned toward the wing chair. “Sir John has been telling me about his life as a vampire. He met the real Henry the Fourth and the Fifth, and Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is based on him. This is so exciting.”
I sat next to her on the sofa. “Violet, are you crazy?”
She smiled even more broadly. “I think the jury is out on that one.”
“This is so unwise. You don’t know this man.”
“I know.” Vi waved her notebook. “That’s why I’m interviewing him.”
I turned to Sir John. “How did you find this place?”
Ignoring my hostile tone, Sir John leaned back in his chair.
“My sojourn in the ranks of the undead, young madam, has sharpened my senses immensely.” He stretched with a show of massive arms and belly. “Once I had your perfume in here—” he tapped his reddened nose—”’twas a simple matter to track you to this place. As soon as I arose this eve, I came here looking for you and found our lovely hostess on the steps. She invited me in. She even found a place for my luggage in a spare room. In return I promised I would a tale to her unfold of the tragical life and undeath of poor Jack Falstaff. A man deprived. A man who loves roast fowl and sack, condemned to a life without either.”
He heaved a sigh that I could have sworn stirred the curtains. “Food, I miss mightily. But sack! No sack, no reason to live.”
“Uh, excuse us a minute. Violet, come here.” I pulled her out into the hallway. “What’s this sack he keeps talking about?”
“It’s sherry. I looked it up. “
“The man is mentally ill.”
“I can hear every word, most clearly, ladies,” Sir John called from the front room.
I stuck my head back in the door. “All right, Sir John. You must know that you can’t abuse Vi’s hospitality much longer. Amuse yourself with some books or something and we’ll be back in just a minute.” This time we went all the way to the kitchen, testing the theory that maybe he wouldn’t hear us back here. “Vi, everyone knows that Falstaff is a literary character. He wasn’t even alive.”
“Vampires are mythical too. So what?”
“Two myths don’t make a reality. A literary creation can’t become real enough to sit in your living room, and vampires don’t exist. Can’t you see you’re being conned? He’s either deluded, or an actor playing a part, or both.”
Every objection I raised increased Vi’s enthusiasm. “If he’s acting he’s better than any Falstaff I’ve seen on stage. If I can only keep him around long enough to go to the Ren Faire, he’ll be a major hit. He’s got some wonderful stories to tell. I think they’ll make a terrific book.”
“He could be dangerous, Vi. Come in here.” I motioned her over. “I didn’t want to show you this. But I think he assaulted me.”
“He was violent?” Her expression dimmed a little. “What do you mean you think he assaulted you?”
“I went into some sort of a trance when I gave him a ride to the VA, and I woke up with this on my neck.” I held the hair back so she could see the marks on my neck.
“Wow that is so cool!” Her voice was tinged with awe. “Maybe he really is a vampire.”
“Violet!”
“I’ll watch him. Okay? I’m a night person anyway, and I’ll just stay up tonight with him. In the daytime he’ll either sleep or die.”
“Yes, well, what if he doesn’t do either? He could be on drugs or manic—some people with mania don’t sleep for days.”
“Well, we should know by dawn. If he’s a real vampire, he’ll go to earth. Except—”
“Except what?”
“Except I’m out of cat food and I really do have to go out for just an hour or so to do my shopping. If I’m going to watch him and get his stories for the next week or more, I’ll need to get a bunch of groceries.”
“Why don’t you let him help you?”
“Look at how he’s dressed.”
“So get him some clothing.”
“I was hoping you’d do that. He says he has money, but I need some help—you’re more assertive—”
I sighed. “Oh, all right.”
Chapter 25
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 6th continued
Vi went to get her coat. I came back to the front room to find Sir John standing by a bookshelf holding an open volume, shifting from foot to foot, and muttering under his breath. “Look at this!”
It was a copy of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud.
“This is Freud, he was a physician in the early years of the 19th century—”
“I know who he was, Mistress Kit!” His voice rumbled in deep base tones of rage. “A man couldn’t venture out of his coffin in the past century without hearing the name. But here I see the arrant knave slanders me.”
He moved a pudgy finger down the page as he read. “…the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, is based on economized contempt and indignation. To be sure, we recognize in him the unworthy glutton and fashionably dressed swindler.” He threw back his head and roared, “‘Glutton!’ he calls me. Swindler! Fashionably dressed, I grant you—when pocket permits. But how would he know a swindler, unless he himself was one?”
