Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  ‘Didn’t want to harm you? What do you call rape?’

  ‘Yes, but he had to do something to balance off saving my life. He didn’t blind me or wither my leg or make me an epileptic. He didn’t do anything permanent.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t want his demon’s chromosomes messed up by all that dope you smoke. When you can get it.’

  ‘That doesn’t happen! That’s a lie, about broken chromosomes. I think he deliberately chose the one thing that would seem awful, but which wouldn’t actually wreck my life.’

  ‘Hell, Trish, you can’t justify rape, ever! Rape’s the vilest abuse of a woman by a male.’

  ‘That’s what I said to him. I said, “Helen’s right – you men are all the same.” And he laughed – because I guess he agreed with you. See, he was a good guy? Me believing I was carrying a demon child was bad enough. As bad as blindness. But he didn’t want to blind me. Or make me epileptic. Yet he had to do something vile, and I had to believe it was vile. Actually … he was being chivalrous.’ Trish clapped her hands gleefully. ‘I guess they’re all moralists over there in the Metaworld. They know good and evil inside out.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ said Helen. ‘You’re sick.’

  ‘No, don’t you see? I’m healthy. I’m not sick with his seed.’ Trish danced around. ‘Oh, what I’d give for a joint now, to celebrate! Sam bent the rules for me. He chose to. That was chivalry. That was … yes, you can even call it love. Kindness and love.’

  ‘I’m going,’ said Helen. ‘This is the complete end.’

  ‘But why? I called Sam up. He exists. You saw him.’

  ‘That was your smoke getting in my head. And that’s all! I was so knocked out by it, I even fell down. That’s all, all, all!’

  Four nights later, with her new roommate due to move in the next day, Trish rolled back the carpet again, and once more drew the pentagram on the floorboards and wrote the words of power around it.

  ‘Jod, Anabona, Heloi, Tetragrammaton!’ she pronounced, all the way through to, ‘Come, Samathiel, Come!’

  But the pentagram stayed empty, chalk lines on bare wood.

  She called. But Samathiel did not accept the call.

  Sam did not come.

  And maybe this was kindness, too.

  Aid From a Vampire

  I walk through a world of fear, little lady, but it is not myself of whom people should be afraid, not any more. People should wish eagerly for my presence, if the truth be told. They should long for my attack, unlike in bygone days.

  If the truth be told. A person such as I retains the mannerisms of speech of much earlier years. A person? Yes, I regard myself as a person. Oh indeed! I’m more of a person now than I’ve been for seven hundred years. At last people are equal to me, and I am merely equal to people.

  I walk through a world gone cold, as cold as my own flesh and blood, but it is not myself who has chilled the world, is it, little lady?

  I hunt, I feed, and I save my victims from themselves. Oh yes I do. If you listen, you will understand. But I cannot save or cure myself, not any longer. Ironic, yes? Ironic. Bitterly, coldly ironic. Perhaps after all there is a God, and this God conceived a plan. I am His salvator, redeemer, his modern Jesus crossed with Wandering Jew. Or maybe there is a Devil, and just as in the case of Doctor Faust – though for many more years than him – I have enjoyed my strength, my skill, my invulnerability only now at long last to have my pledge called in, a pledge which I never to my knowledge undertook yet which was undertaken on my behalf. Undertaken by what? By God? By nature, damned nature? By an unknown alien force?

  You are intrigued?

  * * *

  Facts: in the year 1300, or thereabouts – who kept a calendar in those days? – somewhere in France, since I recall how French was once my mother tongue, and yes I did have a mother, a fat asthmatic peasant woman, and a father, an oafish slave of the soil, and a varying number of brothers and sisters too, round about 1300 when I was eleven or twelve years old I became what I am.

  Eleven or twelve years old. Who counted ages when children died like flies? If indeed they weren’t murdered, massacred, trampled, violated amidst the ravage and pillage of whole countrysides.

  I was named Adrian or something similar. Who knew names except approximately when no one could read or write? I suspect there were some Roman ruins associated with the name of the Emperor Hadrian near our village of hovels. I seem to recall piles of stone grown over by grass. You can call me Adrien.

  No, I wasn’t waylaid on my trudge back from the fields at dusk after a day of scaring birds. No other predatory vampire was involved, and I have never met another one, if any other exist – though from time to time I have tracked the rumours and alarms, discovering all too often that these must only refer to myself, inflated by superstition, distanced in time and space by my own wanderings and by my own forgetfulness.

  Nor have I ever created another vampire. Until the present years I have only left victims dead or dying.

  It was, I suppose, a ‘miracle’ which young Adrien plodded into the teeth of along the edge of the woods. It was a transcendental moment, a vortex of strangeness, a twist of reality. It was Joan of Arc and her voices, it was Bernadette and her shining lady, it was Moses and the burning bush. It was that kind of transforming, transfixing, transubstantiating experience. A visitation: inexplicable, devastating. With this difference: with darkness in the place of light.

  Well, so what did happen to ignorant Adrien? Too ignorant to know what country he lived in, or what year it was, or what lay over the next hill. A sort of human animal.

  Yet how sophisticated he was to become in due course – how well groomed, by experience, for more sophisticated future eras! Almost like a fairy tale, eh? The grubby frog turning into a prince! Albeit a prince of the darkness, of the night – of fine chandelier-lit salons, and of shadowy alleyways.

  What did happen? I’ve little idea. How many beneficiaries – or dupes – or miracles have the slightest idea what actually happened to them, as opposed to what they imagine happened? I was taken, twisted, turned. Not at the hands of some thirsty, lonely elder vampire. Of that I assure you.

  I was, perhaps, a random experiment which the night itself conducted – solidifying and congealing round me at that very spot. Since we live, or used to live, in scientific times may I remind you how science says that all the particles composing matter are constantly vanishing into a void and reforming? Perhaps the cosmos hiccuped, so that all my particles ceased to exist in concert – to recreate themselves from energy a moment later, in a different pattern. Here’s an analogy: it’s highly unlikely that all the atoms of air in a room will simultaneously rush into the same corner, creating a gasping vacuum in the rest of the room. Highly unlikely! Yet not totally impossible.

  I can spin other theories too. I can assert that a communication beam transmitted from a distant star and using some mode of energy which humans haven’t discovered intercepted the antennae of my nervous system and discharged itself, its alienness. Maybe I was an attempt to transmit the essence of alien life, the vital pattern, across the light years into a host organism. If so, presumably the attempt wasn’t repeated.

  Maybe the dark that ate me and spat me out again, digested and reassembled, was one of those supposed unidentified extraterrestrial vehicles such as reportedly shine hypnotic beams of light on people – in my case, a beam of darkness. Maybe aliens descended in that wood without my seeing them and touched me and rearranged me for a purpose difficult to grasp. I may have been intended as a storage device for all the blood I would drink and all the men and women I would drain, a gatherer of specimen lives which would etch my cells, encoded in molecular memory – until the day when my makers, my redesigners, would return and would home in on me and net me and squeeze me dry into some machine or into themselves. If so, it would hardly be part of my purpose to understand my origin, would it?

  So let us simply say that Adrien the animal-boy was altered in that moment-into a
creature which already sensed how strong it was, how quickly it would heal from any injury, how it was the next best thing to immortal, and how it must feed on the blood of the living in order to sustain its own cold blood. If I’d altered a few degrees differently I might have become a wild boy of Aveyron, running with the wolves. Instead I became a vampire. The vampire. Do you know of any other, actually provenly known?

  Of course not, little lady.

  Needless to say, from time to time I attempted to discover my cause. The urge would wax and wane.

  Sometimes curiosity waned for a whole century. The closest I came was with an alchemist in Nuremburg, though finally I drank him, ever-protective of my tracks, yet also imagining in angry frustration that his blood might teach me something extra.

  Johannes Galb was his name, and he signed his coded manuscripts with the Latin form Galbinus.

  From Galb I learned how an alchemist is by no means principally interested in transmuting one element into another element, climaxing with lead into gold. All of his intricate, time-consuming technical manoeuvres aimed at that end, all the alembics and athenors and retorts and furnaces, all the distillations and sublimations, and all the staining of his hands and burning of his hair and exploding of his attic were no more than an analogy, a physical template for what he was actually up to – namely the transmutation of his own mind, and being. Alchemy is a technological shaman dance. Just as the shaman dance gave birth eventually to ballet, so did alchemy conceive chemistry as an offshoot; which soon became the main branch, then the entire trunk. Thus the world grows more arty and refined and clever. Or did.

  Who better than Galbinus to intuit what it was that had transformed me, and how and why?

  I remember his house rather well: all six storeys of it, including the locked attic laboratory and the locked cellar where I spent my days in my normal dreamless trance wrapped in an old quilt (not in a coffin). Oak pillars and beams and panelled rooms and gently winding staircases … but I avoided the household rooms if possible, and the wife, the three children, the maid, the cook, the journeymen and apprentices. Built of half-timbered sand-stone, and partly plastered pink, the house wore a steep red-tiled roof punctuated by gabled dormer windows. High up under the hip of the roof, sheltered by the overhanging jerkin-head, a wooden balcony jutted out. I often stared out from that balcony over the starlit city after I’d returned from feeding on a reveller, and before we got down to our alchemical work. Lofts in Nuremburg were generally used to store firewood which was hauled up in baskets by means of a rope winch; but Galb used his winch to tug up apparatus and materials, whilst I sometimes used the rope to descend in darkness into the square below, and to return later with the sweetsalt taste of blood on my lips.

  The house was close by the city wall near the Tiergartnertor, the great gate tower. As per city by-laws – chimney sweeps for the regulation of – the chimney of the Galb residence was wide enough to be climbed up all the way from the open ground floor hearth to the sky. I used that chimney more than once to shin down to the ground floor in blessed darkness (thus to flee into the cellar) when sunrise had overtaken us unawares aloft; for it’s true that the vampire shuns the sun. I’m the creation of the night.

  Johannes Galb had an eagle nose, wispy straw hair, and little squinty piggy eyes (the better to avoid acid splashes and shrapnel from explosions). Nominally he was a genuine goldsmith – though his hausfrau mostly oversaw the work of the journeymen – consequently he always had a supply of the needful to fake a demonstration and gull fools who might help fund his real enterprise. But he wasn’t a fake himself, oh no. No more was I, though to persuade him of my authenticity I was obliged … No, that isn’t quite so. In those days I felt dramatically invincible. So I put out my left eye with a red-hot iron and … slept on the matter … and arose the next evening renewed. (I didn’t feel much pain, just discomfort, like a very dull toothache. But I wasn’t insensible; my nerves weren’t numb to pleasure. At the taste of blood I experienced shivering ecstasies.)

  ‘See: I have already been transmuted,’ I told Galb that night. ‘I’m over two hundred years old already.’

  ‘Ah,’ he gasped, ‘so you succeeded in the Art. The enterprise is possible.’

  ‘I didn’t succeed,’ I replied, ‘because I attempted nothing. I was a filthy, exhausted, snot-brained country urchin – no scholar, not even a grown man.’

  ‘Therefore we must become as little children? Is that the secret? We must achieve a fresh … a magical perspective?’

  For his epoch this was very acute of him.

  ‘What was it that precipitated your alteration?’ he went on. He had lots of precipitates on his shelves.

  ‘Nothing. Black nothing. The fingers of night.’

  ‘What do you want from me, then? You, who know less than I, who in turn know less than I need to? Surely you don’t wish to be … untransmuted? To be altered back from divine gold into mortal lead?’

  I shook my head. ‘I want to know why it happened, that’s all.’

  With my consent he experimented on me. He boiled bits of flesh which I cut off for him. He brewed up samples of my blood, distilled them, employed them alchemically. I even let him slice me open and poke around inside my guts and touch my cold slow heart. I suppose he discovered more about anatomy than most doctors knew at that time.

  I was with Galb for three months – months for him of excitement and tantalization – however no message was written anywhere in my body which he could read, so perhaps it was a kindness when I finally drank him and easily escaped over the steep roofs and the city wall.

  Galb’s saw a thoroughly medieval way of regarding the universe. He was the whole world as a collection of codes, of embodied meanings whereby every beast and bird and mineral, every plant and insect was the symbolic signature of some other, ethereal reality. Thanks to him I decided that I – my body and my being – was indeed a message, sent from nobody to nobody. I was a cipher that referred back to a language which no one else had ever spoken, I was a symbol without a referent. Yet I referred. Oh yes. I referred to the veins of a multitude of people.

  For a while my very name, Adrien, assumed a significance which may have been unwarranted. ‘Adrien’ is a confusion of Latin and French, meaning ‘to nothing’. Equally my name was an anagram of ‘n’aider’, ‘not to aid’, ‘don’t help’. There’s no help. Nowadays the three letters A and I and D assume much more significance! Perhaps that’s only a coincidence, not something written in me from the start. Though I can’t help fearing otherwise.

  Much later, when Mesmer’s animal magnetism became all the rage (as well as a cause of rage amongst official-dom) I did try a different tack; not a distillation of my blood or a partial dissection of myself but a harking back by means of hypnotism into the well of my darkened memory to that moment when I’d changed or been changed.

  In Paris privately I consulted a stage mesmerist who had been drummed out of the fraternity of physicians for daring to adopt Mesmer’s methods in the clinic. Of course, afterwards I would have to drink Monsieur Ambrose as well.

  Visualize a sunny salon of a room on the second floor of an hotel overlooking the Luxembourg Garden. Dancing sunbeams, clip-clop of carriages outside, a sofa where I lay like a fainting lady while Ambrose spoke softly and made passes with his hands, weaving these before my eyes in patterns which induced languor and the slavery of the will.

  I had told him how I wished to recall being a boy once again, a boy returning to his home village down a path alongside a dark wood of a dingy evening which ‘changed my life’. I also wished to be aware of myself in the trance, as an observer.

  Soon I was uncouthly mouthing medieval French which may have seemed to Ambrose to be simply some broad regional accent – though doubtless he wondered how on earth this sophisticate reclining on his sofa could have been such a bucolic clod in his younger days. Indeed my life must have changed.

  I was describing myself shambling homeward by that dusken wood, once more
I was experiencing that fatal hour, when:

  I blanked.

  Next thing I knew, Ambrose, looking concerned, was alternately pinching my cheeks savagely and making passes like a windmill while he barked, ‘You are awake! You are awake!’

  I bounded up and gripped him with my vampire strength, lifting him easily in the air.

  ‘What did I say? What did I do?’

  ‘Monsieur, please! It’s beyond my experience.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘You were speaking of that wood – and the darkness. At least I think so. It was hard to follow your words, your voice. And then you … you cried out in a strangled horror, “Rien! Rien!” and went rigid as a board, stiff as rigor mortis. As if you had been dead for a day.’

  Only then did it occur to me that I must indeed have died on that day long ago. I must have died, and come coldly alive again. The change must have occurred while I was dead, and was a zero. Being ‘undead’ is such a central strand of the vampire legend that it’s odd – most odd – that I only at last took this personally during that mesmeric séance in the Paris of the first Napoleon. It’s as though my fantasy archetype knew me better than I knew myself.

  On the other hand, since there appeared to be an unbreakable seal, a prohibition upon that moment at the wood’s edge, maybe the truth is that there was nothing about the moment which could be comprehended by a human mind; and therefore nothing existed to be perceived. A frog’s eye is only constructed to perceive movement. Therefore a fly which stands still does not exist for the frog. In a similar way that moment which transmuted me did not exist for me. It was impenetrable, empty, a nothingness.

  ‘I have been dead longer than that, Monsieur Ambrose,’ I said, lowering him so that my teeth were level with his neck. ‘Six hundred years, if it’s a day.’

  Soon his arms waved frantically again. This time he wasn’t trying to hypnotize me.