Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  If I began my life as a vampire in non-existence, in invisibility, then all this talk of peasant boy Adrien and of Galbinus and of Ambrose matters not in the least, does it, little lady? It solves nothing.

  We both know what matters now. All that matters here at the start of the third millennium is the dying of the human race – and that fear-death which paralyses those who still survive. So many people dare not make love any longer. So many men suffer from impotence, the fear unmanning them. You know all this. AIDS is the adze, the chopper that has lopped the human race at the root. The exponential plague without a cure.

  AIDS is why the dominoes have all fallen over, all the systems of civilization. Hospitals, welfare, graveyards, transport, trade, and finally society itself, till we have become almost medieval again. Simply too many victims for the camel’s back! And then more victims, and more carriers, and more victims still. How much love is made these days, little lady?

  I’m sure the plague came from no laboratory. Too slow a tool to fight a war with – yet in cosmic terms how deadly fast, almost infinitely faster than whatever extinguished the dinosaurs, eh?

  Maybe it was always lying asleep in Africa, just waiting for the human race to attain critical mass? Waiting for people to breed enough bodies then mix up those bodies in the centrifuge of high-speed travel, total mobility, commerce, war, and mega-cities? Ha! That suggests a tool devised by nature, by the Earth itself, to correct unbalanced ecology. To be sure the world of nature reconquers its lost territory year by year. I have never regarded nature romantically. What medieval peasant boy could?

  How coldly I laugh when I think of those old proposals to isolate victims and carriers in guarded camps the size of cities! Why, now that the whole world is sick, the camps that are so jealously guarded in remote wilder-nesses by the vestiges of government lock up the remaining pure-bloods instead, if a pure-blood is desperate enough to volunteer, or unlucky enough to be netted. Yes, let us bear witness to the new monks and nuns of sexuality trying to breed untaintedly to save the race, struggling against their own psychic impotence and infertility, terrified that they’ll be exposed or their children will be exposed – when the support systems for those camps collapse or when military chiefs fight for control over those Fort Knoxes of clean blood. It isn’t easy to catch AIDS. Not easy at all. But in the long run – a generation, two generations, with no cure, a soaring graph of victims and carriers, and society in tatters on account of this – it’s also inevitable. The only safety is to become immune.

  Surely you must know about those pure-blood camps? No? Maybe I shouldn’t feel astonished. Communications are as nothing nowadays. Everywhere is fragmented, falling apart. I have travelled more than you.

  There’s something else you didn’t know till you met me, little lady, though now you know. There is one cure for AIDS. That cure is the bite of the vampire. Of me, the only vampire.

  Oh, not because I kill you! That isn’t what I meant by a cure. The baby thrown out with the bath water.

  Let me tell you about the first person I cured – what, ten years ago now? She was a frail redhead with an alabaster skin. Skinny, from her sickness. Still pretty in a way, although not as pretty as you. The flesh was drawing tight over her bones. She was in remission at the time, in between one bout of illness and another, to each of which her wrecked immune system would surrender helplessly. But there were still medical services, after a fashion. There was still a pharmaceutical industry. With drugs, she could stagger from crisis to crisis for a while longer. Better than your predicament, eh? Almost a golden age by comparison. I smell your fear.

  She was the first plague victim I tasted. I was growing desperate, you see, for lack of choice. I have to feed, even if the blood is vile. But truly I hadn’t given much deep thought to the plague as it affected me, other than to worry that my human cattle herd was thinning out drastically, and growing much more wary – violently wary – of anyone who was an unknown quantity.

  I had caught her in a moonlit, rubbish-strewn back street in… it doesn’t matter which city. I gripped her, bared and sank my fangs into her neck – and she laughed at me. She laughed.

  ‘Vampire! Oh that’s rich!’

  Momentarily I relaxed – though already the tang of her blood, albeit spiced with sickness, was enflaming me strangely like some glorious poison.

  ‘I have AIDS, Vampire. I have AIDS. You’re drinking AIDS-blood. Go on, drink! Enjoy! I’d rather be drained by you than by illness after stupid illness.’

  I stared into her eyes, pale and weak in the light of the Moon.

  ‘You can believe in the existence of a vampire? Most people, till nearly their final moment, imagine that I’m some type of psychotic. A flake. A pretend-Dracula.’

  ‘Oh I believe, I believe. This is the last possible piece of poetry in this ghastly world. Thank you! But,’ and here tears squeezed from her eyes, like droplets of moon-dew miraculously wrung from the Moon’s dry seas, ‘you’re feeding on a woman with AIDS. And AIDS is transmitted from blood to blood, isn’t it, my Vampire?’

  That taste, which was tainted, and yet even so… I had to carry on. As if the taint was addictive. And it was, oh it was! Yet not in such a way that I could sate myself by emptying her. I had to feed on her just so much, and no more. Then I laid her down amidst the rubbish, still conscious, still staring at my eyes, my mouth, my teeth, and instead of racing away I sat by her. Thus I witnessed her recovery, the start of her revival. In the rose-hued light of dawn I saw the first hint of bloom in her white cheeks again. That was merely a visual coincidence, but she knew, and I knew – that I had cured her.

  I also knew that I had acquired a taste for the taint; that I was inflexibly addicted, as surely as if the inclination had been locked away in me long ago, and now the door was open.

  It only gradually dawned on me that my powers of recuperation were fading away, that my own flesh was beginning to age, that injuries could prove fatal, that I was no longer immortal.

  I do not mean that I am sick. I am not. Simply, that in another thirty, forty years I shall die just as anyone else has ever died throughout history, of a heart attack, or a cancer, or an accident, whatever.

  Meanwhile I feed, and I cure.

  Do you think I should present myself to what’s left of a government, with its camps and convoys and generators and laboratories? Present myself as a living serum source, to be drained in my own turn, to be milked as carefully as the last cow in the world, my blood to be centrifuged, packaged, and injected? The most valuable resource ever, eh? The most precious protected prisoner, strait-jacketed in case I do myself harm – until, who knows, I do become insane? My new victims carried to me and held to my lips day by day, to cure them and renew my curing blood.

  That would be hateful. Supposing I was believed.

  No camps for your vampire. That’s totally against my nature. Like some Johnny Appleseed I roam the shattered land instead, on and on, planting healthy immunity, slowly growing older and wearier, Saint Adrien of the magic teeth. Every day that I feed, the world dies a little less, another flower of hope can be born.

  Galbinus was right: I am the unreadable message that maps on to the other, unbreakable code – of the death virus. The one cancelling the other, darkness cancelling darkness. And I must carry on till the night that gripped me in that wood seven hundred years ago claims me back at last… though then it will be a different sort of night.

  Why don’t you throw down that knife, little lady? Your blade could hurt me, now that I’m a person like yourself. The wounds might cause me problems.

  Make no mistake, I’m still strong. If I’m obliged, I shall disarm you, so there’s really no value in that knife. I’d rather not risk a wound, though.

  Why can’t you trust me? It’s tragically true that nowadays many forms of sexual fetishism and displacement flourish – at arm’s length! – amongst those whose libido is still rampant. Mirrors, rubber muffs and dildo dolls. Mutual bestiality. Fixation on a partne
r’s socks. Oh I have heard tales told, and seen sights. I know this! Am I proposing to seize you at arm’s length without ever touching your flesh? Quite the opposite! In that case, why should I be one of those fetishists? What possible breed of pervert nowadays would wish to sup another person’s blood?

  Naturally you haven’t heard of my cure. Those whom I cure only acknowledge the fact to their own kind, whom they seek and find, after I point the way. They are the future, not those dupes in government reservations. You can be the future too. Indeed you shall be, and soon! When you meet another of the Cured, you can both have a baby together. You can repopulate the world.

  Once I have drunk a little from you. After one sharp bite. So let me have my will of you. Toss away that knife. Please. I’m asking nicely.

  When Jesus Comes Down the Chimney

  Now, Jamie, if you don’t go to bed when your Daddy tells you to, Jesus won’t come down the chimney!

  Oh, so you can’t even imagine sleeping yet?

  Saints! Tell you the whole story of Jesus – and of Santa Claus? Why, that would take till nine.

  Well, maybe… (No, I am not spoiling the boy!)

  You just snuggle up in your chair by the fire there, Jamie, and listen to me. And I’ll be carrying you upstairs before you’ve heard the half of it!

  We’d better start with Santa Claus.

  We all know how Santa was born in a humble stable amongst the chickens and goats. Most of his countryfolk were poor, and Santa’s parents were no exception. No shoes on their feet, no fine cakes in the larder. No larders, often! A lot of those people lived in tents, and it got pretty cold in the winter. Three magicians had hiked a thousand miles to be present when Santa was born. They followed a bright comet in the sky, and brought a magic sack as a gift. You could take whatever you wished for out of this sack. Santa’s mother didn’t want to stir up jealousy amongst her neighbours, so she hid the sack away. Anyway, her country was being occupied by the Roman army. If the Romans heard of the magic sack she feared they’d take it away for their wild, greedy emperor.

  When Santa grew to manhood his mother gave him the magicians’ gift and explained all about it. Santa decided then and there that he would like to shower presents on his countryfolk, though he swore that he would never pull anything out of the sack for himself.

  So Santa tramped around the land with the sack over his shoulder, giving people whatever their hearts most desired, or what they needed most. He kept his vow about giving nothing to himself. Even so, one widow woman requested a fine red coat trimmed with angora wool then insisted that Santa should wear it, not she. A leper whose feet were rotted and crippled asked for a pair of stout black boots, and forced these on Santa.

  That wasn’t all. Such a number of grateful people pressed bread and cheese on Santa, from out of their meagre stocks, not to mention fish and fruit and meat and milk and wine – which he couldn’t decently refuse – that within a few years he grew positively stout!

  Well, the Roman soldiers finally arrested him. All of those free gifts that poured from Santa’s sack were destabilizing a marginal economy. They were weakening the currency. They were causing job refusal in the colonial labour market.

  The Romans tied the magic sack over Santa’s head. They marched him up to the top of a hill and nailed him to a wooden cross, then jabbed their spears through the sack a couple of times to blind him.

  When they took Santa down dead at last they bundled his corpse into the sack, tied it tight, and set an official seal on it. They debated tossing him into the nearby river, but eventually their captain allowed Santa’s friends to carry him away to a tomb.

  That night the tomb was broken into by robbers who hoped to steal the magic sack… and they found the sack lying there empty. It was as if that burlap bag had digested Santa Claus! As if it had spirited him away to the dimension where all free gifts came from.

  The robbers were filled with wonder, and didn’t want to steal ever again. Instead, they made a pact to spread the word about Santa all over the world and to carry the sack (or snippets from it) wherever they went, as proof. The sack was first carried to Roma, then later to Torino, where most of it remains to this very day.

  In later years the descendants of those original robbers promised that one day when everybody in the world had heard of Santa and loved him, the sack would begin to distribute free gifts again. That’s why, every Easter, we all receive presents wrapped in sackcloth, in memory of Santa.

  Jesus? Oh yes, I’m coming to him. Of course I am, Jamie! It’s Jesus who’s important tonight.

  Jesus was the leader of those thieves who broke into Santa’s tomb. (There’s something symmetrical, don’t you think, between gifts and robbery? Robbery is the product of a society where there aren’t enough gifts to go round -or where there are too many gifts for too few people. What’s that? Symmet-ric-al. It means… oh, it doesn’t really matter, Jamie darling. Honest!)

  Jesus was the exthief who carried the sack to Roma where the hysterical greedy emperor lived, guarded by his soldiers with their spears.

  When Jesus arrived in Roma he went straight to the Forum. That’s a sort of meeting place, like a Senate, but for the common people.

  Jesus stood up on a marble block and waved the empty sack and called out – with the help of a translator, from Aramaic into Latin, ‘Plebeians of Roma, I bring you gifts!’ (A plebeian was someone unemployed, living on free bread and enjoying free entry into circuses.)

  At first the plebeians who thronged the Forum stared at the sack as eagerly as if they were looking up a girl’s skirt.

  When they saw that the sack was empty, many of them hooted and jeered. Others lost their temper and chucked pebbles.

  But Jesus cried out, ‘The gifts I bring you are dialectical!’ (This was a term which Jesus borrowed from the Greek philosophers.) ‘Your desires are the thesis. This sack is the antithesis. The synthesis is that you should empty yourselves of false goals, vain dreams, the products of a diseased society. Just you empty all of that false consciousness of yours into this sack! It will hold everything, and reduce everything that is contradictory. In its place you’ll discover that gifts ought to be given according to one’s neëds, not one’s desires – but society at present is based on legalized theft, on the alienation of persons from their soil, from their work, even from their own bodies and sexuality!’

  With daily repetition Jesus’ message began to sink in. Soon a few of the plebeians believed him – and stepped into the sack and out again, as a symbol of their change of heart. Then many.

  At last the emperor’s curiosity was piqued; for the circus seats remained empty, and the elephants and the trained apes which rode them wept. Also, there was growing unrest among his soldiers at the prospect of yet another colonial war.

  The emperor in person led the party of trusted guards to the Forum, intending to spear Jesus. On the way there the emperor… now we must tell the truth: he was a hysteric but he also cunningly sensed his own political and economic infrastructure ebbing away… the emperor experienced a visionary fit. He saw a sack in the sky which swallowed the sun. (Actually, we believe this was a total eclipse.) When he reached the Forum he dismounted from his horse – and stepped into the sack. Soon the empire had totally changed… into a republic.

  Ah, now you’re nodding off.

  Let’s go quietly, mm? Up up up to bed.

  Tonight, night of nights, Jesus will climb down the chimney and take away whatever you think is most precious to you. Will it be your rocking horse? Or your toy bear? Or just your tin whistle?

  Tush. How else could other deserving little children receive fine gifts at Easter time?

  Hush. He’ll take something from us all. Not just you, you dobbin. Maybe I’ll lose my spinning wheel tonight. Maybe it’ll be my purple velvet dress.

  Jesus’ll redistribute all our wealth. That’s why he’s called ‘the good thief’. He brings Santa’s empty sack with him down all the chimneys in the whole wide world, and fil
ls it full from every house.

  Here we are now, darling. Tuck up tight, and shut those eyes. No peeping, or he mightn’t come.

  The Resurrection Man

  I still have the ear of the resurrection man. It hasn’t fallen to pieces.

  Oh, I don’t mean the ear of Jesus. I’m referring to a different resurrection man. Namely, William Burke – of Burke and Hare fame, or infamy if you prefer. Maybe you don’t prefer. Perhaps, though this strikes me as unlikely, you’re a little rusty as to the activities of Mr B and Mr H, back in the 1820s?

  If so, let me hold forth. (You can’t really stop me, can you?) William Burke, an Irishman, grew up as a vagabond in County Cork. In 1818, when he was twenty-six years old, he moved to Scotland to work as a navvy on the Union Canal, then under construction. A certain William Hare from Londonderry was engaged in the same task. Hare moved on to become a huckster and presently the keeper of an Edinburgh doss-house, Log’s lodging-house in Tanner’s Close. Burke took up residence there in 1827. That November an old lonely pensioner died in the house. Instead of having the body decently buried, Messrs B & H hit on the bright idea of selling the corpse to Dr Robert Knox’s school of anatomy, for dissection by students.

  The windfall of seven pounds and ten shillings persuaded these two rough Williams that there was good money to be made. Soon they, and their common-law wives, were luring lonesome travellers into various houses, getting the wretches drunk then suffocating them. They used suffocation so that the corpses should seem uninjured. The culpable, or gullible, Dr Knox provided a ready market until the October of 1828 when at last his suspicious neighbours tipped off the police. Raiding Knox’s home in their chimney-pipe hats, the police discovered an old woman’s body in a box in the cellar.

  Hare turned King’s evidence; consequently Burke was hanged for murder while a huge crowd howled, ‘Burke him! Burke him!’ Because Hare had peached on his partner, an attempt to indict him for the killing of one Daft Jamie failed legally; and Hare was set free from the Edinburgh Tolbooth – to vanish over the border into anonymity.