The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  "You mustn't think it's jealousy," Sheena observed punctiliously. "Davy doesn't do jealousy. He doesn't care who I fuck. He just needs my input into the music."

  "I care," said Davy. "I could do jealousy, too, if need be. Not the point. You're happy, I'm happy, too."

  The conversation was becoming tedious, and I was glad when it lapsed. I remembered Sheena saying that I would probably like Davy, and that I'd decided to reserve my judgement. It had been a wise decision; I didn't like Davy at all. But when he started his back-up tapes running and began fingering his keyboards, I had to admit that he had a certain style. He had the amps turned up so that the music sounded far louder than it did on tape, and there was something about the acoustics of the cottage's main room that made the produce of his drum machine seem even more insistent than it ever had before. I felt it vibrating in my rib cage, not unpleasantly by any means, but more intrusively than I could have wished.

  I sat in a corner, already feeling like a spectre at a feast. I knew that the feeling was going to get worse and worse. I was certain that Sheena had only the best of motives for letting me into this part of her life, and I certainly wouldn't have felt good about being left out of it, but it wasn't comforting to be made to see that Sheena already had an intimate relationship that ours—however close it might become—couldn't weaken or reduce. I was prepared to be convinced that Davy genuinely didn't envy me any part of Sheena that was actually accessible to me, but that didn't mean that I had to refrain from envying him the part of Sheena that was accessible only to him. I could do jealousy, and then some. I couldn't help myself.

  I'd never seen musicians at work before, so I didn't know what to expect, but I certainly hadn't imagined that it would be so fragmentary or so repetitive. Davy would play a bit, then Sheena would supply a few words, and then they'd break off—for no particular reason that I could discern—and start again. It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd seemed to be building something that got longer and longer each time they tried it, converging on completion, but every time they seemed satisfied with the way one fragment was going they'd switch to something else. They seemed to make such switches without any significant discussion, as if by instantaneous common consent. The intensity of their communion increased by slow degrees, until they both seemed utterly lost. I wondered whether they would even notice if I got up and left, or if I started yelling at them, but I didn't want to try it in case I was right.

  It would have been horribly tedious and mildly annoying if the fragments hadn't been so loud, but I found that the assault on my ears had a peculiar progressive effect on my imagination. Even though I wasn't involved in the making of the shattered soundscape, I was sucked into it regardless. The insistent beat didn't lose its authority in being so frequently interrupted; in a curious fashion, the incompleteness of the many repetitions began to create a kind of physical need in the parts of my body that were reverberating, which gradually confused and disoriented me—but as if in answer to that penetrating loss of focus, I thought that I began to see the relationship between Sheena and Davy much more clearly.

  They worked on the Byronic kiss-and-sting motif for a while, but not as long as they worked on the ramifications of "I want to be free, of myself." Davy seemed to know what it meant, or was at least prepared to pretend.

  As I watched the two of them together, exploring esoteric fractions of some vaster and inchoate scheme, I began to fancy that they were both serving as muses for the other, each drawing the other out and each changing the other's perceptions of their collaborative endeavour. I might once have thought of it as a kind of symbiosis, but I'd heard and read too much of vampires in the last couple of weeks. I couldn't help seeing it as a mutual parasitism that was taking a toll of both of them rather than working to their mutual advantage.

  I tried to put such ominous thoughts aside by letting my mind wander. As the train of thought ran off, seemingly under its own steam, it got a little lighter—but it never left the realm of the macabre.

  How long could a vampire survive on a desert island, I wondered, if she had only her own blood to drink?

  At first, it seemed to me that her predicament wouldn't be much different from that of other hypothetical castaways, who had nothing to eat but slices carved from their own flesh and nothing to drink but their own piss, but then I remembered the difference that Sheena had taught me. To a vampire, blood isn't mere food. To a vampire, blood is life itself, and anyone who feeds a vampire is profoundly changed in the process. So the vampire castaway drinking from her own veins wouldn't simply be wasting away; she'd be embarked upon some mysterious process of self-induced metamorphosis. But suppose that on this desert island there was not one vampire but two, who thus had the alternative of sustaining themselves on each other's blood rather than their own. They, too, would be in a situation very different from two castaways who attempted to dine on each other's meat, or two snakes who tried to swallow each other's tails. They, too, would be remaking the other as they fed, inducing mysterious metamorphoses of flesh and spirit alike.

  If a vampire muse needed nothing but blood, I remembered saying to Sheena, she surely wouldn't bother trading inspiration for what she could have for free—but if she, too, obtained her share of inspiration, of creativity, the trade-off would be more understandable. Not necessarily fair and equal, of course, but understandable. Even if it were a crooked game, you might have to play, if it were the only game in town.

  It was all a flight of fancy, of course. Davy and Sheena were just making music, after their own conscientiously esoteric fashion. They weren't drinking each other's blood. And yet, those bags under Davy's eyes made it look as if he hadn't slept for a week, and Sheena was so slim that anyone who hadn't seen her eat a well-done steak could easily have wondered whether she was anorexic. Now I'd seen the bruises, I knew what a delicate flower she could be—but only could be, because I had her assurance that there were also times when she hardly bruised at all.

  I could do jealousy, and then some. If anyone were feeding on the substance of Sheena's soul, metaphorically or supernaturally, I wanted it to be me. Obviously, I thought, Davy felt exactly the same way. He didn't mind my fucking her, but if I upset the equilibrium on which her singing depended, he'd rip my head off—always provided that he could get to the head of the queue in time.

  Eventually, they finished. They seemed happy with what they'd done, although it didn't seem to me as if they'd completed anything. Unfortunately, I wasn't like Big Bad Davy. It wasn't enough for me to be happy that she should be happy. For me to be happy, I had to be the cause of her happiness—and if that made me a kind of vampire that neither of us could admire, I had to live with it.

  I knew that I couldn't woo her away from the music, and I knew that I shouldn't even try, but that didn't mean that I couldn't try to compete, to make my own demands on the blood that coursed through her body. I didn't have to settle for being the only one who was changed. I could change her, too, if only I put my mind and heart into the attempt. As she'd said herself, anyone can be a vampire, and everything that we take too readily for granted is really supernatural.

  Sheena went to the loo before we left, and I took the opportunity to have another wee word with Big Davy.

  "So who were you in a previous life?" I asked. "Beethoven or Jack the Ripper—or both?"

  He grinned. "What you see is what you get," he said. "I don't do past lives. Do you?"

  That was what I wanted to hear. I'd suspected as much. Sheena had told me that Goths had a licence to be weird in any way they wanted—nothing ruled out, and nothing compulsory.

  "Yes I do," I said. "And how."

  In the next few weeks Sheena and I went dog racing at Elland Road and horse racing at Wetherby. We went dancing wherever there were dark-clad bands playing to legions of dark-clad acolytes—even if we had to go as far as Nottingham or Derby—and we went drinking in the Cock and Crown, the Upin Arms, and the Countess of Cromartie. Mostly, however, we went to Atlantis and Ar
cadia.

  While I was still figuring out the best way to work it I let Sheena do most of the talking. The kind of self-hypnosis she practised wasn't much more complicated than relaxing into a mental gear somewhere west of neutral, and once I'd learned how not to be an inhibitory presence, she didn't have any obvious difficulty in getting there, or in free-associating fantasies of quite extraordinary elaboration. I had a lot of catching up to do, so I was content at first to offer prompts and nonleading questions: As time went by, however, I began to feed more and more information into the fantasies.

  I discovered that Sheena was right about the nature of the creative process—that it really did seem that I was finding the material I fed in, not in the books that I read but within the fantasy itself, as if they had always been there waiting to be noticed or uncovered. It was perhaps as well, because the Atlantis we wove out of words wasn't much like any of the Atlantises in the books I dug up—which ranged from Plato to Madame Blavatsky—and the Arcadia would have been hardly recognisable to the scrupulous author of Dr Smith's Classical Dictionary. If I'd had to plagiarise the material I used in the continuing reconstruction of Sheena's favourite past lives, the wheels would probably have come off the entire enterprise. I'd never have become an authentic collaborator. Fortunately, my own imagination proved equal to the continual challenge. Necessity is the mother of improvisation, and I needed to cement that link with Sheena because it was the only way I could see to go one better than Davy, to be the perfect partner he had failed to be in spite of the hold his music exercised upon her.

  It was inevitable, of course, that the fantasies would come to occupy much of my thought even when I was not with Sheena. At work, once I was able to cruise through calls on autopilot, I often found myself slipping away into daydreams of discovery, in which I would conjure up new titbits of information and imagery that fit one or other of the jigsaws we were patiently bringing towards completion. Whenever I was walking from home to work, or filling in time at home while Sheena was working with Davy, Atlantis and Arcadia were always there to provide temporary avenues of escape. Bit by bit, slyly and shyly, they even managed to work their way into my dreams.

  Sheena introduced me to her mother within a week of introducing me to Davy, but I didn't see her big sister then or on any of the next few times when I had occasion to cross her home threshold, because she was always at work or out. Mrs. Howell was no taller than her daughter, but she was much stouter. She had probably been pretty thirty years before, but she hadn't aged well, perhaps because she was so nervous, indecisive, and fluttery that she must have been hyped up with adrenaline practically all her life. I never mentioned Atlantis, Arcadia, vampires, or Goths in front of Mrs. Howell, who seemed to take some comfort from the fact that I did not have dyed-black hair. Sheena was careful not to leave me alone with her mother, but on the one occasion when Mrs. Howell did manage to snatch a private word, she said: "I hope you'll be patient with Suzy. She's often unwell, you know, and her imagination sometimes runs away with her."

  "She's been fine lately," I assured her, tacitly taking credit for the fact that Sheena's bad legs had almost ceased to bother her. "I love her imagination." It was the truth, if not the whole truth. I adored her pliant, fleshy reality and her runaway imagination, and saw no need to separate the two in my own mind, even if diplomacy circumscribed what I could say to her mother.

  The sex was even better once we began to take it for granted, although I did try to be as gentle as possible, even when she told me that she was in one of her unbruising phases. For me—but not, I suspect, for her—the sex functioned in the beginning as a kind of anchor in reality, tethering the flights of fancy that became, in essence, a leisurely kind of foreplay. I thought of the sex, to begin with, as "coming down to Earth" after an excursion into Neverland, and it wasn't difficult to draw that distinction while our mutual hypnosis sessions weren't really mutual at all. While we were exploring past lives sitting at a table, or in two chairs placed so that we could stare into each other's eyes, the act of going to bed was always an obvious transition from one state of mind to another. As time went by, however, we began to indulge our flights of fancy while lying together on the couch. Sometimes we went to bed before we began to explore the still-hidden treasures of Sheena's supposed memories, and added the physical into the imaginary as if one could be subtly dissolved into the other without crossing of any obvious boundary. I had no alternative, then, but to enter more fully into the fantasies myself.

  It was natural enough, during my early attempts to help Sheena recall her supposed past lives in Atlantis and Arcadia, for me to ask her whether there was anyone among her past selves' acquaintances who might be one of my own former incarnations. She denied it with such apparent assurance that I never thought the point worth pressing—and it seemed, at first, to make my own part as a prompter easier to play. As time went by, however, I began to wonder if her confident denials were a way of keeping me safely distant from the deep core of her dream. The only thing which stopped me making more strenuous efforts to intrude myself into the scenarios we spun out was the fact that she was just as emphatic that none of Davy's previous incarnations was present, even though Atlantis and Arcadia were both places where music flourished. In Sheena's Atlantis, in fact, choral singing was the highest art, much more vital to the coherence and solidarity of society than religion.

  "I wish I could sing the songs of Atlantis for you," she said, "but I can't. I've tried before—" I presumed she meant that she had tried to sing them for Davy "—and it can't be done. The language of Atlantis is dead, and I can't pronounce the words, but even if I could, they're not the kind of songs that can be sung solo."

  That was, of course, one of the many aspects of her fantasies that were intrinsically mysterious. For instance, all her memories of Atlantis were nighttime memories, although her memories of being a dryad or an Amazon in Arcadia were usually sunlit, pleasantly if not gloriously. This was not because Sharayah or Morgina—the two Atlanteans she remembered most frequently and more clearly—had not been active by day, although they had both been vampires after their fashion, but because they were deliberately shielding their memories of day from her miraculous hindsight.

  "Our past selves can do that," she explained. "Access to such memories is a privilege, not a right. In fact, access to our own memories is a privilege, too. Sometimes, when we repress aspects of our present histories, it's not because they're traumatic in themselves but because they're linked to recurrent patterns extending across the centuries, like wormholes."

  "There must be something terrible in Atlantis that can be seen only by day," I suggested. "Some monster that retires to its lair at sunset and returns at dawn, like a movie vampire in reverse."

  "It's not as simple as that," she assured me. "I think it might be something to do with colour. At night, no matter how bright the stars are, it's very difficult to perceive colour. Candlelight helps, but it's not like real daylight. I think the Atlanteans may have had more colours than we have, and that Sharayah and Morgina don't want me to realise what we've lost."

  "Perhaps that's why the magical creatures of Arcadia were destined to die out," I said. "We may flatter ourselves that satyrs and centaurs, dryads and the gods themselves became intangible when humans ceased to believe in them, but it's hard to see why they'd be impressed by our scepticism. Perhaps their hearts were broken, although they didn't know why, by the loss of the secret colours of Atlantis. Perhaps that's why they lost the ability to sing in proper harmony, or even to speak in the language of the authentic Golden Age. Did the Arcadians invent art and drama in the hope of being able to rebuild what they dimly remembered? And is that why the arts have been going downhill ever since, as the memory is slowly obscured from all but a frustrated few? Except, of course, that you're not frustrated, are you?"

  "No," she said, ignoring the double entendre. "What I do remember only makes me more complete."

  There's nothing in the least surprising in the fact th
at I began to hypnotise myself with these same fancies, occasionally slipping into a mental gear where disbelief was totally suspended. The only real cause for surprise is that I couldn't make any progress inventing or summoning up the memories of any past lives of my own. I wanted to find my Atlantean and Arcadian selves, even if it turned out that they didn't overlap in time with any of Sheena's selves and couldn't actually meet, but it seemed that I was to be limited to the role of disembodied voice, accompanying Sheena when she flew upon the wings of time, a mere parasite of her remembrance.

  "I wish I could be more," I said once.

  "Don't fret about it," she advised. "What was, was—the past is unchangeable. It's not the worst of fates, to be a passenger in my memories. It's a far easier way to my heart. I just wish you could hear, if only for a moment, the song of Atlantis, the song of the world as it was. I can describe the people to you, the buildings, the flowers, and the animals. I can even describe the chimeras and the spirits, at least as they seem by moonlight, but I can't describe the music, because that can't be put into any words we know."

  "I have more than enough," I assured her, repenting of the suggestion that I could be in any way dissatisfied with our relationship. "I have everything I need."

  I had, too. I had everything. It took me a little longer to show Sheena off to my mother and my half-brothers than it might have done, because I was paranoid that one or other of them was going to say something horribly wrong, but when the time came to bite the bullet, the occasion passed harmlessly.

  "She's that thin," was Mum's verdict afterwards. "But it seems to be the fashion nowadays. Look at that Ally McBeal." The last remark was not a veiled reference to Sheena's talent for invention, but merely evidence of the censorious frame of mind in which Mum invariably watched TV.