The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  "It's not just temperature," he told me. "All kinds of bodily processes have to be regulated by chemical feedback systems. Blood clotting is one of them. If blood doesn't clot readily enough, you can bleed to death from a trivial cut. If it clots too readily, clots form even when there isn't any damage, and they get stuck—usually in the capillaries in the legs, but sometimes in more dangerous places. A clot in the brain can cause a stroke, a clot in a heart valve can cause heart failure. Nowadays, doctors can treat conditions like haemophilia with clotting factors like thrombin and protein C, and conditions of the opposite kind with warfarin and hirudin, but Sheena's condition wasn't amenable to any kind of continuous therapy. They didn't even know it existed until ten years ago. Her father was one of the first people to be properly diagnosed—posthumously, unfortunately."

  "How can you have both problems?" I demanded. "It doesn't make sense."

  "The level of protein C in the blood is controlled by a feedback mechanism," he said. "Unfortunately, Sheena's father had a bad gene which made a faulty version of the enzyme which is supposed to switch off protein C production when it reaches the right level. It wasn't that the mechanism didn't work at all—just that it was dodgy. Sometimes, his levels went way up, and sometimes they went way down. His children had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the dodgy gene, and that's the way it worked out. Libby was clear, Sheena wasn't. They didn't actually have a test for the gene until a couple of years ago, when they finally managed to locate it, but the symptoms were pretty obvious. Given two or three more years of the Human Genome Project, they'll probably be able to sequence the protein and identify the fault in the dodgy version, and that might open up the possibility of finding an effective treatment, but at the time Mrs. Ho well and Libby got the diagnosis there was nothing that could be done except treat Sheena's symptoms as and when they appeared, according to type, so…"

  "So they decided not to tell her," I finished for him, as enlightenment dawned. "Because they didn't want her to know that she was living under a death sentence." And then, as further enlightenment dawned, I said: "Is that why you broke up with her, you bastard? Is that why Libby hesitated over telling me?"

  "Wo!" he said. "At least, not in the way you think. Okay, I admit, it made a difference when Libby told me. I got scared. Look at me! I'm twice her size. I'd always felt like I was handling precious porcelain—how do you think it made me feel when I was told that a bad bruise could kill her? Maybe I did overdo the carefulness, and maybe she did begin to wonder whether I might be going off her, but that wasn't it. It wasn't. We just weren't right, except for the music… and I knew that if she didn't have time to spare, she shouldn't have to spend it making do. I didn't dump her. We just… fell apart."

  Maybe it was self-justificatory bullshit and maybe it wasn't, but that didn't matter. It had been the right result, after all. Sheena and I had been right. If anything was ever meant to be, we'd have been one of the things that was meant to be—but whether we live a million lifetimes or one, nothing is ever really meant to be. What isn't pure chance is what you make of the cards you're dealt, and Sheena and I had made the most of each other once chance had thrown us together. No one could have made any more of either of us than we'd made of each other, and there was no use complaining about the unfairness of the ill-luck that had torn us apart. It hadn't been cruel fate, or any god that any human had ever believed in. Life never had been fair, even in Atlantis or Arcadia.

  I couldn't blame Davy. I certainly couldn't hold it against him that he hadn't told me what Libby and Mrs. Howell wouldn't, and I couldn't even rail at him for not having told Sheena—because I knew that even if she hadn't heard the ugly clinical details, Sheena had known everything she actually needed to know. She'd always known, even if she'd never raised it to consciousness or connected it to her absent father's premature demise, that she was living in mortal danger. Why else would she have been so implacably determined to get in touch with her past selves, to cram a thousand lifetimes into one horribly narrow span?

  I had helped. I had to cling to that. I had helped.

  The funeral was absolute hell. The crematorium was sterile, the reality of the process carefully hidden by velvet curtains and passionless smiles, but it was even worse at the house, afterwards. Libby and her mother kept giving me books, pictures, CDs, and tapes, saying: "I think she'd have wanted you to have these." She probably would have, but that didn't make it any easier standing beside a chair piled high with the obscene loot of her brief life. Davy had already given me a dozen spare tapes and had promised me faithfully that when the CD came off the presses I'd get the very first copy.

  On the other hand, I certainly wasn't going to turn anything down that had anything of Sheena in it, even if it were just a secondhand paperback whose pages had been turned by her black-painted fingernails.

  I couldn't eat anything, and the tea was vile as well as weak. It wouldn't have tasted any better even if I hadn't still been nursing the remains of the previous night's hangover.

  After hell, it was back to purgatory again when I turned up for work. A dreadful hush seemed to have descended on the call centre, and the muted ringing tones of the multitudinous phones were transmuted by the lack of competition into a sinister symphony.

  I got seven invitations to go out with the girls, and seven assurances that they'd behave themselves if I did. I believed them. They'd have sat quietly in a corner, with me in the middle, sipping their drinks. Although they'd all have made themselves available, just in case I needed further comfort, they would have done so with unprecedented discretion and sensitivity.

  I said no seven times, very politely. Only five of them went on to say: "Well, if you need to talk…"

  I didn't. I needed to listen.

  I played the tapes over and over, and when Davy arrived to make me a present of the newly cut CD—from which "Graveyard Love" had been sensitively omitted, although Byron's kiss-and-sting was still there—I played it over and over and over. I wanted to be free, of myself, but hearing Sheena sing those words, far less plaintively than seemed warranted, didn't do the trick. I wasn't free, especially of myself, even though my true self was invisible. Every time I looked into a mirror, I saw nothing but emptiness.

  Davy told me that the songs on the CD were the best of her work as well as the best of his, but they weren't. They weren't even the rest of her work, left over when body and soul had fled, because I knew full well—although I could hardly confide the truth to anyone else—that her soul hadn't fled at all.

  Sheena was a vampire, and she knew how to remain disembodied. She was in no hurry to be reborn, because she understood well enough how much future remained for serial embodiment. The Earth had existed for four billion years, while humankind had been around for a mere million; it would exist for four billion more, and humankind stood a better than even chance of seeing far more than a million of that, provided that the next falling asteroid was no bigger than the one that had drowned Atlantis and scoured its relics from the soil of Malta. She didn't need to rush for her own sake, and she knew that I needed her to linger. If she had wanted to be free of herself when she wrote that song, she didn't want it now. She had met me in the interim. Now she wanted to kiss and sting in an emergent world, reeking and damp from out of the slime. Now she had a reason to remain, suspended between death and life.

  I played the songs over and over regardless of the fact that their message was out of date, because I knew that music as the purest magic of all as well as the greatest mystery, and I needed magic. I needed to go way beyond sense, into the supernatural. I needed the music to take everything out of me that wasn't just waste, because there was so much in me that was just waste, and I couldn't bear it.

  Sheena had been right when she told me that the only way to get a true appreciation of what it means to be alive is to have died a thousand times, and I knew that I didn't have that true appreciation. She had been right to tell me that until I'd lived and lost a million joyful moments, I wou
ldn't realise how precious they were. And above all, she was right to tell me that once I'd had the even briefest glimpse of other worlds, this one would never be enough.

  I knew that I had only to attract the right kind of night visitor, and feed her, to make the connection I needed, to find the muse who would teach me the art of living in a shattered and shambolic world.

  Every night, I opened a vein in my forearm in order that Sheena could feed. It wasn't strictly necessary, given that she could install herself readily enough within the chambers of my heart, but I wanted her beside me as well as inside me. I wanted to make an offering, an honest libation. I always had to lick the remaining blood away, as if I were a vampire castaway on some desert island, driven to desperate measures in the hope of sustaining myself till rescue came, but the nourishment it provided me was meagre by comparison with the need it filled in her. For her, vampirism wasn't a matter of sinking pints the way lads sup ale. She could leech the blood out of my veins, the marrow out of my bones, the elixir of life out of my very soul, without requiring the delicate touch of her purple-stained lips or the hypnotic gaze of her neutron-star eyes—but she needed the gift, the demonstration of my love.

  I tried my utmost to remember Atlantis and Arcadia, or even to dream of them, but I couldn't. I could have made things up, of course, but I didn't. Fiction is all about contriving happy endings in a world where the only real endings are fire and the grave, but real comfort has to be found and not contrived, and if the supernatural is the only place where real comfort can be found, that's where you have to look for it. If you also find nightmares there, that's the price you have to pay.

  I paid.

  You can't just make things up. You have to find what you need, even if that makes you a puppet in the hands of your own creation. I knew where to look. I knew how. I paid the price. But I couldn't remember. I couldn't even dream. I had to be content with cutting myself, and watching the blood flow down my arm, clotting with minutely judged alacrity, neither too quickly nor too slowly.

  There was always time for Sheena to drink her fill, and she never took too much. She knew the value of extravagance, but she knew the value of economy, too. Her spirit had none of the inbuilt irresponsibility of her body and her blood. She was a vampire—and how!

  I talked to her, of course. Oh, how I talked! But I didn't talk about Atlantis or Arcadia, because she no longer needed my help to recall her past lives. The wandering soul remembers everything. Even Plato, who really didn't know the first thing about Atlantis, knew that. I talked to her about the future, because the future was unmade, and the future was where we'd meet again, if we ever did.

  "In the future," I told her, "all things are possible. In the future, our descendants will learn to see those two lost colours all over again, and they'll find out how to sing again, in all the languages that ever were or ever will be, in true harmony. It won't always be like that, of course, because the course of progress never runs smoothly, and there'll be dark days when civilization all but vanishes and even vampires starve, but as long as the sun shines there'll be new dawns, and because light sustains life, it also, in the ultimate analysis, sustains all the forms of undeath, even the photophobic ones. In time, of course, the sun will begin to fade, reddening as it ages, always reaching for that other colour which is the better part of the colour of blood. In the end, that colour will be all that's left, and even that will fade as the sun shrinks and dies, until there's nothing left of it but the black hole at its core and a surrounding chaos of strange energies. With luck, my love, you'll survive even that; in four billion years even humans ought to be able to reach the stars, and the undead will surely lead the way."

  She didn't answer, but I didn't really expect her to. After all, her voice was the one part of her that I still had in superabundance, and it was always there, filling the space between me and the walls.

  I want to be free, of myself, of myself,

  I want to be free, of myself.

  I didn't really need her voice, although I was very glad to have it, and in such abundance. In the final analysis, I needed only her thirst. It would have been better if I'd been able to remember, or even to dream, but life isn't fair, and you have to play the cards you're dealt to the best of your ability. All I could give her was blood, and for that, she wasn't obliged to be a generous muse.

  But still, I had her thirst.

  I knew she was there every time I cut myself. She was there the rest of the time, too, day and night. She was with me when I slept, no matter how dark and bleak my dreaming was, and she was with me when I went to work, to play the puppet in my best telephone manner, always speaking softly and always following the script with minute precision. She was with me in the Headrow and Harehills Lane, at the Merrion Centre and Elland Road… but when I cut myself, I knew she was there, because I knew exactly how thirsty she was, and exactly what she needed to satisfy her thirst.

  She'd have done as much for me.

  In another life, she already had, even though it set her free upon the tides of time, incapable for a little while of anything but drifting. I'd lost her then, but I didn't have to lose her this time around, and I didn't. I clung on, and I clung hard.

  The more blood I shed, and the more I consumed, the greater the change in me became, but I didn't become the kind of vampire she had been. She'd never promised me that. All she'd promised me was that I would be changed, and changed forever, and I was.

  In a way, it might have been easier to become a shadow of my former self, to pine away and die of a broken heart, but I didn't have a broken heart. My heart was healthy—a fit abode for the sickliest of disembodied vampire spirits—and I didn't want to be a shadow while I still had blood to feed a shadow's thirst.

  Sheena had needed me while she was alive, because nobody else could give her what she needed then, and she needed me just as much now that she was dead, because mine was the blood that she wanted more than any other. When her body had been more than ash and dust, it had been my body that she had needed to give her comfort, and now that there was nothing left of her flesh but ash and dust, it was my blood that she needed for comfort. Any body might have done for warmth, and any blood might have slaked her thirst, but for comfort, it had to be my blood, exactly as it had to be my body. I offered it, as a testament of love.

  It was for comfort, too, that I needed her. For me, nobody else would have sufficed, even for warmth—but what I needed her for most urgently and most ardently was comfort. That was why I cut myself, night after night after night, to feed her and to try—crudely and hopelessly—to feed myself. She was always satisfied, but I never was. I continued to thirst, because no matter how much I had changed, I wasn't the kind of vampire who could sustain myself on a desert island, with none but a ghostly spirit for company.

  "Life goes on, love," Mum said—and she was absolutely right. She had no idea how right she was. Life does go on, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt.

  "It could have been either of us," Libby told me, once when she came to the flat to see how I was doing. "It could have been both, or neither. It could have been me and not her. Maybe it should have been. I was the older one, after all. If I said I wished I could trade places with her, I'd be a liar, but maybe that's the way it should have been."

  "No," I said, in my best telephone manner. "It shouldn't. You couldn't have handled it the way Sheena handled it."

  "We never even talked about it," she went on. "That was absolutely the worst thing about not telling her. We never talked about it. It's almost as if we weren't sisters at all."

  "It doesn't matter," I assured her. "She knew what she needed to know. She said what she needed to say. She heard what she needed to hear."

  "From you," she said. "What did I ever give her, apart from that stupid name?"

  "It was what she needed," I pointed out. "If it hadn't been, she wouldn't have taken it."

  Libby went away happy that we'd shared a few confidences, genuinely pleased that I was bear
ing up and doing well. She didn't offer me any more than her good wishes because she was being loyal to her little sister. She knew, even though she'd never be able to say so, that Sheena wasn't entirely gone. She might even have known what Sheena was, even though she couldn't actually believe in ghosts, let alone in vampires. Working in Gap and living at home had fixated her mind on superficial things. Her mother was like my mother, full of common sense and well-tried saws. I never heard Mrs. Ho well say, "Life goes on, love," but I expect she did, even when there was no one in the room to hear her.

  The first person to see my scars—inevitably, I suppose—was Mum, but she didn't see them for what they were. "What have you been doing, love?" she asked. I could have told her that I'd been out collecting blackberries and she'd have believed it, but what I actually said was a far more blatant lie, even though it was nearer to the truth.

  "I've had them for ages," I said. "They'll be fine, as long as I never get scurvy. Collagen dissolves when you get scurvy, apparently, and the wounds open up."

  "You and your books," she said—which was a tamer version of fucking sociology graduate. I kept drinking the orange juice, though. I didn't want to start coming apart at the seams.

  They say that time heals, but it doesn't. At best, time scars, and there's no orange juice for the soul that will keep you safe from those occasional moments of spiritual scurvy when the scars break down and everything pours out. Even though I couldn't remember, or even dream, I still had those nightmare moments when everything seemed to fall apart and it felt as if all the blood was flooding out of me at once, inviting every supernatural carrion drinker for miles to fall upon me like a flock of crows. The flock was sometimes so dense that my own guardian vampire had no chance to defend her territory—but such moments did pass as my spiritual clotting factors cut in, never more than a little too late.

  I always got through the night, ready to return to puppet life in Phoneland, where even the harpies still touched me tenderly and the gorgons looked at me with naked pity.