The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  "Actually," I confided to Jez one night in the Countess of Cromartie, when I finally allowed him to bully me into letting him buy me a pint of bitter, "life doesn't go on. We begin to die as soon as we begin to live. It's death that whittles the embryo into human shape, death that clears out all the cellular compost day by day, as life takes its toll. Life doesn't go on at all—it just flows away, bit by bit, emptying us out even though we were never really full."

  "Yeah," he said wisely. "Too bloody right. That's why you have to make the most of what you've got. Fight it, mate. You might lose, but you've got to fight." He couldn't quite see that that was exactly what I was doing, far more cleverly than he could know. At least he had the grace to refrain from making observations about the number of pebbles on the beach or fish in the sea. He'd been out with the girls too many times to be under any delusions about any fuck being a good fuck. He didn't know enough to envy me what I now had, but he knew enough to envy me what I'd had before.

  "She was a grand lass," he said. "A bit strange, but who can blame her? We take our health too much for granted."

  "Yes, she was," I said. "And yes we do. Do you mind if I don't get another round in—no offence, but I think I'd rather be at home."

  "No, mate," he said. "Another time, eh?"

  "Another time," I echoed. That was where I was headed. I didn't necessarily expect to get there that night, but I intended to travel hopefully. Contrary to proverbial wisdom, it's far better actually to arrive, but the momentum of hopeful travelling does have its own compensations.

  When I got back to the flat, I made myself eat. I had to "keep my strength up," as Mum would have put it. I peeled and chipped my own potatoes, although the processed peas came out of a tin. It had been a while since I'd been to the supermarket and the skinless sausages were a couple of days past their sell-by date, but I knew it didn't matter. English sausages have so much preservative in them that they keep for at least a week after they've supposedly given up the ghost—it's one of the nation's finest traditions.

  While I ate I put on the CD Davy had given me, and filled the flat with Sheena's voice. Afterwards, I put it on again, and then again. I wasn't always that obsessive; some nights I didn't play it at all, preferring other items from what had been Sheena's Gothic rock collection and was now—thanks to the generosity of Libby and Mrs. Howell—mine. Listening to the Fields of the Nephilim's Elizium or Dreadful Shadows performing "Sea of Tears" or anything at all by Sopor Aeternus brought back tender memories of listening with Sheena as well as creating an appropriately heartaching mood. Most nights, though, I arrived home without having been sidetracked, and there was something about drinking in a pub with Jez that smacked ever so slightly of betrayal, so I felt that I needed to mainline the real thing, to go directly to the source. I had mixed feelings now about Davy's decision to omit "Graveyard Love" from the album, because I had begun to think of that as the most prophetic and deeply felt of all Sheena's non-Byronic lyrics.

  Eventually, I put the kettle on to boil. Then I got the kitchen devil from the drawer and used the jet of vapour gushing from the kettle's spout to sterilise the blade. It wasn't for my own sake that I was frightened of infection, but I needed to preserve the purity of my blood.

  The inner surface of my left forearm already had too many scars crisscrossing it, and the outer part was far too hairy, and I wasn't sure I could make a neat enough cut with the blade in my left hand, so I took off my shirt before sitting down on the bed. There were hairs on my chest too, but they were mostly above nipple-level and I was pretty sure that I could draw a good line across my heart if only I could figure out exactly where it was hiding behind my rib cage.

  By this time I'd read enough about the circulation of the blood to know that Sheena had been right and I had been wrong about the pulmonary vein, but I didn't intend to cut that deep. Freshly oxygenated blood is undoubtedly the best kind—the vampire's champagne—but as soon as you open up the meanest, bluest vein the outflow sucks life from the air and becomes pure scarlet, pure intoxication.

  When I'd made the cut I lay back, closed my eyes, and listened. One day, I knew, I'd be able to lie back like that and keep on going: falling through the space-time continuum, across the fragile borderlands that separate our own universe from all the parallel alternatives, not merely to Arcadia and Atlantis but to venues even more exotic.

  But not yet.

  For the time being, I was still an amateur, still a hopeful fellow traveller, not yet an initiate into the brotherhood and sisterhood of blood. For the time being, I stood in need of guidance, of education, of moulding—but that, at least, I already had. I had the best teacher in the world, perhaps the best in all the worlds.

  Although I could always hear and feel her, I didn't often see her—but that night I did. That night, she came to me vividly, in all her posthumous glory. Her face was pale but her lips were purple and her black hair shone as it tumbled vibrantly about her shoulders. She was dressed for the grave, in a shroud that had once been white, but the night had infected the filmy fabric, filling it with darkness and the stars.

  The lust in her eyes was limitless, but when she settled upon me and lowered her head to feed she was as light as a cloud and as dainty as a moth.

  When I first threw my arms around her, I hardly dared to hug her, for fear that she would break or dissolve into mist, but I felt the thrill in her flesh as she lapped the blood from the horizontal well, and I felt the force of her caresses, as she ran her delicate fingers over my face and my neck, my hips and my thighs.

  When we kissed, she nipped my lip between her teeth to prove that I wasn't dreaming. I needed the reassurance, because I needed to know that the ecstasy was real and not just a product of my wishful mind. Sheena had assured me that even the everyday was supernatural, and we'd had our moments of ecstasy while she was still imperfectly incarnate, but the supernatural is at its best when it's bold and blatant, and ecstasy achieves its greatest heights when it's properly unfettered. To get the best from a vampire lover, you have to do more than dream. You have to overcome your fear of true commitment.

  When I came, Sheena absorbed the milky fluid as easily as she'd absorbed the rich claret that flowed from the gash beneath my nipple.

  It's traditional for supernatural visitors to prove their reality by leaving behind some physical token of their presence, and Sheena did that, too, but it was the substance that she took to nourish her own fugitive solidity that provided the firmer proof to me. It didn't make sense, but I knew that she was way beyond sense now, as truly supernatural as any creature that had ever defied the crippling demands of mortality.

  She had always been a vampire, but I never had before. The final proof of the preciousness of our love would be the future we would share, once we were united in nature and in purpose.

  When she had had her fill of me, she lingered, as only the most loving vampire can or will. She let me run my hands over her body and look into her fabulous eyes. As I looked, it seemed to me that I could see through her eyes, into the dark essence of her emotion and intelligence, where her lust for blood, life, and eternity was manifest in the tortured energies swirling around the event horizon of her appetites. The display was alight not merely with all the colours of the Atlantean rainbow but with others not yet manifest in any of the lives that she and I had lived.

  One day, I know, we'll find the identities that would allow us to perceive those colours, and more besides.

  That night, with all my heart, I wanted to be free, especially of myself—but I knew that the kind of freedom I wanted was the kind that had to be won, and that the winning of it wouldn't be easy.

  Silence fell while we held each other, but it didn't break the spell. Sheena still lay upon me, her head cradled on my shoulder, the weight of her slender torso pressed against my heart, and her legs parted to either side of my lumpen thighs. She was so very peaceful, now that she had fed, that I could have rolled us over and pinned her down, and threatened to detain her
until morning, but she would have laughed at me, because vampires can't be caught like that.

  "There's no hurry," she whispered when she caught the stray thought. "We have all the time in the world."

  I know that—but sometimes it's hard to be patient. Sometimes, when you hold a vampire lover in your arms, you want it to go on—if not forever, at least until the sun comes up. But vampires are definitely creatures of the night, even though the notion that they crumble to dust in sunlight is something the movies made up to provide their tall tales with some sort of closure.

  "When will I see you again?" I asked, although I knew she wouldn't give me a specific answer.

  "Another time," she said.

  That's where I'm headed, for now and always.

  I truly believe that I'll get there. I'm changed and I'm changing, and it's only a matter of feeding the muse until she forgives me for the time it took to see her for what she really is, and to understand what I really am, even if I'll never be able to see it in a mirror.

  The inhabitants of other times saw more in light than we can see, and they heard more in music than we can hear. There's not much we can do to compensate for that, but we should all do what we can. We can all try our utmost not to think the way other people think, not to do the things other people do, not to like the things that other people like, and not to want the things that other people want. We can all feed the creatures of the night, and hope that whichever of them deigns to accept our loving offerings will eventually set us free, in one or another of the nine secret ways that only muses know.

  Sheena told me her secret even before she died: that the only way to get a true appreciation of what it means to be alive is to die a thousand times. Until I've lived and lost a million joyful moments, I can't begin to know what such moments are really worth—and that's not the kind of task you can rush.

  I'm working on it, but I know that even with her to help me, it'll take a lot longer than a single lifetime.

  Another time?

  If only.

  GLOSSARY OF LOCAL AND OTHER ESOTERIC TERMS

  arse: the English word mistranscribed by Americans as "ass" (in the non-Biblical sense). civvies: military slang for civilian dress.

  Dr Smith's Classical Dictionary: an invaluable reference book compiled in Victorian times by William Smith, D.C.L., L.L.D.

  Dry Blackthorn: one of the two brands of dry cider commonly available on draught in English pubs.

  ferret, slip the: penetrate sexually (by analogy with the sportsman who inserts a ferret into a rabbit hole in order to expel the rabbits from their warren; the word "cunt" comes from the old English term for rabbit—although "cunny" is nowadays rendered in script as "coney" and pronounced, euphemistically, as if it did not rhyme with "honey," while the similarly euphemistic "bunny" has been consigned to the use of children).

  Gap: a chain of clothing merchants whose products are aimed at young people.

  Headrow, The: the main street of Leeds, site of the Town Hall, the Central Library, and numerous imposing lampposts.

  hen party: the female equivalent of a stag party, in which "friends" of a bride-to-be get her roaring drunk and play vicious practical jokes; because female imitations of lad culture (qv) tend to be a little less vindictive, a hen party's worst excesses of violence and calculated humiliation tend to be visited upon innocent bystanders (e.g., male strippers) rather than upon the bride-to-be herself.

  Jez: although "Jez" is used in the south of England as a contraction of Jeremy, Jeremys are very rare in Yorkshire; the likelihood is that the Jez in the story was actually christened Jesse but employs the harder pronunciation because Yorkshire slang tends to equate a "Jessie" with "a big girl's blouse" (i.e., an effeminate male).

  lad culture: an aspect of the male backlash against feminism that became well established in Britain in the 1990s, encouraged and sustained by such popular magazines as Loaded; it renews and magnifies the pride taken by young males in their love of association football, their capacity for bitter ale and their deep-seated fear of all things feminine, while simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) converting them into helpless fashion victims.

  lawy: a contraction of "lavatory" widely employed in regions of England where the word "toilet" is considered to be too Frenchified for polite use.

  letter, French: a slag term for a condom, used by people who consider themselves too posh to say "Johnny."

  Ml: the motorway connecting Leeds to London.

  naff: somewhat lacking in good taste, and therefore seriously uncool.

  New Labour: After nineteen years of Conservative government the Labour party finally won a British general election in 1998, having rebranded its ideology and policies as "New Labour"—i.e., indistinguishable from those of the Conservative party.

  Peel, John: a long-serving Liverpudlian radio disc jockey, held in such affectionate esteem by people who were young in the 1960s that he has now become a curious national institution.

  piss, taking the: holding someone or something up to ridicule.

  pull-a-pig contest: an alleged ritual of British lad culture (qv) in which a group of young men in a pub or nightclub place bets as to which of them can find, take home, and have sexual intercourse with the ugliest woman. Proof has to be provided in the form of Polaroid photographs, preferably displaying the unclad victims in supposedly hilarious, compromising positions, which may be submitted to an unbiased referee in order to determine who scoops the pool.

  Redondan Cultural Foundation Newsletter, The: a periodical devoted to the affairs of the Kingdom of Redonda, a loose-knit literary society created by M. P. Shiel (who was taken to the eponymous uninhabited rock near Montserrat in his youth and crowned king thereof by his father). Royal Redondan Naval Reserve T-shirts are, however, an American product.

  slag: a derogatory term for a sexually active woman.

  striker: an attacking player in association football whose job is scoring goals.

  Strongbow: the other brand of dry cider commonly available on draught in English pubs.

  sweeper: a defensive player in association football who never strays far enough into the other team's half to get scoring chances.

  Tesco: a supermarket chain.

  United: in Leeds, the association football club Leeds United; as noted by the narrator, the term has different referents in Manchester, Sheffield, and Dundee (not to mention Newcastle and Carlisle). The Leeds United stadium is in Elland Road, on the opposite side of the road from the only greyhound racing stadium in England whose track is so narrow that there is only room for five dogs to race on it, instead of the usual six.

  You learn something new every day: a popular English cliché which probably holds true only for people who take the trouble to read glossaries.

  * * *

  S. P. SOMTOW

  Vanilla Blood

  In a profession filled with colorful authors, S. P. Somtow is one of the most colorful. Born in Bangkok and related to the royal family of Thailand, he has written many highly regarded fantasies and works of science fiction, notably Vampire Junction, The Pavilion of Frozen Women, Starship and Haiku, Mallworld, and Light on the Sound He is also a musical prodigy who has conducted several of the world's orchestras, and is an avantgarde composer whose music has been performed in more than a dozen countries on four continents. Now if you've been keeping count, it's been a close race in The Vampire Sextette between sympathetic and diabolical vampires. "Vanilla Blood" closes the tally with some particularly nasty bloodsuckers!

  WELL, THEN. WE might as well begin in the middle. Because the beginning has been done to death, hasn't it? The discovery of the bodies, the cross-country chase, even the allegations of police brutality… you've seen it on CNN. 60 Minutes. 20/20. Hard Copy. Graphic detail. You saw it all.

  You saw her face. Pale as Ophelia in the bathtub of blood. The half-formed smile. The eyes, wide, emerald green, the soggy blonde hair that wound about the corpse like a seaweed garnish; the skin, luminescent, of a piece
with the porcelain she lay in; naked, of course, but they didn't show that on TV. If you were lucky, you caught the nudity when the camera lingered on the photos that first day on Court TV, marking the exhibits one by one, starting with the crime-scene photographs.

  You saw it; we can dispense with it.

  You saw the perp on the cover of Newsweek. How young he looked! Anyone's kid, really—a nice southern boy. Tried as an adult? You didn't really want to agree with the prosecutors—he seemed so good-looking, so vulnerable, so… in need of a friendly social worker. Stared right through the camera and into your eyes… and into your heart.

  Even the Pope sent a letter. As if that would have done much good here, right in the heart of Catholic-hating Klan country.

  And then there was the lawyer. Pro bono, of course. A man who had been on every dream team in every high-profile trial in the last ten years. A talking head on Court TV. Once rendered Pat Buchanan speechless on Crossfire. He, too, had made the cover of Newsweek. But that was the "Superlawyers" cover story last year.

  The prosecutor. An ice queen. Considered more robot than human… at least until Flynt released the nude pics. You know this. You've spent whole watercooler breaks discussing her anatomy. Oh, yes, she was a natural redhead all right. Unless, of course, she had taken the trouble to dye… down there.

  What a bitch! But an appealing one.

  And the judge. He fumbled his way through the last big one, an eighteen-month soap opera of celebrity murder, money, and sex. Now he had learned his lesson, and he was breathing fire, not taking any shit.

  You are familiar with all these figures, I'm sure—there aren't many people in America who aren't. The Saturday Night Live parody alone said more than this brief memoir ever could.

  So, instead, we'll start in the middle…just seconds after Judge Trepte kicked the cameras out of the courtroom.