The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  "I won't," he said, and stared down at his desk in silence for several seconds, then asked, "Do you think you will ever come back to San Francisco, Madame?"

  "Ever is a long time, Mr. Sherman," she pointed out. "I do not plan to now, but in time, who can tell?"

  "Who, indeed," he said. "And we knew when you came that you would leave, didn't we?"

  She nodded. "Soon or late, I would go."

  "Off to study America," he said, trying to be jaunty; his voice cracked.

  "Yes." She bit her lip to keep from saying more. With an effort, she remarked, "I suppose your children must be glad that their mother is coming home."

  "Oh, yes," he said, grateful to have something safe to say. "Both of them are delighted."

  "I'll think of them kindly," said Madelaine.

  "You're very good." He fumbled with a square envelope, then held it out to her. "Here. I want you to have this."

  "What is it?" Madelaine took the envelope cautiously, as if she expected something untoward from it.

  "A sketch I did. Of you." He looked her directly in the eye, a world of longing in his gaze.

  "Oh!" Madelaine said softly. "May I open it?"

  "Not here, if you please," he said, his standoffishness returning. "I couldn't keep it with me, much as I wanted to. It… it is very revealing—oh, not of you, of me. If Ellen ever saw it, she—" He cleared his throat. "It is enough that one of us should have a broken heart. I will not chance giving such pain to her."

  Madelaine nodded, unable to speak; she slipped the envelope into her leather portfolio which she had brought to contain her account records.

  "This is too difficult," Sherman whispered as he took the file and thrust it toward her. "If you do not leave now, I don't think I will be able to let you go. And let you go I must."

  "Yes," said Madelaine as she took the file and put it into the portfolio.

  "And your cash and gold," he went on with ruthless practicality, handing her a heavy canvas sack with Lucas and Turner stenciled on its side. "Be careful where you stow this."

  "I will," she said, and turned to leave.

  "Madel—am," he said, halting her. "I wish, with all my heart, you… your stay here wasn't over."

  "You're very kind, Mr. Sherman," said Madelaine, struggling to retain her composure.

  "As it is," he went on as if unable to stop. "I will think of you each… often."

  "And I of you," said Madelaine, wishing she could kiss him one last time and knowing she must not.

  "If only you and I…" He let his words falter and stop.

  Madelaine backed away, reaching behind her for the door. "Our… our friendship is not at an end simply because we part," she told him, forcing herself to speak steadily. She pulled the door open, readying herself to leave the bank.

  His reply struck her with the full weight of his constrained emotions, as if he wanted to impart to her all that he could not say: "I know, Madelaine; I know."

  Presidio de Santa Barbara, 14 November, 1855

  We have found an inn near the Presidio itself, and I am assured we will be safe here… This part of California is much more Spanish than the north, more like Mexico; I suspect it is because there are fewer men willing to prospect in the deserts than in the mountains. Perhaps the hold of the Spanish landlords is stronger here than in the North, as there are fewer newcomers to challenge their rule and their Land Grants. Thanks to gold, San Francisco has become quite an eclectic place, what with miners arriving from every part of Europe and America. But here, I am told, it is not so dramatically changed. For the most part, the Camino Real, which our guide calls the Mission Road, is well enough maintained that we made good progress along it, and lost only one day to rain. Our average progress has been a respectable ten to twelve miles a day, although we did slow in our climb through the mountains around San Luis Obispo. Generally, however, we have traveled swiftly, and at this pace, we should reach San Diego by Christmas, from whence we will turn east.

  I have sent two letters back to Tecumseh, though I have had no replies and expect none; I have not yet found a way to thank him sufficiently for the sketch he made of me and gave me the morning I left. He is right: it is too easily read for him to keep it by him, where it might be discovered and understood. In execution it is simple enough: he has drawn me seated on a fallen log, my hat in my hand, in all considerations a most innocuous pose—but there is something about it that smolders, so that I half expect the paper to burst into flame. He included a short note which said he would have to carry my likeness burning in his heart; that is very gallant of him, as well as being very nearly accurate, if this sketch is any indication of his sentiments, lam surprised to discover how strong the bond between us is, though why I should feel so, I cannot think.

  I wonder if Saint-Germain is right, and I am developing a weakness for Americans?

  * * *

  TANITH LEE

  The Isle Is Full of Noises

  Tanith Lee, the internationally renowned, award-winning fantasist, makes her home on the southern seacoast of England. Her many superb novels and short-story collections include The Birthgrave, Companions on the Road, Dark Dance, Drinking Sapphire Wine, East of Midnight, Red as Blood, and many other books and tales. Her fantasies appear regularly in my anthologies, the most recent being a specially commissioned new story, "The Pandora Heart," in Don't Open This Book! (Doubleday Direct, 1998). "The Isle Is Full of Noises," whose title derives from Shakespeare's The Tempest, features a vampire the likes of which—trust me!—you have never before encountered.

  … and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.—Nietzsche

  1

  IT IS AN island here, now.

  At the clearest moments of the day—usually late in the morning, occasionally after noon, and at night when the lights come on—a distant coastline is sometimes discernible. This coast is the higher area of the city, that part which still remains intact above water.

  The city was flooded a decade ago. The Sound possessed it. The facts had been predicted some while, and various things were done in readiness, mostly comprising a mass desertion.

  They say the lower levels of those buildings which now form the island will begin to give way in five years. But they were saying that, too, five years back.

  Also there are the sunsets. (Something stirred up in the atmosphere apparently, by the influx of water, some generation of heat or cold or vapour.) They start, or appear to do so, the sunsets, about three o'clock in the afternoon, and continue until the sun actually goes under the horizon, which in summer can be as late as seven forty-five.

  For hours the roof terraces, towerettes, and glass lofts of the island catch a deepening blood-and-copper light, turning to new bronze, raw amber, cubes of hot pink ice.

  Yse lives on West Ridge, in a glass loft. She has, like most of the island residents, only one level, but there's plenty of space. (Below, if anyone remembers, lies a great warehouse, with fish, even sometimes barracuda, gliding between the girders.)

  Beyond her glass west wall, a freak tree has rooted in the terrace. Now nine years old, it towers up over the loft, and the surrounding towers and lofts, while its serpentine branches dip down into the water. Trees are unusual here. This tree, which Yse calls Snake (for the branches), seems unfazed by the salt content of the water. It may be a sort of willow, a willow crossed with a snake.

  Sometimes Yse watches fish glimmering through the tree's long hair, that floats just under the surface. This appeals to her, as the whole notion of the island does. Then one morning she comes out and finds, caught in the coils of her snake-willow, a piano.

  Best to describe Yse, at this point, which is not easy.

  She might well have said herself (being a writer by trade but also by desire) that she doesn't want you to be disappointed, that you should hold on to the idea that what you get at first, here, may not be what is to be offered later.

  Then again, there is a disparity between what Yse seems to be, o
r is, and what Yse also seems to be, or is.

  Her name, however, as she has often had to explain, is pronounced to rhyme with "please"—more correctly, pleeze: Eeze. Is it French? Or some sport from Latin-Spanish? God knows.

  Yse is in her middle years, not tall, rather heavy, dumpy. Her fair, greying hair is too fine, and so she cuts it very short. Yse is also slender, taller, and her long hair (still fair, still greying) hangs in thick silken hanks down her back. One constant, grey eyes.

  She keeps only a single mirror, in the bathroom above the wash basin. Looking in it is always a surprise for Yse: Who on earth is that? But she never lingers, soon she is away from it and back to herself. And in this way, too, she deals with Per Laszd, the lover she has never had.

  Yse had brought the coffeepot and some peaches onto the terrace. It is a fine morning, and she is considering walking along the bridgeway to the boat stop, and going over to the cafes on East Heights. There are always things on at the cafes, psychic fairs, art shows, theatre. And she needs some more lamp oil.

  Having placed the coffee and fruit, Yse looks up and sees the piano.

  "Oh," says Yse, aloud.

  She is very, very startled, and there are good reasons for this, beyond the obvious oddity itself.

  She goes to the edge of the terrace and leans over, where the tree leans over, and looks at the snake arms which hold the piano fast, tilted only slightly, and fringed by rippling leaves.

  The piano is old, huge, a type of pianoforte, its two lids fast shut, concealing both the keys and its inner parts.

  Water swirls round it idly. It is intensely black, scarcely marked by its swim.

  And has it been swimming? Probably it was jettisoned from some apartment on the mainland (the upper city). Then, stretching out its three strong legs, it set off savagely for the island, determined not to go down.

  Yse has reasons, too, for thinking in this way.

  She reaches out, but cannot quite touch the piano.

  There are tides about the island, variable, sometimes rough.

  If she leaves the piano where it is, the evening tide may be a rough one, and lift it away, and she will lose it.

  She knows it must have swum here.

  Yse goes to the table and sits, drinking coffee, looking at the piano. As she does this a breeze comes in off the Sound, and stirs her phantom long heavy soft hair, so it brushes her face and neck and the sides of her arms. And the piano makes a faint twanging, she thinks perhaps it does, up through its shut lids that are like closed eyes and lips together.

  "What makes a vampire seductive?" Yse asks Lucius, at the Café Blonde. "I mean, irresistible?"

  "His beauty," says Lucius. He laughs, showing his teeth. "I knew a vampire once. No, make that twice. I met him twice."

  "Yes?" asks Yse cautiously. Lucius has met them all, ghosts, demons, angels. She partly believes it to be so, yet knows he mixes lies with the truths; a kind of test, or trap, for the listener. "Well, what happened?"

  "We walk, talk, drink, make love. He bites me. Here, see?" Lucius moves aside his long locks (luxurious, but greying, as are her own). On his coal-dark neck, no longer young, but strong as a column, an old scar.

  "You told me once before," says Yse, "a shark did that."

  "To reassure you. But it was a vampire."

  "What did you do?"

  "I say to him, Watch out, monsieur."

  "And then?"

  "He watched out. Next night, I met him again. He had yellow eyes, like a cat."

  "He was undead?"

  "The undeadest thing I ever laid."

  He laughs. Yse laughs, thoughtfully. "A piano's caught in my terrace tree."

  "Oh yeah," says Lucius, the perhaps arch liar.

  "You don't believe me."

  "What is your thing about vampires?"

  "I'm writing about a vampire."

  "Let me read your book."

  "Someday. But Lucius—it isn't their charisma. Not their beauty that makes them irresistible—"

  "No?"

  "Think what they must be like… skin in rags, dead but walking. Stinking of the grave—"

  "They use their hudja-magica to take all that away."

  "It's how they make us feel."

  "Yeah, Yse. You got it."

  "What they can do to us."

  "Dance all night," says Lucius, reminiscent. He watches a handsome youth across the cafe, juggling minors that flash unnervingly, his skin the colour of an island twilight.

  "Lucius, will you help me shift the piano into my loft?"

  "Sure thing."

  "Not tomorrow, or next month. I mean, could we do it today, before sunset starts?"

  "I love you, Yse. Because of you, I shall go to heaven."

  "Thanks."

  "Shit piano," he says. "I could have slept in my boat I could have paddled over to Venezule. I could have watched the thought of Venus rise through the grey brain of the sky. Piano huh, piano. Who shall I bring to help me? That boy, he looks strong, look at those minors go."

  The beast had swum to shore, to the beach, through the pale, transparent urges of the waves, when the star Venus was in the brain-grey sky. But not here.

  There.

  In the dark before star rise and dawn, more than two centuries ago. First the rifts, the lilts of the dark sea, and in them these mysterious thrusts and pushes, the limbs like those of some huge swimmer, part man and part lion and part crab—but also, a manta ray.

  Then, the lid breaks for a second through the fans of water, under the dawn star's piercing steel. Wet as black mirror, the closed lid of the piano, as it strives, on three powerful beast legs, for the beach.

  This Island is an island of sands, men of trees, the sombre sullen palms that sweep the shore. Inland, heights, vegetation, plantations, some of coffee and sugar and rubber, and one of imported kayar. An invented island, a composite.

  Does it crawl onto the sand, the legs still moving, crouching low like a beast? Does it rest on the sand, under the sway of the palm trees, as a sun rises?

  The Island has a name, like the house which is up there, unseen, on the inner heights. Bleumaneer.

  (Notes: Gregers Vonderjan brought his wife to Bleumaneer in the last days of his wealth…)

  The piano crouched stilly at the edge of the beach, the sea retreating from it, and the dark of night falling away…

  It's sunset.

  Lucius, in the bloody light, with two men from the Café Blonde (neither the juggler), juggle the black piano from the possessive tentacles of the snake-willow.

  With a rattle, a shattering of sounds (like slung cutlery), it fetches up on the terrace. The men stand perplexed, looking at it. Yse watches from her glass wall.

  "Broke the cock thing."

  "No way to move it. Shoulda tooka crane."

  They prowl about the piano, while the red light blooms across its shade.

  Lucius tries delicately to raise the lid from the keys. The lid does not move. The other two, they wrench at the other lid, the piano's top (pate, shell). This, too, is fastened stuck. (Yse had made half a move, as if to stop them. Then her arm fell lax.)

  "Damn ol' thing. What she wan' this ol' thing for?"

  They back away. One makes a kicking movement. Lucius shakes his head; his long locks jangle across the flaming sky.

  "Do you want this, girl?" Lucius asks Yse by her glass.

  "Yes." Shortly. "I said I did."

  " 'S all broke up. Won't play you none," sings the light-eyed man, Carr, who wants to kick the piano, even now his loose leg pawing in its jeans.

  Trails of water slip away from the piano, over the terrace, like chains.

  Yse opens her wide glass doors. The men carry the piano in and set it on her bare wooden floor.

  Yse brings them, now docile as their maid, white rum, while Lucius shares out the bills.

  "Hurt my back," whines Carr the kicker.

  "Piano," says Lucius, drinking, "pian-o—O pain!"

  He says to her
at the doors (as the men scramble back into their boat), "That vampire I danced with. Where he bit me. Still feel him there, biting me, some nights. Like a piece of broken bottle in my neck. I followed him, did I say to you? I followed him and saw him climb in under his grave just before the sun came up. A marble marker up on top. It shifted easy as breath, settles back like a sigh. But he was beautiful, that boy with yellow eyes. Made me feel like a king, with him. Young as a lion, with him. Old as him, too. A thousand years in a skin of smoothest suede."

  Yse nods.

  She watches Lucius away into the sunset, of which three hours are still left.

  Yse scatters two bags of porous litter-chips, which are used all over the Island, to absorb the spillages and seepages of the Sound, to mop up the wet that slowly showers from the piano. She does not touch it. Except with her right hand, for a second, flat on the top of it.

  The wood feels ancient and hollow, and she thinks it hasn't, perhaps, a metal frame.

  As the redness folds over deeper and deeper, Yse lights the oil lamp on her worktable, and sits there, looking forty feet across the loft, at the piano on the sunset. Under her right hand now, the pages she has already written, in her fast untidy scrawl.

  Pian-o. O pain.

  Shush, says the Sound tide, flooding the city, pulsing through the walls, struts, and girders below.

  Yse thinks distinctly, suddenly—it is always this way—about Per Laszd. But men another man's memory taps at her mind.

  Yse picks up her pen, almost absently. She writes:

  "Like those hallucinations which sometimes come at the edge of sleep, so that you wake, thinking two or three words have been spoken close to your ear, or that a tall figure stands in the corner… like this, the image now and then appears before him.

  "Then he sees her, the woman, sitting on the rock, her white dress and her ivory-coloured hair, hard-gleaming in a post-storm sunlight. Impossible to tell her age. A desiccated young girl, or unlined old woman. And the transparent sea lapping in across the sand…