The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  Yse is there, just inside the wall of glass above the terrace, standing with a tall heavyset man, whose hair is almost white.

  He's kissing her, on and on, and then they draw apart, and still she holds on to him, her head tilted back like a serpent's, bonelessly, staring up into his face.

  From down in the channel between the lofts and towerettes, Lucius can't make out the features of her lover. But then neither can he make out Yse's facial features, only the tilt of her neck and the lush satin hair hanging down her back.

  Lucius sits in the boat, not paddling now, watching. His eyes are still and opaque.

  "What you doing, girl?"

  He knows perfectly well.

  And then they turn back, the two of them, farther into the loft where the light still burns, although the light of dawn has gone, leaving only a salty stormy dusk.

  They will hardly make themselves separate from each other. They are together again and again, as if growing into one another.

  Lucius sees the piano, or that which had been a piano, has vanished from the loft. And after that he sees how the light of the guttering lamp hits suddenly up, like a striking cobra. And in the ray of the lamp, striking, the bulky figure of the man, with his black clothes and blond hair, becomes transparent as the glass sheets of the doors. It is possible to see directly, too, through him, clothes, hair, body, directly through to Yse, as she stands there, still holding on to what is now actually invisible, drawing it on, in, away, just before the lamp goes out and a shadow fills the room like night.

  As he is paddling away along the channel, Lucius thinks he hears a remote crash, out of time, like glass smashing in many pieces, but yesterday, or tomorrow.

  Things break.

  Just about sunset, the police come to find Lucius. They understand he has a key to the loft of a woman called Yse (which they pronounce Jizz).

  When they get to the loft, Lucius is aware they did not need the key, since the glass doors have both been blown outwards and down into the water-alley below. Huge shards and fragments decorate the terrace, and some are caught in the snake-willow like stars.

  A bored detective stands about, drinking coffee someone has made him on Yse's reluctant stove. (The refrigerator has shut off, and is leaking a lake on the floor.)

  Lucius appears dismayed but innocuous. He goes about looking for something, which the other searchers, having dismissed him, are too involved to mark.

  There is no sign of Yse. The whole loft is vacant. There is no sign either of any disturbance, beyond the damaged doors which, they say to Lucius and each other, were smashed outwards but not by an explosive.

  "What are you looking for?" the detective asks Lucius, suddenly grasping what Lucius is at.

  "Huh?"

  "She have something of yours?"

  Lucius sees the detective is waking up. "No. Her book. She was writing."

  "Oh, yeah? What kind of thing was that?"

  Lucius explains, and the detective loses interest again. He says they have seen nothing like that.

  And Lucius doesn't find her manuscript, which he would have anticipated, anyway, seeing instantly on her worktable. He does find a note—they say it is a note, a letter of some sort, although addressed to no one. It's in her bed area, on the rug, which has been floated under the bed by escaped refrigerator fluid.

  "Why go on writing?" asks the note, or letter, of the no one it has not addressed. "All your life waiting, and having to invent another life, or other lives, to make up for not having a life. Is that what God's problem is?"

  Hearing this read at him, Lucius's dead eyes reveal for a second they are not dead, only covered by a protective film. They all miss this.

  The detective flatly reads the note out, like a kid bad at reading, embarrassed and standing up in class. Where his feet are planted is the stain from the party, which, to Lucius's for-a-moment-not-dead eyes, has the shape of a swimming, three-legged fish.

  "And she says, 'I want more.' " 'I want the terror and the passion, the power and the glory—not this low-key crap played only with one hand. Let me point out to someone, Yse is an anagram of Yes. I'll drown my book.' "

  "I guess," says the detective, "she didn't sell."

  They let Lucius go with some kind of veiled threat he knows is only offered to make themselves feel safe.

  He takes the water bus over to the Cafe Blonde, and as the sunset ends and night becomes, tells one or two what he saw, as he has not told the cops from the tideless upper city.

  Lucius has met them all. Angels, demons.

  "As the light went through him, he wasn't there. He's like glass."

  Carr says, slyly (inappropriately—or with deadly perception?), "No vampire gonna reflect in a glass."

  12. Carried Away

  When the ship came, they took the people out, rowing them in groups, in the two boats. The man Stronn had also appeared, looking dazed, and the old housekeeper, and others. No questions were asked of them. The ship took the livestock, too.

  Jeanjacques was glad they were so amenable, the black haughty master wanting conscientiously to assist his own, and so helping the rest.

  All the time they had sheltered in the rickety customs buildings of the old port, a storm banged round the coast. This kept other things away, it must have done. They saw nothing but the feathers of palm boughs blown through the air and crashing trunks that toppled in the high surf, which was grey as smashed glass.

  In the metallic after-storm morning, Jeanjacques walked down the beach, the last to leave, waiting for the last boat, confident.

  Activity went on at the sea's edge, sailors rolling a barrel, Nanetta standing straight under a yellow sunshade, a fine lady, barefoot but proud. (She had shown him the jewels she had after all brought with her, squeezed in her sash, not the ruby earrings, but a golden hair pin, and the emerald necklace that had belonged to Vonderjan's vrouw.)

  He never thought, now, to see anything, Jeanjacques, so clever, so accomplished at survival.

  But he saw it.

  Where the forest came down on to the beach, and caves opened under the limestone, and then rocks reared up, white rocks and black, with the curiously quiescent waves glimmering in and out around them.

  There had been nothing. He would have sworn to that As if the reality of the coarse storm had scoured all such stuff away.

  And then, there she was, sitting on the rock.

  She shone in a way that, perhaps one and a quarter centuries after, could have been described as radioactively.

  Jeanjacques did not know that word. He decided that she gleamed. Her hard, pale skin and mass of pale hair, gleaming.

  She looked old. Yet she looked too young. She was not human-looking, nor animal.

  Her legs were spread wide in the skirt of her white dress. So loose was the gown at her bosom, that he could see much of her breasts. She was doing nothing at all, only sitting there, alone, and she grinned at him, all her white teeth, so even, and her black eyes like slits in the world.

  But she cast a black shadow, and gradually the shadow was embracing her. And he saw her turning over into it like the moon into eclipse. If she had any blood left in her, if she had ever been Antoinelle—these things he ignored. But her grinning and her eyes and the shadow and her turning inside out within the shadow—from these things he ran away.

  He ran to the line of breakers, where the barrels were being rolled into a boat. To Nanetta's sunflower sunshade.

  And he seemed to burst through a sort of curtain, and his muscles gave way. He fell nearby, and she glanced at him, the black woman, and shrank away.

  "It's all right—" he cried. He thought she must not see what he had seen, and that they might leave him here. "I missed my footing," he whined, "that's all."

  And when the boat went out, they let him go with it.

  The great sails shouldered up into the sky. The master looked Jeanjacques over, before moving his gaze after Nanetta. (Strain had avoided them. The other whites, and the housekeep
er, had hidden themselves somewhere below, like stowaways.)

  "How did you find him, that Dutchman?" the master asked idly.

  "As you said. Vonderjan was falling."

  "What was the other trouble here? They act like it was a plague, but that's not so." (Malignly, Jeanjacques noted the master, too, was excluded from the empathy of the Island people.) "No," the master went on bombastically, "if you sick, I'd never take you on, none of you."

  Jeanjacques felt a little better. "The Island's gone bad," he muttered. He would look, though, only up into the sails. They were another sort of white to the white thing he had seen on the rock. As the master was another sort of black.

  "Gone bad? They do. Land does go bad. Like men."

  Are they setting sail? Every grain of sand on the beach behind is rising up. Every mote of light, buzzing—

  Oh God—Pater noster—libera me—

  The ship strode from the bay. She carved her path into the deep sea, and through his inner ear, Jeanjacques hears the small bells singing. Yet that is little enough, to carry away from such a place.

  13

  Seven months after, he heard the story, and some of the newspapers had it, too. A piano had been washed up off the Sound, on the beach at the Abacus Tower. And inside the lid, when they hacked it open, a woman's body was curled up, tiny, and hard as iron. She was Caucasian, middle-aged, rather heavy when alive, now not heavy at all, since there was no blood, and not a single whole bone left inside her.

  Sharks, they said.

  Sharks are clever. They can get inside a closed piano and out again. And they bite.

  As for the piano, it was missing—vandals had destroyed it, burned it, taken it off.

  Sometimes strangers ask Lucius where Yse went to. He has nothing to tell them. ("She disappears?" they ask him again. And Lucius once more says nothing.)

  And in that way, resembling her last book, Yse disappeared, disappears, is disappearing. Which can happen, in any tense you like.

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

  "But he has said, the Island is quite deserted now."

  * * *

  Marvin Kaye has compiled sixteen anthologies for Guild America Books, including Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, Lovers and Other Monsters, and Don't Open this Book! He is adjunct professor of creative writing at New York University and artistic director of the New York City theatrical production company, The Open Book.