The Vampire Sextette

by Marvin Kaye

  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 wouldn'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 sustaini
ng 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 bearing 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 welltried 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