From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

by Emily de Courcy

  And so it was that his grandest opus resided secretly in her cabinet and spoke only to her, notes swirling around her like ghosts, like snowflakes, and like the first sharp breath of winter. In all the centuries that had stretched on after those rose-scented spring days, the queen had never played his last etude all the way through to the end. It was the very last thing he had composed for her and she could not quite bring herself to finish it.

  Perhaps she simply did not care to find out how he had chosen to resolve it. Or perhaps she enjoyed the mystery, there for the solving whenever it should please her. Asdis kept it with all his other music. Often, she would stare at it when she was alone, tracing the notes one onto the next with her artistically sharpened nails.

  That first time, when she had found it awaiting her on top of her harpsichord, looking rather innocuous, she had almost played it through, to see what it might be, but she had stopped just in time, and she could still hear the piece perfectly in her head. Such a short thing. It was as though he had endeavoured somehow to distil a year of music, and the things that had hung in the music as it had come to life around them, into that one short etude. Unlike the rest of the music he had written for her, its edges remained unbent.

  From the opening bar, Asdis had known it for what it was: an inevitable acknowledgement of what could never be. A farewell. He had watched her intently, the hesitant movement of her hands, the sudden stillness: his eyes had missed nothing and she had seen his hands too, clenched, and heard the raggedness of his breath.

  Ever competent, he had given advice on the angle of her wrists and suggested she heed the metronome. She had told him that he had written no instruction, her voice cool and careful as she watched him out of the corner of her eye.

  “Largo con dolore,” he’d replied quietly, as the music died away. “It is the only way to play it.”

  It had been the only way to live, too, she found. Largo, if not quite dolore.

  Asdis had wondered if he’d returned to his own realm, where time moved faster than it ever should, and mortals perished into ash before one’s very eyes. Did he ever become their greatest composer, as he had wished? Or a famous luthier as he certainly deserved? Had he lived as he had written, Largo con dolore?

  She wondered if her name had coloured his music as his always did hers, ubiquitous within the melodies and the hastily scribbled notation, if one only knew how to read it? She’d never cared to find out. There must always be pain where there is great music, after all, and what use to go and find that he had long since turned to dust?

  It was all so far away in the murky depths of time that it hardly mattered anymore. Now she was the great and terrible dowager queen. She would not allow herself to indulge in introspection.

  Largo con dolore, she whispered to herself, a sharp reminder, echoing the words that had haunted her down the centuries. Her voice was instantly snatched by the wind, which tore the hood from her elaborate coiffure.

  Yes, she had certainly known disappointment, even if she had not allowed it to change her, even if she had always been a deviant all on her own.

  The queen could feel the winter fold around her like a blanket.

  There were few things she disliked more than spring and wild strawberries.

  Pumpkins

  The story would have gone differently had the woman thought to run the moment she’d grown aware of him. Survival was a human instinct, just as the hunt was his. As was only his nature, Sylvester tried to kill her on the misty walk, descending from the sky like a bird of prey, and she stopped and faced him, because it was impossible for him to kill her and very silly to even try.

  This threw him so much that he came up short and stared at her just as the rain began and she produced a fuchsia umbrella. He did his best to re-evaluate and regroup. People generally ran from vampires, even if they didn’t believe in them: it was just a survival instinct programmed so deep into human nature that it took over where logic and thought faltered.

  Predator. Danger. Flee. Simple.

  It was the sort of thing he expected. Not unreasonably. It was practically polite. Instead, this particular woman had walked on calmly until she’d reached a wrought iron gate outside a very neat little house. And then he’d pounced and she simply stood there and looked at him: half amusement, half patience. He’d got the impression that she wanted very much to laugh, but didn’t think it would be polite.

  In fact, she still stood calmly under her umbrella, beneath a flickering street lamp, as though she expected him to say something. The darkness, black and cold, covered everything else. He listened a moment to the familiar silence of night and rain – it was comforting and endless. It was entirely fitting.

  Sylvester hesitated then, sensing that something wasn’t quite right and wondering what he ought to say.

  “Who are you?” the vampire demanded at last, through the rain, which was considerably stronger now. All of a sudden he felt particularly out of temper. It was almost embarrassingly childish, really.

  The smile widened fractionally.

  Perhaps it was then that he saw something in her that spoke of lifetimes past and time breaking around her like oceans, because he drew back, took a closer look and knew her for what she was.

  She thought he would have done better asking her what she was in the first place. It was silly to assume. She told him as much and paused thoughtfully, wondering what name she ought to give. There had been many names: she’d had a name since before there were words.

  After another moment she picked an old one.

  “Thanatos.”

  Sylvester came from a time when every gentleman of quality studied the classics. He looked momentarily amused and a little bitter. “Lady Death?”

  “Sometimes.” Usually only to poets, she thought regretfully – you just didn’t get poets like you used to. Most other humans didn’t give her any honorifics.

  “Hah! I always thought I’d meet you in the dark and rain sometime. I confess, however, I thought it would be rather sooner and while still alive.”

  She laughed at that and adjusted her umbrella. “I hardly ever make personal calls these days. Besides which, you’re a little out of my jurisdiction. Bringing death for a long time isn’t quite the same as being dead for a long time, you know. Or undead. So you see, I am not here for you at all. But you’d better come in out of the rain. You haven’t an umbrella – and colds aren’t any more pleasant just because you can’t die of them.”

  He looked surprised at that, so she handed him the umbrella, and produced her keys. A jangly set with a fluffy hell-hound key-ring. They were remarkably ordinary – not the least bit of mysterious filigree in sight.

  Then, she walked through the open gate and to her door and, for some reason, he followed her. The door did not shut ominously behind him as all the doors in his manor did.

  Thanatos thought she liked him, rather. She liked the long memories in his eyes – he didn’t remember as much as she, of course, but that hardly counted since she remembered everything.

  Better yet, if his expensive clothes were anything to go by, he was probably just the sort to have boxes and trunks of antique lace cravats packed away in storage somewhere. Vampires were notoriously sentimental. Most likely, he read too much Byron and Shelley, too. She knew the type. It was almost as good as meeting an old-fashioned kind of poet: they had always been extremely entertaining. Besides, she hardly ever met anyone that old anymore.

  If she were perfectly honest, Thanatos was very amused that she should have met the vampire at all, just when she had entirely given up on the day. And she had wondered how long it would take him to consider possible reasons for why she wasn’t running away. He’d been very gothic, staking her along the rooftops as he had done – Anne Radcliffe would have been impressed.

  It had been raining for a week straight, she reasoned, which seemed to drive everyone just a little bit mad around the edges. With that in mind, it seemed unsurprising that the vampire wouldn’t have recogni
sed her on sight. He did look rather preoccupied. It seemed that she wasn’t the only one who’d had a rather tiresome day.

  October was an altogether miserable month in the part of the world which she currently chose to call her own and she thought she’d spend an evening indulging a bit of fancy by carving a pumpkin into something ghoulish. That was before a vampire happened along of course, but she rather thought she might do it anyway, after she gave him some tea. Mortals carved pumpkins every October and it seemed to amuse them.

  “Well, I trust this means I need not worry about a sudden influx of bats?” said Death cheerfully, when he handed her his expensive coat and stood looking around.

  The vampire smiled a sharp, nacreous smile. “It is the teeth, generally, that one ought to beware – not the bats.”

  Thanatos threw her head back and laughed, her throat pale in the gentle lighting of her entrance hall.

  “I hardly think teeth will bother me. But bats can leave such a ghastly mess.”

  He noticed that she’d hung charms in the doors and windows: the in-between places where things could slip through unnoticed. He wondered what it was that Death had to ward herself against.

  She noticed him looking, but did not elaborate, merely motioning him to follow her. There were a lot of doors: more than the house should have had, and he doubted very much that these doors led to any rooms that should have existed either.

  The portrait in her sitting room, lovingly painted by what could only be Rossetti or one of his set, features Thanatos looking exactly as she did then. She stood in a garden archway, young and pale, bony, of course, and holding a lantern. Her old-fashioned gown was a marvellous cascade of blue silk in an elegant polonaise.

  Thanatos looked almost whimsical and child-like, if you didn’t look too closely into her dark eyes. But it didn’t signify, he supposed because she had always been young, even as she had been old and all the shades in between. And he felt a strange kinship to her, knowing that.

  Death’s kitchen was the strangest place Sylvester had ever had occasion to visit. The walls were cream coloured, and the drawers stained a dark golden shade. It was warm, pleasant and homely – not at all what he would have expected, had he ever stopped to imagine Death having a kitchen.

  “Do sit down – you’re lurking again,” she said chidingly, and moved away to make them tea.

  Sylvester hadn’t had tea in longer than he would have cared to remember, and he had never had tea like that at all. It tasted of pumpkins and cinnamon, because she liked pumpkins in October and always put lots of cinnamon in everything when she could get away with it.

  The vampire watched curiously as she produced a sharp knife, permanent marker, and a big pumpkin.

  “I’m given to understand it’s meant to be fun,” she told him, catching his expression with a smile. Then she proceeded to draw a childishly unpleasant face on it while he watched.

  Sylvester had never carved a pumpkin, any more than he had ever had tea with Death, and he was taken aback when she handed him her bone-handled knife and told him to have a go. The pumpkin pulp made a ghastly mess of the neat kitchen counter, but she didn’t seem to mind that in the least, watching with a strangely tranquil look on her face.

  As they carved, he found himself talking to her about how things used to be, back when he had burned with life and she had been very old, and then about later, when he had already become what he was now.

  “It must be terrible to see all of time as you do. I do not even remember all of my existance – the first time I drew blood to survive. It is peculiar to always bring destruction when I most long to seek out life.”

  “Destruction is a necessity of what I am,” she pointed out, still poised and unconcerned.

  “It is an endless, insatiable hunger. It consumes all, even happiness and hope.”

  “That doesn’t strike me as very unusual – but then I have never felt hunger, though of course I have wondered about it.”

  Sylvester sighed, staring into the past.

  “It is always there, it echoes through the night and through all the rooms of my house.”

  He spoke of the manor he owned just outside her little cathedral town, and of having to flee there numerous times to outrun the angry villagers. But he’d never thought of leaving because he liked living near the sea.

  Thanatos nodded knowingly. “Of course. It’s all the fog.” She’d met enough vampires to know that they had an excessive fondness of fog, whether lurking in it, conjuring it or turning into it themselves.

  The vampire seated at her kitchen looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “That’s very practical... Ah, but I find that I have forgotten to ask your name.”

  “You don’t know it?”

  “No. You’re unlikely to ever be of professional interest to me. And one cannot keep every name in one’s head all at once. I expect you’ve had several names in the course of your undeath, but which do you prefer at the moment?”

  “Sylvester, then. I was named for my great grandfather, you know. I dreadful roué, though still better than a vampire, I expect. I have seen too many sunsets to be even a little bit decent, you know.” He looked rather forlorn.

  Thanatos looked at him steadily down a rather long nose, before returning her attention to her rose tea.

  She found that the best way to get to know vampires was to let them natter on.

  The tea cup was of the finest porcelain and when she drank the tea, her nose and mouth filled with roses.

  Then she looked at him again. “Ah, yes. I know this one! I have made a study of emotions, you see. You find yourself haunted by your eternal torment, forever longing to be what you cannot be and to have what will never be yours.”

  This was said as matter-of-factly as if she were reciting Latin verbs at him.

  “I think you have been reading too much Milton,” Lady Death concluded.

  Sylvester didn’t quite know what to say to that. He would have flushed had he still been alive. He felt startled and a little offended that she seemed to think so little of such an important thing.

  “Oh, don’t look so annoyed. You must admit, when you think about it logically, that you are being quite absurd. Not just you, of course – dramatics is a common problem when it comes to vampires. I’ve met enough to know, you’ll allow. Now, sorcerers have a lot more joie de vivre, although they really shouldn’t, when you think about it, since they generally spend their days crouched over formulas and cauldrons.”

  “Dramatics?” Sylvester found it rather difficult to keep up with her summation of supernatural society.

  “Well, yes, of course. You must have learned by now that for everything there is a price, and blood has ever been an ancient currency. You choose to dwell on that, and wallow in your melancholy, but you might also take a look at the centuries you’ve lived and will live: the wonders you have seen and learned. You are fast, erudite, and well beyond the ravages of time – you have all the time you could want, to chance, to try and to perfect, while mortals have but a handful of decades and must know always the things that are quite out of their reach.”

  “I certainly have time to watch! Forever an observer, all alone. I can never – it is impossible to know warmth and joy if one is only ever an observer.”

  “Stuff. That can be said of everyone,” she dismissed impatiently. “I should know, if anyone – I have had eternity to trace patterns.”

  Her strange silvery eyes, the colour perhaps of some void beyond the universe, were fixed on him.

  “You think, for instance, that you are a thing of darkness,” she said. “But you are no worse than anyone, really.”

  And in her eyes, he was not. He wasn’t used to that, and didn’t know what to make of it.

  Perhaps that was why he kept ringing her door bell after that first unexpected meeting. She had a ridiculous yellow door, he discovered the second time he found himself in front of it. It was almost embarrassing. Assuredly, it was most undignified. He would have
gone with wrought iron and wood – a Victorian Gothic revival of some sort, he mused.

  Then, the door opened and Thanatos stood there, looking surprised. He found he didn’t know what to say at all. If she thought it strange that he kept returning, she said nothing of it, however.

  For her part, Thanatos thought Sylvester a curious thing. He burned like fire, she observed, beneath all the pallor and the cold of undeath. Another vampire trait she couldn’t quite understand. He was almost a living thing, if lives were to be measured in zest. It was all incredibly fascinating, and so nice to have someone who understood the endless ebb and flow of time, if but a little.

  He always visited when one of his melancholies came upon him.

  When he sat in her parlour, looking grim and staring gloomily at her portrait, she would hold his cold hand in her unexpectedly warm one.

  “I was meant to be Persephone in that one. What a lark!”

  “Were you?” he sighed.

  “You really ought to cheer up, you know. It is dreadfully undignified to mope through the centuries.”

  He had expected her hands to be more skeletal than they were.

  “Did you love them, your poets and your artists?” he asked, startling her because no one had ever asked Death that, even though her love was the greatest and most final love of all.

  Thanatos laughed, looking at the canvas with a fondness vast as oceans. “You forget my musicians – those were always dying young, back then. Yes, I did, though not in the way you mean. I never talk about art to those I do not love.”

  That day, and on other days like it, Sylvester stayed late at the house with the yellow door and left in the early hours of another rainy morning, looking paler and somewhat anaemic in the daylight, as all his kind did.

  Thanatos was surprised, and a little pleased when he came back a few days later in a better mood. This time he rang her doorbell with a bottle of old wine, the better to recall the centuries. He told her of the very last summer he was alive, of the parties, and the sunlight on the river, and the unbelievable emerald of the grass. It had stopped raining by then, and she opened the window and let the starlight in. Sylvester watched as it tangled and wove through her hair like a cat.