Blood 20 Page 8

  In those minutes I already knew it all. But, sceptic that I am naturally inclined to be, I would not surrender to my instincts – or not entirely.

  I rarely pray, save from duty. But then I went to my knees and I admit that I required of God a sign. I had some learning, and even in superstition, or those matters I attributed to superstition, I was not uninformed. After a long while, I rose and sought the old volume of supernatural bestiary. There I searched out a particular word, and read again the text and examine again the drawing that lay under the word. Then I laughed at my own imaginings, though my body stayed cold and shivering.

  Going to my own shutters, I opened them, slowly and cautiously, and leaned out a short distance.

  It was a little beyond midnight, dark travelling toward dawn in its long black hourly wagons, silent each as a grave. My window looked from the same stretch of wall, creeper-wrapped, as Mariamme’s. Turning my head I saw how the winged shutters of her room again stood wide. They had been fastened when I was with her. She must have risen and seen to them once I had gone away.

  Something then made me rapidly draw back, pulling my own shutters almost to, but without a sound. It seemed to me I dared not breathe, dared not glance – but clearly I must see if something were to be visible – what did I anticipate? Only the thing I had read of in a book I did not believe.

  As I had kneeled to pray, so now I knelt again, and putting my face close to the slats of my shutter, stared through them, towards Mariamme’s window, so open, so much an invitation.

  There was a dearth of light, but suddenly from that very window bloomed a blood-red ghost that dewed every one of the creeper’s leaves with blood – It would seem she had renewed the three-night candle behind her inner window of ruby glass, even as I had left that behind my window of blueness to go out. A signal – what else? Heaven help her, as the victim so frequently is, she was in collusion now with the creature that slowly murdered and damned her.

  And then my heart froze. Peering between the slats, I made out something, in the creeper, there, easing and gliding like a snake – up the very wall of the house –

  At the last moment my courage failed me; I covered my eyes as it began to slide in over the threshold of her room.

  Needless to say, as I huddled in the half-dark, I pictured it all. How she lay, my sister, voiceless, will-less, and waiting, and the black thing came to her and covered her whiteness with its ink. It seemed to me I heard a small stifled cry – and at that I knew she had again been pierced by the hungry fangs of it. There under the blood-coloured window, the vampire that preyed on Mariamme sucked her blood from a cup of pale flesh and gilded hair.

  At first, I could not move from sheer horror. Then a sort of lethargy overcame me. Eventually, a stupor –

  I wakened – and the sun rose! When I forced myself to look out again, the shutters of the other window were fastened closed. Only a slight tearing in the creeper marked the invader’s progress. Obviously, demon of night that he was, he would be long gone before sunrise. I gazed and could not think. My mind was empty of anything. There my sin began. My sin was, of course, this: I did not speak of it.

  I did not speak, and quantities of days followed, quantities of nights between, when I knew – days of Mariamme moving listlessly about the house, now drooping and ashen, next volatile as if in a high fever. Always a ribbon or a necklace to conceal the tell-tale bruises at her throat. She kept away from me. I did not seek her. She was to me like one infected by plague; she revolted me, yet I was tortured by the image of her subjugation, the pouring in of darkness, the plundering – worst of all, the submission that the vampire inspires in and exacts from his prey. Every night that she went to her bedchamber, sending out her maids (who sometimes loitered in the anteroom, talking of her pallor and her nervousness), every night then I felt I must run to her door, beat on it or force it open; she locked it when once alone, I was certain. Over and over I rehearsed my plan. The anteroom led into a corridor, barred at its far end by a large door. Outside this, turn by turn, chosen knights of our father’s, two by two, stood each a month-long service of guard, and had done so all our lives. We were precious, for our various reasons, my father’s daughters. We had only to cry out to bring the pair of champions of that night’s watch, fully armed, hurtling to our defence. But I would go to them softly. By the rituals and ordeals of their knighthood itself, they knew that evil existed, and in many forms, to battle with the hosts of God. Generally, I had found them as superstitious as the lowliest peasant, though their phrases in describing the affair were high-flown. Now I might thank all the saints they had kept this innocent wisdom. Once I had told them all I had witnessed, could they prevaricate? From the window of my room, screened by darkness (the candle in the blue window put out) and the creeper’s fall, they could behold for themselves that eerie awful progress the monster made up the stone walls of this house. Even to think of it – I had never again been able to bring myself to regard it – filled my veins with show.

  Then again, it had occurred to me I should seek the priest of our house. He was an old man, also learned, and no scoffer at what I had always called ‘myths’. Though I was never less than respectful toward him, and steadily attentive to my religious duties, maybe he did not care for me. Mariamme, who lapsed and committed childish sins continually, also burned with an emotive childish devotion to the idea of God, which the priest liked much more than my unfluctuating piety. He had had to set me no proper penance since I was 16, just before my first marriage. He seemed ever on the verge of telling me now that my confessions were a lie; he would have enjoyed doing so. But as I had always told him only the simple facts, he could never catch me out. And though not the favourite, I was still the Lord’s daughter.

  However, in this, surely in this, he would help me, advise me. If not, I must go elsewhere. The Devil worked upon us – and I did nothing.

  Nothing, though I had seen the proofs and could communicate them to others; all those dreadful proofs the bestiary, treating the vampire as a submortal, thus a beast, had digressed upon. (And had not the hand of Fate been even in this, that I should have chanced on this very passage and read it, only a few minutes before I saw the mark on my sister’s neck?) The book related all. First the shape-changing, to a wolf, or to that other vampire thing, the bat – just as I had seen him, going by the window. Next how, though I myself had closed the way, he manifested from thin air behind the lens of red glass – so they did, no human barrier could keep them out. And oh, the stain of blood, her blood spilled from the wound he had made, on her sheet. And the tiny puncture in her neck that, with his constant use, swelled up and blackened in that terrible bruise she must always conceal. Her weakness, her paleness – sure signs – her fainting at the image of Death, which was a cipher for the vampire. How he entered by night, abandoned her before the sun or the crowing of the cock, leaving her ever more despoiled, until, at length, she would die. And worse than die, die and become one of his own, dead yet possessed, a live corpse with my sister’s face, but motivated by the will of a demon.

  And knowing all this, I kept silent.

  Why? It comes hard to me, I partly do not believe it – and partly I do. She was so lovely, and I – well, I was not Mariamme. She had so long been before me, the vision of her brightness, which captivated all as I captivate none. Let me say it out then. I accuse myself of jealousy, of the Sin of Envy. Could it be I would be glad to see her perish, the victim of the Beast? But no – no. How could such a thing be true? She was my sister.

  It was this anguish that drove me to the priest tonight. It was before him, having woken him in his bed, that I stumbled through a confession in which I murmured of certain things, hinted at others. At one juncture the old man caught his breath and broke in – ‘Your lord father will ask an appalling payment for it – but not from her. He has always loved her. I would rest my own life on that –’ Then I saw he had misunderstood me, so I spoke more precisely if perhaps no more succinctly. Abruptly he too bla
nched, and crossed himself, whispering a snatch of prayer. At this I left him. I fled.

  I returned here to my chamber and paced about.

  Soon the moon rose. In terror and trouble I put out the candle behind the blue window. I crept to my shutters and opened them only a crack. When the creeper rustled I ran and hid my eyes – Coward!

  He climbed, he reached the window and passed inside.

  He is with her now, milking her life and purity –

  If I have not the wit to go for the knights of our guard, let me go alone and sink my woman’s nails in his undead flesh, let me harm him all I can for daring to take her. I have felt his shadow. His shadow has come to me in dreams – a faceless presence – I see now, not my fault – it is his thrall that has corrupted me, made me as compliant as she is – and I shall be his next victim. Yes, he will claim me, too, as his bride of death –

  No more. I must act swiftly and at once.

  She runs along the corridor, Mariamme’s elder sister. She opens the door there at its end and goes out to the two nightly knightly guard, astonishing them. Her story, which she tells with a powerful and controlled hysteria, is more energising than any passion. It turns them from civilised men to embattled warriors. This night is a fortuitous choice – these two knights are founders of Mariamme’s inner court. They definitely love her, and grow instantly afraid.

  So they go along the corridor, through the anteroom, at a noiseless rush, and flinging themselves against the door of Mariamme’s chamber, smash through its one flimsy lock in a few seconds, Then they are in the room, the room of their sacred Madonna, while the dark sister stands in the doorway behind them, still as a post.

  The ruby window, bleeding, gives good light. What do they see? What horror, what demoniac extravagance?

  Their goddess lies naked, sprawling on the pillows, helpless, with a look of fear beyond any they have ever seen, except perhaps in a deer about to be ripped by the hounds.

  At the bed’s foot, a man-shaped being, flowing in and out of blackness against the crimson lambency – seeming as if about to dissolve, of which the vampire, as they know, is capable.

  Each man stands transfixed, raising against Satan the cross-piece of his sword. Unmanned.

  It takes the other woman, she in the doorway, to cry out: ‘No – he will be gone – kill him! Look how he has used Mariamme! And then, more terribly: ‘Or give me your swords. Must I do it?’

  That shifts them. Both spring, and taking hold of the creature that even now is in its turn springing, pantherish and abnormally agile, toward the window, they bring it down. It screams as their blades go through it, guts and heart – but there is only one sure way with a vampire. Of this they are aware. As one man drags back the head by its hair, the other hacks it off.

  Bizarrely, the screaming fails to stop.

  No longer the vampire, it is Mariamme who screams. She kneels on the bed, screaming and screaming, her face mindlessly turning its screaming mouth to each of them, one by one.

  Suddenly one of the knights falls to his knees before her. He lifts his blood-red sword into the blood-red light, a sort of pledge, dazzled by her nakedness and her defilement. At the gesture, Mariamme’s screams die. All at once she is totally dumb, though her look of abject fright remains. And in dumbness and in fright, she steps from the bed, runs to the window and throws herself out of it. Before anything can be done, she is gone into the darkness with a ghastly striking wrenching sound that may only be the tearing of the creeper on the wall.

  My father summoned me in the last quarter of the hour before dawn. I had been praying with the old priest, who had been very constrained with me, his fear and distress evident in every mannerism. The whole of the Stone House was wracked, in uproar, weeping and wailing. From far off, any who chanced to hear, would think us doomed.

  He was in the chapel, my father, where the two bodies had been taken. The demon’s remains, under its black cloak, had been ringed by in-pointing swords, fragments of the Host, branches of thorn hastily lopped and smelling still of their sap. The arms and legs, the torso, the severed head, all were discernible in outline. My sister’s poor pitiful corpse was less well-arranged, so shattered was it by its fall. It lay, a heap, wrapped in a red mantle, and already some flowers scattered over it. One hand, still whole and perfect, had been allowed to lie out on the robe’s surface. The jewels glimmered on its fingers, but only with the motion of the candles.

  I told my father, with a bowed head, of my grief and guilt. I was brief, not wishing to inflame his hurt. I had already cut off all my hair, in token of mourning.

  ‘Look up,’ said my father. I obeyed, of course.

  ‘You wish me to tell my story?’ I asked.

  ‘I have heard your story from others.’ His face was like the house stone, unmarked by any tears. Neither of us had cried at all. I have never found it easy. ‘I am only interested, he said, ‘in how you, who have never credited such things, came to credit this.’

  ‘I saw the proofs,’ I said. ‘My shame is, I waited too long. His hold on her was by then too great.’

  ‘These proofs.’

  ‘As I have described. Her pallor and lassitude. The wound on her neck. And the stain in her bed, though faded by much washing. Lastly, when I saw him climb the sheer wall.’

  ‘There is a creeper on the wall. A strong creeper,’ said my father. ‘Even Mariamme’s body, striking there repeatedly till all her little bones were smashed, did not tear it away. Firmly footed, the creeper. And he was very athletic and supple. Did no-one tell you, it was the actor who played the fool – oh, and he played Death, also.’

  ‘In his human form, he was one of the actors?’ I said. ‘Well, I have heard of such things. Did his fellows never suspect?’

  ‘No. Never. They knew he would go out at night. Some girl, they thought. Which was, too, why he wished to return here. Some high-born girl he wanted, who gave herself to him. A silly thing to do, they always guessed as much. It would seem she was afraid of her father, a man inclined to anger. She was pale with fear every next day, though there was also another cause of that; her paleness, her weakness, her fainting at a sudden public sight of her lover, and the premonition of his death – she was with child.’

  I stood transfixed, bemused. I felt as cold as when I recognised the vampire. (Through the deep windows, as if to augment the rest, it was beginning to get light.)

  ‘What are you saying?’ I asked him, my father.

  ‘As for the wound in her throat, she caught her skin in the clasp of her necklace, hurrying to remove it so her maids would go, and leave her to the longed-for company of her visitor. And the next night, you see, he kissed the little wound, and his kiss grew impassioned – a type of kiss you know nothing about, since no man has ever kissed you in such a way, nor shall one, I imagine. A bruising kiss. But she hid that from me, too, and all the others. She thought I would be enraged and kill her. Her. I would have been enraged. I would have killed him – or perhaps not, if she wanted him, if she had pleaded for him … I could never refuse her anything. When she asked me for the coloured window of glass for you, too, not just for her, a blue window for her red window – she said you would feel the slight otherwise. No, I could refuse her nothing. I loved her. When she begged me not to marry her to this one, or that – I always relented. I let go good matches that way, and fine men. Not like the leavings who would agree to take you – and even they have no stomach for you in the end, they prefer the plague or the war. But even so, she never trusted me, my Mariamme. Some flaw there, I never saw it. Nor, it seems, did I ever see you, my scholarly dark daughter.’

  I said, ‘Her bed was marked with blood.’

  He said, brusquely, ‘She was a virgin when he first had her. Even you must have heard of Showing the Sheet of the First Night.’

  We stood almost idly then, and the sun came in through the windows.

  It came to the vampire under his cloak, next across the body of my sister in its red mantle. The shape of limbs
, broken or only hacked, did not alter, no stench rose of grave mould and crumbling dust. My father crossed to the sword-ringed corpse. He lifted a corner of the covering. I glimpsed young skin and staring eyes –

  ‘One omission from the itinerary,’ said my father. ‘Sunlight, which destroys vampires, leaves him untouched.’ He let the cover fall again. ‘And her. I suppose, if she had not killed herself, you would have found some excuse – a fiendish glint in her eyes, a look of the Devil – you would have had do to that work yourself. Her knights would never have been able to take blade to her.’

  ‘I was mistaken,’ I said. My head rang, as if from a blow. I heard myself say, ‘But do you want this blazed abroad? Your younger daughter a whore, lying down under a common mountebank? Better keep to the other tale; it has a nicer flourish. A vampire who raped only her sweet soul, which was then freed by your gallant knights. She died absolved, naturally, and now queens it again, in Heaven.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ murmured my father. ‘Now I hear you.’

  ‘Why?’ I whispered. ‘What did I say?’

  It is a dire time we have of it. The Stone House has more than earned the grimness of its name.

  All are smitten by sorrow. I, who can never weep, feel it perhaps more than most. I miss the sunshine of Mariamme. There is no-one to take her place. Her special knights have already begun to find excuses to desert us. My father lets them go on their pretexts of campaigns and crusades. He is, I am afraid, somewhat unhinged by bereavement.

  Yes, I do fear for his mind. He will not see me, or let me near him. I keep to my room therefore, and read the large old books. It is peaceful, though sometimes I grow unaccountably anxious.

  Even, sometimes, I admit, I become fearful to eat any of the food that is sent me, or to drink the wine. For a reason I cannot quite fathom, and that is certainly foolish, I begin to think he may very soon poison me, my father.