Metro Winds (25 page)

The wind had dropped. He dressed and went up onto the terrace overlooking the sea. The view was bathed in the blaze of light falling from a full moon.

He recalled the sentence, all those years back, in a musty yellow guidebook to Greece he had found in the attic of his parents' house. That weird, inexplicable sentence had been the seed for the script that had ultimately brought him to Santorini.

‘. . . bringing vampires to Santorini is as bringing coals to Newcastle . . .'

‘But what has Santorini to do with vampires?' asked his agent impatiently, after reading a draft. ‘I have never heard anything about vampires in Greece.'

‘I know,' Case had told her eagerly. ‘That's what struck me. It was such a strange thing to write, and I started wondering what would cause vampires to go there.'

‘But you don't tell us in this,' she'd said, shaking the script. ‘It's not finished.'

He rose and went down to put on his sandals and a coat, and walked out onto the path and up the steps. Despite the chill of the night, he could feel the heat of the day through the soles of his sandals.

He remembered the way the old woman had shaken her head at him, and then as he was coming to the square where he had seen her. He drew a startled breath because he saw that the gate and the wooden door to the church were now wide open, and there were people inside. There were others arriving, wrapped in cloaks and gliding across the moonlit ground. He was standing in the shadows at the end of the path, his heart beating very fast.

Then he saw her sitting on the low stone wall under the eucalyptus trees, the woman in white. She now wore a long white coat belted at the waist and a scarf tied over her black hair. She beckoned to him, and even from so far away, he felt her eyes on his hot, tight skin. He sighed and moved towards her, hardly aware of his own will. As he approached, the night perfume of eucalyptus filled the air and he breathed it in, relishing the pungency of it.

She held out her hand to him, and when he took it, expecting her to draw him down beside her, she rose to look into his eyes.

‘I dreamed of you,' he said. Some of the cloaked figures gliding into the church glanced over as if they heard his soft words, but he could not see their faces or expressions.

‘A seed was planted,' she said. ‘Many seeds were planted, but only one will summon the stranger who will be the way and the gate.'

A shiver ran through Case. ‘What will happen to me?'

‘Once our kind was closer to humanity, but we are immortal and in all the long years began to diverge. We learned how to do without blood, and to live unnoticed among humanity. We became the guardians of humanity, but as we continue to live, so we continue to diverge, and humanity becomes ever more alien to us. Once a century, a human is consumed so that we may understand humanity well enough to care what becomes of it. That human is the stranger who, once consumed, is known, and through that one, all humanity.'

‘I am the stranger?' he asked, but he knew. Here was the answer to his long searching and all of his journeys. He had been a witness all his life, and here at last was his audience. An ecstasy of terror and exaltation welled up in him.

‘Come,' she said. ‘They are waiting.' She took his hand and led him across the stony yard towards the church, where he could see people sitting facing the altar.

‘A church?' he murmured, thinking of all the stories he had researched of vampires being repelled by crosses and holy water.

‘Where else do immortals belong but in a house built for an immortal who was killed by humans,' said the woman, ‘an immortal whose blood is symbolically drunk again and again?'

His mouth was dry as she brought him into the church and to the front, where a man stood, facing the altar. He had the same quality of stillness as the woman, before he turned to face them.

‘I am Gabriel,' said the man, and his eyes were the same pale, dazzling blue as the woman's.

‘Are you an angel?' asked Case.

‘I am as an angel,' answered Gabriel. ‘And now, you must choose.'

‘Choose?' asked Case. His lips felt stiff and cold.

‘What we would have of you is a gift and it is yours alone to give. But this is a dark gifting, for it will end the life of the giver. I think you have guessed that. And so now, you must decide if you can give.'

‘There were others?' Case said, after what seemed a long time.

The figure nodded. ‘There were, and in each case, they gave their gift freely.'

‘If I decide I don't want to die . . .'

‘You will leave this place unharmed,' said Gabriel. ‘You will never see any of us again. You will not be hunted. Think on it, but you must decide before dawn, and that is near.'

Case blinked rapidly, and felt a strange desire to weep. He turned to a looming marble statue of a saint at whose feet lay a sheaf of flowers. The scent was heavy and sickening. Case realised that he was terribly frightened, but he also felt that he had been waiting his whole life for this moment, even if he had not known it consciously. And if he turned from it, what was he to do with what remained of his life? Would he go mad looking for pale eyes to make him feel real?

‘Have you made your decision?' asked Gabriel gently.

Case looked at him, realising there was no choice. Not really. That must have been what the others like him had understood. His life for the future of humankind. It was an exchange any fool could understand. And wasn't this the moment towards which he had been travelling, all unknowing, all these long years? Wasn't this the consummation he had been seeking in all those script endings he had tried to write?

He did not need to tell the immortal his decision. He saw comprehension in those clear, blue eyes. He did not know what he expected, but Gabriel nodded and the rows of seated, cloaked people rose with a soft collective movement and gooseflesh broke out on his neck as the woman in white stepped forward and laid back his collar to bare his neck.

He saw through the open door of the church that the sun was beginning to rise. A fiery crimson light lanced across the sea and in through the door to strike knives of light from every shining surface. Gabriel moved forward, bathed in red, darkness fluttering at his back in great shadowy wings. He laid his long, cold hands on Case's shoulders. His eyes were a blaze of pale light, and Case closed his own eyes. Then he felt the lips of the immortal against his throat. For a moment, he thought that there would be only this kiss, and death, but not all of the old dark stories were false, for he felt the sharp teeth as they punctured his skin and the pain was so intense that he had to clench his teeth to prevent himself crying out. Then the immortal began to draw his life from him, and there was a terrible dragging anguish as if his heart were being torn out. The light of the dawn grew so that he could see the redness through his eyelids. The hands released him, and other hands clasped him, and again he felt the teeth in his throat. All of them, he thought. They will feed on me, and he screamed and felt himself falling away from the sound into the hot burning heart of the volcano.

His last living dream was of the moonlit gumtrees, their sharp scent piercing the alien air.

The end, he thought.

‘Wake,' said a voice.

He opened his eyes. He was outside and it was morning. The woman in white was bending over him, and for the first time, he saw that she was little more than a girl with light, bright eyes.

His throat felt sore but when he lifted his hand to the place where they had bitten him, he could feel that his skin was smooth and unbroken.

‘Our kind heals swiftly,' she said.

‘Our kind?' he asked.

‘You gave your life to bestow the gift of your knowledge. But you were bitten thrice. Once is for the death of a mortal, twice is for the release of the spirit, and thrice is for the birth of an immortal.' A tear fell down her cheek and onto his and he touched it wonderingly. She said, ‘I weep for the human who gave his life for his people. But I rejoice, too, for you are the first new immortal in a century, as I was the first in the last. That is why I was sent.'

He stared at her, and saw the diamond blue of his own eyes reflected in hers. He said, ‘I thought that was the end.'

‘It was the end of endings,' she said, and she held out her hand to him, and he took it, immortal to immortal.

T
HE
W
OLF
P
RINCE
for Heather

M
y son howls.

Hearing it, I start to my feet, the weight of the tapes try I have been working on pulling it from my fingers.

Cloud-Marie gargles thickly in dismay and begins to gather the fabric up from the floor. It is densely embroidered and difficult to handle. When she has managed to heave it onto the rack, she turns her big pale face to me and I wonder if she heard what I heard. One of her eyes regards me with great intensity while the other turns slowly away. I have always seen the drift of that wayward eye as an omen, and more than one decision has been dictated by its movement.

I think of the colour of the sky when I woke this morning: bruise-coloured with tinges of unhealthy yellow; an autumn sky. It used to be my favourite season. I loved the way the thick light soaked any wall in a slow buttery radiance, the rustling susurrus of dried brown leaves sliding along the pavement. Now it seems to me a season of fading sorrow.

It was the very end of autumn when first I came to that city which is the gateway to this place. I had a practical reason for my journey, but my true reason was something less rational, less definable and all but hidden from myself. Simply put, the city had seemed to suggest something that stirred my deepest longings. I do not doubt many people who visit it are drawn by the wonder of an impossible idea translated into a real and miraculously beautiful city.

Yet few who travel to that city, which is fantasy made real, discover that it is the gateway to this labyrinthine land of islands and canals it merely mirrors imprecisely. Despite their longings, the majority will keep to the tourist trails, for the city is a maze designed not to trap victims but to keep them from its secret heart. Most tourists will buy maps and rely upon them to discover what the city has to offer. Seeming to document every tortuous alley as they do, the very complexity of the maps is a glamour designed to ensure that those following them will never wander far from well-travelled paths. Those sensitive or wise enough to suspect the truth and lay aside their maps may still baulk at crossing unknown bridges or following strange paths. Some instinct of caution will remind them of all the stories in which those who choose to leave proper paths come to enigmatic and unsettling ends.

That city keeps its secret well, for this is its entire purpose, the reason for its existence.

Suddenly I want the comfort of my own chamber. I sign to Cloud-Marie that I have finished with the tapestry and, leaving her to return the room to order, I rise and go into the hall. Touching a wall, I find it damp. It is always damp in this realm. In autumn the air is wet because the fallen leaves exude a fermenting steam that intoxicates all who breathe it. In spring, rain falls and falls in grey and slanting curtains that render the grass soggy enough to take a handprint. The air grows so wet that one feels breathing to be little more than a slow drowning. Even in summer, when building surfaces blaze white-hot and the cobbles burn through the soles of your shoes, it is damp, for the heat sucks a haze of water from the canals into the air. It forms a brackish sticky vapour that slicks all flesh and renders all cloth limp. Winter is worse, though. Icy mists rise up as slow and nacreous wraiths, seeping from the cracked black earth to hang almost immobile in the frozen air, breathing a chill, deadly film over the stone walls.