Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (80 page)

Her hands hung limp at her sides.

I searched for something to say. The rain hissed and gurgled. Puddles in the street outside were reflecting old neon and newer light edging through the grey mist. “It’s dawn.”

She just stood there.

“You’re a real doll Sophie. If I didn’t have  ”–

“How did it happen?” She swallowed, the muscles in her  throat working. Under the high collar her pulse was still like  music. “Your . . . you . . .” She fluttered one hand helplessly.  For the first time since she walked into my office three years  ago and announced the place was a dump, my Miss Dale seemed  nonplussed.

“I got bit sugar.” I peeled my  sodden shirt collar away. “I  don’t want to make any trouble for you. I’ll figure something  out tomorrow night.”

Thirty of the longest seconds of my life passed in her front hallway. I dripped, and I felt the sun coming the way I used to feel storms moving  in on the farm, back when I was a jug-eared kid and the big bad city was a place I only heard about in church.

“Jack, you ass,” Sophie said. “So it’s a bite?”

“And a little more.”

665

Miss Dale lifted her chin and eyed me. “I don’t have any more steak.” Her pulse was back. It was thundering. It was hot and heavy in my ears and I already knew I wasn’t a nice guy.  Wasn’t that why I’d come here?

“I’ll go.” I reached behind me and fumbled for the knob.

“Oh, no you will
 
not
.” It was Miss Dale again, with all her  crisp efficiency. She reached up with trembling fingers, and  unbuttoned the very top button of her collar.

“Sophie  ”–

“How long have I been working for you, Jack?” She undid  another button, slender fingers working, and I took a single step  forwards. Burned skin crackled, and my clothes were so heavy  they could have stood up by themselves. “Three years. And it  wasn’t for the pay, and certainly not because you’ve a  personality that recommends itself.”

Coming from her, that was a compliment. “You’ve got  a

real sweet mouth there, Miss Dale.”

She undid her third button and that pulse of hers was a beacon. Now I knew what the thirst wanted, now I knew what it felt like, now I knew what it could do . . .

“Mr Becker, shut up. If you don’t, I’ll lose my nerve.”

Sophie is on her pink frilly bed. The shades are drawn, and the apartment’s quiet. It’s so quiet. Time to think about everything.

666

When a man wakes up in his own grave, he can reconsider

his choice of jobs. He can do a whole lot of things.

It’s so  goddamn quiet. I’m here with my back to the bedroom door and my knees drawn up. Sophie is so still, so pale. I’ve had time to look over every inch of her face and I wonder how a stupid bum like me could have overlooked such a doll right under his nose.

It took three days for me. Two days ago the dame in the black dress choked her last and her lovely mansion burned. It was in all the papers as a tragedy, and Shifty Malloy choked on his own blood out in the rain too. I think it’s time to find another city to gumshoe in. There’s Los Angeles, after all, and that place does three-quarters of its business after dark.

Soon the sun’s going down. Sophie’s got her hands crossed on her chest and she’s all tucked in nice and warm, the coverlet up to her chin and the  lamp on so she won’t wake up like I did, in the dark and the mud.

The rain has stopped beating the roof. I can hear heartbeats

moving around in the building.

Jesus, I hope she wakes up.

667

U ntitled 12

Caitlin R. Kiernan

A
 
s it turns out,
 
finding
 
her was the easy part, as easyas falling off a log, as easy as pie, as easy as you fucking please. I spent so many years preparing myself to begin looking  –  years and years and finally a whole decade seeking out those frightened old men hoarding secrets, the mad women guarding forbidden and forgotten books, years committing all the usual indiscretions and blasphemies that might finally make me suitable in her eyes,
 
if
 
I could ever find her. But I doubted I ever would. I would search, I thought. I would search as diligently as anyone had ever searched for anything, holy or unholy. I would likely search my entire life away and, as with all the others before me, I would only find hints and rumours; there would be times when I’d come so, co close and that would seem some capricious agent was leading me, surely, coaxing me, feeding me the right leads only to steer me astray at the very last moment. That’s what I’d been told to expect, and that’s what I’d read in the books  –
 
Unaussprechlichen Kulten, De

Vermis Mysteriis, Livre d’Eibon
 
and so on and so forth  –  pages too brittle and stained to read, riddles too oblique to fathom, all of it spiralling deeper into the certain despair that I was only an idiot chasing a myth that had never possessed more substancethan the ramblings of schizophrenics and liars. And then, one night,
 
she
 
found me. Weeks after that I don’t recall, darkness until I woke somewhere unfamiliar, sick and sweating in half-

668

light and shadows, sick as a junky going cold turkey; the high  walls,  bare masonry, bricks and mortar, fire doors scabbed with  rust, the constant sound of water dripping somewhere. I lay  naked on a bare mattress soaked through with blood and piss  and mildew, realizing, slowly, that I’d been beaten almost to  death, maybe more than once, that there were broken bones and  missing teeth. The pain made me want to climb back down into  the numb, insensible darkness. But she crouched nearby,  watching me with her ebony eyes. Those secret, ravenous eyes  to match the black holes waiting  at the centre of galaxies, eyes  to devour stars and planets and even time, eyes to devour souls,  and when she smiled blood spilled from her mouth and pooled  on the concrete floor.

“It’s not a game,” she said and licked at her lips.

“I never thought it  was,” I replied, dizzy and slurring the

words.

She nodded her head. “Just so we understand one another.

Just so
 
you
 
understand
 
me
. Just so you know it ain’t ” –

“

–  a game,” I interrupted, and for a moment I thought she

might take my head off.

She crawled a few feet nearer the mattress, moving across the floor more like some reptilian thing than a woman, and the faintest, furious spark glinted in her dead eyes.

“Are you hungry?” she asked and more blood leaked from

her mouth.

“Do you know what I’ve done  to find you?” I said, instead

of answering her question.

“Do you think that matters? Do you think that’s why you’re

here? I asked you a question.”

669

“I’m sick,” I told her.

She nodded her head. “You’ll get a whole lot sicker,” she

said. “Especially if you don’t eat.”

Then she vomited, a sudden gush of the darkest red across the concrete and the edge of the mattress. It spattered my bare skin, speckling me with half-digested blood. She wiped her mouth and sat down.

“That’s how you start,” she said.

I stared at the cooling puked-up blood for a moment or two and then lay back down on the mattress and stared, instead up at the ceiling of the place, which seemed far, far away. There was glass up there, a skylight, and I could see it was night. I shut my eyes and wondered what it would take to get her to kill me.

“You should hurry. It’s better warm,” she said.

“Can I still say no?”  I asked. “Can I change my mind?”

There was a long moment of silence. Maybe she was

surprised. Maybe she wasn’t. I doubt I’ll  ever know.

“It’s not too late,” she said. “I’ll kill you, if that’s what you

want. It seems a shame though.”

Her voice  –  I wish I could find the language to describe her voice. It has to be heard, I think. It made me want to scramble away on my shattered  limbs and hide in some dark hole where she would never be able to follow. It made me
 
want
 
to die.

“It doesn’t really matter to me,” she said. “There will be

others. There always are. They will never stop coming.”

670

“I didn’t come,” I said. “I don’t even know where I am. You

. . .
 
took
 
me.”

“Is that how it was, little girl?” She laughed, licking some of  the regurgitated blood from her fingertips. “Well that’s not how  I remember it.”

And then she brushed the sweaty hair back from my eyes, her hand as cold  as ice across my brow, arctic air against fevered skin, and I shivered so hard my teeth clacked together.

“Don’t look for monsters if you don’t want to find them,”

she said.

What
 
had
 
I expected? Some glorious fallen angel, some beautiful Byronic being of light and shadow? Had I really thought she would be
 
beautiful
? I’d read enough to know better.  But I’d been unprepared for
 
this
, this
 
gargoyle
 
squatting there before me, smeared with blood and gore, dirt and shit, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a matted crown, her lean boyish body a road map of scars and half healed injuries. At some point her left nipple had been torn entirely away.

“What? Am I not pretty enough for you?” she asked and  bared her teeth like a spiteful child. Somewhere overhead, a bird  fluttered about in the criss-cross of steel girders before the  skylight.  “I thought you were a
 
learned
 
woman,” she snarled.  She stood up. And I saw the organ hanging down between her  legs. It almost looked like a penis, almost, a stunted penis  sheathed in bone or horn, barbed and ridged and misshapen.

“The books,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the thing  between her legs, “the books were mostly a waste of time. The  men who wrote them . . . they didn’t know . . .”

“They never do,” she said, stepping over the cooling pool of

bloody vomit. Then she stood above me, glaring down with

671

those hungry eyes, and she began to squeeze the sharp end of  the penis thing between her fingertips. “They hide in their rituals  and incantations, too afraid to confront what they truly desire.  You’re not like that,” she told me

“I’m not? Are you certain about that?”

“No,” she replied. “I’m
 
never
 
certain. But we’ll see. Soon,

we shall see, little girl.”

She knelt down, straddling me, and that hard prong, grown stiff  now and slightly larger, pressed against my belly. She bent down and kissed me, her tongue darting quickly past my teeth, and I tasted the blood of whatever or whomever she’d killed that night. The taste of blood was nothing new to me. My earlier depredations had seen to that. But there was something more, something beyond the rich, faintly metallic flavour, something like biting down on aluminum foil, something that tasted of mould and molasses and dried thyme. She breathed into me then, a sudden etheric rape, storm wind blown off a tide-less pack-ice sea, her rancid, sweet breath pouring down my throat and filling my lungs. She withdrew immediately, and I gasped, coughed and gagged and almost threw up.

“Don’t you dare let that go,” she warned. “Don’t you

fucking dare.”

Then she pressed one hand into the sticky-dark pool she’d left for me beside the mattress and smeared it across my breasts.  There were bruises there, bruises and cuts and maybe broken ribs, and I shuddered at  the pain and the cold of her touch but managed not to cry out.

She was smiling as she painted my chest. “It isn’t in the blood,” she said with a smirk. “That’s what they all think, I know. But they’re all wrong. It isn’t in the blood. Aren’t you hungry yet?”

672