The Color of Light (48 page)

I climbed out of the sarcophagus, brushed myself off, staying as far away from her as I could in the confined space. “Where are we?”

“In the crypt under your family’s tomb.” she said patiently. “We met Tuesday night. You remember that, don’t you? Our little rendezvous? May
I say, my darling, you were delectable, in every possible way. You lay in the morgue for a couple of days until your father thought to look for you. You were laid to rest this morning. It was a small funeral. Your father didn’t contact any of your friends.”

Oh, good, she was insane. “He doesn’t know any of my friends. What day is this?”

“It is a week later. Near midnight.”

“This must be some kind of mistake,” I said, mostly to myself. “I must have been in a coma or something, and they buried me alive.”

“Oh, no,
mon petit artiste,”
she corrected me. “You were quite dead. And now you are undead.”

I was looking for stairs. This episode had been a real wake-up call. I had to get back to Paris.

“All right, then.” I replied, backing slowly away. “Thanks for the information, you’ve been really helpful. And now, I’ve got to be going.”

“Not before I give you a little lesson.”

“What kind of lesson?” I humored her. I had found the stairs.

“There are only a few rules you must follow. But they are unforgiving.” She was following me. “Listen, my darling, this is important. Never go into the light of day. If you do, you will burst into flames like a torch and burn until you are dust.”

“Light of day,” I said. “Flames. Dust. Got it.” I threw open the trapdoor, climbed up into the mausoleum. It was lighter up here. Marble benches. A wreath. Dying flowers. Inspirational words circling the top of a neoclassical dome. My name, freshly carved into a marble plaque.

Disbelieving, I traced my fingers over the letters. The epitaph was something instructive in Latin about time fleeting. “There must be some mistake,” I whispered weakly.

“I told you,” she said sympathetically. “No mistake.”

I turned on her. “You’re mad! Go on, get away from me, before I call the police. My father’s a knight, you know.”

As I stepped down from the family tomb, my legs were curiously wobbly. I tottered off down a wide lane towards the sanctuary, and, I hoped, the way out.

A new moon cast its greenish light over the overgrown gravestones and Victorian statuary. I was barely past the entrance gate when I faltered, pitching clumsily forward. I grabbed at the wrought iron bars to keep myself from falling down.

The woman from the alleyway was right behind me. Her thin eyebrows drew together in concern. “You must be starving,” she said. “Let’s take care of that first.”

Footsteps echoed toward us in the darkness. There must have been a short in the streetlight; the bulb blinked on and off, revealing a reckless young toff making his way home after blowing his week’s allowance on drinks. It was after eleven, the pubs were closed.

She drew herself up to her full height, rearranged her magnificent dress, smoothed a hand over her hair. “How do I look?” she said to me, then wafted out to greet him.

“Excusez-moi,”
she said as he approached, turning her great dark eyes on him. “Do you have the time?”

He stopped, looked at his watch. He had on little round wire-rimmed glasses, like Sawyer Ballard. “Sure,” he agreed, eyeing the white globes of her breasts, just visible over the neckline of her dress. “I’ll give you the time. But not if he’s watching.”

“Run,” I urged him. “Run away while you still can. She’s a monster.”

“Look in my eyes,” she commanded. He tore himself away from admiring her breasts, met her gaze. His chin was smooth and hairless; he was barely old enough to shave. “Lovely.” she murmured. “Just lovely.” And then her hands were pinning him to the brick wall, her long fingers loosening his tie, undoing his shirt collar.

It was all gruesomely familiar. Her lips gaped wide in a smile, and then she was upon him. He wrenched himself upright, tried to work her fingers off of his shoulders, but she was relentless. In another moment, his legs buckled under him.

I could have saved him. At any time I could have stopped her, hauled her off of him. But I stood and watched. Hypnotized. Mesmerized.
Salivating.

She lifted her head. Blood stained her lips a glossy red. “Go on,” she said solicitously, gesturing at the poor boy shuddering on the paving stones.

“Good God!” I said. “I’m going to get the police.” But I didn’t move. I was staring at the pool of blood widening under his head. Staring at his torn throat. Licking my lips.

Something strange was happening to me; I could feel muscles in my face working. My mouth felt swollen, distended. Puzzled, I raised my hand, touched my fingertips to my teeth.

Fangs.
The strange swollen feeling came from sharp triangular fangs, descending from the top of my gums.

I choked on the words. “What have you done to me?”

“I made you
better.”
she whispered, with a secret smile.

I stumbled away, away from the terrible sight, away from the impossible, hallucinatory truth. I didn’t get far; the world began to spin, and I went down, whacking my head on the pavement.

She was there at once, sympathetically tsk-tsking. She took a handkerchief out of a little satin bag, dabbed it on my forehead.

“Raphael Sinclair.” she said firmly. “You can be angry at me later. But now, you really must drink. We can’t have you fainting all over town.” She got her arms under me, lifted me to my feet. I was too weak to resist. She deposited me in on my knees before the dying boy.

His eyes were open; he was breathing very quickly, short shallow breaths. He had lost his glasses. They lay near his hand where they had fallen, the lenses cracked. Fiercely, I shook my head no.

“Why not?” she said. “Of course. You are squeamish. You would prefer a steak. Well, my dear. The time for steak is over. Right now, we must hurry. You may be immortal, but it is still possible to starve to death.”

He was weeping now. A terrible price to pay for choosing the wrong way home. In a daze, I watched his life gushing out of him into the cracks between the cobblestones. The coppery smell of blood filled the air. Insatiable hunger expanded in my chest, taking over my brain like an electrical storm. Revolted, desperate, I crouched over, touched my tongue to the blood coating the paving stones.

The taste hit me like a thunderbolt.

Rich, velvety, winey, briny, delicious blood. It filled my stomach and slaked my thirst; it banished the cold and made me hungry for more.

I took his head in my hands as if he were a lover, turned his face away from me. And then I put my lips to his throat.

I sucked and I sucked and I sucked. I drained the life out of him and into myself, until my hands were warm and his body was cold. And when I was done
—
when there was no more
—
I sat back on my knees and heaved a sigh of relief.

The days after that are dark and filled with half-memories.

At nightfall, I would wake up cursing Anastasia
—
for it was Anastasia, if you haven’t guessed by now
—
for making me a monster, swearing I’d rather die than live this way. By morning, I had my fangs in some frightened shopgirl who’d stopped to give me the time. Remarkable what a human being is capable of in the struggle to survive.

She was in London for business, not pleasure. The man I had seen her with was Rudolph von Theissen, a wealthy German attaché with corrupt tastes who was her sometime lover, as well as the financial backer of her fashion enterprise.

She’d been biding her time, waiting for me, ever since that first time we met in La Coupole all those months ago. When I asked her why, she laughed, lolling over on the cream-colored satin sheets. “Of course, you are beautiful,” she said. “Also, you were embracing tragedy with both arms, like a man who lies down in front of a speeding train. The way you followed around that Jewish girl, knowing you never had a chance! Let’s face it, my darling. It was only a matter of time. All I did was give you a push.”

I moved in with my ancestors at the mausoleum in Highgate. It felt appropriate, somehow, and it offered a certain amount of privacy that was lacking in the center of London. There was allegedly a Highgate vampire roaming the grounds, but I never saw him. For a short while, I filled his undead shoes.

Through the long, hot end-of-summer days I slept in the cool stone sarcophagus that had served as my coffin. I rose at sundown to stalk the sad, the lost, the lonely, unfortunate enough to stray across my path. Though the gates were closed and locked at night, there was always someone foolish enough, or grieving enough, to slip through.

The pale young widow who couldn’t bear to part with her new husband’s company, though he lay in his grave. An old pensioner with leaking eyes who couldn’t believe his wife of forty-seven years had predeceased him. A sylph-like creature who returned night after night to weep at the crypt of a boy who fell in the Great War. A twelve-year-old orphan who wanted only to be reunited with her mother in heaven. A hollow-eyed mother dressed all in black who had sat by a sick child’s bed and would not leave that child’s side now, though he slept in the ground.

I became a connoisseur of death. I found that if I stared into my victims’ eyes long enough, they would surrender themselves up to me with little or no struggle. I found that I could draw life from different places on the human body; the blue artery on the underside of a wrist, the chalice of a soft belly, the inside of a silky thigh. By trial and error, I found that I could take just enough so that my benefactor lived to walk out the gate the next morning. I found that some girls rather liked it. To make love in a graveyard is to shake a fist at death.

Eventually, I lost track of time. Every day was like the next, distinguished only by who I consumed and how. The leaves turned yellow and red and brown, then fell. The air grew brisk, then bracing, then cold. Snow dusted the Victorian angels and winged cherubs, frosted the roofs of the mausoleums as if they were gingerbread houses. A white mist clung to the ground, like ghosts filtering through the trees. I could never get warm, unless I had just fed. I chose one fellow for the size of his coat.

One night, long after dark, I heard footsteps. I halted in what I was doing, finding a final resting place for a furtive-eyed fellow with a shovel and a bag—God knows what he was looking for, but I found him first—lifted my head, and listened. It seemed to be coming from a close, circular path overhung by beech and hornbeam trees that wound its way through a city of Gothic tombs, part of the old Western section.

There were no signs of stealth, no hushed whispers, just the slow click-clack of stiletto heels and the papery swishing of many yards of silk. With the wind moaning and the bare black branches crooked like witches’ fingers, even I was a bit leery.

I made out a tall, regal, dark-haired woman in an orange silk sari. No hat, no gloves, no fear. Anastasia.

I resisted the urge to duck into the nearest doorway and hide until she passed. But I brushed myself off
—
I had become rather disheveled during my tenure in Highgate, what with the one suit of clothes and no bathing and all
—
ran my fingers through my hair in a futile attempt at grooming and stepped through the squealing metal grille.

She halted, put her hand to her heart and gasped. Then she broke into laughter.
“Ça va,
Monsieur Sinclair?” she said warmly, taking in my dishabille.

“What do you want?” I growled. I pushed open a sarcophagus. Inside was a skeleton dressed in wispy Victorian weeds, the long hair still rich and red, bony fingers clamped around a posy of dried black violets tied with a black ribbon.

“I wanted to meet this Highgate vampire that I’ve been hearing so much about,” she replied vivaciously. “It looks like you have gotten over your bourgeois squeamishness,
n’est-ce pas?”

“Couldn’t have done it without you.” I snarled, dumping body and bag atop the skeleton. The bones made a rattling sound like dice being thrown across a gaming table.

Anastasia rolled her eyes. “So much
sturm und drang.
Well, my darling. I came to see how you are doing because tomorrow I am leaving.”

I replaced the sarcophagus cover, a heavy stone thing that weighed hundreds of pounds. If that was so, I would be truly alone. “What about your boyfriend?”

She looked reflective. “Rudi was called back to Berlin. That’s the
coup de grâce
for my little fashion house.” She looked at me more closely. “Can it be you do not know? You haven’t seen the papers? Hitler sent his tanks into Poland. Britain and France declared war. It has begun.”

Poland.
Sofia, my Sofia.
I felt a sharp, familiar pain.

“There’s nothing like a war,” Anastasia went on mistily. “Buildings on fire. Bombs falling from the sky. Smoke filling the air. Confusion everywhere.” Her eyes glimmered with the kind of expression usually reserved for acts of passion. “Women and children left to manage on their own. Girls sent out to do a man’s job. Bodies scattered across the
countryside. Chaos. And everywhere, everywhere, soldiers in adorable uniforms.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty nice place here.” By this I meant that I had stolen an oriental rug from a clothesline in Hampstead and also a nice feather quilt.

Her big round eyes fastened on mine. “Come with me, Raphael.” she said, extending her hand to me. It gleamed white as bone in the moonlight. “I’ll show you the world like you’ve never seen it.” And after a moment, I acquiesced, abandoning the cemetery to the absent vampire and the creeping vines forever.

We drifted around for a while after that. There was no rush for Anastasia to return to Paris; the fashion houses were all closing up shop or moving in anticipation of war.

We did as rich people do; while ordinary Londoners tearfully evacuated their children to the country to keep them safe from the brutal, take-no-prisoners warfare Hitler had perfected in the medieval town squares of Poland, we went touring.