Give Me Your Life

A Vampire Tale

Photo by Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash

I’ve been musing on monsters lately. Vampires come to mind, but not the sexy or angsty variety. I like a more old-world model, a foully animated dead thing with no human feeling. I want the bloody scare of its grotesque anti-life and its uncompromisingly predatory views.

I have only written one straight-up vampire story in my long romp through the dark, and here it is. Settle in, don’t invite any strangers into your home, and let me tell you a story…

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The snow tasted of nightmare. Roger tilted his face to the distant clouds and savored the cold bite of it, each spinning crystal sharp as a razor. He wished the delicate flakes were capable of slicing the life from him, of freeing him, but they only teased him with their feeble stings. He pulled up the collar of his coat and stepped from the alley.

A girl made her way along the snow dusted pavement, keeping close to the curb and slipping a little in her stiletto heels. She gave her short skirt an angry tug and exhaled a plume of smoke with a soft curse. She reached the lamppost at the corner, made an almost military turn on her spiky heel, and reversed her parade along the street. When she saw Roger, she skidded to a stop, and the cigarette fell from its perch on her scarlet lip.

Roger watched the bright ember tumble the length of the girl’s dark figure to lie winking at her feet. A moment stretched and yawned like a railway tunnel between them, and he could have had her. He could have stepped forward and slammed the heel of his hand under her chin. Could have bundled her into the dark alley and trussed her up like a Christmas fir. He had intended to do it. But the moment snapped, and the girl stepped sideways into the road and clicked away on her ridiculous heels as though she had just remembered an urgent appointment.

Roger leaned back into the shadows, put a trembling hand against the frigid bricks of the darkened building, and heaved a dry sob. It was always like this, night after night. He went out into the dark with his brain full of murderous thoughts and his heart sick with dread that he would act on them. For the last three nights, he had stalked the prostitutes that worked along the river. He hated them, not for their mean lives, but for their unerring animal sense of survival.

They never approached him, but strutted in a wide radius around him, their eyes sliding over him like the unseeing eyes of sleepwalkers. They avoided him like a bad smell. He would have to take rats back to the apartment again, or if he was lucky, some skinny stray dog. He would have to face Daciana’s relentless will, the agony as she peeled away more of his humanity, bent him inexorably to the yoke. Exhausted, he slumped against the wall.

*****

It was odd to think that he had begun by collecting her. What a find he had thought her! The e-mail from Budapest had been sensational, Serge’s excited message losing itself in typos. The antiquities dealer had found an ancient, desiccated body in a tomb in the Romanian wilderness. It was, the burning message read, the mummified remains of a vampire.

Roger had been on a plane within twenty-four hours. A day later, jet-lagged and haggard, he stood over the bundle of bones and rags and felt lust surge in his veins. The thing was beyond belief – a shrunken woman, bound in a tight ball with her knees drawn to her chest. The rope used to tie her was wound in thick loops around her wrists and ankles. Her head was bent sideways and leashed down onto her knees by a noose that would have made a hangman proud.

Her skin was hard and leathery, weathered to a dull ivory, and her features were so shriveled and distorted as to be nearly unrecognizable as human. The eyes were closed, but one lid had curled up enough to allow the barest glimpse of a dark chitinous glitter. No orbs rolled in the long-dried sockets, but that hint of vital black had been unnerving. Serge had laughed when Roger drew back from the remains with a cry.

“Don’t worry, my friend, she is very dead.” Serge rapped the mummy along its curved spine with his knuckles, producing a wooden sound. “Pretty, eh? Look here, she has had her mouth stuffed with garlic. Bunch of superstitious bullshit!”

Roger stared at the thing’s face, the long jaw agape and the bundle of rotten cloth jammed almost down the throat. Splinters of petrified garlic still jutted from the flimsy material ground between the full set of strong teeth. He bent closer.

“I don’t see any fangs.”

Serge guffawed. “You are an ass, Rog. Do you really believe the lady was a vampire? She was just some nobleman’s wife who killed herself. Ate poison, so the story goes. Suicide was a great evil. The peasants weren’t taking any chances.”

“How do you know she was noble?”

Serge looked coy. “Well, her tomb, you know. And she was buried with some stuff that I was able to trace to a great house.”

Roger straightened from his fascinated crouch, his collector’s senses pinging.

“What stuff?”

“Nothing much.”

Roger gave Serge a steady, stern glare.

“Okay, okay. There were some jewels. I’ve got a buyer, so don’t ask for them. I kept the mummy for you, and you’ll never find another. Come on, Rog, a goddamned vampire! Talk about a folk culture artifact.”

Serge rummaged through the spill of papers on his desk and handed a sheaf of grainy photocopies to Roger.

“Look. This authenticates her as Daciana, wife of Grigore the Wolf, a thirteenth-century warrior and estate holder – sort of like a baron. That’s solid research. Obviously, I can’t give you a dealer’s certificate on her. She’s illegal as hell. I don’t even know how you’ll get her out of the country.”

Roger grinned. “Let me worry about that.”

*****

The snow mesmerized him. In it were the memories of the vampire, memories of vast cold wilderness and violent rivers. With Daciana whispering in his head, he traveled backward through centuries to the dark medieval forests of her lifetime. Wolves ran through the falling snow, ghosting along under the flickering moon, intent on the hot red scent of prey fleeing panicked before them.

He ran with them, a machine of bone and sinew, warm in his grizzled fur. Beneath his paws, he ground the snow and pine needle carpet to slurry. He did not know if the wind streamed howling past him, or if he flew like an arrow along its wintry track, lifted and hurled toward the panting deer with wild joy.

The spurt of blood was orgasmic, and he came back to himself in a puddle made first red, then black, by the blinking neon above him. At his feet lay a woman, still quivering, and his hands were the slick gloves of a killer. It had happened, finally, and he had not even been present.

The woman gave a last shuddering sigh. She was middle-aged and wore glasses and a stocking cap with an enormous blue pompom. Her canvas bag spilled books onto the bricks. He looked around at the alley, noting details in the rhythmic strobe of the café sign. He was less than a block from his warehouse. If he dragged his victim to the gate at the rear of the alley, he could carry her along the darkened backs of the buildings and take her up to his apartment in the old delivery lift.

He looked down at her. She was small. He bent and got his hands under her shoulders, pulling her into a seated position against his legs. Her limbs sprawled and flopped, and her head rolled back causing the wound in her throat to laugh up at him. His hands felt stiff and sticky, and the woman felt colder than anything he’d ever touched. He dropped her and turned away, retching.

He scrubbed at his hands with the end of his shirt, moaning softly, but voices from the street quieted him. People were leaving the café. The winking sign gave an angry sizzle and went dark, or he might have been spotted, standing in the wet alley gutter with blood smeared from chin to crotch. Quick with adrenaline, he kicked the bookbag into the deeper shadows and grabbed the dead woman by her collar, hauling her up against him and behind a dumpster. There he waited for the footfalls of the café patrons to recede, clasping his gory partner to his breast.

Her lips touched his throat and he nearly screamed. Her flabby, cold weight wanted to drag him down. Her breathless mouth gaped in dumb reproach. He knew he would never be able to carry her to the warehouse, desired nothing more than to hurl her from him, and he let her tumble down like an untethered marionette. He sank against the wall and crawled a few feet from her through the grimy snow, where he rolled himself into his overcoat and lay stunned.

*****

He had been delighted, high on the excitement of his priceless acquisition, when he brought the vampire home. At once, he set to work in his shop and built a display case for her, balancing her frail rounded form on a cushion of sumptuous sable. He stared at her for days. Though he knew he must take pains to preserve her unmolested, he ached to touch her. He knew from his initial exploration of her skin that she was hard as teak and smooth as a carved idol. Her teeth were robust. The living lady must have had a Hollywood smile and a good diet. Thinking of her enjoying a meal gave him a delicious shiver. He thought of her as “the vampire” and indulged in a freak-show mentality of equal parts fascination and disgust.

After a few days, he began to feel uncomfortable. The display case sat on a round Regency table in his library where he often slept by the fire, his books open all around him. He found that he had trouble concentrating on the lines of text before him. The fine hairs on the back of his neck would rise to attention, and although determined not to look at her, he would find himself glancing at the vampire with quick, covert looks from under his lashes. He could no longer sit in the chair by the fire, for her grotesque face was turned toward him there and seemed to have assumed an avid watchfulness. The partially open eye glared like an inscrutable dark star and so unsettled him that he draped the display case at night.

He began to have nightmares, waking in a sweat and gagging at the wild, coppery taste in his mouth. He stopped sleeping in the library, but it did no good. And still, his fingers itched to stroke the ancient flesh of the vampire. Finally, he removed her from the case and carried her to his workbench where he trained the magnifying light on her. She crouched in the harsh nimbus like a gargoyle, her feet gone to talons and her head turned at an impossible angle. She had been buried in a shroud and it hung in stiff, fragile tatters around her skeletal ankles. It was drawn tight enough around her hips to show the shape of her pelvis, which was tiny. She must have been a diminutive woman.

He swung the lens over her mouth, the jaw dislocated and pushed open and sideways by the brutality of the rope and of the fist-sized linen bundle of garlic. Despite his unease, he felt a stir of pity for her. Before he thought about what he was doing, he reached out and tugged at the bundle. The rotted linen tore and puffed to dust in his fingers. The hard little knots of garlic spilled out and scattered over the workbench with a sound like the first fall of earth on a coffin lid. Startled, he leaped back. Into his mind, with the cruel precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, came the voice. It was soft and implacable, and it spoke in a language unknown to him, yet he understood it perfectly.

It said, “Hunt.”

*****

The legends were true enough. It was blood she wanted, and he got it by killing his neighbors’ dogs and cats until so many had disappeared that the police began to patrol the area heavily. He filled the guest bath and submerged her in the gore, and she softened and unfolded like a blossom opening its petals. For several weeks, she lay in the bath and sent him out to kill. She was weak, or he would have made a charnel house of the whole block. He was caught as an insect in amber, but he held on to the slippery rope of his own will and refused to bring her the human prey she demanded.

Returning with a briefcase stuffed with dead rats, he found her sitting up in the bath, her thin fingers clutching the porcelain rim. Her skin was white marble clothed in diaphanous red. Blood clotted in the thick tangles of her hair. Her black gaze went to the briefcase, then to his face. For the first time, she spoke aloud.

“You mean to starve me. I will not allow it.”

Shaken beyond words at her sudden show of vitality, he had tossed the rats by their tails into the horrible bath. The vampire pounced like a cat into the congealing blood and fished out her supper. She sank her teeth into the vermin and watched him over the carcasses as she fed. Roger took a slow, sliding step backward toward the door, and the vampire rose first to her knees and then to her feet, still sucking at the rats. Seconds later, she collapsed in a great splash of sticky crimson, and Roger fled. That had been two days ago. He had not been home, had not slept or eaten, had barely ceased his restless prowl of the city, since then.

In the alley, Roger lay huddled against the café wall and watched the dead woman twitch on the snow. Rats. Already, they were finding their way into her coat, trying a nip here or there. He had come to know their habits well. He could rise and go over to the corpse and bludgeon a couple of the creatures for the vampire’s meal, but he found he lacked any interest in the hunt now. He felt cold and hungry for the first time in weeks. The night seemed immense, crouching over him. He was friendless and worthless. He was a murderer. If he stayed in the alley, he would be found and imprisoned.

He thought it would be best to go home, and he lurched up and staggered stiff-legged to the gate. He crept along the back walls of the buildings, and his shadow sloped along beside him, a towering, hunched thing with its claws extended to the night. It should be red, he thought. Red was the color of his world.

He rode the lift to his apartment, clanking up out of the dark hell of the warehouse where his shadow had been swallowed by the heavier blackness. He missed it; it had seemed more alive than he, more purposeful. In the apartment, a single lamp cast its dim glow across the pale marble floors where small red footprints marched toward the library. Red. That was right; that was the order in his chaos.

Roger followed the prints until they vanished in the scarlet pattern of the Persian carpet. Daciana stood looking at the display case on the round Regency table. She was naked, lean and ropy with sinew. Her rusty patina of blood was all the covering she needed, for she was a pure thing, an angel of primal terror. She turned when he entered and her face, as always, was expressionless.

“Come. Kneel. Give me your life,” she said.

And he did.