The Vampire Tapestry (8 page)

When the vampire lifted his drowned, peaceful face, she said earnestly to him, “I’m a Scorpio; what’s your sign?”

* * *

Roger came home, having at last fired a store manager he disliked. He took Mark out for Chinese dinner and talked angrily about the mess the manager was leaving behind—unrecorded orders, evidence of pilfering and jacking around with receipts...

Mark handed him a note from school. “They want a signature on this.” Roger was good at signing his brother’s name.

“Sent home early for sleeping in class? What gives?”

Mark braced himself and explained.

Roger looked at him in openmouthed astonishment and the beginnings of outrage. “You mean you’ve been having midnight chats with our friend for the three nights he’s been with us? What’s he told you?”

“Nothing. He just listens. Last night I told him
Childhood’s End, The Mysterious Island,
and some Ray Bradbury stories.”

“And he doesn’t say anything?”

“Nothing much.”

Roger’s mouth got thin and pressed together. “Tonight you take the tape recorder in with you, and you ask some questions and get some answers before you tell him a goddamn limerick.” Roger had been trying his questions on the vampire for shorter and shorter periods, perhaps because his efforts were always failures. Mark did no better. When he asked his memorized questions that night, they were ignored.

The vampire merely remarked, “Scheherezade has joined the Inquisition, I see. Fortunately, I can manage now without these diversions.”

* * *

Roger was going away for the weekend, leaving Mark to look after the vampire. You had to keep Roger from taking advantage. He did it without thinking, really; he just sort of forgot about your interests in the pursuit of his own.

“Look, Roger,” Mark said, “I’ll take care of the place for you—water the plants and do some cleaning up and all that, like before, to pay you back for letting me stay here. But you’re away a lot partying or checking out the shops, and that means I’m stuck with...him, in there. That’s a big responsibility.”

Roger was packing a rainbow sweater in nubbleknit acrylic he had borrowed from the uptown store for the weekend. “You can always go home,” he said. Mark waited. Roger sighed. “Okay, okay. Five dollars a week.”

“Ten.”

“Bloodsucker!” Roger said. “All right, ten.” So simple, no tearing your guts up over everything like at home. “Listen, there’s a special reason why I’m going up to Boston. I want to consult with a few friends about this vampire. There must be ways to get incredibly rich on this thing.”

With Roger gone, Mark settled down to the paper for Carol Kelly. Looking for a book of poetry criticism in the living room, he was distracted by a remnant from Roger’s fling with superexotica,
The
Two-Duck Pleasure Book: Balkan Folk Wisdom,
by R. Unpronounceable. Beguiled into browsing for enlightening dirty bits (“...method of contraception is for the woman to get up after intercourse, squat on the floor, and inserting her index finger...”
Yuucchh
), he spent a fascinating half hour. Then he pulled out a book on Lapland and found the vampire’s face looking at him from the back cover of the volume next to it.

No mistake; it was the same man, only in a three-piece suit with a beat-up raincoat slung around his shoulders. He was looking straight into the camera with an assertive stare, as if daring the photographer to soften his imperious features. Mark studied the strong planes of forehead and cheek, the jutting nose, the long, shapely mouth with lips muscular-looking as if slightly compressed on some inner tension. He could look at the photo as long and hard as he liked, while looking at the living man for any length of time made Mark nervous.

The book was called
Notes on a Vanished People,
the diaries of some hitherto unknown German traveler in South America. The translator and editor pictured on the book jacket was Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and director of the Cayslin Center for the Study of Man at Cayslin College upstate. “New light on pre-Columbian history,” proclaimed the blurbs. “A stupendous find for anthropology, with erudite, provocative commentary by Dr. Weyland.”

Mark recalled now having seen that forbidding face somewhere else recently—in the news, it had to be. He dug through the piled-up papers and magazines on the end tables until he found what he was looking for in a copy of
Time.
Then slowly, thoughtfully, heart pounding, he went down the hall, the book in his hand.

The vampire dozed, lying on his side with his knees sticking forward off the cot. Wearing pajamas and showing bandages at the opening of the collar, he looked a lot less impressive than in the photograph. Mark said, “Dr. Weyland?”

The vampire opened his eyes. Mark let him see that he was holding
Notes on a Vanished People.
There was no observable reaction.

“I just thought you might be hungry,” Mark said lamely.

“I am.”

Mark had bought a stoneware mug so that he wouldn’t have to see the blood being drained out of the glass. He stood carefully out of reach while Dr. Weyland drank.

“How’d you get shot?” he asked.

“You know my name. Do a minimum of research: look in the newspapers.”

“I did. All anybody says is that you disappeared.” Mark added aggressively, “I bet you did something dumb and somebody guessed about you and tried to kill you.”

The vampire studied him a moment. “You would win your bet,” he said, and he set the mug on the floor and lay back down.

Mark browsed through
Notes on a Vanished People
over a TV dinner that night. A lot of the book was boring, but there were some intriguing sections in the long introduction. Here Dr. Weyland described his suspicions that the German’s notebooks existed, the search for them, and the struggle—against doubters whom Dr. Weyland demolished with a keen wit—to establish the authenticity of the documents once they were found. There were also some chilly passages about missionaries of the traveler’s day and modern anthropologists. Pretty interesting background reading if you might be the first person to contact the inhabitants of the distant planets on scouting expeditions from Skytown...

* * *

Late on Sunday a stranger came to the door. “Bobbie tells me there’s a vampire here,” he said. “Show him to me.” He stood not exactly with his foot in the door, but turned so that his thick shoulder seemed about to snap the chain.

“I’m sorry,” Mark said quickly, “but my uncle isn’t back yet from Boston, and I’m not allowed to let in anybody I don’t know.”

“My name is Alan Reese. Roger knows me. I’m sure he must have mentioned me to you.”

“I have to keep the house rules,” Mark said, putting a whine into his tone. He was thinking back to when Roger had been into sorcery. This must be the Reese he’d gotten mixed up with about then. Reese looked ready to bulldoze the door down, and capable of it, too, with a powerful torso and a wrestler’s neck as broad as the head it supported.

But he only smiled, shrugged, and retired to sit on the steps into the areaway, reading a paperback book from his pocket. Plainly, he was going to wait for Roger.

Mark did the dishes and watched him from the window over the sink. Reese wore whipcord pants and an embroidered Mexican shirt, and he had brought a large black briefcase. His face was puffy and pale, the skin freckled and smooth like a boy’s. There was more to be read in his thick hands than in his face. He tore out the pages of the book as he finished them, and before flipping them into the garbage can by the steps he absently crumpled them in his fist.

Leaving him unwatched didn’t seem safe somehow. Mark stayed by the sink and sharpened the knives. Then he rearranged all the silver in the drawer.

Finally Roger came, arguing briefly with the cabby over the tip. Mark saw him turn to face Alan Reese with surprise. One of those big paws fell heavily on Roger’s shoulder. The two men stood talking. Roger nodded a lot, hesitantly at first, then with vigor.

When he came in, Reese entered behind him, smiling.

“Mark, I want you to meet Alan Reese, an occultist I’ve known for a long time,” Roger said. “He has some suggestions for managing our guest.”

“I am, strictly speaking, a Satanist,” Alan Reese introduced himself in a measured, theatrical voice. A light of triumph sparkled in his blue eyes, as if Mark had held a castle against him which he had blown down with a breath. “Does that make you nervous, Mark? It shouldn’t. Having a vampire in an unprotected house with you is what should make you nervous. I’m going to help you keep control of him, using my knowledge of his Master.”

Oh boy
, Mark thought. He got the key from the cupboard door and went into the hall ahead of them to unlock the gate, determined to stick close. He wanted to see the man who had written the introduction to
Notes on a Vanished People
take this guy Reese apart with a sharp remark. Dr. Weyland turned his head to watch them come in.

Ignoring him, Reese slipped on a black gown over his street clothes and took some objects from his briefcase. He murmured over them, kissed them, held them up to the four directions. One, a metal charm on a chain, he put around Roger’s neck, its twin around Mark’s. The rest—a knife, a ring, a silver bowl, a withered brown thing that Mark couldn’t identify—he placed carefully in the corners of the stark white cell.

Then he brought out a nest of trays and lit incense in them, and these Roger set down where Reese directed. Reese talked or chanted the whole time, projecting so that he seemed to fill the room. From a little pouch hung round his neck on a thong he rubbed something onto the window frame, the door frame, the drains of the bathroom appliances, and even the electric outlets. He made markings on the floor with a lump of red chalk.

Mark was given a censer and a candle to hold. He felt a fool and wished now he’d let them do all this weird stuff without him.

To his surprise and disappointment, Dr. Weyland made no comment. Mark had his first chance to observe the vampire without those chilly eyes staring back at him, and he felt an unpleasant shock. He thought he saw fear.

“All right, he’s well bound. That’s a start,” Reese said finally, standing in the middle of the little room with his feet braced apart as if against a typhoon. He looked about him with a pleased expression.

“The funny thing is,” Roger said, “he doesn’t seem to have fangs, but he does—well, bite.”

“So Bobbie said.” Reese pulled back the sleeves of his gown from muscular forearms. “Hold him quiet—he can’t hurt you, don’t worry—and let me see.”

Roger made a nervous grab for the vampire’s wrists. Dr. Weyland did not resist, not even when Reese hooked him under the armpits and dragged at him so that his head hung off the end of the cot. There was nothing silly in the scene anymore. Dr. Weyland’s fear touched Mark like a cold breath. Reese bent and clamped the vampire’s head hard against his thick thigh with one arm. Seizing him by the jaw, he wrenched his mouth open.

A sound of protest escaped Mark.

Reese looked up. “This being is inhabited by a devil’s strength. He only pretends weakness and pain to fool us. I may seem rough with him, but I know what I’m doing. I put all the force I have into encounters like this because that’s the only way to keep control. He’s all right; it would take a tank to hurt one of these.”

Roger said, “You’ve come across vampires before?”

“I come across all kinds of abstruse things,” Reese replied. “It’s true there are no fangs, but here—see that? A sort of sting on the underside of the tongue. It probably erects itself at the prospect of dinner, makes the puncture through which he sucks blood, and then folds back out of sight again.”

“Sexy,” Roger said with new interest. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t talk?”

“It shouldn’t interfere,” Reese said. “Let’s have a look at his eyes.” He shut the mouth and moved his hand to thumb back one of the vampire’s eyelids.

Mark told himself they weren’t really hurting Dr. Weyland. They were like zoologists or veterinarians immobilizing a dangerous animal so they could examine it. But Reese gripped and twisted the passive body of the vampire brutally, like a guy wrestling an alligator in a movie about the Everglades. Mark tried not to breathe the sharp odor from the censer and waited miserably for the examination to be over. At last they finished, leaving the disheveled vampire—who had still spoken no word—stretched out on the cot, one arm over his eyes. Roger looked high, as if exhilarated by the defeat of someone who had scared him. Reese, smiling, packed up his gear and shed his gown. He came and sat in the verdant living room like any casual guest.

“Have you any plans for him?” he asked intently.

Roger scowled. “He’s not very cooperative. I’ve been trying to get him to tell me things. Can you imagine what a bestseller it would be, a real vampire’s story from his own lips? But he won’t answer questions.”

Reese stood up. “I was thinking of something more ambitious—some effort to cut through appearances to his essential self, the black and powerful heart of an existence beyond the laws of the life we know. Some way of taking over and harnessing this arcane and formidable nature to our own uses.”

The atmosphere of the room seemed changed—darkened. Reese’s bombast should have reduced him to an absurdity, but it didn’t. He came across as not silly but scary. His melodramatic style was backed up by his beefy, aggressive muscularity and by the watchful stare of his small, cold eyes as he stood over the two of them.

“You have a marvelous find here,” Reese said, “rich in possibilities. My High Priestess is skilled in hypnotism. With that and whatever rites and pressures seem appropriate, we’ll have this creature begging to give up his secrets. Believe me, Roger, we’ll wring him like a wet rag; he’ll be our bridge to realms you can’t even guess at yet. On May Eve, the night of April thirtieth, I and my group customarily hold a Great Sabbat, as you may remember. I want to hold it here and include your guest in the proceedings. Good, that’s settled, then.

“Meanwhile, try to emphasize fresh supplies, like Bobbie. I know some who’ll volunteer for the experience, if I give the word. I agree there’s no danger of the occasional donor becoming a vampire, especially now that I’ve mobilized my protective forces. Some trustworthy students of my arts would even pay to watch a vampire feed. The proceeds...”