The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (26 page)

The others started to drink their dinner again, passing the black jug. Only one of them took any bread, and that was to sop up the last red elements from inside his glass. He wiped the bread round like a cloth then stuffed it in his mouth. I sipped my wine. Zeev, seen from the side of my left eye, seemed to touch nothing. He merely sat there. He didn’t seem to look at me. I was glad of that.

Then the man called Constantine said loudly, “Better get on with your supper, Wolf, or she’ll think you already found it in the woods. And among
her
clan that just
isn’t
done.”

And some of them sniggered a little, softly. I wanted to hurl my glass at the wall—or at all their individual heads.

But Zeev said, “What, you mean this on my T-shirt?” He too sounded amused.

I put down my unfinished bread and got up. I glanced around at them, at him last of all.

“I hope you’ll excuse me, I’ve been traveling and I’m tired.” Then I looked straight at him. Somehow it was shocking to do so. “And goodnight,
Zeev.
Now we’ve finally met.”

He said nothing. None of them did.

I walked out of the conservatory, crossed the large room beyond and headed for the staircase.

Wolf.
They even
called
him that.

Wolf.

“Wait,” he said, just behind me.

I can move almost noiselessly and very fast, but not as noiseless and sudden as he apparently he could. Before I could prevent it I spun round wide-eyed. There he stood, less than three feet from me. He was expressionless, but when he spoke now his voice, actor-trained, I thought, was very musical. “Daisha Severin, I’m sorry. I’ve made a bad start with you.”

“You noticed.”

“Will you come with me—just upstairs—to the library. We can talk there without the rest of them making up an audience.”

“Why do we want to? Talk, I mean.”

“We should, I think. And maybe you’ll be gracious enough to humor me.”

“Maybe I’ll just tell you to go to hell.”

“Oh,
there,
” he said. He smiled. “No. I’d never go there. Too bright, too hot.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

I was seven steps up the stairs when I found him beside me. I stopped again.

“Give me,” he said, “one minute.”

“I’ve been told I have to give you my entire
life,
” I said. “And then I have to give you children, too, I nearly forgot. Kids who can survive in full daylight, just like me. I think that’s enough, isn’t it, Zeev Duvalle? You don’t need a silly little
minute
from me when I have to give you all the rest.”

He let me go then.

I ran up the stairs.

When I reached the upper landing I looked back down, between a kind of elation and a sort of horror. But he had vanished. The part-lit spaces of the house again seemed void of anything alive, except for me.

Juno. I dreamed about her that night. I dreamed she was in a jet-black cave where water dripped, and she held a dead child in her arms and wept.

The child was me, I suppose. What she had feared the most when they, my house of Severin, made her carry me out into the oncoming dawn, to see how much if anything I could stand.
Just one minute.
What he had asked for too, Zeev. I hadn’t granted it to him. But she—and I—had had no choice.

When I survived sunrise, she was at first very glad. But then, when I began to keep asking,
When can I see the light again?
Then, oh then. Then she began to lose me, and I her, my tall, red-haired, blue-eyed mother.

She never told me, but it’s simple to work out. The more I took to daylight, the more I proved I was a true sun-born, the
more
she lost me, and I lost her. She herself could stand two or three hours, every week or so. But she
hated
the light, the sun. They
terrified
her, and when I turned out so able to withstand them, even to like and—
want
them, then the doors of her heart shut fast against me.

Juno hated me just as she hated the light of the sun. She hated me,
loathed
me,
loathes
me, my mother.

Part Three

About three weeks went by. The pines darkened and the other trees turned to copper and bronze and shed like tall cats their fur of leaves. I went on walks about the estate. No one either encouraged or dissuaded me. They had then nothing they wanted to hide from me? But I don’t drive, and so there was a limit to how far I could go and get back again in the increasingly chilly evenings. By day, anyway, there seemed little activity, in the house or outside it. I started sleeping later in the mornings so I could stay up at night fully alert, sometimes, until four or five. It was less I was checking on what went on in the house-castle of Duvalle, than that I was uncomfortable so many of them were around, and
active,
when I lay asleep. There was a lock on my door. I always used it. I put a chair against it too, with the back under the door-handle. It wasn’t Zeev I was worried about. No one, in particular. Just the complete feel and atmosphere of that place. At Severin there had been several who were mostly or totally nocturnal—my mother, for one. But also quite a few like me who, even if they couldn’t take much direct sunlight, as I could, still preferred to be about by day.

A couple of times during my outdoor excursions in daylight, I did find clearings in the woods, with small houses, vines, orchards, fields with a harvest already collected. I even once saw some men with a flock of sheep. Neither sheep nor men took any notice of me. No doubt they had been warned a new Wife-of-Alliance was here, and shown what she looked like.

The marriage had been set for the first night of the following month. The ceremony would be brief, unadorned, simply a legalization. Marriages in most of the houses were like this. Nothing especially celebratory, let alone religious, came into them.

I thought I’d resigned myself. But of course, I hadn’t. As for him, Zeev Duvalle, I’d been “meeting” him generally only at dinner—those barren awful dinners where good manners seemed to demand I attend. Sometimes I was served meat—I alone. A crystal bowl of fruit had appeared—for me. I ate with difficulty amid their “fastidious” contempt. I began a habit of removing pieces of fruit to eat later in my rooms. He was only ever polite. He would unsmilingly and bleakly offer me bread and wine, water . . . Sometimes I did drink the blood. I needed to. To me it had a strange taste, which maybe I imagined.

During the night, now and then, I might see him about the house, playing chess with one of the others, listening to music or reading in the library, talking softly on a telephone. Three or four times I saw him from an upper window, outside and running in long wolf-like bounds between the trees, the paleness of his hair like a beam blown off the face of the moon.

Hunting?

I intended to get married in black. Like the girl in the Chekhov play, I too was in mourning for my life. That night I hung the dress outside the closet, and put the black pumps below, ready for tomorrow. No jewelry.

Also I made a resolve not to go down to their dire dinner. To the older woman who read novels at the table and laughed smugly, secretively at things in them; the vile man with his bread-cloth in the glass. The handful of others, some of whom never turned up regularly anyhow, their low voices murmuring to each other about past times and people known only to them. And him. Zeev. Him. He drank from his glass very couthly, unlike certain others. Sometimes a glass of water, or some wine—for him usually red, as if it must pretend to be blood. He had dressed more elegantly since the first night, but always his clothes were quiet. There was one dark white shirt, made of some sort of velvety material, with bone-color buttons . . . He looked beautiful. I could have killed him. We’re easy to kill—car crashes, bullets—though we can live, Tyfa had once said, even a thousand years. But that’s probably one more lie.

However, tonight I wouldn’t go down there. I’d eat up here, the last apple and the dried cherries.

About ten thirty, a knock on my door.

I jumped, more because I expected it than because I was startled. I put down the book I’d been reading, the Chekhov plays, and said, “Who is it?” Knowing who it was.

“May I come in?” he asked, formal and musical, alien.

“I’d rather you left me alone,” I said.

He said, without emphasis, “All right, Daisha. I’ll go down to the library. No one else will be there. There’ll be fresh coffee. I’ll wait for you until midnight. Then I have things I have to do.”

I’d got up and crossed to the door. I said through it with a crackling venom that surprised me, I’d thought I had it leashed, “
Things to do?
Oh, when you go out hunting animals and rip them apart in the woods for proper fresh blood, that kind of
thing
do you mean?”

There was silence. Then, “I’ll wait till midnight,” he flatly said.

Then he was gone, I knew, though I never heard him leave.

When I walked into the library it was after eleven, and I was wearing my wedding dress and shoes. I told him what they were.

“It’s supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it,” I said, “for the groom to see the bride in her dress before the wedding. But there’s no luck to spoil, is there?”

He was sitting in one of the chairs by the fire, his long legs stretched out. He’d put on jeans and sweater and boots for the excursion later. A leather jacket hung from the chair.

The coffee was still waiting but it would be cold by now. Even so he got up, poured me a cup, brought it to me. He managed—he always managed this—to hand it to me without touching me.

Then he moved away and stood by the hearth, gazing across at the high walls of books.

“Daisha,” he said, “I think I understand how uncomfortable and angry you are—”

“
Do
you.”

“—but I can ask that you listen. Without interrupting or storming out of the room—”

“Oh for God’s—”

“
Daisha.
” He turned his eyes on me. From glass-green they too had become almost white. He was flaming mad, anyone could see, but unlike me, he’d controlled it. He
used
it, like a cracking whip spattering electricity across the room. And at the same time—the
pain
in his face. The closed-in pain and—was it only frustration, or despair? That was what held me, or I’d have walked out, as he said. I stood there stunned, and thought,
He hurts as I do. Why? Who did this to him? God, he hates the idea of marrying me as much as I hate it. Or—he hates the way he—
we
—are being used.

“Okay,” I said. I sat down on a chair. I put the cold coffee on the floor. “Talk. I’ll listen.”

“Thank you,” he said.

A huge old clock ticked on the mantlepiece above the fire.
Tock-tock-tock.
Each note a second. Sixty now. That minute he’d asked from me before. Or the minute when Juno held me in the sunrise, shaking.

“Daisha. I’m well aware you don’t want to be here, let alone with me. I hoped you wouldn’t feel that way, but I’m not amazed you do. You had to leave your own house, where you had familiar people, love, stability—” I had said I’d keep quiet, I didn’t argue—“and move into this fucking monument to a castle, and be ready to become the partner of some guy you never saw except in a scrap of a movie. I’ll be honest. The moment I saw the photos of you, I was drawn to you. I stupidly thought, this is a beautiful, strong woman that I’d like to know. Maybe we can make something of this pre-arranged mess. I meant make something for ourselves, you and me. Kids were—are—the last thing on my mind. We’d have a long time after all, to reach a decision on
that.
But you. I was—looking forward to meeting you. And I
would
have been there, to meet you. Only something happened. No. Not some compulsion I have to go out and tear animals apart and
drink
them in the forest. Daisha,” he said, “have you been to look at the waterfall?”

I stared. “Only from the car . . . ”

“There’s one of our human families there. I had to go and—” he broke off. He said, “The people in this house have switched right off, like computers without any electric current. I grew up here. It was hell. Yeah, that place you wanted me to go to. Only not bright or fiery, just—
dead.
They’re dead here. Living dead.
Un
dead, just what they say in the legends, in that bloody book
Dracula.
But
I
am not dead. And nor are you. Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “you name,
Daisha
—the way it sounds.
Day
—sha. Beautiful. Just as you are.”

He had already invited me to speak, so perhaps I could offer another comment. I said, “But you can’t stand the light.”

“No, I can’t. Which doesn’t mean I don’t
crave
the light. When I was two years old they took me out, my dad led me by the hand.
He
was fine with an hour or so of sunlight. I was so excited—looking forward to it. I remember the first colors—” He shut his eyes, opened them. “Then the sun came up. I never saw it after all. The first true light—I went blind. My skin . . . I don’t remember properly. Just darkness and agony and terror. Just one minute. My body couldn’t take even that. I was ill for ten months. Then I started to see again. After ten months. But I’ve seen daylight since, of course I have, on film, in photographs. I’ve read about it. And music—Ravel’s
Sunrise
from that ballet. Can you guess what it’s like to long for daylight, to be—
in love
with daylight—and you can never see it for real, never feel the warmth, smell the scents of it or properly hear the sounds, except on a screen, off a CD—
never
? When I saw you, you’re like that, like a real daylight. Do you know what I said to my father when I started to recover, after those ten months, those thirty seconds of dawn?
Why,
I said to him, why is light my enemy, why does it want to kill me?
Why light
?”