Vampire$

Three hours at this and Davette was exhausted. More she was angry. At Pough, the slug who liked being hit, a herself, for being here at all, for the vampire Ross, who, like the wicked infant he was, refused to accept the bill he’d run up.

She saw him differently now, in his pain, and her contempt was joyous. There was no seduction here, no hypnotic gaze, no Voice. His skin was no longer smooth cream but mottled, crinkled, paste.

The Undead, she kept thinking.

All those movies and all those stories I’ve seen and read in my life were fantasies. But this is so true. He is not alive. He is Undead. He is Unhealthy.

He is scum.

Ross actually tried aspirin for the pain, a notion that Davette, in her newfound insight, found laughable, ludicrous almost beneath contempt.

You’re dead, pig. You can’t take aspirin, she thought.

But she said nothing as Pough fetched the bottle and Ross tore the top of it open with a flick of his fingers and forced a half dozen of the dry white pills down his throat. She stood way back then, eyeing the ornate quarters for a receptacle. He had quite a few of those urns around against the walls but they were too heavy. At last she spied some awful, intricate, and expensive French washbowl — something on one of the side tables — and sidled over casually to pick it up while Ross lay frozen in his misery, staring straight up at the ceiling, his hands outstretched and talon-taut in the ragged sheets.

First he started to retch, his body warping on the bed as electrocuted. And when he finally vomited it was the most vile, fetid, loathsome… Decay! That awful smell of Death, rotting, sickly-sweet bile!

Davette dropped the washbowl to the carpet and staggered back from that smell.

“Ross, you fool! You’re a vampire! You can only have blood!”

And the monster’s eyes rolled back in his head, the pupils almost disappearing entirely, and his spine arched once more against the bed. But then his head snapped forward and his eyes were red and demonic and the fangs were there and he looked at Davette and hissed:

“Yesss!”

And she thought she was going to die.

But Ross’s arm streaked out and his taloned hands clumped down on Pough’s forearm and pulled it toward his jaws and Pough screamed when the fangs sliced the arteries and the blood began to spurt and Davette felt her scream coming as Ross aimed the stream not at his mouth but at his wound. And as the blood splashed and splattered across Ross’s forehead Davette looked at Pough and saw his eyes go back, but not in pain. In ecstasy.

And her scream blew out from her soul and possessed her and she collapsed, still screaming.

It worked. The wound didn’t heal. Not completely. But the opening shrank to little more than a large pinprick. It still dripped that clear viscous fluid. But a headband was all it needed.

And the pain was less. Not gone, but less. It no longer incapacitated him. It just made him a bit more cruel.

Ross had looked into her eyes and told her she was tired, sleepy and exhausted, that she would go to sleep and not wake up until midnight tomorrow night, and it was so.

He awoke her with his mind or his Voice — she wasn’t sure — at the appointed hour. He was standing in her doorway, the light from the hallway silhouetting him. She could hear voices downstairs, many voices laughing and talking.

She didn’t want to go.

“Ross…” she began weakly.

“Get dressed,” said the Voice. “Now. I’ll be back for you.”

And then he was gone.

She lay there a few seconds, then clambered slowly dizzily, out of bed. She was exhausted, beaten, drained. She hadn’t eaten. She had slept too long. She wanted to die

She didn’t know if she could get dressed.

“I’ll help you,” offered a soft, silky, familiar voice.

Kitty, even in the dim starlight from the terrace doorway, was incredibly beautiful. She was radiant, really, her features sharp yet soft, her walk lazy yet precise and sensuous. She was friendly and warm and obviously glad to see Davette and…

And a vampire.

“I’ll help you,” she said again, this time all but cooing as she strolled forward and took her friend’s limp shoulders. “I’ll make you beautiful.”

And she did. She dressed Davette as one would a child. She fixed her hair and applied her makeup and never once turned on a light.

Davette simply sat there. Or stood up. Or raised her arms as told. She couldn’t cry or disobey or think. She just let it be done.

And then she was ready and Kitty pronounced her beautiful and then Ross, who had reappeared at the doorway, agreed. Then the two of them took each of her arms and guided her downstairs.

On the long main staircase Davette managed to speak at last.

“Are you… going to make me a vampire?”

Ross’s smile was satanic.

“No, my dear,” he replied pleasantly. “I’m going to make you watch.”

And when they reached the bottom of the stairway and turned in to the main living room filled with happy partying victims, Davette saw the plastic tarp had already been laid out.

She watched them feed from a far distance it seemed. The horror was too much, the screams of surprise and terror too piercing, the quantities of blood too enormous to accept. She didn’t move, she didn’t speak. She didn’t respond, except to Voices. She wasn’t there.

But she noticed them swelling as they drank. Like ticks, she thought.

For their bodies did actually expand as they sopped the lives. And their eyes became dreamy and their voices, Voices, became slurred. There was too much blood for the two of them but they drank most of it anyway, gorging themselves and laughing about the presumed lives of the victims based on their clothing and personal effects and when they realized they simply could not drink it all, they laughed and rubbed it all over each other and Davette thought they really did look like serpents, intertwined and slimy with blood.

It was the same the next night. First, though, they had the orgy for the sheep, seducing them with Voice and Gaze, and the sexual tension was rich and thick.

But somehow carefully directed. One young couple in their twenties were somehow carnally separated. Ross had him bound and gagged while the young wife rolled and clasped with a series of men on the floor in front of him, knowing what she was doing, weeping throughout, but unable to help herself, unable to stop the rich, luxurious orgasms from rocking her again and again.

Davette watched the young man, his eyes red with tears, as he went through the torture of his wife the rutting slut. She didn’t know how they had managed to keep the feeling of sex from him, only that they so much enjoyed seeing his agony without having any idea as to what was causing his wife to behave like this.

Then Ross just let them go, without explanation, before the slaughter began.

“Let’s see them work this out,” he said with a laugh as he watched their subcompact lurch away down the drive.

Davette wept silently. The two had been married less than three weeks.

And she thought, for a few brief moments, that it would have been less cruel to kill them. But that was before the night’s slaughter began. Once she heard the new screams, she realized she was wrong. There was nothing worse than what she saw. Except, possibly, the vampires’ pleasure in it all.

I cannot do this, she thought.

I cannot continue like this.

I cannot live like this.

And then she thought: So I won’t. I know where Aunt Vicky kept her pills.

Davette lived because she overslept. She had no chance to sneak into Aunt Vicky’s room to kill herself.