"What did the villagers do to the vechi brbat?"
"They put him in a cage and kept him there. He lived in the cage day and night. They fed him only a little blood, from time to time, to keep him alive, but this is how he existed."
"And when the original villagers died?"
"For the first season all the villagers cared for him, but soon, as winter approached, one woman offered to take the vechi brbat into her home, and it was then that he lived in the cage all the time. She...looked after him, and then her daughter, and so on. It soon became the unspoken rule that only one took responsibility for him. One woman of each generation, the task handed down to the next in line, the eldest. Eventually my grandmother was responsible."
"And with your mother gone, you were next in line?"
Nita"s hands trembled and felt white cold. "Yes."
The man paused. "And this responsibility, to take care of, to live with the vechi brbat, is this something you wanted for yourself?"
"I...I don"t know," she said. No one had asked her this.
Bunic had not. It was a.s.sumed that Nita would go to school, then return home to the village and bear children, raising only one girl child, and that she would look after the ancient one who would live with her, in the cage, as it had been with all the women before her.
"Tell me, you said the vechi brbat walked in the village, and he tried to touch you in the forest. So he was no longer in a cage."
"Somewhere back in time it was determined by a woman who cared for him that if he were not permitted to eat he would be weak and he could then be allowed to roam free at dusk, provided a chain was attached to his ankle with a long rope. This seemed to work out, and the villagers agreed. Anyway, he could not tolerate the sun and always returned to the cage during the day."
"Like a vampire," the grey-haired man said.
"Exactly like a vampire."
"And he was fed blood."
"Yes."
"What kind of blood?"
"The blood of the village."
The man looked a little shocked by this revelation. "Not animals?"
"No. His body could not tolerate their blood. Only human."
"Did he drink your blood?"
"Sometimes."
"How...how was this done? Did he bite you?"
"Of course not!" she said, feeling the tension building in her. "We would make cuts on our arms and legs, each person in the village taking a turn, and would provide a tin cup every day and he would drink that. It kept him alive."
"Why, over the centuries, did the villagers want to keep him alive?"
"Because it would be bad luck to kill him."
"But he"d brought disaster to the village, or so everyone thought?"
"But more disaster would come from killing him. He was a Gypsy. He had been in touch with the most evil spirits. They had come to him, heeded him, given him what he asked for. The villagers did not know what would happen if he were killed or released, but they knew they would be cursed and harm would come to them. They just did not know the nature of that harm."
"But you didn"t believe that, did you? That his curse would bring disaster. That he was ancient. That he had brought back his dead wife."
A small sound slipped from Nita"s lips. She felt a tear form in one eye and tried to brush it away but the sparkly multicolored drop slid down her cheek. Maybe...maybe he understood! "I...I... The university. They said it could not be so. That he was not old. That he was just a crazy man that everyone kept caged and starved, and that his dead wife had not returned but a woman in the village-my grandmother, and my mother-had slept with him to get pregnant."
"How did your mother die?"
That was too horrible. Nita could not bring herself to admit the suicide. Instead of answering his question, her mind raced on as if he hadn"t interrupted. "The university professor said it was an example of a mythology that had gone terribly wrong, and the people wanted to blame someone for all their problems, and to torture him." She looked up at the grey man. "I went home to make it right."
The man nodded imperceptibly.
Now the words spilled from Nita, like the scorching lava that had formed the mountains. "I tried to tell the others. I told them that he could not be ancient. That he was not responsible for catastrophes. That the G.o.ds had not returned his wife to him. I explained that my grandmother who kept him, she was his wife. They would not believe me."
"What did you do?"
"After the sun set, I cut his chain and took him far from the village, up into the mountains, a night"s journey by foot. I gave him food I had brought home with me, liquid food with nutrients, some blood because he was used to that, but other beverages, because he had not eaten solid food that I knew of. I tried to feed him grains but he could not digest them. And then I pointed to the much larger village just over the mountain peak and told him to go there, to begin a new life. That he was free. I told him that he would be caged no more."
Nita shook her head. Tears streamed down her face and though her voice wavered, she needed no encouragement to finish her story. "I returned to my village the following day. My grandmother was furious with me. She struck me and called me a fool, ranting that I had brought down the curse and put them all in danger. The villagers were angry and afraid. Some wanted to run away, others found weapons to defend themselves. One suggested I take the place of the vechi brbat in the cage, as if that would make things right. I told them they had nothing to fear, that the old man, the vechi brbat, was gone for good, and they were all free now. Just as I was free from the life that had awaited me. No more wrong legends to rule their lives, or mine. I could return to the university. I would not have to marry the vechi brbat, or spend my life taking care of him.
"But the people were not pleased by this; they were so enraged. And terrified. My grandmother struggled to keep them from hurting me."
After a moment, the man said, "And then what happened?"
"He returned. Two nights later. He murdered people in their beds, outside their homes, as they fled into the forest. Women, children, men-even the strongest who tried to fight him off. My...my grandmother. He had been strengthened by the nourishment I"d provided, and he took blood until he became bloated, and then took more. He killed everyone, and it was my fault!"
Her body trembled uncontrollably. The room had become icy. The colors surrounding her, even the white, paled as if glaciers had formed over everything, and the opaqueness that reminded her of the vechi brbat"s eyes as he stared into hers began to spin and swirl like a snowstorm.
"But he didn"t kill you," the man said.
"No," she gasped. "He spared me."
"Why?"
She stared at him, watching his grey features shift and twist and the shape of his face change from human to animal then change again from animal to something dark and otherworldly until the images that formed petrified her.
"Nita, they found you covered with blood.
You, not the vechi brbat. You killed the villagers, because you felt trapped there, destined to a life you did not want."
Her head jerked from side to side.
"Nita, if there were a vechi brbat, why wasn"t he found? Where is he now?"
She screamed, "I-don"t-know!"
"Take it easy. You"re safe here."
But his words could not quell the horror that gripped her heart. "He disappeared. And I remained with the bodies, the blood-red bodies, stained by color that seeped into the hungry brown soil as if it were a mouth that had longed for this nourishment. The land of my foremothers, of the villagers, those who imprisoned the vechi brbat. Don"t you see? The blood went back into the earth. Where it should have gone centuries ago! Because they imprisoned him!"
Her raised voice brought Dr. Sauers storming into the room. "What"s going on here? You"re upsetting my patient!" She hit an intercom b.u.t.ton on the wall and told a nurse to hurry with an injection.
"No! No more drugs! Let me be free!" Nita jumped to her feet. "Remove these chains! I did nothing to you, why are you holding me prisoner! Help! Someone help me!
Vechi brbat free me, as I freed you!"
But Nita"s cries faded soon after the needle pierced her flesh. The world around her receded, the colors dimming and fading to nothing, until she could neither see nor hear those outside her with their demands and judgments and limitations. But she clearly heard the vechi brbat, for now he could speak and he spoke to her, calling her his bride, a.s.suring her that he would be with her always. That she would not be a prisoner forever. "One day," he promised, "you, too, must dance with me."
The Beautiful, The d.a.m.ned.
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch"s most recent novel, Diving into the Wreck, will be published by Pyr Books in November. She is the author of more than fifty novels, including several in her popular Retrieval Artist series. Many of her novels belong to the mystery or romance genres and are published under the pen names Kristine Grayson, Kris Nelscott, and Kristine Dexter. Rusch is a prolific author of short fiction as well, much of which will be collected in the forthcoming book Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award thirteen times, winning twice-once for writing and once for editing, making her the only person to ever win a Hugo Award in both categories. She has also won the World Fantasy Award, the Sidewise Award, and numerous Asimov"s Readers Choice Awards.
Rusch describes this story as a kind of sequel to The Great Gatsby-with vampires. "For some reason, I reread The Great Gatsby every two or three years whether I need to or not," she said. "Like Nick Carraway, I am a child of the Middle West, a person who has moved away to a land that"s not quite familiar and people who are a bit strange. I have always seen ties between vampirism and alcoholism (and I am the child of two alcoholics). I dealt with that tie in my novel Sins of the Blood, a vampire book, and I deal with it here too."
On one rereading of Gatsby, Rusch realized that the characters were metaphorical vampires, and that was all the inspiration she needed to come up with the tale that follows.
Chapter I.
I come from the Middle West, an unforgiving land with little or no tolerance for imagination. The wind blows harsh across the prairies, and the snows fall thick. Even with the conveniences of the modern age, life is dangerous there. To lose sight of reality, even for one short romantic moment, is to risk death.
I didn"t belong in that country, and my grandfather knew it. I was his namesake, and somehow, being the second Nick Carraway in a family where the name had a certain mystique had forced that mystique upon me. He had lived in the East during the twenties, and had had grand adventures, most of which he would not talk about. When he returned to St. Paul in 1928, he met a woman-my grandmother Nell-and with her solid, common sense had shed himself of the romance and imagination that had led to his adventures in the first place.
Although not entirely. For when I announced, fifty years later, that I intended to pursue my education in the East, he paid four years of Ivy League tuition. And, when I told him, in the early "80s, that, despite my literary background and romantic nature, I planned a career in the securities business, he regaled me with stories of being a bond man in New York City in the years before the crash.
He died while I was still learning the art of the cold call, stuck on the sixteenth floor of a windowless high rise, in a tiny cubicle that matched a hundred other tiny cubicles, distinguished only by my handprint on the phone set and the snapshots of my family thumbtacked to the indoor-outdoor carpeting covering the small barrier that separated my cubicle from all the others. He never saw the house in Connecticut which, although it was not grand, was respectable, and he never saw my rise from a cubicle employee to a man with an office. He never saw the heady Reagan years, although he would have warned me about the awful Black Monday well before it appeared. For despite the computers, jets, and televised communications, the years of my youth were not all that different from the years of his.
He never saw Fitz either, although I knew, later that year, when I read the book, that my grandfather would have understood my mysterious neighbor too.
My house sat at the bottom of a hill, surrounded by trees whose russet leaves are-in my mind-in a state of perpetual autumn. I think the autumn melancholy comes from the overlay of hindsight upon what was, I think, the strangest summer of my life, a summer which, like my grandfather"s summer of 1925, I do not discuss, even when asked. In that tiny valley, the air always had a damp chill and the rich smell of loam. The scent grew stronger upon that winding dirt path that led to Fitz"s house on the hill"s crest-not a house really, but more of a mansion in the conservative New England style, white walls hidden by trees, with only the wide walk and the entry visible from the gate. Once behind, the walls and windows seemed to go on forever, and the manicured lawn with its neatly mowed gra.s.s and carefully arranged marble fountains seemed like a throwback from a simpler time.
The house had little life in the daytime, but at night the windows were thrown open and cars filled the driveway. The cars were all sleek and dark-blue Saabs and midnight BMWs, black Jaguars and ebony Carreras. Occasionally a white stretch limo or a silver DeLorean would mar the darkness, but those guests rarely returned for a second visit, as if someone had asked them to take their ostentation elsewhere. Music trickled down the hill with the light, usually music of a vanished era, waltzes and marches and Dixieland Jazz, music both romantic and danceable, played to such perfection that I envied Fitz his sound system until I saw several of the better known New York Philharmonic members round the corner near my house early on a particular Sat.u.r.day evening.
Laughter, conversation and the tinkle of ice against fine crystal filled the gaps during the musicians" break, and in those early days, as I sat on my porch swing and stared up at the light, I imagined parties like those I had only seen on film-slender beautiful women in glittery gowns, and athletic men who wore tuxedos like a second skin, exchanging witty and wry conversation under a dying moon.
In those early days, I didn"t trudge up the hill, although later I learned I could have, and drop into a perpetual party that never seemed to have a guest list. I still had enough of my Midwestern politeness to wait for an invitation and enough of my practical Midwestern heritage to know that such an invitation would never come.
Air conditioners have done little to change Manhattan in the summer. If anything, the heat from their exhausts adds to the oppression in the air, the stench of garbage rotting on the sidewalks, and the smell of sweaty human bodies pressed too close. Had my cousin Arielle not discovered me, I might have spent the summer in the cool loam of my Connecticut home, monitoring the markets through my personal computer, and watching Fitz"s parties with a phone wedged between my shoulder and ear.
Arielle always had an ethereal, other-worldly quality. My sensible aunt, with her thick ankles and dishwater-blond hair, must have recognized that quality in the newborn she had given birth to in New Orleans, and committed the only romantic act of her life by deciding that Arielle was not a Mary or a Louise, family names that had suited Carraways until then.
I had never known Arielle well. At family reunions held on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior, she was always a beautiful, unattainable ghost, dressed in white gauze with silver-blond hair that fell to her waist, wide blue eyes, and skin so pale it seemed as fragile as my mother"s bone china. We had exchanged perhaps five words over all those reunions, held each July, and always I had bowed my head and stammered in the presence of such royalty. Her voice was sultry and musical, lacking the long "a"s and soft "d"s that made my other relations sound like all their years of education had made no impression at all.
Why she called me when she and her husband Tom discovered that I had bought a house in a village only a mile from theirs I will never know. Perhaps she was lonely for a bit of family, or perhaps the other-worldliness had absorbed her, even then.
Chapter II.
I drove to Arielle and Tom"s house in my own car, a BMW, navy blue and spit-polished, bought used because all of my savings had gone into the house. They lived on a knoll in a mock-Tudor-style house surrounded by young saplings that had obviously been transplanted. The lack of tall trees gave the house a vulnerable air, as if the neighbors who lived on higher hills could look down upon it and find it flawed. The house itself was twice the size of mine, with a central living area flanked by a master bedroom wing and a guest wing, the wings more of an architect"s affectation than anything else.
Tom met me at the door. He was a beefy man in his late twenties whose athletic build was beginning to show signs of softening into fat. He still had the thick neck, square jaw and ma.s.sive shoulders of an offensive lineman which, of course, he had been. After one season with the Green Bay Packers-in a year unremarked for its lackl.u.s.ter performance-he was permanently sidelined by a knee injury. Not wanting to open a car dealership that would forever capitalize on his one season of glory, he took his wife and his inheritance and moved east. When he saw me, he clapped his hand on my back as if we were old friends when, in fact, we had only met once, at the last and least of the family reunions.
"Ari"s been waiting ta see ya," he said, and the broad flat uneducated vowels of the Midwest brought with them the sense of the stifling summer afternoons of the reunions, children"s laughter echoing over the waves of the lake as if their joy would last forever.
He led me through a dark foyer and into a room filled with light. Nothing in the front of the house had prepared me for this room, with its floor to ceiling windows, and their view of an English garden beyond the patio. Arielle sat on a loveseat beneath the large windows, the sunlight reflecting off her hair and white dress, giving her a radiance that was almost angelic. She held out her hand, and as I took it, she pulled me close and kissed me on the cheek.
"Nicky," she murmured. "I missed you."
The softness with which she spoke, the utter sincerity in her gaze made me believe her and, as on those summer days of old, I blushed.
"Not much ta do in Connecticut." Tom"s booming voice made me draw back. "We been counting the nails on the walls."
"Now, Tom," Ari said without taking her hand from mine, "we belong here."
I placed my other hand over hers, capturing the fragile fingers for a moment, before releasing her. "I rather like the quiet," I said.
"You would," Tom said. He turned and strode across the hardwood floor, always in shadow despite the light pouring in from the windows.
His abruptness took me aback, and I glanced at Ari. She shrugged. "I think we"ll eat on the terrace. The garden is cool this time of day."
"Will Tom join us?"
She frowned in a girlish way, furrowing her brow, and making her appear, for a moment, as if she were about to cry. "He will when he gets off the phone."
I hadn"t heard a phone ring, but I had no chance to ask her any more for she placed her slippered feet on the floor and stood. I had forgotten how tiny she was, nearly half my height, but each feature perfectly proportioned. She took my arm and I caught the fresh scent of lemons rising from her warm skin.
"You must tell me everything that"s happened to you," she said, and I did. Under her intense gaze my life felt important, my smallest accomplishments a pinnacle of achievement. We had reached the terrace before I had finished. A gla.s.s table, already set for three, stood in the shade of a maple tree. The garden spread before us, lush and green. Each plant had felt the touch of a pruning shears and were trimmed back so severely that nothing was left to chance.
I pulled out a chair for Ari and she sat daintily, her movements precise. I took the chair across from her, feeling cloddish, afraid that my very size would cause me to break something. I wondered how Tom, with his linebacker"s build, felt as he moved through his wife"s delicate house.