The Resting Places, page 21
When he says this, for a moment his face changes: he looks older and there is a sadness about him, or perhaps a vulnerability, and in that moment, she wants to take his hand; in that moment she thinks that maybe she is where she is supposed to be.
‘That sounds so lonely a life,’ Marianne says. ‘My mother used to say that without love, a house becomes a den of starving wolves.’
He laughs again and a silence settles across the pair. It is not a laugh with much warmth in it, she thinks. It could perhaps even be considered condescending. Despite the coat that she has pulled tight around her, she is chilled. The moment passes.
One time she wakes and he is at her bedside, as if he has materialised, manifested out of the substance of her dreams. Lethargic sunlight illuminates the bedchamber from the collapsed ceiling and bathes him in gold. It is as if he is the subject of a painting, she thinks, an oil painting of a war hero perhaps, captured in a moment of thoughtful repose. She has never seen anyone like him before. But the more she looks, the more she is disturbed by the realisation that his face seems unreal, as if it is somehow false. He is still beautiful, she thinks, but it is not genuine: like the deceit of sorcery that makes as if to be fire when it is not true fire. It is as if he wears a mask that smiles and laughs, but which conceals some hidden true face.
Do you know what I am?
She thinks of this moment as she looks at the portraits that hang throughout the castle. Most are badly faded with age, the canvases warped and discoloured, but the beauty of the subjects is undiminished: it is no simple mundane beauty to be constrained and damaged by time and the elements, but something transcendental, something eternal. She knows these are the enigmatic nobles she has glimpsed from afar in their black coaches, or others as alike to them, these secret rulers of an unending, undying land, where her own presence is merely tolerated, as one might tolerate a mouse so long as it does not cause a disturbance. She knows they too have some hidden aspect. They all have the eyes of a predator.
One is not like the others. His countenance is less lupine; indeed, it is almost ratlike and his stature diminished. She asks the lord about this portrait, and he snorts derisively.
‘Not all Vyrkos run with wolves,’ he tells her. ‘There are some that lie with vermin. Be careful where you rest your head, little mouse.’
For the next few days, she rests in the bedchamber. She feels intermittently too hot and too cold, sometimes waking with a chill, at other times in a pool of sweat. She is in a state of constant discomfort, as if her skin is too sensitive to touch, and the fabric of her nightdress scratches her like the claws of a thousand tiny animals. She thinks sometimes of the discarded skin of the eel, of how it is sometimes possible to think you have nothing left to lose, only to discover that you can lose even more. To lose more until only a bloody core remains, a fundamental core of being, a core that writhes and squirms, exposed to the cruelties of the world. She feels frustrated in a way she cannot articulate: frustrated with herself, with her life. And she feels disappointed.
When she sleeps, her dreams are vivid and ferocious, like the passions and prophecies of a moon-touched madman. She dreams of a string of black pearls that he places around her neck. In her village this would be one of the intimate rituals of bonding, such as between a couple on the night of their nuptials, such as she has fantasised about since she was old enough to understand what happens in those private and secret moments between two lovers, but there is no tenderness in the touch of her phantasmal suitor; the pearls are too tight and they constrict and coil around her neck like a rope until she gasps for breath. Then the pearls are suddenly sharp, and the rough edges draw blood. One huge hand holds her, then, by the hair. The other hand reaches into the crimson circumference of the wound around her neck and with sharp, clawed, bestial fingers prises the pale skin from the flesh. And begins to pull.
When he visits her, she studies him with lidded eyes, heavy with sleep, and as he smiles at her without warmth she shivers. She has a fever, he claims. He brings her soft brown fruit and watered wine.
‘Did you poison me?’ she asks.
‘You are the poison. Something in your blood.’
He seems to find this whole process distasteful now. He visits her less and less frequently. Some days he does not visit her at all.
She exists in a place between waking and sleeping. In the early hours of the morning, the distinction is blurred. Sometimes she imagines there is movement in the shadows, that there are things crawling in through the void in the ceiling, the ever-present void that reveals the darkness beyond as if to remind her that there is no safety to be found behind stone walls or behind closed doors, and that these constructions are transient like life is transient – like her life is transient – and only death is eternal. And in this darkness, she can almost see fleeting shapes at the limit of her perception. Shapes that are almost, but not quite human.
Another time, she imagines murmuring voices, the faintest susurrations coming from somewhere inside the room. In the darkness she cannot tell if her eyes are open or shut. She does not dare to move; she only listens, unsure if she is dreaming. She hears three female voices, speaking so softly they might almost have been her own thoughts, as urgent and formless as the wind.
There comes a whisper. She should run.
There is nowhere to run. A reply, as faint as a dying breath. The wolf will track her through the forest. Do you not know how wolves run down their prey? Hunting is his favourite game.
She should hide, a third voice says.
There is nowhere to hide. The wolf will sniff her out, even in the darkest corner of the deepest dungeon. Hiding will only make him cross.
Then what can she do?
Only what we three did.
Marianne strains to hear the words that are spoken next. She holds her breath.
She can die.
How many nights since she came to this place? She has lost track. She stands at the corner of her bedchamber and looks out through the shattered wall towards the distant horizon, where the grey night sky bleeds like leaking oil into the infinite vista of pine forests and hazy purple mountains. The villagers will be watching this same sky tonight, she knows, because it is a night when the Whispering Moon so revered by the soothsayers eclipses the ever-vigilant star of the god whose name she does not know. For this one night, this god is blind, and his people are abandoned. She has never felt more abandoned than now.
This night must also hold significance to the Vyrkos lord, because earlier that day he set out into the woods, a scabbarded scimitar worn beneath his coat, the red coat that flutters in the wind that rushes down into the valleys from the distant coast, and that she watches until it is only a red speck lost among the shadows of the forest.
‘My duties take me away from you,’ he had said. He had expressed remorse; he had kissed her hand farewell. For her part, she felt nothing but relief.
While he is away, she explores the castle, lighting the torches in every sconce she can find, trying every handle to every door. Some are locked. Some she is able to force open, but every room is the same – dusty and disused. In one room she finds an animal hide rug, the fur of a bear or something similar. Though she does not particularly feel the cold, she wraps it around her and covers the flimsy shift that is all she has to wear.
On the upper floor of the castle, behind a door of wormbitten oak at the top of a winding stair, she finds a small library. Here too the ceiling is broken in places, and in the mounds of tumbled, snow-dappled masonry a small birch tree has taken root. As the door opens a dozen or more winged creatures take flight in alarm – bats, or birds that look like bats.
She enters the room, her fur trailing behind her like a cape. Books are stacked in heaped piles, some covered with sackcloth to protect against the snow. Others are strewn about the flagstones or have been left to rot beneath the caved-in ceiling on bowing, moss-covered shelves. Upon a small lectern there is a stack of books that appear to have been spared the worst of the depredations of the elements. They are ponderous-looking tomes with titles such as A Treatise on the Shapeshifters of Ghur and Alchemies of Transformation. Another book with an indistinct name contains woodcut illustrations, and as she leafs through the brittle, jaundiced pages a sequence of engravings that depicts a naked woman catches her eye: the woman’s bare flesh is marked with a dividing line that appears to be intended as a point of bifurcation, for in the next image in the sequence the skin is peeled away by unseen hands like the rind of a fruit and the woman steps out of it as if it were mere clothing to be discarded.
She slams the book shut.
An ancient wooden shutter swings open, caught in a sudden gust of wind, to crack against the frame of a window that once would have been glazed with coloured glass but now stands empty and destitute. Marianne stands at this window in the spectral light of the Whispering Moon, the wind tugging at her unbound hair. At the border of the forest, in the shadows at the feet of a copse of silver birch, she senses movement. Three distinct shapes coalesce from pools of darkness, finding lithe and wolfish form. Three sets of yellow eyes that seem to glow in the pale light look back at her, unblinking.
It is some time before the lord of the castle returns from his expedition into the godless forest, and when he returns it is clear that his mood is foul. The castle reverberates with the echo of slamming doors and heavy, booted footsteps.
He seeks her out as she waits in a room that must once have been a banqueting hall, but whose furnishings have long since been discarded or used for firewood. Even the oak panels that surrounded the chamber have been mostly torn down, and the intricate tapestries and black silk brocade hangings that once – Marianne could only imagine – decorated the walls most opulently, now lie in rotten, dusty heaps. This room, she had thought upon discovering it, perhaps more than any other place she has found, is the heart of the castle: empty and lifeless, a monument to desolation. She sits on a chair upholstered in faded vermilion velvet beside a fire which has dwindled to naught but some few glowing embers. Here she sits alone, lost within her tangled thoughts: as alone as she ever is, as lost as she ever is. The comfort of the silence is shattered by the lord of this ruination, who enters like the storm itself. His hair is wild, his knuckles white where he still grips the hilt of his sword, and his clothing is crusted with dry blood.
‘Invaders to this realm.’ He curses, by way of explanation. ‘Barbarians that whoop and howl in idiot worship to their benighted gods. Humans, warring among themselves to lay claim to this land. Do they not know that this realm belongs to another? Do your wretched kind not comprehend that you are in the domain of true predators?’ He is pacing back and forth as he rants, his footsteps echoing in the empty expanse of the hall.
‘We know this,’ she replies. ‘But we have to live anyway. What else can we do?’
Doors and shutters rattle as the wind echoes through the castle, through corridors and down the chimney so that the fireplace wails and groans like a hungry ghost and the ashes within stir.
She gestures to the firepit. Among the ashes there are fragments that she has recognised: charred mementos and relics and trinkets.
‘Why did you burn my belongings? Those were all that I had to remember them by, my brothers and sisters. I have so little, yet you took that from me.’
He snorts. ‘There are no possessions save that which we can hold in bloodied hands when others would take them. There is no family – they can leave you in a heartbeat. There are no friends. Strength is in walking alone.’
‘Yet you seek a mate. Isn’t that why I am here?’
‘You came here of your own free will. And besides, you are…’
‘A disappointment. I know. We are both disappointed. I dreamt I would find something important here. Love, perhaps. Family… Ah, it was a pretty dream, what a shame it did not come true.’
‘You are a naive child,’ he says.
‘No. No, it’s only that I… I hope for the best in people. But…’ She sighs. ‘I’m not naive. Will you kill me now? Or do we prolong this?’
‘Which would you prefer?’ The timbre of his voice has changed, as if the words come from somewhere deeper within him.
He takes the fur from her and spreads it on the flagstones in front of the embers of the fire. He motions for her to lie on it. Instead, she approaches him and removes his coat, much as lovers might undress each other. He shrugs it off and it drops into her hands. She throws it into the firepit to sit among the burning embers. It is a churlish, childish act of defiance. He laughs a cruel and bitter laugh.
‘I know there is fight in you, I see there is resolve in you. But it is not enough. Don’t you understand? It is never enough.’
Why did you come here?
He had asked her this when she first arrived. She hadn’t told him the whole truth: Because I dreamt that I would find love here, family here, and dreams are all I have. Because that is what you must do, you must keep going, you must not stop. You don’t go back or run away. Else what becomes of you?
He lies atop her. His scent is overwhelming. His lips brush against her neck. His hands, those monstrous hands, encircle her throat. His breath is hot and loud, like the snorting of a beast.
‘There were others before me,’ she says. ‘And there will be others after me. But you won’t find what you are looking for. Your den will never know warmth. Your pack will never grow.’
She has his knife, taken secretly from his coat as she undressed him. She pushes the hooked blade between his lower ribs. He does not so much as flinch. She twists the blade and pulls with all her might. The curved tip catches on bone like a fisherman’s hook. It scrapes along the rib, then snags. She hears something like a crack. He grunts in pain. This then, she thinks, will have to be enough.
And then his mask falls away. She is almost relieved to see it happen, to see his true face. A transformation. A wolf’s aspect. His mouth distended into a muzzle filled with teeth the length of her fingers. His yellow eyes are huge and unblinking and contain the promise of annihilation. The wolf’s jaws open impossibly wide. There is a smell of ancient blood upon its breath, and in its yawn the heavens are plunged into darkness.
Do you know what I am, child?
Vyrkos. Vampire.
The wolf’s lower canines pierce the pale flesh of her mouth beneath her cheekbone. Its tearing, crushing teeth close around her skull. In a welter of blood, it rips away her face.
You had to know how this would end.
A girl lies unmoving in the dark, in the bowels of a castle shaped like a broken, grasping hand, in an unremarkable, isolated corner of the Realm of Death. She lies among refuse and animal bones and the rotting carcasses of fish and vermin. Faint torchlight comes from somewhere behind an iron grate in the ceiling, illuminating the shallow stream that washes over her feet: an underground rivulet of icy water that stems from a spring further up in the mountains, and trickles down over broken, moss-covered stonework and between fissures in the basalt bedrock from which the castle was hewn, long ago. Back then, this stream was lifeless. Now, it teems with sinuous black shapes.
The girl does not stir for some time. And then…
‘I had a dream,’ she whispers into the darkness. Her voice is raw, as if from disuse. ‘I dreamt of cold fire. I dreamt of biting. Of teeth and blood. So much blood!’
‘How did it end?’ a girl’s voice whispers in her ear.
‘I am not sure it did,’ she says. ‘I am not sure it ever will.’
She can feel her new siblings beside her, lying intertwined in a squirming tangle of skinny arms and legs. Something cold and wet coils around her naked flesh, slithers around her neck. A moment of panic and then it passes. Nothing flutters in the hollows of her chest. So not a hangman’s noose after all, she thinks. It will not bite her, she knows, not now.
‘Then what comes next?’ a different girl’s voice whispers in her other ear.
‘I could lie here forever.’ Marianne smiles. Her smile is stranger still.
‘Show us, Marianne,’ a third girl says. ‘You are stronger than he thinks. He didn’t see the strength in you, but we do. He tasted you and he didn’t like what he found – but we do. You didn’t run and you didn’t hide. He discarded you, as he discarded us once. His mistake!’
‘I am poison – that’s what he said. But in truth, I think it is life that has poisoned him – he is so alone, yet he cannot tolerate being otherwise.’
‘Show us, Marianne. What comes next? Tell us your dreams. Tell us of blood.’
‘I feel… different.’ Marianne holds her hand in front of her face, but she cannot see it. Visions dance in her mind’s eye, and among the cascade of images there is one she remembers from her dreams. She hadn’t recognised herself at first. She walks barefoot through forests she used to play in as a child, and in her bloody hands she carries new memories, bound up in a charred, red bundle.
‘You look beautiful,’ her sisters tell her. They help her to her feet, their touch as cold as death.
Marianne walks now, no longer alone. She shakes off the skins of her old life, and they drift to the ground like snow.
BLOOD DRINKER
James Brogden
Actaeon flees the Beast through a labyrinth of dark, twisting corridors. Though shaped like a man in armour, it has the head of a wolf, with eyes that burn the darkness like searchlights and a tongue that drools for the taste of his flesh. The thunder of its footsteps shakes the ground, and its talons scrape the walls like the shrieking of demented souls. The only thing that stops it from seizing him immediately is its sheer size; it must bludgeon and tear its way through the narrow passages, bent into a feral crouch, its shaggy head cocked sideways against the ceiling, while he slips through the narrow spaces ahead of it – falling, scrambling, running. It howls its elation and hunger.
